Drake, Flying Lotus, Courtney Barnett
Pitchfork #69 - 67
#69 Drake, If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (2015)
Rating: 2
Here’s the thing about Drake. To understand what Drake is talking about, you have to know a lot of news about the musician…Drake. You need to understand his beefs, his arguments, his career progression. Who likes him, who doesn’t, how big his contract is, who he will and will not collaborate with. As a fan, you are Drake’s therapist. And career counselor. Chicago’s Greg Kot called it “moral psychodrama.”
Aubrey Drake Graham was raised in Toronto. His dad was a musician, an American, a club drummer who performed with Jerry Lee Lewis. He left when Drake was 5.
Drake was a child TV actor on the series Degrassi: The Next Generation. He started releasing mixtapes and eventually signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money label and released three albums before this one, all of them #1 in the US. He won a Grammy for Best Rap Album.
Drake’s flow is familiar. Sing-song talking. He’s in love with eighth notes. And a LOT of “yuh.” Not much to mention about the music other than it’s a beat with synth.
This record is actually a “mixtape,” not a record, which means….I don’t really know what that means. That it’s free? This is chronologically after “Started from the Bottom,” but before “Hotline Bling” Allegedly, it is even more full of Drake’s personal affronts, defensiveness, and grievances than usual. It sounds like being a pop star, being Drake, is super, super annoying. Industry sucks, women are bothersome, I have so much money and everybody wants it. But I AM AWESOME.
“10 Bands” ended up playing a part in the Drake-Meek Mill beef about ghostwriters because, well, someone besides Drake wrote it. “Know Yourself” is about how tricky it is to visit your childhood friends after you get rich and famous. “Energy” is about his disputes with his label and his haters:
I got girls in real life tryna fuck up my day
Fuck goin' online, that ain't part of my day
I got real shit poppin' with my family too
I got n****s that can never leave Canada too
I got two mortgages, thirty million in total
I got n****s that'll still try fuckin' me over
I got rap n****s that I gotta act like I like
But my actin' days are over, fuck them n****s for life, yeah
“Now and Forever” is about the same thing, his departure from his label. See what I mean? For real, when do casual hip hop fans legitimately want to hear about the label? When do we care about your contracts or what your crew said about your show? Not to mention what they say about someone else’s show?
Pitchfork writers:
Drake is showing off, enjoying a victory lap, burning bridges and taking risks, his flows unbound but the pressure of delivering a classic album. With ominous, mesmerizing beats from his in-house team at OVO (40, Boi-1da, PartyNextDoor) and a few talented Canadian mainstays (WondaGurl, Frank Dukes), these songs establish Drake as a relentless conqueror: “The game is all mine and I’m mighty possessive/Lil Wayne could not have found him a better successor,” he boasts in the tape’s closing moments
#68 Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma (2010)
Rating: 2
Flying Lotus, Steven Ellison, is a Producer & DJ, raised in Los Angeles. He’s a distant John Coltrane relative. He broke into the industry through a side door, independently submitting and selling songs for Adult Swim bumpers on the Cartoon Network. In 2008 Flying Lotus really got busy. He released an album called Los Angeles, inspired by love for J Dilla and his dense and complex sampling sound. He started recording this album, Cosmogramma. He also started up come collabs that would carry through his career.
This album is his third. It’s a very thick layering of an array of sounds. It’s futurist zap-zap electronica, it’s instrumental jazz, it’s psychedelic (BTW I just accidentally typed jazz and funk at the same time and ended up with “jank” and I think it’s also fitting). It includes Thundercat on bass, a longtime music partner, and Ravi Coltrane on sax. It also includes a lot of ambient samples.
It’s really a mash of noise, “Clock Catcher” is an 8-bit video game with a bowed harp(?), “A Cosmic Drama” is an angel choir, “Arkestry” is a 50’s jazz drummer and a police siren(?), “MmmHmm” is a standup bass with a…mechanical printing press maybe? I could swear “Do the Astral Plane” has an extended spoon solo. And in “Galaxy in Janaki”, Flying Lotus includes actual sound samples of hospital equipment connected to his mother as she died of diabetes.
It’s all a little much for me. Jazz plus pew pew pew lasers. I would guess it’s what old hippies think a rave would sound like. I definitely believe Flying Lotus is built for live shows far more than car rides.
It’s somehow ashram-toned but also very hyper. So much noise. Funny thing, I was going to write that “…And the World Laughs With You” was like a fake Radiohead song. Then I listened more, looked at the screen, and it’s actually Thom Yorke guesting on the vocals.
Pitchfork writers:
Steven Ellison got his start scoring for Adult Swim in the late ’00s, and with his breakout LP Cosmogramma, he channeled that anarchic energy into a new medium. Fusing jazz, video-game sounds, post-Dilla hip-hop, IDM drum breaks, laser shrieks, and much more, he forged a fluid and propulsive music that doesn’t have a name.
#67 Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit (2015)
Rating: 4
The short story is - Courtney Barnett rocks. Like, traditional and soulful guitar rock that would sound right in any decade since they first plugged guitars in.
Courtney Barnett, whose real name is…Courtney Barnett, grew up in Sydney, Australia. This is her debut studio album. She had released some independent mixtapes and played guitar in some other Australian bands before that. But this is the record that broke her out.
For me, here is the most important and revealing fact of this album: She wrote all the songs, then showed them to her band one week before recording to get a “fresh sound.” Then they recorded the entire record in just 8 days. And it got her nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy! (which she lost to Meghan Trainor in the “All About that Bass” year.)
On her catchy-as-all-hell breakout hit “Pedestrian at Best” Courtney says that on the final album cut, that’s her singing the lyrics out loud for the first time ever. (That song also has a great video with her playing a clown that sucks at being a clown.)
When you cut out all the trading and rehearsing and arguing and overproducing, that just leaves — the music. I can’t tell you how addictive it is for me, I’m sure I could sing you the hooks and refrains of at least 5 of these songs from memory.
I mean, can you listen to the first 20 seconds of “Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go To The Party” and not be transported to Velvet Underground with the Go-Gos drummer? (Or for that matter, ever seen a song title that’s more loaded and wrapped with emotional transparency?) “Kim’s Caravan” is like a slow dance song for Paris, Texas. Her lyrics are funny and prosaic, usually telling a very mundane story that we can identify with. This is from “An Illustration of Loneliness”:
I lay awake at three, staring at the ceiling
It's a kind of off-white, maybe it's a cream
There's oily residue seeping from the kitchen
It's art-deco necromantic chic, all the dinner plates are kitsch with
Irish Wolf Hounds, French baguettes wrapped loose around their necks
I think I'm hungry, I'm thinking of you too
The songs are simple, not a virtuoso guitar showcase, she’s not St. Vincent. But she’s a legit guitarist. Left-handed, FWIW. Check out the bluesy solo at the end of the 7-minute waltz “Small Poppies” I believe a true master of the instrument can leave you pleasantly adrift but never bored. Wanna hear her play that solo over in Union Park? It starts at 4:00 in this video:
Is it the greatest guitar ever? No, but is she absolutely ROCKING? Is she with us? Yes.
And despite the shruggy, out of tune, flat, “whatever, man” Kurt Vile and John Prine-style “I’m going to improvise about my beer” vocal delivery, she can write a pop song, too. OK, imagine Gwen Stefani singing “Aqua Profunda!”
Pitchfork writers:
Her songs unfurl at a stream-of-consciousness pace, narrating the mundanities of daily life over garage-rock guitar. She sings about about the benefits of owning a percolator, the burnout of office workers, and even, at one point, restlessly declares mid-song that she might be hungry. But the poetic attention Barnett pays to everyday experiences belie her greater anxieties beneath the free-wheeling music: a tour of a sad house on “Depreston” tells a story of death and regrowth; a walk on the beach in “Kim’s Caravan” leads to a meditation on destroyed coral reefs. With Sometimes I Sit and Think, Barnett became a poster woman for a young generation seized by self-doubt and introversion, and her music never failed to process those feelings with a dark sense of humor