Turn It Up - 9/3/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s another week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. David goes first, then Charles. As always, we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Nappy Roots feat. Benji – “Home Fried” (single, 2024)

Nappy Roots are such a fantastic band. Not quite sure why they aren’t better known, why over the last twenty years they haven’t had a pop hit or even a substantial R&B one, though they’ve released a string of shoulda-coulda-beens that are among my favorite singles of the century. Nappy Roots have the hooks and the beats, the don’t-get-above-your-raisin’ themes of growing up poor and dreaming big. Plus, their brand of southern hip hop was “knee deep, head over heels in this country shit,” as they rapped on 2002’s “Po’ Folks,” long before that shit became the country thing it now blessedly is. As is nearly always the case with them, “Home Fried” presents as lowkey easy even as it impresses. Check the concluding dozen rhymes with “obstacle.” Note all the downhome epigrams: “Once you get where you’re goin’, you’re still growing up.” “Shit can go left, but what if it doesn’t?” “Life can be a damn shame…  Sometimes.” Walking it like they rap it it, the groove makes do with less—a clock’s tick tock, bass and snare, a one-note choir signifying revelation—and still makes joy. – DC

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nathan Salsburg, Tyler Trotter – “Hear the Children Sing” (single, 2024) – DC

In which “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, and friends unspool an old Lungfish song—for 19 minutes and 58 seconds, so I’ll make this quick. Like if “Down by the River” were twisted into an eerie lullaby (“Hear the children sing, ‘Oh the devil is a flower’…”), is then revealed as a koan (“What’s circling is not circular”) and as a mystery grasped (“What is written, never to be read aloud”), then dashed (“What's coming into view is not old or new”). Somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark you and the song merge into a trance. Repeat. – DC

Dave Dudley – “Bless Them Machines (Please Help the Working Man)” (from Six Days on the Road, 1964)

For Labor Day… Dave Dudley typically sang the praises of the sixteen-wheeled machines that made it possible for truckers to earn a living. This Dudley deep cut, from the songbook of a just-getting-started Tom T. Hall, follows the capitalist logic of the division of labor to where machines replace workers all together. “They don’t need me anymore” down at the factory or out in the fields, Dudley bellows, “but I [still] need them bread and beans!” If Hall were around today, I bet he’d write a new verse about self-driving trucks, then maybe tag it with one about songwriters themselves made obsolete by AI. – DC

Juicy J – “Consequence” (from Ravenite Social Club, 2024)

Out of nowhere, Memphis rap legend Juicy J dropped a jazz-influenced album featuring live instrumentation and guests like Emi Secrest and Robert Glasper. It’s fantastic, less a lushly-arranged flip fantasia and more a spare, fiery set that recalls the great soundtracks of ‘70s “blaxploitation” and Black independent cinema. Juicy J’s crisp productions bring drums, guitars, and horns out to respond to his quiet vocal intensity. He’s rhyming with both precision and ambition here, mixing social commentary with a ground-level view that calls back to earlier generations of Memphis bluesmen. “Consequence,” for example, is pure blues, where a moody track buttresses his meditation on the cost of violence, even on those who seemingly win the battle. No cartoons or gun-fetish games here: when Juicy J reminds that “If you pull out a gun, you better shoot,” it’s less challenge than lamentation. “Know the consequence,” indeed. – CH

Claire Lynch – “I Give You the Morning” (from Bluegrass Sings Paxton, 2024)

The delightful new Bluegrass Sings Paxton features vibrant acoustic tributes to the venerable folk singer-songwriter. Produced by the dream team of Cathy Fink and NFR friend Jon Weisberger, Bluegrass Sings Paxton hits the Paxton classics in fine versions – the man himself even shows up on “I Can’t Help but Wonder Where I’m Bound” – but equally striking are songs that might be less canonical but nonetheless reveal his gifts as much as anything more familiar. This is particularly true of “I Give You the Morning,” a gorgeous love song sung here with soaring tenderness by Claire Lynch. A sonic sunrise, the track emerges slowly around Deanie Richardson’s fiddle and Kristin Scott Benson’s banjo as Lynch delivers one of Paxton’s signature small wonders of lyrical and melodic concision. Like the album as a whole, it’s a simple pleasure and a significant one. – CH

Ebonie Smith (feat. Dawn Richard) – “Fantasy” (from On Imagination, 2024)

Ebonie Smith’s On Imagination starts from a really good idea: a group of Black women artists and political leaders reading poems by great Black women poets over jazz-influenced instrumentation. And then Smith and her collaborators execute this idea beautifully, with guests from Angela Davis to Danyel Smith to the duo of Roberta Flack and Valerie Simpson (!) beautifully capturing a small piece of this crucial literary tradition that stretches from Phillis Wheatley to Maya Angelou and beyond. “Fantasy,” based on the poem by Gwendolyn Bennett, features Dawn Richard reading Bennett’s vision of a wondrous place overseen by a “dark-haired queen” over subtle polyrhythm. After Richard reads the brief three stanzas, the track blooms into an echoing trip-hop groove in its second half. It’s an appropriately evocative affirmation of Bennett’s world-building, the kind of practice which Richard is quite familiar with on her own remarkable work and which Ebonie Smith does masterfully on this compelling album. – CH

Lainey Wilson – “Hang Tight Honey” (from Whirlwind, 2024)

With its driving acoustic guitars and speeding drums, Lainey Wilson’s “Hang Tight Honey” instantly took me back to the early ‘80s New Wave-influenced country of Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, or especially Carlene Carter. And I will never refuse such an association. One of many highlights from Wilson’s very fine new album, which both David and I have written about here before, “Hang Tight Honey” adds a bit of welcome hard-rock crunch to the song’s rave-on rush, turning the whole thing into a motorvating thrill ride that befits the song’s promise that the real party will start once Wilson gets home. Don’t just turn this one up – crank it up. And let it rock. – CH

Bruce Springsteen – “She Don’t Love Me Now” (from Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin, 2024)

Hot take incoming: The Boss’s contribution to the new benefit album for rocker Jesse Malin is better R&B than anything he did on his Only the Strong Survive album of soul covers. Where there he seemed constrained and predictable (save for “Night Shift”), his take on Malin’s “She Don’t Love Me Now” is the kind of affecting reinvention that reveals just how deeply R&B sounds have always informed Springsteen’s music. Riding an easy groove that wafts over the listener like the breeze off the boardwalk, Bruce sings with the poise and vulnerability of an old pro who still enjoys finding a new melody to play around with, not to mention the blend of resignation and resolve that characterizes so many of the soul greats who populate his record collection. Malin deserves all the support he can get, and his longtime pal came out swinging here. – CH

Recommended readings:

-Nate Chinen on Dinah Washington at 100, for The Gig

-Mark Anthony Neal on Michael Jackson and the Chitlin Circuit, for Medium.com

-Brandon Ousley on 20 must-own “neo-soul” albums, for Discogs.com

-Kyle Denis on hip-hop and the American flag, for Billboard

-Stuart Berman on Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese, for Pitchfork

-Marissa Moss and Natalie Weiner on 25 years of the Chicks’ Fly, for Don’t Rock the Inbox

-Amanda Martinez and others talking Black country music in past and present, on Good Morning America

-Emmett Lindner on the late rapper and DJ Fatman Scoop, for The New York Times

-Bill Friskics-Warren on the late A-Team guitarist Pete Wade, for The New York Times

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