Archive | Music Matters

Beyoncé Blows Out Our Backs

It’s been a minute since I posted on this platform and now I’m doing it when everyone is out and about or fast asleep. But I just took Renaissance, Beyoncé’s first full-length LP since 2016’s Lemonade, out for a five-mile, post-readings walk and am here to say that not liking it is a form of anti-populist–nay, anti-popular kids!–sour-pussism akin to not liking screwball dames in the 1940s; Singin’ in the Rain and rock ‘n’ roll backbeats in the 1950s; the Beatles, the Stones and Stax Records in the 1960s; Steinem, Scorsese, and SNL in the 1970s; the Boston Celtics, MJ, and Eddie Murphy in the 1980s; and the Chicago Bulls and Nirvana after Nevermind hit #1 on the Billboard Charts in the 1990s.

Okay, I don’t really expect everyone to toe this aesthetic line, but I do contend that even in this day and age, some things are popular because they are just so freaking good they’re undeniable. To me, that’s Beyonce and this just-what-the-doctor-ordered album. It’s full of her usual Virgo virtousity— full-throttle throaty thotty vocals, brillllllliant syncopation, and a wholly earned homage to the ancestors –with a new splash of real sex, not studio-engineered sex. As in: somebody is blowing out her back besides ho-hum Jay-Z and I’m here to ride that train.

As in: The hardest working broad in show business just released a liberationist album and it’s the trumpet we swans needed.

Every track is iconic in the most utopian application of that term and every one nods to a different big bang. “Cuff It” alone has already been played by this witch at least 100 times, “Cozy” is the ultimate runway anthem for we over-40 thrivalists, and don’t get me started on the “Break My Soul” remixes she’s been releasing all week. Last night she dropped the best one yet–a “Queens” remix reworking Madonna’s “Vogue” that calls out all the r&b goddesses as her very own sister-sirens. By the time she purred “Jilly from Philly, I love you boo,” I was bawling on my stoop. B. holds space for everyone who tries their best, and that sort of generosity is infectious.

In general I’m digging life so much that I haven’t been finding the time to say much about it. But this album encapsulates that vibe so well–a yes-the-sky-is-falling-down-but-that-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-show-up-for-each-other-then-boogie-our-brains–out—that I had to sing it from the rooftops after dancing it naked. Because yes.

In my intuitive readings, city walks, beach adventures, and even social media feeds I’m witnessing this Leo Season as more break-through than break-down. Glass ceilings and glass houses are shattering everywhere–especially in the realms of intimacy, creativity, travel, and the domestic and erotic arts–and pleasure principle is riding principal with a sexy school-marm riding crop.

Summer 2022, y’all. Who knew?

Share Your Love With Me (Aretha, Forever)

Did you know that Aretha’s version of “Share Your Love With Me”–first recorded by Bobby Band, but no one covered a track like the Queen–has made me cry ever since I was a kid? The loneliness and longing of the lyrics are perfectly matched by Aretha’s musicalit; she always produced her albums when the studios boys didn’t credit her. Just listen to the first chords of her piano; that Atlantic Records horn section; her glorious, churchified sisters thrilling and trilling; and then Lady A swooping us all up–generously, joyfully–in her big beautiful voice, making all of the human condition OK. Yes, even our pain. Especially our pain.

This song. I can’t tell you how many times my heart has been so broken that I’ve barely been able to feed myself, let alone feel myself, but could still listen to this song. Over and over, numbly at first, then with big tears streaming, until I was shored enough to face the world with spine and lipstick straight. This song is my church, and Aretha is forever my minister.

I’d say I miss her and of course that’s true. But it’s also true that she lives on in every one of my scratchy vinyls. The ones I’ve been listening to since I was that kid in dirty braids who saved up to buy them at Skippy White’s in Cambridge’s Central Square. I’m so grateful Aretha Franklin helped raise me even if she didn’t know she was doing it. Raising people up is what she did and she always will. She shares her love with all of us.

Painting at Audre’s: Part II

This is the second and final installment of an essay that I began earlier this spring. It is a window into my book, to which I’ve been slowly returning as the world is too rapidly opening back up.
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NYC has opened back up, and the smell of fresh paint suffuses every block, a top note to the concentration of garbage piling up on sidewalks, weed clouding every corner. For every person fleeing their Covid cave for fresher air and wider horizons, another is claiming a new base for big-city dreams, 16 months delayed.

It all involves an awful lot of fresh paint.

Some associate this scent with toxicity—chemicals, ill health, colonization. For me, it’s a gateway to an autumn four decades ago, when Audre resurfaced and the world first opened up.

Really, it was simple. One day Audre called up, and the following Friday, without disclosing any of the long-awaited details of their conversation, my mother whisked Jennie and me into Cambridge, where Audre had rented a long apartment on a tree-lined block between Central and Inman Square. It didn’t occur to any of us to bring my father because he never strayed from his Friday routine: popcorn, tea, computer manuals, sports radio, and bed at 8:30. Of course now substitute poetry for manuals and 70s film for sports radio and my routine is not that far off, but back then his diurnal rhythms seemed the ultimate in passive domination.

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"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy