Last Month Now (2024.4)
If there are no new ideas, do you have any reason to learn?
Likely due to its appearance on last month’s Pits & Landings “Last Month Now” playlist, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is presently omnipresent, and two recent articles take a gander under the hood to see what makes this concoction so potent.
At Bloomberg, Ashley Carman points us toward an origin point for that Nile Rodgers-derived funk/disco guitar lick: turns out that you too can download and license the sample for the low, low cost of about two actual espressos. It’s the work of Vaughn Oliver, a studio musician/producer-type (who is very definitely not Vaughan Oliver, the influential sleeve designer for 4AD, who died in 2019). Oliver uploaded his track to Splice, a sound-licensing platform that launched in 2013 and has seen its samples appear in tracks from Doja Cat and Bieber, and is partnering with Billboard as kind of the Shazam of sample licensing. Library music at the top of the charts? Time to throw on that new Broadcast.
The other story about “Espresso” is far closer to my heart and probably yours too. It comes from Dilla Time and Big Payback author Dan Charnas at Slate and it’s titled “The Musical History Lesson Buried Beneath the Song of the Summer.” Charnas situates “Espresso” as part of an unexamined lineage of pop tracks from the past four decades that borrowed to various degrees from that fecund but uncategorizable period between the end of disco and the rise of hip-hop that produced classics like “Juicy Fruit,” “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” “Gimme the Night” and numerous other funky grown-folks R&B classics.
Blessedly, Charnas made a playlist that speaks for itself:
What the songs themselves can’t explain, however, is how such effervescent, melodic, and danceable music was essentially stonewalled from MTV and Top 40 radio. Charnas, like myself and likely you, resents the fact that, say, Robert Palmer could Pat Boone his ass onto MTV by covering Cherrelle’s vastly superior original, or that performers with obvious crossover potential like Evelyn “Champagne” King and Stephanie Mills weren’t given the opportunities, let alone the resources, given what he calls “the corporatization of FM radio” in the late 70s and early 80s. It’s rare, especially with the ongoing gutting of music criticism, to see an article about the biggest song in the world provide this level of musical/institutional/economic context, and written with this kind of emotional investment.
This month’s Last Month NOW playlist doesn’t have a summer jam on par with “Espresso,” but Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” comes close in terms of giddy lyrical incomprehensibility, and a track that sounds like 2013 Pharrell doing 2012 A$AP Rocky? IDK. It blew up in April on TikTok, and Richman was already the first artist signed to fellow DMV-er Brent Faiyaz’ ISO Supremacy label, so I’d expect him to be either hitting up Splice.com or sampling Rene and Angela anytime now.
One question: does he know how Million Dollar Baby (2004) ends? Is that actually how we’re supposed to read this song? Is it the bummer jam of the summer? (No)
The newest P&L LMN playlist (below) gets us through April’s best music, more or less, with a few newer ones mixed in. I’m dedicating it to Steve Albini, about whom you’ve read more than enough (but if not please read Grayson Currin at Pitchfork).
Fourteen years ago, I wrote a C+ thinkpiece on my Tumblr musing on the political economy of “indie rock” in light of his comments on Sonic Youth selling out by signing to Geffen in 1990. Then, as happened often in 2010, an editor at Pitchfork asked me to republish it, which I did. It’s question-begging juvenalia, the equivalent of me raising my hand and saying “actually, indies were just as crooked in the 90s and didn’t have nearly the distribution power as the majors, and the world is better for Thurston and Kim being on MTV.”
I don’t still have the email that Albini sent me between the Tumblr post going 2010 music-internet-viral and the Pitchfork pub that I reached out to him for comment for, but I do remember him saying, amid a like seven-paragraph riposte with perfect grammar, that the word “indie” is “fucking bullshit” and that “I’ll go to the fucking mat” against the majors, anytime, anywhere. Of course, he was right, and he taught me a lesson. RIP to the realest one ever.
Expect a May playlist—a Maylist—soon, along with some other thoughts on the year’s music and research updates in newsletter form.
(Mavs in 7)
Last Month NOW (2024.4)
How To Dress Well, “No Light”
Billie Eilish, “Blue”
Vince Staples, “Black&Blue”
Tommy Richman, “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”
Yaya Bey, “chrysanthemums”
Corridor, “Phase IV”
English Teacher, “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab”
Cloud Nothings, “Silence”
Fontaines D.C., “Starburster”
The The, “Cognitive Dissident”
Richard Thompson, “The Old Pack Mule”
Rich Ruth, “No Muscle, No Memory”
Gnod, “Pilgrim’s Progress”
Arooj Aftab f. James Francies, “Autumn Leaves”
Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding, “Outubro”
Martha Sky Murphy f. Roy Montgomery, “Need”
AURORA, “The Conflict of the Mind”
The Marias, “No One Noticed”
A.G. Cook, “Serenade”
Valentina Magaletti, “Drum Jump”
Beak>, “Ah Yeh”
NikNak f. Grifton Forbes-Amos and Cassie Kinoshi, “You Were Supposed To Be Good”
mui zyu, “the mould”
Camila Cabello f. Playboi Carti, “I LUV IT”
Wiardon f. Camo Kynshay, “TAILOR MADE”
Rapsody f. DIXSON, “Black Popstar”
Nappy Nina f. Swarvy, “Out The Park”
Juicy J, “Bury My Problems”
Mach-Hommy, “LON LON”
Mike Shabb f. Navy Blue, “Free Jesus”
10 Good Albums:
A.G. Cook Britpop (New Alias) (“You Know Me,” “Serenade”)
Amen Dunes Death Jokes (Sub Pop) (“Purple Land,” “Rugby Child”)
Arooj Aftab Night Reign (Verve) (“Aey Nehin,” “Autumn Leaves”)
English Teacher This Could Be Texas (Island) (“The World’s Biggest Paving Slab,” “The Best Years Of Your Life”)
Ezra Feinberg Soft Power (Tonal Union) (“Flutter Intensity,” “The Big Clock”)
Grandaddy Blu Wav (“Cabin In My Mind,” “Jukebox App”)
How To Dress Well I Am Toward You (Sargent House) (“No Light,” “A Secret Within The Voice”)
Mach-Hommy #RICHAXXHAITIAN (Mach-Hommy) (“ANTONOMASIA,” “#RICHAXXHAITIAN”)
Tara Jane O’Neil The Cool Cloud of Okayness (Orindal Records) (“Seeing Glass,” “Two Stones”)
Vince Staples Dark Times (Def Jam) (“Black&Blue,” “Étoufée”)
That fecund time between disco and hip-hop isn’t called “boogie”? Maybe I’m too much around DJs but that’s how I always tagged it.