Substack: Throwing bricks at glass ceilings

Tell me, what’s more compelling? To have a writer appraise music in a competent yet bookish manner or to read them bringing it to life like a novelist? So much so that it means almost as much to you now as it did to them then. Crossing from the world of what happened and why – the play-by-play – into the realm of characters, conflict, tests and obstacles.

From mixtape drops and nods to your ‘endz’, to triumphant arrivals on the national stage that feel like collective wins because you’ve been on the long journey with them, “throwing bricks at glass ceilings” as Kano rapped. Taking some heavy losses too, it must be said.

I’m not talking about a pure expression of fandom or an I-was-there awareness of a genre’s genesis, both of which have merit. This is different. It’s the ability to chronicle the times in anything other than a straight line. To look behind demographic shifts and hit records. To see the turning points and setbacks with an acute sense of time and place. Complexity and precarity. Cause and effect.

To join the dots between past movements and evolving scenes like you’re explaining your family tree. How we get from Cecil Morris’ Peoples Community Radio Link (PCRL) pirate in 80’s Birmingham to West Midlands grime entrepreneur Despa Robinson, who co-founded the label StayFresh and started the artist management and media company BE83. Aniefiok ‘Neef’ Ekpoudom has achieved this and so much more in Where We Come From.

Read the full story on my Substack, Bluejeans & Moonbeams.

Also in this issue: a poem for all ages, why friendships feel like admin, the curious world of crisp flavours, age-gap relationships, Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi and it’s Fred Again … again.

Talking it out

The mark of a book’s wisdom – in this book anyway – is the number of dog ears. As you see here, Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan collaboration Faith, Hope & Carnage has provided meaningful thoughts and lightning-bolt revelations front to back.

The fruit of a series of lengthy phone conversations between 2020 and 2021, it examines Cave’s loci of inspiration, open-ended practice, personal theology (an approach to religion he describes as “spirituality with rigour”) and his incredible resolve like never before. And that’s saying something, given the length of his career and all the interviews he’s given.

Cave is probably one of the most generous, open and articulate public figures in music, an artist whose creations are always intimate and true reflections of his being. Considered, even poured over. And yet he sees his work as incomplete in a sense. As a vessel into which others pour meaning. “What I do is entirely relational,” he says, “actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it’s animated by others.” Wisdom, in this regard, is knowing how far we have to go as Anthony Bourdain noted.

Cave puts himself out there. It’s a compulsion. He was the distraught father who took to the stage in a series of public ‘inquisitions’ (Variety called it “group therapy”) without having many answers to his own grief. Cave also attempts to address the curiosities, frustrations, ills and injustices of society through his weekly liturgical Red Hand Files, which have “created a kind of ever-creeping transparency by slowly prising me open”, he explains. “They freed me from myself”.

I and thousands of others across the world have come to rely on this correspondence, this antiquated exchange, to make sense of a world that tips ever closer into chaos and conflict on multiple fronts (a “collective lunacy”, in Cave’s eyes). Though he is also happy to answer the comparatively banal (“Who would you like to win Love Island?”) and silly (“Have you ever met Nicolas Cage?”).

On grief, in particular, he offers great comfort and ballast. Having now lost two sons, his mother Dawn and close friend/ex-partner Anita (“an astoundingly valuable human being”), he lives in defiance as much as anything. I can certainly relate to that impulse. Read more about his intentions for the book here.

Don’t expect copious ‘behind the scenes’ insight, an encyclopaediac trawl through the discography or a VH1-style retrospective complete with backstage gossip. But we are transported to the conception of the bruised and bereft Skeleton Tree (which became a form of “radical connectivity” when played live) and, in fleeting moments, feel relative release in the imagery of its follow-up Ghosteen. We are also invited into the endearing bromance with right-hand man Warren Ellis, who also has a book out.

When O’Hagan presses him about songwriting and the purpose of music, Cave uses words such as salvation, absolution, forgiveness and healing. And with real intention. In the context of personal disappointment, catastrophe or devastation, art becomes a means of survival. In Cave’s hands, the song is an act of transformation or transference – a form of supplication, at times – a way to pick up the pieces and move beyond.

Those are the stakes at play in his world, a life in which he has learned to live in uncertainty and by divine possibility. In that time he has gone from running on the burning intensity of youth and rebellion to a form of spiritual audacity or zeal as he puts it. Cave’s depth of faith, in both the religious and quasi-religious sense, is what makes him such a compelling and crucial artist. Perhaps it’s also what’s allowed him to withstand so much and still be alive to raw experience.

Nick Cave with Sean O’Hagan (c) Lynette Garland

When talking about his hands-on passion for ceramics, he offers this advice to budding creative folk: “Learn as much as you can about their craft … but ultimately trust your own impulses. Have faith in yourself, so you can stand beside what it is that you have done and fight for it, because if you invest in it with that faith, then it has its own truth, its own honesty, its own resilient vulnerability and hence its own value.”

Credit to writer and critic O’Hagan for facilitating these lengthy discussions, giving Cave space to expand on opinions and observations, while lightly steering the course and challenging him along the way. He is a sparse yet elucidating presence. Well, that’s how it feels on the page anyway, post-edit. They have known each other for more than 30 years, so there is mutual respect and a rapport they can build on. But that familiarity can breed an overly casual or easy exchange. Not here.

The pandemic must have been a double-edged sword: offering the chance to talk at length amid the enforced isolation of lockdown, with fewer distractions, but then straining to make sense of the shared tragedy of it all as COVID ruptured our sense of time and space.

Chew slowly and savour all that comes to mind. And come back to it when you need it. Faith, Hope & Carnage is restorative and will galvanise your spirit.

BUY

PS I recommend watching this Newsnight interview about the book. Cave’s conversation with Kirsty Wark in the theatre is interspersed with atmospheric performances on piano.

Dilla's Rosebud moment

My copy of Dilla Time by Dan Charnas is very dog-eared. It might be irresistible trivia about where that sample came from and why it sounds different to the original. A musicological analysis of the beat, tracing the evolution of the drum machine to Midi Production Centre (MPC). Or passages that transport us to basements and studios as pivotal tracks are being made.

But above all, it's the insight into Detroit's history, the Yancey family and how James became J Dilla (via Jon Doe, Jay Dee, Dill Withers and other aliases) that I found most captivating.

On a journalistic front, I am full of admiration. This book is a rigorous piece of research, with the author constructing a largely third-person narrative from more than 190 interviews, published/unpublished interviews with Dilla, and a stack of other research (check the bibliography).

I do love my direct quotes. They take us to a place and time and make us part of the conversation. But Dan's approach works because he manages to pour all these discoveries and recollections into a master narrative, building an argument and maintaining the momentum from chapter to chapter like an accomplished storyteller.

There's a real determination on the page to trace Dilla's musical heritage to the Motor City (down to the street grid), to analyse his unique sense of rhythm on a mathematical level and to lend thesis-level weight to the argument that he changed music (not just hip-hop, all popular music). He certainly didn’t just switch off quantization (time correction) and become great overnight – a gross oversimplification that bugged Dan enough to start thinking about setting the record straight with Dilla Time.

This is no hagiography. We get to know the man behind the legend, flaws and all. The character study side of this book is illuminating. The cultivation of persona – sometimes in service of the music but also detrimental to it – and the corrosive nature of ego. The pursuit of credit and status. How a lingering sense of bitterness and betrayal clouds perception when forgiveness is often the reset we all need.

Dan is a great custodian of this story, writing and reporting with sensitivity and empathy. He's always willing to present different sides of that story, to suspend judgment and, where possible, to let the facts speak for themselves. He took the time to earn trust and have readbacks with sources, always considering different versions of reality as he puts it.

There is no better example of this than the squabble over Dilla's estate. Fractured relationships shattered in grief, open conflicts and agendas, questionable intentions on several fronts and mother Maureen 'Ma Dukes' determination to protect her son's legacy perhaps to a fault.

Listen to enough of Dilla’s music and you know he had a great ear for a sample, a unique touch on the MPC and a perpetual will to break convention. Thanks to Dan, we now have the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what made this musician a genius, on par with the likes of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington in his eyes.

A few months ago, the author was a guest on the podcast Broken Record with his old Def American Recordings boss Rick Rubin. Reminiscing aside, it's a compelling conversation about music making, inspiration and how ideas take shape.

This is my favourite moment, also a highlight of the book, where Dan makes the bonkers connection between an aside from a Dilla interview, the out-of-sync claps at the party climax to a Sidney Poitier film called A Piece of the Action and Dilla time being described as anything from “offbeat” to “drunk”. Tremendous detective work.

Next, we can look forward to the feature-length documentary, based on Dilla Time and executive-produced by Summer of Soul Oscar winner Questlove.

BUY

PS Why does Dan call this Dilla’s “Rosebud moment”? It’s a Citizen Kane thing.

Also, I recommend this Vox video about how Dilla humanised the MPC and made it “an extension of himself”.

It’s worth checking two other conversations with Dan. This one with pianist Jason Moran (whose playing style was influenced by Dilla, particularly this track by Busta Rhymes). We learn how Dilla used his lived experience, the landscape and stimuli of The D to “face the beat” as Moran puts it. To construct, then continuously reconstruct, his own sense of syncopation. An architect of his own environment. The link between how a person speaks and plays also blew my mind. FYI, Young James was a stutterer. Highlights are here.

The second one is an Artform event in LA with author Oliver Wang and Stones Throw label owner Peanut Butter Wolf. The discussion about Dilla’s aura and why fans are so fervent about his legacy over someone like Tupac (also a great talent gone too soon) is interesting.

Bonus: Here’s a little mix of some of my favourite productions and remixes by Jay Dee/J Dilla. No doubt, there will be a second volume.