music reviews

I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)

Women prisoners dancing and singing inside the Zomba Prison

Dostoevsky, in House of the Dead, wrote that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the horrors of Zomba Central Prison—overcrowding, malnutrition, HIV—on Malawian society: it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, and the gap in well-being between free people and prisoners is probably narrower in Malawi than in most other countries. But maybe we can revise Dostoevsky and say that the hope of a society can be judged by the character of its prisoners. The inmates of Zomba make music. Masterful, heart-wrenching music. Music about death, sin, fatigue, longing, forgiveness. Their musical virtuosity should not be mistaken for personal virtue. Some of the singers have done terrible things (and others have done nothing except be born poor). But it’s hard not to hear their songs and believe, like children do and like we once did, that no one is beyond redemption, and that there is something akin to character, to morality, within a melody. Some of us are good people, and some of us are good songs. Who is ready to judge that one of these is worth less? 10 ↑

Zomba Prison Project. I Have No Everything Here. Six Degrees Records, 2015. Reviewed October 12, 2024. Notable tracks: “Listen to Me (Or I Will Kick Your Ass),” “Please Don’t Kill My Child,” “I See the Whole World Dying of AIDS,” “Forgiveness.”

Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)

Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial. What does it all amount to? Maybe nothing more sitting on a torn recliner in the yard with a scruffy guitar in hand, singing your heart out to the leafless trees. It’s likely that the universe has no center and that no one’s judgment of success or failure, of a life well-lived or wasted, matters. Still, notes ring out and rustle the leaves. Music is a physical thing, and what’s physical is indestructible, changing forms but never fully divested of its previous content, traveling and traveling. Zane Campbell and his scribbles and his deep tremolo are made of Aunt Ola Wave, her own forgotten ancestors, and his real deal life. And maybe the future too. 9 ↑

Campbell, Zane. Ola Wave. Emperor Records, 2017. Reviewed October 6, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ola Wave,” “A Way Around It,” “Tear Down the Fences.”

Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)

Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The one Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a globalizing world in which music across oceans was available to be synthesized into local styles, and also a time of creeping despair in which Nigerians, and peoples all over the world, began to realize that they had traded brutal colonial regimes for elite corruption. But it takes genius to transform the currents of history into music that reveals and then redirects those currents. Original Sufferhead, released at the height of Fela’s fame as both musician and activist, is a blunt statement about what it feels like to have hands around your throat, every day, every hour. Water, light, food, house: all dissolved in the power show. And yet these tracks will far outlive even the names of the generals that tried to suppress them. 8 ↑

Kuti, Fela. Original Sufferhead. Knitting Factory Records, 1981. Reviewed October 6, 2024. Notable track: “Original Sufferhead.”

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)

All Bob ever wanted is for us to not forget the past. Not to excuse its crimes or stop moving forward, but to simply remember what we once were, how we once felt. Every Dylan record since 1992’s Good as I Been to You serves this kind of conservatism—the best kind of conservatism, one interested in connections between past, present, and future instead of dreaming of a mythical golden age when everyone else was oppressed. Two albums of blues covers; the stunning traditionalist trilogy Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times; the Robert Hunter collaboration Together Through Life; the probably-tongue-in-cheek Christmas album; the Sinatra standards. It’s all about what used to be. Rough and Rowdy Ways not only doesn’t hide its debt to the past, it flaunts it from beginning to end. The opening track, “I Contain Multitudes,” calls out literary giants like a sixth-grade poem, and it would sound like one too if Dylan’s voice were not so damn sincere. He really loves this stuff. The finale “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute recap of JFK’s assassination, is equally guileless, somehow managing to land just on the right side of hypnotic and utterly unnecessary. Notwithstanding a couple of undeniable gems (the devotional “Mother of Muses,” the grave-robber anthem “My Own Version of You”), this is not one of Dylan’s great albums, but it’s also better than mediocre. It’s perhaps most like Tempest, a record that manages to evoke nothing so much as uneasy waiting, fuzzy boundaries, posthumous art that mysteriously slipped into life. 7 ↑

Dylan, Bob. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020. Reviewed September 28, 2024. Notable tracks: “My Own Version of You,” “Mother of Muses.””

Soul Journey, Gillian Welch (2003)

Critics generally regard Gillian Welch’s third album, Soul Journey, as an artistic lull. I disagree. The dominant themes of her other early albums—Revival‘s wistfulness, Hell Among the Yearlings‘ gothic grimness, even Time (the Revelator)‘s nostalgic cool—are more emotionally fundamental than the lightness of Soul Journey. But lightness can also be deep. It’s the sensation of arm hairs standing on end as a cool summer breeze hits, and the jumble of memories and dreams that leak in afterward. And lightness can also be deceptive: “Look at Miss Ohio” and “One Little Song” are as cutting as any song Welch has ever written, sweet melodies notwithstanding. There are a couple duds buried in the album’s center (“One Monkey” is not a good work of art, catchy or not, religious allegory or not), but Soul Journey is, twenty years later, an indispensable part of Welch’s oeuvre. 8 ↑

Welch, Gillian. Soul Journey. Acony, 2003. Reviewed September 13, 2024. Notable tracks: “Look at Miss Ohio,” “Wayside/Back in Time,” “Lowlands.”

Black on Both Sides, Mos Def (1999)

I hated my nose growing up. It was too big, too bulbous. I wanted a white nose: Roman, aquiline. The insecurity grew milder as I got older, but it wasn’t until I saw the album cover for Black on Both Sides, and then listened to the music, that I understood how thoroughly I’d been brainwashed. Yasiin Bey, the erstwhile Mos Def, is Black on all sides and at all elevations. His nose is not like mine, but it’s also not the ad exec’s Platonic ideal of a leading man’s nose. On the cover, Bey is expressionless, serene, his eyes reflecting light, and it’s all so very beautiful, beauty far beyond desire or admiration. The man is alive. What a remarkable thing that is! The music is a deepening of the portrait, a testament to self-love, love of a people, love of home, love of creation, love of music—and sprouting from all that love, demands for sanity and justice, all riding a tight, dextrous flow. Maybe it’s a shame that Bey released so little music over the years; 2009’s Ecstatic was his last album until 2022’s Black Star reunion (not counting the museum exhibit Negus). But maybe Bey was too sincere to do otherwise. Why keep speaking when all the message is there from the beginning? 10 ↑

Mos Def. Black on Both Sides. Rawkus/Priority, 1999. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “New World Water,” “Speed Law,” “Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “Know That.”

The Complete Plantation Recordings, Muddy Waters (1941)

In 1941, the music historian Alan Lomax traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record the legendary Robert Johnson. Johnson was dead, but locals pointed Lomax to another blues guitarist, McKinley Morganfield, better known by his nickname Muddy Waters. Over the course of two visits in 1941 and 1942, Lomax and the musicologist John Work recorded Waters picking and singing on his porch on Stovall’s Plantation, where he’d worked as a sharecropper since he was a teenager. “Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice,” Waters recalled years later, “I can do it.” And he did indeed do it. Muddy Waters is now known as one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, a key figure in restoring the music of the Delta to its rightful place at the heart of American music. The Complete Plantation Recordings is far from the polished, Chicago-fied Muddy Waters that lived on top of the R&B charts in the 1950s. The dust and pain of the Delta is here. And if Muddy’s music is not as quite as defiant and ruthless as Johnson’s, or as plaintive as Son House’s, or as gentle as Mississippi John Hurt’s, it carries an ineffable quality that’s just as essential to the blues. Clear-eyed kindness, perhaps, including towards oneself. We all got to take sick and die one of these days. There’s nothing for a wise man to do but throw himself into each and every flatted fifth. 9 ↑

Muddy Waters. The Complete Plantation Recordings. Chess, 1993. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “You Got to Take Sick and Die One of These Days,” “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “Country Blues.”

RTJ4, Run the Jewels (2020)

RTJ4 dropped a week after George Floyd’s murder and a few months after COVID-19 started shutting down the world. In retrospect, the most painful aspect of 2020 wasn’t the horrific events themselves. It’s the blinding realization that the world is just the same as it was before. No major legislation addressing police brutality passed; no overdue reckoning with racism—the policy normalization of reparations, say—happened. The global public health system hasn’t made the changes necessary to prevent or contain the next pandemic, although it’s very clear that an infectious disease far deadlier than COVID-19 will hit us in the next generation or two. If death—proximate death, the death of parents, the future death of hundreds of millions of indisputable innocents—doesn’t change us, what will? Killer Mike and El-P don’t have the answers, but goddamn it if they don’t have a method. Killer Mike surfs waves of bubbling rage and wit (“Not a holy man, but I’m moral in my perverseness / So I support the sex workers unionizing their services”), El-P’s vulnerability is remarkable (“‘Well, what a wretched state of danger we’ve made here,” I thought to me / Perhaps explaining years of self lobotomy, toxically / Perhaps explaining tears and even tears in my cosmology / You numb yourself for years and it can wear upon you, honestly”), and his jagged, smoking, paranoid-android beats are in top form. Maybe we need to feel—something, anything, as long as the feeling overpowers the noise of ads and tribal slogans—before we can think. Maybe we need to find the church of life before the obvious policy prescriptions appear obvious to us. Preach, Mike. Preach, Jaime. 8 ↑

Run the Jewels. RTJ4. Jewel Runners/BMG, 2020. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ju$t,” “Pulling the Pin,” “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation)” “Goonies vs. ET,” “Walking in the Snow.”

Legalize It, Peter Tosh (1976)

Peter Tosh’s first solo album occupies a hallowed place in the history of roots reggae. The title track and the audacious cover art of Tosh kneeling in a field of ganja are perhaps too memorable. The album is much more than an advocacy platform for weed. Tosh’s impressive stylistic and thematic range is on full display—the sneering “Burial,” the (bouncy!) mama’s lament “What’cha Gonna Do,” and the soulful warning “Till Your Well Runs Dry” stand out—but his characteristic defiance is the thread that runs through it all. The defiance is different in quality than Marley’s—more militant, to be sure, but also more aware of the creative possibilities of juxtaposing sweet melodies and raw anger. Tosh’s talent meshes perfectly with Marley’s unparalleled anthemic instinct and Bunny Livingston’s gentle sincerity, and in an ideal world we would speak of the Wailers in the same breathless breath as we do the Beatles. But we live in a world in which artistically magical relationships fall apart and people die before their gifts are exhausted. Okay. Sometimes a thing of unique beauty stands on the ashes. 9 ↑

Tosh, Peter. Legalize It. Virgin, 1976. Reviewed October 24, 2023. Notable tracks: “Burial,” “What’cha Gonna Do,” “Till Your Well Runs Dry,” “Legalize It.”

The Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce Springsteen (1995)

Critical praise for The Ghost of Tom Joad usually comes with qualifications. “Solid work, but not Nebraska.” “The high-water mark of Springsteen’s least creative period.” The caveats are unnecessary. Tom Joad is one of the finest folk albums of the late 20th century, a heart-in-your-throat walk through the darkness of post-Reagan America. The muddy melodies take some time to sink in, and that’s as it should be: nothing’s easy when you ain’t got that do-re-mi. Springsteen’s heroes are ex-cons fighting to stay afloat, undocumented immigrants cooking meth in the Central Valley, Border Patrol officers falling in love with the wrong person. When hope does peek through in Tom Joad, as it does now and then, it’s all the more powerful. Springsteen had an overtly political goal here, and it’s difficult for art to succeed when its intention, however virtuous, is so carefully chosen. But the album works because Bruce Springsteen’s greatest talent is empathy, the ability to let his characters to sing their lives simply and proudly. We’re left understanding what politics, beyond the corruption and careerism and cynicism, is really about: to make the world sensible, as it never has been. 10 ↑

Springsteen, Bruce. The Ghost of Tom Joad. Columbia, 1995. Reviewed October 20, 2023. Notable tracks: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Youngstown,” “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “Across the Border.”

Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (1964)

In February 1964, Bob Dylan released The Times They Are a-Changin’, a barrage of (mostly) political ballads that would reignite the folk-protest movement. Six months later, Another Side hit the record shops. Dylan never liked the title, but it made the point clearly, if too obviously: Bob was worried about being defined solely as an activist singer, or to be defined at all. And so Another Side is a jumbled mess: simple pleas for sex/love (“All I Really Want to Do,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” “Black Crow Blues”), break-up songs that range from slightly to very bitter (“I Don’t Believe You”, “To Ramona,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Ballad in Plain D”), throwaway talkies (“I Shall Be Free No.10, ” “Motorpsycho Nightmare”), and two songs that don’t fit into any category but reveal, ironically, Dylan’s consistency. The first of these is “My Back Pages,” in which 24-year-old Dylan chastises the naïve politics of 23-year-old Dylan, in the process penning unforgettable introspections about the relationship between politics and music (“Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats/Too noble to neglect/Deceived me into thinking/I had something to protect”). The second unclassifiable track is the most powerful song on Another Side: the stubbornly humane and insanely hopeful “Chimes of Freedom.” Dylan never stopped writing political songs, and, despite his insistent self-identification with plain ol’ American folk music, he also never let go of a certain kind of metaphysical exploration that made his political voice unique. Rimbaud, the critics used to say, with a sprinkling of Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Twain. Maybe. But “Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed/For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe” suggests less the brooding wildness of Rimbaud or Shakespeare’s cosmic wonder than someone more compassionate. Bartolomé de las Casas, perhaps, if the good bishop had stumbled across a 12-string steel and a Leadbelly fakebook in the Chiapas jungle. 8 ↑

Dylan, Bob. Another Side of Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1964. Reviewed October 23, 2023. Notable tracks: “Chimes of Freedom,” “To Ramona,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”