Hello, and welcome to another dispatch of the Rinse. This one is going to cover a lot of different ground, so let’s get started quickly with some housekeeping, a thing that we all know and love.

So, as you should be aware, Black History Month starts on Sunday. As is tradition, this newsletter is going to focus only on Black music for that month. The subtitle for the dispatches will be The Rhythm Is The Reason. There will be four posts: two will be histories of important rhythm players and producers. The two sets of people I will be focusing on are ?uestlove and Sly and Robbie.

Given the recent passing of Sly Dunbar, I will be discussing Sly and Robbie with the first post. If you are not familiar with that name, I can assure you that you are familiar with their work as they have influenced many forms of Black music in the Western hemisphere. In addition, I talked about them briefly during my dispatch about Grace Jones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. ?uestlove has been discussed in reference to D’Angelo, so he’s not a new person to the newsletter either. In both cases, you’ll be surprised by how many people he has worked with.

The second set of posts will be primers on important Black artists. If you have found yourself thinking about getting into someone with a daunting catalog, but not knowing how to, these posts will be for that. It’ll be a few tracks or a couple albums to listen to so that you can get started on the rewarding trip of listening to their catalog. I know one artist that I’m going to talk about, but I don’t know the second, so I’ll keep this one hidden for now. It’ll give you some surprise when they drop.

After February is Women’s History Month, meaning that it’s ladies’ time in the newsletter. don’t know what those posts will look like, but I assure you that they will be cool.

So, after last week’s dispatch about the Gen X Dad Rock canon, reader BJ proposed both the Replacements and Liz Phair for the cool dad and cool mom lines, respectively. I just wanted to say that those are absolutely correct. The Replacements, a band that probably should have been bigger, are excellent candidates for the canon, and Liz Phair, a woman whose Exile in Guyville is lauded as one of the best indie albums of the 90s, is a prime candidate. So, I wanted to thank him for those. If you have more, let me know and we’ll consider it over on this end.

Now, with regards to obsessions, they are only a couple. The first is the following piece of information: Positive K pitched his voice up to do the woman’s part on “I Got A Man.” So, when you are listening to this song, you are listening to Positive K shooting himself down. I am reminded of this from time to time, and it adds an excellent texture to the song while making me laugh.

Next, I have made my piece with the fact that I cannot understand large sections of the world. However, there is one very odd exception: LFO’s “Summer Girls.”

I am haunted by this song. I think about it at least two times a week, and I don’t know why. It’s not a good song. It’s actively bad. It has such quality lines as “I like Kevin Bacon, but I hate Footloose” and “I like The Color Purple, macaroni and cheese/ ruby red slippers and a bunch of trees.” Now, this song would not bother me as much if it was just a random off track I saw some dudes do in a basement somewhere.

I’m bothered because it peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was #38 in the year-end charts. It went platinum. Platinum. One million people heard this song and were like I need to buy this. This song was all over MTV in 1999. I heard this on the radio all of the time. This was a popular song. It was a song of the summer; it was inescapable, as much as I tried to escape it.

My eternal question is how was this song so popular? There’s the inane lyrics (I only quoted a couple; there are more gems about Paul Revere, Chinese food, Georgia, and Family Ties), the “hip-hop” scratching on the chorus, the beat itself. How was this song a thing? If you are up to it, I would love to hear an explanation about how this a good song and not an Abercrombie & Fitch psy-op.

So, as I mentioned in an earlier dispatch, I found two old listening lists when I was doing some cleaning in my house. I’ve already went through the first one from 2014. Went through is probably too strong. I acknowledged that it existed and then recognized that it had various problems. That won’t be the case this time around, primarily because this one is actually dated.

I took these notes after I listened to the album. Are they the most comprehensive notes? Not really, but they were intended help me remember what I listened to because I’m awful at that very task. The only reason I’m marginally good at it now is because I write this newsletter week after week. This notebook has a lot of pages, and there’s on average 5 albums per page. Puts the total listening for those 10 months somewhere in the 200-album range. We are not going to go through each record here. One, it would be boring, and two, I don’t have that kind of time.

As you can see from the photo, I ranked each record I listened to out of 5. When I started thinking about how to lay this out, I was going to do albums from 4.2 and up. Seemed reasonable to me. Here was the problem: it became a lot of albums. So, I had to tighten it up a bit, focusing on albums that 2018 A.C. gave 4.5 or higher. (For the record, no one got a 5/5. Highest score was a 4.9 and that was for Iceage’s Beyondless.) Here is a sampling of some of the albums that fell between 4.2 and 4.5:

Here’s the fun part: I still listen to a number of these albums. I’ve recently listened to Slow Air, I’m Terry, and Working Class Woman for fun. I still listen to Le Kov pretty regularly, and as you know from my year-end lists, I still listen to a lot of Armand Hammer. I long for Nedelle Torrisi to put out new music. And, I’ve listened to every Mitski album since the one listed above. My wife and I saw her on the Be The Cowboy tour, and it was the most people I’ve ever seen crying at a rock club. (Most people I’ve seen at a concert period was when I went to see Taylor Swift.) When she decided to take a break, I completely understood why.

So, with those as the honorable mentions, you might be wondering what got 4.5 or above. They were the following:

I’m not going to talk about all of these albums for various reasons. To start, I’m not going to discuss Parquet Courts or Iceage because, by sheer happenstance, I talked about them in my 2014 Spins dispatch. I’m going to shock you and say that these albums were also extremely good. Parquet Courts had a bit more fun, and Iceage got more dramatic. They were clear advances in both of their sounds and excellent listens on their own terms.

For much the same reason, I’m not going to talk about either Roc Marciano or Mach-Hommy. I have spent a lot of time in this newsletter talking about how great both of them are at rapping, so I don’t really need to go on again about that. As a note, the Mach-Hommy record is one of the records he did with his regular collaborator Tha God Fahim. It’s very good, but it is more of a mixtape, less of an album.

Because time is a real concern for me, I chose albums that I had not listened to for a long time, wanted to return to, or got confusingly high scores.

The first album I listened to was The Orielles’ Silver Dollar Moment. At the time, I wrote the following about this album: “A strong debut from the British trio. Fun, lively, heady, groovy. I want to listen to it again. It’ll get wedged in my head. I know it will. 4.5/5.” Eight years on, these words are still accurate and the score remains the same. This trio of British teens took the best of C-86 and merged it with ESG-style rhythms to create a fun, danceable record. The returns diminished on their next album, Disco Volador, but they completely changed the script on the next album, Tableau, taking a more experimental edge. Their music was the better for it. They have a new record coming this year, and if the single is any sort of indicator, the album will be good.

The next album I listened to was Eleanor Friedberger’s Rebound. At the time, I wrote the following: “Smart, classy, sophisticated. Really a very good album from her. 4.5/5.” I relistened to this last night, and I think that this score might be a little low. I’m going to bump it up to a 4.7. With effortless panache, Friedberger delivers this piece of smooth, sun-kissed soft rock with electronic flourishes that is deeply unhurried. Her lyrics are great, and the vibe is immaculate. Probably two to three times a year, I wonder to myself if she will release new music. That’s how much of an effect this album had on me and still has on me.

The next album I listened to was Beach House’s 7. I wrote the following at the time: “A strong outing from the group. A bit less hazy than usual. Still plenty dreamy. I don’t think that this is the album that will sell people on Beach House. You either liked them before or you still don’t. Your loss if that’s the case, but so it goes. 4.5/5.” These words are still accurate. For about two decades, Beach House has released music that follows the same template with the keyboards, guitar washes, and drum machines, yet each one sounds quite different from the one that preceded or followed it. It’s really quite a testament to how good they are at songwriting. The score remains the same as I think it’s one of the stronger releases in their archive.

I returned to Pusha T’s Daytona mostly for fun. I already know that it goes hard, but I wanted to experience it again. In 2018, I said the following: “[Pusha T] put out 7 songs, called it an album. Although it’s the length of an EP, it’s better than most of the rap albums that I have listened to this year. The man has bars for days, and much to my personal chagrin, Kanye made some very nice beats. 4.5/5.” (Kanye wasn’t a total piece of shit yet, but he was getting there. Furthermore, I just didn’t like Kanye as a person at that point in time. Why? I’m sure I had a valid reason other than just hating.) I stand by all of those words that I wrote in 2018 as well as the score. I would say the same thing again today, especially the Kanye hate.

Next up is Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of. I wrote the following at the time: “I’ve had this dude in the wrong lane forever. Harpsichord-heavy experimental album. Truly crushed it. 4.5/5.” While I did like this album, it is extremely experimental. Keyboards and rhythms are sliced and diced, turned inside out, spliced with samples of all variety. It’s absolutely stunning on a technical level. However, it’s a commitment to listen to it, and as a result, like most OPN records, I don’t return to it often. I would bump this album down to a 4/5. It’s just a little too much of a lift.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s Hope Downs is a highlight of the Australian college rock/indie pop revival of the 2010s. I wrote, “They never disappoint. True jangling magic. 4.7/5.” Upon relistening, this was grade inflation on my part. This album is very good, but it does not reach the levels of a Real Estate, for example, in terms of jangling indie pop. It honestly doesn’t quite reach the levels of their introductory EPs. So, the rescore is a 3.9/5.

Because I think about “Pick Up” a lot, I relistened to DJ Koze’s Knock Knock. At the time, I wrote, “I understand the hype. It’s a bit less dance floor-based, but it’s still an exquisite dance album. It’ll last for a while. 4.5/5.” While I still do understand the hype, we’re going to quickly knock that score down to a 4/5. The beats and production are very much on point, and the mix of house, funk, R&B, and soul is nice. However, there is a massive problem with this album: it’s way too long. It runs for 78 minutes, and I found myself waiting for the album to end, which is never good. With a bit of editing, this album could have been an all-timer. That said, “Pick Up” is an absolutely perfect house track.

Next is Jazzanova’s The Pool. I have a soft spot for this band because they made one of my absolute favorite downtempo tracks, “Coffee Talk.” In 2018, I wrote the following about this album: “They are timeless. A perfect summer album. Cool, sexy, refined. 4.5/5.” I’m not sure what was going on 2018, but none of these words are true. This sounds like the music played in European hotel lobbies. It sounds like music made by people who refuse to acknowledge that there has been rap music since 1996. It’s filled with chanteuses from downtempo albums in 2002, but this album was from 2018. It sounded so dated, and I found my earlier love for this album absolutely bewildering. New grade: 2.5/5.

Given that I’ve been listening to Blood Orange recently, I wanted to return to Negro Swan to see how I felt about it. In 2018, I wrote the following: “You think, Oh, Dev Hynes is putting out a new album. You put it on your calendar and wait until it comes. The day comes, the album drops, and everyone is initially puzzled until they realize that their confusion comes from the fact that they are actually hearing a piece of genius. His music is elusive, sinuous, sensual, and beautiful. His album, while the words never really stick, hit with a force unknown. The tensions always sit on the surface and battle with the listener. I have only positives for this album. A beautiful meditation on what it means to be black in the 2018 world. 4.7/5.” Yea, what that guy said.

Before I get to the last album, I want to give a shoutout to a couple of albums. First, Tirzah’s Devotion. A masterstroke of the modern R&B movement. I gave it a 4.6, and I stand behind that completely.

Also, if you somehow haven’t listened to Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour, go correct that. It’s the perfect example of a country-pop album. I gave it a 4.8, and I stand hard on that.

The last album that I’ll discuss from this notepad is Hater’s Siesta. I wrote the following about this album: “If someone was to go through these notes, they would see that I’m a little like the Pete Hammond of music reviews. However, I do dislike things. This was not one of them. This is the best indie pop album I have heard this year. It’s smart, well-written, and jangly. People will sleep. That’s fine. It’s their loss. 4.8/5.” I read this over and also remembered the fact that this is an automatic buy if I find it on vinyl in a store, regardless of if I have the money for it.

I thought to myself that there is no way this album is 4.8 good. I haven’t listened to it in years. I would think that if I liked this album this much, I would listen to it more. I got to the end of this album, and I immediately understood why I gave it a 4.8 and why it is an immediate buy for me. I love this album. It’s gentle, bittersweet, moving, and beautifully crafted. I really appreciated the craft of this album this time around after having to listen to so much for this newsletter. A true gem of a release.

Alright, I have kept you all for long enough. Please take care of yourselves and each other. As always, fuck ICE and pet a dog or cat as long as they are cool with it. Tell your friends to subscribe and I’ll see you next week with the beginning of Black History Month here at The Rinse.