PRINCE...and goodbye, 2016.

This will probably be my last entry here for a while, and possibly my last entry in this series, period.  It’s been fun challenging myself within the blogosphere, yet more and more I find I am far too occupied with the business of life to spend much time here.  Which, of course, is not a negative thing.

I thought about several directions and/or approaches I could take with this entry, my usual preference being to write about the best albums of the year.  While 2016 was an unbelievably good time for music, there were so many great records released, I’m not really sure I can narrow it down to a workable “top 20” list, as I’d be neglecting too many necessary selections.  From Childish Gambino to Solange to Tribe Called Quest and so on and so forth, 2016 was a year where revolutionary consciousness fully entered the mainstream again, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  Yet it also marked the loss of someone who almost certainly had more of a creative and personal impact on me than any other individual from the world of popular music.

Prince.

When Bowie died earlier in the year, I immediately went to work, learning songs of his, putting together a tribute show, and writing an entry here very shortly after his passing.  But Prince?  I’d lived with and inside his music obsessively for most of my adult life, and I can truly say that he is one of the most fundamental reasons I write, play and perform my own music today.  When I found out he was gone, the air left the room.  That evening, myself, my wife, and a very small circle of friends gathered at the house, ostensibly for what I suppose was a sort of Irish wake for the Purple One, listening to his records and even jamming a few of his songs live.  I am thankful for everyone in that room on that night, because I felt as though something had been torn from the very essence of who I am.

When I first heard Prince, I didn’t get it.  His genius was so far beyond my realm of understanding, I may as well have been trying to wrap my head around nuclear physics.  It wasn’t until one of my oldest and closest friends took me aside, and said, “Dylan.  Listen.”  He played me “Bambi,” “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad,” and “Lady Cab Driver.”  I was a serious lead guitar fanatic in those days, and so, as you can imagine, that kind of sealed the deal for me.

I became a man possessed.  I bought every record, sought out every concert, watched every film.  With each subsequent album of his I dug into, I realized more and more the scope of his accomplishments, the versatility of his song-craft, the endless innovation of his musical virtuosity.  Yet more intensely than that, I started to understand things about myself that previously had felt confusing, or convoluted, or in disarray.  People speak frequently about Prince’s penchant for extreme sexuality, and while there’s no denying that aspect of his persona, it was his emotional vulnerability and sensitivity that drew me in.

After this initial flood of catalytic musical inspiration, I went deeper.  The time period where I became a Prince fanatic coincided with the time period where I began finding my own path as a musician, and so after a few years of woodshedding and playing with various bands, I struck out on my own, with a formidable arsenal of Prince covers at the ready.  Learning how to play his songs—solo, and on a bass, no less—led me to new places in terms of my interpretation of Prince and the increasingly large space his music occupied in my life.  Eventually, it opened the door for me to begin writing my own songs, and while the number of influences that pushed me in that direction is ridiculously crowded and diverse, I think I can authoritatively say that, without Prince, I never would have started writing.  Never would have had the confidence.  Never would have thought that I could bare my soul over on-the-one funk.  Never would have spit game at a girlfriend over my own grooves.  Never would have believed that who I was, and who I wanted to be, were valid or viable choices.

Years passed.  Prince became part of the wallpaper of my life, B-Sides and bootlegs overflowing in the crates.  No band that I led would ever play a show without doing at least 2-3 Prince songs in our set.  At Dolly and I’s wedding, our bridesmaids and groomsmen danced down the aisle to “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”  We all wore purple.  My friend Barry—also gone now—and I would talk for hours about our favorite deep cuts, why he liked “Under The Cherry Moon” and why I didn’t, why I felt the need to include “She’s Always In My Hair” on every single mix I ever made.  (That’s an easy answer…it’s my favorite Prince song, of all time, ever.)  I’d play shows with my friend Julian, a frequent Prince impersonator, and he’d bring the house down no matter the venue or crowd, in the style of old-school showmanship that Prince perfected and that seems so rare now.  All this is to say, Prince and his music took on a life of their own within my life, which I know was also the case for so many others throughout the world.  How beautiful, and unlikely, is that?  Some kid from Minneapolis brings the world closer together?

Then—just like that—he was gone.  A magnificent source of love, and hope, was suddenly absent from the universe.  So distant then did immediately seem the days of my own youth, when his music was my solace from all the stillborn relationships, the murky waters of immaturity, the ecstatic sunshine-filled excesses, the dark nights of the soul. 

I can now only say thank you, and I am not quite sure if those words are enough.  I couldn’t have made it here without you, Prince.  I am still figuring out my path through this strange and bitter world, and feel so woefully inadequate at times that I don’t know where to turn.  Then I play one of your records, and it all sort of drifts away, and I hear it as though I’m listening for the first time, and all the heartbreak and joy and love and pain feel exciting again, and I sing and dance and laugh and cry, and I miss you terribly and I never knew you.  I write this for you now and thank you is not enough.

The Farewell Of The Thin White Duke, AKA “my life with Bowie in 5 songs.”

I saw another piece of writing this week that was discussing the enormous outpouring of love, support, commentary, analysis, astonishment, etc. in the wake of David Bowie’s unexpected passing last Sunday, and how it was difficult to offer anything new to the dialogue—so overwhelming was it all, so much of everything already said.  I certainly have no revelations to give, and so instead will simply write about what Bowie meant to me personally.  The best way I can do this is to tell the story of how I came to love Bowie and his music, through five pivotal songs of his that coincide with very specific times in my own life.

It took me a long time to get to Bowie, as far as my musical tastes were concerned.  Sure, I’d first seen him in Labyrinth like a million other ‘80’s kids, and while his appearance in that film was memorable, I was a child and not yet curious enough to pursue the matter further.  As far as his songs and albums went, well…I grew up in a household dominated by folk music, and so David Bowie, like so many other rock artists, didn’t register on my radar at all.  Mine was an existence of softly fingerpicked acoustic guitars and introspective lyrics, not androgynous superstars and electric bombast. 

It wasn’t until many years later, in my early ‘20’s, that his themes of pride despite—no, because of—alienation really started to resonate with me.  Also, as a catalogue completist, Bowie offered that rare thing that other favorites like The Beatles and Parliament-Funkadelic did, that is, every album was a sonic and lyrical journey, and no two records sounded quite the same as each other.  Once I began to immerse myself, I was hooked, and never looked back.  As the years passed, David Bowie became for me like many of my other still-living creative influences—someone I took for granted, someone who would always just be, you know, around.  In fact, Bowie may have felt more like that than most, as he had so doggedly and determinedly invented and built upon his own mystique, to the point where the average observer such as myself began to think such a creature could be nothing less than superhuman, nothing short of immortal.  And yet when I woke up Monday morning, he was dead.  Dead, but not gone.

1.  “Five Years,” from The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars.  I imagine this must have been a lot of folks’ entry-level initiation into Bowie-world, kicking off as it does the legendary Ziggy LP.  Ziggy wasn’t the first album of his I picked up, but it may as well have been, so momentous were its shockwaves.  However, “Five Years” is significant to me not because of its Ziggy association, nor its tale of the impending apocalypse, but because it always happens to come on when I’ve reached these peak transitional points in life, all occurring at a rate of just about, you guessed it, five years.  Leaving Olympia, WA for my hometown of Omaha, not quite in defeat but not sure of anything, driving towards Tugboat Annie’s on the Puget Sound with my old friend Graham, and singing the chorus while faintly tearing up.  Resigned to, and even content with, the approach of my dreaded thirties, having started careers as both a musician and teacher by that point, while managing to marry a woman so incredible she doesn’t mind my endless hours of pontification about subjects such as, I dunno, David Bowie and his song “Five Years.”  Tears streaming down my face mere days ago, as I watched the man himself perform the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test, thinking of how this tune has accidentally marked such crucial points in my own experience, while realizing that the face on the screen—that gaunt, slightly sad, slightly bemused face—is no more, at least not as we've known it.

2.  “Young Americans,” from Young Americans.  When I first committed myself to investigating David Bowie’s music, to see what all the fuss was about, I didn’t know where to start.  I bought Aladdin Sane and it left me cold, which, oddly enough, it still does to this day, and is the only Bowie album I own that I feel that way about, though I dig certain tracks (“Panic In Detroit” is the biz!).  So, wanting to give it another try, I copped the Young Americans LP, and though I was initially startled at the difference in the sound (hardcore glam to Philly soul is more than a bit of a jump), I immediately liked it, and remember smiling so much it hurt, especially when listening to the title track.  I can’t even speak about the song “Young Americans” objectively, so ingrained is it in my psyche at this point.  I learned it myself, played it at countless open mics and actual shows, and even used to do a hyper-exaggerated version as a sort of alarm clock to awaken my always-sleeping cousin when I would go to his house in Omaha, at top volume and with excessive ridiculousness.  The lyrics to this song are unbelievable, some of the most soulful and devastating Bowie ever wrote, and in my own days as a “young American,” I felt like he was singing about me and everybody I knew, directly addressing and even mocking our contradictions, our over-inflated sense of self-importance, our fickle love lives and our days as pimps and hustlers, all at once. 

3.  “1984,” from Diamond Dogs.  I was constantly listening to David Bowie when I lived in Omaha from ’05-’07, and I started digging into the Diamond Dogs LP right at the beginning of that period, living in the basement of the house I grew up in, not re-adjusted at all to midwest sensibilities or midwest weather.  That being the case, the desolate future-now tone of Diamond Dogs felt more appropriate than ever, and I took a special shine to the Shaft-meets-Brecht funk of “1984.”  Keep in mind that these were also the George W. Bush years, and while the concepts of Big Brother and double-speak certainly weren’t new to the American political landscape, they were now being taken to new heights—or is it depths?—and seemed to have freshly sinister undertones that wormed away at anyone paying attention during those dreary times.  To numb myself from it all, I’d throw this cut on at maximum levels, drowning out everything else that was and wasn’t, ‘til none of it mattered other than that razor-sharp guitar and airtight groove, with Bowie singing so woefully and passionately he could have been in the damn basement with me.  Well, he was, I suppose, or at least his records were, and what more can one ask of an artist, really, in moments of confusion and distress?  Bowie was everywhere for me in those days, he filled up the empty spaces and the awkward silences with joy and fervor and maybe not hope, but something close.  Something more real than hope, even…pragmatic funk and fearless rock. 

4.  “Stay,” from Station To Station.  There are two reasons I have such fondness for this particular track.  One is the lyrics, which expertly summarize the kind of romantic entanglements I frequently found myself in in my early ‘20’s, before I wised up and stopped messing around with women who, for the most part, were of extremely limited substance.  The whole chorus, if it can even be called a chorus, of “stay/that’s what I meant to say or do something”…I found myself in that situation far too many times, not being assertive enough to capture the moment and then, of course, losing said moment.  The other reason is that this has got to be the absolute funkiest cut that Bowie ever did, with the guitar conversations of Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick riding over the slick groove laid down by bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, all creating a whirlpool of pocket.  David Bowie always surrounded himself with superb musical talent, but the Station To Station-era band is easily my favorite, so absolutely next-level was their interplay and sense of rhythmic intensity.  Many evenings were spent bouncing around my apartment in South Omaha to this song, all by my lonesome and completely content with that reality.  Well, mostly content, anyway. 

5.  “Blackstar,” from Blackstar.  And so we shall end at the end.  I bought Blackstar before Bowie’s death, but hadn’t had a chance to listen to it before I found out.  I took it to school with me on that Monday morning, more than a little shaken by the news, and forced myself to listen as I readied myself for the week ahead.  While it was extremely difficult to listen in an objective and/or emotionally removed sense—especially considering the bleak, letter-from-a-dying-man tone—the one thing I kept thinking was, despite all that context, the music I was listening to was still taking me somewhere, it was still new and fresh, it was innovative and dark and harsh and abrasive and beautiful, but it never ceased to be anything less than one helluva ride.  That blinding force of intentional creative provocation, I think, is what Bowie intended to convey throughout his career, though he of course made a few missteps here and there, as any artist does.  Yet he never really compromised his art, and always stayed true to his own muse, regardless of what the buzz may have been about each given album and song.  He killed Ziggy Stardust at the height of that character’s popularity, and became a blue-eyed soul auteur instead.  When the Thin White Duke had outlived his usefulness, he retreated to Berlin and created, with Brian Eno, what is perhaps the most transcendent and influential work of his career.  As the eighties loomed he returned to (relatively) straightforward rock and then pop, and continued to dance around all of the aforementioned styles for the next thirty years, never stopping, never phoning it in, never losing that starry-eyed sense of imagination and possibility that made all of his work such a joy to listen to, for those with open minds and ears.  Finally he gave us Blackstar, and while it’s tempting to say this last statement is frighteningly somber, it is at the same time adventurous, and restless, and—I keep coming back to this word as I’m thinking about Bowie—fearless.  So as I move forward in a world without David Bowie, I internalize his fearlessness as strength and comfort, and though the stars look very different today, they remain, and are perhaps brighter than I’ve seen them in quite some time.

Best of 2015.

1.  Oddisee—“The Good Fight.”  For me, Oddisee’s latest is significant in how anthemic and cathartic it was for me when I first heard it—political, self-reflective hip-hop with melodic grooves and hooks for days.  Essentially, the very antithesis of most hip-hop you hear on the radio anymore.  This album got me inspired and ready to act, while keeping the roots of heart and mind firmly intact.  Honestly, it’s quite surprising to me that this record came and went so quietly, as it has such classic, soulful appeal.  Whatever…regardless of what the charts say, this was my top choice this year.  The rest of this list isn’t really in order, but Oddisee’s “The Good Fight” is absolutely number one.

2.  Bilal—“In Another Life.”  Bilal just keeps it coming with the creativity.  Another album full of wild detours and excursions, this time produced by soul-soundtrack savant Adrian Younge.  The pairing works incredibly well, with Younge adding a sort of live grit and grease to the music that can’t always be found on Bilal’s other, more radio-friendly R&B releases.  This is a record for those days when all you want to do is hide out and listen.  An experience to get lost in.

3.  Kendrick Lamar—“To Pimp A Butterfly.”  I doubt I can say much about this album that hasn’t already been recycled ad infinitum by the music press for much of the last year.  So, I’ll just say, straight-up, this record is revolutionary, and new, and exciting, and difficult.  It’s somewhat necessary to spend days wrapping your head around it.  But whatever you do, do NOT ignore it.  The present and future are embedded in its footsteps.

4.  Kamasi Washington—“The Epic.”  Spring-boarding directly from Kendrick Lamar, there’s this album by sax player Washington, who guested on “To Pimp A Butterfly.”  This album plays like it’s 1972 and you’re hanging with Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter for an afternoon—and you will need the whole afternoon, since it’s three discs long.  “Epic” barely even suffices as a descriptor for this music, which practically explodes with expansiveness and inventiveness.  And while it does explore funk from time to time, the reason it’s so important to the evolution of jazz is because it swings.

5.  Blackalicious—“Imani, Vol. 1.”  The return of Blackalicious, and what a return it is!  The crew’s trademark combination of West Coast funk and tongue-twisting raps remains firmly in place, with a few new sonic and lyrical seasonings.  Gift Of Gab and Chief Xcel bring joy through beats, consciousness through awareness, love through music.

6.  Lianne La Havas—“Blood.”  Joni Mitchell meets Prince-style funk on this wild, lovely effort.  La Havas mixes acoustic guitars with bass-heavy grooves while musing about family, love and darkness, and comes up with an absolute stunner of an album in the process.  Rocked this one for days on end during the summer.

7.  Mark Ronson—“Uptown Special.”  Sure, “Uptown Funk” isn’t much more than a rehash of the kind of boogie-funk pioneered by bands like The Time, Zapp and Lakeside thirty years ago.  However, the album itself offers a surprising amount of variety, from funk-pop heavily influenced by Steely Dan, to the James-Brown-on-steroids tribute “Feel Right,” to fusion instrumentals featuring Stevie Wonder (!) on harmonica.  The kind of record where it’s important to look past the hit single for deeper, more interesting treasures.

8.  Jill Scott—“Woman.”  Jill Scott goes retro.  Kinda.  The songs here owe a bit more to soul revival acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, yet Scott keeps just enough of the sparkling neo-soul touches of her previous work around, so as to create a highly enjoyable, unique hybrid.  Then of course, there is Jill Scott’s voice, which is easily among the greatest of her generation.  Miles and miles of poetic, funky soul goodness.

9.  Van Hunt—“The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets.”  Van Hunt has always been a personal favorite of mine, and the curious, creative spirit that has informed all of his work shows no signs of flagging on “The Fun Rises.”  Edgy, crunchy guitar and bass figures slam headlong into aching piano ballads and clever wordplay, with Hunt’s cutting, swooping, soulful voice leading the charge.  A must-have for anyone claiming to have lost faith in the innovative possibilities of modern music.

10.  Hiatus Kaiyote—“Choose Your Weapon.”  This highly unlikely collective of avant-funk Australians simply has to be heard to be believed.  I’ve told many of my musician friends that, as a musician myself, I listen to these tunes over and over again, trying to figure out how they wrote/performed these very challenging rhythms and melodies so gracefully, and yet with such ridiculous complexity.  Funky, intense, and deceptively smooth.  Also—completely brilliant.