Hippies vs. Punks: Future's DS2

The fact is that Hippies and Punks have long been absent from the cultural vanguard. Hippies represented the last hurrah of post-WWII prosperity and social democracy. Their contributions to the avant-garde ended in the early 1970s, even prior to the time that the Punks arrived on the scene. When the Punks showed up in a big way in 1976 it was to herald the arrival of the "No Future" paradigm of neoliberalism.

Punk quickly went Post- and splintered; it happened at a time when Hip Hop first appeared. So Hip Hop can make a claim as well to be present at the creation of our current neoliberal paradigm. As the decades have looped by Hip Hop has only grown in stature and relevance, while Punk and Hippie music are merely marginal curiosities.

Future's third studio album, DS2 (Dirty Sprite 2) debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 charts this summer. If there is a pop cultural avant-garde in the United States now I have absolutely no doubt that its manifesto is Future's DS2.

I have been immersed it all week. All I can say is that it says it all about late-stage neoliberalism: a vacant, joyless celebration of money, drugs, pussy and violence. It's End Times. No doubt about it. Fucking 'em two at a time, dodging bullets, pissing codeine and gobbling Percocet -- "They got blood on their money, and I still count it." Boy, does it sound good. It's Nietzsche after rejecting Schopenhauer's pessimism but somehow fast-forwarded to the doped-up care of his sister Frau Förster.

I was aware of Future at first because living in Seahawks country the news of the off-season was Russell Wilson hooking up with Future's ex-fiance Ciara (and mother of one of his children). There was some social-media kerfuffle when a picture of Seattle's QB pushing Future's son in a perambulator with Ciara at his side went viral. Then I read an excellent piece by Jon Caramanica, "In Atlanta’s Ever-Shifting Hip-Hop Scene, Future and Migos Keep Innovating," and I was intrigued. It seemed to me that what we were dealing with here is a moment when the Owl of Minerva takes flight not at dusk but midday. The Zeitgeist is being revealed in real time. According to Caramanica:

Future is digging into his weird. “DS2” (A1/Freebandz/Epic), his third major-label album, is full of psychedelic angst, girded by Future’s uncanny gift for melody. He’s as singular as ever here, and also more accessible; “DS2” topped the Billboard album chart last week.

Future has already made his concessionary album — “Honest,” released last year, which was widely maligned but wrongly so. Few rappers are as well suited for pop’s melodic tenderness as he is — the album showcased that gift.

That was one version of Future retreating into his feelings. But since then, and especially after his split from the R&B singer Ciara, with whom he has a son, he’s tried another way. Now when he turns inward, his lyrics emerge as a catalog of savage boasts and self-destruction, his sadness made manifest in the severe desiccation in his voice and the digital fog that obscures it. This approach has made for some of the most bracing music of his career, as heard on the three largely outstanding mixtapes he has released in the past nine months: “Monster,” “Beast Mode” and “56 Nights.” (Future has released as many impressive full-length projects as any artist in the 2010s.)

“DS2” isn’t quite as consistent, but it’s exceptional at its peaks. The album’s cold tone is established early, on “Thought It Was a Drought.” “Bitch, I’ma choose the dirty over you/ You know I ain’t scared to lose you,” he raps, later sinking deeper into narcotic haze: “Have these meds on me, I’ma do ’em/ I take these pills and I’m having a thrill.” Much of the album is produced by Metro Boomin, who knows how to make low rumbles feel epic, like on “I Serve the Base,” with its terrifying scrape; the surprisingly warm computer melodies of “Blow a Bag”; the milky “Rotation,” which showcases Future’s phenomenal mumble.

Future’s vocal approach is impressionistic, which means that when it’s ineffective it can feel faint. But it’s also absorptive and affectingly tragic. So much of this album is devoted to drug consumption — “Take me a Xan and I levitate,” “Ain’t no fabrication, I’m on medication/ Cough syrup, I’m infatuated” — that it begins to take on an air of trauma. Even though the album closes with the mayhem-inducing song whose abbreviated title is “Commas,” Future mostly sounds as if he’s gasping for air, and that dangerous place is where his creativity thrives.

My best friend of the last several years has been a young woman, a coworker. She is a black woman, part Latina, part African-American, who has two boys, one in middle school and the other in elementary. She went through a divorce while we worked together. And even though she had a lot of the other women in the office gunning for her because she is attractive and was being rapidly promoted following a change in leadership at the local, she kept it together, showed up to the job everyday and consistently worked hard.

We share a history of being raised in the debris of broken families; that, and we are both fervent Levellers. We did Occupy Seattle stuff together, PAC for our union local, Labor Neighbor, etc. It is rare to meet a person who doesn't harbor tacit attachment to notions of a divine chain of being, who believes that privilege --all types: skin, money, cronyism -- needs to be scrapped. She has the spark.

When I left the local where we worked together to take my present job, she was very generous. As a thank you for her generosity, I bought her a copy of Future's DS2. Before giving it to her yesterday, I had peeled off the cellophane, opened the CD jewel case and loaded it into my iTunes. That's what I have been listening to all week.

When I saw her yesterday, she said that she had been on the road for three-weeks straight and was burnt out; she hadn't seen her sons in almost a month.

My relationship with this young woman -- never sexualized, always supportive and real, never phony -- is one of the only things that I can point to in my recent life and say that it is an unqualified success.

Future's DS2 capture of the Zeitgeist is proof to me that we're coming to an end here.

Hippies vs. Punks: James Brandon Lewis' Days of FreeMan

James Brandon Lewis' new album Days of FreeMan was released last week. I've been listening to it non-stop. A smorgasbord of bass (Jamaaladeen Tacuma) and drums (Rudy Royston) led by Lewis' tenor sax, Days of FreeMan is an homage to Hip Hop of the 1980s and 1990s.

A good review by Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News just appeared:

“I didn’t grow up a hip-hop head,” says James Brandon Lewis, “but where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, on Freeman Street, the sound of hip-hop was ubiquitous. I decided to go back and explore that time through music.”

Don’t look now but the most spectacular marriage of jazz and hip-hop yet just came from an utterly extraordinary young tenor saxophonist from Buffalo who, quite frankly, makes Robert Glasper seem anemic and academic.

He’s been living and working in New York for years but “Days of Freeman” is an extraordinary musical autobiography of growing up in Buffalo where Lewis remembers “times being filled with nicknames, block parties, street football and my older brother being the ‘deejay’ of the household while my mom would be yelling ‘turn that crap down.’ ”

Here is a musical memoir in four chapters, whose first chapter is called “Buffalo Braves.” It’s a formidable musical memoir in which we hear, all through it, tiny snippets of Lewis’ grandmother philosophizing and reminiscing about hearing Mahalia Jackson in her church and being free in her life because she was taught how to love by her parents.

There are references to Wilson, N.Y., where “my family would fish and have fun times there.” We’re told in the publicity for “Days of Freeman” that the saxophonist poured over “hip-hop documentaries for up to eight hours a day” and dissected “albums by KRS-One, Digable Planets, Pete Rock and CL Smmoth, a Tribe Called Quest, Medeski, Martin and Wood, along with fearless jazz trumpeter Don Cherry’s 1985 album ‘Home Boy’ and Lauren Hill’s 1998 Masterpiece ‘Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.’ ” 

This is an utterly extraordinary disc – magnificently ambitious and completely achieved because of Lewis’ most important musical partners – drummer Rudy Royston and, most important of all, the late Ornette Coleman’s phenomenal bassist in his prime time band Jamaaladeen Tacuma. 

Even if it’s semantic news to listeners that, as Lewis says, “ ‘You know my steez’ is a common phrase in hip-hop referring to style, to be, to be yourself, your swag, your person, your vibe, your flow, the way you operate and function,” Lewis’ formidable playing in a pianoless trio over Tacuma and Royston seems, as does the whole disc, to take off from Sonny Rollins and edge out into the nearer regions of the two ferocious Davids, Murray and Ware. 

In his liner notes, Lewis’ co-leader of a group called “Heroes Are Gang Leaders,” Thomas Sayers Ellis, tells us, “The title of this recording could easily have been ‘Every Good Grandma Deserves a Jam Session or There’s a Riot-Horn Going On.” 

No small achievement by Lewis in this absolutely remarkable achievement is Lewis’ ability to get SONY’s newly re-awakened Okeh label to understand that such a vehemently personal excursion into sound and memory and tenor saxophone line was a good idea in an era where “the music business” and “jazz” are routinely thought to be at war.

Here, the product of a childhood in Buffalo he wants to tell the world about, is an authentic and brilliant new hero of 21st century jazz.

At times -- like on "Of Dark Matter," "Black Ark," and "Lament for JLew" -- you think you're listening to Funk Punk.

I wanted to make this post about "Blackness," how white America's inability to comprehend, make peace with, Blackness has been its undoing. We've been fighting the Civil War since before the Civil War. "Blackness" has dominated the politics of the United States since before the states were united. Our present political dispensation, neoliberalism, was locked in by a maestro of white backlash, Ronald Reagan, who went from being a washed-up Hollywood B-lister to Governor of California -- and then POTUS -- based on his ability to paint a malign picture of Blackness.

But now something seems to be finally changing. White supremacy is being exposed.

Blackness also played an important role in the undoing of the Hippie. The Manson Family, like Dylann Roof, was bent on fomenting a race war with Charlie's Helter Skelter plan. The murder of a black man, Meredith Hunter, by a Hells Angels biker crowned the anti-Woodstock of Altamont. The Weathermen went underground after the police murder of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton.

If white supremacy can be exposed and the backlash blunted, the revolution is here!