‘I had dismissed Joni Mitchell as an acquired taste’
The first time I heard Joni Mitchell, in 1997, she was looped across the chorus of Janet Jackson’s single Got ’Til It’s Gone. The song’s credits would educate me on the sample’s origins; I had previously assumed Big Yellow Taxi was an Amy Grant original. The second time I heard a Mitchell song was when Travis covered the beautiful River as a B-side.
Mitchell always seemed a bit too “adult” to me, or too folky, or too jazzy. As with Bob Dylan, another entry in the “best artists of all time” canon that had eluded me, I had dismissed her voice as an acquired taste. My childhood home was all Michael Jackson, TLC and Meat Loaf, while my teenage years leaned towards singer-songwriters who could channel my angst: I played a lot of Alanis Morissette.
I emailed this perhaps depressing backstory to author Ann Powers, whose book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell tells a similar story. “With time I came to realise that Joni’s great gift is for capturing the tangled ways in which people ruminate and, trying to make connections, communicate with each other,” she replied, before name-checking two Mitchell classics, Blue and Hejira. But my mention of Janet Jackson, she said, makes her think of Prince, whose favourite Mitchell album was 1975’s initially misunderstood experimental gem, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. “It’s her vibe-iest album and the one in which she fully employs her gift for social critique,” Ann added.
She is right: the album is vibey, and after a few listens at home it works particularly well as I take it for a walk on a crisp winter’s day. My early favourite is the avant-pop of The Jungle Line, which uses an early version of sampling to create an intoxicating swirl of distorted drums and synthesised percussion. Lyrically it’s an abstract collage of modern city life and music industry politics, the imagery delivered in a half-sung style I recognise from Laura Marling. I also hear Kim Gordon in the blank intonations of Harry’s House, a song about curdling domesticity, and the synthesiser-heavy Shadows and Light reminds me of Purple Rain-era Prince.
I have to confess that the album’s midsection – the jazzy Edith and the Kingpin; the orchestral softness of Shades of Scarlett Conquering – washes over me a bit. At home, I give the more emotionally direct Blue a go. It instantly suits the evening dusk, and as River’s brutal emotional economy hits I almost cry into my Baileys. As Q-Tip said on Got ’Til It’s Gone: “Joni Mitchell never lies.” Michael Cragg
‘I wince at Kendrick Lamar’s high-pitched vocals’
This year, after I wrote a middling review of Drake’s trifecta of Wireless shows, I was repeatedly accused by his stans of being an agent for Kendrick Lamar, working to entrench the beef between the two rappers. Nothing could be farther from the truth: I’ve been a fan of Drake’s music since the days of downloading mixtapes off DatPiff, and I have never been able to stand Lamar’s music. There’s one simple reason: his voice. I find it unbelievably nasally and grating and it often triggers my misophonia (a lower tolerance to certain sounds).
Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that I need to reassess my relationship with Lamar and work through my wincing at his higher pitch. I appreciate a wide range of Black music, so how can I flat-out refuse to listen to someone considered one of the greatest figures in hip-hop, whose conscious lyrics and painting of inner-city subcultures have earned him a Pulitzer? I was very impressed by his Super Bowl half-time performance, particularly his impeccable breath control and incredibly clever staging and social critiques.
I turn to a close friend of mine, Derrien, who is a Lamar superfan and discovered him during the heyday of hip-hop blogs, back when he was still using the moniker K.Dot. Derrien likes the fact that Lamar is not for everyone. “I gravitated to him because I found his lyrics to be quite layered,” he tells me. “They were like a puzzle to figure them out, so I’d listen and have Genius open to decipher them.” There’s also a personal dimension for Derrien. “I really resonated with his story, especially Good Kid, MAAD City because the title alone resonated with the tribulations of trying to formulate a moral compass when you’re surrounded by gang shit.”
So where should I start with Lamar to make good on my resolution? The deep cuts, Derrien tells me as he sends me a wide-ranging playlist. I start with Black Boy Fly, which immediately resonates with my own experiences growing up in the inner city, dreaming of making it out of your environment, particularly the idea that success could only come through making it in sport or rap: “Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like Top 40.” Then there’s ADHD from his debut album Section.80, which speaks well to experiences of overstimulation and the numbing effect of growing up amid chaos.
But it’s the 12-minute long Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst that really stirs me emotionally. To my surprise, I find Lamar’s mixed pitch cinematic and searching rather than jarring, and it lends an authentic complexity to a track that is partly narrated from the perspective of a murdered friend. Derrien tells me that a notorious Lamar-hater and vlogger cried while listening to it. I understand. I feel as though I’m on a spiritual road that is leading towards conversion. Jason Okundaye
‘On paper, Diamanda Galás offers a lot of what I like …’
My first interaction with the truly uncategorisable music of Diamanda Galás was at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2012, a performance that moved me to tears but left me none the wiser, to be honest, about her place in the pantheon of 20th-century avant garde artists. But at least I started the right way round: experiencing her multifaceted mezzo-soprano in the flesh is the best introduction, according to devotee Luke Turner, co-founder of music website the Quietus. “When I’ve seen her live I’ve been in tears, and time goes weird,” he says.
Why had I not gone back to Galás after that gig? On paper she offers a lot of what I like: weird, imperious, glam, politically radical – and, with those incredible pipes, fusing opera with Middle Eastern modal scales and black metal babble. But I admit I don’t really understand opera, or operatic things. My brain is tuned to repetition, and Galás’s music demands that I sit down and listen closely.
“She’s the sort of artist where you have to focus – it’s not background music,” Luke advises. He got the chance to interview Galás in the early 00s and prepared by spending a weekend immersed in her records. Unfortunately, “it was when I was splitting up with my then wife, in a half-empty flat – it was a real psychic rinsing. But it was good, it worked.”
I try to focus on the elements that appeal to me: notes of blues, goth, punk, free jazz and experimental composition. Over her 50-year career she’s collaborated with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on The Sporting Life (a soft no from me, as a committed Zep-hater) and path-breaking composer Iannis Xenakis, on N’Shima, an abstract piece for mezzo-sopranos, horns, trombones and cello (a massive yes, with my Wire-reading hat on).
Luke points me towards industrial Galás – particularly The Divine Punishment, from a trilogy of records about the Aids crisis released in 1986, when the disease was still heavily stigmatised and barely understood. “I think she found the goth scene incredibly homophobic,” he notes. And this is the stuff: spooky, bizarre, confrontational and compositionally out-there – a soundtrack to a real-life horror movie.
Finally, he guides me to her 2008 version of the Appalachian folk song O Death, where her floor-shaking melismatic vocals seem to channel something ancient and terrible, like Rosalía summoning Cthulhu. What more could you want? Chal Ravens
‘Who has the time for Neil Young’s 60 albums?’
In my mind, Neil Young has always lived in an amorphous category of musicians that includes Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, bound together by nothing more than a loose idea of what I think they will sound like: old-fashioned, miserable and boring. But every time I say this out loud, someone will jump to one of said musicians’ defence, and this is almost always Neil Young. My encounters with his music have been pleasant enough but limited (On the Beach via an old boyfriend, Harvest Moon via Eat Pray Love) and I’ve never believed the hype. Why didn’t I look any further? Because I’m stubborn, no doubt, but also because Young has such a huge discography: more than 60 albums, including bands and side projects. Who has the time?
But in the spirit of trying something new, I reached out to John Mulvey, editor of Mojo and committed Young fan, to see if I could finally understand what he’s all about. John identified three key areas to focus on in his vast back catalogue: “the longform frazzled electric jams”; the more commercially successful, folky corner; and the “Ditch Trilogy” of Time Fades Away, On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night. “It’s a constantly unravelling, capricious and hyper-detailed story that can be very addictive,” he told me. “But obviously you need some basic love of what he does to get drawn in in the first place.” With that in mind, I decided to start with the classics: Harvest, from 1972, and Zuma, a favourite of several of my friends, from 1975.
Over the next few weeks, guided by John’s suggestions, I tried repeat listens of these, plus 10 or so other albums across different styles and time periods. I played them at work, on the bus and while running errands; on one occasion, I listened to After the Gold Rush on the way home from a club. I noticed tracks growing catchier as they became more familiar, and I even jotted down a few for future listens (Tell Me Why, Motion Pictures (For Carrie), Don’t Cry No Tears). Still, it felt like homework.
As a last-ditch attempt, I tried a sideways approach through Young’s “stylistically diverse and chaotic 1980s” music, which John suggested might align more with my tastes – such as Trans, where Young plays around with a vocoder and electronics. I enjoyed the huge, soaring synths on Computer Age, and was surprised by how hypnotic Like an Inca grew over its near-10 minute run time. John was certainly right about range.
I still have more than 40 Neil Young records left to check out, and while I’d not yet consider myself a fan, I now feel more equipped to explain why. Plus, I’ve bagged a few new tracks along the way. Safi Bugel
‘I pretended I liked Radiohead in high school to impress older kids’
I love a lot of gravely serious music, but it would be a stretch to describe myself, in any sense, as a “serious person”. I think this is the reason, among others, that I’ve never really been able to get into Radiohead, a band I’ve always considered too morose and self-important. The closest I’ve ever got was in high school, when I torrented a few albums in order to credibly pretend I liked them when hanging out with some older kids. As time has gone on, I’ve let go of my hangups about seeming smart and largely given up trying to understand this godhead indie band.
When asked if I wanted to try a listening resolution, Radiohead seemed like the obvious choice, and the obvious expert to ask was my friend Jazz Monroe, fellow music critic and certified Radiohead freak. He asked some questions. What’s the closest thing to Radiohead I like? I didn’t know; my boyfriend said Cameron Winter, and I’m still not sure if he was trolling. Who do I like most out of REM, Pixies and Robert Wyatt? REM. What’s my favourite Bowie album? Hunky Dory or Blackstar, I tell him.
A day later, Jazz sent me a short playlist that he assured me was “not canon”, but which might present “a more sympathetic side” of the band for me. Aware of the roiling contempt I have for corporate omnipotence and the rich and powerful, he explained: “Thom is one of those artists who is so naively, childishly pissed off at the sight of a corporate smile or the sound of an automated phone line that they devote themselves to making something beautiful to put an opposite force into the world,” which I found a very compelling raison d’être.
I did enjoy a lot of the songs on the playlist, especially more percussive tracks such as Weird Fishes, Blow Out and Where I End and You Begin: there I found that Yorke’s voice was offset nicely by the alternately pummelling and hypnotic drumming. Certain elements, like the warbling synths on the Hail to the Thief tracks, felt a little hackneyed before I remembered that the reason these sounds are so ubiquitous is because Radiohead are so influential. The songs that draw liberally from jazz generally tended to be my favourites, which tracks with the fact that I actually do really enjoy the Smile, which I know makes no sense because they’re basically Radiohead.
Will I be diving deeper into the catalogue? Probably not. I like these songs well enough, but I can’t help but feel as if I’ve filled the Radiohead-shaped holes in my life with other music that serves a similar purpose. But I plan to listen to a few full albums, just to be sure – in part, because I think A Moon Shaped Pool is a gorgeous album title. Shaad D’Souza