Slow & Steady // Music of the Week / WS 17-May-21
Throughout human history, we have passed down our most fundamental truths through fables and parables. Cultures across space and time are united by the use of didactic stories to convey deep and deceptively banal values. Buddhist India had the Jataka Tales. The Arabian Peninsula had One Thousand and One Nights. And in the nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm paraphrased several European folk stories into parables like Little Red Riding Hood. Each of these tales is an allegory for some simple truth, obvious enough to border on cliché, elusive enough to be lost in the day-to-day.
Of all of history’s great fabulists, perhaps the best known is Aesop. And of all his fables, none is more ubiquitous than the story of the hare and the tortoise, with its simple moral underpinning: slow and steady wins the race. Like the moral of every fable, its truth is both self-evident and remarkably hard to internalise. In a world that gets increasingly unpredictable – and consequently increasingly competitive (dwindling resources, ever-changing skillsets, increasing unemployment, decreasing pay) – it gets harder and harder to repeat the mantra, slow and steady wins the race. To say: if you don’t find yourself wanting, stay the course, just keep going, you’ll get there.
This week’s playlist has served as a soundtrack to my efforts to count my blessings, name them one by one, and stay the course, to just keep going: be it with Stranger Fiction, with work, or with life. It starts with the nightchill downtempo of A Forest Mighty Black’s Duo Trippin’ from their only album, Mellowdramatic, which I covered in the latest Music Box. From there, it moves to the two extremes of early commercial post-punk from Britain: the Police’s shamelessly Afrobeat-borrowing Masoko Tanga and the Cure’s Primary from the damp, depressing, proto-goth tome, Faith. It’s an era James Blake references a couple of times in his 2020 release, Covers, most notably on his cover of Joy Division’s Atmosphere. This playlist features his cover of Stevie Wonder’s Never Dreamt You’d Leave In The Summer.
Next up is the original studio version of Woke Up This Morning by Alabama 3, made famous as the title track to the Sopranos through its six-season run. It’s always amazing to me how one of the weirdest songs from an endlessly weird British electrocountry outfit ended up becoming the centrepiece of one of the most iconic title sequences in TV history (one that is also supremely weird for what was a primetime television phenomenon), but hey, it is what it is.
This leads to the high-energy jazz of Twelve Donkeys, from the album Moving Cities, a very interesting 2019 collaboration between French trumpeter Antoine Berjeaut and American drummer Makaya McCraven. The rest of the playlist vacillates between the introspective electronica of Susumu Yokota’s Kodomotachi, Four Tet’s Parallel 2 and Craven Fault’s Diepkier, and the expressive electro-rock of Mac DeMarco’s Chamber of Reflection, Ween’s Mutilated Lips, and the Nothing Better by the Postal Service, featuring Rilo Kelly’s Jenny Lewis.
The two songs that break this pattern are Portishead’s Mysterons and Kendrick Lamar’s Alright: two songs that represent, to me, my struggles with internalising the key message of this edition of Music of the Week. On my right shoulder, there’s Beth Gibbons wailing, all for nothing, and on my left, Kendrick Lamar’s telling me we’re going to be all right. I hope we are.
