TALES OF LOHR: NEW BLUE (ELEPHANT) ROOM
On atmospherics and expectations; plus, "This Week in Warhol" gets a little Catty
On November 17, the world of music experienced an event that, in most contexts, would be welcomed with exaltation and gratitude: The release, after a layoff of 17 years, of a new LP by André 3000, one half of the titanic latter-millennium Atlanta-spawned hip-hop duo Outkast. The artist, born André Benjamin, has been widely celebrated within the hip-hop community for his linguistic inventions, elocutionary precision on the mic, eclectic fashion sense, and an exploratory sensibility that seemed to stretch the boundaries of rap music into tantalizing new contours. But in the mid-2000s, André seemingly abandoned his presumably secure perch on the hip-hop mountaintop. Apart from an occasional guest verse, delivered with his customary power and poise, and intermittent acting roles in television and films (most prominently his Independent Spirit Award-nominated portrayal of another pioneer of black psychedelia, Jimi Hendrix, in 2013’s Jimi: All Is By My Side), André’s presence within the pop-cultural landscape has been almost intentionally diminished. So, when word got out that a new album was at long last cresting the horizon, longtime fans and the music establishment at large were justifiably excited. One of the game’s most influential figures was finally breaking his near-silence. What fresh insights were spawned during his years in the wilderness? What would he have to say to us?
Then, as word of this new album’s content began to creep out, a few circles of the fandom saw that excitement begin to curdle into confusion. And when the album, entitled New Blue Sun, rose on the 17th day, some of that bafflement burst forth into flat-out hostility and condemnation of André. Because the legendary rapper had returned to recorded music with something that was very much not a rap album. New Blue Sun is an 87-minute long, ambience-intensive collection of eight wholly instrumental tracks, on which André 3000’s “voice” is largely manifested through a procession of wind instruments: standard and contrabass flutes, wind synthesizer, and what André has christened “panther toning,” a sonic effect the artist says grew out of an experience he had when, on an ayahuasca trip, he began transforming into a big cat, with the vocal noises to match. The songs, most of which top out at well over ten minutes in length, are meandering, minimal-melody affairs, most centered around repetitive wind loops that André maintains throughout the extent of the track. The fourth cut on the album, with its bloopy blips of intermittent flute, is a customary example of both this aspect of the LP’s music, and of André’s freewheeling approach to naming these musical excursions. It’s called "BuyPoloDisorder's Daughter Wears a 3000® Button Down Embroidered,” and it is typical of the titular strategy here.
André seems to have anticipated what the reaction of many would be to this change in his creative direction; the first track’s title assures the listener that, while he really had wanted to create new hip-hop music, “This is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” But this sense of self-awareness has done little to quell the reaction of many longtime fans who feel almost betrayed by the sound of a pioneer of the music seemingly, as they see it, forsaking his true gift. Throughout the initial release weekend of New Blue Sun, the music-conversation cybersphere was lit up with commentary decrying the album as nothing more than an effective sleep aid, and blasting André for the audacity, after a near two-decade layoff, of releasing an entire album bereft of bars. I myself commiserated briefly via Facebook with Connecticut-based folk rocker and Outkast appreciator Paul Tabachneck (a compatriot of mine from high school days), who declared the album “a bunch of experiments gone wrong” and said “this could have been a Soundcloud mixtape” instead of a full-fledged commercial release.
For my part, I found New Blue Sun a pleasant enough listen, if less engaging than some of the other new age / ambient music to which it bears the most sonic kinship. It’s music I would certainly revisit, but not as a pure listening-only experience, where I think it lacks the nuance to make it as rewarding on its own merits as it may want to be. I think it would be best suited as comfortable background atmosphere for reading or meditation, or something to ease my thoughts on a long walk. But this relatively sedate assessment stems from my willingness to take the material on its own terms, to attempt to engage with it within its own wheelhouse, rather than try to cram it into the box that so many of those first listeners attempted to muscle it into, a box labeled “André 3000’s New Album” and shaped to fit an aural object with very specific characteristics to which this album very consciously and consistently refuses to conform.
One wonders if fans would have been more receptive to New Blue Sun if it had been released as an “André Benjamin” recording, or perhaps under some other individual or group appellation, rather than being put out, for obviously commercially centered reasons, as the new, official André 3000 release. Tabachneck certainly thinks so; while he appreciates the artist’s willingness to test the reins of his sound and conception, he nevertheless feels that the album “brings little to the table in comparison to the signal that is being sent to the public about it,” a gambit he brands “irresponsible.” In other words, what the fan base was told was Here’s the new album by that rapper you love, without any warning to the more casual, less industry-attuned listenership that the new album by that rapper you love is not at all a rap album.
Granted, some artists find this sort of radical gearshift easier to negotiate than others. One need only look to the recent-years reinvention of Jordan Peele, who, in his previous incarnation as one-half of the brilliantly insightful sketch-comedy pair Key & Peele, once scathingly lampooned André 3000 as a fancifully costumed, feather-brained hipster oddball. (Peele played put-upon Outkast opposite number Big Boi to Keegan-Michael Key’s André, who, in the sketch’s most far-seeing dig at André’s eclecticism, at one point literally brandishes a flutelike wind instrument.) Peele was rightly revered as one of the finest sketch comic performers and creators of his generation. But, when he announced that his leap into feature film directing would be in the form of the social-commentary sci-fi / horror film Get Out, he wasn’t greeted with nearly the skepticism that marked André 3000’s dive into the sonic stream of New Age ambient atmospherics. Indeed, not only was Get Out not roundly rejected as a comedy actor attempting to punch out of his weight class, it was a critically acclaimed box-office smash, winning Peele a screenwriting Oscar and earning him accolades as a new-gen master of horror. So…why Peele and not André? Is it because certain Key & Peele sketches already demonstrated a potential facility with the tropes of the horror genre? Is it because Get Out translated Peele’s already socially conscious sensibility to a new playing field? Or does it simply suggest that hip-hop fans and movie buffs have different expectations of their icons?
Fittingly enough, another album released on November 17 provides just the sort of musical experience André 3000’s fans might have hoped for when they heard the artist was releasing a largely instrumental new album. The record in question, of course, is not by André, but by Electric Powered Soul, a New York-based electronic soul-jazz psychedelic groove ensemble spearheaded by drummer Howard Alper and saxophonist / keyboardist V. Jeffrey Smith. Their new album, the sophomore release Elephant in the Room, bears certain similarities to New Blue Sun. It too has a largely instrumental emphasis, delivers eight distinct tracks, and labels these musical pieces with bizarrely incongruous titles (kicking off with “B’aass Ackwards [When Chit Get Sticky!]” and concluding with “Ma Dukes Meets the Space Toads”). But the music EPS delivers, in a tight-as-a-drum twenty-eight minutes, plays like an explosion of energetic amplified futuro-pop dispatches from the parts of André’s muse that he kept shuttered up while he wandered with the wind. Smith’s saxophone is aggressive and insinuating; Alper’s beats are cavernous and enveloping; Jeremiah Hosea winds through the whole affair with bold, subliminally seductive basslines. Alper also contributes a classic pop-soul vocal to “Touch the Sky,” the album’s most straightforwardly enjoyable, radio-ready cut. André 3000’s voice would feel right at home within these cosmically powerful constructions. So, for anyone who felt mostly bummed out by New Blue Sun, Electric Powered Soul proves that you can still get what you expected from an André 3000 album…even if this time around, you can’t get it from André himself.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
NOVEMBER 27, 1982
Andy Warhol, celebrated and lambasted in equal measure for decades due to the sexual frankness of his paintings and films, has his own moment of pearl-clutching puritanism at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. This day finds Warhol, in the company of longtime Factory fixture Brigid Berlin, attending a performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, which has opened on October 7, following a run in London’s West End.
Warhol and Berlin have to-the-side seats in the very first row, and though Warhol (in his Diaries) calls the musical’s first act boring, he does note the Pop art influence on the production design, citing the “Oldenburg size” Coke bottles and Campbell’s soup cans that adorn the junkyard set. He is not the only one to notice the Warholian elements of Cats’ mise en scène, and the artists mentions other audience members attempting to get his attention so they can commiserate with him over the production’s Pop details.
But Warhol is far more preoccupied with another element of the onstage visual array. “I noticed the pussies of the girls in the cat suits,” he bluntly recounts in his Diaries, before going into graphic detail about the clear visibility of the female performers’ vaginal slits and labium through their leotards, and how in some instances, pubic hair is also clearly poking through the fabric. “But then,” he adds, “they also had cat fur put on there, so it was confusing.” He speculates that this genital framing might account for the large number of old men packing the Winter Garden for Cats performances, before finally degenerating into stammering-on-the-page horror at what he has witnessed: “You could see the - cracks - and the lips - of the - the - the - vulva. Okay? That’s how outlined it was.”
No contextual digressions are provided to suggest just why Warhol, normally so welcoming of sexual display and discussion in art, is so put out by the revealing nature of the Cats costume design. It certainly does nothing to harm Cats’ commercial prospects; the show goes on to run for 18 years and 7,485 performances, the fifth-longest tenure in Broadway history. It also overcomes generally mixed reviews to win Tony Awards for best musical, best original score, and best book of a musical.
37 years after Warhol and Berlin attend this performance, Universal Pictures mounts a big-budget holiday-season film adaptation of the musical. The Cats movie is positioned as a potential Christmas blockbuster and awards-season contender, but it garners absolutely catastrophic reviews and flops at the box office. The day after its general release commences, Universal removes all mention of Cats from its “For Your Consideration” Oscar-campaign website; the film instead goes on to win five Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture of 2019. To this day, legends persist that an early iteration of the film’s visual effects included CGI cat anuses on the felined-up human performers, and that this cut of the movie has received very limited screenings as a sort of Rocky Horror-style cult item. We will, of course, never know what Andy Warhol might have thought had he gotten a chance to see the “Butthole Cut” of Cats for himself.
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