TALES OF LOHR: RUM.GOLD'S "U STREET ANTHOLOGY"
On the latest from a progressive soul artist on the rise; plus, "This Week in Warhol" visits Satan's Alley
A beautiful streak of bittersweet resilience flows through U Street Anthology (Leola), the latest release from D.C.-born, Brooklyn-based progressive soul artist rum.gold. It’s a feeling that marks much of the most resonant and engaging art and music produced by Black Americans, and feels especially germane in these first years of the 2020s, where the surging consciousness sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement continues to smash headlong into the bruised but infuriatingly unbowed edifice of white supremacy and institutional racism. I write about this album mere days after an Oklahoma judge tossed out a lawsuit brought by several centenarian survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, a suit seeking reparations for the racist attack that decimated an area of the midwestern city once known as “Black Wall Street.” This country is ever more reluctant to stare the consequences of its own bigotry in the face, even when confronted by living witnesses to the worst manifestations of that hatred. To persist at all within such a system is formidable. To achieve any measure of triumph while ensconced in it is tantamount to a miracle, and that tempered euphoria suffuses the hushed yet elegant sonic textures of U Street Anthology.
This may all make the album sound more militant, more like obligatory “homework” listening, than it actually is in practice. Granted, the cover, a cropped detail from activist photographer Marion Palvi’s 1947 image In the Shadow of the Capitol, primes listeners for a potential polemic, a perception further shored up by the first voice heard on the album, that of the late soul-jazz vocalist and poet Gil Scott-Heron, from Robert Mugge’s 1982 documentary Black Wax, speaking about how D.C. tourists are often denied a glimpse of the “real Washington.” But, as the muted piano accents and the plangent high register of rum.gold (born Delonte Drumgold) immediately make plain, U Street Anthology is as much about capturing the emotional registers of the current state of Black America as it about delineating the pressure points and areas of progress. Like Scott-Heron, rum.gold plainly grasps the differences between poetry and journalism. But unlike much of the earlier artist’s best work, this album leans more heavily into the idea that making people feel as you do is often a necessary first step towards making them come to think in a new and richer way.
This is not to suggest, of course, that the music of U Street Anthology lacks true topical bite. All it takes to banish that impression is one listen to the moody drug-abuse groove “The Candy Lady,” with its fraught juxtaposition of danceable rhythms and grimly whispered lyrics offering pharmaceutical double-edged swords to stave off the horrors of “hell on earth down on U Street”:
What you want? What you need?
Crystal hope, powder dreams
Bittersweet, dopamine
One for you, one for me
Throughout the album, rum.gold, who wrote or co-wrote all of its 13 tracks, beautifully balances these sorts of ear-pleasing instrumental arrangements with lyrics redolent of the true troubles and heartaches that bedevil the days of simple, striving, suffering humans just doing their best to get by. Forlorn acoustic guitar chords guide the mournful dynamics of “Monuments,” a lamentation on the challenges inherent to the disenfranchised inner-city environment, a place with “Painted brick and alleyways / Corner stores with nothing on display.” This urban disaffection likewise drives “Glory Days,” where rum.gold’s delicate timbre strains against defiantly upbeat percussion as he expresses his helpless desire for escape: “Never had a passport made / Even though I didn’t wanna stay.” A futile-bordering-on-fantastical desire to transcend the everyday is one of the album’s unifying themes. It’s a failed endeavor on the gospel-tinged but sirens-scarred “12th and I (Interlude),” a tale of love destroyed by the realities of the city, and it brings the hero of the brooding, skittering “Death of the Author” crashing to earth, as he entreats those who survive him to “Bury me in a glass casket so I can see all that happens / When everybody around me starts saying my name.”
But rum.gold hews strongly enough to the conventions of the soul genre that love, that ever-conquering musical force, retains much of its transformative power even within this fraught landscape. Swooning layered backing vocals defeat the sirens that again undergird “Love & Basketball,” as rum.gold expresses his desire to hold the world in his heart, his lover “the one to make me face my fears.” Guest vocalist Mereba’s breathy gentility intertwines with rum.gold’s falsetto to swirl “Water My Heart” into an airy, blissful romantic reverie, and the stripped-down spirituality of “Blessed” seems ideally suited to a world that provides people of all colors and classes with plenty of reasons to both believe in the impossible and keep their powder dry. And sometimes, as on the coolly swaying “AM/FM,” even U Street offers an avenue to pure, clean, simple passion and happiness.
Langston Hughes, in his seminal 1951 poem “Harlem,” asks “What happens to a dream deferred?” It is a question Black Americans, despite a stunning century-plus of staggering up-from-slavery achievement, are nevertheless forced to ask themselves again and again, as cops use qualified immunity and the inherent structure of the police system to literally get away with murder, while authoritarian politicians and education administrators attempt to rewrite or flat-out erase their history from the American story. With U Street Anthology, rum.gold, bred on the streets of a national governmental seat literally built by slave labor, offers additional textures to Hughes’ sentiment by creating through sound the feel of that deferred dream. It is music complex yet effortlessly accessible, thematically intricate and emotionally direct, sexy and sad and thought-provoking by turns. It fully embodies the powerful potential of contemporary progressive soul, and marks rum.gold as a talent to watch as he continues his work as a chronicler of the Black American, which is to say absolutely human, heart.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
JULY 13, 1983
Andy Warhol visits the Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street in midtown Manhattan for what his diaries describe as “the glittering event”: A premiere screening of Staying Alive, the long-awaited Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel to the 1977 sleeper hit Saturday Night Fever. As he walks the red carpet, Warhol has his photograph taken by journalists working for the ABC morning show Good Morning America, and once inside, he is personally thanked for coming by Stallone himself, who passes the artist’s aisle seat on the way to the stage to introduce the film. Speeches are likewise given by Paramount executive Frank Mancuso and Stallone’s then-wife Sasha Czack, who discusses the screening’s status as a benefit for autism research. (Stallone and Czack’s four-year-old son Seargeoh has been diagnosed as autistic just a year prior.) Warhol’s attendance at the premiere is possibly due to the influence of another Paramount executive, Jon Gould, at the time Warhol’s romantic partner. But Gould is not mentioned in Warhol’s diaries as either having brokered his invitation or as being in attendance at the screening.
Warhol loves the film, and he has a brief encounter with its star, John Travolta (flanked by 18 bodyguards), outside the Xenon nightclub on 43rd Street, where the premiere after-party is being held. Staying Alive goes on to be a commercial hit, grossing $65 million (against a $22 million budget) and ranking among the year’s top-ten box office successes. But Warhol is among the few noteworthy voices of praise supporting the film, which is roundly savaged by critics, who unfavorably compare its slick, MTV-influenced style to the grittier realism of its predecessor. Years later, Entertainment Weekly Magazine will call it the worst sequel ever made, and it currently carries a rare 0% rating on the critical aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
Travolta, who receives an Oscar nomination for his work on Saturday Night Fever, here nets a nod at the Golden Raspberry Awards, a satirical ceremony “honoring” the year’s low points in cinema, as the worst lead actor of 1983. (He is likewise nominated in 1990 and 2010 as the worst actor of the preceding decades, and “wins” Razzies for his performances in 2000’s Battlefield Earth and 2020’s The Fanatic.) The film becomes a notable bump in the often rocky road that is Travolta’s career, but his star remains bright enough that, almost two years later, a beautiful Richard Bernstein portrait of the actor graces the June 1985 cover of Warhol’s Interview Magazine.
Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss another FREE arts and music newsletter, and join us back here on Thursday 7/13 for the latest Tales of Lohr!