Parts Of Summer, Waiting For Winter

It's great being wrong.

I remember being worried in my review of Castor, the Twin that Dessa's aim was to align herself with a field where she wasn't so interesting or striking, and by and large with Parts of Speech, she has done that. Sure, there's more straight-forward rap bangers like "Fighting Fish" or "Warsaw", but Parts of Speech is defined by Dessa actually full on singing.

And so, I expected the approach largely to fail to my ears. The trouble for me is, Dessa succeeds and at some points, gloriously.

Where I must eat a full plate of crow and maybe two or three is "It's Only Me." It's precisely the song I was afraid of. It's 3:48, with one verse, two choruses and a hyper-long bridge. Most of the song is soft cooing and light instrumentation, courtesy of Dessa's backing band. It's the thing I was most scared of and after living with the disc for three odd weeks, it's my favorite song on Parts Of Speech.

(Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain. If they ask, it's "Warsaw." Blade Runner club jam, bro. But you and me? "It's Only Me.")

It could not exist without Dessa's backing band, the same jazz guys on Castor, The Twin, who deliver on "It's Only Me" a restrained and soft background over which Dessa sings.

"I've been having that dream / it seems I always will / I don't know what the thing means / except it sends me to the telephone."

Parts of Speech is well-realized melancholy, the first record of new material written with and for a group of jazz guys to perform behind her. That should be clear on its face, but this writer has a keen grasp of the obvious. I was cautious during Castor, I think, because the record was written around Doomtree's compositions. Speaking of which, Paper Tiger does a great job on the one-two punch of singles "Call Of Your Ghost" and "Warsaw." Parts Of Speech does not suffer anything in interpretation.

As for the rest of Parts Of Speech, it's a regrets record. I listened to it in a darkened Las Vegas hotel room, complete with a two foot long stain in the carpet and my cell phone off. I drank a lot of tequila for a week and lied about why I was in town. Parts Of Speech suited that mood like a pair of opera gloves.

It's not all sad slow jams, but those stick out to me. "Skeleton Key" is upbeat and good in the sense of the song is solidly constructed, but I doubt it will be anyone's favorite. By the time you get past "Skeleton Key," you understand what you're in for. "Dear Marie" follows that one and it's a letter to a Marie, with the subtext I'm guessing, of Dessa kissing Marie's boyfriend. It is followed by a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm Going Down."

You did read that correctly. It is effective. The song feels morose and aches.

There's less powerful tracks, of course. "Annabelle" or "The Lamb" come to mind. I skip them. They're important stories, but unsuccessful songs, to my ears. "The Lamb" lyrically bears a very strong resemblance to the story of "The Chaccone."

The Chaconne:
"first a darling
then a marvel
when we met
I was still a young girl"


The Lamb:
"If they ask me, I'll deny it
But I remember what you did
While it's true you were a young man, then
I was just a kid"

"Call Off Your Ghost" is probably about the same person as" Go Home." "Icing Burns," a non-album track included with my bandcamp download, I'd bet money is about the same person as "Alibi."

Parts Of Speech got released in the spring/summer of 2013. It doesn't at all feel like a summer record. It feels appropriate for frigid weather. It feels like it ought to be there in your ears with winter's chill around your neck. Maybe I'm feeling too much of the Minneapolis in the record. Parts of Speech feels cold and distant, like a faraway wave goodbye.

In the Phonogram parlance, "It's Only Me" is a curse song. Listen to staring at a text message or a picture and it'll work its melancholic charms.

The Common Clearinghouse

Usually, I'm more nuanced than this, but Common's appearance at the White House and subsequent Fox News pants-shitting based on the "burn a Bush" line has only two sides for me: You either understand Common's rhymes in the context it was written and then compare that to his entire discography or you don't. This is one of the few times where black OR white thinking is completely correct. There's right and there's wrong. It's clear, Fox News is on the second side.
Oh, and this is obviously manufactured outrage. No one ought to be surprised.

(Also: I use rhymes here as opposed to lyrics not because I want to devalue the message in hip-hop, but I instead don't want to use rock parlance to describe hip-hop where I don't have to.)

The song that got Fox News' knickers in a twist, "A Letter To the Law", based on its last part is, explicitly, about moving beyond that kind of violent language and rhetoric the news organization took for the song's core aim, to make a better, more safe world as a community. Period. There is no grey area on this one. I accept none. So let's use this as a test: Are you for Common or Fox News? Life hardly ever gives us these clear choices, these easy distinctions between knee-jerk crank yankerism and you know, truth, bolstered by accuracy. Take this moment and hold onto it.

Side point: Since when does anybody, for any reason, go to Fox News for any meaningful critical dissection of art? Seriously: When was the last time you or any of your friends thought "There's a new record from [Artist H] coming out. What does Fox News think of it?"

Then, Ron Grossman wrote in the Chicago Tribune an idiotic op-ed with the point that hey, Common, as a rapper, is not a poet. And his poetry isn't really that good. He's certainly no Keats, and thus Common ought not to be mistaken for a poet. To support his point, he chose the line I'm a renegade. I ain't never been afraid, I'm fresh and gettin' paid.

Now: Let's ignore the Grossman sheltering himself in his description of himself as a fuddy-duddy. I'll get to that later. What he's doing is using a particularly, say, bad line of Common's and saying it's indicative of the quality of his rhymes. It's not, of course. I don't even listen to Common and I can smoke this guy. Here. I spent an entire...3 minutes on rap genius and found this one: so many raps about rims, I'm surprised niggas ain't become tires.

The genius of rap genius is that you can click on the rhyme itself and get the explanation of it, sooooo, when I click on that, here's what comes up: [Common]’s surprised that even after rapping about rims so much, people aren’t tired of it. Also, play on the words raps/wraps. What wraps around a rim? A tire, of course.

That is some wordplay that Grossman dismisses entirely. Shit, most of rap's best lines are double, triple and quadruple-entendres that you need to be in the community to get. And pursuant to sharpening my point, I don't even listen to that much hip-hop! The two I listen to most often are Dessa and P.O.S., not exactly Hall Of Fame material. I don't even LISTEN to Common! I know he's Kanye's friend from Chicago that isn't Lupe Fiasco. I bought one of Common's CDs, Universal Mind Control, for my brother, for Christmas. That's it. That's the extent of my Common knowledge.

Now: Let's get back to the point about Grossman sheltering himself in the phrase fuddy-duddy. He's old. He doesn't understand kids these days. It's a phrase to give him wiggle room, to show that, well, he might not have everything right, but he has the gist. Fucking wrong. If he's going to call out Common for being bad with language and saying he's an old teacher, then he should at least have the temerity to back up his "Common isn't Keats because Common occassionally writes lyrics that are putrid" statement with his full authority. Plus, I'm Keats wrote subpar stuff and it doesn't get collected with his best work. Why not the same for Common?

And, finally, a recursive point, independent of Common's ability as a poet, just because he's bad doesn't make him not a poet. One can do things and be bad at them. What all of this boils down to is vivid: Common's getting a lot of flak that he simply does not deserve. That it is this simple is something that does not happen terribly often.




This song is by Common. It's called the Corner. It's about the corner and its importance in black culture. Enjoy.