Ned's Atomic Link Bin: Prince Still Mourned, Lemonade Heavily Consumed and Drake Is on Top

Writer's note: Greetings! My name’s Ned Raggett, occasional music writer for a variety of spots. The Cream approached me to talk a bit about interesting music news, think pieces, longreads and more from the previous week. And some actual music too, strangely enough. You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator. Welcome to the column, and hope you enjoy!

Last week felt like a collision of, well, everything. The continuing deflating and retrospective feeling of Prince’s death was suddenly shot through with something more when the special Beyoncé and HBO had been teasing turned out to in fact be her full new album/video project Lemonade, which resulted not merely in a new array of instant reviews but a slew of reactions about who was reviewing it and from what perspective. Then Drake surprise-released his latest album, Views, last Friday. There were other stories well worth noting this past week but in terms of sheer overdrive and reaction driven by the high level trio it felt like seven days of total head-spinning.

Lemonade: A Beyoncé Reaction Roundtable

One of the best immediate reactions to Lemonade came via MTV, where writers like Doreen St. Félix, Hazel Cills, Molly Lambert, Carvel Wallace and more participated in a group discussion that incorporated many of the various references, audio and visual, that Beyoncé had put into the album, not to mention its larger collaborative nature and themes as a whole.

St. Félix: “And the visual, which is a tableau intended to be inseparable from the album itself, is full of faces of black women known and anonymous, young and old, praying and menacing, mourning and reveling. This is a country with one population. There are the famous women who make cameos, evidence of Beyoncé’s transition into a mentor/protector for up-and-comers in the industry: Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Parkwood signees Chloe x Halle, Ibeyi, Zendaya, and, of course, Blue Ivy. Serena Williams makes it clap alongside a reclining Beyoncé, and the pairing of the most powerful person in music and the most powerful person in sports briefly evacuates the world of all other meaning. Ballerina Michaela DePrince. Tina Knowles-Lawson, who probably served as the inspiration for the “Hope” chapter, grins at a newfound love. Lemonade gets its name from a speech made by Jay Z’s 90-year-old grandmother, Hattie White, whom we see celebrating. Lesley McSpadden, Sybrina Fulton, and Gwen Carr cradle photos of their dead sons in their laps. Solange Knowles, who Beyoncé says taught her to speak her mind, haunts the whole thing. And that’s only the list of women seen because they are living. When I saw the Mardi Gras Indian circling the empty dining table, I immediately thought of the scores of black woman ancestors being conjured, too.”

Maura Johnston had another crackerjack response given the crunch of near-immediate turnaround in Time, celebrating the album as both multilayered effort and an instant pop hit.

Beyoncé’s brand of R&B borrows stylistic flourishes from all over the pop spectrum. “Hold Up” adds a dancehall lilt and the occasional airhorn to a devotional borrowed from New York art-punkers Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 “Maps” and a coda nicked from the blustery MC Soulja Boy’s “Get My Swag On.” Meanwhile, “Daddy Lessons” brings in a horn section and a harmonica for a sweaty barroom jam session about a complex relationship with a father figure. Even the presence of the bummer-riding crooner The Weeknd does little to diminish the mood of Lemonade, although it helps that “6 Inch,” the album’s new-millennium update to Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life,” is set in the sort of seedy clubs that serve as his milieu.

More than one online comment during Lemonade’s premiere noted the work’s collective series of literary references and acknowledgements, with the direct participation of poet Warsan Shire the tip of the iceberg. At Fusion, Nichole Perkins put together a handy initial reference list to work both directly connected and otherwise in the wheelhouse of the effort.

Much of the lyrics of “Lemonade” focus on the consequences of infidelity, and we see Beyoncé cycle through the pain of dealing with a cheating husband. We also see the grieving mothers of black boys and men killed unjustly. Because “Lemonade” touches on the actions of men and honors the mourning of men, it’s easy to reduce the film to the idea that everything revolves around them. On the contrary, “Lemonade” gives proof to Anna Julia Cooper’s words: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.‘” “Lemonade” is not simply another “he done me wrong” album or video. The relationship at the heart of the lyrics is a Trojan horse, opening to the shores of black womanhood as healing and salvation.

One key part of the immediate reaction to Lemonade lay in how many black women online sought to claim a narrative and work seen as mostly for them rather than a wider audience — and how many listeners from other backgrounds openly grappled with that in turn. At NPR, dream hampton and Regina Bradley talked from their own perspectives about Lemonade’s impact through that lens, along with much more besides:

hampton: I saw someone who was a writer for Hannibal, the very dark TV show about cannibalism, and I saw her tweet out that she didn't think this album was for her, but she still was intrigued. And I thought, I bet when she was creating her scripts and her art she wasn't telling NBC, "This is going to be a show for cannibals. That's who's gonna watch my show." But in this moment, confronted with this many black girls on camera — and thank you Kahlil Joseph for honoring us in this way, to create this kind of visual altar to black girls, and black girl femmes — you know, in that moment, you can't locate yourself? I wasn't looking for myself in Hannibal, a story about FBI agents or cannibals, because I have no desire to be either. But I loved what she was doing and I didn't begin my read on that work with this feeling of rejection. And that was what was in her tweet. She's a white woman and she felt rejected looking at this video.

In Rolling Stone, Brittany Spanos looked at the connections to earlier artists and performers who do not always find themselves part of the typical canon.

"Don't Hurt Yourself" is only the latest chapter in a rich historical narrative. Since the Fifties and Sixties, black female singers have covered white rock artists and vice versa, though the former have often seen bigger success with their versions. Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" and "Ball and Chain" are more inextricably linked to Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin, respectively. Tina Turner reversed the tide when the Ike and Tina Turner Revue's cover of the Beatles' "Come Together" – performed while opening for the Rolling Stones in 1969 – helped them achieve their breakthrough after struggling with being referred to as "too pop" by soul stations and "too R&B" by white stations. Later, their cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" became the Revue's biggest hit and flipped the standard narrative of white rock artists appropriating black music.

At Salon, Annie Zaleski tackled one of the more tiresome complaints that emerged in Lemonade’s wake, bolstered in part by Prince’s death — that Beyoncé was less a valid artist either than a singular genius like Prince or, more tellingly, than any number of male artists who have similarly relied on a group of people in pursuit of a vision.

And as I considered the many components of “Lemonade,” it occurred to me that the album is a sculpture of rhythms, sentiments and textures—as well as disparate artists, sonic approaches and eras—in a way that’s akin to Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” a groundbreaking record cobbled together via samples. Over the weekend, a writing colleague noted the same thing, and then went one step further, with a pointed tweet referencing other pioneering cut-and-paste albums: “If you feel ‘Lemonade’ has too many contributors, surrender your copies of ‘Paul’s Boutique,’ [DJ Shadow’s] ‘Endtroducing’ & [Public Enemy’s] ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions [To Hold Us Back]’ now.” The idea of pastiche is central to the success of this trio of albums, the core tenet that makes them innovative and laudable. That’s also the case with “Lemonade,” whose well-publicized indie rock songwriting credits are only a miniscule part of the record’s overall breadth and depth. In fact, the YouTube clip for cult act Kaleidoscope’s “Let Me Try,” which is sampled on the Lamar-featuring “Freedom” and appeared in an ad for Beyoncé’s tour, is peppered with commenters who sought out the song and thanked her for introducing them to “good music.”

Prince: A Eulogy Prince’s impact and memory continued to play out throughout the week. At MTV, Greg Tate provided a long view of his work and life.

How cocky was our oven-fresh embryonic young Prince? So cocky you turned down lucrative record deals that would have permitted Maurice White or Quincy Jones to be the in-studio bosses of you. Because you already knew, back when the band was Grand Central, then Champagne — Jimmy Jam on bass, Morris Day on drums — and yawl were cutting your ambitious teeth on every talent-show, hotel-lounge, or chitlin-circus gig the Great White American heartland had to offer future Funk & Roll/Black Rock Stars as bodacious as your rambunctious and anomalous selves.

So baaad that back when the entry exam for upstart contenders in black popular music was more akin to today’s NBA than tomorrow’s TMZ, you blew in with stacked heels, mascara, a supermodel mane, Egyptian kohl, and that puckish grin, telling the league’s gatekeepers, I’m starting five, or Funk You. And I’m floor-coaching myself from day one.

Rob Tannenbaum interviewed Jam for Billboard, with Prince’s fellow Minneapolis music legend and early collaborator delving into any number of stories.

The thing that keeps popping into my mind over the past few days is the look he had on his face when we were playing Saginaw, Mich., on that chitlin’ circuit tour I mentioned earlier. He flew in to see us play — he was hiding behind a side fill [monitor], so nobody could see him. But where I was positioned, at the keyboards, I had a direct line of sight. We started doing our antics — Jerome brings out the mirror and Morris starts combing his hair — and the audience is going berserk. He had the biggest smile on his face, like a dad watching his kids in a school musical. I had that feeling of, "Wow, we’re doin’ good."

And it was funny, because when he noticed me looking at him, the smile came off his face. I’d caught him — he didn’t want us to know he was enjoying himself. He wanted us to keep the pedal to the floor and not get complacent, which is why he’d say to us, “Yeah, y’all are okay.” Hahaha.”

In Jezebel, Maya West talked about the grief she felt in the loss of Prince, tied up with larger feelings and memories of personal tragedies and how they interrelated, and acted on differing levels.

I still feel unqualified, this screed notwithstanding, to presume to tell anyone anything actually about Prince himself, the artist or the man. Others will tell you, link you, provide moments, anecdotes, context—bigger fans than I could ever be; more rigorous scholars. It’s been less than 24 hours since I received that first text, now, as I write this sentence, and already all my go-to facets of the internet are plastered with tributes, memories, celebrations, each habitual social media check leading to another roundup of must-see videos, another article about the scope of his cultural influence, another incredible photo or gif to autopilot click-and-drag into my IMPT PRINCE STUFF folder. And it’s all so good, so good, give it to me, all of it, I want to know it, am happy to learn it, own it, add it my own claim. But I also feel no need to add to the trove, not in that way—there is enough.

And what a thing that is. What a revelation, this grief without pressure. How possible, natural, to share it. How easy. What an opportunity to inhabit the shape of a manageable, shareable sadness, to practice what it might be like to move beyond my own airless approach to loss.

'I'm Going to Personify Sex in Every Way': Prince's Defining 'Dirty Mind' Album Numerous reappraisals of Prince’s work also emerged after news of his death. At Billboard, Michaelangelo Matos studied the album that burst him fully out his more conventional shell early on, 1980’s Dirty Mind.

When manager Steve Fargnoli presented his artist's new album to the label, as he related to the Los Angeles Times, "Warner Bros., ­understandably, didn't know how to react. The last record had sold almost a million, and they expected something with the same sound." Dickerson recalls that Warner was "scared to death. I remember being in L.A. shooting ­videos, and the execs pulled up and took Prince on a long ride, on a break, to talk about the record. They thought they were signing the new Stevie Wonder. They didn't know they were getting a cross between Wonder and Johnny Rotten." But when top Warner executives Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker and Russ Thyret backed Prince, the company fell in line.

Partially due to Purple Rain being his ultimate breakout and clips like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame jam on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” there was a tendency in some corners to posthumously box Prince in as more of a rocker than most. But his impact touched all corners, as numerous dance-trending artists noted in comments to Thump.

Moor Mother Goddess: I remember when Prince changed to The Artist Formerly Known As and had Slave written on his face. [It was] a powerful act of protest and an action that the music world is still trying to understand. What really inspires me about Prince is how tradition and history was so important [to him]. You can find gospel blues and the history of our people through sound. A true Afrofuturist, Prince incorporated the past and future into the music and knew the energy of the music would survive forever. These ideals guide my process towards making my music. I believe it is important to take accountability in one's own art and music because as we see with Prince, it's more than music.

Perhaps the most affecting story this past week about Prince came from one of his earliest and longest-standing friends and collaborators. Cymone’s lengthy, heartfelt memories in Billboard, ranging from childhood to the last time they met and caught up, could be a book — or a movie — in itself.

There was a sixth sense between the two us, absolutely. When you find somebody else who has the same passion, drive and competence, especially at that age because you’re going through all kinds of stuff like girls — this is what we both were meant to do. It’s something that doesn’t happen, I don’t think, very often where you find two people come together who are really passionate about what they do at a time when they’re both growing and learning while still trying to find a way to make that a reality. I played a lot. He played a lot. When he moved in, we’d sit in the kitchen and just play. We spent literally hours and hours doing that. It really is no accident when I think about how things eventually evolved. When you practice and play as much as we did and are as dedicated, you reap the rewards that can bring you.

We literally saw each other every day for maybe 4-5 years straight before all the fame. When you have that kind of a closeness, you kind of know what the other person is thinking without even having to speak. And when you start talking about music, it’s the same thing. There are gigs and pictures where I’m playing the bottom end of the bass and he’s playing the finger board; that doesn’t really work unless you’re really on the same page.

'Views': A Drake Reaction Roundtable As for Drake and Views, well, next week will allow for a little more to be said. But early reactions came in via another MTV roundtable, including Sasha Geffen, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and David Turner among others.

Geffen: Outside of fighting at the Cheesecake Factory and “Controlla,” I’m not hearing a ton of new lines that have the potential to circulate through the pop-culture lexicon the way snippets of “Know Yourself” and “Energy” and “Hotline Bling” did last year. Maybe they’ll reveal themselves on third or fourth listens. But maybe Drake is less focused on sound bites this time around, and more invested in texture, momentum, flow. Views is a self-contained ecosystem, sleepy but dense, eager to be understood as a whole and not a quarry for memes. “Hotline Bling” and its bonus-track designation acknowledge that instant-gratification side of Drake’s work, but also distance the rest of the album from it. Maybe that’s what the Pink Floyd nods — the way the bass on “Keep the Family Close” echoes “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and the drum work that “Summers Over Interlude” borrows from “Breathe (In the Air)” — are there to do: contain this thing as an album with quotes from a band that helped define what an album is and does.

Other recent losses provided material for discussion — and counterdiscussion. An especially ham-handed take on Merle Haggard’s life and work in Jacobin by Jonah Walters prompted a tart takedown from Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Walters clearly has not actually read anything on Haggard either, which is too bad since the literature on him is voluminous. He mentions that Haggard played for Pat Nixon’s birthday in 1973 as central to his argument that Haggard was an unreconstructed conservative. What he doesn’t do is discuss how Haggard actually responded to that event. Jefferson Cowie does detail this event, in his great book Stayin’ Alive, which Walters desperately needs to read if he wants to write about the white working-class. Haggard described it as a horrible experience. He remembered, “I felt like I was coming out for hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.” That’s the evidence Walters should be using. But instead, the actual fact of Haggard playing at this event is a sign of his unreconstructed politics in this incredibly shallow essay.

Alex Marshall wrote for the Guardian about the British band’s set-up of business partnerships, a welter of various individual and group efforts covering their general work in music and beyond.

It seems Radiohead are not so much a band as a conglomerate, having the sort of financial structure you would expect to be more associated with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than bands from Oxfordshire. They have been directors of some 20 companies since they formed, according to Companies House. This is not just interesting for gossip. Radiohead’s financial structure shines a light on one of the lesser discussed facts of the music industry: if you want to be a great band, it can help if you are as good at finance as you are at music, or at least have a team supporting you who are.

More papers from the EMP Pop Conference also turned up, including Keith Harris’s presentation on assumptions about country music’s audience and content in recent years.

The first line [of Tim McGraw’s single “Southern Voice”] pairs off Hank Williams and Dale Earnhart – gotta get them out of the way, right? But then it gets interesting: Linguistic innovators Chuck Berry and “Will” Faulkner are set beside one another, followed by powerhouse vocalists Aretha Franklin and Dolly Parton. Then, weirdly and with no audible irony, Rosa Parks and Scarlett O’Hara. I do like how Martin Luther King and Billy Graham are nearly side by side the second verse.

Through representation and inclusion, the song insists everyone mentioned is a southerner despite his or her skin color. That makes for glib history and thin politics, maybe, but there’s something redeeming about the focus on the voice – that though divided by their appearance, there is nonetheless, through voice, a material manifestation of self that all these figures share.

New York Is Killing Me: Albert Ayler’s Life and Death in the Jazz Capital At Pitchfork, Mark Richardson wrote about the jazz legend’s life and times in the city, including his still mysterious passing — a handy overview and celebration of the work of one of America’s most remarkable artists.

Through 1965 and ’66, Ayler’s ensemble would gig often at Slug’s Saloon, a small club in the Lower East Side that was especially receptive to the daring jazz being created at the time. Opened in 1964, Slug’s was developing a reputation not unlike that of Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem two decades earlier—a place for the most adventurous musicians to gather and play for each other (in 1966 and ’67, Sun Ra had a regular residency at Slug’s). As heard on the double album At Slug’s Saloon, recorded in May ’66, Ayler’s shows had grown into long medleys where one song segued into the next, and the wild energy of his earlier solos were being channeled into unbearably intense statements of melody. The music was not “free” in the strict sense of the word, but it was open and welcoming and utterly unique, with a deep feeling of joy permeating the whole.

In the Quietus, as part of a 40th anniversary series, Neil Kulkarni looked at the tendency to reduce Jamaica’s music in the 1970s to the universes of Bob Marley and dub, selecting three famed but not universally known albums as representing the country’s unsettled, often violent domestic politics at the time which deserve a wider due.

After the PNP won the election the violence subsided briefly, only to return in the ensuing years with a frightening new level of fatality and force. Because Bob Marley is such a massive figure in reggae music and Jamaica’s history, the part he played in the 76 election (undoubtedly the Smile concert helped Manley’s cause, despite Marley’s discomfort with politicians) and the moment he bought Seaga and Manley together to shake hands during the One Love Peace Concert in 78 (his first Jamaican performance since the Smile concert) have become epochal moments in reggae history, proof of the man’s bravery and spirit. Marley is amenable to a version of reggae history that likes the big dramatic moments of sanctimony, the kind of direct messianic reaction and response that Bono and Geldof and others would try and make their own in the subsequent decade.

However, as listeners, if we want to point ourselves towards records that explored precisely the conditions in Jamaica in 1976, we’d do well to avoid such figureheads, frontmen, demagogues. I’d focus more on three albums, two by vocal groups, one by a total eccentric, that for me perfectly encapsulate the myriad tensions, traumas and hopes of that generation of young Jamaicans. The Mighty Diamonds' Right Time is perhaps 76’s sweetest yet sharpest transmission from the island, thanks in no small part to Donald ‘Tabby’ Shaw’s gorgeous vocals. The aching lilt was forged through the group's utter adoration of US soul and old doo-wop, and makes Right Time a poignant, deeply moving document of a nation under siege from within, falling apart at the seams.

Finally, on his personal blog, Simon Reynolds wrote about memory, loss and Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara” in a moving essay about a journey back to the UK and the passing of someone who had been close with.

These days, "Sara" is most often heard in the the car. Our ten-year-old has developed a love of Fleetwood Mac - rather amazing us. She's fascinated by the Buckingham/Nicks broken romance story-line, so for her benefit I made a CD called Stevie ❤ Lindsay. A recreation of a tape I made that accompanied Joy and me on a vacation through New Mexico and Arizona (Stevie's home state). So that's a whole dimension to listening to the song that is new and delightful - listening with your daughter. A new layer of memory overlaying the memories from the South West driving vacation, the unlucky-in-love 1988 memories, the 1980 first-rapture memories.

I wonder what Tasmin's own memories will be of this song - listening with her parents perhaps, when she still enjoyed hanging out with them - and the others that she likes even more - "Landslide", "Silver Springs". I don't know if she has looked up Fleetwood Mac or La Nicks on the internet, but as she journeys more purposefully into music past and present as she gets older, this will be second nature to her - an inseparable part of the musical-discovery process. For better or worse she will be a far more informed listener than I was, or was able to be.

As for me, I do still wish I could recover that lost-in-music, drowned-in-sound feeling that I had when I first heard that song.

And with that as a conclusion, what else to end the column with today but this: