Deep Voices: Midlife rock, Brazilian rap
13 songs, mostly fun (one or two sad)
Deep Voices #52 on Spotify
Deep Voices #52 on Apple Music
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Playlist notes:
I don’t know how to not make this sound like an insult, but the genre I keep thinking of for Azita’s music is “adult rock.” I don’t necessarily mean that as an update or companion to “adult contemporary” but I don’t necessarily not. She was previously in the more outlandish post-punkish groups Scissor Girls and (the excellently named) Bride of No No, bands with fuzzy recordings, herky jerky rhythms, and a decent amount of whooping. She hasn’t left those traits behind in her solo work, simply meted them out much more deliberately. I particularly love “Shooting Birds Out of the Sky,” from her new album Glen Echo. It isn’t linear but it’s not frenetic. The guitar line is meandering, like she wrote it while taking an aimless stroll to collect her thoughts. Azita’s voice has always been wonderfully gruff, but she often sang with a quiver, which kept its natural bluesiness at arm's length. Here, unadorned, she’s practically a torch singer. “Poking at a hornet’s nest/What the fuck did you expect?” she says. But as much as she’s lamenting a lover, it sounds like she is giving herself a pep talk, like, Get it together, you’re too old for this shit. The cymbal gives a big crash, life’s punchline.
I’ve lately been obsessed, like many people, with Willow Smith’s excellent song “Meet Me At Our Spot,” which, in this binary, is absolutely young rock. In this loosely narrative love song, she fantasizes about the future, which includes the absolutely incorrect lines, “When I’m older I’ll be so much stronger/I’ll stay up for longer.” In my experience, I am now weaker and have a much earlier bedtime than at Smith’s age, nearly half my life ago. If other fortyish people reading this may not have the same exact experience, I would bet you’re at least more conscious of how much strength you can extend before it hurts, of how late you can stay up tonight before tomorrow is ruined. Possibilities at this age seem not as immediately available to be picked off of the tree of life like perfect little apples. When you squander an opportunity, big or small, the road not taken starts to feel less appealing, like you didn’t bring a jacket and the road in facts looks like it might be chilly. At my age, cumulative time now spreads out behind as much as before. Maybe that makes Azita’s music not adult but, more specifically, midlife, a period with a lot of responsibility and not much time. In that case, it’s an accomplishment it exists in the first place.
The world of Brazilian rap, and the subgenre of brime, or Brazilian grime, is pretty hard to dig into if you don’t speak Portuguese. Since reading this Resident Advisor story about brime in late 2020, I’ve tried to dive in. But there’s an infinite amount of music, which I’ve haplessly delved into largely via YouTube. Without the benefit of language, cataloging favorites and following catalogs down an endless digital pipeline—my preferred method of mainlining a new musical interest—is basically impossible. So I usually just let the algorithm do its thing. But after a while I noticed that many of the songs I liked the most shared a producer, Chris Beats ZN. His sound is reliably melancholy, with the stuttered drums of drill music accented by frequent piano or acoustic guitar.
Gxlden and Sueth’s “Até o Fim” is my favorite Chris Beats ZN beat. “Até O Fim” translates to “until the end,” which, based on the amount of guns in the video, won’t be too long. Translated, the lyrics loosely are about the difficulty of success and the drugs they do to cope. Both rappers really know how to milk the sadness from the beat. Largely by not rapping, doing some combination of singing and lamenting. Their delivery sounds like the most downtrodden of Future’s songs, slurred singing through enormous pain, likely self-inflicted. In the background, the guitar gently weeps.
I was more than happy to stumble on the name Ross Simonini on the credits list of a track featuring Daniel Aged, the subject of a recent Deep Voices interview. Clicking around, I discovered Simonini had recently released an album and it is a joy. I know Simonini not from making music, but from writing about it. When I was an editor at the Fader, he was a regular contributor, writing with ample knowledge and space about artists who preferred a kookier way of doing business. It turns out his own music is something we would have happily written about had it been around at the time. It sounds like tiny bubbles of Auto-Tune floating around a blue sky, giggling when they bump into each other. “Can’t Stop Me,” whose title is warmly hummed, is a happy anthem of defiance. “You can’t stop me!” Me either.