Pandemic Playlist: I Been Searching Where the Love Went

From the cover art of “Dinner Party” by Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, Kamasi Washington

Our music for shut-ins series returns because more of us need to spend more time at home.

I thought we had retired the Pandemic Playlists when Orleans Parish moved into Phase 2, but with the country and many Louisiana parishes seeking spikes in the number of COVID-19 infections, we’re largely back inside again. Live music won’t really return until we as a region can get a handle on the rate of infections, so here are a couple of hours of music to help make staying in easier. 

When we first went on lockdown, I thought that would be a good time to go through my wall of CDs and revisit some that I remember little about other than liking them. That never happened, so when I started this playlist, I thought that I’d populate it with songs from those CDs but passed on that concept too. Some were less impressive than I remembered, and the concept felt like a way to make a really dated playlist. More importantly, fun playlists are largely free-associative, and trying to force this one into a rigid concept sounded boring. 

Still, a few tracks survived that concept. I loved the Japanese trio Buffalo Daughter’s New Rock with its dance rock influenced by both hip-hop and krautrock. They were on the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal imprint, which tended to work for me, and while I liked the band’s follow-up EP, Pshychic, I couldn’t remember why. Checking it recently, I found Buffalo Daughter leaned into its Neu-ness without many clear, compact songs to balance the longer, more amorphous pieces. “Pshychic a-Go-Go” is representative, and while I like it a lot, it tells me why the album didn’t stick with me.

Other songs that came from the failed attempt to re-hear forgotten albums include “Where I’m Coming From” by The True Reflection, and “Zoom Zoom Zoom” by Calypso Rose. The former is a ’70s soul group that I had never heard of before finding a secondhand Japanese import of an album by them—still the only thing by them I’ve seen or heard—and Calypso Rose’s Far From Home  from 2016 came at a time when I was becoming more interested in calypso, but not so interested that the album became a priority. Now I will get to know it better. 

“Orpheus” by Sophrosyne comes from a similar, less archaeological impulse. I missed Parades when it came out earlier this year between Carnival and life, and once we got to mid-March and the shutdown, my focus shifted to first grade, Common Core math and preventing my daughter from burying herself in seasons of Scooby Doo. I now really like the album and love this track—dub-influenced electronic music that doesn’t tip over into dubstep.

The playlist starts with the brilliant “Freeze Tag,” which smartly meets police violence against people of color with love and soul. It comes from Terrace Martin, who former MSM contributor Raphael Helfand turned me on to when he visited New Orleans as a part of Herbie Hancock’s band, and I keep trying to find music by Martin that reflects the excellent set he played at Jazz Fest in 2018. He’s joined by Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, who like him embody what Nicholas Payton calls #BlackAmericanMusic. Payton made the list in part because I’ve enjoyed some of his chill live-streams, but also because I’m always interested in his forays into electronic music. “Charmin Shortage Blues” shows a sense of humor I’ve often suspected that he hid with strong poker face, and it’s from Quarantined with Nick, an album he recorded with Cliff Himes and Sasha Masakowski. 

The 79rs Gang and Big Freedia made the list because we wrote about them recently, and The Beatles’ “Love You To” did because I recently defended the George Harrison composition from Revolver for an upcoming episode of Jonathan and Julia Pretus’ new podcast, Ranking The Beatles, which debuted Tuesday. Prince’s “Bold Generation” is part of the album’s worth of unreleased songs included with the Super Deluxe reissue of 1999. I’ve been digging into the those songs, a lot of which would have been highlights on albums by artists who didn’t have as many good songs as he did. Sign O’ the Times is set for a similar reissue with another album’s worth of new-to-us songs on September 25.

Dexy’s Midnight Runners made the cut after I watched a video retelling of the Dexy’s story and “Come On Eileen.” I preferred Dexy’s as a punk Northern soul band because few bands have ever played more like their lives depended on the next three minutes of music. There’s also something slightly heartbreaking about Dexy’s because it’s clear that everything about the band, from its look to its lyrics, mattered to singer Kevin Rowland, but his own musical voice and controlling nature made it a hard vision to share. He’s so mannered that I listen to Dexy’s singles from this period more than Searching for the Young Soul Rebels.

A number of songs here were Bandcamp discoveries. I’ve been a fan of the Lisbon-based Enchufada label run by Branko, and on a recent Friday when Bandcamp waved its cut of sales, I found the Columbian label Palenque that featured great dub production by Cerrero, who is represented here by tracks from the soundtrack to the film One Lucky Goat and  the accordion-first Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto.

While searching for artists from a hip-hop compilation on the Palenque label, I found SoundBoy Cartegena El Hip-Hop Jibarito y su Orquestra Nuisfumos. While going through Spotify’s new releases, I learned that Egyptian Lover has a new song that scratches the same 808+Vocoder itch as his old songs. 

In context, the oddest track here comes from David Bowie and a recently released live recording from 1995 on the Outside tour. The album, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live in Dallas ’95), doesn’t hold my attention because the band is very professional but lacking in personality. I found the show more interesting for some of the song choices (“Andy Warhol,” “Teenage Wildlife”) than for the actual performances. Still, it does feature Bowie singing “Under Pressure,” which I hadn’t heard before. Unfortunately, it took the sound man a verse to find the woman in the mix who sings Freddie Mercury’s parts.