Songs 2020 #3: "Esta En Ti," Adriana Rios

 

Rios starts with a deep breath, like she's uncertain before a big statement, maybe she's bracing herself for saying anything at all in the middle of the pandemic. Guitar arpeggios lay a path for her careful first steps. 

It doesn't take long for her to pick up the pace and emphasis, singing of people stripped of the familiar, losing their past identities and finding unity in a common cause. The guitar bangs out flourishes that expand the music's limits. Her voice pushes harder with each verse.

As she sings of doctors and nurses fighting a war that others fight from home, the sound grows epic in its reach. She finds a way to hope and a new kind of freedom, against a rising sun. 

Sure, it may be romantic. She may even sound naive. 

But she's not wrong. 

This is the world the pandemic could show us, is showing us in our best moments, and, as this record's playing, you hear the echo of your own flickers of hope in quiet moments, those moments when the reason for hope seems plain as day. Not just the possibility but the practicality of the vision is unmistakable. 

Of the moment and more demo than finished record, Adriana Rios's "Esta En Ti" ("It's In You") still matters now and matters deeply. After all, Rios isn't talking about anything intangible. She's talking about a real fight to contain a real virus and what it all means. 

Some of us have had the sense of possibility she expresses, at least at the beginning of the pandemic. We thought surely we would come together before a million died, before 11 million in the U.S. alone (versus 1 million in Mexico) contracted this unpredictable and deadly illness.

The fact that no one came through with PPE until too late, the fact that whole cities lay under siege while many speculated about hoaxes, the fact that the public good failed to take precedence over the hungry maw of the stock market, the fact that billionaires grew richer than ever while eight million Americans faced evictions, all of these things may well have cost us our sense of possibility.

But if you listen to this voice, you can't turn away, and if you can't turn away, you can't miss her call. And if we could find ourselves talking about what it would take to answer her--past our old identities and ideas about how things work, we might live in a better world, overnight. Listen to Rios sing and tell me you can't hear that new world aching and fighting hard to be born.

Esta En Ti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5US8h7u5E

 

Songs 2020 #2: Lil Baby's "Bigger Picture"

 It’s hard to imagine a musical form more suited to 2020 than trap, and it’s hard to imagine an artist tackling it better than Lil Baby does here.

The record starts with the sound of thunder and striking (but halting, uncertain) piano. It’s a soundtrack for the uprising after George Floyd’s murder. It ends with the crowd shouting, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

Then, as if harnessing breath control from the streets, Lil Baby begins to talk about what he’s seen all his life, memories and thoughts on memories spit in desperation. People being shot after being told to freeze, moms breaking down with sons in prison, friends packing weapons to keep their heads, everyone being harassed every second of every day by what can only be called an occupying force.

That kick drum and 808 has turned the thunder into another force under the crowd’s control, the keys all but doubled with the snare in insistent emphasis on each shift in the lyric.

He’s telling you why he’s here in the streets even if he knows it’s just a step in a process—“You can’t fight fire with fire, I know, but at least we can turn up the flame some.” He knows he’s surrounded by the blind following the blind, but they’re working this chink in the wall that’s beginning to shine some light.

And then there’s that refrain:

“It’s bigger than black and white/It’s a problem with the whole way of life…”

He’s clearly not turning that call inward, it’s outward. As he’s already mentioned, it’s the whole system. It’s all the questions we can’t even figure out how to ask.

He continues, “It can’t change overnight ---right.” He knows he’s at a stage in a process, and he knows it’s a leap of faith to work it. “But we gotta start somewhere/Might as well gone head start here/We done had a hell of a year.”   

Truer words have never been spoken, and a truer rap, a truer use of hip hop, musically and politically, shouldn’t even be looked for. This is an anthem for 2020 in the streets. And it’s all the better for being reflective. It deals with fears and vulnerability and limitations and the greatest yearning of them all, for a little bit of peace only possible with justice.

 Bigger Picture Official Video                        Bigger Picture Rap Life Live

Songs 2020 #1, Mavis Staples, "We're All In It Together"

 A record that helps me get out of bed.

According to Rolling Stone, early in the pandemic, Mavis Staples called up her buddy Jeff Tweedy and said, “Tweedy, have you heard them saying the title of our song on the news every minute on the minute?” And they released this outtake from 2017’s “If All I Was Was Black,” all money made going to My Block, My Hood, My City, a Chicago mutual aid group turned to the pandemic. My Block My Hood My City

It’s like they released the cut thesis, and somehow it works.

It’s really the simplicity of the thing. Two refrains acting as a verse and a chorus, a two line bridge to the same thing three (and a half) more times. But the simplicity allows it to build, subtly and unforgettably.

It starts off folkie, Tweedy’s acoustic, bluesy and off beat. Mavis quietly doubling her vocal as gravely front woman and aching back up. Then, the second time through, the band kicks in, backing vocals shimmer and bottleneck guitar finds some joy in expressing the pain of the thing.

“I gave up on hating you, just for hatin’ me/I gave up on hating you/A long time ago….”

Guitar sustain and hard fought desperation, “I need you/You need me.”

So the bottleneck shoots fire in the darkness, and the honky tonk keys kick up the dance. And it becomes a party to end all parties--when we know how much we depend on each other and celebrate how much we push each other yet save each other.

There’s a timidity here, like it’s a song afraid of itself, but maybe it should be. It’s tackling the hardest divisions we face, but it’s doing so knowing the stakes. That self-awareness more than redeems it.

We're All In It Together