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It’s Friday; right here’s what we’ve received on deck.
Earlier than the Lifeless
Grateful Lifeless lyricist Robert Hunter, who died in 2019, didn’t simply write songs—though his title is on a reasonably staggering variety of nice ones, together with “Casey Jones,” “Ripple,” “Darkish Star,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Ugliest Lady within the World.” (Sure, this can be a pro-“Ugliest Lady within the World” family, don’t @ us.) He additionally printed books of his poetry and translated Rilke’s Duino Elegies from the unique German, which is spectacular as a result of Hunter didn’t communicate German. However so far as we and Lifeless biographer Dennis McNally are conscious, he solely wrote one full-length ebook of prose, which remained unpublished till this week: A novelistic memoir referred to as The Silver Snarling Trumpet, which paperwork Hunter’s friendship with a 19-year-old Jerry Garcia circa 1961, years earlier than Garcia put collectively a band referred to as the Warlocks and started his journey to cultural immortality.
The ebook, in shops now, is an interesting doc of the historic second– an interim between the age of the beatniks and the rise of the hippie—that formed a music legend’s arc. You may learn an excerpt right here, by which Hunter and Garcia play their first-ever dwell reveals as a duo, and Hunter will get a short style of fame—till Garcia decides they need to go their separate methods. (The breakup didn’t fairly take; though Hunter by no means performed music with the Lifeless, he went on to jot down songs with Garcia and different members of the band for thirty years.)
Cole Consolation
Talking of intra-friend-group rigidity amongst songwriters: After bowing out of probably the most vituperative rap beef in current historical past and thereby sparing his household the trauma of a “Meet The Grahams”-type exegesis on his failures as a rapper and a human being, J. Cole has cleared his busy bike/seashore/beatmaking schedule and tapped again in. This week GQ struggle correspondent Frazier Tharpe breaks down the finer factors of Cole’s new tune “Port Antonio,” by which Jermaine Cole lastly addresses his position, or lack thereof, within the Drake/Kendrick feud whereas squashing rumors of a side-beef with Drake. After rhyming “regrettably” with “discredit me,” “pedigree,” “extremely” and “hypothetically”—we will see the Cole stans doing the Flip Up The Quantity Meme face simply studying that sentence—Cole closes with some conciliatory bars that, Tharpe writes, “really feel maybe addressed to Drake and himself: ‘Tappin again into your magic pen is what’s crucial/reminding these of us why we do it/It is not for beefin, it is for speakin’ our ideas/Pushin’ ourselves, reaching the charts.’” Which because it occurs can also be what we remind ourselves of every time we sit down to jot down this article.
