liner notes Archives

Liner Notes: Grand Opening, Grand Closing

mensah demary The Butter Sep 02, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

This will be brief.

Released in 2003, The Black Album was to be Jay Z’s finality before retirement. How, exactly, a rapper can retire still puzzles me. I assume a retired rapper refuses to rap, on the premise that he/she is now “retired” and therefore “doesn’t do that anymore.” But Michael Jordan still plays basketball, albeit in his personal gym, despite being retired.

Writers try to retire, which really means “maybe I’ll publish again, maybe I won’t, but if I don’t, it’s not because I’m no longer a good writer…it’s because I’m retired.” A failsafe against talent erosion, retirement is the ejector seat from a fighter jet now out of gas, nose-diving toward the earth.

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Liner Notes: Missing Afropunk

mensah demary The Butter Aug 26, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

I woke up this morning with a bit of anxiety. Sunday, Brooklyn: the gym loomed, as did multiple deadlines tumbling all around me, as if drowning in one of those playpens full of colorful plastic or rubber balls, and I had emails to answer, and documents to review, and decisions to make.

Adulthood awaited, and I didn’t even have brunch plans for the day—the worst realization. Still, life is a matter of degrees, when you think about it. One step leads to two, one sentence becomes a paragraph, and this is how I convinced myself to get on with the business.

My home is not necessarily a musical home; that is, all the music I hoard and treasure and discard and replace is rarely played loud enough for others—neighbors, primarily—to hear. I confine my music to the shitty Apple “earpods” that feel great in the ears, until I notice they’re not actually in my ears at all, but sort of sit there, like two lazy white cats, bemused and unbothered by the fair demands you make of them.

Sunday mornings, then, are quiet in terms of music (says this music columnist). But I do listen to my thoughts, made clearer as each minute post-sleep passes; the aqueous shimmer from already-forgotten dreams receding so I can figure out my next move.

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Liner Notes: Drake, Dre, and French Music

mensah demary The Butter Aug 12, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

This past week, I started a new job. And with new jobs come new responsibilities, new people to meet, new expectations, new office politics. Combined, a culture shock occurs, so perhaps I’m reeling from the novelty of my new employment, the drastic, yet thankful (oh so thankful) changes that have come my way. This, I assume, is an explanation for what you’re about to read, assuming you’ll read it all the way through — I’ve learned a lot about reading habits and the Internet.

The biggest news in music, according to me, is the return of Dr. Dre, and whatever this is I’m writing — and you’re reading — must begin here. Dr. Dre has used the release of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton to finally release his first album in sixteen years, the aptly named Compton.

The album has been positioned as one inspired by the movie, rather than an actual Straight Outta Compton soundtrack. It doesn’t matter—fans who’ve waited over a decade for the fabled Detox album now have the next best thing, assuming they don’t believe Compton is simply Detox re-branded.

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Liner Notes: Waiting for Frank Ocean

mensah demary The Butter Jul 29, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

I was in my ex-wife’s car the first time I heard Frank Ocean. Early summer, or late spring, in 2011—we were still married, still friends. Anyway, I remember the car because we had recently purchased it, albeit used—there was no “new car smell,” but it was steam-cleaned and fresh. She drove around town to run errands; I rode shotgun, probably staring down at my iPhone 4. It took a minute or so for me to notice that my head was bobbing to the music.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Frank Ocean,” she replied.

“Who?”

“Frank Ocean.”

“Frank Ocean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Who’s Frank Ocean?” I asked.

I can be insufferable.

The song was “novacane” from Frank’s debut mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra. My then-wife gave me a copy, which stayed in my daily rotation for weeks. I remember being shocked at the sound quality of the mixtape; I don’t consider myself an audiophile, but I like to think I have an ear for clarity. Listening to Frank for the first time engendered feelings of clarity, or perhaps clarity itself—there was something fresh in his voice, his lyrics, and I heard Frank clearly.

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Liner Notes: The Bridge: On Music and Memory

mensah demary The Butter Jul 15, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

More than sports, perhaps, music served as the bridge between my brothers and me. They are eleven and seven years older than me, respectively. The years between us sometimes creates a space that can’t be measured quantitatively and seems impossible to traverse, to narrow, and even possibly close. I perceive their ages—the fact that they are older than me—as though they are marathon runners briskly jogging ahead of me. When I think of them, I think of life as a race, and ever since I was a child I wanted nothing more than to be closer to my brothers. But we do what we can with what we have. So we turn to music.

Those years between us did afford me certain advantages; I heard hip-hop at an early age, as my brothers, nearing or just entering their teenage years, immersed themselves into the new sound of the 1980s. It’s the music I remember when I think of those distant, pre-school years. If nothing else, it meant I had a common language—a native tongue, if you will—with my older brothers, quickly becoming men, launch soon approaching. I guess I wanted to know them as they were learning themselves.

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Liner Notes: A Departure

mensah demary The Butter Jul 01, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

General feelings of uplift, of the future light beamed and burned against the cold historic slabs. Hands clasped together in Emoji prayers. Play Kendrick’s “Alright.” It is a reminder, like the thunderbolt, that change comes swiftly, but only after the painstaking patience of people peering over the precipice.

Hard times like God
Bad trips like: “God!”
Nazareth, I’m fucked up
Homie you fucked up
But if God got us we then gon’ be alright

It is an affirmation against the maelstrom; it is a call to endure. There are online arguments and debates and comments, and then there is justice piloted by grace. You see it coming, on the back of the starling, with a rainbow jet stream visible to everyone — even citizens living on the wrong side of history.

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Liner Notes: Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun

mensah demary The Butter Jun 17, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

It is 2015, Summer, and my birthday is quickly approaching—meaning I’m more nostalgic, and therefore more maudlin, than usual. But I allow myself recollection. It’s part of my art. It has become, unintentionally, the heart of these ongoing Liner Notes—more love letters to my favorite music, and documentation of my tumbling down various wormholes connecting my present to the past, than mere music reviews.

Fifteen years ago, I lived in Washington DC. Or close enough to claim it. In actuality, I lived in Prince George’s County, in a town called Greenbelt, in Maryland—a few miles from the DC border. My nomadic life, which would occur over the next decade, began here in 2000. I can barely remember the year 2000. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet—the world had not yet undergone, if you think about it, the drastic, violent reanimation which has occurred since the towers fell. How old was I? 18? 19? Something like that—some young, stupid age, yet legally free to make a mess of things if I so wished.

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Liner Notes: Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda

mensah demary The Butter Jun 03, 2015

mensah demary’s previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here.

My music collection has diversified over recent years. I blame it on people, if such a wondrous thing can be “blamed” on anyone. But having met many different people over the years, both online and off, I can say that the expansion of one’s music library is a fantastic side effect of being social, of being open to people—something that’s coming easier to me the more I do it. I like to think of my musical evolution in stages, or new waves.

A significant wave occurred between the years of 1998 and 2002, which I mentioned briefly in my Liner Notes column on Yasiin Bey’s Black on Both Sides. Since then, the waves have been smaller and more frequent, with introductions to Joy Division, The Mars Volta (and At The Drive-In and ANTEMASQUE), and FKA twigs—even Beck makes an appearance in my collection with Morning Phase (before Morning Phase beat out Beyoncé for 2015’s Grammy Album of the Year award).

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