The New York Times - 12.09.2019

C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

Pop Music

MTV WAS ON CONSTANTLYin Miles Davis’s
Malibu, Calif., home during the mid-1980s.
“He would turn the sound up when
groups caught his eye,” said Vince Wilburn
Jr., a nephew of Davis who was living with
his uncle at the time and playing drums in
his band, in an interview. “It could be Mr.
Mister, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson,
Prince, Toto.” In his career’s fifth and final
act, one that has yet to be fully appreciated,
even by his staunchest fans, Davis re-
mained committed to the sounds of the day
alongside the wriggling, kaleidoscopic style
that had become his trademark.
Davis released “You’re Under Arrest” in

1985. It was his most directly pop-adjacent
      album, featuring songs by Jackson and Ms.
      Lauper. But critics savaged it, as they did
      most of his work in that era, and it contribut-
      ed to strife between Davis and Columbia
      Records. He soon jumped ship for Warner
      Bros.
      What happened next has scarcely been
      documented, even though it represents a
      significant turn in his career, and shows
      how restlessly he continued to alchemize
      history and the present, into his last years.
      In 1985 and early ’86, Davis quietly re-
      corded a full album’s worth of music with
      Mr. Wilburn and a cast of other young musi-
      cians. The executives at Warner Bros. even-
      tually demanded that Davis ditch the ses-
      sions entirely, but last week, after three
      years of restoration work by Mr. Wilburn
      and his original production team, “Rubber-
      band,” an 11-track album from those ses-
      sions, was released.
      It’s a potpourri of experiments, balancing
      the frayed energy and funky sparring of his
      1970s fusion records with layers of synthe-
      sizer and protean harmonic movement.
      “He wanted a hit on radio,” said Randy
      Hall, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist

who was part of the album’s core production

team. At the same time, the vibe at those

sessions “was street and it was funky,” Mr.

Hall said. “That’s what Miles wanted to get

back to, kind of like what he did with

‘Bitches Brew’ and ‘On the Corner.’”

At the start of Stanley Nelson’s new docu-

mentary, “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool,”

now in theaters, Davis is quoted describing

music as “like a curse” for him. “If anybody

wants to keep creating, they have to be

about change,” the actor Carl Lumbly says,

reading Davis’s own words.

But the film makes clear that what really

tortured Davis was everything except mu-

sic: the stubborn racism he confronted, his

own well-documented and often violent mi-

sogyny, his addictions, the ambient distrust

he carried with him daily. Music, in fact, was

his therapy. By remaining doggedly current

in his art, he could stay engaged with a

world that he otherwise held in suspicion.

The musicologist Tammy L. Kernodle,

who dispenses some of the film’s most acute

insights, explains in the documentary that

music was “a way of healing.”

For Davis, she says, “it gave him an op-

portunity to show a vulnerability, and to

show a side of him that in the real world he

could not show.”

When Davis recorded “Rubberband,” he

was married to the actress Cecily Tyson,

whom he credited with having saved him

from a near-fatal drug habit, but whom he

eventually physically abused, as he had

many other romantic partners. Unfortu-

nately, the film does not tell the story of

their relationship (though it wisely gives

generous screen time to Frances Taylor Da-

vis, the musician’s first wife, who had a pro-

found impact on his work). And it skips over

most of the groundbreaking music he made

in the 1980s.

In the studio, making what became “Rub-

berband,” he kept up an avuncular demean-

or with Mr. Wilburn and his team of much

younger musicians, even as he sometimes

behaved monstrously behind closed doors.

“If the session started at 12, he’d be there

by 10:30, ready to play,” Mr. Hall said. “He

would bring candy and little stuff for us to

eat in bowls. He prepared the room, be-

cause we were going to be there all day.”

Many of the 11 tracks on “Rubberband”

have been doctored and updated, with lush

vocals and drum sounds added in an at-

tempt to pull the album into 2019, and to ful-

fill Davis’s dream of making radio-friendly

songs.

But Mr. Wilburn, Mr. Hall and their fellow

producer Attala Zane Giles are now in their

50s or early 60s, roughly the age Davis was

when he recorded this material. They did

not draw upon younger musicians to help

them update the album, as Davis certainly

would have, so their attempts to modernize

certain tracks with contemporary accouter-

ments often miss the mark. Pieces like “So

Emotional,” with lead vocals from the neo-

soul virtuoso Lalah Hathaway, and “Rub-

berband of Life,” a remix of the album’s orig-

inal title tune with a beat somewhere be-

tween backpack rap and trip-hop, land in a

mixed-up middle ground, straddling the

’80s and today.

But the tunes that are less touched-up of-

fer a tantalizing glimpse down a road that

Davis might well have followed further, had

his label not intervened. Some of those

pieces became part of his stage show, and

have circulated as bootlegs and in compila-

tions. One is “Carnival Time,” an Antillean-

inflected anthem that’s equally indebted to

early Weather Report and Quincy Jones’s

work with Michael Jackson. “Give It Up”

and the original “Rubberband” (included as

the final track, bookending the album with

the more heavily altered “Rubberband of

Life”) intriguingly presage Davis’s hip-hop

experiments on “Doo-Bop,” which would be

his final LP before his death in 1991.

In Nelson’s documentary, the critic Greg

Tate rightly argues that the spookily hyp-

notic funk-rock fusion Davis made in the

early 1970s helped set the table for what

was ahead in popular dance music, from

house music to R&B. “Rubberband,” then,

finds Davis picking up 10 years later on a

pop language he had indirectly shaped, re-

touching it with his old springy energy. The

result is music with a heavy dance beat but

a textural profundity, and song forms that

morphed constantly, keeping listeners on

edge.

This direction differs significantly from

the one Davis would soon follow, collaborat-

ing with the bassist Marcus Miller to create

“Tutu” (1986) and “Amandla” (1989), widely

considered his best late-era albums. On

those, he used simpler chords and riffs to

build understated, well-ordered grooves

and a coolly Afrocentric sound.

There may be more discoveries ahead

from that period, too. Mr. Wilburn said he

hoped to reach an agreement soon with

Prince’s estate to release never-before-

heard music that Davis and Prince made to-

gether in those years.

“Our family’s talking to the estate of

Prince to see if we can release it at some

point,” Mr. Wilburn said. Until then, “Rub-

berband” should give devotees and curious

new listeners plenty to listen to and ponder.

Follow the Clues of Miles Davis’s Final Act

Miles Davis onstage in 1985.

“Rubberband,” a new album of

work he recorded that year and

the next, was released last

week.

CLAYTON CALL/REDFERNS, VIA GETTY IMAGES

His album, recorded in the

mid-80s, speaks to the

trumpeter’s final years.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

POST MALONEis a melodically gifted misan-
thrope with a voice that always sounds like
it’s running away. If Drake has been the ar-
chitect of the last decade’s pop evolution,
Post Malone has been its savviest adopter,
making ethereal post-rap pop songs that
sound inevitable, and also evanescent.
“Hollywood’s Bleeding,” the 24-year-old
musician’s third album, will certainly be one
of this year’s most popular, thanks to the in-
tensity of his success on streaming plat-
forms (his first two albums remain in the
top tiers of the Billboard chart) as well as
his wild adaptability. He is a rock singer
whose cadences come from hip-hop, a pop
songwriter who marries brightness with
sleaze. He’s every genre — it’s all in him.
Which means that even when he is
stretching the boundaries of his sound, as
he does in several places on “Hollywood’s
Bleeding,” the results feel the opposite of
experimental. When you’re an omnivore
taking a mortar and pestle to six decades of
pop music history and turning it into a

smooth slurry, it’s nigh impossible to shock.

That’s true on “Allergic” and “A Thousand

Bad Times,” both spacey songs with a sharp

kick that suggest the “Grease” soundtrack

dipped into an acid bath. It’s even true on

“Take What You Want,” an excellent song

that opens with a guest appearance by a

strikingly undimmed Ozzy Osbourne, and

also features some deep-echo Travis Scott

yelps.

Coming from most other artists, these

would be hard stylistic jolts. But Post Ma-

lone’s signature aesthetic gesture is the

smear, the complaisant way his voice molds

neatly to whatever is handed to him. (This

album is produced largely by Louis Bell,

who has worked closely with Post Malone

since his debut album, and helped shape his

shapeless sound.) The most disorienting

moments here are the most crisp — the title

track, in which he sings like he’s carefully

filling in Scantron bubbles, or the bubbly

single “Wow,” on which he sounds, well,

alert.

This is unusual for Post Malone; sleepy-

eyed absorption is his thing. Typically his

music moves slowly enough to encourage

getting lost. But he also juggles his emo-

tional compass. When he’s boasting, he

sounds miserable, like on “Saint-Tropez,” on

which he sings like he’s lost inside a

haunted house. And when he’s moping —

which is often — he renders his darkness

with a kind of dignity and beauty. “A Thou-

sand Bad Times” is a blissfully happy song

about misery: “I had a thousand bad times,

so what’s another time to me?/You try to

burn my house down, but what’s another

house to me?”

Mostly, though, he’s just petulant, some

combination of arrogant and whiny: “I’m

going to do what I want, when I want, when

I want, yeah,” he chants on “I’m Gonna Be.”

Jumbling all of the feelings into one is a

neat trick — whatever someone might be

hoping to find is in there somewhere. Post

Malone is emotional tofu, a skill, not an acci-

dent.

His talent is rooted in the distressed way

he deploys his voice — soft-focus, faded at

the edges. Perhaps the emblematic vocal

style of the day, it’s widely used in pop and

hip-hop, but his ambiguity is of an elevated,

refined sort.

It also makes for some unusual kin. Post

Malone has an unexpected partner in Bon

Iver’s Justin Vernon, a patient deployer of

technology in a wholly different musical

context, and whose new album, “i,i,” has a

surprising amount in common with “Holly-

wood’s Bleeding.”

Both Vernon and Post Malone are the

great-grandchildren of Kanye West’s 2008

album “808s & Heartbreaks,” and even

though they’ve filtered that source material

differently — Post Malone is laser focused

on accessibility, Bon Iver prefers abstrac-

tion — they both use submersion to similar

ends. For Post Malone, it’s to thrive in the

streaming ecosystem, where you try to

game listeners to press play but never hit

stop. For Bon Iver, it’s to experiment in the

live context — Vernon’s performances are

thick with sensory inputs, channeling free

jazz and jam band sprawl, all coated with

the reassuringly warm bleats of Vernon’s

voice.

There’s something noncommittal in both

Vernon and Post Malone, as if no matter

how vivid their songs become, they them-

selves would rather not be noticed. But

what’s truly different about their music is

the way they weaponize their abstraction.

For Post Malone, it’s a warning sign about

drowning in your own success. For Vernon,

it’s a sign that there might be hope on the

horizon.

JON CARAMANICA ALBUM REVIEW

NINA WESTERVELT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Six Decades of Pop Music Come Together

Post Malone, an inhabitant of

many genres, is ecstatic when

sad and grim when boasting.

Post Malone

“Hollywood’s Bleeding”

(Republic)

Post Malone at the Cutting

Room in Manhattan in August.

“Hollywood’s Bleeding” is his

third album.