I’m sitting here listening to Carole King’s Tapestry, something I’ve done countless times. It’s an album that has been a constant in my life for as far back as I can recall, something I picked up from the adults in my life when I was a child and carried it over with me into my own adulthood. It turns 50 today. And since I love a good news peg, I figured I’d say a few things about it, mainly about the headline of this very installment of The Melt.
I know we live in a time when saying “Boomer” is an insult. And if you don’t know why, I’d suggest picking up A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney. But the truth is, every generation has its massive failings, so I’m not here to pick on anybody or the time they were born in. Instead, this is a short appreciation for what Tapestry is in terms of its importance as a generational bridge for music made by people born roughly between 1946 and 1964. How it signaled a sort of growing up of a certain class of musicians who were usually from New York, usually Jewish, performed on or wrote some of the most famous songs of the 1960s in songwriting factories like the Brill Building, and then decided they wanted to try something else. It’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen moving back to NYC after a few years upstate at Bard, trying to get inside the building where King and her then-husband Gerry Goffin were writing hit songs; it’s Billy Joel playing piano on a recording of “Leader of the Pack” and Neil Diamond going from writing hits for The Monkees to people forever asking me “Are you related to Neil Diamond?” A lot of people might roll their eyes at this sort of stuff. The “mellow” 1970s singer-songwriter sounds and, even maybe more, Steely Dan’s getting tagged “soft-rock” or “jazz-rock” has long been the source of scorn, the furthest thing from genres like punk that looked to destroy it. And while I came up through the punk scene, I had a hard time shedding my affection for a lot of those artists who went from ‘60s pop to ‘70s soft. Most of it I had to keep hidden, like a religion practiced in private. But I was never shy about my love for Tapestry.
Here’s what I correctly understood when I was younger and usually had a CD or used LP version of Tapestry nearby: it’s a wonderful album all the way through. I put it on and I’m probably going to listen to the entire thing. What I learned to appreciate as time went on was what a feat that was for somebody like King who spent a previous lifetime writing hits for other people. She was a master of writing singles, a few of which she reworks on Tapestry. Sure, she’s no Aretha Franklin doing “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and her version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” strips away all the girl group bombast that made it a hit a decade earlier, but that’s the whole point. She wrote the songs, she didn’t need to cover them and try to do her version like Aretha, probably because she knew she’d fail miserably at it, but also knowing that she could add to the song’s legend by putting a different spin on it. She carried her songbook with her into the 1970s, reworking it, not reinventing it.
Like I said, song for song, I love all of Tapestry. I think the time it came out, in 1971 and in King’s life, makes it all the more interesting. She was 28, a few years divorced from Goffin, and had transplanted from New York to Laurel Canyon with her two daughters. She was looking for a fresh start, something she hints at on 1970’s Writer, but all of those tracks she co-wrote with Goffin. Tapestry, on the other hand, is King’s. Sure, there are songs she wrote with her ex in a past lifetime, but she was claiming them as her own while also establishing herself. It’s basically a career move and life change album and that makes me appreciate it even more.
Ultimately, I’ve realized over time that it’s artists like King I’ve connected with throughout my entire life no matter what music phase I’m going though at that moment. It’s albums like Tapestry that have stayed with me the longest and if you haven’t put on your headphones and dialed it up ever or just lately, today is the perfect time to do it.
How do you do, Fellow KAWS fans
I can defend so many things. I find myself liking Supreme drops from time to time and I obviously can appreciate meeting a teen with a dope pair of sneakers. But of all the street art/streewear culture I’ve never quite understood, I’m sorry to say, it’s KAWS. I feel like such a squareadmitting that, like the people that probably said the same thing about Warhol or Basquiat. Hell, I can even enjoy the absurdity in some of Jeffrey Koons’ work, especially the fact that it fetches the prices it does seems like one of the great piss takes in modern history. But I seriously have looked at and thought about KAWS stuff plenty, and I can never figure out the point. I’d say it means I’m getting old, but Brian Donnelly (that’s the guy behind KAWS, in case you didn’t know) is older than me. So I don’t think it’s that.
Anyways. Michael H. Miller has a deep profile in The New York Times Magazine on KAWS. The whole thing is great, but this graf stuck out to me:
“I’m sure he’s a super nice guy,” an art adviser named Josh Baer told Artnet News, but “If you think that Paris Hilton and the Kardashians are important cultural figures, then you’re likely to think KAWS is an important artist.” One art reporter told me, when I mentioned I was writing an article about KAWS, that certain directors at Gagosian, the largest and most profitable gallery in the world, would automatically move anyone known to own a KAWS down on their waiting list to buy something. (A Gagosian representative denied this was true.) Bill Morrison, the former “Simpsons” illustrator whose work Donnelly appropriated, said he’d been “ripped off.” In The Times, one private dealer, in an effort to explain Donnelly’s appeal, said: “The market is wacky. History means nothing.”
Uniqlo? More like UniCOOL!
Jesus. I’m so sorry for what I typed above. You can unsubscribe. But if you don’t, I’m using this forum to publicly state that several years ago when I said I didn’t like Uniqlo’s stuff, I was wrong. At the time, I was just a little pissed that their stuff didn’t really fit me, a guy who has a body like a George Costanza who spends a few mornings a week at the gym. I don’t want to complain too much about this, but it is difficult to find good clothes for my body type, which I like to call “Ashkenazi thicc” or “shtetl bully.” And whenever I picked up anything from Uniqlo on Broadway, I was disappointed. I felt like my chest was going to pop out of it like some scene from an early-’80s grossout film where a woman’s boobs tore through her shirt and there was some sound like “Awwwwogah” and some horny teenage boy raises his eyebrows and says something like “Allll right.”
Where am I going with besides I think I’d have a shot at being an “influencer” for the 35-50-year-old zaftig guys out there? Well, I really like Uniqlo stuff now. It started two years back when I picked up a few pairs of chinos at a Uniqlo in Tokyo, and has since moved on to the oversized crew necks I’ve now stocked up on in bulk. Obviously I don’t know what your body type is, but I find these things to be so versatile that they’ve become my go-to plain shirts. And no, I don’t get any money if you click on that link and buy a few (although that would be nice), but people like to ask me about t-shirts, so sometimes I’m going to carve out some space to talk about them here. That OK?
Delighted to meet you, fellow Bernie Kaminski superfan, Tapestry lover, and KAWS, um, not fan.