![]() Salt-N-Pepa just happened to get there early. Blige’s “I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By” weren’t far away. More than that, though, hip-hop was beginning to thaw to the idea of incorporating R&B and pop: Puff had convened Bad Boy Records in 1993, and genre-shifting cuts like Method Man and Mary J. But in the wake of the so-called “ Year of the Woman,” their career-long pop sensibilities congealed in the hits “Shoop” and the En Vogue-featuring “Whatta Man,” positive anthems that remain stalwart in the wedding and auntie playlists. They didn’t change up their raison d’etre: Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella were still committed to women determining their own futures and calling out creepers and weirdos. “At least we’re all in this horse together,” he notes mordantly, which sounds like a deliberate echo of a platitude regularly trotted out during the pandemic.Salt-N-Pepa were a rebuke to the music industry’s storied disdain for women rappers, having gone platinum on their first two records by their fourth album Very Necessary, which quickly went multi-platinum, the trio could not be denied. There’s something particularly pointed about Everyway, with its blackly comic depiction of sailors shipwrecked off the coast of Callahan’s native Maryland forced to warm their hands “in the corpse of a wild horse”. Naked Souls launches itself at basement-bound keyboard warriors, complete with intimations of bloody revenge. The other emotion his accompanying statement talks about rousing is anger, or rather, “a better anger, to get out of this … dissociated rage that destroys the community”, a subject Reality takes to with considerable gusto. ![]() Arranged differently, it could sound smoothly hypnotic in the manner of Krautrock, but here it feels agitated, punctuated by flurries of twitchy drumming, suggesting that the means of coping with modern life listed in the lyrics – from meditation to microdosing – are sticking plasters rather than remedies. On Partition, his largely acoustic band settles on a droning, insistent two-note riff. ![]() Clearly, we are some distance from the Callahan the late comedian Sean Hughes once offered to introduce on stage with the words “miserable bastards of the world – welcome our leader”.Įven so, there are limits to Callahan’s mood of contentment. If, on paper, the latter reads perilously close to something that Ian Brown might bellow at you, it really doesn’t sound like it on record: it rolls breezily, joyfully along, complete with airy female backing vocals. He expounds on an esoteric brand of personal spirituality that enables us “to get in and out of what we’re living in”, imagines the spirit of his late mother watching over her grandson on Lily, and contemplates reincarnation and animism on Coyotes as well as the power of what he calls “natural information”, hymned on the song of the same title as a corrective to “two million years of data”. Music to rouse love and kindness and lift you up? Not so much.Īnd yet, listen to him on this album, employing his baritone to depict the simple joy of watching his son holding his baby sister’s hand, of hearing the dawn chorus, or seeing a pair of “little feet” sticking out of a pushchair. ![]() ![]() Lacerating pen-portraits and painfully acute fixings of romantic and existential woe? Most definitely. He was justly acclaimed – indeed, Callahan might be the most consistently acclaimed writer to emerge from the early 90s world of off-grid US indie music – but not for the kind of thing he’s talking about here. Rousing love and kindness? Sounds and words that lift you up? There was a time, not all that long ago, when anyone who knew Callahan’s work might reasonably assume any statement along those lines had been issued with a sardonic raised eyebrow. ![]()
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