Author: Craig Jenkins / Source: Vulture
For people who create, a body of work is a building project. When you make something great or timeless, new additions can stand on their own, but in the court of public opinion, they are perceived in relation to and understood in the context of what already exists.
There’s a pressure to that, and it’s why the greats are guarded about what the public does and doesn’t see, why a restless talent like Prince was cagey about his vaults and would just as soon pull a fantastic record like 1987’s The Black Album if he didn’t feel right about the way it would be received. As rock, pop, and funk elders enter their twilight, they devise many different methods of engaging with the moods in their back catalogue. Some revisit and revise the classics, like interior decorators giving familiar rooms new life. Others take a shine to standards, like recent Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan albums dedicated in whole or in part to covering songs made famous by Frank Sinatra. This month, Paul McCartney and Paul Simon have released new albums that seem, in their method, restless about their place in the rock canon. McCartney’s Egypt Station attempts to shake up the former Beatle’s trademark sentimentality and elegance by getting loose, randy, and a little political. Simon’s In the Blue Light arrives at the tail end of the Newark-born veteran’s farewell tour, giving some old favorites new arrangements.Inadvertently or maybe on purpose, Kanye West and Rihanna’s 2015 singles “All Day” and “Four, Five Seconds” tripped off one of the more intense moments of musical culture clash in recent memory, as fans of Wings and the Beatles were introduced to the younger artists performing alongside Mr. “Yesterday,” while an armada of rap and pop fans under 30 scrambled to sniff out the identity of the British gentleman playing bass in between Ye and Rih. If you were conversant in the work of all three artists, the singles were events; musicians often talk about loving the Beatles but few go as far as tracking one down, let alone calling him in for a record as brain-melting as “All Day.” Egypt Station retains the spry youthfulness of those collaborations in mood if not in the arrangements; it eases off the electronic flourishes of the last album, 2013’s New, but leans looser and freer in its language in songs like “Fuh You” and “Come on to Me,” where the 76-year-old songwriter sails off sensual pickup lines at a potential mate.
Egypt’s love songs are catchy but also cloying,…
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