Dessa Has A New Album Out. Let's Review It.
The eternally rising hip-hop artist takes a turn for pop with "Bury The Lede."
Note: You can watch a video version of this review here.
Sigh.
(Note to the editors, please delete that first word of this review. While it is, unfortunately, earnest, it is also a bit arch and cliché [not unlike Dessa’s new album]. Agch! Please delete that, too. Thanks.)
“I’m really proud of this one,” Dessa said on her social media about her new album. In a media ecosystem that is so fickle and unforgiving, Dessa has some great “online presence” game and she has parlayed her social intelligence to cultivate some unique connections for a hip-hop artist (see: her collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, writing a theme song for a best-selling novelist’s new book, and lecturing about neuroscience projects, among other things.) Even after these twenty years of Dessa being perhaps the definition of independent, self-made, and diligent, the big arenas and the headlining festivals and the teeny-bopper Top 40 crowd seem to elude her, and that’s precisely what her new album, Bury The Lede, seems to be chasing.
Now, I love Dessa.
Woah, sorry, that’s a bit too forward and parasocial. “It’s not real love,” Freddie deBoer happily reminds us. I’d rather not be accused of being a mild “fictosexual” for simply having a totally normal celebrity crush. So I’ll just say, I love Dessa’s body of work. Her ouvre. And who amongst us has not welded their soul, sometimes painfully and unreservedly, to an artist’s work? If you haven’t…what are you even doing?
I have written at length before about Dessa’s music and writing and my relationship to it. It’s meant a lot to me over the years. It is her unique mix of hip-hop delivery, indie music vibes, and melancholic lyricism, all on display when I first heard her on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, which has carried me from that performance through most of my twenties, attended by all of the things those years tend to entail. It was a heady time to become an obsessive over an artist.
Recently, I was lucky enough to see Dessa perform in her hometown Minneapolis at the downtown Orchestra Hall with the Grammy Award-winning Minnesota Orchestra backing her up. She was accompanied by her longtime collaborators on vocals, Aby Wolf and Matthew Santos, among others. It had been over a year since I last saw her play at a little grungy venue in Santa Cruz. Seeing her on the big stage with big projections and big sound and a big backing band with a sold-out audience no less, well, it felt good. When she walked out onstage to applause and the crowd finally quieted and the first notes of “Jumprope” struck and she started to sing, I got a little teary eyed. Suffice it to say, I’m a big fan.
And that’s why I reserve the right to unapologetically say that I do not love Dessa’s new album. So let’s get into it.
Okay so I actually do like the first song, “Hurricane Party.” The theme is right up my alley: ironic defiance in the face of catastrophe: “DJ says don’t hold back because the water won’t.” The notion that we are living in the end times, (no really, for real this time, guys), is not an original one, but we are certainly still in need of good art to make sense of our current catastrophe, or at least document the fall, and “Hurricane Party” is a worthy addition to that list. But even on this first song, something is wrong here.
Dessa’s previous albums, the pinnacle for me being 2018’s Chime, were reliably a perfect mix of three things: moody philosophizing; charming egotistical bravado; and aching romantic hang-ups (not to mention a liberal use of the word “kite”). These consistent touchstones are still present on Bury The Lede, not suffused but in flashes (The lyric, “Not a sidepiece or a wifepiece, I’m a thinkpiece,” provides the requisite swagger). Yet something is stopping the album’s lyrical themes from really clicking. This something, my best guess, is the album’s production by Dessa’s longtime collaborators Andy Thompson and Lazerbeak. The music here is more upbeat, neighborhood of 128 beats per minute, and less darkly delphic than the production duo’s previous work with Dessa, more likely to end on a major chord than a minor one.
I should perhaps admit a fundamental bias here. I was initially drawn to Dessa’s work because the music was so different from what I expected from my (admittedly unlearned) experience with hip-hop. Instead of samples, there was a real band. Instead of club beats, there was a string quartet. On my recent stay in Minneapolis, a local showed me the music of the late rapper known as Eyedea, who was coming up in the same Twin Cities scene as Dessa’s hip-hop collective, Doomtree, in the early 2000’s. Eyedea tended more towards a grungy rock sound than Dessa’s indie vibes. But the basic subversion of typical hip-hop sounds is the same. With Bury The Lede’s musical turn towards pop — the synthesized sax sound, the drum machines, the shiny vocal overdubs — I’m frankly just constitutionally less likely to be reached (though the hits on the bell of the cymbal on “Chopper” do get me going for some reason, and the crescendo midway on “I Already Like You” makes me simultaneously turn up the volume knob in an act of sympathetic augmentation).
What lyrical depth there is on Bury The Lede is present almost in spite of the pop-y instrumentation/music production. What I mean is that it’s more difficult for my ear to get invested in the lyrics, to parse them, to listen with intent, to take them seriously, when I can’t take the music (which is standing in front of instead of supporting the lyrics) seriously. Good music can elevate merely passable lyrics, but bad music, or more precisely in this case, ill-suited music, is deathly even to Shakespeare (for a good example of this, check out the two different versions of Bob Dylan’s heartbreaking “Most of the Time.” The solo acoustic version is genuinely haunting and makes me cry. The full band version is…unlistenable).
These new(ish) pop sensibilities on Bury The Lede are clearly a very deliberate direction by Dessa and her team, but they strike me as somewhat inappropriate, perhaps a reaching for broader appeal at the expense of doing the best service to Dessa’s lyrical skills. I should be careful here not to tread into the This isn’t the REAL Dessa! argument. Dessa can do whatever she damn well pleases with her musical stylings and, by definition, it’s all the real deal no matter what she chooses. In her liner notes for Chime, explaining why that album’s sonic and lyrical toolkit was more expansive than previous works, Dessa wrote: “[T]hinking about how you’d like to be perceived is different than thinking about how to best express who or what you really are.” This is true. If Bury The Lede is a facet of who Dessa really is, that’s fair enough. But my argument here really comes down to: what’s on offer with Bury The Lede is not like what came before, and what came before is better.
Dessa’s preceding album, Ides, which was really a compilation of singles she released piecemeal during the height of the pandemic, is a good point of comparison here because that album successfully balances on a tightrope of accessible depth that’s strung above the pit of commercialism and below the firmament of obscurity. Ides feels generally more off-the-cuff and lighter than previous albums, but its songs still pull some hefty weight, starting with the genuinely brilliant “Rome.” From that song’s dirty bass, Dessa going up an octave for the final chorus, her critique of shallow identity politics:
It’s two-bit feminism
Only says you’re better than
Some other bitch—
That’s digging the same ditch
One of us winning don’t fix the damn system
Toes out, girls, back to second position
Her dalliance with Marxist materialism:
The natural order is value neutral
Culture institutes a few virtues
Capital comes and brings moral confusion
But do anything long enough
And the body gets used to it
Or her lovely summation of our culture of surveillance: “looks like the wire wore you.” All of these things make “Rome” just classic Dessa. It’s literate, political, witty, and fun. That’s the whole album. With Ides, Dessa proved that she could have her cake and eat it too. Alas, Bury The Lede is mostly just cake.
By way of another comparison, I’ve often thought of Dessa as the hip-hop version of The National, another one of my favorite living artists. Like Dessa, The National got their start in the early 2000’s and hail from the ennui-breeding American Midwest. Unlike Dessa, The National have turned depressiveness into consistent sold-out arenas worldwide. The National’s lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger has made a career of mining the poetry from his certifiable melancholy. Dessa’s line “time has a funny kind of violence and I’m tryna keep in mind it can’t leave you the way it finds you,” from “Good Grief” would sound quite natural coming from Berninger’s sad, resonant baritone voice. And like Bury the Lede, The National’s latest album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, though clearly a part of their long trajectory, has shifted hard from their well-worn, moody (Sad Dad) indie roots to something more like pop. Berninger is doing a goddamned duet on the album with Taylor Swift. T-Swift! Of all people! It feels less like The National and more like Rod Stewart. My god. All hope is lost. I am an old man already, trapped inside a twenty-something’s body. Does the notion of selling out even bother people anymore? Or are we all just commodities maximalizing our material value these late-stage days? (BTW, Dessa would be a much better choice for a collaboration with The National than Taylor Swift. Get on that, guys.)
Despite my general misgivings with pop inflections, I do find some legitimate joy on Bury The Lede. The catchiest song on the album, and my personal favorite for loudly singing along to, is “Twelve to One.” It comes midway on the album and offers a fine treatment of Dessa’s usual heartache, particularly with the line:
I’ll wait til the next one comes—
been wearing that phrase out
It’s hard to meet someone
to unmeet the last one somehow
Musically, the song sounds like a mix between The Script’s Top 15 hit “Breakeven (Falling to Pieces)” and some generalized Owl City song. Those are both good pop bands, so it’s not like the similarity is inherently a bad thing (though the comparison to the consistently cloying Owl City may feel like a low blow to some, but for me a guilty pleasure). I just didn’t expect such musical reminders from a Dessa album. (Fun fact!: Dessa’s long ago one-time live drummer Ryan House went on to tour with Owl City.) The organ that kicks in on the second chorus of “Twelve to One,” played by Andy Thompson, sounds exactly the same as the chorus chords for “Breakeven.” It doesn’t help that both songs are in the key of A.
Likewise, the bass line for “Crash” just sounds like U2’s “With or Without You,” which is one of those common, hard to avoid “four chord songs,” of which many are genuinely brilliant. But you gotta dress up that chord progression a little bit. “Crash,” with its barely over two-minute run time, doesn’t have the space to take flight. More than half of the songs on Bury The Lede don’t hit the three-minute mark, which sometimes leaves the listener with the musical equivalent of blue balls, and not in a good way.
Next up is “What If I’m Not Ready.” The simple, unadorned guitar riff and bass line that opens the song is reminiscent of the strictly live vibes of Dessa’s previous Castor, the Twin, that album being notable for its sole commitment to a tight backing band. Later, the song’s chorus opens up into a more airy, expansive instrumentation, replete with strings and long reverb, that sounds similar to moments on the darker Parts of Speech. This is the first time on the album, already mostly through, where you start to get a musical taste of the work that came before. The lyrics are a reflection on the pitfalls of cleaving too tightly to one’s independence:
Maybe you’re too attached to your freedom
truth is you don’t let anybody in cuz you don’t like em leaving
Some people pathologize this kind of behavior and call it an avoidant attachment style. The way Dessa puts it: “My pride is my problem. I know that’s right, but that don’t solve it.”
And now for “Rothko,” the last track. This is the song that makes it hard to not like the album. What other pop album would reference a caduceus? What other pop song would derive its whole framing from an apocryphal quote by an abstract painter (“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day the black will swallow the red”)? And of course, Dessa just had to go and write one of my favorite lyrics of hers in an otherwise uneven album:
We seem to be ending
before we begin
It’s like losing the feeling
in a phantom limb
Goddammit. It’s not like I was ever worried that Bury The Lede would make me lose hope in one of my favorite artists, but “Rothko” left me with unarguable assurance that I was so wanting right at the end.
In regards to how she thinks people will take her new album, Dessa told People magazine that “in some ways it's like…in a conversation I can't write your side too. … [T]here are going to be experiences that people come to the music with that will determine which parts really resonate. … [S]omebody who just got dumped is going to listen to a different set of songs more intensely than somebody who is on their first trip on a train through Spain. Different songs are going to pop.”
Album as conversation. It’s an interesting notion. I usually felt that songs are less like a conversation and more like a personal collection of totems. Less back and forth, more a one-way trip. And this is coming from a musician who records and plays music and who finds it essential to stare at someone in the audience eye-to-eye for an entire song just to feel like the whole thing is worth it. I often think about how there are certain songs and albums I carry with me, in a central way, likely for the rest of my life, that were recorded by some small, local, now defunct outfit or single songwriter in their bedroom that, by trick of circumstance, made it to my eardrums and my record collection, and that the person who made that song has no idea, will never know, really, how much it means to me. The advent of recorded sounds is really a revolution in how humans relate to the world around them. The sensitive California Folk-Rock songwriting of Kevin Coons, particularly with his outfit known as Candle, which I first heard at the impressionable age of 14, follows me everywhere I go. Kevin Coons can’t help that, and neither can I. And the high, rubber voice of oddball Colton Ort, one of the two lead singers of the now-dissolved St. Cinder, one of those quintessentially krusty/folky/gypsy/jazzy/punky/dirty outfits, is fixed in my brain forever. I’ve met Colton Ort. He complimented my poetry. But he, the real human being Colton Ort with his real mind and his real heart, can never be sitting next to me on those long drives at night through the evergreen forests of Oregon singing along to St. Cinder’s albums back to back. He can’t know the quiet times by myself where I play “Winter’s Lament” on the guitar as a way to exorcise something in me, emulating his harmony, and wishing he could join me on the chorus. He can’t know the hours of listening time I’ve put in to St. Cinder to the point where I can match his wild vocal runs perfectly. It may cross his mind every so often that someone somewhere is listening to the 21-year old version of himself busking on the streets of New Orleans. He may understand, like Richard Manuel of The Band once expressed, that his music is bigger than himself somehow, even troublingly so, and quite beyond his control. But that understanding must be vague, intellectual, and fleeting compared to the solid, central space he occupies inside me. I carry many others like him with me all the time. But it is, ultimately, a lonely weight. It’s not a conversation. It’s a private communion. So it is too with Dessa.
Commenting on her music, Dessa once quoted her own mother as saying, “Baby, it’s beautiful, but why is it always so sad? You always make music to bleed out to.” Yes, mom! That’s exactly it. Dessa wrote an essay for her book, My Own Devices, about her very real inquiry to an insurance company to see if they would insure her melancholic heart against unwanted unalloyed happiness, a sure deathknell for her writing inspiration, and therefore her artist’s income. Spoiler: The insurance company declined. Though a person’s constitutional moodiness may never go away, how much that well can be pumped, and how fit what bubbles up remains for drinking, is an open question.
So, anyway, I’ve listened to Bury the Lede while tipsy. I’ve listened to it high. As usual with any album, I’ve taken it for long drives. Basically, I’ve given it a good chance. For albums that I’m really into, they bring me into their own world. Their own space. A good album is a real, physical place to inhabit. It’s an altered state of reality. It is a somewhere that you go, somewhere with intention. The music makes you see things. It elicits a quite bodily response. It colors the time that you spend with it. It leaves a heavy mark on the region where you first heard it. Dessa’s Chime, for me, is the lush backroads of southern Indiana just outside of Evansville in the summertime — the moisture, the cicadas, the rising rows of corn, the warm heavy rain. Parts of Speech is driving at night in my first hand-me-down car through my small hometown, killing time with youthful vibrant friends, thinking about someone far away who I wanted to be with more than anything. Bury the Lede didn’t take me anywhere, and it’s not hanging around either.
I suppose, if I’m really being honest here, this is all just personal for me, in case you couldn’t tell by now. In this particular moment in my life, I don’t feel like dancing. I don’t feel like entertaining pop sensibilities. If Dessa is feeling those things herself these days, great, all the power to her. But I’m not there. I wanted the next Dessa album to bleed out to. I wanted something to cry over. Something to hunt. Something to carry with me for the long term. Bury The Lede is not that album. It’s for dancing to. For a passing tryst. And maybe to finally get Dessa on some (overrated) corporate ranking chart somewhere.
I guess, we’ll always have Chime, kid. (Cue the airplane engines revving to take her away to someplace I cannot, or will not, follow.)