Things I Will Keep #5: JILL CUNNIFF, City Beach

Jill Cunniff
City Beach
2007, The Militia Group/Vinyl Films

Here in the steamy state of Texas, August is fucking brutal. It’s my least favorite month. When you’re a kid, late summer is the melancholy time when school is about to start.  When you’re an adult, late summer is the time when you and everyone you know has already gone away and come back from their big summer vacation plans. Nobody’s looking forward to anything. Everyone is just kind of existing and that’s it. There’s no such thing as a “beautiful day” this time of year. The grass and trees are all bleached by the sun. We’re mostly all about the end of the heat wave, that first taste of autumn. It should be here in about a month or so IF we’re lucky.

(Important note: In Texas, summer often keeps kicking the shit out of us into October. I once road-tripped through rural Missouri in mid-September and was awestruck by how the whole landscape was already covered in beautiful autumn yellows and oranges. Where I come from–only about six hundred miles south–a sight like that is still a month off).

The only nice thing about late summer is that I think Jill Cunniff captured it perfectly and made it lovely on her first (and hopefully not her last) solo album.

City Beach is what August should be. Lazy and silly and light and kinda stoned. August should be a time in which we’re all too sweaty to take ourselves very seriously.

Cunniff’s old group, Luscious Jackson, scored one big radio hit (and recorded some other should-have-been-hits), but they were never about the singles game. They were a New York City-based groove band with funk, rap and chilled-out R&B earnestly in their blood. Every song they recorded conjured up city streets sizzling in July.

After they disbanded, Cunniff was part of the creative core of a kiddie techno-pop group called The Cooler Kids, fronted by two youngsters and whose sole album aimed for the top of the charts in 2003, but barely scraped the bottom (and it’s another album that I’m keeping, and not just because the CD is worth about fifteen cents; I’ll write about its appeal here someday when I’m feeling brave).

By 2007, Cunniff sounded like she’d discarded all music business illusions. The major label days were gone and she was a bohemian again, albeit a well-off one with some great connections. She was no longer chasing hits, but executing a vision. Sure, at least half the songs here are worthy singles should the radio want them (she has serious pop skills after all), but something in this album’s confident sway of the hips says that she’ll be fine if it doesn’t.

It’s an album so relaxed that it sounds like it blew into your life from an open window. It brings all of the same elements that made up Luscious Jackson, but this time Cunniff, who dominates the instrumental and production credits, mixes the cocktail to be extra sweet and refreshing. The hip-hop beats and production styles that used to bring a whiff of urban authenticity to her music become aural grenadine and fresh lemon juice in these songs. It’s an album that’s meant to go down easy. It’s a summer breeze. It’s a day with no responsibilities. It’s a record that I put on almost every August to remind myself that this dreary month COULD be fun if, one of these years, I could figure out how to do it right.

I don’t even know the names of most of the songs. I put this on the turntable and just let it go.

This is NOT an important album, but looking at the records that I can’t bring myself to sell, most of them aren’t “important”. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork don’t care about any of ’em. Nobody on the internet is getting into stupid arguments about them.

I also have a weakness for seasoned artists who are still doing it well past the time that the music business has any use for them.

As an aging fuck myself, looking more like a raisin every time I see myself in a mirror, I might relate.

One might have some heavy feelings about that, but getting older is not a bad thing, despite what they tell you. If you understand life, getting older is inherently cool. The great folly of youth is that you see yourself as the center of the universe. And when anything contradicts that, you don’t handle it well.

A well-rounded life though can beat that shit right out of you.

And I’ve got a couple of scars on me.

I, like all of us, am a microbe on a dust mite that floats in the unimaginably endless universe and, holy shit, do I feel like it. I can sit and watch people and eavesdrop and think about mortality for hours.

I’m spending my 40s embracing my inner microbe, feelin’ like a germ. It’s a free feeling. It’s a feeling that there are no rules and that nothing in this life is ever actually explained to us. The closest I get to a spiritual belief of any kind is that we’re all headed straight toward death and, while you’re here, the best thing you can do is come up with something true and unique to say. That’s all that will be left of you when you’re gone.

And the thing that you have to say doesn’t have to be super-important. It can be as light as a celebration of the dog days of summer.

You never know. Some stupid asshole somewhere in Texas just might find some wisdom on it.

The CD release of this album came out on a now-dead indie rock label called The Militia Group, while the vinyl version that cool motherfuckers such as myself own came out on the Vinyl Films label, founded by film director Cameron Crowe, and I have to give credit to these Hollywood bastards; they came up with an impressive package.

The colored LP’s swirly splotches of orange and watermelon-pink looks like the last thing you might see before you crash into the sun. I think it’s damn pretty.

Vinyl Films also tossed in a bonus 7″ of two exclusive tracks, a stripped down version of the album’s lovely “Kaleidoscope” backed with a similarly spare take on the old Luscious Jackson pop monster, “Ladyfingers”.  Both are hits in this home, if nowhere else.