"God Bless Mary" by Little Simz Is An Ode To Good Neighbors
Drumming Upstream 34
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 445 songs to go!
This week I learned “God Bless Mary” by the British rapper Little Simz, a tribute to the long-suffering neighbors of musicians everywhere from 2015. No neighbors were harmed in the filming of this cover, or the writing of this letter.
Side A
“God Bless Mary”
By Little Simz
A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons
Released on September 18th, 2015
Liked on January 25th, 2016
The Big City, full of bustling crowds and bright lights, a flame that attracts every moth from the country with dreams of igniting into a star. This myth endures across decades and national boarders. Whether it be New York City, Vienna, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Nashville, or London, the Big City is essential to the stories we tell about how artists become legends. The metropolis is where humble origins are overcome or where dreams go to die. The globalizing power of the internet has not reduced the potency of this stock narrative. Did you really make it anywhere if you didn’t make it *here* first? Rarely however does the romantic notion of pursuing the arts in the big city grapple with the practical reality of making art in a dense urban environment. This is especially true of music. Actors can read scripts in their living rooms, photographers can practice on the streets, and writers can hole up at coffeeshops all with minimal disturbance to the world around them. Musicians on the other hand require space and the freedom to make noise for hours on end, two things in short supply in cities where buildings are tall and walls are thin. Practicing music seriously in a city comes with the long term risk of never achieving your dreams and the short term risk of making everyone on your block hate your guts.
Some musicians have it better than others. Growing up in Brooklyn, I found the muffled piano exercises working through the walls soothing. Passing by a house and hearing a clarinet waft across the breeze from an open window on an upper floor made even the most mundane routines feel charged with the romance of city life. The white kid who lived up the block from me and played sitar on his front stoop, inexplicable as he was, still felt like a necessary quirk in the city’s eclectic patchwork. Players with a taste for harder sounds have a tougher go of it. The father of one of my friends in high school was a free jazz saxophonist who retreated into Prospect Park in the dead of night to practice, where his squawking would only startle drug-doers and joggers. At least he could carry his instrument there and back by himself.
By deciding to play drums instead of guitar, which I perceived as the conventional choice, I’d committed to an instrument that doubled as furniture and doomed my neighbors’ peace and quiet. My teacher’s instruction to practice for an hour a day served as both an encouragement and a time limit. I would rush back from school to make as much of a racket as I could before my parents and the rest of the working world made it home. For the first year playing by myself this arrangement worked just fine, but once I got good enough to convince two of my friends to bring their amps over and start a band the situation got a little more complicated. It wasn’t all bad. One Gen X couple called our apartment asking for an encore of our cover of Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”. But on the whole, selling my soul to rock and roll only earned me dirty looks in the hallway and angry admonishments anytime I broke curfew.
Urban drummers aren’t the only musicians that leave such a contentious sonic footprint. Beatmakers and producers have to dedicate just as much floor space to monitors, midi instruments, and speakers capable booming through apartment walls with club-ready sub-bass. Headphones can only tell you so much. To really know if your tracks are hitting right you need to crank them on pro-quality equipment. Every new project file could mean the next big hit or the next round of angry thumps from the floor below.
When she released A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons in 2015, Little Simz was well acquainted with this calculated risk. Simz, born Simbi Ajikawo, had by the age of 21 released four mixtapes and a fistful of EPs, all on her own label Age 101. Raised in North London, Simz bought her first recording equipment with money she earned as a child actor on British TV and released her first mixtape at age 15. Over the next five years Simz developed a rapid-fire, multi-syllabic flow that could cruise over grim and rap beats alike, and charged her lyrics with a mix of introspection and social consciousness. This earned her an audience locally and across the pond in the States, even garnering praise from then-ascendant superstar Kendrick Lamar1 before she even released her first album. The path to stardom was clear enough for Simz to organize her debut around her oncoming celebrity. “The main theme it discusses is fame,” Simz told Rookie Mag in 2015, “I talk from different people’s perspectives and points of view, and I tell my own story along the way”. That story begins in a small apartment, long before Simz was earning accolades from hip-hop royalty, when the biggest obstacle to her career was the person on the other side of her wall. While Simz spends most of Trials + Persons rapping from the perspective of fame-seekers in the form of character-studies, “God Bless Mary”, the album’s sixth track, is entirely autobiographical.
Over a wistful piano from the mysterious producer Sigurd (more-ish on him on Side B), Simz tells her origin story in miniature, from practicing rhymes in class to a life of “music galore”. It isn’t until Simz is already all-the-way in on her career that she realizes she’s putting her neighbor Mary through hell. “God Bless Mary” is both an apology for being an inconsiderate tenant and a thank you for Mary’s unspoken grace. Not only did Mary never call the cops on Simz, she also endured early versions of everything Simz had made at that point. She was the first audience to hear Simz sing live, and also had exclusive, behind the scenes access to every creative dead-end, every botched take, and every sour note that never made it onto the albums that eventually made Simz go global. In the tight confines of North London (or Brooklyn, NY, or the big city of your dreams) a neighbor doesn’t have to be actively discouraging to keep you from committing to your instrument. Just the specter of an audience that can’t help but hear you at your worst might keep you from ever practicing. I don’t know if being the next incarnation of Tony Williams would have kept my downstairs neighbors from despising me when I was learning how to play drums, but it at least would have justified my passion for the instrument from the onset. Instead, every practice was an argument to myself and to the world that the work was going to be worth it in the long run.
The hours Simz spent overcoming her “mistakes and frustration” ended up being worth it. Trials + Persons was no major hit, but it put her on the path to legit success. Along the way it also garnered modest critic attention. During my research I came across multiple reviews that highlighted “God Bless Mary” as a standout track from the record. They’re right to do so. “God Bless Mary” is the best song Simz had released yet at this point in her career. It simplified the fire-hose intensity of Simz’ mixtape style into direct, relatable storytelling that explained the world she emerged from. Simz’ singing, while not pop quality, helps make her sound like a real person apologizing in real time. It is both hyperlocal and relatable in any major city across the globe. And yet, even as critics praised “God Bless Mary”, two reviews took the time to ding the song for being self-centered. “It takes palpable effort for Simz to step outside herself;” Jia Tolentino claims in her review for Pitchfork, “she can conjecture nothing about Mary’s life except the woman’s reaction to this record.” Paul MacInnes of The Guardian chimed in that “even Mary is more of a device than a character”. Both of these reviews strike me as missing the point. Of course Little Simz is being self-centered! The act of making art requires self-centricity. Every musician has had to briefly drive those around them nuts in order to get good. It takes a specific kind of tunnel vision to say “fuck it” and crank the volume on a rough mix, or to hunker down and make that mix final even when friends and family are blowing up your phone. Little Simz shouldn’t be singled out for artistic monomania just because she had the vision to make it into a compelling song.
Besides, if you’re going to ding “God Bless Mary” for anything, there’s always the production.
Side B
“God Bless Mary”
Produced by Sigurd
90 bpm
Time Signature: 4/4
If I had any criticism of “God Bless Mary” it would be that the production is a little anonymous. I spent enough years courting the anger of my neighbors to eventually go to college for music. I encountered a lot of boys who made beats, any number of whom could have, with enough effort, produced something like what Sigurd cooked up. It doesn’t help that Sigurd, the human, is equally anonymous. I searched high and low for info and could only find a soundcloud page with no profile picture and only a handful of tracks. Discogs points to the same Little Simz collaborations and nothing more. Where this person came from, what their process is, and what they’ve done since, must sadly remain a mystery. To be clear, anonymous production doesn’t mean bad production. “God Bless Mary”’s beat is well arranged and undeniably pleasant to listen to. Sigurd lays out a bright chord progression on each of the downbeats on keys, leaving plenty of room for Little Simz to take the center stage. Under that simple pattern Sigurd layers strings and a melodic bassline. Short vocal samples laden with reverb pop in as ear candy from time to time. Sigurd didn’t reinvent the wheel here, but every element feels considered and crucially nothing gets in the way of the song’s story.
The same is true for Sigurd’s drums, nothing too fancy, but effective. Sigurd first sets up a presumably sampled drum loop. Then, just as Simz is describing falling in love with making music, Sigurd fortifies those sampled drums with louder, harder programmed ones. I’ve noticed as I’ve learned more rap tunes for this project that this is pretty common practice. The sampled drums set the feel of the track and give the rhythm a “human” push and pull, while the programmed drums give the track the superhuman heft to shock listeners into motion. Once all the layers are locked in, the drums repeat a simple two bar pattern. Near the end of the first verse Sigurd switches to a muffled version of the same beat, essentially mimicking what the track would sound like to Mary on the other side of an apartment wall. In the second verse he tries something even more clever. When Simz mentions turning the track down, Sigurd ducks the volume of the whole track a few notches. The arrangement doesn’t strip down to appear quieter, instead the whole thing just drops in volume the way it would if you turned the total output down on a DAW. It’s a jarring thing to hear on a finished track but it makes perfect sense in the context of the song.
I appreciate these minor details as a listener and a drummer because they make the song feel more dynamic and more fun to play. Speaking of which…
I didn’t have enough time to put together a specific outfit for this cover because I learned the song so quickly. Oh well!
It has been over a decade since I’ve had to play drums in my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. When I moved back to the Big City from the Slightly Less Big City of Chicago, I parked my drums in a practice space that I share with other equally bothersome musicians. The only neighbors I have to upset are the musicians beyond the opposite walls, who have just as much power to ruin my day as I do theirs. I can’t tell you the number of times that Bellows, not exactly the world’s loudest band, has had to compete with a death metal band through one wall and a doom metal band through the other. At the same time, I’m certain that my drumming has been inconvenient to at least one bass lesson and one vocal recording session. The difference is that all of us share the unspoken agreement that even when we make each others lives difficult we share the same goal of making music.
As far as I could tell, recording my drums along with “God Bless Mary” didn’t bother anyone else in the building. Maybe this is why I felt comfortable throwing in a few extra fills into the song. This wasn’t a challenging song to learn, but it was a fun one to play and I think that excitement translated into some lively transitions between sections. How much fun, you ask? Find out below on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
I don’t know where Little Simz records music these days, but I doubt she needs to worry about turning her volume down anymore. In the years since Trials + Persons Simz truly did go global. Her 2016 follow up Stillness in Wonderland was an overstuffed concept record that suffered from all the usual issues that crop on the sophomore albums of ambitious artists. But ever since 2019’s GREY Area Simz has been on a run of high quality, award winning records. Her last three albums all have songs much better than “God Bless Mary”. She’s only improved as a rapper, writer, and artist full-stop. These greater heights only make “God Bless Mary” more compelling. It’s all the more gratifying to hear Simz narrate her come-up knowing how much further she’s about to go. In this sense “God Bless Mary” represents Simz’ past, present, and future, all grounded in the material origins of her career. It is a legit great rap track, and that’s enough to earn it #12 on The Leaderboard.
The Current Top 10
Thanks for reading! In the next entry I’m stepping away from the kit to explore the synthetic wonderland of Oneohtrix Point Never. Until then, have a great week!
Kendrick Lamar will appear three times in Drumming Upstream, once as the lead artist and twice as a featured performer.