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Removing Beethoven’s Wig: A Classical Music Reading List

AP Photo/Capital City Weekly, James Brooks

I know as much about classical music as I do car mechanics, which is close to nothing, but I do know I like it. Not choruses. I’m not a fan of things like Bach’s choral works. And as much as I appreciate Mozart, his best work is too tempestuous for me. I prefer chillaxed baroque chamber music. I prefer Bach’s Orchestral Suites and Brandenburg Concertos. And Franz Schubert, Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Handel’s Water Music, “Pachelbel’s Canon,” and the kind of sprightly, buttoned-up small group sound that fits quiet workday mornings and cups of tea. If there’s anything I’m not, it’s buttoned-up, so my particular love of chamber music still surprises me. Bad Brains’ fast songs and Dead Moon’s gritty guitars sound like my spirit feels, but I’m a Gemini, and my opposite side is contemplative, calm, and still, suited to reggae, jazz piano trios, and Schubert’s Octets. I find that kind of classical soothing. Maybe it counteracts the blaring amplified guitar part of me. Whatever it does, I like it.

I first discovered classical music’s charms as an undergrad, during a period when Fugazi and instrumental surf music dominated my stereo. Cruising the listening stations at those chain mega-bookstores that thrived in the ’90s, with their stuffed rows of books, CDs, and bustling cafes, I found a few classical CDs that were well-reviewed and gave them a try. Where rock ‘n’ roll normally provided the soundtrack to my innumerable college road trips, the Brandenburg Concertos played on a certain winter trip to the mountains of southern California. It did not fit. Speeding along San Bernardino freeways, the charged up cellos made me feel like I was preparing to storm a castle. Driving in the forested mountains to hike old-growth pine forests, Bach’s music made it sound more like study time than bushwhacking time, but I liked the mood it provided, and I liked that the mood felt new. By the late ’90s, I’d grown tired of boot-stomping guitar bands and needed a break. As Fugazi sang in their song “Target”: “It’s cold outside and my hands are dry / Skin is cracked and I realize / That I hate the sound of guitars.” After a break, I came back to loud guitars, but I returned with more varied tastes and a diversified music collection that put Tchaikovsky albums next to ones by T. Rex and jazz trumpeter Thad Jones.

Classical music can seem so staid. It’s easy to imagine the kind of people who perform and listen to it being repressed, teetotalling stiffs who haven’t had sex, let alone a good buzz, for years. Blair Tindall’s book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music proves that assumption wrong. Taking us inside this relatively insular subculture, which is lived backstage in concert halls, recitals, and academia, this insider’s portrait shows classical musicians who are as wild and deviant as rock ‘n’ rollers, and a subculture as dramatic as any other. As a young deviant myself, I was impressed. Her book, and the music, led me to read more about classical history and performance.

Here are a few interesting explorations of classical music history, practice, and performance that might help you hear the music, and think of its culture, differently, too.

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Beethoven’s Kapow” (Justin Davidson, New York Magazine, March 17, 2010)

Classical music can seem so staid that you don’t associate it with shock or revolution, but Beethoven’s Third Symphony has continued to shock people since the composer first performed it in April of 1805. Writer Justin Davidson loves the piece, and keeps coming back to it.

 If I could crash any cultural event in history, it would be the night in April 1805 when a short man with a Kirk Douglas chin and a wrestler’s build stomped onto the stage of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Ludwig van Beethoven, 34 years old and already well along the way to deafness, swiveled to face a group of tense musicians and whipped them into playing a pair of fist-on-the-table E-flat major chords (blam! … blam!), followed by a quietly rocking cello melody. If I listen hard enough, I can almost transport myself into that stuffy, stuccoed room. I inhale the smells of damp wool and kerosene and feel the first, transformative shock of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” as it exploded into the world.

But Davidson also recognizes the way shocking, profound art or ideas — things that were once revolutionary — grow familiar enough to be tame over time. “Beethoven toyed with expectations we do not have and dismantled conventions that no longer guide us,” writes Davidson. “As a result, the ‘Eroica,’ which emerged with such blinding energy that some of its first listeners thought its composer must be insane, sounds like settled wisdom to us.”

Why do we reenact these rituals of revolution when revolution is no longer at stake? How can an act of artistic radicalism retain the power to disturb after two centuries? What’s left when surprise has been neutralized and influence absorbed?

Strike With the Band” (Kate Wagner, The Baffler, September 3, 2019)

“The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair,” Wagner writes, “though its reputation says otherwise.” Wagner played violin since her parents first rented her one when she was 4. After accruing $44,000 of student loan debt and developing carpal tunnel in college, she quit music and switched careers. “Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a shitty job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster.” Her illuminating essay reveals the true story about low pay, limited job opportunities, and rented instruments, which is the story of “arts under capitalism, in a culture where the abandonment of government funding results in a void filled only by wealthy donors and bloodsucking companies.” In the process, her essay dismantles the fundamental American myth of meritocracy and access.

Classical music is cruel not because there are winners and losers, first chairs and second chairs, but because it lies about the fact that these winners and losers are chosen long before the first moment a young child picks up an instrument. It doesn’t matter if you study composition, devote years to an instrument, or simply have the desire to teach—either at the university level or in the public school system. If you come from a less-than-wealthy family, or from a place other than the wealthiest cities, the odds are stacked against you no matter how much you sacrifice, how hard you work, or, yes, how talented you are.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Vogel Staar” (Elena Passarello, Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2016)

Unlike parrots, Starlings do not repeat back what you sing to them, but they transmute, scramble, and modify your singing enough to give you a new view of it. When the young Mozart whistled at a caged starling in a Vienna shop, the way the bird sang it back changed how Mozart heard his song, and how he wrote, and he immediately bought the bird.

There is no other live-animal purchase in Mozart’s expense book, and no more handwritten melodies; no additional transactions were praised as schön! This is one of the very few things we even know about his purchasing habits. He’d only begun tracking his spending that year, and by late summer, Mozart had abandoned the practice and only used that notebook to steal random phrases of English. So this note of sale is special among the extant scraps from his life.

The purchase of this bird, Mozart’s “Vogel Staar,” marks a critical point for the classical period. At the end the of eighteenth century, tunes were never more sparkling or more kept, their composers obsessive over the rhetoric of sonata form: first establishing a theme, then creating tension through a new theme and key, then stretching it into a dizzying search for resolution, and finally finding the resolve in a rollicking coda. The formal understanding of this four-part structure permeated classical symphony, sonata, and concerto. By 1784, sonata form had imprinted itself on the listening culture enough to feel like instinct; Vienna audiences could rest comfortably in the run of classical forms as familiar—and thus enjoyable—narratives. And nobody played this cagey game more giddily than Mozart.

Claus Felix/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Darkness Invisible” (Wendy Lesser, The Threepenny Review, Winter 2011)

The Threepenny Penny review editor Wendy Lesser has written frequently about classical music. In 2010, she sat in a New York City concert hall in complete darkness for an hour, listening to a performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’ third string quartet. Listening was all the audience could do. “We were unable to see our hands before our faces, much less check our watches or glance at our companions,“ she wrote. It was an experiment: how did sensory deprivation change the listening experience? Would the experience have been different with music she’d previously heard?

Sitting in the dark at a concert is a way of being at once alone and in the company of others. As I explored my unusual and tourist feeling of privacy (stretching about in ways I would never do in a lit concert hall, yawning widely, tilting my head way back or lackadaisically from side to side, and repeatedly holding my hands in front of my face to see if they had become visible yet), I thought of D.W. Winecott’s notion about how the child learns to be alone in the presence of its mother – that is, the baby gets to test out being solitary and accompanied at the same time. I imagined I was enjoying this childish sensation immensely, and yet on some level I must have felt a bit of fear or anxiety too, as I realized during my wild head-tilts, when I discovered that the room was not actually completely dark. There were two rows very faint almost-lights barely visible in the ceiling, and another ghostly spot at the very back of the room – and this, strangely, filled me with the same kind of energetic hope that hostages and TV thrillers feel when they come up on a nail or some other sharp protrusion against which they can slowly fray away their binding ropes. But try as I might, I could not free myself from the darkness: I could never manage to see a thing, not even my pale hands waved directly in front of my face. Once, in a moment of casual listening such as one might do at a regular concert, I closed my eyes, and the shock when I opened them and perceived no difference at all with severe.

Apparition in the Woods” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker, July 9, 2007)

The story’s subhead “Rescuing Sibelius from silence” is vague and cryptic, but this is the story of Finland’s greatest composer, arguably what Ross calls its ”chief celebrity in any field.”

Composing music may be the loneliest of artistic pursuits. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. Emerging from the process is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which the score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in “Palestrina,” his 1917 “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance master. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for?”

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late 1920s and the early 30s, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America, and dismissed as a purveyor of kitsch in the tastemaking European music centers, where atonality and other modern languages dominated the scene. The contrasts in the reception of his music, with its extremes of splendor and strangeness, matched the manic depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty (“For an instant God opens the door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony,” he wrote in a letter) and sometimes he felt worthless. In 1927, when he was sixty-one, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair….In order to survive, I have to have alcohol….I’m abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out.”

Notes on Birdsong” (Olivia Giovetti, VAN Magazine, May 29, 2020)

Birds are among nature’s greatest musicians. “The 20th and 21st centuries teemed with birdsong quotations in music,“ Giovetti in an essay of surprising connections, “from Amy Beach’s “Hermit Thrush at Eve” to John Luther Adams’s “Canticles of the Holy Wind.” But the era has most closely been associated with Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). As a teenager in Aube, he began to notice the avian world.“ Humans have matched nature’s beauty with our own beautiful music and ugliness.

In the video of Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper in Central Park, this same shift takes place in Amy Cooper’s voice when she calls the police. It’s so uncanny it may as well have been part of a score.

“I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” she tells Christian as she dials. She repeats “African-American” twice with the dispatcher. When it seems like she needs to explain the situation a third time, her tone modulates from steady (although perhaps slightly heightened by adrenaline and stress) to screaming in shorter breaths: “I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!”

“Strategic White Womanhood is a spectacle that permits the actual issue at hand to take a back seat to the emotions of the white woman, with the convenient effect that the status quo continues,” writes Ruby Hamad in her forthcoming book, White Tears/Brown Scars. “White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of colour from being able to assert themselves or effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system. Consequently, we all stay in the same place while whiteness reigns supreme, often unacknowledged and unnamed.”

Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

The Prodigy Complex” (Hartmut Welscher, VAN Magazine, October 6, 2016)

“Prodigies exist in every field,” Welscher writes. “But since the time of Leopold Mozart, who dragged his son through the drawing rooms of Europe’s nobility like a trained monkey, the prodigal youngster has become a familiar, peculiar trope in classical music hagiography.” What is it about the idea of in-born genius, of the gifted child destined for greatness, that captivates so many cultures? America in particular fails to empathize for the talented childhood whose lives permanently suffer from the way their parents and society use them as commodities. Welscher exposes the ethical dimensions of the prodigy complex, what he beautifully calls “the darker side of prodigy reception,” focusing on coverage the 10-year old composer Alma Deutscher received.

In a profile of Deutscher for Die Zeit, the well-known journalist Uwe Jean Heuser asks, “Who is this child who, at the age of 10, is capable of amazing an ambitious, knowledgeable audience?” Isn’t the real question: Who is this audience that allows itself to be amazed by a child? Is “ambitious” or “knowledgeable” really the right way to describe an audience that is satisfied by “poise and skill,” when it should expect communicated life experience, storytelling, expression? Are these qualities really so much harder to judge in musicians? As Solomon writes, “Musical prodigies are sometimes compared to child actors, but child actors portray children; no one pays to watch a six-year-old playing Hamlet.”

Symphony of Millions” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker, June 30, 2008)

So few people publish long stories about classical music that Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic, appears in this list twice. Classical music, once such a provincial Western music, had taken up residence inside Communist China. “For the past fifteen or twenty years, classical music has been very à la mode in China,“ one accomplished composer told Ross. Ross visited Beijing to investigate if China was indeed the future of classical music. Ross found a classic music culture that reflected Communist China of that time: suppressed, well-polished and publicized in a self-serving propoganda-type way, and fraught with the tension between the freedom practitioners wanted and what little freedom they had.

For a musician on Long Yu’s level, politics is unavoidable. Since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Party has discouraged dissent not just by clamping down on rebellious voices but by handsomely rewarding those who play it safe. Richard Kraus, in his book The Party and the Arty in China, writes, “By 1982, the Party had given up trying to purge all dissident voices and opted instead for the strategy of urging all arts organizations to strive to earn money. “Those who work within the system may be expected to reach the stage where they can win prizes, obtain sinecures, hold illustrious posts, and we will paid for teaching. Artists end up censoring themselves – a habit ingrained in Chinese history. Behind the industrious façade is a fair degree of political anxiety. Reviews often read like press releases; indeed, I was told that concert organizations routinely pay journalist to provide favorable coverage. Critics feel pressure to deliver positive judgments, and, if they don’t, they may be reprimanded or hounded by colleagues. One critic I talked to got fed up and quit writing about music all together.

Crowd Control” (Wendy Lesser, The Threepenny Review, Spring 2008)

As with Ross, Lesser writes so well, and so distinctly, about classical music, that this list would be insincere not to include another piece.  Unfortunately, this one doesn’t appear online for free in full, but it’s too unique not to include. Watching an orchestra, you can’t miss the conductor, but it takes effort to truly see them. After watching one conductor, Simon Rattle, lead the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 2008, Lesser trained her lens on him to examine the conductor’s larger triumphs, challenges, and contribution to orchestral performance.

Whenever a conductor lifts his arms, points his fingers, or gestures with his head, he is actually controlling thousands of body parts. These include (among others) the right arms and left fingers of the string players, the hands and lungs of the woodwinds, the lips of the brass section, the writes of the percussionists, and the eyes and ears of all the musicians performing under him. But the body parts also include the eyes, ears, lungs, and hands of those of us out there in the audience; we too are watching his characteristic movements, listening for the notes, catching our breaths, bringing our palms together in applause. The control can never be perfect, in regard to either the bodies onstage or those off it, and that is a good thing, because robots can neither play nor appreciate music. But to the extent a conductor’s control approaches perfection, in a Zeno’s Paradox-like fashion, without ever getting there, we in the audience stand to benefit. Listening to the Berlin Philharmonic perform under Simon Rattle, one has a sense of what that near-perfection might sound like.

Smoking: A Legal Weed Reading List

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

It’s always 420 somewhere, especially here in Portland, Oregon, where a cannabis dispensary seems to stand on every other corner. I smell weed while biking with my daughter through quiet residential neighborhoods. I smell weed while driving with my windows closed. I smell it at the food carts and on the clothes of college students whose papers I used to help revise at Portland State University. Last year I was skating a park around 8 am one morning, and I smelled weed. No one was walking a dog. No one was playing Frisbee golf. I swear the squirrels must have been blazing in the trees. It’s easy to feel like I’m part of a small minority of Portlanders who don’t get stoned. But legal cannabis is more than easy stoner jokes and giggly good times. Legalization is decriminalization, and that’s a very important distinction in a nation that both disproportionately incarcerates people of color for minor offences and clings to an ineffective, military battle approach to the social and health challenge of addiction. Weed is far less harmful than heroin and alcohol, but it can still be harmful when habitual. And arrests have ended too many lives.

In 2016, to celebrate Pennsylvania becoming the 24th US state to legalize medical marijuana, Longreads editor Cheri Lucas Rowlands compiled a marijuana reading list, called Weed Reeds. This list is an extension of that, featuring stories that have come out since other states decriminalized recreational and medical cannabis, and since advocates have started reframing marijuana as cannabis. Still, as serious as legalization is, people still puff, puff, puff on porches, pass the pipe at picnics, and drop tincture in their beers to lighten backyard parties. Legal weed ain’t all science and medicine. It’s a huge lucrative industry, and that makes for dramatic stories, personalities, and trouble.

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Grow Industry” (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, March 12, 2013)

In 2013, when two U.S. states had legalized recreational marijuana, there were signs that Canada would end its nine-decade-long marijuana prohibition. People were wondering how to capitalize on this historic opportunity, to become, as The Walrus put it, ”the Seagrams of weed.”

There are certainly parallels. Like the marijuana ban today, the prohibition against alcohol—much stricter in the US than in Canada—did not eliminate the drug. It just created a grey market with shortcuts and loopholes, easily exploited if you were someone like Samuel Bronfman, a canny Canadian businessman who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. The Bronfmans were hustlers, Russian Jewish immigrants who set up a string of “boozariums” along the Saskatchewan–North Dakota border, ferried alcohol across the Detroit River, and shipped it into the US aboard schooners. In 1928, they expanded their empire by purchasing Seagrams, the Montreal-based maker of such popular brands as Seven Crown. When Prohibition ended, they were in the perfect position to solidify their hold on the market, and Seagrams became the largest distilling business in the world.

Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed” (Ben Schreckinger and Mona Zhang, Politico, May 24, 2020)

The spectacular explosion of cannabis’ ambitious startup MedMen is a tale for the tech era. The company themselves couldn’t always figure out if they were a tech company or a cannabis company. They just knew they were rushing to capitalize on the lucrative opportunity presented by legal cannabis. They modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran an expensive ad campaign where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like ‘Grandmother.’ “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.”

This is the story of how the cannabis industry comes down from its high.

In some cases, vendors, unable to get cash for the product they have supplied to the company, have instead been taking payment in MedMen stock. As of mid-May, its stock price was down more than 95 percent from its late-2018 high, according to data from the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Normally, a business in such dire straits could seek federal bankruptcy protection. Because of weed’s legal status, that option is not open to MedMen.

MedMen was faring worse than most, but the rest of industry was also coming down hard from its high. There were too many entrepreneurs trying to blaze the same path as Bierman, competing for a pool of legal sales that was not growing fast enough, with too much regulatory uncertainty hanging over them. In the year leading up to March 21, the United States Marijuana Index, which tracks top cannabis stocks, fell by more than four-fifths.

Canada’s Saddest Grow-op: My Humiliating Adventures in Growing Marijuana” (Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail, May 19, 2019)

When one of The Globe and Mail editors suggested writer Ian Brown grow weed as an experiment, Brown borrowed a high tech, automated grow device called a Grobo and set his operation by his office desk. From the dizzying number of varietals to choose from to the sensitive environmental needs of the plants, there are many reasons professional grow cannabis. But could technology like Grobo really democratize and simplify cannabis production?

“I think people will come to love growing,” Mr. Dawson said as we neared the end of our factory tour. “But it’s a much more complex problem than we anticipated.” He was enthusiastic, but wary, because he knew the secret behind the popular misconception that cannabis is a weed anyone can grow anywhere. The truth is, growing good cannabis is way, way harder than it looks.

Eventually, we loaded the Grobo into the hatch of my car. I drove to Toronto and dollied the hulk up to my desk at work. I felt like a revolutionary. There it stood for three weeks while I tried to find something to grow in it.

Reefer Madness 2.0: What Marijuana Science Says, and Doesn’t Say” (Dave Levitan, Undark, January 21, 2019)

By now, many Americans are at least faintly aware of the comical mid-century progoganda waged against marijuana consumption, which included slogans like “The burning weed with its roots in Hell!“ The rhetoric has cooled, but myth and pseudoscience still shape many Americans’ view of cannabis use, and propoganda takes many forms. In this piece, Levitan takes a look at the untruths, fear-mongering, and logical fallacies that inform the case that the book Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence makes against cannabis. He also indicts New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell for his piece, “Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” which, even when justified, is a modern sport in itself. “Combined,” Levitan writes, “these two works offer a master class in statistical malfeasance and a smorgasbord of logical fallacies and data-free fear-mongering that serve only to muddle an issue that, as experts point out, needs far more good-faith research.“ It must also be said that science is still trying to understand the way cannabis works on, and that weed is not harmless, even if it isn’t from HELL.

An important piece of Berenson’s argument is that rates of marijuana use have risen at around the same time as an increase in diagnoses of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. For example, separate studies from Finland and Denmark show an increase in such diagnoses in recent years. The authors of both studies wrote that the increases could be explained by changes to diagnostic criteria, as well as improved access to early interventions. In both cases, the authors do not rule out an actual change in incidence. But Berenson makes that possibility seem a firm reality, and that the rise in marijuana use is responsible. There is no real evidence that he’s right.

Berenson’s connection of marijuana to violence seems even more tenuous. He writes that violence has increased dramatically in four states that legalized marijuana in recent years: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. He notes that the number of violent crimes in those states has increased faster than the rest of the country between the years 2013 and 2017. On its face, he’s not wrong, but this is a great example of the liberties one can take with numbers.

Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, January 7, 2019)

Medicaid, Marijuana And Me: An Ex-Opioid Addict’s Take On American Drug Denial” (Janet Burns, Forbes, February 18, 2018)

A journalist shares what her experience with prescription painkillers taught her about the value of decriminalization.

Current federal leaders have said repeatedly that cannabis is not a medicinal substance at all, just as members of many administrations did before them. In doing so, it seems, they chose to reject the clear definitions and determinations that have been agreed upon by a majority of medical experts and regular citizens in the U.S. and a growing number of nations around the world.

At the same time, the U.S. assigns more favorable legal status to around 50 different opioids than it does to cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms, all but a handful of which are manufactured prescription drugs (think “opium poppy straw”; heroin, originally a prescription drug, has been retired). As of last year, the U.S.was also producing more opioid prescriptions than it has residents. And according to recent statistics, another American dies from opioid abuse every 10 minutes.

Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun” (Sean Howe, Longreads, May 13, 2019)

Before he founded High Times, Tom Forcade was a renegade journalist willing to throw a pie — or a lawsuit — in the face of anyone restricting his constitutional freedoms.

Much as the underground press provided a forum for the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, High Times served as the national message center for the 1970s movement to bring marijuana to the mainstream. During Forcade’s four years publishing the magazine and funding the marijuana lobby, possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. The first Americans began receiving marijuana for a medical condition. High Times editorials from those days seem almost prophetic now: warning against the corporate interests that would descend upon legalized weed, and noting the ways in which international drug wars could serve as cover for imperialist adventures. (Forcade’s own extralegal activities have a legacy as well, but that information has mostly lurked in government agency records, in the memories of tight-lipped collaborators, and in the research files of my forthcoming book about him)

The Grieving Landscape

RJ Sangosti / Getty / Fulcrum Publishing

Heidi Hutner | Fulcrum Publishing | June 2020 | 16 minutes (4,305 words)

We’re delighted to bring you an excerpt by Heidi Hutner from the anthology Doom With A View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Edited by Kristen Iverson, with E. Warren Perry and Shannon Perry, the anthology arrives from Fulcrum Publishing in August, 2020.

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At thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One year before my diagnosis, my mother died from complications after heart surgery. At the time of her death, my mother had cancer — lymphoma. Five years prior to Mom’s death, my father passed away from a brain tumor, a metastasis from the cancer melanoma.

Two years after I had completed my chemotherapy treatment for cancer, I gave birth to Olivia. My miracle baby.

Read more…

Tea, Biscuits, and Empire: The Long Con of Britishness

CSA Images / Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
— Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.”
— Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6.  So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are  demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble. Read more…

If You Love the Music of the Carter Family, Thank Leslie Riddle

British singer and songwriter Yola (Yola Carter) performs at Afas Live, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 12th November 2019. (Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns)

Mainstream country music isn’t overwhelmingly white because whiteness is innate to country music, it’s white because — just like any other overwhelmingly white system — it was purposefully constructed to be that way. In Rolling Stone, Elamin Abdelmahmoud digs into the history and talks to the Black artists who are breaking down those artificial constructs to redefine what country music is.

Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. Working for a struggling record company in the 1920s, the white record executive went to the American South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, in what became recognized as the first commercial country-music recording, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” Peer took credit for inventing something he called “hillbilly music” — what country was known as until after the Second World War.

But if that sounds a little too tidy, it is. Peer’s greatest contribution was as an innovator of the genre as a commercial tool: He found that by marketing hillbilly records to white audiences, and “race records” to black audiences, he could sell more records. It didn’t matter that what he found in the South were white and black musicians recording the same songs and playing the same music with the same instruments. It didn’t matter that the boundaries between genres didn’t exist. It didn’t matter that black musicians were teaching white musicians the art of the string band, and the white musicians were learning fast. For Peer, the label became the tool to sell the record. Then the sell became the story.

I mention one of country music’s foundational groups — the Carter Family, a Peer discovery. “Yes, but A.P. Carter didn’t know how to write music,” she says. “So who did he take with him to gather the songs? Lesley Riddle, who could take them to black churches.”

Riddle was instrumental to the success of the Carter Family, memorizing melodies while Carter transcribed lyrics. Today, the Carters are in the pantheon of country, but there’s a good chance the last paragraph was the first time you’ve heard Lesley Riddle’s name.

The image starts to come together pretty quickly. First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, “you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”

“But when a narrative is that clean,” Giddens warns, “somebody wrote it.”

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Trading Spaces

Henryk Sadura / Getty, Ev MiIee / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Longreads

Cheryl Jarvis | Longreads | June 2020 | 15 minutes (3,812 words)

I’ve reread the letter so many times that coffee rings smudge the words. I’ve won a teaching position at the University of Southern California that will pay my way through graduate school. The year is 2004, and a longtime dream is finally a reality. The aftershocks of my shattered, decades-long marriage — the sleepless nights, the lost months — begin to recede as I fantasize about the life that awaits. Like millions of women before me I’ll go west, to exotic, sun-drenched California, to reinvent myself, start anew.

The ring of the phone jangles my daydreaming.

“Mom!”

My younger son, Brian, is calling from his home in Los Angeles. His deep voice oozes charm.

“How’s my Sweetie?” he asks.

When he wants something, he calls me “Sweetie.” In his youth he exploited his blue eyes and beguiling smile to get his way. At 26, with 1800 miles between us, he has to rely on more sophisticated techniques. My antennae heighten. He’s “psyched,” he says, that I’m coming to L.A., and he’s been thinking, what about living together?

No. No. God, no.

Images flash of size 13 sneakers sprawled across the floor, smelly workout clothes hanging in the bathroom and flung over chairs, grimy dishes congesting the sink, junk food crowding the pantry, the house teeming with testosterone, his friends invading with bulging duffel bags and monstrous appetites. I think of the grocery bills that I’ll end up paying, food devoured before I have a chance to shelve it. More memories of his high school days surface: the urgent calls from school to bring money/ homework/ permission slips, the last-minute requests for help with papers and projects, the late-night calls from the police for assorted misdemeanors. His college years — three schools and a marijuana arrest — ratcheted the strain. Finally, in the five years since he graduated, via long-distance mothering, we’ve evolved to a peaceful co-existence that I’ve not only grown accustomed to but have come to love. But living together?

No. No.
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Snapshot of Canada: An Accidental Reading List

ürgen Schwenkenbecher/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Cleaning our basement recently, I found a box of old Canadian magazines. The covers were crisp, the bindings intact. Published between 2011 and 2013, I’d gathered these issues of The Walrus and Maisonneuve as research for an abandoned book project. Curious about what was inside, I sat down with them and a pot of very British black tea — the kind The Empress Hotel serves with tiny sandwiches in Victoria, British Columbia.

People call The Walrus the Canadian New Yorker. Maisonneuve was named Magazine of the Year in 2005, 2012, and 2016. Between their striking glossy covers I found the stylish, substantial writing these magazines are still known for, and stories both evergreen and of their time: stories about food, sex, drugs, immigration, politics, Indigenous rights, art, and the environment.

Thumbing through old magazines can be fun. Dated advertisements reveal bizarre worldviews and outdated thinking, like the doctors who famously preferred Camel cigarettes, and a mid-century ad I found featuring two poodles smoking the Old Gold brand. Those were the days. Back issues also capture a country’s struggles, its psyche, mythology, and national narratives, and these Canadian issues returned me to a particular time in my own life.

Years ago, I pitched an idea for a book called Canphilia to a literary agent. Philia is a suffix denoting love or an affection for something, and I loved Canada. The title was too scientific for a first-person narrative travelogue in search of the Canadian national identity, but I was younger then, and that was the best I could come up with.

Covering 3,854,085 square miles, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Canada and the United States share the world’s longest international border, yet few Americans can name half of the 10 provinces let alone name beloved Canadian icons or defining cultural characteristics. “To outsiders,” my proposal said, “Canada seems like the perfect country: scenic, peaceful, friendly, progressive. Its national parks are the envy of the developed world. The country has one of the highest standards of living on earth, a functioning public health system, and it’s the only G8 country with balanced books. Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, outlawed the death penalty, and operates North America’s only federally authorized drug injection site. Naturally, when people talk about it, most utter some variation of, Ah, I love Canada. But beyond vague notions of Britishness, hockey, and maple syrup production, what do we really know about it?” One thing I knew was that living next to one of the most loud-mouthed, aggressive, arrogant countries in history could make any neighboring country appear quiet, peaceful, and humble. Or maybe their voice was drowned out by all of our patriotic, idiotic, saber-rattling nonsense.

The vast majority of Canada’s 38 million inhabitants lived in larger urban centers within 125 miles of the US border, so I planned to drive, hike, and ferry across the entire country, from west to east, sticking to the border, to investigate. “More importantly,” my proposal said, “do we even know what makes a Canadian a Canadian? What they stand for? How they think and act? And what do they think of us, anyway?”

I was ambitious and slightly bananas, and I wanted to do for Canada what Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones did for China, and Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains did for the American Midwest: write a vivid, nuanced, humorous portrait of a people and their homeland, that would appeal to a general readership and enlighten myself as much as my fellow Americans. In addition to Canada’s national character, I would interrogate my own interest, search for the reasons so many of us disgruntled Americans fall under the country’s spell. Obviously Canada wasn’t perfect, with its clear-cut logging and historically egregious treatment of Indigenous people. I wanted to examine Canada’s contradictions, and debunk popular stereotypes. I wasn’t interested so much in defining “constitutional monarchy” or “parliamentary democracy” for American readers, or helping them reconcile Canada’s independence with its connection to the Queen. I was interested in profiling the personality of the Canadian people and their culture while trying to figure out why I longed to live somewhere I knew so little about.

The agent loved the idea, but we never shopped it to publishers. I couldn’t afford to take enough of the trip to write any sample chapters, and supposedly, Americans don’t care enough about Canada to read books about it. I filed “the Canada book” away in the back of my mind as I developed other niche book ideas that never sold, because that’s the kind of writer I am. As I moved around, my Canada books and back issues came with me.

After reading these issues, I thought it’d be fun to assemble some of their stories, which reveal new sides of Canada to outsiders like me (and maybe you). This is not meant as a definitive Canada reading list. It’s a sample of what I pulled from one stack of issues from 2011 — 2013. That makes this collection more of a tiny time capsule, an incomplete portrait of a particular place in time. Actual Canadians can gather more wide-ranging, complete lists that capture the totality of Canada, its breadth and depth. These older stories also provide an interesting baseline to compare Canada now with Canada then. After reading them, I wondered: Has Canadian secondary education improved? Is Kraft mac ’n cheese still Canada’s national dish? What happened to that hyped comedy troupe Picnicface? Here they are in chronological order, with their subheads included as description. None of these stories feature hockey or The Tragically Hip, but one is about Labatt beer. Part of Canada’s identity involves outsiders’ reliance on cliché. Enjoy, eh?

* * *

Going Viral” (Maisonneuve, Kaitlin Fontana, Summer 2011)

“This fall, the sketch comedy group and online-video machine Picnicface will simultaneously launch a feature-length movie, a TV show, and a book. Can eight nerds from Halifax resuscitate Canada’s ailing comedy scene?”

In Halifax, far from the showbiz machine, Picnicface has been free to both develop a unique voice in front of a warm audience, and to cultivate a show without fear of high-profile failure. McKinney likes that the group is from Halifax—it reminds him of his early days in Calgary, before he moved to Toronto. “If they’d been born in LA, they’d have all been poached before they could create this voice that develops between like-minded people, this ecosystem that happens in smaller places,” he says. Halifax, for Picnicface, is an incubator. Little goes further: “We’ve done some garbage here, but I’m really happy we did, because it helped mold us.”

Canada’s Most Unwanted” (The Walrus, Jasmine Budak, December 2011)

“Domestic adoption is rarely the first choice for prospective parents. But with rising infertility rates and the availability of foreign infants declining, some 30,000 children in government care have a better shot at finding a family.”

Canadians have long adopted from abroad, but largely for humanitarian reasons, in spurts and small numbers: orphans of the Irish famine, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; and, later, in the mid-’70s, from orphanages in Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Latin America, through Ottawa’s newly established national Adoption Desk. But over the next two decades, as adoption became normalized and the supply of domestic infants began to wane, inter-country adoption became less about finding parents for destitute babies and more about finding babies for hopeful parents. It was no longer motivated by goodwill, but rather became a transaction in the business of fulfilling the developed world’s growing demand for infants.

Visions of the Future” (Maisonneuve, Chandler Levack, Summer 2012)

“A twenty-four-year-old singer named Grimes is the world’s hottest independent pop star, and her fame has cast Montreal into the spotlight yet again.”

Grimes’ success and the exposure she’s brought her Arbutus label-mates—Sean Nicholas Savage, TOPS and TONSTARTSSBANDHT, among others—have made Montreal a high-profile indie-rock hotspot once again, reminiscent of the time, several years ago, when Arcade Fire attracted the world’s attention to the city. Although Montreal has plenty of other worthy independent labels, like Secret City and Alien8, the rise of Grimes has made Arbutus a litmus test for the promise of the city’s young musicians. Today’s tastemakers are fickle, and too much hype can cause a community to cannibalize itself—especially one as small and tight-knit as Montreal’s music scene. As Morrissey once said, “We hate it when our friends become successful.”

Calgary Reconsidered” (The Walrus, Chris Turner, June 2012)

“Six truths about the city that’s no longer, simply, Cowtown.”

Even if you love the city deep down, you sometimes feel as if you’re merely putting up with it, waiting for it to grow all the way up and become what it pretends to be. Calgary is an overnight millionaire fresh from the sale of a gas exploration company, complaining about the greed of all those farmers who jacked up the lease rates. Calgary is the home riding of the prime minister abutting the home riding of the premier, and still insisting that it doesn’t get a fair shake in Ottawa or Edmonton. Calgary is the highest per capita income in Canada in a province with no sales tax, indignant that its property taxes are going up. Its conservatism sometimes scans as a youngster’s I-got-mine insolence. Its emerging power and prominence come across from some angles as pure teenage bluster.

The Hunter Artist” (The Walrus, Sarah Milroy, July/August 2012)

“In Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a new generation is redefining Inuit art, preserving northern traditions as it adapts to southern ways of life. One of these artists is Tim Pitsiulak.”

Whites imagine Inuit, and Inuit imagine whites; Inuit art is where their fantasies meet, but the interface is changing. Kinngait continues to release its annual portfolio of about forty prints, as it has for more than fifty years. Despite stars like Kenojuak, prices for the prints have remained fairly consistent and modest, in the $500 to $2,500 range. But one-of-a-kind drawings are gaining a following and, as with the prints, the prices are regulated by Dorset Fine Arts, the co-op’s Toronto distributor, which sends the art to dealers across Canada and around the world, who then charge what the market will bear. Pitsiulak’s largest and best drawings can now sell for as much as $12,500, making him one of the most successful artists in the North. His aunt Kenojuak’s best works sell for around $16,000. Shuvinai Ashoona’s prices are close behind Pitsiulak’s and rising fast. This phenomenon of individual artists’ commanding widely differing levels of remuneration could someday lead to a break with the old co-op way of doing things, in which the revenue from higher-priced artists supports the costs of maintaining the studio and distribution, helping to fund the production of those artists who are less likely to sell. Inuit artists in Cape Dorset may hesitate to abandon a system that has afforded them predictable prices for pieces on completion (as well as studio space and material costs), irrespective of the vagaries of the southern art market.

Manufacturing Taste” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, September 2012)

“The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner — a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are.”

The point is, it’s nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world’s first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised “dinner in seven minutes — no baking required,” we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.

This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: “If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more.” In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.

John Cage’s Canada” (Maisonneuve, Crystal Chan, Fall 2012)

“The twentieth century’s most important avant-garde composer may have been American, Crystal Chan writes, but he found his greatest inspiration north of the border.”

On a Thursday night in August 1961, Cage took the podium at Montreal’s Théâtre de la Comédie-Canadienne and moved his arms in a circle, imitating the hands of a clock. In response, eighteen musicians began to play. The piece, called Atlas Eclipticalis, was Cage’s first Canadian premiere, and he had written it by matching notes to star positions in an astronomical atlas. At the time, the whole world had its eyes on the stars; earlier that spring, a Soviet cosmonaut had beaten the Americans to space. Composing music with the help of astronomy was still an eccentric method, though, and one that marked an important shift in Cage’s career. After Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage moved away from writing music with notes, rests and other conventional symbols. Instead, he went on to create graphic scores—essentially, drawn music—and write textual instructions. He started to see himself as a creator of experiences through sound, rather than a composer of music.

The Place Where Art Sleeps” (Maisonneuve, Chris Hampton, Fall 2012)

“The vast majority of the art gallery of Ontario’s priceless collection isn’t on display — it’s tucked away in high-security, top-secret vaults.”

Of the AGO’s eighty-five-thousand-piece permanent collection, only about 3,900 works are on display right now. At any given time, 95 percent of the collection is in storage. Paintings, sculptures and installations account for roughly eleven thousand pieces in the vaults, while photography and works on paper make up the other seventy thousand. This isn’t unique to the AGO. Art institutions are a bit like icebergs; the public sees less than a tenth of their holdings. But that may finally be changing. While security and conservation remain top priorities, galleries are beginning to experiment with new ways for the public to engage with their broader collections. Visitors increasingly want to see everything—including what’s behind the scenes.

Doppel Gang: Why Canada Needs Quebec” (The Walrus, Mark Kingwell, January/February 2013)

“Why Canada needs Quebec.”

Yes, there it is. Quebec is Canada’s familiar-strange double, a return of the repressed, so like the rest of the country and yet so minutely, eerily different. Are they plotting something large and secretive, some kind of surprise secession? Probably not. No, they probably just want things to go on like this more or less forever, teetering between passive entitlement and passionate outrage, sketching a glorious future free of any reality principle.

Unmasked” (Maisonneuve, Andrea Bennet, March, 2013)

“Before the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, police infiltrated activist communities as part of a massive, costly campaign that resulted in high-profile arrests and prosecutors. Who were these undercovers, and how did they avoid scrutiny?”

Guelph was also home, in the lead-up to the G20 summit, to a branch of one of the largest undercover police operations in Canadian history. The $676 million security bill for the G20 summit and its G8 counterpart—which was held on June 25 and 26 in Huntsville, Ontario—included funding for an eighteen-month-long infiltration of activist communities, from January 2009 through June 2010. The Joint Intelligence Group, a well-staffed network of OPP and RCMP officers based in Barrie, Ontario, carried out this investigation. According to the JIG Operational Plan, the effort included twelve “trained covered  investigators,” as well as commanders, managers, and technical and office support. Over the course of those eighteen months, JIG made $8 million worth of capital purchases and had a $297 million operational budget. It set up commander offices, a project room, workstations—and, during the G20 summit itself, an operational “War Room.”

Fight of the Bumblebee” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, March 2013)

“Honeybee colonies are collapsing around the world, putting food production in danger. We may need Canada’s indigenous pollinators to save the day.”

South of Detroit and Windsor, sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, the flat lines of Essex County farmland carve the southern tip of Ontario into tidy rectangular parcels of fertile, well-drained soil. When you approach Leamington from Highway 401, it is difficult to imagine this area as the nearly impenetrable forest it once was, or that the fires lit by would-be farmers to clear the land once burned so brightly they could be seen 500 kilometres west in Chicago. Today the aerial view looks more like a semi-industrial park, because the area is dominated by gunmetal grey–framed greenhouses. With some 355 hectares under greenhouse vegetable production, more than anywhere else in North America, the region’s output is larger than the entire industry in the US, and growing much faster than other types of agriculture.

First Do No Harm” (Maisonneuve, Ann Silversides, April 2013)

“Are doctors and drug companies to blame for the opioid-abuse crisis? After two shocking deaths in small-town Ontario, Ann Silversides reports from one of the largest coroner’s inquests in Canadian history.“

Under the Influence” (The Walrus, Matthew J. Bellamy, June 2013)

“Beer is to Canada as wine is to France. How Labatt and its allies brewed up a nation of beer drinkers.”

Before the Black Christmas of 1936, Mackenzie approached J. Walter Thompson Co., a major global advertising agency. Mark Napier of the Toronto office had an uncanny feel for the cultural logic of the age, and wanted to portray brewers like Labatt as instrumental, not detrimental, to the nation’s development. In a series of advertisements published in the national monthly Canadian Homes and Gardens, he highlighted Labatt’s long, influential past. “It really all began 70 years ago,” read the text of one ad in 1937, under the tag line “Then As Now.” In others, he linked the company’s evolution to watershed moments in our history, such as Confederation and the Boer War, when “soldiers knew good ale.” As Canadians searched for uniquely Canadian ideas, events, experiences, and commodities—the makings of a national identity—Napier served up Labatt’s product as an age-old piece of Canadiana.

The Marineland Dreamland” (The Walrus, Craig Davidson, July/August 2013

“Deconstructing memories of a scandal-ridden theme park.”

I worked at Marineland for eight summers. Brendan Kelly, six years. Phil Demers, twelve. It paid our rent and put beer in our fridges. Best summers of my life. To a man, we spoke those words.

It makes you wonder. What if, rather than fabrication, “The Tale of the Frozen Sea Lion” was an act of erasure? My unconscious mind embarking on a sly mission of disburdenment, of purposeful forgetting? If I forget enough, if my own story fills with holes, I can tell myself it’s a lie. And that’s easier, overall. Easier than holding on to the knowledge for twenty-plus years, doing nothing meaningful about it. Easier than remembering how I laughed as my supervisor kicked a dead sea lion.

What I Want to Know of Kindness

County Kerry, Ireland / Getty Images

Devin Kelly | Longreads | May 2020 | 14 minutes (3,897 words)

This is the second time we’ve been lucky enough to publish Devin Kelly. Read his first Longreads essay “Running Dysmorphic.”

I remember that I was in a 6th floor classroom of the high school where I used to teach when I got the text. I read some words: Nancy…about to happen…they moved her.

I remember leaving the classroom and all those kids, finding my department head, and huffing out a rush of phrases.

My friend’s mom is about to die, I said. She’s like my aunt, I said. No, no, I said. She’s like my second mom.

I remember how bright it was outside as I walk-jogged to Grand Central to catch a northbound train out of the city. I remember the polish on the shoes of blue-suited men, and the tinny clack they made as they slapped along the sidewalk. I remember thinking how odd it was, and how much I felt alone, and how the world felt stilled and tilted on its axis, but that I was the only one who felt it, like I was leaning sideways while each other person I passed stood upright.

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American Tests

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words)

I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York City’s alternate side rules? Or that once, after a bottomless brunch, I’d sung loudly on the subway, not caring that someone shouted the suggestion I “stick to shower singing”? My appointment was for noon, and now it was 6 p.m. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hunger had receded, replaced with anxiety and a thudding headache. All afternoon I’d rocked myself for comfort as people streamed in and out of the interview rooms.

It was 2012 and immigration didn’t feel as fraught as it presently does, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. Getting a new appointment would take four to six months.

Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings. Behind the desk sat an overburdened federal worker. She was petite like me, but her caramel skin color contrasted my darker one, a hue my mother once described as the green-black color of boiled cowpea leaves.

“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman told me. “We misplaced your file.”

I was about to take my citizenship exam.
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Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude

Universal Music Group

Read an introduction to the series.

DJ Lynnée Denise | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,096 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

As a teenager, Luther Vandross co-founded his favorite singer’s fan club. I can see him now, watching her seasoned shoulder bounce and measuring the funk in the Black church two-step she makes in post–chitlin circuit venues. He’s standing stage left, holding onto the curtain for balance; he’s lip-synching every song, calculating the mastery of her diction and phrasing; he’s studying her like a text, setting the stage for his own practice — one that would place him at microphones behind David Bowie, Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand, Cissy Houston, and Donna Summer. This Luther was Twenty Feet from Stardom and rising.

Young but wise, Luther Vandross the teenage boy understood how Patricia Louise Holt from Philadelphia became the legendary kick-your-shoes-off and snatch-your-own-wig when the tension builds between music, voice, and audience type of singer. Luther Vandross presided over the fan club of none other than Ms. Patti LaBelle.

Strange things happen when an artist is moved to a new depth by another. We become fanatical about the fantastical beings who place us deeper into the abyss of craft. The management of details of who these artists are and how they come into being become a rite of passage. We obsess over the decisions they make to bring an album to fruition and take pride in knowing as much as we can, from the major to the minor: collaborations, music video direction, hair color, shoe size, inspiration behind the lyrics.  We fancy ourselves experts of our muses. And when it comes to Black music, the stakes are higher — people stay questioning our responses to the brilliance of Black artists; reading them as tribal reactions as opposed to a focused study of mastery. But no. I’m from the school of Luther — and by that, I mean I’m a listener committed to homemade scholarship, community-based research questions, and an organic framework to interpret the artistic offerings of those I crown as legends.


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There’s a strong chance that I became the unofficial president of the artist Joi’s fan club 25 years ago. For 25 years, I’ve paid attention to her musical movement and to the ways she holds court on stage. Today, I feel confident that if asked to write a dissertation that argues the genius of what I refer to as her crunk-funk sound, I’d have my Ph.D. Dr. DJ Lynnée Denise. Joi occupies space in the lineage of artists who thrive across genre lines. How is that possible? Ask Prince, ask Aretha, ask Nina, ask Stevie. Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk

The three of us — Joi, Du Bois, and myself — have something in common: Nashville.

* * *

I saw Joi for the first time while I was sitting in the living room with a group of artists I met during my freshman year at Fisk University. She was in a video wearing a trench coat, hanging on a meat hook in a blue-lit walk-in meat refrigerator. She was squirming on beat with the hope of being released. The video was for her first single, “Sunshine & the Rain.”

Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what Du Bois called ‘double consciousness,’ musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk.

It was Du Bois who taught me about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a masterful a cappella ensemble, who with their carefully crafted compositions saved the university from collapsing in the face of mounting financial struggles in 1871. They toured cities along the route of the Underground Railroad using harmony to trace the path of freedom before eventually landing a paid gig in England, performing for its Queen. Du Bois graduated from Fisk in 1888, 109 years before I did. In his famed essay “Of the Sorrow Songs,” credited by Black theologian James H. Cone as one of the first pieces of writing in the 20th century to treat Black music with serious academic inquiry, Du Bois reflects on Fisk’s institutional significance: “To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”

In 1993, I stepped onto the campus of Fisk University less than three months after the L.A. Riots. I had Latasha Harlins on my mind: a young Black woman who was gunned down by a Korean shop owner in South Central Los Angeles for allegedly stealing an orange juice. When the shop owner was sentenced to probation in November 1991, less than six months before a jury acquitted the officers responsible for the beating of Rodney King, L.A. blew up in flames. I arrived on campus with inspiration brought on by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insightful observation that riots are “the language of the unheard.” That outburst of symbolic rage brought me a sense of peace. With one suitcase and a green trunk plastered with stickers that ranged from images of Marley to Meat is Murder slogans, I showed up ready to learn and receive.

Upon arrival, an upperclassman escorted me to Jubilee Hall’s third floor, and just as Du Bois described, it was pristine, brick-based, and towering above my West Coast head. In this place of Black music history, I had a room of my own and a branch from Joi’s family tree was down the street.

Joi is the daughter of legendary NFL football player Joe Gilliam. A member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was the franchise’s first Black quarterback to start as a season opener. Both Joe and Joi were legacy students at the historically Black public university Tennessee State, walking distance from Fisk.

The local artists in the room witnessing me witness Joi’s video for the first time knew who she was and dismissed my awe with, “Oh that’s Joi.” I was in her hometown. She was their hero. “Joi from down here,” they said with regional pride from blunt stained lips. “She been on that different shit for years.” I took that to mean Joi was ahead of her time and an inspiration to the folks who watched her take shape.

Her absence in the city of Nashville, or more accurately the ghost of her dopeness, made me think about what it meant to leave home in order to be seen. Like when your ambition outgrows your zip code and the only way forward, as you’ve been told through myriad migration narratives, is to move north from the South; even though what you offer the North is rooted in the back-homeness of the funky South. Joi journeyed to Atlanta — 250 miles below Tennessee. She complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant. So, when André 3000 proclaimed at the 1995 Source Awards that “the South got something to say,” Joi was one of the leaders in saying, through her music, what needed to be said.

[Joi] complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant.

After my encounter with the “Sunshine & the Rain” video, I listened to the song on repeat for what felt like a year. It filled the void created by LaFace’s TLC and the Sean Puffy girl group hip-hop soul phase that I struggled to embrace as I was figuring out my own listening practice on an HBCU campus where musical tastes were shaped, almost exclusively, by homecoming anthems and Top 40 hits. Don’t get me wrong, I loved to see the Chicago students at Fisk rush to the dance floor when hearing the first two bars of the “Percolator,” and I fucked with Mary J. Blige from day one and still do. But I had real questions about the war on originality that was creeping into the Black musical lexicon in a Bad Boy kinda way. The art of sampling was now complicated by intellectual property laws and there was less cutting and scratching, which meant that turntablism was, in certain ways, becoming a less crucial, or at the very least a less prominent, part of the sonic footprint of the culture. Plus, audiences of the music seemed to be growing less and less concerned with the original songs — and by default less concerned with the Black musical lineages shaping my ear as a DJ. It was a pivotal moment for me, defined by my acceptance of the loneliness that comes with walking against trends. I made up for it by going in deep. I had a campus radio show on WFSK where I organized weekly themes that explored different eras and genres of Black music: Black women funk artists 1970–1975. New Wave 1983–1987. Jazz trumpeters 1963–1969. In the face of my early days of digging through the crates, the corporatization of hip-hop was creating what music scholar Harold Pride calls “pedestrian listeners” out of my peers and further alienating lesser known artists whose work stretched listeners with innovation. For me, Joi was a bridge.

* * *

Dallas Austin is one of the minds who, alongside Pebbles, gave the world TLC. Around the exact same time, Austin was working on Joi’s debut album The Pendulum Vibe — together they created a call to arms for folks looking for sophisticated melodies and enough lyrical depth to drown in. Songs like “Fatal Lovesick Journey” had me pondering codependent relationships while puffing Black & Milds and drinking Alizé. There was well-placed wailing, playful and unapologetic sexual confidence, and a genre-defying Southern-rooted sound. Anti-formulaic, the music from this album spoke to my heart and gave me hope that Black America had something to compare to the brilliant U.K. soul coming out of London. Though raunchier in her approach, Joi was in the Mica Paris and Caron Wheeler category for me. I even had fantasies of her settling down in London like Jhelisa and her cousin Carleen Anderson did in the ’90s, leaving their Black American (Mississippi, Texas) imprint on the British sound and reinforcing Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic.

I recognized these women and Joi as kindred spirits. After about the 50th listen of the Pendulum Vibe (and after spending that year with “Sunshine & the Rain”), I sat myself down and said with all honesty, “This a bad bitch and the masses ain’t gon’ understand.” Predictably, critics have long used the abstract term the underground in describing the spirit of Joi’s work. I’m skeptical of the word “underground” because it makes an assumption about what success looks like and sometimes strips the agency of artists who don’t aspire to have commercial appeal.

But was I happy to have an “underground” to turn to when H-Town wasn’t enough? Yes indeed. Sitting with the work of these artists, both from America and overseas, felt like a humanizing way to break from the overly familiar. Humanizing because the music compelled me to listen with insatiable curiosity. Something that white men who own record stores and collect Black music are not only allowed but encouraged to do. Knowing that Joi existed was a way for me to stay aligned with wayward women. Excavating their sonic stories, the way Saidiya Hartman does Gladys Bentley’s, became a primary interest to me. Joi was a gateway into a world made up of women musicians who, compared to their male counterparts, were pushed to the sidelines of Black music history — Nona Hendryx, Lyn Collins, and the women of George Clinton’s P-Funk empire: The Brides of Dr. Funkenstein and Parlet. Embedded in Joi’s vocal cords is a deep knowledge of Funkentelechy and “Dandelion Dust” cosmology, a heavy load of legacy to carry. I was a believer. 

* * *

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been one of those people who rolls their eyes when I hear my favorite song from a new album that I’m spending time with being played on the radio. I’m suspicious of what becomes widely accepted, afraid to see the artists I love hand over their authenticity to the police of mediocrity guarding the door of pop music in America. And yeah, everybody gotta eat, but why eating gotta equate to contractual agreements that alter your purpose? Prince’s decision to pen the word “slave” on his face in the ’90s gave us an idea of what can happen when sitting down at the negotiating table with corporations who measure your worth by your marketability. Our collective ear becomes less sophisticated, we develop a forgetfulness that separates us from our pasts. I wanted to keep Joi in my personal library of “underground” artists where she was protected from the fuckery — following her own North Star to musical freedom like the Jubilee Singers.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity. One minute she gives you seasoned performer on a FunkJazz Kafe stage alongside Too $hort; then range and multidimensionality on stage with FishBone and De La Soul the next. I traveled to see both of those shows from Fisk University, leaving “the yard” for places like Memphis and Atlanta to experience Joi in action. My fellow Joi-chasing friend and I coordinated our travels so that we could make it back in time for 10 a.m. classes the following morning; driving along the highway, we passed various symbols of the Confederacy — flags, bumper stickers, and Cracker Barrels. We were two women from Cali on a mission. We invested time and our scarce college-level income into loving her work because Joi always delivered, which made the payoff immediate.

* * *

Between 1996 and 2006, Joi recorded three more studio albums. Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, from 1997, became a highly desired cult classic, shelved before its release due to the collapse of EMI. It was then picked up by FreeWorld, Dallas Austin’s newly formed label following EMI’s collapse, which folded shortly after. Fortunately, it can now be purchased through her website, a gift for fans who were searching high and low for a copy. Her next two albums were 2002’s Star Kitty’s Revenge and 2006’s Tennessee Slim is the Bomb, which was released on Raphael Sadiq’s Pookie Records. The music industry’s instability led Joi to reissue both albums independently, in the spirit of Prince. He had become one of the first major artists to market his albums through a personal website to be in direct conversation with fans in an effort to cut out the middle men — middle men who were typically attached to the bodies of white record company executives or Black music moguls like Berry Gordy or Suge Knight who modeled their music businesses after them.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity.

In addition to her solo work, Joi had a major hand in shaping the Atlanta Dungeon Family/Organized Noize sound. She sang background on Goodie Mob’s classic first album Soul Food. Equally impressive was her work on projects with a range of artists like George Clinton, Sleepy Brown, Big Krit, 2 Chainz, Queen Latifah, and Tricky from London. She collaborated with Raphael Sadiq’s on his Lucy Pearl project, replacing former En Vogue songstress Dawn Robinson and adding a welcomed edge to the group’s live performances. In addition to studio collaboration, she joined Outkast on their final tour in 2014 and was a backing vocalist for D’Angelo’s The Second Coming Tour in 2015. And still, with curriculum vitaé in hand, Joi found time to help, as she would say, “wipe down” a few aspiring singers through her artist development business, Artisan Polishing.

* * *

The very first time I met Joi was in Nashville in 1995. With the same woman I had traveled to Memphis for Joi’s shows, I was trying my hand at concert promotion. We had a little money, a venue, and enough love for Joi’s two-album catalog to take a chance. Within a week, Joi agreed to perform for an amount that had little to do with what was acceptable for her craft and effort and more to do with her willingness to help us see our dreams through and to come home to show her people where she had been. It’s no small feat to have Joi on your roster of events as a young promoter in the industry, and she gave us the cultural capital and experience we needed to break into that world as young Black women. Almost a decade later, I would connect with Joi again when she was featured in an event I produced in Brooklyn called Slum Beautiful: Music from the Gut of Black America in 2010. The title of the event was taken from a song from Outkast’s Stankonia album. I wanted Joi to do the work of reminding New York of its connected history with Black Southern culture and people — it’s a city that tends to forget. The next time I saw Joi was in Atlanta for an event I organized called Erotic City Weekend, bringing the work of Prince and Joi’s unique performances back together again.  

In 2015, I made my way back home to Los Angeles after being away for nearly 20 years. Synchronicity had it so that Joi had left Atlanta and moved there a few years before me. We connected on a more personal level and spent significant time talking about our shared love of the many interconnections of Black music. It was through our conversations that I learned about the Caravans, a 1950s soulful gospel group that featured among its members Shirley Caesar, Inez Andrews, Albertina Walker, and James Cleveland. They were responsible for ushering a new style of gospel that complicated the notion of sacred music with their collective blues ministry sound. She also encouraged me to pay closer attention to Parliament singers Glen Goins, Garry Shider, and Walter “Junie” Morrison, as their voices, too, embodied the tension that exists between Black faith and psychedelic funk. I learned in those moments what it means to be a student of the artform you’re undertaking.

Shortly after landing, I began creating events in L.A. and inviting Joi to make various appearances. My work had taken a turn over the years. I was excited about my developing relationship with the academy, as I had become a lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles in the Pan-African Studies department. I worked closely with the department to shape the social experiences of Black college students who often found themselves at the mercy of and/or ignored in official university events. In 2016, I invited Joi to conduct the Q&A following the screening of the Afro-Punk documentary with the festival’s original founder and the film’s director, James Spooner. During the conversation, Spooner shared with the audience that it was the first time he had been invited to screen his film and talk about the roots of Afro-punk since his departure from what had become a corporate funded cultural institution. Most recently, I invited Joi, along with Jessica Care Moore, to be on a plenary for a conference I coproduced with UCLA in honor of the late, great Aretha Franklin. What I love so much about Joi is her proven record that she is committed to blurring the lines and steeped in the art of interdisciplinarity. She engaged with students, wowed faculty, and in the process, brought a funky sensibility to the art and practice of scholarship. Upon spending a considerable amount of time listening to her latest album, I decided to visit Joi at home, which brought our multi-decade relationship into its third dimension. 

* * *

In 2018, Joi sat her ass down in a studio and pulled diamonds from a year of solitude to create her most recent album, S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove. The journey of the album begins with three words that push us to the other side: Bitch I’m Free. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is what happens when anticipation meets expectations. It is noteworthy that this album, too, was produced independently. Joi’s is the only voice on the album. Don’t be fooled into thinking that there are three other bad bitches in the studio making it happen. It’s just her. She wrote all the album’s lyrics, arranged all its vocals, and produced some of the tracks. She used very little of the vocal compressor, an effect that most contemporary singers rely on, creating distance between authenticity and the voices you think you love.

Here I was, 25 years after seeing her on a screen swinging on a meat hook, sitting in Joi’s L.A. studio — a live/work space she calls “The Funky Jewelry Box.” Inspirational posters and Dolly Parton, Led Zeppelin, Natalie Cole, and Minnie Riperton album covers draped the walls. It was an incubator for critical artistic thought up in there.

As I settled and began to think about questions that would unlock the door to the mysteries of this project, Joi unwrapped detox products from Dr. Sebi that Erykah Badu had sent her. “It’s a perfect time to fast,” she said, while removing the bubble wrap from a dark brown bottle of bodily goodness. She sat at her recording station in an electric blue velvet cushioned vintage chair, “a rare find from a spot in L.A.,” she bragged, “undiscovered by hipsters and still affordable in its dealings.” The chair, shaped like a throne, was perfect for the matriarchal-themed nature of this album. Above her was a classic studio microphone that looked committed to its job and familiar with the racy nature of Joi’s spirit. There’s an intimacy between the two. We agreed to listen to the album. She pressed play and guided me through the sonic journey — joint in hand, ears on guard.

Joi’s racy songs stand out on the new album, and they have a long history. On “Narcissia Cutie Pie” from Pendulum Vibe, the artist explores sexual fluidity and bright dark fantasies about the spectrum of desire, while songs like “Lick” from Star Kitty’s Revenge and “Dirty Mind” from Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome help us remember sex as a powerful creative tool. S.I.R. Rebekah HolyLove builds on Joi’s collection of sex-positive cantatas with “The Edge,produced and arranged by Joi with additional editing by Brook D’ Leux. A bass-heavy funk monster that promises listeners a key to cities where “we can fuck until the dawn, making love til’ cherries gone.” Another Paisley Park parallel. I mean, yeah, you’re married boo, but this is a complicated situation, the song implies. Cheating could become an option if good dick [or fill in the blank] is involved, and not many of us are willing to share that kind of ethical vulnerability on wax. And I don’t mean no disrespect to your official union, she asserts, but you fuck me right and you’re mine tonight. We never once forget that Joi is a human being dealing with the most undesirable and the most pleasurably outrageous scenarios that life asks us to consider: infidelity, heartbreak, orgasmic accomplishments. The appeal is that she’s aware of the costs. I’m standing on the edge with you / so if I jump will I fall or fly

S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is a tribute to an album culture long forgotten. With the push for iTunes singles and music streaming culture, the intimate relating of album between artist and audience has been compromised. The album holds its own against a culture that produces music at a rate almost impossible to enjoy, I’ll be listening to S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove for years to come, and The Pendulum Vibe brought me here years ago. Joi said she drew from various experiences to produce this album. She continued to work on other major projects (both in television and music), without compromising the integrity of her solo work. In her words: “I have one of the most peaceful lives [of] anyone I know, but I recognize that solitude and peace is something I earned and it was necessary for this particular juncture.” 

* * *

Writing this piece felt like that time when Patti LaBelle and a fully established writer and producer, Luther Vandross, shared a stage one glorious night in 1985. It’s that moment when student, fan, and gatekeeper of the musical masters graduate into a league of their own, with a platform to articulate the many ways they’ve been shaped; a tribe of fellow artists marked by the legends. And because Joi’s work has been canonized by a global community, my work to unpack her work is really a citational practice. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove, is on a Black Atlantic continuum — a fantastic voyage will be had.  Catch up on your future. 

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Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne
On Watching Boys Play Music, by Eryn Loeb

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DJ Lynnée Denise was shaped as a DJ by her parents’ record collection. She’s an artist, scholar, and writer whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Lynnée Denise coined the phrase ‘DJ Scholarship’ to reposition the role of the DJ from party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian, and information specialist.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross