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Remembering Pioneering Studio Engineer Geoff Emerick

Ringo Starr of The Beatles congratulates EMI recording studio audio engineer Geoff Emerick on his Grammy Award in 1968. Photo by Monti Spry/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

I once met legendary record producer George Avakian, who worked with everyone from John Cage to Ravi Shankar to Dave Brubeck. I was especially interested in his sessions with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, and the incredible stand up bass sounds on those records from the 1950s.

“What mics did you use, George?” I asked, certain I was about to acquire some arcane and sacred knowledge. “Oh, I never touched the mics,” George said quickly. “I was the producer.”

The recording engineer, as opposed to the producer, is the one person actually responsible for what we hear. The musicians write and perform the music, the producer (at least in the previous century) concerns themself with song selection and arrangement, and the engineer captures the sound. The latitude for personal expression here is incredible: there is the size and shape of the studio room, and its relationship to the microphones. There are all manner of musical instruments, some acoustic, some amplified, and how they sound when recorded. There is a wide spectrum of microphones: ribbon mics, condenser mics, dynamic mics, mics with diaphragms large and small, each contributing a sound engineers variously describe as “dark” or “bright” or having “air on top.” It’s been my experience that most people can’t hear a good performance through bad production. Engineers bear the brunt of that responsibility. So, at least to my mind, Duke Ellington’s dictum “If it sounds good, it is good,” applies to the recording process as much as anything else.

Geoff Emerick died on October 2, 2018. Having engineered late period Beatles records, he was one of the best known and most innovative engineers of the twentieth century. Many modern recording techniques are the result of his work. The best way to illustrate this is to focus our attention on one day: Wednesday April 6, 1966. Emerick was 19. As a 15-year old intern, he had witnessed the Beatles’ first recording session, the one which produced “Love Me Do.” This day was his first as the band’s engineer. He was terrified.

This ‘66 session was the first for the Beatles’ new album, Revolver. The first song to be recorded was also the album’s most sonically ambitious: John Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Lennon, never technically minded and always looking for a way to disguise his voice, asked producer George Martin to “make me sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop.”

“Got it,” Martin said. “I’m sure Geoff and I will come up with something.”

Emerick’s solution was brilliant. After securing Martin’s blessing, he instructed the maintenance engineer to wire a certain amplifier to use for Lennon’s vocal. “The studio’s Hammond organ was hooked up to a system called a Leslie,” Emerick recalled in his memoir Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, “a large wooden box that contained an amp and two sets of revolving speakers, one that carried low bass frequencies and the other that carried high treble frequencies; it was the effect of those spinning speakers that was largely responsible for the characteristic Hammond organ sound. In my mind, I could almost hear what John’s voice might sound like if it were coming from a Leslie.” No one knew exactly what that sound would be, as it had never been done before.

After recording the first take, the band listened to the playback in the control room. The effect worked perfectly. “It’s the Dalai Lennon!” Paul McCartney shouted.

Lennon was amazed and asked for an explanation; he got one he didn’t understand. “Couldn’t we get the same effect by dangling me from a rope and swinging me around the microphone instead?” he asked. It’s hard to imagine now, but Emerick’s lasting contribution here is that he did something that had never been done: Leslie amplifiers were designed to use with Hammond organs, not with human voices. Once this experimental door was opened, any combination of artistry and technology was possible.

Before the day was done, Emerick would make another major contribution to modern sound engineering. To do so, he had to break house rules. EMI, who owned Abbey Road studios, did not allow microphones to be placed closer than two feet from a bass drum. The concentrated “wallop” of low end frequencies can damage sensitive microphones. Excessive low end would also make phonograph needles skip, which is why there are no bass drums on early jazz recordings. Drummers used bass drums, but engineers banned them.

Inspired by the slightly muffled sound of Ringo Starr’s snare drum a side effect of the heavy smoker keeping his pack of cigarettes handy Emerick grabbed a nearby wool sweater. “As quickly as I could,” he remembered, “I removed the bass drum’s front skin the one with the famous ‘dropped-T’ Beatles logo on it and stuffed the sweater inside so that it was flush against the rear beater skin. Then I replaced the front skin and positioned the bass drum mic directly in front of it, angled down slightly but so close that it was almost touching.” He then purposefully overloaded the circuitry of some outboard gear to affect the drum sound. The result was punchy, exciting, and unprecedented.

The heavily compressed drum sound set the template for almost all British pop music for the rest of the decade, from The Jimi Hendrix Experience to Led Zeppelin; the dampened, close-miked kick drum technique is still in use. After Revolver, Emerick went on to engineer the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, and Abbey Road.

With his first work day over, Emerick took the waiting car back to his parents’ house, where he lived.

There are home studio plugins for all these outboard effects now. You can run your vocal through a virtual Leslie cabinet, or employ a faux Fairchild limiter to make your drums sound more Beatles-y, or distort your Neumann microphone, or a digital facsimile, to sound like Lennon’s voice on “I Am The Walrus.” But these innovations were made during a time when engineers at Abbey Road wore white lab coats and ties and could be fired for any misuse of studio equipment. Geoff Emerick, who was part of the Beatles’ career when they began using the studio as an instrument, was as much responsible for their iconic sounds as anyone. “He was smart, fun-loving and the genius behind many of the great sounds on our records,” McCartney remembered. “God bless you Geoffrey.”

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Remembering G. Dep, the Rapper Who Confessed to a 17-Year Old Cold Case

(Photo by Suzi Pratt/WireImage)

Among the standout tracks on Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V, the long awaited and oft delayed fifth album in the rapper’s conceptual discography, the highlight might just be “Uproar,” a ridiculously bouncy track that is as much of a throwback to Wayne’s glory days as it is a sign of the musician’s continued evolution.

Of note, though, isn’t just the song’s lyrics — but also the beat, produced by Swizz Beatz and a reimagining of G. Dep’s “Special Delivery” beat, a 17-year old song that reigned supreme over the NYC airwaves in the early 2000s (signed to Bad Boy Records, G. Dep was a Harlem native). What’s so fascinating about a remixed “Special Delivery” is two-fold: Wayne uses the beat as he would a freestyle, nimbly interweaving bars throughout the boombap-cum-keyboard laden sample; and the release of “Uproar” brings G. Dep (born Trevell Coleman) back to the current pop culture fold.

As chronicled by Jennifer Gonnerman for New York Magazine, Coleman confessed in 2010 to a cold case murder committed in 1993; Coleman pled guilty to second-degree murder, revealing how he shot a man three times and fled the scene without knowing whether the individual died. In his confession, Coleman outlined why he decided to suddenly come forward: “The reason I turned myself in was because I felt awful about what I did and I wanted to make it right for this guy’s family.”

Gonnerman deftly reports on Coleman, his rise to G. Dep fame, and his current incarceration (at Elmira Correctional Facility until at least 2025), and it’s worth revisiting the 2012 profile in light of Lil Wayne’s “Special Delivery” revival.

At times, his life felt like a series of endless internal calculations, all part of an effort to, as he later explained, “balance myself out.” If he bought a coat, he might scribble on one pocket with a marker before putting it on, just to deprive himself of the chance to wear something completely new. He never had much money, and he was so determined to give away what he did have that a few times he stuffed bills into the coin slots of pay phones, then walked away. Afterward, he’d feel a little better—“I did think, Well, okay, now I don’t have to feel like I have too much regret,” he says—but the relief was only temporary.

Coleman and his wife had separated, but he still stopped by to visit his 7-year-old sons. Some days, he’d be seated with them at the table, sharing a meal, thinking how blessed he was to have such beautiful boys, and suddenly be seized by guilt. Did the man he shot at have any kids? What happened to them? And why should he get to spend time with his kids if there was a chance he’d robbed another child of his father?

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The Return of the Face

From The Delinquent Man: Types of Offenders, 1897. Wikimedia Commons, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Adrian Daub | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,170 words)

 

Physiognomy — the attempt to interpret a person’s character by means of their face — was one of those things that educated 19th-century Europeans knew wasn’t supposed to work. In his 1806 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel devoted a lengthy, indecipherable chapter to explain why physiognomy, and its cousin phrenology, had to be hokum. But even if Europeans knew they shouldn’t put stock in physiognomy, they found it incredibly difficult to resist the impulse.

To some extent this remains true today. During the Obama years, many of us were sensitive to representations of the new president, knowing full well that the way faces are read and analyzed could easily encode very old and deeply embedded racist ideas. Then Trump was elected. In a heartbeat, we were back to reading his face, playing with his face, and displaying it next to animal faces. Where does this temptation come from?

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Banished

Photo by Emily Kassie.

Beth Schwartzapfel and Emily Kassie / The Marshall Project / October 2018 / 13 minutes (3,412 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Part 1: NO MERCY

The sun has barely risen over Miami, and Dale Brown loads an orange shopping cart with everything he owns. Through the morning’s swampy heat, he pushes the cart to the edge of the railroad tracks, where he hauls the items one at a time into some overgrowth and covers them with branches. His tent from Walmart, meticulously rolled and packed. A garbage bag with clothes and a blanket. He unscrews the lid to a plastic gallon jug and empties his urine into the brush.

“You feel like an animal,” says Brown, 63.

This industrial neighborhood just beyond Miami’s far western edge is home to lumber yards, auto parts warehouses, and, in recent months, roving encampments of homeless sex offenders. This summer, Brown and a half-dozen other men were living beside a chain-link fence outside a hardware company. Five blocks away, more lived in tents and makeshift shacks. And 12 blocks from there, about a dozen arrived in cars each night.

A combination of federal, state and local laws has rendered almost all of Miami-Dade County off-limits to sex offenders with young victims. The feds say they’re not allowed in public housing. The state says they can’t live within 1,000 feet of a day care center, park, playground, or school. The county says they can’t live within 2,500 feet of a school. In a place so densely populated, forbidden zones are everywhere. And in the narrow slivers of permitted space, affordable apartments with open-minded landlords are nearly impossible to come by. Read more…

Character Work

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Alison Fields | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,214 words)

My dad moved out of the house on January 1, 1990. He’d packed up his cartons of books, records, and stacks of old issues of the New Yorker from the shelves built specifically to house them. This left his study, my favorite room in the house, vacant. I’d largely accepted my parents’ separation and forthcoming divorce. I wasn’t Haley Mills. I had neither a twin nor a plan to get them back together. I don’t remember exactly how I managed his departure, except the first night he was gone — really gone — I lay in bed reading Anne Rice novels and listening to the Beatles on my Walkman, thinking my mother’s claims of “Nothing will change, everything will be the same, and we’ll be all right” had a fine whiff of bullshit about them.

Dad’s apartment was on the second story of a recently renovated building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, full of other divorced parents and distracted weekend children. When the custodial schedule put me there, I spent a lot of time wandering our then-empty downtown. I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica. There I pined after rosaries as jewelry, accidentally stole candles, and visited with the priest. He was a good-natured and quiet man, who perhaps recognized that even pious adolescents don’t spend whole Saturdays alone wandering around a drafty church if they’re even remotely happy. I’m sure I needed answers to a lot of the Big Metaphysical Questions life had served up the past few months, but mostly we talked about the Grand Central Oyster Bar and why my nascent atheism would be a real barrier to entry if I ever wanted to convert to Catholicism.

One Saturday, Dad took my younger sister on one of those guilt-fueled, divorced-parent shopping benders. When she returned, flush with toys, new stereo equipment, and a pair of hamsters, Dad handed me a blank check to take to the public library and pay my king’s ransom in overdue fees. I filled it out at the circulation desk under the twitching eye of the upstairs librarian. On the way out the door, I caught a glance of a yellow flyer that read AUDITIONS TODAY: YOUTH THEATER COMPANY SEEKS YOUNG ACTORS. Finally, I thought, a reason not to find God.

I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica.

I hadn’t curled my hair, put on lip gloss, nor prepared a song from Les Miserables that was hopelessly out of my vocal range and life experience. But I needn’t have worried; I made the company in about 30 seconds. I was flattered and impressed with myself. I didn’t even have to act. They could just see the talent emanating right off of me. The director said she’d see me at orientation the next week at the theater — your new home away from home! Afterward, I stood on the sidewalk across from Dad’s apartment building, January sleet silvering down on me, and glanced up at the basilica. I thought, That poor priest is going to have to find someone else to talk to.

My mother took me to the information session. Unlike my father, who’d met news of my professional theater career with a “Great job, bud” and a nod back to the golf game, Mom found the whole turning your kids into professional actors pitch suspicious at best. I couldn’t figure out what her problem was. Sure, the audition process was unconventional. The theater, in name only, was a filthy warehouse filled with giant spiders and dingy whitewashed brick, with ancient wooden floors so bowed and worn you could pass notes through the cracks to the cellar. The next production was “an Irish play, you know, for St. Paddy’s Day” that had yet to be written seven weeks out from opening. My fellow young thespians were mostly the homeschooled children of hippie parents, and a handful of tough girls with skinhead boyfriends, lipstick the color of bruises, and pack-a-day smoking habits at 13. My closest peer was coincidentally the daughter of my father’s divorce attorney. I couldn’t exactly figure out what she was doing there, but I was glad she was around. Driving me down the derelict alley to rehearsal the first time, my mother was alarmed at the scruffy day-drunks relieving themselves against the wall across the street. I thought it was bohemian, you know, kind of punk rock. Though I would never have said that aloud because the tough girls would have punched me in the arm and called me a poser.

Mom thought it was possible the owners were running some kind of elaborate con. I was sure I was not being conned. “I mean, they haven’t asked me for a dime,” I said. “Yeah, well, they’re charging me several thousand dimes for you to be involved in all this,” she replied. I felt kind of guilty about that, but I also knew that because of the weirdness of the divorce she probably wouldn’t say no.
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The Meaning of “Aquemini”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 18: Big Boi (L) and Andre 3000 of Outkast perform at the Treasure Island Music Festival on Treasure Island on October 18, 2014 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Along with a cluster of other seminal albums that debuted in 1998, Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast’s masterful third album Aquemini turns 20 this year. I was in Memphis then, a high school student living at my mother’s house. To me, Atlanta was like a sophisticated older cousin — still country, but sexier, with more polish and definitely more lights. Many of my friends’ dreams were there, and when I listen to Aquemini now, it still sounds like dreams, a frenetic, far-out ambition, and a real love of home and roots. At The Undefeated, Atlanta-based writer Dennis Norris considers how the album defined the contemporary South and anticipated the pop music landscape of today. 

The idea of having pride in the South has for a long time generally been associated with whiteness. “Southern pride” conjures images of Confederate flags and a longing for a time when the states below the Mason-Dixon could own black people. But what about black Southerners? What do we have pride in? Growing up in Mississippi, I didn’t find any pride in my elementary school named after Jefferson Davis. I didn’t find pride in the Dixie flag fluttering above my head every time I drove through downtown Jackson.

Outkast showed us our reflections as seen in the shiny spokes of Volkswagens and Bonnevilles, Chevrolets and Coupe de Villes bouncing off Old National Highway potholes. They reminded us of the life we could find pride in. The Bayou Classics. The Essence Festivals. Music crafted with the same love and care that the Gullah use to weave a perfectly made handbasket. That perfect slap of a domino smacking the table to drown out the sound of stomachs growling waiting for the ribs to get off the grill.

While we were fighting for monuments of oppressive Southern pride to get torn down, Outkast was constructing a monument to the beauty in the ugliness around us. Aquemini was a love letter to home — a reminder that we were imperfect kings and queens in flip-flops and socks. Aquemini‘s promise was that, if we turned our love inward toward the place that raised us, then we’d see the beauty around us. Because excellence is only magnified by the obstacles overcome to get there. I say, to have a choice to be who you wants to be / It’s left up-a to me / And my momma n’em told me. That’s why Outkast including that Source clip at the end of the album is so powerful. They stuck the landing.

But the acclaim of the album goes beyond mere critical ratings. It’s no coincidence that the years following Aquemini would bring about an era of Southern dominance over hip-hop culture. And while the cultural shift changed the course of the national music scene, it also transformed Atlanta. The city of Atlanta, complete with a black woman as mayor and possibly a black woman governor on the way, embraces hip-hop as much as any other large city in the country. From T.I. and 2 Chainz with restaurants seemingly on every corner to Big Boi and Gucci Mane performing during halftime at Hawks gamesand even the Atlanta United soccer team embracing the likes of Waka Flocka to get the crowd hype. This is an Atlanta that understands the beauty of Southern culture. This is a country that sees the city and its blackness as a triumph worth emulating.

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25 Years of Vibe Magazine

Courtesy of VIBE

For Billboard,  Dan Charnas compiles an oral history of Vibe magazine, the first issue of which was published in September, 1993. Founded by Quincy Jones in partnership with Time Warner (and still publishing digitally today), the magazine represented a “new black aesthetic” that “championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future.”

Mimi Valdes (editorial assistant, 1993-94; assistant editor, 1994-95; style editor, 1997-98; executive editor, 1999-2002; editor-at-large, 2002-03; editor-in-chief, 2004-06): Jonathan [Van Meter, editor-in-chief 1992-93] booked Madonna and Dennis Rodman as a cover. And Eddie Murphy’s publicist was mad as hell that Madonna was getting the cover over Eddie. We all wanted Eddie over Madonna, so we were upset about it too. When [word of the cover choice] started to get out in the industry, we all felt the need to save Vibe’s reputation.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (senior editor/writer, 1992-96): I said [to Jonathan], “The staff needs to have a conference. People are really not happy about this.”

Van Meter: I said, “This isn’t The Village Voice. We’re not unionized. You can’t come in here representing the staff.”

Valdes: We were all standing by waiting for Scott to give us the go-ahead to come in. When Jonathan saw us, he got really upset.

Van Meter: I felt like I was losing control. And I said [to Scott], “You’re fired.” People in the hallways started crying. Mimi Valdes was screaming as if she’d just found out her mother was shot and killed. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I made it worse.”

Poulson-Bryant: He came to my office: “You’re not fired. Look, we’ll have a staff meeting.”

Quincy Jones: I was staying away from editorial policy. I got involved when Jonathan put the Beastie Boys on the cover and told me he was following up with Dennis Rodman and Madonna. He had already shot it!

Van Meter: I guess Quincy was getting a lot of shit from people for putting the Beastie Boys on the cover, and when he sees the Madonna cover, he went crazy.

Jones: I said, “Over my dead fucking body! That’s the way you blow an urban magazine.”

Van Meter: Madonna was queen. You can’t not put her on the cover. I couldn’t conceive of killing the best cover story we had done so far. [Quincy and I] ended up having a fight on the phone, and I smashed my phone into a thousand pieces and cleared off the top of my desk onto the floor. I think I said, “I quit.” I went home. And then the phone calls started. Everyone tried to get Quincy to change his mind. Even Madonna called me at home. She was really pissed.

Jones: I called Madonna and I said, “I’m telling you as a friend: it’s not personal, but you cannot pander with an urban magazine this early.” She said, “Quincy Jones, you and I can take over the world if we want to. See you around, pal.” I haven’t talked to her since then.

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The Underground Magazine That Helped Shape Portland, Oregon

Snipehunt 1994, cover by Sean Tejaratchi, courtesy of Portland Mercury

It’s hard to imagine now, but Portland used to be a tiny ignored little city that a lot of bands didn’t want to play and national media largely ignored. Those were sweet times. In that relative cultural isolation, a poster artist named Mike King started a music fanzine named Snipehunt to both harness and serve Portland’s small arts community. Enlarged and fully realized by editor Kathy Molloy, her volunteer team designed, edited, published, and distributed the magazine themselves. Snipehunt had a devoted following and helped launch the careers of its then-unknown freelance writers. Then in 1997, it abruptly quit publishing, and Molloy ghosted everyone and moved to British Columbia.

In an oral history for the Portland Mercury, local writer Joshua James Amberson goes on his own snipe hunt for Molloy, and he lets those who were involved with her artistically piece together the magazine’s creation and influence. One artist called Molloy “the punk mayor of Portland.” Molloy remains a mystery who, like her magazine, cannot be found online. Thanks to Amberson, Snipehunt now sort of has web presence.

The scene that inspired Snipehunt featured bands that weren’t getting media coverage and writers and artists without an outlet. The magazine soon became a breeding ground for local creators, and its contributor list is a peek at the kind of local talent and energy emerging during that time: novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, current Portland city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, filmmaker and installation artist Vanessa Renwick, local writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell, novelist Rene Denfeld, Crap Hound and Liar Town creator Sean Tejaratchi. For many of the contributors, Snipehunt was their first publication, their first opportunity to regularly try out their ideas on an audience.

A typical issue of Snipehunt had interviews with local and national bands, pages of comics from independent artists, scene reports from West Coast cities, oddball prose pieces, political action coverage, and pages of reviews—albums, zines, live shows, films, and books. It was a broad take on DIY culture, loosely based in the punk scene but covering artists and subjects far beyond the imposed limitations of that world.

With the magazine’s history largely absent from the internet, its name unfamiliar to the majority of current Portlanders, and physical evidence of its existence difficult to come by, I reached out to a couple dozen of its contributors to provide me—and the rest of new Portland—with a much-needed history lesson.

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Still Celebrating the Greatest Day in Hip-Hop

Photo by Gary Gershoff/MediaPunch/IPX

In 1958, Esquire photographer Art Kane took one of the most famous photos in music history: 57 jazz artists gathered in front of a Harlem brownstone. The group included Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young, and Sonny Rollins. Forty years later, the editorial team at XXL magazine celebrated Kane’s image by having legendary photographer Gordon Parks recreate it with 177 hip-hop artists and related musicians. Where jazz was once the primary voice of black America and a pinnacle of artistic innovation, hip-hop had taken its place and remade the world in the process.

For Red Bull Daily, Michael A. Gonzales describes what it was like that day in 1998 and how this historic photo shoot came together. A Harlem kid and longtime hip-hop fan himself, Gonzales has been writing about music for decades, and he was the one who suggested Parks for the project. So many hip-hop luminaries converged that day — Pete Rock, Rakim, Phife from A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang Clan, Russell Simmons, Grandmaster Flash, Queen Penn, The Beatnuts, Slick Rick, Da Brat, Mobb Deep, Bran Nubian, Del Tha Funkee Homo Sapien, Wyclef Jean, Souls of Mischief, and on and on. The day was epic.

While most people knew who Gordon Park was, I wondered if they understood that the soft-spoken and cultural warrior who had snapped shots of Malcolm X and Grace Kelly, was a regal fighter from Fort Scott, Kansas who had also come, much like themselves, from nothing, and shaped himself into an icon. Though separated by more than a few generations, Parks understood these “kids,” knew their pain, shared their desire to be heard and seen by the masses. Parks recognized that these new jack revolutionaries had selected rhymes and rhetoric, turntables and technology as their “weapons of choice” in the same way he had chosen the camera.

Suddenly, people started clapping loudly. Turning around, I saw rapper (Reverend) Run, formerly of Run–D.M.C., walking up the street, just in time. As the rowdiness soon turned to calm, a strange hush came over the block. As Harry Allen said earlier that great day, “What this says is what I’ve always believed, is that black culture is a continuum of black people: of our will, of our will to live and to be heard. That is what today represents. Everybody is going to get together for one picture and what it says is, ‘I was here, these are my brothers and sisters and this is what we did. We changed the world.’”

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Falling in Love with Chicago at Night: An Interview with Jessica Hopper

University of Texas Press / Author photo by David Sampson

Ashley Naftule | Longreads | September 2018 | 9 minutes (2,464 words)

It takes a writer of considerable talent to gear-shift from meditations on mortality to goofy stoner daydreams (and not give the reader whiplash while she’s doing it). It’s a tonal trick Jessica Hopper pulls off over and over again in Night Moves, a poignant (and often hilarious) memoir of her time in Chicago in the early aughts. On one page, Hopper is solemnly reflecting, “You make peace with death’s swift manners and it raises you up”; on another, she’s wondering what it’d be like to run over a great poet with a dune buggy. Ruminations on aging, community, love, and friendships stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sharp, madcap anecdotes, like when a stranger at a nightclub says Hopper resembles “a kabuki donkey” on the dancefloor, or when a pair of socialites at a music festival are aghast at how she’s eating an apple directly off the core. The poetry and absurdity of existence are constant companions in the pages of Night Moves.

The veteran author’s easy grace with the written word comes as no surprise when you take her long career into account. Starting off as a D.I.Y. zine writer, Hopper quickly rose through the ranks to become a freelancer and contributor to publications like SPIN, Grand Royal, Rolling Stone, GQ, Punk Planet, and The Chicago Reader. She’s been an editor at Pitchfork, Rookie, MTV News, and the University of Texas Press. Her knack for juggling incisive cultural criticism with personal reflections and wry humor can be seen in her 2015 collection of music writing, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.

While music comes up often in Night Moves (“Loving the Smiths is one thing, but loving Morrissey is another thing entirely,” Hopper writes), it’s a book that’s more concerned with what happens just outside of and right next to the rituals of listening to records and going to shows. It’s a book about long bike rides to venues, the sadness of watching friends get blitzed on cocaine at dance nights, the joys of holing up in an apartment and reading back issues of The New Yorker while the city freezes outside. Hopper’s book is a testament to the pleasures of bumming around, the ecstasy of slowing down and enjoying the neighborhood and your friends before career and family and all the other milestones of adulthood start accelerating your timeline. Read more…