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Remembering Mark Hollis of Talk Talk

Mark Hollis of Talk Talk performs on stage at Vredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands, 27th March 1986. Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns

Songwriter and Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis died in late February. He was 64. I would love to say that I knew the man’s work beyond the 1984 synth-laden hit “It’s My Life,” but like many people, that was not the case. Knowing how much extraordinary music is available to audiophiles, as yet unheard, can be a concern as much as a comfort. It’s wonderful when a new star appears in your musical horizon, but how many are yet to be seen? Anyway, it’s doubly sad when an artist’s death is what leads you to marvelous art.

I’ve spent the last week remedying the situation, listening to Talk Talk’s phenomenal last two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. But it’s in writing about Mark Hollis’ only solo album that I choose to appreciate his legacy.

In retrospect, the 1998 album Mark Hollis was a final musical statement. It sounds like one anyway. Hollis used it to continue deconstructing the pop form that made him famous. If we give ourselves over to the album as a listener, we become travelers through its emotional topography, ultimately arriving at our preordained destination. Mark Hollis is a record of transition. Not transitional, moving from one form of expression to another, but rather describing a transition out of a state of being. At the time of the album’s release, Hollis was a father, and in interviews prioritized his familial, not professional, life. This is the record where that change takes place.

There’s been some talk about Hollis and his former band pioneering “post rock,” once a couple hit records freed him from financial constraints. Since music genres tend to be a critic’s constraint as much as a descriptor, I feel neither qualified nor motivated to talk about which musical basket is best to contain them. Talk Talk certainly made a remarkable, if unsellable, album with Spirit of Eden—an unusual use of a record label’s blank check—and then promptly stopped touring. Laughing Stock was fruit from the same orchard, and marked the close of the band’s career. The two albums certainly defied expectation, even as they pointed to a new form of expression.

Similarly, Mark Hollis is often beyond category: “The Colour of Spring” has a lyric piano which embodies composer Erik Satie’s simple melodicism; “Watershed”s muted trumpet and tubby string bass are an analog of the modal jazz of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; the muttering woodwinds in “A Life (1895-1915)”—expressing themselves like intrusive thoughts—are reminiscent of Robert Wyatt’s 1974 progressive masterpiece Rock Bottom; and the asymmetrical drumming on “The Gift” predicts the polyrhythms of David Bowie’s swansong Blackstar.

Mark Hollis is delicate but durable, beguiling without needing to be catchy, sparse but harmonically dense, and occasionally dissonant even though it’s mostly unamplified. “The minute you work with just acoustic instruments,” Hollis said in a rare interview about the record, “by virtue of the fact that they’ve already existed for hundreds of years, they can’t date.”

“I wanted to make a record where you can’t hear when it has been made,” he said elsewhere.

The music on the album is intertwined with silence. It is powerful in its quietude. It starts with silence, then ambient sound of the outside world. The first note isn’t played for 20 seconds. Hollis sings, but not in the forward, mixed-loud way of a decade before: “[A]t times,” he said, “the voice is little more than a thin parting of the air in the studio; the words are stretched out, torn apart, boiled down to consonant acoustics.” What he sings are tone poems. The lyrics are imagistic, sparse. “Forget our fate,” he begins.

The pedlar sings

Set up to sell my soul

I’ve lived a life of wealth to bring

And yet I’ll gaze

The colour of spring

Immerse in that one moment

Left in love with everything

“We only used two microphones,” Hollis explained about the album’s production. “We searched a long time to find the right balance. We placed the musicians in different locations—that’s the way the sound and the resonance are built up. Recording in its purest form, really, like in the old days. To me the ultimate ambition is to make music that doesn’t have a use-by date, that goes beyond your own time.”

Hollis is referring to the way music was recorded before the advent of magnetic tape, which would allow for overdubbing, or recording other parts later on the same track. For the first half of the 20th century, songs and albums were cut “live,” with the full band playing for the entire take. No one could go back and add a part, since the performances were being committed to a wax cylinder or cut to a master disc. In many ways, these limitations are salutary: the musicians must play together, blending their dynamics. Once the “balance mix” was achieved—that is, the relative distance of instruments from the microphone, the loudest placed farther away—all that was left was the performance.

There’s another effect available only through a live recording with minimal miking: the listener is put into a physical space. Unlike a compilation of close-miked instruments arranged together to make a song, the contours of the room are communicated in a live recording. Listen to an old Louis Armstrong song. You can hear the room on his trumpet because his volume kept him away from the microphone. Hollis used this technique as well. It doesn’t just sound like a group of musicians playing together; it puts the listener in the space in which the music is being made. We are not so much hearing Mark Hollis as witnessing it.

“You’ve got the whole geography of sound within which all the instruments exist,” he said about the album. “If you listen hard enough, you can actually hear where my head’s moving in position as I’m singing. Because it does exist in a real room space.”

The cover of Mark Hollis is a photograph of a Sardinian Easter bread made to represent the Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God. “I like the way something appears to come out of his head,” Hollis told a Dutch interviewer in 1998. “It makes me think of a fountain of ideas. Also the manner how the eyes are positioned fascinates me. When I saw the picture for the first time I had to laugh, but there’s something very tragic about it at the same time.”  

“Behold the Lamb of God,” the apostle John said of Jesus, “which taketh away the sin of the world.” In the New Testament, Christ made himself a blood sacrifice to God—becoming the new Paschal Lamb—expiating the sins of future generations. Without lugging in the theological baggage, I think Hollis is making a similar offering on his self-titled album: sacrificing his pop star identity. “Come my love,” he sings on ‘Watershed,’ kick the line.”

Afield lies nothing but squalor to turn on

A song asale

Should have said so much

Makes it harder

The more you love

Gladdening eyes

Through slur

Emerge crucified

Hollis granted a few interviews to promote his solo album, but refused to tour in support of it. “There won’t be any gig,” he said, “not even at home in the living room. This material isn’t suited to play live. And I choose my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it, but I can’t go on tour and be a good dad at the same time.”

Westward Bound” points in this direction.

Opaline through her hair

Born on an April tide

Glowing in the wonder of our first child

There my promise is

 

A spur

A rein

 

 

Migrate

Job on the threshing line

Mute i walk

Idle ground

Westward bound

Pop stardom provides many wonders, but it demands much. Making more successful albums brings increased pressure to be even more successful. Getting better at touring only keeps you on the road. There’s an inherent rootlessness in belonging to the world. Mark Hollis gave us his last public statement, and then went to live the last two decades of his life as a husband and father. He made a choice that was right for him, even if it wasn’t the choice some of his fans wanted. What we are left with is Mark Hollis.

***

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

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bill Shine in the Oval Office
White House Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine, who resigned as co-president of Fox News in 2017. (Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Jen Gann, Christine H. Lee, John Birdsall, and Anna Callaghan.

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How To Hide An Empire

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Bridey Heing | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,528 words)

What do we think of when we think about the United States and the country’s history? This seemingly simple question rests at the heart of Northwestern University Professor Daniel Immerwahr’s new book, How To Hide An Empire. Immerwahr posits that, for the vast majority of people living in the contiguous United States, our understanding of our own country is fundamentally flawed. This is for one central reason: We omit the millions of people and large territorial holdings outside of the mainland that have, since the founding of the country, also had a claim to the flag.

In his book, Immerwahr traces US expansion from the days of Daniel Boone to our modern network of military bases, showing how the United States has always and in a variety of ways been an empire. As early as the 1830s, the United States was taking control of uninhabited islands; by 1898, the United States was having public debates about the merits of imperial power; by the end of World War II, the United States held jurisdiction over more people overseas — 135 million — than on the mainland — 132 million. While the exact overseas holdings and the standing of territories have shifted with time, what has not changed is the troubling way the mainland has ignored, obscured, or dismissed the rights of, atrocities committed against, and the humanity of the people living in these territories. When we see US history through the lens of these territories and peoples, the story looks markedly and often upsettingly different from what many people are told. Read more…

Maintaining Mental Health as a Rescuer in the Grand Tetons

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As a climbing ranger in Grand Teton National Park, Drew Hardesty is one of those charged with rescuing lost and injured hikers, runners, and climbers. When things are good, he’s putting his life on the line, dangling 50 feet below a helicopter, harnessed to a survivor. When things get bad, he’s one of the ones who brings home the bodies. When we think of outdoor adventure gone wrong, we often think of the victims — those who died on a climb, on a trek, on a run. At Outside, Hardesty shares a little about how deeply death on the mountains affects the rescuers and how they cope with repeated trauma.

He had been on his share of body recoveries. “Sure, man,” he said. “I get it, I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.”

“This one was different,” I said. “Two women on the ledge. It was obvious they had injuries incompatible with life. We had to climb up through blood in the chimney to find the last gal. I’ve picked up plenty of others—friends even—but this one felt … different.”

Karl Marlantes describes conversations like these in his 2011 book What It Is Like to Go to War. Marlantes was a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam and noted that none of his men ever wanted to talk to the chaplain, because the chaplain had never seen what they had seen. But another soldier, the sergeant, was in his third tour in Vietnam. And one by one, the men would steal back to his tent to talk.

Mental health is like physical health. Both can suffer trauma. Each can take weeks, months, or years to recover from. Sometimes we never recover at all. Mental trauma can affect different people on the same rescue or recovery in very different ways. We may walk through terrain where we conducted a body recovery or see someone in a crowd who you’d swear was the person from the body bag. Bob Irvine, a Teton climbing ranger from 1963 to 1995, says he can’t walk through the range without seeing places where people have died. On the flip side, another climbing ranger, George Montopoli, who began his summer Teton climbing career in 1977, told me not long ago that for every place he sees a body recovery, he sees another place where we made a rescue. For a time, I too could only look at the mountains and see death and injury. I know countless widows around these mountains.

The alpinist Will Gadd recently told me: “If you only see death in the mountains, then you’ll never go there.” I know this is how we are wired. We embrace things that nourish us and give us joy, and we avoid things that cause pain and sadness. But the mountains bring about joy, and they bring about sadness. They remind us of the eternal link between life and death—we can’t have one without the other. Understanding this connection is fundamental to our own resiliency. So is talking with others who hold similar experiences. This is often referred to as peer-to-peer counseling. Another crucial part of the path is finally shedding the stigma of mental health and suffering.

In the Tetons, at the end of a rescue or body recovery, we’d often wander over to the porch at the large cabin in the meadow just south of Jenny Lake. There’d be a bottle or two on the porch, but often it would go unopened. We’d look past one another, tell a joke about death, look up at Teewinot, listen to Cottonwood Creek and the rustle of wind through the leaves. Sometimes we’d tell stories. What was important was that each of us had been there; we all, in another way, had blood on our hands—we had all shared the same experiences. While always offered, we didn’t need the chaplain. We needed each other.

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Home Cooking: A Reading List

Getty Images / Katie Kosma

From second grade to eighth grade, cereal was my portal to the United States. Whenever my dad flew from where we lived in Indonesia to the U.S. on business, he’d bring a near-empty suitcase so he could fill it with Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Captain Crunch, and whatever other colorful boxes caught his eye. When he came home, my brother and I would deliberate over which to open first, rationing ourselves. I treasured each bowl enough that once, when a gecko flung out of the box along with a kaleidoscopic pour of fruity pebbles, I simply brought the creature outside before dipping my spoon into the bowl.

The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less I remembered about life in the United States, even though others reminded me that the U.S. was “home.” Whenever I ate cereal, I imagined an alternate version of myself. The girl I envisioned lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brick house like that of my cousins. She wore outfits from Limited Too, a store I’d visited once during summer vacation. She somehow didn’t have braces or wear glasses. In imagining what I might be like if I lived in the U.S., I began to construct my own version of the country based on summer visits and foggy memories of early childhood. As a result, the U.S. became more artifice than reality, a place I imagined might absolve me of my complicated feelings about identity.

But my illusions about the U.S. were as sugary and insubstantial as the cereal I associated with the country; they dissolved as soon as I moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school. Once there, I realized that even though I spoke the language and looked the part, I felt different from my peers. As much as I wanted to feel at ease in the U.S., I found myself torn between the reality of the place where I lived – all cookie-cutter homes and gleaming aisles of grocery stores – and where I’d grown up. I felt homesick for Indonesia, a place I could never truly call home, privilege making thorny my presence there.

For years, I buried the feelings of loss that came along with leaving Indonesia and instead tried to forge different lives in the states I’ve lived since then. But, like the bowls of cereal of my past that once brought me back to a country I’d left behind, I was given a piece of Kopiko after a meal a couple years ago, and the even the sight of the wrapper was enough to transport me to my old house, one shaded by a rainbow eucalyptus trees and robust flower blooms. Food can be nostalgia embodied, a means of traveling to a place you wish you could return to, a way of bringing to life a memory. Candy in hand, I remembered wandering aisles of the outdoor market, where sounds became a kind of song: vendors chattering, pans clanging, someone calling nasi goreng! nasi goreng!, live birds chirruping from a small cage, knives whisking over metal sharpeners, chickens scuttling around table legs looking for scraps, and motorcycles chortling to life before whining down the road. For sale were tables of produce – spiky round rambutan, bundles of greens, starfruit stacked in precarious piles, shrink-wrapped mango, mounds of durian – slick bodies of fish gutted and chickens plucked clean of their feathers. Nothing went to waste. Blood was boiled down until it congealed, and intestines were arranged on plates like long tendrils of spaghetti.

Perhaps food isn’t a permanent means of returning to anywhere, but a taste can be enough to bring you home. In the following essays, writers interrogate the complicated pasts of place through food, express nostalgia for long-gone homes, and find belonging by sharing meals. As for me, when I put the Kopiko on my tongue, thousands of miles away, the blend of coffee and sugar resonated bittersweet, as it always had, before melting away.

1. I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab. (Bill Addison, September 15, 2016, Eater)

I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

Back in Maryland after time away, Bill Addison digs into a pile of local crab while ruminating on the history, preparation techniques, best places to eat, and future of crab in Baltimore.

2. NASA is learning the best way to grow food in space (Sarah Scoles, June 6, 2018, Popular Science)

Sure, astronauts can gaze down at Earth and see its most beautiful spots—literally all of them—every 90 minutes. But those places are always out of reach, reminders of how far away sea level is. Having something nearby that photosynthesizes might cheer the crew.

A complex set of factors such as humidity, mold, and a host of other ecosystem variants makes growing plants in space a challenge. But far away from the comforts of home, astronauts have begun cultivating zinnias and lettuce on board, thanks to the work of scientist Gioia Massa and her team, who are part of an experiment called Veggie.

3. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food (Shing Yin Khor, February 27, 2018, Catapult)

In this beautiful illustrated essay, Shing Yin Khor expresses how difficult it is for her to communicate emotions verbally. She instead uses food as a means to share feelings of disappointment, love towards others and, eventually, love toward herself as well.

4. Eating to America (Naz Riahi, November 2018, Longreads)

Two years after the Iran-Iraq war ended, and six months after her father, a political prisoner, was executed, Naz Riahi and her mother, Shee Shee, move to the U.S. There, homesick and grieving, Riahi finds happiness and hope through food.

The food sat inside me, taking over spaces that had been full of worry just minutes before and making the worry go away.

5. An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew (Bryan Washington, February 20, 2019, The New Yorker)

I first tasted gochujang because of a boy. We were in a busted strip mall, just west of Houston’s I-610 loop. A lot of things were changing in my life, and I hadn’t been home—home home—in a minute, and we were too broke to go most places.

Though he ends up splitting up with his partner, Bryan Washington’s love for soondubu jjigae remains strong. Washington recounts his efforts to figure out how to make the stew on his own, and eventually brings the recipe home.

6. The Food of My Youth (Melissa Chadburn, July 9, 2018, The New York Review)

In search of a better future, Melissa Chadburn’s mother brings her family to northern California, where they “lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.” At fifteen, Chadburn is taken to a group home where her hunger is satiated, but she is treated as a case number rather than a child.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home.

7. Chop Suey Nation (Ann Hui, June 21, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

After a blogger wrote a post called “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo,” Ann Hui, influenced by her family, for whom “food was an obsession,” sets out to drive across Canada to figure out how the restaurant owners decided to open shop in such an isolated location and why there’s a Chinese restaurant in nearly every Canadian town. Hui wrote a book, Chop Suey Nation, based on her article.

The name “chop suey” translates more or less into “assorted mix,” and refers to a repertoire of dishes mostly developed in North America in the mid-20th century. A mix of ideas both East and West and, to my eyes, frozen in time.

8. Farm to Table (Laura Reiley, April 13, 2016, Tampa Bay Times)

This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

Skeptical of the chalkboard menus touting local, organic ingredients in front of nearly every restaurant in Tampa, Laura Reiley stops at farms, contacts vendors, and “for fish claims that seemed suspicious, I kept zip-top baggies in my purse and tucked away samples” in order to determine the extent to which restaurant owners lie about obtaining ingredients from sources close to home.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

At Glen Mills Schools, the Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Glen Mills, just outside of Philly, is considered the “Harvard of reform schools,” all brick buildings and grassy quads. It has a stellar athletics program that sends players to the NFL, and has served as a model for reform schools across the country. And as Lisa Gartner uncovers for the Philadelphia Inquirer, it’s built on serious physical violence against students enabled by the barest training and standards for staff that are selected for brawn rather than skill.

According to sworn testimony from Glen Mills’ in-house trainer, Carmelo Mustaccio, the school had not devised, let alone demonstrated, specific techniques for properly restraining students.

Instead, Mustaccio recertified Glen Mills’ counselors each year by showing them a PowerPoint, demonstrating “gently” lowering others to the ground, and then giving out an open-book, multiple-choice quiz.

“Very rarely” did anyone fail the 15-question quiz, Mustaccio said. The third question asks: “Which of the following does Glen Mills NOT allow when addressing student behavior?” The options are “verbal ridicule,” “poking and slapping,” “kicking and choking,” or “all of the above.”

The counselors graded one another’s papers. They could miss three questions and still pass. If someone failed the quiz, they stayed after class while the trainer went over the right answers, Mustaccio said. Then they took the same quiz again.

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The Real Danger on the Promenade

Illustration by Cat Finnie

Steffan Triplett | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,080 words)

 

The place that held us together was dying. Maybe it wasn’t the place itself, but our perception of it. Amid the sulk of that summer of 2011, we tried to replicate our friendship from years before, and that meant doing things we had always done. So, I picked up my friend Elisabeth from her house, like I always had, and we drove to a meet-up destination, this time, a deli, like we always did. We stood in the parking lot until every member of the group showed up.

Even though I was warned she was coming, my stomach lurched when Sara’s teal truck drove into the parking lot. That lurch turned into anger as she left her truck and I saw the sweatshirt she was wearing, one I had given to her as a gift. I wondered, Did she do this on purpose? It was like seeing a ghost. We piled into two cars.

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Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela

Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincon / Tachiraptor admirabilis illustration by Maurílio Oliveira / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Valery | Longreads | February 2019 | 18 minutes (5,011 words)

 

— Orocual tar pit, northeastern Venezuela, 2007 C.E.

Ascanio Rincón was standing on a veritable fossil paradise when one of his students brought to his attention a tooth that was sticking out through the dirt. The site presented innumerable shards of prehistoric bones that had been fortuitously unearthed by a steamroller digging a trench for a pipeline. After assessing the value of the site, the young paleontologist stood his ground to protect the tar pit where millions of fossils have been preserved by the asphalt, eventually forcing the workers to redraw the course of the oil duct. When he cleaned around the tooth that was embedded in the trench wall, he found that it was attached to the skull of a creature that the steamroller had missed only by inches. He looked at the eye socket in disbelief: “A saber-toothed tiger was looking at me in the eye,” he recalls. This specimen would constitute a groundbreaking discovery for Rincón and a landmark for the field of paleontology in Venezuela and at large.

To this day, Richard Parker — named after the tiger in Life of Pi — remains one of the most remarkable findings in the country and one of Rincón’s dearest fossils. The sabre-toothed tiger has shed light on a migratory wave during the Ice Age that the scientific community previously had not been aware of. Due to the current mass migration of people from Venezuela, Rincón is one of the only scientists left in the country tapping into the overwhelming wealth of fossils yet to be uncovered at the Orocual tar pit. Like most of his colleagues, the eight students he had trained have all left the country, joining 3 million other Venezuelans fleeing the rampant economic crisis, creating what has been described by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees as the most dire refugee crisis on the continent. Rincón is an endling — the only extant individual of a species — in his field: the last vertebrate paleontologist in Venezuela.* Read more…

The Problem with Nature Writing

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

Nature writing is a prestigious genre graced with such legendary practitioners as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unfortunately, the genre is no longer that popular. For The Believer, nature writer Jenny Price shows what the sprawling Los Angeles Metropolitan Area reveals about the genre’s failure to connect with modern readers, and how we can rethink our relationship with nature.

People frequently ask Price, “Is there nature in L.A.?” Many outsiders incorrectly claim that L.A. has no history, beauty, depth, culture, or pedestrians. Their inability to recognize nature in the city stems from the same core problem that plagues Price’s genre: the idea that nature is something separate from, or untouched by, humanity. “To define nature as the wild things apart from cities,” Price writes, “is one of the great fantastic American stories.”

And it’s one of the great fantastic American denials. On Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills in the Bel Air area, in the Santa Monica Mountain foothills, the TV producer Aaron Spelling has built what’s widely publicized as the starship of Hollywood homes—a 56,550-square-foot French limestone mansion with 123 rooms, with two rooms for wrapping gifts and a rose garden on top of one of four garages. Here are two generally ignored facts about Spelling’s famous homestead. First, it is a house of nature: Spelling built it, has maintained it, and stocks it with fantastic quantities of oil, stone, metals, dirt, water, and wood (a likely forest’s worth of wrapping paper, to begin with). And second, there are very few maples on Mapleton Drive. Maybe maples grew here in abundance once, and maybe not. Either way, the street enjoys the idea of maple trees, which conjures a bucolic refuge above the smog, noise, and torrential activity of the megalopolis below. Call it maple mojo. Smaller manses of nature line the rest of Mapleton Drive as well as the neighboring streets Parkwood, Greendale, Brooklawn, Beverly Glen. No parks, no woods, no dales, no brooks, no glens. Just the mojo of wild nature.

Mapleton Drive showcases the denial intrinsic to the great American nature story. To say there’s no nature in cities is a convenient way of seeing if I like being a nature lover and environmentalist but don’t want to give up any of my stuff. We cherish nature as an idea of wildness while losing track of the real nature in our very houses. We flee to wild nature as a haven from high-tech industrial urban life, but refuse to see that we madly use and transform wild nature to sustain the exact life from which we seek retreat. We make sacred our encounters with wild nature but thereby desacralize all other encounters. Or in other words, if we cannot clearly understand cities and our lives within them unless we keep track of our connections to nature, still there may be some basic things we prefer not to see and understand.

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Hanif Abdurraqib on Loving A Tribe Called Quest

Hanif Abdurraqib by Kate Sweeney / University of Texas Press

Jonny Auping  | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,266 words)

Hanif Abdurraqib claims that he “wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest.” What he produced instead was much more powerful. Abdurraqib’s recently released book, Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, does provide a history of the revolutionary rap group, but more importantly it’s a memoir of listening and feeling, a deeply personal book unafraid to pair music criticism with intimate reflections.

A Tribe Called Quest debuted in 1990 with the album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, an eclectic layering of samples produced by the group’s de facto leader, Q-Tip, and rhymed over with quirky stories and confident punch lines. Their first three albums, all released by 1993, are considered hip-hop canon and three of the most influential albums of the past 30 years across any genre.

A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 comeback album seemed destined to debut amidst doomed circumstances. Phife Dawg, the group’s swaggering and quick-witted lyricist, had died of diabetes between the making of the album and it’s release. Three days before the album came out Donald Trump won a shocking presidential election. No singles had been released prior to We’ve Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, but it turned out to be powerful response to the politics of the time, a prophetic pushback against inequality, as well as a statement of the group’s place in popular culture. Pitchfork called the album, “the first time in their career that the entire group was at their peak.”

You could argue that Go Ahead In the Rain is the type of dream project that anyone who has ever felt immense fandom — or even love — for a particular music would want to write. It’s a tribute to a group, and who doesn’t enjoy explaining why their favorite should also be your favorite? But Abdurraqib earns the authority to actually pull it off, not just through his elegant writing but also by having the courage to use Tribe’s music to examine his own place in the world and reckon with what he discovered. Read more…