I came to inside a CAT scan machine. Not a revelation — I didn’t spring up and bang my bruised face against the cool metal of the medical marvel — but a recognition, a lugubrious return to my cognizance. I surmised I was in a hospital and, broken bones considered, that was a good place to be.
At least my trauma had a sense of humor. I couldn’t remember where I had been before landing inside the CAT scan machine, but I could tell you the song that had been rattling around my concussed head. It was Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
Inside the giant X-ray assessing the damage, I became aware that I was humming along to the song’s rhythmic chug. As the fog of my brain injury lifted, cueing the sharpening of the prickly sensations upon my skull, I eked the lyrics out of my memory: “Never meant to cause you any sorrow / never meant to cause you any pain.”
***
I cried the first time I heard “Purple Rain.” (This puts Prince in a broad category of musicians that runs the gamut from Television to Miles Davis to Taylor Swift.) It’s not only, in my opinion, Prince’s best song — a tough contest, to be sure, considering “Little Red Corvette” — but also one of the best songs ever written. That’s a rare achievement for a ballad, a genre whose slow-burning schmaltz tends to yank at the heartstrings rather than soar for the stars. “Purple Rain” does both, thanks to Prince’s lilting lyrics, addressing a hurt and harmed “you,” and that teasing, probing, undulating guitar solo. Prince carries us with him along every bent note, with the ebb and flow of a prom-night sway. “Purple Rain” is sad, tender, and triumphant, the sound of the most painful part of any relationship: the letting go.
“Purple Rain” is a letting go.
Price died on April 21, 2016, the same day I turned 23. He achieved a rare ubiquity in my adolescence: His iconography was everywhere and his music was nowhere. I knew he was once the “Artist Formerly Known As Prince,” the only satisfying pronunciation of the unpronounceable symbol that he performed under for a spate in the ’90s. His stare on the cover of “Purple Rain” — which has him festooned like some courtier draped around a fanged motorcycle as mist threatens to envelop him — told me everything I needed to know. Just ashis career was fraught with disputes with record labels, making for spotty access to his albums in the post-Napster era, Prince’s stare was a diva’s: pouty, churlish, provocative, longing, damaged.
My first exposure to Prince came in high school. It was around the time I started playing guitar. Looking for a hero, I found a 2004 video of him, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and others paying tribute to George Harrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, trading verses of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The version of the video I saw promised “the BEST guitar solo in music history.”
Prince’s histrionics begin after the final verse, his solo coloring the A minor chord with a chromatic descent. He takes a few bars, then a few more, barrelling over Petty’s attempts to steer the group back to the chorus. With his shirt unbuttoned to his midriff, Prince kneads the frets, thrusting the guitar into his groin and wielding its neck like a phallus. With each elongated note and ecstatic contortion of his lips, he scales a new climax, thrusting and weaving and longing. The panache with which he falls onto a cameraman only to rise again, still playing, would have been unworkable from any less of a showman, but Prince sells it with orgasmic euphoria. Harrison’s son beams at Prince from onstage. The band finishes. Prince tosses his instrument. The camera zooms out. The guitar goes up. It doesn’t come down.
This is a piece about abuse. This is a piece about kink and a piece about consent. This is a piece about the law. This is a piece about some powerful men whom I’ve never met, and it’s a piece about some nobody men whom I’ve loved. This is a piece about rough sex, about “rough sex,” and about how these two categories overlap and rub each other raw. This is a piece that was hard for me to write and may be hard for you to read. Most of all, this is a piece about why masculinity is fractured, and how women get caught in its cracks.
***
On May 7 of this year, The New Yorker dropped itsEric Schneiderman bombshell. The article, cowritten by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, gives voice to four women who detail their experiences with Schneiderman, the New York attorney general at the time, and accuse him of repeated instances of “nonconsensual physical violence.” Presented as a thread in the unfolding #MeToo fabric of sexual abuse allegations, this New Yorker piece told four women’s stories of how Schneiderman slapped and choked them, “frequently in bed and never with their consent.” Within a day, Schneiderman had resigned his office.
I read the Mayer and Farrow piece with a mounting sense of dread, horror, and recognition. I’ve never met Schneiderman; I’ve never met the victims who allege his abuse. But I knew what these women were describing because I too have felt something like those slaps, those stings, that choking fear. I understood the disconnect between thinking you were dating a “woke” man, a guy who understood in his guts the inequity of being a woman in this patriarchal world, and finding that this man was a rank, abusive hypocrite.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Schneiderman glows with an idealized aura of the East Coast elite. After graduating from Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Schniederman worked as a public interest attorney before turning to public office. In 1998, Schneiderman ran for a New York Senate seat in New York’s 31st district, which at the time stretched from the Upper West Side through Washington Heights and into Riverdale in the Bronx. Schneiderman won that election. He won the next election. And he won four times more, eventually parlaying his state congressional successes into his winning 2010 bid for New York attorney general. By all public accounts, Schneiderman used his power and his privilege as a champion for women and for the poor. You couldn’t draw a better poster boy for American liberalism.
I think I voted for Schneiderman. Why would I not? I was a progressive Democrat, and Schneiderman looked like an exciting candidate. Supporting both women’s access to abortion and victims of domestic violence, Schneiderman’s record on women’s issues was strong. Indeed, as state senator, Schneiderman introduced and passed the Strangulation Prevention Act of 2010, a bill that specifically categorized choking as a criminal felony. In his nicely cut, nondescript suits and silver fox hair, Schneiderman embodied consummate “woke” manliness, a guy who can execute a decent jump shot, then effortlessly quash dickish locker-room talk. Read more…
From 2008 to 2016, the amount that state Medicaid programs spend on prescription drugs almost doubled. NPR and the Center for Public Integrity wanted to understand why, so reporters Liz Essley Whyte, Joe Yerardi, and Alison Kodjak interviewed dozens of people and dug through hundreds of pages of data, financial disclosures, and court reports. Following the money and influence led back to the people benefitting the most: drug companies, and the doctors on their payrolls.
Pharmaceutical firms have tremendous incentives to be included on states’ lists: It makes doctors far more likely to prescribe their drug to Medicaid patients and can encourage other insurers to follow suit. To nab spots on the coveted lists, drugmakers often offer the states discounts known as “supplemental rebates,” called supplemental because they come on top of other price concessions required by federal law.
The drug committee meetings where those list decisions are made are a frequent destination for drug company representatives — and those who benefit from their largesse.
At the Texas meeting alone, 12 people advocated for the state’s list to include brand-name antipsychotic drugs, especially the expensive ones. Five of the speakers worked for drug companies. One represented a patient advocacy group that gets significant funding from drugmakers. At least four of the remaining six, including Patel, had ties to drugmakers despite claiming to represent themselves.
Another psychiatrist, Matthew Brams, praised injectable mental health drugs and mentioned that he had researched them in the past. But he did not disclose the more than $181,000 their makers Otsuka and Alkermes PLC paid him to speak about them over the past two years, according to the federal Open Payments database.
Patel, Brams, Otsuka and Alkermes did not respond to requests for comment.
Amy Winehouse’s last big concert was in Belgrade, a month before she died. This was June of 2011. Billed as the beginning of her comeback tour, the gig turned into one of her most infamous train wrecks: when she came on stage, she was drunk beyond the point of making sense, beyond the point of standing — tripping and crouching, sitting down to take off her shoes, leaning into her bass guitarist and holding his hand. The crowd started heckling her early and didn’t let up. “Sing!” they shouted. “Sing! Sing!”
Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.
The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”
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She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.
* * *
The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.
The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her.
At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.
There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.
Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart.
After Belgrade, one newscaster wondered: “Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem.” Another said: “This was supposed to be a comeback. And she TOTALLY. BLEW. IT.”
Something about her addiction made people angry. But that anger wasn’t simple. The woman who wrote, Amy just threw it all away, had a story of her own: As for accidentally OD’ing that’s bullshit. My dad didn’t have a fucking accident when he overdosed on heroin . . . Me and my brothers just stood and watched as the paramedics revived him. Someone else just had a question: Does she want to go back to rehab now ;P
* * *
The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.
After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”
A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”
Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”
* * *
The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.
Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.
Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public. One paparazzi photographer took a photo of her getting into a car and started snapping shots closer and closer on her crotch, then posted these photos as proof that she was wearing diapers — that she’d started wearing them because she couldn’t control her bodily functions. It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.
Why were we obsessed with her anti-rehab anthem? It’s a great song, straight-up and flat-out, jaunty and sublime, Amy’s singular voice all acrobatic and vaulting and rich, like vinyl and leather; the chorus blunt and surprising, full of defiance where you might expect to find the keeling croon of self-pity. The song finds hope and energy in its own rhythms. It’s not interested in self-care. The no, no, no of refusing rehab echoes another kind of assertion: Yes I been black, but when I come back, you’ll know, know, know.No turns into know: resistance becomes knowledge. This isn’t just refusal; it’s a declaration of presence.
It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.
The unrepentant junkie had been a beloved figure for a long time, an unleashed alternative to the good little sober boy. William Burroughs’s 1953 cult classic, Junkie, was subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. It offered an appealing antidote to the bow-tied conversion narrative.
During the same decade, just as federal legislation against “narcotic addicts” was growing more draconian — mandating minimum sentences and constructing the addict as villain — people created another vision of the addict in stark opposition to these moralizing measures: someone who wasn’t apologizing for anything, who was spinning something defiant or even beautiful from the darkness of their compulsion. Elizabeth Hardwick loved to imagine that Billie Holiday faced the wreckage of her life with unrepentant grandeur. She admired Holiday’s “luminous self-destruction,” and her refusal to play nice: “there did not seem to be any pleading need to quit, to modify.” But that was its own myth; Holiday tried to kick her habit many times.
Perhaps with Amy, decades later, it was liberating to see someone who didn’t want to get better; who seemed to say, Fuck it, let’s DRINK. Let’s roll the foil and smoke. If Amy was an unredeemed addict, then “Rehab” was her battle cry: She sang it over and over and over again. She sang it and stumbled; she sang it and drank; she sang it and spilled her wine. She tripped over her sky-scraper heels. “I’m not gonna spend ten weeks,” she sang. “Have everyone think I’m on the mend.”
It was exciting to hear her resist the solace of mending and its easy answers, to hear her reject gift-wrapped redemption, refuse to give it to us — the public act of recuperating pain by performing its transcendence. She refused to get better.
But maybe “unrepentant” wasn’t an alternative to the fantasy of conversion so much as another flavor of fantasy. Maybe fuck it was a fantasy. Maybe our collective vision of her alchemy — ache altered into chorus — depended on a myth that wasn’t quite true. As the poet John Berryman put it, even he had to fight the “delusion that my art depended on my drinking.” That delusion was what he had to break, he felt, if he ever wanted to get sober.
Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times. On a home video from her first stint at an island rehab mansion called the Causeway Retreat, Blake taunts her to sing a revised version of “Rehab.” Can she still sing, no, no, no, now that she’s actually in treatment? Will she have to sing, yes?
Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times.
But she doesn’t seem particularly drawn to the joke. She tells him: “I don’t mind it here, actually.”
* * *
Amy Winehouse was born in London in September of 1983, three months after I was born across an ocean. When she was twenty-seven, she died from too much booze in her blood. When I was twenty-seven, I gave up booze entirely. Maybe these correspondences are part of the reason I grew so obsessed with her life, and with the possibility of what her life might have looked like sober. Or maybe these correspondences are just the little pieces of her I’d like to claim for myself. People love claiming little pieces of Amy for themselves: “Everyone wanted a piece of her,” said her friend Nick, her first manager.
By the time I found myself wanting a piece of Amy, in memoriam, I’d been sober for years. But I could still remember what it had felt like to be unsober — gloriously, unapologetically unsober: drinking whiskey by a bonfire, feeling the sluice of heat down my throat, its rhyme with the flames at my fingertips. I remembered how drinking felt like constant apology; how a blackout could drop inside your life like hostile terrain, behind enemy lines, and how getting drunk also felt absolutely necessary, the only horizon of relief — like the perspective point in a painting, the crucial pivot everything else referred to. I remembered how the prospect of sobriety seemed like unrelenting gray, after luminous, disjunctive nights — a bleak horizon, a shirt washed so many times it had lost all its color. What could the straight line of on the mend hold that might rival the dark, sparkling sweep of falling apart?
* * *
When I imagined sobriety, before I got sober, I imagined The Shining: Jack Nicholson playing a writer white-knuckling his way through bitter sobriety in an empty mountain resort — the opposite of rehab, solitary confinement instead of company — or else a rehab full of ghosts. He spent his days punching a single sentence into his typewriter, over and over: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
On the night she won five Grammys, Amy told one of her best friends: “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”
Part of me wants to tell her: You were wrong. It wasn’t boring without drugs. You just needed to learn how to live sober. Part of me wants to tell her about church basements and evening coffee dates in diners, about the primal thrill of sitting across from someone who has felt some version of what you’ve felt — the fear of boredom, the urge to flee pain, or dissolve self, or permit self — and hear them say it out loud, how liberating that feels, in recovery, resonance not as easy moral or redemption but as a sense of outward possibility, drawing a door on something that looked like a wall.
That is part of me. Another part of me knows I’m drawn to watching her destroy herself. In one short story about an alcoholic going to rehab, Raymond Carver writes: “Part of me wanted help. But there was another part.”
This was the other part: drugs and booze were part of why Amy’s life was so interesting, to me and to everyone. They were part of why we wanted to keep getting closer, wanted to bring our magnifying glasses and our microscopes, our telephoto lenses, to give ourselves a better view of her heartbreak.
Even the title of Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary about her life confesses our collective desire for proximity: just Amy. As if we all knew her; or could still get to know her, even after she was dead, maybe because she had died. As if she were still available to us; as if she had ever been. Amy. It’s ridiculous I call her that. But I find it hard to call her anything else. The film summons the fantasy of intimacy but also ironizes it. It’s full of paparazzi shouting: “Amy! Amy! Amy!” like the chorus to another song.
Off their tongues, in their mouths, her first name doesn’t summon intimacy but its distortion; not private relation but its violation. “Cheer up, Amy!” one tabloid guy calls out, after she shoves a few of his colleagues out of the way. Then a year later, when her body is being carried out of her Camden mansion, a voice says, “Rest in peace, Amy,” a perfect stranger, still on a first-name basis.
* * *
Every story about a dead girl needs a villain, and Amy dangles a few suspects: Maybe her promoter killed her by keeping the machinery of her fame running even when her body was getting crushed by it. Maybe her father killed her by not giving her the love she needed when she was young. Maybe her husband killed her by giving her the thing that numbed the pain her father had already caused, and by causing even more pain that needed numbing.
The film offers Amy as victim-addict and Blake as villain-addict: the woman who got sucked into crack; the man who dragged her into its thrall. We don’t have to reconcile these types: addict as victim; addict as villain. We’re allowed to project them across two conveniently discrete human bodies.
When the documentary shows Blake coming back into Amy’s life, after her album about their breakup made her a star, it visually frames his return as a literal emergence from darkness: he materializes from a dark doorway across a series of paparazzi shots. He’s like a demon, ready to take her back: Back to Black. A doctor who consulted with both of them said: “It was a common case of one person having a situation that was very beneficial to his using . . . not wanting the other person to get better for fear of losing the gravy train.”
Of Amy, the doctor said simply: “She was a very vulnerable woman.”
Amy’s addiction meant she was vulnerable, while Blake’s addiction meant he preyed on someone vulnerable. Amy needed to be protected; Blake needed to be protected from. But Blake needed crack for reasons of his own: “It literally eradicates any kind of negative feeling,” he said once. This was a man who had tried to slit his wrists as a boy, at the age of nine. Was that not vulnerability as well?
* * *
Really the film’s greatest villain is celebrity itself: we killed her. Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art. It kept her in gigs rather than in the studio. Kapadia’s documentary has an uneasy relationship to the paparazzi it documents. They are its villains — all menace and flash, shutters like staccato gunfire — but also its collaborators. The film is built largely from their footage. At one point we see Amy closing a curtain; gazing out her window warily, protecting herself from view. But we can only witness that violation because the violation gave us a record of her resistance.
Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art.
The film critiques the paparazzi’s hunger for access, but also raises the stakes on this hunger — effectively, implicitly — by promising to take us deeper inside Amy’s wounds than the paparazzi ever did. By showing the harsh glare and invasive constancy of paparazzi as one kind of access, heartless and shallow, the film invites us to think of its exploration as another kind of access entirely, full of depth and compassion. We want to feel better about our hunger, but it’s still hunger: We’re still after her, still sniffing the trail of her blood. We still just want in.
Or I should say: I wanted in. I’m not pleased or proud — but there it was, that desire. Winehouse’s life was gone, Amy’s life was gone, and that only made me want to get deeper inside what her life had been. My own drunk life was gone and sometimes I wanted to get back inside it, too. Sometimes I didn’t feel done with it. When I saw ten empty champagne flutes in front of her on a tabletop in St. Lucia, I felt sad for her, and I felt shame — shame at my own desire for proximity — and I also felt thirsty. Even the empty vodka bottles cluttering her home; all of it made me remember that old fuck it feeling. She’d followed it somewhere else.
When I watched the public obsession on film, an endless fuel driving the celebrity that killed her, their eager hands buying the magazines the paparazzi peppered with their eager angles, I hated that public. I also knew I was part of it. The fact of the film itself was almost sickening: we had outlived her, and we were still obsessed with her.
At one point, the film gives us the photo collage of a bender, after Amy’s first stint in rehab: her face darkened by smeared mascara, Blake’s whole face covered in streaks of blood; his arms in bandages, holding his cigarettes; her ballet flats covered in splotches of red. He’d cut himself with a bottle and she had to do it, too, because she wanted to feel whatever he felt, and we want to see the blood on her, so we can feel what she felt, too, or convince ourselves we’ve gotten close.
The film describes the bathroom at her recording studio after she’d covered it with her own vomit; the white towels darkened by mascara where she’d wiped her face. The film narrates these details while showing a video of Amy playing guitar in the studio: she is binging on booze and purging beauty, still metabolizing the pain, still turning it into song.
It was uncomfortable to watch the film because it was exposing a fixation and exploiting it at once. I cried when I watched it, and I wanted it to end. Then I wanted to watch it from the beginning, so I could cry again. I watched the end of the film at least twenty times, the haunting piano composition that plays as her corpse is carried from her house to a private ambulance in the street, as a doctor’s voice speculates that years of starving and purging and drinking “just made her heart stop.” I watched mourners gathering awkwardly in the street, after her funeral service: a man in a kippah standing with his head bowed in grief, one hand to his face; her mother using a cane to get into her car. I thought: Who filmed this private grief? I thought: Who am I, watching it?
“I died a hundred times,” Amy sings in one of her torch songs, and I kept hitting rewind — to watch her die again.
* * *
“This isn’t Amy,” her mother said in 2007. “It’s as if her whole life’s turned into a stage performance.” Amy always had a sense of humor about the dark silhouette she cast, the ways in which she had become an archetype. When the Guardian asked, “What keeps you awake at night?” She said: “Being sober.” She was self-aware about her “issues” and their public performance. “What is your most unappealing habit?” she was asked once. She said: “Being an abusive drunk.”
She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction, spelling Blake’s name on her stomach with a shard of glass while Terry Richardson snapped photographs. She called it “chickenscratch on her tummy,” but it wasn’t just performance. She’d really cut herself for years. Her arms were covered with scars.
She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction
Mos Def remembers watching Amy smoke crack one night and thinking: This is someone who is trying to disappear. Near the end, her doctor asked her: “Do you want to die?” She said: “No, I don’t want to die.” Her bodyguard said she didn’t want to do that final gig in Belgrade: “Can’t go anywhere. Can’t hide anywhere. She needed an escape.” He said, “Then the drinking . . . Escape route, innit?”
* * *
When I watched Amy change across the course of the documentary, watched her body shrink across the years, I felt as if I were watching the disappearance Mos Def described her craving. She went from a voluptuous girl to an emaciated creature; from plump to skeletal. Her beehive got so huge. Her body got so tiny.
Her tiny body was part of the outsized myth, too, our collective awe at how the force of her voice — and the chaos of her her feverish dysfunction — was somehow held by the slip and twigs of her body. Her Rolling Stone cover profile started with her size: “Alongside the world’s tallest free-standing tower, one of the world’s tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands.” It’s all there: She was tiny. She was obsessed with her own beauty. She was close to the garbage.
In that profile, she says she wanted a different kind of life: “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and to look after my family. She told one newspaper she wanted to be remembered as genuine.
Billie Holiday may have been beloved for what Hardwick called “the sheer enormity of her vices. . . the outrageousness of them,” but she had other dreams: She wanted to buy a farm in the country and take in orphans. She once tried to adopt a child in Boston, but the judge wouldn’t let her because of her drug record. Hardwick loved the absence of “any pleading need to quit, to modify” in Holiday, and admired that she spoke with “cold anger” of “various cures that had been forced upon her. But Holiday wasn’t entirely resistant to quitting or to cures. Her anger was directed at the particular kind of “cure” that involved arrest and incarceration, persecution at the hands of federal agents. As a black woman, her addiction made her more vulnerable to being treated as a criminal: she spent nearly a year in a West Virginia prison, and died handcuffed to her hospital bed. She hated that cure, but as for the junk itself? She tried to quit over and over again. To her pianist she said: “Carl, don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!”
* * *
If Amy had gone to rehab that first time, we might have never gotten Back to Black, but I wonder what we would have gotten instead. I would have loved to hear her sing sober. Not just two weeks sober, but three years sober, twenty years sober. “She had the complete gift,” Tony Bennett once said of her. “If she had lived, I would have said, ‘Life teaches you, really, how to live it; if you live long enough.’”
I never lived Amy’s life and she never lived mine, but I know that when I see her on that stage in Belgrade, as if she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom, I think of coming out of a blackout into the strange new world of a Mexican bathroom stall, or a dirt basement, wearing handcuffs, tasting gin and citrus, or some breezeless bedroom where it was easier to let a man finish fucking me than it was to stop him.
I know that when I watch Amy stumbling across that stage in Belgrade, and finally squatting there — still and quiet, smiling — just waiting for something to happen or something to stop happening, I feel less that I know what is happening in her and more that her eyes know something that happened in me. I feel sad she didn’t get years of ordinary coffee dates and people saying, I get that, that she was doomed to her singularity and her vodka-thinned blood and all her drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, hair like a pagoda on her head and her body barely holding the weight — until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.
Leslie Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration and leads the Marian House Project. Her latest book, The Recovering, was published in April 2018. She’s also written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — When I exit the plane in Albuquerque, the first thing I see is space. So much space and so few people. I’ve come from New York, and the minute I step onto New Mexican soil everything feels like it’s in slow motion. I speak slower, my steps are grander, my breath deeper. The desert landscape is a stark contrast to the crowds that I have become accustomed to in the city, and the landscape resembles nothing we have at home in Germany.
I’m on my way to Sister Bar, where Tennis will be playing. Tennis, in this instance, is a band, and I will be touring New Mexico, Arizona, and California with them. In a bus. I am wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a faux leopard fur coat, despite the 90-degree heat. Perhaps I’ve overthought my Rock Tour Ensemble because I’m feeling uncharacteristically self-aware about being thrown into this alternate reality. In my real life, I am a tennis player. Full-time. How should I know what’s cool these days?
We will be traveling in a bus, from venue to venue, waking up early, seeking out breakfast burritos, eating too many, sitting on the bus, driving through the desert, six hours, seven hours, arriving at the theater. Cities and states and landscapes become one, unloading the gear, sound-checking, eating dinner, waiting for the show, the show, THE SHOW, the adrenaline-fueled banter after the concert, one beer, two beers, whiskey then vocal rest for Alaina, the lead singer, too little sleep, too little time for basic hygiene but it’s okay because the others have forsaken theirs too, then waking up early and doing it all again.
I’ve decided to do this because I have a hunger for throwing myself into the art world, the music world, the TV and movie world. I’m obsessed with contemporary culture in the widest sense. Are we tennis players part of it? Does experiencing an extraordinary intensity of emotion in your day-to-day job place you outside of conventional reality? And if it does, why do I try to understand it, why can’t I just accept it as it is? That’s why I’m here. Read more…
“Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they
never doubted it for a second!”
– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
“Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence
for it, but it is scientific fact.”
– Brass Eye, “Paedogeddon” episode
“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles
a rough time.”
– Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”
***
“We have this tree, and we have this strange serpent. That’s a dragon-like form, there—a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree… And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don’t like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve.”
That’s Professor Jordan Peterson, offering the “realistic and demanding practical wisdom” endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times.
“The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and his authority — people worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast.”
That’s the Book of Revelation.
“I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside. I spent the next six hours screaming. Non-stop screaming as loud as I could. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a forest. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell.”
And that’s a man from Vancouver describing a mishap with magic mushrooms in Vice. Of the three excerpts, it’s the only one that can convincingly claim to be non-fiction.
The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon.
If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble.
Angeline Allen must have been pleased. On October 28, 1893, the 20-something divorcée, an aspiring model, made the cover of the country’s most popular men’s magazine, a titillating journal of crime, sport, and cheesecake called the National Police Gazette. Granted, the reason wasn’t Allen’s “wealth of golden hair” or “strikingly pretty face,” though the magazine mentioned both. Rather, the cover story was about Allen’s attire during a recent bicycle ride near her Newark, New Jersey, home. The “eccentric” young woman had ridden through town in “a costume that caused hundreds to turn and gaze in astonishment,” the Gazette reported.
The story’s headline summed up the cause of fascination: “She Wore Trousers” — dark blue corduroy bloomers, to be exact, snug around the calves and puffy above the knees. “She rode her wheel through the principal streets in a leisurely manner and appeared to be utterly oblivious of the sensation she was causing,” according to the reporter.
It is unlikely Allen was truly oblivious, having already shown an exhibitionistic streak over the summer when she appeared on an Asbury Park, New Jersey, beach in a bathing skirt that “did not reach within many inches of her knees,” according to a disapproving newspaper report. (“Her stockings or tights were of light blue silk,” the report added.) Allen didn’t mind people noticing her revealing outfits — “that’s what I wear them for,” she told one reporter — and she kept cycling around Newark in pants despite the journalistic scolding. As another paper reported that November, “The natives watch for her with bated breath, and her appearance is the signal for a rush to all the front windows along the street.”
For a grown woman to reveal so much leg in public was a staggeringly brazen act. What was noticeably unnoteworthy by then was Allen’s choice of vehicle. Ten years earlier, all bicycles had been high-wheelers, and riding one had been largely the province of daring, athletic men. The women who had attempted it were seen as acrobats, hussies, or freaks; one female performer who rode a high-wheeler in the early 1880s was perceived as “a sort of semi-monster,” another woman reported. But by the early 1890s, the bike had undergone a transformation. Allen’s machine — a so-called safety bicycle — had two thigh-high wheels; air-filled rubber tires; and rear-wheel drive, with a chain to transmit power from the pedals. In fact, it looked a lot like a 21st-century commuter bike, and it had become nearly as acceptable as one. Even the fashion police who scorned Allen’s riding outfit didn’t object to her riding.
What had happened to the bicycle in the interim? Market expansion. In the 1880s, when bicycle makers had begun to saturate the limited market for high-wheelers, they sought products to entice other would-be riders, particularly men who had aged out of the strenuous high-wheel lifestyle. In the United States, where bad roads made tricycle ridership impractical, the sales potential for an easy-to-ride bicycle looked stronger than in Europe. In response, manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic created a profusion of high-tech two-wheelers, including models with foot levers instead of pedals; “geared up” bikes with chains and sprockets that spun the driving wheel more than once for each rotation of the cycle’s cranks; and a supposedly header-proof version with the small wheel in the front and the big wheel in the rear. Riders and makers started calling the standard high-wheeler an “Ordinary” to distinguish it from experimental models.
Several of the new bikes used geared-up rear-wheel drive as a way to bring the rider closer to the ground. The most influential of these was the English Rover, with a rear driving wheel only thirty inches tall that had as much force as a 50-inch Ordinary wheel. (Even today, American bicycle gears are measured in “gear inches,” which indicate how tall an Ordinary wheel of equivalent force would be.) At 36 inches, the Rover’s front wheel was slightly bigger than its rear one, but apart from that, the machine looked as streamlined as some models of fifty or a hundred years later.
Introduced in England in 1885, the Rover Safety Bicycle delivered the speed of an Ordinary, but with a greatly diminished risk of skull fracture from flying over the handlebars. The Rover’s manufacturer made some quick refinements, and a model with same-sized wheels caught on in Britain and inspired a fleet of imitators: low-mount, rear-wheel-drive bikes also called “safeties.”
The major US manufacturers weren’t impressed by this new low profile, though; they dismissed the safety style as a mistake. In 1886, after a two-month tour of England’s bicycle factories, the US industry titan Albert Pope expressed confidence in his high-wheeler: “I looked at nearly all the principal [English] makes and I could not find a point that was in any way an improvement over our own.” Echoed his lieutenant, George H. Day, who also made the trip, “Every innovation is regarded as a trap.”
But when imported safeties hit the US market in the spring of 1887, the machines found eager buyers; Pope and other American cycle makers scrambled to put out their own versions of the header-resistant contraptions. By November, the safety bicycle was established in the United States as the modern option for men, even though its low wheels evoked the comically old-timey velocipede of 20 years prior, as one bard made clear in the accented voice of an immigrant child:
In days of old, full many a time
You’ve heard it told, in prose and rhyme,
How down the street a wheelman came,
And chanced to meet his beauteous flame
Just where a pup in ambush lay,
To tip him up upon the way,
And make him wish that he was dead,
While gyrating upon his head.
In days of old
You’ve heard it told.
But nowadays, it’s otherwise.
The safety craze new joy supplies;
The boulders lose their terrors grim,
Stray cans and shoes are naught to him;
He laughs at rocks, he kicks the pup,
But, in the end, things even up;
For, as his maid he gayly greets,
Some unwashed urchin always bleats —
“Hi, look at der big man on der melosipetes!”
For a short time, Ordinaries and safeties coexisted like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, with the bigger, older species continuing to inhabit its traditional niche while the smaller, nimbler creature carved out a new one. “I do not think that [the safety] will hurt the sale of the Ordinary bicycle,” predicted one US industry watcher in late 1887. “It will open the pleasures of cycling to a great many who have been afraid to venture upon a high machine.” The writer was thinking of physicians and other “professional men” for whom an Ordinary was too dangerous, but some enthusiasts suspected that the safety would also appeal to female riders. Offering women “a clumsy wheelbarrow of a tricycle” to ride while men zip around on slender bikes, wrote one sympathetic man, “is offering a woman a stone to eat while men have soft biscuit.”
And the safety bicycle’s low profile did intrigue many American women, especially after the spring of 1888, when makers offered a drop-frame version, in which the bike’s top bar scooped downward to make room for a lady rider’s long skirts. As one woman reported that year, “A sudden desire began to awake in the feminine mind to ascertain for itself by personal experience, what were those joys of the two-wheeler which they had so often heard boastfully vaunted as superior, a thousand times, to the more sober delights of the staid tricycle.”
With the safety’s smaller wheels, its ride was bumpier than the Ordinary’s at first. But then came the pneumatic tire. Devised in Ireland in 1888 by a veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop, who was seeking a faster ride for his son’s trike, the air-filled rubber tube cushioned the road’s ruts and bulges in a way that springs and other early shock-absorbing devices never could. This marvel arrived in the United States by 1890 and became standard equipment on American safeties within a few years. “It permitted travel on streets and roads previously thought unrideable,” recalled an American journalist of the time, “and added to cycling a degree of ease and comfort never dreamed of.”
In the 1890s, bikes got lighter as well as more comfortable. The average weight of a bicycle dropped by more than half during the decade’s first five years, falling from 50 pounds to 23. And since new gearings were able to mimic wheels larger than those of the largest Ordinary, speed records fell too. In 1894, while riding a pneumatic-tired safety around a track in Buffalo, New York, the racer John S. Johnson went a mile in just over one minute and thirty-five seconds, a rate of nearly thirty-eight miles an hour. He beat the previous mile record for a safety by fourteen seconds, and the record for an Ordinary by nearly a minute–and the record for a running horse by one-tenth of a second.
The Ordinary — which had by then acquired the derisive nickname of “penny-farthing,” after the old British penny and much smaller farthing (quarter-penny) coins ─ became obsolete. High-wheelers that had sold for $150 to $300 just a year or two earlier were going for as little as $10.
The first safeties, meanwhile, cost an average of $150 during a time when the average worker earned something like $12 a week. At such prices, the new bikes targeted the same upscale demographic as the tricycle. But a strong market for safeties among well-to-do women goosed production, and competition among manufacturers reduced prices, making the bikes affordable to more would-be riders — and further fueling demand. In 1895, America’s 300 bicycle companies produced 500,000 safeties at an average price of $75, according to one encyclopedia’s yearbook. Even manufacturers were surprised at the demand among women, who thrilled to the new machine’s exhilarating ride. As one female journalist wrote, “If a pitying Providence should suddenly fit light, strong wings to the back of a toiling tortoise, that patient cumberer of the ground could hardly feel a more astonishing sense of exhilaration than a woman experiences when first she becomes a mistress of her wheel.”
It wasn’t just that women enjoyed the physical sensation of riding — the rush of balancing and cruising. What made the bicycle truly liberating was its fundamental incompatibility with many of the limits placed on women. Take clothing, for example. Starting at puberty, women were expected to wear heavy floor-length skirts, rigid corsets, and tight, pointy-toed shoes. These garments made any sort of physical exertion difficult, as young girls sadly discovered. “I ‘ran wild’ until my 16th birthday, when the hampering long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels,” recalled the temperance activist Frances Willard in an 1895 memoir. “I remember writing in my journal, in the first heartbreak of a young human colt taken from its pleasant pasture, ‘Altogether, I recognize that my occupation is gone.’” Reformers had been calling for more sensible clothing for women since the 1850s, when the newspaper editor Amelia Bloomer wore the baggy trousers that critics named after her, but rational arguments hadn’t made much headway.
Where reason failed, though, recreation succeeded. The drop-frame safety did allow women to ride in dresses, but not in the swagged, voluminous frocks of the Victorian parlor. Female cyclists had to don simple, “short” (that is, ankle-length) skirts in order to avoid getting them caught under the bicycle’s rear wheel. And to keep them from flying up, some women had tailors put weights in their hems or line their skirt fronts with leather. Other women, like Angeline Allen, shucked their dresses altogether and wore bloomers. The display that reporters had deemed shocking in 1893 became commonplace just a few years later as more and more women started riding. “The eye of the spectator has long since become accustomed to costumes once conspicuous,” wrote an American journalist in 1895. “Bloomer and tailor-made alike ride on unchallenged.” (For her part, Allen may well have given up riding, but not scandal; she progressed to posing onstage in scanty attire for re-creations of famous paintings, a risqué popular amusement.)
Bicyclists’ corsets changed too, though less publicly. The corset of the 1880s was an armpit-to-hip garment stiffened with whalebone stays, which helped the hips support heavy skirts that hung from the waist. But while corsets braced women’s torsos, they also weakened their wearers, squeezing women’s lungs and displacing other internal organs, making deep breaths impossible. Out of necessity, female cyclists looked for alternatives, and many chose another garment that had been advocated by dress reformers decades earlier: a sturdy, waist-length cotton camisole with shoulder straps. When introduced in the 1870s, this garment was called an “emancipation waist,” and it featured a horizontal band of buttons at the hem, to which drawers or a skirt could be attached. Later versions were named “health waist” or, finally, “bicycle waist.” One 1896 model included elastic insets; its maker promised the wearer “perfect comfort — a sound pair of lungs — a graceful figure and rosy cheeks.” All for $1, postpaid.
If women’s clothing constrained them, so did their role in society. More Americans than ever worked outside the home; by 1880, farmers made up a little less than half of the country’s labor force. But even among the urban working class, married women typically stayed home during the day to cook, clean, tend to children, and often manufacture homemade goods for sale. Meanwhile, their husbands, sons, and unmarried daughters toiled in factories, shops, offices, and other people’s houses. Many Americans came to believe that men and women naturally inhabited two separate spheres: men held sway in business, politics, and other public arenas, and women took charge of the home. For most middle-class women, respectability meant appearing in public only under certain circumstances ─ such as while shopping ─ and making as small an impression as possible. “A true lady walks the streets unostentatiously and with becoming reserve,” instructed an 1889 etiquette manual. “She appears unconscious of all sights and sounds which a lady ought not to perceive.”
In addition, an unmarried young woman didn’t go out without a chaperone, usually an older female relative. Being seen on an unchaperoned date, even at a restaurant or other public place, could be cause for social ruin. An 1887 etiquette guide warned against sailing excursions, for example, lest the boat be becalmed overnight: “A single careless act of this sort may be remembered spitefully against a girl for many years.”
The bicycle challenged all that. Wives who had stayed close to home — venturing out only on foot, by trolley, or, if wealthy, with a driver and horse-drawn carriage — were suddenly able to travel miles on their own. Being so mobile, and so visible, was a revelation to many. “The world is a new and another sphere under the bicyclist’s observation,” wrote one female journalist. “Here is a process of locomotion that is absolutely at her command.” If a woman’s sphere begins to feel too small, wrote another, “the sufferer can do no better than to flatten her sphere to a circle, mount it, and take to the road.”
As for unmarried women, manners mavens urged them to cycle only with chaperones, but the rule didn’t take. “New social laws have been enacted to meet the requirements of the new order,” reported one newspaper editor in 1896. “Parents who will not allow their daughters to accompany young men to the theatre without chaperonage allow them to go bicycle-riding alone with young men. This is considered perfectly proper.” According to the editor, the reason for this difference was the “good comradeship” of the bicycling set. Fellow enthusiasts looked out for one another on the road, he wrote ─ so in a way, every ride was supervised. The historian Ellen Gruber Garvey suggests a second possible reason: propriety already allowed unmarried women to ride horses unchaperoned. Bicycles, as a less costly equivalent, may simply have extended this freedom down the economic scale.
But the same things that made the bicycle liberating also made it threatening. Moralists warned that skimpy costumes and unsupervised travel would lead to wanton behavior. “Immodest bicycling by young women is to be deplored,” declared Charlotte Smith, founder of the Women’s Rescue League, a group that lobbied Congress on behalf of “fallen women.” “Bicycling by young women has helped to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women.” Smith reported that her tours of brothels and interviews with prostitutes confirmed this.
Physicians — who at the time shouldered responsibility for patients’ moral as well as physical well-being — had their own concerns. One visited New York’s Coney Island and saw a 16-year-old cyclist get drunk on wine provided by a beautiful but nefarious older woman. “She looked like an innocent child, but was away from home influence,” the doctor reported. Many physicians fretted that pressure from the bicycle seat would teach girls how to masturbate, a practice thought to lead to spiritual and psychological decline. Climbing hills on a bike could excite “feelings hitherto unknown to, and unrealized by, the young girl,” wrote one doctor in 1898. (Boys faced the same danger: pressure on the perineum would call their attention to the area, warned one doctor, “and so lead to a great increase in masturbation in the timid [and] to early sexual indulgence in the more venturous.”)
The bicycle’s peril was medical as well as moral. In the late nineteenth century, many saw physical energy as a finite resource that had to be carefully parceled out, not a power that could be renewed through exercise. The fashionable malaise of neurasthenia was only one of the disorders thought to be caused by a depletion of energies. Overexertion could also cause tuberculosis, scoliosis, hernias, heart disease, and other maladies, doctors believed. Safely sedentary middle-class women, who frequently suffered from varicose veins and other consequences of annual pregnancies, were prone to fatigue; one Boston writer called them “a sex which is born tired,” adding that “society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalid women.” Particularly for women in heavy dresses and constricting corsets, any activity that raised the heart rate could seem more likely to be the cause of fainting and listlessness than their remedy. Opponents of the bicycle latched onto this perception, arguing that riding would cost women more effort than they could afford. “The exertion necessary to riding with speed … is productive of an excitation of nervous and physical energy that is anything but beneficial,” Charlotte Smith warned. “If a halt is not called soon, 75 percent of the cyclists will be an army of invalids within the next ten years.”
But even as Smith made her dire predictions, Americans’ fear of cardiovascular exercise was beginning to lift. For decades, health reformers had trumpeted the benefits of fitness, and during the 1880s, the United States saw a spike in organized physical activity. Citizens of America’s growing cities tried new sports such as baseball and football, and exercise advocates built the first public playgrounds and pushed for physical education for both boys and girls. Doctors continued to caution against overexertion, but they acknowledged that, in moderation, fresh air and exercise tended to improve patients’ health. The high-wheel bicycle of the 1880s proved the benefits of regular exercise to those who could ride it; proponents made extravagant claims for the risky machine’s ability to restore well-being. “For constipation, sleeplessness, dyspepsia, and many other ills which flesh is heir to, not to speak of melancholy,─all are curable, or certainly to be improved, by the new remedy, ‘Bicycle,'” wrote a Texas physician in 1883. “It is always an excellent prescription for the convalescents, and nearly always for chronic invalids.”
Not everyone could take the prescription, though. High-wheeled cycling and rigorous team sports were acceptable only for young men. The new games deemed suitable for mixed company, such as lawn tennis and golf, were far less taxing — and therefore far less likely to lead to noticeable improvements in fitness. As for working out on your own, the recommended options were either too costly (horseback riding) or too boring (indoor calisthenics) to gain much popularity. As a result, many more Americans of the 1880s thought they ought to exercise than actually did it. So when the safety bicycle appeared at the end of the decade and Americans began riding in large numbers — an estimated two million by 1896, out of a population of about seventy million — few were certain how such vigorous physical activity would affect them.
Doctors were wary. Most US physicians believed that each patient’s condition was based largely on his or her habits and experiences, the weather, and other environmental factors. Good health was a reflection of proper balance among bodily systems and energies. “A distracted mind could curdle the stomach, a dyspeptic stomach could agitate the mind,” writes the medical historian Charles Rosenberg. It was a doctor’s job to know each patient well enough to restore balance when something was out of whack, using laxatives, diuretics, and other purging drugs to reboot the system. Even contagious diseases could not be treated in a cookie-cutter fashion, argued an 1883 medical journal editorial: “No two instances of typhoid fever, or of any other disease, are precisely alike … No ‘rule of thumb,’ no recourse to a formula-book, will avail for proper treatment even of the typical diseases.” To many doctors, advocating a specific drug to cure a specific disease seemed the height of quackery.
And just as there were no one-size-fits-all medical treatments, many physicians believed there were no one-size-fits-all exercise routines. While cycling enthusiasts rhapsodized about the safety bicycle’s benefits for riders of both sexes and all ages, doctors fretted that many of their patients would be harmed by the new machines. Even seeming success stories were suspect. In an 1895 paper on heart disease, one doctor reported that a patient who had panted for breath after climbing one flight of stairs was now able to cycle up hills with ease. “It would be wrong to conclude from this that cycling is not injurious,” the doctor wrote: there hadn’t yet been time to observe the bicycle’s long-term effects. Moreover, as an unfamiliar activity, cycling tended to catch the blame for pretty much anything bad that happened to a new rider afterward, up to and including death.
Logically, acute injuries were a concern. Though the safety bicycle did greatly reduce the risk of head wounds, it didn’t obliterate that risk, particularly among “scorchers” — thrill-seeking youngsters who hunched over their handlebars and pedaled as fast as they could. “It might seem almost impossible to fracture a skull thick enough to permit indulgence in such practices,” reported the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, “but the bicycle fool at full speed has been able to accomplish it.” Medical journals also noted the danger of road rash and broken bones.
More insidious than crash injuries, though, were new chronic complaints attributed to cycling. The bent-over posture of the scorcher was thought to cause a permanent hunch called “kyphosis bicyclistarum,” or, familiarly, “cyclist’s stoop.” Repeated stress to the cardiovascular system — that is, regular workouts — could lead to the irregular heartbeats and poor circulation of “bicycle heart.” Gripping the handlebars too tightly might cause finger numbness, or “bicycle hand,” and a dusty ride could trigger “cyclist’s sore throat.” Practically every body part seemed to have its own cycle-related malady; at least one New York doctor devoted his entire practice to treating such ailments.
Of all the physical woes attributed to the bike, the one that most strained credulity was the “bicycle face.” Characterized by wide, wild eyes; a grim set to the mouth; and a migration of facial features toward the center, the disorder was said to result from the stress of incessant balancing. A German philosopher claimed that the condition drained “every vestige of intelligence” from the sufferer’s appearance and rendered children unrecognizable to their own mothers. The bicycle face hung on, too, warned a journalist: “Once fixed upon the countenance, it can never be removed.”
The doctors raising these alarms were careful to state that many of the new diseases affected only cyclists predisposed to them — which would explain why so few of their fellow physicians might have encountered the disorders. “Whilst thousands ride immune, a small percentage will suffer,” wrote one doctor. Another, who blamed cases of appendicitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and the thyroid condition Graves’ disease on excessive riding, said it didn’t matter how many people believed that cycling had improved their health: “It would not affect my argument in the least if swarms of them had been rescued from the grave.”
Nevertheless, the more Americans took to bicycling, the more tenuous these claims of danger came to seem. The machine made physical activity both practical and fun. “The bicycle is inducing multitudes of people to take regular exercise who have long been in need of such exercise, but who could never be induced to take it by any means hitherto devised,” one doctor wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1896. And all that activity had an effect. Riders quickly noticed improved muscle tone, increased strength, better sleep, and brighter moods. Women, especially, transformed themselves, wrote the novelist Maurice Thompson in 1897: “We have already become accustomed to seeing sunbrowned faces, once sallow and languid, whisk past us at every turn of the street. The magnetism of vivid health has overcome conservative barriers that were impregnable to every other force.”
The empirical evidence of cycling’s health value began to overtake conservative doctors’ concerns, as the rhetoric scholar Sarah Overbaugh Hallenbeck argues. Though many physicians continued to raise objections to the sport, their voices were increasingly drowned out by those of more observant — and pragmatic–practitioners. “The bicycle face, elbow, back, shoulders, neck, eroticism,” wrote one military doctor in 1896, “I pass as not worthy of serious consideration.” Rather than discourage bicycle use, most physicians came to cautiously endorse it. “So long as the cyclist can breathe with the mouth shut,” wrote one such doctor in 1895, “he is certainly perfectly safe.” Some went further, citing evidence of the bike’s benefits for heart patients, migraine sufferers, diabetics, and others with chronic conditions. In Chicago, the demand for injectable morphine dropped as patients with anxiety or insomnia “discovered that a long spin in the fresh air on a cycle induces sweet sleep better than their favorite drug,” the Bulletin of Pharmacy reported.
This shift paralleled a transformation in medical thinking during the 1890s, when American physicians increasingly embraced the scientific method. Some clinics in Continental Europe had adopted this evidence-based approach early in the nineteenth century, using statistics to determine the efficacy of treatments and evaluating patients’ conditions according to universal norms, rather than trying to divine what was normal for each individual patient. In the United States, however, doctors arguing for this approach were long in the minority. According to Rosenberg, the rift between medical traditionalists and empiricists “provided an emotional fault line which marked the profession throughout the last two-thirds of the century.” Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did a research-based, objective philosophy take hold at US medical schools.
It would be folly to suggest that the bicycle alone caused this transformation. Many other factors were at play, such as improved trans-Atlantic communication; an influx of European immigrants, including scientists; and a snowballing of evidence for new medical concepts such as the germ theory of disease. For centuries, Western healers had believed that contagion could erupt spontaneously, but between 1870 and 1900, researchers disproved this theory by isolating the microscopic causes of illnesses including typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, meningococcal meningitis, plague, and malaria.
But even if the bike did not independently modernize American medicine, its unprecedented impact on fitness — and the clash this revealed between what doctors said and what experience showed — may well have accelerated the shift. Much as the bicycle triggered changes in women’s dress that high-minded advocacy could not, it bolstered scientists’ then-radical argument that what is good for one human body tends to be just as good for another.
To the bicycle faithful of the 1890s, this seemed to be just the beginning of the changes that the machine would bring about. The gulf between social classes would recede under the influence of this “great leveler,” one enthusiast wrote in the Century Magazine: “It puts the poor man on a level with the rich, enabling him to ‘sing the song of the open road’ as freely as the millionaire, and to widen his knowledge by visiting the regions near to or far from his home, observing how other men live.”
And while women may not yet have had full access to higher education ─ or even the right to vote — the unchaperoned, self-propelled bloomer girl seemed to be pedaling in that direction. “In possession of her bicycle, the daughter of the 19th century feels that the declaration of her independence has been proclaimed,” wrote one female journalist, “and, in the fulness of time, all things will be added to complete her happiness and prosperity.”
The first-wave feminist Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820, the year after Charles Willson Peale built his iron draisine. By the time of the safety bicycle boom of the 1890s, she was a snowy-haired eminence, too old to risk riding, but she had an opinion of the sport. “I’ll tell you what I think of bicycling,” she said in an 1896 newspaper interview as she leaned forward to lay a hand on the reporter’s arm. “I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world.”
The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 24-year-old New Yorker, wants to shut the world out — by sedating herself into a near-constant slumber made possible by a cornucopia of prescription drugs. In various states of semi-consciousness, she begins “Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating… sleepshopping on the computer and sleepordered Chinese delivery. I’d sleepsmoked. I’d sleeptexted and sleeptelephoned.” Her daily life revolves around sleeping as much as possible, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s pretty much obsessed with strategizing how to knock herself out for even longer the next time, constantly counting out her supply of pills.
Her behavior is so extreme — at one point, she seals her cell phone into a tupperware container, which she discovers floating in a pool of water in the tub the following morning — that a New York Times reviewer dubbed Moshfegh’s work an “antisocial” novel. Moshfegh, the author of Homesick for Another World and Eileen, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, has a knack for creating offbeat characters who don’t fit into neat categories. Like other women in Moshfegh’s stories, the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is unsettling. She is beautiful, thin, privileged — and deeply troubled. Read more…
He was standing on the median of a busy road one morning in the dead of a Massachusetts winter. With bare hands, he clutched a sign asking for money. I was a freshman in college driving to CVS, warm in my car.
I grew up in a rural beach community, where I hadn’t encountered many panhandlers. My experiences with people asking strangers for money came from a few family treks into New York City. Still, I had somehow absorbed a lesson—either spoken or implied, I can’t quite remember—about how to react: Don’t give any money when people ask for it. Doing so will only lead to bad things. The bad things weren’t specified, but drugs and alcohol were likely culprits, with the idea being that giving money to an addict hurts more than it helps. So when I passed that man asking for change, I wasn’t sure what to do.
ISAF Public Affairs/ Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Maija Liuhto | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,978 words)
Late on a Thursday night in a faraway corner of Old Kabul, a community of musicians and worshippers gathers for an evening of solemn prayer, ecstatic singing, and melodies from days long forgotten.
In a small shrine rebuilt after having been destroyed during one of the worst periods in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, fires have been lit, milky tea is served, and hashish is being passed around. This shrine, called Charda Masoom (Persian for “the Fourteen Infallibles”), lies at the end of a muddy street with open gutters, lined with houses with cracked paint and tiny shops selling trinkets and household goods. On the surface, this congested alley looks like any other in this part of the city.
But what an outsider would not know is that for several hundred years, this street — known as Kucheh Kharabat, “the alley of desolation,” the word originally referring to taverns where people came to drink, dance, and listen to music — has been home to a vibrant artistic community of musicians, who now find themselves with their backs against a wall. Space for them in Afghan society continues to shrink.
Originally, many of them came to the area from India to provide entertainment in the 19th-century amir Sher Ali Khan’s court. Local Afghan musicians followed course and moved to this area to learn traditional Indian ragas from the foreigners, letting their own Afghan folk tunes mix with the melodies of the subcontinent. Day and night, singers sang songs by medieval Persian poets, full of references to wine, love, and passion. Tabla drummers gave rhythm to the heady, trance-inducing music.
This is how the music of Afghanistan was born, in this now-forgotten alley in the backstreets of Kabul.
But all of that is in the past. Tonight, one senses a feeling of dread. Only a week ago, the Islamic State attacked a Shia mosque in Kabul. The worshippers and musicians here, although not Shiite, also belong to a minority religious community despised by ISIS and the Taliban. They are Sufis, part of a mystical, tolerant, and inclusive strand of Islam practiced all over the Muslim world. Sufism, followers of which believe is the true heart of Islam, used to have a large following in Afghanistan, evident in the many shrines found all over the country. The Sufis’ love of saints, music, and tolerance was too much for the extremist Taliban regime, and so the movement was driven underground in the late ’90s.
* * *
Today, the Taliban are stronger than ever despite their regime’s fall 16 years ago.
The worshippers seem tense. Police stand guard outside the shrine while a group of men circle a tombstone inside, silently praying for the descendants of Prophet Muhammad who are believed to be buried here. Outside, another group of men huddles in a circle, wrapped in woolen shawls. Smoke rises from their midst and the heady smell of hashish wafts all the way to the street outside the gates.
Suddenly, small children who have been happily running around are gently asked to leave, guided to the gates by a malang, the caretaker of the shrine, who has messy hair and at least a dozen shiny rings on his fingers. A boy, curious to find out what happens after 10 p.m., lingers by the sturdy, carved wooden door — he hasn’t been noticed. He smiles cheekily and quickly runs after the others, fully aware that Thursday nights are not for children, only for adults.
The musicians have arrived. Inside the shrine, a stage waits for nights like these. A harmonium, tabla drums, and a chimta (jingling tongs) are ready for the men to start playing.
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But this is no concert or performance. This is a religious ceremony called sama, practiced by some Sufi orders, where music, dance, and chanting are used as a means to get closer to God. In Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the devotional music played at sama ceremonies is known as qawwali, made famous by the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the ’80s and ’90s.
It is time to begin. Abdul Waheed Shaidayi, a middle-aged man wearing a red Kandahari cap climbs on the stage, greets everyone, and starts playing the harmonium. While he sings the introductory verses in Persian, his voice slowly soars higher and higher, picking up the pace. The tabla and chimta players join in, drumming and jingling their instruments to an intoxicating, fast-paced rhythm. The worshippers gradually fall into a trance — some aided by the hashish they have been smoking — and shake their heads while clapping furiously. When the music stops for a while, they recite prayers.
These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.
These days, the sama nights are Shaidaiyi’s only chance to play the harmonium for an appreciative audience. Otherwise, he’s mostly idle, his work having long since dried up, save for occasional wedding parties where he is asked to perform. Even there, respect is hard to find, with wedding guests whispering behind the musicians’ backs, accusing them of being pimps and infidels because over the years of war people started believing music is prohibited in Islam.
These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.
In Kucheh Kharabat, however, Shaidayi commands respect. Everyone greets him as he walks down the street the next day. In the local attorney’s office, a congested room where an electric guitar hangs on the wall, Shaidayi is joined by another well-known character in Kharabat: Naseer Hamahang, an imposing man in his 50s. His black hair is combed back and colorful rings decorate his fingers. Hamahang is Shaidayi’s nephew, but he is only two years younger than his uncle.
Hamahang lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag, enjoying this long-time habit that doesn’t seem to affect his singing. The two men, both native to this area, can trace their bloodlines 150 years back to all the famous musical masters of the past. Together, they have lived through days of glory, the horrors of war, and Afghanistan’s beleaguered present.
“People from other areas have come here, bad people,” Shaidayi says as he pours fragrant saffron tea for his guests. “They are insulting the street by calling it Kharabat.” In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.
* * *
During the 1990s there was war and years of religious extremism that turned people against this musical community and almost wiped out the culture of Kharabat. When Shaidayi and Hamahang were children in the ’60s and ’70s, their fathers Ustad Shaida and Ustad Hamahang were famous, admired musicians — so much so that most Afghans remember their names with fondness, even while musicians are simultaneously believed to be bad people by the strictly religious.
In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.
When the two men were little, Afghanistan hadn’t yet been through the four decades of war and political instability that changed the entire cultural and social fabric of the country. Before the communists, Soviets, and religious extremists came, the kings who ruled Afghanistan acted as patrons of the musicians of Kharabat.
As a boy, Shaidayi often accompanied his father to the royal palace where he performed for the then-king Zahir Shah. It was the king himself who would come and pick them up from Kharabat in one of his armored cars now on display in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul — now riddled with bullet holes, because the Taliban would decades later use them for target practice.
“My father would be shaving and the king would wait,” he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.
“One night I went with [my father] to the palace. I was about eight or nine years old. My father and the other musicians were singing in the king’s salon and I fell asleep. The queen came and took me to her son’s room and put a blanket on me.”
There were no formalities in the relationship between the royal family and the Kharabatis — they would all sit next to one another, enjoying the poetry and melodies of the songs.
‘My father would be shaving and the king would wait,’ he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.
Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers. “All the palace’s workers came out and wondered what had happened. The king said, ‘Don’t touch them — it is just because of the music.’ When the music stopped, the birds came back to their senses,” Shaidayi recalls.
Even women in Kharabat used to sing, dance, and play instruments. Today, this is not possible anymore — it would be considered equal to prostitution and pimping.
“People think that we send our wives to perform at parties. But our wives are not artists, they wear headscarves,” Hamahang says, raising his voice.
Abdul Waheed Shaidayi and Naseer Hamahang. Photos by Maija Liuhto.
Back in the more tolerant days, all the great musicians of Afghanistan proudly called Kharabat their home. The street was lined with instrument shops and traditional cafés where the ustads, or masters, used to sit on takhts, traditional beds, and talk and play their instruments. Each of them had students who would come to learn the art of playing traditional South Asian and Afghan instruments in their talim khanas, or schools.
“From the day we were born we heard the sound of music,” Shaidayi says. “When the students came we would go too and listen and learn how to play the instruments.”
Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers.
“Growing up here was so much fun,” Hamahang says. “Our childhood was beautiful. Our fathers were very rich. They were living like kings.”
But Shaidayi was only 10 years old when he lost his father, Ustad Shaida, in an accident. “It became very difficult to survive,” he says. Not long after, his mother also passed away. He had to drop out of school after eighth grade.
“I started learning harmonium from one of my father’s students, Saleem Qandahari,” he tells me.
Qandahari’s house was right in front of Shaidayi’s. Back then, most of the musicians regularly performed live at Radio Afghanistan and would be busy until noon. Their songs were transmitted all over the city through loudspeakers, Shaidayi remembers. After that, they would come back to Kucheh Kharabat and take an afternoon nap. At 4 o’clock they finally had time to receive their students.
“Because my father was his teacher he had time for me — he respected me,” Shaidayi says. In return for the lessons, young Shaidayi ran small errands for Qandahari’s family, such as buying rice and coal.
As Shaidayi and Hamahang were slowly growing into adulthood, the prelude to war began. First, the king was overthrown by his cousin Daud Khan in 1973. But he was assassinated only five years later, in 1978, by communists who then took over in Kabul.
At the age of 18, both Hamahang and Shaidayi had to enroll in the newly communist country’s army. It was there that their musical talents were put to use for the first time.
“They noticed I was really good at singing so they asked us to create a group,” Hamahang says.
The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.
The communists were ruling the country with an iron fist. In a deeply religious country like Afghanistan, not everyone liked the atheism they were propagating. A resistance was being organized, led by a group of religious leaders who became to be known as the mujahideen.
Both Shaidayi and Hamahang — each around 20 at the time — were still in the army when the war started in 1979. The Soviet Union had decided to invade Afghanistan to put an end to the mujahideens’ revolt. While soldiers were sent to fight the guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamahang and Shaidayi stayed in Kabul, in a fort called Bala Hissar, whose ruins still overlook the muddy lanes of Kharabat.
The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.
But worse times were still to come. In 1992, three years after Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen took over Kabul. An interim government was formed, but not all mujahideen leaders were supportive of it.
A violent civil war erupted, as opposing factions started shelling Kabul, destroying much of the city and killing as many as 50,000 people. Kharabat was directly in the line of fire of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s rockets.
“It was like a rain of rockets,” Shaidayi says.
“We couldn’t go outside. No one even dared to look out of the window to see who was there,” Hamahang continues. “We stayed in the basement of our house. There was nothing to eat besides rice.”
In a matter of days, the entire city became a horrifying battlefield. Prisoners in their own homes, the Kharabatis witnessed what war can do to people.
“Many people were hit by rockets and we would have to bury them in their homes. A lot of people were buried in our homes, too,” Hamahang says.
Going outside was simply too risky. The mujahideen would periodically come to the Kharabatis’ houses, asking them to take their injured fighters to Bala Hissar, the army fort, where they could be treated. If they refused, the fighters would hang the men and cut off the women’s breasts, the men remember.
“I have seen so much cruelty in Afghanistan, so much cruelty,” Hamahang says, shaking his head.
Both men, who were now married, realized the situation was simply too dangerous for their families. They decided to leave their homes and take their families to safety in neighboring Pakistan.
“We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,” Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.
“We saw that they were injured, but we did nothing because in that situation you only think of yourself,” Hamahang explains, his expression turning somber.
‘We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,’ Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.
A short ceasefire allowed them to get out of Kabul unharmed.
“We took nothing with us,” Shaidayi says. There was no time to rescue precious instruments or tape recordings of their fathers’ performances. Family heirlooms and wealth accumulated through generations were left to the mercy of looting militias.
“When we left, we thought we’d be back in a couple of weeks after things in Afghanistan would calm down,” he explains. Instead, weeks turned into almost 14 years.
When the family reached the border crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, it was nighttime. There was nowhere safe for the women to sleep, so the men decided they all had to sleep on the ground and make a circle around the women, making sure no one would touch them. Peshawar, the city where most Afghan refugees were headed to, was still hours away.
But once there, the family split: Hamahang, his parents, and his wife decided to stay in Peshawar, while Shaidayi took his sisters, wife, and children south to the city of Quetta, where his brother was waiting for them. Both cities were full of newly arrived Afghan refugees, many living in congested camps on the cities’ outskirts.
“We started from zero,” Hamahang says.
The musicians were in a slightly more fortunate situation than those living in camps however because they could use their musical skills to earn money. “We rented a house [in Quetta]. The house had four rooms and we were eight families,” Shaidayi says.
Slowly, the people in Quetta started inviting Shaidayi and his brother to perform at their weddings. Many of them were Pashtuns, members of an ethnic group that lives on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shaidayi, an ethnic Tajik and Persian speaker, started learning Pashto so that he could perform at their weddings.
As they started making money they could soon afford a bigger house. But they still lived largely hand-to-mouth.
Years went by like this, exiled in a foreign country. But Kharabat remained in Shaidayi and Hamahang’s dreams.
One day, a few years after leaving Kabul, Shaidayi heard of a new militant group on television: the Taliban. The group had taken over most parts of Afghanistan, and its militants were now moving around Kabul, brandishing their Kalashnikovs and punishing women for as little as showing their ankles.
Kharabat was now empty. Countless musicians lay in their graves, buried under their houses which had been bombed to the ground. Or, if they had been lucky, they had escaped the rockets to Pakistan like Shaidayi and Hamahang.
With the Taliban’s rule of fear, a temporary peace also came to Kabul. But there was no question of returning to Afghanistan. Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.
“The Taliban didn’t allow music or musicians. All those things were forbidden,” he says.
Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.
In Kabul, people suddenly had to hide their radios and music players out of fear of the Taliban’s brutal punishments. An eerie silence descended upon the city, broken only by the azaan, the call to prayer that rang out like clockwork five times a day, spreading from the first mosque to the next, filling the entire valley of Kabul.
But Afghans were not isolated from the Taliban even in exile in Pakistan.
“The Taliban were there in Quetta, too, but they couldn’t say anything to us,” Shaidayi says. This, according to him, was because the group didn’t have the authority to do anything on Pakistani soil.
The Taliban in Quetta could easily be identified by the way they dressed and talked, Shaidayi remembers. They also frequently carried weapons.
Sometimes, Shaidayi found himself performing at parties members of the Taliban would attend. “They would come and listen to us there. They didn’t bother us,” he says.
* * *
Almost 400 miles north in Peshawar, Hamahang was leading a similar life, recording music with his father and playing at wedding parties.
One day, upon arriving to perform at a wedding, he saw a person with kohl-rimmed eyes and a large turban on his head. “I went to sit in a corner so that he wouldn’t see me. Then I asked who he was. He said he was the chief of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice in Kabul. I became very afraid,” Hamahang says.
The man had come to perform the nikah, the wedding ceremony, for the bride and the groom. He signaled Hamahang to come closer and asked him who he was. “I was shaking from fear,” he says.
When Hamahang identified himself as Ustad Hamahang’s son, the man said, “Your father had a very good life in Kabul.” Hamahang said, “Don’t do anything to me, the minute I walked up to you, I became ritually impure,” meaning he had wet himself out of fear.
“I could tell my companions to take you to the other side of Torkham,” the man said to him. “There, I could do anything to you. I could kill you, but I won’t. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, don’t sing while I’m here. I will wed the couple, I will go, and then you can sing,” the Taliban chief told Hamahang.
Once the man had left, Hamahang says he sang so well that the Taliban chief’s companions became drunk on the music. Later they brought alcohol bottles and started drinking — a serious offence under the Taliban regime.
For a while, it seemed the Taliban had meant to stay in Afghanistan. Years went by. At times, the families would visit one another; a week or two in Quetta, a month in Peshawar.
The year 2001 rolled in, at first like any other. But then came the 9/11 attacks in New York City. “We didn’t realize anything would happen to the Taliban when we were watching the attacks on TV,” Shaidayi says. But Afghanistan’s fate was about to change once again. In October, the United States invaded the country and chased the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates away. But the country was in shambles following decades of war. It was not time to return yet.
While living in Pakistan, Shaidayi and Hamahang’s fame had started spreading to all the corners of the world where Afghan refugees lived. Hamahang had already toured the United States with his father in the late ’90s. While there, he had met several famous musicians from all over the world and had even been offered the opportunity to settle in the States. But the dream of one day being able to return to Kharabat had made him refuse.
* * *
In 2004, it was Shaidayi’s turn to see the world. One day, he received a phone call from London. An Indian man at the other end of the receiver wanted to invite him to perform at a Sufi concert along with other Afghan and Iranian musicians.
A few months later he found himself in England, sitting in front of a mostly British audience.
“A lot of people asked me what I thought about London,” he says. What I always remember is that when I was singing a song about Ali [Prophet Muhammad’s nephew] and the person who was playing tabla was translating the lyrics, all the British people were crying. It was very interesting for me.”
After the concert, a group of British people came up to Shaidayi and invited him to read Sufi poetry on a hilltop. They said they were followers of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Ghaus. “When I read the lyrics of a qawwali song, they all fell into a trance.”
* * *
In late 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan. Hamahang and Shaidayi soon started hearing good news from Kabul. “Streets had been fixed, a lot of construction was taking place, and a lot of capital came to Afghanistan,” Shaidayi recalls.
In 2005, they finally packed their things, vacated their houses in Peshawar and Quetta, and headed for the Torkham border crossing, more than a decade after the first frightening night spent there.
Despite all the construction and development, a devastating sight awaited them on returning to Kabul.
“Kharabat had vanished,” Hamahang says.
Determined to see the area return to its old glory, the families started slowly rebuilding their houses. But nothing would ever be quite the same again. The years of war and horror had changed the people of Kabul.
Although many were glad to have music return to their lives after years of haunting silence, not everyone was happy to see the Kharabatis back.
“The people who had stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban — the poor people who weren’t able to go to Peshawar — experienced a lot of terrible things, and they were psychologically affected. Because of that, some of them had very bad ideas about us,” Shaidayi says.
Still, most of the Kharabatis started teaching and performing again, hopeful that slowly things would get better. And for a good 10 years, Shaidayi had a steady, albeit meager, flow of students. But most of the students only took classes for a few months then disappeared. Two years ago, Shaidayi had to give up the small office he was renting as his teaching space. “I simply couldn’t manage anymore,” he says.
The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.
“Some days ago I met with a person who wanted to learn to play the rubab [a traditional string instrument]. He told me his wife had said to him, ‘Why do you want to learn music, it’s not good.’ This is because of illiteracy. People don’t understand,” Hamahang says.
The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.
Music is not explicitly prohibited in Islam. There are scholars who believe it to be permissible and those who do not. Conservative mullahs and imams of mosques often speak against music in their Friday sermons, or khutbas, because they have been influenced by extremist interpretations of religion. Their words are taken seriously in Afghanistan.
There is a mosque near Kharabat where the musicians often go to pray. The mullah there behaves well with them, partly because the Kharabatis give him money each month.
“But he is against our work. He doesn’t view it positively,” Shaidayi says.
Once, Shaidayi went to pray in a mosque further away. The mullah recognized him. “Because of that, he started his khutba by saying that music is forbidden in Islam, music is bad, and that musicians make women dance.”
Slowly, the men understood that the peace in the early years after the U.S. invasion had only been temporary. The Taliban had regrouped and Kabul became unsafe again. Now, bombs explode on a regular basis and ISIS has started targeting the Shiite community of Afghanistan. Corpses pile up and anyone who doesn’t agree with the extremists’ interpretation of religion must fear for their lives.
“From Amanullah Khan’s reign up until today, these mullahs have destroyed our lives. Not only ours, everyone’s,” Hamahang says, suddenly agitated.
And so it has become a question of life and death for the Kharabatis to prove that they are good Muslims, even though their ways of worshipping might be different from the mainstream.
“Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,” Shaidayi says. “They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.”
But it is not only mullahs, the Taliban, and other extremists who threaten the Kharabatis.
‘Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,’ Shaidayi says. ‘They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.’
One night, Hamahang saw two drunken men with guns outside his house injure a child. He ran outside and asked what was going on. “They shot me, too,” he says, showing his injured hand. The bullet went through his palm and now he is no longer able to move his right middle finger. The men, he says, were part of a criminal gang that sells drugs in Kabul. “No one can do anything to them because they are powerful.”
The gangs often lure the musicians to come to shady locations, speaking of parties and promising them money. “When we arrive, there is nothing there. They beat us, take our keyboards, and all our instruments,” Hamahang says.
Powerful former mujahideen commanders sometimes bring girls and young boys to dance at parties — a practice known by the name of bacha bazi that is often connected to sexual abuse.
“If we go to a party, how can we know that they are bringing a boy or a girl to dance there?” Shaidayi asks. “If we sing, it is uncomfortable for us when someone is dancing in front of us. And if we don’t sing, we will be beaten by them.”
It is a rainy Thursday afternoon. The houses in Kabul are cold and the smell of gas from heaters lingers on men’s traditional suits, or payraan tumbaans. Shaidayi walks down Kharabat wrapped in a woolen shawl. He has just returned from the mosque.
Hamahang appears from around a corner and greets Shaidayi. He has been invited to perform on Afghanistan’s largest TV network’s music program tonight. Occasionally the other Kharabatis go too. But interest in traditional music has decreased even among the more liberal and educated Afghans as Western-influenced music videos have taken over TV channels.
“Now people only watch. They don’t listen. … If there are no girls in the video, nobody is interested,” Shaidayi says.
While Hamahang prepares for his performance, Shaidayi wants to visit some of his former colleagues in the nearby Shor Bazaar where some Kharabatis have their offices. As he is starting to cross a busy road, a man who looks like a beggar comes to greet him. He is also a musician.
Not too long ago, the man’s desperate financial situation drove him to attempt to sell his daughter, Shaidayi explains. But the other Kharabatis, although poor themselves, intervened, collected some money, and prevented this from happening.
Finally in Shor Bazaar, Shaidayi sits in front of his harmonium on the carpeted floor of a room where some Kharabatis still continue to teach their students. The stuffy room smells of hashish and gas from a small heater. Shaidayi starts singing as the man to his left plays the tabla and the one to his right a clarinet. Immediately, everyone is transported to a different world, mesmerized by the melody and lyrics of the song. The piece is a ghazal, a genre of poetry popular in South and Central Asia, composed by Shaidayi’s father, Ustad Shaida. It tells the story of two lovers, Laila and Majnun, a Sufi parable for the relationship between God and his worshipper.
All of this would be considered haram, or forbidden, by the Taliban. But for the Kharabatis, this is the very essence of religion.
“The Taliban don’t like music. If they decide to kill someone [for that] we are the first ones to end up dead,” the tabla player in the corner says after the song has finished.
Shaidayi stands up to leave. Outside, the weather is murky and depressing. Winter has arrived. He slowly walks toward his rented flat in Kharabat, careful not to ruin his shoes in the puddles and open gutters. On the other side of the town, a bomb has just exploded. Sirens fill the air for a while as the injured and dead are transported to hospitals. Then, life must go on again. In the evening, Hamahang’s performance is broadcast on TV while the rest of Kharabatis prepare for another qawwali night in the shrine at the end of the street.
Kharabat may never again become like in the past, but the community worshipping inside the shrine will always welcome Shaidayi and Hamahang. There, away from the eyes of others, it can almost seem like no time has passed.
***
Maija Liuhto is a freelance journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. She covers Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times and the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, the Christian Science Monitor, and VICE.
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