#((in pop culture during the 70s; and with that as their only frame of reference))

[theheadlessgroom]

@beatingheart-bride

Funny...he could swear he'd never met this woman a day in her life, and yet, when she said her name aloud, there was something about it that rang a distant bell in his head, though he couldn't say why...had he maybe read it somewhere, heard it somewhere?

Still, he set aside this feeling of deja vu to answer with a small smile, "Me? Oh, no, I'm a New Orleans native; born and raised, just like my ma!"

Born here, live here, will probably die here, he thought to himself wryly-he'd seldom left the city, let alone the state, and even then was something of a homebody. Unlike his old man, he couldn't exactly be described as a social butterfly, mostly content to keep to himself as he went about his day-sure, he went out; he went grocery shopping, went to the movies, spent his weekends trying to relax before the work week resumed, but one wouldn't catch him at any dance clubs or proverbial party centrals in town, that was for sure.

"Wh-What about you, Miss de Clair?" he asked, half-wondering he should call her "Emily", just as she called hm "Randall", as if they knew each other-maybe she knew something he didn't? "I, uh, I-I don't think I've ever seen you around before either-are you new in town?"

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Balearic Beats (The Album Vol 1) 1988 Balearic Beat / Disco / House / Industrial

Man, this is such a momentous fuckin' album that was compiled by legends Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, and Trevor Fung back in '88. Here they deliver the first compilation to *ever* attempt to encapsulate the sound of the wide-ranging 'Balearic beat,' a dance phenomenon whose home was in the party capital of the world, on the Spanish isle of Ibiza, where plenty of Europeans would visit and end up drawing inspiration from. And with this album, these three guys appear to have finally successfully broken through, able to bring this very quirky vibe into the UK to coat its own exploding dance music scene during the historic 'Second Summer of Love,' which saw the Chicago-born genre of acid house reach critical mass among the youth and spawn a first generation of ravers.

But Balearic beat is not something that one can easily describe, because its most defining trait is that it really only has one rule: so long as there is some sort of tangible beat that's danceable, it'll do. Essentially, Balearic beat represents an extremely expansive coterie of a whole bunch of different genres: pop, rock, house, disco—pretty much everything that ranges between James Brown funk records and industrial music, and with blends of psychedelia, Italo flavor, plenty of leftfield experimentalism, guitar rock, and chunks of world music too. It's probably the single-most unique dance music scene that this world's ever borne witness to, and it not only allowed, but actively encouraged DJs to take unprecedented levels of risk in their own selections, as a culture of decadence, hedonism, freedom, and acceptance was nurtured and fostered.

And Oakenfold and co. really tried to bring this vibe and approach into the UK's own dance consciousness a couple times between '87 and '88, after returning from summers spent on Ibiza and opening up a couple nightclubs. But things finally started taking hold with Oakey's own Monday club night called Spectrum at gay superclub Heaven in Westminster, London. And this comp, with liner notes provided by Boy's Own's Terry Farley, represents those Spectrum club nights, as well as stuff from Shoom, which is the club where the UK's acid house movement first originated. Shoom was founded by Oakenfold compatriot Danny Rampling, whose own first trip to Ibiza with Oakey and others is what inspired him to open up the club in the first place. And Rampling took ecstasy for the first time on that Ibiza trip too 💊😁🥹.

So, from a glance, by looking at this tracklist and not having any familiarity with what Balearic beat entails, you might see this list of songs and inevitably scratch your head: Italo-jazz saxophonist Enzo Avitabile?; pop starlet Mandy Smith, who's unfortunately best known for having an underage relationship with former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and then marrying him 🤮?; San Francisco avantgardists The Residents taking the bassline from "Billie Jean" and fashioning a cover of a Hank Williams honky-tonk tune out of it?; EBM group Nitzer Ebb?; industrial act Fini Tribe on a weird, cocaine-fueled tribal disco tip with ringing and clanging bells??? What on earth is this?!?!?

But don't worry, now that you have a proper frame of reference, it'll all make a whole lot more sense when you actually put this album on 😎.

And we gotta make special mention of this release's opener too, "Jibaro" by Oakenfold and Steve Osborne's Balearic electronic project, Electra. Yesterday I posted about an Italo comp that was put out by this same Pete Tong-run FFRR label called The House Sound of Europe - Vol. V - 'Casa Latina', and I remarked that although the Electra track on there really had no business being included—because it was neither Italian-made nor really a house tune—it was still the best track that that comp had to offer, as it was the pure ultimate in 80s Ibiza silky-chillness. But this "Jibaro" track, a cover of a mid-70s Spanish psychedelic disco-funk tune, and whose own 12-inch art inspired the album art for this comp itself, represents a different branch of that girthy Balearic tree, because this one's a full-fledged house jam; slower than a typical house tune, but a house tune nonetheless; and with a richly patched-together sonic quilt of different sounds that *majorly* diverges from all the black, queer, and acid-jacking beauty that'd been emanating from Chicago.

So, ultimately, this was a very important album in the grand scheme of things. Balearic beat brought a very elastic dimension to the acid house movement writ large in the UK, and if you'll now all allow me to unveil my corkboard-and-yarn setup here to give you all a parting glimpse of just how intertwined all of this got within the UK's own vibrant, fluid, and interconnected music landscape, let's bring all of this full-circle by talking about legendary Manchester new wave band New Order.

New Order once took a two-week trip to Ibiza that had such a profound effect on them that it yielded their fifth studio LP, Technique, in 1989. And they also owned a very popular club in Manchester called The Haçienda. In '88, The Haçienda would launch its own Ibiza-themed club nights, which then played an integral role in the development of the city's own Madchester scene, a style of alternative dance music that saw indie bands mesh their sound with psychedelia and acid house beats. And one of Madchester's biggest landmarks ended up being 1990's Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, an album by a group called Happy Mondays that was co-produced by none other than the Electra boys themselves—Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne! 🤯

Highlights:

Electra - "Jibaro" Code 61 - "Drop the Deal" Beats Workin' - "Sure Beats Workin'" Enzo Avitabile - "Black Out" Mandy Smith - "Mandy's Theme (I Just Can't Wait) (Cool & Breezy Jazz Version)" The Residents - "Kaw-Liga (Prairie Mix)" The Woodentops - "Why Why Why (Live)" Fini Tribe - "De Testimony (Collapsing Edit)" The Thrashing Doves - "Jesus On the Payroll"

[lisbonsteresa]

let me be very obvious and send you nace for the ship ask!

Do it for our besties, Nancy and Ace

absolutely i will besties!!

-

1. Who buys flowers for the other

I mean, Nancy does still owe Ace flowers from his welcome back party... (but also i love the idea of Nancy opening her locker at the end of a hard shift to find flowers Ace snuck in for her. maybe a little note too because ofc he would leave notes)

2. Who makes the other coffee/tea

Ace 1000% - he also makes Nancy lunches and will sit with her to make sure she eats whenever she gets worked up over a case

3. Who eats the most candy on Halloween

Ace (although Nancy will fight him for the fun size snickers) (between him and Ryan the Drew household goes through 4 bags of candy before they get halfway through October)

4. Who tries new recipes all the time

This is kind of a split - Ace sometimes plays around with weird food combos when the Claw's slow (Birdie's grilled cheese and peanut butter actually turned out to be one of his favorites) But Nancy got really into baking after she and Rebecca bonded while Ace was on his road trip, and they still trade recipes whenever she comes over for dinner

5. Who genuinely likes pineapple on pizza

ACE i'm laughing bc i really just tossed that idea into a fic and here it is again...if it comes up again i'm claiming it's canon Nancy absolutely hates it and refuses to kiss him after he has a slice (at least at first....her resistance usually doesn't last too long)

6. Who wears hats on special occasions

Follow-up question: does breaking and entering count as a special occasion? Because Nancy may or may not have knitted Ace his own b&e beanie (Ryan also bought them both Red Sox hats that time he and Carson took them to Boston for a game...it gave Ace major hat hair and Nancy teased him the whole ride home)

7. Who likes ‘90s R&B

Nancy - Ace doesn't have much of a taste in music other than the 70's rock cassettes that came with Florence (but he will listen to anything Nancy puts on)

8. Who likes long walks on the beach

Both - especially at night. Sometimes it's nice to just take a moment away from everything - without any familial conspiracies or spooky shit to deal with - and enjoy the silence together (they also spend a good deal of time on the bluffs. maybe they have their first kiss there. who's to say.)

9. Who buys wacky picture frames

Ace - he particularly likes the ones with big, obviously fake seashells glued onto them (Nancy's bedroom is starting to look like a boardwalk tchotchke shop but she can't bear to get rid of any of them)

10. Who compares themselves to fictional/celebrity couples

Oh, neither. For two people who toss out movie references with ease, they really have almost 0 pop culture awareness. (that being said, if George hears Bess call them the 'Jim and Pam' of the Claw one more time...)

11. Who can solve a rubix cube

Both. Ace can do it in just over a minute (and he's coming for that world record) Nancy can do it in 3 (but only after she peels off the stickers and cheats when no one's looking)

12. Who would wear Hawaiian shirts on vacation/during the summer

I mean.... (Nancy did borrow one of his after a beach day and he had to turn away and walk down to the water to keep his composure)

13. Who wears mismatched socks because they can’t keep up with the pairs

Nancy (unintentionally - she has too many other things to worry about) Ace (deliberately - it works with his style, so he stopped trying to keep the matches a while ago)

[chiseler]

Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as  Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of  populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism  of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49,  the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

[hedwigencyclopaedia]

David Bowie (Pt. 2)

“There’s old wave. There’s new wave. And then there’s David Bowie.” [1] 

After his brief foray into “plastic soul” with 1975’s Young Americans, Bowie released Station to Station— the first in a string of albums heavily influenced by both contemporary German musical artists like Kraftwerk and Neu!, often referred to as krautrock, and German philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. [2] Bowie was no stranger to philosophical references in his work, having previously referenced Nietzsche’s works with “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Quicksand,” and “Supermen,” all off of 1971’s Hunky Dory. [2, 3]

Station to Station introduced the Thin White Duke persona; a character he later referred to as “a nasty character for me.” It was during this era he made controversial comments referring to Hitler and had the infamous incident at Victoria Station that took what was meant as a wave at the gathered crowd and alleged it to instead be a Nazi salute. He had also been detained in Poland for having Nazi paraphernalia. [4]

Having picked up Iggy Pop on his Isolar Tour, David took a short break from producing his own music to help Pop produce his first solo album The Idiot (1977) and to an extent workshop the new sound he had wanted to explore. They headed to Switzerland to create the album with Iggy often “scribbling lyrics” while David and the other musicians worked at crafting the sound of the album. [1]

For Bowie’s next album, he picked up frequent collaborator and producer Tony Visconti as well as newcomer Brian Eno to work on the first of what would become known as the “Berlin Trilogy” or the “Berlin Triptych” in Low (1977). Although known as part of the Berlin Trilogy, work on Low started at the same Swiss chalet that had seen the creation of The Idiot. The move was partly inspired by Bowie’s larger goal to get himself and his friend off of their respective drug addictions and largely to give them both a new mindset away from the fame, fans, and record labels they faced in either the US or the UK. After its completion, Bowie sent a copy of Low to Nicolas Roeg with a note stating “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack,” referring to The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film they had completed the previous year and for which Bowie had initially been promised he’d be able to write the soundtrack. [1]

The release of Low was delayed by Bowie’s record label RCA not caring for half the album being instrumentals and the critical reception — what little there was due to a lack of promotion — was mixed to the point that over the years, it was referred to as almost entirely negatively received upon release. [5]

Bowie’s next album, “Heroes” (1977) expanded on the themes explored in Low, distilling and blending them into the next phase of his career. Recorded ‎at Hansa Studio, which overlooked the Berlin Wall, it loosely used the same format as Low with more accessible lyric songs on Side A and instrumentals making up the majority of the B side. Furthering the similarities, both albums featured use of the “cut-up technique” of writing in which an author takes a poem or written work and cuts it up, rearranging the pages to form an exquisite corpse. [1, 6] Where it differed was while Low’s lyrics were largely inspired by Bowie’s life and current troubles, “Heroes” was considered as a whole to be a less personally inspired project and heavily informed by the culture, history, and “essence” of Berlin. [1]

Bowie continued his experiments not only with sound techniques, but recording and writing styles with the final album in the Berlin Trilogy, Lodger (1979). In writing it, he used techniques such as having his band switch instruments to create a more “garage band” “just learning their instruments” feel for “Boys Keep Swinging,” playing chords from “All The Young Dudes” backwards to create new song “Move On,” reusing the musical track from Iggy Pop’s Sister Midnight, from Bowie-produced The Idiot for “Red Money,” and taking further inspiration from producer Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, which Eno had introduced while he, Bowie, and Visconti worked on “Heroes.” [1]

Going into the 80s, Bowie was determined to have a hit record. [5] Despite previous fame and relative successes, Bowie wanted to not just be a hit artist; he wanted to be the hit artist. And with his divorce from Angela and his split from MainMan officially finalized, now was the time. The next album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980), reached #1 on the UK charts going platinum [7] and #12 in the US. [8]

The follow up three years later, Let’s Dance (1983) outdid its predecessor, both reaching #1 in the charts and going platinum in both countries. [7, 9, 10] The supporting tour, the Serious Moonlight Tour had the distinction of selling out every one of the 96 shows and being one of the largest shows of the time. [11]

The two subsequent albums Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), offered diminishing returns in terms of chart performance [12, 13] and critical reception, with Bowie later disowning Never Let Me Down saying in 1995 “My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album. … I really shouldn’t have even bothered going into the studio to record it. In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did sometimes” [13] and later in 2002 “There was a period when I was performing in front of these huge stadium crowds and at that time I was thinking 'what are these people doing here? Why did they come to see me? They should be seeing Phil Collins'…And then that came back at me and I thought 'What am I doing here?” [14]

In 1987, as part of the Glass Spider Tour, Bowie had one of the most profound experiences of his touring career while playing a stage that butted up to the Berlin Wall. The sound from the fans on the East side singing along was so loud that Bowie could hear it about the din of his own concert. Part of the concert lives on on YouTube as well as a clip of David’s speech in German addressing both sides of the Wall. The influence of this show was acknowledged by the German Foreign Office in 2016 after Bowie’s death with a tweet reading “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall” and linking to a live performance of David performing the song. [15]

As the 80s came to a close, Bowie chose to take some time away from his solo career and formed the band Tin Machine with Reeves Gabrels, and the brothers Hunt and Tony Sales.

He married his second wife, Somali supermodel, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Iman, twice in 1992; the first in a private ceremony and the second in a lavish ceremony in Tuscany. According to David, he was already naming their future children the night he met her. [16] His next album Black Tie, White Noise (1993) was as much a wedding album as it was a reflection of the things currently going on in his life from being in LA when the Rodney King riots started to the death of his beloved half-brother Terry and was a distinct return to “eclecticism” over marketability. [17]

The nineties continued the theme of “eclecticism” with 1995’s Outside, an exploration into the budding industrial movement framed by a murder mystery in support of which he toured with alterative/industrial band Nine Inch Nails [18], 1997’s Earthling, which examined electronic music, and 1999’s hours… which while more conventionally mainstream than its two predecessors in tone, was less well received. [19]

Between albums, Bowie was expanding his horizons beyond his music and film careers such as 1997’s release of Bowie Bonds, an early return for him on future earnings that was presented as an opportunity for the bearer to receive a 7.9% return on their investment [20]; BowieNet, a dial-up internet service provider that also gave subscribers exclusive content and a BowieNet email address [21]; and Omikron: The Nomadic Soul, a futuristic video game that featured songs from ‘hours…’ and featured David and Iman’s voices and likenesses. [22]

Bowie also had started work on Toy which would become his first unreleased album since The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack had been scuttled in the mid-70s. Some of the tracks from Toy ended up on his next album, 2002’s Heathen. [23]

His last album before taking a ten year hiatus was Reality (2003) During the supporting tour, he had a lollipop thrown in his eye, (later memorialized in a self portrait) [24], and had the heart attack that stopped him from touring his own music outside of occasional guest appearances with other artists such as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and at events such as Fashion Rocks in the US. His last live performance was at a benefit for Alicia Keys’ Keep a Child Alive campaign where the pair sang a duet of Bowie’s song “Changes.” [25]

In 2013, he ended his hiatus with the unexpected release of The Next Day, the cover art for which featured a large white box overtop of the iconic “Heroes” album cover. The same year, he partnered with the Victoria and Albert museum in London to exhibit the David Bowie Is collection that later that year began a world tour with stops in Chicago, Paris, the Netherlands, Melbourne, and ending at the Brooklyn Museum on July 15th. [26] A digitized version of the collection became viewable on January 8th 2019 with the David Bowie Is app with narration by Gary Oldman. [27]

Despite the album reaching #2 on the US charts [28] and #1 in the UK [29], producer Tony Visconti said that Bowie had no intention of touring the album [30], a comment that music magazine Pitchfork chose to run with to mean that Bowie would never tour again. [31] Regardless of the intent of the statement, Pitchfork ended up being correct in saying the Bowie would never tour again.

In 2017, Bowie’s long standing ambition of writing a musical was realized when Lazarus opened in New York. Following what happens after The Man Who Fell to Earth, the plot sees lead character Thomas Jerome Newton in the modern day having not significantly aged since the events of the original story. Its composition took inspiration more the original novel by Walter Tevis than from Bowie’s role in the 1976 film. [32]

Bowie’s last album was released January 8th 2016, two days before his death from terminal liver cancer. ★, pronounced “Blackstar” incorporated some of the new songs Bowie had written for Lazarus with originals. Recent successes, past fame, and his very current death made sure that Blackstar placed #1 in 24 different countries including the US, UK, and Germany. [33]

After his death, Bowie was honoured not only with fan memorials and tributes, but with official plaques in Berlin and around England noting places of “historic significance.” [34, 35]

[1] Bowie in Berlin by Thomas Jerome Seabrook. 2008.

[2] David Bowie and Philosophy by Theodore G. Ammon. 2016.

[3] http://loudwire.com/songs-inspired-by-german-philosopher-nietzsche/

[4] https://www.thedailybeast.com/on-race-david-bowie-delved-deep-into-the-darkness-and-came-back-human

[5] Starman by Paul Trunka. 2011. Advanced Galley.

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/13/construct-exquisite-corpse

[7] http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/faq.htm#m09a

[8] https://www.davidbowie.com/blog/2017/9/24/anciant-album-focus-scary-monsters

[9] https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award&se=david+bowie#search_section

[10] https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8457017/david-bowie-no-1-hot-100-1983-chart-rewind

[11] http://www.electricmud.ca/2018/david-bowie-toronto1983/

[12] https://www.billboard.com/music/david-bowie/chart-history/billboard-200

[13] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-david-bowies-biggest-disappointment-became-a-posthumous-reworked-album-702189/

[14] David Bowie interviewed on Jonathan Ross,  June 29th, 2002.

[15] https://twitter.com/GermanyDiplo/status/686498183669743616

[16] http://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-bowie-black-tie-white-noise/

[17] http://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-bowie-black-tie-white-noise/

[18] https://www.revolvermag.com/music/see-david-bowie-sing-hurt-nine-inch-nails-1995

[19] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/881-hours/

[20] https://web.archive.org/web/20130620051917/http://www.commodityonline.com/news/david-bowie-bonds--ip-securitization-1896-3-1897.html

[21] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-bowienet-isp-internet

[22] https://www.polygon.com/2016/1/11/10749686/david-bowie-omikron-nomad-soul-david-cage

[23] http://www.davidbowieworld.nl/mijn-bootlegs-2-2/bbc/attachment/david-bowie-toy/

[24] https://twitter.com/dark_shark/status/692853482512977921?lang=en

[25] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/inside-david-bowies-final-years-237314/

[26] https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/davidbowieis

[27] https://www.davidbowie.com/blog/2019/1/8/david-bowie-is-virtual-launched-today

[28] https://www.billboard.com/music/david-bowie/chart-history/billboard-200/song/775880

[29] http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/features/thenextdaycharts.htm

[30] https://www.spin.com/2013/01/david-bowie-producer-the-next-day-album-details/

[31] https://twitter.com/Tonuspomus/status/289810690338856960

[32] https://lazarusmusical.com/about

[33] http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/features/blackstarcharts.htm

[34] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/22/david-bowie-berlin-plaque-commemorates-singers-time-in-city

[35]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/15/david-bowie-three-blue-plaques-bbc-music-day

General Resources:

https://www.davidbowie.com/about/

[hrlequinsblogofinterests]

Anime v. Cartoons: What's the Difference?

Anime has long held the interest of viewers across the globe. The question is, why? Western cartoons are usually strictly confined to the realm of children’s television, and viewed as immature and childish by adults. So just what is it that makes anime so different? Is it the big eyes? The detailed animation? Magic?

To understand Japanese anime, we must first understand what it is. The term anime, a contraction of the word Animēshon, or animation, was coined by Taihei Imamura in 1948, though it wasn’t widely used until the late 1960s (Richmond 2009, 2). Anime, to paraphrase from Gilles Poitras, has two definitions. In Japan, anime is used as a blanket term for any and all animation. In the West, it is used to refer to animation specifically from Japan (Poitras 2008, 48). For the sake of clarity, we’ll stick with the Western definition.

Unfortunately, the true history of animation in Japan is somewhat of a mystery, as most early film and animation was lost in the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, and then again when Japan was firebombed in WWII (Richmond 2009, 2). It is speculated that Japanese animation may have begun as early as 1907, with a 50 frame short discovered in 2005 in Kyoto, but so little is known about the animation of the time that it’s impossible to know for sure when the short was created - speculation dates it between 1905 and 1912 (Litten 2014, 15; Richmond 2009, 3).

What we do know is that, as Japanese animation developed, it took inspiration from traditional folk tales, Western animation, and Japanese tradition. (Richmond 2009, 4, 5, 9). We also know that Japan became increasingly militaristic in the lead up to WWII. Japan’s first animated feature-film, Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors, released in 1945, was military-funded propaganda intended to entertain Japanese children during the War (Poitras 2008, 49).

The advent of television had a profound effect on the Japanese anime, providing animators with a new platform through which to sell their work. Most early TV anime took inspiration from Western animation and Disney (Drazen 2003, 4; Richmond 2009, 5), and were targeted towards children, much like in the West. Some of those anime were even exported and broadcast in America - albeit in highly edited, Americanized versions, to make them more ‘acceptable’ to US audiences (Drazen 2003, 7).

Unlike Western animation, however, Japanese animators didn’t stop with children’s cartoons. In the early 70s the Japanese anime industry began to branch out and produce anime targeted at middle schoolers, trying to increase their viewership (Poitras 2008, 51). The transition from elementary to middle school was easy enough to make, and met with enough success that, by the 1980s, anime was being marketed to high school and college students as well (Poitras 2008, 53).

One of the reasons anime found success with so many different age groups is that it doesn’t fall into the Western trap of assuming people only want slapstick entertainment and humor from their animation (Poitras 2008, 48). Japanese anime covers a wide variety of extremely diverse genres, and caters to all age groups, genders, and demographics. From the very beginning anime has included deliberate references and similarities to political issues and struggles of the times, with Astro Boy’s mirroring of the Civil Rights Movement (Drazen 2003, 6), and Mobile Suit Gundam’s political upheaval and civil war (Poitras 2008, 52). Even children’s anime has deeper themes than most Western cartoons.

Anime is also filled with emotion. Happiness, love, sadness, anger, depression, drama, joy, all of the emotions we feel throughout our lives are present in anime. When compared side by side, we can see just how far short Western cartoons fall when it comes to emotion. In the West, we shy away from complex issues and darker emotions when making cartoons, we tend to stick with humor, comedy, slapstick, and tame action (Poitras 2008, 48), with very few exceptions.

So what is it that makes anime so different from cartoons? Anime is a way of seeing and commenting on the world we live in, and the struggles we face. It’s a way of looking at life, the things we feel, and the differences between us. Anime allows us to imagine the world as it is, but also how it could be, and lets us live in that world for a time. It’s a way to bring up an issue, to detail the struggles faced by those who have fewer privileges than most, and to talk about how we might move forward as a society. And by not treating the viewers like children and assuming that humor is everything, anime can reach people of all ages, in all walks of life, and show them a different perspective of the world they live in.

Sources:

Drazen, Patrick. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! Of Japanese Animation. Stone Bridge Press, 2002.

Litten, Frederick S. Japanese Color Animation from ca. 1907 to 1945. 2014, http://litten.de/fulltext/color.pdf.

Poitras, Gilles. “Contemporary Anime in Japanese Pop Culture.”  Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime edited by Mark MacWilliams. Eastgate, 2008.

Richmond, Simon, and Rough Guides. The Rough Guide to Anime 1. Original edition, Rough Guides, 2009.

~Hrlequin

[shorthaircutsmodels]

Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts - 15+ - https://shorthaircutsmodels.com/bebe-rexhas-short-hairstyles-and-haircuts/ - Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts, But the American singer songwriter is particularly. Known for her particular fashion sense and her lovable character. Rumours and rumours about the 31-year-old's haircut are always in the limelight of celebrity magazines and tabloids. Check out Bebe Rexha's old looks in the picture gallery here. See yourself with Bebe Rexha's hair. Bleaching your hair is such a bitch but saved my hair. Plus is not an ad btw just my love for this person. Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts, I usually go with the theme of an album. We bring in different painters for album covers, so we had a Dutch artist whose work was full of fantasy for the girls album Panic, and my look came from that. In the early days I was more limited on budget than anything else. I once did an album cover where I cut a pillowcase and wrapped it with red gaffer tape. Bebe Rexha's Hairstyles and Haircuts Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts, He looked really great but the label turned him down. After admitting his lifelong fascination for Harry I'm going crazy gushed the blonde frontman tested everything from his iconic platinum hair to his punk performance to get Rexha kept his blonde sweater.following]. You've always been able to push boundaries whether your hair is with makeup clothes or music Rexha says. Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles Bebe Rexha's Short Hairstyles and Haircuts, It just inspires me to keep trying new things and never get stuck in a particular box. No one really understood my vibe when I started. I had black hair and put out a song called I'll show you crazy about mental health. It exploded with more than 50 million streams, but my label was like your look. It's very dark. Bebe Rexha had a great inspiration growing up. 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He also asked a question to find out which hairstyle was right for him. That video has reached more than 180k likes, and her followers have written many comments to answer her question. It's subtitled. my hair is growing. Do you like it longer or shorter. Bebe Rexha's Hair As well as having a rich set of pipes, Bebe Rexha is also notable for having one of the most powerful beauty games out there. I always know her fans can expect an incredible make-up and hair look from her when she makes an appearance on the red carpet or at a special event. The I am a Mess singer isn't afraid to try neon eyeliner edgy bobs or a bold lip, and she always pulls them off perfectly. It's clear that Rexha and beauty should be, so we've rounded up some of their best looks to give you an idea of how to change your routine. Bebe Rexha's Hairstyles & Hair Colors Even if you've never heard of Bebe Rexha, you've certainly heard of her work. 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She asked her fans on her Instagram story - possibly referring to her natural hair color, which is dark brown. Best Bebe Rexha Hairstyle images in 2020 - 2021 She made it clear the look was a wig and even posted a video of her pulling it from her head. Look at Rexha's long black wig. Two-time Grammy-nominated Beautiful singer Bebe Rexha shared an in-no-Believe video of herself via her official Instagram account showing off her beautiful face. The singer songwriter, who has nearly 2.5 million Instagram followers, has written big hits for artists such as Eminem Rihanna and Selena Gomez. Bebe Rexha haircut And now he's coming up as a solo artist. Mo Mojo. Rexha, it's your fault. Pt 1 released their second EP earlier this year featuring radio favourites such as I Got you and Bad Bitch, as well as a subsequent iteration of their music moot. PT. 2 comes out this month. To celebrate its release, the singer came to the offices to chat about the inspiration behind her new record. 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Basically modern bob is free for haircuts all summer, so it's taking over your Insta feed right now. So to get the trend before I die to check out these 20 short bob haircut ideas I'll have to be texting to wait for the group chat I need to cut my hair. The Bohemian Rhapsody actress makes this mid-piece bob haircut look very cool. Bebe Rexha Best Beauty Looks Live texture is key here, so squeeze a wave spray from the dry strands to recreate its appearance. We had to take a few shots after seeing Bebe Rexha's last hair look. Singer-songwriter Selena Gomez's latest appearance is Jennifer Aniston's greatest pop culture hair moment of all time-a Rachel Green haircut from friends. During the rare singer's last appearance on the Kelly Clarkson Show Gomez debuted ‘shaggy new' with 27 hairdresser Marissa Marino saying she was inspired by Aniston's iconic undulating layers in the early 90s. The Central long boom was also inspired by Goldie Hawn's 1996 film The First Wives Club look. Selena @ kellyclarksonshow today. Bebe Rexha hair color It's a great interview, so make sure you watch it. hair inspo' Rachel ' was first Marino meets Goldie Hawn at the Wives Club where Bebe Rexha wrote There has been a variety of different hair in the past. He is widely known as a great singer and songwriter. So I finally found it because I wanted to. It's a journey. Yes, self-discovery and self-worth progress. You have to be smart when you're involved in art and Commerce. Bebe Rexha's new haircut 2020 - 2021 You have to be honest with yourself. But you also have to make others understand you, and sometimes that's a compromise. mix it with a little mint says. DIY type right. Rexha also chooses Sephora. Bumble and bumble crazy is a new mask oil. I got three from Sephora. It's the best thing I've ever used in my hair and I've tried everything. This is quite high praise from someone who regularly does her hair and make-up and clearly looks like a beauty buff. Another nugget of wisdom from Rexha for bleary blondes. Bebe Rexha hair colour Stay away from coconut oil. And try to minimize the amount of heat you put on your hair. Rexha says she learned this the hard way. Check out our full interview with her below to hear more beauty tips from Rexha. We had to take a few shots after seeing Bebe Rexha's last hair look. The singer-songwriter, whose signature. Bebe Rexha bob haircut Hairstyle has become platinum blonde blunt bob, posted videos on her instagram story of long black hair. Should I go black? She asked her fans on her Instagram story - possibly referring to her natural hair color, which is dark brown. She made it clear the look was a wig and even posted a video of her pulling it from her head. Bebe Rexha Look at Rexha's long black wig. The last hurrah singer returned Tuesday when she was just a little girl. Bebe took several photos from a trip he made to Albania as a child. Her hair was different from a few shades at the time, although her face was open.

[jillianmariebrowning]

Why Hair Matters

This is a presentation I gave at the Comics and Popular Arts Conference at DragonCon 2017 during the Race, Gender, and Culture in Comics panel titled “Why Hair Matters: Negotiating the Politics of Black Hair in Pop Culture” Transcript is below

In this presentation, I interrogate the representation of black hair within the realm of superheroes in comic books, film, and television series. Taking into consideration the time period and political climate which they were created I analyze black characters like Misty Knight, Storm, Black Lighting, and others. In particular, I analyze illustrative changes to their hair and hypothesize how this impacts the character with regard to the way he or she is perceived.

I am focusing on the visual elements that have proven to be common in the design of African American superheroes in the DC and Marvel universes and how those elements function as signs with larger symbolic meanings and cultural significance. Since readers can differ when it comes to gender, age, cultural background, etc images and symbols can have different meanings. A symbol can stand for something different depending on who interprets it. Because of this, certain signs can become complex sites of meaning, when the writer doesn’t poses the cultural knowledge of the subject.

The superhero Black Lightning was DC’s first African American character to get his own solo title. This did not happen until 1977 and like most minority characters in media his existence was quite political. Black Lightning’s civilian identity is an Olympic decathlete turned school principle named Jefferson Pierce.  

The original artist for Black Lightning was Trevor Von Eeden, a young black illustrator who was brought in to offer some insight into this new black character. He designed the look of Black Lightning, including his outfit, except for one very important detail.

Black Lightning’s most distinctive characteristic is that he wears a white mask to shield his identity. That mask is also somehow attached to an afro wig. Now, Jefferson Pierce himself has short hair but when he dons the identity of Black Lightning the act of augmenting his already existing hair to make it longer can be read as a radical act. In an interview Von Eden said “I did NOT design the afromask! I say this because in the 70s, when he was created, the afro was a black man’s symbol of pride, and self-respect, his singular identity. For a black superhero to remove his hair (or… put ON his hair) as part of his identity was certainly… odd. For a black man to do so was, shall we say, tellingly symbolic. And definitely NOT my idea.”

Within the black community, hair has always been at odds with societal conventions. In a society that values westernized beauty standards, closely cropped, “neat”, and straight styles are often considered more professional and safe. Thus, choosing to wear black hair the way it naturally grows out of one’s head can be considered a political statement. During the 1960s afros were worn by black political figures of the Civil Rights Movement and became not only a fashion statement but more importantly a signifier of political expression and pride. Pierce’s, professional job as a school principle would never have allowed him to have a large afro in civilian life so his use of this afro-wig as part of his superhero costume serves as a perfect disguise to make him completely unrecognizable.

Scholars have claimed that this costume serves a purpose of making an ethnic minority character “more ethnic” as if adding bigger hair will get the point across that Black Lightning is indeed black or proud of his blackness. He is often shown in many individual panels putting on and removing the afro-mask or holding it under one arm like some odd trophy.  The comics make sure to show the reader that his mask is indeed a mask. Pierce’s ability to add and remove his afro at will shows a contradicting acceptance and rejection of his afros meaning. During the Civil Right Movement the afro became a signifier of strength and perseverance, striving to be a symbol of justice and power and rightness in his neighborhood it’s often disappointing to see his disembodied afro-mask sitting silently on a shelf while Jefferson Peirce teaches the children of his neighborhood during the day.

Around that same time, Marvel introduced its first black female superhero. Our first introduction to Ororo Munroe is in the 1975 issue of Giant Sized X-Men #1 where she is introduced not as a mutant but as a self-proclaimed goddess in Kenya. She is using her powers of weather control to aid a local village suffering from a drought.

She is shown standing in front of a large stone altar as villagers cry “Ororo, great goddess of the storm come ease us of our burden!” She is only wearing a skirt and headdress, everything else covered by long flowing white hair. Each panel after uses her hair to illustrate movement but also as a demonstration of her power. We know that she is manipulating wind and weather because of the different sweeps of her hair in each panel. It also conveniently covers her chest no matter which way her body is contorted.

The comics also use her hair as a physical reminder of her goddess like powers. Having this unreal long, straight, stark white hair visually separates her from the villagers and indicates a person who doesn’t have the concerns a regular woman would about having hair. She doesn’t have to keep it a manageable length or styled, she’s a goddess! It can also be argued that the length and texture of Storm’s hair reflects an idea that she is better than other people. She refers to herself as a goddess, her first introduction into the comic we see her on a pedestal, long hair flowing around her. Historically a women’s worth was often defined by the length and quality of her hair, so illustrating Storm in this manner could function as a signifier of her status.

In Uncanny X-Men #173 which was published in 1983 and the year we get Mohawk Storm. We see an entirely new Storm here. She reveals this new look at Wolverine’s wedding, honestly for the drama of it all, her long flowing strands cut into a Mohawk while also wearing an entirely new outfit made of leather. Her new look is so shocking Kitty Pride cries and runs away. Storm’s response to Scott asking her why she changed her look is, “I had my reasons, Scott. Am I not allowed?!” In many cultures the act of cutting off a woman’s hair can be used as a punishment or humiliation or even to show a change in status, again, as an act of taking away a woman’s worth or beauty. But Storm, especially being labeled a goddess cutting off her own hair is an act of demonstrating her own body autonomy. She no longer feels the need to keep the hair of her old self. Or her X-Men costume for that matter.

We see a contemporary version of this Storm as actress Alexandra Shipp portrays the young orphan in X-Men Apocalypse.

Possibly the most famous iterations of Storm are when she is played by actress Halle Berry in the X-Men movies. Over the course of 14 years and four movies this version of Storm has had four different hair styles and colors, none of which are canon to any of her comic book styles. In contrast to the comic book illustrations, these shorter, stiff, stick straight synthetic wigs do nothing to indicate her powerful wind-controlling abilities, nor do they function in the same way to symbolize her status as a goddess.

Like Storm, Misty Knight’s hair has gone through a few journeys since her introduction. Her questionable hair choices have been a prominent discussion among fans for years.

Misty first appeared in 1975 in Marvel Premiere issue #21. Misty has a smaller tapered afro fairly common of the female fashions of this time frame. She continues with this hair style through the 1980s until she was reimaged in 2006 in Heroes for Hire.

In this book she seems to change hair styles throughout panels, something I have noticed is a common treatment for Misty. In issue 1 alone she goes from having braided hair in the front to having it gelled down straight. She also has a stylized dent in top of her hair giving her something reminiscent of what I like to call “wolverine points”.

During the 2011 run of Heroes for Hire we are introduced to Misty Knights infamous and confusing straight bangs which she continues to have during the 2013 Fearless Defenders run. The bangs are an issue for multiple reasons. As a woman of color who has at least a minor understanding of my own natural hair the process in which Misty would have to go through to straighten her bangs while still wearing the rest of hair natural is a laborious task. She is either flat ironing them every day (multiple times a day?) but if she used that process whenever her hair got wet it would curl back up again, something simple like working up a sweat while fighting would return her bangs to their natural texture.

In this panel, we see her swimming in the ocean and after she comes up her bangs are still straight. Her afro is also the same round shape while she is submerged in the water and when she surfaces. This signifies the creators of this comic don’t understand basic hair physics, regardless of hair texture. Her other option would be using a chemical relaxer. A chemical relaxer is the process of using a strong and damaging chemical paste to straighten curly or afro textured hair. This process is not reversible. Relaxers are a huge discussion within the natural hair community. A lot of us are coming up from a lifestyle of relaxing our hair and removing that damage involves cutting off the relaxed hair and letting the natural hair grow out. Therefore, I find it hard to believe that Misty would relax the front of her hair no matter how fashion forward. Having natural hair and bangs isn’t impossible but the way Misty’s are drawn are not achievable unless she is doing something to alter the texture of them, which they never show us.

In issue 4 of the 2011 run of Heroes for Hire shows my biggest grievance with Misty’s hair. It shows that the illustrator does not understand the basic science of natural black hair AT ALL. Misty’s hair is drawn reminiscent of a large pom pom with a static electricity issue. The ends of her hair are straight, almost as if the hair that grows out of her head is actually straight and just stands up on end to make her afro.

In this hospital scene, Misty is dealing with the aftermath of her phantom pregnancy by Danny Rand which made her very sick, she is laying in a hospital bed with her neck completely off the pillow here as if her afro is solid and propping her head up.

In 2014 we start seeing some versions of Misty where she has a more realistic and contemporary take on her hair. In the Daredevil Dark Night series we see her still with her red headband but we also see her afro in a more curl defined modern shape. It isn’t really fashionable for black women to wear their natural hair completely picked out and round. We normally go for a more curl defined look which also causes the hair to lay a little flatter than picking it out would. She still has her bangs here but they have a curlier texture.

In 2015 we get Secret Love which is part of the Secret Wars anthology. It’s a book of one shot love stories from a different universe including platonic as well as romantic love. For Misty, we get a glimpse of what her relationship with Danny would be like if they were married and had a child, possibly the one from her phantom pregnancy. Her hair here is the same type of contemporary style, more defined curls, even a rounder shape but still not the picked out cotton ball of her pervious hair.

The most important part of this comic for me is the last panel. Here we see Misty and Danny sharing a very intimate moment. Misty has her prosthetic arm off, in relaxed clothes and asking Danny to do her hair. Hair within the black community is ritual. Misty trusting Danny enough for him to be doing her batu knots or even the fact that he knows how to do them is almost unheard of. I don’t know any women, with a black husband or not, that would trust them enough to do their hair. To have Misty sharing this moment of intimacy and culture with Danny is extremely powerful.

Like previous writers of Misty, Jeremy Whitley is also a white man, but he wrote the comic as a reflection of his life. Jeremy’s wife is African American and he made sure to consult her throughout the story. In an interview he did with BlackGirlNerds.com he said “I originally had written microbraids into the last page.  However, my wife read the story and her first questions was “How long is this last scene?”  I said, based on the length of the two movies they watch that it was between 4-6 hours.  I was informed that not only was this an unlikely amount of time for this, but that it was unrealistic.  Having waited most of a day while my wife got microbraids in the past, I realized she was correct and decided to go with bantu knots instead.” Misty’s bantu knots are also a look into what goes into the texture of her hair in this comic. Bantu knots are often used as a form of “twist out” or protective style that also helps define the curls in natural hair. Misty may wear these knots as a hair style for a day or two and then take them out, or just sleep in them and undo them in the morning. The result will be larger defined curls and volume.

A real life example of that is Simone Missick’s hair in the Netflix Luke Cage series. Much to my excitement they also went with a more contemporary take on Misty’s hair for this iteration. I know I personally was so excited to see her hair represented this was and I wasn’t the only one.

Essence magazine wrote an entire article about what products Simone uses on her hair to achieve her Misty Knight curls.

She even gets asked on twitter by fans.

Representation is important and Simone knows that. Simone was asked in an interview what she thought the most important thing playing Misty for her was. She said “To be able to have my natural hair on TV, that will encourage so many more women who wear their hair natural who are told it’s not professional enough. I think it’s encouraging to all women to be who you are.” This is a powerful and relevant statement in our current political climate. So many women are not allowed to wear their natural hair to work for fear of being fired or not taken seriously. Girls are getting kicked out of school for having braids or are being told their afro is “too distracting”. The hair of black women has become a subject of political discussion but having positive, powerful role models in media is assuring.

This brings us to the two newest black female superheroes, Riri Williams and Lunella Lafyette aka Iron Heart and Moon Girl. I was ecstatic when these two girls were introduced because not only were they young and smart and black but they also wore their hair naturally curly. It would have been very easy for Marvel to just draw these girls with straight hair. Nothing about the character inherently warrants them to have natural hair but they still do and that is important especially in a world where natural hair is becoming more common, especially in the younger generation. I’ve met teenaged girls who have never had their hair relaxed before, which was unheard of when I was growing up. The choice to give these two new young characters natural hair affects not only society’s expectation and value of women with natural hair but also how the representation of that hair affects young women of color and their relationship with their hair. But even me, a 28-year-old professional woman, saw these little girls and I got excited. I myself have only been natural for a little over a decade. That representation is important for everyone.

In issue number 15 of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur we see a crossover with Riri Williams. We get a great interaction with these characters and even a moment where Riri stops herself from thinking she can tell Lunella what to do and makes the connection that Lunella is a smart and capable girl that can make decisions for herself.  However, a big problem I had in this issue is a scene between Lunella and her mother.

We get visuals here, Lunella sitting between her mother’s legs while she braids her hair. Lunella looks mad, like most little girls are when they are getting their hair done but the dialogue here has some issues. Lunella doesn’t think having her hair done is necessary right now. She say “Its ok if I need to mess up my hair when saving the world.” And her mother responds to that with “You need to look respectable, Lunella.” “Respectable” is in bold type. The writers of this comic did not see an issue with this wording and have said they didn’t mean anything by it but using the word “respectable” in regards to black hair is not something to take lightly.

When writer Brandon Montclare, was asked about this on Twitter his response was “And certainly not saying you have to like it or cant find it problematic! But that criticism extends beyond the writer.” This implies the reader is to blame for being offended by this panel instead of the writer understanding that his words, especially words said by a black character being written by a white male, may have a stronger implication than intended. They are implying that Lunella, or by extension little curly haired girls everywhere, need to have combed, styled, or neat hair to be seen as “respectable”. A sentiment black people have been fighting against since the Civil Rights Movement. To have this mentioned in this comic, marketed towards children, and have it not be a source of commentary but stated as nonchalant fact is alarming. This book and these characters can be used celebrate black culture and black girl genius, not teaching girls to police their hair and conform to white western standards of beauty to be taken seriously.

In conclusion, there is an obvious connection between good representation of black hair drawn by artists who have a personal understanding of the cultural significance. In analyzing the newly introduced black female characters, I am both hopeful and apprehensive, since white artists still dominate the genre and contribute to harmful stereotypes about black hair whether they intend to or not. Hopefully future comic adaptations will continue in the vein of the current Misty Knight and continue to improve hers and other character’s representation. And obviously involving black artists who have first hand knowledge of the cultural attitudes toward hair would be a huge improvement.

[vaczine]

Walt Cessna

You may think you know or understand me from the suggested and often misunderstood visceral & visual tone of my posted work. You MAY, but you will never ever actually come to any sort of conclusion unless you choose and succeed at looking deep into the self polarizing pathos and DIY till I die determination that informs every facet of my creative & hopefully thought provoking artistic, political and personal stance. If your spending an overwhelming period of better utilized time questioning the purpose, passion and correct point of view of those you deem .not on your side and couldn't actually care less about their indifference and non inclusion of your world anyway, it is perhaps time for you to social media disconnect and redirect the inspirational sparks and shared creative synergy that your on-line presence not only inspires, but informs anyone seeking some deeper meaning and lasting purpose regarding the manner and socially awkward mayhem of your experiences and the at times long hesitation of wait and see the final destination of our daily life experiences that we over emphasize through bullet point rifled personally potent postings promoting our self delusional appreciation and understanding of the self stating shared synergy that fuels our current creative desires and the never ending search for a perfect new medium in which to showcase them. Picture frames ans pretty much any type of visual not displaying itself correctly on some sort of screen set at a 3 second shift of images that leaves the pictures haphazardly etched into our conscious. It;s been slightly amusing seeing the often incorrect re-appropriation of my past works that when originally presented labeled me a pornographer of dubious and damaged integrity blithely showing off my ex-hooker, forever a junkie, AIDS relate-able personal drama and self persecution laced presentation of what polite people refer to as my artistic work. Autistic twerk is more like it. It all starts to make sense suddenly and my personally motivated switch of creative mediums comes across casually and gives no hint at others poorly perceived notions of how to maintain, manage and virtually manifest the clearest and most accurate version exactly how, where, when, what & why I am initiating a long awaited and previously posed with move from digital photography to digital film. It's not that photographs or random still images no longer incite inspiration within me, but i have a renewed creative hunger to tell my visually rich, moment caught in time pictorial perceptions of the world as I continue to come upon it in personally nuanced and arresting pictures that often wear their intensity like a much maligned and majorly misconstrued social handicap of frankly preposterous and selfishly painful decrees decrying ,owns own carefully and life long curated correctness. I'm 52 and I've been pretty much taking photographs since I was just dropped out of high school and living part time in the Chelsea Hotel as anti- fashion terrorist and 7th Ave knock off re-designer self publishing the first of 5 indie publication The Key. Al it took was an unsolicited paragraph of self reverential praise to take it from a Xeroxed & hand stapled $1 a copy fast food fashion inspired teen dream novelty to fashion designer approved & super supported legends in their own lifetimes hyper surreal 80s shooting style stars like Norma Kamali & Way bandy introduced Stephen Sprouse to secure is a publishing deal literally on my 18th birthday in what would come to be the best realized and inspired 1984 year of my life. I got to work with the essentially inspired likes of Teri Toye, truly the first notable and visually inescapable Transgender fashion cult level model courtesy of the two other points of a supremely inspired and inspiring collaboration between the three of them as downtown designer, muse & Nico - model, aspired, casually confrontational It girl 80s hybrid that paid due homage to Warjol;s Edie now known as Sprouse & Meisel's fashion franken-weenie of perfect for rthe times sculpted androgyny that wore its scandalous reputation like a badge of maybe it just might be true dis-honor. The late 80s defining Avedon Vogue covers just as world famous make-up artist as his oft times super model before it was deemed hashtag worthy Brooke Sheilds. Way was very approachable, much like most of the pop art world of culturally correct pre-internet celebrities that never had to fear with cell phones and social media to further distract from whatever way out wild and personally soiled to random extinction proclivities of all too often misunderstood or simply ignored, looked on as unnecessary critiques on those who call their arts performing. The 70s / 80s gold plated period of utter pop(t) culture perfection has never been replaced or more relevant. it continues to inform a host of style servers and visual vanguards who set the tone for all we deem fashionable, fierce & transformative. Going back to the good time girl prohibition era flappers and their self professed need / desire to dance their cares away and have the best time of their life till death to the current state of street style inspired rebooted and redefining world of Haute Couture once again inspired and defined by Saint Laurent, Dior and Gucci albeit each famed and style setting house now under radical redefining fashion focus that manages to respectfully pay nu rage homage to the brands history, but seek ways to incorporate the often awkward proportions of urban influenced street style that when seen through the eyes of the Vetements infused mind rewerking the always sublime mod style proportion savvy design mind helming an extremely personal and stylishly over wrought almost radical re-imagining of the deeply respected and ultra icronic experimental & visionary couture house Balenciaga..There were skirts fashion from actual and completely randomly sourced car mats deftly shuffled into a collection that closed with 9 over the top and way over-sized almost to the point of unwearable proportions that instantly achieve Avedon photo moment in fashion history correctness as they unapologetic-ally praise the design notion of ultra future modern vintage retro photograph of culturally current creations that take inspiration from bold silhouettes and a generous, almost overly lavish attention to cut and proportion that in some cases requires the pop kulture class-ism of 60's Irving Penn influenced and perfectly posed presence of the cult model of Funny Fave infamous-ness Dovima to pull off with a level of panache and a heightened sense of strictly amplified drama punctuated by perfectly arched eyebrows framing equally attentive and slightly rich bitch super vixen fierceness that can't be faked unless it;s Evita moment Mario Testino in his 90s Vanity Fair primed for all time Madonna. People who talk shit about the should hsve known better bitch i'm Madonna. Looking at the aggressively fearless proponents of radically almost unwearable proportions executed in a modern assimilation of not always unawkward siljouettes that altrhough not as gar out and frankly unbothered by anything other than it;s own correctness Comme des Garcon, rather a redefined riff on the retro notions of business attire and women wearing versions of men's tailoring, sparked by YSL in his properly Helmut Newton 70s style blip of his Le Smoking tuxedo influenced suits further pushed into androgyny by slicked back short hair cuts that forever set the standard for Bowie pioneered gender bending ensembles that were majorly loathed or deeply loved when first introduced. The insane radical yet pop culturally relevant instantly pop cult classic correctness of Ziggy Stardust seamlessly morphed into YSl man tailored sexually ambiguous models mane even more infamous in their provocative, often sexually charge/d photographs often shot in dark Parisian alleys and dramatically street light lit lending an air of instant style reformation of perfectly potent only werked correctly in the 70;s mix of lady like femininity mixed with an elegantly irreverent masculine tailoring that too easily wrought to mind the gay disco dollies not yet commonly referred to as lesbians, yet unflinchingly setting the style trend that made Helmut Newton dangerously exotic and first introduce the idea of super exclusively expensive made by hand atelier attended Haute Couture that today seems more Ready-to-Couture with it;s street styled leanings and brave style assertions that are elegantly askance. The often classic attention to cut and uber refined measures of stitching that further accented the carefully crafted couture cut that is nothing like your basic, badly cut and boring boxy jacket. The New Look symbolized and introduced Christian Dior's legendary post war arrival that stirred a full on fashion freak out for bucking war time fabric restrictions with liberated and lavish for the times over indulgences of fabric measured by multiple yards and a retro regal stance when wearing the often sharply pinched and flared waist suit jackets that had a multi gored and just above the ankle length skirt that every designer in time since had offered their own version. Print Vogue is a bore, but vogue.com gives you every single look shown during global fashion week and to the point well worded break downs freshly devoid of attitude and detail driven to blogger extremes. This just finished past season was over loaded with a plethora of just the right dose of retro inspired vintage sportswear taken to wryly ironic or deathly drastic extremes. Which is probably why I love it and have actually been inspired to write fashion inspired posts in over a decade. - Walt Cessna

Balenciaga Fall / Winter 2017

[strangledeggs]

What A Glorious Time To Be Free

This is a more personal essay on irony, the passage of time and disillusionment. Content Warning for mention of domestic abuse/violence.

“Singer-songwriter” is a term that tends to instantly conjure a certain type of “sincere” musician, one who wants to communicate a “real” feeling through their combined proficiency in words and music. The notion of sincerity in this context is at least a little odd considering many of the most famous songwriters have made careers out of ironic jabs at the very cliches they like to flirt with; Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen come to mind. And yet somehow, whether or not this stereotype has any truth to it has done nothing to dispel the cultural image of the “sincere, sensitive songwriter”.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been closely tracking the apparent dichotomy between “irony” and “sincerity”, their varying popularities, the spaces in which each seems most prevalent, how these factors can impact culture on a grand scale. I can still remember three years ago when an English professor at the University of Toronto introduced me to one of my favourite ideas I’ve taken out of my education so far: he too had noted a sort of struggle between irony and sincerity in culture over the last several decades, but he felt that the most current art (literature, at least) was finding a sort of compromise. He called this compromise “birony”. “Bironic” art (no relation to the “Byronic hero”, an unfortunately phonemically identical literary concept) would refuse to be seen as either sincere or ironic alone. It is instead both genuine and self-distancing at the same time. One example he had pointed to was Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”. I believe I may have dug up another from pop music history.

The song in question, Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y.” (also apparently known as “What A Beautiful World”), actually predates the contemporary era of which my English professor declared birony to be the product. It was released in 1982, in the midst of the Cold War. I will address the significance of this in just a bit, but first I’d like to explain out why this song’s bironic tone was apparent to me almost from the start. Some background is needed for those who are unfamiliar with Donald Fagen: the man was half of the songwriting team that made up the popular 70s rock band Steely Dan. Along with Walter Becker, he wrote songs with a bitter satirical edge, tackling Las Vegas (“Show Biz Kids”), generational conflict (“Barrytown”), nuclear apocalypse (“King of the World”) and any idealist with a glimmer of a hope for freedom (“Only A Fool Would Say That”).

Certainly some of Fagen’s solo work continues in this ironic tradition, but “I.G.Y.” is noticeably different. Having come to its hosting album “The Nightfly” with only that tradition as my context, I was rather shocked to hear the lyrics of “I.G.Y.”, which seem to describe an ideal vision of the future (superfast intercontinental transit! space travel! government by supercomputer!) without a hint of irony. The refrain (from which part of the alternate title is derived) proclaims “What a beautiful world it will be, / What a glorious time to be free!”, backed by a chorus and a light reggae-esque shuffle. Is this the same Donald Fagen that sang “I heard it was you talking ‘bout a world where all is free, / It just couldn’t be”?

Something was definitely off, and being suspicious as I was, I decided to do some research. It turned out my naive millenial self was missing some generational context that would have made the title more illuminating had I been born say, 50 years earlier: “I.G.Y.” was actually an acronym, referring to the “International Geophysical Year”, a period of scientific collaboration between 1957 and 1958. During this relatively peaceful patch of the Cold War, over sixty countries began working on science projects that would come to define the aesthetics and ideas of “the future” for the generation that grew up over the course of the 1950s, including solar power, spandex and the very first satellites.

Donald Fagen, born in 1948, would have been approximately 10 years old during this period. It is possible that the projected potential of these futuristic technologies in development would have sparked his imagination, causing it to run wild with utopian visions. I say this partly because I am consciously projecting here; I know, had lived during the I.G.Y. (particularly if I was the same age Fagen was at the time), that I would have been absolutely ecstatic with optimism. It’s a nerd kid’s dream come true: everyone gets to live happily ever after and it’s all thanks to SCIENCE!

When I was a teenager, my father, who more or less lived right through this period, showed me a book he had called “Wasn’t The Future Wonderful?” Released in 1979, the book collected various images from the 1930s that depicted the imaginary technology of “the future” and helped to spawn the still-popular aesthetics of “retrofuturism” (see: Fallout). Though it focuses on a period almost thirty years prior to the I.G.Y., the book captures a similar naivety. It’s not to say that many of the projects of the I.G.Y. didn’t have real, useful results, or that the promises weren’t delivered on; we still got spandex and solar power and the space race. But the title’s retrospective quality is telling, as is our current condition. Clearly we are not living in the futuristic utopia of the Jetsons.

This was likely to be even more apparent to someone like Fagen, who lived not only through the I.G.Y., but also through the 24 years leading up to 1982*, in which he released “What A Beautiful World”. During that time, the relative period of Cold War peace ended and US citizens witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the assassination of a president and a period of tension so high that Prince had to beg “Ronnie” Reagan to “Talk To Russia” in the year before Fagen’s first solo album. In addition to all this, before most of these events even happened, Russia tested the largest thermonuclear weapon developed to that point in history, the “Tsar Bomba”, in 1961. It would seem to even the most optimistic American that the future was not as friendly as it had seemed even a few years earlier.

I’m not Donald Fagen and I’ve never even met the man, so I can’t claim to know how any of this really impacted him. But there’s a certain narrative that, even if it isn’t true, would go a long way towards explaining what happened to him between 1958 and 1982 that led to his writing “I.G.Y.” Put simply, Fagen might have experienced a classic “loss of innocence” narrative: he began as a young idealist around the time of the I.G.Y., hoping that science could lead to a more peaceful and prosperous world; he then watched those hopes crumble over the next couple decades as widespread violence and accompanying disillusionment returned with a vengeance, eventually ending up the cynical songwriter he was in Steely Dan.

Whether or not this is really what happened to Fagen himself, it would make a nice frame for why I’ve come to see the song as a prime example of “birony”. Knowing the historical context for “I.G.Y.” will make it seem much more like the ironic critiques he contributed to his former band. However, I believe there is still a hint of sincerity in the song. If you forget the historical context, it sounds like a fairly genuine hope for the future, as if Fagen’s 10-year-old self suddenly re-surfaced to sing it. And maybe some part of him still has those same hopes, that one day society could achieve the sort of technological utopia his song describes. But in the end, the disillusionment is inevitable, as we continue to see more than thirty years on from the song’s release.

The lyrics, of course, sound sincere enough to still make you believe (and to fool those lacking the historical context). Some would say this is part of the “trick” that makes it so ironic. I’d go even further and say this actually teaches us something new about irony, at least in this context: irony is not, in fact, the polar opposite of sincerity. Contrary to what we are often told, there is something quite sincere about the irony of “I.G.Y.” The lyrics could not have been written without a sincere belief at some point (maybe Fagen’s, maybe someone else’s) that their ideal world was a real possibility. And at the same time, the disappointment collected over the years up until the song’s release is also quite sincere. The song becomes a serious lament that this type of utopia might never have even been possible in the first place. Thus its “ironic distancing” is actually comprised of two very sincere beliefs, one of which just happens to contradict the other.

Is this still irony? Or is it that new invention of my English professor, “birony”? I’m not entirely sure if I can answer that question alone, or at least not without a much more in-depth study than this one. However, I would like to change direction here for a moment and point out once again that I don’t actually know whether or not this is even the “true” story of “I.G.Y.” I say this because even if it isn’t, I brought it up for a reason: the disillusionment narrative I constructed behind it is actually quite personal. OK, yeah, I didn’t live through the Cold War, and I’ve never written a song as great as “I.G.Y.” and probably never will. But the song’s implicit “fall from grace” arc hits me on a, shall we say “scientific” level.

Growing up, I took a serious interest in science, probably in part because my father was one himself (a geologist, for those who are curious). Our family wasn’t really religious at all and I ended up with a much stronger belief in the “power of science” than in any kind of divine order of things. I took this interest/belief with me through school, which won the approval of many teachers who in our age seem to increasingly associate studious/successful children with such a scientific focus. And then somewhere in high school it began to slip. I say this not only because I started to realize I would never be able to become a scientist myself (my math grades made sure of this) and not because I stopped taking science courses to focus on other subjects, which I didn’t do but in hindsight maybe should have. I continued to learn a lot about science, but I also started to learn about other subjects which were a little more critical of the discipline. A basic philosophy class helped me realize how hard it is to have a strong foundation for any kind of concrete belief, including those implicit in the scientific method. Some historical background on eugenics made me realize that people could use public faith in science as an excuse to violate others’ human rights just the same as religious institutions had abused their power. Suddenly, scientists were no longer clearly “the good guys”.

This is not to try and create a narrative of “enlightenment” for myself. The ending of this story is not that I “now know better” and I’m not claiming to have answers to any of the philosophical problems I raised. All I’m trying to prove here is that my beliefs in science were shaken in a similar (though probably less violent) manner to those of a 10-year-old kid coming out of the warmth of the I.G.Y. and into the Cold War. Nowadays, though I’m still inclined to believe most scientists on a number of things, I’m significantly more skeptical of “science” as a cultural institution or as a justification for anything. We probably all have stories like this, stories in which we grew up believing strongly in something only to have that belief turned upside-down later in life. These disillusionments can sometimes have devastating effects on us, radically changing the people we once thought ourselves to be into other people entirely. Sometimes it’s relatively inconsequential, but most of the time it’s at least somewhat painful.

It just so happens that I experienced another painful disillusionment along these lines more recently. As you can probably deduce through my familiarity with their work, I used to listen to Steely Dan a lot, particularly when I was a teenager (coincidentally, right around the time I started to become more suspicious of science). This, too, I inherited from my parents, who were big fans back in their high school and university days when the band still existed. I was impressed by their musicianship, their refusal to distinguish between rock and jazz and, of course, their slyly biting lyrics which I only appreciated more over time. Naturally, I got into Donald Fagen’s post-Dan solo career and loved it almost as much. I guess you could say I sort of idolized the guy. And being disposed to an “innocent until proven guilty” method of judging people, I assumed he was probably at the very least a decent enough person. It’s true that the lyrics in certain Steely Dan songs displayed tendencies towards the fetishization of Asian women (“Bodhisattva”) or creepy relationships with “barely legal” girls (“Hey Nineteen”), but I was hoping these were simply mistakes that Fagen since recognized and regretted.

Early in January last year, it was reported that Donald Fagen had beaten his wife, Libby Titus, and that she was going to divorce him. Apparently the two have since “reconciled”, though exactly how is unclear and I remain very suspicious of Fagen for doing such a terrible thing in the first place. I am also concerned for his wife as I am for any partner caught in a situation of potential domestic violence. However, not being an expert on the situation or the subject, I will leave the social issue to those experts dedicated to solve it. What I am more qualified to write about is the strange disillusionment that occurs when something like this happens, when a public figure breaches trust with an audience that has inevitably deified them.

There’s a whole discourse on the idea of the famous talent that does something their audience doesn’t agree with morally, turning them into the “problematic fave”, but there are some acts which shift from “problematic” into a deeper level of criminality and Donald Fagen’s abuse falls into the latter category. Some tend to reject the talent outright following such acts and I completely understand that course and the reasons for doing it. But I can’t seem to do it with Donald Fagen and his music. This is not because I don’t think the issue is important; it absolutely is, and I will continue to tell people about what Donald Fagen did to at the very least alert people to the fact that he’s probably not the “generally decent person” I once assumed he was and at most help to spark more conversations about domestic violence. Hopefully we will also see a point at which Libby Titus is safe, though this is something few of us will get to have any say in.

The truth is, I could renounce my love for Steely Dan and Donald Fagen and whatever part of myself was shaped by their music. I can (and have) felt bad listening to it when I think of the man behind it. But I would be lying to myself if I said that I didn’t enjoy it anymore and that I didn’t want to listen to it again. The music still reaches me and I don’t think I can do anything about that.

So the music remains. What about the man himself? Well, I certainly won’t be giving him any more of my money any time soon. Of course, there’s that disillusionment again. And once again, both the love for the music and the disillusionment with the person are real. It’s difficult to discover that someone you saw as a hero simply isn’t. Some would probably say that this is simply the way life moves and that this is how we learn over time; we must abandon our heroes and our worship of outside forces to somehow achieve an enlightenment through our trust in our own perceptions alone, recognizing that everyone else is as fallible as we are. Personally, I don’t buy this logic, partly because I don’t believe that there is any “authentic self” underneath the self I’ve built through following others and partly because I do believe that some people are less fallible than me, at least in some areas. Those people are the heroes, and though they may become damaged by revelation of their natures, we still tend to have some sort of need for them, although some more than others.

I certainly still feel like I need heroes to follow and shape myself in the image of, but maybe I need to take a more bironic (again, not “Byronic”) approach to them. I can’t follow in their footsteps knowing that they are the kind of people I don’t ever actually want to become. But at the same time, I often have some grain of admiration I can’t seem to shake; some trust in the scientists that develop vaccines and work towards automated labour, some emotions still stirred when I hear the winding chord changes of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”. It certainly doesn’t excuse Donald Fagen, and it’s not a way out of the social inequality in which he is an oppressor. But it at least helps to explain why I might still have seemingly contradictory reactions to such situations.

*This may be poorly phrased as to make it sound as if Fagen is deceased. He has actually continued to live up to this very year and recently gave an interview in which he described modern life as “resembling something out of a Vonnegut novel”.

[mulliganisms]

Himself Alone 1970

In the thin air of the Azteca Stadium in the 1970 World Cup Final Pele hovers majestically over his Italian prey - Himself is similarly airborne as his ten year old derriere has been launched towards a Western Irish sky by a bolting horse.

In the next few moments gravity will work on both and Himself will attempt to match the cacophony of 107,412 and will come pretty close. Life is flashing before him, At ten his life is as watchable as a reality TV spin off on a cable channel  - thin content which Himself tries to stretch out by endless previously ons recaps and in next week’s show...He had recently sat through Love Story - will he die before his own has ever tasted love? Never to skate in Central Park? Never having to say sorry - and not even the drawn out death where Ali Mcgraw looks more glamorous as the end nears but an instant hit of body on Connemara marble. At least he would die with as clean a conscience as Bobby Moore post diamond necklace scandal.

The nag that had inched forward like a non league crowd following a triumphant cup tie vs higher placed opposition who wanted to savour the relative luxury of the away ground now moves with energy and purpose as speedily and unexpectedly as the appearance of the roundel insignia on Japanese fighter planes over the Pearl Harbour skies.  Not like in the Michael Bay travesty but as in the epic war fillum he's just seen at the ABC Essex Rd: Tora Tora Tora - surprise surprise surprise - like all 70s boys he was multilingual - provided there was a war on.  feuer achtung Banzai hande hoch. And this is war: man vs horse - all about personal survival.

Fortunately Himself had bronze, silver and gold badges acquired thro many hours of perspiration starting with Mum’s dexterous use of a safety pin when she somehow retrieved the elastic swimming trunk cord - as much a wonder to Himself as the third of the working class consistently voting against their own interests or the touting  of £100k Peter Marinello as the next George Best. The swimming lessons in the Tibberton Rd Public baths - always busy as very few folk had bathrooms at home relying on the Saturday night tin bath. That would be followed by climbing into the blue and white cotton pyjamas warmed in front of the coal fire in readiness for the Andy Williams Xmas snowbound belatedly screened in April.

Finally the inflating and tying off of said blue and white cotton sleepwear and the desperate drying of them with dressing room hairdryer which had been recently installed owing to demand from men growing their hair longer. This had resulted in the wolf whistling of certain players at football grounds- obviously only visiting or especially former heroes especially Jimmy Robertson  at the Lanewhen he scored for Arsenal. The skills  these medals acknowledged were of no use on land.  If only his bolting mount had been a giant sea horse... 

Himself has never ridden before but he has seen the Grand National on the telly so The pose is pure Pat Taafe - Mum’s fave Irish jockey who won the grand national that year  resulting in her annual bet paying off with jubblies all round.The horse is no Arkle the champion horse much less Champion the Wonder Horse star of Saturday Morning Pictures - a communal cinema going experience where the largely junior crowd heckled the Government Information films watched rapt at key moments in Z for Zorro and cheered at Flash Gordon - all behaviours far more endurable than the Vue/Cineworld going adult munching supersize tacos swimming in collagenous red , loudly predicting plot outcomes and turning their phone screens up just in case they miss an update from their co-worshippers of WKD, Lynx and cuffed sweatpants who style themselves as the whatsapp group lethal banter squad

The horse is one of a team too - some of his mates bearing  Aulfella and da brudders others pulling a trap navigated by Mam with dasisters. They have names tho none as resonant as 

Tostao, Gerson, Jairzinho - Brazil 1970 the greatest team ever - and the highlight of their play wasn’t even a goal but an outrageous dummy and miss vs Uruguay by the totemic Pele. Pele’s opening goal and Carlos Alberto’s clinching fourth meant  Brazil won Jules Rimet three times and got to keep the trophy. Perhaps that’s what drives Mark Francois and Rees Mogg towards urging constant war on Germany - a hat trick of victories would give them world domination in perpetuity - the natural order of things. 

The rarity of sightings of these yellow and green shirts enhanced their allure. They were only glimpsed every four years and the white clad Germans and Orange dutch every two. Contrast that with the attention mega trawler supernet net of todays’ neverending news  - transfer deadline day is more exciting than most games. No such problem in 1970 midweek - we got Sportsnight with Coleman - which did feature football but only after you had sat through all sorts of things boxing, figure skating but the one most pertinent to the crisis - showjumping

 Following exposure on the telly kids would head to the park to attempt to copy their newfound Gods - the Willie Carr  flick, the Best robbing of Banks at wembley - scandalously ruled out for ungentlemanly conduct, The Denis Law sleeve grab (does anyone still make long sleeve shirts?). 

Rosemary Gardens cinder pitch was their Highbury, their Lords (with matting rolled out and stumps on springs) even their Wimbledon when anyone cared to play (two weeks in June) but it was never our Hickstead-  our Wembley stadium never the Empire Pool Wembley

The only pools that mattered were the centrepiece of early Saturday night ritual. The football results delivered to kitchens steaming with anticipation of life changing news and perfectly cooked potato flesh - invariably just like the clocks that year of nothing in our lives and others changed. However, one of Aulfella’s friends, Old Docherty, actually won the pools and grew beardier, scroogier and unhappier with each occasional visit -never once bringing anything with him. For Irish kids the visitors from Home - and most of them were in the same boat as us, ie a barely afloat dinghy - were always good for a few bob. It was considered good luck to give the kid some silver. Yet this man whom fortune had shone on never once shelled out to us. In fact he spent one whole day complaining that the imminent decimalisation of the currency meant penny for the guy was now  prone to hyper inflation and nothing but a profiteering shameful scam perpetrated on the unknowing  and donors should be handing over 0.471new pence. God knows what he did during bob a job week. Bob a job week was where uniformed kids washed cars, cleaned windows, ran errands - known collectively as odd jobs. They ain’t odd tho are they? Night time Czar is an odd job as is innovation sherpa at Microsoft and eBay curator - here is a Crying Boy print in cracked frame contrasted with a chipped babycham glass tight against the cracked  soda stream  bottle - and they all earn more than a few bob.

Being Catholics Himself and crowd were always a bit self conscious during bonfire night possibly cos of the burning of effigies. Anyway he had All Souls day - Halloween - then to Church all souls - Old Docherty cme  one year and the highlight was his reaction to the  collection plate: a dummy worthy of Pele followed by a Barry John pass or if the row was very empty - he demonstrated real potential in the new sport of Frisby. 

Always happier as player than spectator, Himself enjoyed the privilege of altar serving which often yielded significant coinage. The tariff was clearly signposted -  weddings, baptisms - then the biggest payers:  mourners.  We used to pray for  for a big funeral not the old miser Docherty of course - even tho he had promised Aulfella he’d get his newish telly in the will

Telly was the talk of the summer for the cinder pitch in the park was also the scene of filming the TV show Budgie. This starred Adam Faith who was an actor/ pop star and managed his own career as well as other artists. It’s not easy doing that - only Louis CK really handles himself and look where that’s got him. When the show was aired one local geezer was rechristened as Budgie because of his feathered cut - the Rachel of its time. Until the 90s such references were pretty universal but the market led fragmentation of broadcasting reflected the times of greater social inequality especially in broadcasting. Food banks remain a shock to us children of the 1970s - then we had Adam Faith, Bob Hope but no Charity - too much Charley Pride. Thanks to the proliferation of channels TV has lost its role as cultural glue. Back then Cultural glue was, well, glue - sniffed from a crisp packet. Now football is the cultural glue though it seems far more one way than in the past

Old stadiums are demolished to be replaced by what look like PFI prisons  - do you think real supporters care about their new stadia? If they did you’d hear new songs - we have a craft beer concession in our stand/ we followed carbon neutral building practices/ four figure sums our tickets cost four figure sums.

He  pines for the old Highbury, the Lane , the Den. There used to be alphabetically ordered boards on the side of the pitch with a key to the code supplied in the programme  intended for half time scores - Himself’s crowd always bet upon the initial of which of the neighbours teen sons would be turfed out. In their flared wrangler belt loop they wore their red and white wool scarf knitted by loving aunties (no doubt she’d be sued for copyright by the club now). The offender would be escorted out by a hopefully helmet free copper- if there’d been a pitch invasion - their perp walk taking them past a raucously cheering Northbank to a warholian fifteen minutes - of fame not that is not the wait for VAR. 

As football grew into the monolith it is today other sports were forced into the shadows - after all you can recreate the epic Celtic vs Leeds European Cup Semi -Final the two legged Battle of Britain - see it wasn’t just kids who were obsessed by war tho even the ten year olds knew the actual Battle did not feature Scottish pilots in Mescherschmidts.  You could even recreate speedway in the bombed out church with some soil at the corner and the bike - the Ivan Mauger skiddy turn at corner. But showjumping ?

Its rural and/ or upper class credentials meant it never really caught on in London as a participation sport - how could it? The  horses in the area were  totter or rag and bone man and the coal carthorse.  Undeterred Himself devised a game where he would jump over paving stones which hosted street furniture - lamp posts, beacons - obviously  any failure to clear the slab would deduct faults. In truth this was the  steeplechase a la Alf Tupper in the Victor whose every win would see his thought bubble read “I’ve run him” sparking huge moral panics about comics ruining kids English - 

So as his mount charges towards a Dry stone wall Himself searches for showjumping knowledge that might help - Princess Anne who went on to winning medal in 1976 - only athlete not required to undergo a sex test - typical class privilege; David Broome; Lucinda Prior Palmer - just one person - the only double barrelled name Himself knew was Ian Storey Moore-  who kept winning at  Badminton -now he’s really getting lost...Himself suddenly knew he could be  saved and weirdly his Gordon Banks turned out to be Hughie Greene.

In those days beer was delivered by horse - called dray carts  On Opportunity Knocks that year the Dray King for Thwaites Star brewery had been declared Britain's champion beer drinker. Using the technique he’d seen Tonto use Himself directs the horse towards the stream. It stops to drink and he dismounts and does the full Harvey Smith  - futile but made me feel better - gesture politics they call that now. Himself recreates the Central Park scene from Love Story there is no snow but sweet connemara rain turning the earth into mud…(falling up/ snow angels / eating snow build snowman) 

No horses were harmed in the making of this story...

[micaramel]

Artist: Johannes Wohnseifer

Venue: Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: Fractured Memories

Date: January 25 – March 21, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

  Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

Press Release:

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Fractured Memories, Johannes Wohnseifer’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

In this latest exhibition, Johannes Wohnseifer looks back twenty five years to his first solo exhibition in 1995 as a reference point. The very fact that 1995 was twenty five years ago and time has passed seemingly so quickly feels like a “scandal“ to the artist and his latest series of paintings on aluminum are his reaction to this inevitability. In the new exhibition, Wohnseifer continues his critique of consumerism, capitalism and culture using the artistic language of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism, repurposing, reusing and co-opting logos, corporate branding, and design strategies to frame autobiographical, historical, political, and fictional data.

The show’s title painting and central reference point uses a rendering of a – mostly redacted – press release from the renowned Berlin gallery neugerriemschneider the site of Wohnseifer’s first solo show in 1995 at as source material, leaving only the gallery details

and the phrase “fractured memories,” the composi- tion recalling conceptual art of the 1960’s and 70’s. The monochromatic announcement cards used at the time by the Berlin gallery were designed by artist Jorge Pardo and the exhibiting artists were free to select their own personal color choice for the card. Wohnseifer opted for a fluorescent orange and this special “signal” color of Wohnseifer’s is an emblem that recurs throughout the new paintings in the cur- rent show, weaving a thread through time from that initial exhibition.

The nine new paintings (all 2020) refer to Wohnseifer’s childhood in the 1970s, his youth in the ‘80s, and his first public appearances as an artist in the ‘90s. They relate to the construction of memory, how subjective perception makes time pass quickly or slowly and a world subject to constantly changing values. Wohn- seifer uses a range of consumer imagery and refer- ences from Cherry Coke, the Rolex “Daytona” and his friend and mentor Martin Kippenberger’s Capri paint- ings from the early 1980s, to dreams, disco, the latest memes, word play, codes and riddles, all of which are synchronized, consolidated and fused into the new works. Wohnseifer resumes his ongoing series’ of Spam and Bungalow paintings combining these with his most recent series of Password paintings, where images are transformed into text files and fragments of the resulting code are presented in the paintings.

A free signed and numbered edition of 100 prints will be available at the gallery during the exhibition.

Johannes Wohnseifer (b.1967) lives and works in Cologne and Erftstadt, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Johann König Galerie, London, Galerie K, Oslo (with Matthias Weischer), Parkhaus im Malkastenpark, Düsseldorf, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Group shows over the past few years include exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Sammlung Olbricht / me Collectors Room. Berlin, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria among others. Upcoming exhibitions in 2020 include group shows at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and the Kunst- verien Braunschwieg, Germany and Wohnseifer’s work is currently view at the Boros Bunker / Boros Collec- tion, Berlin and the Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (ongoing).

Link: Johannes Wohnseifer at Meliksetian | Briggs

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from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2WxW0fg

[lodelss]

‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,597 words)

Houston-born sisters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles couldn’t be more different. They emit different energies, seem to vibrate at different frequencies. Solange is the emo Cancerian who lunged at her brother-in-law in an elevator. Beyoncé, the preternaturally polished Virgo, clung to the corner and fixed her dress. Lately, I’ve been hung up on how they’re similar. I think it’s because, for people who’ve paid attention, it’s their differences that got drilled into us over the years. By the time Solange released her first record in December 2002, Beyoncé, with Destiny’s Child, had released four albums, earned three Grammy Awards, and was in the final recording sessions for her solo debut. Focusing on their differences was probably a strategic move dreamed up by their father, and, at the time, manager, Matthew Knowles, to maximize the commercial viability of the two artists. Yet, seventeen years later, in the spring of this year, both siblings released albums and accompanying films with musings on “home.”

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation. Both follow albums that were career highlights. Both build their foundations on rhythm, the voice, and vocal harmony. Both marry light and sound and knit their soundscapes into images. Both depend on the improvisational skill of a cohort of contributors. Beyoncé’s project, the live album companion to her Netflix documentary “Homecoming,” documented her two headlining sets at last year’s Coachella and layered the visuals and sonics of HBCU pageantry atop references to a specific, Southern emanation of blackness. Solange’s fifth studio album, When I Get Home, traveled the exact same terrain, but in a far-out, deconstructed way, with references to cosmic jazz and psychedelic R&B, black cowboys, undulating hips and mudras, and the skyscrapers and wide, green lawns of the sisters’ hometown.

It’s logical that if two people share a childhood home, they grow up to be into the same things. But it’s taken time — for us, as audiences, to widen our perspectives enough so that we can see, in the same frame, how they’re similar and how they’re not. It’s taken time for the two sisters to grow comfortable enough being themselves while publicly navigating the music industry as black women. To differentiate herself from her sister’s glamorous pop image, Solange initially emanated an alterna-vibe that resonated with those who may have liked Beyoncé, but felt hemmed in by her R&B fantasy, lead-girl-in-a-video perfection. While Bey rocked the trendy low-slung denim of the early aughts, went blonde, and mostly kept a huge mane of loose, blown out curls, Solange wore red box braids, and in her first video, a floor length patchwork skirt. She was the earthier sister, positioned in alignment with the diasporic neo soul scene of the late 90s. She had a baby, got married early, and lived with her young family, for a while, in Idaho. Then she sheared her long locks and quietly rented a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.

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We didn’t linger on or make much meaning from Solange’s time as a background dancer for her sister’s group, or how she’d replaced Kelly Rowland in the lineup for some tour dates when they opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000. But it did raise eyebrows when, during Solange’s Brooklyn years, Beyoncé began showing up at concerts of indie acts her sister put her on to.

Solange’s first album Solo Star covered a lot of musical ground, but didn’t make much of an impact commercially or otherwise. She was then 16. Between 2001 and early 2003, a number of female R&B vocalists made big Top 10 pop albums: Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Ameriie, Ashanti, Mya. Beyoncé’s 2003 debut (coupled with the rapid deterioration of the recording industry) seemed to flatten out the pop-R&B landscape like a grenade. Five years later, Solange released the Motown-influenced Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, then left her label. She independently released the 2012 EP “True.” Its lead single “Losing You,” a buoyant breakup bop, was a breakthrough. A Seat at the Table, with spoken word interludes that include interviews with her parents about black history and family, came out in the fall of 2016. It was Solange’s first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. By then, Beyoncé was talking about her mama’s and daddy’s roots, too, most explicitly, on Lemonade, her sixth studio project as a solo artist, which, just five months before, earned the same chart placement.  

* * *

According to Billboard, besides the Knowles sisters, in the history of the chart there have been only two other pairs of sibling solo artists in which each sibling has earned a number one pop album: Master P and Silkk the Shocker during a run of releases in the late nineties, and Janet and Michael Jackson. The Jacksons’ older brother, Jermaine, The Braxton sisters, Toni and Tamar, and the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, have all earned albums in the Top 10. But the only solo siblings to earn number ones during the same calendar year have been Janet and Michael, Solange and Beyoncé.

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation.

Michael famously got his start in a band of brothers, The Jackson Five. After signing to Motown in 1969, their first four singles — “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save”, and “I’ll Be There” — all went to number one. Their father, Joseph Jackson, a former boxer and steelworker born in Arkansas, managed the band with reportedly horrid methods. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon all became capable musicians individually. But it was Janet, born eight years after Michael and too young to join her brothers’ band, who truly absorbed their ascent. She performed in the family’s variety show and TV sitcoms throughout the 70s, and beginning in the late 80s, released music that, arguably, approached Michael’s impact. Control, Rhythm Nation, Janet., and The Velvet Rope are gorgeous, singular statements that define pop-R&B and still sound alive.

Janet has earned more number one albums than Michael (seven to his six) and her singles have been in the Top 10 for more weeks than his (“That’s the Way Love Goes” was the longest running number one for either of them). For a while, the fiasco of Super Bowl 2004 derailed Janet’s career. She lost endorsement deals and had a long, marked decline in album sales. “Nipplegate” angered then CBS chairman Les Moonves so much that he’d reportedly ordered MTV and VH1 to stop playing her videos. Janet’s black fans always suspected something sinister at play. Last year, the New Yorker and New York Times published sexual assault allegations against Moonves, and his pattern of derailing women’s careers became public knowledge. Janet got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past March, and while that’s somewhat palliative, it doesn’t give back the lost years, or acknowledge her sprawling, multi-medium contributions to entertainment. Still, her reputation hasn’t had the kind of epic blemishes Michael’s has, and our current ferment of empowered, black women singers owes everything to her.

Though they’re starting to, Solange and Beyoncé haven’t leaned all the way in to their shared origin in the way of Michael and Janet in the ”Scream” video, where their charisma and similar, long-limbed, open hip-jointed athleticism is foregrounded in nearly every frame. We got glimpses at Solange’s set at Coachella in 2014, when Bey joined in for a dance break, and its reprise in Bey’s sets, a highlight of the 2019 film. Solange has, like Janet, who sang backup on Thriller, been all over Beyoncé’s catalog. And while coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be (the glamorous diva vs. the earthy bohemian), it still hasn’t gone far enough.

In Interview, Beyoncé asked her younger sister where she got her inspiration, and she answered,“For one, I got to have a lot of practice. Growing up in a household with a master class such as yourself definitely didn’t hurt.” She also namechecked Missy Elliot, who produced and provided vocals for some of Destiny’s Child’s finest tracks. In other words, she claimed her proximity to her older sister’s career, as nourishment, cultivation, as part of what undergirds her artistry. When Solange’s latest album launched, the NPR music critic Ann Powers made a playlist of its antecedents called the “mamas of Solange.” It included Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, Tweet, Aaliyah, and TLC. It did not include Beyoncé or Destiny’s Child, contemporaries of some of the women who did make the list. Maybe it’s taken for granted? Stevie Wonder’s ambient album The Secret Life of Plants is brought up a lot in relation to When I Get Home, but The Writings on the Wall and Dangerously in Love are also important building blocks of the music Solange and most contemporary pop and R&B artists make. It feels incomplete to not say so. Similarly, when talking about Beyoncé, something’s missing when we don’t acknowledge how indebted she is to the cluster of women around her. Perhaps that’s leftover residue from the marketing machine of the late 90s and early aughts, too — an overemphasis on singularity.

* * *

When I Get Home’s interlude “S. MacGregor,” named after an avenue in Houston’s Third Ward, contains snippets of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen performing a poem their mother, Vivian Ayers-Allen, wrote. Rashad and Allen make up another culturally significant sibling pair. There’s Fame!, The Cosby Show, and A Different World, but also the stage — Rashad is the first black woman to win a lead actress Tony, and Allen was nominated for Tony Awards for West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Both sisters also had short-lived recording careers. Rashad released a tribute album to Josephine Baker in 1978 and an album of nursery rhymes in 1991. She memorably sang on multiple episodes of The Cosby Show. Allen released Special Look in 1989. It was a pop, dance-R&B concoction that sounds like a harder edged Paula Abdul, whose blockbuster Forever Your Girl had come out the year before. Today, Allen directs for TV and runs Los Angeles’ Debbie Allen Dance Academy, while Rashad directs for the stage.

Allen’s younger than Rashad by 2 years, and they have two older brothers: the jazz musician Andrew Arthur Allen, and Hugh Allen, a banker. Their parents’ nasty divorce in the mid-’80s got covered in Jet. I often wonder about the dynamics in high-intensity, high-achieving households like theirs. Some accounts say Solange felt neglected for parts of her childhood when her older sister’s group became the family business. The five-year age difference is too wide for straightforward competition, but not so for resentment. Some of my earliest memories are the legendary fights between my two older, high-achieving siblings. It still annoys me to think about how much time and energy their rivalry took up (and continues to take up) in our family. In an interview with Maria Shriver last year, Tina Knowles Lawson said she deliberately taught her daughters not to be intimidated by another woman’s shine and sent them to therapy early on to learn to protect and support each other. From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to have worked.

While coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be, it still hasn’t gone far enough.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop. My mother adored the voice of Karen Carpenter, who’d gotten her start in a duo with her brother, Richard. The LPs of the Emotions, the Pointer Sisters, the Jones Girls, and Sister Sledge were in my  mother’s racks, too, — all vocal groups with at least one pair of siblings. The early years of rock and roll, the doo wop era, is full of crews of schoolmates, like the Chantels, the Marvelettes or the Supremes, or sibling groups like The Andrews Sisters, the Shangri-Las, and the Ronettes. Later, there’s DeBarge, the Emotions, The Sylvers, the Five Stairsteps, Wilson Phillips, the Winans, Ace of Base, Xscape, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, the Isley Brothers. Part of me wants to say it’s because of the genre’s origins in domestic spaces like the living room or the stoop, a refuge of creativity against the backdrop of chaotic 20th century urban life. Music education in schools provided training, as did the subtle rigor of the church, where troupes, quartets, and choirs led worship. When describing what’s special about “that sibling sound,” in 2014, Linda Ronstadt told the BBC: “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood-related to you.” What a voice sounds like, in large part, depends on biology and anatomy—the shape of the head, chest, the construction of the sinus cavities. It makes sense that the sweetest, most seamless harmonizing could happen between people who share DNA. And as audiences, we like being witness to the chemistry of our performers. It can feel fun and somewhat uncanny to watch people who look a little bit alike sing and dance in formation.

None of this completely explains how much popular music has historically been “A Family Affair” (a number one in 1971 for Sly and the Family Stone, a group comprised of Sylvester Stewart and his siblings Freddie and Rose, with baby sister, Vaetta, in charge of the backing vocalists). Or how much, aside from the Jonas Brothers, the top 40 of the past few months is absent sibling groups, or, really, groups of any kind. Haim, the trio of sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana from the San Fernando Valley, had Top 10 albums in 2013 and 2017, and will co-headline this year’s Pitchfork’s festival with the Isley Brothers and Robyn. They sing in effortless three-part harmony, are aggressive on guitar, bass, and percussion, and write their own songs. A New York Times critic called them proudly “anachronistic,” because their sound is a throwback to earlier eras and bands like Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child, whose Stevie Nicks-sampling “Bootylicious,” was the last pop number one from a girl group. In a 2011 piece for The Root, Akoto Ofori-Atta attributed the decline of vocal groups to, among other factors, reduced record label budgets and the “me-first” narcissism of social media. She also suggested the cyclical nature of music trends could mean that audiences will want to hear tight vocal harmonies again. I’d think that was impossible since digitization has meant that people don’t have to sing together anymore. But singing itself has gotten new life from young R&B artists like Ella Mai, Moses Sumney, and H.E.R., so who knows.

In 2015, Beyonce signed the sister duo Chloe+ Halle to her record label. She’d seen them on YouTube performing covers and accompanying themselves on keys in their living room.  The young women sing ethereal, soul-inflected harmonies, play multiple instruments and compose and produce their own music. They’re also actresses with recurring roles on “grown-ish.” Their first studio album The Kids are Alright released last year and earned the group two Grammy nominations. They performed at the ceremony, memorably, in the tribute to Donny Hathaway, and at the Grammy’s tribute to Motown, they performed the Marvelette’s “Please Mr. Postman,” Motown’s first number one. None of the singles from Chloe + Halle’s record have made much of a commercial impact or stuck with me yet, but, based on history, the incubation potential of the vocal group, the sibling group in particular, bodes well for longevity.

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[ismael37olson]

You're Cellophane!

Not too long ago, I created a Music Man glossary, since that show is so chock-full of period slang and euphemisms. Now, working on Anything Goes, I find the same thing is true. It's part of what make both shows so good -- they create a very real, full world in which these characters exist. And contrary to what a lot of directors and actors think, it is not important for the audience to get every reference; but it is important that the actors get them, so that they can live fully and honestly in this world. That sense of reality is the real value of period references. On the other hand.. In the original Anything Goes, several the lyrics were full of references to people and things that were popular in 1934, many of which we haven't even heard of today. So a lot of the original lyric for "You're the Top" and "Anything Goes" would just be baffling to audiences; and instead of listening to the song, they'd be feeling left behind and confused. Those lyrics had to be revised for the revivals. All that said, for actors and directors working on Anything Goes, and for all musical theatre fangirls and fanboys (of which I am one) who just love the show, here is my Anything Goes glossary. Take a look particularly at the juxtaposition of these pop culture references against each other, in their context. Porter is doing some really subtle, sophisticated social commentary in many of these lyrics. From the original 1934 script: "Manhattan" -- a cocktail made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters. While rye is the traditional whiskey of choice, other commonly used whiskeys include Canadian whisky, bourbon, blended whiskey, and Tennessee whiskey, invented in in the early 1870s at the Manhattan Club. "Grosvenor House" -- one of the largest private homes in London, torn down during World War I, and replaced with the luxury Grosvenor House Hotel

"Tommy gun" -- the Thompson submachine gun, invented by John T. Thompson in 1918, and became infamous during the Prohibition era. "rote shot" -- a section of the newspaper with society photographs, called the "rotogravure," after the printing process "Evelyn" -- a then common British man's name pronounced EVE-lin. "Snake Eyes Johnson" and Moonface Martin" -- jokes on 1930s gangster nicknames, like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bugsy Siegel, Machine Gun Kelly, Lucky Luciano... "dicks"  -- law enforcement; a slang term for detectives, originally coined in Canada and brought south by rumrunners during Prohibition. The comic strip character Dick Tracy was named for this term. "a wireless" -- a telegram "Mater" -- British for Mother, from the Latin, an intentionally old-fashioned term "Eight Bells Strike" -- the striking of eight bells on a ship says a four-hour watch shift is over (it's not connected to a specific time on the clock) "my sea legs..." -- a person's ability to keep their balance and not feel seasick when on board a moving ship. "Nicholas Murray Butler" -- a famous American philosopher, diplomat, and educator; president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Damn white of him" -- originally used under British colonialism, an expression of appreciation for honorable or gracious behavior, under the assumption that white people were inherently more virtuous. "The Social Register" -- according to Wikipedia, "The social elite was a small closed group. The leadership was well known to the readers of society pages, but in larger cities it was impossible to remember everyone, or to keep track of the new debutantes, the marriages, and the obituaries. The solution was the Social Register, which listed the names and addresses of the families who mingled in the same private clubs, attended the right teas and cotillions, worshipped together at prestige churches, funded the proper charities, lived in exclusive neighborhoods, and sent their daughters to finishing schools and their sons away to prep schools" "Beefeater" -- actually a ceremonial guard at the Tower of London, but here just referring to a British person, possibly also implying that Evelyn is stiff...? "Coliseum" -- the famous amphitheater in Rome, built in 70-80 AD "Louvre Museum" -- the world's largest museum, in Paris, holding some of our great works of art, including the "Mona Lisa." "Symphony by Strauss" -- German composer Richard Strauss was still actively writing operas and concert works when Anything Goes opened.

"Bendel bonnet" -- a ladies' hat from Henri Bendel, the upscale women's specialty store still today based in New York City, selling handbags, jewelry, luxury fashion accessories, home fragrances and gifts "Shakespeare Sonnet" -- Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, fourteen-line poems Mickey Mouse -- you have to remember that for these characters living in 1934, Steamboat Willie premiered only six years ago, and Mickey was still only in black and white... "Vincent Youmans" -- Broadway composer of many musicals, including No, No, Nanette, Hit the Deck, and several Hollywood films "Mahatma Gandhi" -- still in the middle of his historic fight for independence for colonial India from Great Britain at this moment "Napoleon Brandy" -- an "extra old" blend of brandy in which the youngest brandy is stored for at least six years "The National Gallery": Famous art gallery in Washington, D.C. "Garbo's salary" - according to an article on Slate.com, "After the success of Flesh and the Devil (1927), Greta Garbo demanded that MGM raise her salary from $600 per week to $5,000 per week. Louis B. Mayer hemmed and hawed, so Garbo sailed to Sweden. Eventually Mayer gave in and Garbo sailed back. $5,000 per week comes to $260,000 per year, or the equivalent in today's dollars of $4.6 million per year." "cellophane" -- according to Wikipedia, "Whitman's candy company initiated use of cellophane for candy wrapping in the United States in 1912 for their Whitman's Sampler. They remained the largest user of imported cellophane from France until nearly 1924, when DuPont built the first cellophane manufacturing plant in the US. Cellophane saw limited sales in the US at first since while it was waterproof, it was not moisture proof—it held water but was permeable to water vapor. This meant that it was unsuited to packaging products that required moisture proofing. DuPont hired chemist William Hale Charch, who spent three years developing a nitrocellulose lacquer that, when applied to Cellophane, made it moisture proof. Following the introduction of moisture-proof Cellophane in 1927, the material's sales tripled between 1928 and 1930." Our story is set in 1934. "Derby winner" -- the 1934 running of the Kentucky Derby was its 60th! "You're a Brewster body" -- the frame for a Bentley or Rolls Royce luxury car "A Ritz hot toddy" -- a specialty drink of the Ritz Hotel bar in Paris "the sleepy Zuder Zee" -- The Zuiderzee was a shallow bay of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands. The characters in Anything Goes know this because in 1928, sailing events for the Amsterdam Summer Olympics were held on the Zuiderzee. "Bishop Manning" -- Episcopal Bishop of St. John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan. "A Nathan panning" -- a bad review from New York drama critic George Jean Nathan "broccoli" -- something of a novelty in 1934, having been farmed commercially in the US only since the 1920s, and the first advertising campaign on its behalf didn't occur until 1929. So in 1934, broccoli was the culinary cutting edge "a night at Coney" -- Coney Island "Irene Bordoni" -- French actress who starred on Broadway in Cole Porter's 1928 musical Paris, introducing the song "Let's Do It" (which had replaced "Let's Misbehave") "a fol-de-rol" -- a useless ornament or accessory, nonsense

"Arrow collar" -- the famous "Sanforized" collar on Arrow Shirts. The Arrow Collar Man became an advertising symbol in the 1920s for rugged masculinity. "Coolidge dollar" -- the very sound, very strong American dollar, under President Calvin Coolidge, before the Depression "Fred Astaire" -- Broadway and film star of musical comedies "(Eugene) O'Neill" -- Pulitzer Prize winning American playwright of powerful dramas, including Anna Christie (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and others "Whistler's Mama" -- the famous painting actually called Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, best known as Whistler's Mother, painted by the American painter James McNeill Whistler in 1871 "Camembert" -- A mellow, soft cheese with a creamy center first marketed in Normandy, France. "Inferno's Dante" -- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) author of The Divine Comedy, the third part of which deals with Inferno (Hell). "the great Durante" -- comedian/actor Jimmy Durante. His first film was in 1930, but he had made 19 films by 1934 "de trop" -- a mispronunciation of the French phrase de trop, meaning too much, not wanted, unwelcome "A Waldorf Salad" -- a salad of apples, walnuts, raisins, celery, and mayonnaise, originated at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. "Berlin ballad" -- A romantic song by American songwriter Irvin Berlin, who by 1934 had already written standards like "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "What'll I Do?", "Blue Skies," and "Puttin' on the Ritz." A few years later, in 1938, Berlin would write "God Bless America." "an Old Dutch master" -- a Dutch master painter like Rembrandt, but ALSO a brand of cigars "Mrs. Astor" (changed to "Lady Astor" in 1962) -- Mrs. John Jacob Astor, leading New York socialite. "Pepsodent" -- toothpaste introduced in the USA in 1915 by the Pepsodent Company of Chicago. The original formula for the paste contained pepsin, a digestive agent designed to break down and digest food deposits on the teeth, hence the brand and company name. From 1930 to late 1933 a massive animated neon advertising sign for the toothpaste, featuring a young girl on a swing, hung on West 47th Street in Times Square in New York City.

"the steppes of Russia" -- a region of grasslands joining Europe and Asia -- Around 1930 the Soviet Union wanted to attract foreign tourists to bring in currency and improve its external image. On Stalin's and the Party's initiative a national tourist agency was founded. Intourist was responsible for attracting, accommodating and escorting all foreign guests.Western advertising styles were applied to appeal to the target audience. Intourist posters pictured a tourist paradise, not a country of laborers and peasants. Trains were no icons of progress but a comfortable way of transport. Intourist women were not working hard in a factory but were either fashionable or exotic. "Pants on a Roxy usher" -- the famous Roxy Theatre in Manhattan ("the Cathedral of motion pictures") had a squad of ushers who were trained like an army platoon and wore very tight pants. "G.O.P." -- Grand Old Party, i.e. Republicans. "Tower of Babel" -- Biblical tower in the land of Shinar, the building of which ceased when a confusion of languages took place. "Whitney stable" -- the socially prominent Whitney family bred famous horses "Mrs. Baer's son, Max" (also referred to as "Maxie Bauer") -- Max Baer, World Heavyweight Champion in the 1930s (his son, Max Baer Jr. played Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies) "Rudy Vallee" --  1920s/1930s crooner, who often sang through a megaphone and later starred in the original production of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. "Phenolax" -- a  pink flavored wafer laxative, first introduced in 1908

"Drumstick Lipstick" -- brand of makeup manufactured by Charbert, a French cosmetics firm. "brig" -- military prison "in irons" -- shackled "The Dean boys" -- baseball players and brothers Dizzy and Daffy, members of the famed "Gashouse Gang," the 1934 St. Louis Cardinal baseball team, which won 95 games, the National League pennant, and the 1934 World Series -- just months before Anything Goes opened! "Max Gordon" -- Broadway producer from the 1920s through the 1950, famous for extravagant productions "Jitneys" -- independent taxi cabs or small buses. The joke here is that the middle-class folks who can still afford to take a cab, here in the middle of the Depression, would be shocked to find out that some of the richest Americans (in this case, the Vanderbilt and Whitney families) had lost nearly everything. "Vanderbilts and Whitneys" -- two prominent rich families in New York "Sam Goldwyn" -- movie studio head "Lady Mendl" -- an American actress, interior decorator, author of the influential 1913 book The House in Good Taste, and a prominent figure in New York, Paris, and London society. Her morning exercises were famous, including yoga, standing on her head, and walking on her hands. "Missus R." and "Franklin" -- Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt

"broadcast a bed from Simmons" -- Eleanor Roosevelt did weekly radio broadcasts sponsored by Simmons mattresses "Mrs. Ned McLean" -- a socialite who was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond "Anna Sten" -- Ukrainian movie star "Swannee River" -- a reference to Stephen Foster's famous song "Old Folks at Home" and to the Gerhwin song "Swanee "goose's liver" -- pate "Russian Ballet" -- reference to the 1934–1935 world tour by the Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet "the Oxford movement" -- a 19th-century movement of High Church members of the Church of England which eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism, arguing for the reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. Presumably, Mrs. Wentworth is confusing the Oxford Movement with The Oxford Group was a Christian organization founded in 1931 by the American Christian missionary Frank Buchman. [For the references in "Anything Goes," see my earlier post on that song.] [For the references in "Blow Gabriel, Blow" see my earlier post about that song.] "Sing Sing" and "Joliet" -- famous maximum security prisons [For an explanation of the intro to "Be Like the Bluebird," see my earlier post about that.] Additional Things from the 1962 version: "The Globe American" -- a generic fictitious name for a newspaper "Hymsie Brown, the fighter" -- a fictitious nicknamed boxer "you know the New Deal" -- reference to government red tape, bureaucracy "Toscanini" -- Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. The New York Philharmonic under Toscanini, in 1931, became the first orchestra to offer regular live coast-to-coast radio broadcasts of its concerts, gaining Toscanini unprecedented fame and a remarkable salary of $110,000 per year. "Milton Berle" -- already a successful stand-up comedian in the 1930s, patterning himself after one of Vaudeville's top comics, Ted Healy (the inspiration for Billy Flynn in Chicago). A year before Anything Goes opened, Berle starred in the short musical film Poppin' the Cork, a topical musical comedy about the repealing of Prohibition. "tomato ketchup" -- During the 1930s Heinz increased their sales force and advertising, to battle the drop in sales due to the Depression. Heinz salesmen were expected to be at least 6ft tall, impeccably dressed and particularly eloquent at promoting Heinz products. Their equipment ­ which included chrome vacuum flasks, pickle forks and olive spears ­ weighed about 30lbs. "Chippendale" -- various styles of furniture fashionable in the late 18th century and named after the English cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale

"Fourth Dimension" -- according to Project Muse, "During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the fourth dimension was a concern common to artists in nearly every major modern movement: Analytical and Synthetic Cubists, Italian Futurists, Russian Futurists, Suprematists, and Constructivists, American modernists in the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, Dadaists, and members of De Stijl. Kandinsky’s own awareness of the idea, and the growing interest in Germany in the space-time world of Einstein. Although by the end of the 1920s the temporal fourth dimension of Einsteinian Relativity Theory had largely displaced the popular fourth dimension of space in the public mind, one further movement was to explore a fourth spatial dimension: French Surrealism." "George Bernard Shaw" -- British playwright (Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Saint Joan, etc.) "verse" -- Today, we call the first section of a song the intro, which sets up the topic, before we get to the first verse and main melody (though many songs today don't have one). Then we get the first verse, which introduces the main melody, and then in most pop songs, we get the chorus. Sometimes there's a contrasting section called the bridge. But in Porter's time, the first section was the verse, and what we call the verse and chorus were together called the refrain. "Tinpantithesis" -- an invented joke word, meaning the Tin Pan Alley (common) antithesis (opposite) of good music Gullery -- Billy's joke on Mrs. Harcourt "un peu d'amour" -- French for a little love "DAR, PTA, and WPA" -- The Daughters of the Revolution, the Parents-Teachers Association, and the Works Progress Administrtion -- three things that do not belong together, but Mooney doesn't know that... Every day, I find new richness in Anything Goes, new craft, new surprises. It's such diving this deep into a show I've always loved but never thought about that much... Hope you enjoy learning about all this stuff as much as I do! The adventure continues! Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/02/youre-cellophane.html

[itsandiesanchez-blog]

Born 1976. Not Generation X.

I am 41, middle aged and getting older by the nanosecond. I’m not 21 anymore and I’m ok with that. I would be lying if I said I’d rather have wrinkles than none at all, but generally speaking, I’m alright with the advancing years and how they’ve treated me. 

I am a lot of things, just.......not Generation X.

Well, let me clarify first:

Generation X was initially classified as a generation beginning in 1965 and ending in 1984 by Douglas Copeland, the so-called 13th American generation, following the Baby Boomer cohort. As it stands in that form, completely arbitrary, chronological and unyielding, I am indeed a member of Generation X. It says nothing about me other than the fact that my birth year falls into that particular segment of a series of equal, unemotional generational divides.

It was, however, a surprise to me, to find out I was indeed considered Generation X. My whole teenaged and young adult life was lived fully believing myself to be a member of Generation Y, born somewhere between 1975 and 1990. Sometime during school in the 90s, a teacher addressed us with that label, and it stuck with me ever since. By the time I was 20, I knew that Generation X was Winona Ryder and all the 80s teens that came before us and that we, the heirs to the 90s and its technological advances, were something different. It made sense to me. The older kids weren’t like us. The 80s weren’t like us. We could sense the divide and the dawn of a new era. It was upon us.

And then..... one day someone started talking about Millennials. At first I mistook it for a new generation, born after 1990, the next in line, the one that came after Generation Y. Imagine my shock to find that not only was the Millennial generation referring to people practically the same age as I was, people I worked with and hung out with, but that I was also no longer a part of their gang. Suddenly I was Generation X. Not just stalwart 1965-1984 Generation X (which I would have accepted), no - 1965-1981 Generation X, chopped off three years before the actual 20 year divide, AS IF IT MEANT SOMETHING.

What did it allegedly mean? I couldn’t find an answer to that, except descriptions and identifiers - stereotypes - that might stick to someone born in 1970, but certainly not on me. Suddenly I was “cynical”, my idols were from the 80s, and all of my formative experiences and influences belonged to someone 10 years older than me. WTF??  1975-1981 found itself suddenly amputated from the rest of its generation. For no logical reason.

But it gets worse.

Those of us belonging to the island of Gen Y floating in Gen X started talking about it. We noticed the discrepancies in cut off years. We saw that depending on who you talked to, we were either Millennials or Gen X. The verdict wasn’t in, regardless of what Howe and Strauss said. Oregon Trail Generation, Generation Catalano - we saw ourselves everywhere, posting, discussing, putting up a fight.

Enter Xennials.

Yes, I thought. Finally. 

And then I saw the cut-off years.

1977-1983

FUUUUUUUUCK NO.

As a 1976er, there is no difference, absolutely none, between me and anyone born during the 1977 to 1983 time frame. In fact, I share more with ANYONE born between 1975 and 1990 than I do with a single person born in the 60s or early 70s. We can argue about years like 1974 or 1973, but trust me, in all my 41 ancient years here on the planet, living in four different countries, I have not ONCE met someone born in 1965 or 1970 that shares my childhood and youth experiences. Let this be known once and for fucking all, because I am sick and tired of explaining it.

Why?

1. 80s pop culture and music. 

Duh. I don’t really remember the 80s, aside from toys, the first video games and cartoon t-shirts. The 80s were vastly different on a pop culture level from the 90s and I was on the bench in the haze of childhood. Gen Xers had AIDS, world hunger and music and films that I only watched and listened to retrospectively out of curiosity much later on. Anyone who wasn’t a youth during the 80s (at least 15–24) would not have been fully part of that culture.

2. The Cold War: 

When the Berlin Wall fell, I was obsessed with the Little Mermaid. Does my voice sound like Ariel’s? How do you like my Ariel drawing? I couldn’t give two darns about politics in 1989 and really don’t remember the feeling of the environment that preceded it. I came of age during the age of Middle Eastern wars, starting with Iraq, continuing with Iraq and leading up to 9/11. I wasn’t old enough to vote for Reagan or Bush — I am Clinton era all the way. Again, if you weren’t at least 15 before the Cold War started crumbling, you probably don’t have much to say about it.

3. Technology: Now, I am not saying Gen Xers are not tech savvy, but give me a handful of people born in the 60s or early 70s and you’ll find quite a few people who pride themselves in the fact that THEY survived a good chunk of adulthood without the internet, that THEY can live without their phones. You know the memes. I was a teenager when I first got internet and I don’t know what real life is like without it unless you’re talking about My Little Pony and She-Ra. Smart phones were second nature to me and yes, I have my face glued to my phone whenever I am not asleep. I came of age during the whole 90s tech boom and it helped make me who I am.

4. The whole latchkey running wild thing: Technically, the latchkey era didn’t end until the mid-90s and by the time I was a kid, only irresponsible parents let their kids run around like free range chickens. We were the post-Adam Walsh, milk carton era and parents were worried. Contrary to popular belief, kids STILL play outside and of course, so did we, but we did not “run out of the house in the morning and come back when the streelights came on”. Oh no. My parents wanted to see me in the yard at all times and actually gave me a physical boundary that I was not allowed to pass (our yard ditch). Friends had to be approved and parents had to be contacted for any kind of visit or playdate. New children and families had to pass the parental supervision test — I was not allowed to roam free with kids whose parents were not home or just randomly pop by someone’s house unannounced. The shift was already there in the 80s — the freedom 60s and 70s kids had was gone. Oh yes, you’ll find a few of these kids (born anywhere in the late 70s and 80s) from divorced homes engaging in the same romantic nostalgia right alongside the Xers and Boomers, but seriously, the times were gone. Although I never read it myself at the time, my parents had IT, thank you very much. They had Wayne Williams, Clifford Olsen, Randy Kraft and John Wayne Gacy. My life at 10 was no 60s Disney live action film. And yes, we loved to stay inside and play video games. Atari, Nintendo, Sega…… those were the days.

5. The pessimism/anti-Baby Boomer thing: What???? I mean seriously, whaaat??? I can’t even write about that because I don’t understand it. Hippy was not a slur to me, in fact, we were very much into that sort of thing during the later 90s. I am not a pessimist, or a cynic or a slacker and I didn’t hate my parents or thought disappointing them was “cool”. I am STILL worried what they think and I’m over 40. I know that’s just me, but again, this particular Gen X attitude was one we always associated with either dysfunctional kids or… older kids. Yep. Older kids. Real Gen Xers. We were actually kind of enemies at the time. I recall “so 80s” (accompanied by a sneer) as a thing. It always seemed to me like they were still desperately trying to recapture the 50s cool during the 90s with a giant big hair, mullet fail.

6. The absurdity of the cut off lines and criteria for these so called “generations”. Who cares if I was born one year before the first Star Wars? Really? WHY? Does the fact that I was born the year Steve Jobs founded Apple count for less? Also, who cares if I can remember Nirvana? How does that negate almost complete comtemporary ignorance (and indulgance) of major 80s bands? I mean, let’s face it: the only reason I know what Depeche Mode is, is because of songs they produced in the 90s…….but then again, wait, maybe it wasn’t Depeche Mode…..Dire Straights perhaps….. or Duran Duran? I have to Google every time. Please don’t hold it against me. At the time in question, I was too busy pretending to be Jem and the Holograms. And grunge…..the one Gen X thing that actually occurred during at least a brief moment of my formative youth, well — Kurt Cobain was dead by the time I started going to concerts. While admittedly being a real common denominator between me and Gen X, grunge was just a fledgling spark at the dawn of budding musical tastes. Bluntly speaking, I am more Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, Weezer, Blink182 and Linkin Park. It’s hardly enough to completely reclassify me and ignore the rest.

None of these cut offs are a strong argument, folks. You might as well say that “you are an Xennial” if you were the same age as one of the actors on That 70s show playing Eric and his friends. Which, incidentally, includes anyone born from 1983 back to……you guessed it: 1976.

Yes, some kids born anywhere during the late 70s or early 80s will have had older siblings or friends that influenced them with all things Gen X, just like I know 90s kids today that know more about Gen X culture than I do due to their Gen X parents. There’s also these pesky socio-economic aspects that play a role — I’ve met ’00s babies down here in the rural south that still don’t have a smart phone or their own computer. That aspect can be quite arbitrary.

I have real Gen X friends. I have Millennial friends. And while I won’t claim to be like anyone born in 1994, I have vastly more in common culturally with my 80s born Millennial friends than I do with my 60s, very early 70s born Gen Xer buddies. In fact, the latter group tends to freely associate with early 60s born “Baby Boomers” as if they are part of the same generation, as their “remember whens” seem to be in tune with each other. There is a generation gap between us that is every bit as tangible as the one that exists between anyone born throughout most of the 90s and I. As adults, it is enjoyable now, this funny little rift — certainly food for plenty of mutual teasing, but it is real. It exists.

The times just moved too quickly in the 90s. Politically, culturally, technologically - those of us who experienced our formative years during the 90s and early 2000s are hard to classify, I get that. But....The least anyone can do is keep us together. 

So stop. I repeat: STOP cutting me off from my generation and shoving me into a group that doesn’t share my experiences. If you want to be fair, keep the clean 20 year cut off — 1965–1984 for Gen X, so that I can at least be grouped with a good decade of people I can identify with. If you’re going to start chopping things up, be a little more meaningful. Might I suggest: Gen X 1960–1974? I have yet to meet a person born in 1974 that identifies as a Millennial or “in between generations”. Not to mention the nifty fact that grunge was almost exclusively produced by this demographic, a demographic which also includes many teen idols of the 80s.

Why does it matter? Well, people do ask — are you a Millennial or Gen X. And even Xennial. I kid you not! Can you imagine how much it blows to have to classify yourself as something you are NOT, suddenly stereotyped with qualities you don’t have, lumped into a category that makes you feel like oil in water, sitting there, suffocating under a label that doesn’t belong to you, while the rest of your people are bonding safely in the 1977 and beyond zone? The isolation is real.

SO STOP.