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I was so excited to walk around \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/lake-merritt\">Lake Merritt\u003c/a> with my date, Kai, that I commuted one hour from the Mission and responded enthusiastically to her suggestion of lunch at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895209/vegan-mob-oakland-mission-sf-expansion-food-truck-toriano-gordon-senor-sisig-vegano\">Vegan Mob\u003c/a> — even though I don’t like vegan food. Or I didn’t think I did, anyway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was my first time visiting Oakland, and its village charm and conspicuous Blackness made me feel happily nostalgic for my hometown back in Connecticut. By the time we approached the quaint lime-green building, I practically forgot we were going to a vegan restaurant. It helped, too, that Vegan Mob’s lineup of plant-based burgers and barbecue plates didn’t look like any other vegan food I’d seen. Reading the menu, I fantasized about the brisket and ribs from my favorite soul food restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over plates of Impossible Burgers and candied yams, Kai and I joked around and recounted our childhoods. It was only after the meal, when she asked how I liked the vegan meat, that I began to consider the question. I was delighted but a little disoriented. I knew I had not eaten animal meat, but nothing about the meal \u003ci>felt\u003c/i> vegan either. I appreciated the lightness of the mushroom burger patty, and just how tasty and everyday all of the food was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13953909\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13953909\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob.jpg\" alt='Man in a black \"Good Hood\" sweatshirt gestures toward the Vegan Mob food truck behind him.' width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chef and owner Toriano Gordon poses in front of the food-truck incarnation of his vegan soul food business, Vegan Mob. The original Oakland location near Lake Merritt closed in 2023. \u003ccite>(Vegan Mob/IG)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Prior to this, my most salient experiences with vegan food were from the dinner parties my white, effective-altruist friend hosted during college. The tofu in the chickpea curry he cooked was always watery, and I pushed chunks of it around my bowl more than I ate it. Most of our mealtime conversations were about the self-sacrifice needed to create a more environmentally, racially and morally just world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like a good kid forcing himself to swallow his broccoli, I endured those meals because I believed the discipline was healthy and the discussions were thought provoking — not because the food actually tasted good. I saw veganism as a form of liberal asceticism, where taste and pleasure were less important than the morality of one’s diet. That all the vegans I knew were ardently political, and that the few restaurants they brought me to were absent of spice, supported this viewpoint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vegan Mob challenged these biases. A few months later, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13910234/taqueria-la-venganza-vegan-tacos-mexican-latinx-impossible-foods\">Taqueria La Venganza\u003c/a>, a vegan Mexican restaurant in North Oakland, upended them. I’d suggested the place when Seiji, an old high school friend who is vegetarian, reached out to grab a meal. What I didn’t tell him was that I still suspected that vegan food was, generally speaking, kind of gross.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But each mouthful of La Venganza’s two-pound soy carne asada burrito — and the fresh lettuce, tomato and guac they packed into it — was delicious. We spent the first half of our reunion in awe of the food, and in awe of ourselves after learning how quickly each of us could eat an entire pound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910279\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910279\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Vegan carne asada with all the fixings on a flour tortilla, ready to get rolled into a burrito.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-768x480.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-2048x1280.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The burritos at Taqueria La Venganza weigh two pounds. Instead of beef, the carne asada is made with soy chips. \u003ccite>(Raul Medina)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Eventually, we revisited our time at boarding school, which dug up complicated memories that I usually avoid talking about. But the bond that Seiji and I had formed over those burritos — the way the food made us feel so comfortable and at home — helped lower my inhibitions. For the first time I expressed out loud my sense of betrayal that a math teacher I had admired is currently in prison for sexually assaulting one of my classmates. We grieved and reflected deep into the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13935854/miso-aedan-koji-kitchen-community-sf\">This is why I love food so much\u003c/a>. Every meal is a ritual, a recurring pause that allows us to reflect on the beauty, joy and sadness of life — especially when we share those meals with others. Now I realized that vegan food didn’t have to be something I only ate when philosophizing about morality or social justice. It could simply be part of the fabric of my everyday life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"large\" align=\"right\"]‘Whenever I discussed a vegan future with friends, it felt like I was envisioning a world where Ghanaian food didn’t exist.’[/pullquote]My newfound appreciation of vegan eating has also expanded my understanding of Ghanaian food — the food of my own cultural background. Because I had grown up on plates of crab in okra stew and chicken in jollof rice, I assumed the cuisine needed meat to achieve its savory and dense perfection. So whenever I discussed a vegan or vegetarian future with friends, it felt like I was envisioning a world where Ghanaian food didn’t exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But these \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101887767/the-bay-areas-new-and-evolving-vegan-scene-with-luke-tsai\">new, ethnically specific vegan restaurants in the Bay\u003c/a> made me realize that my assumption that Ghanaian cuisine had to have meat was unfounded. Recently, I asked my roommate, Russell, to help me make a vegan version of my favorite dish: peanut soup. This was the dish I always requested from my mom during breaks from boarding school, so nowadays, without asking, I always return home to \u003ci>omo tuo\u003c/i>, or rice balls, waiting to be doused in this soup of peanut butter, tomato paste, spices and chicken stock. To make our vegan version, Russell and I used vegetable stock, and we used tempeh in place of the chicken that normally bulks up the soup. To compensate for the lack of meat, we reduced the soup for longer and added more peanut butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The result was the earthiest and sweetest version of the dish I had ever eaten. The velvety soup held on perfectly to the rice, and the mildness of the vegetable stock really allowed the peanuts to shine. As we slurped the last few spoonfuls from our second servings, we began fantasizing about the tweaks and adjustments we’d make on our next batch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13953913\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13953913\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo.jpg\" alt=\"A man stirs a pot of peanut stew while a young woman looks on, pressing her hands together in anticipation.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">For the author (left), veganizing his favorite Ghanaian dish — peanut stew — was a fun and meaningful way to celebrate with friends. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Kofi Ansong)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>My folks back at home marveled over the photos of the soup that I sent to the family group chat. And the next morning, my mom called to share something I hadn’t known: that her grandmother, Akua, had largely avoided eating meat. Instead, she prepared jollof rice, tilapia bean stew and other traditional, “meaty” dishes using only vegetables.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cstrong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[aside postID='arts_13910234,arts_13895209,arts_13935854']\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/b>My own grandmother Lydia — Akua’s daughter — demonstrated her love most vividly through the meals she cooked for me growing up. Her funeral a couple years ago was essentially a village feast, where aunties, cousins and neighbors who had all experienced my grandmother’s love cooked in her memory. Buckets of freshly boiled kenkey, banku and other Ghanaian staples surrounded too many stews and grilled meats for me to try. Hearing that Akua had cooked similarly for my mom back in Ghana, but with little to no meat, was all the proof I needed that vegetarianism and veganism have a home in Ghanaian cuisine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These days, Russell and I cook both vegan and meat-based versions of dishes at the same time, so we can see how they compare — our most recent experiment was coq au vin. I am also reinterpreting more Ghanaian foods just as my great-grandmother Akua once did. Fufu, a ball of pounded plantains, served in a soup of palm oil and spiced peppers, is next. I no longer dismiss whole cuisines or dietary choices, or limit my thinking on what must be in a dish. All cuisines can be vegan, I’ve learned. And their flavors can deepen my understanding of myself and my world.\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Vegan Mob and Taqueria La Venganza helped show me that culturally specific foods don't need to have meat.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1710267805,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":17,"wordCount":1352},"headData":{"title":"Vegan Ghanaian Food: How the Bay Area Helped Me Embrace It | KQED","description":"Vegan Mob and Taqueria La Venganza helped show me that culturally specific foods don't need to have meat.","ogTitle":"How the Bay Area Taught Me to Love Vegan Food — and Make It Ghanaian","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"How the Bay Area Taught Me to Love Vegan Food — and Make It Ghanaian","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","socialTitle":"Vegan Ghanaian Food: How the Bay Area Helped Me Embrace It %%page%% %%sep%% KQED","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"How the Bay Area Taught Me to Love Vegan Food — and Make It Ghanaian","datePublished":"2024-03-12T18:23:25.000Z","dateModified":"2024-03-12T18:23:25.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"source":"Food","sourceUrl":"https://www.kqed.org/food","sticky":false,"nprByline":"Kofi Ansong","excludeFromSiteSearch":"Include","showOnAuthorArchivePages":"No","articleAge":"0","path":"/arts/13953866/ghanaian-vegan-food-bay-area-essay","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">A\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>bout two years ago, I went to my first vegan restaurant in the Bay. I was so excited to walk around \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/lake-merritt\">Lake Merritt\u003c/a> with my date, Kai, that I commuted one hour from the Mission and responded enthusiastically to her suggestion of lunch at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895209/vegan-mob-oakland-mission-sf-expansion-food-truck-toriano-gordon-senor-sisig-vegano\">Vegan Mob\u003c/a> — even though I don’t like vegan food. Or I didn’t think I did, anyway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was my first time visiting Oakland, and its village charm and conspicuous Blackness made me feel happily nostalgic for my hometown back in Connecticut. By the time we approached the quaint lime-green building, I practically forgot we were going to a vegan restaurant. It helped, too, that Vegan Mob’s lineup of plant-based burgers and barbecue plates didn’t look like any other vegan food I’d seen. Reading the menu, I fantasized about the brisket and ribs from my favorite soul food restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over plates of Impossible Burgers and candied yams, Kai and I joked around and recounted our childhoods. It was only after the meal, when she asked how I liked the vegan meat, that I began to consider the question. I was delighted but a little disoriented. I knew I had not eaten animal meat, but nothing about the meal \u003ci>felt\u003c/i> vegan either. I appreciated the lightness of the mushroom burger patty, and just how tasty and everyday all of the food was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13953909\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13953909\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob.jpg\" alt='Man in a black \"Good Hood\" sweatshirt gestures toward the Vegan Mob food truck behind him.' width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/VeganMob-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chef and owner Toriano Gordon poses in front of the food-truck incarnation of his vegan soul food business, Vegan Mob. The original Oakland location near Lake Merritt closed in 2023. \u003ccite>(Vegan Mob/IG)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Prior to this, my most salient experiences with vegan food were from the dinner parties my white, effective-altruist friend hosted during college. The tofu in the chickpea curry he cooked was always watery, and I pushed chunks of it around my bowl more than I ate it. Most of our mealtime conversations were about the self-sacrifice needed to create a more environmentally, racially and morally just world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like a good kid forcing himself to swallow his broccoli, I endured those meals because I believed the discipline was healthy and the discussions were thought provoking — not because the food actually tasted good. I saw veganism as a form of liberal asceticism, where taste and pleasure were less important than the morality of one’s diet. That all the vegans I knew were ardently political, and that the few restaurants they brought me to were absent of spice, supported this viewpoint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vegan Mob challenged these biases. A few months later, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13910234/taqueria-la-venganza-vegan-tacos-mexican-latinx-impossible-foods\">Taqueria La Venganza\u003c/a>, a vegan Mexican restaurant in North Oakland, upended them. I’d suggested the place when Seiji, an old high school friend who is vegetarian, reached out to grab a meal. What I didn’t tell him was that I still suspected that vegan food was, generally speaking, kind of gross.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But each mouthful of La Venganza’s two-pound soy carne asada burrito — and the fresh lettuce, tomato and guac they packed into it — was delicious. We spent the first half of our reunion in awe of the food, and in awe of ourselves after learning how quickly each of us could eat an entire pound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910279\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910279\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Vegan carne asada with all the fixings on a flour tortilla, ready to get rolled into a burrito.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-768x480.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-2048x1280.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/venganza_burrito-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The burritos at Taqueria La Venganza weigh two pounds. Instead of beef, the carne asada is made with soy chips. \u003ccite>(Raul Medina)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Eventually, we revisited our time at boarding school, which dug up complicated memories that I usually avoid talking about. But the bond that Seiji and I had formed over those burritos — the way the food made us feel so comfortable and at home — helped lower my inhibitions. For the first time I expressed out loud my sense of betrayal that a math teacher I had admired is currently in prison for sexually assaulting one of my classmates. We grieved and reflected deep into the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13935854/miso-aedan-koji-kitchen-community-sf\">This is why I love food so much\u003c/a>. Every meal is a ritual, a recurring pause that allows us to reflect on the beauty, joy and sadness of life — especially when we share those meals with others. Now I realized that vegan food didn’t have to be something I only ate when philosophizing about morality or social justice. It could simply be part of the fabric of my everyday life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"‘Whenever I discussed a vegan future with friends, it felt like I was envisioning a world where Ghanaian food didn’t exist.’","name":"pullquote","attributes":{"named":{"size":"large","align":"right","label":""},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>My newfound appreciation of vegan eating has also expanded my understanding of Ghanaian food — the food of my own cultural background. Because I had grown up on plates of crab in okra stew and chicken in jollof rice, I assumed the cuisine needed meat to achieve its savory and dense perfection. So whenever I discussed a vegan or vegetarian future with friends, it felt like I was envisioning a world where Ghanaian food didn’t exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But these \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101887767/the-bay-areas-new-and-evolving-vegan-scene-with-luke-tsai\">new, ethnically specific vegan restaurants in the Bay\u003c/a> made me realize that my assumption that Ghanaian cuisine had to have meat was unfounded. Recently, I asked my roommate, Russell, to help me make a vegan version of my favorite dish: peanut soup. This was the dish I always requested from my mom during breaks from boarding school, so nowadays, without asking, I always return home to \u003ci>omo tuo\u003c/i>, or rice balls, waiting to be doused in this soup of peanut butter, tomato paste, spices and chicken stock. To make our vegan version, Russell and I used vegetable stock, and we used tempeh in place of the chicken that normally bulks up the soup. To compensate for the lack of meat, we reduced the soup for longer and added more peanut butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The result was the earthiest and sweetest version of the dish I had ever eaten. The velvety soup held on perfectly to the rice, and the mildness of the vegetable stock really allowed the peanuts to shine. As we slurped the last few spoonfuls from our second servings, we began fantasizing about the tweaks and adjustments we’d make on our next batch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13953913\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13953913\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo.jpg\" alt=\"A man stirs a pot of peanut stew while a young woman looks on, pressing her hands together in anticipation.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/peanut-stew-group-photo-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">For the author (left), veganizing his favorite Ghanaian dish — peanut stew — was a fun and meaningful way to celebrate with friends. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Kofi Ansong)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>My folks back at home marveled over the photos of the soup that I sent to the family group chat. And the next morning, my mom called to share something I hadn’t known: that her grandmother, Akua, had largely avoided eating meat. Instead, she prepared jollof rice, tilapia bean stew and other traditional, “meaty” dishes using only vegetables.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cstrong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"aside","attributes":{"named":{"postid":"arts_13910234,arts_13895209,arts_13935854","label":""},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/b>My own grandmother Lydia — Akua’s daughter — demonstrated her love most vividly through the meals she cooked for me growing up. Her funeral a couple years ago was essentially a village feast, where aunties, cousins and neighbors who had all experienced my grandmother’s love cooked in her memory. Buckets of freshly boiled kenkey, banku and other Ghanaian staples surrounded too many stews and grilled meats for me to try. Hearing that Akua had cooked similarly for my mom back in Ghana, but with little to no meat, was all the proof I needed that vegetarianism and veganism have a home in Ghanaian cuisine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These days, Russell and I cook both vegan and meat-based versions of dishes at the same time, so we can see how they compare — our most recent experiment was coq au vin. I am also reinterpreting more Ghanaian foods just as my great-grandmother Akua once did. Fufu, a ball of pounded plantains, served in a soup of palm oil and spiced peppers, is next. I no longer dismiss whole cuisines or dietary choices, or limit my thinking on what must be in a dish. All cuisines can be vegan, I’ve learned. And their flavors can deepen my understanding of myself and my world.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13953866/ghanaian-vegan-food-bay-area-essay","authors":["byline_arts_13953866"],"categories":["arts_1","arts_12276"],"tags":["arts_2438","arts_991","arts_10278","arts_1297","arts_10426","arts_14087","arts_21774"],"featImg":"arts_13953906","label":"source_arts_13953866"},"arts_13855917":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13855917","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13855917","score":null,"sort":[1556722812000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"in-how-to-do-nothing-a-simple-near-impossible-challenge","title":"On 'How To Do Nothing'—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It","publishDate":1556722812,"format":"image","headTitle":"On ‘How To Do Nothing’—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It | KQED","labelTerm":{"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">F\u003c/span>or two weeks after \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/artschool/578/mining-the-internet-with-jenny-odell\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jenny Odell\u003c/a>’s new book \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> arrived in the mail, I was too busy to pick it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856338\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 160px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-13856338\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg\" alt=\"Jenny Odell's 'How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.'\" width=\"160\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 160px) 100vw, 160px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Melville House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That feels ridiculous to write, since I’d been looking forward to reading it since well before publication. As the artist behind projects like the ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.suspended-objects.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bureau of Suspended Objects\u003c/a>’ at the San Francisco dump and the mind-expanding essay \u003ca href=\"http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There’s No Such Thing As a Free Watch\u003c/a>, Odell has long been one of those people whose grocery lists, even, I feel certain I would find scintillating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I was slammed: I had deadlines to meet, emails to send, and social obligations and/or networking events that all had a way of bleeding over into my downtime. As a full-time freelance writer, I always know exactly what’s in my checking account. And even on the best days, this knowledge forms a sort of cloud overhead, casting a guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, I really \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also have to keep up on the news, be on Twitter, promote my own work if I want anyone to see it. I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that a good deal of my work is simply selling myself—sorry, “branding”—and also to the nonexistent line between my professional and personal lives. It all adds up to a sense of always being busy. Also, the new season of \u003cem>Queer Eye\u003c/em> had just arrived on Netflix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856327\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end of the second week of Odell’s book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day—the kind where the guilt over how little you’ve accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself—I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend’s band play. A typical Thursday night for me, except that I was 26 weeks pregnant, and looked it, and it turned out this show meant seeing a handful of people I hadn’t seen in a while, people who were not expecting to find me in such a state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a great show, and I stayed until the last band had played the last note, generally behaving the way I always do at shows (minus a beer or two). At some point before I split for home, a musician friend who’d just been on stage gave me a hug and, eyeing my belly, said with innocent admiration that it was great to see me “out.” He seemed amused that I had even danced a little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He meant nothing by it, yet the defensiveness that rose up in my throat was immediate. I was still me. Why wouldn’t I be out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the next day, as I bristled at his implication—\u003cem>I’m pregnant, I don’t have polio\u003c/em>, I said to a friend over brunch—I also couldn’t ignore the hatch door of possibility that had just swung open before me. People’s expectations for me had changed shape overnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was pregnant, and with this fact came coded privileges. I had an excuse to go home early. I had an excuse to stay home in the first place. Because I was visibly “working” to create a human being, and doing it around the clock, I realized I had a limited-time-only pass—for a strange, temporal period—to do nothing else at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856328\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">“A\u003c/span>t some point, I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book,” writes Odell in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>’s introduction, a disclaimer that becomes unnecessary midway through the first chapter. Despite the book’s title, anyone hoping for Wikihow-style bullet points about how to achieve enlightenment via inaction should look elsewhere. (Perhaps to Wikihow. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wikihow.com/Appreciate-Black-Metal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Those illustrations!\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Odell delivers instead, over the course of six chapter-length essays, is a labyrinth of questions about the usefulness of a life focused on “usefulness”—and what gets overlooked in a culture obsessed with productivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a reason, Odell suggests, that so many of us increasingly spend our days feeling like our brains are occupied by tiny wind-up monkeys playing cymbals—\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">overstimulated but unfocused\u003c/a>, lonely while supposedly more connected than ever. \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> is a call to arms about the fractured state of human attention (a commodity Odell paints as our most precious resource), and what’s at stake for society when we allow it to be bought and sold by companies whose profits depend on our willingness to stay addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To do this, Odell finds inspiration in the bioregionalism movement; touches on organized labor and the political potential of work stoppage; traces the history of communes and other forms of physical escape from the rat race and their through-line to modern “digital detox programs,” noting the pitfalls of each; looks to trees as role models for passive resistance; and outlines the bubble effect of online communities like Nextdoor (in contrast with, literally, having dinner with one’s neighbor next door).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856329\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell has a historian’s obsessiveness for the provenance of her ideas, and she pulls from a broad swath of teachers, including Plato, Audre Lorde, the third-century hermit St. Anthony, the fourth-century philosopher Epicurus, the technology ethicist James Williams, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a slew of 20th and 21st century performance artists, Rebecca Solnit, and Tom Green (who, it turns out, invented \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_(fad)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">planking\u003c/a> back in 1994).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A hundred different trend stories can tell you \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too much screentime is bad for your brain.\u003c/a> Intellectually rigorous and quietly radical, Odell’s book extrapolates those studies outward to argue that what’s detrimental for one’s personal health is, potentially, fatal for one’s community. When we forfeit our ability to interact meaningfully with our environment and with other human beings, she argues, we lose the very fabric of society: the means to truly connect and support one another, to organize, to make meaningful social and political change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The antidote she suggests is both simple and challenging: a reclaiming and redirecting of attention to our literal surroundings. The book forces some practice on this; at times, the reader is made to slow down to the pace and character of a physical space, and the reading itself becomes a trust fall of observation. We have to believe that the description of a dam or a type of bird will not only “pay off” in terms of a larger point. It \u003cem>is\u003c/em>, in fact, the larger point—to notice how the world opens up when you step back from the “financially incentivized proliferation of chatter” that makes up the digital age, and simply see what’s around you as worthy of attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856330\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To that end, we go birdwatching in the Oakland hills, sit in the Morcom Rose Garden, and explore the topography of Odell’s native Cupertino via its creeks and office parks. In one example of an attention “exercise,” Odell recalls going to see the San Francisco Symphony perform John Cage’s \u003cem>Song Books,\u003c/em> an experimental piece made up of ambient sound, in which the musicians dress in plain clothes and futz around with everyday, noise-making props like a typewriter, a set of cards, and a blender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the absence of music, the audience’s uncomfortable throat-clearing and chair sounds all build tension, becoming part of the score, until conductor Michael Tilson Thomas uses the blender to make a smoothie—then takes a sip and makes a satisfied face. “After that, all bets were off, with laughter tumbling down from the seats toward the stage and integrating itself into the piece,” writes Odell. Then:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered that I could have lived in a city for four years already… and never have actually heard anything? For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The type of heightened awareness she’s describing—not just of her surroundings but of her own everyday reality as a construction, something malleable—is a state I mostly hear people talk about as the result of either psychedelics or a disciplined meditation practice, or both. The suggestion that each of us already has what we need for this in our brains—that such a shift in perception might be possible through simply, consciously taking back our attention from the corporate forces working to drain it—is nothing short of exhilarating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean: You’re telling me that if I retrain myself not to look at Twitter 32 times a day, I might be able to go on a walk and look at trees and hear birds and notice the hum of the ecosystem and tap into the fact that everything in the world has a secret life and pulse that’s always there and that everything’s connected and technically I’m part of it? And that it’s simply up to me to remember and keep that front and center (instead of thinking about who shared my latest story on Facebook or what Ariana Grande said about Jim Carrey or whether or not I should cancel my ClassPass membership) and that in so doing I would actually be fighting back against the creep of technofascism and resisting capitalism’s hold on the most vital and wild aspects of humanity—and that all of that is possible \u003cem>without drugs\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to put into a hashtag. But it sure beats anything I ever learned from \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">D.A.R.E\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856332\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s I write this, I’m well into my third trimester, and I’m just getting used to the ways it’s changed how I move through the world: walking down 16th street, I’m met with a warm, protective nod from the older man smoking outside a bar at 1pm on a Tuesday, as opposed to a lecherous comment. Women with babies offer me conspiratorial smiles. In the past 48 hours I’ve had two different groups of people make a fuss about insisting I sit down on the bus. (I’ve chosen to take this as reassurance that chivalry is alive and well, and not as “You look like you might go into labor any minute and I’d prefer you not be standing next to me when you do.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, more surprising (to me) are the changes in how I treat myself: basic tenets of “self-care” that have always eluded me became unavoidable overnight. My needs and responses to them have become animal-like, elemental: when I’m tired, I sleep. When I’m hungry, I eat. I have to work, so I work, and I love my friends and family, so I see my friends and family. I show up for my community when I want or need to. But there’s very little striving. I want to say I don’t feel tethered to notifications the way I’m used to. When I don’t want to do anything, I really \u003cem>don’t do anything\u003c/em>. And I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s very new and it’s very, very weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s surely no coincidence that this newfound ability to “listen to my body,” to use more terminology that grosses me out, arrived at the same time I stopped being able to bulldoze over physiological instincts with quick fixes: tired=more caffeine, stressed out at the end of the day=have some whiskey, and so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it also occurs to me that I’ve truly never felt \u003cem>allowed\u003c/em> to indulge in the possibility of non-productivity before. It definitely occurs to me that I only feel this way because it’s temporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856331\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing about refusal to participate as a method of resistance, of course—whether mentally, from the news cycle, via quitting social media, or physically, from urban society, by splitting for a cabin in the woods—is that it necessitates a certain level of privilege. (Thoreau only spent one night in jail, after all, because some rich aunt paid his back taxes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you start seeing rest as a luxury good, it’s everywhere; most recently, I loved \u003ca href=\"https://archinect.com/news/article/150133249/sunlight-was-weaponized-how-shade-has-been-an-index-of-inequality-in-la-s-urban-design\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this piece on shade in Los Angeles as an index of inequality\u003c/a>. And when it comes to mental rest, we all reflexively know the prerequisites: in the first months of the Trump administration, when people mentioned in an offhand way that they just “couldn’t read the news anymore,” those people were generally not undocumented immigrants or Muslims or trans women—members of groups for whom the stakes of inattention are life and death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell knows this, too, and she owns, among others, the privileges that made it possible for her to even write this book. Yet in so doing, she winds up back at the labor movement—perhaps the last tangible win for the working class in America—and reminds us that the “eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was a campaign “about a demarcation of time”:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries… so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>It’s not an answer to the privilege question, to be sure. But I took a photo of this passage, and since finishing the book, these words have haunted me. They bite at my ankles when I compulsively check Twitter before bed. They raise their eyebrows when I click on a shoe ad on Instagram, and for the next week, the app seemingly chases me around my own home, asking: are you sure you don’t want those shoes? How about \u003cem>these? \u003c/em>(\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Insert Radiohead lyrics here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is, of course, we’re all busy, and concepts like the ones conveyed in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> are hard to keep in focus. As I write this, I’m staring down three other deadlines and an overgrown swamp of an inbox, and I need to get groceries, and have I mentioned freelance writers don’t exactly get paid maternity leave? I am staggeringly privileged compared to many people in America, but like many people in America, I cannot afford to stop working around the clock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell also makes a compelling case that we can’t afford not to. I am curious to see if and how this argument lands differently for me when I stop being a person with a highly visible hall-pass-to-do-nothing and instead become a Working Mother, a category of human I have come to understand is not exactly pampered by the infrastructure of American capitalism, nor encouraged to go on long, reflective nature walks alone. Similarly, I find myself wondering how this book would read if I were a person whose work involved 10 hours of daily manual labor, as opposed to sitting in front of the internet all day, and then wondering why my leisure time felt so familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for me, for now—and, I suspect, for many of us—it’s a huge shift to even ask some of these questions in the first place. After reading \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>, I have a newly heightened vigilance about what counts as work, and about whom we’re working for, exactly, when we open up Instagram for the 10th time that day. And a new awareness of the lessons that dwell in the realm of negative possibility—of doing nothing—which are, of course, always there waiting. They require only that we be still.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jenny Odell speaks about ‘How To Do Nothing’ with East Bay Yesterday host Liam O’Donoghue on Thursday, May 2, at Wolfman Books in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"http://wolfmanhomerepair.com/event/2019/5/2/how-to-do-nothing-in-oakland-with-jenny-odell-and-liam-odonoghue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Jenny Odell's new book is a salve for the guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, we really should be working.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705026257,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":45,"wordCount":2959},"headData":{"title":"On 'How To Do Nothing'—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It | KQED","description":"Jenny Odell's new book is a salve for the guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, we really should be working.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"On 'How To Do Nothing'—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It","datePublished":"2019-05-01T15:00:12.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T02:24:17.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"path":"/arts/13855917/in-how-to-do-nothing-a-simple-near-impossible-challenge","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">F\u003c/span>or two weeks after \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/artschool/578/mining-the-internet-with-jenny-odell\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jenny Odell\u003c/a>’s new book \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> arrived in the mail, I was too busy to pick it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856338\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 160px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-13856338\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg\" alt=\"Jenny Odell's 'How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.'\" width=\"160\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 160px) 100vw, 160px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Melville House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That feels ridiculous to write, since I’d been looking forward to reading it since well before publication. As the artist behind projects like the ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.suspended-objects.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bureau of Suspended Objects\u003c/a>’ at the San Francisco dump and the mind-expanding essay \u003ca href=\"http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There’s No Such Thing As a Free Watch\u003c/a>, Odell has long been one of those people whose grocery lists, even, I feel certain I would find scintillating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I was slammed: I had deadlines to meet, emails to send, and social obligations and/or networking events that all had a way of bleeding over into my downtime. As a full-time freelance writer, I always know exactly what’s in my checking account. And even on the best days, this knowledge forms a sort of cloud overhead, casting a guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, I really \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also have to keep up on the news, be on Twitter, promote my own work if I want anyone to see it. I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that a good deal of my work is simply selling myself—sorry, “branding”—and also to the nonexistent line between my professional and personal lives. It all adds up to a sense of always being busy. Also, the new season of \u003cem>Queer Eye\u003c/em> had just arrived on Netflix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856327\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end of the second week of Odell’s book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day—the kind where the guilt over how little you’ve accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself—I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend’s band play. A typical Thursday night for me, except that I was 26 weeks pregnant, and looked it, and it turned out this show meant seeing a handful of people I hadn’t seen in a while, people who were not expecting to find me in such a state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a great show, and I stayed until the last band had played the last note, generally behaving the way I always do at shows (minus a beer or two). At some point before I split for home, a musician friend who’d just been on stage gave me a hug and, eyeing my belly, said with innocent admiration that it was great to see me “out.” He seemed amused that I had even danced a little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He meant nothing by it, yet the defensiveness that rose up in my throat was immediate. I was still me. Why wouldn’t I be out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the next day, as I bristled at his implication—\u003cem>I’m pregnant, I don’t have polio\u003c/em>, I said to a friend over brunch—I also couldn’t ignore the hatch door of possibility that had just swung open before me. People’s expectations for me had changed shape overnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was pregnant, and with this fact came coded privileges. I had an excuse to go home early. I had an excuse to stay home in the first place. Because I was visibly “working” to create a human being, and doing it around the clock, I realized I had a limited-time-only pass—for a strange, temporal period—to do nothing else at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856328\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">“A\u003c/span>t some point, I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book,” writes Odell in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>’s introduction, a disclaimer that becomes unnecessary midway through the first chapter. Despite the book’s title, anyone hoping for Wikihow-style bullet points about how to achieve enlightenment via inaction should look elsewhere. (Perhaps to Wikihow. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wikihow.com/Appreciate-Black-Metal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Those illustrations!\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Odell delivers instead, over the course of six chapter-length essays, is a labyrinth of questions about the usefulness of a life focused on “usefulness”—and what gets overlooked in a culture obsessed with productivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a reason, Odell suggests, that so many of us increasingly spend our days feeling like our brains are occupied by tiny wind-up monkeys playing cymbals—\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">overstimulated but unfocused\u003c/a>, lonely while supposedly more connected than ever. \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> is a call to arms about the fractured state of human attention (a commodity Odell paints as our most precious resource), and what’s at stake for society when we allow it to be bought and sold by companies whose profits depend on our willingness to stay addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To do this, Odell finds inspiration in the bioregionalism movement; touches on organized labor and the political potential of work stoppage; traces the history of communes and other forms of physical escape from the rat race and their through-line to modern “digital detox programs,” noting the pitfalls of each; looks to trees as role models for passive resistance; and outlines the bubble effect of online communities like Nextdoor (in contrast with, literally, having dinner with one’s neighbor next door).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856329\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell has a historian’s obsessiveness for the provenance of her ideas, and she pulls from a broad swath of teachers, including Plato, Audre Lorde, the third-century hermit St. Anthony, the fourth-century philosopher Epicurus, the technology ethicist James Williams, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a slew of 20th and 21st century performance artists, Rebecca Solnit, and Tom Green (who, it turns out, invented \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_(fad)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">planking\u003c/a> back in 1994).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A hundred different trend stories can tell you \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too much screentime is bad for your brain.\u003c/a> Intellectually rigorous and quietly radical, Odell’s book extrapolates those studies outward to argue that what’s detrimental for one’s personal health is, potentially, fatal for one’s community. When we forfeit our ability to interact meaningfully with our environment and with other human beings, she argues, we lose the very fabric of society: the means to truly connect and support one another, to organize, to make meaningful social and political change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The antidote she suggests is both simple and challenging: a reclaiming and redirecting of attention to our literal surroundings. The book forces some practice on this; at times, the reader is made to slow down to the pace and character of a physical space, and the reading itself becomes a trust fall of observation. We have to believe that the description of a dam or a type of bird will not only “pay off” in terms of a larger point. It \u003cem>is\u003c/em>, in fact, the larger point—to notice how the world opens up when you step back from the “financially incentivized proliferation of chatter” that makes up the digital age, and simply see what’s around you as worthy of attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856330\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To that end, we go birdwatching in the Oakland hills, sit in the Morcom Rose Garden, and explore the topography of Odell’s native Cupertino via its creeks and office parks. In one example of an attention “exercise,” Odell recalls going to see the San Francisco Symphony perform John Cage’s \u003cem>Song Books,\u003c/em> an experimental piece made up of ambient sound, in which the musicians dress in plain clothes and futz around with everyday, noise-making props like a typewriter, a set of cards, and a blender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the absence of music, the audience’s uncomfortable throat-clearing and chair sounds all build tension, becoming part of the score, until conductor Michael Tilson Thomas uses the blender to make a smoothie—then takes a sip and makes a satisfied face. “After that, all bets were off, with laughter tumbling down from the seats toward the stage and integrating itself into the piece,” writes Odell. Then:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered that I could have lived in a city for four years already… and never have actually heard anything? For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The type of heightened awareness she’s describing—not just of her surroundings but of her own everyday reality as a construction, something malleable—is a state I mostly hear people talk about as the result of either psychedelics or a disciplined meditation practice, or both. The suggestion that each of us already has what we need for this in our brains—that such a shift in perception might be possible through simply, consciously taking back our attention from the corporate forces working to drain it—is nothing short of exhilarating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean: You’re telling me that if I retrain myself not to look at Twitter 32 times a day, I might be able to go on a walk and look at trees and hear birds and notice the hum of the ecosystem and tap into the fact that everything in the world has a secret life and pulse that’s always there and that everything’s connected and technically I’m part of it? And that it’s simply up to me to remember and keep that front and center (instead of thinking about who shared my latest story on Facebook or what Ariana Grande said about Jim Carrey or whether or not I should cancel my ClassPass membership) and that in so doing I would actually be fighting back against the creep of technofascism and resisting capitalism’s hold on the most vital and wild aspects of humanity—and that all of that is possible \u003cem>without drugs\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to put into a hashtag. But it sure beats anything I ever learned from \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">D.A.R.E\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856332\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s I write this, I’m well into my third trimester, and I’m just getting used to the ways it’s changed how I move through the world: walking down 16th street, I’m met with a warm, protective nod from the older man smoking outside a bar at 1pm on a Tuesday, as opposed to a lecherous comment. Women with babies offer me conspiratorial smiles. In the past 48 hours I’ve had two different groups of people make a fuss about insisting I sit down on the bus. (I’ve chosen to take this as reassurance that chivalry is alive and well, and not as “You look like you might go into labor any minute and I’d prefer you not be standing next to me when you do.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, more surprising (to me) are the changes in how I treat myself: basic tenets of “self-care” that have always eluded me became unavoidable overnight. My needs and responses to them have become animal-like, elemental: when I’m tired, I sleep. When I’m hungry, I eat. I have to work, so I work, and I love my friends and family, so I see my friends and family. I show up for my community when I want or need to. But there’s very little striving. I want to say I don’t feel tethered to notifications the way I’m used to. When I don’t want to do anything, I really \u003cem>don’t do anything\u003c/em>. And I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s very new and it’s very, very weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s surely no coincidence that this newfound ability to “listen to my body,” to use more terminology that grosses me out, arrived at the same time I stopped being able to bulldoze over physiological instincts with quick fixes: tired=more caffeine, stressed out at the end of the day=have some whiskey, and so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it also occurs to me that I’ve truly never felt \u003cem>allowed\u003c/em> to indulge in the possibility of non-productivity before. It definitely occurs to me that I only feel this way because it’s temporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856331\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing about refusal to participate as a method of resistance, of course—whether mentally, from the news cycle, via quitting social media, or physically, from urban society, by splitting for a cabin in the woods—is that it necessitates a certain level of privilege. (Thoreau only spent one night in jail, after all, because some rich aunt paid his back taxes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you start seeing rest as a luxury good, it’s everywhere; most recently, I loved \u003ca href=\"https://archinect.com/news/article/150133249/sunlight-was-weaponized-how-shade-has-been-an-index-of-inequality-in-la-s-urban-design\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this piece on shade in Los Angeles as an index of inequality\u003c/a>. And when it comes to mental rest, we all reflexively know the prerequisites: in the first months of the Trump administration, when people mentioned in an offhand way that they just “couldn’t read the news anymore,” those people were generally not undocumented immigrants or Muslims or trans women—members of groups for whom the stakes of inattention are life and death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell knows this, too, and she owns, among others, the privileges that made it possible for her to even write this book. Yet in so doing, she winds up back at the labor movement—perhaps the last tangible win for the working class in America—and reminds us that the “eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was a campaign “about a demarcation of time”:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries… so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>It’s not an answer to the privilege question, to be sure. But I took a photo of this passage, and since finishing the book, these words have haunted me. They bite at my ankles when I compulsively check Twitter before bed. They raise their eyebrows when I click on a shoe ad on Instagram, and for the next week, the app seemingly chases me around my own home, asking: are you sure you don’t want those shoes? How about \u003cem>these? \u003c/em>(\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Insert Radiohead lyrics here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is, of course, we’re all busy, and concepts like the ones conveyed in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> are hard to keep in focus. As I write this, I’m staring down three other deadlines and an overgrown swamp of an inbox, and I need to get groceries, and have I mentioned freelance writers don’t exactly get paid maternity leave? I am staggeringly privileged compared to many people in America, but like many people in America, I cannot afford to stop working around the clock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell also makes a compelling case that we can’t afford not to. I am curious to see if and how this argument lands differently for me when I stop being a person with a highly visible hall-pass-to-do-nothing and instead become a Working Mother, a category of human I have come to understand is not exactly pampered by the infrastructure of American capitalism, nor encouraged to go on long, reflective nature walks alone. Similarly, I find myself wondering how this book would read if I were a person whose work involved 10 hours of daily manual labor, as opposed to sitting in front of the internet all day, and then wondering why my leisure time felt so familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for me, for now—and, I suspect, for many of us—it’s a huge shift to even ask some of these questions in the first place. After reading \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>, I have a newly heightened vigilance about what counts as work, and about whom we’re working for, exactly, when we open up Instagram for the 10th time that day. And a new awareness of the lessons that dwell in the realm of negative possibility—of doing nothing—which are, of course, always there waiting. They require only that we be still.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jenny Odell speaks about ‘How To Do Nothing’ with East Bay Yesterday host Liam O’Donoghue on Thursday, May 2, at Wolfman Books in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"http://wolfmanhomerepair.com/event/2019/5/2/how-to-do-nothing-in-oakland-with-jenny-odell-and-liam-odonoghue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13855917/in-how-to-do-nothing-a-simple-near-impossible-challenge","authors":["7237"],"categories":["arts_1","arts_73","arts_2303"],"tags":["arts_928","arts_2767","arts_991","arts_1118","arts_7263","arts_7262","arts_5849","arts_7308","arts_2137"],"featImg":"arts_13856326","label":"arts"},"arts_13823574":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13823574","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13823574","score":null,"sort":[1517673624000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"its-all-in-your-head-the-one-way-intimacy-of-podcast-listening","title":"It's All in Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy of Podcast Listening","publishDate":1517673624,"format":"standard","headTitle":"It’s All in Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy of Podcast Listening | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>I fell in love this week. Happens more often than you might think.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the fact that it’s happened before, and will happen again, doesn’t mean this latest infatuation is any less passionate, abiding, head-over-heels, birds-suddenly-appear, stars-fall-down-from-the-sky resolute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My husband’s cool with it. He always is; we have an understanding. Also the object of my love is a podcast. Probably should have mentioned that at the top.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This time it’s \u003ca href=\"http://answermethispodcast.com/\">\u003cem>Answer Me This\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a (now) biweekly British show entering its 11th year, hosted by Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann. They answer questions posed to them by the public — that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Except of course it isn’t, and there’s a lot more to it: I spend a few minutes extolling the depth and breadth and height of my passion for the show on an upcoming episode of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/129472378/pop-culture-happy-hour/\">Pop Culture Happy Hour\u003c/a>, so I won’t jabber on about it here, but just know: It’s great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did what I always do, with a newly discovered podcast paramour: I binged. I tore through their archive, devouring episode after episode, moving steadily backward through time — Benjamin Buttoning like a goggling fiend. It’s all I’ve listened to for a solid week: on the Metro, at the gym, walking the dog, folding socks, loading the dishwasher, realizing I’d just loaded the dishwasher with folded socks, unloading the dishwasher, you get the idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Previously, I’d done the same thing with \u003ca href=\"http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go\">\u003cem>Jordan Jesse Go\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://thisistheread.com/\">\u003cem>The Read\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"http://www.gilmoreguysshow.com/\">\u003cem>Gilmore Guys\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/stop-podcasting-yourself\">\u003cem>Stop Podcasting Yourself\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.buzzfeed.com/anotherround\">\u003cem>Another Round\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://foreverdogproductions.com/fdpn/podcasts/las-culturistas/\">\u003cem>Las Culturistas\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"http://www.mydadwroteaporno.com/\">\u003cem>My Dad Wrote A Porno\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://audioboom.com/channel/Blank-Check\">\u003cem>Blank Check With Griffin And David\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.flophousepodcast.com/\">\u003cem>The Flop House\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And many, many others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The putative subjects of these podcasts that turn my eyes into fluttering hearts, in defiance of several basic biological and anatomical laws, vary widely: current events, movies, television, paternally penned erotica. Several are comedy podcasts, where the subject is the collective chemistry of the participants itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It occurred to me, as I paused in my gorging of the \u003cem>Answer Me This \u003c/em>archive (interrupting Helen and Olly as they were commiserating about what a lousy year 2015 was shaping up to be, which: oh, \u003cem>honey\u003c/em>) that what had triggered this latest infatuation was exactly the same thing that had triggered all those others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This profound sense of adoration I was feeling, I realized then, was not directed at the podcast’s subject, or even, technically, at the hosts themselves. It turns out that what I love, what I hunger for, and what keeps me perpetually searching for new roundtable discussion podcasts, is what gets created at the intersection of these subjects, and these hosts — the particular \u003cem>nature \u003c/em>of these conversations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It creates in me a great upwelling of congenial familiarity, of sense of knowing and being known.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of \u003cem>friendship\u003c/em>, basically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is, let’s stipulate here, nuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that doesn’t matter: Listening to a favorite podcast — whether you do it over the course of years, months or hours — engenders a powerful sense of intimacy. You come to know the hosts’ tastes, their tics, the phrases they overuse. As they unthinkingly dole out tiny, incremental parcels of information about their personal lives — a new baby here, a beloved pet’s passing there — you realize one day that your brain has unthinkingly constructed exhaustive virtual dossiers on each of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You listen to them talk to one another in exactly the same way you talk to your friends. You keep them close throughout your day — you can even sleep with them if you want to, that’s your business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps most crucially, earbuds transmit their voices inside your head — they \u003cem>roost \u003c/em>there, rubbing shoulders with your own thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No wonder you feel as if you know them; that the sound of their voices comes to fire precisely the same neurons, arouse the same feelings, that the voices of your closest friends do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s purely biological, and it’s indistinguishable from intimacy — except for one minor, mundane, trifling detail:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unidirectional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know them, you trust them, you \u003cem>love \u003c/em>them, and they have absolutely no idea who you are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mass media has always fostered this imbalance, of course. You likely feel some sense of ephemeral but deeply personal closeness with the authors of your favorite books, or actors whose work you’ve followed avidly all your life, or familiar radio personalities, maybe there’s a comedian or two whose sensibility you feel lines up with yours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Theaters and movie houses are communal spaces that exist to take you outside of yourself, and transform you into a collective identity — an audience. But radio, television and the Web bring experiences to you, they’re inside your home. And in the case of podcasts, anyway, inside your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not logical, this sense that your favorite podcast hosts are your friends, but it’s hard-wired, inescapable. Look, I’m on a podcast myself, and over the years I’ve had several very nice strangers come up to me to remind me of a thing I said once that I don’t remember, or to ask something small and alarmingly specific about my husband, my dog, my favorite movie. It’s both tremendously flattering and a bit disorienting. I’m an open book to them; they’re a blank slate to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I know all this, and yet I have gone up to the hosts of podcasts I love and done the very same thing. That feeling of closeness bypasses higher brain functions. All of this information, these vast stores of osmotically collected data, these feelings on feelings, are sloshing around inside me; I gotta do \u003cem>something \u003c/em>with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the singular power of podcasts, I think. (Roundtable discussion podcasts, that is. Obviously there are many different kinds, and the various formats — slick storytelling, authoritatively imparted history, true-crime deep dives — will engender different but related clusters of feelings.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been thinking about why I feel the way I do about the podcasts I love, and what, precisely, triggers this sense of a deep, enduring, unidirectional intimacy. I’ve narrowed it down to a handful of factors they share.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe you’re thinking of starting a podcast with some friends. (It’s 2018, those odds are pretty good.) Here then, humbly submitted, are some traits that, taken together, engender the profound sense of closeness I feel with my favorite podcasts. They’re subjective, of course, and they’re just common sense, but I did want to conclude this post by offering something a bit more concrete than \u003cem>gee podcasts are a thing, hunh?\u003c/em> so here goes:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>The 6 Eminently Disprovable Rules For Roundtable Podcasting \u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>1. Like each other.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>This first rule is, of course, the toughest one to achieve. But if you’re trying to hit upon the precise interpersonal alchemical formula that will make us fall in love with your podcast, the best thing to do is not to try. We can sense when something’s forced, when you’ve selected your panel based on something clinical like expertise, instead of something organic like sensibility, or a shared history. If we can hear your respect and affection for each other, we’ll join in with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(I listed this first, but it’s \u003cem>\u003cstrong>not \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>the most important of these rules. It’s the \u003cstrong>\u003cem>second \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>most important. You’ll see why in a bit.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>2. But maybe don’t, like, \u003cem>love \u003c/em>each other, you know?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Look, there are plenty of great podcasts featuring romantic partners, and many romantic partners have no problem making fun of each other. That’s great, because being able to make fun of each other, and each other’s opinions — lightly, judiciously, respectfully, joyfully — is essential to the endeavor. We want to hear you disagreeing, when you do disagree, in an honest, full-throated way — but we don’t want to worry about your relationship. We don’t want you bringing outside arguments into the mix, or letting discussions descend to a place where you’re simply trying to score points off each other. Keep the stakes low, the conversation bubbling, and when necessary, call each other out with glee, the way friends do.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>3. Prepare …\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>I know you, bunky. You’ve got the gift of gab. You’re eloquent, witty, thoughtful. You don’t want to sound flat, rehearsed, anodyne. You think you can you wing it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the thing though: You can’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attitude is not enough. I’ve unsubscribed from many podcasts over the years because the panelists in question have convinced themselves that a sardonic “What’s THAT about?” amounts to a point of view. It doesn’t. We need more. Think about what you’re going to say: Bring notes, plan phrasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>4. … but leave room for discovery.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>You need to invite us in, and the way you do that is by bringing us along with your thought process. Roundtable podcasts \u003cem>do \u003c/em>need to feel different than polished, heavily produced radio pieces. Slickness is the enemy, it keeps us listening at a far remove. We want to feel like we’re in the room with you. So by all means, prepare, and think about phrasing. But plan ways to say things that will \u003cem>open \u003c/em>the discussion, not shut it down. Invite your fellow panelists into your thinking, and follow along with theirs. Show your work; reach for insights. The goal is for all of you to collectively find something in that room that you hadn’t planned on finding before you went into it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is to say: Listen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(This is the \u003cem>third \u003c/em>most important rule.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>5. Be yourself. But better.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Blah blah blah, don’t be slick, it’s important to be raw and real, to reach for conclusions instead of forcing them blah blah blah: Yes. Clearly. That’s all true. Learn it. Internalize it. Live it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>… And now forget it. Because the version of you that you need to be on your podcast is a performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or maybe it would better to say: a \u003cem>distillation \u003c/em>of yourself. Sharper, cleaner, more efficient. Pithier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Please, for the love of all that is holy, be pithier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How do you do that? Simple:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>6. Edit. Edit \u003cem>ruthlessly\u003c/em>. I mean, with \u003cem>no discernible ruth. \u003c/em>At all. None. Think the last 10 minutes of \u003cem>Harold and Maude\u003c/em>. Is how ruthless.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is the single most important rule of all. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Look, no hyperbole or anything, but it’s the One True Answer to Everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I know, I \u003cem>know \u003c/em>I’ve hectored you above about how roundtable discussions need to feel loose and shaggy — natural, not polished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s just it. They need to \u003cem>feel \u003c/em>loose and shaggy. Not \u003cem>be\u003c/em>. \u003cem>FEEL\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that means editing. That means cutting digressions, dead ends, jokes that don’t land, and — if you’re willing (and be willing, oh, do!) — the uhms and aahs and lip-smacks. It means listening back with your aural scalpel and slicing away any dead conversational tissue. When it doubt, take it out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not dishonest. It’s not disingenuous. It’s not slick. It’s a vital service to us, your listeners. It’s a way of centering your discussion, a vital opportunity for you to identify and clearly delineate what makes your podcast uniquely its own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Pop Culture Happy Hour, we freshly marvel, week after week, at the yawning chasm that stretches between our raw audio and the finished product producer Jessica Reedy delivers. Applying what I call the Jess Filter makes any given episode 100 percent better than it began — and, in the bargain, makes us seem a good 40 to 45 percent smarter than we know ourselves to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now: You likely don’t have a Jess. That means the hard duty of editing falls to you. Don’t shirk it. Violate Rules 1 through 5 if you must, but you can still pull things out — you can still inspire legions of listeners to tear through your archives, binge-listening to your every utterance while cartoon hearts flutter around their heads — if you don’t flake on Rule 6.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So go now, and podcast. Podcast like the wind, if the wind were a thing with a podcast! Be brilliant, be witty, be warm (but not \u003cem>too \u003c/em>warm, please, guys), be brutally tough on yourself, and have fun. If you do, so will we. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=It%27s+All+In+Your+Head%3A+The+One-Way+Intimacy+Of+Podcast+Listening&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"An attempt to come up with rules to explain the singular appeal of roundtable discussion podcasts by a guy who's on one — and who's listened to hundreds more.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705028604,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":51,"wordCount":2207},"headData":{"title":"It's All in Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy of Podcast Listening | KQED","description":"An attempt to come up with rules to explain the singular appeal of roundtable discussion podcasts by a guy who's on one — and who's listened to hundreds more.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"It's All in Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy of Podcast Listening","datePublished":"2018-02-03T16:00:24.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:03:24.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"smartboy10","nprByline":"Glen Weldon","nprImageAgency":"Getty Images","nprStoryId":"582105045","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=582105045&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2018/02/02/582105045/its-all-in-your-head-the-one-way-intimacy-of-podcast-listening?ft=nprml&f=582105045","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Fri, 02 Feb 2018 06:01:00 -0500","nprStoryDate":"Fri, 02 Feb 2018 06:01:20 -0500","nprLastModifiedDate":"Fri, 02 Feb 2018 06:01:20 -0500","path":"/arts/13823574/its-all-in-your-head-the-one-way-intimacy-of-podcast-listening","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I fell in love this week. Happens more often than you might think.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the fact that it’s happened before, and will happen again, doesn’t mean this latest infatuation is any less passionate, abiding, head-over-heels, birds-suddenly-appear, stars-fall-down-from-the-sky resolute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My husband’s cool with it. He always is; we have an understanding. Also the object of my love is a podcast. Probably should have mentioned that at the top.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This time it’s \u003ca href=\"http://answermethispodcast.com/\">\u003cem>Answer Me This\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a (now) biweekly British show entering its 11th year, hosted by Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann. They answer questions posed to them by the public — that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Except of course it isn’t, and there’s a lot more to it: I spend a few minutes extolling the depth and breadth and height of my passion for the show on an upcoming episode of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/129472378/pop-culture-happy-hour/\">Pop Culture Happy Hour\u003c/a>, so I won’t jabber on about it here, but just know: It’s great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did what I always do, with a newly discovered podcast paramour: I binged. I tore through their archive, devouring episode after episode, moving steadily backward through time — Benjamin Buttoning like a goggling fiend. It’s all I’ve listened to for a solid week: on the Metro, at the gym, walking the dog, folding socks, loading the dishwasher, realizing I’d just loaded the dishwasher with folded socks, unloading the dishwasher, you get the idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Previously, I’d done the same thing with \u003ca href=\"http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go\">\u003cem>Jordan Jesse Go\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://thisistheread.com/\">\u003cem>The Read\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"http://www.gilmoreguysshow.com/\">\u003cem>Gilmore Guys\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/stop-podcasting-yourself\">\u003cem>Stop Podcasting Yourself\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.buzzfeed.com/anotherround\">\u003cem>Another Round\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://foreverdogproductions.com/fdpn/podcasts/las-culturistas/\">\u003cem>Las Culturistas\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"http://www.mydadwroteaporno.com/\">\u003cem>My Dad Wrote A Porno\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://audioboom.com/channel/Blank-Check\">\u003cem>Blank Check With Griffin And David\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.flophousepodcast.com/\">\u003cem>The Flop House\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. And many, many others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The putative subjects of these podcasts that turn my eyes into fluttering hearts, in defiance of several basic biological and anatomical laws, vary widely: current events, movies, television, paternally penned erotica. Several are comedy podcasts, where the subject is the collective chemistry of the participants itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It occurred to me, as I paused in my gorging of the \u003cem>Answer Me This \u003c/em>archive (interrupting Helen and Olly as they were commiserating about what a lousy year 2015 was shaping up to be, which: oh, \u003cem>honey\u003c/em>) that what had triggered this latest infatuation was exactly the same thing that had triggered all those others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This profound sense of adoration I was feeling, I realized then, was not directed at the podcast’s subject, or even, technically, at the hosts themselves. It turns out that what I love, what I hunger for, and what keeps me perpetually searching for new roundtable discussion podcasts, is what gets created at the intersection of these subjects, and these hosts — the particular \u003cem>nature \u003c/em>of these conversations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It creates in me a great upwelling of congenial familiarity, of sense of knowing and being known.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of \u003cem>friendship\u003c/em>, basically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is, let’s stipulate here, nuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that doesn’t matter: Listening to a favorite podcast — whether you do it over the course of years, months or hours — engenders a powerful sense of intimacy. You come to know the hosts’ tastes, their tics, the phrases they overuse. As they unthinkingly dole out tiny, incremental parcels of information about their personal lives — a new baby here, a beloved pet’s passing there — you realize one day that your brain has unthinkingly constructed exhaustive virtual dossiers on each of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You listen to them talk to one another in exactly the same way you talk to your friends. You keep them close throughout your day — you can even sleep with them if you want to, that’s your business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps most crucially, earbuds transmit their voices inside your head — they \u003cem>roost \u003c/em>there, rubbing shoulders with your own thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No wonder you feel as if you know them; that the sound of their voices comes to fire precisely the same neurons, arouse the same feelings, that the voices of your closest friends do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s purely biological, and it’s indistinguishable from intimacy — except for one minor, mundane, trifling detail:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unidirectional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know them, you trust them, you \u003cem>love \u003c/em>them, and they have absolutely no idea who you are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mass media has always fostered this imbalance, of course. You likely feel some sense of ephemeral but deeply personal closeness with the authors of your favorite books, or actors whose work you’ve followed avidly all your life, or familiar radio personalities, maybe there’s a comedian or two whose sensibility you feel lines up with yours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Theaters and movie houses are communal spaces that exist to take you outside of yourself, and transform you into a collective identity — an audience. But radio, television and the Web bring experiences to you, they’re inside your home. And in the case of podcasts, anyway, inside your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not logical, this sense that your favorite podcast hosts are your friends, but it’s hard-wired, inescapable. Look, I’m on a podcast myself, and over the years I’ve had several very nice strangers come up to me to remind me of a thing I said once that I don’t remember, or to ask something small and alarmingly specific about my husband, my dog, my favorite movie. It’s both tremendously flattering and a bit disorienting. I’m an open book to them; they’re a blank slate to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I know all this, and yet I have gone up to the hosts of podcasts I love and done the very same thing. That feeling of closeness bypasses higher brain functions. All of this information, these vast stores of osmotically collected data, these feelings on feelings, are sloshing around inside me; I gotta do \u003cem>something \u003c/em>with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the singular power of podcasts, I think. (Roundtable discussion podcasts, that is. Obviously there are many different kinds, and the various formats — slick storytelling, authoritatively imparted history, true-crime deep dives — will engender different but related clusters of feelings.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been thinking about why I feel the way I do about the podcasts I love, and what, precisely, triggers this sense of a deep, enduring, unidirectional intimacy. I’ve narrowed it down to a handful of factors they share.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe you’re thinking of starting a podcast with some friends. (It’s 2018, those odds are pretty good.) Here then, humbly submitted, are some traits that, taken together, engender the profound sense of closeness I feel with my favorite podcasts. They’re subjective, of course, and they’re just common sense, but I did want to conclude this post by offering something a bit more concrete than \u003cem>gee podcasts are a thing, hunh?\u003c/em> so here goes:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>The 6 Eminently Disprovable Rules For Roundtable Podcasting \u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>1. Like each other.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>This first rule is, of course, the toughest one to achieve. But if you’re trying to hit upon the precise interpersonal alchemical formula that will make us fall in love with your podcast, the best thing to do is not to try. We can sense when something’s forced, when you’ve selected your panel based on something clinical like expertise, instead of something organic like sensibility, or a shared history. If we can hear your respect and affection for each other, we’ll join in with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(I listed this first, but it’s \u003cem>\u003cstrong>not \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>the most important of these rules. It’s the \u003cstrong>\u003cem>second \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>most important. You’ll see why in a bit.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>2. But maybe don’t, like, \u003cem>love \u003c/em>each other, you know?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Look, there are plenty of great podcasts featuring romantic partners, and many romantic partners have no problem making fun of each other. That’s great, because being able to make fun of each other, and each other’s opinions — lightly, judiciously, respectfully, joyfully — is essential to the endeavor. We want to hear you disagreeing, when you do disagree, in an honest, full-throated way — but we don’t want to worry about your relationship. We don’t want you bringing outside arguments into the mix, or letting discussions descend to a place where you’re simply trying to score points off each other. Keep the stakes low, the conversation bubbling, and when necessary, call each other out with glee, the way friends do.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>3. Prepare …\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>I know you, bunky. You’ve got the gift of gab. You’re eloquent, witty, thoughtful. You don’t want to sound flat, rehearsed, anodyne. You think you can you wing it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the thing though: You can’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attitude is not enough. I’ve unsubscribed from many podcasts over the years because the panelists in question have convinced themselves that a sardonic “What’s THAT about?” amounts to a point of view. It doesn’t. We need more. Think about what you’re going to say: Bring notes, plan phrasing.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>4. … but leave room for discovery.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>You need to invite us in, and the way you do that is by bringing us along with your thought process. Roundtable podcasts \u003cem>do \u003c/em>need to feel different than polished, heavily produced radio pieces. Slickness is the enemy, it keeps us listening at a far remove. We want to feel like we’re in the room with you. So by all means, prepare, and think about phrasing. But plan ways to say things that will \u003cem>open \u003c/em>the discussion, not shut it down. Invite your fellow panelists into your thinking, and follow along with theirs. Show your work; reach for insights. The goal is for all of you to collectively find something in that room that you hadn’t planned on finding before you went into it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is to say: Listen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(This is the \u003cem>third \u003c/em>most important rule.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>5. Be yourself. But better.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Blah blah blah, don’t be slick, it’s important to be raw and real, to reach for conclusions instead of forcing them blah blah blah: Yes. Clearly. That’s all true. Learn it. Internalize it. Live it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>… And now forget it. Because the version of you that you need to be on your podcast is a performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or maybe it would better to say: a \u003cem>distillation \u003c/em>of yourself. Sharper, cleaner, more efficient. Pithier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Please, for the love of all that is holy, be pithier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How do you do that? Simple:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>6. Edit. Edit \u003cem>ruthlessly\u003c/em>. I mean, with \u003cem>no discernible ruth. \u003c/em>At all. None. Think the last 10 minutes of \u003cem>Harold and Maude\u003c/em>. Is how ruthless.\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is the single most important rule of all. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Look, no hyperbole or anything, but it’s the One True Answer to Everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I know, I \u003cem>know \u003c/em>I’ve hectored you above about how roundtable discussions need to feel loose and shaggy — natural, not polished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s just it. They need to \u003cem>feel \u003c/em>loose and shaggy. Not \u003cem>be\u003c/em>. \u003cem>FEEL\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that means editing. That means cutting digressions, dead ends, jokes that don’t land, and — if you’re willing (and be willing, oh, do!) — the uhms and aahs and lip-smacks. It means listening back with your aural scalpel and slicing away any dead conversational tissue. When it doubt, take it out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not dishonest. It’s not disingenuous. It’s not slick. It’s a vital service to us, your listeners. It’s a way of centering your discussion, a vital opportunity for you to identify and clearly delineate what makes your podcast uniquely its own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Pop Culture Happy Hour, we freshly marvel, week after week, at the yawning chasm that stretches between our raw audio and the finished product producer Jessica Reedy delivers. Applying what I call the Jess Filter makes any given episode 100 percent better than it began — and, in the bargain, makes us seem a good 40 to 45 percent smarter than we know ourselves to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now: You likely don’t have a Jess. That means the hard duty of editing falls to you. Don’t shirk it. Violate Rules 1 through 5 if you must, but you can still pull things out — you can still inspire legions of listeners to tear through your archives, binge-listening to your every utterance while cartoon hearts flutter around their heads — if you don’t flake on Rule 6.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So go now, and podcast. Podcast like the wind, if the wind were a thing with a podcast! Be brilliant, be witty, be warm (but not \u003cem>too \u003c/em>warm, please, guys), be brutally tough on yourself, and have fun. If you do, so will we. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=It%27s+All+In+Your+Head%3A+The+One-Way+Intimacy+Of+Podcast+Listening&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13823574/its-all-in-your-head-the-one-way-intimacy-of-podcast-listening","authors":["byline_arts_13823574"],"categories":["arts_71"],"tags":["arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596","arts_3837"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13823575","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13815912":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13815912","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13815912","score":null,"sort":[1511823610000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"within-the-context-of-all-contexts-the-rewiring-of-our-relationship-to-music","title":"Within the Context of All Contexts: The Rewiring of Our Relationship to Music","publishDate":1511823610,"format":"image","headTitle":"Within the Context of All Contexts: The Rewiring of Our Relationship to Music | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Imagine you are\u003c/strong> in an averagely pleasant pub in Manhattan, talking to a couple of people, half-listening to the music being played from the ceiling speakers, until a song from the distant past makes you start listening closely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The song is Homer Banks’ “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrMgLRZ6Wzk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60 Minutes of Your Love\u003c/a>,” from 1966, which was not an American hit, but became a favorite in the English mod club-dancer’s canon of rediscovery called Northern Soul. Now this is a \u003cem>song\u003c/em>: undiluted momentum from the first beat, one satisfying jolt after another. There you are, having an encounter with music’s past. You point at the ceiling in recognition. You realize that you have been pointing at the ceiling more often lately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All right: “You” is really me. I am a music critic, for whom all songs carry some kind of coding. I would be paying attention anyway — but I have a feeling you’d have noticed that song too. A while after Homer Banks, Ruth Brown’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA2U5Rh8-qg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wild, Wild Young Men\u003c/a>,” from 1953, came on. Ruth Brown is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and her song \u003cem>was \u003c/em>a hit, rising to No. 3 on the R&B charts that year; even so, you’d need to have a pretty decent grip on the history of American music to know it by ear. Later, I heard a few southern rock-shuffles strung together, including ZZ Top’s famous “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vppbdf-qtGU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Grange\u003c/a>” and a more recent and more leaden one that I felt I should know and didn’t. (It bothered me that I didn’t.) And then, out of the blue: Blind Melon’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qVPNONdF58\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Rain\u003c/a>,” a doughy song that seemed to be for some other place than this one, an early ’90s MTV hit which I suspect far more people know than like. It felt even more shallow than usual, by virtue of the depth that had preceded it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clearly, I was listening to a streaming-service algorithm. The overall sequence made no sense. The music in that place, while I was there, at first felt like a gift — and then like an encounter with an alien presence. It had “taste” — and then no-taste. (Not “tastelessness,” but an \u003cem>absence\u003c/em> of so-called taste.) The signifiers had gone haywire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize cultural signifiers, which tell you something about where you are and who’s behind the bar and what kind of time you might be having before you leave. These signifiers (not just musical ones) always, in some way, have to do with history, with the past. That Blind Melon song retroactively soured the Homer Banks encounter a little. Also, I recognized that Homer Banks song, but what if I didn’t? The appropriate or typical response to it in our time might not be \u003cem>this is part of a tradition about which I want to know more, \u003c/em>but rather: \u003cem>what the hell is this? \u003c/em>And then, maybe, at best, a\u003cem> \u003c/em>half-step further: \u003cem>What’s the footprint of this thing? How many views on YouTube? Who knew about it first? How did this escape me? How did it find me? \u003c/em>And so on. A paradoxical reaction, both uninformed and\u003cem> \u003c/em>connoisseur-ish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a different example. A few weeks ago, in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify — constructed by an algorithm for someone of my data-set – came “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLyoHrZ1kqY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pourquoi Tu Me Fous Plus des Coups?\u003c/a>,” an electro-pop love song, a good one, by the French-Vietnamese singer An Luu. I put its lyrics into a translation engine: The conceit of the song is domestic abuse — one of those he-hit-me-and-it-felt-like-a-kiss songs, a complicated and disconcerting trope that also comes up in Bessie Smith, Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Crystals and Lana Del Rey. I’d never heard of An Luu,\u003cem> \u003c/em>so\u003cem> \u003c/em>I looked her up online. Oh, okay — she’s an actor; she was in the movie \u003cem>Diva. \u003c/em>I remember that. Otherwise, not much there. A YouTube video with about 10,000 views, and also a \u003ca href=\"http://blog.joshuadsites.com/2017/04/25/todays-lesson-an-luu-pourquoi-tu-me-fous-plus-des-coups/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blog post about it\u003c/a> written a few months ago by a media-studies Ph.D in Indiana. “I don’t know how or why Spotify recommended this track to me,” that Ph.D student wrote, “but I sure am grateful they did.” Like me, he was registering the surprise of secondary use. Meaning: He didn’t come to the song because something led him toward the work of An Luu, French-Vietnamese actor and singer, in and of herself. He came to it incidentally, because Spotify used it, within a playlist, as an act of seduction by orphaned data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d want to know who An Luu is and what else she did and what led her to record “Pourquoi Tu Me Fous Plus des Coups?” (The song was written, unsurprisingly, by two men — Jacques Duvall and Philipe Chany.) But Spotify won’t tell me any of that, because Spotify tells you very little. Instead, I’m given an encounter that ends with me wondering: \u003cem>What the hell is this? \u003c/em>Nevertheless, now I recognize the song, for what it’s worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My sense is that such encounters, just like encountering little-known songs in movies and advertisements and new TV shows (such as when the funk-pop slow-dance “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODgezpIjR9k\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amarsi Un Po\u003c/a>” by Lucio Battisti, a wise and searching Italian pop singer of the ’70s and ’80s who never had any American audience whatsoever, appeared on \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em> last spring) are changing, perhaps subtly, what we are looking for from the past. And just as importantly, what we are getting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m going to generalize for a minute. The new assumption we carry around is that we know most of what we need to know because of the considerable labor most of us put into using social media and streaming services. If you use them, think of how many ideas, observations, warnings, judgments, alarms, images, videos and sounds you absorb regularly. The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has, by some wild math, estimated the information intake of a social-media user as similar to reading 175 newspapers per day. I would imagine this all leads us to feel we recognize what is “relevant” simply because we feel the fatigue of so much keeping up. If something escapes our attention, it must be pretty negligible. Relevance, as logic requires, is finite. If it weren’t, then everything would be relevant, and there would be no use for the concept. What really takes us by surprise is when we hear music that has perhaps never been important to our way of thinking but is somehow smuggled into our presence. We experience a feeling of temporary disbelief, or of being privy to an alternate reality. It’s lucky to get our attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Old music, reframed or brought into new circulation, can be as dynamic and unpredictable as new music. Its work is not done by the end of its own epoch. This was always so, but once, only a small number of people truly knew it; scholars, mostly, who understand that the past evolves by our understanding of its context. People like Mary Beard, the Cambridge professor of ancient Greek and Latin languages and history, who \u003ca href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/01/12/do-classics-have-future/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote in a 2012 essay\u003c/a> that “the study of the Classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>College-radio DJs, a guild whose influence is disappearing, knew too. I was one during what I take to be the first great wave of reissued popular music, the mid-’80s. American roots music issued from little record labels in Massachusetts, California, Germany, England; Rounder, Arhoolie, Bear Family, Charly, Ace. (Reissues of funk, disco, electronic and psychedelic music came slightly later.) When Ace, an English label, released B. B. King’s music from the 1950s in an ongoing series of LPs during the mid-’80s, there was a sense that a presidential door had been unbolted. These extravagant outpourings of blues, massive and sophisticated and virtuosic, weren’t really accessible in any other way. There was no YouTube, no Amazon, no Discogs, no Spotify. Even when Ace made it available, this music would not probably reach you unless you moved toward it — and when you did, you committed yourself a little. Here was the past as national library, offering you on the back cover what sober and legitimate context was required, but otherwise letting the work, in considerable quantities, stand for its own powerful self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the same time came a different orientation to the past, typified by the Norton label, run by Miriam Linna and Billy Miller. Norton presented American music from the ’50s and ’60s as regional and eccentric and extreme. Hits, in Norton logic, were exceptions; the more common reality was a bunch of tapes made by nobodies like Hasil Adkins, Wade Curtiss and Jack Starr. “The idea was the discovery of stuff that was not available at all,” Linna told me. “We hated to call ourselves a reissue label — we wanted to find people whose music was \u003cem>never\u003c/em> released.” Here was the past as delirious garage-cult fandom, with lots of information attached, and it was just as immersive as the legit kind — again, as long as \u003cem>you went toward it\u003c/em>, rather than \u003cem>waiting for it to come toward you\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I think about listening to those B.B. King records in 1986, I am thinking of a time when the role of music’s present was usually surprise, counter-argument and probable oblivion. The role of music’s past was confirmation, grounding, study and possible immortality. My sense is that these roles are being reversed. In 2014, Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, said to the \u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> journalist John Seabrook: “We’re not in the music space — we’re in the moment space.” This implies that music’s past could become a sequence of brief, discontinuous moments, like quick-fading Snapchat pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ten years ago, I thought the effect of widespread, immediate access to so much of the history of recorded music would be that the past would come to merge with the present. It would simply become another room in the house. I liked that idea, and I imagine Mary Beard would too. But it seems, instead, that the more likely use of the past, and the more profitable one, is as a weird or uncanny diversion. It delivers you a punch in the neck and then retreats back into a flat, non-hierarchical landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13815921\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette.jpg\" alt=\"Audio cassette.\" width=\"500\" height=\"323\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13815921\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette.jpg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-240x155.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-375x242.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Audio cassette. \u003ccite>(Serts/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>My encounter with Homer Banks\u003c/strong> happened during a conversation I was having in an Irish pub with Ken Shipley and Rob Sevier, who run the Numero Group, a Chicago-based label for reissuing old music. They have worked together for 15 years, long enough to become foils: Shipley is sparky and associative, optimistically building theories, and Sevier is saturnine and skeptical, taking them apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They were in Manhattan on scouting trips. The day before, they’d visited a private collector of instructional belly-dancing records in Brooklyn; they’re working on a project about what they called “appropriated ethnic music.” After meeting me, they were off to visit a New York avant-gardist of great stature with a promising archive of early work. They spend long periods of time working on multiple deep and esoteric projects simultaneously, finding master tapes, securing the rights, then doing the complicated work of re-framing the past. This is their passion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Are they obscurity snobs? Probably. But beyond that, they are betting on a belief that even average listeners know there is more to the history of music than what has been placed before them by radio, algorithms or the happenstance of social media. Their work has originality and integrity as \u003cem>primary-use\u003c/em> culture — you buy, you \u003cem>move towards\u003c/em>, a Numero Group record or box set dedicated to a single artist or label from the past, beautifully designed and well-annotated, and you’re going to learn a lot. But primary use isn’t paying the bills anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten years ago, it didn’t take any effort to sell 5 to 10,000 CDs,” Shipley told me. “Now you’re lucky if you can sell 3,000.” Just recently, as they noticed in their last round of royalty statements, Numero has started to sell more LPs than CDs. And though there has been a gradual rise in the sales of LPs, the few small (actual) stores that sell them, as Shipley explained, prioritize LPs that young people are actually going to buy. The Beatles’ \u003cem>Abbey Road\u003c/em>, Metallica’s \u003cem>Kill ‘Em All\u003c/em>, and so on. There may not be room in the bin for obscure soul records after that. The LP revival does not lift all boats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not long ago, they realized the vastness of their interests was outpacing the market. They’d been great at the game of reframing the past and won Grammys for their work, but were now sitting on dead stock. As a consequence, they are putting out far fewer records now, a fifth as many as they did four years ago. And their priority, increasingly, is to be able to administer the “sync rights” (synchronization rights, for songs to be used in movies or TV or in ads) themselves. They’ve negotiated for songs — mostly American music from the ’60s and ’70s — in many movies: \u003cem>The Circle, The Trust, Loving \u003c/em>— lots and lots. Take my word for it. If you don’t talk about music while pointing at the ceiling in bars, perhaps you are doing it while pointing at the television. Same thing. You are pointing at the means of production. Secondary use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our business is changing away from being a record company to being a copyright company, which is kind of ugly,” Shipley said. From primary to secondary. “But: You make these records, they’re really beautiful, and the record audience is actually really minimal. I don’t care who you talk to” — here he named four other pre-eminent “reissue” labels — “Light in the Attic, Ace, Rhino, Now Again. Physical business is not the business any more, it can’t survive on selling CDs and LPs. It’s not a sustainable way of thinking about copyrights. The sustainable way is to figure out: One, how can you get something to stream as many times as possible? Two, how can you put it in a film, television show, or advertisement? Those are the two avenues for historical music that are available to finance it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They hope that the \u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/user/numerogroup/playlist/52WrPQG9sn9xVS9PK00i2z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">’60s Girl Group playlist\u003c/a> they made for Spotify, full of obscurities, called “Basement Beehive,” will become more widely listened to than the mainstream-oriented one created by Spotify. (It’s making gains. It could happen.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Actively reframing the past is another way. Shipley and Sevier, who are putting their fingerprints on currents in music of the past that did not have a name or genre: “Kid Soul” (little-known Motown-era bands with pre-adolescent singers), “Black Vietnam” (war-haunted ’70s soul and funk). They’re taking many approaches: national-library, garage-cult, critical reframing \u003cem>and\u003c/em> playlisting. They are sharing minute obsessions for fun, because obsession is fun, and it is communicable. But they are also challenging theories of relevance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re reframing in a way that \u003cem>corrects for hits,” \u003c/em>Sevier told me. “Look at what the history of popular music is at any given point. What’s focused on are the hits. We’re getting into what happened at the time and creating a restructured version that just looks at what happened in the scene, but doesn’t have anything to do with hits. Isn’t interested in it.” The restructured version doesn’t just rule out big, dumb pop music; it might rule out B. B. King, too. But their theory is still legitimate. The American imagination, and American media, can stand to devote more time considering what was \u003cem>not\u003c/em> made successful by the usual commercial forces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I pointed at the ceiling, Shipley and Sevier both made the same doubtful face. They were listening to the whole sequence of songs, not just the one that got me excited. This, I said to them, must be the real challenge in your work — it’s easy now to have an \u003cem>adequately new\u003c/em> experience with old music. You don’t need to be curious about anything in particular; you just leave it to an algorithm or a new Netflix show and you’ll hear something you don’t know. They looked at me as if I didn’t know the half of it. Or a fifth of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As Shipley suggested\u003c/strong>, I spoke to Matt Sullivan, of Light in the Attic, founded in 2002. “The sync world… to be frank, it’s one of the last bastions of making a living in music,” he said. His label, he explained, had hired one person to work on licensing ten years ago — now it has three. “There are more original TV shows,” he said, “and a lot of supervisors now — this has been building for the last 15 or 20 years — come from a college radio or record-store background. \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em>, or \u003cem>Fargo\u003c/em>, these shows have phenomenal music. They’re almost the new form of college radio, in terms of a discovery tool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This seems true. You want to know about new hip-hop and R&B? Watch \u003cem>Insecure. \u003c/em>You want to see music used with subtlety as a mood, or as an extension of the character? Watch the shows Sullivan mentioned, or \u003cem>Transparent, \u003c/em>or \u003cem>Big Little Lies\u003c/em>, whose music supervisor, Susan Jacobs, very recently won the first-ever Emmy for music supervision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Numero Group, Light in the Attic has released some of the most interesting records of the last 15 years: its \u003cem>Native North America \u003c/em>compilation of Canadian Native-American folk-rock; the catalogs of Lizzie Mercier Descloux, Betty Davis, Françoise Hardy, and Rodriguez, all of which can reorder and expand the histories of pop you have in your head. It just put out a collection of the work of the 1990s Los Angeles post-rock band Acetone, a band which for me certainly needed reframing, since I ignored them at the time. At the moment, starting with the compilation \u003cem>Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973\u003c/em>, the label is looking toward Japanese pop from the ’70s and ’80s, the next frontier for discophiles — and if Sullivan is lucky, for secondary use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could be that the current generation of music supervisors for TV and film are establishing a new express lane that connects a certain kind of obscurantist taste (mining for overlooked artists who are either representative or unusual, but not exceptional in the old way, the stun-you-up-front, accomplished-all-around way of B.B. King, or Aretha Franklin, or Prince) and the most powerful secondary-source platforms for music. From there, they all run together; an obscure old song that gains traction in a film or TV show can quickly enter streaming-service playlists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13815922\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-800x392.jpg\" alt=\"Our relationships to music are dictated by the means of its transmission to us\" width=\"800\" height=\"392\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13815922\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-800x392.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-160x78.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-768x376.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-1020x500.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-1180x578.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-960x470.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-240x118.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-375x184.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-520x255.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players.jpg 1300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Our relationships to music are dictated by the means of its transmission to us \u003ccite>(Getty/Glasshouse Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“I can fancy a man,”\u003c/strong> wrote Oscar Wilde in \u003cem>The Critic as Artist\u003c/em>, “who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.” Music is particularly good at suggesting a kind of alternative past for the listener, Wilde argued, because it is always implying motion, and because it has a life of its own. It can’t be bound by the intention of the composer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zach Cowie might disagree. I used to correspond with him 15 years ago when he worked as a publicist for Drag City records, and it was clear that he knew more about music than most of the writers he was helping. He is now one of the music supervisors for \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em> (he and Kerri Drootin are responsible for that Lucio Battisti moment at the end of that show’s second season). They were also nominated for the music-supervising Emmy this year. He finds himself in an interesting position: His job is encouraging secondary use, but he worries about what secondary use is doing to music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think any music goes beyond its intention,” he told me. “And a lot of music that is being passed my way as a supervisor has a commercial intent. A lot of reasons got us to this point, but I can detect it right away. My interest in finding these old things is to find music that was made for the \u003cem>sake of making music,”\u003c/em> he said. “Music-making has changed so much since the era of everything’s-available, to where I hear more direct derivativeness than ever before. I get pitched stuff all day: ‘Imagine Kate Bush fronting Kraftwerk!’ Well, the reason I love Kate Bush and I love Kraftwerk is because they never wanted to be anything other than themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Cowie is right — and if the commercial intent of more and more new music is, increasingly, for secondary use — what then? Will ahistoricism eventually make all music even out? The English theorist and critic Mark Fisher, who died earlier this year at the age of 48, had a Marxist answer to this question. Capitalism, as he wrote about it in the books \u003cem>Capitalist Realism \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Ghosts of My Life, \u003c/em>unhitches us from a structured idea of history and makes us unable to imagine a future of any kind, including a future of art. He noticed that pastiche was all around us in pop music of the ’80s, coming with quotation marks included. But around the turn of the 21st century, he argued, the quotation marks came off, resulting in bands like the Arctic Monkeys. “They’re clearly a retro group,” he said in \u003ca href=\"http://crackmagazine.net/article/music/mark-fisher-interviewed/\">an interview from 2014\u003c/a>, “but the category of retro doesn’t make any sense anymore because it’s retro compared to what?” It was around 2003, in his estimation, when he felt that listeners on a grand scale got used to the idea that they would never hear anything new again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m sympathetic to that idea, but I can’t fully get on board with it. Fisher was generally talking about pop music, which carries the profit motive genetically. But pop music isn’t all music, and it makes sense that what lives by capitalism may die by it. I have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about music in which innovation happens slowly, and in which tendencies that might otherwise be known as “retro” are really strategies for survival, for learning from the elder spirits. In jazz, the elder spirits are often still alive, playing, sometimes giving lessons. Then there’s hip-hop. Hip-hop’s never satisfied for long. It comes with aspirations of change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This isn’t a bad period for music’s past. (No time ever was.) And it has some clear advantages — a mania about stories, stoked by public radio and podcasts and documentaries; the everything’s-available assumption, making what is \u003cem>not \u003c/em>available seem exotically attractive; a sense of sociocultural reparation, leading the charge in bringing some artists back to light; and a furious new intensity of research, which is a byproduct of all the other advantages. (For example, A 12,000-word essay accompanies Numero’s Hüsker Dü box set.) Now may be the time of passive encounters and secondary use, but it is also the time of the Julius Eastman revival. Eastman, the New York composer who died in 1990, was uncannily contemporary —an honorary citizen of \u003cem>now\u003c/em> — in his forthright blackness, gayness, and disinterest in institutional power. The reissue culture of the last few years has directed us to his recorded music and has started to bring his repertory into contemporary music ensembles. None of this happened because of ahistoricism — quite the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what if the real proof of Eastman’s relevance is if his music becomes used for TV shows and streaming playlists, and thereafter lives only as vague allusions in the music of others who want their tunes to be picked up for later secondary use?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"275\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-13815924\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player.jpeg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-160x88.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-240x132.jpeg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-375x206.jpeg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The real lesson of the past\u003c/strong>, now that cultural artifacts have become so easy to share, is the unwieldiness of it. Once there wasn’t enough, now there’s too much to go around. A national-library approach to old music, understanding artists of special stature in and of themselves, may be respectful and responsible and history-minded, but isn’t the only way, and can hardly be trusted. Who has bestowed the special stature? And what’s their stake in it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of my recent interests is an English label, or some kind of music-organizing entity called \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/deathisnot?lang=en\">Death Is Not the End\u003c/a>, run by Luke Owen. He finished university seven years ago, he told me, and has worked for record distributors ever since, surrounded by old music. He has put together a series of brilliant shows for NTS — an English, web-based radio-station — filled with music still lurking below the level of collection, from pre-LP times, from the radio, from microphones someone stuck in the air at a certain time and place. The shows overlap with what he has released on his label, mostly digitally or in small editions on cassette. One of his recent shows, in mid-August, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.nts.live/shows/death-is-not-the-end/episodes/death-is-not-the-end-26-08-17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an edit of various tapes\u003c/a> from from reggae sound-clash and sound-system sets in London during the ’80s and ’90s. They represent hectic places. The backing tracks stop and start, the singers and toasters wail and imprecate and drift in and out, including one called Screamer, who made me think, much like Wilde’s man, \u003cem>I’ve been there. \u003c/em>They’re not unlike field recordings, and as with many field recordings, there’s not a lot of information attached to this music. The assumption, somehow, on behalf of someone, is that you don’t want to know the information, or it’s unknowable, or it’s all better when presented as an uncanny mystery. I’ve looked up Screamer. Next to nothing. Less than An Luu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recordings come from sites like \u003ca href=\"http://whocorkthedance.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Who Cork The Dance\u003c/a>, among others—online storage-houses of old soundsystem tapes. This isn’t ephemera, it’s the true broth. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nts.live/shows/death-is-not-the-end/episodes/death-is-not-the-end-26-08-17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The sound-clash program\u003c/a> was one of the best things I’ve heard in months. I went toward it, learned from it, made primary use of it. But I also got a major hit of the uncanny feeling, the punch-in-the-neck feeling. I wondered what was rendering this music especially attractive to me: the indistinct, slurry-like sound quality? The density of the action, making me conjure the place? The ongoingness and never-endingness of it, such that one thing is pretty much as good as the next? The fact that I don’t know how to find out more about Screamer?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What’s the worst\u003c/strong> that can happen? Oh, I don’t know — where to begin? That new music won’t suggest a future; that the only viable use of music’s past is as ahistorical amusement to accompany scripted stories or conversations in bars; and every note ever played will level out into a vaguely seductive past-present. Perhaps, at that point, all music will become field recordings. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Within+The+Context+Of+All+Contexts%3A+The+Rewiring+Of+Our+Relationship+To+Music&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"You've probably been surprised to hear a remarkable song you've never heard pop out of nowhere sometime recently — you're not alone. But as the terms of excavation shift, what are we losing?","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029034,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":42,"wordCount":4862},"headData":{"title":"Within the Context of All Contexts: The Rewiring of Our Relationship to Music | KQED","description":"You've probably been surprised to hear a remarkable song you've never heard pop out of nowhere sometime recently — you're not alone. But as the terms of excavation shift, what are we losing?","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Within the Context of All Contexts: The Rewiring of Our Relationship to Music","datePublished":"2017-11-27T23:00:10.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:10:34.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"martinwimmer","nprByline":"Ben Ratliff","nprImageAgency":"Getty Images/iStockphoto","nprStoryId":"565968260","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=565968260&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/11/27/565968260/within-the-context-of-all-contexts-the-rewiring-of-our-relationship-to-music?ft=nprml&f=565968260","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Mon, 27 Nov 2017 06:00:00 -0500","nprStoryDate":"Mon, 27 Nov 2017 06:00:46 -0500","nprLastModifiedDate":"Mon, 27 Nov 2017 06:00:46 -0500","path":"/arts/13815912/within-the-context-of-all-contexts-the-rewiring-of-our-relationship-to-music","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Imagine you are\u003c/strong> in an averagely pleasant pub in Manhattan, talking to a couple of people, half-listening to the music being played from the ceiling speakers, until a song from the distant past makes you start listening closely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The song is Homer Banks’ “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrMgLRZ6Wzk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60 Minutes of Your Love\u003c/a>,” from 1966, which was not an American hit, but became a favorite in the English mod club-dancer’s canon of rediscovery called Northern Soul. Now this is a \u003cem>song\u003c/em>: undiluted momentum from the first beat, one satisfying jolt after another. There you are, having an encounter with music’s past. You point at the ceiling in recognition. You realize that you have been pointing at the ceiling more often lately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All right: “You” is really me. I am a music critic, for whom all songs carry some kind of coding. I would be paying attention anyway — but I have a feeling you’d have noticed that song too. A while after Homer Banks, Ruth Brown’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA2U5Rh8-qg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wild, Wild Young Men\u003c/a>,” from 1953, came on. Ruth Brown is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and her song \u003cem>was \u003c/em>a hit, rising to No. 3 on the R&B charts that year; even so, you’d need to have a pretty decent grip on the history of American music to know it by ear. Later, I heard a few southern rock-shuffles strung together, including ZZ Top’s famous “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vppbdf-qtGU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Grange\u003c/a>” and a more recent and more leaden one that I felt I should know and didn’t. (It bothered me that I didn’t.) And then, out of the blue: Blind Melon’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qVPNONdF58\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Rain\u003c/a>,” a doughy song that seemed to be for some other place than this one, an early ’90s MTV hit which I suspect far more people know than like. It felt even more shallow than usual, by virtue of the depth that had preceded it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clearly, I was listening to a streaming-service algorithm. The overall sequence made no sense. The music in that place, while I was there, at first felt like a gift — and then like an encounter with an alien presence. It had “taste” — and then no-taste. (Not “tastelessness,” but an \u003cem>absence\u003c/em> of so-called taste.) The signifiers had gone haywire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize cultural signifiers, which tell you something about where you are and who’s behind the bar and what kind of time you might be having before you leave. These signifiers (not just musical ones) always, in some way, have to do with history, with the past. That Blind Melon song retroactively soured the Homer Banks encounter a little. Also, I recognized that Homer Banks song, but what if I didn’t? The appropriate or typical response to it in our time might not be \u003cem>this is part of a tradition about which I want to know more, \u003c/em>but rather: \u003cem>what the hell is this? \u003c/em>And then, maybe, at best, a\u003cem> \u003c/em>half-step further: \u003cem>What’s the footprint of this thing? How many views on YouTube? Who knew about it first? How did this escape me? How did it find me? \u003c/em>And so on. A paradoxical reaction, both uninformed and\u003cem> \u003c/em>connoisseur-ish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a different example. A few weeks ago, in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify — constructed by an algorithm for someone of my data-set – came “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLyoHrZ1kqY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pourquoi Tu Me Fous Plus des Coups?\u003c/a>,” an electro-pop love song, a good one, by the French-Vietnamese singer An Luu. I put its lyrics into a translation engine: The conceit of the song is domestic abuse — one of those he-hit-me-and-it-felt-like-a-kiss songs, a complicated and disconcerting trope that also comes up in Bessie Smith, Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Crystals and Lana Del Rey. I’d never heard of An Luu,\u003cem> \u003c/em>so\u003cem> \u003c/em>I looked her up online. Oh, okay — she’s an actor; she was in the movie \u003cem>Diva. \u003c/em>I remember that. Otherwise, not much there. A YouTube video with about 10,000 views, and also a \u003ca href=\"http://blog.joshuadsites.com/2017/04/25/todays-lesson-an-luu-pourquoi-tu-me-fous-plus-des-coups/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blog post about it\u003c/a> written a few months ago by a media-studies Ph.D in Indiana. “I don’t know how or why Spotify recommended this track to me,” that Ph.D student wrote, “but I sure am grateful they did.” Like me, he was registering the surprise of secondary use. Meaning: He didn’t come to the song because something led him toward the work of An Luu, French-Vietnamese actor and singer, in and of herself. He came to it incidentally, because Spotify used it, within a playlist, as an act of seduction by orphaned data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d want to know who An Luu is and what else she did and what led her to record “Pourquoi Tu Me Fous Plus des Coups?” (The song was written, unsurprisingly, by two men — Jacques Duvall and Philipe Chany.) But Spotify won’t tell me any of that, because Spotify tells you very little. Instead, I’m given an encounter that ends with me wondering: \u003cem>What the hell is this? \u003c/em>Nevertheless, now I recognize the song, for what it’s worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My sense is that such encounters, just like encountering little-known songs in movies and advertisements and new TV shows (such as when the funk-pop slow-dance “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODgezpIjR9k\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amarsi Un Po\u003c/a>” by Lucio Battisti, a wise and searching Italian pop singer of the ’70s and ’80s who never had any American audience whatsoever, appeared on \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em> last spring) are changing, perhaps subtly, what we are looking for from the past. And just as importantly, what we are getting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m going to generalize for a minute. The new assumption we carry around is that we know most of what we need to know because of the considerable labor most of us put into using social media and streaming services. If you use them, think of how many ideas, observations, warnings, judgments, alarms, images, videos and sounds you absorb regularly. The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has, by some wild math, estimated the information intake of a social-media user as similar to reading 175 newspapers per day. I would imagine this all leads us to feel we recognize what is “relevant” simply because we feel the fatigue of so much keeping up. If something escapes our attention, it must be pretty negligible. Relevance, as logic requires, is finite. If it weren’t, then everything would be relevant, and there would be no use for the concept. What really takes us by surprise is when we hear music that has perhaps never been important to our way of thinking but is somehow smuggled into our presence. We experience a feeling of temporary disbelief, or of being privy to an alternate reality. It’s lucky to get our attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Old music, reframed or brought into new circulation, can be as dynamic and unpredictable as new music. Its work is not done by the end of its own epoch. This was always so, but once, only a small number of people truly knew it; scholars, mostly, who understand that the past evolves by our understanding of its context. People like Mary Beard, the Cambridge professor of ancient Greek and Latin languages and history, who \u003ca href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/01/12/do-classics-have-future/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote in a 2012 essay\u003c/a> that “the study of the Classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>College-radio DJs, a guild whose influence is disappearing, knew too. I was one during what I take to be the first great wave of reissued popular music, the mid-’80s. American roots music issued from little record labels in Massachusetts, California, Germany, England; Rounder, Arhoolie, Bear Family, Charly, Ace. (Reissues of funk, disco, electronic and psychedelic music came slightly later.) When Ace, an English label, released B. B. King’s music from the 1950s in an ongoing series of LPs during the mid-’80s, there was a sense that a presidential door had been unbolted. These extravagant outpourings of blues, massive and sophisticated and virtuosic, weren’t really accessible in any other way. There was no YouTube, no Amazon, no Discogs, no Spotify. Even when Ace made it available, this music would not probably reach you unless you moved toward it — and when you did, you committed yourself a little. Here was the past as national library, offering you on the back cover what sober and legitimate context was required, but otherwise letting the work, in considerable quantities, stand for its own powerful self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the same time came a different orientation to the past, typified by the Norton label, run by Miriam Linna and Billy Miller. Norton presented American music from the ’50s and ’60s as regional and eccentric and extreme. Hits, in Norton logic, were exceptions; the more common reality was a bunch of tapes made by nobodies like Hasil Adkins, Wade Curtiss and Jack Starr. “The idea was the discovery of stuff that was not available at all,” Linna told me. “We hated to call ourselves a reissue label — we wanted to find people whose music was \u003cem>never\u003c/em> released.” Here was the past as delirious garage-cult fandom, with lots of information attached, and it was just as immersive as the legit kind — again, as long as \u003cem>you went toward it\u003c/em>, rather than \u003cem>waiting for it to come toward you\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I think about listening to those B.B. King records in 1986, I am thinking of a time when the role of music’s present was usually surprise, counter-argument and probable oblivion. The role of music’s past was confirmation, grounding, study and possible immortality. My sense is that these roles are being reversed. In 2014, Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, said to the \u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> journalist John Seabrook: “We’re not in the music space — we’re in the moment space.” This implies that music’s past could become a sequence of brief, discontinuous moments, like quick-fading Snapchat pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ten years ago, I thought the effect of widespread, immediate access to so much of the history of recorded music would be that the past would come to merge with the present. It would simply become another room in the house. I liked that idea, and I imagine Mary Beard would too. But it seems, instead, that the more likely use of the past, and the more profitable one, is as a weird or uncanny diversion. It delivers you a punch in the neck and then retreats back into a flat, non-hierarchical landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13815921\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette.jpg\" alt=\"Audio cassette.\" width=\"500\" height=\"323\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13815921\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette.jpg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-240x155.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Cassette-375x242.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Audio cassette. \u003ccite>(Serts/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>My encounter with Homer Banks\u003c/strong> happened during a conversation I was having in an Irish pub with Ken Shipley and Rob Sevier, who run the Numero Group, a Chicago-based label for reissuing old music. They have worked together for 15 years, long enough to become foils: Shipley is sparky and associative, optimistically building theories, and Sevier is saturnine and skeptical, taking them apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They were in Manhattan on scouting trips. The day before, they’d visited a private collector of instructional belly-dancing records in Brooklyn; they’re working on a project about what they called “appropriated ethnic music.” After meeting me, they were off to visit a New York avant-gardist of great stature with a promising archive of early work. They spend long periods of time working on multiple deep and esoteric projects simultaneously, finding master tapes, securing the rights, then doing the complicated work of re-framing the past. This is their passion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Are they obscurity snobs? Probably. But beyond that, they are betting on a belief that even average listeners know there is more to the history of music than what has been placed before them by radio, algorithms or the happenstance of social media. Their work has originality and integrity as \u003cem>primary-use\u003c/em> culture — you buy, you \u003cem>move towards\u003c/em>, a Numero Group record or box set dedicated to a single artist or label from the past, beautifully designed and well-annotated, and you’re going to learn a lot. But primary use isn’t paying the bills anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten years ago, it didn’t take any effort to sell 5 to 10,000 CDs,” Shipley told me. “Now you’re lucky if you can sell 3,000.” Just recently, as they noticed in their last round of royalty statements, Numero has started to sell more LPs than CDs. And though there has been a gradual rise in the sales of LPs, the few small (actual) stores that sell them, as Shipley explained, prioritize LPs that young people are actually going to buy. The Beatles’ \u003cem>Abbey Road\u003c/em>, Metallica’s \u003cem>Kill ‘Em All\u003c/em>, and so on. There may not be room in the bin for obscure soul records after that. The LP revival does not lift all boats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not long ago, they realized the vastness of their interests was outpacing the market. They’d been great at the game of reframing the past and won Grammys for their work, but were now sitting on dead stock. As a consequence, they are putting out far fewer records now, a fifth as many as they did four years ago. And their priority, increasingly, is to be able to administer the “sync rights” (synchronization rights, for songs to be used in movies or TV or in ads) themselves. They’ve negotiated for songs — mostly American music from the ’60s and ’70s — in many movies: \u003cem>The Circle, The Trust, Loving \u003c/em>— lots and lots. Take my word for it. If you don’t talk about music while pointing at the ceiling in bars, perhaps you are doing it while pointing at the television. Same thing. You are pointing at the means of production. Secondary use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our business is changing away from being a record company to being a copyright company, which is kind of ugly,” Shipley said. From primary to secondary. “But: You make these records, they’re really beautiful, and the record audience is actually really minimal. I don’t care who you talk to” — here he named four other pre-eminent “reissue” labels — “Light in the Attic, Ace, Rhino, Now Again. Physical business is not the business any more, it can’t survive on selling CDs and LPs. It’s not a sustainable way of thinking about copyrights. The sustainable way is to figure out: One, how can you get something to stream as many times as possible? Two, how can you put it in a film, television show, or advertisement? Those are the two avenues for historical music that are available to finance it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They hope that the \u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/user/numerogroup/playlist/52WrPQG9sn9xVS9PK00i2z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">’60s Girl Group playlist\u003c/a> they made for Spotify, full of obscurities, called “Basement Beehive,” will become more widely listened to than the mainstream-oriented one created by Spotify. (It’s making gains. It could happen.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Actively reframing the past is another way. Shipley and Sevier, who are putting their fingerprints on currents in music of the past that did not have a name or genre: “Kid Soul” (little-known Motown-era bands with pre-adolescent singers), “Black Vietnam” (war-haunted ’70s soul and funk). They’re taking many approaches: national-library, garage-cult, critical reframing \u003cem>and\u003c/em> playlisting. They are sharing minute obsessions for fun, because obsession is fun, and it is communicable. But they are also challenging theories of relevance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re reframing in a way that \u003cem>corrects for hits,” \u003c/em>Sevier told me. “Look at what the history of popular music is at any given point. What’s focused on are the hits. We’re getting into what happened at the time and creating a restructured version that just looks at what happened in the scene, but doesn’t have anything to do with hits. Isn’t interested in it.” The restructured version doesn’t just rule out big, dumb pop music; it might rule out B. B. King, too. But their theory is still legitimate. The American imagination, and American media, can stand to devote more time considering what was \u003cem>not\u003c/em> made successful by the usual commercial forces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I pointed at the ceiling, Shipley and Sevier both made the same doubtful face. They were listening to the whole sequence of songs, not just the one that got me excited. This, I said to them, must be the real challenge in your work — it’s easy now to have an \u003cem>adequately new\u003c/em> experience with old music. You don’t need to be curious about anything in particular; you just leave it to an algorithm or a new Netflix show and you’ll hear something you don’t know. They looked at me as if I didn’t know the half of it. Or a fifth of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As Shipley suggested\u003c/strong>, I spoke to Matt Sullivan, of Light in the Attic, founded in 2002. “The sync world… to be frank, it’s one of the last bastions of making a living in music,” he said. His label, he explained, had hired one person to work on licensing ten years ago — now it has three. “There are more original TV shows,” he said, “and a lot of supervisors now — this has been building for the last 15 or 20 years — come from a college radio or record-store background. \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em>, or \u003cem>Fargo\u003c/em>, these shows have phenomenal music. They’re almost the new form of college radio, in terms of a discovery tool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This seems true. You want to know about new hip-hop and R&B? Watch \u003cem>Insecure. \u003c/em>You want to see music used with subtlety as a mood, or as an extension of the character? Watch the shows Sullivan mentioned, or \u003cem>Transparent, \u003c/em>or \u003cem>Big Little Lies\u003c/em>, whose music supervisor, Susan Jacobs, very recently won the first-ever Emmy for music supervision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Numero Group, Light in the Attic has released some of the most interesting records of the last 15 years: its \u003cem>Native North America \u003c/em>compilation of Canadian Native-American folk-rock; the catalogs of Lizzie Mercier Descloux, Betty Davis, Françoise Hardy, and Rodriguez, all of which can reorder and expand the histories of pop you have in your head. It just put out a collection of the work of the 1990s Los Angeles post-rock band Acetone, a band which for me certainly needed reframing, since I ignored them at the time. At the moment, starting with the compilation \u003cem>Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973\u003c/em>, the label is looking toward Japanese pop from the ’70s and ’80s, the next frontier for discophiles — and if Sullivan is lucky, for secondary use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could be that the current generation of music supervisors for TV and film are establishing a new express lane that connects a certain kind of obscurantist taste (mining for overlooked artists who are either representative or unusual, but not exceptional in the old way, the stun-you-up-front, accomplished-all-around way of B.B. King, or Aretha Franklin, or Prince) and the most powerful secondary-source platforms for music. From there, they all run together; an obscure old song that gains traction in a film or TV show can quickly enter streaming-service playlists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13815922\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-800x392.jpg\" alt=\"Our relationships to music are dictated by the means of its transmission to us\" width=\"800\" height=\"392\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13815922\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-800x392.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-160x78.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-768x376.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-1020x500.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-1180x578.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-960x470.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-240x118.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-375x184.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players-520x255.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/Tape-players.jpg 1300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Our relationships to music are dictated by the means of its transmission to us \u003ccite>(Getty/Glasshouse Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“I can fancy a man,”\u003c/strong> wrote Oscar Wilde in \u003cem>The Critic as Artist\u003c/em>, “who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.” Music is particularly good at suggesting a kind of alternative past for the listener, Wilde argued, because it is always implying motion, and because it has a life of its own. It can’t be bound by the intention of the composer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zach Cowie might disagree. I used to correspond with him 15 years ago when he worked as a publicist for Drag City records, and it was clear that he knew more about music than most of the writers he was helping. He is now one of the music supervisors for \u003cem>Master of None\u003c/em> (he and Kerri Drootin are responsible for that Lucio Battisti moment at the end of that show’s second season). They were also nominated for the music-supervising Emmy this year. He finds himself in an interesting position: His job is encouraging secondary use, but he worries about what secondary use is doing to music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think any music goes beyond its intention,” he told me. “And a lot of music that is being passed my way as a supervisor has a commercial intent. A lot of reasons got us to this point, but I can detect it right away. My interest in finding these old things is to find music that was made for the \u003cem>sake of making music,”\u003c/em> he said. “Music-making has changed so much since the era of everything’s-available, to where I hear more direct derivativeness than ever before. I get pitched stuff all day: ‘Imagine Kate Bush fronting Kraftwerk!’ Well, the reason I love Kate Bush and I love Kraftwerk is because they never wanted to be anything other than themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Cowie is right — and if the commercial intent of more and more new music is, increasingly, for secondary use — what then? Will ahistoricism eventually make all music even out? The English theorist and critic Mark Fisher, who died earlier this year at the age of 48, had a Marxist answer to this question. Capitalism, as he wrote about it in the books \u003cem>Capitalist Realism \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Ghosts of My Life, \u003c/em>unhitches us from a structured idea of history and makes us unable to imagine a future of any kind, including a future of art. He noticed that pastiche was all around us in pop music of the ’80s, coming with quotation marks included. But around the turn of the 21st century, he argued, the quotation marks came off, resulting in bands like the Arctic Monkeys. “They’re clearly a retro group,” he said in \u003ca href=\"http://crackmagazine.net/article/music/mark-fisher-interviewed/\">an interview from 2014\u003c/a>, “but the category of retro doesn’t make any sense anymore because it’s retro compared to what?” It was around 2003, in his estimation, when he felt that listeners on a grand scale got used to the idea that they would never hear anything new again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m sympathetic to that idea, but I can’t fully get on board with it. Fisher was generally talking about pop music, which carries the profit motive genetically. But pop music isn’t all music, and it makes sense that what lives by capitalism may die by it. I have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about music in which innovation happens slowly, and in which tendencies that might otherwise be known as “retro” are really strategies for survival, for learning from the elder spirits. In jazz, the elder spirits are often still alive, playing, sometimes giving lessons. Then there’s hip-hop. Hip-hop’s never satisfied for long. It comes with aspirations of change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This isn’t a bad period for music’s past. (No time ever was.) And it has some clear advantages — a mania about stories, stoked by public radio and podcasts and documentaries; the everything’s-available assumption, making what is \u003cem>not \u003c/em>available seem exotically attractive; a sense of sociocultural reparation, leading the charge in bringing some artists back to light; and a furious new intensity of research, which is a byproduct of all the other advantages. (For example, A 12,000-word essay accompanies Numero’s Hüsker Dü box set.) Now may be the time of passive encounters and secondary use, but it is also the time of the Julius Eastman revival. Eastman, the New York composer who died in 1990, was uncannily contemporary —an honorary citizen of \u003cem>now\u003c/em> — in his forthright blackness, gayness, and disinterest in institutional power. The reissue culture of the last few years has directed us to his recorded music and has started to bring his repertory into contemporary music ensembles. None of this happened because of ahistoricism — quite the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what if the real proof of Eastman’s relevance is if his music becomes used for TV shows and streaming playlists, and thereafter lives only as vague allusions in the music of others who want their tunes to be picked up for later secondary use?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"275\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-13815924\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player.jpeg 500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-160x88.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-240x132.jpeg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/11/beat-up-tape-player-375x206.jpeg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The real lesson of the past\u003c/strong>, now that cultural artifacts have become so easy to share, is the unwieldiness of it. Once there wasn’t enough, now there’s too much to go around. A national-library approach to old music, understanding artists of special stature in and of themselves, may be respectful and responsible and history-minded, but isn’t the only way, and can hardly be trusted. Who has bestowed the special stature? And what’s their stake in it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of my recent interests is an English label, or some kind of music-organizing entity called \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/deathisnot?lang=en\">Death Is Not the End\u003c/a>, run by Luke Owen. He finished university seven years ago, he told me, and has worked for record distributors ever since, surrounded by old music. He has put together a series of brilliant shows for NTS — an English, web-based radio-station — filled with music still lurking below the level of collection, from pre-LP times, from the radio, from microphones someone stuck in the air at a certain time and place. The shows overlap with what he has released on his label, mostly digitally or in small editions on cassette. One of his recent shows, in mid-August, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.nts.live/shows/death-is-not-the-end/episodes/death-is-not-the-end-26-08-17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an edit of various tapes\u003c/a> from from reggae sound-clash and sound-system sets in London during the ’80s and ’90s. They represent hectic places. The backing tracks stop and start, the singers and toasters wail and imprecate and drift in and out, including one called Screamer, who made me think, much like Wilde’s man, \u003cem>I’ve been there. \u003c/em>They’re not unlike field recordings, and as with many field recordings, there’s not a lot of information attached to this music. The assumption, somehow, on behalf of someone, is that you don’t want to know the information, or it’s unknowable, or it’s all better when presented as an uncanny mystery. I’ve looked up Screamer. Next to nothing. Less than An Luu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recordings come from sites like \u003ca href=\"http://whocorkthedance.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Who Cork The Dance\u003c/a>, among others—online storage-houses of old soundsystem tapes. This isn’t ephemera, it’s the true broth. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nts.live/shows/death-is-not-the-end/episodes/death-is-not-the-end-26-08-17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The sound-clash program\u003c/a> was one of the best things I’ve heard in months. I went toward it, learned from it, made primary use of it. But I also got a major hit of the uncanny feeling, the punch-in-the-neck feeling. I wondered what was rendering this music especially attractive to me: the indistinct, slurry-like sound quality? The density of the action, making me conjure the place? The ongoingness and never-endingness of it, such that one thing is pretty much as good as the next? The fact that I don’t know how to find out more about Screamer?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What’s the worst\u003c/strong> that can happen? Oh, I don’t know — where to begin? That new music won’t suggest a future; that the only viable use of music’s past is as ahistorical amusement to accompany scripted stories or conversations in bars; and every note ever played will level out into a vaguely seductive past-present. Perhaps, at that point, all music will become field recordings. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Within+The+Context+Of+All+Contexts%3A+The+Rewiring+Of+Our+Relationship+To+Music&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13815912/within-the-context-of-all-contexts-the-rewiring-of-our-relationship-to-music","authors":["byline_arts_13815912"],"categories":["arts_69","arts_235"],"tags":["arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13815913","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13812508":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13812508","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13812508","score":null,"sort":[1508859344000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"this-halloween-what-does-it-mean-to-call-something-spooky","title":"This Halloween: What Does It Mean to Call Something \"Spooky\"?","publishDate":1508859344,"format":"standard","headTitle":"This Halloween: What Does It Mean to Call Something “Spooky”? | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>So, you’re at your friend’s elaborately decorated Halloween party. There are cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, bloody handprints on the wall, a frothing potion brewing on the stove. It’s creepy! And scary! But is it … spooky?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sure, “spook” can refer to a ghost. It can refer to a spy. But as many of us know, it’s also, sometimes, a racial slur for black people. One of our \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZeFoLpWq-HbUBxMpiYGczjsuZJtCbIv8uMiNOoRWTFGDzWg/viewform\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ask Code Switch\u003c/a> readers wrote in to ask about the etiquette of using words like spook and spooky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During this, the season of murder mysteries and haunted hayrides, is it insensitive to say that you were spooked?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So here’s the deal: Spook comes from the Dutch word for apparition, or specter. The noun was first \u003ca href=\"http://www.etymonline.com/search?q=spook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">used in English\u003c/a> around the turn of the nineteenth century. Over the next few decades, it developed other forms, like spooky, spookish, and of course, the verb, to spook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From there, it seems, the word lived a relatively innocuous life for many years, existing in the liminal space between surprise and mild fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t until World War II that spook \u003ca href=\"http://www.dictionary.com/browse/spook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">started to refer to black people\u003c/a>. The black Army pilots who trained at the Tuskegee Institute were \u003ca href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb3779n9gv;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00046&toc.depth=1&toc.id=div00045&brand=oac4\">referred to as the “Spookwaffe”\u003c/a> — \u003cem>waffe \u003c/em>being the German word for weapon, or gun. (Luftwaffe was the name of the German air force).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the word “spook” was linked to blackness, it wasn’t long before it became a recognizable — if second-tier — slur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the end of the story for spook. The word had a bit of a renaissance in the 1970s, with the release of the novel and classic film, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BynXfREPG8\">The Spook Who Sat By The Door\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/sam-greenlee-whose-movie-the-spook-who-sat-by-the-door-became-a-cult-classic-dies/2014/05/20/3d157e6c-e034-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html?utm_term=.aa20b36e90fb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sam Greenlee\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the book and movie tell the fictional story of the first black man recruited and trained by the CIA. That man goes through his training, works for a little while, and then quits his job and moves back to Chicago, where he secretly trains a group of young black “freedom fighters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title of the movie, of course, both refers to spook meaning “black person” and spook meaning “spy.” And as a satirical piece of literature written by an African-American author in the years following the civil rights movement, the use of “spook” was infused with an extra dose of irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://as.nyu.edu/faculty/renee-blake.html\">Renee Blake\u003c/a> is a sociolinguist who studies the way language is used in society, “whether it’s based on race, class, gender or the like.” She says she doesn’t hear the word spook all that often, but she does have two salient reference points for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first is \u003cem>The Spook Who Sat By The Door\u003c/em>, and the second is the 2000 book and 2003 movie \u003cem>The Human Stain, \u003c/em>by Phillip Roth. His novel tells the story of a professor at a New England college who is forced to resign after he calls two African-American students spooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The word spook hasn’t just gotten fictional people in trouble. In 2010, Target apologized for \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/10/01/spook-drop-parachuters-racism-or-halloween-spirit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">selling a Halloween toy called “Spook Drop Parachuters”\u003c/a> — literally miniature black figurines with orange parachutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In light of all this baggage, I asked Blake what she thought about the use of words like spook and spooky during Halloween. She said that, while it’s clear that spook has multiple, distinct meanings, it’s still important to think about context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The way that certain words get attached to particular racial groups is incredibly complicated. (\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/04/30/403362626/the-racially-charged-meaning-behind-the-word-thug\">Take thug\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/18/245953619/what-a-thugs-life-looked-like-in-nineteenth-century-india\">for example\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Be thoughtful about the fact that [spook] now might have the connotation of referring to a black person in a disparaging way,” Blake says. “If someone says, ‘Did you get spooked?’ and there are no black people there, then, OK, you mean ‘Did you get scared or frightened?’ That’s fine, I get it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But once you insert black people into the situation, Blake says, it’s important to be more tactful. “We know that the word ‘niggardly’ doesn’t mean a black person, but let’s be sensitive. Are you going to use the word niggardly in front of a group of young students in a classroom? No.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, this Halloween, be a little cautious when it comes to describing your surroundings. And don’t be afraid of creeping into the thesaurus for a spooky synonym.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To me, it’s more fun to be aghast, bloodcurdled, or spine-chilled than “spooked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Got a race question for Code Switch? \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZeFoLpWq-HbUBxMpiYGczjsuZJtCbIv8uMiNOoRWTFGDzWg/viewform\">Ask us here\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=This+Halloween%3A+What+Does+It+Mean+To+Call+Something+%27Spooky%27%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Scared, fine. Frightened, sure. But spooked? This week, we dive into the racial history behind one of Halloween's most fraught descriptors.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029267,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":22,"wordCount":817},"headData":{"title":"This Halloween: What Does It Mean to Call Something \"Spooky\"? | KQED","description":"Scared, fine. Frightened, sure. But spooked? This week, we dive into the racial history behind one of Halloween's most fraught descriptors.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"This Halloween: What Does It Mean to Call Something \"Spooky\"?","datePublished":"2017-10-24T15:35:44.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:14:27.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"path":"/arts/13812508/this-halloween-what-does-it-mean-to-call-something-spooky","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>So, you’re at your friend’s elaborately decorated Halloween party. There are cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, bloody handprints on the wall, a frothing potion brewing on the stove. It’s creepy! And scary! But is it … spooky?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sure, “spook” can refer to a ghost. It can refer to a spy. But as many of us know, it’s also, sometimes, a racial slur for black people. One of our \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZeFoLpWq-HbUBxMpiYGczjsuZJtCbIv8uMiNOoRWTFGDzWg/viewform\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ask Code Switch\u003c/a> readers wrote in to ask about the etiquette of using words like spook and spooky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During this, the season of murder mysteries and haunted hayrides, is it insensitive to say that you were spooked?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So here’s the deal: Spook comes from the Dutch word for apparition, or specter. The noun was first \u003ca href=\"http://www.etymonline.com/search?q=spook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">used in English\u003c/a> around the turn of the nineteenth century. Over the next few decades, it developed other forms, like spooky, spookish, and of course, the verb, to spook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From there, it seems, the word lived a relatively innocuous life for many years, existing in the liminal space between surprise and mild fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t until World War II that spook \u003ca href=\"http://www.dictionary.com/browse/spook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">started to refer to black people\u003c/a>. The black Army pilots who trained at the Tuskegee Institute were \u003ca href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb3779n9gv;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00046&toc.depth=1&toc.id=div00045&brand=oac4\">referred to as the “Spookwaffe”\u003c/a> — \u003cem>waffe \u003c/em>being the German word for weapon, or gun. (Luftwaffe was the name of the German air force).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the word “spook” was linked to blackness, it wasn’t long before it became a recognizable — if second-tier — slur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the end of the story for spook. The word had a bit of a renaissance in the 1970s, with the release of the novel and classic film, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BynXfREPG8\">The Spook Who Sat By The Door\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/sam-greenlee-whose-movie-the-spook-who-sat-by-the-door-became-a-cult-classic-dies/2014/05/20/3d157e6c-e034-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html?utm_term=.aa20b36e90fb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sam Greenlee\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the book and movie tell the fictional story of the first black man recruited and trained by the CIA. That man goes through his training, works for a little while, and then quits his job and moves back to Chicago, where he secretly trains a group of young black “freedom fighters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title of the movie, of course, both refers to spook meaning “black person” and spook meaning “spy.” And as a satirical piece of literature written by an African-American author in the years following the civil rights movement, the use of “spook” was infused with an extra dose of irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://as.nyu.edu/faculty/renee-blake.html\">Renee Blake\u003c/a> is a sociolinguist who studies the way language is used in society, “whether it’s based on race, class, gender or the like.” She says she doesn’t hear the word spook all that often, but she does have two salient reference points for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first is \u003cem>The Spook Who Sat By The Door\u003c/em>, and the second is the 2000 book and 2003 movie \u003cem>The Human Stain, \u003c/em>by Phillip Roth. His novel tells the story of a professor at a New England college who is forced to resign after he calls two African-American students spooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The word spook hasn’t just gotten fictional people in trouble. In 2010, Target apologized for \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/10/01/spook-drop-parachuters-racism-or-halloween-spirit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">selling a Halloween toy called “Spook Drop Parachuters”\u003c/a> — literally miniature black figurines with orange parachutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In light of all this baggage, I asked Blake what she thought about the use of words like spook and spooky during Halloween. She said that, while it’s clear that spook has multiple, distinct meanings, it’s still important to think about context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The way that certain words get attached to particular racial groups is incredibly complicated. (\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/04/30/403362626/the-racially-charged-meaning-behind-the-word-thug\">Take thug\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/18/245953619/what-a-thugs-life-looked-like-in-nineteenth-century-india\">for example\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Be thoughtful about the fact that [spook] now might have the connotation of referring to a black person in a disparaging way,” Blake says. “If someone says, ‘Did you get spooked?’ and there are no black people there, then, OK, you mean ‘Did you get scared or frightened?’ That’s fine, I get it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But once you insert black people into the situation, Blake says, it’s important to be more tactful. “We know that the word ‘niggardly’ doesn’t mean a black person, but let’s be sensitive. Are you going to use the word niggardly in front of a group of young students in a classroom? No.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, this Halloween, be a little cautious when it comes to describing your surroundings. And don’t be afraid of creeping into the thesaurus for a spooky synonym.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To me, it’s more fun to be aghast, bloodcurdled, or spine-chilled than “spooked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Got a race question for Code Switch? \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZeFoLpWq-HbUBxMpiYGczjsuZJtCbIv8uMiNOoRWTFGDzWg/viewform\">Ask us here\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=This+Halloween%3A+What+Does+It+Mean+To+Call+Something+%27Spooky%27%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13812508/this-halloween-what-does-it-mean-to-call-something-spooky","authors":["92"],"categories":["arts_1"],"tags":["arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13812510","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13811856":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13811856","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13811856","score":null,"sort":[1508277603000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"songs-that-say-me-too","title":"Songs That Say 'Me Too'","publishDate":1508277603,"format":"image","headTitle":"Songs That Say ‘Me Too’ | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Content advisory:\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cem> The videos and language below contain strong language and may be offensive to some.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the past two days women have overwhelmed social media with a truth often hidden in plain sight: \u003ca href=\"https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">One out of every six\u003c/a> women has been subject to an attempted or completed rape during her lifetime. Countless more endure other forms of assault, abuse or harassment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prompted by the recent revelations that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein performed such acts on dozens of women over the past four decades, the phrase “\u003ca href=\"https://www.bustle.com/p/the-woman-who-started-me-too-on-why-we-didnt-need-another-quiet-day-2920079\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">me too,\u003c/a>” posted as a hashtag or Facebook status, did the usual digital-activism work of intensely personalizing a social and political issue that many could otherwise dismiss as “not my problem.” As some men posted, and some women of color argued, it takes a certain amount of privilege to feel safe enough to make even a two-word disclosure like this one. Questions about race and gender arose that necessarily complicate rapid-fire political discourses. Yet “me too” has approached a certain critical mass; the hashtag had been used 200,000 times as of Monday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a meme, “me too” does a great job of crystallizing the rage and vulnerability women feel in the face of rape culture. This conversation, however, is hardly new. Artists, activists, writers and musicians have told the stories of violated women across time — particularly since the 1990s, when popular music and feminism powerfully intersected in the pop mainstream and the musical underground. Here’s a list of twenty songs in which women said “me too” — without shame.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tori Amos, “Me And A Gun” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4KjmFMtiywPXyr6CbLOhY3\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This stark, semi-autobiographical monologue, which \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15182176/tori-amos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amos\u003c/a> wrote to be performed a capella, takes the listener within the mind of a woman being raped – and is based on details of the singer-songwriter’s own assault after a show when she was 21. The emotional centerpiece of her solo debut album \u003cem>Little Earthquakes\u003c/em>, it remains one of pop’s most intimate and forthright accounts of how women experience sexual violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>TLC, “His Story” (1992)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3naqVKAWQJyghdX9VzYEJA\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“‘His Story’ was happening before we were born,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15807876/tlc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TLC\u003c/a> member Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas said in a recent interview, addressing this song’s theme of society’s tendency to accept the male viewpoint on sexual assault, even in the most dubious circumstances. A protest song in the guise of a funk jam, TLC’s invective has been somewhat forgotten, perhaps because it was inspired by and mentioned the highly controversial \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/05/209194252/15-years-later-tawana-brawley-has-paid-1-percent-of-penalty\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tawana Brawley\u003c/a> case of 1987; its big-picture take still resonates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Au Pairs, “Armagh” (1981)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5OqNaCBBU7qK5TeUzREhx1\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sexual assault is always political, and sometimes it’s actually a tool of the state. The post-punk band Au Pairs – part of a vibrant feminist scene that arose in Northern England at the turn of the ’80s – made that reality explicit in this song, about female Irish Republican prisoners who were repeatedly strip-searched and reportedly violated as part of the daily routine in the Northern Irish prison of the song’s title. The women of Armagh conducted a \u003ca href=\"http://www.theirisharchives.com/articles/view/97/The-Women-Hunger-Strikers-Of-Armagh-Prison\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“dirty protest”\u003c/a> to call attention to their plight; this song captures its disgust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Liz Phair, “F*** and Run” (1993)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4MSdFtD1JPc2W3J13uJPeS\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15402643/liz-phair\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Phair\u003c/a>‘s album-length rejoinder to carelessly sexist indie rockers, \u003cem>Exile in Guyville\u003c/em>, is one of the finest accounts of all the crap that women put up with within music scenes. This deceptively wry ballad about one-night-stand Johnnies contains a shocking line — “even when I was twelve,” Phair sang, recalling all the times men enjoyed her body and then left her behind — that connects everyday, callous treatment to the larger culture of abuse that women must navigate, starting when they are girls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bikini Kill, “Liar” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1aycS7_P-M\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The early ’90s Riot Grrrl movement brought the realities of rape culture into stark focus within an indie rock community that often presented itself as above “all that.” Kathleen Hanna, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/106311747/bikini-kill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bikini Kill\u003c/a>‘s vocalist and visionary, was the Cassandra who demanded that the men around her acknowledge that they, too, were part of the mass deceit that allows male perpetrators to “deny, deny, deny, deny.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fiona Apple, “Sullen Girl” (1996)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6cVxGzo7214XabSXFGasNl\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effects of sexual assault often, perhaps nearly always, last a lifetime. At 17, in this blunt, introspective, beautiful piano ballad, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15183593/fiona-apple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fiona Apple\u003c/a> revealed the aftermath of her rape at age 12. “My oblivion,” she called it, resurrecting herself through sheer grit and musicality, and guiding others to do the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Raincoats, “Off Duty Trip” (1979)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6hsh2tGBNL5WlaQLrD61P7\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rape culture is supported by a criminal justice system that can seem inclined towards preserving male power. (The recent case of Brock Turner, the Stanford student whose sentence was reduced by a judge concerned about its \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/07/02/the-judge-in-the-infamous-brock-turner-case-finally-explains-his-decision-a-year-later/?utm_term=.afbf2b168bee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">impact on his future\u003c/a>, is illustrative.) Post-punk greats \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/539037321/the-raincoats\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Raincoats\u003c/a> refer in this song to a much-publicized rape trial in which a British Army officer received lenient treatment from a judge concerned about his military standing, and contextualizes that outrage within a larger view of women’s objectification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rihanna, “Man Down” (2010)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/454h9zAIuTe1eJyw9iTnj4\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Barbadian queen of international pop has often alluded to sexualized violence in her songs, partly because of her own history, which includes surviving domestic assault by her then-boyfriend, the singer Chris Brown. This song takes on rape directly, and can be heard as a revenge fantasy aimed at the fiercely patriarchal culture of the Caribbean dancehall music it mines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>War On Women, “Say It” (2015)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0eta41JkL9xjzWxiPtuMEQ\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certain environments where male bonding is prioritized — fraternities, for example, or perhaps summer rock festivals — have proven particularly conducive to men who violate women. This past summer, the Baltimore band War On Women brought this demand to disrupt such enclaves to Warped Tour, and, perhaps predictably,\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.popsugar.com/news/How-Women-Warped-Tour-Pushing-Back-Against-Sexual-Harassment-43727311\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">endured a backlash\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah McLachlan, “Possession” (1993)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/28SynOAuafgfxvPXWFgS7D\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stalking – the relentless invasion of a woman’s space and privacy – is a major aspect of the culture of misogyny. In one of her most resonant and popular songs, Lilith Fair co-founder \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15397450/sarah-mclachlan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sarah McLachlan\u003c/a> claimed power over a fan who’d stalked her by imagining herself in his position, a chancy move that allowed her some sense of power. Though, she said, the experience had forced her to live with the constant fear that she \u003ca href=\"http://www.addictedtosongwriting.com/sarah-mclachlan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">might be raped\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser’s Option” (2017)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5RmAtT0VaKttU0Eybo6ZWA\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The #metoo hashtag rivets us because it feels urgent and new. But sexual assault is embedded in American culture, especially within the poison legacy of slavery. Newly minted MacArthur Foundation Genius \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/384980773/rhiannon-giddens\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rhiannon Giddens\u003c/a> brings listeners right into the bloodied heart of one enslaved woman impregnated by her rapist, whose resilience defied history itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eve, “Love is Blind” (1999)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0H2jfzzREOr9MF95HB7ry6\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What kind of love,” Eve asked in this song dedicated to a friend who’d been killed by her boyfriend, “make you wish he would die?” The cycle of domestic violence included rape, and the rap royal included it as part of this cry for justice, which ends in a scenario of revenge. “Love is Blind” is a swaggering achievement that stands against hip-hop’s longstanding practice of \u003ca href=\"http://uproxx.com/webculture/50-absurd-rape-lyrics/\">making light\u003c/a> of sexual assault and harassment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Otep, “Fillthee” (2001)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0AWMwRNXNc0bX2sPLWrxX7\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The atmospheres in which violence can be mounted against women are often aggressively male. Extreme heavy metal is, notoriously, a dude’s paradise; Otep Shamaya is one of the few women who has found stardom within it. From the start of her career, as in this song confronting the shame a rape victim feels, she has demanded that her peers acknowledge the ways in which they quash the feminine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Amy Grant, “Ask Me” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5rLGbtNvUB8nqyUNTRC5n9\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All too often, women have been taught to blame themselves for their own victimization. Sometimes religion has enforced this self-condemnation. Amy Grant, one of contemporary Christian music’s superstars, turns this shame around by telling the story of a sexually abused child in poignant detail before celebrating the girl’s redemption as a grown woman. Grant puts mercy before patriarchal judgment in her version of being born again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gillian Welch, “Caleb Meyer” (1998)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/170BlLwmzfaW7hlKCl24sb\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The murder ballad is a Euro-American traditional song form that forms one of the foundations of folk music. Through its many tales of lone male wolves strangling women or \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KvXteZkByE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pushing them into rivers\u003c/a>, it also normalizes misogyny. In this satisfying twist on the usual story, by Americana’s master storyteller \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15237439/gillian-welch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gillian Welch\u003c/a> and her partner David Rawlings, the titular character is a rapist who becomes a casualty of his own criminal act when his victim – a determined survivor – grabs a broken bottle and ends both the crime and his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Angel Haze, “Cleaning Out My Closet” (2012)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olBOFLqEREI\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One way that men have erased women’s accounts of their own realities is by treating misogyny as a joke. The Detroit rapper Angel Haze battles one of the masters of that despicable art, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15404635/eminem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eminem\u003c/a>, in this truth-baring session. The Eminem song that shares this title is uncharacteristically (and barely) tender, qualified by a final rhyme about almost shooting his ex-wife Kim. Haze’s is much deeper, detailing childhood trauma enacted by multiple abusers and ending with her listing its devastating effects on her psyche. The truth is not a punchline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Big Thief, “Coma” (2017)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0cMGrVR6OQoNZwgmtQ0jWC\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The crucial task of helping women recover from violence often falls to other women. In this gently redemptive song about recovery from \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/467816510/big-thief\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Big Thief\u003c/a> — a response to Big Thief’s “Watering,” which details an assault, possibly of the same woman — the band’s singer-guitarist and main songwriter Adrianne Lenker becomes that nurturing companion, helping a survivor understand that both her inner and outer world have forever changed with what she’s endured, but that she can still see light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kira Isabella, “Quarterback” (2014)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5aIPwyYKzd3RyPvhwloeoZ\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peer pressure and alcohol are two potent forces that both feed rape culture and, sometimes, protect its perpetrators. Canadian country artist Kira Isabella and her songwriting team (including Saving Jane’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/martilynndodson?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Marti Dodson\u003c/a>) capture that reality in the tale of a “no name girl from the freshman class” violated by the big man on campus and, in a tragic contemporary twist, by whatever witness chose to post images of the act on the Internet. Penn State and Steubenville are the backdrop for this all-too-familiar tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Petrol Girls, “Touch Me Again” (2016)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/21oFKSwN0SnBYC4bFtDZEI\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is about the really not-very-difficult idea that you shouldn’t f*** people if they don’t want to have sex with you, and you shouldn’t touch people if they don’t want to be touched,” said Ren Aldridge, vocalist and leader of this raucously righteous London-based hardcore band, introducing this song at a recent show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lady Gaga, “Til It Happens To You” (2015)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0bCCGLHflR08UVA6oJJc8I\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If today’s rejuvenated mainstream consciousness about sexual assault has an anthem it is this ballad, co-written by pop’s Mother Monster alongside Diane Warren, the mother of many other massive hits. Featured in \u003cem>The Hunting Ground\u003c/em>, a 2015 documentary about rape on college campuses, it’s a giant power ballad whose ultimate message is that only those who’ve survived sexual violence can understand it. Tragically, the past few days have indicated that most women are in that position; songs like this one resonate all too widely. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Songs+That+Say+%27Me+Too%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Women have posted the phrase on social media to raise awareness of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment. Here is a list of songs in which artists said \"me too.\"","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029316,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":true,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":64,"wordCount":2009},"headData":{"title":"Songs That Say 'Me Too' | KQED","description":"Women have posted the phrase on social media to raise awareness of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment. Here is a list of songs in which artists said "me too."","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Songs That Say 'Me Too'","datePublished":"2017-10-17T22:00:03.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:15:16.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"Mark Ralston","nprByline":"Ann Powers","nprImageAgency":"AFP/Getty Images","nprStoryId":"558098166","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=558098166&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/10/17/558098166/songs-that-say-me-too?ft=nprml&f=558098166","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:45:00 -0400","nprStoryDate":"Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:45:18 -0400","nprLastModifiedDate":"Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:45:18 -0400","path":"/arts/13811856/songs-that-say-me-too","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Content advisory:\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cem> The videos and language below contain strong language and may be offensive to some.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the past two days women have overwhelmed social media with a truth often hidden in plain sight: \u003ca href=\"https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">One out of every six\u003c/a> women has been subject to an attempted or completed rape during her lifetime. Countless more endure other forms of assault, abuse or harassment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prompted by the recent revelations that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein performed such acts on dozens of women over the past four decades, the phrase “\u003ca href=\"https://www.bustle.com/p/the-woman-who-started-me-too-on-why-we-didnt-need-another-quiet-day-2920079\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">me too,\u003c/a>” posted as a hashtag or Facebook status, did the usual digital-activism work of intensely personalizing a social and political issue that many could otherwise dismiss as “not my problem.” As some men posted, and some women of color argued, it takes a certain amount of privilege to feel safe enough to make even a two-word disclosure like this one. Questions about race and gender arose that necessarily complicate rapid-fire political discourses. Yet “me too” has approached a certain critical mass; the hashtag had been used 200,000 times as of Monday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a meme, “me too” does a great job of crystallizing the rage and vulnerability women feel in the face of rape culture. This conversation, however, is hardly new. Artists, activists, writers and musicians have told the stories of violated women across time — particularly since the 1990s, when popular music and feminism powerfully intersected in the pop mainstream and the musical underground. Here’s a list of twenty songs in which women said “me too” — without shame.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tori Amos, “Me And A Gun” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4KjmFMtiywPXyr6CbLOhY3\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This stark, semi-autobiographical monologue, which \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15182176/tori-amos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amos\u003c/a> wrote to be performed a capella, takes the listener within the mind of a woman being raped – and is based on details of the singer-songwriter’s own assault after a show when she was 21. The emotional centerpiece of her solo debut album \u003cem>Little Earthquakes\u003c/em>, it remains one of pop’s most intimate and forthright accounts of how women experience sexual violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>TLC, “His Story” (1992)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3naqVKAWQJyghdX9VzYEJA\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“‘His Story’ was happening before we were born,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15807876/tlc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TLC\u003c/a> member Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas said in a recent interview, addressing this song’s theme of society’s tendency to accept the male viewpoint on sexual assault, even in the most dubious circumstances. A protest song in the guise of a funk jam, TLC’s invective has been somewhat forgotten, perhaps because it was inspired by and mentioned the highly controversial \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/05/209194252/15-years-later-tawana-brawley-has-paid-1-percent-of-penalty\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tawana Brawley\u003c/a> case of 1987; its big-picture take still resonates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Au Pairs, “Armagh” (1981)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5OqNaCBBU7qK5TeUzREhx1\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sexual assault is always political, and sometimes it’s actually a tool of the state. The post-punk band Au Pairs – part of a vibrant feminist scene that arose in Northern England at the turn of the ’80s – made that reality explicit in this song, about female Irish Republican prisoners who were repeatedly strip-searched and reportedly violated as part of the daily routine in the Northern Irish prison of the song’s title. The women of Armagh conducted a \u003ca href=\"http://www.theirisharchives.com/articles/view/97/The-Women-Hunger-Strikers-Of-Armagh-Prison\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“dirty protest”\u003c/a> to call attention to their plight; this song captures its disgust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Liz Phair, “F*** and Run” (1993)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4MSdFtD1JPc2W3J13uJPeS\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15402643/liz-phair\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Phair\u003c/a>‘s album-length rejoinder to carelessly sexist indie rockers, \u003cem>Exile in Guyville\u003c/em>, is one of the finest accounts of all the crap that women put up with within music scenes. This deceptively wry ballad about one-night-stand Johnnies contains a shocking line — “even when I was twelve,” Phair sang, recalling all the times men enjoyed her body and then left her behind — that connects everyday, callous treatment to the larger culture of abuse that women must navigate, starting when they are girls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bikini Kill, “Liar” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/i1aycS7_P-M'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/i1aycS7_P-M'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The early ’90s Riot Grrrl movement brought the realities of rape culture into stark focus within an indie rock community that often presented itself as above “all that.” Kathleen Hanna, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/106311747/bikini-kill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bikini Kill\u003c/a>‘s vocalist and visionary, was the Cassandra who demanded that the men around her acknowledge that they, too, were part of the mass deceit that allows male perpetrators to “deny, deny, deny, deny.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fiona Apple, “Sullen Girl” (1996)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6cVxGzo7214XabSXFGasNl\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effects of sexual assault often, perhaps nearly always, last a lifetime. At 17, in this blunt, introspective, beautiful piano ballad, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15183593/fiona-apple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fiona Apple\u003c/a> revealed the aftermath of her rape at age 12. “My oblivion,” she called it, resurrecting herself through sheer grit and musicality, and guiding others to do the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Raincoats, “Off Duty Trip” (1979)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6hsh2tGBNL5WlaQLrD61P7\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rape culture is supported by a criminal justice system that can seem inclined towards preserving male power. (The recent case of Brock Turner, the Stanford student whose sentence was reduced by a judge concerned about its \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/07/02/the-judge-in-the-infamous-brock-turner-case-finally-explains-his-decision-a-year-later/?utm_term=.afbf2b168bee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">impact on his future\u003c/a>, is illustrative.) Post-punk greats \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/539037321/the-raincoats\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Raincoats\u003c/a> refer in this song to a much-publicized rape trial in which a British Army officer received lenient treatment from a judge concerned about his military standing, and contextualizes that outrage within a larger view of women’s objectification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rihanna, “Man Down” (2010)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/454h9zAIuTe1eJyw9iTnj4\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Barbadian queen of international pop has often alluded to sexualized violence in her songs, partly because of her own history, which includes surviving domestic assault by her then-boyfriend, the singer Chris Brown. This song takes on rape directly, and can be heard as a revenge fantasy aimed at the fiercely patriarchal culture of the Caribbean dancehall music it mines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>War On Women, “Say It” (2015)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0eta41JkL9xjzWxiPtuMEQ\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certain environments where male bonding is prioritized — fraternities, for example, or perhaps summer rock festivals — have proven particularly conducive to men who violate women. This past summer, the Baltimore band War On Women brought this demand to disrupt such enclaves to Warped Tour, and, perhaps predictably,\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.popsugar.com/news/How-Women-Warped-Tour-Pushing-Back-Against-Sexual-Harassment-43727311\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">endured a backlash\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah McLachlan, “Possession” (1993)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/28SynOAuafgfxvPXWFgS7D\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stalking – the relentless invasion of a woman’s space and privacy – is a major aspect of the culture of misogyny. In one of her most resonant and popular songs, Lilith Fair co-founder \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15397450/sarah-mclachlan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sarah McLachlan\u003c/a> claimed power over a fan who’d stalked her by imagining herself in his position, a chancy move that allowed her some sense of power. Though, she said, the experience had forced her to live with the constant fear that she \u003ca href=\"http://www.addictedtosongwriting.com/sarah-mclachlan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">might be raped\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser’s Option” (2017)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5RmAtT0VaKttU0Eybo6ZWA\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The #metoo hashtag rivets us because it feels urgent and new. But sexual assault is embedded in American culture, especially within the poison legacy of slavery. Newly minted MacArthur Foundation Genius \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/384980773/rhiannon-giddens\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rhiannon Giddens\u003c/a> brings listeners right into the bloodied heart of one enslaved woman impregnated by her rapist, whose resilience defied history itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eve, “Love is Blind” (1999)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0H2jfzzREOr9MF95HB7ry6\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What kind of love,” Eve asked in this song dedicated to a friend who’d been killed by her boyfriend, “make you wish he would die?” The cycle of domestic violence included rape, and the rap royal included it as part of this cry for justice, which ends in a scenario of revenge. “Love is Blind” is a swaggering achievement that stands against hip-hop’s longstanding practice of \u003ca href=\"http://uproxx.com/webculture/50-absurd-rape-lyrics/\">making light\u003c/a> of sexual assault and harassment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Otep, “Fillthee” (2001)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0AWMwRNXNc0bX2sPLWrxX7\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The atmospheres in which violence can be mounted against women are often aggressively male. Extreme heavy metal is, notoriously, a dude’s paradise; Otep Shamaya is one of the few women who has found stardom within it. From the start of her career, as in this song confronting the shame a rape victim feels, she has demanded that her peers acknowledge the ways in which they quash the feminine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Amy Grant, “Ask Me” (1991)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5rLGbtNvUB8nqyUNTRC5n9\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All too often, women have been taught to blame themselves for their own victimization. Sometimes religion has enforced this self-condemnation. Amy Grant, one of contemporary Christian music’s superstars, turns this shame around by telling the story of a sexually abused child in poignant detail before celebrating the girl’s redemption as a grown woman. Grant puts mercy before patriarchal judgment in her version of being born again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gillian Welch, “Caleb Meyer” (1998)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/170BlLwmzfaW7hlKCl24sb\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The murder ballad is a Euro-American traditional song form that forms one of the foundations of folk music. Through its many tales of lone male wolves strangling women or \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KvXteZkByE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pushing them into rivers\u003c/a>, it also normalizes misogyny. In this satisfying twist on the usual story, by Americana’s master storyteller \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15237439/gillian-welch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gillian Welch\u003c/a> and her partner David Rawlings, the titular character is a rapist who becomes a casualty of his own criminal act when his victim – a determined survivor – grabs a broken bottle and ends both the crime and his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Angel Haze, “Cleaning Out My Closet” (2012)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/olBOFLqEREI'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/olBOFLqEREI'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>One way that men have erased women’s accounts of their own realities is by treating misogyny as a joke. The Detroit rapper Angel Haze battles one of the masters of that despicable art, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15404635/eminem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eminem\u003c/a>, in this truth-baring session. The Eminem song that shares this title is uncharacteristically (and barely) tender, qualified by a final rhyme about almost shooting his ex-wife Kim. Haze’s is much deeper, detailing childhood trauma enacted by multiple abusers and ending with her listing its devastating effects on her psyche. The truth is not a punchline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Big Thief, “Coma” (2017)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0cMGrVR6OQoNZwgmtQ0jWC\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The crucial task of helping women recover from violence often falls to other women. In this gently redemptive song about recovery from \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/467816510/big-thief\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Big Thief\u003c/a> — a response to Big Thief’s “Watering,” which details an assault, possibly of the same woman — the band’s singer-guitarist and main songwriter Adrianne Lenker becomes that nurturing companion, helping a survivor understand that both her inner and outer world have forever changed with what she’s endured, but that she can still see light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kira Isabella, “Quarterback” (2014)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5aIPwyYKzd3RyPvhwloeoZ\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peer pressure and alcohol are two potent forces that both feed rape culture and, sometimes, protect its perpetrators. Canadian country artist Kira Isabella and her songwriting team (including Saving Jane’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/martilynndodson?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Marti Dodson\u003c/a>) capture that reality in the tale of a “no name girl from the freshman class” violated by the big man on campus and, in a tragic contemporary twist, by whatever witness chose to post images of the act on the Internet. Penn State and Steubenville are the backdrop for this all-too-familiar tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Petrol Girls, “Touch Me Again” (2016)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/21oFKSwN0SnBYC4bFtDZEI\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is about the really not-very-difficult idea that you shouldn’t f*** people if they don’t want to have sex with you, and you shouldn’t touch people if they don’t want to be touched,” said Ren Aldridge, vocalist and leader of this raucously righteous London-based hardcore band, introducing this song at a recent show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lady Gaga, “Til It Happens To You” (2015)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0bCCGLHflR08UVA6oJJc8I\" width=\"600\" height=\"80\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If today’s rejuvenated mainstream consciousness about sexual assault has an anthem it is this ballad, co-written by pop’s Mother Monster alongside Diane Warren, the mother of many other massive hits. Featured in \u003cem>The Hunting Ground\u003c/em>, a 2015 documentary about rape on college campuses, it’s a giant power ballad whose ultimate message is that only those who’ve survived sexual violence can understand it. Tragically, the past few days have indicated that most women are in that position; songs like this one resonate all too widely. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Songs+That+Say+%27Me+Too%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13811856/songs-that-say-me-too","authors":["byline_arts_13811856"],"categories":["arts_69","arts_235"],"tags":["arts_2798","arts_991","arts_1118","arts_2797","arts_596"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13811857","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13806312":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13806312","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13806312","score":null,"sort":[1503525511000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"in-reckoning-with-confederate-monuments-other-countries-could-provide-examples","title":"In Reckoning With Confederate Monuments, Other Countries Could Provide Examples","publishDate":1503525511,"format":"image","headTitle":"In Reckoning With Confederate Monuments, Other Countries Could Provide Examples | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center conducted \u003ca href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy\">a study\u003c/a> on public symbols of the Confederacy. The center found more than 700 Confederate monuments on public land in the U.S. — with nearly 300 in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the country, a fresh push is on to remove Confederate statues, the great majority of which were erected \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">well after the Civil War\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A protest linked to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Va., became a scene of violence, and officials elsewhere are moving swiftly to remove statues, hoping to keep their own towns and universities from becoming similarly embroiled. Monuments in cities including \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/16/543851420/baltimore-removes-confederate-statues-one-day-after-voting-on-issue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Baltimore\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/18/544407092/maryland-state-house-removes-statue-of-judge-who-wrote-dred-scott-decision\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Annapolis\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/21/544942064/confederate-statues-are-coming-down-at-the-university-of-texas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Austin\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/17/544235556/watch-protesters-try-to-surrender-in-solidarity-with-confederate-statue-topplers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Durham\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2017/05/20/529232823/with-lee-statues-removal-another-battle-of-new-orleans-comes-to-a-close\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Orleans\u003c/a> have already been taken down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments is uniquely American, the U.S. is not alone in reckoning with public symbols of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Taiwan\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taiwan has its own figure who lost a civil war, and whose cause retains support: Chiang Kai-shek, the then-president of the Republic of China who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing to the Communist army.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Statues of Chiang were erected all over Taiwan in an effort to cultivate allegiance to his government and a sense of national identity among the local population,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/asia/taiwan-statues-chiang-kai-shek-park.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">explains\u003c/a> \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>. But as Taiwan transitioned to democracy, many wanted the monuments to come down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t want to be part of China, and Chiang Kai-shek represents the idea that China possesses Taiwan,” historian Chen Yi-shen told the newspaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what to do with the statues? Taiwan opted to move more than 200 of them to a park in the northern part of the island, near Chiang’s mausoleum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But thousands more remain elsewhere on the island. Proposals to move the rest of them to the park have met resistance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, a statue of Chiang in Taipai was \u003ca href=\"http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2017/04/23/2003669253\">found decapitated\u003c/a> and splashed with red paint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806315\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"Workers dismantle an enormous monument to Lenin in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, in March 2016. It was the largest remaining Lenin statue in the country.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806315\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-520x390.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f.jpg 1983w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Workers dismantle an enormous monument to Lenin in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, in March 2016. It was the largest remaining Lenin statue in the country. \u003ccite>(Prylepa Leksander/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ukraine\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance says it has removed every one of the 1,320 statues of Lenin in the country, \u003cem>The Times\u003c/em> of London \u003ca href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-removes-all-1-320-statues-of-lenin-wqsz8b6nh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>, and destroyed another 1,069 Soviet-era monuments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The removal of the statues is part of a ban on Soviet-era symbols that was signed into law by President Poroshenko in May 2015,” the newspaper explains. “As well as the removal of statues and monuments, the law orders the renaming of thousands of streets, squares, towns and cities. However, the law cannot be enforced in those parts of eastern Ukraine under the control of Kremlin-backed rebels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the statues remained in place after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but they’ve since been toppled in waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some came down during the 2004 Orange Revolution, others in late 2013 during demonstrations against Ukraine’s president, and the rest since the new law went into effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most places have been renamed after Ukrainian heroes, but in the western region of Zakarpattia the authorities paid homage to the Beatles — changing Lenin Street to Lennon Street,” the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806316\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-800x599.jpg\" alt=\"Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is removed from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in April 2015.\" width=\"800\" height=\"599\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806316\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1920x1438.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-960x719.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-520x389.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is removed from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in April 2015. \u003ccite>(Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>South Africa\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes became the subject of student protests at the University of Cape Town in 2015.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Rhodes bequeathed the land on which the university was built, but he also slaughtered Africans by the thousands in colonial conquest and helped lay the foundations of apartheid in South Africa,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/28/395608605/why-south-african-students-say-the-statue-of-rhodes-must-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reported\u003c/a> NPR’s Don Boroughs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, Kgotsi Chikane, told NPR the statue needed to come down “not just because it makes people feel uncomfortable, but because it’s the biggest symbol of the institutionalization of racism. That’s why we wouldn’t want to pull it down ourselves. We want the university to acknowledge this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a month of demonstrations, the mainly white university council voted to take down the statue – a move Agence France Presse \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/09/university-cape-town-removes-statue-cecil-rhodes-celebration-afrikaner-protest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a> was welcomed by the government. “It marks a significant … shift where the country deals with its ugly past in a positive and constructive way,” a spokesman for the arts and culture ministry told the wire service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inspired by the students in Cape Town, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/oxford-university-oriel-college-cecil-rhodes-statue.html\">similar debate unfolded\u003c/a> over a statue of Rhodes at Oxford University in England. But the college — home to \u003ca href=\"http://www.rhodesscholar.org/\">Rhodes’ namesake scholarship\u003c/a> — decided to keep its monument in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s positive about this whole Rhodes Must Fall movement is that it’s drawing attention to our history,” Oxford vice chancellor Louise Richardson \u003ca href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/49e70004-b9f2-11e5-b151-8e15c9a029fb#axzz3ycCHQsOh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told\u003c/a> the \u003cem>Financial Times\u003c/em>. “We need to confront our history. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and I think if this encourages students to go to the Bodleian and look at the archives of the Rhodes period, there are some fabulous archives there both about colonialism and about the contemporary anti-Rhodes movement when he was alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806317\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-800x599.jpg\" alt='A woman takes pictures of the installation \"Beyond The Wall\" by German artist Stefan Roloff mounted on remnants of the former Berlin Wall earlier this month.' width=\"800\" height=\"599\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806317\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1920x1438.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-960x719.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-520x389.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A woman takes pictures of the installation “Beyond The Wall” by German artist Stefan Roloff mounted on remnants of the former Berlin Wall earlier this month. \u003ccite>(Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Germany\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Well, most of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berlin has preserved a section of the wall, creating what it says is “the longest-open air gallery in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just after the wall fell, artists from 21 countries began painting on it, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.visitberlin.de/en/east-side-gallery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Berlin’s official tourism site\u003c/a>: “In more than a hundred paintings on what was the east side of the wall, the artists commented on the political changes in 1989/90. Some of the works at the East Side Gallery are particularly popular, such as Dmitri Vrubel’s \u003cem>Fraternal Kiss\u003c/em>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>and Birgit Kinders’ Trabant breaking through the wall.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A new exhibit by German-American artist Stefan Roloff \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-art-idUSKBN1AQ1MW\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opened on the wall\u003c/a> this month, with photos of soldiers who patrolled the wall and the stories of those who lived behind it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elsewhere in Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker is marked only by a small sign outside a parking lot. “One reason for not preserving Hitler’s bunker was that it was feared that the site might become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis; a place of violence and shameless celebration of a history that should be shameful,” NPR’s Maggie Penman \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/08/16/543808019/the-view-of-charlottesville-from-berlin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+Reckoning+With+Confederate+Monuments%2C+Other+Countries+Could+Provide+Examples&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"The U.S. isn't alone in confronting sites dedicated to contentious, and often troubling, moments in its history.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029701,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":32,"wordCount":1158},"headData":{"title":"In Reckoning With Confederate Monuments, Other Countries Could Provide Examples | KQED","description":"The U.S. isn't alone in confronting sites dedicated to contentious, and often troubling, moments in its history.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"In Reckoning With Confederate Monuments, Other Countries Could Provide Examples","datePublished":"2017-08-23T21:58:31.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:21:41.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"Sam Yeh","nprByline":"Laurel Wamsley","nprImageAgency":"AFP/Getty Images","nprStoryId":"545308125","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=545308125&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/22/545308125/in-reckoning-with-confederate-monuments-other-countries-could-provide-examples?ft=nprml&f=545308125","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Wed, 23 Aug 2017 12:41:00 -0400","nprStoryDate":"Tue, 22 Aug 2017 20:21:00 -0400","nprLastModifiedDate":"Wed, 23 Aug 2017 12:41:45 -0400","path":"/arts/13806312/in-reckoning-with-confederate-monuments-other-countries-could-provide-examples","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center conducted \u003ca href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy\">a study\u003c/a> on public symbols of the Confederacy. The center found more than 700 Confederate monuments on public land in the U.S. — with nearly 300 in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the country, a fresh push is on to remove Confederate statues, the great majority of which were erected \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">well after the Civil War\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A protest linked to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Va., became a scene of violence, and officials elsewhere are moving swiftly to remove statues, hoping to keep their own towns and universities from becoming similarly embroiled. Monuments in cities including \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/16/543851420/baltimore-removes-confederate-statues-one-day-after-voting-on-issue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Baltimore\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/18/544407092/maryland-state-house-removes-statue-of-judge-who-wrote-dred-scott-decision\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Annapolis\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/21/544942064/confederate-statues-are-coming-down-at-the-university-of-texas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Austin\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/17/544235556/watch-protesters-try-to-surrender-in-solidarity-with-confederate-statue-topplers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Durham\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2017/05/20/529232823/with-lee-statues-removal-another-battle-of-new-orleans-comes-to-a-close\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Orleans\u003c/a> have already been taken down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments is uniquely American, the U.S. is not alone in reckoning with public symbols of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Taiwan\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taiwan has its own figure who lost a civil war, and whose cause retains support: Chiang Kai-shek, the then-president of the Republic of China who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing to the Communist army.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Statues of Chiang were erected all over Taiwan in an effort to cultivate allegiance to his government and a sense of national identity among the local population,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/asia/taiwan-statues-chiang-kai-shek-park.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">explains\u003c/a> \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>. But as Taiwan transitioned to democracy, many wanted the monuments to come down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t want to be part of China, and Chiang Kai-shek represents the idea that China possesses Taiwan,” historian Chen Yi-shen told the newspaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what to do with the statues? Taiwan opted to move more than 200 of them to a park in the northern part of the island, near Chiang’s mausoleum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But thousands more remain elsewhere on the island. Proposals to move the rest of them to the park have met resistance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, a statue of Chiang in Taipai was \u003ca href=\"http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2017/04/23/2003669253\">found decapitated\u003c/a> and splashed with red paint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806315\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"Workers dismantle an enormous monument to Lenin in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, in March 2016. It was the largest remaining Lenin statue in the country.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806315\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f-520x390.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-516153618-3eec2a26289aed0e2650e4950e2bf673e4a08d7f.jpg 1983w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Workers dismantle an enormous monument to Lenin in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, in March 2016. It was the largest remaining Lenin statue in the country. \u003ccite>(Prylepa Leksander/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ukraine\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance says it has removed every one of the 1,320 statues of Lenin in the country, \u003cem>The Times\u003c/em> of London \u003ca href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-removes-all-1-320-statues-of-lenin-wqsz8b6nh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>, and destroyed another 1,069 Soviet-era monuments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The removal of the statues is part of a ban on Soviet-era symbols that was signed into law by President Poroshenko in May 2015,” the newspaper explains. “As well as the removal of statues and monuments, the law orders the renaming of thousands of streets, squares, towns and cities. However, the law cannot be enforced in those parts of eastern Ukraine under the control of Kremlin-backed rebels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the statues remained in place after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but they’ve since been toppled in waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some came down during the 2004 Orange Revolution, others in late 2013 during demonstrations against Ukraine’s president, and the rest since the new law went into effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most places have been renamed after Ukrainian heroes, but in the western region of Zakarpattia the authorities paid homage to the Beatles — changing Lenin Street to Lennon Street,” the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806316\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-800x599.jpg\" alt=\"Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is removed from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in April 2015.\" width=\"800\" height=\"599\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806316\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1920x1438.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-960x719.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-469050932-62c30325bfafee8fffcb992af3b5208a7fb72826-520x389.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is removed from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in April 2015. \u003ccite>(Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>South Africa\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes became the subject of student protests at the University of Cape Town in 2015.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Rhodes bequeathed the land on which the university was built, but he also slaughtered Africans by the thousands in colonial conquest and helped lay the foundations of apartheid in South Africa,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/28/395608605/why-south-african-students-say-the-statue-of-rhodes-must-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reported\u003c/a> NPR’s Don Boroughs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, Kgotsi Chikane, told NPR the statue needed to come down “not just because it makes people feel uncomfortable, but because it’s the biggest symbol of the institutionalization of racism. That’s why we wouldn’t want to pull it down ourselves. We want the university to acknowledge this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a month of demonstrations, the mainly white university council voted to take down the statue – a move Agence France Presse \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/09/university-cape-town-removes-statue-cecil-rhodes-celebration-afrikaner-protest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a> was welcomed by the government. “It marks a significant … shift where the country deals with its ugly past in a positive and constructive way,” a spokesman for the arts and culture ministry told the wire service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inspired by the students in Cape Town, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/oxford-university-oriel-college-cecil-rhodes-statue.html\">similar debate unfolded\u003c/a> over a statue of Rhodes at Oxford University in England. But the college — home to \u003ca href=\"http://www.rhodesscholar.org/\">Rhodes’ namesake scholarship\u003c/a> — decided to keep its monument in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s positive about this whole Rhodes Must Fall movement is that it’s drawing attention to our history,” Oxford vice chancellor Louise Richardson \u003ca href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/49e70004-b9f2-11e5-b151-8e15c9a029fb#axzz3ycCHQsOh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told\u003c/a> the \u003cem>Financial Times\u003c/em>. “We need to confront our history. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and I think if this encourages students to go to the Bodleian and look at the archives of the Rhodes period, there are some fabulous archives there both about colonialism and about the contemporary anti-Rhodes movement when he was alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806317\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-800x599.jpg\" alt='A woman takes pictures of the installation \"Beyond The Wall\" by German artist Stefan Roloff mounted on remnants of the former Berlin Wall earlier this month.' width=\"800\" height=\"599\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13806317\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1920x1438.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-960x719.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-829017238-ba57262a1fb98bbedac94f8d2cba6deef8c815c4-520x389.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A woman takes pictures of the installation “Beyond The Wall” by German artist Stefan Roloff mounted on remnants of the former Berlin Wall earlier this month. \u003ccite>(Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Germany\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Well, most of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berlin has preserved a section of the wall, creating what it says is “the longest-open air gallery in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just after the wall fell, artists from 21 countries began painting on it, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.visitberlin.de/en/east-side-gallery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Berlin’s official tourism site\u003c/a>: “In more than a hundred paintings on what was the east side of the wall, the artists commented on the political changes in 1989/90. Some of the works at the East Side Gallery are particularly popular, such as Dmitri Vrubel’s \u003cem>Fraternal Kiss\u003c/em>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>and Birgit Kinders’ Trabant breaking through the wall.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A new exhibit by German-American artist Stefan Roloff \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-art-idUSKBN1AQ1MW\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opened on the wall\u003c/a> this month, with photos of soldiers who patrolled the wall and the stories of those who lived behind it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elsewhere in Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker is marked only by a small sign outside a parking lot. “One reason for not preserving Hitler’s bunker was that it was feared that the site might become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis; a place of violence and shameless celebration of a history that should be shameful,” NPR’s Maggie Penman \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/08/16/543808019/the-view-of-charlottesville-from-berlin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+Reckoning+With+Confederate+Monuments%2C+Other+Countries+Could+Provide+Examples&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13806312/in-reckoning-with-confederate-monuments-other-countries-could-provide-examples","authors":["byline_arts_13806312"],"categories":["arts_235","arts_70"],"tags":["arts_1448","arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13806313","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13805975":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13805975","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13805975","score":null,"sort":[1503154833000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"iconic-plague-images-are-often-not-what-they-seem","title":"Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem","publishDate":1503154833,"format":"standard","headTitle":"Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>Many of the images we associate with the plague actually depict leprosy or smallpox. In fact, there are very few images of the Black Death from the time of the scourge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few weeks ago, I reported \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/29/534863486/the-bubonic-plague-is-back-this-time-in-new-mexico\">a story\u003c/a> about three cases of the plague in New Mexico. The bacterial illness pops up fairly regularly across the globe and is now easily treatable with antibiotics, if caught in time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story ran with an iconic image of the plague from a 15th-century Italian document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805977\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"A 15th-century Bible depicts a couple suffering from the blisters of bubonic plague. The same bacterium that ravaged medieval Europe, where the disease was known as the Black Death, occasionally re-emerges.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805977\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-520x390.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf.jpg 1901w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 15th-century Bible depicts a couple suffering from the blisters of bubonic plague. The same bacterium that ravaged medieval Europe, where the disease was known as the Black Death, occasionally re-emerges. \u003ccite>(Corbis)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But, as historian \u003ca href=\"https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/384868\">Monica H. Green\u003c/a> swiftly \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/monicaMedHist/status/880851932402798592\">pointed out\u003c/a> on Twitter, the image doesn’t actually depict the plague. The patients shown are suffering from leprosy. So, we took the image down and replaced it with another iconic image of the plague, made about 50 years earlier and published in a Swiss Bible. That one, it turns out, doesn’t show the Black Death, either. The people in it are also lepers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805976\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-800x626.jpe\" alt=\"A 15th-century image by Jacopo Oddi from the 'La Franceschina' codex depicts Franciscan monks treating victims of the plague in Italy.\" width=\"800\" height=\"626\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805976\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-800x626.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-160x125.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-768x601.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1020x798.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1920x1501.jpe 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1180x923.jpe 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-960x751.jpe 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-240x188.jpe 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-375x293.jpe 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-520x407.jpe 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced.jpe 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 15th-century image by Jacopo Oddi from the ‘La Franceschina’ codex depicts Franciscan monks treating victims of the plague in Italy. \u003ccite>(A. Dagli Orti/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We’d made the same mistake twice. D’oh!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You and a lot of other people,” says Green, a historian with Arizona State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As her colleague Lori Jones \u003ca href=\"http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(16)30119-0/fulltext\">makes clear in the journal\u003c/a> \u003cem>The Lancet Infectious Diseases, \u003c/em>NPR is far from the first organization to make exactly the same succession of image mistakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most of the images we associate with plague are actually leprosy,” says \u003ca href=\"https://arts.uottawa.ca/history/people/jones-lori\">Jones\u003c/a>, a historian of medieval and early modern medicine at the University of Ottawa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s yet another iconic image from James le Palmer’s \u003cem>Omne Bonum\u003c/em>, a 14th-century encyclopedia. The image has been \u003ca href=\"http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13/\">commonly mistaken\u003c/a> as depicting the Black Death, including in an exhibit on the epidemic at the Museum of London in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805993\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-800x800.jpg\" alt=\"This image in a 14th-century encyclopedia called the 'Omne Bonum' shows a priest giving instructions to people with leprosy. The British Library mislabeled the image as depicting plague victims.\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805993\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-240x240.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-375x375.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-520x520.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-50x50.jpg 50w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This image in a 14th-century encyclopedia called the ‘Omne Bonum’ shows a priest giving instructions to people with leprosy. The British Library mislabeled the image as depicting plague victims. \u003ccite>(The British Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Historians like Jones and Green are trying to correct such mistakes with websites including NPR, the BBC, Wikipedia and, most importantly, in libraries and art resource databases, including The British Library and Getty Images, that distribute the images.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It gives a misrepresentation of what the plague actually looked like and what people’s experience was of it,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to understand how it happened. A domino effect of misunderstanding, they say, likely originated with incorrect captioning by libraries and subsequently by art resource databases where journalists purchase photos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the pictures that have been mislabeled as the plague, we see in them what we want to see of the plague,” says Jones. We see groups of victims mid-demise, covered in lesions, reaching up to the heavens for help that we know won’t come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost everything about that is wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First off, there were a lot fewer spots involved. People in the mislabeled images tend to be covered from head to toe in red lesions. Some patients probably \u003cem>did\u003c/em> get petechial hemorrhaging — pinpoint dark spots of blood under the skin. But today, as in the past, plague victims would only have had one bump on their bodies — a big swollen lymph node called a “bubo” close to where they were bitten by a flea carrying the infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806001\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 721px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4.jpg\" alt=\"This woodblock print from Germany in the late 15th century is meant to show doctors how to lance a bubo, which was thought to be how to get rid of the plague.\" width=\"721\" height=\"1025\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13806001\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4.jpg 721w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-160x227.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-240x341.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-375x533.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-520x739.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 721px) 100vw, 721px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This woodblock print from Germany in the late 15th century is meant to show doctors how to lance a bubo, which was thought to be how to get rid of the plague. \u003ccite>(Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This is not to say they looked good. They were probably sweating and shivering with fevers, and they supposedly smelled terrible, says Jones, “because their bodies were breaking down from the inside.” But those aren’t characteristics that would stand out in an illustration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Second, while they certainly must have done their fair share of praying to the saints for recovery, they also knew much more about infectious disease than we give them credit for. Plague inspired the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html\">first known use\u003c/a> of the quarantine, a word that comes from the Italian term for “40 days,” the amount of time that ships had to stay offshore before anyone was allowed to set foot on the ground. It also inspired an early version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/27/359323578/new-yorks-disease-detectives-hit-the-street-in-search-of-ebola\">contact tracing\u003c/a>, where medical practitioners would search for neighbors and relatives who’d been in contact with a plague victim and isolate them to prevent further infectious spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The incorrect images, Green says, scratch our plague itch. “They fulfill our image of infectious disease,” she says, but they’re wrong. “This is the big hoodwinking everyone has participated in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what medieval illustrations actually \u003cem>do \u003c/em>depict the plague?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From what I’ve been able to find, there are no contemporary images of what the plague looks like,” says Jones, the historian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There just aren’t images of what it was like to suffer from the Black Death drawn during the time of the Black Death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between about 1347 and 1353, the Black Death wiped out an estimated 50 percent of the European population. It was horrendous. “People were terrified,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You’d think, Jones says, “that if this was such a major catastrophe, there must be drawings of it. But there aren’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those that do exist are in line with how we show terrible epidemics today — lots of social chaos and death, rather than a detailed focus on the disease and its symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One scene, in book written in the 1340s by a man named Gilles li Muisit, shows a scene of people carrying coffins of those who died during the Black Death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805979\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-800x566.jpg\" alt=\"This is one of the earliest known images of the plague. Drawn in 1349, during the time of the Black Death, it shows people carrying coffins of those who died of the illness in Tournai, a city in what is now Belgium.\" width=\"800\" height=\"566\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805979\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-800x566.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-768x543.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1020x722.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1920x1358.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1180x835.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-960x679.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-240x170.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-375x265.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-520x368.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This is one of the earliest known images of the plague. Drawn in 1349, during the time of the Black Death, it shows people carrying coffins of those who died of the illness in Tournai, a city in what is now Belgium. \u003ccite>(UIG via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“He doesn’t depict the physical symptoms of the plague. He depicts the social devastation — just that social chaos of having to deal with mass death,” says Green.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another image from the 1340s shows Jews, who were blamed for the Black Death, being burned alive in what’s now Switzerland and Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805995\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-800x481.jpg\" alt=\"In this history book written in the 1340s by the French chronicler and poet Gilles li Muisis, residents of a town stricken by the plague burn Jews, who were blamed for causing the disease.\" width=\"800\" height=\"481\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805995\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-160x96.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-768x462.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-240x144.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-375x225.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-520x313.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In this history book written in the 1340s by the French chronicler and poet Gilles li Muisis, residents of a town stricken by the plague burn Jews, who were blamed for causing the disease. \u003ccite>(Royal Library of Belgium)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Why didn’t artists show people suffering from the disease itself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe it was because the artists themselves were too busy dying of the plague to draw other people dying of the plague. Maybe they were fine, and just really scared of picking up the disease from their subjects. Or maybe the plague became so commonplace back then that people didn’t consider it worth depicting — just like how today, doctors and scientists don’t go out of their way to publish images and reports of chicken pox.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It would be like us publishing in the medical literature about a regular case of flu — we don’t waste our time on that in medical literature today. How often are there pictures of measles?” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe it was because at the time of the Black Death itself, people had no idea what was killing everyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/index.html\">first recorded pandemic\u003c/a>, the Plague of Justinian, had ended 700 years earlier. Detailed records existed, but they were mostly written in Syriac or Greek and had remained in the Middle East. The only records available in Western Europe spoke about the plague in vague terms — there was lots of talk about death and demise, but not a lot of specifics on the disease’s progression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They just had no concept of this disease at all,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t until about a century after the Black Death ended that people in Western Europe started connecting the dots. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, records of the much earlier scourge made their way to Western Europe with fleeing Christian scholars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And people in Europe, where smaller outbreaks continued to pop up every 10 to 15 years through the 1720s, started connecting the dots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They started going, ‘Wait a minute, this has happened before,’ ” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally, people started drawing the plague and its symptoms. This one from the 1490s shows St. Sebastian praying on behalf of people suffering from or killed by the plague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805996\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-800x1194.jpg\" alt=\"St. Sebastian, one of the saints that people prayed to for protection against the plague, kneels before God while a grave attendant is stricken with the plague as he's burying someone else who died of the disease. He has a single bubo on his bent neck. It was painted by French artist Josse Lieferinxe at the end of the 15th century.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1194\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805996\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-160x239.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-768x1146.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-240x358.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-375x560.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-520x776.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">St. Sebastian, one of the saints that people prayed to for protection against the plague, kneels before God while a grave attendant is stricken with the plague as he’s burying someone else who died of the disease. He has a single bubo on his bent neck. It was painted by French artist Josse Lieferinxe at the end of the 15th century. \u003ccite>(The Walters Art Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Note that these people are not at all covered in spots. You have to look closely to notice the swollen red lump — the bubo — on the neck of the man on the ground in green sleeves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this image from 1500, the plague patient points to a bubo in his armpit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medical illustrations from the late 1400s, like this one from France, are meant to teach medical practitioners how to lance a bubo to get the infection out of it (something along the lines of “poke it with a sharp stick”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what the plague actually looked like to people who were around to experience it. The images don’t show much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Jones says, who are we to criticize?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We judge medieval people for not having these images on the Black Death, but where’s our modern image of it?” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, plague is still around in many parts of the world, including in the U.S. Where are the images of buboes on American plague patients this year? How about \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/03/09/the-plague-alive-and-well-in-madagascar/?utm_term=.8f8c9f8524ff\">photos of plague-\u003c/a>suffering in Madagascar, where a recent outbreak killed dozens? And, after all, how many of us could describe what a person suffering from Ebola \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/28/366790665/test-your-medical-smarts-does-this-patient-have-ebola\">actually looks like\u003c/a>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are always constructing a narrative,” says Green. And often that narrative has much more to do with conveying emotion than medical facts. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Iconic+Plague+Images+Are+Often+Not+What+They+Seem&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Many images that have been used traditionally to depict the Black Death are, in fact, not images of the plague at all. Now, a group of dedicated historians are trying to correct the record.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029728,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":47,"wordCount":1833},"headData":{"title":"Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem | KQED","description":"Many images that have been used traditionally to depict the Black Death are, in fact, not images of the plague at all. Now, a group of dedicated historians are trying to correct the record.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem","datePublished":"2017-08-19T15:00:33.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:22:08.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"A. Dagli Orti","nprByline":"Rae Ellen Bichell","nprImageAgency":"Getty Images","nprStoryId":"542435991","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=542435991&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/18/542435991/those-iconic-images-of-the-plague-thats-not-the-plague?ft=nprml&f=542435991","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:14:00 -0400","nprStoryDate":"Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:14:23 -0400","nprLastModifiedDate":"Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:14:23 -0400","path":"/arts/13805975/iconic-plague-images-are-often-not-what-they-seem","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Many of the images we associate with the plague actually depict leprosy or smallpox. In fact, there are very few images of the Black Death from the time of the scourge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few weeks ago, I reported \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/29/534863486/the-bubonic-plague-is-back-this-time-in-new-mexico\">a story\u003c/a> about three cases of the plague in New Mexico. The bacterial illness pops up fairly regularly across the globe and is now easily treatable with antibiotics, if caught in time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story ran with an iconic image of the plague from a 15th-century Italian document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805977\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"A 15th-century Bible depicts a couple suffering from the blisters of bubonic plague. The same bacterium that ravaged medieval Europe, where the disease was known as the Black Death, occasionally re-emerges.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805977\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf-520x390.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/42-24063922-25-e928d9481b2569af610bde0d1fee97c7ace752cf.jpg 1901w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 15th-century Bible depicts a couple suffering from the blisters of bubonic plague. The same bacterium that ravaged medieval Europe, where the disease was known as the Black Death, occasionally re-emerges. \u003ccite>(Corbis)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But, as historian \u003ca href=\"https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/384868\">Monica H. Green\u003c/a> swiftly \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/monicaMedHist/status/880851932402798592\">pointed out\u003c/a> on Twitter, the image doesn’t actually depict the plague. The patients shown are suffering from leprosy. So, we took the image down and replaced it with another iconic image of the plague, made about 50 years earlier and published in a Swiss Bible. That one, it turns out, doesn’t show the Black Death, either. The people in it are also lepers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805976\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-800x626.jpe\" alt=\"A 15th-century image by Jacopo Oddi from the 'La Franceschina' codex depicts Franciscan monks treating victims of the plague in Italy.\" width=\"800\" height=\"626\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805976\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-800x626.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-160x125.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-768x601.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1020x798.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1920x1501.jpe 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-1180x923.jpe 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-960x751.jpe 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-240x188.jpe 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-375x293.jpe 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced-520x407.jpe 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/plague_custom-52add211fa3187a41c1ca5892706a5d64840eced.jpe 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 15th-century image by Jacopo Oddi from the ‘La Franceschina’ codex depicts Franciscan monks treating victims of the plague in Italy. \u003ccite>(A. Dagli Orti/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We’d made the same mistake twice. D’oh!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You and a lot of other people,” says Green, a historian with Arizona State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As her colleague Lori Jones \u003ca href=\"http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(16)30119-0/fulltext\">makes clear in the journal\u003c/a> \u003cem>The Lancet Infectious Diseases, \u003c/em>NPR is far from the first organization to make exactly the same succession of image mistakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most of the images we associate with plague are actually leprosy,” says \u003ca href=\"https://arts.uottawa.ca/history/people/jones-lori\">Jones\u003c/a>, a historian of medieval and early modern medicine at the University of Ottawa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s yet another iconic image from James le Palmer’s \u003cem>Omne Bonum\u003c/em>, a 14th-century encyclopedia. The image has been \u003ca href=\"http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13/\">commonly mistaken\u003c/a> as depicting the Black Death, including in an exhibit on the epidemic at the Museum of London in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805993\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-800x800.jpg\" alt=\"This image in a 14th-century encyclopedia called the 'Omne Bonum' shows a priest giving instructions to people with leprosy. The British Library mislabeled the image as depicting plague victims.\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805993\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-240x240.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-375x375.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-520x520.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-50x50.jpg 50w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/3_custom-f3ddc5146515095812bec0f297316a90f9fbbf66-s800-c85-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This image in a 14th-century encyclopedia called the ‘Omne Bonum’ shows a priest giving instructions to people with leprosy. The British Library mislabeled the image as depicting plague victims. \u003ccite>(The British Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Historians like Jones and Green are trying to correct such mistakes with websites including NPR, the BBC, Wikipedia and, most importantly, in libraries and art resource databases, including The British Library and Getty Images, that distribute the images.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It gives a misrepresentation of what the plague actually looked like and what people’s experience was of it,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to understand how it happened. A domino effect of misunderstanding, they say, likely originated with incorrect captioning by libraries and subsequently by art resource databases where journalists purchase photos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the pictures that have been mislabeled as the plague, we see in them what we want to see of the plague,” says Jones. We see groups of victims mid-demise, covered in lesions, reaching up to the heavens for help that we know won’t come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost everything about that is wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First off, there were a lot fewer spots involved. People in the mislabeled images tend to be covered from head to toe in red lesions. Some patients probably \u003cem>did\u003c/em> get petechial hemorrhaging — pinpoint dark spots of blood under the skin. But today, as in the past, plague victims would only have had one bump on their bodies — a big swollen lymph node called a “bubo” close to where they were bitten by a flea carrying the infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13806001\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 721px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4.jpg\" alt=\"This woodblock print from Germany in the late 15th century is meant to show doctors how to lance a bubo, which was thought to be how to get rid of the plague.\" width=\"721\" height=\"1025\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13806001\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4.jpg 721w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-160x227.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-240x341.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-375x533.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-4-520x739.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 721px) 100vw, 721px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This woodblock print from Germany in the late 15th century is meant to show doctors how to lance a bubo, which was thought to be how to get rid of the plague. \u003ccite>(Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This is not to say they looked good. They were probably sweating and shivering with fevers, and they supposedly smelled terrible, says Jones, “because their bodies were breaking down from the inside.” But those aren’t characteristics that would stand out in an illustration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Second, while they certainly must have done their fair share of praying to the saints for recovery, they also knew much more about infectious disease than we give them credit for. Plague inspired the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html\">first known use\u003c/a> of the quarantine, a word that comes from the Italian term for “40 days,” the amount of time that ships had to stay offshore before anyone was allowed to set foot on the ground. It also inspired an early version of \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/27/359323578/new-yorks-disease-detectives-hit-the-street-in-search-of-ebola\">contact tracing\u003c/a>, where medical practitioners would search for neighbors and relatives who’d been in contact with a plague victim and isolate them to prevent further infectious spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The incorrect images, Green says, scratch our plague itch. “They fulfill our image of infectious disease,” she says, but they’re wrong. “This is the big hoodwinking everyone has participated in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what medieval illustrations actually \u003cem>do \u003c/em>depict the plague?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From what I’ve been able to find, there are no contemporary images of what the plague looks like,” says Jones, the historian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There just aren’t images of what it was like to suffer from the Black Death drawn during the time of the Black Death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between about 1347 and 1353, the Black Death wiped out an estimated 50 percent of the European population. It was horrendous. “People were terrified,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You’d think, Jones says, “that if this was such a major catastrophe, there must be drawings of it. But there aren’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those that do exist are in line with how we show terrible epidemics today — lots of social chaos and death, rather than a detailed focus on the disease and its symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One scene, in book written in the 1340s by a man named Gilles li Muisit, shows a scene of people carrying coffins of those who died during the Black Death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805979\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-800x566.jpg\" alt=\"This is one of the earliest known images of the plague. Drawn in 1349, during the time of the Black Death, it shows people carrying coffins of those who died of the illness in Tournai, a city in what is now Belgium.\" width=\"800\" height=\"566\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805979\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-800x566.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-768x543.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1020x722.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1920x1358.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-1180x835.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-960x679.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-240x170.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-375x265.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/gettyimages-535795241-50_custom-24857a8478a44a190d409bcd1b48148eb631dff7-520x368.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This is one of the earliest known images of the plague. Drawn in 1349, during the time of the Black Death, it shows people carrying coffins of those who died of the illness in Tournai, a city in what is now Belgium. \u003ccite>(UIG via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“He doesn’t depict the physical symptoms of the plague. He depicts the social devastation — just that social chaos of having to deal with mass death,” says Green.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another image from the 1340s shows Jews, who were blamed for the Black Death, being burned alive in what’s now Switzerland and Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805995\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-800x481.jpg\" alt=\"In this history book written in the 1340s by the French chronicler and poet Gilles li Muisis, residents of a town stricken by the plague burn Jews, who were blamed for causing the disease.\" width=\"800\" height=\"481\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805995\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-160x96.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-768x462.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-240x144.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-375x225.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-2-520x313.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In this history book written in the 1340s by the French chronicler and poet Gilles li Muisis, residents of a town stricken by the plague burn Jews, who were blamed for causing the disease. \u003ccite>(Royal Library of Belgium)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Why didn’t artists show people suffering from the disease itself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe it was because the artists themselves were too busy dying of the plague to draw other people dying of the plague. Maybe they were fine, and just really scared of picking up the disease from their subjects. Or maybe the plague became so commonplace back then that people didn’t consider it worth depicting — just like how today, doctors and scientists don’t go out of their way to publish images and reports of chicken pox.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It would be like us publishing in the medical literature about a regular case of flu — we don’t waste our time on that in medical literature today. How often are there pictures of measles?” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe it was because at the time of the Black Death itself, people had no idea what was killing everyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/index.html\">first recorded pandemic\u003c/a>, the Plague of Justinian, had ended 700 years earlier. Detailed records existed, but they were mostly written in Syriac or Greek and had remained in the Middle East. The only records available in Western Europe spoke about the plague in vague terms — there was lots of talk about death and demise, but not a lot of specifics on the disease’s progression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They just had no concept of this disease at all,” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t until about a century after the Black Death ended that people in Western Europe started connecting the dots. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, records of the much earlier scourge made their way to Western Europe with fleeing Christian scholars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And people in Europe, where smaller outbreaks continued to pop up every 10 to 15 years through the 1720s, started connecting the dots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They started going, ‘Wait a minute, this has happened before,’ ” says Jones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally, people started drawing the plague and its symptoms. This one from the 1490s shows St. Sebastian praying on behalf of people suffering from or killed by the plague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13805996\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-800x1194.jpg\" alt=\"St. Sebastian, one of the saints that people prayed to for protection against the plague, kneels before God while a grave attendant is stricken with the plague as he's burying someone else who died of the disease. He has a single bubo on his bent neck. It was painted by French artist Josse Lieferinxe at the end of the 15th century.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1194\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13805996\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-160x239.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-768x1146.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-240x358.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-375x560.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/08/bubonic-plague-3-520x776.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">St. Sebastian, one of the saints that people prayed to for protection against the plague, kneels before God while a grave attendant is stricken with the plague as he’s burying someone else who died of the disease. He has a single bubo on his bent neck. It was painted by French artist Josse Lieferinxe at the end of the 15th century. \u003ccite>(The Walters Art Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Note that these people are not at all covered in spots. You have to look closely to notice the swollen red lump — the bubo — on the neck of the man on the ground in green sleeves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this image from 1500, the plague patient points to a bubo in his armpit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medical illustrations from the late 1400s, like this one from France, are meant to teach medical practitioners how to lance a bubo to get the infection out of it (something along the lines of “poke it with a sharp stick”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what the plague actually looked like to people who were around to experience it. The images don’t show much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Jones says, who are we to criticize?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We judge medieval people for not having these images on the Black Death, but where’s our modern image of it?” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, plague is still around in many parts of the world, including in the U.S. Where are the images of buboes on American plague patients this year? How about \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/03/09/the-plague-alive-and-well-in-madagascar/?utm_term=.8f8c9f8524ff\">photos of plague-\u003c/a>suffering in Madagascar, where a recent outbreak killed dozens? And, after all, how many of us could describe what a person suffering from Ebola \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/28/366790665/test-your-medical-smarts-does-this-patient-have-ebola\">actually looks like\u003c/a>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"floatright"},"numeric":["floatright"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are always constructing a narrative,” says Green. And often that narrative has much more to do with conveying emotion than medical facts. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Iconic+Plague+Images+Are+Often+Not+What+They+Seem&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13805975/iconic-plague-images-are-often-not-what-they-seem","authors":["byline_arts_13805975"],"categories":["arts_70"],"tags":["arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13805976","label":"arts_137"},"arts_13740275":{"type":"posts","id":"arts_13740275","meta":{"index":"posts_1591205157","site":"arts","id":"13740275","score":null,"sort":[1501014811000]},"guestAuthors":[],"slug":"the-enduring-legacy-of-jane-austens-truth-universally-acknowledged","title":"The Enduring Legacy of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'","publishDate":1501014811,"format":"standard","headTitle":"The Enduring Legacy of Jane Austen’s ‘Truth Universally Acknowledged’ | KQED","labelTerm":{"term":137,"site":"arts"},"content":"\u003cp>\u003cem>Geoff Nunberg (\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GeoffNunberg\">@GeoffNunberg\u003c/a>) \u003cem>is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It’s not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen’s novel had been exactly 200 years earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can argue about whether that’s the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of \u003cem>Moby Dick\u003c/em> or \u003cem>A Tale of Two Cities\u003c/em> or \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>. But there’s no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re looking to add a literary touch to your article on \u003ca href=\"http://www.pensions-expert.com/index.php/DC-Auto-enrolment/Default-DC-structures-require-closer-scrutiny\">pension schemes\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"http://humblebeehome.blogspot.com/2014/02/it-is-truth-universally-acknowledged.html\">emergency contraceptives\u003c/a>, you’re not going to get very far with “Call me Ishmael.” But “It is a truth universally acknowledged” is always available as an elegant replacement for “As everybody knows” when you want to introduce some banal truism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The phrase is ubiquitous in the age of Jane-o-mania. Rummage around on the Internet and you’ll learn that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a “pop star in possession of a good fortune must be \u003ca href=\"https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/08/13/fans-show-pride-in-jane-austen-and-prejudice-against-kelly-clarkson/\">in want of baubles\u003c/a>,” that business class \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelocal.no/20170404/10-reasons-to-get-on-board-with-qatar-airways-qsuite-qatar-tlccu\">is more comfortable\u003c/a> than economy, that “\u003ca href=\"https://www.yahoo.com/style/grandpa-got-stood-internet-isnt-155500930.html\">online dating sucks\u003c/a>” and, needless to say, that Jane Austen “\u003ca href=\"http://ew.com/article/2013/01/28/pride-and-prejudice-anniversary-colin-firth/?http://p=872946\">has left quite a mark\u003c/a> on pop culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the puzzling thing. Those adaptations of Austen’s sentence are almost never ironic or facetious. They only underscore the prevailing wisdom, rather than throwing it into question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet my guess is that a large portion of the people who adapt that sentence know perfectly well that the original version is anything but straightforward. It may be the single most celebrated example of literary irony in all of English literature. Pick up a paperback of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> at a garage sale and it’s even money you’ll find the first sentence underlined with “IRONY” written in the margin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sentence may look like a truism, but the first part actually undermines the second. In her book \u003cem>Why Jane Austen\u003c/em>, Rachel Brownstein points out that if the novel had begun simply with “A single man possessed of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” we’d snuggle in for a stock romantic story. We might expect the next sentence to describe an aristocratic Colin Firth lookalike galloping full-tilt toward the Bennets’ house at Longbourn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But prefacing that clause with “It is a truth universally acknowledged” implies that’s only what most people say they believe — after all, if everybody really does accept it, why bother to mention the fact? In fact, as Austen says in the following sentence, nobody really cares what the wealthy man himself thinks he needs. There’s only one truth that matters to Mrs. Bennet and the other families in the neighborhood — that a daughter who has no fortune must be found a well-to-do husband to look after her, which Mrs. Bennet has made “the business of her life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we suspect that Austen has her reservations about that single-minded pursuit of an advantageous marriage, even if she doesn’t say so outright. And we’re flattered to think that she counts on astute readers like us to pick up on that, while others will miss it. It makes us feel complicit with her. As the modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1920, “every true admirer of [Austen’s] novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone — reading between the lines — has become the secret friend of their author.” (That pronoun “he” gives us a start now, but bear in mind that back then the most prominent Austen devotees were the male literati of the Bloomsbury set.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Austen’s sentence is a masterpiece of indirection, and it’s no wonder that people keep trying to repurpose it in the hope that they can pluck it from its original context and its irony will somehow cling to its roots. But that can’t happen without the covert wink, the tip-off to the sharp reader that the truth isn’t as pat as the rest of the sentence makes it seem. Otherwise, the phrase is an empty gesture. It merely signifies irony, the way an empire waistline or a neck cloth signifies Regency gentility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OK, it’s just a sentence. But it points to what always happens when Austen is repackaged for export. There have been some wonderful stage, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk4hAHHB7L8\">film\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_(1980_TV_series)\">TV adaptations\u003c/a> of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> over the years. But as charming as they are, they can only depict the second half of that opening sentence, the Colin Firth \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hasKmDr1yrA\">bits\u003c/a>. We get a beguiling story of romance and courtship. But we don’t see it at Austen’s skeptical remove. We miss the arched eyebrow, the sly and confiding voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the paradox of Austen’s novels. Like the opening sentence of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em>, they cry out for adaptation. They seem infinitely resilient: You can relocate them to \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/07/17/423740582/in-clothes-and-language-clueless-offered-counterpoint-to-grunge-crowd\">Beverly Hills\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha_(film)\">Delhi\u003c/a>; rewrite them as \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142848012/pride-and-prejudice-meets-clue-at-pemberley\">murder mysteries\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/thank-the-bbc-for-jane-austen-erotica/412039/\">erotica\u003c/a>; populate them with \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?id=rrYemmZ_P5gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false\">vampires\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2016/02/04/465305804/these-zombies-make-an-austen-update-even-the-undead-cant-revive\">zombies\u003c/a> — they’ll always retain some trace of their original appeal. Yet there are few other novels so unwilling to give up their souls. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Enduring+Legacy+Of+Jane+Austen%27s+%27Truth+Universally+Acknowledged%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n","blocks":[],"excerpt":"Linguist Geoff Nunberg describes the opening sentence to \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> as a \"masterpiece of indirection\" that is frequently repurposed, but whose irony is never matched.","status":"publish","parent":0,"modified":1705029958,"stats":{"hasAudio":false,"hasVideo":false,"hasChartOrMap":false,"iframeSrcs":[],"hasGoogleForm":false,"hasGallery":false,"hasHearkenModule":false,"hasPolis":false,"paragraphCount":16,"wordCount":1038},"headData":{"title":"The Enduring Legacy of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged' | KQED","description":"Linguist Geoff Nunberg describes the opening sentence to Pride and Prejudice as a "masterpiece of indirection" that is frequently repurposed, but whose irony is never matched.","ogTitle":"","ogDescription":"","ogImgId":"","twTitle":"","twDescription":"","twImgId":"","schema":{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"The Enduring Legacy of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'","datePublished":"2017-07-25T20:33:31.000Z","dateModified":"2024-01-12T03:25:58.000Z","image":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KQED-OG-Image@1x.png"}},"sticky":false,"nprImageCredit":"De Agostini Picture Library","nprByline":"Geoff Nunberg","nprImageAgency":"Getty Images","nprStoryId":"538609475","nprApiLink":"http://api.npr.org/query?id=538609475&apiKey=MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004","nprHtmlLink":"http://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/538609475/the-enduring-legacy-of-jane-austens-truth-universally-acknowledged?ft=nprml&f=538609475","nprRetrievedStory":"1","nprPubDate":"Tue, 25 Jul 2017 15:16:00 -0400","nprStoryDate":"Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:09:00 -0400","nprLastModifiedDate":"Tue, 25 Jul 2017 15:16:05 -0400","nprAudio":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2017/07/20170725_fa_02.mp3?orgId=427869011&topicId=1057&d=347&p=13&story=538609475&t=progseg&e=539238756&seg=2&ft=nprml&f=538609475","nprAudioM3u":"http://api.npr.org/m3u/1539315286-1d154b.m3u?orgId=427869011&topicId=1057&d=347&p=13&story=538609475&t=progseg&e=539238756&seg=2&ft=nprml&f=538609475","path":"/arts/13740275/the-enduring-legacy-of-jane-austens-truth-universally-acknowledged","audioUrl":"https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2017/07/20170725_fa_02.mp3?orgId=427869011&topicId=1057&d=347&p=13&story=538609475&t=progseg&e=539238756&seg=2&ft=nprml&f=538609475","audioTrackLength":null,"parsedContent":[{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Geoff Nunberg (\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GeoffNunberg\">@GeoffNunberg\u003c/a>) \u003cem>is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It’s not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen’s novel had been exactly 200 years earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can argue about whether that’s the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of \u003cem>Moby Dick\u003c/em> or \u003cem>A Tale of Two Cities\u003c/em> or \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>. But there’s no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re looking to add a literary touch to your article on \u003ca href=\"http://www.pensions-expert.com/index.php/DC-Auto-enrolment/Default-DC-structures-require-closer-scrutiny\">pension schemes\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"http://humblebeehome.blogspot.com/2014/02/it-is-truth-universally-acknowledged.html\">emergency contraceptives\u003c/a>, you’re not going to get very far with “Call me Ishmael.” But “It is a truth universally acknowledged” is always available as an elegant replacement for “As everybody knows” when you want to introduce some banal truism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}},{"type":"component","content":"","name":"ad","attributes":{"named":{"label":"fullwidth"},"numeric":["fullwidth"]}},{"type":"contentString","content":"\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The phrase is ubiquitous in the age of Jane-o-mania. Rummage around on the Internet and you’ll learn that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a “pop star in possession of a good fortune must be \u003ca href=\"https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/08/13/fans-show-pride-in-jane-austen-and-prejudice-against-kelly-clarkson/\">in want of baubles\u003c/a>,” that business class \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelocal.no/20170404/10-reasons-to-get-on-board-with-qatar-airways-qsuite-qatar-tlccu\">is more comfortable\u003c/a> than economy, that “\u003ca href=\"https://www.yahoo.com/style/grandpa-got-stood-internet-isnt-155500930.html\">online dating sucks\u003c/a>” and, needless to say, that Jane Austen “\u003ca href=\"http://ew.com/article/2013/01/28/pride-and-prejudice-anniversary-colin-firth/?http://p=872946\">has left quite a mark\u003c/a> on pop culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the puzzling thing. Those adaptations of Austen’s sentence are almost never ironic or facetious. They only underscore the prevailing wisdom, rather than throwing it into question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet my guess is that a large portion of the people who adapt that sentence know perfectly well that the original version is anything but straightforward. It may be the single most celebrated example of literary irony in all of English literature. Pick up a paperback of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> at a garage sale and it’s even money you’ll find the first sentence underlined with “IRONY” written in the margin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sentence may look like a truism, but the first part actually undermines the second. In her book \u003cem>Why Jane Austen\u003c/em>, Rachel Brownstein points out that if the novel had begun simply with “A single man possessed of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” we’d snuggle in for a stock romantic story. We might expect the next sentence to describe an aristocratic Colin Firth lookalike galloping full-tilt toward the Bennets’ house at Longbourn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But prefacing that clause with “It is a truth universally acknowledged” implies that’s only what most people say they believe — after all, if everybody really does accept it, why bother to mention the fact? In fact, as Austen says in the following sentence, nobody really cares what the wealthy man himself thinks he needs. There’s only one truth that matters to Mrs. Bennet and the other families in the neighborhood — that a daughter who has no fortune must be found a well-to-do husband to look after her, which Mrs. Bennet has made “the business of her life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we suspect that Austen has her reservations about that single-minded pursuit of an advantageous marriage, even if she doesn’t say so outright. And we’re flattered to think that she counts on astute readers like us to pick up on that, while others will miss it. It makes us feel complicit with her. As the modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1920, “every true admirer of [Austen’s] novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone — reading between the lines — has become the secret friend of their author.” (That pronoun “he” gives us a start now, but bear in mind that back then the most prominent Austen devotees were the male literati of the Bloomsbury set.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Austen’s sentence is a masterpiece of indirection, and it’s no wonder that people keep trying to repurpose it in the hope that they can pluck it from its original context and its irony will somehow cling to its roots. But that can’t happen without the covert wink, the tip-off to the sharp reader that the truth isn’t as pat as the rest of the sentence makes it seem. Otherwise, the phrase is an empty gesture. It merely signifies irony, the way an empire waistline or a neck cloth signifies Regency gentility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OK, it’s just a sentence. But it points to what always happens when Austen is repackaged for export. There have been some wonderful stage, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk4hAHHB7L8\">film\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_(1980_TV_series)\">TV adaptations\u003c/a> of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em> over the years. But as charming as they are, they can only depict the second half of that opening sentence, the Colin Firth \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hasKmDr1yrA\">bits\u003c/a>. We get a beguiling story of romance and courtship. But we don’t see it at Austen’s skeptical remove. We miss the arched eyebrow, the sly and confiding voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the paradox of Austen’s novels. Like the opening sentence of \u003cem>Pride and Prejudice\u003c/em>, they cry out for adaptation. They seem infinitely resilient: You can relocate them to \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2015/07/17/423740582/in-clothes-and-language-clueless-offered-counterpoint-to-grunge-crowd\">Beverly Hills\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha_(film)\">Delhi\u003c/a>; rewrite them as \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142848012/pride-and-prejudice-meets-clue-at-pemberley\">murder mysteries\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/thank-the-bbc-for-jane-austen-erotica/412039/\">erotica\u003c/a>; populate them with \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?id=rrYemmZ_P5gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false\">vampires\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2016/02/04/465305804/these-zombies-make-an-austen-update-even-the-undead-cant-revive\">zombies\u003c/a> — they’ll always retain some trace of their original appeal. Yet there are few other novels so unwilling to give up their souls. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Enduring+Legacy+Of+Jane+Austen%27s+%27Truth+Universally+Acknowledged%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>","attributes":{"named":{},"numeric":[]}}],"link":"/arts/13740275/the-enduring-legacy-of-jane-austens-truth-universally-acknowledged","authors":["byline_arts_13740275"],"series":["arts_4414"],"categories":["arts_73"],"tags":["arts_991","arts_1118","arts_596","arts_4358"],"affiliates":["arts_137"],"featImg":"arts_13740282","label":"arts_137"}},"programsReducer":{"possible":{"id":"possible","title":"Possible","info":"Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. 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Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.","airtime":"SUN 2pm","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg","officialWebsiteLink":"https://www.possible.fm/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"Possible"},"link":"/radio/program/possible","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/possible/id1677184070","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"}},"1a":{"id":"1a","title":"1A","info":"1A is home to the national conversation. 1A brings on great guests and frames the best debate in ways that make you think, share and engage.","airtime":"MON-THU 11pm-12am","imageSrc":"https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/1a.jpg","officialWebsiteLink":"https://the1a.org/","meta":{"site":"news","source":"npr"},"link":"/radio/program/1a","subscribe":{"npr":"https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/RBrW","apple":"https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=1188724250&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory","tuneIn":"https://tunein.com/radio/1A-p947376/","rss":"https://feeds.npr.org/510316/podcast.xml"}},"all-things-considered":{"id":"all-things-considered","title":"All Things Considered","info":"Every weekday, \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> hosts Robert Siegel, Audie Cornish, Ari Shapiro, and Kelly McEvers present the program's trademark mix of news, interviews, commentaries, reviews, and offbeat features. 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You ask the questions. You decide what Bay Curious investigates. And you join us on the journey to find the answers.","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Bay-Curious-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg","imageAlt":"\"KQED Bay Curious","officialWebsiteLink":"/news/series/baycurious","meta":{"site":"news","source":"kqed","order":"4"},"link":"/podcasts/baycurious","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406","npr":"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious","rss":"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/category/bay-curious-podcast/feed/podcast","google":"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvbmV3cy9jYXRlZ29yeS9iYXktY3VyaW91cy1wb2RjYXN0L2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdA","stitcher":"https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/bay-curious","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/6O76IdmhixfijmhTZLIJ8k"}},"bbc-world-service":{"id":"bbc-world-service","title":"BBC World Service","info":"The day's top stories from BBC News compiled twice daily in the week, once at weekends.","airtime":"MON-FRI 9pm-10pm, TUE-FRI 1am-2am","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/BBC-World-Service-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg","officialWebsiteLink":"https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_world_service","meta":{"site":"news","source":"BBC World Service"},"link":"/radio/program/bbc-world-service","subscribe":{"apple":"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/global-news-podcast/id135067274?mt=2","tuneIn":"https://tunein.com/radio/BBC-World-Service-p455581/","rss":"https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0gn.rss"}},"code-switch-life-kit":{"id":"code-switch-life-kit","title":"Code Switch / Life Kit","info":"\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />","airtime":"SUN 9pm-10pm","imageSrc":"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Code-Switch-Life-Kit-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg","meta":{"site":"radio","source":"npr"},"link":"/radio/program/code-switch-life-kit","subscribe":{"apple":"https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/1112190608?mt=2&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory","google":"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy","spotify":"https://open.spotify.com/show/3bExJ9JQpkwNhoHvaIIuyV","rss":"https://feeds.npr.org/510312/podcast.xml"}},"commonwealth-club":{"id":"commonwealth-club","title":"Commonwealth Club of California Podcast","info":"The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. 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