Stream Joni Mitchell’s Complete Discography: A 17-Hour Playlist Moving from Song to a Seagull (1968) to Shine (2007)

in Music | October 24th, 2017

In “Fear of a Female Genius,” a recent essay on Joni Mitchell, Lind­say Zoladz explains why “one of the great­est liv­ing artists in pop­u­lar music still isn’t prop­er­ly rec­og­nized.” If you’re think­ing that has some­thing to do with gen­der bias, it does. But there’s so much more to Mitchell’s com­plex sto­ry. Those who ful­ly embrace her are an eclec­tic group with lean­ings, like Mitchell, toward folk, jazz, clas­si­cal, and instru­men­tal music world­wide: some­times all at once. Despite occa­sion­al breezy plain­spo­ken­ness, she nev­er makes for easy lis­ten­ing.

Her albums take us on wind­ing jour­neys through pecu­liar­ly evoca­tive lyri­cal tableaus, rich with unex­pect­ed, even jar­ring, images. Even the most acces­si­ble songs—for exam­ple, Court and Spark’s Burt Bacharach-like “Help Me”—spin like ver­ti­go-induc­ing roller coast­ers, lit­tle gyres pow­ered by bound­less cre­ative ener­gy. Her most pop­u­lar tunes glow with a world­ly-wise inten­si­ty all their own. Hear them all, from 1968’s Song to a Seag­ull to 2007’s Shine, in the 18-hour Spo­ti­fy playlist below. Or access it direct­ly here.

The idio­syn­crat­ic beau­ty of Mitchell’s music, woven from shim­mer­ing tonal pat­terns, shift­ing polyrhythms, and odd tim­ings and tun­ings, defies the labels we might apply. “I think when you lis­ten to Court and Spark,” says Bar­ney Hoskyns, edi­tor of a new anthol­o­gy of writ­ing about Mitchell, “you can’t real­ly sit there and say, ‘Well this is just pop music.’ You have to think of it on a lev­el with the great­est art that’s been done in the last hun­dred years.” If Bob Dylan “is sort of Shake­speare,” Hoskyns says, “then Joni Mitchell is Mil­ton… or Dante,” two writ­ers whose labyrinthine verse often pos­es sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges for read­ers.

These kinds of “crass analo­gies,” as Hoskyns terms it, might seem off-putting and pre­ten­tious. But if it seems like Mitchell’s name appears more in the com­pa­ny of famous men than women, it’s an asso­ci­a­tion she made her­self.  “Most of my heroes are mon­sters, unfor­tu­nate­ly,” she has said, “and they are men.” Pablo Picas­so, Miles Davis, Charles Min­gus, whose sur­name Mitchell took for the title of her tenth album…. “This kind of male-hero wor­ship,” writes Zoladz, “has made Mitchell a dif­fi­cult fig­ure to some fem­i­nist crit­ics.”

Indeed, there is some­thing “inter­net-proof” about Mitchell—her “unruli­ness” and unwill­ing­ness to remain in one place, to play the roles assigned her, to adopt hip stances, pan­der, or deny her­self the free­dom to move in unfa­mil­iar artis­tic direc­tions, mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies and risk­ing mis­steps more cau­tious artists would avoid.

Chuck Mitchell, the estranged ex-hus­band and musi­cal part­ner who seemed to resent her incred­i­ble tal­ent, called her odd tun­ings “mys­ti­cal.” But she resists the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of her play­ing as strange. “How can there be weird chords?” she asks; “these chords that I heard inside that suit­ed me—they feel like my feel­ings.” As much as her work has emerged from her admi­ra­tion of male heroes and col­lab­o­ra­tors, it has also been defined by escape from the restric­tions men in her life might place on her, from Mitchell to Gra­ham Nash, whose mar­riage pro­pos­al she declined. “As much as I loved and cared for Gra­ham,” she remem­bered lat­er, “I just thought, I’m gonna end up like my grand­moth­er, kick­ing the door off the hinges, you know what I mean? It’s like, I bet­ter not.”

Albums like Heji­ra—her ver­sion of an Ara­bic word mean­ing some­thing like “jour­ney to a bet­ter place”—and The Hiss­ing of Sum­mer Lawns, with its night­mare vision of domes­tic­i­ty, doc­u­ment Mitchell’s release from the snares of mar­riage. But it has been dif­fi­cult for the 21st cen­tu­ry to come to terms with her for oth­er rea­sons. Her casu­al appro­pri­a­tion of cul­tur­al tropes and her deci­sion to appear in lit­er­al black­face, not only at a Hal­loween par­ty but on the cov­er of 1977’s Don Juan’s Reck­less Daugh­ter, have been called marks of poor taste, at best. Her albums became increas­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal in the late 70s, show­cas­ing a pas­tiche of influ­ences and guest musi­cians over­lay­ing her already unusu­al musi­cal­i­ty, and alien­at­ing many of her fans.

As she left behind the “con­fes­sion­al” voice of albums like 1971’s crit­i­cal­ly-vaunt­ed Blue and head­ed into weird­er ter­ri­to­ry, she lost lis­ten­ers and crit­ics, who sav­aged abstract projects like The Hiss­ing of Sum­mer Lawns, only to find, forty years lat­er, that these were essen­tial works of art pushed aside by the weight of expec­ta­tion. Mitchell had been push­ing against that weight her entire life. Like some oth­er unique­ly tal­ent­ed guitarists—Django Rein­hardt, Tony Iommi—her style devel­oped around a dis­abil­i­ty, in her case a left hand weak­ened by the polio she had as a child in Cana­da. “So she invent­ed her own way of play­ing,” writes Zoladz, and invent­ed her own way of being in the music busi­ness and the world at large. “For good and at times for ill, Joni Mitchell believes she is a genius.” Spend some time with her discog­ra­phy and you may find it hard to dis­agree with her.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the 150 Great­est Albums by Women: NPR Cre­ates a New Canon of Albums That Puts Women at the Cen­ter of Music His­to­ry

For Joni Mitchell’s 70th Birth­day, Watch Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

Vin­tage Video of Joni Mitchell Per­form­ing in 1965 — Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hallelujah!: You Can Stream Every Leonard Cohen Album in a 22-Hour Chronological Playlist (1967–2016)

in Music | October 18th, 2017

Every­body knows the war is over. Every­body knows the good guys lost.

Per­haps no one since Thomas Hardy has matched Leonard Cohen in the dogged per­sis­tence of lit­er­ary bleak­ness. Cohen’s entry into a Zen monastery in 1996 was a “response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had,” he said in an inter­view that year. Ten years lat­er, Cohen told Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, “I had a great sense of dis­or­der in my life of chaos, of depres­sion, of dis­tress. And I had no idea where this came from. And the pre­vail­ing psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic expla­na­tions at the time didn’t seem to address the things I felt.”

Only a hand­ful of peo­ple on the plan­et have expe­ri­enced the “life of chaos” Leonard Cohen lived as an acclaimed poet, nov­el­ist, singer, and one of the most beloved song­writ­ers of the last sev­er­al decades. But mil­lions iden­ti­fy with his emo­tion­al tur­moil. Cohen’s expres­sions of despair—and of rev­er­ence, defi­ance, love, hatred, and lust—speak across gen­er­a­tions, telling truths few of us con­fess but, just maybe, every­body knows. Cohen’s death last year brought his career back into focus. And despite the mourn­ful occa­sion for revis­it­ing his work, he may be just the song­writer many of us need right now.

The great themes in Cohen’s work come togeth­er in his most famous song, “Hal­lelu­jah,” which has, since he first record­ed it in 1984 to lit­tle notice, become “everybody’s ‘Hal­lelu­jah,’” writes Ash­ley Fet­ters at The Atlantic, in a suc­ces­sion of cov­ers and inter­pre­ta­tions from Jeff Buck­ley and Rufus Wain­wright to Shrek and The X Fac­tor. It is here that the depths of despair and heights of tran­scen­dence meet, the sex­u­al and the spir­i­tu­al reach an accord: “This world is full of con­flicts and full of things that can­not be rec­on­ciled,” Cohen has said of the song. “But there are moments when we can… rec­on­cile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hal­lelu­jah.’”

Every­body knows it’s a mess. But it often takes a Leonard Cohen to con­vince us that—at least sometimes—it’s a beau­ti­ful one. If you feel you need more Leonard Cohen in your life, we bring you the playlist above, a com­plete chrono­log­i­cal discog­ra­phy avail­able on Spo­ti­fy—from the sparse, haunt­ing folk melodies of Cohen’s first album, 1967’s The Songs of Leonard Cohen to last year’s grip­ping swan song, You Want It Dark­er. In-between the leg­endary debut and mas­ter­ful sum­ma­tion are sev­er­al live albums, the clas­sics Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and oth­ers, as well as that odd 1988 album I’m Your Man, in which Cohen set his grim ironies and uni­ver­sal truths to the sounds of eight­ies synth-pop, inton­ing over slap bass and drum machine the indeli­ble, gen­tly mock­ing lyrics he co-wrote with fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Sharon Robin­son:

Every­body knows that the boat is leak­ing
Every­body knows that the cap­tain lied
Every­body got this bro­ken feel­ing
Like their father or their dog just died
Every­body talk­ing to their pock­ets
Every­body wants a box of choco­lates
And a long-stem rose
Every­body knows

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Say Good­bye to Leonard Cohen Through Some of His Best-Loved Songs: “Hal­lelu­jah,” “Suzanne” and 235 Oth­er Tracks

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

A 17-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Jour­ney Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Sound­tracks of Our Lives

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear 1,500+ Genres of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insanely Thorough Interactive Graph

in Music, Technology | October 13th, 2017

If you are ready for a time-suck inter­net expe­ri­ence that will also make you feel slight­ly old and out of step with the cul­ture, feel free to dive into Every Noise at Once. A scat­ter-plot of over 1,530 musi­cal gen­res sourced from Spotify’s lists and based on 35 mil­lion songs,  Every Noise at Once is a bold attempt at musi­cal tax­on­o­my. The Every Noise at Once web­site was cre­at­ed by Glenn McDon­ald, and is an off­shoot of his work at Echo Nest (acquired by Spo­ti­fy in 2014).

McDon­ald explains his graph thus:

This is an ongo­ing attempt at an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly-gen­er­at­ed, read­abil­i­ty-adjust­ed scat­ter-plot of the musi­cal genre-space, based on data tracked and ana­lyzed for 1,536 gen­res by Spo­ti­fy. The cal­i­bra­tion is fuzzy, but in gen­er­al down is more organ­ic, up is more mechan­i­cal and elec­tric; left is denser and more atmos­pher­ic, right is spiki­er and bounci­er.

It’s also egal­i­tar­i­an, with world dom­i­nat­ing “rock-and-roll” giv­en the same space and size as its neigh­bors choro (instru­men­tal Brazil­ian pop­u­lar music), cow­boy-west­ern (Con­way Twit­ty, Mer­le Hag­gard, et. al.), and Indi­an folk (Asha Bhosle, for exam­ple). It also makes for some strange bed­fel­lows: what fac­tor does musique con­crete share with “Chris­t­ian relax­i­tive” oth­er than “rea­sons my col­lege room­mate and I nev­er got along.” Now you can find out!

Click on any of the gen­res and you’ll hear a sam­ple of that music. Dou­ble click and you’ll be tak­en to a sim­i­lar scat­ter-plot graph of its most pop­u­lar artists, this time with font size denot­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and a sim­i­lar sam­ple of their music.

I’ve been spend­ing most of my time explor­ing up in the top right cor­ner where all sorts of elec­tron­ic dance sub­gen­res hang out. I’m not too sure what dif­fer­en­ti­ates “deep tech house” from “deep deep house” or “deep min­i­mal tech­no” or “tech house” or even “deep melod­ic euro house” but I now know where to come for a refresh­er course.

Spo­ti­fy and oth­er ser­vices depend on algo­rithms and tax­onomies like this to deliv­er con­sis­tent lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences to its users, and they were attract­ed to Echo Nest for its work with gen­res. Echo Nest was orig­i­nal­ly based on the dis­ser­ta­tion work of Tris­tan Jehan and Bri­an Whit­man at the MIT Media Lab, who over a decade ago were try­ing to under­stand the “fin­ger­prints” of record­ed music. Now when you lis­ten to Spotify’s per­son­al­ized playlists, Echo Nest’s research is the engine work­ing in the back­ground.

McDon­ald says in this 2014 Dai­ly Dot arti­cle this isn’t about a machine guess­ing our taste.

“No, the machines don’t know us bet­ter than we do. But they can very eas­i­ly know more than we do. My job is not to tell you what to lis­ten to, or to pass judg­ment on things or ‘make taste.’ It’s to help you explore and dis­cov­er. Your taste is your busi­ness. Under­stand­ing your taste and sit­u­at­ing it in some intel­li­gi­ble con­text is my busi­ness.”

If you’d like a more pas­sive jour­ney through the ever expand­ing music genre uni­verse, there’s a Spo­ti­fy playlist of one song from each genre (all 1,500+) above. See you in the deep, deep house!

via Kottke.org

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Elling­ton Cre­at­ed Sound­tracks for Noir Films & TV

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Napoleon’s Kindle: See the Miniaturized Traveling Library He Took on Military Campaigns

in Books, History | October 12th, 2017

Every piece of tech­nol­o­gy has a prece­dent. Most have sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of prece­dents. You’ve prob­a­bly used (and may well own) an eBook read­er, for instance, but what would have afford­ed you a selec­tion of read­ing mate­r­i­al two or three cen­turies ago? If you were a Jacobean Eng­lish­man of means, you might have used the kind of trav­el­ing library we fea­tured in August, a hand­some portable case cus­tom-made for your books. (If you’re Tom Stop­pard in the 21st cen­tu­ry, you still do.) If you were Napoleon, who seemed to love books as much as he loved mil­i­tary pow­er — he did­n’t just amass a vast col­lec­tion of them, but kept a per­son­al librar­i­an to over­see it — you’d take it a big step fur­ther.

“Many of Napoleon’s biog­ra­phers have inci­den­tal­ly men­tioned that he […] used to car­ry about a cer­tain num­ber of favorite books wher­ev­er he went, whether trav­el­ing or camp­ing,” says an 1885 Sacra­men­to Dai­ly Union arti­cle post­ed by Austin Kleon, “but it is not gen­er­al­ly known that he made sev­er­al plans for the con­struc­tion of portable libraries which were to form part of his bag­gage.” The piece’s main source, a Lou­vre librar­i­an who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librar­i­ans, recalls from his father’s sto­ries that “for a long time Napoleon used to car­ry about the books he required in sev­er­al box­es hold­ing about six­ty vol­umes each,” each box first made of mahogany and lat­er of more sol­id leather-cov­ered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or vel­vet, and the books were bound in moroc­co,” an even soft­er leather most often used for book­bind­ing.

To use this ear­ly trav­el­ing library, Napoleon had his atten­dants con­sult “a cat­a­logue for each case, with a cor­re­spond­ing num­ber upon every vol­ume, so that there was nev­er a moment’s delay in pick­ing out any book that was want­ed.” This worked well enough for a while, but even­tu­al­ly “Napoleon found that many books which he want­ed to con­sult were not includ­ed in the col­lec­tion,” for obvi­ous rea­sons of space. And so, on July 8, 1803, he sent his librar­i­an these orders:

The Emper­or wish­es you to form a trav­el­ing library of one thou­sand vol­umes in small 12mo and print­ed in hand­some type. It is his Majesty’s inten­tion to have these works print­ed for his spe­cial use, and in order to econ­o­mize space there is to be no mar­gin to them. They should con­tain from five hun­dred to six hun­dred pages, and be bound in cov­ers as flex­i­ble as pos­si­ble and with spring backs. There should be forty works on reli­gion, forty dra­mat­ic works, forty vol­umes of epic and six­ty of oth­er poet­ry, one hun­dred nov­els and six­ty vol­umes of his­to­ry, the remain­der being his­tor­i­cal mem­oirs of every peri­od.

In sum: not only did Napoleon pos­sess a trav­el­ing library, but when that trav­el­ing library proved too cum­ber­some for his many and var­ied lit­er­ary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cas­es but even more portable books made for him. (You can see how they looked packed away in the image tweet­ed by Cork Coun­ty Library above.) This pre­fig­ured in a high­ly ana­log man­ner the dig­i­tal-age con­cept of recre­at­ing books in anoth­er for­mat specif­i­cal­ly for com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience — the kind of com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience now increas­ing­ly avail­able to all of us today, and to a degree Napoleon nev­er could have imag­ined, let alone demand­ed. It’s always good to be the Emper­or, but in many ways, it’s bet­ter to be a read­er in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Vin­tage Pho­tos of Vet­er­ans of the Napoleon­ic Wars, Tak­en Cir­ca 1858

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Alan Watts Explains the Meaning of the Tao, with the Help of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn

in Comics/Cartoons, Life, Philosophy | October 9th, 2017

A Nan­cy pan­el is an irre­ducible con­cept, an atom, and the com­ic strip is a mol­e­cule. — comics the­o­rist Scott McCloud

A lit­tle over ten years ago, car­toon­ist Jim Woodring iso­lat­ed a sin­gle image from Ernie Bushmiller’s long-run­ning and deeply polar­iz­ing Nan­cy com­ic strip, cel­e­brat­ing it on his blog, the Woodring Mon­i­tor, as “the great­est Nan­cy pan­el ever drawn.”

What makes this pan­el the great­est? Woodring declined to elab­o­rate, though his read­ers eager­ly shared the­o­ries—and some befuddlement—in the com­ments sec­tion:

Slug­go has reached the per­fect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the “small mind” and all of the suf­fer­ing that comes with it.

… it’s the com­ic equiv­a­lent of a koan—something designed to tie our ratio­nal mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlight­en­ment.

Slug­go smiles because he knows a secret. He says no because he rejects con­sen­sus real­i­ty. He floats along because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the main­te­nance of the har­mo­ny and is one with that har­mo­ny. He knows all paths lead away from home. Instead he goes with­in and knows free­dom.

“I am con­tent. I need noth­ing, I will do noth­ing, I am fine as I am.”

Anoth­er fan, Glyph Jock­ey’s Lex 10, took it one step fur­ther, remov­ing the speech bub­ble before tak­ing Slug­go on an ani­mat­ed trip through the cos­mos, nar­rat­ed by philoso­pher Alan Watts:

In the state of being in accor­dance with the Tao, there is a cer­tain feel­ing of weight­less­ness, par­al­lel to the weight­less­ness that peo­ple feel when they get into out­er space or when they go deep into the ocean.

Gab­by Pahinui’s “Pu’uanahulu” and Ramayana imagery bestow added hyp­not­ic appeal.

Revis­it this strange lit­tle ani­mat­ed gem the next time your head­’s about to explode from stress. Don’t ques­tion or get too hung up on mean­ings, just go with the flow, like Slug­go and Watts.

Could oth­er Nan­cy pan­els serve as vehi­cles for Taoist enlight­en­ment? May­haps:

Bushmiller’s strong point was nev­er the con­tent of his com­ic strip’s jokey plots—a friend once described him as ‘a moron on an acid trip.’ In fact, the gags were even sim­pler than was nec­es­sary for a ‘chil­dren’s’ strip. That’s because they were just a vehi­cle for the con­trolled and bril­liant manip­u­la­tion of rep­e­ti­tion and vari­ety that gave the strip its unique visu­al rhythm and com­po­si­tion. Bush­miller chore­o­graphed his famil­iar for­mal ele­ments inside the tight­est frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beau­ti­ful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” — Tom Smuck­er, The Vil­lage Voice, 1982

Recent­ly, Bushmiller’s Nan­cy has been enjoy­ing a renais­sance. The strip that many casu­al read­ers of the fun­ny pages dis­missed as bor­ing or dumb is revered by many cel­e­brat­ed car­toon­ists, includ­ing Bill Grif­fith, Daniel Clowes, and Art Spiegel­man.

This month sees the pub­li­ca­tion of Paul Karasik and Mark New­gar­den’s How to Read Nan­cy, a book length analy­sis of one sin­gle strip, which also func­tions as a how-to and his­to­ry of the com­ic medi­um. This hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed vol­ume has in turn giv­en rise to a live­ly online How To Read Nan­cy Read­ing Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered pan­els, and Nan­cy strips from around the world.

Invite your pals over to play com­ic the­o­rist Scott McCloud’s Dadaist game Five Card Nan­cy or take the online ver­sion for a solo spin.

And for those who require con­text, here is the orig­i­nal strip from which the float­ing Slug­go pan­el is drawn.

Appar­ent­ly the key to the Tao is a plas­tic ham­mock…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Philosophy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Dedicated to Revealing the Truth About De-Evolution

in Art, Music | October 4th, 2017

The chief dif­fi­cul­ty for any­one want­i­ng to make an assault on our munic­i­pal the­atre… is that there can be no ques­tion of reveal­ing a mys­tery. He can­not just point a stumpy fin­ger at the theatre’s ongo­ings and say, “You may have thought this amount­ed to some­thing, but let me tell you, it’s a sheer scan­dal; what you see before you proves your absolute bank­rupt­cy; it’s your own stu­pid­i­ty, your men­tal lazi­ness and your degen­er­a­cy that are being pub­li­cal­ly exposed.” No, the poor man can’t say that, for it’s no sur­prise to you; you’ve known it all along; noth­ing can be done about it.

–Berthold Brecht, “A Reck­on­ing”

Have you ever felt like Net­work’s Howard Beale? Rant­i­ng to any­one who’ll lis­ten about how mad as hell you are? “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Every­body knows things are bad.”

Or maybe agreed with the weary cyn­i­cism of his boss, Max Schu­mach­er? “All of life is reduced to the com­mon rub­ble of banal­i­ty.”

Faced with the cru­el, stu­pid the­ater of mass pol­i­tics and cul­ture, we begin to feel a blan­ket of over­whelm­ing futil­i­ty descend. All of the pos­si­ble moves have been made and absorbed into the programming—including the out­raged crit­ic point­ing his fin­ger at the stage.

Avant-garde artists since the late 19th cen­tu­ry have cor­rect­ly sized up this depress­ing real­i­ty. But rather than seize up in fits of rage or suc­cumb to cyn­i­cism, they made new forms of the­ater: Jar­ry, Dada, Debord, Artaud, Brecht—all had designs to dis­rupt the oppres­sive banal­i­ty of mod­ern stage- and state-craft with mock­ery, sadism, and shock.

And so too did DEVO, the authors of “Whip It.”

Their 80s New Wave antics seemed like a juve­nile art-school prank. Behind it lay the­o­ret­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion and seri­ous polit­i­cal intent. “When we first start­ed Devo,” says Mark Moth­ers­baugh in the “Cal­i­for­nia Inspires Me” video above, “we were artists who were work­ing in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent media. We were around for the shoot­ings at Kent State. And it affect­ed us. We were think­ing, like, ‘What are we observ­ing?’ And we decid­ed we weren’t observ­ing evo­lu­tion, we were observ­ing de-evo­lu­tion.”

Won­der­ing how to change things, the band looked to Madi­son Avenue for inspiration—intent on tak­ing the tech­niques of mass per­sua­sion to sub­vert the enchant­ments of mass per­sua­sion, “report­ing the good news of De-Evo­lu­tion” in a joy­ous the­ater of mock­ery. The phi­los­o­phy itself evolved over time, first tak­ing shape in 1970 when Moth­ers­baugh and Ger­ald Casale met at Kent State. Casale had already coined the term “De-Evo­lu­tion”; Moth­ers­baugh intro­duced him to its mas­cot, Jocko-Homo, the 1924 cre­ation of anti-evo­lu­tion fun­da­men­tal­ist pam­phle­teer B.H. Shad­duck.

Fas­ci­nat­ed by Shadduck’s bizarre, pro­to-Jack Chick, illus­trat­ed freak-outs, Moth­ers­baugh and his band­mates adopt­ed the char­ac­ter for the first sin­gle from their 1978 debut album (top). Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! announced their car­ni­va­lesque gospel of human stu­pid­i­ty. Devo proved noth­ing we didn’t already know. Instead, they showed us the ele­va­tion of idio­cy to the sta­tus of a civ­il reli­gion. (Lat­er in the 80s, they would express­ly par­o­dy the nation­al reli­gion with their Evan­gel­i­cal satire DOVE.)

The the­ater of Devo was weird­ly com­pelling then and is wierd­ly com­pelling now, since the banal­i­ty and casu­al vio­lence of late-cap­i­tal­ism that threat­ened to swal­low up every­thing in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry has, if any­thing, only become more bloat­ed and grotesque. “As far as Devo was con­cerned,” writes Ray Pad­gett at The New York­er, “Devo wasn’t a band at all but, rather, an art project… inspired by the Dadaists and the Ital­ian Futur­ists, Devo’s mem­bers were also cre­at­ing satir­i­cal visu­al art, writ­ing trea­tis­es, and film­ing short videos.”

One of those videos, “In the Begin­ning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion,” fea­tured their “first ever cover”—Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man”—before they re-invent­ed (or “cor­rect­ed,” as they put it), the Rolling Stones’ “Sat­is­fac­tion.” They would screen the 9‑minute film, with its footage of two men in mon­key masks spank­ing a house­wife, before gigs.

The con­cepts are aggres­sive­ly wink-nudge ado­les­cent, reflect­ing not only Devo’s take on the regres­sive state of the cul­ture, but also Casale’s belief that “high-school kids know every­thing already.” But amidst the synths and shiny suits, we still hear Howard Beale’s cri de coeur, “I’m a human being dammit! My life has val­ue!” Only in Devo’s hands it turns to dark comedy—as in the title of a song from their 2010 come­back record Some­thing for Every­body, tak­en from words print­ed on the back of a hunter’s safe­ty vest that call back to the band’s begin­nings at Kent State: “Don’t Shoot, I’m a Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Shows Off His Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

New Wave Music–DEVO, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costello–Gets Intro­duced to Amer­i­ca by ABC’s TV Show, 20/20 (1979)

Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh & Oth­er Arists Tell Their Musi­cal Sto­ries in the Ani­mat­ed Video Series, “Cal­i­for­nia Inspires Me”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Stream Online The Vietnam War, the New Documentary by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

in Film, History | September 25th, 2017

Right now, PBS is in the midst of air­ing The Viet­nam War, a ten-part, 18-hour doc­u­men­tary film series direct­ed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The “immer­sive 360-degree nar­ra­tive” tells “the epic sto­ry of the Viet­nam War,” using nev­er-before-seen footage and inter­views. If you’re not watch­ing the series on the TV, you can also view it on the web and through PBS apps for smart­phones, tablets, Apple TV, Roku and Ama­zon Fire TV. Episode 1 appears above. Find all of them here.

Note: If these videos don’t stream out­side of the US, we apol­o­gize in advance. Some­times PBS geo-restricts their videos. Also, these videos like­ly won’t stay online for­ev­er. If you’re inter­est­ed in watch­ing the series, I’d get going soon­er than lat­er.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

An Aging Louis Arm­strong Sings “What a Won­der­ful World” in 1967, Dur­ing the Viet­nam War & The Civ­il Rights Strug­gle

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renaissance Invention Created to Make Books Portable & Help Scholars Study Several Books at Once (1588)

in Books, History, Technology | September 25th, 2017

Devo­tees of print may object, but we read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry enjoy a great priv­i­lege in our abil­i­ty to store a prac­ti­cal­ly infi­nite num­ber of dig­i­tized books on our com­put­ers. What’s more, those com­put­ers have them­selves shrunk down to such com­pact­ness that we can car­ry them around day and night with­out dis­com­fort. This would hard­ly have worked just forty years ago, when books came only in print and a seri­ous com­put­er could still fill a room. The paper book may remain rea­son­ably com­pet­i­tive even today with the con­ve­nience refined over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years, but its first hand­made gen­er­a­tions tend­ed toward lav­ish, weighty dec­o­ra­tion and for­mats that now look com­i­cal­ly over­sized.

These posed real prob­lems of unwield­i­ness, one solu­tion to which took the unlike­ly form of the book­wheel. In 1588’s The Var­i­ous and Inge­nious Machines of Cap­tain Agosti­no Ramel­li, the Ital­ian engi­neer of that name “out­lined his vision for a wheel-o-books that would employ the log­ic of oth­er types of wheel (water, Fer­ris, ‘Price is Right’, etc.) to rotate books clock­work-style before a sta­tion­ary user,” writes the Atlantic’s Megan Gar­ber.

The design used “epicyclic gear­ing — a sys­tem that had at that point been used only in astro­nom­i­cal clocks — to ensure that the shelves bear­ing the wheel’s books (more than a dozen of them) would remain at the same angle no mat­ter the wheel’s posi­tion. The seat­ed read­er could then employ either hand or foot con­trols to move the desired book pret­ty much into her (or, much more like­ly, his) lap.” This rotat­ing book­case gave 16th cen­tu­ry read­ers the abil­i­ty to read heavy books in place, with far greater ease.

In his 1588  book, Ramel­li added:

This is a beau­ti­ful and inge­nious machine, very use­ful and con­ve­nient for any­one who takes plea­sure in study, espe­cial­ly those who are indis­posed and tor­ment­ed by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large num­ber of books with­out mov­ing from one spot. Moveover, it has anoth­er fine con­ve­nience in that it occu­pies very lit­tle space in the place where it is set, as any­one of intel­li­gence can clear­ly see from the draw­ing.

Inven­tors all over Europe cre­at­ed their own ver­sions of the book­wheel dur­ing the 17th and 18th cen­turies, four­teen exam­ples of which still exist. (The one pic­tured in the mid­dle of the post, built around 1650, now resides in Lei­den.) Even archi­tect Daniel Libe­skind has built one, based on Ramel­li’s design and exhib­it­ed in his home­land at the 1986 Venice Bien­nale. Alas, after it went to Gene­va for an exhi­bi­tion at the Palais Wil­son, it fell vic­tim to a ter­ror­ist fire bomb­ing. Inno­va­tion, it seems, will always have its ene­mies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear What Happens When Avant-Garde Composer Pierre Boulez Conducts Three Frank Zappa Songs

in Music | September 13th, 2017

Was Frank Zap­pa a musi­cal genius? A mod­ernist, avant-garde com­pos­er who just hap­pened to work in an idiomat­ic pas­tiche of jazz, clas­si­cal, pro­gres­sive rock and juve­nile shock tac­tics? The ques­tion can be a deeply divi­sive one. Zap­pa tends to inspire either intense devo­tion or intense dis­like. But what­ev­er one’s opin­ion of the man or his music, it’s safe to say that when he wasn’t work­ing alone, Zap­pa worked in the com­pa­ny of some incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed musi­cians. And he attract­ed, as John Rock­well wrote in 1984 at The New York Times, “a tiny fol­low­ing among clas­si­cal avant-gardists.”

That year, one of his more gen­teel fans, Pierre Boulez—for­mer music direc­tor of the New York Phil­har­mon­ic and “wide­ly regard­ed,” notes Rock­well, “as one of the great com­posers of the [20th] century”—decided to con­duct a suite of Zap­pa songs. Zap­pa hoped the result­ing album, The Per­fect Stranger, would help him real­ize his ambi­tion of hav­ing his music tak­en seri­ous­ly in clas­si­cal cir­cles. (“A brief col­lab­o­ra­tion in 1970 with Zubin Mehta,” writes April Peavey at PRI, “went nowhere.”)

Boulez con­ducts his own ensem­ble for three tracks on the album, “The Per­fect Stranger,” “Naval Avi­a­tion in Art?” and “Dupree’s Par­adise.” The remain­ing four songs are per­formed by “The Bark­ing Pump­kin Dig­i­tal Grat­i­fi­ca­tion Con­sort,” a Zap­paism for the Syn­clavier, Zap­pa’s favorite elec­tron­ic instru­ment. For all the high seri­ous­ness the col­lab­o­ra­tion implies, Zap­pa couldn’t help insert­ing his sur­re­al­ly sar­don­ic sense of humor; always “a com­pul­sive musi­cal come­di­an,” wrote Rock­well, he wears here “the defen­sive mask of irony, again.”

Each of the songs has an accom­pa­ny­ing sce­nario. “The Per­fect Stranger” imag­ines that “a door-to-door sales­man, accom­pa­nied by his faith­ful gyp­sy-mutant indus­tri­al vac­u­um clean­er, cavorts licen­tious­ly with a sloven­ly house­wife.” In “Love Sto­ry,” Zap­pa wants us to pic­ture “an elder­ly Repub­li­can cou­ple attempt­ing sex while break­danc­ing.” Many peo­ple have had trou­ble get­ting past the sopho­moric pos­tur­ing and see­ing Zappa’s music as seri­ous art. He often seemed intent on alien­at­ing exact­ly such peo­ple.

But per­haps Zap­pa did not need the pedi­gree Boulez lent to his work. When lis­ten­ing, for exam­ple, to the Moth­ers of Inven­tion play Zappa’s orig­i­nal arrange­ment of “Dupree’s Par­adise” (top), one has to admit, he cre­at­ed bril­liant­ly com­plex, rhyth­mi­cal­ly excit­ing music and, in the final analy­sis, rep­re­sent­ed “a par­tic­u­lar­ly appeal­ing type of quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can composer—genuinely defi­ant of estab­lished cat­e­gories and divi­sions that oth­ers rou­tine­ly accept.” Lis­ten to the Boulez/Zappa col­lab­o­ra­tion The Per­fect Stranger in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above, or access it direct­ly on Spo­ti­fy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Frank Zap­pa Gets Sur­prised & Ser­e­nad­ed by the U.S. Navy Band at the San Fran­cis­co Air­port (1980)

Frank Zappa’s Amaz­ing Final Con­certs: Prague and Budapest, 1991

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

An Animated Introduction to Rene Descartes & His Philosophy of Radical Doubt

in Philosophy | September 12th, 2017

Ear­ly Enlight­en­ment French philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian René Descartes invent­ed a new genre of phi­los­o­phy, we might say, one that would dom­i­nate the cen­tu­ry to come. Before Locke, Leib­niz, or Kant, Descartes stood out as a “the­ist ratio­nal­ist.” Rather than trust­ing in rev­e­la­tion, he leaned sole­ly on log­ic and rea­son, cre­at­ing a set of “rules for the direc­tion of the mind,” the title of one of his books. He believed we might think our way—solely unaid­ed by unre­li­able exter­nal sources—to belief in God and “all the knowl­edge that we may need for the con­duct of life.”

Descartes’ proofs of God may not sound so con­vinc­ing to mod­ern ears, slip­ping as they do into the lan­guage of faith when con­ve­nient. But in oth­er respects, he seems dis­tinct­ly con­tem­po­rary, or at least like a con­tem­po­rary of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein. He believed that phi­los­o­phy suf­fered from improp­er def­i­n­i­tions and lacked clar­i­ty of thought. And like the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry log­i­cal pos­i­tivists, he put tremen­dous store in log­ic and math­e­mat­ics as ana­lyt­ic tools for acquir­ing knowl­edge about the world. These, along with the sci­en­tif­ic method Descartes cham­pi­oned, were indeed the sole means of acquir­ing such knowl­edge.

Descartes, then, has become known for intro­duc­ing the rad­i­cal “method of doubt,” which sup­pos­ed­ly strips away all prej­u­dice and pre­con­cep­tion, every arti­cle of belief, to get at the most fun­da­men­tal­ly ascer­tain­able core of knowl­edge. Upon doing this in his 1637 Dis­course on Method, the French philoso­pher famous­ly found that the only thing he could say for cer­tain was that he must exist because he could see him­self doubt­ing his exis­tence—cog­i­to ergo sum, “I think there­fore I am.” The process involved cast­ing aside all author­i­ty and tra­di­tion, which made Descartes a hero to French Rev­o­lu­tion­ists. His free­think­ing also made him very much the ene­my of many in the Catholic church.

Describ­ing in Dis­course on Method how he had aban­doned all reliance on oth­er texts and resolved to derive the answers to his ques­tions from expe­ri­ence and rea­son, he seemed to dis­miss the author­i­ty not only of church hier­ar­chy and dog­ma but of scrip­ture itself. Rather than fix­ing God at the cen­ter of the uni­verse, Descartes used the “Archimedean point” of his own cer­tain exis­tence to anchor “an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal­ly unsteady world.” Nonethe­less, he was com­mit­ted to keep­ing faith intact, even as he seem­ing­ly demol­ished the foun­da­tions of its exis­tence, including—for Catholics—the cher­ished idea that priests could turn bread into flesh.

It might have been an attempt at self-preser­va­tion or appease­ment, but it seems more to reflect sin­cere belief: in the Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy, Descartes sought to prove the exis­tence of God in much the same way as he had proved his own exis­tence, through cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing and argu­ments that split mind and mat­ter into two dis­tinct camps. Descartes cre­at­ed a dual­ist view of the world that became a major prob­lem in his phi­los­o­phy. At the time, many of his crit­ics were less con­cerned with this onto­log­i­cal puz­zle than they were with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of his hereti­cal thought inter­fer­ing in world affairs.

Descartes’ rad­i­cal doubt threat­ened not only church doc­trine but also church pol­i­tics. One schol­ar claims to have found evi­dence that a Catholic priest—fearing the French free­thinker would jeop­ar­dize the con­ver­sion of Sweden’s Queen Christi­na to Catholicism—murdered Descartes with an arsenic-laced com­mu­nion wafer. If so, it would have been a cru­el­ly iron­ic death, per­haps by design, for the man who dared to write in the Med­i­ta­tions that transubstantiation—one of the Church’s cen­tral super­nat­ur­al teachings—should be “reject­ed by the­olo­gians as irra­tional, incom­pre­hen­si­ble and haz­ardous for the faith,” and to hope for a time when “my the­o­ry will be accept­ed in its place as cer­tain and indu­bitable.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness