Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block

in Music, Writing | April 13th, 2017

Pho­to by Steve Jurvet­son, via Flickr Com­mons

Last year we alert­ed you to a short doc about authors and their rela­tion­ship with writer’s block. Many were philo­soph­i­cal. Oth­ers like Philipp Mey­er dis­missed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actu­al­ly exists,” he said. “It’s basi­cal­ly inse­cu­ri­ty.”

How seri­ous­ly you take it or how ter­ri­bly it affects you, we have a Spo­ti­fy playlist cre­at­ed by Lin-Manuel Miran­da of Hamil­ton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”

He revealed the playlist on his Twit­ter feed on March 20 with an apol­o­gy that the mix took longer to make than expect­ed. It is a mix, he said, “about writ­ing, songs that fea­ture great writ­ing, and every­thing in between.” Like his oth­er mix­es, he’s think­ing about us, that kind­ly Mr. Miran­da.

The eclec­tic mix begins with “Hap­py Birth­day Dar­ling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then fea­tures Eng­lish-lan­guage hip hop from the Hamil­ton Mix­tape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Span­ish-lan­guage hip hop from Calle 13 (“Aden­tro”), folk clas­sics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morn­ing”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaun­ty pop from Vam­pire Week­end (“Oxford Com­ma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza­’s bal­lad “Why” from the musi­cal Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which clos­es the mix with a paean to the healthy addic­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)

And don’t wor­ry if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy (which you can down­load here). He’s list­ed the tracks on his Twit­ter post too.

It’s nice to know that Miran­da fussed over this selec­tion like one used to do back in the days of cas­sette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?

via Nerdist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

8 Writ­ers on How to Face Writer’s Block and the Blank Page: Mar­garet Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

A Clever Super­cut of Writ­ers Strug­gling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Bar­ton Fink to The Roy­al Tenen­baums

How Famous Writ­ers Deal With Writer’s Block: Their Tips & Tricks

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

S‑Town: The Podcast That Will Help You Binge-Listen Your Way Through This Week

in Podcasts | April 3rd, 2017

Last week, the folks behind Ser­i­al and This Amer­i­can Life, teamed up to release S‑Town (short for Shit­town), a sev­en-episode/­sev­en-hour pod­cast which I devoured in three days flat. I don’t want to give any spoil­ers. So let me give you just the text that pro­motes the pod­cast on iTunes, and then sug­gest you start lis­ten­ing:

John despis­es his Alaba­ma town and decides to do some­thing about it. He asks a reporter to inves­ti­gate the son of a wealthy fam­i­ly who’s alleged­ly been brag­ging that he got away with mur­der. But then some­one else ends up dead, spark­ing a nasty feud, a hunt for hid­den trea­sure, and an unearthing of the mys­ter­ies of one man’s life.

Find episodes on iTunes, Stitch­er, RSS feed, Radio Pub­lic, or the web.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

I’m Just a Pill: A Schoolhouse Rock Classic Gets Reimagined to Defend Reproductive Rights in 2017

in Biology, Current Affairs, Health, Politics, Television | March 27th, 2017

Like many Amer­i­can chil­dren of the 70s and 80s, my under­stand­ing of how our gov­ern­ment is sup­posed to func­tion was shaped by School­house Rock.

Immi­gra­tion, sep­a­ra­tion of leg­isla­tive, exec­u­tive and judi­cial pow­ers and of course, the promise of the Con­sti­tu­tion (“a list of prin­ci­ples for keepin’ peo­ple free”) were just a few of the top­ics the ani­mat­ed musi­cal series cov­ered with clar­i­ty and wit.

The new world order in which we’ve recent­ly found our­selves sug­gests that 2017 would be a grand year to start rolling out more such videos.

The Lady Parts Jus­tice League, a self-declared “cabal of comics and writ­ers expos­ing creeps hell­bent on destroy­ing access to birth con­trol and abor­tion” leads the charge with the above homage to School­house Rock­’s 1976 hit, “I’m Just a Bill,” recast­ing the original’s glum aspi­rant law as a feisty Plan B con­tra­cep­tive pill. The red haired boy who kept the bill com­pa­ny on the steps of the Cap­i­tal is now a teenage girl, con­fused as to how any legal, over-the-counter method for reduc­ing the risk of unwant­ed preg­nan­cy could have so many ene­mies.

As with the orig­i­nal series, the prime objec­tive is to edu­cate, and com­ic Lea DeLar­ia’s Pill hap­pi­ly oblig­es, explain­ing that while peo­ple may dis­agree as to when “life” begins, it’s a sci­en­tif­ic fact that preg­nan­cy begins when a fer­til­ized egg lodges itself in the uterus. (DeLar­ia plays Big Boo on Orange is the New Black, by the way.) That process takes a while—72 hours to be exact. Plen­ty of time for the par­tic­i­pants to scut­tle off to the drug­store for emer­gency con­tra­cep­tion, aka Plan B, the so called “morn­ing-after” pill.

As per the drug’s web­site, if tak­en with­in 72 hours after unpro­tect­ed sex, Plan B  can reduce the risk of preg­nan­cy by up to 89%. Tak­en with­in 24 hours, it is about 95% effec­tive.

And yes, teenagers can legal­ly pur­chase it, though Teen Vogue has report­ed on numer­ous stores who’ve made it dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, for shop­pers to gain access to the pill.

(The Repro­duc­tive Jus­tice Project encour­ages con­sumers to help them col­lect data on whether Plan B is cor­rect­ly dis­played on the shelves as avail­able for sale to any woman of child­bear­ing age.)

There’s a help­ful foot­ball anal­o­gy for those who may be a bit slow in under­stand­ing that Plan B is indeed a bonafide con­tra­cep­tive, and not the abor­ti­fa­cient some mis­tak­en­ly make it out to be. It’s NSFW, but only just, as a team of car­toon penis-out­lines push down the field toward the uter­ine wall in the end zone.

The oth­er bills who once stood in line await­ing the president’s sig­na­ture have been reimag­ined as sperm, while song­writer Hol­ly Miran­da pays trib­ute to Dave Frish­berg’s lyrics with a piz­zazz wor­thy of the orig­i­nal:

I’m just a pill

A help­ful birth con­trol pill

No mat­ter what they say on Cap­i­tal Hill

So now you know my truth

I’m all about pre­ven­tion

If your con­dom breaks

I’m here for inter­ven­tion

Join me take a stand today

I real­ly hope and pray that you will

Drop some facts

Tell the world

I’m a pill.

Let’s hope the resis­tance yields more catchy, edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tions!

And here, for com­par­ison’s sake, is the mag­nif­i­cent orig­i­nal:

Via BUST Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

School­house Rock: Revis­it a Col­lec­tion of Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Edu­ca­tion­al Videos

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

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

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film, Music | March 22nd, 2017

What hap­pens when you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz (1939) and Pink Floy­d’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and play them togeth­er? You get some­thing mag­i­cal. Or, to be more pre­cise, you get “Dark Side of the Rain­bow,” a mashup that first began cir­cu­lat­ing in 1995, back when the inter­net first went com­mer­cial. Watch “Dark Side of the Rain­bow” (here) and you could believe that Floyd wrote Dark Side as a stealth Wiz­ard of Oz soundtrack–though that’s some­thing the band firm­ly denies. And, we believe them.

But bury one rumor, and anoth­er takes its place. The Vimeo cap­tion accom­pa­ny­ing the oth­er mashup above reads as fol­lows:

It has long been rumoured that Pink Floyd set ‘Echoes’ to the final sequence of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Two years before pro­duc­ing their album ‘Med­dle’, fea­tur­ing the 23 minute piece ‘Echoes’, Pink Floyd worked on the ‘More’ French film sound­track, where they worked with film syn­chro­ni­sa­tion equip­ment. From there the rumours blos­somed, with Roger Waters being mis­quot­ed as say­ing the band were orig­i­nal­ly offered to do the sound­track (they in fact turned down an offer to fea­ture the ‘Atom Heart Moth­er’ suite in ‘A Clock­work Orange’). Whether or not the rumours have any basis in fact, there is an unde­ni­able beau­ty when watch­ing the com­bi­na­tion of Kubrick­’s intri­cate stop-motion uni­verse, cou­pled with the psy­che­del­ic won­ders of Pink Floyd.

This last thought is sec­ond­ed by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Joe Steiff, who, writ­ing in the edit­ed col­lec­tion, Pink Floyd and Phi­los­o­phy, adds this:

A less­er-known mashup is the sync­ing of “Echoes” (from Med­dle) with the final twen­ty min­utes of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (begin­ning with “Jupiter and Beyond the Infi­nite”)… [T]he mashup is coher­ent and cohe­sive. The emo­tion­al tone of the music and the images work in near-har­mo­ny, result­ing in a mashup that stands up to repeat­ed view­ings.… Both the movie and the music feed into and expand the sense of mys­tery and unknowa­bil­i­ty that each explores inde­pen­dent­ly.

Watch “Echoes Odyssey” above and see for your­self.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf?

in Biology, Math, Music, Science | March 14th, 2017

You don’t need to know any­thing at all about clas­si­cal music, nor have any lik­ing for it even, to be deeply moved by that most famous of sym­phonies, Lud­wig van Beethoven’s 9th—“per­haps the most icon­ic work of the West­ern musi­cal tra­di­tion,” writes The Juil­liard Jour­nal in an arti­cle about its hand­writ­ten score. Com­mis­sioned in 1817, the sub­lime work was only com­plet­ed in 1824. By that time, its com­pos­er was com­plete­ly and total­ly deaf. At the first per­for­mance, Beethoven did not notice that the mas­sive final choral move­ment had end­ed, and one of the musi­cians had to turn him around to acknowl­edge the audi­ence.

This may seem, says researcher Natalya St. Clair in the TED-Ed video above, like some “cru­el joke,” but it’s the truth. Beethoven was so deaf that some of the most inter­est­ing arti­facts he left behind are the so-called “con­ver­sa­tion books,” kept from 1818 onward to com­mu­ni­cate with vis­i­tors who had to write down their ques­tions and replies. How then might it have been pos­si­ble for the com­pos­er to cre­ate such endur­ing­ly thrilling, rap­tur­ous works of aur­al art?

Using the del­i­cate, melan­choly “Moon­light Sonata” (which the com­pos­er wrote in 1801, when he could still hear), St. Clair attempts to show us how Beethoven used math­e­mat­i­cal “pat­terns hid­den beneath the beau­ti­ful sounds.” (In the short video below from doc­u­men­tary The Genius of Beethoven, see the onset of Beethoven’s hear­ing loss in a dra­mat­ic read­ing of his let­ters.) Accord­ing to St. Clair’s the­o­ry, Beethoven com­posed by observ­ing “the math­e­mat­i­cal rela­tion­ship between the pitch fre­quen­cy of dif­fer­ent notes,” though he did not write his sym­phonies in cal­cu­lus. It’s left rather unclear how the com­poser’s sup­posed intu­ition of math­e­mat­ics and pitch cor­re­sponds with his abil­i­ty to express such a range of emo­tions through music.

We can learn more about Beethoven’s deaf­ness and its bio­log­i­cal rela­tion­ship to his com­po­si­tion­al style in the short video below with research fel­low Edoar­do Sac­cen­ti and his col­league Age Smilde from the Biosys­tems Data Analy­sis Group at Amsterdam’s Swammer­dam Insti­tute for Life Sci­ences. By count­ing the high and low fre­quen­cies in Beethoven’s com­plete string quar­tets, a task that took Sac­cen­ti many weeks, he and his team were able to show how three dis­tinct com­po­si­tion­al styles “cor­re­spond to stages in the pro­gres­sion of his deaf­ness,” as they write in their paper (which you can down­load in PDF here).

The pro­gres­sion is unusu­al. As his con­di­tion wors­ened, Beethoven includ­ed few­er and few­er high fre­quen­cy sounds in his com­po­si­tions (giv­ing cel­lists much more to do). By the time we get to 1824–26, “the years of the late string quar­tets and of com­plete deafness”—and of the com­ple­tion of the 9th—the high notes have returned, due in part, Smilde says, to “the bal­ance between an audi­to­ry feed­back and the inner ear.” Beethoven’s reliance on his “inner ear” made his music “much and much rich­er.” How? As one vio­lin­ist in the clip puts it, he was “giv­en more free­dom because he was not attached any­more to the phys­i­cal sound, [he could] just use his imag­i­na­tion.”

For all of the com­pelling evi­dence pre­sent­ed here, whether Beethoven’s genius in his painful lat­er years is attrib­ut­able to his intu­ition of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal pat­terns or to the total free rein of his imag­i­na­tive inner ear may in fact be undis­cov­er­able. In any case, no amount of ratio­nal expla­na­tion can explain away our aston­ish­ment that the man who wrote the unfail­ing­ly pow­er­ful, awe­some­ly dynam­ic “Ode to Joy” finale (con­duct­ed above by Leonard Bern­stein), couldn’t actu­al­ly hear any of the music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryosh­ka Dolls in Japan

Leonard Bern­stein Con­ducts Beethoven’s 9th in a Clas­sic 1979 Per­for­mance

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

An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy

in Media, Politics | March 13th, 2017

For near­ly as many years as he’s occu­pied the pub­lic eye, famed lin­guist and anar­chist philoso­pher Noam Chom­sky has made claims that might have dis­cred­it­ed oth­er aca­d­e­mics. Per­haps his many books, arti­cles, lec­tures, inter­views, etc. car­ry such weight because of his “famed lin­guist” sta­tus and his long­time tenure at MIT. But there’s more to his longevi­ty as a respect­ed crit­ic of U.S. state pow­er. His voice also car­ries sig­nif­i­cant author­i­ty because he sub­stan­ti­ates his argu­ments with eru­dite, gran­u­lar analy­ses of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry, his­to­ry, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

We’ve seen him do exact­ly this in his fierce oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam War at the begin­ning of his activist career, and in his cri­tiques of proxy wars, impe­ri­al­is­tic repres­sion, and cor­po­rate resource grabs in Latin Amer­i­ca and South­east Asia in decades since.

When it comes to the U.S. domes­tic scene, one of Chomsky’s most point­ed and con­tin­u­al­ly rel­e­vant cri­tiques address­es the way in which we’re led to believe the country’s actions over­seas jus­ti­fy them­selves, as well as its actions upon its own cit­i­zens. We might debate whether the U.S. is a democ­ra­cy or a repub­lic, but accord­ing to Chom­sky, both notions may well be illu­so­ry.

Instead, Chom­sky argues in Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent—his 1988 cri­tique of “the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the mass media” with Edward S. Herman—that the mass media sells us the idea that we have polit­i­cal agency. Their “pri­ma­ry func­tion… in the Unit­ed States is to mobi­lize sup­port for the spe­cial inter­ests that dom­i­nate the gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor.” Those inter­ests may have changed or evolved quite a bit since 1988, but the mech­a­nisms of what Chom­sky and Her­man iden­ti­fy as “effec­tive and pow­er­ful ide­o­log­i­cal insti­tu­tions that car­ry out a sys­tem-sup­port­ive pro­pa­gan­da func­tion” might work in the age of Twit­ter just as they did in one dom­i­nat­ed by net­work and cable news.

Those mech­a­nisms large­ly divide into what the authors called the “Five Fil­ters.” The video at the top of the post, pro­duced by Marcela Pizarro and nar­rat­ed by Democ­ra­cy Now’s Amy Good­man, pro­vides a quick intro­duc­tion to them, in a jar­ring ani­mat­ed sequence that’s part Mon­ty Python, part Res­i­dents video. See the five fil­ters list­ed below in brief, with excerpts from Goodman’s com­men­tary:

1. Media Own­er­ship—The endgame of all mass media orgs is prof­it. “It is in their inter­est to push for what­ev­er guar­an­tees that prof­it.”

2. Adver­tis­ing—Media costs more than con­sumers will pay: Adver­tis­ers fill the gap. What do adver­tis­ers pay for? Access to audi­ences. “It isn’t just that the media is sell­ing you a prod­uct. They’re also sell­ing adver­tis­ers a prod­uct: you.”

3. Media Elite—“Jour­nal­ism can­not be a check on pow­er, because the very sys­tem encour­ages com­plic­i­ty. Gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and big insti­tu­tions know how to influ­ence the media. They feed it scoops and inter­views with sup­posed experts. They make them­selves cru­cial to the process of jour­nal­ism. If you want to chal­lenge pow­er, you’ll be pushed to the mar­gins…. You won’t be get­ting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

4. Flack—“When the sto­ry is incon­ve­nient for the pow­ers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: dis­cred­it­ing sources, trash­ing sto­ries, and divert­ing the con­ver­sa­tion.”

5. The Com­mon Ene­my—“To man­u­fac­ture con­sent, you need an ene­my, a tar­get: Com­mu­nism, ter­ror­ists, immi­grants… a boogey­man to fear helps cor­ral pub­lic opin­ion.”

Chom­sky and Herman’s book offers a sur­gi­cal analy­sis of the ways cor­po­rate mass media “man­u­fac­tures con­sent” for a sta­tus quo the major­i­ty of peo­ple do not actu­al­ly want. Yet for all of the recent ago­niz­ing over mass media fail­ure and com­plic­i­ty, we don’t often hear ref­er­ences to Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent these days. This may have some­thing to do with the book’s dat­ed exam­ples, or it may tes­ti­fy to Chomsky’s mar­gin­al­iza­tion in main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course, though he would be the first to note that his voice has not been sup­pressed.

It may also be the case that media the­o­ry and crit­i­cism like Chom­sky’s, or the work of Mar­shall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, or Jean Bau­drillard (all very dif­fer­ent kinds of thinkers), has fall­en out of favor in a 140-char­ac­ter world. In the late-80s and 90s, how­ev­er, such the­o­ry received a good deal of atten­tion, and Chom­sky appeared in the many venues you’ll see in the short video above, excerpt­ed from an almost 3‑hour 1992 doc­u­men­tary called Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, a film made by “die-hard fans,” wrote Col­in Mar­shall in an ear­li­er post, that “curates instances of Chom­sky going from inter­view to inter­view, debate to debate, forum to forum, mak­ing sharp-sound­ing points about the rela­tion­ship between busi­ness elites and the media.”

Our desire for instant reward and set­tled opin­ion may have over­tak­en our abil­i­ty to sub­ject the entire phe­nom­e­non of mass media to crit­i­cal analy­sis, as we leap from cliffhang­er to cliffhang­er and cri­sis to cri­sis. But should we take the time to watch this film and, prefer­ably also, read Chomsky’s book, we may find our­selves some­what bet­ter equipped to eval­u­ate the onslaught of pro­pa­gan­da to which we’re sub­ject­ed on what seems like an hourly basis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

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

Watch a 5‑Part Animated Primer on Afrofuturism, the Black Sci-Fi Phenomenon Inspired by Sun Ra

in Music, Sci Fi | March 9th, 2017

We rec­og­nize its hall­marks in music espe­cial­ly. It is the province of Sun Ra, George Clin­ton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Afri­ka Bam­baataa, and, in recent years, Janelle Mon­ae, Andre 3000, Bey­on­cé, and many oth­er black artists who have updat­ed for the 21st cen­tu­ry the styles and sounds of Afro­fu­tur­ism. Reach­ing back into an Afro­cen­tric past—with heavy empha­sis on Egyptology—and for­ward to an inter­stel­lar future, the genre of Afro­fu­tur­ism reclaims the ter­rain of sci­ence fic­tion for peo­ple of African descent, serv­ing as an “umbrel­la term,” as one con­tem­po­rary Afro­fu­tur­ist com­mu­ni­ty puts it, “for the Black pres­ence in sci-fi, tech­nol­o­gy, mag­ic, and fan­ta­sy.”

One might be sur­prised to learn that the term itself did not orig­i­nate with the vision­ary founder of its aes­thet­ic. Sun Ra (for­mer­ly Her­man Poole Blount)—bandleader of the Arkestra and space alien from Saturn—called his space-themed big band music “cos­mic jazz” or, some­times, “phre music—music of the sun.” Instead, “Afro­fu­tur­ism” was coined by cul­tur­al crit­ic Mark Dery in his sem­i­nal 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” which includ­ed inter­views with sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany, crit­ic and musi­cian Greg Tate, and schol­ar Tri­cia Rose. Afro­fu­tur­ism has tak­en on a vari­ety of mean­ings, not only in music, but also in art, dance, film, and sci­ence fic­tion writ­ing like that of Delany and Octavia But­ler.

But as you’ll learn in the video above, the first in a 5‑part ani­mat­ed series on the genre from Dust, “its roots go back to the late 1930s in Huntsville, Alaba­ma,” the actu­al birth­place of Sun Ra, where he main­tained he was abduct­ed, tak­en to Sat­urn (not Jupiter, as the nar­ra­tor mis­tak­en­ly says), and told by aliens to “trans­port black peo­ple away from the vio­lence and racism of plan­et Earth.” The series traces the growth of Sun Ra’s orig­i­nal mis­sion through the cul­tur­al touch­stones of Lieu­tenant Uhu­ra, George Clin­ton, Jimi Hen­drix, and Mis­sy Elliott.

Sun Ra died in 1993, the year before Dery invent­ed the name for his gen­er­ous lega­cy. “What does it say,” the nar­ra­tor asks, “about how far we have or have not come if this mes­sage still res­onates with each new gen­er­a­tion?” Dery recent­ly took on the ques­tion in a 2016 essay, in which he quotes Tate—now at work on a book on Afro­fu­tur­ism: “Hav­ing ced­ed the racial ground war to Enlight­en­ment-era impe­ri­al­ism some­where back in the 17th cen­tu­ry, black futur­ism deter­mined that the fiery realms of the sym­bol­ic and the myth­ic and the rhetor­i­cal and the spir­i­tu­al and the wicked­ly styl­ish, son­ic, and polyrhyth­mic would become our culture’s baili­wick, rai­son d’être, and cul­tur­al tri­umphal­ist bat­tle­ground.”

Afro­fu­tur­ism trans­forms trau­ma, the era­sure of the black past, and bleak prospects for the future into pow­er­ful dis­plays of cre­ative agency. The strug­gle to claim that agency in the face of impe­r­i­al vio­lence and plun­der con­tin­ues, Dery argues, but now takes place in the midst of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments even a space alien like Sun Ra could not have fore­seen. While many of the ques­tions once asked about the human­i­ty of enslaved peo­ple have shift­ed to debates over androids, cyborgs, and oth­er posthu­man cre­ations, the con­di­tions for many col­o­nized and mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple all over the world have not con­sid­er­ably improved.

As “Afro­fu­tur­ism is all too aware,” Dery writes, “objects can have inner lives…. Con­se­quent­ly, it is less con­cerned with knock­ing the human off its onto­log­i­cal perch than it is in forg­ing alliances with Oth­ers of any species, human or posthu­man.”

Afro­fu­tur­ism speaks to our moment because it alone – not the ahis­tor­i­cal, apo­lit­i­cal cor­po­rate pre­cogs at TED talks; not the fatu­ous Hol­ly­wood fran­chis­es that have noth­ing to say about our times – offers a mythol­o­gy of the future present, an explana­to­ry nar­ra­tive that recov­ers the lost data of his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry, con­fronts the dystopi­an real­i­ty of black life in Amer­i­ca, demands a place for peo­ple of col­or among the mono­rails and the Hugh Fer­ris mono­liths of our tomor­rows, insists that our Visions of Things to Come live up to our pieties about racial equal­i­ty and social jus­tice. 

You can see three short episodes of Dust’s Afro­fu­tur­ism series above, with parts four and five to come. (You will be able to find them all here.) Until then, watch the short Vox video explain­er on Afro­fu­tur­ism below.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

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

How Mindfulness Makes Us Happier & Better Able to Meet Life’s Challenges: Two Animated Primers Explain

in Life, Psychology, Religion | March 6th, 2017

The West has very rich con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tion. Monas­tics of the ear­ly Chris­t­ian church prac­ticed forms of med­i­ta­tion that have been adopt­ed by many peo­ple seek­ing a deep­er, more serene expe­ri­ence of life. Giv­en the wealth of con­tem­pla­tive lit­er­a­ture and prac­tice in Euro­pean his­to­ry, why have so many West­ern peo­ple turned to the East, and toward Bud­dhist con­tem­pla­tive forms in par­tic­u­lar?

The answer is com­pli­cat­ed and involves many strains of philo­soph­i­cal and coun­ter­cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Some of the great­est influ­ence in the U.S. has come from Tibetan monks like the Dalai Lama and Chö­gyam Trung­pa Rin­poche, one­time teacher of Allen Gins­berg, and founder of Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty and the ecu­meni­cal Shamb­ha­la school of Bud­dhism. Trung­pa Rin­poche con­trast­ed the­is­tic forms of med­i­ta­tion, both Hin­du and Chris­t­ian, with the mind­ful­ness and con­cen­tra­tion prac­tices of Bud­dhism, writ­ing that the first one, focused on a “high­er being” or beings, is “inward or intro­vert­ed” and dual­is­tic.

Bud­dhist mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, on the oth­er hand, is “what one might call ‘work­ing med­i­ta­tion’ or extro­vert­ed med­i­ta­tion. This is not a ques­tion of try­ing to retreat from the world.” Mind­ful­ness  “is con­cerned with try­ing to see what is,” he writes, and to do so with­out prej­u­dice: “there is no belief in high­er and low­er; the idea of dif­fer­ent lev­els, or of being in an under­de­vel­oped state, does not arise.” In oth­er words, all of the import­ed con­cepts that push us one way or anoth­er, dri­ve our rigid opin­ions about our­selves and oth­ers, and make us feel supe­ri­or or infe­ri­or, become irrel­e­vant. We take own­er­ship of the con­tents of our own minds.

How is this rel­e­vant for the mod­ern per­son? Con­sid­er the videos here. These explain­ers,  like many oth­er con­tem­po­rary uses of the word “mind­ful­ness,” peel the con­cept away from its Bud­dhist ori­gins. But sec­u­lar and Bud­dhist ideas of mind­ful­ness are not as dif­fer­ent as some might think. “Mind­ful­ness,” says Dan Har­ris in the video at the top, “is the abil­i­ty to know what’s hap­pen­ing in your head at any giv­en moment with­out get­ting car­ried away by it.” (Some might pre­fer the more suc­cinct Vipas­sana def­i­n­i­tion “non­judg­men­tal aware­ness.”) With­out mind­ful­ness, “there’s no buffer between the stim­u­lus and your reac­tion.” With it, how­ev­er, we “learn to respond wise­ly” to what hap­pens to us instead of being pushed and pulled around by habit­u­al reac­tiv­i­ty.

As the video above has it—using the Chero­kee para­ble of the two wolves—mind­ful­ness pro­vides us with the space we need to observe our sen­sa­tions, emo­tions, and ideas. From a crit­i­cal dis­tance, we can see caus­es and effects, and cre­ate dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. We can learn, in short, to be hap­py, even in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances, with­out deny­ing or fight­ing with real­i­ty. The Dalai Lama refers to this as observ­ing “the prin­ci­ple of causal­i­ty… a nat­ur­al law.” “In deal­ing with real­i­ty,” he says, “you have to take that law into account…. If you desire hap­pi­ness, you should seek the caus­es that give rise to it.” Like­wise, we must under­stand the men­tal caus­es of our suf­fer­ing if we want to pre­vent it.

How do we do that? Is there an app for it? Well, yes, and no. One app is Hap­pi­fy—who pro­duced these videos with ani­ma­tor Katy Davis, med­i­ta­tion instruc­tor Sharon Salzberg, and Har­ris, cre­ator of the mind­ful­ness course (and app) 10% Hap­pi­er. Hap­pi­fy offers “Sci­ence-based Activ­i­ties and Games, and “a high­ly sec­u­lar­ized, some might say decon­tex­tu­al­ized, form of mind­ful­ness training—including the “Med­i­ta­tion 101” primer video above. For those who reject every­thing that smacks of reli­gion, sec­u­lar mind­ful­ness prac­tices have been rig­or­ous­ly put to many a peer-reviewed test. They are wide­ly accept­ed as evi­dence-based ways to reduce anx­i­ety and depres­sion, improve focus and con­cen­tra­tion, and man­age pain. These prac­tices have been used in hos­pi­tals, med­ical schools, and even pub­lic ele­men­tary schools for many years.

But whether we are Bud­dhists or oth­er reli­gious peo­ple prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, or sec­u­lar human­ists and athe­ists using mod­i­fied, “science-based”—or app-based—techniques, the fact remains that we have to build the dis­ci­pline into our dai­ly life in order for it to work. No app will do that for us, any more than a fit­ness app will make us toned and healthy. Nor will read­ing books or arti­cles about med­i­ta­tion make us med­i­ta­tors. (To para­phrase Augus­tine, we might say that end­less read­ing or star­ing at screens amounts to an atti­tude of “give me mind­ful­ness, but not yet.”)

Har­ris, in char­ac­ter as a mouse in a V‑neck sweater, says in the video above that med­i­ta­tion is “exer­cise for your brain.” And like exer­cise, Trung­pa Rin­poche writes, med­i­ta­tion can be “painful in the begin­ning.” We may not always like what we find knock­ing around in our heads. And yet with­out acknowl­edg­ing, and even befriend­ing, the feel­ings and thoughts that make us feel ter­ri­ble, we can’t learn to nur­ture and “feed” those that make us feel good. If you’re inspired to get start­ed, you’ll find sev­er­al free online guid­ed med­i­ta­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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

Stream 8,000 Vintage Afropop Recordings Digitized & Made Available by The British Library

in Music | March 3rd, 2017

Sta­bil­i­ty or cul­tur­al vital­i­ty: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the oth­er. The Repub­lic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a tur­bu­lent his­to­ry, yet its musi­cians have also enjoyed roles as “pio­neers in the cre­ation of African pop­u­lar music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne’s Graeme Coun­sel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean cap­i­tal of Conakry on a mis­sion to pre­serve the great vari­ety of music, part of the tra­di­tion now broad­ly labeled “Afropop,” record­ed dur­ing the decades of state-spon­sored cul­tur­al abun­dance after the coun­try gained inde­pen­dence from France in 1958.

“Under the lead­er­ship of music lover Pres­i­dent Ahmed Sék­ou Touré,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, “the gov­ern­ment was soon send­ing out gui­tars, sax­o­phones, and brass instru­ments to 35 state-fund­ed pre­fec­ture orches­tras as part of a new authen­tic­ité pol­i­cy.

This direc­tive encour­aged a cul­tur­al revival that mixed tra­di­tion­al sounds with con­tem­po­rary music, par­tic­u­lar­ly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syli­phone, which record­ed and dis­trib­uted this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the pow­er­ful radio sig­nal of Radiod­if­fu­sion Télévi­sion Guinée (RTG) turned lis­ten­ers on to it well beyond the new coun­try’s bor­ders.

Coun­sel, already a col­lec­tor of Syli­phone records, dis­cov­ered dur­ing his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean gov­ern­ment still held a col­lec­tion of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery dur­ing an unsuc­cess­ful coup”). Apply­ing for and receiv­ing, ulti­mate­ly, three rounds of fund­ing from the British Library’s Endan­gered Archives Pro­gramme, he set about dig­i­tiz­ing and cat­a­loging the unex­pect­ed­ly numer­ous and per­haps expect­ed­ly dis­or­ga­nized and poor­ly main­tained reels of mag­net­ic tape he found, work­ing through bureau­crat­ic has­sles, coups d’é­tat, and even a mas­sacre.

“Noth­ing would deter me,” writes Coun­sel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the author­i­ties’ indif­fer­ence towards the sound archive, not the recal­ci­trance of their atti­tudes, nor the tragedies of every­day life in Guinea. Noth­ing.” The fruits of his labors have now become avail­able at the British Library’s online Syli­phone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks record­ed over 26 years. Meier names among the “leg­endary” music it makes avail­able “the loose rhythms of the Bem­beya Jazz Nation­al, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influ­enced beats of Orchestre de la Pail­lote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Ama­zones de Guinée.” Those musi­cians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a lit­tle time with the archive will guar­an­tee a long-term inabil­i­ty to get their songs out of your head.

Find the 8,000 record­ings here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing Is Rhythm

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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.

Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: An Animated Introduction to the Most Insightful Study of American Democracy

in Philosophy, Politics | February 22nd, 2017

We can­not right­ly see our­selves with­out hon­est feed­back. Those who sur­round them­selves with syco­phants and peo­ple just like them only hear what they want to hear, and nev­er get an accu­rate sense of their capa­bil­i­ties and short­com­ings. And so the best feed­back often comes from peo­ple out­side our in-groups. This can be as true of nations as it can be of indi­vid­u­als, pro­vid­ed our crit­ics are char­i­ta­ble, even when unspar­ing­ly hon­est, and that they take a gen­uine inter­est in our well-being.

These qual­i­ties well describe one of the sharpest crit­ics of the Unit­ed States in the past two cen­turies. Alex­is de Toc­queville, aris­to­crat­ic French lawyer, his­to­ri­an, and polit­i­cal philoso­pher, who trav­eled to the fledg­ling coun­try in 1831 to observe a nation then in the grip of a pop­ulist fever under Andrew Jack­son, a pres­i­dent who became noto­ri­ous for his expro­pri­a­tion of indige­nous land, ruth­less relo­ca­tion poli­cies, and embrace of South­ern slav­ery. But the groups who flour­ished under Jackson’s rule did so with a tremen­dous enthu­si­asm that the French thinker admired but also viewed with a very skep­ti­cal eye.

De Toc­queville pub­lished his obser­va­tions and analy­ses of the Unit­ed States in a now-famous book, Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca. Though we’ve come to take the idea of democ­ra­cy for grant­ed, for the young French­man, a child of Napoleon­ic Europe, it was “a high­ly exot­ic and new polit­i­cal option,” as Alain de Bot­ton tells us in his ani­mat­ed video intro­duc­tion above. De Toc­queville “pre­scient­ly believed that democ­ra­cy was going to be the future all over the world, and so he want­ed to know, ‘what would that be like?’”

With a grant from the French gov­ern­ment, De Toc­queville trav­eled the coun­try (then less than half its cur­rent size) for nine months, get­ting to know its peo­ple and cus­toms as best he could, and mak­ing a series of gen­er­al obser­va­tions that would form the vignettes and argu­ments in his book. He was “par­tic­u­lar­ly alive to the prob­lem­at­ic and dark­er sides of democ­ra­cy.” De Bot­ton dis­cuss­es five crit­i­cal insights from Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca. See three of them below, with quotes from De Toc­queville him­self.

1. Democ­ra­cy Breeds Mate­ri­al­ism.

For De Toc­queville one kind of materialism—the exces­sive pur­suit of wealth—disposed the coun­try to anoth­er, “a dan­ger­ous sick­ness of the human mind”—the denial of a spir­i­tu­al or intel­lec­tu­al life. “While man takes plea­sure in this hon­est and legit­i­mate pur­suit of well-being,” he wrote, “it is to be feared that in the end he may lose the use of his most sub­lime fac­ul­ties, and that by want­i­ng to improve every­thing around him, he may in the end degrade him­self.”

De Toc­queville, says De Bot­ton, observed that “mon­ey seemed to be quite sim­ply the only achieve­ment that Amer­i­cans respect­ed” and that “the only test of good­ness for any item was how much mon­ey it hap­pens to make.”

2. Democ­ra­cy Breeds Envy & Shame

“When all the pre­rog­a­tives of birth and for­tune have been abol­ished,” wrote De Toc­queville, “when every pro­fes­sion is open to every­one, an ambi­tious man may think it is easy to launch him­self on a great career and feel that he has been called to no com­mon des­tiny. But this is a delu­sion which expe­ri­ence quick­ly cor­rects.” Unable to rise above his cir­cum­stances, and yet believ­ing that he should be equal to his neigh­bors in achieve­ments, such a per­son may blame him­self and feel ashamed, or suc­cumb to envy and ill will.

De Toc­queville was far too opti­mistic about the abol­ish­ment of “pre­rog­a­tives of birth and for­tune,” but many Amer­i­cans might rec­og­nize them­selves still in his gen­er­al pic­ture, in which “the sense of unlim­it­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty could ini­tial­ly encour­age a sur­face cheer­ful­ness.” And yet, De Bot­ton notes, “as time passed and the major­i­ty failed to raise them­selves, Toc­queville not­ed that their mood dark­ened, that bit­ter­ness took hold and choked their spir­its, and that their hatred of them­selves and their mas­ters grew fierce.”

3. Tyran­ny of the Major­i­ty

De Toc­queville, De Bot­ton says, thought that “demo­c­ra­t­ic cul­ture… often ends up demo­niz­ing any asser­tion of dif­fer­ence, and espe­cial­ly cul­tur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty, even though such atti­tudes might be con­nect­ed with real mer­it.” In such a state, “soci­ety has an aggres­sive lev­el­ing instinct.”

It wasn’t only attacks on high cul­ture that De Toc­queville feared, but what he called the “Omnipo­tence of the Major­i­ty,” a phrase he used to denote the pow­er of pub­lic opin­ion as an almost total­i­tar­i­an means of social con­trol. In vol­ume two of his study, pub­lished in 1840, De Toc­queville devot­ed par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to “the pow­er which that major­i­ty nat­u­ral­ly exer­cis­es over the mind…. By what­ev­er polit­i­cal laws men are gov­erned in the ages of equal­i­ty, it may be fore­seen that faith in pub­lic opin­ion will become for them a species of reli­gion, and the major­i­ty its min­is­ter­ing prophet.”

From this pre­dic­tion, De Toc­queville fore­saw “two ten­den­cies; one lead­ing the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the oth­er pro­hibit­ing him from think­ing at all.”

De Bot­ton goes on to dis­cuss two close­ly relat­ed cri­tiques: democracy’s sus­pi­cion of all author­i­ty and its under­min­ing of free thought. Rather than encoun­ter­ing the kind of mar­ket­place of ideas the coun­try prides itself on fos­ter­ing, he found in few places “less inde­pen­dence of mind, and true free­dom of dis­cus­sion, than in Amer­i­ca.” The crit­i­cism is harsh, and De Toc­queville did not flat­ter his hosts often, and yet for all of its “inher­ent draw­backs,” De Bot­ton writes at the School of Life, the French­man “isn’t anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic.”

His aim is “to get us to be real­is­tic” about demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety and its ten­den­cies to inhib­it rather than enlarge many free­doms. As Arthur Gold­ham­mer observes at The Nation, De Toc­queville believed that “True free­dom lay not in the pur­suit of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic aims, but “in ‘slow and tran­quil’ action in con­cert with oth­ers shar­ing some col­lec­tive pur­pose.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

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