Weekend Reads (Oct 1): Celebrating CDs, Spotify and Nazis, Roxy Music, the Middle Ages
Recommended weekend reading material for October 1, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
40 years ago today, the very first CD — Billy Joel’s 52nd Street — was released in Japan. Daryl Worthington reflects on the format’s impact, including its revolutionary new possibilities for listening experiences.
If CDs marked a new era, it is perhaps as much in the way they suggest specific ways of interacting with recorded music as in questions of fidelity. As the Towards 2000 coverage noted: “You can select your own sequence in advance, so you can play [the tracks] in any order you want.” The fact CDs can be programmed, and tracks easily skipped, is perhaps their most significant feature when it comes to their legacy. They loosened up the album as a fixed document. You could more seamlessly put one track on constant repeat, skip the interludes you didn’t like, or imagine a hypothetical ‘better order’ for your favourite album.
They prefigured many of the key features we’d associate with mp3 players, iPods and, most recently, streaming. CDs introduced randomization and customization to a physical format, and that bled through into later music technologies. It presented a possibility to mess with sequence which artists and labels embraced and explored.
Cassettes and vinyl may get all the buzz and nostalgia these days, and give music a tactile experience that’s hard to beat, but CDs remain the world’s most popular physical format. They’re also far more environmentally friendly, at least when compared to LPs.
Stereolab’s classic Dots and Loops album recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Treble’s Jeff Terich has compiled a list of ten albums in a similar vein.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably been seeking out other records like it for the past two-plus decades and found only occasional success. As a public service to our readers, I’d like to help guide you in the right direction by providing 10 albums that each feel connected to Dots and Loops in a way — early influences, kindred spirits, peers and collaborators and newer artists carrying the torch.
Related: My review of Dots and Loops, which I described as “incredibly listenable, downright catchy, and kitschy in all the right ways.”
In light of their 50th anniversary tour, Guy Denton reflects on Roxy Music’s origins and musical legacy.
Roxy Music’s catalog is satisfyingly lean, devoid of artistically vacant records and permeated by thrilling, varied, and emotionally resonant songs. A sampling of these anthems constitutes the setlist for the band’s current tour, which is nearing the end of its trek across America. In concert today, Ferry’s voice has faded somewhat, and Manzanera, Mackay, and Thompson naturally seem less assured on their feet. But age has failed to diminish the power of their material or the enthusiasm that animates it, and the same will hold true long after this last celebration reaches its end. Just as Roxy laid the foundation for the gaudy New Romanticism and languid yacht pop of the 1980s, perhaps its ingenuity is currently inspiring another great musical trend that time will reveal.
The COVID pandemic may be over, but COVID is still around, which means that touring musicians face some unique challenges.
COVID rates in the U.S. stayed relatively high this spring and summer, and have only recently begun to dip (though the official stats don't account for unreported home tests). But beyond the numbers, many musicians have found a set of complex and wearying tradeoffs await them on tour lately. The maze-like logistics of COVID safety are theirs to navigate, with little support from governments or their industry. Mask mandates and similar risk-reduction policies have evaporated. And audiences, perhaps starved for social connection and a sense of normalcy, have largely reverted to pre-pandemic behavior. For those operating below the very highest levels of success and infrastructure, the increased health and financial risks of mounting live music — and the burden of trying to avoid them — tend to fall hardest on the individual performers.
Many musicians make most of their money via touring and the related merch sales. If you want to support your favorite musicians, then be sure to buy their music in addition to streaming it via Spotify, Apple Music, et al.
Criticisms of Spotify have included paying artists a pittance and hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast. Now, the Anti-Defamation League is accusing the streamer of promoting white supremacist artists.
In the report, the ADL’s Center on Extremism found 40 white supremacist artists across a variety of music genres and sub-genres aiming to spread white supremacist ideology, promote antisemitism and racism, and promote fascism. Many of the artists identified by the ADL were verified, the organization stated, and used their profiles to share links to other extremist spaces. Being verified on Spotify allows white supremacist artists to be included in the platform’s official curated playlists.
[…]
Furthermore, users can easily create and share their own playlists “inspired” by white supremacist artists. When searching for the terms Fashwave, Rock Against Communism, and National Socialist Black Metal playlists, which are the three most popular sub-genres of white supremacist music on Spotify, the ADL found approximately 100 user-created playlists. Many of the playlists had… cover art that included extremist and neo-Nazi imagery.
Tyler Huckabee interviewed rapper/activist M.I.A. about her conversion to Christianity and her efforts to reconcile her new faith with her culture and upbringing.
She’s taking time to sort through it all, and that sorting hasn’t been helped by Christianity’s American reputation, which she feels like comes with a load of other assumptions.
“If you say you’re a Christian, I feel like you have to be this person who’s against this thing, who’s against this president, who’s against that thing, who’s against Twitter,’’ she says. “It’s so crazy.”
But when she studies actual Christian thought, she doesn’t see any of that there.
“The concept of Christianity is very much based in being there for the needy or helping the needy and saving people and giving people a clearer path to God,” she says. This all dovetails with her own passion for marginalized and oppressed people groups.
Lawrence English discusses the impact that manga, and specifically, Yoshihisa Tagami’s dystopic Grey, had on his worldview and music.
Instead of speaking to exception, heroism or super powers, an individual reigning over all, Grey spoke to irrelevance, isolation, loss, nihilism and distrust. It presented a portrait of a world that spoke to hardship and a day-to-day slog that was both relentless and quite possibly meaningless. It also spoke to a post-apocalyptic reality rooted in the emergent concerns of its present day: environmental degradation, artificial intelligence, entrenched poverty and the perpetuity of proxy wars as a means of constructing or at least encouraging economic prosperity.
Grey was also one of the first manga series that I ever read, along with issues of Akira and Heavy Metal Warrior Xenon. It was adapted into an OAV titled Grey: Digital Target in 1986 (read my brief review).
Last year, Netflix announced that they’d be adapting Matt Wagner’s long-running cult comic series Grendel. But despite having already filmed most of the series, Netflix decided to pull an HBO and cancel it altogether, much to the chagrin of those making it.
Here’s my question: How much of this decision was related to Netflix’s subscriber losses so far in 2022 as well as the news that 25% of Netflix’s subscribers plan to cancel their subscriptions?
I’d love to see a Grendel series but despite the acclaim that Wagner’s comic has received over the years, it is a relatively unknown and niche title compared to some of Netflix’s other planned adaptations, like The Three-Body Problem, One Piece, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hopefully, this news isn’t a sign of trouble for Netflix’s planned adaptation of Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT.
The Predator franchise turned 35 earlier this year. Though best known for their bloody action and machismo, Cole Burgett reflects on the films’ sometimes-subversive view of masculinity.
With each grueling death, McTiernan and Co. dismantle the carefully constructed image of the ‘80s “tough guy” and reduce action icon Schwarzenegger to a terrified man running for his life in a dark and brutal landscape, all while being stalked by an unearthly enemy. His guns, his muscles, and his damn-the-torpedoes attitude will, if anything, get him killed. He is forced to play the game differently, relying on guerilla tactics and good ol’ fashioned ingenuity to wage an asymmetrical war in which he is most assuredly at a distinct disadvantage. As a result, Predator stands as one of the most subversive films ever to land mainstream appeal and features one of the best and most nuanced performances from Schwarzenegger in his long and storied career.
Related: I watched Prey, the latest installment in the Predator franchise, a few weeks ago, and thought it was excellent (read my brief review).
YouTube isn’t just for influencers, memes, and scenes from you favorite movies. You can also find hours of dark, atmospheric music for those times when you want a haunting sonic backdrop for your everyday activities.
As I’ve learned, however, ambience comes in all shapes and sizes, and YouTube’s algorithm has attempted to show me all of them. In particular, the weirder, darker side of ambient noise has been revealed to me in all its bizarre, upsetting glory. If you, dear web user, also wish to hear some truly unusual atmospherics as you go about your day, read on.
The author, Lucas Ropek, gets bonus points for mentioning Cryo Chamber, one of the best dark ambient labels currently releasing music today. (His description of their music — “a cross between the Blade Runner soundtrack and the auditory weirdness of a David Lynch film” — is pretty spot on.)
For various reasons, some people have seized on the Middle Ages as the “good ol’ days,” but the truth is quite a bit more complicated.
The era resists surety: During that time in Europe — and these references are almost always made to Europe — the majority of people, including virtually all peasants, were illiterate. Detailed records plotted the lives of royalty, nobility, and important religious figures, but there are relatively few primary sources that describe the day-to-day existences of regular working stiffs. If you can’t read or write, you can’t even keep a diary that someone might find 1,000 years later. This, Clark said, means that historians have to do far more subjective interpretation of medieval life than is required for post-Enlightenment eras of history. The necessity of interpretation is convenient for anyone trawling for a good historical anecdote to prove a point — you can shop around and probably find something that suits whatever opinion you’ve already formed.
Via Morning Brew.
Adrian Daub explores the imagination and ideas behind fantasy maps, like those of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, and what they might say about our own society, culture, and politics.
Traditional fantasy continents let their readers have their cake and eat it too: all the derring-do of exploration, war, and expansion, but none of the guilt. They’re encounters with “exotic” culture that don’t have to take power imbalance into account. No wonder that many of today’s most interesting fantasy writers design their worlds against these conventions. At the same time, it’s worth taking seriously a part of the wish that stands behind the archetypal fantasy map and behind its enduring popularity. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to fantasize a world that may have suffered conquest and war crime, but that has a geography beyond past horrors. There’s nothing wrong with imagining a world in which crossing a border makes a real difference — makes you a different you.
Via 1440.
Republicans like Ron DeSantis may drape themselves in Christian words and images, but they’re not afraid to twist and rewrite Scripture (in this case, Ephesians 6:11) to score some cheap political points.
“Depicting the other party as inherently evil and your own party as on God’s side distorts how one views elections and our democratic processes. This perspective frames Democrats not as good people with political differences but as existential threats. One doesn’t compromise with the devil. Nor does one just sit back and let the devil take over. True believers will instead try to save the nation from the devil’s election schemes. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that multiple insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, marched toward the Capitol while wearing the words ‘armor of God.’
[…]
But this view of being on a mission from God also distorts how people view their own political loyalties. While demonizing the other side, the “godly” in one’s own camp can do no wrong. Political checks-and-balances are tossed aside by a theology that justifies achieving the desired ends by any means necessary.”
It’s one thing to draw upon the Bible (or any sacred text, for that matter) for inspiration and encouragement, or to allow it to inform and influence your political views. It’s quite another to literally twist the words of Scripture to appeal to your base while demonizing your political opponents.
The term “Christian nationalism” has been on the rise in recent years, following Trump’s presidency and the January 6 insurrection. Sarah Posner explores the phenomenon, its history, and its implications for American politics and society.
Christian nationalists believe that God had a “providential hand” in America’s founding. They contend that, carrying out God’s will, the founders intended America to be a “Christian nation.” They insist, falsely, that the founding documents prove both this intent and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” God also intended government to play a limited role in people’s lives, they assert — but to the extent government carries out its functions, it should be done from a “biblical worldview.” That is why, in the Christian nationalist view, Christians should run for office, and voters should support them, so that America will be freed from what they claim is the anti-Christian overreach of a secular government.
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