Posts Tagged ‘blues’
“Some confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about”*…
Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But, as Audrey Wollen reminds us, nostalgia for the new isn’t new…
You could be forgiven for thinking things—art, books, music, clothes—were irretrievably dire. Almost a decade ago, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “culture appears more monolithic than ever. . . . Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.” In a 2023 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago claimed: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” A headline last year at The Atlantic read: “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” New York recently released “The Stupid Issue,” asking, “Is 2025 the stupidest year on record?” and answering with “12 signs of a culture in decline,” in the same listicle format often blamed for dwindling journalistic standards.
Apparently, I’ve been living in this arid desert of innovation for my entire adolescence and adult life. In 2011, the year I turned nineteen, the music critic Simon Reynolds made the following diagnosis in his book Retromania: “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.” In 2014, in the introduction to his influential essay collection Ghosts of My Life, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, “It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised—not in the far distant future, but very soon—as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.” (An odd claim, as the 1950s saw the birth of rock and roll in the United States, major breakthroughs in jazz, and Singin’ in the Rain.)
“Very soon” has arrived, the simultaneity of time notwithstanding, inaugurated by W. David Marx’s recent book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, which aims to historicize the years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred.
In his closing chapter, Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.
No one could argue that people are making less of it, as this is also an era defined by unprecedented access to the tools of production and distribution. The means to edit a short film, design a poster, or record an album in your bedroom, and then publish that work directly to an audience, are newly affordable and widespread. For Marx, however, most of that creation (or should we call it content?) is not creativity; it is a surplus of material, propelled and inhibited by a wish to make money and gain attention. Poptimism—the idea that commercial pop should be accorded the same critical attention as traditionally “serious” genres such as rock or jazz—has wrenched away our critical ability to assess something’s worth outside of metrics defined by mass-market success: if it makes money, it must be good. (I would argue that the floundering of critical thinking in public life, and of criticism as a professional practice, is not due to the scholarly appreciation of Mariah Carey songs, but that is a minor point.)
According to Marx, nothing “feels new” or “radical enough to outmode the past,” resulting in a terrible state of affairs in which “Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Joan Didion remain iconic because no one has emerged who can compete with their cool.” Yet it is the narration and re-narration of Hepburn’s, Davis’s, and Didion’s “cool” that cements them so firmly in our firmament. Not only have all three appeared in mainstream fashion campaigns in the past twenty years (the Gap, Supreme, and Celine, respectively), but each has been the subject of a full-length documentary in the past ten (Audrey, 2020; Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, 2019; Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, 2017), and at least one major book about each has been released in the past five (Intimate Audrey, 2026, by Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden; 3 Shades of Blue, by James Kaplan, and Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik, both 2024). To allow others to “compete,” the cultural historians of the recent past would have to find something to historicize other than the current generation’s perceived inadequacy.
History, as usual, presents a Goldilocks problem—never “just right,” it is always ballooning into overwhelming excess, filling up the room and weighing down the present, or deflating into a slippery pellicular film, impossible to handle or understand. Popular internet discourse delivers jokes about millennials “watching their 173rd once-in-a-lifetime historical event unfold,” as one recent meme put it, as though my generation suffers from too much history, a “too much” that also signifies the end of itself, like the home of a hoarder that has accumulated so many mountains of life detritus that it ceases to function as a place where a person can live. This surplus of past in our everyday lives, which Reynolds has dubbed our retromania, is eased by the flattened, instantaneous libraries of Babel in our pockets at all times, and causes what the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi described as “the slow cancellation of the future,” a feeling of time’s forward propulsion gradually decelerating until it barely moves at all. If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh. This is found in the ubiquity of reboots in our movie theaters, the diffuse archive-jumbling of our fashion trends, the collapse of unifying -isms in our contemporary art, the citational frenzy of our popular music, and, most nefariously, the conservative nostalgia that currently dominates Western politics.
And yet it is hard not to hear the claims of our missing originality as a kind of nostalgia in its own right, hearkening back to a semi-mythical past when artists were brave and fun, rent was cheap, and everything was new and meaningful. (Nostalgia for those material conditions, rather than a generalized haze of rebellion and inspiration, is well placed; as Fisher wrote, “If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages.”) On a rhetorical level, Marx’s sweeping judgment is very difficult to contest: either you dredge up a few artifacts of novelty that have gone ignored, which reads as a little pathetic (please, sir, what about hyperpop?), or you are forced to defend the material he has dismissed as worthless (Addison Rae, Paris Hilton, the Real Housewives; his harbingers of cultural apocalypse—my harbingers of a great night!), which reads as a naive defense of late-capitalist consumerism. It is true that we are a generation stuck in a loop: many tiny loops, looping at different speeds, looping into other loops, as if we were all wedged inside an undulating Ruth Asawa sculpture, but instead of wire it is made of time. Maybe we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.
“What’s so bad about repetition?” the compulsion asks. But, no, really, what’s so bad about repetition? Or perhaps it would be better rephrased as: What’s so good about innovation?…
… It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary, unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of the twentieth century. To approach the world “anew,” we might need to embrace the word’s cyclonic strangeness, its inherent paradox, defined as “once again” (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again), “in a different way.”…
Read on: “Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?” (a perfect example of Betteridge’s Law :-) from @yalereview.bsky.social
* W. H. Auden
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As we rethink repetition, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that a man who used something old to make something new– and played a key role in transition from the blues to rock and roll– had his only #1 hit: Bo Diddley‘s eponymously-titled debut single reached the top of Billboard’s R&B chart.
Five months later– and five months before Elvis Presley’s first appearance– Bo Diddley, born Ellas Otha Bates, made his television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show… and introduced the mainstream American audience to the 4/4 wonder we would come to know as Rock and Roll. He performed his signature tune, “Bo Diddley”– which prefigured such classics as Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and the Stangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” among countless others. In the kinescope of the show (below), the studio audience can be heard clapping heartily along.
Diddley later recalled that Ed Sullivan had expected him to perform only a cover version of “Tennessee” Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” and was furious with him for opening with “Bo Diddley”– so furious that Sullivan banned him from future appearances on his show. But the damage was done: as George Thorogood told Rolling Stone: “[Chuck Berry’s] ‘Maybellene’ is a country song sped up… ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is blues sped up. But you listen to ‘Bo Diddley,’ and you say, ‘What in the Jesus is that?’”
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”*…
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…
Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf [see here] had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”
Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.
After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.
Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.
No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.
“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”
For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).
Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”
Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.
A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.
WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”
Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.
The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.
The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”
The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.
Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)
For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.
Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)
“Choosing the Word of the Year is No Easy Feat“- the history of who and how, from @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @literaryhub.bsky.social
See also Fatsis on the precarious status of the dictionary: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
* Lewis Carroll (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass)
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As we contemplate coinage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Animals recorded “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which had been first recorded by Nina Simone earlier that year. It was the first single released from their album Animal Tracks (followed by “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”).
“The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits”*…
We recently lost an audio pioneer: Ben Manilla, an award-winning radio and podcast producer, audio entrepreneur, pioneering disc jockey, and broadcast journalism educator, passed away at the end of last month. In his long and storied career, he won awards (the Peabody, Columbia University’s Edward Howard Armstrong Award, RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Scripps Howard Award among others) for everything from Philosophy Talk (from Stanford University) to The Loose Leaf Book Company (with Tom Bodett).
But Ben had a long suit in programming about the Blues. His work with Martin Scorcese and the Experience Music Project helped lead the year-long, nation-wide multimedia event, “The Blues.” It included Ben’s thirteen-hour radio documentary, The Blues with Keb’ Mo’, the most widely distributed special in the history of Public Radio International (PRI). His long running Elwood’s BluesMobile with Dan Aykroyd (nee, House of Blues) was recently inducted into the Library of Congress.
Here in tribute both to Ben and to the Blues, the series’ induction ceremony at the Library of Congress:
(Image at the top: source)
* “The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It’s better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.” – Willie Dixon
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As we feel it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Bo Diddley, Keb’ Mo’, Buddy Guy, and a host of others performed at a tribute at the Kennedy Center to the “father of Chicago Blues,” Muddy Waters.
“All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present”*…
… especially, one might conclude, when it comes to understanding civilizational challenges like climate change. But as Deborah Coen explains, that’s not so straightforward…
Never before in human history has Earth experienced a change in climate as rapid as the shift we’re living through today. Can history hold clues to an upheaval without precedent? That depends on how we frame the question. Scientists tend to have two questions. They want to know how past societies have been impacted by less dramatic episodes of climate variability, and they want to know what has motivated societies to switch from one fuel source to another. Over the past 20 years, historians’ answers have influenced the reports of major international scientific bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences. And yet, following the lead of scientists has constrained how climate historians think about drivers of change. Scientists like to think that change comes from bold new theories and technological breakthroughs. The chemist Paul Crutzen, for instance, popularized the term “Anthropocene” in part to underscore his faith that the solution to the environmental crisis would come from human ingenuity. Today, scientists seek funding for massive projects, from shoring up a melting glacier to constructing climate research centers on the scale of the Manhattan Project. In this spirit, climate historians have tended to tell dramatic stories in which societies fail or succeed according to their ability to impose top-down change. What these accounts miss are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Indeed, a third question is emerging for historians today: what small-scale mechanisms might trigger a transition to a more equitable and sustainable future?…
…
The appeal of both historical frameworks—collapse and resilience—lies ultimately in their framing of human societies as complex systems that can be modeled much like other components of the “Earth system.” In this respect, historians have dutifully answered the question posed by scientists, and they have done so in scientists’ terms. They have thereby made it possible to integrate the human factor into the models that scientists use to study and predict global change. As one 2018 paper put it, “the idea of building a forecasting engine for societal breakdown is too tempting to resist.”
Such “integrated assessment models,” which incorporate demographic and economic trajectories into forecasts of environmental change, gained currency in the 1990s with the rise of international diplomacy around global warming. The models raised the second thorny question mentioned above: How do energy transitions unfold? What motivates a society to replace one fuel source with another?
Again, the framing of the question conditioned the answers. Implicit is the assumption that human history has inevitably marched towards increasingly energy-dense fuel sources. With the onset of industrialization, animal power, wind power, and waterpower were replaced by coal and peat, which in turn gave way to gas and oil. The task of the historian became a narrow search for the factors that induced a fuel switch in the past—and which, by extension, might motivate a transition to “clean” energy in the future…
…
Morris and McNeill [Ian Morris’s 2015 Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve and J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World] gave the scientists what they were looking for: a universal, quantitative version of human history. And yet, these historians obscured what I would call the most important feature of history: contingency. The problem stems, first, from their reliance on historical sources—such as bureaucratic records and monumental remains—that tell history from the point of view of states and their elites. Secondly, these histories constrain their field of view by adopting the language of science and policy. The very concept of “sustainability,” much like its partner, “development,” implies that the goal is to continue along the path that got us here. Reading Morris and McNeill, it is hard even to imagine what an alternative would look like—let alone how we could bring it about.
Fortunately, other historians have shown us that the course of industrialization was by no means inevitable. Energy transitions did not go unchallenged. Recent histories of coal mining (Victor Seow, Thomas G. Andrews) and fracking (Conevery Valencius) reveal that ordinary people objected to the extraction of these fuels due to the risks they posed to local communities. Dismissing past critics as shortsighted or irrational misses the point: history could have gone differently…
…
David Graeber and David Wengrow build on Scott’s insights [James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States] in their monumental synthesis, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). They argue that what has looked to archaeologists like the remains of collapsed early states might be evidence of a conscious decision to abandon the experiment. In sharp contrast to the inevitability of the evolutionist narrative, Graeber and Wengrow stress that humans have repeatedly exercised their freedom to opt out of hierarchical societies and live otherwise. Their message: We might do the same. Our values need not be dictated by the economic choices made by our forebears…
… Morris’s critical review of The Dawn of Everything claims that its attention to exceptions cannot disprove his model. Well then, what can? For a scholar so concerned with scientific credibility, Morris is remarkably unconcerned that his theory fails to pass Popper’s falsifiability test. He closes his review by chiding the authors for their utopianism: “It would be uplifting to think that whatever we dislike about our own age only persists because we have hitherto lacked the imagination and courage to put something better in its place.” One has to wonder: who is this “we” who lacks imagination and courage? Clearly, Morris has missed their point. “Something better” has been put in place again and again, flourishing at smaller or larger scales throughout human history.
Environmental historians Ian Jared Miller and Paul Warde diagnose the problem this way: “Purely quantitative or global approaches to energy” tend to overlook the experiences of those who are not making the decisions but whose lives are affected by them. This oversight is a result of methods that make it “difficult to grasp everyday experience as a prompt to action and an agent of change.” Otherwise put, historians miss a great deal when they rely on the quantitative tools of scientists.
History will never provide a crystal ball, and that’s not what we should ask of it. Nor should we be limited by theories of historical change that consider “events” only as unusual occurrences that were recognized as such by contemporaries. Change can also be the result of an accumulation of small disruptions that goes unnoticed by mainstream observers. Climate historians know this well, since the variability they study was often unremarked upon by those living through it. And yet, climate historians have taken little interest in processes of change that run bottom-up rather than top-down.
This is why climate historians have much to learn from historians of disenfranchised populations…
These histories show that human feelings and values are not dictated by the economic system in which we happen to find ourselves. On the contrary, emotions are unruly and uncontainable; they cannot be quantified and will never serve as input for Earth system models. They can, however, point towards alternative ways of living and relating. Where those alternatives lead, no one can know. But the very fact that human relations are emergent and unpredictable is grounds for hope.
Eminently worth reading in full: “What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change,” from @LAReviewofBooks.
* Fernand Braudel
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As we include, we might send grateful birthday greetings to a historian with a different focus, but that same urge to inclusion– Alan Lomax; he was born on this date in 1915. A historian, folklorist, musician, and ethnomusicologist, he collected, archived, and distributed recordings of vernacular American music that would surely have otherwise been lost.
The many, many artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, and country blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song (of which he was the director) at the Library of Congress; and he produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.
“How low can you go?”*…
… Pretty low if you have an octobass– which the Montreal Symphony now does…
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra has just become the only ensemble in the world to employ an octobass… Here it is dwarfing its new orchestra mates in Montreal:
“This is an octobass – it’s so low it will turn your insides to jelly,” @classicfm
Because of the extreme fingerboard length and string thickness, the musician plays it using a system of levers and pedals which engage metal clamps that are positioned above the neck at specific positions and act as fretting devices.
The octobass, which typically plays a full octave below the double bass, has never been produced on a large scale nor (though Hector Berlioz wrote favorably about the instrument and proposed its widespread adoption) used much by composers. Indeed, The only known work from the 19th century that specifically calls for the octobass is Charles Gounod‘s Messe solennelle de Sainte–Cécile.
Per Berlioz, the octobass’ three open strings were tuned C1, G1, and C2. The fundamental frequencies of the lowest notes in this tuning lie below 20 Hz—the commonly-understood lower bound of the human hearing range—still, these notes are audible due to the overtones they produce. More interesting these inaudible lowest notes (like the 32′ stop on an organ)– known as “infrasound“– elicit a physical reaction: feelings of awe or fear. It has also been suggested that since it is not consciously perceived, it may make people feel vaguely that odd or supernatural events are taking place. In any case, it’s why sound designers in thrillers and horror movies mix infrasound into the tracks at moments meant to be tense or frightening.
* “Born to Hand Jive,” Grease
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As we stretch, we might recall that it was on this date in 1925 that Lonnie Johnson made his first recording, “Mr. Johnson’s Blues,” in a session for OKeh Records. A Blues guitar innovator, his music fueled a blues craze throughout the rest of the decade and influences the next generation of blues and folk musicians.
Johnson was also a talented pianist and violinist, and is is recognized as the first to play an electrically-amplified violin.
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