Peter Gabriel Re-Records “Biko,” His Anti-Apartheid Protest Song, with Musicians Around the World

in Music | February 17th, 2021

Wis­dom, humour, com­pas­sion, under­stand­ing, bril­lian­cy of intel­lect, unselfish­ness, mod­esty, courage—he had all these attrib­ut­es… The gov­ern­ment quite clear­ly nev­er under­stood the extent to which Steve Biko was a man of peace. He was mil­i­tant in stand­ing up for his prin­ci­ples, yes, but his abid­ing goal was a peace­ful rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of all South Africans.

—Don­ald Woods

When South African police mur­dered Steve Biko in deten­tion on August 18, 1977, they thought they were rid­ding them­selves of a thorn in their side, that in killing him, they could for­get about him. Senior TIME edi­tor Tony Karon, who grew up in white South Africa, record­ed what the Min­is­ter of Police said when announc­ing Biko’s death to “a con­fer­ence of the rul­ing par­ty”: “I am not glad and I am not sor­ry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold. I can say noth­ing to you. Any per­son who dies… I shall also be sor­ry if I die.” Then, writes Karon, “they laughed. Like B‑movie Nazis.”

Despite the apartheid state’s best efforts to destroy him, Biko’s death made him a mar­tyr. “I didn’t know Steve Biko,” writes Karon, “but his death made clear to me, and hun­dreds of young white peo­ple like me, what mil­lions of black South Africans knew from expe­ri­ence…. The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thou­sands of lives before his, and many thou­sands more would be killed after Biko’s mur­der. But no death shook my world, and the coun­try all around me, more than Steve Biko’s.”

Biko helped found the South African Student’s Orga­ni­za­tion (SASO) while study­ing med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Natal, and he found­ed the Black Con­scious­ness Move­ment to advo­cate “self-aware­ness and self-reliance for Black peo­ple,” writes Mohammed Elnaiem at JSTOR Dai­ly. It was a move­ment to cen­ter the expe­ri­ences of Black South Africans. Yet as Biko under­stood the term, “Black” was a polit­i­cal class: his was “a move­ment for peo­ple who are oppressed,” he said, includ­ing so-called “col­ored” and Indi­an South Africans. “We believe,” says Biko in the inter­view above, “in a non-racial soci­ety.”

The gov­ern­ment “soon real­ized,” Karon writes, “the rad­i­cal move­ment was a threat to racial hier­ar­chy in the coun­try,” with its legal divi­sions of caste and class. They could not stop Biko’s mes­sage from res­onat­ing around the world. News of his arrest and death spread quick­ly and remained a pow­er­ful sym­bol of the regime’s bru­tal­i­ty. In the music world, the news took the form of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Released in 1980, the song became a major hit. It was, wrote crit­ic Phil Sut­cliffe, “so hon­est you might even risk call­ing it truth.” Gabriel him­self, on the 40th anniver­sary of Biko’s death, wrote that “both music and lyric are sim­ple but writ­ten to be direct and emo­tion­al.”

He did not need to embell­ish, espe­cial­ly in the song’s final line: “the eyes of the world are watch­ing now, watch­ing now.” Indeed, they were, as they are now, even in our states of pan­dem­ic iso­la­tion, watch­ing the con­tin­ued police bru­tal­i­ty of gov­ern­ments built on racism, colo­nial­ism, slav­ery, apartheid, and exclu­sion. It’s an ide­al time for Gabriel to re-release “Biko,” and re-record it with Play­ing for Change, the orga­ni­za­tion gath­er­ing famous and non-famous musi­cians around the world in remote col­lab­o­ra­tive cov­ers of famous songs with uni­ver­sal res­o­nance. “Biko” belongs in their com­pa­ny.

At the top, you can see the per­for­mance, which opens with the stun­ning voic­es of The Cape Town Ensem­ble choral group. Then bassist Meshell Nde­geo­ce­lo, Beni­nese singer Angélique Kid­jo, and cel­list Yo-Yo Ma join in with a Japan­ese per­cus­sion group and oth­er musi­cians as Gabriel deliv­ers the lyrics with as much con­vic­tion as he did over forty years ago. Just above, see a mov­ing live per­for­mance of “Biko” from 1987, in a video direct­ed by Lol Creme. Intro­duc­ing the song, Gabriel calls the activist “a man who preached non­vi­o­lence in a state that has racism enshrined in its con­sti­tu­tion.” Or as the lyrics put it in their dev­as­tat­ing­ly direct way: “It was busi­ness as usu­al / in police room 619.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Musi­cians Around the World Play The Band’s Clas­sic Song, “The Weight,” with Help from Rob­bie Robert­son and Ringo Starr

Musi­cians Around the World Play “Lean on Me,” the Uplift­ing Song by Bill With­ers (RIP)

 

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The Birth of Hip Hop: How DJ Kool Herc Used Turntables to Change the Musical World (1973)

in Music | February 17th, 2021

We all reach an age when the music of our youth becomes “the oldies.” When it comes to music as dynam­ic, inno­v­a­tive, and far-reach­ing as hip-hop, that age can feel sur­pris­ing­ly young. Or so it seemed to me, a child of the 90s, when the 21st cen­tu­ry dawned. Now, sep­a­rat­ed from the artists I grew up lis­ten­ing to by a gulf of almost thir­ty years, I can say they are all cer­ti­fi­ably old school, which I sup­pose makes me cer­ti­fi­ably old.

But con­sid­er this—in 1993, a year I once con­sid­ered some­thing of a gold­en age of hip-hop—the music had already trav­eled twen­ty years and thou­sands of miles from its Bronx ori­gins to become a world­wide phe­nom­e­non. Its great­est inno­va­tors, the men and women who invent­ed the sound, were by then very much old school.

In fact, every­one who wasn’t get­ting down to the sound sys­tem of DJ Kool Herc in the New York of the ear­ly sev­en­ties is a late­com­er to the scene, includ­ing punks like Blondie who imme­di­ate­ly seized on its rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“In 1973,” Hen­ry Louis Gates informs us in the video at the top from the Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes series, the Jamaican-born Herc “set up his turnta­bles and intro­duced a tech­nique at a South Bronx house par­ty that would change music as many peo­ple knew it. His abil­i­ty to switch from record to record—as well as iso­late and repeat music breaks—led to the dis­cov­ery of the hip hop genre.”

It was the sound of a thou­sand radios play­ing, all over the city, with the noise fil­tered out, beats made from the breaks, and the chaos cut into pieces and stitched togeth­er into music again; the sound of turntab­lism, a series of tech­niques, from Herc’s break-beats to the “Trans­former scratch” to jug­gling beats: switch­ing between “two iden­ti­cal records at light­ning fast speed,” as a PBS guide explains, “loop­ing or re-com­bin­ing indi­vid­ual sounds to pro­duce an entire­ly new beat.”

These new means of using play­back devices as instru­ments led “from rework­ing exist­ing tracks to com­pos­ing music” from the com­po­nents, a mad sci­en­tist approach that pre­ced­ed the age of the MC, whose pri­ma­ry pur­pose was to hype the crowd in the music’s ear­ly days, instead of deliv­er­ing the news of the streets in ever more-com­plex rhyme schemes. In the short videos above, you can learn more about Herc’s rev­o­lu­tion. Just above, hear from the man him­self and his for­mer neigh­bors, who went to his first par­ties in the com­mu­ni­ty room of his South Bronx apart­ment build­ing.

Herc took the dis­co DJ’s tech­nique of using two turnta­bles, but played punk and funk records instead, seiz­ing on the obser­va­tion that the crowd went wild dur­ing instru­men­tal breaks. “How would it be,” he thought, “if I put them all togeth­er?” Call­ing it “mer­ry-go-round,” Herc showed off his new idea, after first announc­ing it to the crowd, and got just the reac­tion he’d hoped for. The rest is a his­to­ry we should know. But if we leave out the turntab­lists, the DJs who built the beats that made the music what it is, no mat­ter how old school they sound to us now, we’re miss­ing some­thing crit­i­cal, an exper­i­men­tal rev­o­lu­tion that changed the world.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Jazz Became the “Moth­er of Hip Hop”

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

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

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

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

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Saint John Coltrane: The San Francisco Church Built On A Love Supreme

in Music, Religion | February 17th, 2021

Lit­tle of San Fran­cis­co today is as it was half a cen­tu­ry ago. But at the cor­ner of Turk Boule­vard and Lyon Street stands a true sur­vivor: the Church of St. John Coltrane. Though offi­cial­ly found­ed in 1971, the roots of this unique musi­cal-reli­gious insti­tu­tion (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) go back fur­ther still. “It was our first wed­ding anniver­sary, Sep­tem­ber 18, 1965 and we cel­e­brat­ed the occa­sion by going to the Jazz Work­shop,” write founders Fran­zo and Mari­na King on the Church’s web site. “When John Coltrane came onto the stage we could feel the pres­ence of the Holy Spir­it mov­ing with him.” Over­come with the sense that Coltrane was play­ing direct­ly to them, “we did not talk to each oth­er dur­ing the per­for­mance because we were caught up in what lat­er would be known as our Sound Bap­tism.”

Or as Mari­na puts it in this new short doc­u­men­tary from NPR’s Jazz Night in Amer­i­ca, “The holy ghost fell in a jazz club in 1965, and our lives were changed for­ev­er.” This was the year of Coltrane’s mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme, a jazz album that, in the words of The New York­er’s Richard Brody, “isn’t mere­ly a col­lec­tion of per­for­mances. It’s both one uni­fied com­po­si­tion and, in effect, a con­cept album. And the core of that con­cept is more than musi­cal — it’s the spir­i­tu­al, reli­gious dimen­sion.”

Coltrane, as the doc­u­men­tary tells it, com­posed the suite in iso­la­tion, deter­mined to go cold-turkey and kick the hero­in habit that got him fired from Miles Davis’ band. In the process he under­went a “spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing,” which con­vinced him that his music could have a much high­er pur­pose.

It was Coltrane’s ear­ly death in 1967 that clar­i­fied the Kings’ mis­sion in life, even­tu­al­ly prompt­ing them to con­vert the lat­est in a series of jazz spaces they’d been run­ning into a prop­er house of wor­ship. “John Coltrane became their Christ, their God,” writes NPR’s Anas­ta­sia Tsioul­cas. A Love Supreme “became their cen­tral text, and ‘Coltrane con­scious­ness’ became their guid­ing prin­ci­ple.” Over the past 50 years, their church has endured its share of hard­ships. In the ear­ly 1980s a life­line appeared in the form of the African Ortho­dox Church, whose lead­ers want­ed to bring it into the fold but had, as Fan­zo remem­bers it, one con­di­tion: “John Coltrane can­not be God, okay?” Then the Kings remem­bered a remark Coltrane con­ve­nient­ly made in a Japan­ese inter­view to the effect that, one day, he’d like to be a saint. Thence­forth, St. Coltrane it was: not bad at all for a sax play­er from North Car­oli­na.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

John Coltrane Draws a Mys­te­ri­ous Dia­gram Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal & Mys­ti­cal Qual­i­ties of Music

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

New Jazz Archive Fea­tures Rare Audio of Louis Arm­strong & Oth­er Leg­ends Play­ing in San Fran­cis­co

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

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

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Paul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)

in Music | February 16th, 2021

It takes a cer­tain amount of hubris to write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”—to write, that is, a sec­u­lar hymn, a non-reli­gious gospel hit for burned-out six­ties’ folkies. Maybe only a trag­ic flaw could inspire a com­pos­er “com­ing off the back of four hit albums and two num­ber one sin­gles in four years” to soothe the dis­af­fec­tion of down-and-out Amer­i­cans who could see the bot­tom from where they stood in 1969, a year noto­ri­ous for its cul­tur­al dis­af­fec­tion and polit­i­cal gloom.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s sta­tus as super­star hit­mak­ers at the end of the decade per­haps made it hard­er for view­ers of Songs of Amer­i­ca—the tele­vi­sion film in which “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” debuted—to take them seri­ous­ly.

When the duo first appears on screen in the musi­cal doc­u­men­tary, of sorts, Gar­funkel “brings up the sub­ject of America’s immi­nent bicen­ten­ni­al,” writes Dori­an Lynskey for the BBC, and “a cam­era-con­scious Simon gazes into the dis­tance and asks solemn­ly: ‘Think it’s gonna make it?’”

Direct­ed by Charles Grodin with over half a mil­lion in CBS mon­ey, the film’s “mood of pen­sive pom­pos­i­ty comes to dom­i­nate.” It won few con­verts, despite the show­stop­per of a song. “The aver­age CBS view­er didn’t want to see the world crum­bling,” again, in Songs of Amer­i­ca.

The heav­i­est sequence was a dark twist on the film’s trav­el­ogue theme, jux­ta­pos­ing clips of the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King on the cam­paign trail with footage of mourn­ers watch­ing Bob­by Kennedy’s funer­al train go by. The musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment was unfa­mil­iar: a kind of white gospel song, state­ly and hymn-like, build­ing to a shat­ter­ing cli­max as the long black train sped through America’s bro­ken heart. One mil­lion view­ers respond­ed by turn­ing the dial and watch­ing the fig­ure skat­ing on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. Songs of Amer­i­ca wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years. 

While the movie failed, the song, and album, became instant­ly clas­sic and rose to No. 1. “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” also entered the cul­tur­al lex­i­con as though it had emerged from the misty pre-record­ing his­to­ry of the 19th cen­tu­ry, when songs were writ­ten and rewrit­ten by anony­mous folk claim­ing divine inspi­ra­tion. “The cel­e­brat­ed New Orleans musi­cian Allen Tou­s­saint liked to say: ‘That song had two writ­ers: Paul Simon and God.’ ”

The real sto­ry involves no super­nat­ur­al intervention—it does involve a kind of “love and theft” (as Bob Dylan admit­ted, allud­ing to a book on black­face min­strel­sy), through the influ­ence of the Swan Sil­ver­tones’ record­ing of the 19th-cen­tu­ry spir­i­tu­al, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.” Simon lis­tened to the record “over and over again in his Upper East Side apart­ment… thun­der­struck by a line impro­vised by lead singer Claude Jeter: ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.’” (When Simon met Jeter two years lat­er, he appar­ent­ly “wrote him a cheque on the spot.”)

Inspi­ra­tion flowed through him. “I have no idea where it came from… It just came, all of a sud­den,” he remem­bers in the clip fur­ther up from the 2011 doc­u­men­tary The Har­mo­ny Game. “I remem­ber think­ing this is con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than I usu­al­ly write.” He rec­og­nized right away that he had penned what he would call “my great­est song”… “my ‘Yes­ter­day.’” The com­par­i­son is notable for its con­trast of atti­tudes.

Paul McCartney’s mega-bal­lad extols the virtues of nos­tal­gia and pines for sim­pler times; Simon’s chan­nels Black Amer­i­can gospel, look­ing beyond per­son­al pain to the plight of oth­ers. It also takes its chord pro­gres­sion from a Bach chorale adapt­ed by 19th-cen­tu­ry hymn writ­ers. That’s not to say “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water,” doesn’t evoke the per­son­al. The lyrics “Sail on sil­ver girl” speak direct­ly to his soon-to-be wife Peg­gy Harp­er, “who had recent­ly fret­ted about find­ing her first grey hairs.” The rest came from tra­di­tions of reli­gious music.

Simon gave the vocal to Gar­funkel because he thought “only Artie’s choir­boy voice could do jus­tice to the song,” Lynskey writes. Gar­funkel felt intim­i­dat­ed by the song and “liked the sound of Paul’s falset­to.” Simon took his hes­i­ta­tion as an affront. “Such was the state of their part­ner­ship in 1969.” It’s clear in the open­ing min­utes of Simon’s solo 1970 inter­view with Dick Cavett at the top that the icon­ic folk team would soon be part­ing ways, for a time at least. Cavett has some fun with Simon about the authen­tic­i­ty of his song­writ­ing. “Maybe I lied… a cou­ple of times,” he answers, some good-natured Queens defi­ance aris­ing in his voice. “I was pre­tend­ing to be some­one else.”

Cavett then (at 5:25) asks the “impos­si­ble question”—how does one write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”? Simon pulls out his gui­tar and oblig­es, show­ing how the chords first came from Bach. He gets big laughs and applause for his def­i­n­i­tion of feel­ing “stuck” before he dis­cov­ered the Swan Sil­ver­tones. “Every­where I went led me to where I didn’t want to go.” It’s maybe as uni­ver­sal a feel­ing as has ever been put in song.

“Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” turned 50 in Jan­u­ary of 2020, a month or so before so the nation Simon eulo­gized pre­ma­ture­ly in Songs of Amer­i­ca fell into seri­ous­ly trou­bled waters. In our stuck­ness, maybe his clas­sic bal­lad, and espe­cial­ly its call to reach beyond our­selves, can help get us over like noth­ing else. See Simon and Gar­funkel play it live just above in their first Cen­tral Park reunion con­cert in 1981.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

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

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Alfred Hitchcock Meets Jorge Luis Borges Borges in Cold War America: Watch Double Take (2009) Free Online

in Film, History | February 16th, 2021

In 1962, while shoot­ing The Birds, Alfred Hitch­cock gets a phone call. Or rather, he’s informed of a phone call, but when he makes his way off set he finds not a call but a real live caller, and a thor­ough­ly unex­pect­ed one at that: him­self, eigh­teen years old­er. Beneath this encounter — in a room the Lon­don-born, Los Ange­les-res­i­dent Hitch­cock rec­og­nizes as a hybrid of Chasen’s and Clar­idge’s — runs a cur­rent of exis­ten­tial ten­sion. This owes not just to the imag­in­able rea­sons, but also to the fact that both Hitch­cocks have heard the same apho­rism: “If you meet your dou­ble, you should kill him.”

So goes the plot of Johan Gri­mon­prez’s Dou­ble Take, or at least that of its fic­tion­al scenes. Though fea­ture-length, Dou­ble Take would be more accu­rate­ly con­sid­ered an “essay film” in the tra­di­tion of Orson Welles’ truth-and-fal­si­ty-mix­ing F for Fake. As Every Frame a Paint­ing’s Tony Zhou reveals, Welles’ pic­ture offers a mas­ter class in its own form, illus­trat­ing the vari­ety of ways cin­e­mat­ic cuts can con­nect not just events but thoughts, even as it expert­ly shifts between its par­al­lel (and at first, seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed) nar­ra­tives. Dou­ble Take, too, has more than one sto­ry to tell: while Hitch­cock and his dop­pel­gänger drink tea and cof­fee, the Cold War reach­es its zenith with the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis.

We call Hitch­cock “the mas­ter of sus­pense,” but revis­it­ing his fil­mog­ra­phy expos­es his com­mand of a more basic emo­tion: fear. It was fear, in Dou­ble Take’s con­cep­tion of his­to­ry, that became com­modi­tized on an enor­mous scale in Cold War Amer­i­ca: fear of the Com­mu­nist threat, of course, but also less overt­ly ide­o­log­i­cal vari­eties. Hol­ly­wood cap­i­tal­ized on all of them with the aid of tal­ents like Hitch­cock­’s and tech­nol­o­gy like the tele­vi­sion, whose rise coin­cid­ed with the embit­ter­ing of U.S.-Soviet rela­tions. Even for a man of cin­e­ma forged in the silent era, the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a TV series could hard­ly be reject­ed — espe­cial­ly if it allowed him to poke fun at the com­mer­cial breaks for­ev­er quash­ing his sig­na­ture sus­pense.

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents, its name­sake announced upon its pre­miere, would com­mence “bring­ing mur­der into the Amer­i­can home, where it has always belonged.” But along with the mur­der, it smug­gled in the work of writ­ers like Ray Brad­bury, John Cheev­er, and Rebec­ca West. Dou­ble Take also comes inspired by lit­er­a­ture: “The Oth­er” and “August 25th, 1983,” Jorge Luis Borges’ tales of meet­ing his own dou­ble from anoth­er time. Its script was writ­ten by Tom McCarthy, whose Remain­der appears with Borges’ work on the flow­chart of philo­soph­i­cal nov­els pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. How­ev­er many dif­fer­ent Hitch­cocks it shows us, we know there will nev­er tru­ly be anoth­er — just as well as we know that we still, in our undi­min­ished desire to be enter­tained by our own fears, live in Hitch­cock­’s world.

Dou­ble Take will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

1000 Frames of Hitch­cock: See Each of Alfred Hitchcock’s 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artis­tic Frames

Men In Com­mer­cials Being Jerks About Cof­fee: A Mashup of 1950s & 1960s TV Ads

How Orson Welles’ F for Fake Teach­es Us How to Make the Per­fect Video Essay

A Flow­chart of Philo­soph­i­cal Nov­els: Read­ing Rec­om­men­da­tions from Haru­ki Muraka­mi to Don DeLil­lo

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

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Archaeologists Find the Earliest Work of “Abstract Art,” Dating Back 73,000 Years

in Art, History, Life | February 16th, 2021

Image by C. Fos­ter

Art, as we under­stand the term, is an activ­i­ty unique to homo sapi­ens and per­haps some of our ear­ly hominid cousins. This much we know. But the mat­ter of when ear­ly humans began mak­ing art is less cer­tain. Until recent­ly, it was thought that the ear­li­est pre­his­toric art dat­ed back some 40,000 years, to cave draw­ings found in Indone­sia and Spain. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, this is also when archae­ol­o­gists believed ear­ly humans mas­tered sym­bol­ic thought. New finds, how­ev­er, have shift­ed this date back con­sid­er­ably. “Recent dis­cov­er­ies around south­ern Africa indi­cate that by 64,000 years ago at the very least,” Ruth Schus­ter writes at Haaretz, “peo­ple had devel­oped a keen sense of abstrac­tion.”

Then came the “hash­tag” in 2018, a draw­ing in ochre on a tiny flake of stone that archae­ol­o­gists believe “may be the world’s old­est exam­ple of the ubiq­ui­tous cross-hatched pat­tern drawn on a sil­crete flake in the Blom­bos Cave in South Africa,” writes Krys­tal D’Costa at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, with the dis­claimer that the drawing’s cre­ators “did not attribute the same mean­ing or sig­nif­i­cance to [hash­tags] that we do.” The tiny arti­fact, thought to be around 73,000 years old, may have in fact been part of a much larg­er pat­tern that bore no resem­blance to any­thing hash­tag-like, which is only a con­ve­nient, if mis­lead­ing, way of nam­ing it.

The arti­fact was recov­ered from Blom­bos Cave in South Africa, a site that “has been under­go­ing exca­va­tion since 1991 with deposits that range from the Mid­dle Stone Age (about 100,000 to 72,000 years ago) to the Lat­er Stone Age (about 42,000 years ago to 2,000 years BCE).” These find­ings have been sig­nif­i­cant, show­ing a cul­ture that used heat to shape stones into tools and, just as artists in caves like Las­caux did, used ochre, a nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring pig­ment, to draw on stone. They made engrav­ings by etch­ing lines direct­ly into pieces of ochre. Archae­ol­o­gists also found in the Mid­dle Stone Age deposits “a toolk­it designed to cre­ate a pig­ment­ed com­pound that could be stored in abalone shells,” D’Costa notes.

Nicholas St. Fleur describes the tiny “hash­tag” in more detail at The New York Times as “a small flake, mea­sur­ing only about the size of two thumb­nails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The mark­ings con­sist­ed of six straight, almost par­al­lel lines that were crossed diag­o­nal­ly by three slight­ly curved lines.” Its dis­cov­er­er, Dr. Luca Pol­laro­lo of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Wit­wa­ter­srand in Johan­nes­burg, express­es his aston­ish­ment at find­ing it. “I think I saw more than ten thou­sand arti­facts in my life up to now,” he says, “and I nev­er saw red lines on a flake. I could not believe what I had in my hands.”

The evi­dence points to a very ear­ly form of abstract sym­bol­ism, researchers believe, and sim­i­lar pat­terns have been found else­where in the cave in lat­er arti­facts. Pro­fes­sor Francesco d’Errico of the French Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­en­tif­ic Research tells Schus­ter, “this is what one would expect in tra­di­tion­al soci­ety where sym­bols are repro­duced…. This repro­duc­tion in dif­fer­ent con­texts sug­gests sym­bol­ism, some­thing in their minds, not just doo­dling.”

As for whether the draw­ing is “art”… well, we might as well try and resolve the ques­tion of what qual­i­fies as art in our own time. “Look at some of Picasso’s abstracts,” says Christo­pher Hen­shilwood, an archae­ol­o­gist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen and the lead author of a study on the tiny arti­fact pub­lished in Nature in 2018. “Is that art? Who’s going to tell you it’s art or not?”

Researchers at least agree the mark­ings were delib­er­ate­ly made with some kind of imple­ment to form a pat­tern. But “we don’t know that it’s art at all,” says Hen­shilwood. “We know that it’s a sym­bol,” made for some pur­pose, and that it pre­dates the pre­vi­ous ear­li­est known cave art by some 30,000 years. That in itself shows “behav­ioral­ly mod­ern” human activ­i­ties, such as express­ing abstract thought in mate­r­i­al form, emerg­ing even clos­er to the evo­lu­tion­ary appear­ance of mod­ern humans on the scene.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

A Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing Tells the Old­est Known Sto­ry

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

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

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Travel from Rotterdam to Amsterdam in 10 Minutes by Boat: A 4k Timelapse

in Travel | February 16th, 2021

In 2013, a boat trav­eled from Rot­ter­dam to Ams­ter­dam, with a time­lapse cam­era installed 30 meters high. The result­ing film “gives a unique and stun­ning view of the old Dutch water­ways, in 4K.” And lots of bridges along the way.

All images were shot with a Canon 550d at an inter­val of 3 sec­onds. 30,000 pic­tures were tak­en in total. Ini­tial­ly, “the film could­n’t be pub­lished due to restric­tions. After a few years it was for­got­ten.” But now it has been res­ur­rect­ed, and it’s online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

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:

16th-Cen­tu­ry Ams­ter­dam Stun­ning­ly Visu­al­ized with 3D Ani­ma­tion

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

The Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam Has Dig­i­tized 709,000 Works of Art, Includ­ing Famous Works by Rem­brandt and Ver­meer

Revis­it Scenes of Dai­ly Life in Ams­ter­dam in 1922, with His­toric Footage Enhanced by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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The Color That May Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Green

in Chemistry, Fashion, History, Science, TED Talks | February 15th, 2021

“Either the wall­pa­per goes, or I do.” —Oscar Wilde

Look­ing to repel bed bugs and rats?

Dec­o­rate your bed­room à la Napoleon’s final home on the damp island of Saint Hele­na.

Those in a posi­tion to know sug­gest that ver­min shy away from yel­low­ish-greens such as that favored by the Emper­or because they “resem­ble areas of intense light­ing.”

We’d like to offer an alter­nate the­o­ry.

Could it be that the crit­ters’ ances­tors passed down a cel­lu­lar mem­o­ry of the per­ils of arsenic?

Napoleon, like thou­sands of oth­ers, was smit­ten with a hue known as Scheele’s Green, named for Carl Wil­helm Scheele, the Ger­man-Swedish phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal chemist who dis­cov­ered oxy­gen, chlo­rine, and unfor­tu­nate­ly, a gor­geous, tox­ic green pig­ment that’s also a cupric hydro­gen arsen­ite.

Scheele’s Green, aka Schloss Green, was cheap and easy to pro­duce, and quick­ly replaced the less vivid cop­per car­bon­ate based green dyes that had been in use pri­or to the mid 1770s.

The col­or was an imme­di­ate hit when it made its appear­ance, show­ing up in arti­fi­cial flow­ers, can­dles, toys, fash­ion­able ladies’ cloth­ing, soap, beau­ty prod­ucts, con­fec­tions, and wall­pa­per.

A month before Napoleon died, he includ­ed the fol­low­ing phrase in his will: My death is pre­ma­ture. I have been assas­si­nat­ed by the Eng­lish oli­gop­oly and their hired mur­der­er…”

His exit at 51 was indeed untime­ly, but per­haps the wall­pa­per, and not the Eng­lish oli­gop­oly, is the greater cul­prit, espe­cial­ly if it was hung with arsenic-laced paste, to fur­ther deter rats.

When Scheele’s Green wall­pa­per, like the striped pat­tern in Napoleon’s bath­room, became damp or moldy, the pig­ment in it metab­o­lized, releas­ing poi­so­nous arsenic-laden vapors.

Napoleon’s First Valet Louis-Joseph Marc­hand recalled the “child­ish joy” with which the emper­or jumped into the tub where he rel­ished soak­ing for long spells:

The bath­tub was a tremen­dous oak chest lined with lead. It required an excep­tion­al quan­ti­ty of water, and one had to go a half mile away and trans­port it in a bar­rel.

Baths also fig­ured in Sec­ond Valet Louis Éti­enne Saint-Denis’ rec­ol­lec­tions of his master’s ill­ness:

His reme­dies con­sist­ed only of warm nap­kins applied to his side, to baths, which he took fre­quent­ly, and to a diet which he observed from time to time.

Saint-Denis’s recall seems to have had some lacu­nae. Accord­ing to a post in con­junc­tion with the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al History’s Pow­er of Poi­son exhib­it:

In Napoleon’s case, arsenic was like­ly just one of many com­pounds tax­ing an already trou­bled sys­tem. In the course of treat­ments for a vari­ety of symptoms—swollen legs, abdom­i­nal pain, jaun­dice, vom­it­ing, weakness—Napoleon was sub­ject­ed to a smor­gas­bord of oth­er tox­ic sub­stances. He was said to con­sume large amounts of a sweet apri­cot-based drink con­tain­ing hydro­cyan­ic acid. He had been giv­en tarter emet­ic, an anti­mon­al com­pound, by a Cor­si­can doc­tor. (Like arsenic, anti­mo­ny would also help explain the pre­served state of his body at exhuma­tion.) Two days before his death, his British doc­tors gave him a dose of calomel, or mer­curous chlo­ride, after which he col­lapsed into a stu­por and nev­er recov­ered. 

As Napoleon was vom­it­ing a black­ish liq­uid and expir­ing, fac­to­ry and gar­ment work­ers who han­dled Scheele’s Green dye and its close cousin, Paris Green, were suf­fer­ing untold mor­ti­fi­ca­tions of the flesh, from hideous lesions, ulcers and extreme gas­tric dis­tress to heart dis­ease and can­cer.

Fash­ion-first women who spent the day corset­ed in volu­mi­nous green dress­es were keel­ing over from skin-to-arsenic con­tact. Their seam­stress­es’ green fin­gers were in wretched con­di­tion.

In 2008, an Ital­ian team test­ed strands of Napoleon’s hair from four points in his life—childhood, exile, his death, and the day there­after. They deter­mined that all the sam­ples con­tained rough­ly 100 times the arsenic lev­els of con­tem­po­rary peo­ple in a con­trol group.

Napoleon’s son and wife, Empress Josephine, also had notice­ably ele­vat­ed arsenic lev­els.

Had we been alive and liv­ing in Europe back then, ours like­ly would have been too.

All that green!

But what about the wall­pa­per?

A scrap pur­port­ed­ly from the din­ing room, where Napoleon was relo­cat­ed short­ly before death, was found by a woman in Nor­folk, Eng­land, past­ed into a fam­i­ly scrap­book above the hand­writ­ten cap­tion, This small piece of paper was tak­en off the wall of the room in which the spir­it of Napoleon returned to God who gave it.

In 1980, she con­tact­ed chemist David Jones, whom she had recent­ly heard on BBC Radio dis­cussing vaporous bio­chem­istry and Vic­to­ri­an wall­pa­per. She agreed to let him test the scrap using non-destruc­tive x‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­troscopy. The result?

.12 grams of arsenic per square meter. (Wall­pa­pers con­tain­ing 0.6 to 0.015 grams per square meter were deter­mined to be haz­ardous.)

Dr. Jones described watch­ing the arsenic lev­els peak­ing on the lab’s print out as “a crazy, won­der­ful moment.” He reit­er­at­ed that the house in which Napoleon was impris­oned was “noto­ri­ous­ly damp,” mak­ing it easy for a 19th cen­tu­ry fan to peel off a sou­venir in “an inspired act of van­dal­ism.”

Death by wall­pa­per and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors is def­i­nite­ly less cloak and dag­ger than assas­si­na­tion by the Eng­lish oli­gop­oly, hired mur­der­er, and oth­er con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that had thrived on the pres­ence of arsenic in sam­ples of Napoleon’s hair.

As Dr. Jones recalled:

…sev­er­al his­to­ri­ans were upset by my claim that it was all an acci­dent of decor…Napoleon him­self feared he was dying of stom­ach can­cer, the dis­ease which had killed his father; and indeed his autop­sy revealed that his stom­ach was very dam­aged. It had at least one big ulcer…My feel­ing is that Napoleon would have died in any case. His arseni­cal wall­pa­per might mere­ly have has­tened the event by a day or so. Mur­der con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists will have to find new evi­dence! 

We can’t resist men­tion­ing that when the emper­or was exhumed and shipped back to France, 19 years after his death, his corpse showed lit­tle or no decom­po­si­tion.

Green con­tin­ues to be a nox­ious col­or when humans attempt to repro­duce it in the phys­i­cal realm. As Alice Rawthorn observed The New York Times:

The cru­el truth is that most forms of the col­or green, the most pow­er­ful sym­bol of sus­tain­able design, aren’t eco­log­i­cal­ly respon­si­ble, and can be dam­ag­ing to the envi­ron­ment.

Take a deep­er dive into Napoleon’s wall­pa­per with an edu­ca­tion­al pack­et for edu­ca­tors pre­pared by chemist David Jones and Hen­drik Ball.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waist­coat?: The Ori­gins of This Dis­tinc­tive Pose Explained

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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