We know the ori­gin sto­ry of hip hop as the prod­uct of an enter­pris­ing sub­cul­ture of young, most­ly African-Amer­i­can, West Indi­an, and Lati­no tastemak­ers in the Bronx (or first in Brook­lyn, accord­ing to an alter­nate his­to­ry). We’ve seen at least one of the dozens of doc­u­men­taries and drama­ti­za­tions cen­tered on this piv­otal moment in musi­cal his­to­ry in the late 70s/early 80s—when pio­neers like DJ Kool Herc and Grand­mas­ter Flash began using two turnta­bles and a mix­er to splice togeth­er bars of dis­co, soul, funk, and many oth­er kinds of music to turn them into an entire­ly new form.

In time, sam­pling became the prove­nance of ded­i­cat­ed dig­i­tal machines, which, in con­cert with drum machines and clas­sic turntable tech­niques, formed the basis of the sound of hip hop, dance, and pop music as we know them today. From local NYC roots came a glob­al phenomenon—which has tak­en “cen­ter stage on Netflix’s orig­i­nal music pro­gram­ming,” as Forbes notes, with the stream­ing com­pa­ny invest­ing mil­lions in new hip hop-themed con­tent. Still, even with the music’s main­stream­ing and glob­al reach, it’s a bit odd to see the piv­otal role of sam­pling explained by Eng­lish DJ and pop pro­duc­er Mark Ron­son, on a TED Talk Stage, through a remix of a few dozen oth­er TED talks.

But Ron­son turns this clever pre­sen­ta­tion into an immer­sive exam­ple of the ways that sam­pling allows cre­ators to become part of a “shared event” and to make new nar­ra­tives or alter the old ones. “That’s what the past 30 years of music has been,” he says, “that’s the major thread.” Sam­pling, he argues, is not about “hijack­ing nos­tal­gia whole­sale,” but about cre­at­ing new tapes­tries of sound. “Albums like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Ris­ing and the Beast­ie Boy’s Paul’s Bou­tique,” he notes, “loot­ed from decades of record­ings to cre­ate these son­ic, lay­ered mas­ter­pieces that were basi­cal­ly the Sgt. Pepper’s of their day.”

I think Ronson’s right—no these weren’t pio­neer­ing, exper­i­men­tal rock albums, as purists might point out, but the com­par­i­son is valid for the sheer vari­ety, inven­tive­ness, and son­ic com­plex­i­ty of the arrange­ments. (And like The Bea­t­les, these artists were involved in their share of law­suits, though in their case for copy­right infringe­ment.) Artists mak­ing albums built pri­mar­i­ly out of sam­ples aren’t “too lazy to make their own music,” Ron­son says, or “try­ing to cash in on the famil­iar­i­ty of the orig­i­nal stuff.” Most artists and pro­duc­ers, indeed, look for the most obscure sam­ples they can find, with some pret­ty obvi­ous excep­tions.

Rather, Ron­son argues, like the influ­ence of the Delta blues on British inva­sion rock­ers, sam­pling is a way for artists to pay trib­ute to music that moves them and to take its dis­tinc­tive­ness and make it their own, “to co-opt that music for the tools of their day.” To put it in oth­er terms, sam­pling is both a form of love and theft. Ron­son fol­lows his argu­ment with some per­son­al his­to­ry of his own musi­cal jour­ney, then gets back behind his DJ rig for a demon­stra­tion of Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di,” the fifth most sam­pled song of all time, as re-appro­pri­at­ed by The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G. and “cul­tur­al tour-de-force” (he says with tongue in cheek), Miley Cyrus.

Like it or not, sam­pling is here to stay, now the source of vir­tu­al­ly every build­ing block of many pop­u­lar gen­res, from snare drums and cym­bals to gui­tars and effects. But maybe this isn’t just a new phe­nom­e­non of the dig­i­tal age or a spe­cif­ic arti­fact of the hip hop rev­o­lu­tion, but just anoth­er exam­ple of Kir­by Ferguson’s cul­tur­al the­o­ry of every­thing in his four part video essay series, Every­thing is a Remix.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing is a Remix: The Full Series, Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty, Released in One Pol­ished HD Video on Its 5th Anniver­sary

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

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

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

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

Last night I had din­ner at a local restau­rant that hap­pened to have a playlist on of great songs from my high school years. As one after anoth­er came on I thought, “wow, I for­got how good these songs are.” But after a while I real­ized I couldn’t real­ly sep­a­rate the songs them­selves from my mem­o­ries of lis­ten­ing to them back in the old days. Nos­tal­gia, as we know, plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in how we respond to record­ed music. But as to the ques­tion of what makes a song great to begin with, what sep­a­rates it from thou­sands of oth­er songs released around the same time… this is much more dif­fi­cult for many peo­ple to answer.

We might pull out one or two musi­cal elements—“this beat is amaz­ing” or “those heavy gui­tars are awe­some” or “her voice is just so powerful”—before falling back on sub­jec­tive cri­te­ria about how the song makes us feel and what we think of when we hear it. Most peo­ple can’t iden­ti­fy with pre­ci­sion how and why cer­tain songs sound like they do because devel­op­ing such an ear takes years of train­ing. It’s a skill learned by study­ing the­o­ry, record­ing, and musi­cal tech­nique, and by lis­ten­ing crit­i­cal­ly to lots and lots of music. Ask a musi­cian, pro­duc­er, or engi­neer what makes a song great and you might get a sem­i­nar on its mix­ing, arrange­ment, chord pro­gres­sions, and use of stu­dio effects.

That’s what we get in the YouTube series What Makes This Song Great?, cre­at­ed by musi­cian and pro­duc­er Rick Beato. Here, as Metafil­ter writes, he “breaks down the musi­cal struc­ture and pro­duc­tion tech­niques in pop­u­lar songs. Work­ing from the stems [pre-mixed group­ings of drums, gui­tars, vocals, keys, etc] of each song, he dis­cuss­es every­thing from Sting’s Lydi­an mode bassline, to the use of Neu­mann mics to cap­ture the inten­si­ty of Chris Cor­nel­l’s vocals; from sidechain com­pres­sion in an Ari­ana Grande song, to the use of a flat 6th to intro­duce a melan­choly air into the vocal melody of a Tool song.”

Now, everyone’s enti­tled to their tastes, and you might find your­self look­ing over his choic­es and think­ing of some of them, “this song’s not great!” And, well, fair enough. But give it a chance any­way. Because you can gain new lev­els of appre­ci­a­tion even for music you don’t sub­jec­tive­ly enjoy, just by learn­ing how that music was con­struct­ed. When I first began to learn about the skill and effort that goes into writ­ing, record­ing, mix­ing, and mas­ter­ing stu­dio-qual­i­ty music, the expe­ri­ence was quite hum­bling, and I found myself lis­ten­ing to songs I didn’t love, exact­ly, but could very much appre­ci­ate from a tech­ni­cal point of view.

I also found my tastes expand­ing, even to include some pop music I had dis­missed as mean­ing­less fluff. Because I could hear inter­est­ing uses of reverb, or stereo pan­ning, or delay, or chord voic­ings. In short, with care­ful, informed, lis­ten­ing, you can learn to appre­ci­ate the archi­tec­ture of record­ed music, rather than just the choice of exte­ri­or paint col­ors or obvi­ous dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments. And songs don’t always need to land emo­tion­al­ly to still tick­le your inter­est. Does that mean that I’m now a fan of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” (top)? Well, no. But instead of rolling my eyes when it comes on, I can hear the small things (see what I did?) Beato points out and think, okay, that is actu­al­ly kin­da cool.

The lit­tle hook in the intro, that one mut­ed chord in the open­ing pro­gres­sion, a sus4 chord thrown in for a dis­so­nant instant. Maybe it also helps that, with the vocals stripped out, this could be anoth­er three-chord punk song and not that song, but, hey, it’s a learn­ing process. Many of the oth­er songs in the series might be more uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged as “great” for their musi­cian­ship and songcraft. But that doesn’t mean we can’t glean some­thing from all of Beat­o’s videos. Get­ting expert per­spec­tives like his can expand our appre­ci­a­tion for any kind of music, and the best pro­duc­ers and musi­cians tend to have the most eclec­tic tastes.

Fur­ther up, see Beato’s videos on The Police’s “Every Lit­tle Thing She Does is Mag­ic,” Steely Dan’s “Kid Charle­magne,” Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of,” and, just above, Tom Pet­ty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” And check out all of the videos on his chan­nel here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

The MC5’s Wayne Kramer Demon­strates the Cor­rect & Offi­cial Way to Play “Kick Out the Jams” on the Gui­tar

Hear Mar­vin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capel­la: The Haunt­ing Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track

I wish a had a bet­ter answer to the ques­tion “where were you when David Bowie died?” than, “sit­ting at my desk, star­ing dumb­ly at the com­put­er screen.” While the ide­al place to read every instant online trib­ute and RIP, it was hard­ly a mem­o­rable loca­tion to get the news that one of our era’s most bril­liant cre­ative lights had gone out, leav­ing in his wake mil­lions of bro­ken-heart­ed fans and a discog­ra­phy unequaled in mod­ern music.

But, like mil­lions of oth­er Bowie lovers at their com­put­ers, I could med­i­tate on his music videos—from the painful­ly ill-con­ceived to the har­row­ing and pro­found; con­tem­plate his film work; and call up with a mouse click my favorite songs. It’s beyond cliché to point out Bowie’s exu­ber­ant embrace of change, but it bears repeat­ing that his embrace of tech­nol­o­gy was a key com­po­nent in the evo­lu­tion of his many per­son­ae.

Bowie was as adapt­able to the age of YouTube as he was to the ana­log days of glam. Sev­er­al less­er albums notwith­stand­ing, the major Bowie upgrades inspired ado­ra­tion from new gen­er­a­tions of fans in every decade of his career since the 70s. Always “will­ing to take risks and do some­thing dif­fer­ent,” writes Nicholas Pell at L.A. Week­ly, “what he was not will­ing to do is become an oldies act.”

Pell also advances an “unpop­u­lar opin­ion” sure to irri­tate many a Bowie fan. Bowie, he argues, “wasn’t an inno­va­tor,” but “an ear­ly adopter of what the real van­guard artists were doing.” Skip­ping the strange, unsuc­cess­ful late 60s record­ings and “stan­dard, psy­che­del­ic-tinged folk” cribbed large­ly from Dono­van, Pell begins by not­ing that Zig­gy Star­dust and Aladdin Sane were basi­cal­ly vari­a­tions on T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, “a pret­ty spe­cif­ic form of inspi­ra­tion, not exact­ly imi­ta­tion.”

The Thin White Duke peri­od was a take on Roxy Music’s Bryan Fer­ry, and Bowie record­ed his most laud­ed work—the Berlin Tril­o­gy—with Roxy Music’s key­boardist, Bri­an Eno, with­out whose sound and vision those albums could hard­ly have been made. In the nineties, he pulled from Nine Inch Nails and drum and bass; in his swan song Black Star, from Kendrick Lamar.

But so what? In each incar­na­tion, “influ­ence, not imi­ta­tion” is the least one can say about what he did with oth­ers’ styles. The prop­er word, per­haps, is trans­mu­ta­tion—Bowie turned glam rock into mes­mer­iz­ing musi­cal the­ater, com­bin­ing Bolan’s flam­boy­ant swag­ger with mime, dada, mod­ern dance, and sci-fi absur­di­ty.

He took Bryan Ferry’s art rock, smooth, roman­tic moves, and suits and turned them into dark, Teu­ton­ic, brood­ing sound­scapes and haunt­ing Cold War anthems like the utter­ly per­fect “Heroes.” Into the fre­net­ic clat­ter of drum and bass he inject­ed para­noia, alien­ation, and unset­tling nar­ra­tives of per­son­al frag­men­ta­tion. If these aren’t inno­va­tions, I don’t know what the word means. Every artist copies; Bowie was at his best when he stole from the best.

The more for­get­table albums show him in uncer­tain phas­es, lack­ing the right mus­es and col­lab­o­ra­tors to make him shine. But his cat­a­log is enor­mous and still full of sur­pris­es, even in records crit­ics pan or most­ly ignore. In the 19-hour playlist above, you can fol­low it all from start to fin­ish, “from glam to folk, dance to rock and roll,” as Stereogum’s Aaron Lar­iv­iere sums it up in his exhaus­tive rank­ing of Bowie albums from worst to best, “heavy met­al, musi­cal the­ater, art-rock, soul, elec­tron­i­ca, indus­tri­al, ambi­ent, all of it.”

Lean back in your desk chair, click play and “relive it all—album by album… turn by left-turn,” influ­ence by influ­ence. Bowie was a col­lec­tor of sounds new and old who nev­er let him­self become a muse­um piece.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The Peri­od­ic Table of David Bowie: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Sem­i­nal Artist’s Influ­ence and Influ­ences

In 1999, David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good and Bad of the Inter­net

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

One thing they don’t teach you in par­ent­ing school is how to guide a young child into mak­ing few­er mis­takes in her home­work, while also com­mu­ni­cat­ing to her that mis­takes are not “bad” but often “good” in that they can be con­duits for cre­ative think­ing and intu­itive path­ways to progress. This les­son presents even more prob­lems if your child has per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies. (If you have sound ped­a­gog­i­cal meth­ods, I’m all ears.)

The prob­lem isn’t just that adults con­stant­ly tele­graph bina­ry “yes/no,” “good/bad” mes­sages to every­one and every­thing around them, but that most adults are deeply uncom­fort­able with ambi­gu­i­ty, and thus deeply afraid of mis­takes, as a result of imbib­ing so many bina­ry mes­sages them­selves. Impro­vi­sa­tion fright­ens trained and untrained musi­cians alike, for exam­ple, for this very rea­son. Who wants to screw up pub­licly and look like… well, a screw up?

We think that doing some­thing well, and even “per­fect­ly,” will win us the pat on the head/gold star/good report card we have been taught to crave all our lives. Sure­ly there are excel­lent rea­sons to strive for excel­lence. But accord­ing to one who should know—the most excel­lent Miles Davis—excellence by nature obvi­ates the idea of mis­takes. How’s that, you ask? Let us attend to one of Davis’ for­mer side­men, Her­bie Han­cock, who tells one of his favorite sto­ries about the man above.

Loose impro­vi­sa­tion is inte­gral to jazz, but we all know Miles Davis as a very exact­ing char­ac­ter. He could be mean, demand­ing, abra­sive, cranky, hyper­crit­i­cal, and we might con­clude, giv­en these per­son­al qual­i­ties, and the con­sis­tent excel­lence of his play­ing, that he was a per­fec­tion­ist who couldn’t tol­er­ate screw ups. Han­cock gives us a very dif­fer­ent impres­sion, telling the tale of a “hot night” in Stuttgart, when the music was “tight, it was pow­er­ful, it was inno­v­a­tive, and fun.”

Mak­ing what any­one would rea­son­ably call a mis­take in the mid­dle of one of Davis’ solos—hitting a notice­ably wrong chord—Hancock react­ed as most of us would, with dis­may. “Miles paused for a sec­ond,” he says, “and then he played some notes that made my chord right… Miles was able to turn some­thing that was wrong into some­thing that was right.” Still, Han­cock was so upset, he couldn’t play for about a minute, par­a­lyzed by his own ideas about “right” and “wrong” notes.

What I real­ize now is that Miles didn’t hear it as a mis­take. He heard it as some­thing that hap­pened. As an event. And so that was part of the real­i­ty of what was hap­pen­ing at that moment. And he dealt with it…. Since he didn’t hear it as a mis­take, he thought it was his respon­si­bil­i­ty to find some­thing that fit.

Han­cock drew a musi­cal les­son from the moment, yes, and he also drew a larg­er life les­son about growth, which requires, he says, “a mind that’s open enough… to be able to expe­ri­ence sit­u­a­tions as they are and turn them into med­i­cine… take what­ev­er sit­u­a­tion you have and make some­thing con­struc­tive hap­pen with it.”

This bit of wis­dom reminds me not only of my favorite Radio­head lyric (“Be con­struc­tive with your blues”), but also of a sto­ry about a Japan­ese monk who vis­it­ed a monastery in the U.S. and promised to give a demon­stra­tion in the fine art of Zen archery. After much solemn prepa­ra­tion and breath­less antic­i­pa­tion, the monk led his hosts on a hike up the moun­tain, where he then blind­ly fired an arrow off a cliff and walked away, leav­ing the stunned spec­ta­tors to con­clude the tar­get must be wher­ev­er the arrow hap­pened to land.

What mat­ters, Davis is quot­ed as say­ing, is how we respond to what’s hap­pen­ing around us: “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that deter­mines if it’s good or bad.” Or, as he put it more sim­ply and non-dual­is­ti­cal­ly, “Do not fear mis­takes. There are none.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 65-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Miles Davis’ Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jazz Albums

Miles Davis Dish­es Dirt on His Fel­low Jazz Musi­cians: “The Trom­bone Play­er Should be Shot”; That Ornette is “F‑ing Up the Trum­pet”

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

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

We recent­ly fea­tured a video of Bri­an Eno giv­ing con­tro­ver­sial advice to artists: “don’t get a job.” Eas­i­er said than done, of course, but he makes a com­pelling case. Along the way, he says some­thing inter­est­ing about the fetish we make of genius—an obses­sive focus on lone, and almost always male, artists as self-made, hero­ic embod­i­ments of great­ness. “Although great new ideas are usu­al­ly artic­u­lat­ed by indi­vid­u­als,” he says, “they’re near­ly always gen­er­at­ed by com­mu­ni­ties.” (He pro­pos­es the neol­o­gism “sce­nius” in place of “genius” to describe “coop­er­a­tive intel­li­gence.”) Eno would prob­a­bly agree that great art not only comes out of cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties of peers, but also from the influ­ence of great teach­ers.

One such fig­ure, Nadia Boulanger (1887 –1979), has been described as “the most influ­en­tial teacher since Socrates.” This is hard­ly hyper­bole. As Clemen­cy Bur­ton-Hill notes at the BBC, “her ros­ter of music stu­dents reads like the ulti­mate 20th Cen­tu­ry Hall of Fame. Leonard Bern­stein. Aaron Cop­land. Quin­cy Jones. Astor Piaz­zol­la. Philip Glass,” and so on.

“It is no exag­ger­a­tion, then, to con­sid­er Boulanger the most impor­tant musi­cal ped­a­gogue of the modern—or indeed any—era.” She was also a tal­ent­ed com­pos­er, a men­tor and fierce cham­pi­on of Igor Stravin­sky, and the first woman to con­duct major sym­phonies in Europe and the U.S., such as the New York Phil­har­mon­ic and the Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra.

Boulanger had her own take on genius: “We are as fools to say, ‘he’s a genius,’” she opines in the inter­view at the top. She also describes her method of weed­ing out unse­ri­ous stu­dents by ask­ing them, “Can you live with­out music?” If the answer is yes, she tells them “thank the Lord and good­bye!” Even at an advanced age, her fierce­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing approach is pal­pa­ble, a qual­i­ty Philip Glass remem­bers from his first meet­ing with her in 1964, when “she was already a rel­ic,” writes Matthew Guer­ri­eri at Red Bull Acad­e­my. She iden­ti­fied a bar from one of Glass’s com­po­si­tions as “writ­ten by a real com­pos­er,” says Glass. “It was “the first and last time she said any­thing nice to me for the next two years.”

Amer­i­can com­posers sub­ject­ed them­selves to Boulanger’s harsh dis­ci­pline as a “rite of pas­sage,” vis­it­ing her in her Paris apart­ment where she did most of her teach­ing. She also made her way through “lead­ing con­ser­va­toires,” Bur­ton-Hill notes, “includ­ing the Juil­liard School, the Yehu­di Menuhin School, the Roy­al Col­lege of Music and the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Music.” Boulanger’s ear­ly life is as fas­ci­nat­ing as her teach­ing career; she was the def­i­n­i­tion of “a tough, aris­to­crat­ic French­woman,” as Glass describes her, and grew up sur­round­ed by music. Her father, Ernest, was a com­pos­er, con­duc­tor, and singing pro­fes­sor. Her younger sis­ter Lili, who died in 1918 at the age of 24, was the more tal­ent­ed com­pos­er. (Nadia, writes Bur­ton-Hill, was “riv­en with envy.”)

A few years after Lili’s trag­ic death, Nadia aban­doned com­po­si­tion to focus pri­mar­i­ly on her teach­ing, men­tor­ing stu­dents with tremen­dous promise and those with less evi­dent gifts alike. “Any­one could be a Boulanger stu­dent,” Guer­ri­eri writes (pro­vid­ed they couldn’t live with­out music): “Those with less­er skills were tak­en in along­side prodi­gies and pro­fes­sion­als.” She did not dis­crim­i­nate on any basis, though her polit­i­cal atti­tudes make her a dif­fi­cult fig­ure for many peo­ple to ful­ly embrace. “She espoused nation­al­ism, monar­chism and, although her good man­ners kept it from her often-Jew­ish stu­dents, anti-Semi­tism.” She held democ­ra­cy in con­tempt and did not believe women should vote. And she was espe­cial­ly hard on her female stu­dents. (When one woman final­ly met her approval, Boulanger addressed her as “Mon­sieur.”)

Boulanger was as tra­di­tion­al in her musi­cal attitudes—spurning Arnold Schoenberg’s inno­va­tions, for example—as in her pol­i­tics. Yet she worked with jazz musi­cians like Jones and Don­ald Byrd, and with com­posers like Joe Raposo, “the musi­cal chameleon behind the songs of Sesame Street and The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny.” She was an encour­ag­ing pres­ence in the lives of her stu­dents long after they had gone on to suc­cess and fame. When Leonard Bern­stein sent her the score to West Side Sto­ry, she pro­nounced, “I am enchant­ed by its daz­zling nature” (though she added a cri­tique about its “facil­i­ty”). Per­haps her most rad­i­cal stu­dent, Philip Glass, has nev­er been accused of musi­cal con­ser­vatism. But through his dif­fi­cult course of study with Boulanger, he says, “I learned to hear.”

“To under­go Boulanger’s rig­or­ous train­ing,” writes Guer­ri­eri, “was to absorb her sense of music his­to­ry: evo­lu­tion, not rev­o­lu­tion.” Then again, many of history’s rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies have also been some of the keen­est stu­dents of tra­di­tion, usu­al­ly assist­ed, guid­ed, and trained by his­to­ry’s great teach­ers.

via @dark_shark/Red Bull Acad­e­my

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Min­i­mal Glimpse of Philip Glass

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

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