Like much of the rest of the country, President Obama is getting some downtime in August — in his case spending 16 days in Martha’s Vineyard. From that nice getaway spot, POTUS has launched on Spotify (download the free software here) two playlists of music — 20 songs for a hot summer day, and another 20 for a nice summer evening. You can play the songs below, and further down the page, find six books on his summer vacation reading list.
Daytime listening features songs from Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Coldplay, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, Florence and the Machine, and The Rolling Stones. For nighttime, he’s serving up John Coltrane, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and more. The man has taste. And for summer reading you can do worse than offer Jhumpa Lahiri, James Salter and Elizabeth Kolbert.
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With the possible exception of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, few works of philosophy confront the barrenness of human life in the modern world in bleaker terms than Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Taking its title from Aristotle’s Magna Moralia, or “The Great Ethics,” Adorno’s book subverts the classical idea of the good life as a realistic aspiration in a world dominated by totalitarian systems of control and inexorable, grinding logics of production and consumption. “Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer,” writes Adorno in his Dedication. The individual has been “reduced and degraded” by capitalism and fascism, flattened to mere appearance in the “sphere of consumption.”
Adorno’s book—a philosophical memoir of his experience as an “intellectual in emigration”—reflects his pessimism not only in its title but also in its subtitle: Reflections from Damaged Life. How little he could have suspected—and how much he likely would have despised—the kinship between his own postwar angst and the neurotic anger of the American hardcore punk generation to come some thirty-five years later.
Right now look at me now Look at me now Just shadows I’m just shadows of what I was I just want another thing I don’t even get by for that
One might make the case that Black Flag lyrics—and those of so many similar bands—play out Adorno’s thesis over and over: to quote a much less angry pop band from a later generation: “Modern Life is Rubbish.”
Seizing on these pessimistic parallels between punk rock and critical theory, filmmaker and artist Brian J. Davis recorded an EP of readings from five chapters of Adorno’s book, set to blistering hardcore drums and guitars. (Anyone happen to know who is on vocals?) Above, hear “They, The People,” and “This Side of the Pleasure Principle” and below, we have “UNmeasure for UNmeasure,” “Johnny Head-in-the-Air,” and “Every Work is an Uncommitted Crime.”
As you’ll note, Adorno’s titles allude to well-known works of art, politics, folk song, and theory and—as the publisher’s note in my Verso edition puts it— “involve irony or inversion,” primary rhetorical methods of his “negative dialectic.” The hardcore punks who picked up, however unconsciously, on Adorno’s disaffected critique may have eschewed his self-consciously literary approach, but they were no less masters of irony, even if their targets happened to be much more pop-cultural.
For a much more serious look at Adorno and music—a subject he wrote passionately and controversially about—check out this post on his own avant-garde compositions, which turn out to be much less punk rock than one might expect given his social alienation and despondency.
An old musician’s joke goes “there are three kinds of drummers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t.” But perhaps there is an even more global divide. Perhaps there are three kinds of people in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t. Perhaps, as the promotional video above from GE suggests, drummers have fundamentally different brains than the rest of us. Today we highlight the scientific research into drummers’ brains, an expanding area of neuroscience and psychology that disproves a host of dumb drummer jokes.
“Drummers,” writes Jordan Taylor Sloan at Mic, “can actually be smarter than their less rhythmically-focused bandmates.” This according to the findings of a Swedish study (Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm) which shows “a link between intelligence, good timing and the part of the brain used for problem-solving.” As Gary Cleland puts it in The Telegraph, drummers “might actually be natural intellectuals.”
Neuroscientist David Eagleman, a renaissance researcher The New Yorker calls “a man obsessed with time,” found this out in an experiment he conducted with various professional drummers at Brian Eno’s studio. It was Eno who theorized that drummers have a unique mental makeup, and it turns out “Eno was right: drummers do have different brains from the rest.” Eagleman’s test showed “a huge statistical difference between the drummers’ timing and that of test subjects.” Says Eagleman, “Now we know that there is something anatomically different about them.” Their ability to keep time gives them an intuitive understanding of the rhythmic patterns they perceive all around them.
That difference can be annoying—like the pain of having perfect pitch in a perpetually off-key world. But drumming ultimately has therapeutic value, providing the emotional and physical benefits collectively known as “drummer’s high,” an endorphin rush that can only be stimulated by playing music, not simply listening to it. In addition to increasing people’s pain thresholds, Oxford psychologists found, the endorphin-filled act of drumming increases positive emotions and leads people to work together in a more cooperative fashion.
Clash drummer Topper Headon discusses the therapeutic aspect of drumming in a short BBC interview above. He also calls drumming a “primeval” and distinctly, universally human activity. Former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley have high hopes for the science of rhythm. Hart, who has powered a light show with his brainwaves in concerts with his own band, discusses the “power” of rhythm to move crowds and bring Alzheimer’s patients back into the present moment.
Whether we can train ourselves to think and feel like drummers may be debatable. But as for whether drummers really do think in ways non-drummers can’t, consider the neuroscience of Stewart Copeland’s polyrhythmic beats, and the work of Terry Bozzio (below) playing the largest drumkit you’ve ever seen.
Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud: if these theorists share any quality at all, they share a reputation for not going easy on their readers. Each of them wrote in a way that exudes a different kind of intellectual difficulty — Benjamin’s sudden swerves into the zone where high relevance meets high irrelevance, Wittgenstein’s austere certainty, Freud’s elaborate flights into the near-fantastical — but all of their work poses a challenge to readers approaching it for the first time. And so Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Theory addresses the obvious question: what if you didn’t read it, but heard it sung instead?
“In his performance of the text, Goldsmith fuses precisely delineated musical sections, or movements, with the chaotic, shifting pitch and tone of his voice, paralleling Benjamin’s observation in the essay that ‘if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.’ ” Can you find similar parallels between Goldsmith’s manner of singing and the theory he delivers with it when he performs Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Igor Stravinsky [MP3 part one, MP3 part two]? Or below, where he sings Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, starting on the passage of the “slips of the tongue” which have popularly come to bear Freud’s name,to The Who [MP3]? After all, style doesn’t count for much, as such a strikingly dressed character as Goldsmith knows full well, unless it aligns with substance.
NPR called William Schimmel “the greatest accordionist in the world,” and thanks to NPR you can hear Schimmel at work, taking Gustav Mahler’s sprawling Ninth Symphony and “squeezing this immense musical canvas down to just 6 1/2 minutes.” That’s a feat in itself.
Her husband, author Neil Gaiman, is no exception.
Neil Gaiman is a total weirdo when he’s half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he’s been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he’s at his best when he’s in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he’s the strangest sleeper I’ve ever slept with (let’s not get into who I’ve slept with…different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he’s in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he’s asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking Neil Gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake.
She’s made a habit of jotting down her husband’s choicest somnambulistic mutterings. One paperless night, she repaired to the bathroom to recreate his nocturnal statements on her iPhone’s voice recorder as best she could remember.
As someone who’s sorely tempted to get incontrovertible proof of her bedmate’s erratic snoring patterns, I wonder that Palmer wasn’t tempted to hit record mid-rant, and let him hoist himself on his own petard. Revenge does not seem to be the motive here, though. Palmer uses the device as more of a diary, rarely revisiting what she’s laid down. It’s more process than product.
That said, when she rediscovered this track, she felt it deserved to be animated, a la the Blank on Blank series. (BrainPicking’s Maria Popova urged her on too.) The ever-game Gaiman reportedly “laughed his head off” at the prospect of getting the Janis Joplin found text treatment.
Perhaps his services will be called upon again. Gaiman reports that his very pregnant bride is also prone to nonsensical sleep talk. (“I want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, Don’t let them take the sheep.”) Turnabout is fair play.
In the afterglow of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts, we highlightedThe Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project launched in 1995, which provided editorial footnotes explaining the references of every original Grateful Dead song.
For many of these songs we have Robert Hunter to thank. The majority of the Dead’s songs were Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia collaborations. Garcia composed the music, and Hunter, the lyrics. Hunter didn’t perform with the group (Garcia called him “the band member who doesn’t come out on stage with us”), but he was an integral part of the group all the same. When the Dead entered the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Robert Hunter was one of the inductees.
Being part of the Grateful Dead family, Hunter sometimes joined the band on tours, which weren’t always fun and games. As Dennis McNally, the Dead’s official historian, wrote in A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, the band, especially as it gained popularity and toured on a bigger scale, pulled some rough and tumble people into its orbit. The business managers made life difficult for the musical purists. And there was dissension at times. At one point, writes McNally, Robert Hunter wrote an open letter to the band members, structured as a sarcastic list, which “identifies the least-charitable aspects of life in the Grateful Dead hierarchy.” It reads as follows:
The Ten Commandments of Rock & Roll
1. Suck up to the top cats
2. Do not express independent opinions.
3. Do not work for common interests, only factional interests.
4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.
5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property and personnel.
6. Make devastating judgments about persons and situations without adequate information.
7. Discourage and confound personal, technical, and/or creative projects.
8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.
9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.
10 Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.
It is surprising to me, but a few people I’ve come across don’t know the name of cartoonist Robert Crumb, cult hero of underground comics and obscure Americana record collecting. On second thought, maybe this shouldn’t come as such a surprise. These are some pretty small worlds, after all, populated by obsessive fans and archivists and not always particularly welcoming to outsiders. But Crumb is different. For all his social awkwardness and hyper-obsessiveness, he seems strangely accessible to me. The easiest reference for those who’ve never heard of him is Steve Buscemi’s Seymour in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. There’s an obvious tribute to Crumb in the character (Zwigoff previously made an R. Crumb documentary), though it’s certainly not a one-to-one relation (the film adapts Daniel Clowe’s comic of the same name.)
Whether or not Ghost World (or Zwigoff’s Crumb) rings a bell, there’s still the matter of how to communicate the lovable lewdness and aggressive anachronism that is Crumb’s art. For that one may only need to mention Big Brother & the Holding Company’s 1968 classic Cheap Thrills (top), the first album cover Crumb designed—and which Janis Joplin insisted upon over the record company’s objections. With its focus on musicians, and its appropriation of hippie weirdness, racist American imagery, and an obsession with female posteriors that rivals Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s, the cover pretty much spans the spectrum of perennial Crumb styles and themes. Above, see another of Crumb’s covers, for a compilation called The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead, which collects such roots and old-school rock and roll artists as Merle Haggard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, and more.
Though he objected to the 1995 assignment—saying to Shanachie Records, “You want all these people on a CD cover? What are they, like, five inches across?”—Crumb must have relished the subject. (And he was paid, as per usual, in vintage 78s.) Next to those posteriors, Crumb’s true love has always been American roots music—ragtime, swing, old country and bluegrass, Delta country blues—and he has spent a good part of his career illustrating artists he loves, and those he doesn’t. From famous names like Joplin, Dylan, and B.B. King (above, whose music Crumb said he “didn’t care for, but I don’t find it that objectionable either”), to much more obscure artists, like Bo Carter, known for his “Please Warm My Wiener,” on the 1974 compilation album below.
Crumb’s use of racially questionable and sexist imagery—however satirical—has perhaps rendered him untouchable in some circles, and it’s hard to imagine many of his album covers passing corporate muster these days. His recent work has moved toward more straightforward, respectful portraiture, like that of King and of Skip James on the best-of below, from a series called “Heroes of the Blues.” (Crumb also illustrated “Heroes of Jazz” and “Heroes of Country,” as we featured in this post.) See Crumb’s inimitable, looser portrait style again further down in 2002 album art for a group called Hawks and Eagles.
Crumb may have shed some of his more unpalatable tendencies, but he hasn’t lost his lascivious edge. However, his work has matured over the years, taking on serious subjects like the book of Genesis and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For an artist with such peculiar personal focus, Crumb is surprisingly versatile, but it’s his album covers that combine his two greatest loves. “What makes Crumb’s art so appropriate for the album sleeve,” writes The Guardian’s Laura Barton, “is its vividness, and its certain oomph; it’s in the mingling of sex and joy and compulsion, and the vibrancy and movement of his illustrations.”
Crumb hasn’t only combined his art with music fandom, but also with his own musicianship, illustrating covers for several of his own albums by his ragtime band Cheap Suit Serenaders. And he even provided the illustration for the soundtrack to his own documentary, as you can see above—an extreme example of the many self-abasing portraits Crumb has drawn of himself over the years. Crumb’s album cover art has been collected in a book, and you can see many more of his covers at Rolling Stone and on this list here.
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