Hey everyone, it's okay to like Lil Wayne

Before I get to the main topic of this post, I want to make it clear that it's okay to like any kind of music that you like. Far be it from me to judge what you enjoy listening to, as I frequently find myself unable to resist the lure of Britney Spears' siren song 'Break the Ice' when YouTube suggests it and I'm secretly--now not-so-secretly--hoping for a Skee-Lo revival (it would likely be very brief, as the link there was pretty much the entirety of his oeuvre). But I suspect that I am not the only person in Schenkerian Gang Land who occasionally has qualms about some of the music that I enjoy, specifically when the lyrics refer to women in derogatory terms. Perhaps this reaction is particularly strong when it occurs in hip hop. Those with less power in disenfranchised groups are often the most disenfranchised. More specifically, those railing against authority in hip hop often denigrate those who have even less power: the women around them. There is a much bigger discussion here about how misogyny continues to surround much of hip hop, but I am not the person to do this crucial issue justice. However, I am aware of it, and it is a problem that I wrestle with often in terms of my listening choices.

[As an aside, we do have an almost infinite tolerance for the culture of misogyny when it comes to other genres, even 'high art' ones such as opera, so let's not pretend that this problem is unique or limited to hip hop]

Here is where we come to Lil Wayne.  In a song such as 'Steady Mobbin,' where the chorus repeatedly talks about 'pop[ping] that pussy', it sometimes causes me to reflect about why I am listening to this for the umpteenth time and whether I can (or more importantly, should) simply relegate these seemingly chauvinist lyrics to the realm of entertainment. Well I am here to say that I have reconciled this issue, and not only because I think 'Steady Mobbin' has a great hook that involves this climb to an octave that never quite makes it decisively (a similar trick can be found in Depeche Mode's 'Enjoy the Silence,' although I suspect this is a coincidence. If anyone has any evidence to suggest that Depeche Mode has influenced Lil Wayne's production style, kindly send it my way).

Why do I think it's okay to like Lil Wayne even though he has another song with the less-than-subtle title 'I'm Goin In'? First, it's worth noting that many of his lyrics are quite clever; one of my favorites is from his collaboration with Drake, 'The Motto,' in which he declares that 'money talks/and Mr. Ed.' A Mr. Ed the Talking Horse joke! Who expects that in modern-day hip hop? Later in that verse, he makes a direct reference to 'Baby Got Back,' one of the most novel of all novelty hip hop songs. There are plenty of scatological jokes scattered throughout Lil Wayne's works, several of which are pretty funny (go check out 'Steady Mobbin' for a particularly great line about how Lil Wayne plans to commemorate the size of his giant house. Hint: there are a lot of bathrooms). Even the manner of production makes it feel as though Lil Wayne is having fun as we frequently hear him laughing, a rarity in today's tracks. Second, and maybe this is more important, Lil Wayne tosses around a lot of words that are potentially offensive, but the overall ambiance in his songs are remarkably less so. While relistening to 'Lollipop' in preparation for this post, I realized that there is an awful lot about what the Unnamed Shortay in the song wants. We may not agree with Shortay's Weltanschaaung, but she wants a thug, and Lil Wayne is there to provide. So while there may be elements of misogyny, Lil Wayne is less committed to them in his songs than his lyrics might initially suggest (for contrast, go check out 50 Cent's contribution on a related theme, 'Candy Shop,' which is far more authoritarian in its demands).

That Lil Wayne means to make us laugh points to his role within hip hop: he is a trickster, an archetypal figure from African folk culture that has been integral to black American culture (I am not even going to pretend to be an expert here, but will refer you instead to Henry Louis Gates). Arguably, he is one of the few who has the talent to turn language around in a unique way combined with his trickster-like treatment of topics. Although virtually all rap is in some way engaging with what Gates identifies as signifying, Lil Wayne does it best in his manner of combining rhymes and humor.

Early hip hop was steeped in exactly this combination; going back to 'Rapper's Delight,' much of that track is quite silly, particularly the part where they get going about collard greens. But as hip hop became more tied to activism, the trickster element began to disappear. Perhaps the most memorable figure in this regard was Flava Flav as part of Public Enemy.

I'm going to assume that you don't need this picture as reference, but you do need it because a Viking helmet???

At first glance (and possibly many subsequent glances), Flava Flav seems like little more than comic relief to Chuck D's far more serious persona in songs such as 'Fight the Power.' Why is there a guy with a giant clock asking about the time? But his occasional contributions can also be understood as signifying. 'Fight the Power' begins with Chuck D's pronouncement that it is 1989. Sure, prominently stating the year of the song is a hallowed rap tradition that goes at least back to Big Daddy Kane's 'Ain't No Half Steppin', but Chuck D is raising another point: that in 1989, racial issues persist that have been around for centuries. Flava Flav's references to time, then, are better understood as reminders that the time has come for change. His other exhortation is to 'get this party started right,' which seems like little more than a throw-away line (and a reference to Strafe's 1984 song 'Set It Off'). But 'party' has a second meaning, specifically political, and as the video for 'Fight the Power' makes clear, it is time to take action.

[I have no answer for what happened on 'Flava of Love'. I am not even going to try.]

If Lil Wayne is hip hop's current trickster, then his most significant contribution to date is 'Mrs. Officer,' an R&B-esque song that chronicles Lil Wayne's arrest and subsequent seduction by his arresting officer. The implication is that even when he is totally helpless, Mrs. Officer is unable to resist his sexual energy (worth noting: this song also features the best example of the Renaissance technique of word painting that I know of in the modern age with the depiction of the police siren in the vocal line). On the surface, this song seems like little more than an amusing diversion--it gives another meaning to the phrase 'fuck the police,' if you get what I mean--with great text painting, but there is more here. Lil Wayne hints at one of the justifications that white society concocted for persecuting black men: sexual misconduct, a trope entrenched so thoroughly in American race relations that it is at the core of the widely-read To Kill A Mockingbird. The fear that black men would rape white women was, in part, a fear that white women would succumb to the allure of black men; in 'Mrs. Officer', this is precisely what happens, as Lil Wayne is irresistible. It's not known if Mrs. Officer is black or white here, but on some level it doesn't matter. Lil Wayne has 'infiltrated' (or penetrated, if you get what I mean) the white power structure that is manifested in the police. But this is, naturally, fantasy, and Lil Wayne brings back the reality of what the police can do in an unusual moment when he references Rodney King not once, but twice in a row, as a quick reminder of how dangerous Mr. Officers can be.

So yes, I like Lil Wayne. And upon some reflection, I no longer have any qualms about enjoying his music. His voice is a unique one in the world of hip hop and it is one that should be taken seriously--or at least as seriously as any other trickster.

"GET THE F&CK OFF STAGE!" Nationalism, Racism, and Sexism at the Deutsche Oper's Production of Mozart's "Abduction from the Serail"

"GET THE F&CK OFF THE STAGE!!!"

- The Deutsche Oper, Tuesday, June 28, 2016

I (Kira) am in Berlin for the summer, pretending to do research in archives but mostly trying to write my damn book in the few hipster coffee shops that have wi-fi here. And while I'm here, I do what I always do in Berlin, which is go to the opera. It's almost like I'm a carrier pigeon. The homing device in my brain beeping towards the Deutsche Oper kicks in pretty much instantly once I land at Flughafen Tegel.

I've only seen two productions so far in the week that I've been here (Richard Strauss's Elekra and Mozart's Abduction from the Serail) but the second one (Abduction) that I saw was by far the most disturbing. And it's taken me some time to figure out why I found Tuesday's performance so traumatizing and strange. But I think I've figured it out (mostly) and I'd like to share my thoughts with you all about it.

I'd already been told that the Deutsche Oper's production was a wacky staging of Mozart's opera, The Abduction from the Serail/Die Entführung aus dem Serail. It's an exotic opera (as most of you already know), set in a palace in the Ottoman empire. It is, as critic Edward Said argued back in the late 60s/early 70s in his famous book, Orientalism, an imagining of the Orient. Europeans imagined that harems (the section of the palace where women lived separate from men) were exotic, erotic, sensual, glamorous, and forbidden. That's not what harems were actually like. But that's not the point. It's how Europeans imagined them, and we've been living with the consequences of Europe's imagination for some time now (ugh).

Anyway. A few things about the plot that are necessary to know before I explain what I experienced: Belmonte (dashing young tenor) is in love with Konstanze (despondent beautiful soprano), who has been kidnapped by the scary Pasha Selim (male speaking role). Guarding the harem is Osmin, a brutish baritone who's not the brightest crayon in the box (bless).

I've seen this production many, many, many times. I've seen different DVDs of it. I've seen it at the Staatsoper. I've seen the crazy Calixto Bieito staging that everyone hates.

Calixto Bieito's staging of Die Entfürhung aus der Serail at the Komische Oper (panterre.com)

But this evening, my naive opera-going self did not know what she was getting into.

Where do I even start????

With the booing. There was so much booing. Loud booing. Enraged booing. Shouting back and forth, people saying nasty things to the singers on stage (directly calling them out by name!), saying nasty things to each other. The booing started pretty much instantly and did not let up for about 20 minutes. I'm not kidding! And the shouting was so full of outrage, anger, and venom that I honestly worried I was in a Rite of Spring moment (note: people rioted at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring in 1913. Booing, fist fights, and everything. Fighting poured into the streets). It was so intense that my heart wouldn't stop beating quickly. It was so intense that a woman about ten rows behind me passed out and the ushers had to call for a doctor as she was carried out of the theater.

Why were they booing? Because the director changed all of the dialogue from German into English. This enraged a woman in the balcony so much she just wouldn't stop screaming about it. Every time a singer opened his or her mouth to say something in English, she howled. "DAS IST DIE DEUTSCHE OPER!/THIS IS THE GERMAN OPERA!" Everything should be in German!

My first thought when I started realizing that people were outraged because the singers (most of whom were American, actually) were speaking in English was of African American mezzo-soprano  Vera Little's debut as Carmen at the Deutsche Oper in 1958.

People were absolutely shocked by the audience's response to her performance. The booing was so vociferous that stories appeared about it in the news for several days after her debut. People wrote in also explaining why they had booed her. It was not (entirely) because she was black, but rather because she was foreign. And they wanted to keep The German Opera House truly German. One local opera-goer wrote,

"In reference to your 'Carmen' critique, I would like to say that the booing did not refer to the singer Vera Little herself, to her achievements, or to her being a Negress. The protesting is focused on the fact that more and more good German [male and female] singers are being laid off. Instead, foreigners are engaged who are not better, but at best just as good. I would be interested to hear how the intendant of the City Opera justifies this fact." (Not naming the source - my own private stash, and I have a book to publish!)

Another separate letter also lays this bare:

"There are only five soloists in the ensemble of the State Opera, who have world-class status and who are beloved by opera visitors: Ms. Grümmer, Ms. Trötschel, Mr. Greindl, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau, Mr. Suthaus. But how much longer before these last great talents will also leave? None of these soloists were engaged by Intendant Ebert, but rather underused. Who does he engage? Names like Parabas, Lane, Pilarczyk, Konya, Heater, Roth- Ehrang, and Neralic."  (same deal here)

What do all of those names have in common? They're all, of course, foreign names.

What's great about this Vera Little example is that it reminds us to historicize our contemporary experiences. The fear or suspicion that the Deutsche Oper is becoming a little less German was palpable on the stage that night, and it's also entered German politics. The far-right, racist, xenophobic hate group PEGIDA, for example, recently denounced avant-garde stagings that don't celebrate German values and the hiring of non-German singers as well. Hm. 

But these fears of foreignness infiltrating the German opera world aren't new. And you know what? It's pretty obvious that the "foreignness" of the Deutsche Oper hasn't made it any less "deutsch" over the years. The world hasn't collapsed. People still buy tickets. We rejoice and we will continue to rejoice over good singing, irrespective of who it was who opened his or her mouth to sing the aria we love deeply.

So in other words: the Germanness of the the Deutsche Oper has always been a sticking point amongst fans of the Deutsche Oper. They see themselves as the vanguards and gatekeepers of the best opera house in Germany (they'd say) and the one most representative of what German opera is capable of. But the irony here, of course, is that the Deutsche Oper excels because it hires the best singers from around the world. Some homegrown (Diana Damrau), some foreign (Joyce DiDonato). 

BUT GUYS I AM NOT EVEN DONE WITH THIS PRODUCTION YET.

So here's to Part II of this blog post, The Production Itself, Which Was Indeed A Hot Mess.

Because I was so distracted by the booing and the shouting and the fighting in the audience, I honestly didn't have much time to think about the opera production itself until the second half, when things had calmed down a bit more.

And guys. I think I pretty much hated it. I'm not against provocative stagings of opera. I loved Barrie Kosky's staging of Rigoletto from a while back, and that one had evil clowns dancing around everywhere in it (my best friend, Connie, and my husband, Joel, still haven't forgiven me for taking them to see it):

Verdi's Rigoletto at the Komische Oper, 2010

But it was a cohesive staging that enhanced (and did not detract away from) the story of Rigoletto itself.

BUT THIS HOT MESS?

Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Deutsche Oper, 2016

Everyone in the opera - including Belmonte and Konstanze, who are supposed to be in love with each other (he travels thousands of miles to rescue her!) - were completely debased, unfaithful, and just all-around terrible human beings. The harem itself was a site of just sheer debauchery. Everyone was on drugs, making drugs, taking drugs, sleeping with each other, etc.  As Belmonte sings of his love for Konstanze in the first act, a film played in the background showing him having a threeway with two other women. True, Mozart always pokes at fidelity in his operas (I'm looking at you, Cosi Fan Tutte), but he does so with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. From the perspective of director Rodrigo Garcia, however, everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer. Subtlety just completely went out the window.

That didn't bother me so much as the outright sexism of the staging. All of the women in the harem (dancers mostly) were the same shape and size. Skinny. Big boobs. Flat stomach. You get the gist. 

And I don't think that the director was using them to critique how society defines beauty and womanhood. I think he honestly just thought that this was the model standard of beauty and went with it. 

My other big problem with the staging was that he hired a black woman to play the Pasha Selim, the Sultan-type character who abducted Konstanze to his palace. It's not that I'm against hiring black women in opera (obvs). But it's that he deliberately sought out a stereotype.

The casting call stated that he was looking for tall black women who could play basketball. The woman who won the part, Annabelle Mandeng, jokingly said she got it because she could dribble the best on stage. Um, what?

Annabelle Mandeng as Pasha Selim in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Deutsche Oper 2016 

Even this I was willing to look past if I thought the director was going to do something interesting with her part. But no. Again and again and again, black female sexuality stands for something deviant, titillating, strange, and debased. How do you want to make Die Entführung wacky? Make the Pasha Selim a black lesbian who leads a sex-crazed, drug-obsessed harem. You know what? I'm over it. So, so over it.

Of course, director Rodrigo Garcia and others are patting themselves on the back for their progressivism, for supporting artists of different "migration background" in their work. But we see through that, right? What kinds of roles are different artists of color being assigned? What do these roles signify? That matters just as much as the act of hiring someone who doesn't look like a traditional white German.

It was her monologue, told in a repetitive, Gertrude Stein kind of way ("I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you...") that drew the most ire from audiences. Professed in English from the body of a tall, amazonian Afro-German woman, it made the whole evening all the more strange and, because of the audience's reaction to her, disturbing. 

The singing was beautiful in this production. Gorgeous. Kathryn Lewek (Eastman alum, what whaaaaaat!) was a phenomenal Konstanze! Oh my goodness! Girlfriend can SANG. But the production and the audience's response to it just bothered the hell out of me. Opera is alive, yes! But so are racism, nationalism, and sexism. And they were all on display that evening.

Kanye contra Swift

Spotted in Boston, March 2015

Fans of SGS may remember that early in this blog's history, we posted about the parallels between two of our favorite megalomaniacs, Richard Wagner and Kanye West. But, as a conversation over beers tonight revealed, it is entirely possible that we missed a time when Wagner was Kanyed, by which I mean that once Wagner was told Imma Let You Finished. By Nietzsche. In print. Which was, perhaps, less immediately provoking than Kanye's comments directed at Taylor Swift, but is now indelibly entrenched in history--only time will tell if Kanye's act that launched a thousand memes has achieved the same notoriety.

Allow me to explain.

1) In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche published The Case of Wagner, a book in which he criticized the master's operatic oeuvre. This stance contradicted the one that Nietzsche had posited in his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he hailed Wagner as a figure of such importance that his works were in the process of ushering in a revival of classical Greek civilization--specifically its ability to blend the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses inherent in all societies (I'm not making this stuff up. It's really in there. Also something about the veil of Maya).

2) In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche made an extensive argument that Wagner's stage works were deeply flawed because of their misunderstand of true culture. One of the most evocative phrases in his critique is 'Senta-sentimentality', by which Nietzsche means Wagner's tendency to imbue his plots with too much idealism in their reflection of society, an idealism molded by a dangerously nationalistic and chauvinistic lens. Nietzsche argued instead that Bizet's Carmen, to paraphrase, was 'one of the greatest operas of all time' because it was a love understood through natural impulses (feel free to disagree with this. I'm simply reporting on what happened). However, since Nietzsche was not appearing live at the MTV Video Awards, he could not be booed off, and instead he wrote an extensive essay about the ways that Carmen succeeded while Wagner failed.

Most people view Nietzsche's stance as one of provocation: he was reneging the support that he had lent to Wagner's works in the past by instead putting forward an opera that was, on the surface, far more salacious and sensuous than the works of Wagner, whose sensuality was underpinned by flawed beliefs. Did Nietzsche genuinely enjoy Bizet's most famous opera or was his choice more of a direct challenge to Wagner? The nuances of Nietzsche's argument remain a point of contention.

So it's time that we ask the many questions that arise from these unexpected parallels: did Kanye really believe that Beyoncé's video for 'Single Ladies' was the greatest of all time? Or was this simply a platform that Kanye took in order to criticize the overall aesthetic that Taylor Swift represented? Is this an example of Swifty-Sentimentality? Or was Kanye putting out a rallying cry for the importance of 'put[ting] a ring on it' as an artistic statement? Does this make Taylor Swift a Parsifal amongst 'Single Ladies', and Kanye both Wagner and Nietzsche? Tune in next time, when SGS finds more unlikely parallels between 19th-century aesthetic arguments and contemporary pop music figures.

The Beauty of Musical Comedies, or Why The Lonely Island was so damn funny, Tenacious D's "Tribute" made us snort, and "Crazy-Ex Girlfriend" has us giggling

So I had the great pleasure of introducing to a colleague of mine this week several music videos from the comedy group, The Lonely Island.

And you know what I realized? I miss The Lonely Island. I miss good musical comedies. The Lonely Island was so funny. They were so damn funny. Why were they so funny? And in the middle of the night last night (because my brain works that way), I started thinking more seriously about that. And the answer to that question has to do with something really obvious but also unspoken: the music itself.

I remember reading a review of The Lonely Island's album, Incredibad, from Pitchfork back in the day and agreeing with pretty much everything they said.

It's clear that the group (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) knew what they were doing as musicians, not just as comedians.

Take our favorite song on the planet, "I'm On A Boat."

It's not a parody of a hip-hop song. It is a hip-hop song. It has the same braggadocio and swag as the music of DJ Khaled, Rick Ross, Kanye, and Lil' Wayne.

And it's musically good, it's aesthetically pleasing, it's well-written. That's what makes it hilarious at the end of the day. I have this theory anyway that the more aesthetically pleasing a creative work, the more convincing (and even manipulative) it is. I think the same thing applies here.

Other Lonely Island songs follow suit. "Three-way" uses classic 90s R&B riffs and lines like "Hop off the bus with the Alizé" that give it its distinct R&B sound.

Pick your favorite Lonely Island song and five bucks says there's something musically interesting going on that makes it work well with the lyrics and video. "Motherlover" and "Boombox" have really great choruses in the major key that temporarily shift the music away from the dominant minor key. "I Just Had Sex" has all of the makings of a 2010 pop song (including Akon as a vocalist). These songs work because they're musically clever and cheeky. Not just because the lyrics are funny. 

Years ago, my brother and I became temporarily obsessed with the song, "Tribute" by Tenacious D. And I think we both liked it so much because it was musically fun to jam to (with our air guitars).

My brother's favorite moment of the song arrives around the 2:40 mark. If you know the song, you know exactly what moment I'm talking about. And that's not an accident. The song is structured like other classic rock songs by groups like Led Zeppelin (Jack Black and Kyle Bass are huge Led Zeppelin fans, and Bass was inspired to write "Tribute" after hearing Metallica live in concert). Tenacious D musically prepared us for the moment when the devil asks, "Be ye angels?" and Tenacious D respond in the negative. They paid homage to other classic rock songs in form and style to make their ridiculous song sound epic and, thus, epically hilarious.

Although the show is hit and miss, the new tv show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" operates in the same way. What keeps people tuned in, I suspect, is the effectiveness of their musical comedy. The song, "Sexy Getting Ready Song" works so well as its own musical number:

Reminiscent of the music of Brandi or Toni Braxton circa 2000, it gives the listener classic R&B poppy hooks while slowly unraveling itself and becoming increasingly absurd. The interlude with the rapper is so perfect as well, as the rapper discovers how much work some women put into for a date and then becomes wracked with guilt over the pressures women face in a patriarchal society to look beautiful.

I had *just* been listening to some early 90s hip hop (Public Enemy and Advanced Chemistry in particular) when I heard the song, "Jap Rap Battle" from the show:

The flow of the rhymes, the musical line of the bass guitar, and the back-and-forth interplay between the two female characters and the call-and-response from the group all make it sound like a classic 90s rap song. And it's a good one.

It's all obvious once you say it out loud. Good music makes good musical comedy. It's deceptively simple. It's so deceptive in fact that people paused when The Lonely Island was nominated for a Grammy for best rap in 2010 for "I'm On A Boat." Shouldn't the group have been in the comedy section of the Grammy's? Was "I'm On A Boat" good rap or good comedy? The answer, of course, is both.

YEAR OF BOWIE: Hunky Dory (1971)

In the wake of David Bowie's recent passing, Schenkerian Gang Signs has declared 2016 to be the Year of Bowie. To commemorate, we will be exploring all twenty-seven of Bowie's studio albums at a rate of one every two weeks or so. Along the way, we will explore the gamut of Bowie's achievements, from granular musical analysis to broader notions of artistic trajectories. 

My original plan for the Year of Bowie was to tackle one album every second week or so to ensure that I made it through the whole discography before the year ended. Alas, then life intervened and now I find myself behind, despite the fact that I did start giving Hunky Dory some serious listenings to over a month ago. And part of why I think I found it tricky to write about was that this album felt like the songs I most associate with Bowie: 'Changes,' 'Life on Mars,' 'Oh! You Pretty Things', 'Queen Bitch' (my previous knowledge of Bowie was clearly influenced by the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic). And perhaps my prior knowledge of these songs led to my procrastination in writing about them. This is, in my view, peak Bowie. Vintage Bowie. Definitive Bowie. What more could you say about them? What more could I possibly say about them? How could my listening experience be enhanced by hearing them again?

(This isn't to detract from their power as songs. My most likely sing-along song in the car is 'Life on Mars.' I sometimes sing it to my dog. He doesn't seem to appreciate it. And let's just take a minute to acknowledge that Bowie's gesture at the word 'spit' is one of the great moments in music video. I also try to imitate this gesture when I sing this to my dog. He doesn't seem interested in it either.)

But what stuck with me from this album was less the songs I've heard so many times and instead the moments that were new to me, and perhaps for that reason, more insightful. Like the introductory instrumental section of 'Eight Line Poem,' which vaguely reminded me of the piano exit from 'Layla' and made me want to write about unexpected wistful piano moments in music ca. 1971, the year that both of these songs appeared. In fact, the way in which 'Oh! You Pretty Things' elides directly into 'Eight Line Poem' makes it feel as though it is a piano/guitar exit at first.

Or the part of 'Quicksand' that dissolves into wordless melody that doesn't quite harmonically resolve as it should. This section has been stuck in my head for the past couple of days, much as the guitar duet in 'All the Madmen' stayed with me when I was listening to The Man Who Sold the World.

Or the final song from the album, 'The Bewlay Brothers,' which Bowie claimed was comprised of nonsense lyrics, but is very melodic and beautiful and also wistful. Kind of like piano exit music from around this era, but with a folk-ish sound. In fact, it doesn't feel all that far removed from contemporary music that imitates folksong, à la Passenger; it's surprising that this song hasn't been covered recently by anyone (from what I can see), as I have a feeling it would continue to draw an audience today. 

Anyway, who needs lyrics? They're only really required when you are singing 'Life on Mars' to your dog.

On Music/Art Pedagogy, Integration, and the Institution's Role in Creating Change

The Sphinx Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra

So I had this idea for a pedagogical article or blog post or some such on how to integrate people of color into classical music courses. I was going to point out that even if the recording you're going to play in class is straight-up Mozart, you can always show someone who does not look like Mozart singing it, like Reri Grist:

Reri Grist at the Salzburg Festival in 1966 performing in Le Nozze di Figaro

Speaking of opera singers: it's really not that hard to find a diverse array of opera singers to secretly sneak into your classes. Marian Anderson, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, tenor Ramon Vargas, Leontyne Price, and soprano Sumi Jo are a few that come to mind. You can then also casually ask your student what they might know about said singer - where they grew up, where they trained and studied, etc.

You can of course also play this game with instrumentalists: Yo Yo Ma, Sphinx Orchestra recordings, etc.

Additionally, if you're going to give students an example of sonata form or a rondo, you can always turn to composers of color from the past to give a quick demo. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it, too: feel free to play that Beethoven piano sonata because it IS so canonical (and effing awesome) while also supplementing your canonical material with other works.

Another idea: you can show how other composers utilized well-known and historical musical techniques for their own compositions. If you're talking about 19th-century German choral music, for example, you can point out how some of the colors and textures of choral arrangements found their way in the music of African American composer Nathaniel Dett. Why and how did he utilize them? What did he find useful in historical choral arrangements that he wanted to incorporate into his music?

Here's what I'm trying to say to be entirely blunt about it: if you manage to teach an entire classical music class without a single person of color in it, that mess is on you. Because it's not that hard to find ways to add different performers and composers to your class. You just weren't looking. And by not looking, by not even trying to look, you ended up reifying Western art music as white, everything else as Other, and encouraging your students to do that, too.

I'm not a fan of having one day or one concert dedicated to "The Music of Mexican Composers" or "African American Concert Music," either. Especially if that's the only way audiences are going to hear them. That smacks of tokenizing. Integrate that stuff into your courses and into your concert halls, people!

So that's what I was going to write about....


...And then I discovered this article by a music professor named Lucius R. Wyatt, called "The Inclusion of Concert Music of African American Composers in Music History Courses." And do you know when it's from? 1996.

1996. 

TWENTY YEARS AGO. 

AGAIN: TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Wyatt had already proposed this. He'd already promoted these very same ideas. But using less angry language.

So how are we in the same position today that we were in twenty years ago? And more importantly, how do we get out of it?

A Day of the Dead altar on display at Harvard's Peabody Museum

I've been having a conversation with a colleague of mine who works in Museum Studies, and she pointed me to a really great collection of essays in the journal, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Several years ago, scholars and curators from several museums got together to ask the question: how do we bring together art, archeology, and anthropology in the museum?

The reason why they were concerned with this question has to do with how Western museums have historically understood the difference between art objects and anthropological objects. The decision to place an object from Nigeria in an anthropology museum instead of in an art museum was sometimes quite arbitrary, and revealed clear Western biases in aesthetics ("this isn't art because it's not an oil painting;" "even though this is actually a really important local religious object, it's pretty so let's place it in an art museum anyway even though that's not it's function").

The editors Ivan Gaskell and Jeffrey Quilter ask the questions, "Why are some things admitted as art while others are excluded? Who is entitled to decide what constitutes art and what should be treated as anthropological material? Do things look different from other cultural viewpoints, and, if so, how might those viewpoints be represented in both art and anthropology museums?" (RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 52, Museums: Crossing Boundaries (Autumn, 2007 ), p. 5)

One of the conclusions drawn from this conference was that the institution that's best suited to try to change how the public interacts with objects is the university museum. As Henry S. Kim explains, "Whereas most nonuniversity museums must relate to a wide public audience, university museums have a natural group of key stakeholders who engage with them in direct dialogues, between specialists in objects and their counterparts in the faculties, between experts and the students they teach. Perhaps the most important responsibility of a university museum is the role it can play in teaching the undergraduate and graduate curricula." (RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 52, Museums: Crossing Boundaries (Autumn, 2007 ), p. 45)

Not beholden to the public, the university museum is the most free to take risks, and the most able to shape the next generation of curators and art directors, too.

Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is an example of this call to re-arrange objects and place new ones together put into action. They deliberately re-organized their museum spaces, placed different objects in conversation with one another outside of the usual geographic boundaries, and provided lots of new descriptions to re-contextualize the objects viewers saw on display.

That's all great for art historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, but how does this relate to musicology?

I'm wondering what might constitute a risk-free space for music schools to try something similar. What would that space look like? Who has to be on board in order for this project of diversifying the music curriculum to be carried out? According to the authors in this special issue of RES, it's the university art school or music school that's in the best place to radically try something new. What institutions, what spaces and places, are in the best positions to try out something different?

Yes, there's the traditional concert hall at a music school. But I'm already imagining the complaints that would come of that ("students are there to train so they can join an orchestra. They need to learn the standard repertoire."). And the point isn't to stop students from playing Debussy, is it? The point is to put Debussy's music in conversation with other musics, and to find ways to support people of different backgrounds who want to play Debussy, too.

And yes, we can focus on teaching new works in the classroom, but the lesson learned from Harvard's Peabody Museum is that you need to have both the classroom setting and the museum space working together to shape new conversations on art and aesthetics.

What does it take to create radical change in the classroom and in the concert hall? To answer this question, it is worth thinking seriously about the institution's role in intervening in aesthetic discourses, in shaping or challenging what we teach and how we teach it, in interrogating what we love and why we love it. Art museums, concert halls, music schools, and universities create the structures for affirming or negating what we know, love, and understand.

Which institutions have tried to overhaul their music history programs? Which ones are currently struggling with this question and working out their own solutions? I'm curious to hear your reports back.  I'm all for a variety of positions on this topic. I just want to know that institutions are trying.

Unraveling 'untitled unmastered'

In the wee hours of Friday, shortly after midnight, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new surprise album entitled 'untitled unmastered.' Along with this enigmatic title came an enigmatic title image:

Considering all of the hand wringing and fussing Kanye recently made over his new album, 'untitled unmastered' feels like the antithesis of 'The Life of Pablo' in its low-profile release--for example, there is no public record of him consorting with a Kardashian for help with its name. Perhaps Kendrick was recently inspired to pull a Beyoncé (aka drop an album out of nowhere with little warning) while hanging out with Bey and Jay at basketball, although in fairness, 'To Pimp A Butterfly' was also dropped out of nowhere last year:

This really happened

Early commentary on this album has pointed out that it may be closer to a series of sketches than a completed product; certainly the choice of the word 'unmastered' in the album's name suggests this interpretation. However, in thinking over what this album presents, I am struck by the complexities that Kendrick has incorporated into it solely based on these naming conventions alone. An untitled piece of art is not necessarily an incomplete one.

Wassily Kandinsky's 1916 untitled painting

What an unmastered work is remains unclear, at least in this context.

The track names are equally nebulous. Rather than providing specific titles, there are only dates, suggesting that these are works that were abandoned at some point. But what point? What do these dates represent? Start dates, end dates, abandoned dates, studio session dates? This question of dates is not trivial. For example, some of the material in these songs has been heard before on late-night appearances and in other contexts and these dates don't match those in the title for the track. Instead of a specific date, as most the tracks have, 'untitled 7' dates from 2014-2016 and incorporates a range of different recordings that are abruptly connected. Thus this track spans a broad swath of time, beginning with a 'song' that might otherwise be called 'Levitate' (in the vein of 'Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe' from Kendrick's first major album, 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City') and ending with what sounds like an improvised jam session with friends. Abrupt shifts during a track are not unusual for Kendrick as they abound on 'To Pimp A Butterfly,' but here they reveal that while what we're hearing may be 'unmastered,' it is not unedited. At one point during the start of the jam session, Kendrick states, 'This is a fifteen-minute song!' The whole track is only 8:16, and at that point we are already five minutes in. Consequently, the listener is made acutely aware that either there were cuts or that this was not really a fifteen-minute song. Either way, what is presented to us on 'untitled unmastered' should not be accepted necessarily at face value.

I have two possible interpretations of 'unmastered' for this album. The first is that these are tracks that predate 'To Pimp A Butterfly' and he is suggesting that it is that album which is masterful. Indeed, the tone and language here is somewhat out of place with that on 'To Pimp A Butterfly,' whose trajectory explores many different nuances of controversial terms (and almost entirely eschews the word 'bitch'). So perhaps Kendrick did undergo a change in his artistic outlook between 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City' and we are seeing its evolution here; these tracks, then, are from before he 'mastered' his art. Alternatively, perhaps these songs simply didn't fit the overall narrative. The albums that bookend these tracks (if the dates on 'untitled unmastered' are accurate) both, ostensibly, had a plot--the plot of 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City' is outlined more clearly, but there is definitely one on 'To Pimp A Butterfly' as well. These tracks could be leftovers that were not quite right for those albums and didn't fit with the overall structure.

And yet, even on 'untitled unmastered,' Kendrick has a linking device with a rallying cry 'Pimp pimp, hooray' that appears between various songs and is the last sound on the album. So although these may be 'unfinished' or 'unmastered' tracks, in the end, Kendrick presents a 'master' copy that links together what has come before, and what was originally a simple title proves to be far more complex.