The Tardigrade Times # 7
Unpacking Madlib's samples on 'Sound Ancestors' | Adam Curtis' new BBC docuseries is a timely look at conspiratory thought | A chat with Madam West
Collage art by Ron Hart
A hip-hop producer and an IDM producer walk into a bar…
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke at a hipster open mic night in Brooklyn, but the way Madlib tells it, his creative collaboration with Kieran Hebden (the IDM producer better known as Four Tet) came into form as the two talked about their shared love of record collecting at wine bars over the past two decades.
“[Kieran and I] connected musically — he knows me, like I know him,” Madlib recently told NPR. We talked about [doing a record together] for years before we did it.”
And did it they have, delivering Sound Ancestors — an album that diehard heads and those who use instrumental hip-hop as study aids alike are all deeming an instant classic.
Sound Ancestors is ultimately Madlib’s show, and Hebden knows it. At times, it’s as if the samples culled form Madlib’s instrumental biography, conjuring moments where Madlib challenges himself by taking standard hip-hop samples into uncharted territory, moments where he nods to his own past, and moments that find him presenting brilliantly alive, hence-unheard genre hybrids to pair with the groove.
Read the rest on Rock & Roll Globe
Adam Curtis’ ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ docuseries is an emotional history of conspiratory thought
We’re a month and a half into 2021, and it’s already been a huge year for Bruce Springsteen. First, The Boss performed “Land of Hope and Dreams” at the Biden inauguration in January. Then earlier this month, Jeep premiered a Superbowl commercial starring Bruce, who drives through Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado delivering a message of seeming political reconciliation while playing his everyman role perfectly.
“Fear has never been the best of who we are,” Bruce says in the ad. “We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground. So we can get there. We can make it to the mountaintop, through the desert… and we will cross this divide.”
These feel-good platitudes, akin to wood-carved inspirational messages from the bargain bin of a Michael’s craft store, not only highlight how out of touch the notion of Bruce Springsteen as a healing force has become, but also how much his seemingly subversive liberal stances (fans love citing the verses on “Born in the USA” and the subtext of his Nebraska album) don’t often amount to any substantive expression of values or identity.
Writer Tim Sommer identified this disconnect with hysterical results a few years back, when he wrote a fake open letter as Bruce that apologized for not doing more grassroots work to prevent Trump from getting elected. The missive trended, and Snopes debunked it, at which point an interesting dialogue ensued as to what constitutes good satire.
Last Wednesday, three days after the big game, TMZ reported that Bruce had been arrested last October for DWI in Jersey. Jeep pulled its ad the same day, for obvious reasons, and the hot takes on the sincerity of the Boss’ schtick flew fast.
Also last week, the BBC released the first few episodes in a new series by acclaimed documentarian Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the World. Over the years, Curtis has amassed a cult following for the lucid style of presenting sociological and cultural histories using stock footage over his galaxy-brain narration. This one, coupled with his last film, frame the disconnect between what Bruce is selling and how it’s resonating in a fresh context.
In a recent New Yorker profile, Curtis describes himself as “fundamentally an emotional journalist,” who the writer claims “doesn’t like to be called an artist, but he behaves like one.” Curtis, who has access to the massive archive of video footage the BBC has filmed and acquired over the years, constructs each work by ‘cutting the archive,’ splicing together meaningful moments which may illustrate, contradict or juxtapose his narrative at any given moment.
In the profile, Curtis says that all of his films are either about revolutionaries, who want to change the world, or engineers, who want to stabilize and control it. Reading reframes Bruce, and many other celebrities with a public platform, as branded identities who play the role of a revolutionary while, in effect, existing as someone who merely maintains the status quo. In practice, those of us us who are not engaged on a deep level with the value system that celebrity purports to represent see them as a stand-in, an avatar for the values, and feel satisfied.
This idea also calls back to Curtis’ last film, 2016’s Hypernormalisation, which posits that much of the art and culture we were been fed on the back half of the 20th Century presented itself as championing the perspective of revolutionaries while, in effect, actually serving greater the financial and ideological agendas of an upper class. In that film, Curtis talks about the illusion that smoking cigarettes is cool and rebellious, despite the fact that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry. He also talks about Patti Smith, and the fact that she has put out the image of a vagabond progressive misanthrope on the fringes of society, but always been supported by a major label.
All of this was floating through my head watching the first episode of Can’t Get You Out of my Head, specifically the idea that individuality in a monoculture is a myth, which Curtis introduces in earlier work but cares further here by investigating the emotional ways that people claim their individuality through cultural engagement.
I was also thinking again about last month’s chat with Dan Boeckner for The Tardigrade Times, when we discussed a concept that Curtis goes into deeply in episode one. In our chat, Dan laid out why he believes this concept of a fake, Merry Pranksters-esque ‘religion’ called Discordianism in the mid-’60s became an unwitting inspiration for Q-Anon:
“The key Discordian practice known as ‘Operation Mindfuck’ is a deliberate attempt to create practical jokes with the purpose of positive social confusion. So, this is the darkest version of the cosmic fool. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was watching the Capitol insurrection, because I feel like QAnon, and that entire movement, is a bizarre outgrowth of Discordianism that has no purpose.
Even though it claims to just be a big joke, I think its purpose was to weaken the state. To break down reality. Whereas with this QAnon stuff, I don't think it actually has a purpose. Its horrible race of intention and philosophy where, you see, when they get into the Capitol, they have no idea what they're going to do. There's no goal beyond keeping the TV man as president.”
Having Dan explain this concept to me, then hearing Curtis unpack it weeks later on a much larger platform, was a coincidence that made me feel like we were on the precipice of arriving at a profound truth. Curtis explains how The Discordians’ Operation Mindfuck, a disinformation campaign that began with a series of prank letters in Playboy, was intended to ‘help break the spell of conspiracy theories’ by making people see how ridiculous it was that the Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society from Bavaria, was secretly running the world. Of course, readers took these claims of an Illuminati conspiracy seriously, and such conspiracy theories still persist to this day, in record numbers, on message boards across the land.
It brings to mind the classic George Carlin quote, “Think of how smart the average person is. Then remember, half of them are stupider than that.”
In my novel-in=progress, The Last Great American Whale, Discordianism takes the form of Situationist theory run amok, the idea of artistic pranks as public protest without consideration for the consequences. I started writing it well before learning about Discordianism, but reckon the concept will make its way into the text somewhere down the line.
Elsewhere in the first episode of his new series, Curtis also talks about an influential essay that’s been near and dear to my work for several years. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter, published in the Nov. 1964 issue of Harper’s, is an influential text that presented a definitive history of conspiratory thought in this country. Hofstadter notes that, though the inclination toward conspiracy thinking leans Conservative, it is in fact an apolitical beast that has been present since the birth of this country, encompassing paranoid rumors about everyone from Native people and Catholics to Goldrushers and Freemasons.
In my own work, I’ve written about it through the frame of an avant, 12-tone big band concert about conspiracy theories at BAM, the revival of The X-Files, and more. The essay proves to be a continuous point of reference in my work because of how crucial it has become toward understanding our current cultural juncture. Curtis seems to dig that, too.
Conspiratory thought can be largely challenged, and usually completely debunked, with a simple maxim: “Correlation does not equal causation.” One funny paradox in Curtis’ work is how often he flirts with that “correlation/causation” boundary through form and structure, drawing correlations between seemingly unconnected things without resorting to subjective suppositions that morph into outlandish conclusions.
It’s a fine line, indeed, but one he walks with tact and intrigue. This time around, you get the sense that Curtis is deliberately subverting the trajectory of conspiratory thought in order to draw a distinction between the true conspiracies and the theories.
In fact, early on in the first episode of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis suggests some powers that be have a vested interest in blurring any distinction between conspiracies real and imagined, as it offers them a chance to cover their tracks and hide their real misdeeds. “These strange days did not just happen,” he narrates. “We, and those in power, created them together.”
Media Musings #8 — Madam West
"It's about giving you more than just a body in a room, walking into the bathroom or going outside to smoke a cigarette at the moment you get off stage."
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
I first met Sophie Chernin, a singer/songwriter and front-person of New York’s psych-soul-pop group Madam West, when we worked together at legacy communications trade publication PRNEWS. It’s nerve wracking when you work with somebody and find out they are in a band. There’s always this ‘here we go again!’ moment, as Sophie laughingly describes it, when you pray you actually enjoy their tunes because you don’t want to have to lie to them every day and feign interest.
Thankfully, Sophie's music with Madam West — a band that describes themselves as ‘Joni Mitchell fronts Yo La Tengo after they've taken too much adderall’ — is absolutely joyful to listen to. Together with her now husband Todd Martino on keys, Mike McDearmon on drums, Jory Dawidowicz on bass, and Will Clark on guitar, Sophie float above the music with a deceptively demure lilt, often modulating and twisting her vocals onstage with pedals and loopers that echo off into astral realms.
On the heels of two recently-released singles, “In Color” and “February Goat,” I caught up with Sophie to learn more about how Madam West has acclimated to making music in limbo, how to separate egos and feedback when making music with your partner, navigating the balance between self-promotion and artistic pursuit, and much more.
I feel that the way that you relate to art and music, and the way that you write songs and perform, is so pure, maybe to your own detriment sometimes.
Absolutely. When I first started the band, there was just this whole Brooklyn aesthetic of being sort of as jaded as possible. I'll admit, I tried it. I tried the mysterious Instagram posts of the back of somebody's head. I tried the low-key hiding who I was, trying to play it as cool as the other bands who we would be playing shows around the city. I just couldn't do it.
My husband says I have no capacity for subterfuge, and I think that sort of describes me pretty well. As much as I would love to hide my emotions and not wear my heart on my sleeve, I just can't.
There’s also the fact that you work for a public relations trade magazine. You do the man's dirty work as far as marketing and PR and comms go, for the most part. There is a sentiment in those disciplines that withholding, only sharing the back of the head Instagram square, creates a promotional mysterious kind of energy that’s conducive toward you selling your brand.
Leaving them wanting more. I'm really bad at that.
I know you’ve thought a lot in that balance between operating on the business promotional side of things and also being present with yourself creatively. So I was hoping we could explore that a little bit.
We first started playing shows around the city around when Instagram was coming up, and Facebook was slowly becoming a little less hip, but I was so into it. I was making digital flyers. I was following a million accounts and building my online network. I was super into it, but on the other hand, it really took me away from the music because I was pursuing that high of the likes and the reposts and the events. Back then Facebook Events was huge, the RSVPs. I once had a venue tell me I couldn't play their gig unless I had 1,000 Facebook fans or something like that.
That's the digital version of those East Village clubs that say, "You have to sell this many tickets before we start paying you."
Yeah, exactly. I became so into that concept of ‘band as brand’ that it really took up my life that could have been spent composing and group writing, which is how the band works. We take forever to write songs because we write so collaboratively that it's not like I'm just the singer-songwriter. I rarely come in with a song fully baked. It just takes a long time.
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
In the beginning, I was so focused on that, marketing and building the audience that I wasn't as focused on the music. Then, over the years, I think part of working in the trades actually took me away from that social media obsession in terms of the band.
That was your day job and Madam West was your passion, so you could silo them?
Yeah. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was go in and check the numbers and post. What I wanted to do was play music and write songs. So it was really this big reversal for me, making that social media stuff into work, and it really just reframed the way I looked at the journey of the band in general.