November 9, 2022 On Music I Remember All Too Well: Taylor Swift and Joe Brainard By JoAnna Novak Taylor Swift. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. Last year, I began running the trail at Lake Storey in Galesburg, Illinois, where I live. My friend S. recommended Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” as an exercise soundtrack; soon, I was clocking my runs by it. Five took me around the lake and to the dock where I stretched. For me, there is only the ten-minute version. The five-minute original is like getting cheated out of an orgasm. The song had just been released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the 2021 rerecording of her fourth album, which came out in 2012. It’s a power ballad, the story of a dissolved romance that haunts the speaker, who is still hurting over the cruelties of the relationship. “You never called it what it was,” Swift sings. “All I felt was shame.” “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”—which broke the Guinness World Record for longest song to hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100—is also a master class in the present tense. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. Verse one opens in scene: “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.” The door is the door to an ex-lover’s sister’s house, where Swift has forgotten a scarf. The first three lines of the verse are written in simple past, but the fourth shifts to present perfect, foreshadowing the showdown to come between tenses. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present. Read More
May 6, 2022 On Music Watch the Staples Jr. Singers Perform Live at The Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown. Photograph by Eliza Grace Martin. On the evening of Friday, April 22, the staff of the Review tidied our desks, tucked away our notebooks and computers, ordered pizza, and welcomed the nine members of the band known as the Staples Jr. Singers to our Chelsea office for a very special performance. The band’s music was introduced to us by our friends at Luaka Bop, who are today rereleasing the Staples Jr. Singers’ 1975 record, When Do We Get Paid. The Staples Jr. Singers (who named themselves after Mavis Staples) formed in 1969, when the original band members—A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown—were still teenagers; they sold that first, glorious record on the front lawn of their home in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Almost fifty years later, to celebrate the rerelease, the original members drove the seventeen hours from Aberdeen to New York City, children and grandchildren in tow, for a weekend of gigs in New York City. We at the Review were thrilled to host the band’s first-ever concert in the city, and we are delighted to share a clip from that performance with you.
November 10, 2021 On Music Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich By Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song “Roadrunner.” Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out. Read More
April 16, 2020 On Music How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary By Sasha Geffen Ma Rainey in 1917. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole. It has always limped along in pieces, easily cracked by a brief foray into the historical record. The Christian colonialist construction of men as inseminating subjects and women as reproductive objects does not extend into ancient history, nor does it govern every facet of the present. Masculinity and femininity, so much as they refer to certain strategies for moving through the world, have never neatly corresponded to the two types of bodies defined in the opening passages of the Bible. Even human bodies don’t hold true to the popular myth of strictly dimorphic sex, as anyone in the intersex community can tell you. There have always been more than two genders, and music and gender nonconformity have gone hand in hand since long before pop music emerged as a product—since before the concept of “product” existed. But the patriarchal order, in order to survive, needs to brand threatening ideas as artificial, superimposed, harmful, and new, so as to distract from the underlying truth: that patriarchy itself is artificial, superimposed, harmful, and not nearly as ancient or universal as it pretends to be. Hardly the natural order of the human being, patriarchy relies on the illusion of its own inevitability to survive. The notion that only two genders exist, and that each gender prescribes specific behaviors, movements, and relations, has always been undercut by a thriving spectrum of deviant expressions that white capitalist patriarchy seeks to erase. When European settlers devastated the Americas, they “looked to the existing sexual and gender variance of Indigenous people as a means of marking them as racially inferior and uncivilized: a justification for a forever unjustified genocidal conquest,” wrote Michael Paramo. During the era of American slavery, white men and women similarly clung to the gender binary to distinguish themselves from the racialized people they were brutalizing, stamping out expressions of gender that didn’t fit into the white Christian patriarchal mold as part of a long campaign of hellish state-sanctioned violence. Read More
January 22, 2020 On Music Cole Porter’s College Days By Brian Cullman Cole Porter, Yale College Class of 1913 My father graduated from Yale in 1913. At the time, getting into Yale must have been a bit like making a reservation at 21. If you were one of the fortunate few, the only real question was did you want a table at seven thirty or eight thirty. He played football (“badly, very badly”), was a member of the mandolin club, and was fired early on as drama critic at the Yale Courant for asking Sarah Bernhardt rude questions about her love life. In later years, he found that boys from his dorms, ones with names like Pinky, Weasel, and Lefty, were now ambassadors to Sweden, vice presidents of General Electric, or on the board of the Federal Reserve. And he came to remember that one of the boys down the hall, someone he barely knew back then, was Cole Porter. Read More
July 10, 2019 On Music The Woman of a Thousand Faces By Zachary Fine Aldous Harding performing at the Oxford Art Factory on November 21, 2015. Photo: Bruce Baker (CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons. Aldous Harding is a young singer-songwriter, the kind usually labeled a folk musician, but she’s been more fittingly described as “New Zealand’s woman of a thousand voices.” She grew up in Lyttelton, a town near Christchurch, and was discovered while busking in the streets. On her self-titled 2014 debut, she has a high, tremulous voice that’s subtly lisped and bent into an accent, and the tone across songs is uniform—subdued, eerie, a vague mood of the medieval. But on her second album, Party, and again on Designer, released at the end of April, her voice splays. Tonally, it might sound as if she’s blowing into a glass bottle at first—every note shored up on warm bass—then she’ll pull some invisible ripcord in the prechorus, and a sustained wail will spring out, cutting through everything like blades on ice. I first encountered Harding while I was living in England a few years ago. The weather was gray, the political situation was dire, and my bike kept doing this thing where the pedals would lurch and my ribs would get crushed on the handlebars. I bought a helmet and a heavy rain jacket, indoctrinated myself in the pleasures of lukewarm ale, and eventually began looking online for new music—something dark that would hopefully confirm and condense the British situation. Harding’s songs are not just sad and morose; they’re funereal. Every note climbed out of my speakers like a black vine, curving its way around my flat until the walls breathed a kind of death chill. I felt I should be lighting rows of candles or wearing a suit. Her lyrics and track titles alone relay that skulls are swelling, stones are being cuddled, birds are not singing but screaming, and someone has broken their neck while “dancing to the edge of the world.” There’s also her face. When she sings, her eyes wheel around ballistically in their sockets, her teeth grit into a grimace, and her lips purse in this muscular way, as if clenching around gravel. The unspoken coordination of features somehow seems orchestral, complex. It’s totally mesmerizing. Even the promotional literature that circulates with her live show explains that she “does more than sing”—her body and face are a “weapon of theatre.” Read More