January 8, 2015 On Music Alone Together By Dan Piepenbring On D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and the disappearance of R&B groups. From the cover of Black Messiah. The last number-one R&B single from a group was “Independent Women,” by Destiny’s Child. Since it slipped from Billboard’s top slot in January 2001, only solo acts have held the position.* Groups have all but disappeared from the mainstream in every genre, but their absence is especially apparent in R&B, where, in 1994, for instance, four of the ten number-one singles were by groups, and in 1974, thirteen R&B groups made it to the top of the charts. Now, zero—for fifteen years, solo artists have dominated music. Who knew the thesis of Bowling Alone applied even to this, our most collaborative art form? Anyone can rattle off the names of big R&B groups: Earth Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers, TLC, Boyz II Men, the Supremes, the Pointer Sisters, the Force MDs, Jodeci, and on and on. What these groups foregrounded—and what’s noticeably lacking in present-day R&B—were vocal harmonies. Obviously the Top 40 is still loaded with backup singers; I don’t mean to say that vocal harmony has gone extinct. But a certain kind of performance has gone missing from the charts, a choral style for trios, quartets, or quintets, where the harmony was just as essential as the melody. In songs like these, you could hear the genre’s connection to jazz and especially to gospel. Not that you have to be a music scholar to enjoy the sound of people singing together. At the risk of getting all Kumbaya about it, isn’t it just sort of nice to hear voices working in harmony? To me, the sound of a group has always been more approachable than that of a soloist—a collective is bound to be more welcoming than an individual, especially if they’re a collective of really pretty voices. I think pop music at the moment is as inventive as it’s ever been, but still: Where have our great R&B groups gone, and why have they ceased to capture the public imagination? Read More
January 8, 2015 At Work Inventing Situations: An Interview with Thomas Pierce By James Yeh Photo © Andrew Owen What’s immediately striking about Thomas Pierce’s debut story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, are its wild, unforgettable conceits. In “Shirley Temple Three,” a long-extinct dwarf mammoth is cloned for a TV show, then dumped off in a small Southern town with Mawmaw, the show host’s mother. In “More Soon,” the body of a man’s brother is shipped all over the world because of worries over a mysterious contagion. In “Videos of People Falling Down,” the lives of a host of characters—a local-news reporter, a right-wing Listserv manager, a cheesy pop singer—converge and intertwine through the shared humiliation of having been filmed while falling. But Pierce’s characters never feel secondary to his plots. They are resoundingly human, with their bundles of worries, joys, dreams, and burdens, their beliefs, theories, and suspicions, their wanderings and wonderings. Pierce and I first met in 2000, as students in a high school summer program in South Carolina, our shared home state. Even then I was impressed by his charm and intelligence, and his lively, slightly askew sense of humor. In 2013, my magazine, Gigantic, published his story “Time to Get Radical,” a funny and unexpectedly moving catchphrase-driven monologue that in around twelve hundred words manages to capture the highs, lows, and in-betweens in the life of one semi-religious auto-parts salesman someplace down South. This interview took place over a series of e-mails and a shared Google Doc, along with two in-person meetings—in his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he now lives. You worked for five years at NPR as a blogger, reporter, and producer. How has this experience informed your work? In radio, you’re always aware that you have to win the listener’s attention. You’re wrestling them away from their breakfast or their drive or kids. So lesson one is to be interesting and engaging. You also learn quickly that the best sentence to read over the air is usually the simplest one—complex ideas don’t necessarily require complex sentences. Don’t get me wrong, I love beautiful, confusing sentences, too, but I also value clarity—and radio helped me in that regard. You may only have ninety seconds to tell a story on the radio. When you write a radio script, there’s software you can use with a little clock in the upper right-hand corner that tells you the piece’s length in terms of time. This helps you to remember that what you’re creating will occupy a portion of a person’s day. One of my short stories might steal forty-two minutes from your life. I want to use your time wisely. Read More
January 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent No Object By Sadie Stein War and Peace’s Natasha Rostova in a postcard by Elizaveta Bem, 1914. Yesterday, amid the headlines and hashtags, the footage and pictures from Paris, came an e-mail. It was from a publicist. It reminded us that this month marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of War and Peace. Well, sort of: the first installment of what was then titled 1805 was indeed published in the January 1865 issue of Russkiy Vestnik. It ran in serial form for the next two years. However, Tolstoy wasn’t happy with this version and reworked much of the book—which he called “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle”—before publishing it as War and Peace in 1869. Arguably, a sesquicentennial is a tenuous peg in any case (it doesn’t even have an honorific, like gold or diamond). But in dark times, you don’t need an excuse; they are reason enough. I’m not suggesting that whenever there is tragedy in the world you drop everything and pick up a fourteen-hundred-page novel; there is life to lead and news to read and, yes, social media to follow, too. Besides, you’d be reading all the time. But it’s like Mr. Rogers said: when the world is frightening and violent, look for the helpers. Read More
January 8, 2015 On the Shelf Save the The, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The frequency of the over the twentieth century, as seen in Google Books ngrams. Image via Language Log An English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission will be published in America, though no date has been set. (Houellebecq and the controversial novel are on the cover of the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo.) Have a question for Haruki Murakami? (NB: “Dear Mr. Murakami, I, too, enjoy jazz and cats” is not a question.) Go ahead and ask him. He’s answering queries from fans on a new site called Mr. Murakami’s Place, though as of this writing the site remains—maybe fittingly—impossible to find. Our definite article is endangered. Linguists have crunched the numbers, and over the course of the twentieth century, our use of the plummeted. If you treasure the the as I do, join the campaign to employ the the as often as the circumstances allow. (We started by putting it in the title of our magazine.) The key to an authentic sci-fi novel: show your work. Andy Weir’s The Martian, once a self-published e-book, has found a wide readership because of its attention to technical specifics: “An astronaut gets left behind on Mars in a near-future NASA mission, and has to survive until help comes. This he does through physics and chemistry, algebra and pipe fitting, botany and celestial navigation, all described in meticulous detail, some of it even simulated with software that Weir wrote himself.” The descent of the English department—why do outsiders so commonly regard it as “a bastion of muddled thinking”? Some say “academics ‘must make their peace with the fact that viewed from the outside their work does not look like work,’ but this misses how academics are perceived by those sensible enough to dwell outside their ranks: The problem is precisely that their work looks too much like work—onerous, meticulous, pointless, jargon-soaked work without application either to literature or to living.”
January 7, 2015 On History Amazing Robot Brain Translates Russian By Dan Piepenbring The general layout of the IBM 701. Photo via Computer History Sixty-one years ago, on January 7, 1954, a massive, terrifying, IBM artificial intelligence—referred to in the press as a “giant brain,” a “robot brain,” and a “polyglot brainchild,” among other wide-eyed terms—translated more than sixty sentences from Russian into English. It was the first public demonstration of machine translation. And yeah, the people were pleased. The computer was an IBM 701, which was, according to its manufacturer, “the most versatile electronic ‘brain’ extant,” used sixteen hours a day for “nuclear physics, rocket trajectories, weather forecasting, and other mathematical wizardry.” But translating was an entirely different pursuit, and substantially more difficult: in fact, the computer knew only six grammatical rules, and its vocabulary comprised just 250 terms. Working with Georgetown linguists, and with dozens from the media watching in IBM’s New York headquarters, a woman “who didn’t understand a word of the language of the Soviets punched out the Russian messages on IBM cards.” (They used a Romanized version of Russian.) She began with sentences about chemistry, which probably unnerved the newsmen in attendance—how were they supposed to captivate readers with such examples as “The quality of coal is determined by calorie content” and “Starch is produced by mechanical methods from potatoes”? Read More
January 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Notes on Becoming a Crank By Sadie Stein Gerard Dou, Woman Reading a Bible, ca. 1630. There are many benefits to being a grown-up. Using stoves unsupervised, buying things online, enjoying herring. As children suspect, you can set your own bedtime; as adults know, this can be as early as you like. One of the worst things—besides the loss of innocence, I mean—is becoming a crank. When you’re a kid and you’re opinionated, it’s cute. Less so when you’re a teenager—you morph into an ass—but people forgive that, too. As a young adult, maybe you’ve become a jerk, but whatever, you still have idealism and fire in your belly. Then one day you wake up and you’re just a crank. Read More