{"id":110217,"date":"2017-04-24T09:40:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T13:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110217"},"modified":"2017-04-24T10:40:25","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T14:40:25","slug":"the-sweet-sounds-of-benzodiazepine-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/24\/the-sweet-sounds-of-benzodiazepine-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sweet Sounds of Benzodiazepine, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_110218\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-110218\" class=\"wp-image-110218\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"661\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant.jpg 2000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant-300x198.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant-768x508.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/xanaxpendant-1024x677.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-110218\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sounds good.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When Huey Lewis sang, in 1983, that he wanted a new drug, someone should\u2019ve told him to\u00a0look in the mirror. He was the drug all along! His soft, edgeless sound \u2026 his\u00a0narcotic, synthetic, placid distance \u2026 America wanted Huey Lewis in pill form. Thirty years later, pop music\u2019s performers are better looking, its production styles silkier, and its sonics deep enough to swim in, but a kind of Charmin toilet-paper softness is at the center of every song again. Chris Richards argues that the sound of today\u2019s \u201cpill pop\u201d can be traced to the rise of Xanax and Percocet\u2014that we want our music, like our increasingly vast pharmacopeia, to dampen any distress signals: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/style\/soft-smooth-and-steady-how-xanax-turned-american-music-into-pill-pop\/2017\/04\/19\/535a44de-1955-11e7-bcc2-7d1a0973e7b2_story.html?tid=ss_fb&amp;utm_term=.cd07c1bcd22b\">It\u2019s a smoothness, a softness, a steadiness. An aversion to unanticipated left turns<\/a>. It isn\u2019t new, but it\u2019s increasingly everywhere. You can hear it in the Weeknd\u2019s demulcent falsetto, in Rihanna\u2019s unruffled cool, in Drake\u2019s creamier verses, even in Justin Bieber\u2019s buffed edges \u2026 In that sense, the pill-pop aesthetic and the streaming experience go hand-in-hand. Crafting a hit single with sleek synthesizers, pillowy electronic drums and Auto-Tuned purrs might be enough to get you in the game, but it isn\u2019t enough to win. Dominance belongs to those superstars willing to replicate their softness in abundance, and then roll it out on the streaming platforms \u2026 the anxiety-smothering sound of pill-pop is bound to help define this moment in our cultural memory\u2014the same way late-sixties rock-and-roll still pulses like an LSD vision, or the way mid-eighties hair-metal still screams like cocaine.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Martin Herbert\u2019s new essay collection, <em>Tell Them I Said No<\/em>, looks at artists who\u2019ve shunned the self-promotion and ceaseless glad-handing that have overtaken the profession. Hettie Judah writes in her review, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2017\/apr\/20\/tell-them-i-said-no-artists-who-turn-backs-on-world-martin-herbert#img-1\" target=\"_blank\">Herbert examines ten artists who have withdrawn, some in extreme ways, from the self-promotion and courting of celebrity that is bundled up with our understanding of art-world success<\/a>. Here we find\u00a0Lutz Bacher, who assumed a near invisible, gender-ambiguous identity;\u00a0Cady Noland, who ceased making art despite acclaim, and now monitors and bedevils anyone seeking to sell or show her work; and\u00a0Stanley Brouwn, who shunned photographic documentation and recordings, and once had all the copies of a book featuring images of his performances destroyed \u2026 In 1983,\u00a0David Hammons\u00a0sold snowballs of various sizes off a pavement pitch in downtown Manhattan, in an event titled the the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. A few years later, in a rare interview, he detailed his objection to the gallery-visiting public. He thought that audience was \u2018overly educated, it\u2019s conservative, it\u2019s out to criticize and not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Laurie Penny looks at the commodification of \u201cself-love\u201d and how we can avoid it, perhaps even without giving up yoga: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/thebaffler.com\/latest\/laurie-penny-self-care?src=longreads\" target=\"_blank\">The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and \u2018radical self-love\u2019<\/a>\u2014the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns \u2026 The problem with self-love as we currently understand it is in our view of love itself, defined,\u00a0too simply and too often, as an extraordinary feeling that we respond to with hearts and flowers and fantasy, ritual consumption and affectless passion \u2026 The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Pam Houston believes her ambition has its origins in her childhood home, where she watched her father as \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elle.com\/life-love\/a43605\/ambition-pam-houston-essay\/\" target=\"_blank\">he gave my mother $200 every two weeks to buy groceries, clothes, and every single other thing the family needed from the time I was born until I left for college, with no adjustment for inflation<\/a>. My father carried more than $200 in his wallet at all times, bought Cadillac convertibles and Italian suits while my mother made our clothes on the sewing machine and scoured magazines to find interesting ways to use leftovers. The song that was on continuous repeat in my childhood kitchen was my mother reasoning or flirting or begging for an advance on next week\u2019s money, and him shaming her\u2014no matter the circumstances\u2014 for spending it too fast \u2026 If your mother runs away from Spiceland, Indiana, to Broadway at thirteen, if she spends the last thirty years of her life begging her husband for the money back that she earned to pay the dry cleaner for his freshly starched shirts, if the single most powerful emotion in your family\u2019s home is her soul-shattering grief over the absence of meaningful work, that is likely to inform your relationship with ambition.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Don\u2019t mind Tim Parks and Riccardo Manzotti, they\u2019re just over here debating the essence of consciousness and our basis for apprehending the \u201creal\u201d world around us: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/04\/20\/consciousness-dreaming-outside-our-heads\/\" target=\"_blank\">The quickest neural processes still require tens of milliseconds to complete as electronic and chemical signals travel back and forth across the meters of neural circuitry packed in our brains<\/a>. So even for the neuroscientists the physical stuff that they view as constituting our conscious experience is spread over space and time, albeit tiny spaces. In fact, if we wanted to be really rigorous and consider only what is present at one instant in time, the world as we know it would disappear. Sounds, light, voices, gestures, actions, words, all require a flexible notion of nowness that encompasses more than a single instant.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: the waxing influence of pill pop, the artists who dare to defy the self-promotion machine, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[647,35,9241,14345,14645,20035,862,7403,28500,52,14442,28503,16226,28502,36,28501],"class_list":["post-110217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ambition","tag-art","tag-artists","tag-capitalism","tag-consciousness","tag-drake","tag-drugs","tag-philosophy","tag-pill-pop","tag-pop-music","tag-rihanna","tag-self-love","tag-self-promotion","tag-tell-them-i-said-no","tag-women","tag-xanax"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Sweet Sounds of Xanax: \u201cPill Pop\u201d is on the Rise<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news 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