Yesterday, the journalism world received the sad news that D Magazine writer and editor Zac Crain had died. His colleagues sent him off with a loving and affecting collection of memories; I’m using this space to celebrate his 2017 piece about Erykah Badu, a once-in-a-generation artist who, like Crain, is woven deeply into the city she lives in. As a profile, it’s a writearound like few others, though you leave with the satisfaction of knowing that when they finally did talk, it was well worth the wait.
There she is, in front of her house that overlooks White Rock Lake, sitting at a card table with her girls, passing out cups of water to runners and bikers on a hot summer day. She’s at Beauty Bar on a Thursday night, sitting in with DJ Sober at his Big Bang party, or visiting the kids at the Dallas International School. She’s stranded at DFW Airport during an ice storm, in a fur and “Badu in Japan” hoodie. You never really know when you’ll find her, and that’s the point.
Maybe you were there when she performed an aerial ring routine with the Lone Star Circus. Maybe you were at the Bad Boy Family Reunion show at the American Airlines Center, when she showed up unannounced and took over the stage near the end. Or maybe you happened to be at Dealey Plaza the day she filmed her video for “Window Seat,” slowly disrobing until she stood where JFK had been shot, naked, in and out in one take, here and gone so quickly you could hardly believe what you’d just seen.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/CaQHo0V
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/D6iQgoY
Nondisclosure agreements were once largely confined to the corporate world—they provided a way to prevent company secrets from getting into the wrong hands. Now NDAs are everywhere. Read this juicy story from Reeves Weideman to understand just how much these legal documents have become a part of many people’s everyday existence. We’re talking celebrities, yes, but as one of Weideman’s sources puts it, NDAs are also pro forma for “small-market newscasters, or hedge bros, [or] a medium-tier meteorologist”:
While NDAs were originally reserved for executives or employees with access to proprietary technical or financial information, the paperwork has flowed down the org chart. “They used to be confined to pretty rarefied worlds, and now you see companies imposing these on janitors,” Jodi Short, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said. This spring, I found job listings that required an NDA to work as a forklift driver in Virginia, an e-commerce associate at Island Beach Gear on the Jersey shore, and a “meat cutter” at a biltong shop in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. The NDA is now a part of many job hunts—some companies require it in order to come in for an interview—and a meme went around TikTok that the document could be used to explain any gaps in your résumé: “Sorry, I signed an NDA.”
The next frontier for companies was to extend the web of secrecy to their customers. This year, a plastic surgeon in Seattle was found to have made more than 10,000 patients sign an NDA before their procedures that prohibited them from posting a “negative review,” which was defined as anything less than four stars. Julie Macfarlane, an emerita professor of law in Ontario and the co-founder of Can’t Buy My Silence, an organization that advocates for the regulation of NDAs, told me companies often use them to keep the public from learning about bad things they have done. “The first case in which a parent was compensated because of the impact of tainted baby formula was years before anyone knew about it,” Macfarlane said.
But even this consumer-facing use has expanded. Companies now deploy NDAs to conceal their own generosity. In April, I spoke to a man I’ll call Paul, a pseudonym he requested I use to avoid jeopardizing his status as a member of Marriott’s Ambassador Elite program. Paul is 37, works in real estate in Hong Kong, and travels a lot. He achieved his Ambassador Elite status by spending a hundred nights in Marriott hotels last year. Over Easter, when Paul checked in to the Royalton Chic Cancún, a Marriott on the beach, the receptionist greeted him with good news: a free upgrade! But there was a catch. The receptionist slid a piece of paper across the desk. Paul would need to promise not to brag about his upgrade at the pool bar. The NDA didn’t look very legal. It was half a page long, and the last words, in bold below the signature line, were “Please, have an amazing vacation.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/1DVXGRU
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/uyOeIzP
Moira Donegan | Bookforum | July 2, 2024 | 4,344 words
In 2022, I published a story about four women who, as teenagers, were groomed and sexually abused by teachers at their acclaimed public high school. I agonized about how the story would affect their lives. So did they. The teachers who hurt them—and other teachers who knew about the hurt—were beloved. How would the women’s peers react to their childhood mentors being exposed as predators? How would the subjects cope with seeing their pain committed to the page? I’m proud of the story and believe it had a positive impact. One of the women got the first letter of the pseudonym I used for her tattooed on her arm as a symbol of empowerment. I heard from dozens of readers who said the story prompted personal reckonings with the wrongdoing that persisted at the school in all but plain sight. An additional survivor of abuse came forward to file a lawsuit. But I also communicated with other victims, and with people aware of other victims, who didn’t want to come forward. I understand that decision, and I thought about it while reading this devastating essay by Moira Donegan. While technically a review of a memoir by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during high school, Donegan’s piece is really a much larger project. It’s an indictment of the triumphalist narrative of the #MeToo movement, a reminder that for many survivors, the decision to speak out brought on new forms of pain: bullying, death threats, PTSD. Ford realized that she would forever be narrowly defined in the public eye by her testimony. “You can never be anything else now,” a PR rep told her. Meanwhile, justice has been elusive for many survivors, including Ford. Since his confirmation to the court, Kavanaugh has helped to restrict women’s rights. I fear—as I suspect Donegan does—that other abusers have only gotten savvier about avoiding scrutiny for both past and current wrongs. What, then, was the public spectacle of so much of #MeToo for? “The plundering of public survivors’ psyches…their vulnerability and humiliation, their drained emotions and bank accounts, their curtailed prospects and usurped identities, their rage and grief and degradation,” Donegan writes, “appears, in retrospect, to have been less about our edification than about our entertainment.” —SD
Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | July 12, 2024 | 5,724 words
Journalism rule #4080: if you wrote for hip-hop magazines long enough, you ended up with at least one cocktail-party story that involves the specter of violence, veiled or otherwise. (Mine involves Lil Wayne, a tour bus in Florida, and a massive jar full of White Widow.) Most of the time it was a momentary storm cloud, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it had more than weed smoke behind it. Sometimes it was physical. Sometimes it was all the above, as it was when Bad Boy Records founder Sean Combs told Vibe editor in chief Danyel Smith he’d see her “dead in the trunk of a car.” That’s the part of the story she’d always remembered; what she’d forgotten, until recently, is the prelude to the death threat. The part where her staff ushered her from office to office, eluding Combs and his security guards until she could escape the building. For Combs, 2024 has been a reckoning of sorts—multiple lawsuits, a federal raid connected with a sex-trafficking investigation, video surfacing of a truly horrific physical assault against R&B singer Cassie—but it’s also the culmination of years of whispers. Whispers that Smith regrets not heeding. Whispers that highlight the bind so many in the music industry, and women especially, found themselves in. “We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was,” she writes. As with so much of Smith’s writing, a mournful poetry peeks around every corner in this essay. Journalism is “an art tart with betrayal”; Smith has been “a fly on the wall, and a fly pinned to it”; she “could barely hear music for the tears in [her] ears.” Hers is not a story of journalism’s battle scars. It’s the story of being part of a world that holds you underwater, even as your gifts propel you upward. —PR
When I was staring at Marilyn Munroe’s uplifted skirt and giant embroidered underpants, I was unaware of the rumbling debate about their existence. It was 2023, I was in Palm Springs for work, and, heading to dinner, I was one of many who stopped to gawk at Seward Johnson’s 26-foot statue Forever Marilyn. It’s hard to miss: slap-bang in the middle of downtown Palm Springs on Museum Way. Marilyn eternally grins into space as she holds down her skirt, immortalizing that 1954 night on Lexington Avenue when a gust from a vent blew it up. (It was a gimmick—the gust came from an industrial fan installed below the sidewalk.) Looking at the five-times-larger-than-life Marilyn felt like an homage to kitsch, a fun embodiment of the heady atmosphere of Palm Springs. Some residents agree. But others think she is an unnecessary roadblock that needs moving, and a few consider her a monstrosity. Hearing about the wealthy Springsians arguing over a “colossal statue of a midcentury sex symbol,” Dan Kois asks: “As much of America is engaged in battles over very different statues that evoke its past, why is this one making so many fancy people so crazy?” Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be complicated. While the basic arguments center around whether or not it was okay to close Museum Way and whether Forever Marilyn is art, the situation has gone on for five years and involved “a litany of committee meetings, architectural designs, legal briefs, environmental reports, and legal demurrers.” I understand if you pause here, doubting your commitment to reading about “a litany of committee meetings,” but rest assured, Kois is well aware of the boredom pitfalls and deftly avoids them. He does not hold back in this highly entertaining piece, gleefully painting characters almost as large as Marilyn and throwing journalistic integrity to the wind to declare how he hates this “huge, tacky statue flashing its knickers at a perfectly nice art museum that doesn’t want it there.” Not just a story about Marilyn but also about Palm Springs, “a make-believe city” in the desert, where maybe, just maybe, she belongs. —CW
Michael Aylwin | The Guardian | July 9, 2024 | 5,937 words
For The Guardian, Michael Aylwin recounts caring for his wife, Vanessa, a marketing professional who died at 53 after battling Alzheimer’s. Vanessa and Michael met by chance on a dance floor in their 30s. At the time she was caring for her mother who already had the disease, and Vanessa was convinced she’d one day have it too. At first Michael brushed off her prediction, but after misplaced keys turned into completely forgotten conversations, he knew she’d been right all along. His first-person account is refreshing and poignant. He cared for Vanessa at home for as long as possible, until she began to show signs of aggression toward their children. Aylwin found it difficult to find professional nursing home care for someone so young. “An angry 50-year-old strutting around the place is a threat they cannot afford to risk,” he says of facilities charged with looking after much older and more vulnerable residents. Aylwin reveals the vast care gaps that exist for people like Vanessa, those too young for traditional nursing homes, yet who require far more care than a loving spouse can provide while trying to raise children and earn a living. The costs of the disease are high and despite the fact it seems more and more prevalent among younger people, there is little public financial support. Aylwin fought for what he did receive, making appeal after appeal. It was hard on him, but he says it was much harder on Vanessa. She knew she had Alzheimer’s; she railed at it in lucid interludes that put the indignity of her decline in stark relief. “’It’s not a life. It’s not a life,’ Vanessa told Michael. ‘I was really vibrant once, going everywhere … ‘ She stopped to sob gently. ‘And now I’m not. I don’t know who I am.’” The Aylwins’ story reminds us that with every day, we must simply make the most of now. —KS
Becky Ferreira | WIRED | June 25, 2024 | 2,276 words
Ever thought about what might happen if you passed a bowel movement in space? (My guess is no.) Here on Earth, gravity pulls your poop down, and flush toilets immediately whisk it away. On the moon, where would it go? Let this squeamish thought sink in, and then buckle up as you read Becky Ferreira’s fun Wired story. “At the dawn of the Space Age,” she writes, “American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module.” More than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the moon left nearly 100 “poo bags” across six landing sites—and they’re still sitting there today. I didn’t count how many unexpected phrases and laugh-out-loud lines there are in this piece, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira’s opening paragraph to her last line. Potty humor aside, she provides a fascinating look into this less-appealing aspect of space travel. For NASA and other space agencies to return to the moon, and for companies and billionaires like Richard Branson to launch a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system (pun intended) must be in place. And what about those very old Apollo poo bags left on the lunar surface, teeming with microbiota? What can they tell us about the emergence of life in outer space? “Answers to some of the most profound and ancient questions about our place in the cosmos,” writes Ferreira, “may indeed be waiting in Neil Armstrong’s 55-year-old spent diapers.” A worthy addition to this 💩 reading list. —CLR
Cameron Maynard | Texas Monthly | July 3, 2024 | 1,879 words
Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd. —KS
from Longreads https://ift.tt/otEieX1
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/uyOeIzP
Twenty-seven years ago, not long after Danyel Smith became editor in chief of Vibe, Sean Combs threatened to have her killed. Some of the episode stuck with her, as you’d imagine, but not all of it—and her subsequent realization that she’d redacted details from her own memory prompted a larger reckoning with the legacy of her career. While Combs is undoubtedly the catalyst of this troubling essay, he’s also just a manifestation of a larger system that treats so many as disposable.
The music industry was, and is, a mean place. Journalists were being threatened at recording studios and stomped in their own offices. In the spring of 1999, the music executive Steve Stoute claimed that Combs and two bodyguards attacked him over the way Combs was depicted in a music video. He said that Combs punched him in the face and hit him in the head with a telephone and a Champagne bottle. (Stoute later asked the court to drop the charges after Combs publicly apologized and pleaded guilty to harassment.) Not only were many rank-and-file workers in our business — men and women alike — jittery about our physical and emotional safety, we were enlisted to boost the egos of the very artists and executives who felt entitled to violate us. We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was. Or even to unsee it. In our 2006 interview, Combs said: “Somebody gave me multiple choices early on — having a smooth working relationship, having a personal life or being in the music industry. I chose the music industry.” Same, Puff. Same. Too many of us did. We wouldn’t have thought of ourselves as ambivalent or numb then, but that’s what we were. A lot of us women wanted our fair shot at winning. There were dues to pay. We paid dearly.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ZRM5z0F
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/uyOeIzP
Why does It’s a Wonderful Life maintain such a powerful grip on the American imagination? Writer Dean Bakopoulos details his personal experience with the movie, from his childhood through his adult years, when the life and times of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) hit painfully close to home:
I was thinking that my life had become a life I didn’t know how to live.
I was in the middle of the worst major depressive episode of my life—a darkness I had known several times in the past but one that, at this moment, was threatening to kill me. I had never seriously considered ending my life before though, for some reason, in the darkening weeks of late autumn that led up to the moment on the bridge, I felt the pull acutely. I’d gone dizzy one morning on the roof of a parking structure in Iowa City a few weeks earlier; driving down a dark two-lane one night, I pictured the release of swerving my small pickup into the path of an oncoming hog truck. One night, I found myself in the emergency room at the University of Iowa telling a receptionist that I had chest pains, but once I was admitted, I finally told the attending physician the real reason I was there: I wanted to hurt myself and needed somewhere to get through the night.
And yet, these moments didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel like the kind of person who would consider suicide. My two kids needed me—I knew that and the thought of leaving them fatherless in this world while I moved into the underworld seemed unthinkable—but the voice in my head insisted they’d be better off, the world would be better off, the whole fact of my existence was—
I walked out to the bridge.
There are stories you never tell anyone until you have to tell them.
This is one of those stories.
In the middle of the bridge, it was windy. Cold. The sky was steel gray, the cloud layer low. The water churned, choppy below me. I did the mental calculus. Would I die if I jumped? Would it be painless? Would it be—
And then I thought of George Bailey. And of Clarence.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/A2FhtTQ
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/cb8Z9ma
When Vanessa Aylwin was in her 30s, she was caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Vanessa knew that one day, the disease would come for her. Her husband Michael recounts caring for Vanessa, who died at 53 of the disease and the vast gaps in social and financial support for young Alzheimer’s patients.
What a dance it has been. Not as I might have expected, but expectations can only ever be thwarted, so I don’t have anything to do with them. I emerge with a touch of survivor’s guilt. To watch closely the deterioration of a mind of such vivacity and colour to its end point, sped up in that untimely fashion, has been difficult, but it has been a sort of privilege, too. For all the anguish she endured in expectation of her fate, I hope Vanessa would have looked back on her life, if she could, with fondness and pride. At 53, she died at least 20 years before her time, but there is much living to be had in 50 – and she had it.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/kLfRSVx
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/cb8Z9ma
Kelly Stout has good, close friends. But she realized that she was struggling to find someone among the 8 million citizens of New York City willing to meet her for a beer on a Tuesday, someone who was up for a little low-key spontaneity. So, she gave herself a mission: to make a friend in one month.
First, I’d have to define “friend” for our purposes. Deceptively tough. Would meeting for one coffee do the trick? Surely not. What about four? What if we did something a little more involved, like seeing a concert or taking a cooking class? We’d have to develop some recurring jokes, memories, shared enemies for it to count. Friendship requires a knowledge base, too: Can you really declare yourself friends with someone if you don’t know their brother’s name or what their girlfriend does for a living? How much work should it take? I wound myself up trying to make a discursive distinction between that which makes someone a friend and that which makes someone a good friend before the damn project had even started. I had to cut my losses. I just needed someone I really—I mean, really—enjoyed hanging out with, someone whose problems I could take on as my own, someone who would take on mine as well.
Friends weren’t just going to happen to me. Babies may have been partly to blame for the disappearance of my old friends, but perhaps they could also be a solution. When we first had our baby, people went out of their way to tell us how easy it would be to make friends now that we had a kid. So I signed my daughter up for a parent-and-me swim class that met every Saturday morning at a high school. We arrived early so I could scope out the friend potential. She sat on my hip in her towel with a dinosaur tail and sucked her thumb. I felt the same way.
What I really wanted was something that, for some reason, despite its near-universal popularity, we’ve constructed society to make nearly impossible: hanging out casually when the mood strikes, with a bunch of people who know us deeply and love us anyway.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/k3fGOCW
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZfXFyPc
Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, in which she credibly accused him of assaulting her in high school, failed to stop his ascension to the Supreme Court. Ford now has a new memoir that captures, as writer Moira Donegan puts it, the hazards of “coming forward.” Because the assault didn’t destroy Ford’s life—but talking about it almost did:
Nearly a decade beyond #MeToo, we still do not know much about the after. At least, not for the women. There is a seemingly bottomless popular interest in the experiences of abusive men and in the afterlives of powerful figures who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Fiction, nonfiction, and film have contemplated their humiliation and rage, their professional downfalls, their denials or repentance, their rehabilitation or exile. In 2019, Jane Mayer published a long profile in the New Yorker of former senator Al Franken, who resigned from office after being accused of groping and harassment by multiple women. Mayer’s piece dwelled sympathetically on Franken’s diminished circumstances, writing of how he puttered tragically around his home. In 2022, viewers were enthralled by Todd Field’s two-and-a-half-hour psychodrama Tár, about the exposure and downfall of a sexually predatory orchestra conductor, played by an exquisitely tailored Cate Blanchett. In the aftermath of #MeToo, a number of allegedly abusive men have written long essays contemplating their predicament. The radio host John Hockenberry, accused of sexual harassment by several colleagues, wrote a lengthy Harper’s Magazine piece, “Exile,” in which he mourned the death of a sort of yearning old-timey romance in which he is a noble true believer. In the New York Review of Books, the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi’s “Reflections from a Hashtag” provided meandering thoughts on the author’s newfound infamy, which followed a criminal trial for multiple violent sexual assaults. But the piece ended hopefully, with Ghomeshi flirting with a pretty stranger on a train. The genre, by now, is an old one. Most of these works owe much to J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, in which a South African professor’s impotent and humiliated life in the months after he is exposed for the rape of a student is mixed ominously with the end of apartheid. For these figures, too, it’s less what they’ve done that pains them. It’s what happens when people find out.
Women do not typically receive this kind of prolonged attention in the aftermath of sexual violence. Their psychic life is not pried with pity or prurience; their paralysis or tragic humility is not mined for metaphor. Part of what makes One Way Back such an unusual book is the simple fact that the warped afterlives of public survivors are so rarely depicted at all.
Women’s stories of what happened after their disclosures fail to capture the popular imagination in the way that stories of the accused do. Maybe one reason for this is simple misogyny, that reflexive form of narrative sexism that leads us to imagine men as protagonists and women as tertiary characters. But there is something, too, about the intractability of the survivor’s position that can preclude the narrative tension that so often animates accused men’s stories. She was wronged by the man, and then when she talks about it, she is wronged, too, by the society that refuses to care. No suspense is on offer here: the heroine has tried to change her world by telling a truth about herself, and she has failed. It is a story of narrative inaction, of a failure to effect change. A story, that is, about the futility of storytelling itself.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/aRdgbw3
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZfXFyPc
“THE NEW SATANIC PANIC,” blares the August cover of Harper’s. “Exorcism in the age of TikTok.” What you’ll really find is Sam Kestenbaum’s behind-the-scenes account of working a tent revival in Tennessee—a fascinating read that’s gonzo and empathetic at the same time. Greg Locke learned how to court online outrage as a pastor in the 2010s, but he really hit his stride during the pandemic; now, he and his like-minded “Demon Slayers” hold events of mass exorcism, in which they drive demons from the faithful with one hand and sell merch with the other.
Onstage, the Demon Slayers pit themselves against a limp and sissified American church, deriding mainstream houses of worship as anemic Christian-in-name-alone places of fussy theological debates and snoozy Sunday worship, defeated and decayed, moldy and morose. In contrast, this here is an exhilarating, slap-you-in-the-face, roaringly Spirit-led, experiential thing, animated by that gutsy supernaturalism that has been forgotten for all too long. The miracles: Cancers evaporate. A woman is helped out of her wheelchair and takes several halting steps forward. Pow, pow! Yet the ills these Slayers diagnose and the demons they battle can also feel more modest and familiar, coming less from a distant Apostolic Age than from our present Therapeutic Age. Among more far-flung enemies are the spirits of codependency, ADHD, OCD, IBS, dyslexia, narcissism, procrastination, lactose intolerance. At one point, Locke roars, “Tell that gluten-free demon, Up and out, right now!”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/sW7EU4J
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZfXFyPc
When Will Smith rose from his seat at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, walked to the stage, and unleashed a right-hand slap on host Chris Rock, it shocked the watching world—but perhaps it shouldn’t have. The creative arts are no stranger to interpersonal drama. The internet is filled with reports of actors who despise each other. In 1971, authors Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal went at it hammer and tongs live on late-night TV in a showdown that allegedly spilled over into violence. More than 400 years ago, the Italian artist Caravaggio was accused of circulating disparaging poems about his rival, Giovanni Baglione. “Pardon me, painter, if I do not sing your praises,” he wrote after a series of surprisingly profane suggestions about what Baglione’s art could be used for, “because you are unworthy of that chain you wear, and worthy only of painting’s vituperation.”
Yet, none of these spats can match the sheer messiness of those found within the realm of popular music. Before hip-hop brought the concept of “beef” into the mainstream, rock and roll’s aggression and excess resulted in many an unfriendly rivalry; decades earlier, the hard life of the traveling jazz musician led to some heady and memorable fallouts. Whether it’s pop stars, country singers, dancehall artists, or Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s recent multi-song war, feuds hold an irresistible pull for listeners.
These days, of course, things play out not just on record or in mainstream media, but in the 24/7 pressure cooker of social media. In such an environment, where success or failure is stamped in the concrete numbers of record sales, streaming numbers, and concert tickets, it’s easy to see how competition can erupt into conflict. And such conflict can easily spill over into tribalism. (If our tastes define us, then it’s hard not to take an attack on said tastes personally.) In my day, it was Blur versus Oasis, a battle that utterly divided UK Gen Xers in the mid-’90s.
Of course, strife occurs not just between competing artists, but among bandmates as well. External pressure can either bring a group together or split it apart; when the latter occurs, it’s often a bitter divorce. Insecurity, arrogance, misunderstanding: no matter the cause, the stories collected below are more than a chronicle of artistic difference. They’re a mirror held up to human nature itself.
The two biggest bands of the 1960s (and possibly of all time, depending on your criteria) share more than an era-defining rivalry. They also share a lineage. Before Andrew Loog Oldham became the Rolling Stones’ manager—and, depending on your point of view, he either shaped the Stones into a cultural juggernaut or alienated band members with his cutthroat tactics—he did publicity work for The Beatles. The fact that he was fired from that gig by Beatles manager Brian Epstein provides a nifty origin story for the rivalry: for Oldham, creating a band that could outdo the Fab Four was a personal mission of revenge.
That bad blood aside, though, were the two groups themselves really rivals? Individual Beatles and Stones have certainly traded words over the decades, but the issue is far from straightforward, as this in-depth piece makes clear. Journalist John McMillian does an admirable job of drawing the reader into the center of the action, painting a vivid account that explores the complex interrelations between fans, press, and the musicians themselves. Whatever side of the fence you fall on, these are two of the most influential and successful acts of the 20th century, and their combined stories remain absorbing.
Nowhere was the Beatles/Stones debate more fiercely fought than in American underground newspapers, which by 1968 could be found in every pocket of the country, and had a readership that stretched into the millions. “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times,” claimed literary critic Morris Dickstein. Freewheeling and accessible to all manner of left-wing writers, these papers generated some of the earliest rock criticism, and provided a nexus for a running conversation among rock enthusiasts nationwide. To recall how youths assayed the Beatles/Stones rivalry is to be reminded that when rock and roll was in its juvenescence, youths interrelated with their music heroes in a way that today seems scarcely fathomable. Amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings that characterized the late-1960s youthquake, they believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality, and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things.
Throughout his life, jazz icon Miles Davis earned a fearsome reputation for being taciturn at best, and impossible at worst. The same toughness that strained his personal relationships, however, unquestionably served his ambition. The jazz life was a hard one, full of hard touring and the temptations of alcohol, drugs, and general excess. Though Davis couldn’t match the frenetic, fiery playing of his idol, Charlie Parker, he was also too stubborn to quit. Instead, he forged his own path, and a whole new approach to jazz—cool, introspective, and quite beautiful. Yet, he would later abandon even his own oft-emulated sound in a relentless quest for new styles.
As Davis approached the end of his career, Wynton Marsalis was on an upward trajectory. Since the mid-’60s, jazz had been declining, unceremoniously pushed from its podium by rock and roll, then the folk revival, then hip-hop and rap. Marsalis was the savior burdened by critics with reigniting the genre’s flame. Marsalis was on a mission to de-corrupt his beloved artform, stripping away its acquired rock stylings and electronic edges to return to the pure wellspring. Or so the music press would have us believe. As is usual with such cases, nothing is ever so clear cut, and this piece does a first-class job of diving into the truths behind the headlines—particularly an onstage encounter at a jazz festival in 1986.
A startlingly gifted trumpeter from a brilliant New Orleans jazz family, he first came on the scene in the late 1970s and immediately began making a splash, both with his playing—not only of jazz but also the classical trumpet repertoire—and his outspoken critiques of the contemporary jazz scene, most pointedly of his former idol, Miles Davis.
The young trumpeter was highly opinionated and highly quotable, and from the beginning the music press, sniffing a possible feud, gave Marsalis’s venting about Miles—he even critiqued the outlandish outfits Miles had taken to wearing onstage, calling them “dresses”—plenty of column inches. The first time the two met, Miles said, “So here’s the police.”
For three blazing years straddling the 1960s and ’70s, Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of the most commercially successful acts in rock. Formed in California, CCR consisted of brothers Tom and John Fogerty (on guitar and vocals/guitar respectively), bassist Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford on drums. They were still in their mid-teens when they began playing as a unit, fired up by British Invasion bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Today, they’re best remembered for their enduring hit single, “Bad Moon Rising,” and for numbering among those who appeared onstage at the legendary Woodstock concert. In their short career the band released an asstonishing 14 consecutive US Top 10 singles and five Top 10 charting albums. Then, in 1972, it ended, with a split so acrimonious that even revisiting it can be painful.
So rancorous was the group’s dissolution that, in 1993, when CCR were justly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, John Fogerty refused to perform with the band’s two surviving members. Fogerty continued to play CCR songs live, while Cook and Clifford themselves later toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited. With such tangled tales, it’s often hard to appreciate the viewpoints of all parties, but Hugh Fielder’s balanced retrospective comes as close as possible to unraveling the causes behind CCR’s swift demise. Sibling rivalry, paranoia, swelling egos, and grasping music executives all play a role—but in the end, it comes down to the fact that you can’t escape the unrelenting pressures of the entertainment industry.
Fearing they would be sued, Warners told Fogerty to remove the tracks. Fogerty refused, and indemnified Warners instead. He then found himself facing a $140 million defamation lawsuit from Saul Zaentz. Scarcely had he wriggled out of that by changing the song title to “Vanz Kan’t Dance” than Fantasy sued him, claiming that the album’s first single, “The Old Man Down The Road” (not published by Fantasy), plagiarised an earlier Creedence song, “Run Through The Jungle” (published by Fantasy). Fogerty was being sued for plagiarising himself.
I was in my early 20s in 1994 when Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe, shot to the top of the UK albums chart. This was a time that would come to be viewed as the heyday of Britpop, a sensibility somewhere between pop and rock, with catchy melodies, often whimsical sonic palettes, and sophisticated, yet earthly lyrics. Acts like Super Furry Animals, Kula Shaker, The Lightning Seeds, and Pulp all occupied the scene, but two bands inarguably stood out, with their singles regularly racing each other up the charts: Blur and Oasis.
Fronted by Damon Albarn, London-based Blur displayed a metropolitan sheen and veered toward the poppier side of things, producing hit after earworm hit, with tracks such as “Girls & Boys” and “Country House” burying themselves in the public consciousness. Oasis was Blur’s perfect polar opposite; fronted by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher and hailing from the industrial city of Manchester, the band employed a grittier sound that matched its provenance. A rivalry between the two bands was nearly inevitable, but was stoked by the media, with large bodies of fans forming into two entrenched groups. In fact, the competition was more about hype, with little to no true enmity between the outfits. Unbeknownst to many, however, a bona fide feud was growing inside Oasis, and would spill out into a fractious and very public affair. Here, Mark Beaumont does a fine job of breaking down the long and complicated history of the fallout between Noel and Liam, breaking things down by era to offer a balancing, nuanced perspective of one of the ugliest feuds in popular music.
Liam’s drunken comments about his ongoing divorce from Kensit turned into a free-for-all of abuse that overstepped the mark. When Liam questioned the legitimacy of Noel’s daughter Anais, Noel jumped on him, raining punches and splitting his brother’s lip. Again, Noel quit the tour; again the band eventually reconciled. But this was one barb that stuck deep – as late as 2005 Noel would tell Qmagazine, “I’ve never forgiven him because he’s never apologised…He’s my brother, but he’s at arm’s length until he apologises for what he’s done.
*This article may require a Telegraph subscription to read.
There was a time when John Lydon’s credentials as a counterculture anarchist icon seemed unshakeable. A swaggering, unconventional singer with an intense, magnetic presence, Lydon joined punk legends The Sex Pistols while still a teenager, having been spotted in a crowd sporting a handmade “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Attitude was everything with punk, and Lydon had plenty. Yet the singer’s credibility has slipped over the decades; it may have begun with his appearance in this surprising ad for Country Life butter, but more seriously, his comments against same-sex marriage, support for Donald Trump, and anti-Muslim sentiment have led many to wonder if Lydon was ever the antiestablishment hero that his early persona suggested.
Of course, that’s putting it simply. Lydon is clearly a complicated character, and Andy Malt’s detailed history of the singer’s war of words with the American band Green Day offers a fascinating insight into the mind of a man who, for better or worse, played a large part in changing the course of music history. It also asks the question: what happens when an old punk finds himself displaced by a new one?
Soon after those happy remarks, however, something snapped. Possibly because Lydon tired of being repeatedly asked what he thought of Green Day, the biggest punk band of the time, while promoting his reunion tour.
In a particularly antagonistic interview with MTV the same year, Lydon was asked what he felt he could “offer a sixteen-year-old Green Day fan that Green Day can’t?” The answer? “A big willie,” said Lydon, who at this point had already called interviewer Toby Amies “queer.”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/zWUSiRA
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZfXFyPc
In 2007, a gasoline truck crashed on the MacArthur Maze, a high-trafficked tangle of multiple freeways in Oakland. The explosion from the crash melted the overpass. In this compelling story for Popular Mechanics, Mitch Moxley recounts how Clinton “C.C.” Myers, a construction boss known for high-speed emergency bridge repair, took on the challenging job and rebuilt this section of the freeway in only 26 days.
As dawn broke, officials across California were asking, “How the hell are we going to fix this?” The guy they looked to: Will Kempton, the director of Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. A trim man with graying hair and a matching mustache, Kempton presided over a massive agency notorious for slow, expensive roadworks that snarled traffic around the state.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was Kempton’s big boss. As a young man, Schwarzenegger had worked as a bricklayer between bodybuilding competitions. Now, he saw infrastructure as a way to publicize the government’s capacity to do good. What’s more, Schwarzenegger remembered that the last Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, had gotten the Santa Monica Freeway, one of the busiest freeways in the world at the time, rebuilt in just 66 days after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Schwarzenegger was a ferocious competitor—in bodybuilding, at the box office, even with his in-laws, the Kennedys (“I’m the only Kennedy in elected office,” he liked to brag). He told his staff to call Governor Wilson. “Find out how he did it,” he said. “Then figure out how to do it faster.”
The solution to Schwarzenegger’s request was C.C. Myers. Back in 1994 Caltrans had estimated it would take 12 to 18 months to repair the Santa Monica Freeway, but Governor Wilson, facing a tough reelection, told the agency to get it done in 140 days. Caltrans opened the job to bids, and Myers won.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/DCW1FtO
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/1pejtmQ
Marilyn Monroe is causing a kerfuffle, well, a 26-foot statue of her is. Dan Kois explores the warring factions of Palm Springs, who can’t decide if Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn belongs there. A delightful, fun piece, where Kois refuses to stay objective!
A tall, gregarious gadfly who met me wearing a vibrant aloha shirt, Hoban spent his career conducting market research for television networks and then working in Silicon Valley, until his husband made him retire after a heart attack. Now he keeps getting involved in various Palm Springs kerfuffles: a battle over short-term vacation rentals, a fight about the establishment of a community college campus in town. He’s the one, he said, who negotiated the purchase with the Seward Johnson Atelier, which disassembled the 30,000-pound statue, loaded it onto several tractor trailers, and sent it across the country. He’s the one who spent “50 different days walking around this area, looking at every possible spot.” When he decided that Museum Way, with its mountain backdrop, was perfect, he’s the person, he said, who made the case to City Council members one by one.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ZIsOMSN
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/1pejtmQ
What would it be like to watch a baseball game—in London? Imogen West-Knights heads to Stratford, to a stadium in London that’s the home of Premier League football club West Ham, to find out. It’s the Phillies vs. the Mets that day, and over the course of the game, West-Knights observes the “light-hearted bit[s] of cultural exchange” between attendees, and the differences between an American baseball game and, say, a UK soccer (ahem: football) match. She writes a fun, breezy essay for The Dial commenting on the distinct Americanness of the event.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/PX3Ndzf
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/1pejtmQ
