Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early 20s, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as “Another Green World,” “Music for Airports” and with David Byrne, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a landmark in the history of sampling.
His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.
David Mitchell, born in 1969, is the acclaimed, award-winning author of the novels “Ghostwritten” (1999), “Number9Dream” (2001), “Cloud Atlas” (2004) — the latter two shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — “Black Swan Green” (2006), and “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (2010). Granta selected him as one of the best young British novelists, and he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, which credited him with having “created the 21st century novel.” Mitchell was raised in England, spent many years teaching and writing in Japan, and presently lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
Mitchell and Eno were fans and admirers of each other before the idea for this conversation came about, and spoke for the first time over email. David Mitchell asked questions, and Brian Eno provided answers.
I. NO SONG, NO BEAT,
NO MELODY, NO MOVEMENT
Do you agree that no new genre is ever invented, but rather hybridized from something that was there before? That infallible source Wikipedia credits you with coining the phrase ambient music. If that’s so, from what was ambient music cross-pollinated?
Yes, nothing starts from nowhere. My version of ambient was the coalescence of lots of different streams. Some of them were musical, others not. The musical threads I picked up would include Satie, of course, but also the early experiments of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and the other minimalist composers of the late ’60s — all of whom were looking at music as a “steady state” rather than a narrative experience. Also, I would have to add that it was the slow movements of classical works that appealed to me most — the parts where less was happening.
But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.
The technologies of this manipulation were what I came to specialize in, and they multiply every week, so quite a lot of my time is spent playing with new technology to see what it can do that could never be done before.
What does Doctor Pangloss have to say about how 21st-century human ingenuity is being channeled into inventing juicy gizmos like the iPad, instead of preparing for a world without oil, which, if even conservative estimates are correct, will be upon us by the time my daughter is in her late 20s?
The hope is that some of these gizmos become the tools by which we make those preparations. It’s a worry: Are we entertaining ourselves to death, or are we actually learning new ways of coping? Only time will tell.
One of my favorite definitions of time is that time is what stops everything happening at once. I wonder if music is what stops noise happening all at once?
I think much of your music — like on the albums “Music for Airports,” “Apollo,” “Discreet Music,” “The Pearl” — is ideal writing music. It can kick-start a good writing session, and then, if your mind wanders back to the here and now, your music sends it back to work, but these four albums never obtrude or nag or distract. I wonder if there’s a “Man From Porlock” spectrum on which all music can be placed with, say, Ian Dury at the Porlock end — which is impossible to work to, where listening is compulsory — and much of your work toward the non-Porlock end?
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like, “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement” — and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc … The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.
I think I got to this place by noticing what I wanted from music in my own life. Of course I wanted the high-focus, exclusive, pure-Porlock stuff like the Velvet Underground and Shostakovich — but I also wanted a music that simply “tinted” the air around me. Problem was, there wasn’t much of that kind, and what there was all had something wrong with it from my point of view — classical was too stiff and carried the baggage of people sawing away at violins; jazz had too much personality; Muzak was unbearably oversweet.
By the early ’70s, a few friends and I were exchanging cassettes we’d compiled from our record collections — long sequences of “mono-mood” music that were intended to create and maintain a feeling for a long time. Remember that records at this time were compiled on the assumption that nobody could possibly want to spend more than four minutes in the same feeling, so you’d get a fast track and then a ballad and then a dance number, and most classical music was similar: allegro, andante, largo. All of this was based on the idea that music was an ephemeral form — which it used to be, before recording — and that you’d therefore be after an adventure, a narrative.
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture. It’s an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music. But my feeling is that it just widens the possibilities: It doesn’t prevent anyone from writing difficult and engaging, high-Porlock music if that’s what they want to do, and I’ve always tried to make it clear where I felt any particular piece of my own work rested on that widened spectrum. I came up with the word “ambient” to suggest that here was a kind of music that rewarded a different sort of listening behavior, but the term certainly isn’t meant to cover everything I do.
I notice that a lot of pop music now is much further toward the non-Porlock end than it used to be. Bands like Portishead and the Cocteau Twins started it (well, I suppose I did, too, but they made it successful). Now there are countless bands that have a sort of ambient-pop sound, where the vocals are partly buried, the instruments are swathed in echo, and the rhythm instruments are softer and more distant.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
II. SKY BLUE AND LIGHT
CHOCOLATE BROWN
I read that Paul McCartney got the tune for “Yesterday” from a dream. Once I dreamed that I opened a wooden box at the end of my bed, and on it was written “The Language of Mountains Is Rain.” I used the phrase in an early book. Have your dreams ever chucked you a freebie like that?
I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head. The fact that these works come from dreams is no guarantee that they’re going to be any good — a direct line to the subconscious is only rewarding if there’s something interesting going on there — but nonetheless it is a thrill to be “given” a chunk of material like that. The song “On Some Faraway Beach” came almost intact in a dream, and, to a lesser extent, other songs have drawn lines or titles from dreams. “Two Voices,” from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and “copied it out.”
I’ve occasionally dreamed ideas for types of music. One was called “reality score,” and it involved the use of samples. Every sound was sampled from a momentous historical recording — the snare drum was a recording of the shot that killed President Kennedy, and so on. I still think this could be great, but I don’t have the necessary persistence and nerdery to actually get it done.
Are you synesthetic? Do you think music can convey emotion because music is a form of universal synesthesia? In my limited case, days of the week and common male names have colors.
I don’t think I’d call myself synesthetic, although I do think of sounds in terms of temperature and brightness and hard-edgedness and angularity. Is that being synesthetic? I don’t seem to have an invariable and involuntary set of responses of the kind you and Nabokov have — a “the letter d is dusty olive green” kind. I do, however, have extremely strong responses to certain “aesthetic” things. I am made furious, for example, by a minor chord lazily used in songwriting, or a throwaway middle eight written just for “variety.”
I despise variety for its own sake. My friends and colleagues find the extremity of my reactions very amusing. Conversely, I am always deeply moved by certain combinations of sound or color — sky blue and light chocolate brown, for example. But there are thousands of others! I have spent a lot of time wondering where those strong preferences come from.
What is interesting to me about music among all the arts is that it is, and always has been, as far as I know, a completely nonfigurative medium. Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting. Even opera, with its strong narrative element, doesn’t depend on the narrative for its effect. So although lots of people still find abstract painting difficult to deal with, they are very happy to listen to music — a much more resolutely abstract form of art.
I know what you mean when you describe music as being resolutely more abstract than art, but doesn’t music’s emotional directness explain its accessibility? Even vocal-less music can stimulate adrenaline, calm you down, or bring on homesickness with a wallop that only literature can rival, among the arts.
When you think about it, why does music have any emotional appeal at all? Why should something so unlike anything else in our experience — unlike, that is, any sound generated by the normal workings of the world — have an emotional impact? Perfume seems to have a similar directness, in that we are affected by it without really being able to articulate why; as opposed to stories, for example, where we have a clearer sense of what’s going on and why it might matter to us.
A science website asked several scientists to tell them what they thought was the most interesting question you could ask of science at this moment. Most of the replies were of the nature “Is the alpha constant stable over the universe?,” “Will the Riemann hypothesis hold?,” “Does junk DNA have a function in the genome?” — science questions. My friend Danny Hillis asked, “Why do we like music?” — a question that has formed the basis of our conversations over the years. And that is truly a mysterious question, which many learned books have utterly failed to answer. Why do I like one composer’s string quartet rather than another’s, when to a Martian visitor they’d seem indistinguishable? What are the differences we’re hearing? What intrinsic wiring exists for having feelings about music? — and by intrinsic wiring I mean the kind of wiring that leads us to prefer symmetrical faces to asymmetrical ones, or to be frightened of spiders.
I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to “get” any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.
III. THERE ISN’T A HORSECOW,
THERE ISN’T A VIOLINET
Do you think that music involves propinquity? I’ve noticed with writing, just by placing sentence A — about a ladybird, say — next to sentence B — about a man’s last three seconds of life — a C gets generated as if by alchemy. It’s not there, but it is. You don’t even have to write C — in fact, you shouldn’t. I was wondering if this happens in music, and, if it does, whether this is why, even where your music eschews melody, it still feels as if there is a tune, so long as you don’t try too hard to identify it?
The problem with analyzing music is that there are so many relevant variables. The most complicated is context. When you hear a great moment in a piece of music, how far can you separate it from its context? And how much of its context is relevant: the preceding two bars? The surrounding four bars? The whole piece? What is the context, anyway? Is it your knowledge of how the piece was played? Your understanding of the artist’s other works? Your understanding of the whole genre? I always think that whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to — all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard. So what you are listening to are tiny differences, tiny innovations. Something new is added, something you’ve grown used to is omitted, something you thought you were familiar with sounds different.
Why are some chords sinister and dimly lit, and others seem wistful, while others are brash and extroverted? How come?
One could maintain that there are no fundamental musical responses — that they’re all the result of acculturation, so somebody growing up in an entirely different culture could quite possibly receive entirely different emotional signals. But this extreme position is not supported by evidence. There do seem to be some “pre-cultural” fundamentals. I think we universally hear “louder” as “more exciting, alarming” and “brighter” as more “lively,” for example. I think few people would argue about that. But there’s a lot of argument about subtler points. Does everybody feel that minor chords (that is, chords with a flattened third) are darker, sadder, more nuanced? If so, why?
The psycho-acoustician’s answer is that the more dissonant a chord is, the more work our perceptual machinery has to do to read it. A minor chord — say C, E-flat, G — apparently requires more neural processing than its major — C, E, G. That may be true: The notes in the former are more complexly related, mathematically. But I don’t understand why it follows that we would translate that neural overtime into “sinister” or “melancholy.”
Of course, a simpler argument is to say that we respond more fondly and comfortably to chords that are most like the ones we heard as children, and are more alarmed and disturbed by those which we connect to our more complicated adulthood. But this argument’s a bit circular: Do we play music made up of major chords to children because that’s what they like and understand, or do we like those chords because that’s what we hear first as children? What responses would a child brought up in a dogmatically 12-tone household have?
Anyway, there’s a whole other axis to consider here. In classical times, or pre-electronic times, the question of timbre was of limited importance. A violin sounded like a violin, and, in the hands of a great player, it could be extended a little this way or that. But it always sounded like a violin, rather than, say, a kettledrum or a harp. So with all other instruments: each is an isolated sonic island in the same way that animal species are isolated genetic islands. Just as there isn’t such a thing as a horsecow, there isn’t a violinet. But there can be now. The field of timbre is effectively unlimited and continuous, and a lot of what contemporary composers — particularly in pop music — are doing is exploring that huge new palette.
One of the interesting results of that exploration is that the distinctions between, say, major and minor are now augmented, or even displaced, by these new timbral effects. I can confidently invest the brightest major chord with the deepest sadness by manipulating its timbre. Funnily enough, this is something the kitsch painter Tretchikoff discovered. His “Blue Lady” pictures are perfectly normal women made to look deeply interesting by being deep blue. That sort of trick is a commonplace in modern music.
It’s a good day when I learn about a job or discipline I didn’t know existed — psycho-acoustician, thank you for that!
IV. HOW BLIND PEOPLE
MIGHT SEE RADIATORS
With which dead composers do you feel a sense of kinship?
A very important figure in my life was Cornelius Cardew, who died young, in 1981. His approach to making music was fiercely experimental, and although a lot of the experiments now seem a bit dated, when they first worked, they were eye-opening. Cardew started the Scratch Orchestra, of which I was a member. This was a large group of mostly art students who, under Cardew’s influence, regarded the making of music as a kind of philosophical enterprise. That idea of music as philosophy embodied stayed with me.
Painterly isn’t an adjective I would have applied to your music before this dialogue, but, now that I think about it, it strikes me as rather a good one. I’d read somewhere you’d trained as an artist.
I feel a lot more connection with painters than composers. Mondrian, for example, is a big star in my firmament. I am still amazed by the magical simplicity of his paintings. Since Mondrian was the first modern painter with whom I really connected, I’m sure that this feeling of “magic from limited means” has remained a strong meme for me, and why I’d call myself a minimalist.
Novels are palimpsests written over earlier versions, red herrings, wrongly barked-up trees, and still somehow contain the ghosts of the novels that didn’t get written in order for this one, the finished one, to emerge. In a not-dissimilar way, one senses the thought behind an Eno composition — all the paths not taken to find the uncluttered path that is taken.
When I do listen close and hard to your work — as opposed to writing to it — I feel watched. I don’t know where this is going — a confession of paranoia, perhaps! — but your music has a particular hold on its listeners, and we hanker to know why. Sentient snakes may feel a similar curiosity about snake charmers.
Mondrian and “magic from limited means” shed light on your work. For me, you’ve always been a sonic Rothko. A friend describes Rothko as “how blind people might see radiators.”
A brilliant analogy!
You and less than 10 other British musicians have been making artistically muscular and widely listened-to music for, what, five decades? What’s the secret of artistic longevity in the music business? This question was inspired by a recent biography of Syd Barrett — it contained a strong metaphor about creativity being like a tube of paint of finite size, and if you squeeze it out all in one go, there’s none left for a long-term career, but if you spend it in more judicious dabs, you can go on and on. Tube size differs, as it were, but I like the basic image.
Thanks for the compliment, but I think I can only claim four decades at the moment. Perhaps the answer is not to be too successful at any particular thing: Success can become an albatross for an artist, as it does for those actors who do so well in a particular role that they can never successfully take on any other.
What one human work gets to be saved from the fires of destruction at the end of the world?
Christ! That’s a tough one. I could mount a good argument for writing, but a better one for recording, since theoretically that could subsume writing into itself. The very idea of recording — of saving experiences in some way so that they become available to others — is, after all, the basis of human culture: namely, the way in which humans can pass information to each other and thus escape their purely genetic destiny.
I like your observation about how recording fixes the ephemeral, like insects in amber. It makes me think of how the printed word is frozen speech, or perhaps pickled thought. Kilgore Trout might imagine a world where novelists read their work from memory, just the once, then get plastered on home brew to lose their latest work forever, though the collapse of civilization will achieve the same end.
If you could email your 20-year-old self about what was ahead, what would you tell him? Or would you tell him nothing and just let him get on with it?
I think I’d say, “Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.” My feeling is that a work has little value until you “release” it, until you liberate it from yourself and your excuses for it — “It’s not quite finished yet,” ”The mix will make all the difference,” etc. Until you see it out there in the world along with everything else, you don’t really know what it is or what to think of it, so it’s of no use to you.
This article first appeared in the Believer. To read more from the Believer, or to subscribe, visit www.believermag.com.
If I were the Texas School Board in search of the one text that could justify teaching “intelligent design,” I would use the Creation Myth of the Beatles as my sole curriculum. It is a story oft retold with wonder, as it defines the word “supernatural.” Two musical prodigies of staggering gifts, with complementary personalities, just happen to meet in the same fairground, and just as casually decide to change the world. They soon meet a third musical force of nature, and, just before they march from their secret fortress, they add the final element to what is now an impregnable weapon of mass musical distraction.
In the words of noted musicologist Steve Jobs, “It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.”
If Jobs had to ask what Ringo did, well, it proves every genius has a blind spot. But the ineffable mystery is this. There are many precedents for single geniuses that spontaneously combust into existence (see Dylan, Bob, or Hendrix, Jimi), but how do four extraordinary elements come together to produce a world-changing hydrogen bomb of musical genius? I’ll leave the Texas School Board to explain that to me. Or, watch the two films in this week’s double bill.
Today marks the DVD release of “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” the four-hour Martin Scorsese dissection of the life and offhand times of George Harrison. The film’s compiler — not really director (more on that later) — Martin Scorsese, knows from musical genius and genius in general, being something of one himself. His last core sample on this subject, “No Direction Home,” spent four hours getting as close to the genesis of Bob Dylan’s genius as the artist would allow, which is to say, not very. It wisely did the next best thing, which was just showing Dylan being Dylan, while a chorus of friends and acquaintances tried to figure it all out. Nobody came close, of course, and Dylan’s own interview was conducted by his manager, Jeff Rosen, with all of the hardball questioning one would expect of Fox’s Chris Wallace interviewing John Boehner. Scorsese did the best he could – and that is very good indeed – overseeing a compilation of found objects in something that resembled a narrative structure. But in Dylan’s case, good is never good enough. Essential viewing if you are a Dylan fan, but ultimately, a museum artifact, where Dylan’s infinity of talent is definitely not on trial.
Scorsese’s follow-up, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” is not really much different, though, ironically, one of the very few things left out in this tragical history tour was the impact of Harrison’s long creative and personal association with Dylan. The Beatles Creation Myth is front and center here, and as a duly authorized by the Harrison estate project, the archive material takes the viewer on a ride through the highlights. But only in the back seat. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are both interviewed at length on both Harrison and the journey they took together, but they offer few new insights. Ringo Starr lets down his guard only once, when he remembers his last encounter with his dying comrade, but that guard is soon posted again, and the show goes on. Knowing the forensic details of a magic trick does not do that trick any favors, and there’s little magic to be found in the first half of this film.
The second half of the film that deals with George coping with that ever-so-awful burden of huge fame and unlimited wealth drags on longer than the interminable jams that rounded out Sides 5 and 6 of the vinyl of “All Things Must Pass,” and while Harrison emerges as the hero of his own life, we ultimately agree with him that there were compelling reasons why his private life should have stayed private.
Sometimes, as I am sure Scorsese knows, bootlegs reveal far more than official releases, and the weight of being an “Authorized Release” somehow diminishes the end result. Scorsese doesn’t put much of his own skin in the game, and acts less as a director here than a detached observer, and that detachment prevents us from connecting with a story that defined a cultural renaissance. One longs to see Scorsese on fire, beating the creative process into submission in the way that Nick Nolte’s abstract painter bashed out a canvas to Dylan’s 1974 apocalyptic version of “Like a Rolling Stone” in the underrated anthology “New York Stories.” It takes one to know one, and in “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” as in his other musical hagiographies, Scorsese seems almost embarrassed to confront genius on his own terms, in that secret language he’s privileged to share with his subjects.
A much scruffier and ultimately more revealing insight into the Beatles Creation Myth comes from the 2009 “Nowhere Boy.” This movie is set entirely in those moments when a strange kind of human alchemy transpired, in the grimy laboratory of Liverpool. No attempt is made to explain how the magic happened, but the viewer gets the distinct sense “why.” It’s ironic that one of the most insightful glimpses into the real George Harrison in “Living in the Material World” comes from a long excerpt from “A Hard Day’s Night,” where George stumbles into an advertising focus group, and returns the cynical condescension he is given with a far more withering detachment. The fact that this scene is wholly fictional does not diminish its insight – and the same thing can be said for “Nowhere Boy.”
Based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, the film was endorsed and informed at extreme arm’s length by Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and is far better for their lack of involvement. Lennon is inhabited, not played, by Aaron Johnson, and at no time does Johnson’s performance descend into mere impression. Johnson just “is” – and within a few moments of his first on-screen appearance, you are transported back to 1955, and present at the creation. Primal rock ‘n’ roll fills the air, and a rough beast slouches on its way to be born, and Johnson’s Lennon puts a face on that creature. The film’s director, Sam Taylor-Wood, married the much younger Aaron Johnson after she completed the movie, and her primal attraction does seem justified.
All the bases are covered. The eternal fights with Aunt Mimi, played with prim precision by Kristin Scott Thomas. The strange, almost sexual attraction between Lennon and his uninhibited mother, Julia. And of course, the legendary 1957 first meeting with Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Paul McCartney. Entire books have been written about this July day at a school fair, where the world turned on its axis. As a card-carrying Beatlemaniac, with a mail-order degree in advanced Moptopology, I noticed that “Nowhere Boy” got all of the details just exactly right, down to the checkered shirt that Lennon wore on that meeting day, and even a brief glimpse of the photographer who took the now iconic picture that is the only record of that day when the world turned inside out. George Harrison’s later back-of-a-bus passage into legend is also documented adroitly, though here, as was sadly the case in the life of the Beatles, Harrison plays a supporting role.
But in ways that no authorized documentary can hope to attain, “Nowhere Boy” gets the human dimensions of the Beatles myth just right. The shimmering brilliance, tragic vulnerability and occasional brutality of Lennon comes through, and the telepathic connection that bound the Beatles together somehow extends to the viewer. Even if huge dramatic licenses are taken, they are not abused. The John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy” is often referred to as a “dick” by his peers – but in this film, the wavering line between “dick” and “genius” is navigated with a drunken precision.
Stanley Kubrick once said that “sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the ‘think’ of it, as in the ‘feel’ of it.” “Nowhere Boy” has that feel, and that touch, and brings us as close as we are likely to get to “feeling” the reality behind the myth.
Russia Today, the politsiya and Western punks alike all want to know: Who is Pussy Riot, when is their next gig, and where can I get their album? Despite having no releases or merchandise for sale, no tour dates, no Myspace or even recorded music, the band of masked women who perform only aggressive guerrilla shows has achieved a level of punk legitimacy not reached since the era when the combination of bleached hair and three chords was on its own automatically scandalous.
The days of the Fraternal Order of Police suing the Crucifucks, Tipper Gore taking on the Dead Kennedys, and black metal goblins burning churches are long past. Punk is now no more a social threat than some leftist fringe group selling poorly designed newspapers. And yet, with three of its alleged members now imprisoned and facing seven-year jail sentences, the pastel-balaclava-wearing, sloppy-guitar-playing riot grrrls have become an icon of a brewing cultural revolution in Russia.
Pussy Riot’s now famous performance of Punk Prayer in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow’s Kremlin, which earned them the personal ire of both the Orthodox Church’s patriarchate and Vladimir Putin himself, was a call for the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and exorcise Putin. Other feminist and anti-authoritarian performances included disrupting a fashion show by taking over a catwalk, performing unpermitted in a posh boutique, and playing a song called “Freedom to Protest — Death to Prisons” on the roof of a building in a Moscow prison complex to jailed anti-Putin protesters.
Last week a “Party Riot Bus” circled Moscow blasting punk rock and stopping for news conferences and performances calling for the release of the imprisoned band members. Riot grrrl matriarch Kathleen Hannah released a video pledging her support to the band, telling her fans she would “see you out in the streets.” A concert in Tallinn, Estonia, to support the band drew several notable politicians, including President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
On the flip side, counterprotesters have attacked supporters in Moscow, focusing on removing the masks of female supporters. An anti-Pussy Riot rally was held the same day is Krasnodar, drawing an estimated 10,000 calling for a “moral revival” in the “fatherland.”
The band has derived their success — and scorn — by turning contemporary punk culture on its head. Where punk was once relegated to musky basements, squats and other shabby makeshift venues, Pussy Riot makes all public spaces — the streets, the metro, the church — their stage. While punk bands play for punks, Pussy Riot plays for commuters, police and clergy. While punk bands seek fame with glamorous pseudonyms and outlandish rock star antics, Pussy Riot is masked. While punk bands engage in nihilistic lyricism, Pussy Riot’s songs are direct attacks on the confines of their authoritarian state and patriarchy. Since punk fell from the pop charts in the early ’80s, it has been sent on a quest to define and sustain its own identity, creating punk houses, venues, record stores and community centers, resulting in the introverted and self-obsessed situation of the sub-genre today. Pussy Riot does precisely the opposite.
It is fitting, then, that one conservative Russian website translated Pussy Riot to “Uprising of the Uterus.” What was once scandalized, forbidden, subaltern, rises from its rightful caste hidden and below and speaks in the very locations of its oppressing power. Who are these women, these punks, to perform, to pray, to protest in sacred locales? To desecrate is one of punk’s existential tasks. The smashing of sacred relics conjures society’s most archaic reactions: in this case, imprisonment, public shaming, flogging, concerns of Satanism, witchcraft, hysteria.
Punk has needed a Pussy Riot for so long. In many ways, it is the literal projection of the riot grrrl movement, which employed satire and third-wave theatrics to intervene in the traditionally macho and misogynist punk scene. It succeeded in creating a new type of punk — the grrl — but, until now, it had never successfully caused a riot.
Through the 2000s, bands have unsuccessfully attempted to wreck cultural terror. There was San Diego’s the Locust, who wore masks and bodysuits similar to Pussy Riot, played noisy and aggressive punk, but were not actually anonymous, nor were their lyrics directly political. The band shocked a lot of punks and sold a lot of records, but had very little cultural impact outside their genre. Black metal-heads became enamored with the “Cultural Terrorist Manifesto,” which also has had seemingly no effect. In 30 years, punk had perfected only gestures.
Perhaps part of the reason punk has begun to lash out so effectively in the former Soviet Union is the nature of the extreme oppression in Russian society. I spoke to Moscow anti-fascist Kostya about the dual dangers to the Russian anarchopunk — the right wing and the State:
I came up with the scene when it was possible to organize a strictly antifascist show, and you could be sure that only the right people will visit it. But still there was a danger of being attacked by Nazis before or after the show. Today it continues, but the situation is even worse. First of all, nobody fights with the fists, you’re more likely to be stabbed or shot with a traumatic gun. Secondly, and what is worse, there is strong oppression from the state and police. The situation in Russia isn’t stable, that’s why the government tries to control all the young people who can be dangerous today or in the future. They always try to put the same number of Nazis and anarchists in prison.
Kostya tells me Russia has its own anti-activist police force, called the “Department of Fighting Extremism.” Along with the threat of right-wingers burning down political squats or punk venues, the result has been a neutralized public face for the punk scene. All radical politics have been forced underground. It is no surprise, then, to see it return masked.
In 1977 the Ramones toured America like an Armed Struggle cadre of cultural terrorists, all dressed alike, playing the simplest and loudest music yet formulated. They not only invented punk that year, but they planted it everywhere they went. Punk’s success was its virility; reproducing with such ease that soon there were Ramones at every corner of the globe.
Reacting to increasingly technical progressive rock, the Ramones liberated the guitar to the world. Pussy Riot has taken this communization a step farther. To be a “member” of Pussy Riot, you don’t need to be able to play guitar or even to know the original band. As one member, Garadzha, told the newspaper Moskvkie Novosti: “In principle anyone can join.” You don’t even need to sing very well, she continues. “It’s punk, you just scream a lot.”
What would be the shape of punk outside the confines of the world of rock music? If Pussy Riot is any indication, it appears at scenes of intense banality or oppression. They have appeared on the catwalk, on top of a prison and of course at the altar. They sound something in between a streetpunk band (Blatz’s Fuk Shit Up is the first thing to come to mind) and an battle-worn activist giving an impassioned speech through a megaphone. The precarity of their performances gives a new spin to the typical speedy bursts of punk — the songs need to be so short because they could be apprehended any second.
Everything about the band is similarly practical. The rawness of their sound reflects the semi-improvised site-specific nature of the songs. Their masks obscure their identities from police detection. Their bombastic performance (use of fire, flares and the iconic punch-dancing) makes up for the lack of amplification. While other novel punk bands form their own stylized front against the limits of society, society’s limits seems to have fully formed Pussy Riot.
Perhaps antagonistic counterculture, once self-ghettoized within the margins of society, is beginning to coalesce into a new political form, one that transcends both its anti-social roots and the populism that activism too often demands. The Occupy movement is the most obvious example, but disruptive feminist and queer situations similar to those created by Pussy Riot have occurred in the United States over the last several years. The radical queer group Bash Back! disrupted service at a Lansing, Mich., megachurch, making out on the pulpit and dropping pro-queer flyers. Repetitive comments by law enforcement official that rape is a result of women’s attire lead to massive anti-rape and sex-positive “Slut Walk” protests last year. With a new right-wing offensive against women escalating to the withholding of contraception and forced transvaginal ultrasounds, the coalition between the church and authoritarianism is as relevant in the United States as in Russia. Could time be ripe, then, for some of the aforementioned agitators to arrange a Pussy Riot U.S. tour?
The New Inquiry is an online journal of social and cultural criticism. Every month,TNI releases a subscription-based magazine for $2, available for download in both PDF and e-reader formats. The New Inquiry Magazine, No.3: “Arguing the Web” (April, 2012) is available now! Support TNI and subscribe for $2 here.
On my computer, the play count for the song “Randy Described Eternity” is 406. But I’ve also listened to it in my car, on the subway and on YouTube. The song is from the 1997 Built to Spill album “Perfect From Now On,” which turns 15 this year. And apart from playing a few other Built to Spill records for variety (lately “You in Reverse,” previously “Keep It Like a Secret,” frequently “There Is No Enemy”), I haven’t voluntarily listened to anything besides “Perfect From Now On” since May 2011.
What’s wrong with me?
Like many music connoisseurs whose tastes were forged in the ‘90s, I’ve long admired Built to Spill, the rare rock band that’s spent its entire career basking in the adulation of critics and fans. The New York Times once compared singer/guitarist/founder Doug Martsch to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The band’s devotion is deserved. Even as its members settle comfortably into middle age, Built to Spill remains emblematic of a certain post-adolescent longing. Their sound is catchy, twisty and inventive, and their lyrics burst with wit and humanity. There’s every reason to like them if you like complex arrangements and blistering solos. (And if you don’t, who needs you?)
What I wonder, though, is why my devotion evolved into full-bore obsession. I mean: 406 times. Am I suffering from some psychological malady? Some neurological tic? Perhaps that sounds hysterical, but my family tree has borne a veritable bushel of obsessive, compulsive, biologically quirky fruit. And my need to listen to this band upward of three times a day approaches a kind of addictive behavior: I’ve blown off deadlines to listen to them, I’ve violated FAA takeoff regulations to listen to them, I’ve irritated my spouse and become physically uncomfortable when I can’t listen to them. It worries me. One night on my evening commute back to the Bronx, I tried to go cold turkey without the song. I lasted six subway stops before I fell off the wagon. (I imagine people at my funeral: “How’d she die?” “Built to Spill overdose,” they’ll say.) So, will I really be listening only to “Perfect From Now On” … from now on? And if so, why?
I pick up Dr. Daniel J. Levitin’s fascinating book, “This Is Your Brain on Music,” in which he describes the phenomenon of “earworms,” or songs that stick in your head. Built to Spill is stuck in my head, for sure; the difference between me and the case studies Levitin describes is that I’m OK with it – as opposed to the helpless frustration others feel when they can’t stop singing, say, the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started.” Still, the earworm theory seems applicable. “Our best explanation,” Levitin writes, “is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in ‘playback mode’ … it is rarely an entire song that gets stuck, but rather a piece.”
It’s true that I often turn to this album because some brief moment of it is drilling through my mind. In “Randy Described Eternity,” I can hear the opening with its clean, quiet guitar, which peals out two alternating notes in a cadence reminiscent of a car alarm. I can hear another guitar entering, descending mournfully and then repeating, like the melody is crumbling and rebuilding itself. Most of Built to Spill’s albums are composed of disparate chunks like these, expertly stitched together.
Levitin also confirms a relationship between earworms and obsessive-compulsive disorder: “In some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects,” he writes. To shed some light on the OCD question, I make my way to that most trusted of diagnostic tools: the Internet quiz. Am I plagued with the fear that I might accidentally harm my family members? No. Do I have excessive religious thoughts? No. Do I worry that I might be infected with a disease? Well, just OCD. After six questionnaires — including the industry standard Yale-Brown (Y-BOCS) Obsessive Compulsive Scale — give me a relatively clean bill of health, I finally relax.
If my fixation isn’t neurological, maybe it’s psychological. This record makes me feel so much — joy, pain, amusement, nostalgia for a bygone time. Perhaps this last one is key. Built to Spill’s recent albums are fantastic, but I’ve chosen to fixate on one that sounds distinctly like the ‘90s, a time before the specter of terrorism, when TV’s only reality show aimed to teach people tolerance (I refer, of course, to “The Real World”). Maybe this is happening because I’m about to turn 30; there’s nothing like a milestone birthday to send one into a thumb-sucking state of regression. Maybe it’s significant that May 2011, the month this insanity began, was the same month I published my first novel, an anxiety-provoking time. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Adulthood is often terrifying, and “Perfect From Now On” is a cozy escape to my teenage years, when I would lie in bed with a Discman and listen to this band through foam headphones, Doug Martsch’s voice in my ear like he was speaking solely to me.
Trying to identify the root of my behavior, there is one more source I have in mind. So one night, while wandering Built to Spill’s rather unkempt website, I dash off an interview request. I didn’t really think it would work. When a nice woman from Warner Bros. emails to arrange the call, I’m beset with cold sweats. I have no idea what to ask. Or what I hope to accomplish. But then I finally hear his voice on the call, actually talking to me alone: Doug Martsch.
“I am fucking loving this,” he says, once I’ve explained my situation. “What is it you’re listening to?”
When I tell him, his voice deflates. Wrong answer, I guess. I ask which record is his favorite.
“The last two are listenable,” he says. “The earlier stuff I can’t deal with.”
“Wow.”
“It’s just not my cup of tea. I listened to ‘Perfect From Now On’ a few years ago and couldn’t get through it. The singing is too precious.”
“So when I said I love that record, did you judge me?”
“Of course,” he jokes. “I thought you had really bad taste.” He’s so nice and down-to-earth, I forget to be nervous. “You know, I have no idea what you hear when you put on a Built to Spill record. I have no idea how you relate to it, what it means to you, what it sounds like at all.”
“When you like something,” I ask, “do you like it obsessively?”
“Not really,” he says. “My method is to savor things. If I’m obsessed with a song, I’ll put it away. And then I’ll be like, Oh, that’ll be nice when my iPod chooses that song.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to meet your idols?” I ask.
“If you like normal people,” he says.
“Have you ever had a memorable experience meeting a fan?”
“Not really,” he says. “Most Built to Spill fans aren’t all that rabid. Except you. If I ever get that question again, you’ll be the answer.”
After we hang up, I email him my address, since he’s offered to send recordings of his old punk outfit, the Treepeople, and the covers record he and some friends made under the name Boise Cover Band, “so you never have to listen to anything else again,” he says. I take the subway home, and as usual, pull out my iPod and press play in the same spot. Not even Martsch’s own distaste for his album is enough to sour my devotion to it.
A week later, a package arrives. Along with the two CDs, there’s a note that begins, “Hope I didn’t tease you too much,” and ends, “♥ Doug.” (Reader, I framed it.) My husband and I play Treepeople and experience an echo of the not unpleasant psychic agita that punk rock inspired in us in high school, when we came by our angst more honestly. The album is fresh and immediate. Then we try Boise Cover Band’s “Unoriginal Artists,” a collection of obscure R&B, spacey ballads, and such classics as the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” and Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” all rendered with care and consistency in tender Martsch-ese. But there’s a moment during the song “I Love You More” when Martsch goes into panty-dropping doo-wop mode — “My pretty baby,” he wails, “my little darlin’…” — that makes me audibly gasp. This is swoon music. I feel the same vertiginous sensation I experienced the first time I ate a soft shell crab, or saw a Coen brothers film, or met my husband — an “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” feeling.
Weeks pass. I don’t touch “Perfect From Now On.” The play count for “Unoriginal Artists” is 76 (though ask me again in an hour), but it seems something has shaken me from my mania. A friend recommends St. Vincent, and I give her a listen; a bookstore where I’m shopping plays Hall and Oates, and I get deep into it; one morning I revisit Animal Collective’s “Strawberry Jam” and feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years.
Then again, “Unoriginal Artists” is playing as I type, as it has been for most of the day. I listened to Treepeople in the car last Saturday and bought their other albums. I also bought (and adore) Martsch’s solo album, “Now You Know.” When I learned recently that Built to Spill would be touring again after a hiatus, I scrambled to buy tickets; when I read that they’d likely release an album this year or next, I leapt for joy.
I’ve abandoned the worry that there’s something wrong with my brain or my psyche. As best as I can figure, the absurd adage that we each have a soul mate is actually true — except not about people, just music. Maybe I’m just lucky enough to have found the songs that are the most in tune with who I am and what I want to feel and they happen to come from the same artist. However monogamous my musical taste has become, maybe the lesson here is simply that — to invoke the title of another of Doug Martsch’s fine records — there’s nothing wrong with love.
In essay collections like “The Disappointment Artist” and last year’s acclaimed “The Ecstasy of Influence,” best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem brought his sharp critical lens and personal passion to bear on Marvel Comics, Roberto Bolaño, Bob Dylan and the John Carpenter movie “They Live.” Add to that diverse list of cultural artifacts the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music,” the subject of Lethem’s latest book, and published as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of music writing.
The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) – from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.
What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?
In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.
I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.
In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?
Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.
But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.
Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.
I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.
I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.
In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.
I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime” is pretty good too. [laughs]
Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?
It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.
What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.
How did you start?
I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.
I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”
There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.
Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?
I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.
In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.
You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?
How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.
I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.
Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.
Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.
In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?
They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.
Brian Eno (Credit: Reuters) 
Stills from "Nowhere Boy" and "George Harrison: Living in the Material World" 
Seven members of the band Pussy Riot (Credit: Wikipedia) 
One Direction 
Jonathan Lethem 
