Dada Reads 12032022
Good Writing x Music & Community: Cecilia Ballí on high school mariachi, Harmony Holiday on entourage toxicity + Hilton Als' Prince book, Chris Richards on music titles and punctuation...and more
Some reading for your weekend - maybe beyond. Quality of writing and ideas is a must. Primarily current, or newly surfaced, pieces. Always music-, culture- and/or community-related. No hot-takes set to grow cold when headlines change, but story-telling or philosophical thinking I believe to have a long shelf life. Forever searching for alternative sources, but, yes, lots of obvious publications included.
Cecilia Ballí, “A Championship Season in Mariachi Country” (New York Times Magazine 11/3/2022) - One of those wonderful pieces that brings together local music culture, history, geo-politics, human portraits, and drama. Balli’s long piece, accompanied by Benjamin Lowy’s incredible photos, follows the highly lauded mariachi band teams, from three high schools in Starr County, Texas, on the Mexico-U.S. border, as they prepare for the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza, the largest student mariachi competition in the country. The main focus of the piece are the kids, the musical directors, and the band battle pitting Grande City High School's Mariachi Cascabel, Roma High School's Mariachi Nuevo Santander and La Grulla High School's Mariachi Grulla de Plata. But it’s not just about the meaning of Mexican-American teenagers learning to play the music of their elders or competitive natures. It also paints a vivid landscape of existence, the tense edge of two countries and a community whose lives flourish on both sides of the border, often to the consternation of the armed militias which run it. There's a scene where one of the school mariachi bands plays at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection event during National Hispanic Heritage month, a scene filled with inner dread and cognitive cultural dissonance even the kids remark upon. It could be a short story by itself.
Harmony Holiday, “A New Theory of the Entourage (Part 1)” (Black Music & Black Muses 11/15/22) + “Seduction and Betrayal: Hilton Als’s Conflicted Love Letter to Prince” (BookForum Dec-Jan-Feb 2023) - Anyone who’s studied music writing with me over the past few years knows the high esteem in which I hold Harmony’s work. Two of the pieces she published in November are indicative why I do. “Seduction and Betrayal” is a review of My Pinup, Hilton Als’ new memoir notes on his admiration of Prince, and in many ways is simply does its job as such. But the piece also an exploration of who we give our hearts away to, how we control it (or don’t), and the power (or the poweless-ness) of the subject of our adoration to define themselves in the eyes of the adoring; of how, in many ways, “pinups” are “martyrs” reflecting crises in society, broadly personalizing them. It’s a fascinating attempt at unraveling of emotional responses to elevated desires. “A New Theory of the Entourage,” which is published on Holiday’s must-read newsletter, is something less symbolic and more specific (to her own life, even). It’s also a provocation to honestly look at industry friendship packs which are more like secret societies, and their gendered social constructs, to explore blowing them up in order for certain kinds of art-making to move forward. It’s about how some “squadgoals” become toxic, or how those goals can be manipulated from within the squad. (It’s also a hard AF read because Harmony opens up about her own connection to the people she’s writing about — full disclosure: I know some of them too — and the vulnerability is palpable.) Both pieces are great examples of why Holiday is always worth reading: Her poetic prose intentionally drifts into unpredictably sublime spaces, finding philosophical points unimaginable mere sentences earlier. Her narratives are informed not simply by musical history, but by the charges beneath it, by the inner lives of its characters and how history (colonialist, patriarchal white supremacy) affected and infected the work. And most importantly (for me), Harmony Holiday’s work is committed to be part of the process of change, unwilling to play the game, always reminding the reader of the part each post/story/review plays in an overall purpose.
Chris Richards, “A Grammy nominee list that capitalizes on endless uniformity” (Washington Post 11/16/22) - The headline maybe too smart for itself, or too smart for me. But this tongue-in-cheek-yet-perfectly-serious piece, written ostensibly as a “review” of the year’s nominees, actually addresses another aspect of how music-streaming platforms have changed the way musicians regard their own work — and how listeners invoke it. This time through the rarely addressed element of nomenclature. Written-style details such as capitalization (all-caps or no caps), quotes, numbers or letters or icons, are often left to the meta-data writers to figure out, or invoked in a haphazard way to stand out amidst the drab presentation within apps. A couple of hateful things attract me to Chris’ examination: There’s the fact that it’s an ongoing concern for those of us in the “fact-checking music writing” business (yes, we still exist). There’s also the fact that a label’s, or a platform’s, meta-data engineer may be involved in exactly what a song is called by listeners, or how an artist’s name appears in print. Which is a pretty good metaphor for how the world of culture often seems to be run nowadays.
IMPORTANT-To-DADA READ: David Graeber, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep” (Jacobin, 3/4/2021) - A few days ago, I found this short note by the late, lamented radical philosopher-economist Graeber in an open tab on my phone. Hidden in plain sight for over a year, I remember reading it during that brief moment of “post-pandemic optimism” around the time it was published, six months after Graeber’s tragic passing. It is not a long, historically informed jeremiad, as was often his wont, but a simple request to remember where we as a society had recently been, when choosing our future path — a warning, then, against a return to structural economic “normalcy.” On the occasion of refueling Dada Strain for the long haul, it is worth remembering that “the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, and generally get in the way of those who are making things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.” Which is to say, it’s reminder to support your local musickers.