On our second visit, Xiao Li tells us of a breakthrough: If you knot the top corners of the blanket around the first metal bar on each side of the bed, lao lao won’t get up at night. The contraption is simple: she tries to sit up, the blanket holds her down. With such little room between the mattress and the blanket to gather enough energy, another attempt is worth too much effort, especially at such an ungodly hour, and so the contraption buys silence for another few hours. Let us all rest for just one night, she says, god knows we need it.
It’s my first winter break since starting college and I’m with my mother in her hometown, Jiangyou, a city I barely know. We’re there to visit her mother, my lao lao. On paper, she’s been hospitalized for a broken hip bone, but as she takes my mother’s hand on our first visit, pausing as if confronted by something new, mouth slightly open with surprise, we know it is something more. She feels each of my mother’s fingers with the curiosity of a child discovering the world for the first time, and my mother leans as close as she can to the pillow, whispering, “Mama, it’s me, hong-er.” The nickname falls off her tongue like a plea, hushed and frantic. Lao lao doesn’t look her directly in the eyes, but even from my place at the end of the bed, I feel a
Dear Readers,
I’m writing this editor’s note inside a tent at the newly established Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the Main Green. Having had little experience with activism previously, I’ve had to think quite a bit about my decision to participate. Ultimately, I found myself contemplating what it means to be a senior. This is the last edition of post- I’ll be editing, after joining the team as a copyeditor back in the fall of 2020, before I was even on campus. As I’m getting ready to leave Brown, I’ve been thinking about the world I want to live in and the communities I want to help create. I suppose most seniors have similar thoughts: the combination of reflection on the past and anxiety toward the future seems to result in a fun blend of
reckoning— undeniably warm against the January chill of the hospital room.
My mother spends the rest of the visit talking to lao lao in a baby voice. There is something about the affected nature of her tone, the dumbed-down immaturity of each syllable, that I cannot shake.
China has “one of the fastest-aging societies in the world” and a deep-seated culture of intergenerational households. Despite government efforts to increase the birth rate by adopting a three-child policy in 2022, incorporating reproductive technology into medical insurance, and providing an array of other incentives, the population continues to age. The underbelly of this trend is a dementia crisis, which ripples through medical, social, and familial spheres. The insurance system for long-term elderly care is overwhelmed and rarely accommodates dementia cases; patients are relegated outside of professional care and left to their families. Caring for someone with dementia is deeply personal, emotionally visceral. I know lao lao’s symptoms and my mother’s helplessness are shared by millions of others, but their struggle, over the course of years, is no less isolated.
Lao lao’s caregiver, Xiao Li, a woman a little over 40, is cheery, brutally honest. She was referred to my mother after the previous caregiver backed out, and I learned that this informal hiring process underlies a care system that functions much like patchwork—some of the other caregivers in the ward are provided by the hospital, some privately found, some relatives of the patient themselves. Xiao Li, my mother tells me, is a gem. When she sticks out her hands to show us how she’s
nostalgia, idealism, and plain cold fear.
Our writers this week are also considering their tentative place in an equally unpredictable world. Our Feature writer contemplates mortality upon visiting her aging grandmother in the hospital. One Narrative writer compares their current unsteady, intangible existence to their freshman year self, while the other reflects on her identity as a writer and her time writing for post-. In A&C, one writer uses a playlist to cope with the uncertainty that follows graduation. Our other A&C writer examines Beyoncé’s recent re-emergence into the music scene in Cowboy Carter. One Lifestyle writer considers lawns and the unpredictability of life, and the other encourages mindfulness by listening to our surroundings. If you need a break from the fraught existentialism, our crossword this week is bigger and better than ever.
been cleaning lao lao, I notice that her fingers swell around her knuckles like sausage. She’s the only person lao lao knows by name and face, and so she translates her emotions to us: Bao bao is hungry, bao bao is getting sleepy, bao bao is so happy to meet you, she’s been waiting all day.
Bao is Chinese for baby, sweetheart. As an adjective, it means precious, something possessing the rarity of a jewel. Duplicated as bao bao, the characters become a term of endearment. I know the sound distinctly in my mother’s voice, its echoes dot the memories of my childhood. Sometime during middle school, she switched to “Elena” after I became selfconscious about the unabashed intimacy of the term—hearing it again years later, in such a different context, is jarring. I imagine lao lao’s life stretching out as one giant arch, its trajectory paralleling the mysterious bend of the train track outside of her apartment complex when it is steeped in early morning fog. The end, obscured by distance, bending to meet the beginning. I wonder if this is the universe’s backward way of offering one last form of compensation, as if to say: You’ve been through so much, it’s only right that we return this gentleness to you.
On the taxi ride from the hospital, my mother laughs, “Did you see the nurse walk in and think Xiao Li was her daughter? If I were a stranger, I would think that too, really.” We sink into awkward silence. As the bustle of Jiangyou rushes by in the window, I picture the family trees I’ve drawn during previous visits to the city collapsing in on themselves, leaving behind nothing but a stump, rings upon rings hugging one another. And there, in the center of our many orbits, is my mother. Remember, I considered asking her, when I had all my suitcases
A lot in the world is uncertain, and it can be challenging to navigate such an unknown landscape. Lately, I’ve been charting my course with the goal of working toward the world I want to see. Reader, whether you too are graduating, or are just concluding your first year at Brown—I hope you, me, all of us are able to build a better world with a place for everyone. In the meantime, sit down with a copy of post-. There’s some inspiration to be found in these pages.
packed for college, and you told me that to be your daughter is to be your little girl forever? What about that?
The next time we visit, Xiao Li teaches us what the best thing to say is when lao lao is having a bad day: You look so pretty today. Remember fifth grade, when they called you the prettiest girl in class? Watch her smile and nod. The first time you see the sparkle in her eyes, she says, you’ll feel like something halfforgotten inside you has finally healed. Help her smooth out her hair when the male doctor, or the handsome visitor from next door, comes in to say good morning. If she begins rubbing at the moles on her right cheek, let her.
When I test it out, lao lao beams. She keeps on looking at a space through the back of my head, where the rain has bruised a land-shaped scab onto the ceiling, but she is glowing, alert, a smile growing on her face. I tell her about how I am enjoying Jiangyou, our lunch plans at the local hotpot joint where all the servers know her by name. She tells me, anxiously, that she can pay. She asks if I have a place to sit. She grabs my hand—there is plenty of money to go around, dinner is on me—and brings it to her face, pausing before touching it to her lips. Then, she is crying. She calls me bao bao over and over again, and it strikes me that we are all children even after we outgrow our childhood, and I tell her, yes, lao lao, of course, when this is over we will eat until we can not fit another bite.
By the middle of the week, Jiangyou gets so cloudy that I begin to feel like the sky is a thumb pressing down on the entire city, its pressure point gathering exactly where my grandmother is resting in the hospital ward. We make a routine out of visiting at noon, the sweet, forgiving period of time when the morning disorientation has worn off and the afternoon fatigue has yet to creep in. She’ll be in a good mood and we’ll have the luxury of talking to her for an entire hour.
In the hallway, warped by the green sheen of sun passing through plastic-wrapped windows, the caregivers are busy preparing lunch. Everything crescendos in a hum of blenders pureeing rice, pork belly, and overcooked bok choy, patients turning softly in their beds, the medical machinery on auto. The air of the hallway is thick and still. In the corridor, I watch lao lao lie beneath Xiao Li’s nimble hands from afar, and it takes effort to hold onto the fact that the stillness is nothing but a product of the midday lull.
Later that day, Xiao Li lifts up her blanket briefly to change her diaper, and I catch a glimpse of lao lao’s legs. Each joint aching to bend, the slim, graceful lines of dormant muscle flexing underneath pale skin. Flush against the shape of bone. My mother has always talked about lao lao as a performer. Certain duties came with being deemed the prettiest girl in class: You took center-stage in grade-level performances, you sang, you captivated the stage, beauty and talent and all. There’s a video on my younger sister’s iPad of her and lao lao singing to a classic Chinese song in our living room in Beijing, their silhouettes dancing in perfect unison. Even through the screen, I can picture stages decked red and lit golden six decades ago, lao lao captivating the audience with her poise, the near-magical quality of her body as she flickers between spotlights. Beside me,
Xiao Li leans over to my mom, as if to break a secret. She whispers, “Did you know? Someone tried to bind your mother’s feet. The toes, they’re folded in, but only halfway. There’s dried pus. I can smell it when I clean her.”
The characters for lao lao are composed of two characters side-by-side: nu, female, on the right, and lao, old, on the left. The male counterpart, lao ye, adopts this character and switches out the second for another that uses the same feminine radical. And with this detail I rationalize my anger—none of it is fair, not when the passage of time is gendered from whatever way you decide to face it. And before girls like lao lao even learned to walk, they were placed on the path with feet that hurt, nothing but pain and pus. The molding is linguistic and anatomical before it is lived. It is not surprising that lao lao has learned to spin and float and dance to propel our worlds, that my mother is the strongest person in my life and lao lao the strongest in hers.
When I look back at lao lao, she is already asleep. The steady rise and fall of her chest is so peaceful, and I forget about the secret until it comes back to me hours later in the form of a bitter image.
In the remaining hours I spent in the hospital room that month, I learned from Xiao Li that lao lao no longer remembers that she was married to a man she grew to despise, that there was ever any other woman or a divorce so ugly she almost wanted to give up. I learned that the way to lull lao lao to sleep is to play music by her right ear—nothing recent, but anything released during her childhood or adolescence is fair game. She knows them all. You can see it on her face, especially when she is seconds away from slipping into a dream. I learned that she is still as stubborn and as sarcastic as ever, but that she will always remember to call for Xiao Li when she has filled the diaper, and will never try to get up for a second time in one night after she’s been warned once. I learned that she asks for the “two women” when we go too long without visiting, and it fills my mother and I with hope. I tell her “I love you” more times than I’ve ever said it in my life.
My mother takes me on a walk the night before our train back to Shanghai. At every turn, I linger a step behind, listening to her reminisce. We pass the courthouse where lao lao used to work as a judge, the squares in front of malls where she loved to dance with nothing but a speaker put on full blast, and finally the track with the tricky bend, now empty and clear. Under the streetlight, the graying roots that form a slim path along my mother’s head appear golden, struck by some amber glow. Many years ago, she’d call me to sit on the back of the couch, where she’d hunch and instruct me to pluck out the new batch of white hairs she’d collected from the month. Be thorough, she’d say. Make sure you get everything. No, bao bao, it doesn’t hurt at all. There are too many now, and together they halo her in a gorgeous light, and for all I know, she is a girl and we are at the part of the track where she is more of a daughter than anything else. Her hair is dark and long for a moment, then pure white, speckling gray, blowing messy in the wind. Everything unravels ahead of her and around her. I am certain that lao lao is gliding somewhere in the distance, “hong-er” on her lips, their heads turning to find one another.
post-postturning the page as a writer, graduating senior, sentimentalist
by Ellie Jurmann Illustrated by Junyue Ma“We have a lot of fun here,” said a Brown Daily Herald staff member with his shoulders tensed up to his ears, in a tone so serious you would think he was delivering tragic news. Maybe the copious amount of devastating news he reports on the Daily has altered his perception of “fun.” The amount of stress I felt radiating from their Zoom screens was enough for me to leave the call immediately. Right as I was about to click off, I was met with the warm and welcoming voice of a young woman: “If you are interested in joining post-, the magazine of the BDH, then hop into our breakout room!” Figuring what the heck, I followed the friendly faces into the post- Zoom, and what started as a quick chat with section editors turned into my longest-term commitment at Brown.
There are a number of reasons why my post- stint endured through my days as a (socalled) Pre-Baccalaureate-First-Year-Fall-2020 “Special Student,” as a depressed and burnt-out sophomore, all the way into my last few weeks as an undergraduate at Brown. The main reason: I needed a creative outlet. Regardless of my state of being, I could always find something to say, something to talk about, something to attempt to articulate. If I needed to process my anxieties about who or what I wanted to be, to dissect my own brain to better understand the maze of my mind, or to just distract myself from the internal mayhem that consumed me, I would write. This was something I did for my own self-care, and other people just happened to want to read it. Even when I felt I had nothing to say, or nothing worth saying, I would write anyway. I would write until something stuck. I would feel a spark of creativity and run with it as far as it would take me.
Having the commitment of writing for post- has been a blessing for my personal and artistic growth, but it has been difficult in weeks where I do not feel particularly creative. What do I do when writing feels like getting out of bed during a torrential downpour? When I just want to stay under the covers where it is warm and safe? It feels antithetical to being an artist to somewhat “force” any sort of art. There are days when I just do not feel like writing, or when I have no idea how to word anything in a way that I like. On many of those days, I just need
“I didn’t address how the homoromantic relationship between God and Noah had repercussions on his wife.”
“They’re not even ball sackular because they are not in the scrotum”
a change of scenery to inspire me to find something that feels important to see. Other days, I just need to roll with whatever mediocrity I am producing. With time, I find my rhythm and voice, and I weave my words and sentences into a tapestry that holds grave and powerful truths—some of which I am only now discovering for the first time.
As much as I love all of the non-writing-related things I do, including the math I study and for which I will receive my degree, I am a writer at heart. There are people who like to write poetry, and then there are poets. I identify as the latter. My soul calls for me to take my strings of beautifully intricate thoughts and thread them through paper. I live for sitting on a bench next to strangers and watching the sunset. I love grocery shopping and paying attention to what other people gravitate towards but eventually put back. I treasure walking along the beach and imagining the stories each seashell holds of the long, glorious life that led it to be here with me in this moment. I am enamored with the ordinary and I find stories everywhere I go. When I write, I draw out these stories, and I fall more in love with the way the world and I see each other. Words are the closest answer to my insatiable curiosity about everything there is to see, to feel, to experience. I often wonder if others feel the same way as I do.
I am going to miss my regularly scheduled postrevelations, where I learned to make a little more sense of my reality, one piece at a time. Without a writer’s schedule, it is up to me to keep sharing my stories, because nobody will be waiting for me to share them on a certain day, at a certain time. I still have so much left to say, and so much left to discover and create and articulate. In the realm of my ongoing life anthology, my post- produced pieces are only the preface.
**In my next body of work, I will serve as a math teacher in Providence. I will share my craft with my students as they learn to process, embrace, and convey their own narratives.**
half-faded, but alive
on spring and fading away, or holding my past self’s hand
by Liza Kolbasov Illustrated by Stella TsogtjargalLately, I’ve been watching myself disappear again. I remember the feeling, achingly familiar, like the warm hug of your covers when you know you’ve slept too long past your alarm. It used to cling to me constantly. My freshman year of college, at any given point, I wasn’t sure whether I existed. It was something about being in a new place all alone, combined with life being confined almost entirely to the virtual world. Sometimes, people would acknowledge me in the hallway, or on my way down to the OMAC to get my COVID test (the one variation to my routine, which was otherwise confined to my dorm room and the Ratty), and I would jump—responding to their friendly greeting a half-beat too late. Could they really see me? Were they sure I existed? I imagined ghosts that return to haunt the world of the living and run into a medium on the street that feel somewhat the same way. Wait, did that person acknowledge me? They can speak to me? Can I speak back? Oh, I’ve forgotten how to use this rusty tongue! Mostly, the people on my floor ignored me, and I was left to roam undisturbed in my dazed, lonely state.
I similarly witnessed my first Rhode Island spring as a ghost. The sun started to stay out longer, daffodils and snowdrops popped up through the frozen earth, magnolia blossoms burst open all over campus. Everything and everyone seemed to be coming to life again. I would go outside, lie in the grass on Ruth Simmons Quad, and listen to cheering and laughing voices echo from the Main Green. If I squinted my eyes just the right way, I
could imagine the spring sun slipping in between the cracks where my soul had already started to disappear, melting the rest of me into the soil, mixing with the roots of the flowers and relaxing into nothingness, no longer this half-body-halfnothing. Or else I would dip a cautious finger into the bloodstream of so-called college life— eating spoonfuls of Del's frozen lemonade on the campus center steps, telling myself over and over again that I, like everything else, must come to life with the sun.
On other days, I’d lay on my bedroom floor for hours, staring up at the humming fluorescent lights, unable to convince myself to get off the floor and into bed. Or else, in a desperate attempt to convince myself that I was, in fact, alive, I’d leave my room at 3:00 a.m. and walk down to the Providence Pedestrian Bridge, letting the pinch of the night cold lure me back into the illusion of my own body. I don’t know how to describe those walks, except to say that they were the times I felt the most whole, and also the times the bitterness and emptiness inside me would most threaten to explode. I’d sit by the edge of the water, watch it glisten, and try to hold my mismatched parts and heaviness. Stare at the lapping river, let it stare back at me. Dare it to tell me what it saw in my dark, sad eyes.
I don’t take that walk anymore. When I do walk at night, I turn instead to India Point Park, let my feet trace paths that haven’t been tainted by a shadow of freshman-year me. I have grown so much since that horrible, nightmarish spring— settled into myself, found people to hold close, mediums who look into my eyes and tell me I exist there, and I believe them. Looking back over the past four years, I have moments to hold tenderly and sweetly—moments when I felt so very alive and so very sure of my own existence. Wearing fancy clothes and spinning in giggly circles the night of Campus Dance my sophomore year with my graduating friends, then lighting sparklers on the lawn in front of our house and drawing hearts
in the air. Lying on the roof and looking up at the stars. Making pancakes in the kitchen in the early Sunday morning sun.
And yet, this specter of my freshman-year self continues to haunt me, just out of sight, pulling at the edge of my peripheral vision, daring me to make eye contact. Especially on warm April days, I feel them whispering in my ear, threatening to pull me down. I’m not you anymore, I want to say. I want to hold them close, tell them it gets better. So much better. But I know they wouldn’t believe me. In many ways, in their darkness and emptiness, they are still so much stronger than the fragile, beautiful life I’ve tried my very hardest to build here. How do you know it won’t get worse again? And they’d be right. I don’t. I don’t.
This April is the saddest I’ve felt since freshman year. I’ve been finding myself constantly on the verge of tears, gritting my teeth through work meetings and classes and collapsing in a weepy heap on my floor as soon as I get home. More often than I have in past years, I’ve been getting startled by people saying my name, looking me in the eyes. The tell-tale signs of slipping away. And there’s something tantalizing about it, the desire to end college the way I started it, alone and ghostly under the late-spring sun.
But I refuse to let myself make spring the season of disappearing. Truly, it’s not right that so many things in our lives end in spring—how am I supposed to reconcile the way everything in the world is coming back to life when I’m left gripping at incomplete endings and goodbyes? At the beginning of this month, I got my heart broken in a way that shattered me from the inside out, sent me flying back into the comforting embrace of freshman year me’s: See, it wasn’t even worth trying. I told you it would end up this way. Two days later, I got a sword framed by two daffodils tattooed on my sternum. Symbols of spring, of rebirth, of getting cut down and coming back again anyway. I’m trying to think of it as a way to reach back to my freshman year self, to hold their hand through the harshness of the spring sun. To be gentle with them, and beg them to be gentle with me. Sure, maybe it’s a curse, but I’m sorry, honey, we’re just going to have to keep coming back. I want this April to be something other than the second-worst April in my life. If anything, maybe it’ll be the one that teaches me to live— half-faded, but live anyway.
a
album that calcified on COWBOY CARTER , Beyoncé’s historical clarity comes at the cost of musical coherenceby Evan Gardner Illustrated by fiona mcgill
All those weeks ago, in the middle of Super Bowl LVIII, Beyoncé came along and “broke the internet” with the surprise release of twin country singles “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” and “16 CARRIAGES,” a preview of her upcoming album. Almost immediately, a fiery debate ensued among the self-appointed protectors of the country genre: Could Beyoncé really qualify?
“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” has all the telltale trappings of a country song: the hollering inflection, the call and response, the pining strings (specifically banjo), the gravity of a pun at its center, and if you’re looking for the signs, she’s got the “liquor,” the leather, and the “Lexus” to back it up. This wasn’t the first time she’d explored country, though: In 2016, Beyoncé sang “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks (née Dixie Chicks) at the Country Music Awards, a bold performance with a rich Texas twang.
Beyond genre, “Daddy Lessons” and “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” also told us something deeper about Beyoncé’s oeuvre: she comes from a Louisiana Creole mother and Texan father; her songs are often reflections of that heritage. Just listen to the saxophone solo at the CMAs: soulful, smooth, muddy as the Bayou, and performed in a pair of knee-high cowboy boots. Much of her music is like a good old-fashioned Texas cookout: She pulls contributions from each relative onto her plate, and tops it off with the “hot sauce in her bag” for a signature Beyoncé Knowles-Carter kick. Each album has been an artful index of the Beyoncé story (see Beyoncé) and, taken together, her catalog might be heard as a kind of American story: a tale of cultural exchange with music as its melting pot.
That is, until COWBOY CARTER dropped: now, it’s an “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”.
The newly released album isn’t entirely country but instead a study of genre and the American musical canon, featuring everything from a Beatles cover to a “Good Vibrations” quote to a Willie Nelson voice-over. In a project that sounds more like my History of Popular Music course syllabus than a contemporary album,
country becomes a mere bullet point. It’s less musical and more musicologist, adopting a deeply academic approach to songcraft that privileges direct citation over interpolation. The cookout becomes a library.
On COWBOY CARTER, Beyoncé seems to have left her passion for composition at the door—gone are the calls for complex and cohesive musical “formation.” Instead, we’re left with a post-modern treatise of disjointed historical detritus where discography dissolves into cultural document. The problem isn’t purely that she’s citational, for she’s long been working in that mode. But Beyoncé at her best treats citations as less source and more material: They’re raw items, malleable in her grasp. This time, she’s ceding space to the sources themselves— not just the text, but the people—and if Beyoncé is best appreciated as auteur, it’s disappointing to watch her drop the pen.
The album begins with “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” a moaning and mournful ballad about death, destruction, and memory. Like a true requiem, the opening track establishes the album as a token of remembrance: she declares early on that “them big ideas are buried here” with piercing certainty. And yet, buried seems to carry two meanings: It’s buried as in disposed of, yes, but buried also means that they’re embedded into these songs. Those old ideas about genre are always there on this album, lying just six feet under each track. It’s an ominous opening introducing a duality that continually haunts this album: Are we remembering these ideas to say goodbye, or to preserve their memory? It seems we’ve been condemned to both.
“AMERIICAN REQUIEM” also explicitly positions the country industry as a primary provocateur of this project: “the rejection came, said I wasn’t country’nough.” It’s a small moment, but one that nonetheless presents discourse as the central concern of this album: As she tells us again and again, “there’s a lot of talking going on.” Shade aside, we soon learn that this is a discourse she’s determined to enter, as she repeatedly asks “do you hear me?” until finally, in the heat of exasperation, she concludes, “for things to stay the same they have to change again.” Here, she leaves us with a profound insight about musical innovation, but it’s also an insight that exposes the album’s fatal flaw: As she goes on to recall all these old American art forms, nothing really changes.
Indeed, the very next track is “BLACKBIIRD,” a cover that directly reproduces the Beatles' work— no samples, no remixes, no changes. It’s a simple resurrection. On Lemonade, Beyoncé cited the original “Blackbird” organically by folding a single image (broken wings) into her own symbolic repertoire; here, all is lost in following the author rather than the text. She’s assembled a veritable Avengers of young female country stars—young black female country stars—as background vocalists, but their only superpower is the ability to revive a group of tired old Brits. Tanner Adell, especially, seems like a natural counterpart to Beyoncé with her winking creativity and hip-hop inflected flare—nonetheless, “BLACKBIIRD” drains her of all that life force, whittling Adell down to nothing more than a symbol.
Perhaps nowhere is Beyoncé’s preoccupation with past voices more vivid than in the series of vocal interludes delivered by country’s legends. First, there’s “SMOKE HOUR WILLIE NELSON,” featuring, you guessed it. The beginning of this interlude is stunning—it opens with the crackling of a radio as the dial oscillates between stations, bringing us a taste of genres, styles, and cultures that were once worlds apart, collated by a single change in channel. In less than a minute, Beyoncé has rendered all of American music readily available through the radio in a piece that’s subtle, performance-based, and evocative—in short, it’s art.
But all that art comes to a screeching halt when the radio reaches KNTRY: The Willie Nelson
Channel. In walks Willie Nelson, the MC of the station, announcing Beyoncé’s next track. On KNTRY, Willie literally has his finger on the switch: he becomes both annunciator and arbiter of what counts as country. Sure, she gets a spot this time, but if genre is truly democratic, why have an electoral college?
And then there’s the next interlude: “DOLLY P.” Dolly might be an especially interesting interlocutor for Beyoncé—if only she were that. Instead, Dolly, like Willie, speaks only as the guard granting her passage: “Same hussy different hair color,” Dolly tells us, officially sanctioning Beyoncé’s “JOLENE.” Once again, we have a track that seems to believe Dolly is a necessary authenticator—a track that leans more on her acceptance than its own artistic merit.
Willie and Dolly are rivaled only by “THE LINDA MARTELL SHOW,” where Martell declares (twothirds of the way into the album, no less) that “This particular tune stretches across a range of genres / And that's what makes it a unique listening experience / Yes, indeed.” The whole thing reeks of pedagogy.
For all its earlier attempts at aural archaeology, the album’s two forward-looking collaborations are some of its finest. “II MOST WANTED,” a collaboration with Miley Cyrus, almost makes Willie and Dolly’s impositions worthwhile; it’s an intricately woven duet that knots the outlaw thread into an elegant bow: We’ve followed the historical outlaws all the way up to our present ones, Miley and Beyoncé. Even sonically, the song’s hushed harmony and seamless call and response smoothly enact this artful integration of storylines. ****
There’s a photo, from 2008, posted on the cover of Texas Monthly. Beyoncé’s standing front and center in dark jeans and a form-fitting shirt with Willie Nelson on her chest. She’s got the same braids and bandana as him—except, while his arms are crossed, hers are placed elegantly on her hips. She’s wearing Willie as her attire, but the pose is hers; he’s just an accessory.
All these years later, Beyoncé adopts a similar posture on “LEVII’S JEANS,” a collaboration with Post Malone—just as she once stepped into the Willie shirt and dark blue jeans, here she picks up another countrycoded item and wears it as a coating for a uniquely Beyoncé conceit: “I’ll let you be my Levi’s jeans / so you can hug that ass all day long.” Unlike all those disembodied voiceovers, here we have a song whose structure and style relies on her presence inside of it.
And then, there’s the guest verse from Post Malone. Malone is a challenging artist precisely because he is so plastic—the substance itself isn’t all that artful, but it’s structurally sound, and its plasticity allows it to adapt to any sonic environment. He’s the soggy white bread of popular music: Beneath a heaping stack of barbecue, he’s an inoffensive conduit, clinging to the juices around him; on his own, he’s barely appetizing, and certainly not flavorful. But as it turns out, his flimsy sound is exactly what this song needs: he can fade into the Beyoncé project, rather than the other way around. Like those jeans, he brings out the best contours of what she’s already been doing: “You’re my Renaissance,” he sings, and just like that, she’s back in the conductor’s chair.
With Beyoncé back at the helm, “LEVII’S JEANS” becomes an exceptional exploration of negative space— its drawn-out, drawling syllables serve as an opening ripe for her authorial arrival. Much like Malone himself, the song is understated yet ambitious: Everything you need to know about its aesthetics can be traced back to the line “giving high fashion in a simple white tee.” It’s minimalism as luxury.
Much of the rest of the album slips into a scattered stretch of songs perhaps best represented by “TYRANT”—a Dolly x DA Got That Dope collab that layers a scratching fiddle over anxious 808s, gesturing toward the kind of bass-powered country-rap that artists like Adell have mastered. But when the project finally comes to a close, it leaves us with “AMEN,” a soft variation on “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” which reiterates that this was always a memorial—only now, we know that it’s the material that’s dead. In meditating on musicians past, Beyoncé has somehow lost the thread of music’s present.
By the final notes, it’s clear that COWBOY CARTER took postmodernism beyond its limits: How can an album that stretches in so many different directions— from crooners past to trap beats present—possibly stay together as a cohesive piece of work? Aurally, it can’t, but since our experience is never enough with these songs, she has to tell us once and for all: “Yes, it crumbled.”
But all that musical crumbling ultimately seems like a contradiction on its own terms—in the very same song, she implores, “Can we stand for something?” reminding us that this sprawling experiment was never about music that does something, but music that represents something: All along she’s used her iconic guests as pillars, hoisting the message onto their backs.
Graduation looms ahead and is all too tangible for my liking. Just over five weeks away—37 days until the end, to be exact. Over the past few weeks, I’ve lost all ability to conceptualize time; I have the date marked on all my calendars, I am receiving far too many emails about applying to graduate, and my mom keeps calling to ask if I’ve picked out a dress yet. I haven’t.
May 26 does not register as a real day in my frazzled brain. May 26 embodies the idea of leaving a place where I’ve found some of my favorite people. May 26 marks my departure from a safe world that I’ve built for myself.
May 26 feels like the end.
The end can’t be this close, can it? ***
I’ve never been the biggest fan of winter break. By the time December rolls around I’m always in dire need of respite, but the lengthy break between semesters always feels drawn out just a bit too long. Too long without the chaos of campus, and I start to feel trapped within the four pink walls of my childhood bedroom. Too long without distinguishing my roommates’ laughs among their cacophonous howling, and I start to feel suffocated by the hush of my hometown. It’s a tricky balance that I never really figured out over these past four years.
This January was different. It was my last intermission between semesters; the last time I impatiently awaited the arrival of spring semester, famous for its improved weather and days of sprawling out on the Green. Yet for the first time, I caught myself wanting to postpone my return to Providence.
Sitting at my favorite local coffee shop, I stared blankly at the screen in front of me: Job titles and untitled documents returned my cold gaze. Countless tabs lay out in an array that made it impossible to remember each application. During winter break, I drove there every morning, sat at my favorite window seat each day, begging myself to just start typing. Progress was minimal.
The reality of figuring out what I will do after graduation, what I am supposed to devote my life to, who I am supposed to be, pummeled me, and I was clueless about how to battle all of it.
So instead of learning how to cope with my recurring existential crises, I turned to music. I snuck glances around me to make sure nobody was watching as I slowly rid my screen of applications, cover letters, and emails I had originally planned to send out days ago. In their place, Spotify asked me to retitle “My Playlist #53,” a blank screen eagerly waiting to externalize my feelings and confusion through an equally confused amalgamation of lyrics and instruments. Finally, my fingers found themselves effortlessly tapping away on my keyboard: I want to be someone!! ***
Bad Luck
I listened to an excessive amount of Noah Kahan during my freshman year. A taste of New England enveloped the strumming of his guitar, and I felt seen. “Just know that I’m doing everything that I can.” Blindly entering college in the midst of a pandemic, with eyes as the only recognizable features of my peers’ faces, I was so unsure of how I was supposed to integrate myself into my new life. All I could do was tell myself that I was doing whatever I could to make it work.
I still listen to a lot of Noah Kahan; I still feel like a kid from New England who is weirdly tied to their hometown, constantly convincing herself that she is
doing everything that she can. Weeks before I graduate, I recognize many more faces on my walks. I roam around campus, sometimes with a destination in mind and other times without. Smiling at buildings where I’ve spent hours attempting to make sense of problem sets and at trees that I’ve accidentally hurled frisbees into, I realize that I’ve managed to make this campus my own. I see myself in the sidewalks that I’ve imprinted on, and I see myself in the people who wave at me across the street. Perhaps I did do everything that I could, and perhaps I did figure out how to find myself in my new life.
I am a self-proclaimed Swiftie. I have loved the tumultuous journey of changes in genre and style in her music. Listening to her re-recording of Red, I am instantaneously transported back to the fall semester of my sophomore year: the re-emergence into a slightly more normal semester of college, where we shed masks and unapologetically invited people into our much-too-small rooms. We played that album on our communal speaker for weeks on end. “How can a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22?” I never thought twice every time I belted it from the top of my lungs.
I am now 22, and I know nothing. I understand her. Though previously unsure of how I felt like I had a stronger grasp on my world four years ago than I do now, I’ve finally realized that it’s because my world has grown and, hopefully, I’ve grown with it. I’ve learned how to ask questions. I’ve learned how to be curious. I am learning how to be okay without knowing everything. So yes, I might know nothing, but I’m excited to keep expanding my own world and realize that there is even more for me to know nothing about.
I rediscovered Melodrama during my final winter break. Itching for new music to overcome the noise, I instead returned to old music and let Lorde reason
through my jumbled thoughts for me. “Trying to find these perfect places.” I yearned to find the perfect places that already existed in my life. My childhood bedroom? My favorite desk at the library? My go-to spot for a late-night sweet treat? No matter how hard I pored over the places I devoted my time to, I couldn’t label any of them as perfect.
I still don’t know if perfect places exist. In these last few weeks, as I leave my footprints scattered throughout Providence, I’m invited to remember the memories that have made my time at Brown so unforgettable–the moments that I still carry around in my back pocket, ready to be looked back on at any given second. As someone who enjoys dwelling on the past a little too much, these remembrances are what fuel my love for this space that I’ve created in just a few years. Perfect places might not be real, but perfect moments certainly are. They remind me that even if I’m still a little unsure of who I might want to be, I’m still someone no matter what. ***
Graduation is 37 days away and it is real.
I want to be someone!! can be found under the “Recently played” section of my Spotify. Clairo and Ethel Cain have now joined my entourage on this journey of coming to terms with graduation; I’m sure many other artists will soon join the ranks in these upcoming weeks as I rely on their words to help me scramble to the Van Wickle gates.
I still don’t know what I’ll be doing after May 26, and I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years later. I do know that I’ll be figuring it out with my headphones on, cultivating soundtracks for each moment of uncertainty along the way.
May 26 will be a day of celebration. May 26 will be a day of holding my friends and realizing how proud I am of them. May 26 will not be a day of leaving somewhere that I’ve learned to call home, but instead will mark the start of building a new world for myself. May 26 will feel like the beginning.
Tending to the lawn is a source of pride for some and a burden for others. My younger brother, for one, holds the former sentiment. As the eldest daughter of my family, I managed to escape the duties of mowing the lawn; that honor was bestowed on the son. Classic. When my brother first took on the responsibility, he did so hesitantly. Whether it happened gradually or with an epiphany (it is still unclear to me), he gained an affinity for a task that most would consider to be a mindless chore. For him, it’s therapeutic—notorious for his chickenscratch handwriting and cluttered room, he finds solace in the clean, straight lines of his lawnwork. The neat piles of lawn clippings and the precision of the striped grass are his own form of artistry.
***
A lawn, in general terms, can be any patch of grass. For us Brown students, the most well-known is the Main Green. Although spring officially began a while ago, the physical manifestations have only recently started to germinate. Magnolias, cherry blossoms, and daisies are everywhere. Signs of rejuvenation. In the past few weeks, I've spent hours basking in the sun, pondering the ubiquitous joy felt around campus. In doing so, I’ve subconsciously made a ranking of the spring-time lawn activities that I’ve observed:
1. Lounging, in any and all forms: For the cozy dwellers who love napping, yapping, hammocking, reading, tanning, daydreaming, or some combination of them all.
2. Spikeball: Great flexibility in the range of participants, for both the adrenaline-seekers and the occasional dabbler.
3. Music, in any and all forms: Even if it’s unintentionally eavesdropping on the songs
vibrating from a nearby stranger’s speaker, I find it wholesome to be able to share and create music with others.
4. Ball sports (excluding spikeball): Volleyball, soccer, playing catch. Exciting and lowmaintenance.
5. “Working”: What you’re really doing is posing as a muse for the romanticization of Brown by prospective students and tour groups. Boring but justifiable (we still need to get our degrees somehow).
6. Selling clothes: An admirable feat, this is a great way to kill two birds with one stone— encouraging second-hand shopping and nonchalantly flaunting your style. Regardless, I will always be lured by it.
7. Frisbee: Unless you have incredible coordination, a skillful flick of the wrist, or a lot of open space, this is not for the faint of heart. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen frisbees fly astray and hit an innocent bystander.
8. Slacklining: If you can do this… I envy you. Slightly adjacent to the Green are the people sitting on miscellaneous steps of Faunce, Manning Chapel, University Hall, and Rhode Island Hall. Whether it’s to avoid grass stains or to destress in a more secluded spot, sitting at this slight elevation is a perfect starting point for something even more indulgent: people watching. There’s so much to notice in the minute details. A spring in her step, laptop in hand, wires pouring out of her backpack, that girl is definitely late for her three-hour-long biochem lab. By the bear statue, there’s a guy practicing tricks on his skateboard. In the span of ten minutes, he only lands two, but his persistence is commendable. He seems like the type to wait in line for an hour for an Andrews burrito bowl. On the slope in front of Friedman are two best friends. His head resting softly on her lap. They are blissfully oblivious to the world around them, fixated on nothing but each other.
At times when the school can feel small, where everyone seems to know everyone, all it takes is a visit to the Main Green on a sunny day to be humbled. It feels as if thousands of people spawned onto campus overnight, left to roam and act freely. In observing these details, there’s something intriguing about the dichotomy of both the mundanity and messiness of the day-to-day. One moment I’m relaxing on the Green, and the next, I’m pressing my head into my hands because I’ve hit rock
bottom trying to get my machine learning model to train at an accuracy above 80 percent. On the Green, I can savor the feeling of the gentle breeze slipping over my skin. I can hear the melody of birds chirping in the distance and the faint laughs of friendships strengthening, lifelong bonds forming. Only a short walk away, in the depths of the Rock, I sit in silence as I’m consumed by thoughts of deadlines, meetings, interviews, and impending doom.
The nature of time, paradoxically both fast and slow, is reminiscent of one of my all-time favorite books, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It is a story of two people who find beauty in exactly that: the feeling that time doesn’t seem to move at all, yet passes in a flash. As weeks, months, years and decades pass, they grow into individuals of their own with lives that couldn’t be more different, but they are always bonded by their deep-rooted love of video games. From childhood best friends building virtual worlds together to adults confronting the complexities of the real world, they wrestle with the changing tides of life in a way that encapsulates so much of the human experience. Their emotions are raw and organic, profoundly resonating. In some chapters, the plot feels stagnant and uninteresting. Other chapters are inundated with one heart-wrenching event after another, always in the most unexpected circumstances. Thinking about this book reminded me that moments, both good and bad, are fleeting. Even if the days seem to drag on, the weeks will fly by. As the weeks fly by, the months will vanish into thin air. Yesterday, I was a timid freshman having my first dinner at the Ratty on move-in day, and in a few weeks time I will (unofficially) be a senior buying furniture for my apartment in the fall.
The end of the school year is always a bittersweet moment: the recognition of another year of growth as we’ve navigated this microcosm of a world on College Hill. It’s the time for a tearful yet tender reflection upon the people we are now, the moments we’ve shared, and the memories still to come. In this liminal space between childhood and adulthood, we are told to ride the waves of college through all of its trials and tribulations. “Just figure it out.” No handbook, no checklist, no rules. In trying to “figure it out,” I’ve been searching for the comforting lullaby of the past and yearning for a reassuring promise from the future. In a life that isn’t mine anymore and a life that isn’t ready for me to see just yet. So the best I can do is live like lawn people and be in the present, where I can embrace every day like it’s a sunny day on the Main Green.
What sound do your shoes make when they hit the pavement?
Revving engines, the echoes of passing conversations, and the incessant honking at wandering pedestrians—on Thayer Street and even the Quiet Green, everything’s sounding off. These everyday sounds are part of a dissonant symphony we have free tickets to every day, an improvised performance we find ourselves in whenever we step outside. As mundane as the sound of tires rolling on the pavement is, there’s nuance in noticing. As often as we’re exposed to these sounds, how often do we hear them?
“I don’t know what to do when I leave my room and my AirPods are dead,” an editor of post- shared with me as we discussed this article. “I’m at a loss without my ten minutes of AirPod time.” I, too, am guilty of walking everywhere with wired headphones dangling from my ears, even if they’re not playing anything. It’s easier to block everything out sometimes, to focus on my breath and the sound of my footsteps. I don’t think it's a crime to walk around in headphones, but what do we miss out on when we tune out the sounds of the streets? Maybe the city offers a different playlist, one that requires just as much engagement as your Spotify Daily Mix. What does the song of the streets sound like, and how can we understand it?
To answer this question, I’m drawing on my limited music theory training from high school marching band. We learned about the balance pyramid—a triangle divided into four unequal parts stacked on top of one another. The balance pyramid isn’t to suggest hierarchy, but rather balance and proportion. It organizes and locates each part within the band to form a nice rounded sound. A brief lesson on the physics of
sound waves: lower-pitched tones have wider wavelengths. The balance pyramid helps us find the sweet spot where the wavelengths align, creating harmony and literally sonic vibrations. At the base of the pyramid is the bass. The bass line quite literally grounds the triangle and provides the structure for the rest of the sounds to balance on top of. It’s the deep, resonant pool that everything else swims around in. Jack Antonoff talks about the power of the bass in this live recording at Radio City Music Hall in 2023. A deep buzzing is filling the room: “Do you hear that low sound that feels like it's hugging you?” Sound can glue—it can envelop you.
Next are tenor and alto. Our band director was prone to metaphor, so to borrow from Mr. Felver, it’s the ice cream in the sundae—the creamy goodness within, the content, the whole of the thing. The order that the balance pyramid sets up asks each group to listen to the entirety of the band, giving special attention to play quietly enough as to hear below them and louder than what comes above. Again, the alto and tenor voices must listen to the deep resonance of the bass. To toot my own horn for a moment, I famously had great tone on the bass clarinet. When the band was losing our balance, Mr. Felver would bring us back to the deep bass line I was playing, and ask
that the sound of the band centers itself around my bass clarinet. Walking the urban soundscape requires the same levels of attention. What sounds are grounding me in this moment? And what are the sounds that float above me, on the top of the pyramid?
The sopranos make up the top of the pyramid and play the melody—that musical line stuck in your head. On your walk to class, it might be the fleeting sounds that come in quickly just to disappear, the sounds that rest on top of the balance pyramid of noise you’ve identified around you. The melody is the content of the conversations passing you by, the turning spokes of bicycle wheels, or bird chirps flying overhead. Mr. Felver asks me to listen in. Can you play quietly enough to hear them? And how does the melody fit within the bass line?
Like that ice cream sundae, the point is that every sound has its (equally important!) place.
But maybe the sounds of the street don’t work together in harmony. The music drifting out of Caliente’s and Tribos can sound a little dissonant sometimes. The cars lined up on Thayer honk in an endless feedback loop. Then there’s the terrifying, thundering footfalls of a group of high schoolers walking down the street. When sounds become too much, and the urge to plug our headphones back in overcomes us, perhaps understanding how
each sound does or does not fit in its place can be a way to grapple with the world around us. A “bad” sound is never isolated. Locating it within the world of sounds around you, reminds us of the larger picture—of sounds deep and constant that ground us in the present moment. Understanding the balance pyramid means understanding your footfalls and your heartbeat work in concert with even the discordant sounds. The group of high schoolers will pass. Your heart will keep beating. A singular voice returned to its context takes its place among a symphony of sounds.
“In order to blend and balance in band, you must listen to your section and the entire band and make adjustments in real-time.” I found that quote on a 5th grade band website (thank you Mrs. Goldstein!). On my way to class today, I tried to do just that. In front of me, the finance bro hums a dull drone on the phone: “venture capital market start-up.” He drags his Vans on the sidewalk a little as he walks. Across the street, a woman carries a box full of bouquet centerpieces, their glasses clinking. A couple passes by, and I listen to how their conversation crescendos as they near, and fades away as they pass me. A siren wails in the distance. Today I took the time to listen, and the sounds were a little kinder to me. For the rest of my walk to class, I took my steps in time with the unheard rhythm of petals falling on the grass.
eat your words
big post- crossword 1
by Lily Coffman, AJ Wu, Will Hassett, Ishan Khurana
Across
Annual poker championship held in Nevada, abbr.
Assert, without proof
Data visualization technique with varying degrees of color intensity
Bits and ____
Latin for "from what is earlier"
1995 hit by Alans Morissette, "You ____ Know"
Description of music in a quote by Arthur 30 Schopenhauer ... or a hint to 5- Down and 17-, 27- and 43- Across Yummy sauce to put on your Cantonese BBQ Pork
“You’ve lived it, it’s been so full of knowing, and you’ve been so, so lucky. Everyone you’ve learnt and loved is yours to keep.”
—Aditi Marshan, “A Chronological Guide to Endless Joy” 04.28.23
“So instead I will run toward you, now and forever, and I will refuse, and refuse, and refuse goodbye.”jarring feeling.”
—Kaitlan Bui, “Regret is a Four Letter Word” 04.29.22