Post- 02/15/18

Issue

In This Alternatives to Apple's Airpods Pia Mileaf-Patel 4

Love According to Hollywood and Reality

bianca stelian 3

Defining "Cushty"

CHARLIE STEWART 2

JULIAN TOWERS 5

Cathartic Trash

postCover by Lisa Fasol

FEB 16

VOL 21 —

ISSUE 3

NARRATIVE

Defining "Cushty"

Beans On Toast and being British the other day someone messaged me asking what “cushty” meant.

I’d finished a sentence with the phrase “so that’s all cushty,” which means roughly the same thing as “oh bonza” or “fabby dabby,” which are fun ways of saying “good” while also reminding people that I’m British lest they expect me to develop some sort of actual personality on the spot. Their reply was “huh?” which means “huh?” I did my best to explain.

The trouble is, “cushty” doesn’t just mean good, it means good in a sort of relaxed way, a comfortable, easy-going “good” like everything will work itself out. Saving a child from a horrible car wreck is good, finding out his mum is the CEO of a successful takeout franchise and wants to reward you with a lifelong pass for free chicken tikka masala is cushty.

Suddenly distracted from my typical midnight pastimes like worrying or masturbating, I set out to find a sufficient definition.

If you search the word “cushty” on Spotify, you will happen upon a 2017 album called Cushty by the artist Beans On Toast. It’s an anti-Brexit protest album in the “drunk-folk” genre, a genre seemingly created and exclusively performed by Beans On Toast. To my delight I found out that Beans On Toast isn’t a band, but a man—real name Jay McCallister.

Cushty, his ninth studio album, contains songs like “The House that Austerity Built,” “The Ignorant Englishman,” and “I Think Everybody Should be Terrified.” It doesn’t get much more British than a man named Beans on Toast quietly singing in baffled horror about economic anxiety based on isolationist regret. When I searched McCallister on Google images, I found that he looks exactly like what you might expect beans on toast would look like if turned into a human man by an unimaginative child’s wish. It is hard to articulate the joy I felt in that moment. Disappointingly, however, the word “cushty” is not used once in any of his lyrics; I

couldn’t find the true meaning of “cushty” through context clues alone.

Once I’d resumed my hunt for the true meaning of “cushty,” I discovered that the word has its recent roots in Cockney slang. I’m from South London, but while all Cockneys are Londoners, not all Londoners are Cockneys. I was born in Croydon, while a true Cockney is a working-class Londoner born within

Letter from the Editor

It doesn’t get much more British than a man named Beans on Toast quietly singing in baffled horror about economic anxiety based on isolationist regret.

Dear Readers,

hearing distance of the St Mary-le-Bow church in the East End. Think Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins, and if at all possible forget the attempts of Dick Van Dyke, Mike Myers, and Don Cheadle. Due to the massive hike in central London housing prices within my lifetime, there are few true Cockneys under the age of 40. Despite that, Only Fools and Horses, the 1981–1996 sitcom about the get-richquick schemes of three Cockney geezers, is credited with preserving some Cockney words among a wider British audience, including some of my other favorite terms, like “plonker,” meaning idiot, and “lovely jubbly,” meaning lovely, but with more jubbliness involved.

Cockney should not be confused with the United Kingdom’s thousands of other accents and dialects, which just off the top of my head includes Geordie, Mancunian, Brummie, Estuary, Scouse,

Pop-Punk Bands That Are Next Year's Best Picture Nominees

We have a new redesign. This time, it's

family. I believe it better represents the

involuntary, and we’re doing everything we

experimentation with form and forum for

can to make it temporary. I believe in post-

student voices that this section aspires to

as a valuable print platform for our writers,

promote. Love it? Hate it? Want to write for

illustrators, designers and reader. This issue, if

us? E-mail post@browndailyherald.com and

2. Eat Me Raw

stripped of a few pages, is no exception.

let us know.

3. Falling in Reverse

As they say, every time a door closes, a

I want to thank 128 for their bottomless

window opens, and we indeed have something

support, the layout team for redesigning our

to celebrate. We are waving goodbye to

issue in 24 hours, and you for helping us keep

Lifestyle and welcoming Narrative into the

on keepin’ on.

2 post–

1. The Dead Milkmen

4.

Forever the Sickest Kids

5. Zolof the Rock and Roll Destroyer 6. Kids in the Way 7. Lucky Boys Confusion

Happy Long Weekend!

Saanya

8. You Me at Six 9. Screeching Weasel 10. Something Corporate

Illustrated by Lillian Xie

By charlie stewart

NARRATIVE

Love According to Hollywood and Reality

They grow closer. She makes him dinner, and in that moment he realizes he loves her.

They grow closer. She makes him dinner, and in that moment he realizes he doesn’t like caramelized onions.

"You've got nothing to lose."

By bianca stelian

Boy meets girl. In a cute way, like they reach for the same avocado at Whole Foods, or she accidentally takes his cappuccino at Starbucks and their hands meet. Overpriced edible goods are crucial. He asks her out, and even though that big work presentation is coming up, she says yes.

“You’ve got nothing to lose,” her devastatingly attractive yet platonic male sidekick says.

Boy meets girl. It’s not cute, because she’s mindlessly swiping on Tinder while microwaving a Lean Cuisine. She sends him a GIF, and he responds with another GIF, and their conversation is GIF after GIF until he decides to break the pattern. His sarcasm doesn’t always register over text, but she decides to go out with him anyway.

“Don’t get your hopes up for a boy from the internet,” her mom says.

They go on a date. The connection is instant—their brunch turns into a full-day affair, somehow visiting every farmers market in the tri-state area without having to stop to pee. But that big work presentation is coming up, so she departs. They go home to their respective roommates and declare they’ve found “the one.”

They go on a date. They don’t connect immediately, likely because she’s 20 minutes late, having gone to the wrong restaurant because he had misspelled his suggestion over text. Conversation flows eventually, though—they bond over their shared allergy to shellfish, and he shows her cool pictures from his trip to the Grand Canyon, and she likes that he doesn’t talk about it for the whole dinner. He walks her back to her apartment and kisses her on the forehead, which he thinks is sweet but she thinks is too paternal. Her roommate is asleep.

They open up to each other. She breaks down about her big work presentation. He consoles her, telling her he will be there for her and plans to help her rehearse every day.

They open up to each other. He admits his hypochondria and how he thinks he has arthritis.

She tries to stop cracking her knuckles for him.

She still does it, but he appreciates the effort.

Things take a turn for the worse. The night before her big work presentation, he won’t pick up his phone. She calls his best friend, who says he’s at pasta with Margot.

Things take a turn for the worse. She sees a picture of him on Facebook posing with another girl. She checks out the girl’s profile and sees past pictures of them together.

Still, she perseveres. Aided by the no-nonsense support of her sidekick, she does her big work presentation, and it goes well. He shows up at the end to congratulate her, saying that he didn’t help her the night before because he wanted her to find the strength within. They embrace and declare their love for one another. Due to a writer’s oversight, “pasta with Margot” goes unexplained.

Still, she perseveres. As in, she texts him to ask about the girl, and he explains that she’s his cousin. He sends her a heart-eyed emoji to express his thanks for her understanding.

They live happily ever after.

They break up a few months later when he falls asleep during sex.

He texts her the day after to see her again. They begin dating regularly, and she appreciates his gestures of affection, ranging from a casual run-in with his cousin Usher to having family friend Gordon Ramsay cook them beef Wellington. She realizes that her big work presentation might not be the most important thing in the world.

He texts her the day after to see her again.

She doesn’t like that he said he wanted to “hang out. “What is this, a playdate?” she asks her roommate, who doesn’t really care—but agrees. Soon, they see each other more and more, and when her mom asks if she’s with anyone, she says, “I think so,” and listens to her mom deliver the classic rant about labels.

"My Bumble be a buzzin'."

"My pussy ain't a balanced diet, my friends."

"My existence is a social blunder." february 16, 2018 3

Illustrated by Pia Mileaf-Patel

West-Country, South Wales, North Wales, MidNorth Wales, and drunk. The origins of this dialectal diversity can often be traced to immigration to Britain. During the 19th century, the East End saw significant Romani settlement, and with it, several new editions to what would become the cockney dialect. One such contribution was the word “kushti.”

The Romani people began their migration from North-West India, the modern Punjab state, nearly 1,500 years ago. Due to the diasporic and insular nature of their often-persecuted community, the Romani language has remained remarkably true to its roots. Before claims of Romani ethnic links to the Indian subcontinent were corroborated by recent DNA evidence, they had been long theorized due to strong linguistic links between the Romani language and both Hindi and Persian.

“Kushti” means “good.” Not only that, but the word’s use is specifically linked to bonding between friends, implying a comfortable environment, a bit like saying “that’s great, mate” or, if you’re American, “that’s hella swella, my fella.” Having made this discovery, I at once felt a sense of undeserved accomplishment and entirely deserved uselessness, considering that “good in a sort of relaxed way” was the definition I hazarded back in paragraph two. But it was already 2 a.m.; no going back now.

“Kushti” entered England through the Romani language, but it didn’t stay there. Instead, it became part of what is know called Angloromani, a form of dialect broadly using English grammar and structure but with many Romani words. In Romani it’s called “Poggaddi Jibb,” meaning “the broken language.” A few such words have entered American English via Britain as well, like “nark” for an informer, “pal” for a friend, “shiv” from “chivomengo,” meaning knife, and “lollipop,” originally a combination of the words for candy and apple. There are even some seemingly nonsense words that have Romani origins. One Romani nursery rhyme begins “yekeri, akairi, you kair an,” meaning “First—here—let us begin.” This might not ring a bell, until you hear its English corruption: “hickory dickory dock.” Other Romani words that have stayed in British English through similar integration include “chav,” usually meaning a working class young person in sportswear (we’ve had a long time to let our prejudices get awfully specific) which comes from the Romani word “chavi” meaning child, and the word “minge,” which you can look up for yourself.

I think the word “cushty” deserves recognition for its complexity. It’s a reminder that ideas of Britishness, and indeed singular cultures of any nation, are bollocks. There’s no such thing as an English word, only words that somehow ended up in England along the way. I know that sounds a bit sentimental, but I’ve been listening to Beans On Toast’s Brexit protest album on repeat for nearly three hours now, and it’s getting to me a little bit. To quote a wise-ish man who may or may not refer to himself as a legume and cooked bread-based dish, “I’m an Englishman, so what would I know, but we’ve got the same bullshit going on at home.”

NARRATIVE

created By Pia Mileaf-Patel

4 post–

LIFESTYLE

Cathartic Trash

Make Some Space for the New Justin Timberlake Album written By julian towers – illustration by erica lewis

february 16, 2018 5

ARTS&CULTURE

F

un times in post-internet malaise: The big-pop album is not out for another week, in fact, it’s entombed in a miniUSB under Fort Knox, so while you wait, here’s all the disqualifying backlash strung together in a Twitter moment. Excited for Reputation? The roll-out’s been a misread of third-wave feminism.

Taylor’s canceled. Younger Now sounds… interesting? Unexamined whiteness returns to its roots. Boycott it. No joke, the night before the Justin Timberlake album even dropped, Pitchfork had already put up a feature telling its readers not to listen to it. If you aren’t in the business of writing about music, and are under no obligation to clothe your family with hot-takes, you might wonder why your reaction is so important that the media would leave you untrusted with it.

Thankfully, bad art will always be bad art; the first transgression, the one everyone will register, will likely be aesthetic, and hence, unavoidable. That is, a wackass lead single— always a welcome democratization. In recent memory, the unsettling hostage duress code of Weezer’s “Feels like Summer,” the clueless apologia of Eminem’s “Untouchable,” and the overstuffed-to-unfinished chorus bars of Katy Perry’s “Chained to the Rhythm” (sorry, I mean

entirely of that absurd album title. That, as well as the equally absurd way it was announced, via an earnest video that dipped future-sex JT into scenes of unexpected and ill-fitting rural machismo. This was to be… country music? The narrative snapped into place with the release of the first single, an amusingly industrial Detroit funk riff called “Filthy” (when all one had was a tracklist, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was about rolling around in the mud with some pigs). Namely, Timberlake was skipping blithely between black and white musical spheres, retaining the former only inasmuch as it lent this new “rootsier” endeavor crossover appeal, and getting away with it under a patina of goyish caucasian privilege. Which, I mean, yes, that’s true, good job, but also have you heard Madonna’s Music?

The album where she took a break from swiping Bowery Disco to put on a cowboy hat and ask us if we “liked to boogie woogie?” Careers built upon an appropriation of black culture have unthinkingly diverted back to a foundational whiteness before, and they will again. That sucks, but preemptively declaring Man of the Woods the “poster record” for racial second-use only serves to shroud the album’s more singular and intriguing awfulness—which, in retrospect, was also predicted in its announcement.

Because if your vested interest in Justin

Indeed, Man of the Woods is the sound of Timberlake’s insincerity catching up with him, years of pretty boy coasting changed overnight into midlife panic.

“DANCEDANCEDANC-”) have all detonated as equal opportunity landmines, making cheerfully old-fashioned dive bombs on plebeian ear-buds before cultural curators were given the chance to contextualize the little bastards away.

That relationship—direct between a musician and a listener—shouldn’t come only once an album cycle. After all, pop stars, in brand and physicality, carry a closer association with their art than anyone else, and much of our delight in listening to pop music therefore comes in measuring their totemic, larger-than-life standing in mass culture. But if we want to keep that culture alive we have to keep listening to the albums released, and the packaged dismissals we see during pre-release cycles risk minimizing such a healthy plurality. So it was that the windswept, barren slipstream between January and February brought us an album rollout that was widely dismissed before any consumer had heard more than a single track: Justin Timberlake’s aforementioned Man of the Woods.

Don’t be dissuaded—the album is quite dreadful.

But it’s also dreadful in ways that are exciting to investigate, nourishing to consider, and more nuanced than the anti-hype would suggest.

For Man of the Woods, the writing on the wall came early, and it may very well have consisted

Timberlake extends beyond his vulnerability to woke takedowns, then you know the leading facet of his career to date has been his incredible insincerity.

That is, as a performer. I’m sure JT is a hell of a nice guy (or whatever), but like a lot of early 2000s pop dinosaurs, he rarely comes on like he believes any of the words he’s singing. Whereas his contemporaries often possessed a kitschy self-awareness of this fact (recall that Britney Spears played a fembot in the third Austin Powers), Timberlake’s frequent aspirations toward good taste and respectability saw him working with increasingly forward-thinking productions (from Timbaland, The Neptunes, etc) whose robotic efficiency matched the hollow pastiche of his voice. So a stripped back country album about who Timberlake is? Surely Man of The Woods was to be the final chapter in the violent and exciting death throes of the pop-culture 2000s?

Indeed, Man of the Woods is the sound of Timberlake’s insincerity catching up with him, years of pretty boy coasting changed overnight into midlife panic. Taken as a whole, the album satisfies as a karmic deep-dive into toxic male insecurity— inevitable, horrific, and blissfully unintentional— with the rugged iconography functioning as the sad and desperate counterpoint. Just look at the lyrics. “Supplies” creates a last man and woman on earth scenario wherein JT’s genitalia (his “supli-

ie-ie-s,” as it were) are the only hope for the latter’s salvation. “Say Something,” meanwhile, pressures him for a response to past “transgressions,” before the superstar shrewdly decides in the outro that “sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all.” In “The Hard Stuff,” we learn that it’s the crappy, hard-won relationships that ultimately mean the most, but Timberlake still makes sure to preemptively secure a guarantee from his loved one that she’ll “forgive the things in this life that I have to learn” anyway. And sitting at the center, a smoking gun—a spoken word interlude wherein Jessica Biel directly equates her sense of womanhood with her belonging to Timberlake, to her being “his.” Whether Biel actually wrote and internalized those lines is beside the point.

Because it’s an element the artist has incorporated into his art, we’re here to analyze its intention, and the ultimate takeaway is that this is Timberlake constructing scenarios where he can appear a substantial, sincere person.

Naturally, his desperation is reflected in the record’s sounds, which are wonderfully flailing and rudderless. Simply going through the tracklist once is a dizzying sensation, with much of the second half blending together—an undifferentiated blur of digital acoustics spooling out over rubbery, tap pad percussion. For comparison, imagine six straight tracks of “Shape of You.” Though that isn’t to suggest the record is front-loaded, either. Coffeeshop playlist entrant “Morning Light” is barely there, seemingly built entirely around handclaps and sustained syllables (“youuuuu,” “dieeeeee”), and “Wave” is a wholesome call-and-response that never generates enough interest to imagine that anyone might bother learning the lyrics. It’s a tacky, garish listen, but it becomes extremely reassuring when measured up against the worrying trends of our current moment (such as, I don’t know, hollow nostalgia acts bogarting undeserved Grammys). Flashy mimics are people too. One day they will desire more than they have, they will reach uncertainly for authenticity, and it will destroy their back-catalog. We’ll look back on Futuresex/ Lovesounds, and all we’ll remember is that Beyonce’s B’Day came out a week earlier.

Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain Feature

Copy

Managing Editor

Chief Alicia DeVos

Jennifer Osborne

Zander Kim

Section Editors

Amanda Ngo

Anita Sheih Kathy Luo

Design Grace Yoon

Narrative

Sarah Saxe

Managing Editors Annabelle Woodward

Layout

Pia Mileaf-Patel

Chief Livia Mucciolo

Section Editors

Julia Kim

Divya Santhanam

Gabriela Gil

Arts & Culture

Media

Managing Editor

Head Claribel Wu

Josh Wartel

Samantha Haigood

Section Editors

“Those lanyards are nice.

You know what I have?

A real Brown ID.” —Kathy Luo, "Stacks Shelver" 2.23.17

6 post–

Celina Sun

Illustration

Marly Toledano

Head Doris Liou

Julian Castronovo

Want to be involved?

Email post@browndailyherald.com!