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In This Issue

A Family of Artists

Danielle Emerson 4

Starless Nights

Ethan Taswell 2 Georgeara Castaneda 4

Breaking the Silence Julian Towers 5

Lost in The Groove

postCover by Brenda Rodriguez

APR 12

VOL 23 —

ISSUE 22

FEATURE

Starless Nights

On Light Pollution and How to See in the Dark

By Ethan Taswell Illustrated by Ashley Hernandez

I

saw stars, and I mean really saw stars, for the first time when I was 18 years old. And no, I’m not from New York City or Hong Kong or some other neon-lit “City That Never Sleeps,” but a suburb in Maryland where a cursory glance at a clear night sky reveals Orion’s belt, a flickering yellow dot I squint at before realizing it’s an airplane, and little else. The background of the night’s sky is not the inky pitch it should be, but rather a warm, diluted glow, on most nights a dull orange, on others a pallid green. It’s light pollution: that ubiquitous yet littlediscussed phenomenon keeping some of us up at night. Literally.

My case is in no way unique—two-thirds of humanity lives in these conditions; one-fifth can’t see any evidence of the Milky Way at all. On the long

list of environmental problems, light pollution is a relative newcomer. For most of human history, a lack of electricity meant no night lights, and so no light pollution. To give some further perspective: If you stood two or three miles outside of London on a typical night in 1800s (at the time the world’s largest city with around one million residents), you wouldn’t be able to see any evidence of the city at all. Tonight, you could drive 100 miles away from Salt Lake City (also home to around one million) to a desolate salt marsh in the middle of nowhere and still see the city’s lights grazing the night’s horizon.

What happened in between? Let’s start by giving a hearty thanks to Thomas Edison. Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not invent the first light bulb. That would’ve been, depending on how

you define the device, Alessandro Volta in 1800, Humphry Davy in 1802, any number of British inventors of the 1840s and 1850s, or perhaps even Canadians Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans a few decades later. Nevertheless, in 1879 Edison finally made the light bulb practical (i.e. commercial), using a carbon filament to create a relatively long-lasting incandescent bulb, and the technology exploded from there. As Alex Goody put it, it was “a transformation of culture at a fundamental level.”

A century later, the crew of Apollo 17 took the first full image of a daylit Earth from space and dubbed it the Blue Marble. But those crewmembers and today’s astronauts no longer see a Black Marble by night; the East Coast of the United States, like

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Mid-April feels like an in-between time. We’re back from break, mostly settled in, but reading period and finals are still a few safe weeks away from popping up on our Google Calendars. Some days feel warm enough to lie on the green and consider the possibility of sunscreen, but my winter coat still waits at the front of my closet—just in case...

Waking up tells me something about where I am each semester. I always wake up to the first couple weeks full of questions, outfits pre-planned and revised, readings stapled on my desk. Finals and midterm seasons wake me up fifteen minutes early, full of nervous energy and unfinishable checklists—without time to think too hard about anything. But in mid-April, I wake up groggy: forgetting the day of the week, weighing whether I should start that paper that’s due in a week and a half, guessing if the weather will trend high 40s or low 50s by the end of the day.

So as you wrap up this in-between week, consider taking a few minutes to read about in-between times. This week’s feature seeks to see through the light pollution

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that too-often obscures night-sky views, situated between humans, animals, and the Milky Way. In one narrative, the author describes her family’s rich history of traditional Native American art practices: passed between generations, exchanged among neighboring tribes and community members. Another story recounts the writer’s evolving experience of chronic pain: an illness narrative that she has carried between home and Brown, with shifting access to insured care. Between existential crises, our Arts & Culture piece punctuates a semester of questioning with the musical tracks of Fela Kuti.

Of course, I’m looking forward to those weeks when I can wear shorts without an extra layer and eat my Ratty dinners out of a to-go box on Wriston. (Plus, get ready for post-’s Spring Weekend magazine edition!) But I’m glad we have these April weeks, before Spring Weekend hits and finals fear is too jittery to ignore. In-betweens can be times to notice where you are, times to fall back on semester-long routines, or just the opposite. Time to pause and read...before you’re on to the next thing.

Liza

Narrative Section Editor

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Nagini The Incredibly Deadly Viper Nicki Minaj's anaconda Kaa Medusa Brutus Crotalus durissus The one in my boot Python (Hello, World!)

Julian Towers

a string of Christmas lights, is an unbroken chain of glowing cities tracing I-95’s path. The whole of Europe is awash in a firefly-like twinkle. There’s also no night in Japan—the California-sized island is entirely covered by an incandescent sheet.

Lights aren’t confined to cities, either. According to “Our Vanishing Night,” a popular 2008 National Geographic article, “In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.” Darkness, apparently, is only left in a few far-off places, less urbanized countries like the Central African Republic, often cited as the world’s darkest nation.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is not quite so dark, but with the exception of a few spots in Arizona, it’s pretty good for the continental United States I’m 17, out West on summer vacation, and I’ve just realized that my entire knowledge of astronomy is based on pictures I’ve marveled at in nature magazines, the same way I only know what a T. rex looks like because I’ve seen its fossils and artistic renderings.

Each night I’m there I check the sky with the help of an astronomical map telling me where to focus to find the glittering arc of the Milky Way. Each night I charge my camera in the hopes of capturing the constellations. Outside, it’s cloudy: back to bed.

Wake. Vacation. Check for stars: cloudy. Repeat.

For a week I stumble onto the inn balcony to find Jackson’s lights bouncing off the accumulated gray ceiling so the whole valley is illuminated from above and below. But the night I fly home into Reagan National Airport, the sky is clear, and I see Pierre L’Enfant’s city plan spelled out in boulevards of glaring office buildings and the pinpricks of light that mark traffic circles. An alternating pulse of green and red leaps out from the top of the Washington Monument.

Some cities have made attempts to counteract this nighttime brightening. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the only irregular flashes of light come from shooting stars. In 2001, the International DarkSky Association recognized Flagstaff as the world’s first International Dark Sky City. In an effort to protect the scientific integrity of the city’s Lowell Observatory from seeping light during the middle of the 20th century, the city enacted sensible regulations: Offices had to shut lights off at night, and reflectors bounced excess streetlamp wattage toward the ground.

This was back when scientists thought light pollution only affected astronomers, and the public had never even heard of the phenomenon. But most cities in 2019 are nothing like Flagstaff. In Chicago, for example, thousands of Victorian-style street lamps spill their contents upward where the light waves mix with the halogens, floodlights, and LEDs of countless skyscrapers. The result is a nebulous beacon sprawling across Lake Michigan.

Fourteen thousand years ago, when the Ice Age’s glaciers retreated and left the Great Lakes sitting in their wake, when there were no compact fluorescent bulbs or gas lamps or campfires (only bioluminescence), the view of the night sky would have been that of the unadulterated cosmos. In fact, this was how it was up until the last century

or so. Consequently, for the last 3.8 billion years, excluding this recent change (which is a mere sliver in the timeline of the history of the Earth), life on this planet has evolved in concert with natural patterns of day and night. In nearly every biological process and activity necessary for survival—feeding, mating, migrating, hunting, spawning—the animal is dependent on the cues of light and darkness.

Already beleaguered by humanity in the forms of habitat loss, ocean acidification, and global warming, species around the world have found their circadian rhythms disrupted by light pollution. Over 100 species of coral in the Great Barrier Reef that normally spawn after each October or November’s full moon are now producing their sperm and eggs too late—or not at all—because of overflowing lights from Australia’s urban coastal cities. This mistimed spawning results in perpetually fewer offspring.

For newborn sea turtles, which are hatched high up on beaches, light pollution proves especially confounding. The hatchling turtles are biologically coded to crack out of their eggs and seek the bar of shining light low on the horizon—what used to be the moon’s reflection on the ocean’s waves.

Unfortunately, that glowing horizon line is now often the nearby boardwalk. Vulnerable hatchlings march off in the wrong direction of the water and are prone to exhaustion and, unless they fancy margaritas, dehydration. Those that survive make an easier meal for predators.

Light pollution also negatively affects species of zooplankton, countless bugs, and migratory birds.

What you probably didn’t realize—maybe because you don’t look in the mirror every morning and

Flick off the lights, or find a dark spot, and the night sky I stare at is the same one my ancestors saw from a boat crossing the Atlantic. The same one my ancestors’ ancestors prayed and worked and ate and shat and fought and loved under—and so on before them all the way back to the first homo sapiens, an ordinary species who by some fluke of evolutionary roulette distinguished itself from all the other animals under the moon and stars by assigning patterns and meaning and stories to those far-awaybut-oh-so-close celestial balls of gas and dust.

Light pollution is not like other types of pollution. Litter takes time to be picked up and shipped off to become litter elsewhere. Chemicals need to be cleaned up from ecosystems or given thousands of years to radioactively break down.

The magic of light pollution is that it can disappear instantly; all we need to do is be more mindful, throw on a lampshade, and dim the lights. I can tell you now, the view won’t disappoint if we do.

I saw stars for the first time in my life—I mean, finally saw the Milky Way—a few Augusts ago from a pullover on the road in Southeastern Maine. The best stargazing in the world is in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where high elevations, cool temperatures with no humidity, and few people combine to make the perfect recipe for clear skies. This, a gravel parking lot by one of Maine’s well-trafficked coastal summer campsites, was not. Car headlights poked their way through knobby pine trunks to shine periodically into my eyes. A distant sentinel lighthouse blinked its formal hello every five seconds, which the black ripples of the North Atlantic scattered peacefully.

And the white beam of my dad’s headlamp bounced

The magic of light pollution is that it can disappear instantly; all we need to do is be more mindful, throw on a lampshade, and dim the lights. I can tell you now, the view won’t disappoint if we do. process your reflection as a Great Ape in business attire—is that light pollution is probably adversely affecting your own health, too. Just like any other animal, be they Loggerheads or Sapsuckers or singlecelled microscopic organisms floating helplessly in lakes, your body is designed to operate under the pretense of light days and dark nights. Alter that balance, and your internal clock gets out of sync, causing hormone levels to shift to irregular marks.

Specifically, current research (of which there isn’t much yet) shows significant influence on melatonin production, which can in turn harm nerve tissue.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when or why I became interested in the night sky. Maybe it was when my elementary school class went to a planetarium.

Maybe it was when Pluto was demoted, and I started reading about what the heck a dwarf planet was.

Maybe it was when I first saw a Hubble photograph of the corner of the galaxy we live in. In my mind, though, it’s none of these. I’m hardwired to look up at the stars in awe the same way we all are; it’s the same reason nearly every religion’s gods come down from the sky, and even if the ether doesn’t determine our horoscopal fate, it still holds a power over us.

sporadically downward as he picked his way over sea-sculpted rocks. I had kept him up that night in my ongoing effort to see stars, and while every other vacationer in Vacationland was probably long asleep, we left our rental and drove to the most remote peninsula we could find.

If, on this stretch of road by the sea in Maine, you crane your neck back until you hear your vertebrae uncomfortably protest and then look up at the night sky, this is what you see: a Jackson Pollock splattering of brilliant whites and yellows and reds and blues against the blackness. Then—if, like me, you let the black hole in the middle of your eyes dilate ever wider—you see those glowing dots start to unhinge themselves from their assigned seats, and the whole canvas does a flickering shimmy. And if, like me, you’ve lived your whole still-short life without ever seeing this universal show of electromagnetic radiation, you stand there gazing up for a while without noticing the mosquito dessert-ing on your bicep or hearing the tractortrailer on the nearby highway, because all those little things on Earth don’t matter when you get to look beyond.

“Would you like the patriarchy to open your bag of chips for you?"

“The fortune in the fortune cookie said, ‘It’s a good time for old tasks.’ I say that’s not a fortune; that’s an attack.” april 12, 2019 3

NARRATIVE

A Family of Artists

Learning from Native American Art Venues

by Danielle Emerson Illustrated by Linda Fry As a young girl, I loved laying under my grandmother’s work table, watching as she molded life out of clay. Diné Bizaad poured out of the radio, the Navajo language mixing with the faint scent of wet dirt to fill the room. Sensing my wonder, my grandmother would invite me to stand beside her. I’d shape miniature sheep while she molded Native men and women around hogans. I’d sneak portions of clay from her table into my mouth, reveling in its fresh taste. She’d playfully slap my hand, stifling laughter.

Years later, I traveled with her as we took our work to sell at various art festivals. Side by side, we stood.

As we exchanged creative practices with onlookers and fellow artists, our smiles were never restrained.

We connected to our traditions and celebrated the cultures of other tribal artists across New Mexico and Arizona.

Artwork has been a part of my family for generations. My paternal great-grandmother wove rugs from sheep wool, cleaning the freshly cut hair, brushing out stubborn clumps, and boiling special herbs to create dye. She sold her rugs to uphold Diné tradition—and to feed her children. Inspired by my great-grandmother’s traditional weaving, my paternal grandmother pursued a career in clay work.

My father and uncle followed her example as well; one became a sculptor, the other a painter. Under my grandmother’s influence, I took up landscape painting. Through art, my family and I capture both modern and traditional perspectives of Diné life on the reservation.

My family has participated in a variety of Native American art venues, including Farmington’s annual Totah Festival: Indian Market and Pow Wow, where Native American artists ranging from woodcarvers to jingle dancers share their talents over frybread and mutton stew. There, I met dozens of Native artisans from various backgrounds and cultures. I watched as children chased each other—tumbling through the grass, jumping over rocks, collecting rogue sticks. I felt at home among the circle of drummers who sang our traditional songs, their voices carrying across

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the courtyard. It’s here that we basked in a feeling of pride and acceptance. We learned from each other and helped one another grow.

These art festivals taught me that everyone has their own story to tell. As illustrated by the myriad of art genres displayed annually, every attendee has something to share, whether traditional or contemporary. These events bring my community together, allowing us to recall our tribulations while celebrating how far we’ve come. We preserve and express our voices in clay, wool, wood, music, and words. Generation after generation, the medium of art that my family creates changes; we are painters, cooks, weavers, storytellers, sculptors, and dancers.

Though our mediums shift, the purpose behind them remains: pursuing creative expression, encouraging individuality, and owning our stories with undeniable pride.

Every individual carries their own narrative, possesses their own connection to culture. My father creates personified crows, my uncle multicolored horses, my grandmother miniature sheep, and I create landscapes of orange sunsets and mesas. My father feels close ties to the sacred nature of the crow, a good omen tied to the spiritual connection between the Navajo people and animals. My uncle admires the horse’s perseverance and strength. My grandmother respects the cultural traditions of everyday Diné life: shearing sheep, making frybread, caring for livestock, and weaving magnificent rugs. And I rely on the land of Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Navajo, for spiritual and personal comfort—even as I attend college on the east coast. We each possess our own connection to art, and everyone has a right to share that connection in any way they desire: among family and friends, in statewide art festivals, studios and gallery spaces. No one can take this away.

My great-grandmother’s art started a chain reaction. Without that first spark, my family history would have been altered drastically, my perception of the world shifted. My great-grandmother’s continued artistic passion to artistic passion helped her succeed, and her creativity helps me—and others like me—thrive in an ever-changing world full of new perspectives and experiences. Embracing a community of art invited me to share my own story and the story of my people. Our art brought us together, just as art brings together communities across the world. Attending art festivals didn’t just expand my knowledge of the world beyond the reservation—it gave me a better understanding of life within.

Breaking the Silence

Ibuprofen, Physical Therapy, and Generational Pain

By Georgeara Castaneda Illustrated by katie fliegel Ibuprofen is the duct tape of the medicinal world (that and Vicks VapoRub). I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with empty bottles of Advil and prescription-grade ibuprofen for my chronic pain for a portion of my life. And despite greater medical access since packing up my things and moving across the country, the once-magical effects of a 200mg Advil tablet have steadily withered into nothing for me. Back home, the pain was bearable. Now, even four pills at a time do nothing to assuage the all-too-familiar aches in my shoulders, chest, and back.

So, I’ve learned to deal with it.

It must be a family thing—the pain and the frustration. Be it my grandmother’s knees, my mother’s back, or my brother’s entire body, pain seems to come with the territory. Although some of us are better at brushing it aside and getting on with our day, I haven’t always experienced that luck. Instead, I’ve dealt with my physical health gradually deteriorating until I’ve been unable to move out of bed due to the immense pain in my shoulders.

I’m not exactly sure what prompted me to seek help. Perhaps it was the unbearable throbs that kept me awake at night. I was already plenty stressed during my first year at Brown, but I was determined to do something about it—or at least, find a more effective alternative to Advil.

The first time, the doctor said my pain was from stress—yoga and “not being stressed” would alleviate it. Despite my insistence that this problem ran considerably deeper than just stress, the doctor assured me that a routine of yoga would help me tremendously. And with that, I waited for over six months before mentioning my pain again.

The second time, a different doctor referred me to physical therapy and gave me muscle relaxants to help me deal with the pain. Had I not been at Brown, my lack of insurance would have ushered my pain into silence and forcefully swept the constant discomfort I faced under the rug.

It was weird. The first night, I didn’t feel my shoulders tense or the usual ache radiating down my spine. I had become so accustomed to the pain that I felt naked, even vulnerable, without it. My pain had morphed from a nuisance into a twisted safety blanket—its harsh arms would envelop me and keep me in its grasp, regardless of where or how I was. Even at Brown, where I was aimlessly afloat in an unfamiliar world and trying to find some sort of direction, my physical pain was the unyielding part of my life; it was the strange stability during the relentless weeks of chaos.

Unfortunately, the muscle relaxants turned out to be a temporary fix for a chronic problem.

But the weeks I spent in therapy taught me how skewed my perception of reality was and still is.

While I had grown used to my pain, I was reminded that most people are not consumed by daily aches that inhibit their ability to do certain things. I was reminded that most students here are not barred from physicians due to income or are entirely unaware of the magic of physical therapy for those who need it.

Attending my bi-weekly therapy sessions

ARTS & CULTURE

introduced me to the handful of Brown students also taking advantage of the service. I felt awkward, as if I was taking space I didn’t earn or deserve. I never knew what physical therapy entailed or what it were until I was a senior in high school, but there I was, surrounded by patients that were as young as three years old.

However, what hurts most is not the occasional sharp jolts that travel down my spine or the dull throb in my lower back. What hurts most is the realization that my pain is only a symptom of something much bigger than myself. The reality is that this is not a temporary or minor condition but one that permeates every aspect of my life—from budgeting money so I can afford copays to shifting the way I sit in class to mitigate my pain.

It hurts, deeper than the knots in my shoulders and the slight curve of my spine. And it hurts even more to know that my family members have dealt with similar experiences but could never fathom a reality free of them, whether due to their lack of money or the “weakness” they believe accompanies speaking out. It hurts to know that even at age 20, I still barely view seeking help as anything but a weakness.

It hurts to know that chronic disease is not a rare occurrence. It hurts to know that my conditions will never be cured. Instead, I’ll learn how to deal with them like the many other things I’ve learned to manage. Physical therapy and muscle relaxants are merely luxuries for me. I will eventually return home, to doctors and their resigned sighs as they tell me this pain is nothing more than stress. I will see my family again and remember that access to adequate services is something only I have the opportunity of experiencing.

And although I find a melancholic comfort in sharing my pain and struggles with them, it hurts to know that writing off our pain as nothing or simply pushing through it is the thread that strings marginalized communities together. The silencing of our pain is a byproduct of bigger systems that prevent a space for discussion or an avenue for adequate medical access. For a world so thoroughly saturated with images of marginalized communities' suffering and dominated by morbid curiosity, we still seem to be obligated to suffer in silence.

But with every effort to soothe our own pain and create a community to voice our shared struggles, we are steadily breaking this silence.

Lost in the Groove

One Boy's Unhealthy Obsession with Afrobeat

By Julian Towers illustrated by Penelope Katz In the future, when science identifies all the different species of human introvert, perhaps gathering them together into the world’s least exciting museum diorama, it’ll be easy to pick me out. I’m the one frozen in furious motion on the plaster sidewalk, headphones strapped to his ears—present for all the world to see, but hopelessly lost in the groove. My face says, “Talk to me, and you die.”

Every second of my life unreserved for human interaction, standardized testing, and minimal hygienic maintenance (I don’t sleep) goes to music. Anyone who knows me can tell at least one story about failing to get my attention on the street. Though this will often begin as a funny story, its teller will turn sad and worried when I insist that I never saw them. They say I should keep my eyes open. But it’s not true; I am engaged, just not with College Hill.

After three years in university, every emotional, intellectual, and social event has become a variation on one I’ve encountered before, but in music I can still find new pathways. Ghostface Killah’s rhymes can take me to a grimy New York bodega; a Travis Scott beat will offer me drugs I’ve never tried. Getting lost in a densely orchestrated Beach Boys song is like building my own universe, and listening to the rawest, most careless punk is like burning it all down. I let each note tell me what it felt like to play it. I live lives that are not my own.

And if I’m curious what German Marxists did with their time in the 1970s, there’s this one band I’ve been meaning to check out. They’re called *squints at iPhone* “Rufus Zuphall.”

But what I’ll never want is a soundtrack, some aural drapery to put up as a partition between myself and an active mind. I want to make discoveries in sound, to feel myself reborn in each roaring blast of a John Coltrane solo. If my own life can ever match it, maybe I’ll take off my headphones and give it a listen. But until then, my list of albums to hear currently sits in the thousands.

In the event of my sudden disappearance, it’ll likely be seized as police evidence.

If you’re concerned, know that the universe is

conspiring to keep me on the grid. Spotify, in a horrific betrayal, apparently now functions as social media, enabling friends to stalk me by observing my listening habits. I have the service synced on so many platforms that when I turn music off on my phone and open my laptop in class it’ll usually continue blaring. Not that it matters; my headphones are so beaten and abused that they bleed sound. Even if I’m not telling the world how I’m feeling, my music will. This distresses me. Not because I’ll be embarrassed when you hear the sounds of Rufus Zuphall, but because you’ll assume the sounds of Rufus Zuphall reflect me. And they don’t; I’m a sonic traveller, but I don’t have any one destination. F*ck if I know where I’m going. F*ck if I know how I’m feeling.

Life, without music, is just kinda happening.

And as I sink deeper into my groove, I find less patience for music that pursues obvious emotional effects. I’m familiar with all those already. I instead seek sounds that force me to master them—sounds that are elusive, dense, cryptic. I hope that if I spend enough time within their walls, I might uncover new strains of human feeling—feelings known only to me.

With beating heart and thumping chest, I tell you I have found this music.

My 8 A.M T.A says it sounds like tropical casino jazz.

It’s more or less all I’ve been listening to this semester. People must think I’m feeling groovy.

The jazzman in question is Fela Kuti, and I’ll concede his music does indeed conjure images of warm climes. A Los Angeles nightclub musician before being deported to his native Nigeria, Fela spent the `70s merging traditional African stylings with greasy, deepfryer American funk. Despite the fact that he was the only one playing it, he declared his creation a genre and named it Afrobeat.

Fela is perhaps the most famous non-Western musician ever; he is to African music what Bob Marley is to reggae. But the popular take on his songs—that one is always as good as another so you might as well listen to any—kept me away from him for years. Indeed, people talk about Fela's music like it’s always the same.

They don’t mean this as an insult. Rather, repetition is understood to be the whole appeal. Like Warhol’s soup cans or Monet’s haystacks, every Afrobeat jam represents a minor variation on a central ideal. Each is around 13 minutes long and divides into two parts that proceed according to certain rules.

At the beginning, the rhythm section is isolated; clattery percussion and a tight, catchy guitar riff combine into a simple, unchanging groove. It’s conceivable that at the end of each song the musician’s limbs fall off from repetition. Their sacrifice does not go in vain—the groove makes crucial room for Fela to come in and do his thing on top. He’ll solo with keyboard, saxophone, and—in the second half—his own rap-like vocals. Usually incensed about some political injustice, he’ll rant for a while before ending the track on a hooky call-and-response chant. For example: Angry sounding Fela: “them leave sorrow, tears, and blood!” Happy sounding backing vocalists: “them regular trademark!”

Any remaining empty space (like when Fela needs to breathe) is rounded out by a cycling section of loud, punchy horn players. Though these jams are distinguished by different hooks, arrangements, and lyrics, the feel they create is always the same. If one were to suddenly skip ahead two minutes, it’s unlikely that anyone would notice. The groove is endless. I figured a sonic explorer like myself had little to discover through active listening—just the same empty, pulsating throb over and over.

My interest in Afrobeat had been so low, in fact, that when I first made my acquaintance with it, I deployed it as no good music should be deployed: background noise. But when you’re exercising, it’s good to have april 12, 2019 5

ARTS&CULTURE something behind you, and Fela's music occurred to me as an athletic ideal: energetic enough to keep me moving and without surprises that might trip me up.

Plus, it was all the same, right? If I ran longer I'd never have to scramble for anything else, just toss a random song on and keep going. So my relationship with Fela began innocuously enough, with me queuing up three

or four of his jams as I ran sprints.

I'm lucky I exercise like a weirdo because the 100-meter dash unlocked my unique understanding of his music. Bolting as fast as I could, over and over, isolated the degree of passion coming from his end.

Our energies synchronized in special moments—when the horns blew extra loud, when the keyboards were stabbed with murderous intent, and when Fela’s screaming vocals seemed to tear at his larynx.

Conversely, I also noticed whenever the musicians sounded tired. I found these wavering emotional shades annoying as a sprinter but intriguing as a music listener. Walking the length of the straightaway as I rested, survival-head-rush-blood heightening my senses, unexpected notes came floating out of the funk. A particularly heavy bass ostinato in one song, a surprisingly subdued keyboard line in another— subtle compositional differences that captured my imagination before I lifted my legs and charged back into the groove again.

Without necessarily intending to, I found myself taking it with me back out on the street. Fed up with some go-nowhere song but not wanting to risk my time trying something else, I’d reboot a Fela jam on the way to class and see what else I could discover. More often than not, I had to rediscover the original song. Is “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” the one with the water-wrinkled electric guitar? Or is that “Colonial Mentality,”? And this is the one with the freaky organ texture? Each relisten was that same sort of battle—my sonic memory versus labyrinthian African funk—but I was gaining ground fast, memorizing the tracks and learning their contours. Pretty quickly, I regretted the years I had been misled. The Afrobeat experience wasn’t about one lengthy song. It was about four or five or six or twelve lengthy songs. And I was hooked. I had to hear them all so I could hear them again.

What’s important to understand now is that Fela Kuti is absurdly prolific. In the 1970s alone, he released 33 albums. At the beginning of the decade, he even

founded his own country—the so-called Kalakuta Republic, really just a large compound in Lagos—so he could run his own recording studio and release music without being bothered by the Nigerian military junta (and, also, so he could marry his 27 backup singers—as mentioned, the dude was prolific). Luckily, most of his albums are pretty short—usually two songs for a total of 25 minutes; it was easy to fit them in during walks back from class or schedule in new ones as study breaks.

Moving through Fela’s discography is, essentially, listening to the chronological evolution of a single song—the arc of an artistic vision. After mastering the subtle instrumental variations, I start to wonder if they may contain clues to Fela’s life and how he was feeling. Why are the horns on Opposite People so especially triumphant? Why does “Mr. Grammarticalogylisationalism is the Boss” sound like a Doors song? Was he going through a Jim Morrison phase? Why is the guitarist on Authority Stealing mixed so low as to be almost inaudible? Was Fela mad at him?

Oh no—did he sleep with one of his wives? Sometimes the lyrics offer hints, but they’re often even more mysterious. The 1975 album He Miss Road brings the deepest, saddest organ work of Fela’s career, but one song is about returning to work on a Monday morning after a fun, drunk weekend with your friends, and the title song is a quasi-diss track aimed at another band’s frontman. By direct contrast, 1981’s Coffin for Head of State is about how the Nigerian government threw Fela’s mother out of a window, and it’s built around the dinkiest, most sunshine-happy keyboard melody I’ve ever heard. His own messages are literally undercut by the funk. What was he trying to tell people? Am I the only one who notices? Is it just tropical casino music to everyone else?

About halfway through the semester, I start to get lost in my own groove. The dangling interest that’s kept me engaged in my classes falls off at once, and I ghost group meals to go on long walks without direction or destination. My internship emails are being returned as rejections. My ex-girlfriends haunt the streets as tormenting specters. And after all the time and energy I’ve committed to him, I still have no clue how Fela feels—I have even less of an idea what I feel, and I see no future for life except to repeat, repeat…and repeat.

My most meaningful, slaved-over human project is a ranked list of Afrobeat albums that changes every time I listen to them.

Finally there comes a Friday when I can no longer claim to be busy, and my friends drag me out for the night. At the second party, I recognize a girl I know from my hip-hop class. I try to flirt, but life right now is so narrow that my conversation quickly and inevitably turns to Fela. Luckily, she’s a fan. We geek out over polyrhythms, Tony Williams’s drumming, and the lyric “them go use your sh*t to put you for jail.” But when I start to rattle off my expansive theories about Fela’s

“Consume a God donut and you will understand the yeasty truths of the universe.”

- Claribel Wu, “The Misprint Multiverse” 3.16.17

“Plato defined humanity as a ‘featherless biped,’ and presumably felt very confused every time he plucked a chicken.”

- Charles Stewart, “the birds and the beats” 4.26.18

6 post–

murky messages, things turn sour. “Fela wasn’t trying to confuse anybody,” she tells me, her drink splashing around in her hand. “He literally sang in pidgin English so all of Africa could understand him!” I mumble out some brief justification and back gradually away from the girl, leaving the party and my friends early.

Once into the night, I move quickly, as though with haste I might save the schema that crumbles all around me. But it’s too late. It happens in less than an instant; the existence of other people has booted me out of my groove, out of my own personal Kalakuta Republic, and now I’ve been left to fend for myself. As a symbolic gesture, I consider deleting my Fela rankings, but even that seems too melodramatic for the nothing I’ve created of my life. Instead, I just put on some Juice WRLD and make the journey back to my room.

It’s a couple of days before I’m compelled back to Fela—the pull of the funk is just too strong, but I’ve spent days stress-consuming Nigerian history, and I’m determined to meet him on his own terms. I press play, and it’s instantly clear how drastically I’d gotten him wrong; Fela’s music isn’t about getting lost in the groove, it’s about breaking through it. Fela lived at a time when the military government was waging a propaganda war on its own people, and most of his songs unambiguously advise Africans to stay alert and think for themselves. It’s the familiar, predictable structure of his music that makes these messages so powerful—like rebellious citizens re-claiming agency from a crushing, meaningless (and, I guess, funky) everyday. Afrobeat aims to set listeners free, but I’d spent months denying it. I put my favorite songs in a playlist, let my ears wander around, and stopped trying to memorize the confines of my own oppression. I was going to open my eyes, just in time for spring.

These days, the Fela jam I listen to most is called “Shuffering and Shmiling.” The twenty-two-minutelong (!) track cooks up a plinking, mischievous keyboard line as the man rallies against what colonial religions have done to Africa—telling its people to “Suffer, suffer for world / Enjoy for heaven.” Back when I was plunging Afrobeat for deeper meaning, the track seemed straightforward to a fault. But now it’s one of my favorites for that very reason—Fela literally saying, “Hey, don’t live the way someone else says you should.

Enjoy sh*t now and do what you want to do.”

I’m neither African nor a member of the Christian faith, but I’ve tried to follow his advice the best I can.

When I put my headphones on tonight, I’m going to spend less time adapting to how my music feels and more time finding music that matches my own mood.

That may seem like a downgrade, but I disagree. I’m still making discoveries, but they’re not just about John Coltrane or Fela Kuti or Rufus Zuphall anymore.

Instead, they’re about me. I’m figuring out how I want to feel, everyday, for the rest of my life—my own special groove.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih a FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo Section Editors Kathy Luo Sara Shapiro Staff Writers Sarah Lettes Caroline Ribet

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