Four Contemporary Classics to Outlast Our Lifetime

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room is the oldest novel on this list, but it feels just as modern as its peers. It is one of Baldwin’s greatest novels, though mostly overshadowed by his other more famous works If Beale Street Could Talk and his Collected Essays, which include ‘Th e Fire Next Time’ and ‘Stranger in the Village’. Giovanni’s Room is a small book; it follows the story of a man vacationing in Paris, away from his normal life and wife in America. Totalling 159 pages, this book is slim like a dagger. Giovanni’s Room is a story less about queer love than it is about queer fear, how suffi cating and hurtful it can be, this book holds it all. Baldwin’s prose is so searing that it burns away any hesitancy to approach delicate topics of intimacy and pain. It fi guratively and literally strips its characters to bare fl esh, exposing their vulnerability and studying it under the light. For LGBTQ+ literature, this is a totemic text and is one to be brought forward in queer studies and the queer experience.

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Cusk’s 2014 novel, the fi rst in her trilogy, fractionally changed the contemporary conception of fi ction. Outline falls into the genre of autofi ction, a form characterised by the slight fi ctionalisation of the author’s life, moulding it into a narrative with a message and optional changes of names and places. Th e supposed goal of the form was for the writer to distance themselves from their past life, like a Greek catharsis. In 2014, the term ‘autofi ction’ began to resurface in mainstream literary discourse, having last majorly surged in the mid-late 90s, New York. Th e diff erence now is that Cusk’s novel prescribes to the autofi ction standards, replaying a titled version of her life on paper, but without the goal of soothing emotions towards life hitherto. Outline is a look back at the past, not focused on the person you were but on the places you were and what relations and systems fi lled that place. Cusk perfectly cuts together social realism with personal viewpoints, like Sylvia Plath’s  e Bell Jar merged with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the novel Cusk’s avatar is used to craft an excellent social realism, told with clear, clean sentences.

For a novel published in 2013, McBride’s debut is a strange creature. Its form is typically modernist, told in stream of consciousness, but the subject matter is timeless, or at least, undesignated to a time. It resists strict defi - nition, and convenient summation. It is about a girl, what she is given and what she wants for herself, and the mutual exclusivity of those things. It is a book saturated with contradictions, at times it reads as diffi cult as Samuel Beckett. One could say that it is a book about sex and family, but one could also argue it is not about that at all. Does the protagonist’s psychology orbit around pain, or is it dogged by pain? Th ese are the questions. McBride sews in all of the trademarks expected in an Irish story: Catholic tyranny, sexual diffi culty and enshrined shame. But its allegiance to nationalism is questionable. It is a great book, one of the greatest Irish books of the last decade, but there is nothing nice about it.

All  e Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Th e language of McCarthy’s seventh novel is twisting and expansive. It's a sensual experience to read All the Pretty Horses. Th e writer’s focus is on everything and everyone, the candle on the windowsill and the heartbeat of the horse, but that's not the most compelling reason to read it. Th e speed and sincerity of the writing is touching, like an outpour of desperate expression. His novel reads a lot like the works of Salinger and Scott Fitzgerald. It is a Great American novel dealing with Great American themes. A man’s bond to the land and his bond with himself. Th e American need for something new and the American need for something to own.

Give Them What They Want:

posthumous releases and the case of Brian Wilson

Soon a er Smiley Smile (1967) was released, the principal songwriter of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, was admitted into psychiatric care. Soon a er Smiley Smile (1967) was released, the principal songwriter of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, was admitted into psychiatric care.

With his talent for original composition, Wilson held almost sole responsibility for the band's success. Ever since Wilson's resignation from live performances in 1964, however, his musical direction changed. In contrast to songs like ‘Sur n' USA’, the new songs were personal, melancholic and surreal. It just didn't seem commercially viable.  is caused friction during recording sessions.  e label took a di erent tack towards the public, presenting the band's new direction as a sign of a masterpiece that would challenge the claim of the Beatles as the kings of pop. "Brian Wilson is a genius!", a 1966 advertising tagline proclaimed. Internally, however, they were keeping a worried eye on him. With his talent for original composition, Wilson held almost sole responsibility for the band's success. Ever since

By the late 60s, Wilson's artistic vision had become utterly disconnected from the rest of contemporary pop music. Pet Sounds had been strange, but the music of Smiley Smile was out of this world.  e entire project has become the stu of legends. For the recording of the song ‘Fire’, Wilson lit a  re in the studio. On ‘Vega-tables’, it was rumoured he had Paul McCartney munch on a carrot, and have that serve as percussion. For other tracks, he insisted that the Beach Boys sing while  oating in his swimming pool.  e recording process was as surreal as the music it produced.

Yet despite the beautiful insanity of Smiley Smile, this wasn't the album Wilson had been aiming for.  at album was to have been called ‘Smile’, and should have been the Beach Boys' magnum opus. It never came to be. Due to the divisions within the band, Wilson's deteriorating mental health and the sheer ambition of the project, it collapsed under its own weight. Losing patience with the expensive, meandering songwriting process, Capitol Records demanded that the Beach Boys ful ll their contract by providing an album, be it good or bad. Wilson was persuaded to shelve his ambitions and simply have the estranged members come back in and record what he had so far.  e result was Smiley Smile: the biggest commercial failure at that point in their career.

Why was Smiley Smile such a failure?  e main issue was Capitol marketing avant-garde music as if it were pop. ‘Smile’ was intended to be a concept album about childhood, with humour interspersed throughout.  ere were comic sketches, including one where Brian Wilson falls into a piano, getting stuck between the C and the C-sharp, until his bandmates manage to play him out.  ese were cut.  e songs were made short to encourage radio play.  ese decisions lead to the album sounding rushed and shallow. As the years passed, a cult of interest in the ‘Smile’ project became noticeable. In 2011, Capitol responded to this demand by issuing  e Smile Sessions, a box set comprising  ve discs. Instead of presenting radio friendly compressions of what the Beach Boys had recorded, the whole sprawling project was laid out in its incomplete form.  e release was a commercial and critical success, despite being composed of outtakes and un nished material.

Together, these releases illustrate two distinct approaches to un nished material. With the Smiley Smile approach, you try to cover up the un nished nature of the work, and present it as if it were a completed work. Your aim is radio play and wide commercial success. Ideally, it should  t comfortably with the artist’s previous releases without arousing suspicion from uninformed fans.

You can see this very same approach in the posthumous albums of American rapper XXXTentacion. Since his death in June 2018, two albums have been released. On both, a small amount of material is stretched out with guest features from a slew of artists including Kanye West and Lil Wayne.  e list of producers is even more copious.  ere is no indication on the front of these albums that there is anything unusual about them.  is is intentional. Ideally, an uninformed listener would keep buying whatever material was released under XXXTentacion’s name.

 e problem with releases like these is that, as a listener, you're le in the dark about how much input the deceased artist even had in these tracks. Your sense of their personal touch is obscured under a thick layer of polish.

 is approach appears to me the height of cynicism. It handles the deceased artist as if they were merely a cog in a machine to be replaced when they stop working. For artists like Michael Jackson, it’s truly amazing how many posthumous work is released under their name.  ey appear more productive in the grave than they were in life.

 e alternative approach is exempli ed by  e Smile Sessions. Here, you emphasise the un nished nature or the album. You can present di erent versions of a song, contrasting early takes with later ones; things you wouldn't dream of putting on a release you hoped would be a chart-topper.

 e bene ts of this are evident on recent Beatles releases, such as the 2018 remaster of the White Album or the 2019 remaster of Abbey Road . On the second halves of these albums are session recordings where you hear the band joking around, and experimenting with di erent approaches to their songs.

Over the last century, audiences have become increasingly demanding. We feel a sense of entitlement towards the media we consume. Even when a project collapses, we stand patiently by the wreckage, waiting for any remnants to be presented to us. We're insatiably predatory.

Record labels respond to public demand.  e only problem is that the public doesn't know what it wants. In fact, nobody does. Public taste can change in an instant. Still, the executives at Capitol, the publicists, the other members of the Beach Boys, and Wilson himself all had their own expectations about what would be a hit. Of course, a hit song is a notoriously di cult thing to achieve. Some bands only ever have one, and then waste the rest of their career trying to emulate that success. Others, like the Beatles, Phil Spector, and the early Beach Boys seemed to have had it down to an art.  e fatal  aw of the Beach Boys was that they got too concerned about what the public wanted.  ey were so anxious about whether their new music would alienate their listeners that they ended up boring them instead.

Like all companies, record labels are amoral.  ey are guided by money alone. As long as we keep accepting d ubiously moral posthumous releases, they'll keep robbing graves to provide them. We live at a time when companies can be held morally accountable for their actions.  rough social media, we can damage them where it hurts.  ese companies are only trying to give us what we want. It's about time we have a hard look at what that is.