The Washington Post National Weekly. February 2, 2020

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2020

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

Campaign 2020 The fight to be the last Democratic presidential candidate standing opens in Iowa PAGE 810

Politics A disloyal White House 4

World Worry and boredom in Wuhan 9

5 Myths Jazz 23

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KLMNO Weekly

Politics

All the president’s disloyal men

Photos by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

Trump has set a culture in which advisers expect to be betrayed — and act accordingly BY

A SHLEY P ARKER

P

resident Trump’s personal lawyer called him “John the Backstabber.” A proTrump Fox News host described him as “a tool for the radical Democrats.” And the president himself dismissed John Bolton, his former national security adviser, as a disgruntled lackey trying “only to sell a book.”

The explosive disclosures in Bolton’s forthcoming memoir about his time in the White House — including his firsthand allegation

that Trump directly tied the holdup of $391 million of military aid for Ukraine to investigations into a political rival — prompted cries of heresy and betrayal from Trump and his allies.

But the short gestation period — less than five months — between Bolton’s September exit from the administration to his scathing book manuscript underscores an uncomfortable truth for Trump: For a president who demands absolute loyalty, he inspires strikingly little of the same, with former aides, advisers and

associates turning on him with thrumming regularity.

They are, en masse, all the president’s disloyal men and women — an unofficial club that includes Rex Tillerson, Trump’s former secretary of state, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House senior adviser, and Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney and fixer now serving three years in federal prison for crimes committed while working for Trump.

The culture, of course, is set from the top, with an Oval Office

National security adviser John Bolton attends a meeting in the Oval Office in 2019. After leaving his post in September, Bolton is releasing what is expected to be a scathing memoir about his time in the White House.

occupant who requires abject fealty but rarely returns it. Trump is known for his petty cruelty, for berating aides publicly and privately and for presiding over an intentionally gladiatorial West Wing, where advisers seem to expect to be betrayed at some point — and behave accordingly.

“There is irony in the fact he constantly talks about loyalty, but doesn’t understand how it works,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist. “In order to work, loyalty is a two-way street. The president defines it as something he

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Politics

gets, not something he gives — and therefore he doesn’t get it.”

Nonetheless, Trump still commands some genuine fidelity, especially among those still serving in his administration, such as Vice President Pence, counselor Kellyanne Conway and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. Others who have departed — including former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager — have also remained faithful, maintaining strong ties to the administration.

And Bolton himself is a wily bureaucratic infighter known for relentless self-promotion at the expense of colleagues predating his stint in the Trump administration. That Bolton — a conservative hawk serving a generally non-interventionalist president — would turn on Trump and his team seemed all but preordained, more a question of when than if.

But the people who turn on the president are notable for the large number of them and their prominence, as well as for the public and private havoc their grievance-airing often brings. The stories shared in Bolton’s book, for instance, promise to be especially devastating, according to early news reports, with Bolton not just personally implicating Trump in the matter for which he

was impeached, but slamming the president and his advisers in a wideranging critique of his year and a half in the administration.

Cliff Sims, a former White House aide who wrote “Team of Vipers” about his time in Trump’s White House, said that another challenge Trump faces is that he surrounded himself with purported loyalists who were anything but.

“The entire premise of my book is that the president has been continually undermined by liars and snakes like John Bolton who refuse to subordinate their views to his, have selfish motives, or think there is something patriotic about ‘protecting the country’ from his agenda,” Sims wrote in a text message.

The public breaks with Trump are big and small. On Monday, speaking before a crowd in Sarasota, Fla., former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly sided with Bolton and said he personally supports calling witnesses in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

“If John Bolton says that in the book, I believe John Bolton,” Kelly said.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s communications adviser for 11 days before being fired, officially broke with Trump in a Washington Post op-ed after the

president penned a racist tweet suggesting that four minority congresswomen “go back” to the places from which they came, though all are U.S. citizens and three were born in the United States.

“I broke from Trump because not only has his behavior become more erratic and his rhetoric more inflammatory, but also because, like all demagogues, he is incapable of handling constructive criticism,” wrote Scaramucci, who has continued to criticize Trump in interviews, on television and over Twitter.

Former White House senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon — a reliable Trump stalwart when Trump was pursuing Bannon’s ideological projects — turned on the president’s family in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury.” In the book, he described a Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. had with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”

Tillerson, whom Trump fired by tweet, gave an interview to CBS News’s Bob Schieffer several months after his unceremonious ousting in which he explained that Trump often ordered up policies in violation of the law, and offered an unflattering assessment of his former boss.

Tillerson described the presi-

President Trump is flanked by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, left, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January 2018. Tillerson and Mattis are now former aides, and Trump has disparaged them.

“My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything.”

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer

KLMNO Weekly

dent as “a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’ ” Others in Trump’s orbit operate as though they fully expect their tenure eventually to end when the president turns on them, prompting them to preserve evidence — in the form of recordings, video and other material — almost preemptively. To wit: Cohen, Manigault Newman and Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani who is under indictment in New York on charges of committing campaign finance violations.

Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, kept secret recordings of his conversations with his client, and after Trump distanced himself from Cohen, his former confidant jettisoned Trump as well. He testified before Congress that Trump is a “racist” and “con man” who during the campaign directed hush money payments to a porn star with whom he had an extramarital affair. Cohen is now cooperating with an investigation by federal prosecutors in New York into the Trump Organization.

Manigault Newman also kept secret recordings from her time in the White House and penned a book, “Unhinged,” after leaving the administration, in which she painted a scathing portrait of Trump as a racist who was “delusional” and experiencing mental deterioration.

Parnas, too, kept photos and video of his encounters with Trump and Pence — helpful leverage when administration officials denied knowing him. He also had audio of a small dinner he attended with the president at the Trump International Hotel in Washington where Trump can be heard ordering associates to fire then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Trump’s demands for obsequious devotion, as well as his failure to provide anything similar in exchange, seems to have pushed many of his cast-off associates to despair — and disloyalty.

“My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything,” Cohen said during congressional testimony. “I will not sit back, say nothing and allow him to do the same to the country.” n

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Nation

Ups, downs of life expectancy BY

J OEL A CHENBACH

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he number of fatal drug overdoses declined for the first time in 28 years, and U.S. life expectancy at birth ticked upward for the first time since 2014, according to long-awaited numbers for 2018 published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A decline in the death rate from cancer is the single largest driver of the small increase in life expectancy, the CDC reported. Five of the other nine leading causes of death also showed declines in death rates, including the top cause, heart disease, as well as unintentional injuries (which include overdoses), chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. Two more, diabetes and kidney disease, were essentially unchanged. Deaths from suicide and influenza and pneumonia increased.

Despite the encouraging elements of the CDC mortality report, the broader pattern for American health remains sobering. Life expectancy improved by the tiniest of increments, from 78.6 to 78.7 years. That figure remains lower than the peak in U.S. life expectancy, at 78.9 years, in 2014.

It is also identical to life expectancy in 2010, and it appears unlikely that U.S. longevity will

KLMNO Weekly

In the United States, life expectancy flattens as health expenditures rise Life expectancy and health spending as a share of gross domestic product in the United States compared with the average of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1980-2018* Life expectancy

Health spending as share of GDP

82 years

18%

16.9%

80.8 OECD average

U.S.

78.7

78

12

U.S. 74

8.8%

8.2% 6 6.1%

73.7

OECD average

72.5 70

1980

2000

2018

0

1980

2000

2018

*OECD average life expectancy through 2017 Source: OECD.Stat, National Center for Health Statistics

show any significant improvement over the entire decade of the 2010s. The United States is continuing to fall behind similarly wealthy countries — a phenomenon that experts refer to as the U.S. “health disadvantage.”

“It’s good news that there was an increase in life expectancy.

That’s what we want to see, but it doesn’t really alter the long-term picture. We still have a very bleak

HARRY STEVENS/THE WASHINGTON POST

situation at this point,” said Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Woolf was the co-author of a report published in November in the JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal, that revealed a long-term increase in death rates in the United States for people in the prime of life —

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2020 The Washington Post / Year 6, No. 17

from 25 to 44. That study was based on mortality data from 1959 to 2017, and showed that improvements in life expectancy and a lowering of death rates peaked in the 1970s, with more gradual increases after that. In 1998, the United States for the first time fell behind the average life expectancy in peer nations, Woolf said.

Another new overview of American health, released early Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, a health-care research organization based in New York, noted that the United States has a lower life expectancy than 10 peer nations — Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — despite spending far more per capita on health care than any of them. The suicide rate, at 14 per 100,000 people, is twice that of Britain, the report said.

David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund, said Wednesday that the poor health outcomes are due to a “very inadequate primary care system” in which too few people have access to medical care, with costly consequences such as trips to the emergency room and preventable illnesses. The report said the United States, compared with peer countries, has the highest rate of hospitalization from preventable causes and the highest rate of “avoidable deaths.” n

Contents Politics The World Cover Story Sports Books Opinion Five Myths

4 7 10 16 18 20 23

On the cover Top row: Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg; middle row: Amy Klobuchar, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders; bottom row: Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang.

Illustrations by BEN KIRCHNER for The Washington Post

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World

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In Wuhan, worry and boredom set in G ERRY S HIH in Beijing BY

I

n China’s Hubei province, authorities are waging a desperate struggle to supply protective equipment, testing kits and hospital beds as the sick pour into clinics and confirmed cases of the new coronavirus mount.

But holed up in apartment blocks across an area the size of Washington state, tens of millions of others who are symptomfree are fending off cabin fever.

More than a week into a quarantine of unprecedented scale, as many as 54 million people trapped in the outbreak’s epicenter, Wuhan, and the densely populated plains lining the Yangtze River are beginning to adjust to a surreal new reality that could last weeks, if not longer.

Transportation services have largely ground to a halt, and most businesses are shuttered. But so far, residents say, food remains relatively well-stocked — if more expensive than usual — in supermarkets, and order prevails on the eerily abandoned streets.

Government officials have ordered Alibaba’s Hema chain of grocery stores to remain open, and companies have continued to offer home deliveries of food and supplies. Seven of the country’s major courier services say they are rushing in express shipments of medical aid.

State propaganda organs this past week showed the premier, Li Keqiang, visiting a Wuhan supermarket, where he assured the crowd that the government could keep vegetables flowing in and prices stable.

With most basic necessities within reach — for now — the next looming question for the healthy population: Is this life for the near foreseeable future?

“I don’t want to take the risk just yet,” said Zhang Min, a 30year old homemaker whose family hasn’t ventured out of their 500-square-foot apartment on Zhongshan Road for six days. She plans to continue staying indoors, doing yoga and learning

Hector Retamal/Agence france-presse/Getty Images

Those trapped at center of coronavirus outbreak begin to adjust to a new reality with no end in sight dance moves with her daughter since her pantry is stocked with another three days’ worth of food, she said.

Around 8 p.m. on Monday, Zhang turned off the lights in her apartment, opened her window and began bellowing the national anthem as part of a citywide initiative arranged by neighborhood committees to boost morale.

“It was good to release some pent-up stress,” she said.

Across town, an English teacher surnamed Tang, 28, said he was instructed this week by his academy to prepare teaching over the Internet, probably for a long haul. All primary and secondary schools in Wuhan would transition to online courses starting Feb. 10, local media reported this week.

Tang said he saw online notices that Wuhan would remain under lockdown through April that were later scrubbed.

Whatever the case, he said, “this is going to last much longer.

It’s the only way we can keep our families safe. There’s no other choice.”

Zeng Yulin, another teacher, said Wuhan librarians have been offering books to keep children occupied at home. Bank lenders were even extending mortgage payment deadlines, she said.

“The biggest problem isn’t eating. It’s not going to work and getting your salary for a month or two,” she said. “Will people survive that?”

On Chinese social media, holed-up Wuhanites showed how they were coping in videos that quickly went viral. Neighbors exchanged meat for vegetables out of their high-rise windows. Aunties sat around a mah-jongg table placing bets with their prized protective face masks instead of cash. A man in his pajamas sat in front of his living room aquarium dangling a fishing pole.

A family looks out from their home in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Wuhan.

About 54 million people in the city and surrounding region are forbidden to leave.

Some experts argue that Hubei’s quarantine — likely to be the largest in human history — may not be necessary or effective, and may instead backfire by stoking public resentment. Indeed, beneath the jokes and memes this week was an undercurrent of frustration about the government. Many Chinese this past week logged onto sites streaming the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl” and left comments drawing a connection between the late-era Soviet Union and a Chinese Communist Party also known for coverups.

In a state television interview, Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang apologized to citizens who were angry about the city’s lockdown, and he acknowledged that the government withheld information about the outbreak during its critical early stages. Zhou appeared to indirectly blame his superiors in the party hierarchy for muzzling him.

“The party secretary above him who hasn’t even shown his face yet,” said Tang, the English teacher, referring to the mayor and his superiors. “What we’re seeing now can’t be his fault alone. We need the country to hold all these people accountable.”

Chinese officials have foreshadowed the possibility of tough and disruptive isolation measures lasting months — and exacting an enormous toll on the economy and daily life. One of them, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, Zeng Guang, urged Wuhan to brace for a “protracted war.”

“The virus battle in Wuhan will last longer than SARS,” Zeng wrote Monday on Weibo, referring to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus epidemic that lasted eight months from 2002 to 2003.

Zeng said the coronavirus’s spread may not taper off until warmer weather arrives in spring, but he said the arrival of medical relief teams from across the country should relieve the patient bottleneck. n

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sports

Blazing a trail for women in football A DAM K ILGORE in Miami BY

I

n the first preseason game of his first NFL training camp, Kendrick Bourne dropped two passes and returned to the San Francisco 49ers sideline sullen, a mood his new teammates had rarely seen the buoyant rookie in. He sat on the bench and dropped his head.

Up walked one of his coaches, a low-ranking staffer and a fellow newcomer to the 49ers. The coach told him, “Live in the moment. Treat it how you’ve been playing all your life. You’re supposed to be here.”

The message lifted Bourne and stayed with him. A couple of plays later, he made his first catch. He finished the game with a strong performance. He would make the 2017 team as an undrafted free agent. In the three years since, he has carved out a role in San Francisco’s offense.

When Bourne looks back, he views the coach’s message as a pivot.

“I always think about that,” Bourne said. “That was just a big moment in my life. It was her first year, my first year. She was finding her way, I was finding my way. I just felt like her giving me that tip helped me make my way.”

It was a common NFL occasion, a coach helping a young player through a test, and yet it was unlike almost any interaction on an NFL sideline. Look again at the pronoun: The coach’s name was Katie Sowers.

She was not just a striver. She was a trailblazer, a fierce former quarterback who saw a path when one did not really exist.

Sunday evening, Sowers will become the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl. One of three women who have full-time NFL coaching jobs (the Tampa Bay Buccaneers employ the other two), she is an offensive assistant on 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan’s staff. Her job consists mostly of grunt work. She helps organize practices. She spends late nights drawing plays on cards for the scout team and early morn-

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

The first female coach in a Super Bowl has a simple goal: ‘I want to make sure I’m not the last’ ings prepping drills. She is living her dream.

“I’m waiting for someone to tell me this is all a joke, and they’re going to be like, ‘Sike — you’re not really there, you’re not really a football coach,’” Sowers said. “It’s one of those things that, you really start to look around you and take advantage of every single day.”

Around the office and among players, the distinction of her gender has vanished; Sowers is just Coach Katie to them. A common theme is how her presence makes them enjoy coming to work more. Wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders called her “one of the coolest coaches I’ve been around.” Wide receivers coach Wes Welker extolled her work ethic. Other coaches find more work for her, because they know she can handle any task.

“The best compliment — I don’t know if this is right to say — she’s like one of the guys in there,” 49ers General Manager John Lynch said. “It’s awesome.

It’s inspired us. I’ve got three daughters, and I think it’s really cool for girls to realize they can dream to do this.”

Sowers, 33, has gained a small degree of fame. Monday night, at Super Bowl week’s first media availability, reporters huddled around her for an hour. She answered openly and comfortably, understanding and explaining her significance without selfpromotion. She filmed a commercial this year for Microsoft that will air during the Super Bowl. “I’m not just here to be the token female,” she says in the ad.

“I’m here to help us win.”

Her first step into the NFL came in 2016, during training camp with the Atlanta Falcons. It had been years in the making, spurred by a chance encounter.

Sowers loved football as a kid growing up in Kansas, even without opportunity to play. As an adult she played quarterback in the Women’s Football Alliance, an unglamorous league in which players pay to participate. She

San Francisco 49ers offensive assistant Katie Sowers got plenty of attention from reporters at the start of Super Bowl Week. She is one of three women who have full-time NFL coaching jobs.

also worked as the general manager of the league’s Kansas City Titans, and at the same time coached girls basketball. One of her players was the daughter of Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli. Sowers introduced herself.

“I was definitely nervous,” Sowers said. “I knew who he was.

I didn’t want him to think I just wanted to get to know him to try to ask a favor. But then I really got to know him. I started to realize I was stereotyping him as much as I was worried about him stereotyping me. When I opened the communication, I found he was an amazing mentor and almost a second father.”

The Chiefs fired Pioli in January 2013, but he and Sowers maintained a relationship. Her desire to work in football only strengthened, but coaching in the NFL did not strike her as an option. In 2014, when Sowers saw former WNBA Becky Hammon coaching for the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, it hit her, no matter how improbable it seemed — she could coach in the NFL. “Football has always been my favorite sport, but I never thought it was possible. As openminded as I was, I never saw it,” she said. “ … It cleared a path for me. Seeing that triggered something in my mind. She’s breaking barriers. She’s doing something outside of what we see as the norm. And it helped me to think outside.”

Hammon’s example made Sowers redouble her devotion.

She self-taught herself, devouring every football book she could find, especially Bill Walsh’s tomes on coaching.

“I knew I had a long road ahead of me if I wanted to be an NFL coach,” Sowers said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to play on a college team. I didn’t have the opportunity to break down film. I didn’t have the opportunity to network like a lot of people did. But I was up for the challenge.”

Pioli resurfaced as a front office assistant with the Atlanta Falcons, and he badgered his bosses to bring Sowers on. In

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MuSic | perspective 2016, she received a chance as an offensive intern during training camp, working with wide receivers coach Raheem Morris on organizing and conducting practice drills. Once the season started, Sowers worked in the coaches’ office.

“I was nervous, but I was excited,” Sowers said. “I knew I belonged, and that’s what was most important. If I didn’t feel like I belonged, I would have never stepped foot in that room. I knew I was going to face difficulties, but we all do. We all face them. It’s part of your path.”

Shanahan was the Falcons’ offensive coordinator, and he viewed Sowers as an asset. Early in training camp at a coaches’ meeting, one Falcons assistant swore and then blurted, “Oh, sorry, Katie.” She replied, “Why would you say sorry?”

“You start to realize, that’s what made it work,” Shanahan said. “We could all be ourselves.

It didn’t matter that a girl was in there, or a guy. She was just another intern trying to get a job.

Katie made everyone so comfortable in that way, I never even thought about it.”

When the 49ers hired Shanahan, Sowers asked if she could be a training camp intern again on his new staff. Shanahan hired her under the 49ers’ Bill Walsh Minority Fellowship. At the end of that summer, passing game coordinator Mike LaFleur approached Shanahan. “Katie’s helped me so much,” LaFleur said. “Is there any way we can just keep her here?”

In the seasons since, Sowers has become a fixture: “I just feel like she’s on her way to the top,” Bourne said.

It is still surreal for her to be here, especially considering the opponent. She has the Kansas City skyline tattooed around the word “home” on her left arm.

Sowers wants girls and women to see her at the Super Bowl and feel what she felt when she watched saw Hammon on the Spurs’ bench. One day, she hopes, a woman will coach at the Super Bowl without attracting extra attention. That day hasn’t arrived, but Sowers plans to work for it to come.

“You have to have a first for everything to create change,” Sowers said. “But I want to make sure I’m not the last.” n

KLMNO Weekly

A change of tune is vastly overdue for the Grammys BY

C HRIS R ICHARDS

W

hen something falls apart, you have to rebuild it. So once we’ve finished whisking the rubble of the 62nd Grammy Awards into history’s dustpan, will the Recording Academy treat that task like a chore or a privilege?

The Grammy telecast felt more confused, lethargic and broken than ever, with anything resembling progress (a young woman, Billie Eilish, winning big) ultimately weighed down by the perennially inexcusable (the ugly fact that in the era of Rihanna, Beyoncé, Frank Ocean and Drake, no black artist has won album of the year since 2008). At this late hour, anyone who cares about contemporary music should be furious, bored or both. The Grammys have been too white, too male and too old for too long. It’s time for swift, radical change.

Next year, it’ll be entirely possible. After freshly ousted Recording Academy President Deborah Dugan surfaced allegations of vote-rigging and sexual misconduct within the organization’s highest levels mere days before Sunday’s awards, the academy is expected to make an immediate pivot into introspection. Let’s hope for the best. A smart shift in Recording Academy leadership could make the Grammys’ highly secretive voting process more transparent. It could make the awards more inclusive — and, you know, representative of our reality. It might even cultivate an environment where the artists feel free to speak their minds about the academy’s inner workings from the Grammy dais.

That didn’t happen this past Sunday night, and the silence was eerie. The Grammys were trudging through the most contentious internal scandal in their 63-year history, but uninformed viewers would have had no idea. It wasn’t until the very last moment of the telecast when host Alicia Keys

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

Sean “Diddy” Combs declared that “black music has never been respected by the Grammys,” at a pre-Grammy gala this past week.

vaguely suggested that “we need to do better.”

Next year’s Grammys should at least look different on the surface.

The telecast’s producer, Ken Ehrlich, is stepping down after 40 years of creating “Grammy moments,” usually via those transgenerational duets that made “music’s biggest night” feel more like a sodden veneration of the past than a vital celebration of the present. It’s an approach that brought Ehrlich into direct conflict with various nominees in recent years, including Ariana Grande and Bon Iver.

(Dugan has also accused Ehrlich of having inordinate influence over the Grammy voting process.

Ehrlich has denied it.)

Regardless, the Grammy night telecast has been Ehrlich’s baby for decades, and he ended his last one with a soaring tribute to himself: A long, loud performance of “I Sing the Body Electric” from the 1980 movie “Fame.” Aside from the man in the control booth, who was this for?

We like to think that the Grammys are for us, but we think wrong.

In truth, the Grammys have only ever been the music industry’s overblown celebration of self, a prime-time public relations ritual in which a cutthroat industry pre-

tends to put its best face forward.

And that makes the racism of the Grammys all the more galling.

Rap music has been the dominant mode of pop music for this entire century, but here’s a distressing piece of Grammy trivia that we have to keep reciting, year after year: Only one rap album, OutKast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” has ever won the most coveted Grammy, album of the year. And that was 16 years ago.

Sean “Diddy” Combs has had enough. At a pre-Grammy gala a week ago in Los Angeles, he declared that “black music has never been respected by the Grammys,” then called on the academy to change course. It’s outrageous that the artists who have been excluded from the academy’s highest honors are the ones tasked with initiating reform, but here we are.

And who in the Grammy electorate wouldn’t have been inspired to do exactly that after Tyler, the Creator literally set the stage aflame on Sunday night?

Joined by Charlie Wilson and Boyz II Men, the performance obeyed the law of “Grammy moments” — thou must collaborate with at least one household name at least twice your age — but it ultimately felt like an urgent, subversive, playing-with-fire kind of fun. Tyler was the greatest performer of the night. Why wasn’t he up for any of the night’s biggest prizes?

After the ceremony, Tyler said that the Grammy he later won for best rap album felt like a “backhanded compliment,” adding, “I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. To me, it’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word. Why can’t we just be in pop?”

Yeah, why not? Why not introduce more genre-blind award categories to the slate? Why not invite a wider variety of artists into the Grammys’ most prestigious winner’s circles? Tyler, the Creator has a cascading imagination, but this idea was simple enough. For a Recording Academy that desperately needs to re-imagine itself, it would be a good place to start. n

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Supporters stand in front of an Iowa flag ahead of a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Sioux City, Iowa, in late January.

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Cover Story BY

DAN BALZ

The long road to the nomination The Democratic race has a tough calendar and big field. The winner will face a ready Trump.

T

he 2020 presidential campaign began more than a year ago, and it has been a whirlwind of Democratic town halls, coffee chats, candidate debates, fundraising appeals, Twitter spats and nonstop punditry — all competing for attention against the overriding presence of President Trump. What still lies ahead could be a political season like none other.

After all the 2019 preliminaries, voters will finally begin to speak in Iowa on Monday night at that state’s precinct caucuses. New Hampshire’s primary will come eight days later, followed by caucuses in Nevada and a primary in South Carolina.

From there, the contest for the Democratic nomination will immediately fan out across the country in a rapid series of primaries and caucuses that could make clear by the end of March the identity of the likely Democratic nominee — or foreshadow a potentially wrenching fight among two or more candidates all the way to July’s national convention in Milwaukee.

Whenever the Democrats finally settle on their nominee, that person will enter a general-election contest that Trump and his reelection campaign have been waging almost from the time the president took the oath of office three years ago.

The Trump machine is likely to be the best-funded in history and, by the assessment of some Democratic strategists, might be the most sophisticated presidential campaign operation they have encountered.

The Nov. 3 general election is seen by many voters, regardless of their party allegiance or ideology, as the most important in their lifetimes. Trump’s presidency has been one of controversy and division from the very beginning, one that has further polarized an already divided country.

Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

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Cover Story

All reelection campaigns are judgments on the incumbent, but this year’s stands as one in which strong passions about the president, pro and con, and assessments of what his presidency means for the future override almost everything else — the economy being one wild card — in determining how people will vote.

Campaign 2020 is unique in many ways: the number of candidates who have sought the Democratic nomination; the increasing reliance on small-dollar donations from grass-roots activists; a primary calendar that gives no pause for candidates until the end of March; a general election that could have fewer true battlegrounds than ever.

What makes this year different, Democratic media strategist Jim Margolis said, is that “everything is on amphetamines.”

The year also will mark the first time in the nation’s history that an impeached president will be seeking reelection, assuming the Senate acquits Trump at the end of the trial now underway. Twice before, presidents have been impeached but not convicted: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither was on the presidential ballot in the subsequent general election. Trump will be the first to try to convert the stain of impeachment into a political asset to win a second term.

Democrats hope that the desire to drive Trump from office will become the salve that repairs any lingering wounds after their nomination contest. Right now, however, there is little time to ponder that, as the candidates and campaigns are almost singularly focused on one another and on winning the nomination.

The early states Iowa and New Hampshire kick off the year amid recurring controversy over the role those two small and predominantly white states play in the selection of presidential nominees. That debate will continue well beyond this election year. For now, the candidates know that the calendar is fixed and that the results Monday in Iowa and Feb. 11 in New Hampshire will shape everything going forward.

The last four Democratic winners of the Iowa caucuses — Al Gore in 2000, John F. Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 — all went on to win the nomination. Since 1976, there have been only two cases when the Democrat who led at the caucuses did not become the Democratic nominee, the last occurring in 1992 when no one competed against favorite-son Tom Harkin. That is why the record-large field of Democratic candidates has spent so much time, money and organizing effort focused on turning out what will be a fraction of Iowa’s population.

The biggest turnout for the Democratic caucuses in Iowa was 240,000 in 2008, when Obama and Clinton (and others) waged an

Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post

epic battle. Many Democratic strategists believe this year’s turnout will eclipse that record. They base that assumption on the number of well-organized campaigns actively working to get people out on caucus night as well as the perceptible enthusiasm and energy among Democrats, who turned out in big numbers in the 2018 midterm elections and have swamped presidential candidate events since early 2019.

New Hampshire’s role is equally important. Since the start of the modern primary in 1952, only three candidates of either party have lost the New Hampshire contest and gone on to win the presidency that same year: Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000 and Obama in 2008.

William M. Gardner, the longtime New Hampshire secretary of state, noted that the election there is about more than winning: A weak finish can be crippling. No candidate of either party who has finished below second in New Hampshire has won the presidency that year. And since 1972, no candidate of either party has finished lower than second and ended up as the nominee.

Today there are at least four Democrats who believe they could finish in one of the top two slots in both states. Former vice president Joe Biden, whofinished far behind Obama and Clinton in Iowa in 2008, is one.

The others are Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who narrowly lost to Clinton in Iowa in 2016

A sign welcomes former vice president Joe Biden to a community event in Osage, Iowa. After all the preliminaries for the Democratic presidential nomination contest, voters will finally begin to speak in Iowa in Monday’s caucuses.

and who ran away with the New Hampshire primary the following week; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The Washington Post’s average of state polls shows Biden and Sanders virtually tied in Iowa and Sanders leading Biden and the others by a few points in New Hampshire.

In Iowa, each of the four top candidates has led in one or another version of the highly regarded Iowa Poll, conducted by J. Ann Selzer for CNN, the Des Moines Register and Mediacom over the past halfyear. The final Iowa Poll will be released Saturday night.

Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are not the only ones working to gain a foothold in Iowa. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is looking for a surprise finish to give her candidacy the jolt it needs to go forward.

Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur turned candidate, has been stumping the state this past month with his own hopes riding on what happens. Investor Tom Steyer is campaigning hard on the issue of climate change. Former congressman John Delaney of Maryland has spent more time in Iowa than other candidates, so far to little impact with voters.

Iowa’s caucus rules can skew the support that candidates end up with on caucus night. Candidates who do not reach a 15 percent threshold of support in any

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Melina Mara/The Washington Post

precinct get nothing to show for it, their backers freed to shift their votes to someone else.

The result reported by the Iowa Democratic Party reflects that realignment.

In the vernacular of Iowa Democrats, the final results will be percentages of “state delegate equivalents,” or SDEs. But the state party also plans to report two other numbers: the percentage of supporters who show up for each candidate and the percentage of supporters for each candidate after the final vote.

The three-part reporting raises the prospect of a free-for-all in which multiple candidates seek to gain ground by seizing on whichever numbers give them the best talking points.

New Hampshire’s rules are straightforward: The candidate with the most votes wins. But the state’s substantial cadre of independent voters is free to participate in the Democratic primary, and the makeup of the electorate will be influenced by how many do so.

Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who worked for Sanders in 2016 and now is working for Yang, predicted that Sanders victories in the first two states would open an intraparty battle. “If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, the lines are going to be drawn between the progressive wing and the establishment,” Devine said.

Autumn Starr, 8, listens to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speak at a town-hallstyle meeting in Davenport, Iowa, on Jan. 25.

The votes by Nevada Democrats on Feb. 22, and by South Carolina Democrats on Feb. 29, will mark the first time nonwhite voters will play substantial roles — Latinos in the western state and African Americans in the east. The latter vote will take place only three days before the Super Tuesday contests deliver the single biggest haul of delegates.

“I think South Carolina matters so much more than it ever has,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was campaign manager for former congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas before he dropped out of the race and who was deputy campaign manager for Obama in 2012. “In part because of this short timeline but also because of the way we’ve built this cycle with the question of who has the support of the Obama coalition. That carries much more weight than it ever has.”

The second wave Winning the Democratic nomination on the first ballot in Milwaukee will require amassing 1,991 pledged delegates. A secondballot fight would open the contest to roughly 771 superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials — and the winner would then need a majority of the total pledged and superdelegates, according to Democratic National Committee officials.

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The first four states on the calendar account for 155 pledged delegates, or 4 percent of the total that will be selected through June. Super Tuesday on March 3 will see primaries or caucuses in 14 states, including California and Texas, and other locations. On that single day, candidates will be competing for 1,357 delegates, or 34 percent of the 3,979 pledged delegates at stake.

That means beginning March 3, the campaign will shift from its opening stages, when building momentum is the goal, to the period when accumulating delegates claims overriding importance.

Sanders’s goal is to win Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, aiming to ride into Super Tuesday as the leading candidate and then to position himself as the front-runner. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, said that, if they’re successful in the early states, “getting into California and Texas and putting ourselves into position to expand our delegate lead would be crucial.”

Biden’s team has said he can afford to lose Iowa and possibly New Hampshire, and recoup in South Carolina, where he continues to enjoy strong support from black voters. “We knew that the strength of our campaign is the diversity of our support,” said Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager. “No matter what happens in the first two, it’s not until Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday that the country as a whole is represented. We have built our campaign for that.”

Buttigieg’s team knows he must do exceedingly well in Iowa to demonstrate that a young, gay former mayor of a fairly small city can truly be a competitive candidate for the presidency. “We really are counting on the mayor doing well in the first two contests,” said Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg’s campaign manager, “to show that he can beat other people and to buttress our electability argument and also our change argument, that people are looking for something different.”

Like Biden, Warren has signaled she is looking to play a long game, though she cannot afford to fall far behind in the earliest states. Her campaign is betting that the results in the first four states will be enough of a muddle to set up the March primaries as a possible showdown. “We think Super Tuesday and all the March states as a whole are important,” said Kristen Orthman, Warren’s communications director. “We’ve allocated resources as such basically throughout the year.”

She added that the campaign began building operations in Super Tuesday states many months ago and that Warren has visited every state voting March 3, with the exception of Maine and Vermont, both

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adjacent to Massachusetts, and Arkansas.

“That wasn’t by accident,” she said.

Super Tuesday also will be the first day that Mike Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, will be on ballots. Bloomberg is skipping the first four contests, a strategy no successful candidate has pursued in the modern era. He has already dropped more than a quarter of a billion dollars into television ads and organizing in Super Tuesday states and has the capacity to do what no other candidate can afford to do to reach voters.

But Bloomberg’s hopes of becoming competitive rest almost entirely on whether, after the first four contests, Biden is doing well or gasping for support, and if any other moderate — Buttigieg or Klobuchar, for example — has swept into contention.

“It may be that what we have seen since 1976 largely repeats itself, that these two contests [Iowa and New Hampshire] help pick who will go on and win the nomination,” said Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s campaign manager. “Or this may be a very different kind of year. At least one candidate is running a nominal test of running a national campaign.”

The sprawling nature of the Super Tuesday competition and the lack of time for any campaign besides Bloomberg’s to invest broadly will require candidates to make difficult choices about where they spend time and money. “The whole exercise is targeting resources,” said Robby Mook, who was the 2016 Clinton campaign manager. “You cannot do everything.”

Past years have given candidates some time to regroup after the first primaries and to campaign in the swath of states that follow. Not this year. There are just three days between the last of the initial four elections and the Super Tuesday contests, meaning the winner of South Carolina will have an edge in media coverage.

“A win in South Carolina is the last thing people are going to hear before Super Tuesday,” said Lily Adams, who was communications director for the campaign of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), who dropped out in December.

The pace doesn’t slow after Super Tuesday. The next two Tuesdays will account for an additional 23 percent of the delegates available; the surviving candidates will have to run a gantlet of big states like Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Ohio and Arizona. By the end of March 17, 61 percent of the pledged delegates will have been selected.

“March 3 to March 17 is as brutal a thing as we’ve seen in presidential politics, with big states, all the time zones and territories,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, who helped guide the 2012 reelection from a perch in the White House. “I can’t describe how different running that race is from the race they’re running now.”

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

The delegate battle Except in Texas, which apportions party delegates by state Senate district, most delegates are determined proportionally by results in congressional districts, with the remainder awarded to the statewide winner.

This arithmetic of allocation means it can be difficult for a candidate to gain a significant advantage — and even more difficult for a trailing candidate to catch up or overtake the leader.

That makes delegate hunting a complex matrix that requires campaigns to know the demographics of every district in the country and how they match up with the appeal of their candidate. Most important, it requires decisions about where it’s worth competing hard and where it isn’t.

Under the party’s proportional rules, some districts award an even number of delegates and others award an odd number. In those with an even number, gaining a split is relatively easy — while winning an advantage requires blowing away the competition. In odd-number districts, a narrow victory can produce an extra delegate.

Moreover, districts where Democrats get their highest percentages in presidential races have extra delegates to award. Many of these have a high proportion of minority voters, especially African Americans. That was a strength for Clinton against Sanders in 2016 and could be valuable to Biden if he

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., speaks at a town hall event at the University of Dubuque in Iowa in late January.

holds on to strong support from black Democratic voters.

Insurgent or inspirational candidates, like Obama in 2008 and Sanders in 2016, took advantage of the many caucuses on the calendar to add to their delegate counts.

Caucuses tend to draw more energized party activists, even as they disenfranchise voters who are not able to attend at the time they are held. This year, however, the DNC — with the assent of Sanders’s representatives — cut the number of states with caucuses from 14 to seven.

“Every campaign will look at what are their strengths demographically and regionally, and try to put together a profile of where they will do well by state and by congressional district,” said Jeff Berman, who helped craft Obama’s successful delegate strategy in 2008.

Berman added that campaigns must look for opportunities to win states “so their candidate appears on the election night results chart as a winner in multiple states.” Still, the race remains all about winning delegates.

In recent campaigns, the early election night commentary focused on a candidate’s wins in premier states, but when the delegates from all the contests that night were counted, a different picture emerged.

One night in 2016, for example, Clinton netted far more delegates from her lessnoticed win in Mississippi than Sanders did

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Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

in his high-profile victory in Michigan.

Several candidates are likely to have the resources to continue their campaigns well into the spring and, potentially, all the way to the July convention. The big question is whether there will be a protracted fight, even if one candidate has a clear, if modest, delegate lead by the end of the March contests.

“After the first four [states] and out of Super Tuesday, I think you’ll begin to see some clarity emerging in the delegate advantage and other advantages,” said Michael Donilon, one of Biden’s senior advisers. “And I think there will be a force that exerts itself, that voters will want to move toward a resolution and not leave this open-ended for a long time.”

Yet, even if there is some clarity about a likely nominee, there’s no guarantee that the leader will have the 1,991 delegates needed to win on a first ballot wrapped up by the end of the primaries. Would the hundreds of superdelegates who could vote on a second ballot turn to someone other than the delegate leader? That’s a particularly pertinent issue for someone like Sanders, whose possible nomination causes angst among the establishment Democrats who dominate that category.

“That is the path we are trying to avoid,” said his campaign manager, Shakir. “The goal is to win Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada,

sweep into Super Tuesday and crush it. That has dictated every spending decision, resource decision of this campaign.”

Trump supporters at a Women for Trump event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, cheer for Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law; Mercedes Schlapp of the Trump campaign; and Kayleigh McEnany, national press secretary for the campaign.

Trump and the general election As Democrats wage their contest, Trump’s campaign will be operating on a separate track, free from any serious challenge for the nomination and focused on the general election. But he will be in the faces of the Democrats at every opportunity, whether through Twitter commentary on his potential rivals or with state-by-state rallies.

He will be on the caucus ballot in Iowa the same night the Democrats hold their caucuses, and he held a rally in Des Moines on Thursday night — days before the vote.

Another rally is set for Manchester the night before the New Hampshire primary.

Trump has challengers for the nomination — among them former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld and former congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois — but his grip on the Republican Party is so strong that he is free to ignore them. The GOP is helping to assure that; a number of states have either scrapped their primaries or given more control to state party leaders to allocate convention delegates.

Through the end of last year, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee raised half a billion dollars, and

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they began the election year with $200 million in the bank. Collectively, Democrats contributed $1 billion to candidates and organizations through online donations, but whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, with the exception of Bloomberg, is likely to begin the general election cash-strapped by comparison with the president.

Trump’s operation has been building and building, identifying the voters it believes will determine the outcome in November in the states Trump must win to assemble another electoral college majority. “Time is one of the great advantages the president’s reelection campaign has enjoyed, and we have not squandered it,” Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, said in an email message.

Murtaugh reiterated that the reelection operation will target not only the swing states Trump won narrowly but other states that Democrats captured four years ago, where the president’s team hopes to put them on the defensive. Pointing to the financial disparity between Trump’s campaign and that of the likely Democratic nominee, he added, “The Democrats will not be able to match the president in resources or organization.”

In many of those states, there has been minimal to no Democratic presence yet.

Bloomberg’s hefty advertising campaign is beginning to compensate in some of the most important general-election battlegrounds. The billionaire ex-mayor is setting up field offices in those states and has promised to keep them open until November, even if he isn’t the nominee.

“It has become clearer to me how strong Trump is in the . . . swing states and how much work he has done,” said Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Sheekey. “The more time I spend in Wisconsin or Michigan or North Carolina, the more I realize how difficult those states are going to be to win.”

Trump also will start with the advantage of a more sophisticated understanding of which voters he needs beyond his core supporters to win a general election. His campaign already is testing various messages on many issues.

The Democratic nominee will start well behind on that front, relying instead on any organic Trump opposition to help narrow the margin. Plouffe recalled that after Obama won the nomination in 2008, and after campaigning in every state, it was like starting over to attract a new set of voters.

“The voters who make the difference don’t know you,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve got staff and volunteers, but you’re not talking to voters who will be front and center in the general election.”

That will be the challenge for whoever becomes the Democratic nominee. But that is at least several months into the future, and only after the biggest field in the history of the Democratic Party is narrowed to the last person standing. n

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books

The West and one ambitious couple N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

H . W . B RANDS

R Imperfect Union How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

By Steve Inskeep Penguin Press. 449 pp. $32

arely has good fortune become so calamitous as after gold was discovered in California in 1848. The recent war with Mexico that resulted in the acquisition of the American Southwest had reopened the debate over slavery in the western territories, but the sparring was mostly symbolic and prospective.

The Southwest was chiefly desert.

Its climate unsuited it to the plantation agriculture that supported slavery in the South. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was still largely unsettled after nearly five decades in America’s possession; the Southwest might not require a decision about slavery until the 20th century. By then the forces of modernization that had rendered slavery anachronistic in the North might well do so in the South, and it would die of its own weight.

The discovery of gold eliminated this possibility. The sudden peopling of California by the gold rush erased the buffer of time.

California filled with enough residents to qualify for statehood, and when Congress was slow to provide a government that could protect the Californians from armed robbers, arsonists and other agents of insecurity, they created a government of their own. They wrote a constitution and sent it to Washington for approval.

They also sent John C. Frémont, half of the subject of this fine new book by Steve Inskeep, as one of California’s inaugural senators.

Frémont’s entry into politics was as surprising as the emergence of California, and it reflected the same forces. The bastard son of a French immigrant and his adulterous paramour, Frémont had clawed his way out of obscurity by attaching himself to powerful men. And to one woman — the other half of Inskeep’s “Imperfect Union” — even more ambitious than he.

Jessie Benton’s father had hoped for a boy. She herself often regretted being female, for it

Library of congress

A gold miners’ camp in El Dorado, Calif., around 1850. The gold rush led to more residents and a new state — California — where John and Jessie Frémont found fame.

meant she would have to work twice as hard to attain anything like the influence of Thomas Hart Benton, a senator from Missouri since that state’s founding. And she would have to be crafty, for where her father could browbeat or occasionally shoot opponents, women were expected to be more demure.

Jessie met John Frémont when John escorted Jessie’s older sister to a concert. Whether the spark that resulted was passion or ambition was difficult to say. Not that either felt obliged to parse the matter; the one motive served the other. Jessie defied her father, who wanted a big wedding with a groom of good family, and eloped with John. When they broke the news and the senator ordered John to leave and never return, Jessie said she would go with him.

Her will proved stronger than her father’s: Thomas Benton resigned himself to making the best of the bad situation by making the most of his son-in-law’s career.

Benton’s special project was the West, which became John and Jes-

sie Frémont’s project, too. In “Imperfect Union,” John Frémont goes on various expeditions of discovery across the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada. Jessie Frémont is never far behind, in the telling if not the traveling, for she served as co-author, editor and promoter of the accounts that made John Frémont a hero of the armchair explorers who snatched the stirring narratives from bookshops around the country.

Inskeep’s day job is journalism; he hosts NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

His journalist’s eye for detail and nuance serves his readers well.

His account of the dumb luck of the Frémonts in becoming insanely wealthy in California — a property that John bought for a ranch proved to sit atop the Mother Lode — makes clear how capricious fortune could be in that singular moment of American history.

And as a journalist, Inskeep recognizes spin when he sees it.

He cross-checks the Frémonts’ accounts of the Western journeys with diaries kept by other mem-

bers of the expeditions, who acknowledged John Frémont’s courage but saw it shade into foolhardiness that could have killed them all.

Inskeep traces the rise of John and Jessie Frémont, culminating in his nomination for president by the new Republican Party in 1856.

This narrative arc suits the author’s story of the invention of celebrity in 19th-century America.

But sudden wealth was a disaster for the Frémonts. John Frémont squandered their fortune on bad investments, eventually losing it all, and his reputation along with it. Nor did the gold do anything good for their marriage — but that might have suffered anyway, once Jessie discovered that John was out of his element in politics and would never make her the wife of a president. Imperfect union, indeed. But the more fascinating for it. n Brands teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is “Dream of El Dorado: A History of the American West.”

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Five Myths

Jazz BY

N ATALIE W EINER

If you’re not already a fan, your vision of jazz might contain a guy (always a guy) in a fedora playing tenor saxophone in a smoky bar. Or a self-satisfied aficionado waxing poetic about a rare free-jazz LP, acting as though he’s the only one capable of decoding its knotty melodies as he pushes his glasses up his nose. Yes, jazz has an image problem: More than a century after its genesis, the genre remains shrouded in many of the same erroneous cliches that initially made it so controversial — as well as a slew of newer ones. The trouble comes when that mystique looms large enough to keep people from ever exploring the music.

Myth No. 1 Jazz is more serious than other genres.

In fact, jazz requires exactly as much or as little expertise to listen to and appreciate as anything else. Understanding the music’s history can certainly inform the listening experience — as with music from any genre — but all you really need to appreciate jazz are open ears.

Reverence and study are not prerequisites: After all, many of the most canonical jazz records were meant to be danced to.

Myth No. 2 Jazz was born in New Orleans.

One oft-cited, very easy history of jazz begins with the relative musical liberation of New Orleans’s Congo Square, continues with cornetist Buddy Bolden and pianist Jelly Roll Morton (who played in Storyville, the city’s red-light district), and moves with Louis Armstrong up the Mississippi on the paddle wheel boats to Chicago.

But the trouble with this story is that jazz had no Big Bang. Its roots involve so many different kinds of music: blues, spirituals, West African rhythms as they had been reimagined in the Caribbean, European classical music and more. Those sources informed musicians around the country. As a result, music we would now identify as jazz emerged almost simultaneously in a number of

different communities from Jacksonville to Kansas City around the turn of the century.

Myth No. 3 Jazz must swing.

“Most jazz is very rhythmic [and] has a forward momentum called ‘swing,’ ” explains the website for the National Museum of American History. (Now, name a music that is not “very rhythmic.”) Swing is a way of playing eighth notes unevenly to produce a shuffle effect. It was one of the initial innovations of jazz and quickly became one of its distinguishing features.

“Swing” and “jazz” are often treated as interchangeable terms because of the assumption that swing is one of jazz’s essential qualities.

But “straight” eighth notes have been integral to jazz from the start, especially in jazz from the Caribbean and South America, such as mambo or bossa nova. Dave Brubeck combined “straight” eighth notes and swing to monumental effect on “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in 1959, and playing “straight” has become popular among contemporary jazz artists — who, like Brubeck, are also prone to experimenting with unusual time signatures. Those experiments tend to be a little simpler rhythmically when musicians aren’t trying to swing as well.

Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press

Members of the Soul Rebels Band from New Orleans play in the streets of Havana during a jazz festival this past month. Many historians say jazz originated in New Orleans, but in fact its origins are so varied that a single birthplace can’t be pinpointed.

Myth No. 4 Jazz musicians were (or are) on drugs.

“Charlie Parker’s heroin addiction helped make him a genius,” argued the New York Post in a recent article, just one of the countless places where jazz musicians’ habits — not their work — are featured front and center. It’s a sensationalized, romantic vision of the music, one that reinforces an imagined connection between addiction and superlative creativity.

But the majority of jazz musicians did not regularly use intravenous drugs, according to an anonymous survey conducted by Nat Hentoff in the late 1950s — even though heroin was in vogue while the music was most popular.

Instead, the cliche plays into a long, racist history of disproportionately prosecuting black drug users. The cannabis euphemism “jazz cigarette” has its roots in early propaganda designed to paint black communities (and their artists) as dens of iniquity — and create reasons to arrest them.

Myth No. 5 Jazz is dead.

But people have said jazz is dead since Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk had the moldy figs aghast with their audacious bebop in the 1940s.

Though there are real questions about whether the term “jazz” is useful, the music it describes has always been diversifying and regenerating.

If anything, streaming technology presents unprecedented opportunities for music makers and fans to learn more about jazz’s history, as well as the wide range of artists active today. It’s integral to hip-hop — now the dominant form of pop music — and vibrant jazz scenes in Los Angeles, Chicago and London speak to a new generation of artists committed to live, local music. Physical album sales are growing incrementally thanks to the vinyl renaissance, and festivals remain generally well attended. n Weiner, a staff writer at SB Nation, covers music for Billboard, Rolling Stone and JazzTimes.

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