Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 442

The Mystery of Kesha's Comeback

It’s impossible to ever really know what a public figure is feeling, which is probably why it’s a national pastime to speculate about it. That’s doubly so in pop music, where a musician's songs sit alongside their “narrative”—both self-created and not—in most conversations. Kanye West has recently been spinning a story about being transformed by fatherhood, marriage, and an Adidas contract; Lady Gaga, everyone knows, is in her “normal” phase after her hype bubble burst; Beyoncé, if you believe the Instagrams, is enjoying the best life on Earth as a reward for her hard work and inherent flawlessness.

Kesha, formerly Ke$ha, real name Kesha Rose Sebert, is … well, it’s hard to say. After reigning as a chart-topping A-lister for a few years on the strength of her high-octane and irreverent dance anthems—with a visual presence that relied on glitter, facepaint, and the middle finger—the image of her as a superhuman party warrior started to crack. A few singles underperformed in 2013; people in her camp started to grouse about her producer, Dr. Luke, being too controlling; she checked herself into rehab for an eating disorder; she dropped the dollar sign from her name. After spending much of 2014 out of the public eye, she filed a lawsuit alleging that Dr. Luke sexually and emotionally abused her, including a charge that he drugged and raped her. He countersued, saying she was just trying to get out of her contract.

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Dr. Luke, real name Lukasz Gottwald, isn't merely a producer. He was an essential part of the Kesha story, the person who signed her at age 19 and who co-produced or cowrote basically most of her hits (not to mention other smashes from Katy Perry and Lady Gaga). Even before the abuse lawsuit, she and her mother had publicly confirmed fans' suspicions that Luke had been stifling her creativity and that she wanted to branch into different kinds of music. Now that the falling out is official, what does that mean for Kesha the performer? And where does a pop narrative go after such an ugly turn?

Last week, the Washington, D.C. rock club Black Cat announced that Kesha would play there on Tuesday night, and that tickets would go on sale at noon for $25 apiece. Following a couple of college-campus and benefit shows, the appearance was her first public U.S. performance since 2013, at a location that's nothing like the stadiums she’d previously been playing: dark and small, with a capacity of around 750 people. The Narrative loomed. Why was an ultra-famous pop star mounting her comeback in a tiny venue that usually hosts indie rock? Would she ditch all her Luke songs and play unreleased stuff? Follow the thread of her divisive Bob Dylan cover and go acoustic? Double down on her Last Rock Star image and put on a metal show? Say something about the controversies? Tickets sold out in under four seconds.

But from the opening moments of the show last night, it was clear that this was not to be the unveiling of Kesha 2.0. She came out performing the opening title track to Warrior, the 2012 album heavily shaped by Dr. Luke. Buff male dancers swung swords like samurais and the crowd, decked in glitter, headdresses, and unicorn tights inspired by Kesha’s videos, roared. They'd keep roaring as the rest of the set offered basically anything a diehard could want: confetti, props, “Tik Tok” and “Timber.”

Band members played guitar and keyboard, and for “Die Young”—a Warrior song that Kesha, at one point, tried to disown as something she’d been forced into singing—there was a drum. But for the most part, Kesha just made like an arena-pop performer, singing along with a backing track as her on-stage crew provided visual stimulation. She seemed thrilled to be there, swinging from the rafters and shouting out the local gay strip club. Besides countrified covers of Chris Brown’s “These Hoes Aint Loyal” and Nick Jonas's "Jealous," the setlist was entirely of songs she’d already released; “Lover,” the non-Dr. Luke track uploaded to Soundcloud last year, didn’t make the cut.

After the concert, she tweeted “tonight was everything” and “touring gives me life,” so maybe she chose to play a small stage with little advance warning just for the fun of it, and precisely to avoid the pressure of a potential career relaunch. She’ll soon play another college venue in Baltimore, and then will entertain Los Angeles Pride. In terms of The Narrative, you could imagine these shows—all with guaranteed fanatical audiences—as psychically refreshing for her, as a reawakening of her fan base, or as an assertion that she's a fully complete artist independent of Dr. Luke, or as a statement that she wants to move past the drama. Or, like the many glitter-coated fans glad to be given an epic Tuesday night, you could forget the narrative and see a performer doing her job, and doing it well.

If You Seek Amy

With Inside Amy Schumer, the comedian doesn't even need to appear in a sketch to make her presence felt. A gem among Comedy Central's lineup, Schumer's Peabody Award-winning show returned Tuesday night for a third season, continuing its dual mission of taking on the kind of material many would deem too sensitive for basic-cable comedy and challenging the form of the sketch show in exciting, cinematic ways. Most personality-driven shows exist almost entirely on the backs of their stars, and Schumer is no exception. But unlike the recently concluded Kroll Show, the wonderful Key & Peele, or the unforgettable Chappelle's Show, Schumer doesn't feel the need to dominate the show, whether appearing in every skit or rarely popping up at all. Either way, she makes her presence felt by tackling increasingly ambitious topics, including college rape and Hollywood's marginalization of older actresses.

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The centerpiece sketch of Tuesday's premiere, "Football Town Nights," presented as a faithful spoof of NBC's departed classic Friday Night Lights, from the atmospheric opening credits to the shot-for-shot recreation of some of its most familiar visual motifs (the coach listening to the radio in his car, or slamming his fist against the locker-room wall after his team blows it on the field). Josh Charles does a pitch-perfect job in the Kyle Chandler role, while Schumer plays his supportive wife, clutching a glass of chardonnay that grows larger with every passing scene.

The joke within the sketch is brutally blunt—as the new coach in town, Charles lays down some rules for his high-school footballers, the most controversial of which is: "No raping." This stricture sparks cries of protests and a thousand questions about loopholes, and turns the whole town against him in a remarkable, uncomfortable, deliberately extreme examination of the horrifying knee-jerk defenses athletes convicted of such crimes receive on a regular basis. Inside Amy Schumer has always managed to navigate tricky territory without ever losing sight of what's funny, but as Schumer has grown as an actress and the show has continued to explore the visual potential of sketch, it's also begun taking greater and greater risks.

So there's Schumer on the sidelines, gently encouraging her coach husband while sipping goblets of wine, even wondering if he should give up on the whole "no raping" policy because it's made everyone so mad at him. No offense to Connie Britton, who did such wonderful work on Friday Night Lights in its five glorious seasons, but Schumer is cleverly poking at the stereotype of the supportive wife, the soundboard character we've seen in a thousand films and TV shows, who pours her husband a drink as he gets home, collapses on the couch, and delivers expositional dialogue about his inner struggle. Here's a sketch exploring the very real, very noxious issue of athletes and sexual assault, and there's only one female character in it. This is no oversight—Schumer (and her head writer Jessi Klein) knows exactly what she's doing here.

Here's a sketch exploring the very real issue of athletes and sexual assault, and there's only one female character in it.

This theme recurs throughout the episodes sent out to critics—on Tuesday night, one sketch had Schumer running across Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, and Patricia Arquette at a boozy picnic together, bidding farewell to Louis-Dreyfus' "last fuckable day" before Hollywood consigns her to the pile of middle-aged actresses doomed to play non-sexual wives and mothers for the rest of their lives. Again, Schumer knows when to dominate a scene and when to hang back, and here she let the talent she'd assembled do all the work. Next week's episode features a sketch called "Plain Jane," where Schumer plays a Miami Vice-type undercover cop who's so unremarkable looking, criminals can't even see her when she's in the same room. Each time, Schumer takes on media stereotypes, but rather than just repeat the same joke about it over and over again, she finds surprising directions to go in.

This is pushed even further in the show's tour de force third episode, titled "12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer," shot entirely in black and white as a direct homage to Sidney Lumet's film. Schumer only briefly appears at the beginning and end. The rest of the episode is 12 jurors in their shirtsleeves, played by an all-star cast (Jeff Goldblum, Paul Giamatti, John Hawkes, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Gethard, Vincent Kartheiser among them), debating whether Schumer is "hot enough" to have her own TV show.

For the entire episode, Schumer is nothing more than a picture hanging in a corner being debated by a panel of frustrated men, but her presence permeates the conceit. It's in the writing, which finds horrifying new ways to deconstruct Schumer's own insecurities about her appearance and the scrutiny she's constantly subjected to as a stand-up comic and TV star. All of which is part of the grand plot of the play being spoofed, where the jurors enter with preconceived notions but begin to admit their deeper insecurities as the hours drag on. In minimizing its figurehead, the show cleverly plays with sketch-comedy's dependence, to an extent, on the egos of its stars. Schumer's more-modest approach to inserting herself into her own show has hardly diminished its impact; if anything, it's amplified it.

How Writers Can Grow by Pretending to Be Other People

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug Mclean

In 2011, Kate Bolick’s much-discussed Atlantic cover story “All the Single Ladies” made a case for the unattached life, decrying the lack of affirming cultural narratives for single women. In a new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick combines memoir, literary biography, and cultural history to continue her examination of what it means to remain alone. Spinster studies the lives of five groundbreaking, independent women—Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edith Wharton. As Bolick considers how these historical figures triumphed, faltered, and made tradeoffs, she explores the pleasures and consequences of long-term solitude, as well as her own competing desires for freedom and attachment.

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When I spoke to Bolick for this series, she chose to discuss an overlooked short story by Gilman, one of the five “awakeners” depicted in the book. “If I Were A Man,” falls somewhere between Freaky Friday and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: the story’s female narrator, Mollie, wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting her husband’s body. We discussed different forms of projecting oneself into another person’s experience, and what’s revealed in our personal fantasies about freedom, relationships, and the future.

Kate Bolick is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. She lives in New York City, where she spoke to me by phone.

Kate Bolick: In my late 20s, I felt very lonely in my thinking about being single. As I wondered what I was going to do with my life—as well as whether I’d get married or not—I didn’t see the option of staying single being reflected in an appealing way within the contemporary situation. Back then, in the year 2000, our culture was representing single women as either Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City—fabulous and frivolous—or Bridget Jones—desperate and comical. The archetype was very limited.

Then I came across Neith Boyce, who wrote a column for Vogue in the year 1898 called “The Bachelor Girl” about her decision to never marry. Discovering Boyce was a revelation, and the beginning of a very long process that eventually became this book. It felt incredibly exciting and important to read a late-Victorian piece of writing about what it meant to be an unmarried woman. I hadn’t known such a conversation existed so long ago.

I had known that, during the second wave of the women’s movement, there was a lot of discussion about single women and a huge critique around marriage. But I hadn’t known that conversation also happened in the late 1800s (not to mention the early 1800s). To hear Boyce’s voice a century on—a voice that sounded so relevant and contemporary and modern—made me feel not alone. It was something I really needed at that moment in time. To think that history was supplying me with what I needed was consoling.

By the time I sat down to write Spinster, I’d acquired this habit of accumulating women from the past. After my mother died, it became a way of recreating the kinds of conversations I would have had with her. I couldn’t talk to her, but—oddly enough—I could talk to these other women instead. A lot of my questions were about finding a home in the world: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What kind of home am I making for myself? Once my mother died, my sense of home was lost, in a way, because I could never return to the life I’d shared with her. Going out into the world and accumulating these women was a way of creating my own home, whatever that would turn out to be.

I first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman in college, and at the time she was never one of my favorites. But I found myself thinking about her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” as I wrote this book—so I looked around on my shelf, found my copy, and reread it. Right away I was struck by what a strong piece of writing it is, and I became curious about her life and her work.

There is a very universal longing to be alone, to be independent.

Gilman’s not a great writer. She’s not a stylist. She didn’t think of herself as being a literary type of person. But what I find so admirable about her—so refreshing and exciting—is the way she’s just bursting with ideas, hurrying to get them down on the page. You can see her imagination at work, for example, in her 1915 novella, Herland—a satirical work about a utopian, all-female society. Gilman designs the entire society from soup to nuts: the architecture, the dinnerware, the food supply system, the clothes. It’s such an inspired vision: Every detail about this world she engineers.

One of my favorite Gilman stories is the lesser-known “If I Were a Man,” which was published in 1914. (I assume she wrote it for her publication The Forerunner, which she ran from 1909 to 1916—she pretty much wrote and published the whole thing herself.) It’s a very short story about a character named Mollie, whom Gilman describes as typically female. One day, Mollie wakes up as a man: she’s become her husband, Gerald. She finds herself in his body, hurrying to the train to commute into the city for work—running late, "as usual, and, it must be confessed, in something of a temper." Which made me laugh out loud. Even now we say men “have tempers” and women are “moody.”

As Mollie experiences what it’s like to be a man, one of her very first revelations is that she has pockets. In the early 1900s, pockets were not a feature of women’s clothing. Unthinkingly, she/he reaches into one to get a nickel for the conductor, a penny for the newsboy, and is overcome with the novelty and power conferred by this tiny sartorial element:

These pockets came as a revelation. Of course she had known they were there, had counted them, made fun of them, mended them, even envied them; but she never had dreamed of how it felt to have pockets. Behind her newspaper she let her consciousness, that odd mingled consciousness, rove from pocket to pocket, realizing the armored assurance of having all those things at hand, instantly get-at-able, ready to meet emergencies ... The keys, pencils, letters, documents, notebook, checkbook, bill folder—all at once, with a deep rushing sense of power and pride, she felt what she had never felt before in all her life—the possession of money, of her own earned money—hers to give or to withhold, not to beg for, tease for, wheedle for.

It’s very typical of Gilman to imagine herself into the mind of a man to try to see what that would feel like, just as an exercise. Here, the pocket becomes a powerful gender distinction. Being able to stash all of the things that help her move around the world makes Mollie feel powerful.

Gilman taught me about material feminism, a movement within the long history of feminism I had not been aware of until I started reading her. She was committed to the idea that changing our physical, material world—our built environment, our architecture—could improve our lives. One of her biggest ideas, for instance, was the kitchen-less house: taking kitchens out of individual homes and making them communal [to] alleviate the chores and scutwork of housekeeping, and free women from toiling alone. She showed me ways to think about the home in relation to the world at large, and how to change society through changing the home. Up until then, I’d been thinking about it on an individual level—how the house shapes the person, how the house shapes the family—but Gilman politicized architecture and space for me in a way I found very compelling.

Reading allowed my fantasy to live inside of my reality.

Mollie’s climbing into the male experience and feeling that physicality is similar to what I felt like I was doing as I climbed into the experience of women like Gilman in order to write this book. I find that I habitually turn to the past into order to make sense of the present. I’m very drawn to that imaginary time-traveling—projecting yourself into the past, and into a specific person’s experience of the past, though their physical environment and the actual clothes that they wore.

I think that, as I was thinking about wanting to be single, I was living that fantasy through the lives of the women I read about. Adam Phillips has written eloquently about the role of our longed-for selves, the lives we think we should be leading versus the lives we actually are leading. A sense of frustration is, surprisingly, necessary: The answer is not always to give up the life you have and then go lead the life that you want. The fact is that we’re all living in a tension between the life we live and the life we think we should be living or want to be living, constantly, and that our life is in that tension. In my own life, even at a moment where I would be in a committed relationship, I might still long for or wonder or dream about what it would mean to be a single woman. I could do that by reading about this woman or thinking about that woman. Reading allowed my fantasy to live inside of my reality.

There is a very universal longing to be alone, to be independent. It’s a real fantasy for a lot of people, whether or not they’re actually living it. At some point in my 30s, a woman my mother had been friendly with contacted me out of the blue. She said, “I’m Margaret, the woman your mother wrote a romance novel with.” I had no idea my mother had ever written a romance novel. It was a very un-her thing to do. She didn’t read romance novels, she was not a particularly romantic or sentimental kind of person, and she was very serious in her reading habits. So this friend sent me the novel—my mother had written the first half by herself and then had gotten bored with it, so she and this friend collaborated to finish it.

I don’t think of the historical women I write about as “inspiring” figures.

There I was, 10 years or so after my mother’s death, reading her romance novel—the story of a young, unmarried woman named Ivy Winter who works as an interior decorator and lives in New York City. It was so uncannily like my own life—at the time, I was living in New York and working as an editor at a glossy home-decor magazine—but had nothing at all to do with my mother’s experience—she never lived in New York, she was single for about two minutes before she married my father, and she knew nothing about interior decorators. But clearly, she had a fantasy about home decorating, about being the archetypal single, urban woman. To see that my mother had carried around that fantasy while living the life of a married woman and mother of two children was a thrill. Of course, we never fully know our parents—and we rarely get such evidence of their secret selves. It made me feel so much closer to her.

Though they allowed me to fantasize, and despite my admiration for them, I don’t think of the historical women I write about as “inspiring” figures. “Inspiring,” to me, suggests an aspirational stance—that you want to be that person. I didn’t ever want to be these people: They were completely distinct entities that I engaged and interacted with by bumping up against. Engaging with them allowed me to think about my own life from different perspectives the way great conversations do. I could like or not like their choices as I read, just as people who read my book will like or not like the decisions I’ve made.

I’m very suspicious of the role of the bad-ass, brave, rebel woman. That is a type of personality, of course, and there are people out there who are like that—they are necessary! But we can tend to reduce women to two archetypes: You’re the badass woman who breaks all the rules and gets to live a fulfilled life, or you’re a woman who follows convention and is fearful. There’s a whole range, obviously, in between. The most shocking and helpful thing, when I am reading the biographies and memoirs and letters of the women who I converse with most readily, is when I get to experience moments of self-doubt. To watch them go through that, and find their own confidence—that is useful. Just being presented with a strong badass woman who has it all figured out, that doesn’t help me. What helps me is watching somebody else go from doubt to certainty. Or to change their mind again. It’s a reminder that there is no fixed place to arrive at. We’re always works in progress.

Fresh Off the Boat Is Good—but It Could Be Even Better

"You think they're going to put two Chinese boys on TV?" is a question Jessica (Constance Wu) asks her young sons Evan and Emery in the penultimate episode of ABC's Fresh Off the Boat. She—a Taiwanese immigrant mother from 1995—delivers the question with disbelief and cynicism, but she’s also talking to an audience that's been watching those two Chinese boys on TV for weeks. It’s cute, it’s meta, and it’s hard not to read the line as ABC congratulating itself for having embraced the kind of diversity Jessica never believed possible 20 years ago. And yet it seems fair to allow the show a little bit of smugness as it comes to a close Tuesday, after a first season with respectable ratings and an overwhelmingly warm critical reception—arguably the best possible outcome for television’s second-ever sitcom to feature an Asian American family.

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So what’s next? It's likely that next month, ABC will announce plans to renew the show for a second season. If (or when) it does, the question will be whether Fresh Off the Boat will continue to do more of the same kind of lighthearted, sitcommy storytelling—with stories like the show's young protagonist Eddie (Hudson Yang) running for school president, or Louis, the father (Randall Park), trying to sidestep his wife's controlling tendencies—or whether it'll raise the stakes. Having already proven its worth to audiences and critics, it's possible the show will take advantage of its enviable perch and head in the direction of even smarter, nuanced, and more progressive storylines. Unlike with All-American Girl, the first Asian American family sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat hasn't blown its chances: The show doesn't need to wait for another series to come along and improve on what it's done.

As with any show, Fresh Off the Boat's first season had its missteps, mostly stemming from its not doing enough to distance itself from the very stereotypes it sought to critique. Some shows (I'm looking at you, 30 Rock) have excelled at using two-dimensional depictions to create elevated commentary about issues like race, sexual orientation, or gender. In fact, many of Fresh Off the Boat's smartest moments involved pointing out bigotry or myopic thinking in order to subvert them. It didn't always work: In an episode titled "Blind Spot," Jessica realizes that her old college boyfriend is actually gay, and her ex-flame is rendered as a mostly flat stereotype in a "Gaysian" T-shirt. Other lapses included efforts to milk laughs out of Eddie's attempts to hit on older girls based on behavior he picked up from rap videos.

Plenty of television shows have started out as decent (or even mediocre or bad) only to transcend their earlier years in thematic complexity. Buffy the Vampire Slayer began its run as a clever and charming bit of television only to up the stakes in season two, moving past its initial focus on the anxieties of high-school life. Parks and Recreation's bland first year gave way to six of the finest seasons in modern sitcom history. The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is far weaker than, say, its fifth, sixth, or seventh. (Deep Space Nine and Voyager follow a similar pattern.) A show as groundbreaking as Fresh Off the Boat shouldn't let the conventions of the network sitcom limit its subject matter or potential for incisiveness.

The show doesn't need to wait for another series to come along and improve on what it's done.

So much of the initial conversation (both handwringing and jubilation) about Fresh Off The Boat revolved around issues of representation and visibility. But visibility isn't such a lofty aim; it's simply a starting point for a medium that's inherently visual. With television, before you can talk about ornamentation like motifs, pacing, and story arcs, you first have to talk about who’s being seen and whose stories are being told. Even while recognizing the futility of trying to capture some universal Asian American experience, the prospect of seeing how Fresh Off the Boat would handle this responsibility was exciting. Equally exciting was the fact that it offered a rare opportunity for people to think and write about diversity on television as more than just an abstract goal (or a harbinger of some dreaded age of ethnic-casting quotas).

Before the show’s two-part premiere episode aired, Eddie Huang, the chef and writer whose memoir inspired the show, openly shared his misgivings about how the series had significantly watered down his life experiences. By the end of a long New York Magazine piece, he had somewhat demurred, acknowledging that it took "chutzpah" for the network to include the word "chink" in the pilot. And yet, weeks into the series, Huang took to Twitter, careful not to diss or dismiss the rest of the show outright, but claiming that it was helping to perpetuate an “artificial representation of Asian American lives.” Why even bother adapting his memoir at all, if ABC was just going to strip it of everything that made it special in the first place?

I had to say something because I stood by the pilot. After that it got so far from the truth that I don't recognize my own life.

— RICH HOMIE HUANG (@MrEddieHuang) April 8, 2015

Why do sitcoms have to avoid real issues and instead appropriate the symptoms of our problems for entertainment? I don't accept this.

— RICH HOMIE HUANG (@MrEddieHuang) April 8, 2015

Authenticity isn’t really the issue here. Huang might very well think that his memoir captured something real, if not raw and tragic, or that it could have added necessary nuance to a story whose creases had otherwise been vigorously ironed out. His frustration is understandable—that he suffered abuse at the hands of his parents isn’t just an autobiographical nugget, but part of a disturbing and mostly ignored trend of domestic violence in Asian American households. A show that instead chooses to further develop the familiar trope of the Tiger Mom might seem negligent, or willfully ignorant (though Wu's character is far from a screeching, unaffectionate harpy). But as E. Alex Jung pointed out at Vulture, “This is not a problem of content so much as a problem of the medium: If you have a show on ABC, it’s going to be an ABC show.”

The series has paved the way to tell funnier, sadder, wiser stories about Asian Americans.

In an ideal world (hopefully called “the future”), there’d be a constellation of voices, each adding dimension to the broad concept of Asian American-ness so that no single individual would need to carry the weight of speaking for millions of people, many deeply different from himself. Ideally Huang’s memoir would get to keep its illuminating specificity in the same way, say, Piper Kerman's Orange Is the New Black would. His story wouldn’t have to be stretched thin to mean much more (and simultaneously much less) than it was ever intended to because there would be so many other stories out there to choose from. It would be great to see Fresh Off the Boat take up this challenge if it locks in another season. But regardless, the series has paved the way for other networks to do even better in the years to come: to tell funnier, sadder, wiser, and ultimately more expansive stories about Asian-Americans.

And for all its flaws, the show realizes that. At the very end of the same episode where Jessica questions her sons' interest in acting, the family gathers in front of a television playing an episode of All-American Girl, starring Margaret Cho. "No Asians on TV huh?" Emery asks her playfully. The significance of the nod at the earlier show needs no explanation. The moment is less about saying, "Look how much better things are now in 2015 than they used to be," and more one of gratitude: "We couldn't have done it without you."

@MrEddieHuang some asians are all "finally an A! after a B in 1994 and Fs after that." you're all "why not A+?" you're so asian. ha ha ha!!

— Grace Chu (@gracethespot) April 9, 2015

How 'Nothing Compares 2 U' Endured

The video, 25 years later, is almost as recognizable as the song itself, even though it conjures up images of soft-focus karaoke backing tracks and a million drunken vocal renditions of heartbreak. The camera scans over a road flanked on either side by tall trees, while a figure clad in black walks across the screen. Then there’s a misty shot of a bridge, a couple of pigeons flap their wings, and Sinead O’Connor’s face comes into focus: shorn, oval-eyed, seemingly disembodied, and completely indelible.

“It’s been seven hours,” she sings, “and fifteen days/ Since you took your love away.” Beneath her vocals, there’s just the sound of a single synthesized string note, before the drum track kicks in on the seventh line, just as O’Connor’s voice becomes an unmistakably Gaelic wail: “I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant/ But nothing/ I said nothing can take away these blues.”

The song, released by O’Connor in 1990, hit number one on the Billboard 100 on April 21, holding the top spot for four weeks—an honor it shared with just two other songs that year, “Vision of Love” by Mariah Carey and “Because I Love You (The Postman Song)” by Stevie B.” Unlike both of those tracks (with apologies to Mariah fans), it has endured. Rolling Stone placed the song at #165 on the magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, sandwiched between Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You”; on Billboard’s list of a similar name, it came in at #87. O’Connor has never quite  managed to emulate its success, even though she’s recorded eight albums since. Last month she stated on Facebook that she wouldn’t be performing the song anymore, saying “I finally ran out of anything I could use in order to bring some emotion to it.” And that’s her prerogative, because if anything is responsible for the success of "Nothing Compares 2 U," it’s O’Connor’s interpretation of it, which enshrined the song as one of the great emotional pop performances of the 20th century.

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“Nothing Compares 2 U,” for all its lush restraint and lilting pathos, was written in the mid-1980s by an artist named Prince. The musician had assembled a band called The Family as a side project and an outlet for his prolific songwriting abilities, and the song appeared on its first and only album as a futuristic soul ballad, with Close Encounters-inspired synth jams and an inspired saxophone solo. It’s an intriguing recording to listen to, but by no means does it sound like a future VH1 staple. Singer Paul Peterson channels the exaggerated regret of the lyrics—Tell me baby, where did I go wrong?—but his delivery is too polished, and too deliberate. As far as feeling bummed out goes, he gives the impression that his weekend has possibly been ruined, but not so much his entire life.

O’Connor, by contrast, offers something more guttural. She’s angry; she practically snarls at the camera and seethes as she recalls a doctor’s foolhardy advice to go out and try to have fun, but a few seconds later she’s desolate again, almond-eyed and hollow. She casts her eyes down at the ground then looks up again, half confrontational, half lost. Wearing a black turtleneck, and against a black backdrop, her head appears to be floating. When she sings, “Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling,” the passivity of the statement aches. Then, the “nothing” of the chorus is emphasized and bisected as she jumps an octave, underscoring its emptiness.

Then, around the 3:20 mark, after a few shots of O’Connor stalking around Paris in an overcoat, something extraordinary happens. As she sings, “All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard, they all died and withered away,” two tears well in her eyelids and fall slowly down her face. “I know that living with you baby was sometimes hard,” she yelps, “but I’m willing to give it another try.” In her own words:

The close-up of me singing “Nothing Compares 2 U” was supposed to be only one part of the video. But the song reminded me of my mother, who had died three years previously … I made an emotional connection, which I was not expecting—it didn’t hit me when I was recording the song. It only kicked in when I was being filmed. So I was sitting there, thinking about me mother, and trying hard not to bawl my eyes out.

The moment is unrivaled in music video history when it comes to raw emotion, but the song itself is serves as an example of the power of interpretation. Produced by Nellee Hooper, who later worked with The Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Madonna, and Gwen Stefani among others, it made an understated ballad out of a funk-pop song, and a star out of its singer, who enhanced her notoriety two years later when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. O’Connor might not sing it anymore, but the work is ultimately timeless—a confession of pain that defies its saccharine lyrics to offer instead one of pop’s most honest performances.

Migrant Deaths and 'Reckless Multiple Homicide' Charges

On Tuesday, Italian authorities arrested Mohammed Ali Malek, captain of the 66-foot boat that capsized off the coast of Libya on Sunday, killing over 800 migrants seeking refuge in Europe. Malek and Mahmud Bikhit, a fellow crew member, will reportedly face charges including reckless multiple homicide and engaging in illegal human trafficking.  

More Details About the Fatal Accident at Sea

The horrifying deaths of hundreds of would-be migrants, widely characterized as the deadliest shipwreck on record in the Mediterranean, occurred after the boat they were in rammed into the King Jacob, a Portuguese container ship, that had responded to a distress call. (In a separate incident Monday, another migrant ship sank near Greece, reportedly killing three.)

According to accounts given by the disaster's few survivors to local authorities and international organizations, the migrants had been locked in the hold when the boat capsized. Malek has been accused of steering recklessly in the boat's final moments.

"Prosecutors in Italy are investigating what caused the sinking, including whether the vessel capsized after the migrants rushed to one side of the ship," The New York Times reported.

Few Survivors Out of 850 Passengers

"Only 28 people are known to have survived the shipwreck, including a young man from Bangladesh who was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Catania, Sicily, on Sunday, and 27 people disembarked by the Italian Coastguard in Catania last night [Monday]," the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.

Among the dead were 350 Eritreans, would-be migrants from a number of African countries, and a number of Syrians.

Europe's Response

As demonstrations expressing support for migrants took place in a few European countries, the European Union released a "ten-point action program on migration" following a meeting of ministers in Luxembourg on Monday. The plan includes a boost in resources for rescue operations in the Mediterranean as well as a more concerted effort to crack down on smuggling infrastructure, including boats and funding.

“Twenty years ago, we and Europe closed our eyes to Srebrenica," Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said in a press conference on Tuesday, referring to the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in that city. "Today it’s not possible to close our eyes again and only commemorate these events later.”

1Book140: Vote for a Book to Read in May

In light of the robust conversation happening over at #1book140 about commenting, voting, and community (and also limiting monthly suggestions to five options—point taken!), May’s vote is going to be a bit of a grab bag of military fiction, books with maternal themes, books suggested ironically, and books that people just felt like reading.

Please cast your vote by 12 p.m. this Friday, and join us in reading one of the following:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Full points to @twindy5, who nominated Anthony Doerr’s novel before Monday’s announcement that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The jury called the story of a blind French girl and a German boy “an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.”

Crabwalk by Gunter Grass

In tribute to the Nobel prize-winning author Günter Grass, who died earlier this month, we’re including Crabwalk, one of his more recent novels. The book centers around the deadliest maritime disaster ever recorded—the sinking of a German refugee ship by the Soviets in 1945—and the ramifications for the Pokriefke family. As The New York Times Book Review wrote, “In his best book in a long while, Günter Grass once again dazzlingly analyzes Germany’s past and present, while hinting soberly at its future.”

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin’s “experiments in the pursuit of happiness and good habits” may be a bit of an odd book out this month but it might also prove to be a pleasant respite from the darker themes emerging on this list. Subtitled “Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun,” The Happiness Project provides practical advice with Rubin’s humorous journey.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

A dedicated reader might have suggested Kundera’s masterpiece ironically in a different #1book140 thread but it seemed liked a great addition to this month’s somewhat Euro-centric list. If you haven’t yet read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, now’s your chance to experience this work “of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos" (New York Review of Books) that's “of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness” (Vanity Fair).

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee sets his well-loved 1980 novella in a small border outpost in “the Empire.” Narrated by an aging, unnamed Magistrate whose comfortable existence unravels when interrogation experts and their captives arrive, Barbarians challenges our not only the reader's complacency but also our complicity in unjust regimes.

In addition to voting this week, we’re hosting a Twitter chat with Srdja Popovic, the author of Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, one of the runners up in our March vote. He’ll be replying to tweets throughout the week—just use #1book140 and tag @SrdjaPopovic when you pose your questions.​

1book140's May 2015 Read

Loretta Lynch Gets Her Vote

Loretta Lynch will finally get a Senate vote this week on her nomination to be attorney general, five-and-a-half months after President Obama chose her to succeed Eric Holder.

The long-delayed vote will come after Senate leaders struck a deal on completely unrelated anti-trafficking legislation and as Republicans faced mounting pressure from within their own ranks to confirm her. While her eventual approval had been expected, Lynch had become entangled in the Senate's partisan wringer, with Mitch McConnell refusing to call a vote until Democrats relented on abortion language in the otherwise non-controversial trafficking bill.

Related Story

Loretta Lynch's Long Wait

On Tuesday, McConnell and Harry Reid, the minority leader, announced an agreement that, at first glance, appears to be a genuine compromise. The trafficking measure creates a fund for victims, and Democrats had protested when Republicans added language explicitly prohibiting any of the money from paying for abortions. They argued that this would amount to a significant expansion of the  Hyde Amendment, which for four decades has prevented taxpayer dollars from funding abortion. Under the compromise, the revenue for the fund will be split into criminal fees that can go to legal aid and law enforcement but not healthcare, while money appropriated by Congress—and subject to the Hyde restrictions—can pay for health and medical services. Like most compromises, it allows both sides to claim success. Republicans have prevented either pot of funds from paying for abortions, by preventing criminal fees from paying for any healthcare. Democrats have limited the application of the Hyde Amendment to taxpayer dollars, halting the effort to expand it to other sources of funding.

The real payoff for Democrats, however, is that Lynch will get a vote after waiting longer than any nominee for attorney general in the last 30 years. Obama had denounced the delay as "embarrassing" to the Senate, and even Republican onlookers in recent weeks wondered why the party was holding up a nominee whose qualifications were never in dispute. The delay was particularly curious given that it only extended the tenure of Holder, a frequent target of conservative criticism. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, had lobbied for Lynch's confirmation; Jeb Bush said last week that Republicans should just go ahead and confirm her, despite his opposition to her support for Obama's immigration policy; and yesterday, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called for Lynch to have a vote.

The margin is expected to be close, but Lynch appears to have secured at least 51 votes, just enough to win confirmation without relying on Vice President Biden to cast a tie-breaking vote. (Republican opposition has centered not on her tenure as the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn but on her endorsement of the president's unilateral move to shield immigrants from deportation.) More broadly, the agreement is the latest sign that the logjam in Congress may finally be breaking after a slow start to the new Republican majority—at least to a limited extent. In the last several weeks, lawmakers have approved a significant change to Medicare policy and an extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program, and they have announced bipartisan agreements on trade and on Iran policy. Confirming a scandal-free attorney general shouldn't count for much, but given the recent dysfunction in Congress, it represents significant progress.

Star Wars: The Nostalgia Awakens

J.J. Abrams, the director tasked with bringing Star Wars back to the top of the crowded franchise heap, has always been happy to borrow. When he set out to make a new Star Trek and drag that moribund cinematic franchise back into blockbuster territory, he cheerfully swapped in some very familiar visual language to help it over the hill. Early on in the film, James Kirk (Chris Pine), nursing a desire to transcend his farmboy life, rides a motorcycle to see the U.S.S. Enterprise being built at a shipyard, and gazes up at it longingly. Star Wars fans would connect the scene to one at the beginning of the first 1977 film, when Luke Skywalker wistfully watches the dual suns of his home planet set; Star Trek's producers even called the scene "our Tatooine moment." Abrams has never exactly been a visionary artist, but he's a master of elevating the familiar—a fact made clear in the previews of his new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.

In those twin scenes of Kirk and Luke looking out into the unknown, the visuals and the swelling music behind them tell the whole story. In turning Star Trek into an egocentric hero's journey about Kirk's origins in the captain's chair, Abrams upended many a traditional Trek fan's conception of the franchise, and his films have never been fully embraced by that fan base. But 2009's Star Trek also made $385 million at the worldwide box office, compared with $67 million for its predecessor, 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis. Star Trek's first trailer also ends with a glimpse at a dynamic space battle, the likes of which one might find in, well, a certain George Lucas film.

Paramount Pictures

Now, Abrams has the reins to those films, and he got a rapturous reception at last week's "Star Wars Celebration" convention, where he premiered the second teaser to The Force Awakens, the series' seventh "episode." It might be too much to call the Star Wars franchise moribund, but after Lucas' prequel trilogy, its future seemed dire. Lucasfilm's surprise sale to Disney in 2012, which placed Star Wars in the hands of producer Kathleen Kennedy, set it up as a moneymaker for years to come, but it had been hard to know what the Lucas-less sequels would look like until Kennedy hired Abrams to spearhead them.

Kennedy, a longtime collaborator with Steven Spielberg, has known Abrams since he was 14 years old and doing a young movie nerd's dream job—watching and restoring the Super 8 films Spielberg made as a child. With a background like that, it's no wonder Abrams taps into the classic Hollywood moviemaking of that era, nor is it surprising that Kennedy saw him as the perfect candidate for The Force Awakens, persuading him to leave the Trek franchise and numerous other projects for what Abrams called "the first movie that blew my mind."

This is the stuff of nostalgia, not the breath of fresh air Star Wars offered in 1977.

The Force Awakens is looking to blow audience's minds in the same way. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber noted of the film's most recent trailer, there's nothing going on here that audiences haven't seen before. Familiar faces, stormtroopers, X-Wings swooping around, all set to John Williams' score; this is the stuff of nostalgia, not the breath of fresh air the original Star Wars offered in 1977. Whatever new formula Abrams might be adding, it's certainly not apparent from the advertising, which is instead designed to remind everyone of the first time they saw Han and Chewie in the Millennium Falcon.

But there are indeed hints that Abrams is going to do more than just recycle Star Wars' greatest hits. When George Lucas made his maligned prequels, one of his biggest challenges was the great leaps in movie technology that took place between Return of the Jedi in 1983 and The Phantom Menace in 1999. How could that be reconciled with the fact that Phantom was set before the original trilogy? Lucas, to the dismay of critics, doubled down and used CGI and green screen for everything, embracing the fact that he could make the "Old Republic" look like an unblemished jewel, primed for the great downfall audiences knew would come. Abrams has wisely gone the other way, returning to the practical effects of the original films. When the Millennium Falcon loop-de-loops at the end of The Force Awakens' first teaser, the real thrill is the feeling that the camera is actually moving with it, rather than mimicking that feeling with the programmed virtual cinematography Lucas eventually leaned on.

With the second teaser's bravura opening shot, Abrams is communicating everything viewers need to know about his Star Wars world with the same tactical, brilliant economy of his Star Trek. Here's the Star Destroyer fans remember, but crumpled on a planet's surface; Darth Vader's mask, burned and disfigured; Luke Skywalker's artificial hand, its fake skin gone after all these years. Most importantly of all, there's the first lightsaber audiences ever saw in a Star Wars film, seemingly being put in Leia's hands, a small but powerful piece of imagery that signals an upending of the long-standing gender dynamics of the original series, as Salon's Sonia Saraiya noted.

It's as if the blessed artifacts of the original films have been recovered by Abrams, an intrepid Hollywood archeologist who understands their power. By the time Harrison Ford delivers his one line ("Chewie, we're home"), Star Wars fans can't help but feel moved, even if the emotional manipulation at work is obvious. It's ridiculous to assume a film will succeed based on just two minutes of expertly edited footage. But Abrams has always understood the difference between nostalgia and tackiness. It's not just that you have to remind an audience of something they once loved—you have to make sure they still love it. With Star Wars, the deck is stacked in Abrams' favor.   

Alabama Shakes Frees Itself

Brittany Howard has given a name to each of the many dance moves she does onstage with her band Alabama Shakes. Those moves include, according to The Guardian's profile of Howard, “the Reverse Raindance, the Matador, the One-Legged Foxtrot, the Pre-Apocalyptic Strut (completely different, she insists, from the Post-Apocalyptic Strut), the Full Body Seizure.” You’ve got to wonder, listening to her band’s new album Sound & Color, whether she has a similar taxonomy for the kinds of sounds her voice can make. Might she refer to the wheeze at the start of “Don’t Want to Fight No More” as the Deflating Balloon? The quivering moan of the word “baby” on “Gimme All Your Love” as the Movie Villain Cackle?

Or maybe she doesn’t overthink her gift. During the young band’s already-legendary concerts, she taps into what she's called the “the spirit world”—“latching on to a feeling, riding it, trying not to come out of it. You stop thinking, you’re just performing—that’s the spirit world.” The ideal of a total-abandon performance, of being in the zone like an athlete, isn’t a new one for musicians. But it’s one that seems especially powerful in relation to Howard, a singer who rasps and booms in styles that recall icons from Robert Plant to Nina Simone. How many of her wild swings in pitch, her murmured asides, and her asymmetrical phrasings come out of careful, creative planning? How many result from pure improv?

There was little need to ask the same questions about the rest of the band's sound on Alabama Shakes' 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, which sold an impressive 500,000 copies in the U.S. It was retro rock in the Kings of Leon model, placing classic and Southern soul sounds into a tight, polished packaged that captured the attention of NPR playlist-makers and Jack White. There are lots of bands working in the same mode all over the country, writing songs as or nearly as catchy; for the most part, it was Howard who made this one stand out.

But on its sophomore album, Alabama Shakes sounds delightfully unglued. The title-track opener drifts by with vibraphones, Howard crying that "a new world hangs outside the window," and no traditional crescendo. The message: something freer, jazzier, and possibly more difficult is on offer. When creaking funk riffs and a disco beat snap into place for the follow-up track, “Don’t Wanna Fight,” it’s reassurance that the band hasn’t abandoned pop, but it's also a sign that where Boys & Girls prized consistency, Sound & Color prizes diversity. The songs to come include punk, psychedelia, and slew of more unplaceable moments.

The experimentalism pays off when it's executed with the same crazed passion as Howard's vocals. “Gimme All Your Love” is a two-parter: first comes stop-start thundering, alternating shouts and guitar stabs with lullaby-like interludes. In the second half, the tempo picks up and the band starts jamming over a bright organ line, and it feels like the satisfaction of some primal, universal hunger. Another highlight, “Miss You,” opens with a 50s-prom backing as Howard delivers some uncharacteristically specific lyrics—“I’m gonna miss you and your Mickey Mouse tattoo / and you’ll be leaving in your Honda Accord”—before she and the arrangement froth up in waves of noisy desire.

Other songs don't gel as well. The punk salvo “The Greatest” was apparently intended to be a ballad but, according to the band’s publicity material, it got a genre makeover because “it wasn’t clicking.” The conflation of interesting style with interesting songwriting is a problem throughout, especially on the Sun Ra-indebted "Gemini," which sounds neat in theory—Alabama Shakes: Space Voyagers—but at more than six and a half minutes long, just bores.

But for a band with an asset like Howard, some misfires in the name of ambition are no vice. Hearing her in new contexts is exciting; it makes you realize how cool it would be to have a Howard singing above house, or prog, or any number of styles. The most tantalizing piece of work is the closer, “Over My Head,” where Howard harmonizes in rounds with herself over a minimal soundscape of handclaps and keys. It’s gospel meets Kid A, but it doesn’t feel like arty affectation. It feels like a band realizing that with a voice as weird and powerful as Howard's, they can do anything at all.