Author: bapu
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I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)
Dostoevsky, in House of the Dead, wrote that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the horrors of Zomba Central Prison—overcrowding, malnutrition, HIV—on Malawian society: it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, and the gap in well-being between free people and…
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Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)
Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial. What does it all amount to? Maybe nothing more sitting on a torn recliner in the yard with a scruffy guitar in hand, singing your heart out…
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Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)
Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The genre Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a…
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Middlemarch, Eliot (1872)
Middlemarch depicts a very particular people, place, and time: the English provincial middle-class of the 1830s. Eliot cares about detail. The speech of the characters, their behavioral decorum, the parsing of status and misfortune, even the physical details of habitat are described with such fidelity that the reader experiences a gradual change in focus. What…
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Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)
All Bob ever wanted is for us to not forget the past. Not to excuse its crimes or stop moving forward, but to simply remember what we once were, how we once felt. Every Dylan record since 1992’s Good as I Been to You serves this kind of conservatism—the best kind of conservatism, one interested…
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From Eternity to Here, Carroll (2010)
From Eternity to Here is the best available single-book popular treatment of time and entropy as understood by present-day physics. These are not easy topics. The history of the philosophy of time is byzantine, burdened with both wishful thinking and self-absorbed pessimism; and if there’s one modern topic that’s been thoroughly obfuscated by misuse (by…
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Soul Journey, Gillian Welch (2003)
Critics generally regard Gillian Welch’s third album, Soul Journey, as an artistic lull. I disagree. The dominant themes of her other early albums—Revival‘s wistfulness, Hell Among the Yearlings‘ gothic grimness, Time (the Revelator)‘s nostalgic cool—rely on more powerful human emotions than the lightness of Soul Journey. But lightness can also be deep. It’s the sensation…
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The Corrections, Franzen (2001)
There are good reasons why The Corrections is talked about in the same breath as the great 19th-century Russian novels. The book has similar ambitions—to explore psychological truths and social dilemmas through detailing the inner lives of a family—and Franzen is an undeniably talented storyteller. But I can’t recall having been more depressed reading a…
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Black on Both Sides, Mos Def (1999)
I hated my nose growing up. It was too big, too bulbous. I wanted a white nose: Roman, aquiline. The insecurity grew milder as I got older, but it wasn’t until I saw the album cover for Black on Both Sides, and then listened to the music, that I understood how thoroughly I’d been brainwashed.…
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The Complete Plantation Recordings, Muddy Waters (1941)
In 1941, the music historian Alan Lomax traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record the legendary Robert Johnson. Johnson was dead, but locals pointed Lomax to another blues guitarist, McKinley Morganfield, better known by his nickname Muddy Waters. Over the course of two visits in 1941 and 1942, Lomax and the musicologist John Work recorded…
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RTJ4, Run the Jewels (2020)
RTJ4 dropped a week after George Floyd’s murder and a few months after COVID-19 hit the world stage. In retrospect, the most painful aspect of 2020 wasn’t the horrific events themselves. It’s the blinding realization that the world is just the same as it was before. No major legislation addressing police brutality passed; no overdue…
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My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante (2012)
The New York Times recently released a list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st century, as chosen by over five hundred writers and critics. Number one on the list—the putative greatest book, fiction or non-fiction, of the last twenty-four years—is Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I don’t see it. The novel is a…
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On Functions
A function is a machine. We observe the world and wonder what generated the phenomena we see. Water flowing, a bicycle rolling, a tree growing. What we would need to put into the world in order to obtain what we observe? A function mathematizes the process, which is to say that it allows for careful…
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Wolf Hall, Mantel (2009)
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to the 16th century English king Henry VIII, is a rebuttal. Narrowly, it’s a rebuttal to A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s 1954 play (and later Academy Award-winning film) about Thomas More, Cromwell’s contemporary and greatest antagonist. In…