Carl Sagan

Search:

André 3000’s Flute Album Is More Than Background Music

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 11 › andre-3000-new-blue-sun-album-flute-music › 676085

This story seems to be about:

In 2017, I spoke with a music historian to understand the trend of flute rap: a boom in rappers rhyming about codeine, cars, and trauma over the soft sound of breath moving through a tube. Ardal Powell, the author of The Flute, told me that nothing surprised him when it came to this instrument. It is possibly the oldest musical device in the world. Neanderthals and 15th-century Swiss mercenaries and 1970s heavy-metal bands found use for it. Why not rappers?

The “key thing in the history of the flute, going back thousands of years,” Powell said, is that “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.” No reed or mouthpiece separates the player’s breath from the sound it makes. This observation suggested that the flute, all along, was a bit hip-hop. And at its best, rap can seem like an act of inner channeling, of making the body and mind one. The flute is difficult to master but, fundamentally, intuitive to operate—intuitive like tapping out a rhythm, or like speaking.

André 3000’s intuition long ago earned him a claim to being one of the greatest rappers alive. Starting in the early 1990s as half of the Atlanta group Outkast, he specialized in wise and funny verses connecting street life with the stars. He was in conversation with his peers in southern rap—known for lackadaisical charm and sonic-boom bass lines—but also with Prince, Shakespeare, and Carl Sagan. Eventually, however, his vision dimmed. Outkast’s last album was released in 2006, and since then, André has put out almost no solo music. The reason for his silence, he has said, was lack of inspiration. Life in middle age wasn’t sparking new bars.

Now he’s back with a new album, and he’s speaking in a new voice, or rather rendering his voice in a new guise with the flute. Over the past half decade or so, André collected reedless woodwinds from around the world; playing the flute, he has said, is a better way of passing time than scrolling through a smartphone. He loved that the instrument made him, a master of one art form, into a “baby” at another, he told GQ. Returned to newbie status, his creativity flared once again. These days, he’d feel uncomfortable if someone were to ask him to freestyle rap. But he’d happily improvise on the flute.

New Blue Sun, his first album in 17 years, features no rapping and lots of flute. It also has drums, keys, guitars, and other instruments, played by well-respected improvisatory musicians led by the percussionist Carlos Niño, whom André befriended at a crunchy Los Angeles grocery store. For hip-hop fans who’ve long awaited his return, disappointment is inevitable; the opening track title even apologizes: “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” (His aesthetic compass told him to write song names that long, and mine is telling me to abbreviate them for the rest of this article.) Charitably, the project seemed at first to signal retirement boredom, a retreat from ambition. Signs pointed to it sounding like kitsch jazz or spa music, like comedy or wallpaper.

But it turns out the album is stranger than that. I first listened to New Blue Sun while doing chores, and it really got on my nerves. The flute playing sounds rudimentary and halting, the sound of someone practicing aimlessly rather than committing to an idea. The rest of the band drowns André out with smoggy synthesizer chords and percussion that rustles with the irregularity of an animal climbing in a bush. (“Plants” are listed in the instrumental credits.) I am not much of a jazz listener, but I know enough of John and Alice Coltrane—two stated influences—to know that the pulsing ferocity of those cosmic greats isn’t present. Nor does the album achieve Brian Eno-ian usefulness, melding into my life.

But later, as I lay awake in a dark room, the music clicked. A pleasant coldness settled into my body three tracks in, on “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther … ,” whose minimal drum thump calls to mind an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, foreboding and lonely. Midway through the song, André locks into a melody that wheels up and up, and I felt carried with it. The next track, “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter … ,” seems to open up onto a cloudscape, with tufts of keyboard that billow and shiver. A sunray of a synthesizer erupts about eight minutes in, cohering the song’s mood, adding warmth. It’s like the moment a pot of ingredients, stirred and simmered at great length, finally thickens into a sauce.

Dissecting instrumental music requires either using technical terminology—which most people, André included, do not think in—or writing in the fairly silly way I did in the previous paragraph: mixing metaphors in an attempt to render subjective sensations concretely. It is very easy, when communicating in this mode, to rhapsodize past the point of meaning anything at all. One must be sure to draw contrasts, saying what something is like but also what it is not. (As a rapper, André always knew this; he’d take time in a verse to delineate the difference between slumber party and spend the night.)

So: Listening to New Blue Sun is not like listening to rap, watching a movie, or staring at a painting. It’s more like looking out of a wide window on a changing and interesting scene. The individual sounds remind me of bubbles—crowding, dilating, and suddenly dissipating. The overall songs move cyclically (breathe in, breathe out) but not repetitively (each breath is different from the last). Most important: The album’s best passages—the prismatic goo of “Ghandi, Dalai Lama …”; the subtle, drifting “Dreams Once Buried …”—are beautiful in original ways. They create shapes you’ll find nowhere else.

People will no doubt play this album to help them empty their brain for sleep or to congeal a vibe during dinner parties. But I’m not sure these are the best uses of it. Maybe if André were removed, New Blue Sun would fit more stereotypical notions of ambient or new-age music. But his flute, blowing humbly yet insistently within the canyon of reverberation created by the more veteran instrumentalists, sounds too alive—and flawed—to tune out. He’s not the virtuosic soloist or the hypnotizing pied piper; he’s more like someone talking to himself on a hike. I personally cannot write or even think when music with lyrics is playing in my ears, and the flute of New Blue Sun nearly achieves the same distracting effect. You hear intelligence at work; you hear language without words.

This is, strange as it is to say, music to listen to. André recently told NPR that playing the flute isn’t a “set-out meditation,” and emphasized, “I have to force myself to pay attention to what I’m doing.” For the listener of New Blue Sun, the same imperative holds. Spotify and its kind have flooded the music ecosystem with cheap background noise. This album is a reminder of the rewards that can come with taking time to tune in rather than tune out.

In that same NPR interview, André said that his flute melodies flowed out of thoughts that he feels unwilling or unable to put into words. Music, he said, is “sub-talk,” encoding ideas that different people will translate in different ways. Some fans will try to solve these songs like a puzzle (hoping to find the release date for an actual rap album, one imagines). But to approach this album as though it contains a hidden message isn’t quite right. The point of New Blue Sun, as with so much great music, is the inarticulable narrative created by the changing relationship between sounds. A tale lies, too, in the album’s status as an act of lively creation for someone who felt burnt out by words. In his way, André is still pursuing the art of storytelling.

When Hollywood Put World War III on Television

found 22 Nov The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 11 › the-day-after-hollywood-world-war-iii › 676084

This story seems to be about:

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The ABC made-for-television movie The Day After premiered on November 20, 1983. It changed the way many Americans thought about nuclear war—but the fear now seems forgotten.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation. What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?

A Preview of Hell

We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. But at least it’s not 1983, the year that the Cold War seemed to be in its final trajectory toward disaster.

Forty years ago today, it was the morning after The Day After, the ABC TV movie about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Roughly 100 million people tuned in on Sunday night, November 20, 1983, and The Day After holds the record as the most-watched made-for-television movie in history.

I remember the movie, and the year, vividly. I was 22 and in graduate school at Columbia University, studying the Soviet Union. It’s hard to explain to people who worry about, say, climate change—a perfectly legitimate concern—what it was like to live with the fear not that many people could die over the course of 20 or 50 or 100 years but that the decision to end life on most of the planet in flames and agony could happen in less time than it would take you to finish reading this article.

I will not recount the movie for you; there isn’t much of a plot beyond the stories of people who survive the fictional destruction of Kansas City. There is no detailed scenario, no explanation of what started the war. (This was by design; the filmmakers wanted to avoid making any political points.) But in scenes as graphic as U.S. television would allow, Americans finally got a look at what the last moments of peace, and the first moments of hell, might look like.

Understanding the impact of The Day After is difficult without a sense of the tense Cold War situation during the previous few years. There was an unease (or “a growing feeling of hysteria,” as Sting would sing a few years later in “Russians”) in both East and West that the gears of war were turning and locking, a doomsday ratchet tightening click by click.

The Soviet-American détente of the 1970s was brief and ended quickly. By 1980, President Jimmy Carter was facing severe criticism about national defense even within his own party. He responded by approving a number of new nuclear programs, and unveiling a new and highly aggressive nuclear strategy. The Soviets thought Carter had lost his mind, and they were actually more hopeful about working with the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan. Soviet fears intensified when Reagan, once in office, took Carter’s decisions and put them on steroids, and in May 1981 the KGB went on alert looking for signs of impending nuclear attack from the United States. In November 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and was replaced by the KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. The chill in relations between Washington and Moscow became a hard frost.

And then came 1983.

In early March, Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and accused it of being “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Only a few weeks after that, he gave a major televised address to the nation in which he announced plans for space-based missile defenses, soon mocked as “Star Wars.” Two months later, I graduated from college and headed over to the Soviet Union to study Russian for the summer. Everywhere I went, the question was the same: “Why does your president want a nuclear war?” Soviet citizens, bombarded by propaganda, were certain the end was near. So was I, but I blamed their leaders, not mine.

When I returned, I packed my car in Massachusetts and began a road trip to begin graduate school in New York City on September 1, 1983. As I drove, news reports on the radio kept alluding to a missing Korean airliner.

The jet was Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was downed by Soviet fighter jets for trespassing in Soviet airspace, killing all 269 souls aboard. The shoot down produced an immense outpouring of rage at the Soviet Union that shocked Kremlin leaders. Soviet sources later claimed that this was the moment when Andropov gave up—forever—on any hope of better relations with the West, and as the fall weather of 1983 got colder, the Cold War got hotter.

We didn’t know it at the time, but in late September, Soviet air defenses falsely reported a U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet Union: We’re all still alive thanks to a Soviet officer on duty that day who refused to believe the erroneous alert. On October 10, Reagan watched The Day After in a private screening and noted in his diary that it “greatly depressed” him.

On October 23, a truck bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the Marine barracks in Beirut.

Two days after that, the United States invaded Grenada and deposed its Marxist-Leninist regime, an act the Soviets thought could be the prelude to overthrowing other pro-Soviet regimes—even in Europe. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began a military communications exercise code-named Able Archer, exactly the sort of traffic and activity the Soviets were looking for. Moscow definitely noticed, but fortunately, the exercise wound down in time to prevent any further confusion.

This was the global situation when, on November 20, The Day After aired.

Three days later, on November 23, Soviet negotiators walked out of nuclear-arms talks in Geneva. War began to feel—at least to me—inevitable.

In today’s Bulwark newsletter, the writer A. B. Stoddard remembers how her father, ABC’s motion-picture president Brandon Stoddard, came up with the idea for The Day After. “He wanted Americans, not politicians, to grapple with what nuclear war would mean, and he felt ‘fear had really paralyzed people.’ So the movie was meant to force the issue.”

And so it did, perhaps not always productively. Some of the immediate commentary bordered on panic. (In New York, I recall listening to the antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott on talk radio after the broadcast, and she said nuclear war was a mathematical certainty if Reagan was reelected.) Henry Kissinger, for his part, asked if we should make policy by “scaring ourselves to death.”

Reagan, according to the scholar Beth Fischer, was in “shock and disbelief” that the Soviets really thought he was headed for war, and in late 1983 “took the reins” and began to redirect policy. He found no takers in the Kremlin for his new line until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and both men soon affirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought—a principle that in theory still guides U.S. and Russian policy.

In the end, we got through 1983 mostly by dumb luck. If you’d asked me back then as a young student whether I’d be around to talk about any of this 40 years later, I would have called the chances a coin toss.

But although we might feel safer, I wonder if Americans really understand that thousands of those weapons remain on station in the United States, Russia, and other nations, ready to launch in a matter of minutes. The Day After wasn’t the scariest nuclear-war film—that honor goes to the BBC’s Threads—but perhaps more Americans should take the time to watch it. It’s not exactly a holiday movie, but it’s a good reminder at Thanksgiving that we are fortunate for the changes over the past 40 years that allow us to give thanks in our homes instead of in shelters made from the remnants of our cities and towns—and to recommit to making sure that future generations don’t have to live with that same fear.

Today’s News

The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to one of the most severely gerrymandered legislative district maps in the country. A gunman opened fire in an Ohio Walmart last night, injuring four people before killing himself. Various storms are expected to cause Thanksgiving travel delays across the United States this week.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ricardo Rey

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?

By Ross Andersen

(From July)

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had captured the world’s imagination like nothing in tech’s recent history. There was grousing in some quarters about the things ChatGPT could not yet do well, and in others about the future it may portend, but Altman wasn’t sweating it; this was, for him, a moment of triumph.

In small doses, Altman’s large blue eyes emit a beam of earnest intellectual attention, and he seems to understand that, in large doses, their intensity might unsettle. In this case, he was willing to chance it: He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Read the full article.