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Monday, October 4th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | DEVO Co-Founder Jerry Casale Muses on Songwriting & Social Protest: Stream the Nakedly Examined Music Interview Online
This week’s Nakedly Examined Music podcast features a discussion of songwriting and social protest with Jerry Casale, the co-frontman of Devo since its formation in 1973. Jerry developed the idea of “devolution” with his friend Bob Lewis in the late ’60s when attending Kent State University, and by his own account was radicalized to political action by the Kent State shootings in 1970. This took the form of what was originally a partnership with Mark Mothersbaugh to create visual art, but this quickly became a musical partnership as well. Mark had used his synthesizer skills to ape British progressive rock, while Jerry was more influenced by blues, having played bass in The Numbers Band and other outfits. The two started recording independently, bringing in Mark’s brother Bob (“Bob 1”) to play lead guitar and later adding Jerry’s brother Bob (“Bob 2”) to play rhythm guitar and more keyboards as well as drummer Alan Myers. Buoyed by heralded live shows in Ohio that included a particularly idiosyncratic and catchy take on The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Devo was signed to a major label and released seven albums before coming to a gradual stop in after their album sales declined in the late ’80s given that Mark was doing more and more music for TV and film. This created a dilemma for Jerry, who has regarded Devo as his life’s work and also regarded it as essentially a partnership with Mark. There have been many Devo live reunions (including one happening now), and there was a full new Devo album in 2010, but that leaves a lot of time to merely collect residuals from “Whip It” and run a winery in Napa. In reaction to the falsehoods that launched the 2003 Iraq War, Jerry recorded a limited-release solo album under the name “Jihad Jerry and the Evildoers.” This work has now been repackaged to accompany the release of a brand new single (attributed to “DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale”) called “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” written with current Devo drummer Josh Freese and featuring guitars by Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek. As Jerry has always thought of his videos as integral to his musical output, this new song features an elaborately storyboarded and textured video co-directed with Davy Force of Force! Extreme Ani-Mation.
This revival of the Jihad Jerry character created to criticize America’s paranoid post-9/11 mindset allowed Jerry to visualize a conflict between Jihad Jerry and DEVO Jerry, in the Nakedly Examined Music interview, host Mark Linsenmayer engages Jerry about what these characters amount to and how exactly irony does (or does not) play into them. It was both a blessing and a curse for Devo that their various militaristic and/or robotic personas were so funny. The humor (and fun danceability) involved in songs like “Whip It,” “Mongoloid,” and “Freedom of Choice” meant they could gain an enduring foothold in popular culture, but on the other hand, they’ve been dismissed as merely jokes. Including themselves in the critique, acknowledging themselves as subject to the same human foibles, allowed them to create minimalist, anthemic songs that had a self-conscious stupidity and lampooned the pretensions of art rock. There was a clear connection between the musical styles that Devo sported and the message of this critique: They could all chant in unison that we are all degenerate conformists and use synthesizers and jerky rhythms to act out our dehumanization. Jihad Jerry, i.e. Jerry wearing a theatrical turban and sunglasses, was given a specific backstory involving escaping Iranian theocracy, determined to use music as a weapon to fight prejudice and ignorance everywhere. Whatever the virtues of this character as a narrative device, it was a marketing disaster, raising ire both with American conservatives and with Muslims who felt they were being mocked, and so the character was retired in 2007. Jerry’s Nakedly Examined Music interview discusses “The Owl,” a track written during Jihad Jerry’s initial run, which confusingly has Jihad Jerry (a character) speaking narratively through the voice of a superhero character “The Owl,” who threatens physical violence on all boorish, selfish American evildoers. Now, given that there’s a character named Nite Owl in Alan Moore’s comic Watchmen, which is explicitly about the mental instability of those who appoint themselves the moral and physical guardians of society, it would be natural to think that irony is playing ask thickly in this new portrayal as it was for the Devo “smart patrol” characters, but in this interview, Jerry urges us to take the critique at face value, as a straightforward condemnation of American arrogance. Does the critique land better without the explicit self-incrimination? Or is the fact that Jihad Jerry is obviously a joke, the Owl as a superhero is obviously a joke, and the fact that we’re talking about characters talking through characters give Jerry Casale enough of a framework to be able to launch very direct attacks without being dismissed as shrill or condescending? The latter portion of the interview turns to a lesser known Devo track “Fountain of Filth,” which Jerry says he wrote with his brother Bob Casale (who passed away in early 2014) during the recording sessions for Devo’s most famous album, 1980s Freedom of Choice. The song (in the form presented in the podcast) was included in the Hardcore Devo: Volume Two CD in 1991, and was performed live for the first time as part of the 2014 Hardcore Devo Live! tour. In Jerry’s introduction to the song in that concert and in this interview, he describes the “fountain” as all the misinformation and other commercial garbage that makes up much of American media. However, the lyrics of the song are ambiguous: “I’ve got a hunger that makes me want things… Nowhere are we safe… from the appeal of the eternal fountain of filth.” Like one of Devo’s well-known songs “Uncontrollable Urge” (written by Mark without Jerry), this could be a song not actually condemning the temptations, but laughing at prurient hysteria about temptation, i.e. a firmly ironic missive. The technique here is most likely irony that cuts in all directions: One can condemn the overreaction while still condemning the thing it was a reaction to, and a prudish fear of sexuality and full immersion in it are two sides of the same degenerate (i.e. “de-evolved”) coin. The interview concludes with a 2016 single attributed to Jerry Casale with Italy’s Phunk Investigation that explicitly states this totalizing condemnation/celebration: “It’s All Devo.” Again, the song was released with an elaborate, evocative video, in this case using the art of Max Papeschi and direction by Maurizio Temporin.
Get more links related to this episodes on the Nakedly Examined Music website. Nakedly Examined Music is a podcast hosted by Mark Linsenmayer, who also hosts The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast, Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, and Philosophy vs. Improv. He releases music under the name Mark Lint. DEVO Co-Founder Jerry Casale Muses on Songwriting & Social Protest: Stream the Nakedly Examined Music Interview Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 11:00a | Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Monet to Paint His Final Masterpieces & Create “the World’s First Art Installation”
When one considers which artists most powerfully evoke the horrors of trench warfare, Claude Monet is hardly the first name to come to mind. And yet, once viewed that way, his final Water Lilies paintings — belonging to a series that, in reproduction, speaks to many of no more harrowing a setting than a doctor’s waiting room — can hardly be viewed in any other. These eight large-scale canvasses constitute “a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the First World War,” argues Great Art Explained creator James Payne. Monet declined to include a horizon line in any of them, leaving viewers in “a vast field of unfathomable nothingness, of light, air, and water,” at once peaceful and reminiscent of “the battle-ravaged landscape along the western front.” Those battlefields “had no beginning or end, and no horizons. Time and space was forgotten, as soldiers were enveloped in a sea of mud, surrounded by waterlogged and surreal landscapes, which covered their field of vision.” The Great War, as it was then known, still raged on when the septuagenarian Monet began these works. (“He could hear the sound of gunfire from 50 kilometers away from his house in Giverny as he painted,” notes Payne.) By the time he finished them, in the last year of his life, the fighting had been over for eight years. In a sense, these paintings may have kept him alive: “He was constantly ‘reworking’ them and seemed incapable of finishing,” even though, by his own admission, “he could no longer see the details or make out colors.”
When these Water Lilies were revealed to the public, mounted in their own specially designed gallery in Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie (arranged by close personal friend Georges Clemenceau), Monet was dead — which may, in part, explain the critics’ willingness to deride them as the work of an artist who had lost his powers. “Monet, rejected by critics in the 19th century for being too radical, was now being criticized in the 20th century for not being radical enough.” It would take a later generation of artists — including American painters like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock — to see his last works as “a logical jumping-off point for abstraction,” and the space that houses them as “the Sistine Chapel of impressionism.” World War I has passed out of living memory, but “the world’s first art installation” it inspired Monet to create has lost none of its power. Related Content: How to Paint Water Lilies Like Monet in 14 Minutes Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny 1923 Photo of Claude Monet Colorized: See the Painter in the Same Color as His Paintings 1,540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Monet to Paint His Final Masterpieces & Create “the World’s First Art Installation” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 2:00p | The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tritone”: Debunking a Great Myth in Music Theory
Music lives deep within us, in the marrow of our evolutionary bones, tapping into “this very primitive system,” says British musicologist John Deathridge, “which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy.” In other words, our brains are predisposed to hear certain combinations of sounds as soothing and others as disturbing. When we plot those sounds on a staff, we find one of the most dissonant, yet intriguing, combinations, what can be called an augmented 4th or diminished 5th but isn’t quite either one. But it’s much better known by its medieval nickname, “the devil’s tritone” (or “devil’s interval”), a sequence of notes so sinister, they were once banned in the belief that they might conjure Lucifer himself…. Or so the story goes. The truth is less sensational. “To the chagrin of many a musician wanting to tap into a badass rebel streak in music’s DNA,” James Bennett writes at WQXR, “there aren’t any records to suggest any rogue medieval composers took a hike to Perdition after using this spooky, devilish interval.” In other words, no one seems to have been tortured, imprisoned, or excommunicated for a musical arrangement, all internet assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. But the association with the devil is historical. In the 18th century, the tritone acquired the name diabolus in musica, or “the devil in music,” part of a mnemonic: “Mi contra fa est diabolus in musica” or “mi against fa is the devil in music.” If you’re already versed in music theory, you’ll find this technical explanation of the “devil’s interval” by musician Jerry Tachoir helpful. In the video above, bass player Adam Neely debunks the myth of the devil’s tritone as an actual curse. But his explanation is more than “one long, ‘Um, Actually,'” he says. Instead, he tells us why the tritone is a musical blessing, and was thought of as such a thousand years ago. His explanation also gets a little technical, but his visual and musical demonstrations make it fairly easy to follow, and if you don’t absorb the theory, you’ll pick up the true history of the “devil’s tritone,” beginning with the Greek thinker Aristoxenus of Tarentum, one of the first to write about the uncomfortable dissonance of a note sitting between two others.
The tritone is what musicologist Carl E. Gardner called a “dependent” chord, one characteristic of tension. We may not register it consciously, but it primes our brains with anxious expectation. “The reason it’s unsettling is that it’s ambiguous, unresolved,” says Gerald Moshell, Professor of Music at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “It wants to go somewhere. It wants to settle here, or [there]. You don’t know where it’ll go, but it can’t stop where it is.” We hear this irresolution, this “devil” of musical doubt in compositions ranging from The Simpsons theme to the chorus of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse macabre,” a piece of music that may not actually conjure evil, but sure sounds like it could if it wanted to. Related Content: How to Listen to Music: A Free Course from Yale University John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music How Ornette Coleman Freed Jazz with His Theory of Harmolodics Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tritone”: Debunking a Great Myth in Music Theory is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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