Book Review: Ben Westhoff - Original Gangstas

The very day I finished this book, I read that Death Row Records had just been sold to Hasbro. Technically, Hasbro bought the parent Entertainment One megacorp that counted Death Row as part of its portfolio, but it's fun to imagine telling Suge Knight 20 years ago that his record label that produced some of the all-time hip hop classics would one day be owned by a toy company. Whether hip hop will eventually loom the largest in historical memory depends on how exactly the demographics of musical canonization shake out in the future, but even though hip hop didn't come from the West Coast, it's that sound that will be the main argument that the genre deserves as much respect as any other style of 20th century music. Westhoff is a bona fide superfan of the genre - a white guy from the Midwest, naturally, that often-derided but crucial fan constituency - who made it his mission to show how exactly LA's music scene went from living in the shadow of New York to setting the standard for what hip hop should sound like, and even more crucially what it should mean to the audience. He succeeds wonderfully, and even though everyone involved in that scene is now hawking endorsements for a living (Snoop being the ultimate example of the transformation from wanted criminal to universally beloved pitchman), Westhoff shows how they became megastars by translating frustration, rage, and rebellion into art.

Westhoff mostly focuses on N.W.A. personnel (Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DOC), along with Snoop, Tupac, and some East Coast figures (Biggie, Puff Daddy) who moved between the two coasts, and he provides lots of context behind the albums, so it vastly improves on entertainment products like 2015's Straight Outta Compton by connecting more dots and providing more answers (though the real best exploration of hip hop remains Fear of a Black Hat). As charming as it might be for some to see bits of trivia like the "Bye, Felicia!" scene, most of the real story of every musical group is in the business negotiations with lawyers, labels, distributors, and every other necessary parasite. Artists make music for fun and personal fulfillment, but you can't make more than an album or two without getting paid, and so the tension between the art and the commerce sides of the music industry is overlaid on all of the other well-known drugs/crime/violence issues that plagued the West Coast scene. This means the book overlaps more with 2017's The Defiant Ones, which focuses on Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. Iovine in particular was crucial to the band's success, as shown for example by his marketing strategy for The Chronic's first single "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang":

"We can't get it played on the radio," Jimmy Iovine said the radio guys told him.
"It's 'Satisfaction,'" he retorted.
"Radio doesn't think so. They think it's a bunch of black guys cursing who want to kill everybody."
Iovine decided to create a minute-long commercial, consisting of nothing but the song. "Don't say who it is, and buy it on fifty stations, drive time. I want the program directors to hear it in their cars."

There are many interesting counterfactuals that Westhoff proposes:

Daily Beast writer Rich Goldstein pointed out that 1988 was a huge year for record sales, led by George Michael's Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, each of which sold over ten million copies. In those pre-internet days, there weren't very many places to hear about new music, and not many places to buy it. All of N.W.A's publicity was great, but that didn't matter if you couldn't actually consume their songs. "Had Straight Outta Compton been played on MTV, listened to on the radio, and been available for purchase in big-box retailers like Walmart, there is a good chance it would have eclipsed the Dirty Dancing soundtrack," Goldstein theorized.

And the saddest parts of the book are of course the discussions of the tragically brief and violent lives of many incredibly talented people, most notably Biggie and Tupac. All of the surviving members of N.W.A. lament how short their collaborative period was before it fell apart, and one can only imagine the works that they and the rest could have created if they hadn't hated each other:

Tupac claimed to have directly influenced Biggie's style. "I used to tell the nigga, 'If you want to make your money you have to rap for the bitches. Do not rap for the niggas,'" he said. "The bitches will buy your records, and the niggas want what the bitches want." As proof that Biggie had heeded his advice, Tupac cited the difference between the aggressive "Party and Bullshit" and softer Ready to Die hits tracks "Big Poppa," which appealed more to the ladies. Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind / And ask what your interests are, who you be with?

But as unfortunately truncated as many of their careers were, their surviving works are legendary, and books like Westhoff's are a testament to how brightly stars can shine in such a brief period.

Book Review: Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential

The New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This" that this book was based on turned 20 in April 2019, so it's interesting to read the book only now, yet still be able to see exactly why this guy became so famous. Food content is everywhere now - personal blogs, Yelp reviews, and impossibly lengthy SEO-optimized recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches - so it's hard to remember what it was like before the internet turned writing itself into fast food, but Bourdain's irreverent peek behind the kitchen curtains was genuinely novel at the time. Even now his writing is frequently spectacular: his keen and gossipy characterization, amusing but still affecting storytelling, and wry, appreciative voice all give a side of the restaurant industry that was not really seen 20 years ago and is still often underappreciated all the glamour and human interest that he would later make a career out of exposing viewers to on TV. It's a mix of memoir, philosophizing, career retrospective, apologia, and plain old complaining that he uses to make being a chef seem heroic and pathetic at a stroke, writing from the perspective of a man who has experienced the closely-linked extremes of crippling failure and stunning success, showing why restauranteur is such a fascinating profession in the aggregate yet any given chef is not to be trusted one bit.

I remember reading once that to get truly famous you have to excel at at least two different things and corner the market on the intersection of your talents. It seems like most chefs are not also good writers, let alone also good TV personalities, and likewise very few television hosts or authors are classically trained French chefs (as a sidenote, a lot of the French techniques and items he discusses are totally alien to me, although to be fair I'm not the kind of person who's making reservations at Dorsia - I mean Les Halles - very often). While I'll never have the opportunity to eat a meal that Bourdain cooked, if it was anything like his writing it would have been a real treat. He's good at making you think about your own food experiences: the opening chapter contains such a lovingly detailed description of learning to love oysters as a child on vacation in France that you can't help but think about great meals you've had, and right up until the end of the book he's raving about sushi he once had in a way that has actually changed how I view what I'm eating.

Sometimes his rule-breaking renegade shtick wears a bit thin over the course of the book - he really wants you to know that he's done a lot of drugs and seen a lot of misbehavior and lived a wild and crazy life, etc - but I don't begrudge him for getting as much mileage as he can out of his life story, and honestly, a lot of it is simple jealousy. The exact same questions about food authenticity apply to chef authenticity, and the same answer - just relax and enjoy what you're served - also applies. You can go a long way in America by playing the bad boy with a hidden soft side, and Bourdain's voice is just the perfect blend of wasn't-I-a-scoundrel and sincere passion for his craft, neatly balancing his (very) lengthy assurances about how much he loves dick jokes with more humanizing moments like his unashamed love letter to the bread one of his cooks makes. And his closing humility, where he reveals that everything he's said was just his own personal opinion, and just like there's no one right way to live there's no one right way to run a restaurant, cements him as surely one of the coolest people to evangelize the art of appreciating food. RIP.

Book Review: Anton Chekhov - Five Plays

Chekhov is perhaps the most dedicated chronicler of unhappy, dissolute minor aristocrats there's ever been. The five major four-act plays selected here examine in grim detail the joyless lives of cash-strapped gentry with their best days behind them, forced to pawn off what's most dear to them merely to preserve a life that, on reflection, hasn't been worth much to anyone anyway. Chekhov's work is "funny" in that same melancholy way that Kafka's oeuvre strikes a certain bleak-minded kind of person as funny, so in striking contrast to Gogol's weirdly cheerful absurdity, the "comedy" involves characters being required to continually revise their expectations of life downwards, the previously fixed emotional scaffolding supporting their cherished conceptions of life getting knocked out bit by bit, until their lives collapse into lovesickness or destitution or terminal misery or all of the above. Midway through Uncle Vanya, an odd comparison struck me: Chekhov's plays are like a gloomier, more realistic Seinfeld, bone-dry modernist studies of small people in ill-fitting clothing too big for them, going through the motions of their meaningless lives with only themselves to blame. Unlike the harmless slapstick of a a sitcom though, Chekhov thoughtfully includes murder or suicide at the end to punctuate the unavoidable futility of everyone's existences, so there's that.

The perennial downside of reading plays instead of seeing them is that you lose the different emotional valences that performers bring out of the text; you might as well read an opera's sheet music instead of hear it, or judge a movie by its script alone. Chekhov worked very closely with Konstantin Stanislavski, the inventor of "method acting", on these plays, so I can only imagine the contrast between the somber action and the intense performances in a contemporary production. Reading all these plays back to back is a bit bleak, although it must be said that there's a sparse perfection to the construction of the scenes and flow to the dialogue that's impressive even if you feel the need to detox with some lighthearted farces afterwards. Chekhov keeps his characters on a tight leash for the most part, only occasionally letting their frustrations loose in volcanic monologues. One can't help but sympathize with Ivanov, Triplev, Astrov, Vershinin, or Trofimov's agonizing, and yet their passionate declamations are typically dismissed instantly by their loved ones. It's a great example of theater as tempo and cumulative effect, and although he does occasionally dip into the dangerous waters of metafiction, like the play-within-a-play in The Seagull, he always returns from his abstractions to the hard facts of his characters' lives. Perhaps all our most cherished possessions, experiences, and even thoughts themselves are like cherry orchards, fated to be consigned to oblivion in the end; or perhaps I just need a refreshing dose of Molière.

Book Review: Tom Shippey - The Road to Middle-Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien was better at transporting readers into a living, breathing, fully-realized fictional reality than almost any other author who has ever lived. While for most readers the pleasure of the stories themselves is sufficient alone, more hardcore aficionados like myself want to see the deep roots of such a remarkable creation. How did he do it? Shippey's work delves deeply into Tolkien's inspirations, artistic obsessions, and creative process. It will greatly satisfy the sort of person who finds the LOTR appendices as interesting as the plot they've just finished. There's an infamous dropoff in readership from The Hobbit, to The Lord of the Rings, to The Silmarillion, and then to the likes of Unfinished Tales, but for the small group of fans who not only sympathize with but valorize Tolkien's decades of effort with his legendarium simply to create plausible settings for his artificial languages, this book provides an incredibly interesting account of how Tolkien's attitudes toward the power of words shaped his characters, stories, settings, and indeed his entire thematic repertoire. I thought I was a dedicated fan (although to my shame I have not read any of the 12 posthumous volumes of The History of Middle-Earth), but Shippey has read every one of Tolkien's works so many times that he enhanced my appreciation for the under-the-hood craftsmanship in the Tolkienverse more than I thought possible.

The short answer to "why is Tolkien so great?" is that he had a clear vision (or rather a series of visions), he made sure his plots and his themes lined up, and he put a ton of work into what for most authors would seem like irrelevant background details. Tolkien really loved a lot of old epic poetry that his fellow linguists were lukewarm about, but that turned out to provide excellent templates for modern stories even across the vast cultural gap between modern England and its millennium-old antecedents. Shippey doesn't use any film analogies, but as he was discussing how Tolkien studied Beowulf carefully in order to produce similar effects with his own works, I was reminded how a lot of the better genre films put modern material atop older structures in order to take advantage of people's love of both the familiar and the new. So, for example, successful science fiction films mix the genre with noir as in Blade Runner, with Westerns as in Star Trek, with samurai/swashbuckers as in Star Wars, etc. Tolkien used the format of the children's adventure story in the The Hobbit as a comforting framework for his "modern mythology", upgrading to a more adult literary style in The Lord of the Rings, and then dispensing entirely with contemporary narrative formats in his drafts for The Silmarillion, which would have been nearly impenetrable to lightweights and casuals even if he'd been able to finish it.

While Shippey does use Tolkien's own writings as primary sources, and his acknowledged inspirations as secondary material, the book is mainly concerned with tracing Tolkien's own attitudes towards his work; not merely wondering why Tolkien dedicated so much of his life to this fantasy world, but how he made it so convincing to others. The storytelling urge is nearly universal in young children, but most people's fantasies are not very interesting to other people, and nearly all of us eventually turn our mental narrative generation machinery over to more prosaic concerns due to the pressures of adulthood. One of the things that made Tolkien unique was his determination to maintain his creative processes for his whole life; there have of course been countless novelists in history, but Tolkien's novels stand apart from most other writers by his decision to ground them in linguistics, to most people perhaps the dullest soil possible to sprout a fantasy world from. Even his colleagues, who may have been fellow linguists but not true philologists ("philology" = "love of learning"), certainly did not appreciate languages aesthetically to the same degree, and were often skeptical or dismissive of the power of words, leaving Tolkien as one of the very few linguists who appreciated the ancient epic poetry as poetry. Shippey quotes a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher:

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what (The Lord of the Rings) was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory.' And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo, and that the phrase long antedated the book. I never heard any more.

Even today, Tolkien's works seem to stand above the obligatory constellations of fanfiction that always surround seemingly similar media franchises like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. This is because fanfiction authors, even the most talented ones, naturally tend to focus on the appeal of the characters, and in Tolkien's works the interactions of the characters are only one of the things going on. The chapter "The Bourgeois Burglar" in particular is a fascinating exploration of just how hard Tolkien worked to ensure that the language and vocabulary of the hobbits, men, dwarves, and so on was congruent with their nature, which complemented the alternately comic and dramatic tone of their interactions with each other, and how the broader thematic concerns then are revealed by the plot in turn (see Adam Roberts' thoughtful review in the July 2017 Strange Horizons contrasting Tolkien's approach with that of with a modern author like Patrick Rothfuss). In the chapter "Interlacements and the Ring" Shippey extends this deep alignment to Tolkien's religious explorations, handled far more subtly here than in C. S. Lewis' otherwise comparable Narnia series. Is evil active or passive, Manichean or Boethian, a force unto itself or a mere turning away from the good? Is the Ring a pagan symbol, and the cosmology of Middle-Earth therefore heretical? Tolkien spent a huge amount of time ensuring that his creation worked consistently within itself and with the pre-Christian heroic motifs underneath it without openly contradicting Christian doctrine, to the extent possible. He was not immune to the problems of internal contradiction, which partially explains his immense difficulties finishing his later works, but perhaps any truly great work inevitably expands beyond the point where all its pieces can fully harmonize together. Just look at any of the more modern "epic" properties with teams of writers and all the money in the world, and Tolkien's accomplishments seem all the greater.

On the subject of consistency, one of the more unexpectedly moving chapters is "Visions and Revisions", when Shippey discusses the meaning that the story of Beren and Lúthien had to Tolkien. It's only one part of the Silmarillion, but Tolkien rewrote it so many times that even though it's hardly known, its story of a grand quest undertaken for a powerful yet ultimately doomed love was clearly more dear to him than any other part of his whole creation (Tolkien and his wife's gravestones read 'Beren' and 'Lúthien', respectively). This obsessive dedication made me think of other works that get compared to his, for example Wagner's operas, which Shippey doesn't discuss until the first appendix (as always with Tolkien, read the appendices!), and how idiosyncratic Tolkien's vision often was. Tolkien evidently did not think highly of Wagner as a dramatist, which somewhat surprised me, but it makes more sense when you realize that, as with all great artists, he hated basically everything, particularly artistic works seemingly very similar to his own:

Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. 'Both rings were round', he snarled, 'and there the resemblance ceases' (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of 'the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring', des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

Now, I personally love Wagner, and rank the Ring Cycle as an incredible artistic achievement, but Tolkien of course has a point about how he and all those other authors are not really playing the same game (though read George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" essay on Shakespeare to see how differently even great writers can rank artistic merit). This is another reason why I think comparisons of Tolkien to people like George Lucas, or (especially) George R. R. Martin can only go so far; Martin might have excellent points about flaws in Tolkien's models of political economy (the infamous "What was Aragorn's tax policy?") and so forth, but it's like comparing a Balzac novel to the Epic of Gilgamesh solely because they both have prostitutes in them. Shippey extends this point further in another book called Author of the Century, which I haven't read, but even if you don't agree with Shippey that Tolkien will eventually represent the entirety of 20th century literature the way that Shakespeare epitomizes the 16th, it's enough to note that Tolkien invented an entire literary genre just to give his mock-Welsh and faux-Finnish artificial languages a playground, and no one else has done anything even close since. Tanner Greer's essay "On the Tolkienic Hero" notes that Tolkien seems untouched by irony, and even though it seems strange that it took a fussy and incredibly opinionated academic, one who wrote entire poems about how misguided oak trees (his critics) couldn't understand the pure love of learning natural to birch trees (philologists like himself), to create one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, perhaps the only conclusion is that the genius and genesis of literature might remain as forever mysterious to us as the Undying Lands, or as the power of words themselves.