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'No Sense in Wishing' and 'Hit Girls' consider the way culture shapes identity
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- [00:02]
Andrew Limbong
Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The two books we have for you today have got me thinking about the nature versus nurture debate. You know, that eternal question of how much of who we are is predetermined versus how much is dictated by our environment. They're two works of cultural criticism and on the surface couldn't seem any more different. Up ahead, we've got an author examining the female pop stars of the 2000s. Think Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff, you know, pop stars who got their start at Disney. But first, Lawrence Burney's essay collection no Sense in Wishing is an appreciation of the art and artists that shaped him as he grew up in Baltimore. Think Gil Scott Heron or local rappers like Young Moose or Lor Skuda. Again, at first sight, they seem wildly different. But on the COVID of Bernie's book is a photo of him as an 11 year old boy. And he's wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Because somehow, no matter who we are or where we go in life, Disney finds us. More after the break.
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Andrew Limbong
Was a musician and so was his grandpa. This is objectively a cool job, but that's hard to see when you're a kid. Except for one time when Bernie remembers they opened for poet and singer Gil Scott Heron.
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Lawrence Burney
Just another gig that they dragged me along to. Obviously I didn't know where I was going, but it was something different this time where I felt like this guy, whoever he was, really lanky older guy. I remember the gravity that he pulled from people in the audience. You know, you just kind of, you can observe when somebody is somebody.
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Ayesha Roscoe
The revolution will not be televised.
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Lawrence Burney
As I got older and started looking up his music, I'm like, oh, this guy's really cool. And it made me think my mother was cool because I'm like, okay, if you opened up for this guy, maybe you were doing something that I should find pride in.
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Andrew Limbong
He talked to NPR's and wanted Summers about the impact Gil Scott Heron had on him, particularly the album Winter in.
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Lawrence Burney
America, I think it's just really a really beautiful assessment of the black American condition in the 1970s. I think a lot of Gil Scott Herring's music obviously deals with the aftermath of people coming back from combat, people coming home, expecting certain promises of being set up for a fruitful life. But it didn't happen for people in black communities. And that led to drug abuse and high levels of poverty. And I think Gil Scott Hearn was really good at peeling back the layers of people's complexities.
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Nora Princioti
Peace.
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Lawrence Burney
Go with your brother. As a society, we have a bad tendency of kind of writing off people we look at as undesirables or people who deal with addiction as if they spent their whole lives addicted. But I think we kind of graze over the fact that there are things that led to that point. You know, people lose their way. They find easy ways to cope. And I think Gail Scott and Heron was really good at identifying the emotional depth of what leads a person to that place.
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Interviewer
You are the founder of True Laurels, which is a platform dedicated to highlighting Baltimore and this region's music, its visual arts and cultures. You started it back in 2013. What did you want to show the people outside Baltimore to show folks about what's going on in the cultural life in Baltimore? Say that you feel like people weren't just getting any exposure to, or perhaps weren't trying to get exposure to?
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Lawrence Burney
One thing I've encountered in the art scenes in Baltimore, it's a little different now, but when I was coming up, I think a lot of people are giving the message as they grow up that if you want to make something of yourself, you have to get out of here. And I think the media platforms that were available at that time weren't really digging into the black neighborhoods. And I just saw an opportunity. I saw a gap. So I feel like True Laurels was my attempt at, I guess, kind of reimagining the fanzine, but for black people, basically.
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Interviewer
You talked about how people always get told in Baltimore that you gotta get out if you want to make something of yourself. If you want to grow, if you want to continue to build, you have to leave. I wonder, Lawrence, if you could tell us the story of somebody who stayed and made it, somebody who's native to Baltimore.
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Lawrence Burney
There's an essay in the book called Two Pillars, and there are two rappers. One is named Young Moose. The other's name is Lil Scooter. In the early 2010s, they both kind of broke out on the local scene. And I Think they were really gifted storytellers, and they were really gifted at being messengers for what the average youth in inner city Baltimore was experiencing. Young Moose is from the east side. He talked about, obviously, growing up with the challenges of poverty. His grandmother was murdered in a home invasion. He talked about police harassment. And I think that's why people loved him so much. So you have Moose, you have little scooters from the west side. He's from Pennsylvania Avenue, which is a really historical part of black Baltimore.
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Ayesha Roscoe
My city got the bird flute. It's game time. I think we need a ring or two.
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Lawrence Burney
Obviously, that Pennsylvania Avenue changed a lot after the late 60s with the riots that were related to MLK's assassination. A lot of white flight took place. A lot of businesses followed, and then a lot of dilapidation and just kind of divestment followed. And I think Lil Scooter was a kind of a loudspeaker for the new Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Interviewer
You are from Baltimore. And as somebody who didn't grow up there, but has lived there for more than a decade, at this point, when I was flipping through your book and reading these essays, so many of them read like a love letter to the city, as imperfect as it is, and its culture and the people who live there. And in one of the essays called A Love Letter to Steamed Crabs Piled onto a Bed of Newspaper, you write about the ritual of picking crabs, which is so familiar to many in the region, but you call it almost like communion for people who were raised along the Chesapeake. Talk about that essay.
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Lawrence Burney
Growing up in this region, crabs are just like. It's a rite of passage. I think while I was kind of ruminating on that tradition, I wanted to dig deeper because, you know, just as any tradition, especially any American tradition, I find that if you dig deep enough, there's some sort of tragedy or some sort of a tough route that led to people being able to enjoy this thing that's kind of, I would say, is indicative of the state of Maryland. I would say it's definitely like the mascot. I was just thinking about it, and I started digging into some history, and I was reading Frederick Douglass first autobiography, and I was like, this is really interesting that the way that he achieved his freedom was by borrowing a friend's sailor's outfit and a seaman certificate. For those that don't know, a seamen certificate was a document that people who worked on the water, whether that be catching oysters or crabs or even helping build vessels, if you had this certificate, it essentially acted as freedom papers. Pre abolition of slavery And I think Baltimore was interesting at that time because it had, I believe, the highest, the largest population of freed black Americans, but it also still had an enslaved population. So I think, you know, it just made me think about like this, you never know the lengths that people had to go for you to enjoy this thing that you just don't even think about.
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Interviewer
Writer and culture critic Lawrence Burney, his collection of essays no Sense in Wishing is out now. Thank you so much.
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Lawrence Burney
Thank you.
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Andrew Limbong
Nora Princioti's book Hit Girls is a serious look at what some might dismiss as teeny bopper music. But as she tells NPR's Ayesha Roscoe, we dismiss the teeny boppers at our own peril because they've repeatedly proven themselves to be the leading indicators of where our culture is headed.
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Nora Princioti
When most people think of the start of the new millennium, they probably remember this.
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Ayesha Roscoe
Back on the Y2K front, a simple glitch is threatening a new age of.
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Nora Princioti
But author and podcaster Nora Princioti hears something a little different. Because for the self described millennial pop culture obsessive, the 2000s actually started 15 months earlier with the release of Britney Spears Spears chart topping album Baby One More Time. Prince Yachty's new book, Hit Girls starts with Britney and moves through the aughts most dominant female powerhouses like Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, Beyonce, and so many more. Definitely too many for us to get to. So don't send us letters. Nora Princioti joins me now from our studios in New York. Welcome.
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Ayesha Roscoe
Hi Aisha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and chat.
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Nora Princioti
Yes. Yeah. So I mean, you started off the book with this memory of and all a lot of us can remember back to those scholastic book fairs. But it wasn't a book that you were looking for, right? What was it?
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Ayesha Roscoe
No, no, I was buying Hilary Duff's first album, Metamorphosis, which I just remember being sort of the first piece of culture that really taught me what it is to be obsessed with pop culture, which of course has gone on to have major impact on my life. So, you know, I had to start the introduction there.
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Nora Princioti
And what was it about that album that really got you, like, kind of obsessed with pop culture and. And pop stars?
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Ayesha Roscoe
Well, I think in part it was that, you know, Hilary Duff was a core figure in the sort of mid aughts, Disney to post Disney ecosystem of entertainers who were doing a really, really good job making music and other types of entertainment content that appealed to the sort of preteen micro generation that I was a part of. The other piece of it though, is that I really ride for that album. Those songs totally hold up. Like I will listen to come clean right now.
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Nora Princioti
Well, I mean, you talk a lot in the book about how pop music is often viewed with this disdain, especially, especially, I think, music for made by women, but also music kind of directed and aimed at young women. Would you say that like that that was part of the disdain that pop music felt, especially in those early aughts?
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Ayesha Roscoe
Absolutely. Even though young women, you know, from the Beatles to the Backstreet Boys have always been incredibly astute predictors of where culture is going to go and what's going to be popular and what things that actually end up having real lasting significance in, you know, entertainment history and music history. There is this tendency to sort of look down your nose at, oh, that's teeny bopper music. That's not important.
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Nora Princioti
You know, when you think about pop in general, but especially in that decade, you can't talk about that without talking about, like R and B, hip hop. And even though it's such a huge component of the pop music, actual R and B singers and rappers, they were not given the same platforms for the most part. Why was that?
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Ayesha Roscoe
I mean, I think that it's mostly just sort of straight up racism. The chapter about Beyonce in the book spends a lot of time sort of tracing how hip hop and R and B was the most mainstream musical style in all of America. But what was sort of closed off was these upper echelons of celebrity. It's getting the Vogue cover. It's, you know, going to the Met gala that was being reserved for mostly white and more traditional pop artists, despite the fact that those artists were often borrowing the sounds that they were using to stay current from hip hop and rb. And Beyonce, I think, is. Is the figure who breaks through that ceiling for the first time, and particularly by turning the narrative of her relationship with Jay Z into something that people obsessed over.
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Nora Princioti
Well, you know, the thing about that decade is you talk about this in the book is how you had these women and young women who were, like, really charting this new course for music, but then you also had this kind of moralizing double standard, like, talk to me about, like, all that, that double standard that these women faced.
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Ayesha Roscoe
Well, I think culturally, particularly around a lot of the early Britney Spears stuff, it started to sink in for me that progress is not always linear in society. And there's sort of a reflexive return to lowercase C conservatism in some ways around the beginning of the 2000s. And there are some sort of galaxy brain ideas around there that things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal kind of reintroduced the idea of moralizing about sex as something that was okay to do in more serious areas of media. And therefore it was just suddenly kind of acceptable dinner table conversation to be casting these judgments about what people are, are doing in their personal lives. That really found a way to pick up some steam. The other piece of it is just tabloid culture reaching a real fever pitch.
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Nora Princioti
Do you think as a society, we've reckoned with the pressure and the ridicule that we put on these. These young artists?
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Ayesha Roscoe
Not really. I think the place where there's been a real reckoning is within professional media, though I don't think professional celebrity media has the same type of power that it did in the 2000s. It's still a gatekeeper. It's still a tone setter for the people who consume it. So I do think that that's a meaningful change. I just think that the sort of most aggressive tendencies of the paparazzi in, say, 2006 have mostly been taken over by just, you know, anybody with an iPhone.
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Nora Princioti
What do you see ultimately as the legacy of these hit girls? You know, of the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, you know, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne? What is their legacy?
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Ayesha Roscoe
I really think this generation taught the ones that came after them to take pop music seriously and to get over the idea that because there is an inherent manufactured quality to pop, it's about escapism and fantasy and showmanship and putting on a show. And that performance means that there is something of a facade that's a part of it, that those things did not make it any less valid or any less real or authentic.
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Nora Princioti
That's Nora Princioti. Her book, Hit Girls, is out now. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
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Ayesha Roscoe
Thank you, Aisha. Thanks so much for having me.
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Andrew Limbong
That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us@bookofthedaypr.org I'm Andrew Lynbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Maier. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Justine Kennan, Avery Keatley, Adriana Gallardo, Monsey Khurana, Shannon Rhodes, Danny Hensel, Jeanette woods, mia Venkat, Kai McNamee, Dee Parvaz, and Ryan Bank. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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