Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2026

“Let’s roll!”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the Neil Young song — yes, that Neil Young — that best captured the events on Flight 93 on the eleventh of September, 2001:

“Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, after a Boeing 767 hits each tower during the September 11 attacks.”
Photo by Michael Foran via Wikimedia Commons.

[T]here was one striking exception to the stultifying conformity of cultural critique, one lonely example of an A-list star confronting a specific 9/11 event head-on and offering his voice in full-throated support of authentic American heroism. Even more impressively, it came from a Canadian — and at a time when Jean Chrétien’s ministry was mostly engaged in petty sniping about alleged offenses to its amour propre. When I was, oh, fourteen years old I saw Neil Young with Crosby, Stills, Nash & … plus his compatriot Joni Mitchell and The Band. And to be honest in the intervening decades I can’t say I gave Neil Young much thought — and, whenever I’ve chanced to be tootling around and “After the Gold Rush” or “Heart of Gold” comes on the radio, I’m reminded of why I haven’t much missed him. Nevertheless, just a few weeks after September 11th, Neil Young offered a new song that took its inspiration from what I called in the papers that week “the only good news of the day” — the turn of events on Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one supposedly headed for the White House or the Capitol or Camp David that Tuesday morning but whose passengers rose up and overpowered the hijackers. Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but its fallen heroes saved hundreds of lives, including perhaps the Vice-President’s or multiple congressmen, and denied Osama bin Laden an even more iconic remaking of the Washington skyline and the symbolic (and potentially actual) decapitation of the Great Satan. Todd Beamer’s last words, heard by a GTE telephone operator to whom he’d been speaking, were, “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!”

It was hard to credit from the disposition of even moderate Democrats just a couple of years later; but Young, a very leftie celebrity, was genuinely moved by Lisa Beamer’s account of her husband’s sacrifice. As he put it:

    She was talking about how he always used to say that (‘let’s roll’) with the kids when they’d go out and do something, that it’s what he said a lot when he had a job to do. And it’s just so poignant, and there’s no more of a legendary, heroic act than what those people did. With no promise of martyrdom, no promise of any reward anywhere for this, other than just knowing that you did the right thing. And not even having a chance to think about it or plan it or do anything – just a gut reaction that was heroic and ultimately cost them all their lives. What more can you say? It was just so obvious that somebody had to write something or do something …because it’s just such a great image – the whole story about the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. I think it’s a legendary story that’s gonna go down through the ages; it’ll never be forgotten.

It was indeed “just so obvious”, and for writers there are two reactions to that: you jump on it and write it immediately — as a book, a play, a poem, a movie — or you figure some other guy must surely have got to it. Except in this case no one did. Neil Young was perhaps being too naïve with regard to contemporary culture’s ambivalence about unabashed heroism. So he waited, and waited. “I was very surprised,” he said, “that I didn’t hear any songs.”

And eventually he got tired of waiting. “So, I just wrote it. I couldn’t stop it anymore.” He took Todd Beamer’s catchphrase, turned it into a song title, and sang it out for real — no playing for irony or nuance.

Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” is a dark, driving anthem that begins with a church organ (Young’s own, acquired in Europe) and over its ominous drone the sound of cellphones ringing. That was the most important weapon the passengers had: the mobile telephone. By all accounts, the hijackers of Flight 93 weren’t exactly the cream of Osama’s toxic crop. The flight was halfway across the continent before the boobs made their move and started meandering back east to their target. It was getting on for 9.30 on that Tuesday morning. By the time the passengers began calling home, their families were aware of what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unlike those on the earlier flights, the hostages on 93 knew they were not on a conventionally hijacked aircraft bound for Cuba or Libya, but were conscripts on an airborne missile intended to kill thousands of their fellow citizens. So, unlike the earlier passengers, they understood the FAA’s cobwebbed 1970s hijack procedures would not save them. The terrorists took charge at 9.28am. The pushback started at 9.57. In those 29 minutes, ordinary American citizens decided that, if they had to die, they would die as warriors. Put yourself in their shoes, on those phones, in that time-frame. Neil Young does, and, after the plaintive unanswered phones, and the organ, and a bit of guitar, an aged rock star’s familiar rasp captures the moment:

    I know I said I love you
    I know you know it’s true
    I got to put the phone down
    And do what we gotta do…

The song can’t be said to be of much melodic interest. In those first four bars, 17 of the 27 monosyllables are all set to the same single note: “know I said”, “love”, “I know you know”, “I got to put”, “phone”, “do what we got”, and what follows plonks along in the same vein. It’s what Sammy Cahn used to call “the kind of tune a lyricist writes”; the words are set as you’d expect, without any of the great transformative intervals that can give a bi-syllable a power way beyond what it would have as mere speech. But it’s urgent speech, and the track is great. At the time Young was working on an album with Booker T and the MGs, and in the studio one day unveiled the song to the guys somewhat sheepishly. Booker T Jones liked it. “You don’t have to figure out what to do on a song like that,” he said. “We were just able to pull it off.” He and the MGs aren’t much into vocals (as you’ll know from “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight” and their other killer instrumentals), but they gamely provide the old croaker with some discreet background support here. And of course Jones’ Hammond organ and Donald “Duck” Dunn’s bass keep driving the narrative relentlessly forward. Above the band, Neil Young distills the essence of those last, haunting cell conversations in a way few songwriters had either the courage or the inclination to do.

September 6, 2026

QotD: 90s music

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

90s music was all fake and gay. Let’s get that right out front. We hadn’t invented the phrase “fake and gay” yet, though, so we were forced to make due with a phrase from Lit Crit: “Deconstruction”.

[Not to be confused with Disintegration, which as we all know is the greatest album ever].

Nirvana’s genre-defining hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a deconstruction of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”. Pearl Jam were the deconstructed Doors (though this is more because of Eddie Vedder’s “kinder, more sensitive Jim Morrison” act than for the music). The Counting Crows were deconstructed Sixties folk, the Smashing Pumpkins were deconstructed Pink Floyd (I like Smashing Pumpkins), the Gin Blossoms were the deconstructed Eagles, and so on, finally reaching its nadir with Oasis, the “deconstructed” Beatles who were so deconstructed, McCartney et al could’ve sued them for plagiarism and probably won.

Severian, “Alt Music Thread”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-06.

September 4, 2026

QotD: My generation

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We talk a lot about generations and what defines them — Boomers and Xers and Millennials and Zs — but ultimately a generation is just a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, but this is something that is determined largely in retrospect. You only know what was yours once something comes along that is clearly alien and you realize that the culture was something you shared, that you made for one another. Eventually the whole scene moves on.

That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.

Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.

August 23, 2026

QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”

Filed under: Business, France, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s one of those numbers that sings so easily you’d have to be a total idiot to louse it up. I’ve always loved it because it’s pure Americana, a song that no other culture could have produced. As I mentioned last week, I’m often asked how I started writing, what got me interested, who were my influences, all the usual questions. And I don’t really have a ready answer. But, if I were to be semi-serious about it, it was songs like this that tickled my curiosity about language – not just the words and phrases and images, but the way the ideas were expressed so neatly. Compression is the essence of songwriting, and if you had to come up with a couplet that defines the genre, that encompasses a whole world and a whole point of view and an entire musical tradition, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store” comes as close as any.

I once asked a friend in the French music biz how the song went over there. I hummed him the tune and he sang me the French lyrics and, although I can’t recall any of them, I remember they were entirely different from the English words. It’s not just the five-and-ten that’s hard to translate or the million dollar baby. But the concept of finding the latter inside the former is also very American. There are a ton of Mitteleuropean operettas in which the prince or duke or count wanders into the streets in disguise and falls in love with a serving wench, but the serving wench usually turns out to be a Countess or Margravine or some such also wandering around in disguise. Even the British are prone to this syndrome (Spring In Park Lane, etc). But in an American song the shop girl is a genuine shop girl, and she’s still a million dollar baby. That’s what makes it American.

In the Sixties, by the way, you could have found a future billion dollar baby in a five and ten cent store: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, got his start in retail as a franchisee at a Ben Franklin’s, founded in 1920 by the Butler brothers, who’d been in the five-and-dime business since the 1870s. I’m not saying “I Found a Million Dollar Greeter in the Big Box Store at the Strip Mall on the Edge of Town” would be as big a hit, but there is an historical continuity from the Butlers to Wal-Mart.

Mark Steyn, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”, Steyn Online, 2020-10-25.

August 3, 2026

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved”

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Business, China, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Ted Gioia explains how he became the “Honest Broker”:

This particular project brought me to China. I was trying to set up an operation in a remote province, far outside my comfort zone, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to maneuver among the various interests and stakeholders. My patron was one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong, and by using his contacts, I gained access to people who normally operate behind layers of intermediaries and gatekeepers. But even these contacts led me on an endless runaround. My sources gave me conflicting advice and confusing directions. Everything felt wrong and nothing seemed quite on the level.

I knew I needed help, but had run out of options. Then I met the drunk Australian.

He wasn’t a contact on my list, and I can’t even remember his name. This was a chance encounter in a hotel bar late at night. But this hard-drinking Australian was talkative and had interesting things to say. He had spent most of his life bouncing around the capitals of Asia, and was a high-level operator in his own spheres. He bragged about his insider’s knowledge, and claimed — with some accuracy, as I came to discover — that he knew how to maneuver in China better than the clueless Westerners who were now appearing on the scene. He had traced the secret paths to power and knew all the dangerous mistakes amateurs always make.

He reeled off a list of them. “You go into a province or city and flash around some money, then expect the local officials will help you? Forget it. They’ll rob you blind, and even make you bribe them for the privilege. Same goes for the party leaders. From each according to his ability, and all that, my friend. And forget about lawyers — the legal protections here are like this” — he held up his empty glass, then flipped it over as if to emphasize the nothingness of what he was offering to the gods of Marx and Mao. “As for the bankers, you might as well call them wankers.”

The empty glass was also a sign that I needed to order another round of the local brew, and I quickly complied. My new friend fell into a meditative silence until further libations arrived. Finally, after another sip on the stomach-destroying glass of baijiu that passed for spirits at our watering hole, I asked the obvious question.

“So what do I do? Who can I trust?”

“That’s easy, mate. You need to find the Honest Broker.”

This sounded appealing enough, but I had zero idea what my new acquaintance was talking about. He might just as well have told me to go to Oz and consult with the Wizard.

“Who, exactly, is this Honest Broker?”

“There’s at least one in every city. But don’t expect their business cards to say ‘Honest Broker’ — that’s just what I call them. But that’s exactly what they are. Sometimes they don’t even have an official position. But they are the key to everything.”

He proceeded to explain how Honest Brokers play a hidden but vital role in communities without a history of legal protections and stable institutions. Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. “They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need — a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever — they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks.

“And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently — you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings. The Honest Broker may help you for free right now, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for assistance on something completely different months or even years later. You Yanks have a hard time grasping it, and are always looking for shortcuts. But the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate.

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved.”

This proved to be valuable advice, worth far more than the cost of drinks. Over the next few weeks, I changed my approach completely. I made inquiries, compared notes, and finally found my Honest Broker — who did solve my problems, just as promised. My mission accomplished, I returned back home to California and tried to forget all about it.

I put my passport out of sight. My world shrank back to manageable dimensions, and my days were spent at the two keyboards, the piano and the word processor. I was getting back into my music groove again.

A long time went by before I realized the real importance of what I had learned in China, and how it applied to the other half of my split and fractured life. I was putting energy into a new sphere now, music criticism, and trying to create a rule book for how to make it sizzle.

Yet criticism seemed such a degraded form of writing at that juncture. I had already seen the collapse in literary criticism — in fact, I had lived through it as a student at Stanford and Oxford. The whole enterprise had turned into a circus sideshow over the course of just a few years. Critics now aspired to quasi-celebrity status, and they exploited their roles as arbiters of taste to engage in the worst sort of strutting and preening. The more outlandishly they sold out their craft, opting instead for self-aggrandizement, the larger the rewards they received. This blight took root first in France but quickly spread elsewhere. And now the taint seemed to be seeping into other forms of criticism as well. Whether the subject at hand was a movie or a meal or a TV wrestling match, the critics were the real stars, and everything else subservient to their self-serving deconstruction of anything in their path.

July 24, 2026

Did This Meal Kill Mozart?

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Jan 2026

Sliced pork loin with a rye bread crumb and cinnamon crust

City/Region: Vienna
Time Period: 1742

Mozart is one of my favorite composers of all time. When he fell ill and died in 1791 at the age of 35, rumors flew about what caused his death. Speculation continues to this day. Was it poison from a jealous rival or the Freemasons? Was it one of many possible illnesses? We don’t know for sure, but one theory is that it was trichinosis from undercooked pork, and we do know that he ate pork 44 days before he became sick.

This recipe from a Viennese cookbook in 1742 is for mutton loin, but it says that you can use the recipe for pork or venison as well. While boiling meat is not the most delicious way to prepare it, the crust that you prepare after it’s boiled is delicious. It’s slightly sweet with a hint of cinnamon and a very nice crunch, so if you’re not worried about sticking to the historical recipe exactly, try the crust on some pork chops (cooked however you like) or a roasted pork loin.

    No. 239 — Mutton Loin
    Take from a mutton the loin, as large as it can be, and dress it as one does a venison loin. Boil it in water, wine, and vinegar with bay leaves, onion, rosemary, and strips of lemon peel until it is quite tender. When it is cooked, arrange it on a casserole dish and pour melted butter over it. Take grated dark bread, mix it with cinnamon and sugar, sprinkle this over the loin, pour more butter over it, and put it into the oven, so that it becomes nicely brown, turning it once or twice. Make a good broth, pour it underneath, and serve it warm at the table.
    — Nützliches Koch-Buch (The Useful Cookbook) by Johann Holzmayer (1742 edition)

(more…)

July 18, 2026

The current state of play in the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t make a habit of sharing reports from the ongoing fighting in Ukraine, as the war has ground on (how do you say “short, victorious war” in Russian?). It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s that trustworthy sources are vanishingly thin, and most coverage is either hyper-pro Ukraine or hyper-pro Russia … so assessing events is somewhere between difficult and impossible for those of us without our own satellite and espionage networks. kulak, on the other hand, has been paying attention and does have some insights that are worth considering:

One could be forgiven for thinking that there is something deeply wrong with the Russian State and Vladimir Putin in particular.

Every 1 to 3 months some new unprecedented Ukrainian asymmetric attack hits Russia’s homeland in ways almost tailor designed to provoke an escalation, outrage the populace, and leave the Russian Government humiliated at the loss of face.

The “Crocus City Hall” (it’s a civilian music venue not an actual city hall) attack in Moscow was killed 151 and injured 600+ Civilian music fans in an “ISIS” terrorist attack … That everyone knows was funded, coordinated, and enabled by Ukraine (and the CIA). Right down to the assailants passing through Ukraine, and being on camera collecting their discarded firearm magazines (presumably because the manufacturer stamps would tie them to their backers) …

This was huge Russian News, and the specific band whose audience was targeted is also significant.

Piknik is a massive hit Russian 80s band. Now, Students of history will note that Russia was still communist in the 80s. They’ve been around forever, and are generally inoffensive and middle of the road (they were mainstream under the USSR)… They’re kind of a weird gothic slavic prog-rock blend of Phil Collins and the Tragically Hip. And they’re huge … Individual videos with 10s of millions of views on Youtube … As big as any hit western 80s band and lots of cultural fondness in the Russian imagination.

(Presumably it hits harder if you can appreciate Russian)

This matters because their core demographic are Russian boomers who are Nostalgic for their Soviet Childhoods, but are also established and content in Modern Russia … Ie. Putin’s Core demographic.

This would be like if you attacked a Hamilton performance or a Bono concert in the west. That’s the regime’s core supporters right there. That’s a knowledgeable and incisive cut that actual Muslim foreigners wouldn’t know or care to hit … But that Slavic Ukrainians and calculating CIA planners trying to apply pressure or destabilize Russia into escalation would know and salivate at.

Likewise Ukraine explicitly attacked Russia’s Nuclear Strategic Bomber fleet in Operation Spider Web, assets that were not used in the Ukraine war, and indeed were basically irrelevant to the conflict … But are core to Russia’s nuclear triad and the stability of the global nuclear balance of power … Again basically begging for a massive escalation and almost certainly making Russian Generals and Strategic planners break out in a cold sweat until they assessed the damage.

Beyond this there have been prominent assassinations of Russian Generals … In Moscow. And assassination attempts on Putin himself …

In addition to the destabilizing Ukrainian counter-invasion of Russia, and escalating strikes on Moscow itself.

The thing to understand is that none of these have been conventionally advantageous for Ukraine. The Invasion of Russia stretched their forces, the Assassinations if anything probably cycled in younger, more competent, hungrier generals, attacking Moscow Boomer civilians probably gave a massive morale spike to the outraged Russian populace … These strikes on Russia have infuriated Russians and made them call for blood.

This is in many respects THE OPPOSITE of what you’d normally want to do as a smaller country fighting a larger that hasn’t fully mobilized. Usually you want to exhaust a larger force that’s half committed or politically divided, without getting them to up their commitment or causing them to unify. Think of Vietnam … The Vietnamese wanted Americans to get tired of fighting them and get demoralized at the idea of ever “winning”, fight amongst themselves, then wind down and withdraw. If in 1972 Vietnamese terrorists had attacked the Superbowl and killed hundreds of American civilians on US soil … that’s actually one of the few things that could have united American in 1972 or gotten America to commit to another 5 years in Vietnam at that point.

It would have greatly damaged American prestige … Moscow or China might have liked that … But from Vietnam’s perspective where they want America to wander elsewhere, it’d lock in years of misery.

So that’s weird … but weirder has been Putin’s Reaction: Nothing. Basically no counter-escalation. Certainly nothing that’s made Zelensky sweat and hesitate at sending more drones at Moscow.

Indeed many sympathetic commentators both in Russia and the West have been screaming their frustration at Putin that he hasn’t suitably punished these insults to Russian Honor or restored Russian deterrence … Or merely enforced baseline international norms around targeting heads of state, civilians, and Strategic nuclear assets in a non-nuclear conventional war.

Russia has hundreds of these Tornado systems.

It’s not as if Russia lacks conventional options. Kiev is RIGHT THERE. Hell, If the Russians really wanted the Tornado MLRS (Multiple Launcher Rocket System) has a range of 200km, fires thermobaric warheads or White Phosphorus rounds, and could hit Kiev from Russian Ally Belarus …

Without even debating the extent of air-cover, and to what extent Ukrainian Air Defense is intact (or to what extent the US can supply them with interceptors) … Putin has the capacity to firebomb Kiev on the scale of Dresden if he wanted to, from the ground. He’s not lacking in conventional, nuclear, and every other kind of escalatory option.

And yet he’s not escalated … And his retaliations have been as close as possible to the bare minimum he could get away with to not be overthrown for treason.

So what the hell is wrong with Putin?

July 5, 2026

Progressives are only against “some people” getting wealthy

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson posted an accurate assessment of how progressives view certain kinds of wealthy people as being undeserving of their fortunes:

Konstantin Kisin explained why this is the case:

This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They’re against certain types of people being crazy rich.

Artists and athletes make sense to them because they’ve played music and sports and because their success can be explained by “luck” and “talent”. Messi’s wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are.

But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They’ve never taken entrepreneurial risk. They’ve never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They’ve never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they’ve picked up a ball or a guitar.

They *literally* don’t understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly.

It’s why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don’t understand why they’re wealthy.

Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, “diverse”, left wing etc. Business leaders are “evil” middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don’t understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it’s just harder to measure.

July 4, 2026

The Dark Truth Behind America’s National Anthem

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Rest Is History
Published 8 Jun 2026

How did the War of 1812 result in America’s national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner? Who came up with it? And, why does this origin story make the anthem so controversial?

Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into the first episode of their Football World Cup special, with the story behind America’s national anthem, and its secret story.

0:00 – Lloyd’s
01:21 – The Star-Spangled Banner
02:43 – A World Cup Series on National Anthems
04:08 – America’s Most Controversial Anthem
05:00 – The Forgotten War of 1812
09:10 – Britain Strikes Back
11:39 – Francis Scott Key Boards the British Fleet
15:27 – The Bombardment of Fort McHenry
18:14 – The Giant Flag That Inspired the Anthem
20:41 – Francis Scott Key Writes the Poem
23:28 – Why the Anthem Used an Old English Tune
26:13 – The Anacreontic Song
29:07 – How the Song Became a Hit
30:37 – The Times
31:48 – Is The Star-Spangled Banner About Slavery?
36:08 – Escaped Slaves and the British Army
40:55 – The People Who Found Freedom Under the Union Jack
42:29 – Francis Scott Key’s Complicated Legacy
47:06 – The Song Spreads Across America
51:39 – Why America Took So Long to Get a National Anthem
56:42 – How It Finally Became the Anthem
57:06 – Controversial Performances
1:00:17 – Colin Kaepernick and Taking the Knee
1:02:39 – Can You Separate the Anthem from the Author?
1:03:03 – The Abolitionist Version of the Anthem
1:04:13 – Coming Next: God Save the King
1:06:33 – The Rest Is History Club

Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude
Senior Producer: Callum Hill
Executive Producer: Dom Johnson
Chief Digital Officer: Sam Oakley

QotD: “Yankee Doodle”

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Everyone in America knows “Yankee Doodle”. That is a remarkable thing to be able to say about any piece of music, let alone one written in the middle of the eighteenth century by a British army surgeon who meant it as an insult. Most of us learned it before we learned to read. It arrives through some combination of school, parade, ice cream truck, and the ambient cultural air of the American summer, and by the time you can name it you already know it. You know the melody before you know the words, and you know the words before you know what any of them mean. A feather. A pony. Macaroni. A young man coming to town. It is the most familiar song in the American songbook and also, when you actually look at it, one of the strangest.

[…]

Which is how we ended up with a patriotic standard that is also a death threat, a sodomy joke, a farm boy’s account of watching grown men handle their enormous guns with mounting enthusiasm, and the song we teach five year olds at Fourth of July parades. All of this has been inside the song the whole time. I want to walk through what is actually in there, because once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it, and I think we owe the song more than we have been giving it.

Start with the title, because the title is already doing two things at once. “Yankee” is almost certainly from the Dutch Janke, a diminutive Dutch settlers in New York used to mock their English neighbors. The British army picked it up as convenient shorthand for a provincial American. A rube. A man of no consequence. “Doodle” meant fool, from the German dudel, and this is the part that makes it into the elementary school music program. The part that does not is that “doodle” was also eighteenth-century British slang for a penis. Both meanings were in active circulation. Neither was obscure. When the British handed this song to their regulars as a marching tune intended to demoralize the enemy, they were calling the colonists provincial idiots and, on a second pass, Yankee dicks. The American troops heard the title and, in the great tradition of men who have already stopped caring what anyone thinks of them, said yes, that one, put it on the flag.

The first thing the song was is a threat.

    Yankee Doodle’s come to town / For to buy a firelock / We will tar and feather him / And so will we John Hancock.

British soldiers were singing verses like this one in the run-up to Lexington. Tar and feathering was not a prank. It was a ritual. Men were stripped, had boiling pine tar poured directly onto bare skin, rolled in feathers while the tar was still cooling, and paraded through town as public spectacle. The skin came off with the tar. Some victims died in the days that followed from shock and from infections in the raw flesh. The British soldiers are singing about doing this to a specifically named man. John Hancock. The wealthiest man in Boston, already on London’s list for arrest. “So will we John Hancock” uses his name as a verb. We will do this to him. We will use his body to make a point.

The soldiers singing this were on their way to arrest him. They missed. Hancock got through Lexington, made it to Philadelphia, and in the summer of the following year signed the Declaration of Independence in letters so large that his name became, in English, the common noun for a signature. The verb became the noun. We will destroy you publicly became I was here, I did this, come and get me. The song that had been a mob-violence threat against a living dissident was now, a year later, being sung by the men who had saved him as they mustered for the same war. The target of the verse became the architect of the country that kept the verse. This is the first transformation the song undergoes and it is not subtle. It is also not the last.

The second thing the song is is a sodomy panic. He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. Every American schoolchild has been told this means the colonist was too stupid to know what fashion was. That is the sanitized reading. The full reading requires understanding what the Macaroni Club was. Young English aristocrats came back from the Grand Tour in Italy wearing wigs so tall they required structural adjustment to pass under a doorframe, corseted coats, embroidered slippers, and Continental affectations so pronounced the London press began printing caricatures of them within the year. “Macaroni” meant dandy, in the same dictionary-accurate way “doodle” meant fool. Technically correct. Missing the entire point.

The point is that the Macaroni Club had become, by the 1770s, a convenient public container for British anxieties about male effeminacy, foreign moral contamination, and sodomy. The caricatures drew them in pinched silhouettes and muffs, in poses the London audience was supposed to read as unmistakably queer. The courts were not caricaturing. They were prosecuting. Men were pilloried. Others were executed. The word “macaroni” was carrying the weight of active criminal cases at the exact moment “Yankee Doodle” was being composed. A British army surgeon named Richard Shuckburgh is the likely author of the most famous macaroni verse, and what he wrote was a joke with a second floor. On the ground floor: the colonial rube does not know what high fashion is and mistakes a single feather for an entire wardrobe. On the second floor: the colonial rube has just put on the signifier of a group of men the British state is currently prosecuting for sodomy, and he does not realize what he has announced himself as. He is a joke to the troops singing the song, and the joke is that he is queer and does not know it.

The colonists heard all of this and kept the song anyway. The British were banking on a shame that had already dissolved. You cannot humiliate a people that has stopped needing your approval. The song arrived as an instrument of British contempt, and the colonists adopted it anyway, and from that moment on it stopped being a British song and started being something else. A vessel. Whatever the singer needed it to carry, the song carried. That is the reclamation, and it is also the engine of everything that happens to the song from here.

Emma, “Yankee Doodle, Undressed”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-22.

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

June 24, 2026

QotD: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Vox has created a stir this week with a podcast claiming that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is, for some reason, a particular “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”. It’s not super clear why Vox singled out the Fifth for abuse, and my conscience is frantically reminding me that I am not to provide sustenance to trolls and nitwits who aren’t me, but this is certainly intriguing. Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding suggest that “women, LGBTQ+ people, (and) people of colour” may resent Beethoven, but they conflate two arguments to produce this conclusion.

One is just that Beethoven is a dead white male who is universally deemed an incomparable composer. The other is that concerts of classical music are kind of classist and snooty, and if you showed up with a piercing or anime hair or dark skin, you might get beaten up, or sneered at, or something.

The first accusation attracts an immediate guilty plea, and identifies a real problem: no one (of any colour or creed or sexual orientation) who takes up music composition in 2020 has any real hope of becoming the equal of Beethoven. Vox found musicians to complain about the suffocating centrality of Beethoven within their tradition of creating and performing, but this sentiment isn’t the exclusive property of minorities, or of musicians. It persecutes all indiscriminately. No young mathematician setting out on a career imagines that he is going to give Euclid or even Poincaré a serious run for their money.

[…]

The second charge in Vox‘s indictment — that concerts of classical music discourage outsiders — is something that (surviving) symphony orchestras have been working their fingers to the bone to address, and not without obvious success. At this point there can’t be an ensemble of any size on this continent that hasn’t spent several summers going to battle in public parks, armed with trendy film scores and orchestral pop, to play for people in jogging outfits and tank tops.

Colby Cosh, “Roll over Beethoven, you exclusionary elitist”, National Post, 2020-09-16.

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

May 14, 2026

“Trust is the most scarce thing in the media landscape right now”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As with a lot of cultural upheavals, I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, so let Ted Gioia give you the state of play in “Rick Beato Versus the NY Times“:

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article — so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy — but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally — the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in” — whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list”. But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter”. The survey was just a “starting point”. The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment — when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List“.

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader — simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny.

May 10, 2026

The “death of the reader” is how art stops being for people and becomes just for artists

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When I first got interested in Jazz, I bought all sorts of music from multiple musicians and groups, liking some more and some less. But it seemed that at some point in the 1960s, I was finding less and less of the music to be interesting and entertaining. More and more from that point on, the music seemed to be deliberately less accessible, more intricate without being pleasant or compelling to hear, and (as I characterized it years ago on the old blog) more oriented to other musicians rather than the non-musician general listening audience. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen shows that this happens in many artistic and creative pursuits and groups them all together in a phenomenon he calls “the death of the reader”:

This is what I call “The Death of the Reader”.

Authors write for readers, who aren’t authors. Artists paint for non-artists. Musicians play for non-musicians.

This keeps fiction, art, and music grounded.

But when any group stops creating for an external audience, and starts trying to impress only each other, they create a weird, self-reinforcing feedback loop.

This isn’t clothing, or even fashion. It’s a costume party. They’re all trying one-up each other with something weirder and more eye-catching.

So when an athlete, of recent and topical celebrity, who isn’t a part of their Bored Billionaires’ Club, shows up in a dress that’s just a dress, of course they are going to mock her. She’s just revealed that she didn’t get the memo. That she’s not an insider.

How she looks to the world at large is not the point.

This is why 99.999…% of copies of Infinite Jest have never been read. This is why John Cage “wrote” four minutes of silence. This is why competitive bodybuilders from the 80s looked like Greek gods, and modern ones look like gargoyle freaks.

It’s all the Death of the Reader.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies for you now. They hate you. They make movies for each other.

And then cry about how you didn’t buy a ticket, because they think your only role is to pay for their onanistic circle of self indulgence.

This game isn’t going to stop. It’s just going to keep getting weirder until someone’s dress malfunctions and catches fire, and the rest of us all have a good laugh.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress