THEY'RE PLAYING OUR SONG
What is the soundtrack of impending apocalypse?
AND A MICROPHONE
Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence.
So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules.
This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm.
The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it.
A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN
The David Bowie retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum has been organized as a long rambling walk, with artifacts from his extraordinary career displayed within half-hidden nooks and narrow passages. There are amazing things to see: the space-age Pierot costume from the Ashes to Ashes video, the lyric sheet from The Jean Jenie, diaries from the Berlin days. Visitors receive headsets that are synced to micro-zones within the galleries, cueing clips from relevant songs.
As a monument to the artist, the show is unpolished. The spaces are dark and uncomfortable, and the exhibit design is inconsistent. Objects that fans are familiar with, like CD and album covers, are hung up front, at eye level. And objects that fans would want to examine more closely, like Aladdin Sane costumes, are mounted on platforms, behind glass, or twelve feet above the floor.
As a testimony to the person, however, the show is true and moving. What grips one are videos from Bowie’s television and stage appearances. These are shown untouched, in their original format, in low resolution, grainy, shadowy, or pixellated, some on CRT monitors. The outdated formats speak powerfully, and poignantly, to the eras in which Bowie was working, before Instagram, gay marriage, and everyday cross-dressing.
Throughout his career Bowie was clear-eyed, gentlemanly, and sincere. In a television clip from the 1960′s he pleads tolerance for men who wear their hair long. In an MTV interview from the 1980′s he asks a reporter, politely, why the channel doesn’t feature black artists. And in the exhibit’s final gallery, in vintage film footage, he performs as Ziggy Stardust. Despite the studied outrageousness of his costume, makeup and hair, the beauty of the songs, and his connection to them, shine through. There are no false notes. Bowie wrote beautiful songs and performed them, meaning every word he sang.
ONE LIFE ON EARTH
For the launch of Voyager in 1976, NASA commissioned pop-scientist Carl Sagan to create a document that could be carried on board to explain human life on earth. That phonograph, The Golden Record, contains Scenes From Earth (139 scientific diagrams and photographs), Sounds from Earth (21 audio clips), Songs from Earth (27 compositions), and Greetings from Earth (55 audio hellos, including one in whalesong). A copy of the record was left, along with a player, on both the Voyager I and II capsules. They remain aloft, where they might encounter, as Sagan had hoped, “advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.”
While the idea is terribly moving – that there are beings on other planets that will find our record and become our friends – the documents themselves are not. The scientific diagrams have been simplified graphically, without text and shade, stripped of their musicality and complexity.
The photographs are radically inclusive, showing men and women of
different ages, cultures and races, but they’re grainy and loosely
composed, with a cloying Family of Man sweetness.
The songs are an instant controversy. The playlist includes, correctly, three compositions by Bach and, incorrectly, no Beatles song. (EMI didn’t allow Sagan to use “Here Comes the Sun.”) The sounds are mundane but poignant, perhaps because they’ve been curated and recorded so painstakingly. Their listing alone goes a way to capture the Whitmanesque texture of life on earth (…”Chimpanzee/Wild Dog/Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter”)
There’s a famous scene at the end of Manhattan when Woody Allen lists those things that make life worth living, and while it’s solipsistic and culturally specific, it’s true. For each one of us there are certain things (a shade of blue, a flavor of hard candy, a pop song, a rainstorm) that rupture the texture of everyday life and, for whatever reason, carry great meaning. When compiling The Golden Record Sagan was striving for a universal comprehensibility and comprehensiveness. What if, instead, he had reached for personal power: astronomical problems, a favorite poem, a town he dreamed of visiting, his childhood home. That record would not have given us life on earth, but one life on earth, and that would have been enough.