The Test Tube and the Scale

  Evidence of the triumph of mass advertising as unifying, commercial tool drawing the attention of local, national, and global cultures can be found in the success of social media. It’s difficult, if not altogether impossible, to communicate across these interactive platforms without acknowledging the influence of commercial advertising. That influence is present not only in the syntax of the texts we compose, but also in the layout of our photos, particularly when accompanied by text. If you’ve ever posted online, then you know that internalized feeling of instinctively understanding the shockingly narrow parameters of the acceptable, the permissible, of online content. Consequently, you may also have the banal poster’s knowledge of wanting to test the boundaries of those constraints, a popular impulse practiced sometimes amusingly, sometimes over indulgently. When fronting the now iconic punk band X-Ray Spex, the legendary vocalist Poly Styrene sounded not only as though she wer...

  From Nigeria, the Yoruban electric guitarist Bob Ohiri takes a simple, funk-inflected guitar motif and layers it with additional guitar and sax solos, along with rhythm section and vocals, and broadens the central riff’s dimensions, upending a typical in-studio polyrhythmic jam into something extraordinary, the formalization into music of kinesis and the sensory world. Though clearly danceable, Ariwo Ya is so finely textured and densely packed with rhythm that it also keeps the listener at a distance from its mysterious commentary on human nature. The cadenced vocals, especially, atop the repetitious and sinuous guitar, bass, and sax lines, emphasize the song’s gripping estrangement from normality. Sublime rhythms then, like both jazz and classical music, transcend routine human experience and informs the narrative of our sentient life in the same fashion that the tree informs the narrative of the seasons, or the internal organ the narrative of our health. But it’s so much more; ...

  Privileged with the gift of memory, I peer into the skull-domed darkness behind my eyes, past the stringed, jumbled network of starkly colored arteries and veins and the firing nerves, hoping for a quick glimpse of the years’ detritus; the smashed cassette tapes, the unusable cameras full of ruined batteries, the rain damaged paperback novels with their bloated pages, all the old magazines with the best pictures scissored out. Here’s another memory, ghostly like all the rest, yet shareable with persons still living. It’s of a cavernous, brightly lit retail space whose three interior walls are covered in a blond wood paneling. Every several feet along the walls, the paneling—installed on the diagonal—is interrupted by a large square frame decorated with colorful posters of varying size that are periodically replaced by the employees of the various record labels promoting a current release. (Once, in the spring of 1990, Charles, the store manager, asked me to build a wall display f...