In this inaugural episode of Twenty-Song Tuesday, your DJ (me) walks you through the whole idea. Basically I’m trying to have a WFMU show without being on WFMU, and I think I kind of nailed it. Nothing fancy, I just grabbed twenty pieces of music that I have been intentionally enjoying recently and talked about it a bit.
Set 1 gets us off to a gentle start — mostly solo guitar, and not a word of English.
Loituma — “Ievan Polkka”
Wolf Biermann — “Ermutigung”
Georg Ringswandl — “Radlmare”
Bettina Wegner — “Cool Sein”
Maria Elena Walsh — “Manuelita la Tortuga”
Set 2 picks up the pace, but in a gentle way.
Todd Rundgren — “Healing, Pt. 1”
YMO — “Perspective”
Virus — “Wadu Wadu”
Prefab Sprout — “Ride”
Hermeto Pascoal — “Musica da Lagoa”
Ata Kak — “Obaam Sima”
Set 3 gets weird, starting at intergalactic gangster funk and arriving at postcolonial Casio pop via dancehall and gabber.
Max Rebo (possibly Rick James) — “Lapti Nek”
Bald Terror — “Rotterdam”
Lovindeer — “Babylon Boobs”
Lady G — “Nuff Respect”
William Onyeabor — “Atomic Bomb”
Francis Bebey — “Black Coffee Cola”
Set 4 is just three newer songs I have been into lately.
Mark Lipsitz died yestereday. You meet a lot of people on the music path. Some of them don’t care. Some of them help you out when they can. Some of them go out of their way to make absolutely sure you have everything you need, and that everyone and their grandma knows about your music. Mark was the third kind. This is an incalculable loss for those of us who knew him that way, and we can only imagine what it’s like for his family. I think we’ll slowly discover in the coming seasons that, simply by being who he was, Mark quietly built a web of sparking connections that would not have existed without him. I’ll be grateful for that web, for Mark’s lifework, and for his impact on mine, forever. Blessings to you and your family and your legacy, Admiral Lipsitz of the mighty tugboat Bar/None. We’ll do our best to make you proud.
The logo of El Salvador’s CECOT prison looks a lot like the ISIS logo.
This proves nothing, of course. But when I’m not wearing sight aids my mind has been trained over a lifetime to match low-info, blurry images to the closest matching sign in my inventory (everyone’s mind does this of course, but because of my low vision I suspect I do it faster and better than most.) Here’s what the two logos look like through a Photoshop filter I made to closely simulate my unaided sight:
Both logos have a white-on-black color scheme. Both feature a white circle with black markings. Both have similar ratios of circle-to-text. If I see one of these logos on a laptop screen and I can’t find my glasses, I have a hard time picking them apart on first glance. Global brand recognition of the ISIS flag is high and is in the Christian and secular west nearly universally associated with fear, and this seemingly-superficial similarity may at minimum count as a visual metaphor (Marlan, 2018) or even trademark dilution via associative cognition (Tushnet, 2007).
I found no evidence that this similarity is intentional. Even if it is, I doubt any such evidence will ever come to light; admitting inspiration came from an organization so universally loathed in the Christian and secular west would create unnecessary political risk for Nayib Bukele’s government and its Trumpist U.S. backers. But CECOT’s logo is part of a project of political branding much as the black-field-white circle banner was for ISIS (Bandopadhyaya, 2019), and the similarity of these projects is more than graphical. CECOT was built not just to incarcerate gangs but also to generate propaganda images that inspire fear among outsiders (Oette, 2024) and encourage public acceptance of violent and supposedly necessary measures towards achieving populist social change (Rosen et al., 2023). These are goals ISIS shared.
Whether CECOT’s logo was meant to subconsciously remind us of ISIS or not, the resemblance should prompt us to examine nominally-Christian western societies like El Salvador and the United States, their flagging commitment to the Christian values of forgiveness and redemption, and their drift towards glorification of violence.
Further Reading
Bandopadhyaya, S. (2019). Branding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Global Media and Communication, 15(3), 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766519874380
Rosen, J. D., Cutrona, S., & Lindquist, K. (2023). Gangs, violence, and fear: Punitive Darwinism in El Salvador. Crime, Law and Social Change, 79(2), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10040-3
50 limited-run lathe cuts of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” are available. They ran out fast last time, so if you want one get it here. Details below.
My friends at Bar/None and dreamsOfField and I produced another limited run of fifty 33.3-RPM lathe cuts for you.
This month’s offering is a weather-resistant, EMP-proof polycarbonate plate containing mono audio of my 2014 contribution to a 99 Percent Invisible episode on nuclear semiotics, “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty.)”
Each copy includes individually paw-printed art featuring the face of one of our family cats in the center of a radiation trefoil. (Her name is Trisha, she is a very proper lady, and I am happy to report that her eyes remain normal-colored and therefore that our current home is not located near a nuclear waste storage facility.)
As with all of these dub plate releases, I personally lathed each copy, signed each label, stamped and hand-numbered each jacket, and paw-printed each jacket back. We will not reprint this edition.
The most important component of this video is the interview section. Several local musicians were generous enough to share their thoughts with me about what it’s like to participate in a music community during wartime. Some also had messages for those of us on the outside — some cheerful and courageous, some requests for empathy and aid, and some warnings that none of us in North America and Western/Central Europe are immune to the tough circumstances they’re living through.
The first interview subject is Artur. He’s involved in the Lviv community as a performer, but he also has experience with cultural scenes in other smaller towns in Ukraine’s east, closer to the line of contact between the AFU and Russian Federation troops. He says that young people tend to cluster in hub cities with good air defense like Kyiv and Lviv where niche communities enjoy relative stability and protection. This leaves scenesters stuck in the smaller towns isolated. “They want to feel alive, but…in Mikolaiv, no one smiles.”
Artur
Next, Katja describes one benefit of the war: people now tend to show more interest in Ukrainian bands than previously. This is unfortunately offset by how difficult organizing concerts — and even rehearsals — can be, especially for her band as Re-read’s pre-war drummer is now participating in forward operations against the RF. “It’s not a government fighting another government…it is, but it’s also normal people — the people who we know, our fathers, our friends, they are fighting for what they love.”
(The drummer in a cat suit pictured above is currently with the AFU flying drones on missions against occupying Russian forces.)
Towards the end of the video you will see an interview from Timothy, a punk musician who expresses traditionalist values that might surprise some of us on the left. We discuss the artistic identity crisis he faced at the start of the war. Along with Katja, we then briefly discuss the tension between punk and traditionalism, and how that tension changes when one’s society and culture face existential threats. “Europe faces the same problem [as Ukraine],” Timothy says, “but on an even bigger scale.”
Later this week I’ll upload footage and interviews from Kharkiv, and also start to dip back into analysis. What’s going on here? Alternative music communities are playing strange new roles in the larger picture of Ukraine’s war effort, and that war effort is also changing the views and functions of a cultural avant-garde that used to map neatly onto the left-right divide. For better and for worse, Ukraine’s music scene might be a glimpse of our subcultural future in North America and Western/Central Europe. Ignoring developments here would be very comfortable, but also very inhumane to Ukrainians and very irresponsible to ourselves.
