Quentin's Weeknotes 1/15/23-1/21/23

This Week:

• I finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s “The Daylight Gate”, a dark and entertaining historical yarn about the Pendle witch hunt, and the people caught up in the mix of political intrigue, anti-catholic persecution, and patriarchal violence that spurred it.  It’s beautifully and hauntingly written, and doesn’t pull any punches with regards to the cruel brutality of witch trials and imprisonment.
• My parents came out to visit us!
• I worked on some collections projects that will hopefully bear fruit soon.
• I continued to help with the installation of our new Micronesian exhibit.
• I have really enjoyed Pitchforkmedia’s sunday reviews, which feature a long-form review of an album they have never reviewed previously. This past Sunday’s delight was a review of “Monsters of Rap”, a 90s-era TV-infomercial 2CD set from the people who had made “Those Fabulous 70s” and would go on to make “Kidz Bop”. It’s a delightful review that takes me back to the landscape of pop radio in eastern Iowa in the 1990s, which was my first real exposure to anything like popular music. There are also plenty of jaw-dropping factoids (Ice-T shouting out MC Hammer?, Pharrell co-wrote “Rumpshaker”?) that made it endlessly entertaining and draws a thru-line from this early crossover success to contemporary popular music in all kinds of interesting ways. Overall, it charts the tensions between rap music’s undeniable commercial appeal and its parochial, urban, black-cultural origins.