‘If not hope, then what?’: the musicians finding optimism in dark times
Michelle Zauner, Japanese Breakfast
I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.
I actually wrote this album (Jubilee) before the pandemic, at the end of 2019.
After writing two albums that were rooted in grief and general suffering, and a book about that experience, I felt ready to move on. A lot of the record is about fighting for joy, and struggling to feel joy, or walking away from a situation that negates your joy. Also getting older, and knowing that so much art is rooted in these very intense, almost teenage-like feelings, I wanted to find a way to tap into that as an adult.
Especially now, we’re really aware that joy is precious and needs to be carved out. A lot of the time I can be really hard on myself. [The song Paprika] was a reminder not to take it so seriously. Don’t stress out so much about writing a record about joy! It’s gonna sound contrived if you don’t actually feel that way. Japanese Breakfast’s new album Jubilee is released 4 June on Dead Oceans. Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart is published 5 August by Pan Macmillan
Jon Batiste
I started making this album in September 2019. It’s a love letter to my history and heritage, and the Black diasporic music and culture that has been marginalised. Trump was in office. There was social unrest, aspects of the political system being challenged in unprecedented ways, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, then the pandemic. I put hope in my music because having authentic hope is a radical stance right now. I say this in a purposedriven way as opposed to an egotistical way: what I’m doing is bigger than me.
We’re in a very dehumanising time. You have to have a lot of therapy – by therapy, I mean to access things that give you the feeling of being human and connect us to our greater purpose. When I create, it’s never separate from my faith as a Christian. I take my faith as the ultimate form of optimism, because it allows you to understand as much as anyone can why things are the way they are. There are things we can’t change, but we should just focus on things that we can change. That’s what all of the greats have done. Jon Batiste’s album We Are is out now on Verve
MC Taylor, Hiss Golden Messenger
If not hope, then what? That is the essential question of being for me now. What is the alternative? I don’t necessarily consider myself a rock of hopefulness; I don’t think of myself as someone that can walk into a room and animate it with visions of unfettered joy and possibility. However, as the father of two children, ages eight and 12, who continually bear witness to the injustices of our world, I believe that part of my obligation to them is to offer a picture of the world that, while based in reality, interprets any small cracks in the forces that work against them – against us – as seeds of potential for a better world, one that is fairer and more just. Otherwise, how could I talk to them about climate change, or the murder of George Floyd by a cop, or the marshalling of untruth, racism, and xenophobia in pursuit of money and power all over the globe, without breaking down?
This type of hope has to be intentional. It takes work in the same way that a mindfulness meditative practice does. You do it enough, and you start to see sparks of hope in places you didn’t expect them; you also notice the things that want to extinguish those sparks. So maybe Quietly Blowing It – though I certainly wasn’t thinking of it as such when I was writing it – is in part a gathering of some of these seeds of hope, as well as a reckoning of the battles that we face. In other words: the sanctuary, and the ways that those in power will break us on the wheel for our truthtelling. But if not hope, then what? Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album Quietly Blowing It is released on 25 June on Merge
Amy Lee, Evanescence
My sister died when I was six and it set my mind away from typical kid stuff. When I started writing music as a teenager, I was going through a lot of those big questions: “Who are we, what is our place in the universe, what is the point and where do we go when we die?” I lost my brother three years ago and the pandemic has meant we’re all facing our mortality so there’s that deeper need for connection through music and art.
Everything feels connected for me at the moment. I’ve never felt moved by politics like I have in the last couple of years. Every day waking up to a new ridiculous horror, even something as stupid as our former president’s tweets. We’re being made to feel like we have no power or voice, but I’m being pushed to think, yes, we do if we stand together. That’s what our song Use My Voice is about. Truth has to rule. We can break out of the old moulds and invent a better future if we admit the things that are broken in ourselves and in society. Evanescence’s album The Bitter Truth is out now on BMG
Fred Again
People tell me I’ve made a joyful record but to me it’s devastating. Actual Life (April 14 – December 17 2020) was impacted by the worsening illness of a very close friend. The song Me (Quiet Evenings) is the one that’s most about death but people say it sounds really hopeful. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to find some sort of positivity while everything around felt tragic. Most of the really optimistic people I know have become like that after really challenging circumstances.
The album is a diary of other people’s moments in life. I recorded Carlos, a construction worker in Atlanta, saying “Friend, we’re gon’ make it through!” and he was a song just waiting for some music. The pandemic didn’t consciously influence the album other than the recording circumstances, but Big Hen (Steal My Joy) samples my flatmate Hen and I on shrooms watching the sun come up over a deserted London. It was a beautiful moment and the song came from a place of pure hope and joy.
Before I wasn’t so bothered about how my music resonated. Now, the meaningful messages I’ve had from people who’ve heard the album already and found it inspiring will stay with me forever. I’m very proud to have that effect. Fred Again’s new album Actual Life (April 14 – December 17 2020) is out now on Again… Records
Chuck Johnson
Recent years here in the Bay Area, there have been these parallel, destructive forces of gentrification and wildfires. I was intrigued by how gentrification is sometimes actually enabled by spaces being destroyed by fire. I lived in a warehouse that was a live-work space and venue. After I moved out, a tragic fire claimed two lives – a couple of years before Ghost Ship [in Oakland]. That building is now luxury condos, all the residents displaced. I wanted to acknowledge the loss of important spaces, and at the same time find signs of hope. I see more hope in how the natural world is able to deal with fire and use it as a process for germinating seeds. I don’t see as much hope on the human side.
I sampled reverb from the space where I lived that was destroyed by fire, and there’s a performance from an Oakland space called Life Changing Ministry. The sounds of these spaces live in our memories as sonic ghosts. It was interesting to work with reverb because they’re not perfect representations – they carry distortions and inaccuracies. I’m sure my memories already carry distortions and inaccuracies. My hope was that the album would present the listener with a space to acknowledge loss and then hopefully also to experience that sense of hope or renewal. Optimism needs reinforcement for me. Music was a way to access that. Chuck Johnson’s album The Cinder Grove is out now on VDSQ
Sofia Kourtesis
My EP Fresia Magdalena is all about activism, trying to bring positive change and hope. It was a homage to my dad. He was a pro bono lawyer. The song Nicolas references his last case, defending a journalist who found out that a politician was corrupt. After he died, I needed to show my pain and also that the bad is not the end, it’s about what we give to our next generation. I saw it as my mission to be vulnerable with my father when I was losing him: “I feel your pain – I’m in pain too because I’m losing you. So if you open up and I open up, we can help each other.” Now I’m singing more, and I hope that being more vulnerable will open up the conversation for others to show their pain, too.
Fresia is my mother’s name and Magdalena is the district where she works as a politician and a social worker. Seeing the fight she has in her fills me with hope. [In the past], it was always important for me just to make people dance and make them happy. But now when people listen to my music, I want them to think about the changes they can make, to stand up for their rights – to get people dancing and trick them into listening deeper. We humans can change the world through demonstrations, getting involved in politics. I need to be a positive person because if I don’t believe in the human race, what else can I believe? Sofia Kourtesis’s new EP Fresia Magdalena is out now on Technicolor
Porter Robinson
My debut album was such a departure from EDM that I was convinced I would lose half my audience. It did much better than expected. I went back into the studio five years ago feeling pretty good about myself and with huge expectations. That’s where it went wrong. I was creatively blocked and depressed and the longer I spent in the studio, the music just got worse. Meanwhile, my brother was undergoing chemotherapy for a rare lymphoma. It was an incredibly bleak time.
Eventually my manager told me to get out and take as long as I needed or else I would drive myself crazy. I moved out of my parents’ house, my brother got well and I fell in love. Nurture captures that transformation. The sonics are influenced by J-pop, which I would listen to while driving and be on the verge of tears because the harmonies were so great. People might wonder why a twentysomething is singing “I’ll be alive next year” [in Look at the Sky] but I guess that does resonate with the pandemic. We’ve had so much nihilism in music and on social media. I just want to show how useful hope can be. Porter Robinson’s new album Nurture isout now on Mom + Pop
• Part two – featuring Rostam, Jungle and Esperanza Spalding among others – will be published tomorrow.
out of favour. Matt Nicholls, agent to Made in Chelsea cast members Olivia Bentley and Mark-Francis Vandelli, thinks that shows such as Benefits Street became so popular that commissioning producers started pushing for more extreme, desperate conditions “until there was nowhere left to go”. Viewers began to question the ethics of treating low-income “reality stars” like zoo animals to be poked, prodded and guffawed at. Known as “poverty porn”, it was a concept discouraged by global aid workers for its perpetuation of misrepresentative stereotypes of working-class people.
These shows still exist but are less extreme: take the savvy working-class people on Bargain Brits on Benefits or the benevolent nurses on Channel 4’s long-running show One Born Every Minute. But since these tempered versions of reality TV don’t satiate our need for extreme, they have left a space for more shows about the wealthy. “Punching up rather than down is perhaps less problematic,” says Dr Ruth Deller, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of Reality Television: The TV Phenomenon That Changed the World, “especially if [the rich] are in on the joke.”
The unstoppable rise of wealth TV can be traced back to the success of US teen drama The OC.The fictional portrayal of the life of wealthy teens and their parents in the exclusive communities of a southern Californian town proved to be so popular that reality TV commissioners wanted a piece of the proverbial pie.
In 2004, MTV launched the first rich reality TV show in Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, which lasted two years and spawned a successful spin-off, The Hills. But the true gamechanger came in the form of reality TV network Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County, which began airing in 2006. Showing the lives of rich, white women in the OC, the franchise grew nine spin-off shows in the US alone, including Atlanta and New York, and many more globally. Over 15 years, Bravo has managed to diversify its cast, and capture a varied audience, from gay fans attracted to the camp fabulousness of the lives on show to bored housewives themselves.
In the past year, Netflix has attempted to challenge Bravo’s power with their own line of shows, including Bling Empire and 2019 hit Selling Sunset, about a team of high-end, west coast real-estate agents. The result is a cycle of ultra-rich one-upmanship. “Producers are thinking: how can we make a show ‘even glossier’ and more aspirational,” Nicholls says. For more than a decade, fans have become used to Housewives spending five figures on shopping sprees, but on Bling Empire, “we meet a woman whose father is an arms dealer,” says Ben Mandelker, co-host of reality breakdown podcast Watch What Crappens, “and a person who owns the stores that these housewives do their spending sprees in”.
For all the gaudy opulence on show, there has been an unlikely positive gained from this trend for wealth TV, in the burgeoning diversity seen on screen. “Audiences [in the US] are no longer predominantly white and viewers want to relate to the stories they are watching,” says Jeff Jenkins, the executive producer of Bling Empire. “It seems arrogant to think, in 2021, that people just want to consume stories about white folk.”
Bravo has been very strong in this regard, airing shows such as Shahs of Sunset and Family Karma that feature predominantly Muslim and Jewish Persians, as well as Indian cast members. The success, meanwhile, of the network’s Black reality series such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Potomac – the former is the most watched in the whole Housewives franchise – has dispelled the tired notion that minority shows don’t capture large audiences.
In the past year, Netflix has successfully emulated this trend with shows such as Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, Indian Matchmaking and, of course, Bling Empire. These shows serve as a departure from reality TV’s past portrayals of minorities, on American reality shows such as Cops and The First 48, which encouraged the stereotype that Black people are prone to crime and deceit. Still, modern reality shows aren’t entirely perfect when it comes to race. The often heavily stereotyped portrayals of minorities – be it overbearing Indian parents or uberwealthy south-east Asians – serve as a reminder that representation in itself isn’t always enough in telling the reality of people’s lives.
It is no coincidence rich reality TV is enjoying a boom just as the world faces the upheaval caused by Covid, offering as it does schadenfreude and escapism. We can’t call up Jeff Bezos to tell him his wealth’s growth during a pandemic disgusts us. But we can jeer at those who have chosen to flaunt their money on our TV. It would be wrong to assume that the lives of the very rich are entirely easy, says Jenkins. “For most of us it’s perhaps secretly satisfying to learn that the wealthy also have lots of problems – and sometimes their problems are even worse than our own.”
Wealthy people aren’t going anywhere. So why not bask in their lives, from a safe distance? (A very safe distance, in the case of Bling Empire’s Anna – who in one scene knocks down the wall of her walk-in closet with a sledgehammer, while wearing a ballgown.) Considering they control the world we live in, perhaps it’s a good idea we keep an eye on them.