This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, it’s RiverBeat time! Alex Greene talks about his cover story interviews with Chuck D, Bobby Rush, Cage the Elephant, and DJ Zirk. Plus, Memphis rock legend Greg “Oblivian” Cartwright visits to give us the skinny on his latest project The Hypos.
I recently attended a lecture by Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University. Snyder’s specialty is the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. His 2017 book, On Tyranny, was essential reading during the first Trump administration, and earlier this year, it topped the New York Times Bestseller list. If you’ve recently heard the phrase “don’t obey in advance,” that’s Snyder’s work.
His new book, On Freedom, asks hard questions about the way we use the word “freedom” in America. Too often, we think of freedom only as the absence of anyone telling us what to do. But it’s much more than that. Freedom is not merely individualistic in nature. There are times when banding together with other people will make both us and them more free. The American Revolution is one example. People with diverse interests from diverse places banded together to throw off the chains of monarchy and prevent any one person from ever having that much power over them again.
George Lucas called the good guys in 1977’s Star Wars the Rebel Alliance. The bad guys were the Galactic Empire. The names weren’t important. He just needed an excuse for lasers to go pew pew. Sure, Obi-Wan Kenobi was fighting to restore the Old Republic, but his number-one ally was Princess Leia, who was royalty. And where did this plucky group of rebels get a fleet of expensive-looking spaceships? Who cares? It’s a story about space wizards trying to get their mojo back.
Lucas himself was the first to realize he had half-accidentally created a political story, and the prequel trilogy is really about how democracies die. In the Disney era, Rogue One stood apart for its glimpse into what everyday life was like under the rule of Emperor Palpatine. When Tony Gilroy, who was on Rogue One’s creative team, continued the story with Alliance operative Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on Disney+, it was as much about how revolutions begin in authoritarian regimes as it was about a street hustler who finds a purpose in life.
Season 2, which premiered last week on Disney+, leans into the ensemble cast Gilroy created and adapted. This season is unique, in that its twelve 30-minute episodes are being released three at a time, with each batch telling a complete story and then skipping ahead one year. From the very first scene, Gilroy and his crew show they’re taking Star Wars to an emotional place it has never been before. Cassian has infiltrated Sienar Fleet Systems to steal an advanced TIE fighter prototype. As she is handing him the keys to the ship, the young tech who has helped him (Rachelle Diedericks) asks, “If I die today, will it be worth it?”
Yes, Cassian assures her; no matter what happens, she’s made a decision to be free in the face of oppression. Then he leaves her to her fate. It’s a brilliant bit of writing, revealing Cassian’s moral calculus. Many more people will be faced with the same bad set of choices. On the prosperous world Chandrila, Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is facing the consequences of the deals she made to finance the Alliance to restore the Republic. She’s giving her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) away in a loveless arranged marriage to the son of a shady oligarch. It’s the social event of the season, which means Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), the deep-cover Rebel leader, can use it as an excuse for a visit. Meanwhile, Mothma’s own marriage is falling apart, her daughter hates her, and her banker Tay (Ben Miles) is considering ratting her out to the Empire.
The most chilling sequence in these first three episodes is a boardroom meeting. Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) has assembled a secret team of Imperial brass, including ISB investigator Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). Under the guise of “energy independence,” Krennic plans to mine the peaceful planet Ghorman, famous for its fine silk exports, for the enormous quantities of minerals it will take to build the Death Star. The problem is, how to remove the population without causing too much of a stir. The bureaucrats calmly pitching genocidal ideas is a reference to the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis planned the Final Solution. By taking the question “Where did the Rebellion come from?” seriously, Gilroy has elevated this space fantasy into a work that’s sadly relevant to our moment. What is freedom? When push comes to shove, how hard will you fight, how far will you go, for freedom?
New episodes of Andor premiere Tuesday nights on Disney+.
Synthpoppers Recent Future are prepping a new full-length album for Red Curtain Records, expected later this year. The first single from the duo of Charlie Davis and David Johnson, “Crosstalk,” gives you an idea of what to expect. It’s got a little industrial grind and some pleasing bleeps and bloops. The video explores the group’s duality via incessant split screen and some retro graphic. Get into the groove:
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Kailynn Johnson talks about her cover story on the Memphis Roller Derby and the latest on the xAI controversy. Plus, a new documentary on John Lennon and Yoko Ono and why haven’t you seen Sinners yet?
When Steve Hirsh and Friends take the stage at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts, they will have something in common with the audience. You won’t know what songs they’re going to play, and they won’t know either!
Hirsh will make the long drive from his home in Bemidji, Minnesota, to play with a group of Memphis’ finest “free” musicians, all of whom have embraced extemporaneous music-making for years.
Saxophonist Arthur Edmaiston says both he and saxophonist/flutist Chad Fowler were steeped in improv in the 1990s, with regular sessions at Young Avenue Deli that coalesced around saxophonist Frank Lowe. “He came back to Memphis in the ’90s after a 20-plus year career,” Edmaiston says. “It was a weekly gig, and that was a great way for us to all develop our own thing and develop as a band and improve as musicians. And we recorded those shows. See, we all lived in the neighborhood, so we’d go and we’d do the gig and record it, and then we’d come back home and drink on the porch, whoever’s porch, and listen to what we had done earlier and tear it apart and kind of learn from it.”
“Is this free jazz?” I ask Hirsh, referring to a genre tag that was often applied to Lowe.
“I’m going to ask you not use that term,” Hirsh replies.
As bassist Khari Wynn explains, many improvisational musicians consider the term a trap. “As soon as you drop the ‘J’ word, you get two avenues of thought. People are immediately like, ‘Oh, I don’t like that. It doesn’t have words. It’s too out there.’ Or you get the other side of it where people are like, ‘Oh yeah! I’m definitely a jazz fan!’ So then they expect to hear some of these certain figures repeated or played, and then if you don’t do that, then you’re not authentic.”
Hirsh was originally from New York City, the crucible of modern jazz, but left when he was still a teenager. “I wasn’t even aware of all that stuff,” he says. “I grew up on rock-and-roll. I didn’t start learning about jazz until I was in high school. I just kind of stumbled across some records. I went to the ‘University of Liner Notes,’” he says. “I moved out to the Bay Area, and I was playing in rock-and-roll bands and blues bands and really got into the [Grateful] Dead, which is really where I learned about improvising.”
Meanwhile, the group that became Deepstaria Enigmatica originally brought three of these players —Fowler, Wynn, and Alex Greene — together with David Collins and Jon Harrison in 2022, opening for Jack Wright’s improv trio Wrest. Something clicked. “That October, we went into Sam Phillips Recording and improvised for several hours,” says keyboardist Greene, who is the music editor for the Memphis Flyer. “A tiny fraction of that became our first album, but that day was explosive. It was like the big bang for our group.”
The Eternal Now Is the Heart of a New Tomorrow consists of two tracks, both more than 20 minutes in length. Unlike the stereotypical free jazz freak-outs of the ’70s, Deepstaria takes a whirlwind tour through 60 years of instrumental innovation. Soulful grooves dissipate into ambient atmospherics and sheer sonic textures.
That album, released on the celebrated ESP-Disk label, which also released Lowe’s 1973 debut, is getting some attention, as with DownBeat’s recent positive review of the disk.
Edmaiston, for his part, has also been a maverick of improvised music here, either with SpiralPhonics or with trailblazer Ra-Kalam Bob Moses, not to mention ad hoc groups and his early years with Lowe.
These Memphians’ slippery eclecticism is what attracted Hirsh to them. “There’s no genre about it. It’s a process. It’s a way to make music,” he says. “Our brains differentiate between noise and music, but we learn what music is. There are people who intentionally work with that boundary, and I think that’s perfectly valid. But I always want a narrative. I want a story arc in the music I play. Playing with these guys is hip because they all want the same thing, and we’re all kind of reaching for the same thing when we’re playing — at least when we’re playing together.”
“We just go in any direction the music wants to go,” says Greene. “We were just reviewing one of [Deepstaria’s] unreleased tracks from Phillips, and it was like, ‘Oh, wow! I forgot about that whole metal section!’ We embrace that. We know what to do when things start to careen off in that direction. It’s five composers, jointly contributing, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
That’s what makes the long drive from Minnesota worth it for Hirsh.“What I enjoy so much about playing with these guys, and why I keep coming down to Memphis, is that everybody’s ears are so wide open. It’s like you’re 10 years old, and you’re out in the woods running around playing, and somebody says, ‘Ooh! Look at this cool thing over there!’ And everybody runs off to see this cool thing over there.
“You hear people, particularly jazz musicians, talk about reflexes. But what we are talking about, I think, is a step beyond reflexes. Everybody is hearing something unfold, and it’s not that they’re reacting to something they’ve heard; it’s that they hear where it’s going. … I call it ‘real-time group composition.’ That’s my best description of it.”
Crosstown Arts presents Steve Hirsh and Friends in the Green Room on Thursday, April 24th, 7:30 p.m. Visit crosstownarts.org for details.
When John Lennon was shot in front of his apartment at New York City’s Dakota building in 1980, Time magazine called it an “assassination.” Noting that the term is usually reserved for the murder of a head of state, the Time editorial board called Lennon “the leader of a state of mind.” Before his murder by a deranged fan, Lennon was a musician — albeit one of the most famous in modern history. Afterwards, he became a martyr.
But martyrdom, it turns out, does not suit Lennon. Sure, they open every Summer Olympics with his secular hymn “Imagine,” but the Beatles Backlash is real, and Lennon’s legacy has gotten the worst of it. Sir Paul McCartney is still playing shows and wowing audiences at age 82. Ringo is still the floppy mascot guy he always has been (and, let’s be clear, one of the greatest drummers of all time). George Harrison’s solo work is now venerated as the best of the post-Beatles output. But spend a few minutes on any social media network these days and you can find people who say the Beatles were massively overrated, and, most cruelly of all, John Lennon would probably be MAGA if he were alive today.
Lennon the iconoclast would have understood. A couple of generations have had the Fab Four’s music shoved down their throats by the Beatles industrial complex. That the band “changed the world” is a Boomer catechism. So when young people hear the music made by a bunch of moldy old white guys, of course they’re predisposed to hate it.
In One to One: John & Yoko, director Kevin Macdonald aims to demystify Lennon and reveal the human being behind the mythical martyr. The meat of the film is performance footage from Lennon’s Madison Square Garden show on August 30, 1972. The concert was a benefit for the victims of the Willowbrook State School in New Jersey, which journalist Geraldo Rivera had exposed as a hellhole where developmentally disabled children were basically imprisoned and left to rot. It was the only full-length concert Lennon played after the Beatles’ Shea Stadium swan song in 1966.
The shocking footage from inside Willowbrook is a part of the hundreds of clips from TV and film that flesh out One to One. Macdonald begins the story in 1971. The Beatles have been broken up for more than a year, and John Lennon has been living with his new wife Yoko Ono in a posh English country estate outside London. As Lennon recounts in a taped interview with a print journalist, Ono was the one who hated living in a mansion and wanted to simplify their lives. On a short vacation to New York City, Lennon and Ono discovered that they loved the hustle and bustle, and the cultural scene. Lennon tells the interviewer that he felt at home because “no one bothered us.” So the couple sold their English estate and moved into a two-room flat in Greenwich Village. There, they mostly smoked weed and watched the TV they had propped up at the foot of their bed, which had been left by the apartment’s previous owner.
A couple’s therapist would have a field day with the picture of John and Yoko’s relationship Macdonald draws. The “Yoko is the villain who broke up the Beatles” narrative was exposed as misogynistic agitprop by Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary series. Jackson found a sound clip where Sir Paul himself calls bullshit on the notion that the group was in trouble because “Yoko sat on an amp.” But Lennon and Ono were clearly codependent, years before the psychological term was coined. By the time they moved to New York, they had both gotten hooked on heroin and kicked the habit. Lennon was tired of being a prisoner of his own fame and fascinated by the avant-garde art world which had embraced Ono, whom he called a “creative genius.” (One of the film’s running gags involves taped conversations between Ono’s staff who are trying desperately to secure a thousand house flies for one of Ono’s art installations.) In a clip from one of the panel-type talk shows that was popular on TV at the time, Lennon opens up about being abandoned by his mother and reconnecting at age 16, only months before she was hit by a truck. For her part, Ono was the daughter of a rich Japanese family who had been made into destitute refugees by the American firebombing of Tokyo. It’s no wonder that two people with abandonment issues would cling so fiercely to each other.
The focus of their lives in 1971 to ’73 was radical leftist politics. Ono’s feminism was a revelation to Lennon, who had been abusive to his first wife Cynthia. Macdonald drives the point home by showing footage of Lennon getting kicked out of the First International Feminist Conference, where Ono was speaking, for being the only man there. Protests against the Vietnam War were raging in America, and the Ono-Lennons were in the thick of it. They were planning an American “peace tour,” where some of the proceeds would have gone to bail funds for imprisoned Black men. Lennon tried to recruit Bob Dylan as a co-headliner but never quite got it done. He wrote a song about the Attica prison revolt that his manager begged him not to perform in public. In the end, the tour plans fell apart. Three months after the Plastic Ono Band’s MSG show, Nixon was reelected in a landslide, and his State Department tried to deport Lennon. The restored concert footage shows what might have been. Lennon and the band (which includes a bass player dressed as Jesus and a Stevie Wonder guest vocal on “Give Peace a Chance”) are loose and playful. Lennon delivers a transcendent version of “Imagine” at a piano while casually chewing gum. One imagines a world where, with a little more practice, they coalesced into a touring powerhouse that freed prisoners across the country. But that is not the world we got.
One to One: John and Yoko
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Malco Ridgeway
Bruce Newman, folk singer/songwriter, host of WEVL’s Folk Song Fiesta, and frequent friend of Music Video Monday, is also a burner. Every year he makes a pilgrimage to Burning Man, the week-long art and music festival held in a remote desert. Around 80,000 people gather on a dry lake bed outside Gerlach, Nevada, during Labor Day week to build Black Rock City. There, burners create giant art installations, dance to some of the biggest names in electronic music, and generally reclaim the freedom they don’t have in the mundane world.
Newman wrote one of his first songs about his time spent in Black Rock City, and collected images and videos of the wild days and nights on the playa over the years. Edited by Laura Jean Hocking, and containing a few shots I took on my one trip to Black Rock, here’s “Burning Man”!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Ryan Coogler has proven himself to be one of the great masters of genre films. Every time he’s tried a new kind of film, he has mastered it and made it better. In 2015, he made the Rocky spin-off Creed, starring his friend and frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan as the son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. It was, incredibly, better received than Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revitalize the inspirational sports picture he had pioneered. Remember 2005’s Rocky Balboa? Of course you don’t.
Then Coogler moved on to the superhero space with Black Panther, the consensus choice for the best chapter of the never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Coogler saw the potential of his star Chadwick Boseman to transcend the shallow and banal crash-bang and become a hero for the people. And I’m not just talking about Black people, who were finally able to see on-screen both a hero and a culture which looked like them. T’Challa was the MCU’s moral center, the person who took time to wrestle with the right and wrongs of the situation, rather than just punching the bad guys. Marvel’s vision of good leadership is not the American President Thaddeus Ross, a barely reformed war criminal, or Tony Stark, the technocratic billionaire. It’s T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, who prioritizes justice for all humanity and puts his nation’s (and his own) blood and treasure on the line to achieve it.
Now, Coogler ventures into the horror genre with Sinners. The 21st-century superhero film cannibalizes genres so they can be digested by the corporate body. Captain America: Winter Soldier was a ’70s paranoid thriller in colorful tights; Guardians of the Galaxy is a sci-fi adventure with the occasional super-heroic flourish. Even Black Panther more closely resembled The Adventures of Robin Hood than it did Thor: The Dark World. The horror genre gives its practitioners more freedom. Throw in an atmosphere of creeping dread, a few jump scares, and a little monstrosity, and you can call it horror. After all, this is a genre that encompasses both David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Coogler takes the opportunity to play fast and loose in Sinners, bringing in elements from all over the cinematic map. One of its biggest influences is Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a decidedly not-horror psychological portrait of two deeply damaged people trying to find themselves in the squalor of North Mississippi. Another major tributary is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampire neo-Western that provided Bill Paxton’s finest hour. If I had to pin it down, I would call Sinners folk horror. Like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, it finds terror in the inscrutable laws of pre-Christian pagan beliefs.
The film’s animated preamble introduces us to the concept, handed down over millennia through dozens of different cultures, of shamanistic figures whose music-making was so powerful that it became magic and temporarily tore the veil between our world and the spirit world. We then meet Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). It’s October 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and times are tough. Sammie’s a preacher’s son who quotes scripture from the pulpit on Sunday morning after playing the blues on Charley Patton’s resonator guitar on Saturday night.
Against the wishes of his pa, who warns him against “playing music for drunkards who shirk their responsibilities,” Sammie takes a gig at the Delta’s newest venue, Club Duke. The owners are the Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan. They left Clarksdale 15 years earlier to fight in World War I, then joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where they became enforcers for Al Capone’s Prohibition smuggling operation. After years of being good soldiers, they have unexpectedly returned to the Delta, throwing cash around and sitting on enough bootleg booze to stock a juke joint for months. How they came into this good fortune is one of the film’s early mysteries.
The twins buy a former cotton warehouse and proceed to get the band back together, Blues Brothers-style. Along with Sammie, they recruit piano pounder Delta Slim (the great Delroy Lindo) and the singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) for opening night. It is one hell of a party. Every drunken shirker in a three-county radius packs into the run-down old building to party their butts off late into the night.
Did I mention that Sinners is also kind of a musical? And that some of the music was recorded here in Memphis by Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios? Coogler frames the big emotional moments with musical numbers performed by his cast. On Club Duke’s opening night, Sammie’s songs whip the revelers into a frenzy of ecstatic dancing. When people from other eras start to appear in the barn, from a masked San shaman of Kalahari to Eddie Hazel decked out in Parliament-Funkadelic-era Afro and star-shaped sunglasses, we know we’re through the looking glass.
The revelers are mostly oblivious, but someone notices the magic working. Remmick (Jack O’Connell) appears, smoldering from the sunlight. He’s an Irishman of indeterminate age, who knows all the old Appalachian folk songs. When he and his little band show up at Club Duke, the door man Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) won’t let them in. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s ex-wife, is a secret voodoo priestess who recognizes the undead when she sees them. But it’s going to take more than a mojo bag and a trunk full of guns to defeat the devils this time.
Sinners spends a long time giving backstory to its sprawling cast, so that when the action kicks in, we feel each loss and setback. Coogler takes big swings, but not all of them connect. Jordan’s double duty as twins could have been a disaster, but he pulls it off with bravado. On the other hand, a half-assed subplot involving the Klan bogs things down in the final reel. It hardly matters. Sinners is one of our great filmmakers exploring the outer limits of his gifts. Let Coogler cook.
Sinners
Now playing
Multiple locations
This was the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the premier music festival in the United States. More than 125,000 people descended on the California town to hear a surprisingly diverse cross section of popular music. On Friday night, alongside the epic headliner set from Lady Gaga, the return of Missy Elliott (who will be in Memphis for RiverBeat Music Festival in a couple of weeks) and The Prodigy, and a scorcher from Seun Kuti & Africa 80 (another RiverBeat booking), two of Memphis’ hip-hop top guns wowed in the 100-degree heat.
Unfortunately, there are no good videos on YouTube (yet) of GloRilla’s stomping set, which whipped the audience into a frenzy. Luckily, we’ve got Three 6 Mafia’s volcanic opener, “Hit a Muthafucka,” to bring you up to speed if you couldn’t afford to spend the weekend in the desert. Get ready to get buck! (And do I have to tell you this clip is NSFW? ’Cause it ain’t.)
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, Michael Donahue talks about his cover story on Memphis chef Ann Barnes. Plus, dive bar revival, and does Memphis still know how to party?