Harvard University Press Blog

“Everything I Wanted”: Black Women Listeners and the High Fidelity Culture of Taste-Making

Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, praises Hulu’s High Fidelity series, whose main characters are creative, intelligent Black women who are passionate about music and confident in their tastes and opinions. Where are the other shows like it?

Blink and you would’ve missed it. Last year’s short-lived Hulu reboot of High Fidelity, the upstart reimagining of Nick Hornby’s 1995 cult favorite novel and its subsequent year 2000 film adaptation emerged in mid-February 2020, that uncertain period when the whispers of a deadly virus were just beginning to gain traction in the U.S. media. Preoccupied with mourning NBA legend Kobe Bryant’s tragic death just a few weeks earlier, American culture turned its attention toward the winter awards season and then leaped into the tabloid eccentricities of Netflix’s Tiger King as a form of hearty streaming escape once the pandemic reared its head in full that March. Reviews of the remixed High Fidelity, a gender-inverted, millennial version of Hornby’s Gen-X record nerd, breakup-and-wake up adulting tale, arrived right in the run of this storm, and they were decidedly uneven in spite of a strong cast—Zoe Kravitz, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, David H. Holmes, and Kingsley Ben-Adir—anchoring an unprecedented TV series, one which featured, in part, Black women popular music wonks debating and pursuing the musical passions and tastes that rule their world.  Some feminist critics lamented what they read as the unreconstructed masculinist politics of the Fidelity narrative’s core dynamics involving dudes duking it out about the music that matters to them. Others bemoaned a plot structure that seemingly failed to “commit” to more nuanced character development. By summer, the show had been canceled.

I seem to be one of the few who lamented this turn of events as is evident by the fact that I’ve spent the past few months pitching a feature on the history-making elements of the next-generation High Fidelity to no avail. No one, it would seem, wants much to do with this show which is a shame since, in my mind, it brings to life the critical, cultural, and intellectual passions of two vastly different, wildly intelligent, curious, and artistically passionate Black women living by the creed of their nuanced and urgent convictions. No show before it has taken the tastes and opinions of Black women—young, old, of any age—so seriously and matter-of-factly and invites you to live in their universe. Co-produced by Kravitz, who took to Instagram last August to call out Hulu’s decision to cancel the series, particularly in light of its diversity-challenged programming, the series broke barriers by experimenting with a distaff scenario: what if Black women characters could inhabit the original’s white masculinist ideas about contemporary popular music culture and the semi-self-conscious “rock snobbery” sentiments of Hornby’s original novel as well as its slightly more expansive film (the casting of Kravitz’s mom, Lisa Bonet, had to mean something)?

The High Fidelity motion picture starred John Cusack and Jack Black in his breakout role as Barry Judd, a full-on manifestation of record store denizen hyperbole and music wonk excess. As the gender-flipped leads, Ms. Kravitz and Ms. Randolph quietly made history, holding down a show that takes seriously the tastes and passions of their two Black women characters. Fandom matters in High Fidelity 2.0, just as it did in the original, but the fans are now Black women, vastly distinct from one another and yet both deeply invested in music as both a salve and a form of their felt and complicated self-making journeys. As Ms. Randolph put it in a phone interview last August, these “women are allowed to study with each other, to study culture and to have opinions and ideas and convictions about their beliefs about cultures.” The classically-trained vocalist and Yale School of Drama alum who boldly reinvented Black’s original character delivered one of the most ingenious and exhilarating small screen performances of 2020. And she clearly recognized the beautiful and pathbreaking complexities of what she and Ms. Kravitz were given the room to do on the show together. These “conversations about artistry” are vital, she suggested to me. “[W]hen that artist did this at that one part, and that bridge is killer. She’s learning. This is her education. This is her grad school.”

Her Cherise is a marvel of a character, a Black woman, Wesley Morris reminds, “with all of these opinions about art and taste and is conversant in all of these modes of being.” She is a fireball of eclectic pop music knowledge and obsessions and along with Ms. Kravitz’s “Rob,” the heartbroken record store owner who swoons over scoring a rare copy of David Bowie’s classic album, The Man Who Fell to Earth, they exist in a universe in which they each have to tolerate the casual ways in which they are not consistently seen, heard, or taken seriously as cultural intellectuals, and in the case of Cherise, as a real, bonafide, aspiring musician. [Spoiler alert] Rob’s reparative gesture, gifting Cherise with her dream guitar, a Daphne Blue Fender, in the wake of her spat with Cherise is the emotional denouement to a one-season show in which a pair of Black women music lovers, aficionados, critics, and record collectors reconnect with one another through the gift of being seen. “Someone invested” in her artistry, said Randolph, who grew up learning to play guitar by watching Lauren Hill on MTV’s Unplugged and India.Arie, and “it manifests within the guitar, but every time that girl sees that guitar, she knows that someone believes in her. And it urges her to keep on going.”

The capacious inner world of a character like Cherise’s (one that we who watched with great interest were longing to see more of on this show) is the beginning of a way to tell the story of Black women’s relationship to popular music culture from the ground up, and it is a reminder that Black women across the century have been having what artist Carrie Mae Weems describes as “endless conversations” with the music and not just churning it out for the industry Big Machine. High Fidelity joins with Empire’s not-yet-done final season (featuring Cookie and company’s Bossie record label female empowerment narrative and the 2020 Tracee Ellis Ross feature The High Note) in calling our attention to the variety of African American women’s roles, challenges, and ambitions in the business and culture of pop music today. More stories please….

Ethics 101—The Good Place: A Reading List

As The Good Place comes to an end this week, we at Harvard University Press wanted to take a moment to appreciate a show that took moral philosophy into the mainstream. Who’d have thought we’d ever see an NBC episode named after one of our backlist titles? Or Kantian ethics discussed alongside fro-yo? Philosophy professor Chidi, one of the main characters in the show, is to thank for this, so we imagined which other HUP books he would have on his bookshelf.

“It’s like, who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?”

“Plato.”

 

One of our favorite jokes from season 1, episode 3. We’d like to think Chidi would be a Loeb Classical Library fan, so we’re hoping he’d refer to our versions of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo, and maybe even Plato’s Republic as well.

A reoccurring theme throughout the show is the question: What is good? How can we know, and how important is it? Perhaps Chidi could have used some help from Richard Kraut’s book, What Is Good and Why. Using ancient Greek philosophy, Kraut develops this thought into a good-centered moral philosophy, an “ethics of well-being” that requires all of our efforts to do some good.

“Okay, let’s save humanity shall we? Can one of you Janets get me a chalkboard, and a copy of Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices?” —Chidi, season 4, episode 10

It seems that a copy of Ordinary Vices, along with a chalkboard and some pretzels, may (or may not, depending on how the finale pans out) save humanity.

Chidi is seen reading Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in the show. At only 75 pages, Chidi would surely want to know more about it. That’s where Dieter Schönecker and Allen Wood’s commentary comes in. The authors describe the ways the it forms the basis of our modern moral outlook, and explain key Kantian concepts of duty, the good will, and moral worth.

Charles Taylor is one of the most famous living philosophers of our time. Chidi would surely have at least one of his books on his bookshelf. We think Sources of the Self would be on there, as it gives insight into modern subjectivity, in all its epistemology, aesthetic, and political ramifications, and has its roots in ideas of human good.

And we couldn’t write about books and The Good Place without mentioning What We Owe To Each Other. Pamela Hieronymi, philosophy advisor for The Good Place, introduced the show’s creator, Michael Schur, to the work of T. M. Scanlon (her dissertation advisor at Harvard), leading to the reoccurrence of the book in the show. According to his interview with the New York Times in 2018:

“Schur loved not only the central thesis of What We Owe to Each Other but also the book’s title. ‘It assumes that we owe things to each other. It starts from that place. It’s not like: Do we owe anything to each other? It’s like: Given that we owe things to each other, let’s try to figure out what they are. It’s a very quietly subversive idea.”

At the beginning of season 1, episode 6 (aptly named, What We Owe to Each Other), Chidi hands Eleanor a copy of Scanlon’s book, much to our delight. The premise of the book becomes a recurring theme throughout the show, with Chidi using key themes and arguments from the book on his quest to save humanity, and teaching Eleanor and company about contractualism. T. M. Scanlon spoke to The Crimson last year about the inclusion of his book in the show:

“It’s a weird thing to have your book appear as a character on a TV show. It’s sort of like having your child chosen to be in the school play. You’re pleased that they’re there, but worried that something embarrassing is going to happen. But so far not.”

The Good Place might be almost over, but you can still channel your inner Chidi by reading books on moral philosophy. Which books would you add to the list?

 

Stephen Colbert, Protector of Billionaires

“This French fried fraud is attacking our way of life from atop the bestseller list.”

“Remember the old saying: the rich get richer, and the poor should really try being rich, it’s nice.”

“Well folks, I’m not gonna take it from this Pepé Le Punitive Tax Rate, here.”

“Why are you trying to tear down the Western economic system and replace it with socialist redistribution of wealth?”

“Doesn’t the United States—sittin’ on top of the pile here—don’t we have the right to have our economic system benefit us and maybe not the rest of the world?”

“Inequality is bad because you want mobility. But if I’m already mobiled up to the place I want to be, isn’t it better for me to pull up the ladder behind me? Because then I can be charitable with money that I don’t even miss, to all the poor people I can easily find.”

Just some of what Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert had to say when he hosted Capital in the Twenty-First Century author Thomas Piketty this week.

Have a look:

 

Michael Lerner featured in PROHIBITION

The newest documentary film series from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premieres on PBS this Sunday night. The three-part series is entitled Prohibition, and it tells “the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.”

Getting the talking head treatment this time is historian Michael Lerner, author of Dry Manhattan, an acclaimed study of the Prohibition era in New York City. Some other cities could claim to have been “wetter,” Lerner explains, but New York was notorious in the 1920s for its defiance of the dry laws and its more than 30,000 speakeasies and nightclubs. Nowhere in the country were the clashes and questions surrounding Prohibition more visible than they were in New York City.

Lerner argues in Dry Manhattan that those very clashes and questions are often neglected by those of us taught by popular culture to look back on the Prohibition era as one of the most glamorous and thrilling periods of modern American history. These pop culture depictions, Lerner explains, have rarely succeeded in conveying the importance of Prohibition to the history of the twentieth-century United States:

Given the frivolous nature of our popular depictions of the “Roaring Twenties,” it is easy to dismiss the dry laws as part of a comical attempt to stop Americans from drinking. But there was much more at stake in Prohibition than booze. In addition to being the most ambitious attempt to legislate morality and personal behavior in the history of the modern United States, Prohibition embodied a fourteen-year-long cultural conflict over the nature of American identity, the reach of moral reform movements, and the political future of the nation. Prohibition indeed was the defining issue of the 1920s, one that measured the moral and political values of the nation while shaping the everyday lives of millions of Americans. Prohibition thus provides a key to understanding the cultural divides that separated Americans in the 1920s, as the United States was transformed by rapid economic growth and demographic changes.

As the country’s cultural capital, financial center, media headquarters, and largest city, New York was the “foremost battleground in the war against demon rum.” Its ethnic and racial minorities had their own take on the law, and Lerner explains their view of Prohibition as a “crusade rooted in the bigotry of the dry movement and its distrust of ethnic and racial minorities.” Their opposition spread to the city’s middle and upper classes, and soon much of the city was openly flouting the law. Ultimately, argues Lerner, the conflict over Prohibition was a debate about competing visions of American society that revealed deep divisions within the United States over individual rights, personal liberty, and the limits of reform. And those are divisions that we know haven’t yet been resolved.

Take a look at the trailer for Prohibition, and watch on PBS this Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights.