Category: Culture

Dan Whitlam and a New Iteration of Poetry By Callum Tilley.

As those of us not immune to social media trends will have noticed, everything – and I mean everything – now has a space online. Whilst some might critique this impulse as shallow, the hollowing-out of arts like fashion, literature, and film for likes and online fame, it also means that creatives have new platforms on which to broadcast their work, and this art can find new audiences. Whilst this debate about the use of social media for art might rumble on – does it represent a superficial manifestation of technological capitalism, or a democratising impulse in creativity and the arts? – one man has been using media to broadcast his own art, and it is truly quite remarkable.

Dan Whitlam has been posting videos on Instagram (@danwhitlam) since 2017, and on Spotify since 2021. His work consists of a unique blend of spoken-word poetry, coupled with musical accompaniment that renders his work emotionally touching. Now amassing around 137,000 followers on Instagram (as of March 2024), is his significant following a symptom of the democratisation of the arts through social media? And how is work so uniquely modern, yet steeped in a rich poetic tradition? Is Dan Whitlam the future of poetry?

Firstly, I would argue that Whitlam’s style is novel, but not radically new. Whilst being a pioneer of his art form, he has not invented a new category of literature (if such a thing is possible). Spoken word poetry has a long and rich history, its oral tradition reaching as far back as Homer; and in a more modern context, its influences and iterations include theatre, jazz, and blues music from the early twentieth century. His art is not revolutionary, but perhaps a new iteration of this rich art form for the modern (or post-modern) age. 

Arguably, the novelty of Whitlam’s poetry comes from addressing problems unique to his (and our) generation. Perhaps my favourite of his works, ‘Paper People’, is about what could conventionally be described as a break-up. The speaker explains that he doesn’t know if he and his former partner can be friends, because,

“That would mean writing over what we were

Those rose-tinted days

Turning it into something less special

And slightly more mundane.

A lower level of pain – 

You no longer want me as your lover

But wanna hold on to my best bits

When your chest hits

The arm of another.

I don’t think we can be friends.”

The emotional distress Whitlam transmits is acutely familiar to anyone who has gone through a break-up in the past. The feeling of having to turn what was a hugely special relationship into something that, whilst no less important is much less intimate, is something that only those with immense emotional strength can manage. The pain of seeing a former lover in the light of friendship, and knowing that you lost something – or wondering about what could have been – is perhaps too strong an emotion to translate into a friendship. 

Whitlam effectively captures this emotional turmoil in a uniquely modern way. Whilst conventionally interpreted as a failing relationship, it is never explicitly referred to as such. This ambiguity could refer to the diminishing importance of labels when navigating modern love; poetry has absorbed the ambiguity of post-modern dating. Would it be too much to suppose that Whitlam is describing the emotional fallout after that perilous quasi-relationship-like place, the ‘situationship’?

Take, for example, another piece, published on Instagram. The poem opens,

“Nothing stranger than lovers turned friends.

As you both slowly forget your beginning and

Only remember the end.”

Perhaps the most piercing line comes later; when the couple meet again, as friends, 

“Just as strangers with a hidden knowledge

Who have to sadly pretend.

[…]

Where laughter’s not quite as close

But still holds the memory.

Or smiles that aren’t as deep…

But they’re still your remedy.”

In Whitlam’s emotionally sensitive phraseology, the pain of not quite knowing where you’re standing – emotional no-man’s-land – is rendered crystallised. It cuts straight to the buried point of tension, where your complicated feelings and questions about a relationship that cannot be quite defined – that, like Whitlam, avoids labels – and pins it down. The poet won’t let you escape your pain; he expresses it for you. You cannot be friends with someone who was once more than that. You might be friendly, but you either operate on a new plane of relationship – a halfway-point, where you operate as friends but know one another as lovers – or, if too painful, you cut and run. Whitlam leaves it up to us, the audience, to make that choice for ourselves. For him, or his poetry at least, it is too painful.  

If Rupi Kaur is the millennial poet, Dan Whitlam is the emotional mouthpiece of Generation Z. He voices our concerns about the instability of relationships, refusing to define them as we often refuse to define our relations to a lover, and gives intense and beautiful words to the complicated and often un-utterable emotions that characterise our feelings for someone who does not necessarily reciprocate in the same way. It’s painful to listen to, emotively read and set to music, but it’s reflective of our post-modern understanding of love.

This framing of our understanding of relationships finds a uniquely modern platform. Shared on Instagram, Tiktok, Spotify, these poems are directly targeted at the generation of people they discuss. This democratisation of his art allows Whitlam to reach everyone – or, anyone with access to the Internet – which is remarkably modern. So, too, is the blurring of the boundary between music and literature, so that this new iteration of spoken word poetry finds a modern setting over low-fi beats. 

What is not modern, however, is Whitlam’s discussion of loss. I am struck by the intense sadness that runs through his work, but never at any point do I get the impression that he regrets it. This recalls Tennyson’s famous lines,

“’Tis better to have loved and lost 

Than never to have loved at all.”

Whilst Whitlam might be communicating intense emotional turmoil, one emotion left off the page (or screen) is regret. Like Tennyson and countless others, whose rich tradition of love poetry Whitlam now continues, there is no sense that we should protect ourselves from these feelings. Before, I argued that his framing of relationships is uniquely modern; his framing of love, however, is definitely not.

Perhaps the only anti-modern thread in Whitlam’s work is the advocation for feeling these emotions; for loving and loving harder, for experiencing these emotions regardless of the potential consequences, because to fail to do so insulates you from one of the most natural aspects of the human experience: heartbreak. Discussed for thousands of years as an almost universal theme in poetry, Whitlam’s work continues this legacy of advocating for the pursuit of love whilst pushing back against the current impulse to not feel and remain emotionally bubble-wrapped. He reframes age-old poetic tropes of love and loss for post-modern contexts and audiences. Despite being intensely modern in his approach and his medium, Whitlam reminds a modern audience that not to love is worse than loving, and losing.

Sources:

Dan Whitlam’s Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/danwhitlam/

Dan Whitlam’s Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/artist/4t4zanmCp0GBomHaX5hXt8?si=j9bMkWsfRKW6QYVj1ywgsA

Dan Whitlam, ‘Paper People’, extract on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/C3p4kyoo77P/ 

Dan Whitlam, ‘Nothing Stranger’, extract on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/C4slEHjovs4/

Dan Whitlam, ‘Paper People’, on Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/album/5ao1mH7SdctA1afS3CtklP?si=RWGyXOrcQ5u7tP5GM4x-Ug
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 27, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45336/in-memoriam-a-h-h-obiit-mdcccxxxiii-27

By Chloe Stiens

I was in a folky rocky acoustic mood this week. Featuring new music from St. Vincent only.

You can find this week’s playlist at the top of the ‘Spring 24’ playlist, here:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5FaZdPSwOS8sEOx6Dq0yB1?si=528b996c66b74f05

Laura Marling, Alexandra

• This song was the soundtrack to my 2020 lockdown, i.e., sitting in the sun with my Bluetooth speaker and a glass of wine, so as soon as it gets sunny this song makes an appearance.
• The song is inspired by the Leonard Cohen song ‘Alexandra Leaving’. Here, Marling questions what happens to the woman-muse after she is no longer relevant to the writer.
• I like chromatic descent in the internal harmony, in which the flat 7 note lends mixolydian modal folk sensibility.

Funkadelic, Can You Get To That

• From their celebrated 1971 album, Maggot Brain. It is actually a reworking of an earlier Parliament’s track, ‘What You’ve Been Growing’.
• I love how the drums come in accompanied by a piano glissando, and the low ‘I wanna know’ in the chorus.

St. Vincent, Big Time Nothing

• From St. Vincent’s new album, All Born Screaming (it has also been released as a single). This is the first album entirely self-produced by St. Vincent, in which her previous sonic influences are excitingly combined; in this song, the Masseduction-esque synth gives way to a funk influence first explored on  Daddy’s Home.

Big Red Machine, Fleet Foxes, Anaïs Mitchell, Phoenix

• Big Red Machine is the collaborative project between Aaron Dessner (of The National, and co-producer of Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore and The Tortured Poets Department), and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). 
• The piano writing here brings to mind one of my favourite Evermore songs, ‘Dorothea’. The percussion is very interesting; the backbeat is composed more of fills than grounding kicks. I also enjoy the subtle horns combined with the other country/folk acoustic instruments.

Mac DeMarco, Moonlight on the River

• My favourite song off of 2017’s This Old Dog. 
• The reverb on the lead guitar brings to mind reflections in water, before it gives way to simple acoustic guitar, bass, and drums for the verse.
• I love how it goes crazy at the end, as ‘everybody dies’. While the rest of the song can be interpreted as the narrator coming to terms with his father’s impending death, the ominous sounds here could be his grief taking over.

Gang Starr, Full Clip

• This song is from the rap duo’s eponymous compilation album, released in 1999, and samples Cal Tjader’s instrumental ‘Walk On By’. I particularly like the scrubbing on the chorus.

Joni Mitchell, California

• Joni Mitchell’s music is back on Spotify!
• I too have been ‘Sitting in a park in Paris, France / Reading the news and it sure looks bad.’
• I love how her voice floats upwards on ‘Just give you the blues’.

Land of Talk, Compelled

• From the Canadian band’s 2020 album, Indistinct Conversations.
• The layered guitars and synths from 2:21 create a kind of ‘indistinct’ soundscape.

Taylor Swift, The Bolter

• One of my favourites off the Anthology portion of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I’ve chosen the clean version, just because I don’t enjoy how the explicit lyrics in the chorus jar against the sentiment of acceptance and renewal.
• Dessner’s country/folk influence is strong here, and perfectly compliments Swift’s vocal writing. I really like the minor turn at the end of the chorus.

Grateful Dead, Deal – Live at Gizah Sound & Light Theater, Cairo, Egypt, Sep. 16, 1978

• I was visiting friends in Cairo, so downloaded this album for the flight. The Grateful Dead were the first band to play at the pyramids!
• ‘Deal’ is my friend’s favourite Dead song at the moment, so it was on repeat during my trip.
• I really like the solo (which is actually in the first half of the song, starting at 1:23)… you can really hear Jerry’s banjo techniques in the arpeggiation. 

by Vadim Goss

‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ is the greatest opening line to the greatest villanelle ever written. 

On a first reading, ‘One Art’ begins ostensibly simplistic. How yes, indeed, it is easy to lose door keys and have an ‘hour badly spent’. But that’s ok — ‘their loss is no disaster’. And then, in its heartbreaking final stanza, we understand what the poem is really about. 

When Elizabeth Bishop was 40, she was awarded a fellowship to travel South America; and it was during her travels in Brazil when she met Maria “Lota” Soares, a daughter from a prominent Rio de Janeiro family. Bishop was only supposed to stay for two weeks in Brazil. In the end, she stayed for 15 years. It was during this period Bishop wrote her third and most outwardly joyful volume of published work, Questions of Travel, in 1965. The work is markedly different from her previous collections, North and South and A Cold Spring, with the shedding of her insular, New England upbringing in favour of a more mature, more outward facing poetic. And whilst the theme of place remained (and indeed, would always remain), what it signified underwent significant alteration. That instead of it being somewhere one has been, rather, place became somewhere one arrives. 

As mentioned, there is an immense amount of joy in Questions of Travel. For we get to witness Bishop’s voice grow as if a bird learning to fly — beginning as the outsider in ‘Arriving in Santos’, before developing to that of the full-fledged native in ‘The Riverman’. Such joy is compounded in its context, running parallel with Bishop and Soares’ love story — a journey which too began under foreign skies and found its home through a blissful familiarity, reaching the clouds. For as much as the work is a love letter to Brazil; as much as it is a testament to the importance of travel and the virtues found in new beginnings, more significantly the work is an ode to Soares; to the discovery of love and the long-awaited aggrandisement of Bishop’s own homosexuality. It is an object which unveils how love is transformative across all strata.  

Questions of Travel was Bishop’s most hopeful collection. A work which encapsulated the sheer happiness of a life kept waiting now living. But this happiness, like all happiness eventually one must suppose, was not to last. Yet in this particularity, its ending was that of superlative horror. In September 1967, very shortly after she went with Bishop back to New York, Soares took her own life. Questions, in turn, gained an unwanted context and thus an unwanted new way of reading it — becoming a work that no longer lived in happiness, but could only reminisce. More than that, it felt (and still reads now) as if it is begging to reminisce. 

8 years later, Bishop began writing ‘One Art’. Conversely, one might question why it took her 8 years to address the subject. But as the poem itself answers, grief makes the memory of love as young and as old as yesterday. “Lota”, who had been gone for 8 years, had never left. Perhaps any attempt at elegy had eluded her for 8 years. Or perhaps, for Bishop, it had only been 8 minutes.

Like Dickinson before her, Bishop had a singularly small body of published work (just a little over a hundred poems), making her, too, anomalous compared to other great poets. Indeed, she was an extensive drafter, known to spend months at a time working and reworking a single poem. ‘One Art’ was no different, amounting to 17 drafts in total. The title, for example, went through several iterations, such as ‘How to Lose Things’, ‘The Gift of Losing Things’, ‘The Art of Losing Things’. Another notable revision was the line ‘I shan’t have lied’, originally ‘I am lying’. And so on. These drafts are particularly revealing, not only in relation to her signature, artistic anxiety, but also in demonstrating an equally real human one. 

But how different would ‘One Art’ really be for example, if the title was ‘How to Lose Things’? Or if she wrote ‘I am lying’ instead of ‘I shan’t have lied’? If the former was the title, perhaps it seems Bishop is telegraphing an instruction manual of letting go. If she opted for the latter as the line’s composition, Bishop willingly admits that the poem’s thesis — of how ‘it’s no disaster’ to lose things — is untrue. And yet ‘One Art’ is a product of the struggle between these two anxieties; a constant tremble; an endless grappling between her responsibility as a renowned poet and as a lover who never stopped loving. In this light, ‘How to Lose Things’ suddenly becomes a question Bishop is asking herself, desperately trying to write the answer to rid the pain. ‘I am lying’ becomes Bishop’s own doubt invading an art form which demands a disguise to the writer’s Caliban. Yet I think one has to concede: all these tensions exist in ‘One Art’, whether it’s a draft version attested in her notebook, or the final version.

These tensions define ‘One Art’. They are why it comes across so undecided and elusive. On one hand, we have the poet — the silent communicator whispering to the reader permeable meanings. And on the other, the mourning lover who simply wants to scream and to cry and to convince herself of her own meanings. And whilst this is not unique to the elegy itself — one has to look no further than Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the dedication to his “friend” Arthur Henry Hallam (and we can even go as far back as Milton and the veneration he pays to his “esteemed fellow” Edward King in ‘Lycidas’) — ‘One Art’ is unique because it does not pretend to uphold the elegy’s mythos. There is no attempt to re-write a national consciousness; no lamentations on the state of the English Church. Bishop does not divert her attention to state apparatus. She does not dilute the meaning of the elegy. She stares down at grief undiverted, for they have Lota’s eyes. She demands for them to close, for yet cannot bare the sight of Lota’s light becoming lost forever. For Love is ‘filled with the intent / to be lost’. It should be ‘no disaster’. And yet it will always be. This is the concession that renders heartbreak. 

One would be tempted to think there is no “resolution” in ‘One Art’ of which we expect in the traditional elegy. There is a misconception however, that the elegy is supposed to be some sort of cathartic experiment healing the writer from its pain. No doubt this is the consequence of the form’s male lineage, in which coming to terms with grief and “turning away” from it are the same thing. But grief exacts an emotional struggle seemingly too demanding for the masculine sensibility. No male elegists have ever been able to properly deal with grief (except maybe W. H. Auden) because men must always conquer their emotions. They must have their victory over grief. But in grief there is no chance for victory. We have already lost. Bishop’s female sensibility understands this. The “resolution”, if one can call it that, is simply one of this understanding. Grief will always be a cruel contradiction. ‘One Art’ is therefore the anatomy of grief itself — a psychology of contradiction constantly wanting to preserve, to get back, and to let go. 

‘One Art’ towers over later twentieth-century poetry. What first appears as an ode to the elegiac tradition becomes something more confessional, more fragmented, and more human. It refuses to be lofty, nor does it seek to be universal — “to speak for everyone”. Bishop speaks her own voice. She sings her own song. It’s the reader’s job to listen. And at its heart, what we hear is a declaration, both mournful and proud. ‘I have loved. I still love.’ 

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Shimmering silver costumes. Specials on da rocks. Spiteful dancehall girls waiting for their big break. Welcome to the world of Bugsy Malone. Slightly feverish, suffering the consequences from getting too ‘tight’ the night before, I decided to revisit my childhood favourite. My mother protests, “not everyone has had as camp an upbringing as you”, but I really think every child, and film-loving adult, should be made to watch this film. How does a film that merges The Sopranos with Cabaret, is set in New York but was filmed in Slough, relies entirely on a cast of under 15s, and has iconic songs that the children certainly didn’t record themselves, last beyond the bizarreness of 70’s British TV? Charm. 

There’s a cold, deserted New York street where moonlight and outsiders dare to tread. The sound of frantic footsteps dart behind a brown stone, disturbing the alley-cats and a mother at her wit’s end. Shouting. The arrival of the gang in this dead-end spot signals the struggle. Roxy the Weasel, covered in deadly custard, lies in the gutter. Cut to song. 

Gang warfare, the Mob, showgirls who sing suggestively to an audience of mobsters, politicians, and wise guys, shoot-outs and lock-ins. Most children’s films would try and distance themselves away from this crime-ridden world, even if it’s romantically portrayed in 1920’s glamour and gowns.  Part of Bugsy’s magic is that it’s a film for children, starring children, yet why treat children like kids, give them a film that grows up with them. Children aren’t as afraid of playing in a grown-up space as we often believe, Bugsy accepts this and cuts out the middleman by making the kids the heroes without diluting their characters or stories. ‘Namby-pamby showgirls’ are criticised by tedious casting directors, all 13 still, who effortlessly deliver lines exclaiming how they could ‘do something’ with that ‘great face’. From Fat Sam’s Tony Soprano reminiscent demeanour, to passing waitresses and agents, all the characters are given their time to play pretend at full, convincing pelt. The moustaches drawn on with pencils, eyes gaze up as Tallulah glides across the stage ready to start her number, she rolls her eyes in tired professionalism, winking at mobsters and factory workers alike. She opens her mouth ready to sing. ‘My name is Tallulah, I live ‘til I die’. Whilst it may sound like a perfect copy of a showtune, it sounds like a copy written by the kids based off snippets of songs heard through their parents’ records with their innocence of songwriting shining through. This is a musical that wants to feel like a child’s game, and it’s terrific. 

A world powered by peddle-powered cars that are constantly running from the creek of peddle chains belonging to rival mobs, where characters retire from a stressful day with a cocktail and a cabaret, guns that actually shoot; it’s all rather charming. Age appropriateness without patronising. The gusto to the commitment of Bugsy being a mob film is fabulous without pretension; language, names and settings are all so perfectly in keeping with the genre, why sacrifice any of the more cert 15 bits? Despite this age-blind approach, the film gives no sour stage-school taste. Jazz hands are firmly excluded from this speakeasy. Jodie Foster, who plays the wickedly witty chanteuse Tallulah, arrived at the Bugsy set fresh from the scenes of Taxi Driver; these are children who are already immersed into the adult world of acting, why not let them play-pretend as adults, but without the bullets? 

Bugsy finishes galivanting through 1929’s Little Italy with a Leone style shootout. Fat Sam’s Grand Slam is covered in cream, the volume of which almost ventures into the absurd. The glittering girls are dulled. The piano keys glue together under the warfare. Tallulah lets out her last quip, ‘so this is show business’, as she wipes the custard from her eyes. In the normal world, this is catastrophic, a merciless shooting of an entire speakeasy. Yet in Bugsy’s world, it is the perfect finale to extended game of dress up. The previously deadly custard bullets loose all killing potential, causing all to erupt into a custard coated final number. The costumes must all go back into the box, the kids must go back to their respective houses for tea, and they turn back into kids once more – just kids, having fun. Whilst they are convincing and almost scarily good at dressing up as adults, Bugsy Malone has managed to escape a fate of being caged into the weird children’s media of the 1970s by keeping a surreal sense of fun and games close to its chest. They ‘could’a been anythin’ they wanted to be’ and they chose to be fun. 

By Jack Fry

I wait on springtime with bated breath. Like leaves on a vine, I desperately seek out any creeping sunlight. I really do feel reborn as the weather changes and my levels of vitamin D rise. To many, the first true sign of spring is when the blossom appears; I returned home from Durham last week to find the magnolia tree at the bottom of my garden had bloomed a brilliant white. Spring to me is the first time you tentatively hang your sheets on the washing line, a toasted hot cross bun slathered in salty butter, rain that glimmers as it refracts the pale sunlight, the first freshly cut lawn, a thawing of creaking winter bones. Someone wisely suggested to me recently that spring was a better time for New Year’s resolutions and I always feel a reinvigorated sense of purpose at this point in the year; spring is often associated with renewal, awakening, and growth. The season is transitional and fleeting, a bridge between extremes. I feel each song included is a call to recognise not the sublime, but those smaller moments that occur in between, a moment where a beam of light just breaks through the clouds or the unfurling of a leaf, blink and you’ll miss them and summer will be upon us. So with all this in mind, I’ve curated this seasonally-themed playlist. 

Light of a Clear Blue Morning – Waxahatchee

This Waxahatchee cover of a timeless classic by Dolly Parton, and the album it’s included on St Cloud, feels incredibly emblematic of spring to me. The album, full of songs of renewal and hope, was written following a period when Crutchfield had embarked on a new love affair and had chosen to get sober, observing the world with an intense lucidity. Crutchfield sings in the first verse, a line I think we are all too familiar with after a winter spent in Durham:

“I’ve been looking for the sunshine

You know I ain’t seen it in so long”

With the spring equinox having just passed, the daylight hours now outnumber the dark. And so when Crutchfield’s glassy voice cuts through the grey clouds, she embodies the communal sense of hope that comes with a blue sky day, singing: “Everything’s gonna be alright, It’s gonna be okay”.

Morning has Broken – Yusuf/Cat Stevens

I just managed to catch Cat Stevens’ Legends slot while working at Glastonbury last year and his presence, especially whilst performing this song, brought about a tangible serenity amongst the crowd. This song will always be reminiscent of this time of year for me; when I was growing up it was always sung on Easter Sunday at church. It feels like a companion song to the ‘Light of a Clear Blue Morning’ –  one is an actual hymn and the other is a hymn-like tribute to the renewing power of the morning. 

Little Green – Joni Mitchell

To celebrate the return of Joni Mitchell’s catalogue to Spotify, listen to this moving and deeply vulnerable ode to the child she gave up for adoption whilst at art school, with lovely lyrics capturing the season:

“Just a little Green

Like the colour when the spring is born

There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow”

New Jade – Caribou

One of my favourite electronic musicians, Dan Snaith makes music under the moniker Caribou. This song from his most recent album evokes the vivid greens of spring with its title. The lyrics referencing new beginnings, stabs of drums throughout and slightly psychedelic production make for a propulsive and joyful springtime listen. 

“It’s like a new first kiss

Yeah, you can start feeling glad

We’ve been waiting for so long

And now he’s finally gone”

Deeper Well – Kacey Musgraves

In this cut from her new album, Musgraves sings of some emotional spring cleaning, where she dispatches some bad habits and unhealthy people from her life and in return draws from a richer spiritual source.

Wash. – Bon Iver

Whilst this title I believe refers to a place, Washington State, I was always under the impression it actually referred to the act of washing. For me, the piano motif sounds like the steady drip of melting ice or raindrops post-April shower. It sounds like a seasonal cleansing, washing away the woes of winter for a fresh start.

Go Do – Jonsi

To me, this song truly captures the energy of spring, an urgent life force compelling us forward. The glitching of the sonics at the beginning resembles the natural world stuttering back to life, a bird beating the water off its wings, a bud breaking through the earth. Whilst I generally don’t like being told what to do, this song can be the exception to the rule, its thumping drums could make even the most sluggish seize the day. 

April Come She Will – Simon and Garfunkel

The most obvious choice of the playlist doesn’t particularly need explaining.

The Foggy Dew – Ye Vagabonds

Earlier this week I went for a walk to watch the sunrise and returned with my boots sodden by the dew, no longer frost. This achingly gorgeous Irish folk sung by a brother duo in lilting harmony is a recent find and one I have on repeat.

Four Seasons In One Day – Crowded House

British weather is unpredictable even in summer, but springtime is when it’s at its most fickle, when the climate assumes a rather fluid identity, giving us warmth, chill, and downpours sometimes all in a matter of minutes. As I write this the sun has offered a brief interlude to an afternoon of torrential rain, hail and gusts of wind that knock the breath out of you. Thus this single from the Australasian band’s album, Woodface, seemed rather apt.

Cattails – Big Thief

Adrienne Lenker, the frontwoman of Big Thief, is in my opinion a songwriter who singularly captures small moments of beauty, as I explained earlier on I find these collected ephemera to be representative of the essence of spring.

Sleep the Clock Around – Belle and Sebastian

The whimsical production of this song in the beginning sounds like birdsong and the song itself sounds like reemerging into the world after a winter of hibernation, sleeping the clock around. The line, “Then the moment will come, and the memory will shine” in conjunction with the brass and synths is absolutely euphoric.

Rise – Eddie Vedder

Like Autumn, the transitional nature of this season can often place me in a plaintive mood and the line “such is the passage of time/ too fast to fold” very much reflects this. This rousing tune from the Pearl Jam frontman, created for the Into the Wild soundtrack, will stir you from your winter slumber.

Silver Soul – Beach House

Beach house sounds like daydreaming feels, and I often catch myself at the moment fantasising about the idyll of summer. The hook is a repeated mantra that “it is happening again” announcing to the world the excitement of a new season and assuring us that with the continuous passage of time, spring will roll around once more no matter what.

By Chloe Stiens.

Bass bass bass! Also, it’s finally getting warmer…

This week’s playlist can be found at the top of the “Spring ‘24” Spotify playlist, attached here:

The Flying Burrito Brothers, Just Can’t Be

• On their 1971 eponymous album, the first without Gram Parsons. 
• If I was going on a long drive in summer, this is what I’d play with the windows down. Maybe I’m listening to it as wishful thinking (it’s freezing in Paris)! I like the mixolydian modal influence, and the bass.

ENNY, I Want

• You may know the South-East London rapper’s song with Jorja Smith, ‘Peng Black Girls’, also from 2021. The second verse slightly reminds me of Little Simz’s ‘Woman’… I’d love to hear them on a track together.
• Again, I love the bass on this song. It fully explores the potential of a synth bass, in both its bouncy tone, and wide range.

Led Zeppelin, Good Times Bad Times

• Another windows down song, this time from 1969.
• John Paul John keeps the bass moving in quavers or semiquavers throughout, complementing the sporadic drum fills. It really takes off in the guitar solo after the second chorus.

Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Nem Kaldi

• My new favourite song, by multinational band Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek. There is a great article by The Guardian that talks about their creative process that spans national borders, that you can read here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/24/grup-simsek-band
• The group call their music Antonalian folk. Here, you can hear the influence of Turkish music, as well as psychedelic rock. Like Arab music, Turkish music uses modes that include tones outside of the Western conception of harmony (such as ‘half-flats’, which can be heard here in the vocal line and solo instruments. I particularly enjoy the timbre of the bağlama, a kind of lute.

Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, II MOST WANTED

• New music by Beyoncé, featuring Miley Cyrus. I wouldn’t necessarily call this country, but its influence can be felt. Cyrus’ husky voice perfectly complements Beyonce’s smooth tone.
• There are no drums in this song, just bass! This allows the song to maintain its acoustic feel, while keeping it rhythmically grounded.

Marvin Gaye, What’s Happening Brother

• This song, from Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On, tells the story of a soldier returning from Vietnam, and getting used to how life has changed since he’s been gone.
• Here, you can really hear the influence of jazz and funk in the chord progression, which is constantly shifting tonal centre, and in the syncopated bass.

Control Machete, Comprendes, Mendes?

• From the Mexican hip-hop groups 1997 album, Mucho Barato. I like the trumpet-mute sample, and the bass slide.

Julia Jacklin, Don’t Let The Kids Win

• From the Australian indie-rock artist’s 2016 album of the same name. The simple guitar chord accompaniment complements the poignancy of the lyrics.
• My brother already doesn’t think I’m cool, sorry Julia.

The Pixies, Ana

• Again, I really enjoy the tonal instability here, as well as the counterpoint between the multi-tracked vocals and lead guitar.

Art Tatum, I Cover The Waterfront

• A version of the jazz standard (composed 1933), by one of the greatest jazz pianists, Art Tatum. Here, you can hear the influence of stride players like Fats Waller.

Photo credit – The Flying Burrito Brothers, Spotify

Feierlich, Misterioso

By Harry Laventure

Solemnly, mysterious etch the brackets into which we are hemmed in the opening sears of the first movement. Violins buzz with the tremors of dust disturbed in the prelude of a tempest’s caprice, and call the calling of sombre fanfare. Thus the brass asserts itself above the tremolo in forceful simplicity, and therein the inscribed syllables of loft find their reciprocal: the nod of a bull before the altar’s slaughter. Forgive the Classicist his unimaginative vices, but there is something of Homeric grandeur in this sonic landscape. The twin rumble of drums are hammers to the battlelines, and we are sealed in amidst the scattered promises and declarations of an uncanny hero’s ambition. Our tension is permitted a woodwind reverie of gasping brevity, a bouquet of memories before commencement. We hear what it is to soar in the vignettes of a past well spent, spliced with shots of remorse too thrifty. Then comes the surge, at the mercy of a rolling wave’s architecture: from the raging torrent swells some dark god – the conductor himself? – and with it the orchestra is electrified into a monument of raw majesty, blasting thunderous bolts of assault on the ear in ruthless succession. Paralysis of megalophobia, to coin a phrase. Under these auspices does Bruckner begin his theological wrestling match: the unfinished Symphony No.9 in D minor.

Some forty-five minutes earlier, I had disembarked at Newcastle station. Abiding thematic etiquette, the fragrance of a fashion show induced hangover had left me feeling penitent. Indeed, advancing on the refractive armadillo of The Glasshouse at Gateshead by afternoon sunlight, I mused that perhaps this was the only way to appreciate a work written on the composer’s death bed. Macabre remarks aside, I had never visited the International Centre for Music; I was quite shocked to find such a titanic figure perched like an enormous silver hippopotamus enjoying a river tipple. Changing its name from The Sage in 2022, the £70,000,000 project was built in 2004, and houses a small rehearsal and performance space, a 450-seater, and a 1,700-capacity auditorium. The latter of these formed the arena for the afternoon’s concert – the third day of The Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend in celebration of his 200^thbirthday. 

A true centurion of the concert hall, my grandfather had attended all three days, witnessing the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s take on Bruckner’s 7^th (“quirky”), the Hallé’s portrayal of his 8^th (“breathtaking”), and the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s performance of his ‘Great’Mass No.3 (“quite staggeringly beautiful”), to name the party pieces. Whilst we enjoyed a sobering glass of elderflower, I surveyed the belly of this beast to the soundtrack of three of Bruckner’s motets, live. Bar the occasional jolt of ground coffee belted from its chamber, a reverential silence cascaded upon the open-plan café and restaurant as we were serenaded by the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s chorus. The acoustics cradled the gentle cadences of these chapel-sized blooms, and the delicate parhelia of technicolour lights above provided fitting aesthetic symmetry. It was moving in a soft way, and quite unlike the rip-roaring blasts of the symphony to come. A composer of measure, I chortled to myself. 

On 4^th September 1824, Anton Bruckner was born intothe Grimmly named Ansfelden, Linz-Land. A variation on a fairy-tale theme, he was the eldest of 11 childrenand the son of the village schoolmaster. Though the family’s poverty rendered a solely musical career untenable, his early years ran parallel to the lines of the stave – lessons in violin and the organ from his father set the tone for the man who would come to be known for his meticulous, obsessively-calibrated scores. Prior to this symphonic success, he trained as a schoolteacher, returning from positions at Windhaag and Kronstorf to the monastery where he had once played chorister: St. Florian’s. 1855 saw him grace the organ-pipes of Linz Cathedral, before spending the best part of a decade studying under Simon Sechter and Otto Kitzler. The latter of these two pedagogues would introduce Bruckner to his most profound musical influence and champion in Richard Wagner. By 1868, Bruckner had secured the position in the Viennese Conservatory previously held by Sechter, and had become court organist for Emperor Franz Joseph I. Then, and only then, could he turn his hands to composition. 

Many biographers have gone to great lengths to demonstrate the peculiarities of this “late blooming”. Aged 38, Bruckner had already outlived Mozart and Mendelssohn’s entire careers before he put quill to stave– I daresay you can hear it. This procrastinated musical puberty meant a very choppy few years for the Austrian. His organ playing was unquestionably gifted, but his composition was the subject of frequent and vehement ridicule. Brahms would lambast his work as a toggle of‘symphonic boa-constrictors’, referring to the man himself as a drunkard and a ‘bumpkin’. Indeed, though Wagner considered him the finest symphonist since Beethoven, Bruckner’s 1877 premiere of the 3^rdsymphony was such a catastrophe that most of his audience left before it had finished. As a man of perpetual low self-confidence and revision, he would go so far as to beg the emperor to prohibit the draconian critic Eduard Hanslick from writing about him. It was only twelve years before his death, upon the opening performance of his Symphony No.7 in E Major in Leipzig, that Bruckner would receive due applause for his work. The final nine years of his life would see him metronomically sway between grave illness and the attempted completion of his most grandiose aspirations yet in his Symphony No.9.

Feierlich, Misterioso. The existential sobriety of a pious man’s last musical musings is indeed enveloped in enigma. Even the famous dedication Dem Leiben Gott (To the Good Lord) is a matter of dispute, with some suggesting Bruckner’s doctor Richard Heller fabricated it. Quoted or not, it goes some way to connote the scale of this biblically infused colossus. Numerous writers (the present not exempt) have resorted to hyperbole to articulate the majestic physicality of the work. Graf would compare Bruckner to a medieval architect before a Gothic cathedral. The Glasshouse’s website calls him ‘musical marmite’, with the tagline ‘Bold. Brassy. More peaks than the highlands’. Perhaps Douglas Kennedy’s Leaving the World puts it best: ‘the search for the divine amidst the whirligig of the quotidian; the notion that there are large, ethereal forces at work in the universe’.Between belches of dissonance and swooning passages of beauty, the composer’s behemoth embraces every kaleidoscopic slide of life as the man in fever clings to the bedsheets with atavistic desperation. 

And so, it fell to the Scottish Symphony Orchestra to inflate this piece to popping point. I took my seat, awkwardly parcelled the programme below my chair, and performed the stand-up stand-down routine as last-minuters scuttled past me. Settled, the doors locked us in. The young iridule Alpesh Chauhan strutted as a gladiator to his conductor’s perch. Thus, the ring completes. I have gone to some lengths to describe the scintillating opening of the first movement, triumphant and commanding with phrases of delicacy. In many ways, this is a fitting synecdoche for the whole chapter. There are groans of elephantine proportion, and cadences like the exhalation of a dandelion on a clement gust. Rapid, tumbling passages expel us from paradise, before peacefully curious, dainty perambulations hold our hands with glee. The movement finishes as it started, as a towering pillar that confronts even the casual listener: the aggressive finger of accusation to the heavens seen in a high church spire. The Scherzo of the second movement is crashing and dynamic, tying us to the back of a chariot that drags us through wastelands by night, by way of Bruckner’s own katabasis. Bewegt, Lebhaft. Emotional and lively, it attacks the ear with vermiculite aggression, and wouldn’t be out of place replacing Williams’ famous Imperial March. Finally, the Adagio is Bruckner’s ‘farewell to life’. If the battle has been lost and won, the bittersweet third movement is reflective and elegiac, at once a lament and a celebration of achievement and decay. Langsam, Feierlich. We start as we begin, but emerge changed utterly: solemnly, but slowly. Mystery gives way to clarity and consideration, but the conclusions are of magnificent scale and effect. Unsurprisingly, there is Wagnerian climax in the spine-tingling ‘cathedral of sound’, and we are left in the cosy fallout of a truly nuclear finale. If this sounds excessive, it is. The SSO were sublime, and Flora Willson’s review was absolutely right to praise Chauhan as a charismatic and balletic conductor, at once channeling the energy of this almighty work and bridling the tension necessary to execute it. I think I heard more than one exasperated “blimey” as I walked out, bereft. 

Given this sense of closure, it is perhaps even more bizarre to consider that this was not the intended ending. As Bruckner passed on to meet his maker, the fourth movement remained unfinished. His doctor Heller claimed that ‘he had drawn up a contract with his ‘dear Lord’’ – I wonder if it was fulfilled thus. Many have edited, revised, and ornamented the final movement in vain attempts to give the piece its full glory. But to my mind, performing it as is feels overwhelming enough, only just balanced. For all his division and derision, a word that doesn’t come up enough when discussing Bruckner is poise. Whether he pushes or pulls us, toys with our expectations or fulfils them, there is an innate sense of pacing that maturely pulses throughout – a sign of his age, possibly.

Bruckner’s reception through the years has been unorthodox to say the least. His influence is hard to express, but tangible. Occupying a liminal space between Wagner and Mahler, it is unsurprising that cinematic parallels are often drawn in the epic scale of his symphonies. This occurs in translation and paraphrase: as Bergman adopted the Scherzo of Symphony No.9 in Saraband, there is certainly more than a smattering of the Jaws bass in the opening minutes of the Adagio. Some have even suggested an impression on contemporary music: take to minute 3.05 of the 2005 Munchner Philharmoniker/Christian ThielemannSymphony No.5 in B flat Major, and try not to detect The White Stripes’ painfully omnipresent Seven Nation Army riff. 

Influence aside, Bruckner has been the victim of more than one biographical embellishment or rumour through the years. We have already seen the potential tampering of his doctor, Richard Heller, in the alterations to his final work. Morbid oddities are a weed-like motif throughout his other biographies. The mammoth ninevolume work of Auer and Göllerich (1922-37) mentions a compulsion to count, claiming Bruckner was addicted to numbering everything from windows, to steps, to the bars of his scores. We are also told of nine documented proposals to women much younger than him (all rejected), and a page in his notebook reserved for those whom he had taken a fancy to. He allegedly planned his funeral with fastidious acumen, and cherished a picture of his mother on her death bed. Once more, Butt names testimonies that Bruckner had ‘fingered and kissed the skulls of Beethoven and Schubert’. There is no denying that Bruckner was a most peculiar man. 

And yet, as with all lives of the artists, we must be on our guard to writers’ attempts to make the private moments of great creators and pioneers live up to the scale of their outward inventiveness. In many ways, we probably ought to be thankful for these attention stunts: in the 1927 printing of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Anton Bruckner receives no more than a singular paragraph, deemed too redolent of Wagner for due time and effort. We are on the correct trajectory to rectify this misdemeanour. Although we may never know the man, the panegyrics of our eyes will always harmonise with his work. The Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend did a stupendous job of facilitating that. The exhibition Bruckner, the Pious Revolutionary at the Austrian National Library’s State Hall will hopefully amplify awareness further. Only time will tell whether we are capable of more perseverant praise than sitting up and listening at a landmark like his 200^thbirthday. To plagiarise a toast, perhaps Ludwig Speidel put it best: ‘it is no common mortal who speaks to us in this music’. For all his solemnity and mystery, let us tip our hats Bruckner’s way.

By Zoe Worth

“A society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else” (Gilles Deleuze)

“Birds fly, and far off” (Robert Grenier)

The events of May ’68 in Paris have been romanticised and permanently written into the national French consciousness. From memories of Marie Antoinette to the cultural and sexual upheaval of May 1968, rebellion has become an intrinsically French tradition. ’68, however, shatters the image of fruitless protest that many so often use to slate our European neighbours. May ’68 isn’t something that hums along in the evening news; it is something that has inspired an explosion in films, art, fashion and literature.  The anti-structuralist rebels were fatally sanguine; they treasured the art that was born in tumult. This reflected a longing for a dream world and a rejection of the messiness of the real world. There was a rush of existentialism; law was no longer relevant. And so the students took to the streets. Soon the structures would be dismantled and slightly later, the walls would blossom with scrawled slogans like ‘Althusser is useless.’ 

May ’68 is often seen today as glamorously bereft of any significance:“In contemporary French politics, it is “often derided as ‘nothing’ but in such a way as to confirm that it really was ‘something’, although no one is ever quite sure what”. Raymond Aron’s reflections on ‘La révolution introuvable’ encapsulates the oblique sublimity of the events. The title translates to ‘The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution’. Somewhat paradoxical, of course, since revolutions burn with a rebellious spirit and swarm the streets. They become the defining characteristic of the time. So why is it that a revolution that seemingly represented the dreams of an entire society, still cannot be found? Was it that an entire society was asleep? In a reluctant amnesia that negated reality, intoxicated with the spirit of rebellion yet slumbering, ’68 was as much a spiritual, philosophical, and sexual revolt as it was political. Some call it unapologetically ‘postmodern,’ shattering sacrosanct establishments and bringing a new sort of self-awareness. It brought stylistically subversive forms of rebellion. Often witty, ludicrous, and poetic; postmodernism was confrontational, it worked at the boundaries of taste. Elegant but also tongue-in-cheek, the contradictions were ceaseless. Politics was now art.

May ’68 was not a call for A Clockwork Orange- esque ‘lawlessness’ but rather an ’emancipatory politics’ charged with creative potential. Of course, May ’68 wasn’t only about dismantling laws … that wouldn’t exude such an allure. The elusive, opaque goals of the revolution were never really made clear. Were they pacifists crystallised in the Anti-Vietnam war sentiment? Were they existentialists? Were they there to simply speak? To be young? Their odyssey of self-determination was largely founded on an empty rhetoric, a rhetoric so impressionable that it was inherently irresolvable. Maybe this was precisely the point; it was a rhetoric that could transgress generations. The sixty-eighters tied themselves to certain dreams of being slightly radical. I think everyone can agree there is a lot of that today. I certainly can.

I came across a cool memoir by Suzanne Borde, who was a girl at the time of 68. She made herself a skirt “red—that only reached to here, and wrote along the bottom, in black marker, INDECENCY IS NOT IN THE CLOTHING BUT IN THE GAZE”. This is something I can only imagine seeing in a place like the Tate Modern in an exhibition on rebellious punk fashion or something like that. It recalls a Vivienne Westwood kind of swagger that you certainly wouldn’t encounter sauntering down the Bailey. Yes, even the stunning expressions of “It is forbidden to forbid” speak to us now, hardly resembling the empty clichés that you’d think at first glance. These slightly sickly, floral slogans such as “the tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods” aimed to encapsulate the fever of the time but also the thoughts of the people whose hearts were captured by 68. Many of the sixty-eighters had everything our consumerist society could ever want, what were they protesting for? It was more of a disillusionment with the unemotional, individualistic style which was invading society. The revolutionaries wanted to challenge the comfort of everyday Parisian life, everything that made it drag. So, May 68 urged people not to negotiate with their bosses- but rather to abolish them.

They had to find a way to express themselves inexpensively and wildly. So, ‘la beauté est dans la rue’ (the beauty is in the street). The most exposed, boundless stage for the exaltation of angst, the anarchic, the anti-system. There was this clash between the kids who would rebel against anything and the generations who believed everything reasonable, everything they cherished, was being shattered into pieces. They blossomed from breaking convention, being sexually liberated and ultimately being understood. Whether that was through the lyrics of bands like the Velvet Underground. Or the art of Andy Warhol that blended fascination and revulsion for consumerism and mass media. Strangely, it seemed like everything and anything was both a source and a constraint on freedom. And so, anything could be rebelled against, really. Conformists had to hide their faces.  

“Be realistic: Demand the impossible!” Uttering what it was they were protesting for, would crack the magnetic allure. This recalled Blanchot’s words: “By saying my own name, I am singing my own mourning song”. What could be more of a killjoy than taking to the streets with an unemotional manifesto for revolution? The death of the revolution would come the moment it was believed to be something serious. Not something that could be lost in the seductive spring Parisian fog. It was far more in line with the rockstar bohemianism to demand the ‘impossible’—whatever that could mean. This slogan, penned by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse crystallises the heady opulence of 68—the transgressive voyage to self-determination. Perhaps this is why it is remembered, nostalgically, as a ‘non-revolution’. Waving their metaphorical guns, the children of 68 exuded a very pretty but rather empty fatalism. Glamorous yes, but certainly of no major political consequence. They became “the masterpiece of their own being” while delighting in the painfully brief moment when the world was expansive. Surely, their commitment to the cause is memorable. Particularly, if we compare it to the apathy that you are often meet with today when the word ‘politics’ is uttered. We all know there was nothing reasonable, or realistic for that matter, about the demands of May 68. Yet, I still find them thrilling.

The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci sublimely captures the political tempest of Paris ’68. “68 might seem to have been a moment so cataclysmically beautiful and tragic as to be unfilmable”. Yet, this film delicately encapsulates the beauty of rebellion. 

Matthew, a pacifist American exchange student, meets twins Theo and Isabelle at a protest. We first encounter Isabelle at the Cinémathéque Française, chained to the gates. Only we learn that the chains are not locked. Simmering with temptation, she is only playing at protest. We find imperfection. Two Parisian orchids, swirling in cigarette smoke, utterly infatuated with cinema, revolution, and youth. Never has dissidence looked so sexy. The gruesome rebellion trickles into a dreamy realm through which the ménage á trois obliviously drift. Their opulent, olive-walled, high-ceiling bohemian apartment forms a hothouse for the trio to play out their edgy desires. Soundtracked by the likes of Hendrix, Francoise Hardy and The Doors, Bertolucci conveys the moody but seductive restlessness of the Dreamers.  Yet, The Dreamers is undeniably beautiful. The exhilarating scene where they race through the Louvre to the sparkling, whimsical New York Herald Tribune mirrors Godard’s Band of Outsiders, is visually stunning. They exist in this separate hazy realm- painted with the blissful innocence of youth, to quote Wordsworth: “To be young was very heaven” And much of 68 was about youth: the fatal sweetness of it. Cinema is treasured as the art of resurrection—far from being an escape from the world, it is an entry into it. Philosophy and literature are worshipped. Bertolucci works with the ripest, most sensual palette which tethers on the edge of anguish. The Dreamers play with dangerous intimacy, one that could be lit into flames at any moment. Their excessive desire and obsession with escapism paradoxically feel claustrophobic. The Dreamers eventually wake when a stone crashes through the window. This sort of fragility makes it even more mesmerising. Self-destruction was now seductively in vogue. Call it superficial, but there is something very electrifying about their endeavours for artistic renaissance. As they throw Molotov cocktails, the Dreamers delight in their mad desire for freedom in whatever form.

The whole world of social upheaval of May ’68 dreamed of tearing up the pages of de Gaulle’s France and with it, the institutions of monotony. The children of May ’68 were so overtly and knowingly romantic. Boredom still exists today, yes. But so does art and self-expression.  As do the modern-day romantics. As Jean-Luc Nancy contemplates: “the reason there is no possible legacy of ’68 is because ’68 never ended”. Therefore, when one comes to question whether such a thing as May ’68 exists, one can look at the children of ’68 who found redemption in revolution.

The Dreamers and children of ’68’s intense love for the evanescence of things and intense regret at their inevitable passing means that May ’68 remains a treasured little trinket from a far-off time—one where anything could mean anything. Yet its impact today seems impossible to strictly define. What happened when the dreamers flew from their bird’s nest? Does the obsession with rebellion remain or is it written off as starry-eyed absurdity? I think as an artistic and existential experiment there is much to admire. They had serious guts to imagine that, well, everything could be deconstructed. Its legacy insists in the youthful romanticism for positive societal change that brings people to protest, in whatever form that may be: l’esprit de rebellion. From this may flower a sea change for everything that seems so hopelessly permanent.

By Maisie Jennings

‘An endearing tale of sisterhood against the odds’ – this was my review of Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a French film about two sisters studying at a prestigious veterinary school, and their mutual gastronomic indulgence in human flesh. Irreverent Letterboxd witticisms aside, the film draws upon a fairly recent, radical tradition of subverting the horror genre through feminist iterations of body horror. 

In Raw, Justine is a naive first-year student, subjected by her older sister, Alexia, and her peers, to a humiliating and debauched hazing. Raised staunchly vegetarian, she’s drenched in animal blood and forced to eat raw rabbit kidney. Soon after, she develops an inflamed rash all over her abdomen; it’s a physical, Cronenbergian manifestation of her new compulsion for meat and flesh. Her transformation is terrifying, visceral, and located with her emerging sexuality. Justine’s cannibal interiority is gendered – she takes on masculine prerogatives of violence, animal bodily pleasure, a lack of inhibition, and sexual appetite. Ducournau addresses the feminist nature of Justine’s cannibalism as ‘a punk gesture against this patriarchy’; this is particularly resonant in Justine’s first taste of human flesh, which arises from a bikini wax gone horrifically awry, resulting in Justine heartily gobbling her sister’s severed finger. It’s a startling reiteration of girlhood. The body horror of the film – its teeth, blood, viscera – is a corporealisation of feminist resistance. 

The body, or biological horror genre is concerned with transforming the human form through grotesque violations of the body. Often, in mainstream slasher films and horror cinema, female bodies function as the site for such mutilations – as a locus of fear and pain. There are long, gratuitous shots of women in peril, sexualised acts of violence, the penetrating blade of a male killer. Body horror, with its emphasis on the consciousness of terror, is able to respond to the treatment of female bodies and pain. 

One of the very earliest instances of this occurs in David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome. The film begins with scenes of graphic sadomasochism and torture, as the protagonist, Max Renn, discovers ‘Videodrome’ – a broadcast of snuff films we would now associate with dark corners of the internet. Max, a sensationalist network director, believes he has found the illicit ‘high art’ for his channel to distribute. In reality, the broadcast causes malignant brain tumours and hallucinations in the viewer, causing a maddening addiction to its sexually violent content. As ‘Videodrome’ distorts Max’s grip on reality, he develops a vaginal opening in his abdomen in which hallucinatory tapes are forced inside. Cronenberg is depicting the way we internalise content literally, through a technological wounding of the body; the way pornography is consumed is likened to the slow, insidious progression of cancer. However, in giving Max this exposed vaginal wound, Cronenberg is also turning the sexualised gaze of the camera away from the initial BDSM snuff videos and towards the pornographer himself. Max becomes vulnerable to penetration; he becomes the subject of violence and terror. Cronenberg’s body horror challenges the exploitation flicks Videodrome is in dialogue with – he is self-reflexively commenting on porn, B-movie horror, and our easy consumption of violence against women. 

In inverting the traditional subjugation of the female body, Cronenberg’s influence on subverting the location of pain in cinema through a feminine transformation pervades an assortment of arthouse and mainstream horror. Returning to the emergence of female sexuality explored by Raw, the preeminent site of grotesque feminine transformation is puberty. This is perhaps an obvious focal point; I think, since the first film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie in 1976, there could be an entire subgenre of ‘menstrual horror’. The purported mystery and shamefulness of female adolescence is hyperbolised through monstrous encounters with PMS-induced bloodlust. It’s a trope with the potential to be both incredibly demeaning, and remarkably feminist. The difference, I believe, can be negotiated through explicit emphasis on the duality of the female body as an object of subjugation for its assumed weakness, as well as for its perceived threat. This is how body horror can be used as a process of ‘othering’ to identify and explore female bodily experiences and psychological landscapes. 

Films like Ginger Snaps (2000) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), straddling the genres of supernatural body horror and young adult coming-of-age, inaugurate a playful, yet distinctly feminist reimagining of the terrifying metamorphosis of a teenage girl. Both films also centre the importance of female friendships and sisterhood, and, arguably, entail queer interpretation and analysis. They stand as unlikely predecessors of Raw, a film so graphic it caused some viewers to faint at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, crucially, however, they demonstrate the broad spectrum of feminist cinema body horror is able to engage with. It is a genre that is as much transformative and shifting in its content, as it is in its nature.