The Resurrection of Judee Sill
Skinny Girl In Glasses announces ‘This Song or Suicide’
Makes lasting music for the ages
Overdoses on heroin and cocaine
Los Angeles, 1971. God has decided to speak through Judee Sill, a skinny girl with round glasses and a rap sheet. Between holding up gas stations and liquor stores, dealing and scoring junk, turning tricks, forging checks, and sleeping in a ’55 Cadillac (in shifts with four others), her training as the reform school organist paid off. This would be the year of her debut on Asylum Records, an asylum indeed.
She hailed from Studio City, California and moved around. Her stepfather, whom she called "mean, dumb, narrow-minded" was an Oscar-winning animator for Tom and Jerry. Her hard-to-classify accent — SoCal with a twang — evoked the Bakersfield sound and the Cane Ridge Revival. Listen to any of her songs, and it’s clear she did not quite adapt to Earth. Her life could have been material for a film by PT Anderson or the Coen Brothers, but Judee Sill actually happened. Nearly a decade in the …
The Mind of the South
Southern Man blames, embraces region’s ills
‘queer, feverish fits’
Made stupid by climate, rhetoric
Skulks, broods, rages
“You have to read this book to understand the South,” my freshman-year history teacher told me. In my adolescent mind, she was herself the South — a chubby cheerful busy spinster whose family had run a small town upstate a generation before and whose memory extended into countless other families’ intimate affairs. At fourteen I didn’t want to understand the South, just to escape it. But school seemed to be a means to that end, and I was enough of a teacher’s pet to fulfill what I took to be an assignment: To read W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, published six decades prior, on the double-eve of World War Two and the author’s suicide.
The book shook me. Cash analyzed the Southern mind — that is, the mind of the white male Southerner, the mind of someone like himself, or, I worried, like me — as rather a refusal of thought. The South, as Cash saw it, was not congenial to thinking, or indeed to …
Chester Watson
ex-Atlanta Rapper Denies that Fish Climb Trees
Struggles to Remember Dreams
He Finds Peace in the Countryside
Hip-hop was born in urban parks and apartment projects, but there’s also a pastoral tradition in rap that long predates Kanye West’s flight to Wyoming. Earl Sweatshirt’s mother shipped him off to reform school on a remote Pacific island at a pivotal early point in the Odd Future boy genius’s career. Upon his return, Earl became one of the most influential lyricists in rap history. One of his young fans was a teenage skater and ballet dancer named Chester Watson, who’s now a lanky 26-year-old responsible for a decade’s-worth of his own brain-shifting hip-hop.
The title of Watson’s latest album, Fish Don’t Climb Trees, combines two images from the rural town an hour and half outside of Atlanta where the underground rap star spends much of his time these days. The record’s name refers to “being underestimated or counted out,” he told me, with tantalizingly little elaboration. Maybe fish can climb …
