The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet – featuring all the friends we’ve met along the way.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The Unthinkable

Last time Trump was elected, I lived in New York. The morning after, on my way to work, I took the 4 train to Union Square. I’d never seen the city so sullen. It was grim, and gray and drizzly to match. A man outside the subway station was holding a sign that read: "I'm gay and I'm afraid for my life."

Folks waited in line to give him a hug and share tears. That line felt like hope. And it wasn't the only one. In the aftermath of the election, I marched with many to the foot of Trump Tower, where we gathered just to let him know he wasn’t our president.

It was the beginning of months of civil unrest, which reached a crescendo at the historic Women's March, the day after the inauguration, where love boiled over and the whole Trump thing just felt like one big fuck-up. Just need to tread water for four years, put up with the BS and then we’re in the clear. Back toward progress.

What's most disheartening this time is that it felt so clear that we were in the death throes of that era. A last gasp of the old white bigoted, narcissistic, imperialist man archetype.

Yet more than half the country bought into his fear. And with Congress in tow, he can pursue that bigoted, narcissistic, imperialist agenda unfettered. There’s plenty of noise about how it'll be good for crypto, but not for the right reasons, and that certainly shouldn’t come at the expense of women, the queer community, black people, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, POWs, Iowans, people with disabilities and all the other folks he’s summarily mocked and menaced. 

This week it feels unthinkable to write about industry machinations. So instead I’m going to write about music, and people who actually have it in them.

Quincy Jones

In last week’s Beat I invoked 2016 Adam Gopnik when he wrote of Trump in the New Yorker: “there is no music in this man.”

But there was in Quincy, who died on Sunday at the age of 91, leaving behind a nonpareil legacy. He won 28 Grammys, a Tony and an Emmy, but that’s not the half of it. His impact unfurls in every direction, touching seemingly every corner of the last century’s cultural pantheon.

In 1956, at age 22, he played second trumpet in the studio band that supported a 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his first six television appearances. The next year he moved to Paris, where he studied composition and theory with the iconic Nadia Boulanger (whose students included Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla and Aaron Copland), and the mythic French composer, Olivier Messiaen.

Soon after, he worked with Sinatra – and kept working with him for decades. “Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet,” Jones once said. “I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.”

He was the trumpeter and music director for Dizzy Gillespie. In the 60s, he was an arranger for pop luminaries like Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee, and he produced Leslie Gore’s smash hit “It’s My Party” (and her three other million-selling singles).

In 1974, diagnosed with what he thought was a life-threatening brain aneurysm, he attended his own memorial service. In attendance were Sarah Vaughan and Sydney Poitier (and his neurologist).

Famously, Jones produced three Michael Jackson records, including Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. 

In 1985, after receiving the adaptation rights to Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, he successfully convinced Steven Spielberg to direct the film – and to let him be the first person not named John Williams to write its score (Jones’s music earned one of the film’s 11 Oscar nominations). It was also Jones who recommended Oprah, a then little-known actress he’d spotted on local Chicago TV, in what was her film debut.

He also composed the theme music for Ironside, Sanford and Son and the opening episodes of Roots and Mad TV. He was the executive producer of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which introduced the world to Will Smith.

In 1991, Miles Davis finally caved to Jones’s prodding to revive the music he recorded on his classic 50s records. Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux would be Davis’s final record.

In 1993, Tupac criticized Jones for having relationships with white women, which prompted his daughter – Rashida Jones (of The Office fame) – to write a scathing letter that was published in The Source Magazine. 

Shakur changed his tone, though. And at the time of his death, he was engaged with another of Jones’ daughters, Kidada. (The mother of both Rashida and Kidada is actress Peggy Lipton, perhaps best known for playing Norma Jennings on Twin Peaks.)

And this is but a sample of Jones’s tales. Nelson Mandela tried to get him to touch a cheetah. He bought dope from Malcolm X. Ray Charles got him hooked on heroin when he was 15, which he did for five months before falling down five flights of stairs and promptly ending the habit.

He outed sexual relationships that Marlon Brando had with his friends Richard Pryor, James Baldwin and Marvin Gaye. And he claimed to know who really killed JFK.

He was neighbors with Elon Musk for 10 years and they had regular dinners.

Bono once introduced him to the Pope and, after the pontiff kissed him on the head, Jones remarked, “Oh, my man's got some pimp shoes on.”

He became a mentor to Jacob Collier. In various capacities, he’s been in league with Pharrell and Travis Scott and the Weeknd.

The guy was everywhere (some have compared his omnipresence to Forrest Gump) – and not just in the arts. His activism began in the 60s with his support of MLK. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music (IBAM). He produced and conducted the famous charity song "We Are the World" (with just about every celebrity on the planet), which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. In 2004, he founded the We Are the Future project.

Politically, he was a close friend and backer of the Clintons. On one occasion, in 2007, Oprah brought Barack and Michelle to Jones’s house to try and woo him – unsuccessfully – away from Hilary. (The year before, Jones claims to have gone on a date with Ivanka Trump: “He’s a crazy motherfucker,” Jones said of Donald Trump in a 2018 interview with Vulture. “Limited mentally – a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.”)

When Obama ultimately won the 2008 election, Jones said that his next conversation with the young president would be “to beg for a secretary of arts.” And he followed through, creating an online petition that beseeched Obama to institute a Cabinet-level cultural position in his administration.

“While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position,” the petition read. “We in the arts need this and the country needs the arts – now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.”

The Way of the Samba

It didn’t happen (and still hasn’t, and now certainly won’t soon), but as Jones alluded, the move wouldn’t have been unprecedented. I’ve written here before about the Brazilian music legend Gilberto Gil, who gained renown in the late 60s for guiding the tropicália movement. 

Musically, tropicália is an amalgamation of Brazilian styles like samba and bossa nova with the avant garde and imports like American psychedelia and pop rock. More than that, though, it was a political and cultural statement against the country’s military dictatorship. 

Gil and fellow luminary Caetano Veloso were perceived as threats to that regime, and after imprisoning them for three months, the military expelled them from the country. Gil relocated to London for three years, from 1969 to 1972, before moving back to Brazil. Back home, he continued to make music and engage in activism.

From 2003 to 2008, Gil served as Brazil's Minister of Culture in the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who is once again Brazil’s president).

In 2005, a group of American online rights activists and scholars – one of whom was Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons non-profit – sat down with Gil in a living room in Rio de Janeiro. The then 62-year-old presiding Minister of Culture spoke about how “the fundamentalists of absolute property control” stood in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy.

"A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he said. "No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world – and there's no use resisting it."

Gil summed up his team’s approach to intellectual property in the digital world with one word: “tropicalize.” The goal? "To make the digital world join in the samba.”

In 2000, Gil shared a Sao Paulo stage with a fellow Brazilian legend, Egberto Gismonti.

Last night I saw Gismonti play at London’s Cafe Oto. About 100 onlookers watched the composer navigate his ten-string guitar, playing in duet with Daniel Murray (who donned a more standard six string).

As the players oscillated between unison and counterpoint, melodies emerged from a thicket of unsettled harmonies.

Eventually, Gismonti, who wore a pink knit beanie atop a shock of long white hair, moved to the piano. Performing solo, he wove a tapestry of sound, deftly transiting between key, time signature and texture. It was astounding.

“I like playing like that,” he said to us after the first such song, “just open, thinking about other composers.

Like Jones, Gismonti spent time living in Paris, where he also studied with Boulanger. Both figures are known for their arrangement skills, and for their ability to fuse musical traditions – to tropicalize, so to speak; to embrace the fluidity of the samba in this “semantic abundance of the modern world.”

Notably, between each song, Gismonti and Murray stood up and took each other’s hand, acknowledging their fellow player before nodding to the crowd. They did that every time – I’d never seen that before, and it recalled words attributed to Jones in an ‘in memoriam’ episode of NPR’s Consider This:

“Every day, you have to make a choice,” he said in a speech to Harvard’s 1997 graduating class, “and the choice is between love and fear.

“As much as you can, always choose love.”

Coda

Regular Beat readers will have heard of the excellent music research community, Water & Music. Founder Cherie Hu borrowed its name from a 2015 interview between Quincy Jones and Kendrick Lamar, where the former asserts that “the last things to leave this planet will be water and music.” (And it’s not the only time he said it.)

This week it feels like we’re closer to those end days, divided and stuck in this world of autocrats with fascist friends who hold the keys to the nuclear codes. But “a world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up” in an isolationist, imperialist, bigoted vision of humanity. Life is best lived interwoven.

And we’re still here, still united by water and music. As long as we can agree on those two things, there’s still hope.

Now go outside and listen to music – even this is a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.