2020-03-01_The_Atlantic

72 MARCH 2020

Shara McCallum’s most recent book is Madwoman, which

was the poetry winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for

Caribbean Literature. This poem is from her forthcoming

book No Ruined Stone, an imagined account of the Scottish

poet Robert Burns’s planned migration to Jamaica for a job

that involved supervising enslaved Africans on a plantation.

THE MULATTA UNMASKS

HERSELF TO HER HUSBAND

Edinburgh, 1826

By Shara McCallum

For all the faith in argument in principle in reason

for all the books you hand me bid me read

for all in the dark I pretend

for all the pursuit of equality of righteousness and good

for all the rights of man the vindication of woman

for all in the dark I pretend we are

for all the moral cause abolition the struggle for freedom

for all in the dark I pretend we are just

for all the history of heroes and foes the victors and

the vanquished

for all the talk and talk and talk

for all in the dark I pretend we are just one soul

what would it mean at last to see

not Love not Truth not Beauty but who

has been in your house who sleeping in your bed?

OMNIVORE

with a commonly heard refrain from today’s artists
and critics that streaming devalues music economi-
cally and spiritually. Robin even seems a bit smug
about her store’s obsolescence. “Half the neighbor-
hood thinks we’re washed-up relics,” she says. “The
other half thinks we’re nostalgic hipsters. They’re both
kind of right.”
So how are we to think about the key motto—
“What really matters is what you like, not what you
are like”—referenced in all three versions of High
Fidelity? Hornby’s aphorism might sound outdated in
the era of identity politics, when Twitter’s brawls over
art can make independent aesthetic judgments seem
secondary to proudly lining up with one’s tribe. Hulu’s
High Fidelity does, refreshingly, correct the exclusion-
ary spirit that went with the original’s lack of diversity.
Yet crucially, the series retains the assurance that music
preferences reflect something individual, ineffable,
soul-deep, and in need of sharing. Kravitz’s Robin—a
brooding biracial and bisexual space cadet enamored
of the Beastie Boys, Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book,
and the folk singer Nick Drake—eludes any image
neatly tied to race, gender, or sexuality. In one hilari-
ous subplot that highlights taste as an idiosyncratic
proxy for identity, Cherise posts a flyer looking for
bandmates in sync with her ideal sound: “Think Brian
Eno producing Beyoncé fronting Soul Coughing but
with Daniel Ash on guitar.”
Such fervent eclecticism is countercultural in any
era, because by definition it flouts paradigms. Here it
represents another way in which the new High Fidelity
audiophiles feel they have, as Cherise puts it at one
point, “opted out” of their own algorithm-obedient
generation. But they’re not quite the oddballs they
think they are. Genre boundaries have been melting in
popular music lately, and the quest for self-definition
through sound is no niche practice. As I write this, my
social feeds are full of people sharing their personalized
Spotify report on their most-listened-to songs of the
year. Some users are LOLing at the quirkiness of their
habits (one friend’s top five artists of 2019 included
ultra-glossy contemporary country, hard-edged under-
ground rap, and the Barenaked Ladies). Others cheek-
ily revel in the stereotypes it turns out they’ve fallen
into (“so gay,” texts someone whose No. 1 was Carly
Rae Jepsen). I’m not seeing a lot of mockery; I am see-
ing a lot of curiosity, amusement, and discussion. The
tools of High Fidelity’s rankers and curators have been
democratized, and of course not everyone is going
to use them for esoteric adventures. If you’ve got a
problem with that, you might be a snob.

Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic.