As the pandemic set in this spring, the histo-
rians and curators at the Smithsonian Ar-
chives of American Art began doing what
they do best: looking through relics of
history.
They found little information related to
the 1918 flu pandemic in their archives, and
decided to make sure that future historians
would have a lot more material about this
time of the coronavirus. So a team at the Ar-
chives of American Art, led by Liza Kirwin,
its interim director, set out to create a thor-
ough record for posterity.
Beginning this spring, curators and oral
historians from the archives conducted
Zoom interviews with 85 artists to create
the “Pandemic Oral History Project.” The
first round of interviews, which includes
such artists as Ed Bereal and Sheila Hicks,was released on Monday.
“It started right at the beginning of May,
and we were thinking just about Covid-19,”
said Ben Gillespie, the Arlene and Robert
Kogod secretarial scholar for oral history.
Then, with the news of the killings of Bre-
onna Taylor and George Floyd, he said, “we
also realized this is such an important mo-
ment in American history to really hold on
to.”
Though there are many things that repre-
sent 2020 — odd objects, pandemic-related
ephemera, photographs being gathered by
many or put on social media — this Smithso-
nian oral history project also offers a guar-
antee: The recordings are meant to last.
The project is unusual for a group of archi-
vists who typically work on long, in-depth,
documentary-quality interviews that delve
into the past — these sessions are all on
Zoom and run 20 minutes to an hour. But
working rapidly to preserve the present also
allowed the staff to see this year through
fresh eyes.
“Time, for me, has felt completely un-
spooled,” Mr. Gillespie said. “It’s been like
history doesn’t exist anymore and I’m just
like, swirling in an amorphous ether.”
Josh Franco, national collector for the ar-
chives, said that because he usually worked
with older artists, sorting through personalcollections and studios to find moments
worth preserving, this project offered a wel-
come challenge.
“We understood we’re making a record
and it has something to do with the large arc
of time,” Mr. Franco said, “but also is just in
the moment, people talking and kind of
freaking out together.”
Mark Bradford, a contemporary artist
based in Los Angeles who participated in
the project, spent part of his interview com-
paring this year to a massive storm.
“It’s like a big deluge of rain,” Mr. Brad-
ford said in his video. “And you know you’re
running down the street, and you’re getting
wet and then every once in a while you run
into an underhanging or something, and you
stay there for a minute?”
“Sometimes you look to the left and
there’ll be someone there with you,” he said.
“And you say, ‘What are youdoing?’ and you
have a little conversation.”
Ms. Kirwin said, “To me, that was like a
metaphor for the whole project.”
“It was like us ducking under an awning
with people and having this kind of ex-
change in the moment,” she said, “knowing
that there’s a torrential rainstorm around
and that everybody’s going to get wet. But
they had this moment where they
connected.”Capturing 2020 Through Oral History
The Smithsonian Archives
of American Art is at work
on a record for posterity.
By JULIA CARMELMark Bradford, based in Los Angeles, is one
of 85 artists who participated in the project.
He compared this year to a massive storm.
ERIK CARTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESC4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020CLUE OF THE DAY
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THIS BODY OF WATERYesterday’s Response:
WHAT IS “MONTY PYTHON
AND THE HOLY GRAIL”?When Phoebe Bridgers’s phone started “go-
ing crazy” last week, at first she feared the
worst. “I was like, ‘Who died?’ ” she said.
But the news, of course, was much happi-
er: The 26-year-old singer and songwriter
from Los Angeles had earned her first four
Grammy nominations, including a nod in
one of the four big categories, best new art-
ist. (Her other nominations are best alter-
native music album for “Punisher” and best
rock performance and song for “Kyoto.”)
“Punisher,” Bridgers’s second studio al-
bum, features bleak ballads suffused with a
20-something’s candor. The LP is “a show-
case of Bridgers’s great strength as a song-
writer,” Lindsay Zoladz wrote, reviewing
the album in The New York Times, “weav-
ing tiny, specific, time-stamped details
(chemtrails, Saltines, serotonin) into dura-
ble big-tent tapestries of feeling.”
Bridgers brings another side of herself to
Twitter, where she’s a funny and irreverent
voice guaranteed to liven up your lock-
down.
Recently, Bridgers talked about women
nominees dominating best rock perform-
ance, how that “Iris” cover with Maggie
Rogers came about and how she knows a
song is complete. These are edited excerpts
from the conversation.
How did you find out you were nominated?
I was in bed with a migraine — these things
give me a lot of anxiety. Then I saw all these
messages from my mom — she was crying
and sent a picture of a bottle of champagne
she bought two days ago that she hadn’t
wanted me to know about, just in case noth-
ing happened.
Did you watch the Grammys growing up?
My mom and I watched pretty much every
award show, but this one was always more
fun because I actually give a [expletive]
and pay attention to music.
Do you have any plans for the ceremony?
Have you been asked to perform?
No, but I hope we get to do some semblance
of something fun, whether it’s from this
apartment or elsewhere.This is the first time the rock performance
category has all women nominees. Do you
think the Grammys are pandering after
being criticized for poor gender representa-
tion?
Maybe. But it’s also funny and shocking be-
cause it’s probably been all men for every
award ceremony at some point. But who
gives a [expletive], they’re great choices.
I’m honored to be nominated with those
people.You scored your first Billboard Hot 100
single last week for a cover of the Goo Goo
Dolls’ “Iris” you recorded with Maggie
Rogers. How did that come about?
It started as just a riff. I’d rediscovered that
song after watching the movie “Treasure
Planet,” and then I just made a joke on Twit-
ter that if Donald Trump loses, I’ll cover
“Iris.” And I let the tide of the internet take
me wherever it would. I wanted to do it for
charity, and Maggie suggested Fair Fight,
which was such a good idea.
How long have you been politically en-
gaged?I saw Obama’s inauguration, which was this
huge moment. And I thought that white
privilege and racism were over, and that ev-
erything was good now that Obama was
president. Then I took part in SlutWalk in
high school, which is this anti victim-blam-
ing march, and we had a feminism club. I
just slowly realized that just because we
had a Black president didn’t mean that ev-
ery problem was over in America.
Where are you finding songwriting inspira-
tion right now?
I’m doing a new type of therapy and lots of
memories are resurfacing, so I don’t need to
look for it. I’m processing a lot of [expletive]
because time is so stagnant, and I feel like I
have songs just building up inside me. I’m
like, “How will I write every song about ev-
erything?”How are you a different person than you
were a year ago?
I hope I’ve experienced some sort of ego
death with not being cheered for every
night. I’ve been forced to come into my own
and self-soothe, in a way. If the worst thathappens to me all year is that I’ve been
bored, I will have had a great year.
Is the candor and stinging honesty in your
music something you’ve had to work up to,
or have you always had that confidence?
I maybe still am working up to it. I wrote
more songs before where I wanted to por-
tray emotion and darkness, but I was
shielding myself a bit and my lyrics weren’t
as good. And I think “Motion Sickness,”
from my first record, was where that really
shifted. I was like, “What if I wrote like this
instead of doing more frilly songs?”
How do you know a song is finished?
When every line brings me sort of joy, which
is weird in the context of my music, but I
don’t want there to be any parts that people
skip to get to better lyrics.The Grammys love to bring together artists
from different generations for perform-
ances. In general, who would be your dream
collaborator?
If I could conquer Bob Dylan, I feel like life
would be pretty complete.THE GRAMMYSIt’s Good News.
Read That Text.
Phoebe Bridgers
picked up her first
four nominations,
including one for
best new artist.
By SARAH BAHROLIVER WALKER/GETTY IMAGES“Punisher”
showcases Phoebe
Bridgers’s writing.
The music industry has a hot new format,
one that can generate huge sales, demon-
strate fan loyalty and dominate the weekly
charts.
It’s called the compact disc.
This week, the K-pop superstars BTS
opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart
for the fifth time with their latest release,
“Be,” which had the equivalent of 242,000
sales in the United States, according to
Nielsen Music. Of that total, 177,000 were
for copies sold of the eight-song LP as a
complete album. Two versions were avail-
able: a $9 digital download and a $51 “de-
luxe edition” CD that came with a photo
book, seven postcards, a poster and other
goodies.
Last week, AC/DC topped the chart with
a similar strategy, selling its latest CD,
“Power Up,” in a $49 box that displayed the
band’s logo in neon and played a guitar riff
from a built-in speaker.
The CD format has been dying a slow
death for years. In 2019, just 52 million al-
bums were sold on CD in the United States,
down from a peak of 943 million in 2000, ac-
cording to the Recording Industry Associa-
tion of America. But some acts, like BTS,
have found ways to move discs by super-
serving fans with collectible packages, even
as streaming remains the default format for
most listeners. In its opening week, “Be”
had 49 million streams.
The loyalty and promotional power of
BTS’s fans is so great that it was considered
a major factor in the success of a $4 billion
initial public offering this fall by Big Hit En-
tertainment, the South Korean manage-
ment company behind the band. (Big Hit
derives almost 90 percent of its revenue
from BTS.)
Megan Thee Stallion’s “Good News”
opened at No. 2 with the equivalent of just
over 100,000 sales, including 116 million
streams. Last week, BTS and Megan Thee
Stallion received their first Grammy nomi-
nations. BTS got one nod and Megan had
four, including best new artist and record of
the year for “Savage.”
Ariana Grande’s “Positions” is in third
place, while Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for theStars Aim for the Moon” is No. 4; Future
and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Pluto x Baby Pluto” fell
three spots to No. 5 in its second week out.
Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” rose 23 spots to
No. 6, after the LP’s vinyl version went on
sale in Target stores and her new film,
“Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,”
began streaming on Disney+. (Swift is up
for six Grammy nominations, including al-
bum of the year.)Hey, Could the 45 Be Next?
CDs Help Propel BTS to No. 1
The boy band BTS’s “Be”
opened at No. 1 on the
Billboard album chart with the
equivalent of 242,000 sales in
the United States.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, VIA GETTY IMAGESBy BEN SISARIOFor a second week in a row,
an old-fashioned format helps
push a new release to the top.