🛫✨The Nexialist #0082
40.000 Years of Music | Sounds of Discovery | Dissociation Music | Drag Kings | The Queens Remix | Biology Enables, Culture Restricts | The Mathematics of Polycules | Free Yourself
Welcome to my weekly attempt to spark something in our brains, The Nexialist!
This week and the next I will be taking some time off in beautiful Sardegna so I decided to offer another Nexialist Quicky, because I can (and I had some great content lined up already to share with you this week). I’m also celebrating more Nexialisters (?) joining this trip every week. It warms my heart and keeps me excited to keep doing this. I will leave you to it, then! Enjoy!
1 year ago » 🚨✨The Nexialist #0032 : Code Red For Humanity | Indigenous Thinking for Troubled Times | Net Zero | Biomass Delusion | New Pollution | Doughnut Economy | Lido Pimienta | Kunumi MC | Jaloo
🎵40.000 Years of Music
If you were born in Beethoven's time, you'd be lucky if you heard a symphony twice in your lifetime, whereas today, it's as accessible as running water.
An incredible video with Michael Spitzer, author of The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, reminds us of how far this incredible human technology has come, even though we easily forget while it’s easily available. It also makes us wonder what the future of music holds for us.
Read: The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer review – a wide-ranging global history of music - The Guardian
🌌Sounds of Discovery
A beautiful way to illustrate discovery with music (or musify (?) it?).
Read: From zero to 5,000 – music and visuals express 30 years of exoplanet discoveries
🌀Dissociation Music
Personally, I love this ability some people have to detect or even analyze cultural and societal movements through music. This one in particular talks about the rise of dissociation music, especially through the lyrics and vocal tone.
Anytime a cultural phenomenon spreads this far, you can be sure those neurons are firing in music, too. And sure enough, once I started looking for it, I realized I’d been hearing this hollowness across genres and styles, from British post-punk to West Coast street rap.
(This article was a recommendation from my friend Dimas’ newsletter Música em Casa (Music at Home), which I recommend if you speak Portuguese or not, because it is about music… and you can use a translator in your e-mail )
Extra: The cult of the dissociative pout - By Rayne Fisher-Quann | i-D
🕺Drag Kings, explained
I keep on repeating here… women take things and make them better.
“Drag is just the performance of gender. The performance, the absence, the transformation of gender. The majority of drag kings are AFAB performers: Assigned Female At Birth. I do, however, know that there are AMAB performers who also perform drag kings and also lots of trans performers. It's about playing with masculine identities, masculine performativity. Whether that's politicizing it, vulgarizing it making it a farce, making it silly”
When you wonder why this art hasn’t quite taken off as the drag queen movement has, this answer fits perfectly:
“What I do want is for folks to acknowledge the power of misogyny. We are usurping male power and privilege. And that's still scary to people. Our patriarchal society doesn't really take kindly to the idea that masculinity and manhood is something that anyone can put on.”
(Thank you, Juan, for sending this my way ❤️)
👑The Queens Remix
Another iconic moment in pop herstory, and Beyoncé bringing other black icons along with her over Madonna’s Vogue.
“Queen mother Madonna, Aaliyah, Rosetta Tharpe, Santigold, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Betty Davis, Solange Knowles, Badu, Lizzo, Kelly Rowl’, Lauryn Hill, Roberta Flack, Toni, Janet, Tierra Whack, Missy, Diana, Grace Jones, Aretha, Anita, Grace Jones, Helen Folasade Adu, Jilly from Philly.”
Even better when I learned (thanks to Gianfranco) that this came out as a mashup on TikTok, by @frootytreblez, and got their attention (and he is listed on the credits).
Read: Beyoncé & Madonna’s “Break My Soul” Remix Honors A Group Of Black Icons
🫀Biology Enables, Culture Restricts
“From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.” — Yuval Harari
This quote from Yuval Harari I would love to see tattooed because it is so simple and so true.
How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obligates people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children — some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another — some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
[…]
…Evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak, and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?
Read: What Biology Enables, Culture Forbids - Farnam Street Blog
❤️The Mathematics of Polycules
Shared with me by my friend Gustavo, from Temporality Lab, and I love the simplicity, the humor and the truth to it.
🏳️🌈Free Yourself
We had the privilege of watching a short concert with Jessie Ware at Milkshake a couple of weeks ago, and this was one of those fun moments, even under the light rain, where I remembered it is fun also just to let it go sometimes.
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🔌Let’s Collab?
I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.
I offer inspiration sessions, called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other Bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below: