6A — Friday, September 23, 2016 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com The fact that Mac Miller is as relevant as he is, and command- ing the specific type of rap cul- tural relevance that he does, is some- where between a small and large miracle. Early Mac sucked (though as a 15-year-old, I secretly loved him). He was more of a radioactive byproduct of the internet’s effect on rap music than a notable con- tributor to its sound. He was what old people at Rock the Bells would complain about. In the six years between when Mac’s stand- out pop-rap mixtape K.I.D.S hit datpiff and today, Mac has had seven Billboard Hot 100 tracks, become completely addicted and un-addicted to promethazine, produced an entire Vince Staples mixtape under the stage name Larry Fisherman, infiltrated the inner circles of both Odd Future and TDE, slept on Rick Rubin’s couch, moved to DUMBO (lol) and released two critically acclaimed albums (Watching Movies with the Sound Off and GO:OD AM). Part of the appeal of new Mac Miller is that he has made mis- takes, and he owns them. Inten- tionally or not, new Mac plays up his personal and sonic growth with introspective lyrics and cre- ative production, and it’s really good. Old Mac crooned over sim- ple synthy choruses and talked about smoking weed at pool par- ties. New Mac is warier, weirder and a lot cooler. The Divine Feminine, with its captivating title, should have been good. Described as a con- cept album, The Divine Feminine is supposed to be about the journey that is falling in love. The phrase “Divine Feminine,” is a nod to the spiritual concept of a female ener- gy governing the world or, as Miller paraphrases, “you know, like, Mother Nature” (Red Flag). TDF does just about everything to perpetuate Mac’s “I’ve Changed” narrative. The album art is minimalist, mostly pink and gives off the aura of pro- fundity. The lead single off the album, “Dang!,” has Anderson Paak on it and is blowing up as I type this review. From top to bot- tom the album is packed with in vogue features, expensive produc- tion, and trumpet tracks record- ed by Julliard students. I mean, come on, it’s a concept rap album ostensibly about the worshiping of female energy, it’s nearly satiri- cally progressive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take more than 15 minutes into The Divine Feminine to realize that Mac does not deliver on many of the album’s promises. There is very little worshiping of female energy in The Divine Feminine. There is much talk about Miller’s lust over the various women in his life, and the problems he has with them, but no divinity conveyed. In other words: It’s a lot of Mac Mill- er talking about the girls he has sex with, and that is a gentle way to put it. Miller’s lyrics are unambigu- ously misogynistic. He raps “Okay your legs like a store they open up. And you got people in the aisle” and later adds “First prize, Nobel, get a piece. Your clothes off, turn around, let me see. (In between Miller’s verse’s Ty Dolla $ign adds Aaron Carter-esque nuggets like “Parents they just don’t under- stand.”) For a second, if we forget about the insincere and misleading title and concept, the album does sound good. The production fuses lighthearted funk, complex jazz, and Miller’s darker and poignant rap. The tracks change abruptly, and each song melts into the next. “Dang!” is an absolute hit, with an energy you can’t quite wrap your brain around. The song is complicated, maybe, by the fact that Paak originally wrote the song in response to the death of a loved one. There are also flashes of not divinity, but at least relat- able, semi-profound lyrics. On “Congratulations,” Miller paints a heartbreaking image, rapping about changing relationships, sex and love lost, before hopping right into “Dang!” and giving a slightly different, though thematically linked perspective. The Divine Feminine is a well- produced album, with an exciting progressive concept, and a frus- trating lack of integrity. I do not mean to take on the lack of certain progressive ideals in rap as a whole — that is an entirely different dis- cussion — but the false promise of progressiveness in The Divine Feminine is deeply disappointing. New Mac Miller is a good, if not a great artist. He’s also only 24 years old. Regardless, the Mac Miller of The Divine Feminine needs to do some serious soul searching before he tries his hand at another “pro- gressive” concept album. WARNER BROS. Did Ariana meet him at a gas station? TV REVIEW HARRY KRINSKY Daily Arts Writer Mac Miller is back, weirder and a lot cooler on new ‘The Divine Feminine’ The former teenage favorite tries to show off how he’s changed FILM NOTEBOOK A few weeks ago, my friend and Daily Film colleague Jacob Rich wrote an impassioned plea for us all to listen to The Canon, a movie of the week podcast in which two film critics, Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson, debate whether a given movie belongs in the “canon,” a collection of “the great films to live on forever,” whatever that means. For Jacob, listening to a new episode of The Canon is something of a weekly ritual, and I don’t blame him for it; there’s something magical about hav- ing your film agenda defined by “enlightened” film-watchers. But I’m not as convinced by the strength of The Canon. Jacob is right to note that the podcast’s defining feature is the banter between its two co-hosts. They are certainly far from a myth of public radio personalities that can verge on sleep-inducement, but Jacob clearly doesn’t listen to the right public radio. Folks like Elvis Mitchell and David Edel- stein match Faraci and Nicholson in their passion, but it comes out more in their words rather than their tone. Plus, these public radio critics maintain some semblance of decency in their commentary that doesn’t demean their co- workers or, worse, their listeners. The conversations in The Canon, meanwhile, invariably feature an extremely arrogant and aggressive Faraci constantly speaking over and launching ad hominem attacks at a quiet and always-wrong Nicholson. Nichol- son’s research seems to be lifted from IMDb trivia pages and Fara- ci’s “textual analysis” seems to be less a detailed train of thought and more constantly referring to him- self as a New Yorker even though it seems like the last time he lived there was in his childhood. It’s infuriating: I want to root for Nicholson because Faraci is so profoundly an affront to respect- able human interaction, but I find her film tastes so poor that I am constantly let down. Ugh. If Jacob wishes to question long-standing academic notions of film, like the auteur theory, perhaps he should also question the desirability (and, frankly, possibility) of having a “canon.” In The Canon, any time one host questions how to define the quali- fications for entry into the canon (Importance? Quality? Impact?), the episode inevitably becomes a referendum on the point of the podcast itself. That both hosts use self-serving arguments sur- rounding qualifications in each episode to justify a film’s inclusion or exclusion proves the idea of a canon is arbitrary to its core. I’m a proponent of debate, but the act of defining terms, especially defin- ing the central idea of the whole podcast, should precede the pod- cast. Plus, the podcast only serves to divide the world of film into “haves and have-nots.” Let’s make the reasonable assumption that the end goal of this podcast is to create a final list of films in the canon, while noting which films did not enter the canon. Wouldn’t that dissuade a budding and curi- ous film audience from watching those movies that didn’t make the cut? All movies offer us something. Even poor films can serve a pur- pose; we can use all films to trace techniques, moods and themes to construct a meaningful narrative of the human experience since the birth of the art form. I offer an alternative: it’s anoth- er film of the week podcast, with bickering that remains within the realm of respectability. Each pair of episodes (bi-weekly two- parters) contains a current release and a film from the past that can teach us something about the current release. Recent episodes include the first and latest “Star Wars” films; “The Neon Demon” and “Suspiria,” an Italian hor- ror film with similar themes and styles; and “Finding Dory” and “Memento.” Safe to say, the film choices run the gamut from main- stream to arthouse, domestic to foreign, old to new, good to bad. The podcast is The Next Picture Show and it was started by alumni of The Dissolve, a beloved website that offered some of the greatest film writing I have ever read. To quote the opening mantra repeat- ed in each episode, “No film exists in a vacuum. All culture is more interesting in context.” That’s not debatable. Film is a medium that exists to transport us through time and space. When we talk about film, we talk about what it copies, steals, alludes to and references. The Film School generation and the current postmodern film land- scape of directors all abide by this principle. Why shouldn’t our pod- cast tastes? DANIEL HENSEL Daily Arts Writer The film podcast you have to hear ALBUM REVIEW C- The Divine Feminine Mac Miller Warner Bros. Performing an orchestra con- cert takes a considerable number of people. It takes an orchestra’s worth, of course, but behind the scenes there are even more indi- viduals working to manage all of the logistics of such a large endeavor. Understand- ably, it’s difficult, and in this model, it becomes useful to rely on pieces of music which are mostly known to the musicians, pulled from a col- lection of standard repertoire which has crystallized over the last century and a half. Playing new and contemporary work pro- vides challenges, and most living composers have their orchestral music performed quite rarely. But most composers aren’t John Adams. On Friday the 23rd the Univer- sity Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Kenneth Kiesler, will be giving their inaugural performance of the year, featur- ing music by John Adams and George Gershwin. Adams is perhaps the most famous living American concert composer. He is more frequently performed than any other Ameri- can composer alive and has been the focus of national and interna- tional fame for the better part of three decades, since the premiere of his well-known opera “Nixon in China.” On Friday the USO will be playing two pieces, spanning from his “Nixon in China” era to the present decade. The larger of the two Adams pieces being performed is more recent, his “Saxophone Con- certo,” which will feature Music Prof. Timothy McAllister as solo- ist, a role he also filled at the pre- miere of the concerto in 2013. “I met him because the Los Angeles Philharmonic brought him in to play the solo sax part in a piece I’d written for the first con- cert with [Gustavo Dudamel] as music director, a piece called ‘City Noir,’ ” Adams said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “There’s a sort of jazz inflected part that was very dif- ficult, and they felt that nobody in the LA area was really appropriate to play it, so they brought Tim in, and I was absolutely entranced by his talent and his skill. So I decided to write a concerto for him.” The saxophone is not generally thought of in the context of classi- cal music. Most people first came to know it through the iconic sound of jazz music, and Adams is no different. “I discovered the saxophone largely through listening to a lot of great jazz players, and I think I had that sound and that kind of spontaneity in mind and was trying to translate that into a work which, obviously, has more formal outlines,” Adams said. “I didn’t want to write a piece that called for the saxophonist to improvise his or her own ideas, I wanted to make a work that sounded or felt like it was largely improvised but at the same time was very specifically notated.” This sense of jazz-derived lib- erty appropriately links the “Sax- ophone Concerto” to Adams’s earlier piece, “City Noir,” which was heavily jazz influenced and was how the saxophonist McAl- lister and the composer Adams first met. Decades before either of these pieces, however, Adams was writing a very different style of music, as the other Adams piece on the program, “The Chairman Dances,” demonstrates. “I think my work has evolved,” Adams said. “I think a work like ‘The Chairman Dances’ is proba- bly a little more — parts of it — are a little more pulse-driven. You don’t quite feel that consistent, inevitable pulse in the sax con- certo that you feel in ‘The Chair- man Dances.’ ” “The Chairman Dances” is an example of Adams’s earlier style, which has been described as post- minimalism, though the compos- er has eschewed that term in favor of “post-style.” Given Adams’s artistic evolution over the years, this latter term does indeed seem to be the most accurate descrip- tion of his work as a whole. “Each piece is its own little world,” Adams said. “I don’t like to repeat myself. There are a lot of artists, and painters and even some composers who find a suc- cessful template and they tend to repeat it, just slightly altering it. But I try to — for lack of a better term — develop an entirely unique DNA for each piece. I think each one of my pieces is uniquely dif- ferent from all the others.” Complementing Adams’s par- tially jazz-inspired selections is the rest of the evening’s program, which is comprised of two pieces by the extremely famous 20th- century American composer George Gershwin, who is known for his fusion of the jazz and clas- sical genres. The concert will feature Music Prof. Logan Skelton performing Gershwin’s 1925 “Piano Concerto in F” — which is the composer’s second most known composition for piano and orchestra, after his universally recognized “Rhapso- dy in Blue” — and his symphonic poem “An American in Paris,” which is based on the composer’s experience abroad in the French capital of the 1920s. Both of the Gershwin pieces are new critical editions, and this will be the first time that these editions will be performed. DAYTON HARE Daily Arts Writer The American composer sets the tone at Hill Auditorium University Symphony Orchestra to perform Adams and Gershwin September 23rd, 8 PM; pre-concert lecture 7:15 PM Hill Auditorium Free Adams starts USO season BOOK REVIEW How far will someone go to uncover the truth? This is the central question in the excel- lent second novel of Anuradha Roy, “Sleeping on Jupi- ter.” The book has received nearly universal praise, winning the pres- tigious DSC Prize for South Asian Lit- erature and being long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The work of fic- tion critiques hypocrisies in Indian culture in the context of the small tourist town of Jarmuli, which is famous for its ancient temples, but is also hiding dark secrets of abuse and misogyny. The novel switches between three seemingly separate stories, slowly weaving them into each other as the text goes on. We first meet Nomi, a young filmmaker trying to piece together the his- tory of her trau- matic childhood on assignment in Jar- muli. On the train there she meets three older women on holiday, long- time friends eager to enjoy one last adventure together. Once in Jarmuli, the women are shown around an ancient temple by Badal the monk, who struggles over his lust for the boy who works at his favorite tea stand. The three stories are brought together by chance, but end up having immense conse- quences over each and every per- son involved. Indian-born novelist Roy crafts a riveting tale of religion, fam- ily and violence that is nearly impossible to put down. Central to this book is a damning por- trayal of religious tourism, paint- ing Badal as one of many temple guides who rip off their patrons under the guise of a higher power. Nomi’s background is a disturb- ing critique of religious zealots, an unwitting victim of a civil war and repeated sexual abuse at the hands of a religious guru, who, ironically, is treated as a god by the Western tourists who visit his ashram. The novel sometimes falls into unreliable narration. However, this is not a disadvantage for the text. Rather, it serves as character development. Gouri, one of the elderly woman, is slowly losing her memory, and her forgetfulness as a narrator is all too familiar for those who have seen a grandpar- ent fall into the same patterns. Nomi’s understanding of what happened to her as a child is pep- pered with holes, mainly due to her young age at the time of her trauma, as well as the purposeful repression of disturbing memo- ries. “Sleeping on Jupiter” is not a happy book. It does not answer questions about the fates of the characters, or the reasons why certain actions are taken. But that’s okay. The novel is a peek into five days in the lives of a few truly unordinary people. Much of what we learn about the characters is accumulated in pieces, through dialogue, reminiscing, and in the case of Nomi, occasional flash- backs. As readers, Roy wants us to know we are not entitled to the knowledge of what happens after the five days are over. If anything, we should be happy we were even given such an intimate look in the first place. Brilliant choices like these are what gives “Sleeping on Jupiter” so much weight — specu- lating what happens to the charac- ters is enough to keep a person up at night. KATHLEEN DAVIS Managing Arts Editor ‘Jupiter’ a riveting tale of religion “Sleeping on Jupiter” Anuradha Roy Graywolf Press Published Sept. 6 EVENT PREVIEW