6 — Thursday, September 12, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Danny Brown’s last album, 
Atrocity Exhibition, was widely 
acclaimed and viewed by many to 
be one of the best projects of 2016. 
To follow up such a successful 
project can be a challenge, but, 
luckily for us, Danny Brown 
seems more than ready for the 
daunting task at hand. “Dirty 
Laundry,” the first single off of 
his recently-announced project, 
uknowhatimsayin¿, is a brazen, 
colorful statement of intent, 
letting everyone know that he’s 
got more to say.
Much like Danny Brown’s 
signature vocal style, the beat 
(courtesy of Q-Tip) is vivid, 
hallucinatory and cartoonish. 
These are not the shadowy, 
vintage cartoon images that are 
suffused throughout much of 
hip-hop 
(e.g. 
Madvillainy, 
“Cartoons and Cereal”), but more 
like the vibrant, acid-drenched 
animation found on Adult Swim. 
Much like the experimental 
cartoon 
programming 
block, 
Danny Brown is not afraid of 
vulgarity, and his record of 
humorous sexual explicity is 
continued on “Dirty Laundry”: 
Lines like “Once got a ho, ain’t 
had money for the room / So we 
did the humpty hump in a Burger 
King bathroom / Lowkey kept it 
undercover / The way she slurp 

slurp, she’s the quicker picker-
upper” make the double entendre 
of the title all too clear (even if 
the “quicker picker-upper” line 
is actually the tagline for Bounty 
paper towels). 
Most 
importantly, 
Danny 
Brown 
sounds 
fearless 
and 
confident in his new direction. 
“Dirty Laundry” preserves the 
bizarreness 
and 
acerbic 
wit 
that makes him special without 
stagnating, is brimming with 
creativity and is an auspicious 
sign of things to come.

Danny Brown has more to say 
 on new single ‘Dirty Laundry’

SINGLE REVIEW

I don’t think I found out about 
online shopping until I was 11 or 12. I 
surfed the Internet before then, sure. 
I may have found the model bios on 
Abercrombie & Fitch and read up 
on how Nathan likes to spend his 
summers sailing off the coast of his 
family’s vacation home in Nantucket. 
I studied how he wore his jeans low, 
and how he didn’t seem to be worried 
about their grave potential of falling 
off at any moment in the pictures he 
posed for. I owned several pairs and 
approximated his look to the best of 
my ability —which, for me, somehow 
meant layered t-shirts in a variety 
of colors, ripping apart my carefully 
distressed denim to display a tasteful 
peep of thigh, and a propensity to 
suck in my cheeks and push out my 
lips that plagues me to this very day. 
I may have spent some long nights 
having long, separate conversations 
—on my phone and through my newly 
minted email (Runningaddict97@
comcast.net because I wanted to 
seem sporty), at the same time and 
with the same person. Hunter was 
funny, bubbly and just cruel enough 
to me that I felt comfortable coming 
back to him every night to bond over 
our mutual love of … corn dogs? I 
don’t remember exactly what we 
talked about, but I remember that he 
ate corn dogs and twinkies every day, 
and that I fantasized about shacking 
up with him as we prepared for the 
nuclear winter. He looked like a 
literal fox with fine, almost platinum 
blonde hair. I knew he secretly hated 
me, and I was enamored to the point 
where I could only bear to try and 
connect with him from the safety 
afforded to me behind my desktop 
computer screen.
We would play soccer and football 
together, but I only really knew how 
to run fast. I thought that if I ran laps 

around the scrum of players in the 
middle of the field — and I harnessed 
the cool masculinity that Nathan 
wielded so easily with my ripped 

jeans — then I would finally be 
picked to be on his team. I thought if 
I saved up enough of my allowance, I 
could buy myself into this boys’ club 
that was always just out of reach. 
Hunter could play sports, and I just 
wanted to look the part.
Themes 
were 
very 
important 
to me growing up, whether that 
was the — shall we say ill-fated — 
PBTeen, 
tiki-inspired 
confection 
that became of my bedroom or the 
worlds that I could build for myself 
with its contents. A model car or 
a cutout from a magazine were 
one way tickets to a fully realized 
fantasy — complete with houses 
by the beach, jobs, 401ks, spouses 
across 
a 
spectrum 
of 
genders, 
precarious social networks that had 
to be traversed in Machiavellian 
fashion and clothes. The clothes 
I got to wear! My self expression 
was completely uninhibited in this 
fantastical, if not slightly vacuous 
space of mine, and the only kernel 
that could be salvaged from my 
reverie was what I wore to school 
each day.
It turns out that I was the last 
person to get in on the ground floor 
of my sexual deviance. Rumors 
about my friendship with Dorothy 
began 
to 
circulate 
around 
the 
same time I started exhibiting 
that subtle flash of leg. The stress 
they brought, combined with the 
absurd popularity contest that was 
my elementary school experience, 
seemed to color what I viewed as an 
escape from daily life. My fantasies 
weren’t absent of the creatures that 
created the need for them, I was just 
powerful enough to cast them off 
into vague opportunities for conflict 
in which I could be successful and 
clothes were my sword.
It 
makes 
perfect 
sense 
that 
everything changed for me when I 
found out that Saks had a website. 
It took very little time for dancing 
around in a towel dress and my 
mom’s open-toe pumps to turn into 
canary Zac Posen taffeta and a pair of 
cork-soled red bottoms. Pressures to 
conjure up a wife and focus on what 
she would wear more than myself 
were vanquished, and all of a sudden 
I got to be Isabella. Or Cheryl. Or 
whoever. I got to be Sam, too — I 
didn’t have to choose. Every ideal 
that I would happily bridge chasms 
to satisfy in my mental landscape, 
be it my relationship to gender and 
sexuality or all of the attributes 
entailing that easy masculinity I 
so valued, almost instantaneously 
collapsed 
upon 
entry 
into 
the 
consumer marketplace. 
My first forays into an empowered 
sense of femininity, one that skulked 
in and out of the Park Avenue 
penthouse she found on Christie’s 
and wasn’t afraid to indulge in long, 
long stares at the all-nude Dolce & 
Gabbana Menswear ads of the time 
— into queerness, really, happened 
at the same time I started to realize 

what class was. And that the things I 
feel drawn to have a nasty tendency 
to cost lots and lots of money. 
Dressing myself not only reached 
new 
dimensions 
of 
aspiration, 
but became a way for me to shield 
myself from a community that was 
hostile towards difference. As a 
very nervous young boy preparing 

to go down a road that spoke of 
vulnerabilities having yet to reveal 
themselves, a facade that read as 
impenetrable to others seemed like a 
sensible way to go. 
This of course, is not a love letter 
to consumerism, or a failure to 
acknowledge that part of what I 
aspired to had very much to do with 
surviving (even selfishly thriving) 
in a system that afforded me some 
privileges and not others. Rather, 
I’m saying that there are great 
truths that lie in fantasy, in what we 
envision ourselves to be, and how we 
communicate that to others. Clothes, 
in choosing them and throwing 
them on our back, can give us the 
keys to explore parts of ourselves 
that we’re not yet fully conscious 
of. They let us create characters, 
fabricate whole worlds, and try to 
sell them as best we can. They can 
be armor. They have the power to 
unite and divide, and as with all 
modes of expression that lie at the 
intersection of history, culture and 
status, finding the self starts with 
what we can only dream of. Fashion, 
style and art are too often discussed 
as musings of the mind — born of, 
but ultimately detached from, the 
matrices of power from which we all 
operate. So if you’ll humor me, from 
my velveteen dreams to yours, I’d 
like to start a conversation.

Sam Kremke: Velveteen Dreams

STYLE COLUMN

SAM KREMKE
Daily Style Columnist

Who gets to tell the shameful stories of a 
nation’s past? Imagine a negotiating table, 
but for collective memory. Whom should 
we see seated, and where? Historically, 
the victors have taken a disproportionate 
number of seats, controlling the historical 
record apparently among the spoils of war. 
In more recent decades, marginalized and 
oppressed people have fought their way into 
the negotiations, staking their claim in the 
story of nations that are equal parts theirs. 
Regardless, the questions of who gets a seat 
at the negotiating table, and who sits where, 
are always in flux.
Co-directors Nanfu Wang (“Hooligan 
Sparrow”) and Jialing Zhang’s (“Complicit”) 
handling of these questions will surprise, 
especially given their subject matter: In their 
documentary feature “One Child Nation,” 
the two native Chinese women filmmakers 
take on the history and present-day 
repercussions of China’s one-child policy. As 
the name implies, this legal measure limited 
families in China to having one child; what 
isn’t as readily discernible are the great, 
human-rights-out-the-window lengths the 
country went to in order to enforce it. 
I expect many of you will go into the 
film awaiting victims’ accounts of what the 
policy stripped from them, much like I did. 

But Wang and Zhang chose to tell the story a 
different way, incorporating the perspectives 
of people with varying levels of complicity in 
the policy’s brutal enforcement. The result 
is a film that renegotiates not only China’s 
memory of this policy gone horribly wrong, 
but the entire notion of historical memory 
along with it.
One of the first subjects, Wang, the 
conductor of on-screen interviews and 
director whose presence is most apparent 
throughout, talks to is a village official from 
the rural community she grew up in. While 
we saw Wang’s own mother and will see 
many others speak in the same anticipatory, 
defensive way, when asked about how they 
responded to the policy, this man’s responses 
were punctuated by long pauses between 
confessions of his role in the cruelty. When 
he describes the forced sterilizations he 
witnessed, he calls them “fucked up,” 
though he does not claim that he tried to 
disrupt them. At the end of this sequence, 
while the camera stays fixed on the official 

and his neighbors, we hear Wang think 
out loud about whether to use the village 
official’s connections to find women who 
lost their children in the enforcement of the 
policy. Another off-screen voice challenges 
the thought of putting them on camera and 
asking them to re-experience their trauma.
In the film that ensues, Wang and Zhang 
seem to heed this warning. We see Wang 
speak to a midwife who aborted children 
without the mother’s consent. She speaks 
with a family planning official, who justifies 
the policy as an act of putting national 
interest before personal discomfort. She 
speaks with researchers who try to track and 
reunite abandoned children with their birth 
families, with journalists who resisted the 
policy and its aftermath in their respective 
forms. What we do not hear are any pained 
accounts from forcibly sterilized women, 
from children sold to orphanages in the 
strictest days of the policy.
Wang and Zhang do not tap into this 
ethos, which seems so natural to a narrative 
that has numerous victims, but I think that 
was deliberate and wise. That might have 
been too much of what we expected to hear, 
might have matched this story’s frequency to 
that of most of the stories we hear, drowning 
in a cacophony of shameful histories and 
unimpressive resolutions. Instead, we have 
to wrestle with the complexity, if not futility, 
of allocating individual blame, as well as 
the perhaps more worthwhile question of 
reparation and collective healing.
That said, ambivalence surrounding 
enablement of the policy does not register 
throughout. 
For 
instance, 
whenever 
the directors had a child on camera, the 
emotional weight of the burden they 
inherit from their elders was not subdued 
but patiently allowed to sit, uneasily, 
unresolved on our minds and hearts. To 
that end, the most heartrending scene is 
easily the interview with a twin, living in 
China, whose sister was taken away. When 
the pre-teen girl lists off what she wants for 
her sister — a loving set of adoptive parents 
in America, where her twin was found to 
have ended up — she gets sidetracked with 
what she would want, were they to reunite 
someday. They would have snowball fights 
in the winter, wear matching clothes and her 
tearful, thorough list goes on. In this young 
girl’s desperate fantasy, we watch it unfold: 
the outstanding loss, the open wound that is 
neither shrinking nor scabbing, as time goes 
by and steps toward healing are neglected.
By speaking to unexpected figures in 
the history of this policy and soliciting 
otherwise unheard of accounts, Wang and 
Zhang blurred the supposed line between 
victim and perpetrator, between innocent 
and guilty. Isn’t that how it should be? Isn’t 
history too complex to arrange into simple 
categories of good and evil? If anything, 
I hope “One Child Nation” might inspire 
others to tackle shameful histories in an 
equally nuanced light. There is such a thing 
as accountability, as taking responsibility for 
the wrong you did. Guilt is sitting with that, 
allowing it to fester, when the only way to 
truly take responsibility is to work together 
for reparation and positive change.

Confronting the past 
in ‘One Child Nation’

JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

Dirty Laundry

Danny Brown

Fool’s Gold Records

My first 
forays into an 
empowered 
sense of 
femininity ... into 
queerness, really, 
happened at 
the same time I 
started to realize 
what class was.

FILM REVIEW

WARP RECORDS

It makes perfect 
sense that 
everything changed 
for me when I 
realized that Saks 
had a website.

One Child 
Nation

Amazon Studios

Michigan Theater

By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/12/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

09/12/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Thursday, September 12, 2019

ACROSS
1 “Are you getting 
100%?” cereal
6 Lover
11 Excludes
15 Place to play
16 Gulf of Oman 
vessel
17 Neutral tone
18 Charcuterie fare
19 Quaint sleeping 
coach
21 Target, as a 
receiver
23 “Moonlight 
Sonata” opening 
movement, e.g.
24 Stand buy
25 Dromedary 
feature
28 Hybrid fruits
31 Cheerleader’s cry
33 Top __
34 “Garfield: __ of 
Two Kitties”
37 Deceptive 
appearance
39 __ Plaines
40 Classic American 
board game 
symbolized by 
this puzzle’s 
circles
44 Fish often fried
45 Famille member
46 Out of practice
47 Deceptive
50 Took to heart
52 Sleep soundly?
53 Classic movie 
theaters
54 Maple yield
57 Martial arts 
teacher
61 Knesset country
63 Brit’s afternoon 
drink
67 Raised landform
68 Stable baby
69 Befuddled
70 It was originally a 
sitting meditation 
pose
71 Capital on the 
Tiber
72 With 22-Down, 
intimidate
73 Reach

DOWN
1 __ Bay Rays
2 Nymph 
associated with 
Artemis

3 Needle
4 Tiny tunnelers
5 Eighteenth, 
usually
6 Clotheshorse
7 Sch. with a 
Brooklyn campus
8 Penne __ vodka
9 Fuse
10 Writer Bombeck
11 Inoffensive
12 Praise
13 New Deal agcy.
14 __ La Table: 
cookware shop
20 Bonn : Wasser :: 
Barcelona : __
22 See 72-Across
26 Soccer star 
Rapinoe
27 Beer belly
29 Unlikely to react
30 Likely to react?
31 “Scram, 
varmints!”
32 2017 “Hello, 
Dolly!” Tony 
winner
33 TV’s Arthur
34 Billing nos.
35 “This __ / Doth to 
our rose of youth 
rightly belong” 
(Shakespeare)

36 Intrusive MP3 
files
38 Aerodynamic
41 __ sauce
42 Bridal gown 
storage option
43 It’ll never work
48 Big Easy cuisine
49 Co-worker of 
Lane and Olsen
51 “Where __ sign?”
54 Pulled a chair 
up to

55 Insurance giant
56 Skirt fold
58 Dove, e.g.
59 Young 
salamanders
60 Wee
62 Sleight of hand
63 Egypt’s cont.
64 Jack of “Barney 
Miller”
65 Common Market 
letters
66 Hot tub sigh

