In April 2016, author, historian and professor Ibram X. Kendi published his National Book Award-winning “Stamped from the Beginning.” In what he subtitles “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” Kendi’s exhaustive research chronicles the timeline of anti-Black racist ideas and their shifting power throughout American history. Kendi, one of America’s leading antiracist voices, was the youngest- ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. The same year, Jason Reynolds’s “Ghost” was nominated for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. This prestigious celebration of the best literature in America is where the two men met. But, it wasn’t until March of this year, nearly four years later, that “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” was released — the remix of Kendi’s original book, reimagined by Reynolds. In an interview with “CBS This Morning,” Reynolds reveals that he initially declined Kendi’s request to write the remix: “I said no because I’m careful about tampering with things that I believe are sacred.” Yet, he finally agreed when he realized “this work was bigger than the both of us, and it’s not about either one of us.” Reynolds’s remix is geared toward a younger audience, readers 12 and up. While Kendi is a scholar who holds a position as the Director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, where he is a professor of history and international relations, Reynolds is a writer of books and poetry for young adults and middle- grade audiences. On his website, Reynolds declares that he plans to “not write boring books.” He goes on to say that “I know there are a lot of young people who hate reading… but they don’t actually hate books, they hate boredom” — which is one of the initial obstacles he faced with the remix. So Reynolds, who has said that young people don’t like to read history books, decided that his remix wasn’t a history book, “but a book about the present: here and now.” Like Kendi’s original version, Reynolds structures the book using five historical figures: Puritan minister Cotton Mather from the 17th century, founding father Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and radical activist and writer Angela Davis. The division of the book into five sections coincides with the five guides, spanning from the 1400s to modern day. While that encompasses over 600 years of history, Reynolds’s remix caps at 248 pages, half of Kendi’s 500-page original. Another important similarity in the remix is the three different definitions used to identify and describe the people explored: segregationists, assimilationists and antiracists. These three categories are repeated frequently throughout the book, helping us to understand the historical figures represented along with their motives and beliefs (which we often discover to be contradictory). Reynolds simplifies the definitions to help young readers grasp the complex material, calling segregationists “haters,” assimilationists as “the people who like you, but only with quotation marks” and antiracists as “the people who love you because you’re like you.” Later, when discussing figures like Abraham Lincoln, it was helpful to have these definitions as we approached his contradictory views — like that he wanted slavery gone, but didn’t think Black people should necessarily have equal rights: an assimilationist. An The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Monday, August 31, 2020 — 15 BOOK REVIEW CULTURE NOTEBOOK CULTURE NOTEBOOK Review: ‘Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism and You’ KALAMAZOO PUBLIC LIBRARY LILLY PEARCE Daily Arts Writer On Dec. 13, 1963, Bob Dylan was given the “Tom Paine Award” by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for his political activism. A visibly shaken, and likely drunk, Dylan said he accepted the award on behalf of “everybody that went down to Cuba,” then unleashed a doozy: “I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald … I saw some of myself in him.” The crowd booed him off the stage. A few days later, Dylan released a statement that read, in part, “If there’s violence in the times, then there must be violence in me.” * It’s 2020, and the times are more violent than ever. They have been for a while. Where has Bob Dylan been in the era of Donald Trump, mass shootings, climate crisis and COVID-19? Where’s the singer who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote searing political anthems like “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game?” He was releasing Sinatra cover albums — three, to be exact — from 2015-2017. It seemed, for those who hoped for a guiding message from rock’s poet laureate, that Dylan had decided to sit this one out. Yet, in June 2020, Bob Dylan is back with his first album of original music in almost a decade — Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s a career-defining masterpiece, an album both bracingly current yet timeless in its compositional breadth, pulling from the best of Dylan’s work through the decades. Rough and Rowdy Ways has the enthralling auditory grit of 1997’s Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, the socio-political layers of Highway 61 Revisited and the personal revelations of Blood on the Tracks. “Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too,” Dylan begins the album’s first song, “I Contain Multitudes.” “The flowers are dyin’, like all things do.” Dylan’s message is clear from the start: These are the end times. Yet after this apocalyptic pronouncement, he implores an unnamed woman to “Follow me close … I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.” In Dylan’s world, where “Everything’s flowing, all at the same time,” one can “sleep with life and death in the same bed.” Basically, even if everyone’s going to die, they don’t have to die alone. In a whimsical, almost snide cadence, Dylan throws in a myriad of other personal complexities, but one line stands out: “I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones and them British bad boys the Rolling Stones.” The lyric bristles at the ear, mainly because it’s so impenetrable. How is the 79-year-old Dylan, while a rock star like the Rolling Stones, like Anne Frank or Indiana Jones? Right from the start, Rough and Rowdy Ways is sonically striking. Dylan’s last original album, 2012’s Tempest, was chock-full of crashing drums, out-of-control guitars and a voice that sounded like Dylan had swallowed a gallon of rocks. Dylan has self-produced every one of his albums since 1997, and generally favors a raw, unfiltered performance by both himself and his tour band. This time, though, he’s meticulously crafted every aspect of the album. The instrumentation and his voice transform to reflect the subject matter of each song. “I Contain Multitudes” is almost completely acoustic, intimately shading the confessional lyrics as the listener is drawn in by Dylan’s soft voice. This comfort is ripped away on the second track, “False Prophet.” Amid crashing drums and smarmy guitar, Dylan continues the dark lamentations in a Tempest-style bark — “I know how it happened, I saw it begin. I opened my heart to the world, and the world caved in.” While he doesn’t yet reveal what caused this apocalypse, Dylan asserts with haggard surety “I’m no false prophet, I just know what I know.” Things get weirder in “My Own Version of You,” a song backed by a mournful steel guitar straight out of a retro horror flick. Dylan details his plan to dig up “limbs and livers and brains and hearts” and “bring someone to life … someone who feels the way that I feel.” Again, love and death are bedmates. While Dylan, parroting Victor Frankenstein, swears to act with “decency and common sense … for the benefit of all mankind” with his creation, he also asks “What would Julius Caesar do?” Like Caesar, and all authoritarians, Dylan considers his actions, however inhumane, permissible since he believes himself to be working for the common good. Adding to this prescient commentary, Dylan invites the listener to “Step right into the burning hell, where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell.” In these flames, Dylan somehow finds a way to sing a masterful love song, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” “I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars,” he begins. The Sinatra phase has paid off — Dylan’s voice hasn’t sounded this sharp in decades, a cavernous croon that soars with genuine affection. The soft instrumentation builds to a sublime electric guitar solo that’s one of the best moments on the album. There are also faint, almost imperceptible backing singers, one of which just might be Fiona Apple, whose soft choral drone gives the song a sense of deep melancholy. When Dylan sings, almost tearfully, “I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone,” it’s as moving as anything from his love-sick opus Blood on the Tracks. Thankfully Dylan meets someone, telling this unnamed lover “I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone.” In a time when reality itself seems to be falling apart, Dylan’s honesty is piercing. Then comes “Black Rider.” To the tune of a slithering acoustic guitar, Dylan criticizes an unnamed man for womanizing, violence and arrogance (all of which Dylan has displayed thus far in the album, making one wonder if the song is a soliloquy, critiquing Dylan’s own dark, masculine shades). Whoever the black rider is, Dylan tells the guy “You’ve been on the job too long,” before giving one the album’s most brutal, unexpected lines. Bob Dylan in 2020: Love, violence in the end of times MUSIC NOTEBOOK MUSIC NOTEBOOK DYLAN YONO Daily Arts Writer POETS.ORG Pop culture would have us believe that the Venn diagram between sports fans and art nerds is more or less two separate circles. As a humble representative of the tiny sliver in the middle, I want to introduce my friends on both sides to the world of their culturally prescribed adversary. There are some similarities between the two that few would expect to find — similarities that, I argue, allow us to view sport as art. Let’s set the scene. Our protagonist is NFL analyst Adam Schefter, who stakes his reputation on his straight-shooter, no-nonsense reporting. Schefter’s Twitter feed is the Associated Press of the NFL world; if he says something, it’s true. A few weeks ago, Schefter put on his best suit, set up his webcam in front of his well- stocked bookcase, and joined an ESPN broadcast held over Zoom, complete with all the aggressive rock music, flashy graphics and artificial urgency we’ve come to expect from the network. The occasion? The announcement of the order in which next season’s NFL games will be played in. One might think the order of games isn’t particularly interesting news, perhaps worthy of a short segment highlighting interesting matchups, but ESPN had other thoughts. They instead hosted a three-hour show breaking down each team’s schedule with such pressing commentary as “X team won’t be able to handle so many games in cold cities in December,” or, “Y rookie quarterback will be demoralized by difficult opponents early on.” This was stated with a baffling level of confidence, despite being months away from a season whose fate is already uncertain due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Schefter desperately tries to do the impossible and fill the home stretch of this painfully long production with anything resembling objective analysis. How did Schefter find himself in this position? The ESPN show is an extreme example of the increasing role of narrative in professional sports. A three-hour show for a schedule release is a bit excessive, but the stories that the media constructs around games are a large part of what makes them so exciting. Each NFL team plays 16 regular-season games. Though the average broadcast is over three hours long, the ball is only in play for about 11 minutes per game. To make these short bursts of action feel consequential, the media sets up elaborate storylines in the hours and days leading up to games. They do so by creating characters out of athletes and framing games such that they follow a traditional narrative arc, putting their characters in situations where they have to overcome obstacles larger than the game itself. The week one matchup between the Saints and the Buccaneers, for instance, becomes not just a potentially good game, but a battle between veterans Drew Brees and Tom Brady to solidify their legacy as the best quarterback in the league and to push the limits of how many years they can play at a high level. Analysts will routinely praise the determination and perseverance required of Brees and Brady to play through their 40s. Each play thus carries far more weight, as it’s not just the game on the line, but also a whole host of abstract values and principles. In this light, analysts can be considered analogous to storytellers — more so than regular journalists, as they add far more narrative to their subject matter than a reporter covering a “real” news story. That is to say, the difference between the actual events and their portrayal in the media is greater in sports journalism than it is in other branches of journalism. Athletes are, in a sense, analogous to performers, coaches to directors, referees to stage managers and so on. The result is a coherent “show” so to speak, a circular system consisting of the game and the media’s commentary about the game. The tendency to narrativize games can be found in other sports, but the NFL and its media apparatus have used these techniques the most. It pays off for them too. The NFL has for some time been the most watched sports league in the United States. One might argue that this phenomenon is just a way to sensationalize the game and increase profits. Though I’m inclined to agree, the narrativization of sport has nonetheless created the conditions by which sport can — and I think should — be considered art. Coinciding with the rise of narrativized sport, we’ve seen athletes and sports journalists broaden the scope of the issues that they’re willing to discuss. Whereas sports media in the past generally had a narrow focus on the sport itself (e.g. play-by-play recaps, statistics, trade and contract negotiations, etc.), it now doesn’t shy away players’ personalities, drama and even broader social issues that don’t directly relate to sports. This is mostly an organic process, without any motivation outside of generating more content for its own sake. People in sports media are probably not intentionally making sport like art, and if they are, it is only for the practical concern of making games more entertaining. There are, however, real stakes to these conversations. Sports media, especially NFL media, often uses rhetoric that praises athletes’ toughness, determination, grit and other similar attributes. This traditionally masculine rhetoric is often channelled to destructive ends. Athletes’ toughness is used to justify and downplay the serious health risks associated with playing a contact sport like football. Countless football players have suffered from CTE, and though the NFL has made some small gestures to player safety, the problem remains largely unaddressed. Violence by athletes is routinely swept under the rug. On the intersection of sports and the arts SEJJAD ALKHALBY Daily Arts Writer ARTS NOTEBOOK Read more online at michigandaily.com Read more online at michigandaily.com Read more online at michigandaily.com