I'm Julia Turner and this is the Slate Culture Gabfest How Quincy Jones Reinvented American Music Edition. It's Wednesday, November 6, 2024 and we are coming to you from the very recent past. We taping Tuesday morning, do not yet know how today's election will go and you listening sometime later on the far bank of our electoral rubicon. No, at least something. Hopefully it's something good. In the meantime, we're going to dig into today's topics.
First up, a film about a pivotal election in which one candidate wants to disempower women and another wants to recognize their full humanity. It's Conclave, a thriller set in the Vatican about cardinals deciding who should be Pope. Then Martha, a new documentary from RJ Cutler about lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, arguably our first influencer and the doc reveals an unusually fascinating and prickly one.
And finally, we'll be joined by Chris Melanfee to discuss the life and legacy of Quincy Jones, the extraordinary musician and producer who helped create the sound of America as we know it and who died this week at 91. Joining me today is Steve McCaff. Hello, Steve. Hey, Julia. How you doing this election day morning? I'll future me will let you know how present me was feeling. Okay. We'll just put a pen in that. How about you, Dana? Good morning.
Hey, good morning. Yeah. I'm just trying to narrow my focus to the next 15 minute segment of today. Segment by segment. All right. Well, let's get ourselves to the Vatican. Conclave is the newest film from director Edward Berger, who directed all quiet on the Western front back in 2022. And this film is a sumptuous rendering down to every casick and totally know of what happens when a Pope dies and cardinals convene to elect his successor.
Ray finds stars as Dean Lawrence, who must oversee the proceedings and the backstabbing competition among the various contending cardinals. In this scene, we hear finds his character and liberal cardinal Aldo Bellini played by Stanley Tucci discussing Bellini's bid for the papacy and the potential consequences of his conservative rivals victory. If Chodesco becomes Pope, he will undo 60 years of progress. You talk as if you're the only alternative, but Adyemi has the win behind him.
Adyemi. Adyemi. The man who believes that homosexual should be sent to prison in this world and hell in the next. Adyemi is not the answer to anything. And you know it. If you want to defeat the fate of the death group. This is a conclave, Aldo. It's not a war. It is a war. And you have to commit to a side. That clip definitely accurately captures the tone and drama of this film. Dana, please tell us what you made of Conclave.
I mean, I guess I'm almost embarrassed at how much I like this movie because it is really like middle brow airport fiction and it is based actually on a novel by Robert Harris that is kind of airport fiction. You know, the kind of like page turnery book that has embossed letters on the title and you know is sort of well research historical fiction, but not particularly high brow.
Right. Very different from all quiet in the Western front, Burgers last movie, also an adaptation, but they're sort of an adaptation of classic literature that has a long cinematic tradition and you know that movie won best foreign film at the Oscars. And while I wasn't crazy about that movie in terms of it's sort of there was nothing, let's say groundbreaking about it. Right.
There was something a little bit too fussy about it ultimately and this movie does not have that less to be approaching Conclave thinking, I don't want to see some fussy historical drama.
There's just a costume picture. This this movie makes you watch it minute by minute and there's a lot of things about it that are completely silly, the musical score being one of them that's just utterly over the top to the extent that as I said in my review, it sounds as if it's implying that all these cardinals are secretly in the service of Satan.
But they're not I promise it's not a horror movie. It is actually a sort of political thriller set within this this very exotic for most viewers right the exotic world of the Vatican it actually takes place a lot of it within the system chapel or a fake version of the system chapel that was constructed in Chinatown Rome.
But it's kind of luscious like it looks amazing. It's full of a list actors having snappy exchanges like the one you just heard between two Chi and finds. And while I can imagine there being a backlash against this movie if it becomes a big Oscar favorite because there is nothing kind of artistically new or inventive about it. It is a very fun two hours at the movies in my opinion. Steve fun at the movies. What do you make of this film?
Dana do not be embarrassed. I loved this movie. We will get to the controversial twist at the end in our spoiler special spoiler plus but I Julia your intro was so typically brilliant because it got at the heart of something which is why this might be comfort viewing the idea of something for all the intrigue and maybe sinister double dealing that this movie is sort of about.
At the end of the day the idea of a conclave sequestered from the rest of the world which is kind of a muguffin in the movie they can't. There's only so much they can get from the outside world as it becomes clear that Ralph finds character Thomas Lawrence who's the cardinal in charge of the conflict. He needs information in order to understand if there has been certain perfidies that should influence his guidance of the procedure. You know the idea of a very small but exceedingly powerful.
I mean there's something profoundly uncomfortable about it being a bunch of men but just the idea that ritual and orderliness might prevail over chaos and highly activated mobs in determining the fate of the whole world.
I don't know it was weird it was nice being in this weirdly comforting being in this airless chamber and then Dana you really nailed it I had written in my notes that there's something about Mario Puzzo's Godfather and its translation to the screen by Coppola that's echoed here though of course you know the Godfather movies are the first two or the two of the best American movies ever made this is not to that standard but you sense this big weirdly dignified airport novel.
Men to be pulpy but also not entirely low brow being successfully transferred by a thoughtful director to the screen like this deep. Umbroal you know atmospheric of the movie fun only enough I disagree I don't think that clip is all that representative there's much more scenery chewing even in that low key as it is then there is almost any other moment in the movie the movie is actually quite demure compared to that moment and you have these senior actors.
Absolutely bringing their a game to the material there there by and is is as much as the steady and reflective director or style I think they're utter by and into this is what make this movie so good and then just to convey the experience of it I the movie theater was wrapped and full it was wrapped it was breathless like it was as more traditional political suspense thriller right through every beat of it and then Isabella Rossillini who's magnificent delivers a performance.
Equal to the other leads and there are two or three moments one of one of which probably which involves her that are very very funny in the subtlest and odd as way that everyone knew to laugh at exactly those moments not in a derisory way or and not in a way that broke the mood and so I thought it was you know the ending will get to later I think it's a tremendously tremendously good blockbuster of a by gone.
Style I do it I really enjoyed myself wow okay I very much enjoyed it as well it's really well made it does not not make you think of Dan Brown although the Dan Brown books didn't turn into such good movies in my recollection but the sort of meticulous research about these hidden worlds and mysterious portents just turned into kind of page turning
drama there were some echoes there for me but I think I had this problem with the all quiet on the western front movie and maybe it's part of burgers directorial style I found that this movie was so beautiful and so well acted that I yearned for it to be making a point
perhaps beyond what it is actually trying to do and I'm not sure that this movie has anything to say and maybe that's fine but I like it's a little empty headed it's beautiful and it's entertaining but I'm not sure it is wise or intelligent
and again delightful two hours at the movie wonderful performances incredible precision there's the production design and costume design is extraordinary the attention to the detail of what this sequestered world is as beautiful I particularly love the scenes set in the kind of boarding house where all the cardinals stay they're bust over to the
16 chapel to have their proceedings but they stay in this just incredibly you know if you've spent time in Italy you've been in this kind of space that's sort of modern and classical at the same time it's minimalist but things are covered in marble but it's sort of spare and empty and cold and square there's fluorescent lighting just all over the place in a way that feels
odd there's a beautiful scene of like the steam trays blooming as they are brazing cabbages for the incoming cardinals on the first night of the conclave the world building is glorious the performances are glorious the plot mechanics are delightful and then it's sort of like this movie doesn't have anything to say the one
dramatic thread is the weight of management dean the fines character is really wrestling with he wants to just go often and live a life of prayer and and stop with his managerial duties but the dead pope whose death has necessitated the conclave has told him no he's meant to be a manager needs to be the dean needs to run this concave and he's you know so it's sort of at the weight
of managerial responsibility this is a theme that i'm interested in and i was like oh maybe this is a movie about that but not quite sure it really goes anywhere with that then there's sort of faith crisis of faith purity of faith faith versus power
movie about the mechanics of power maybe it's a little bit more to say there and then the movie and i think we'll get to this a little bit more because we're going to do a spoiler plus segment about the ending movie also has some ideas about gender and obviously what's a lean-e is like you know those little bouillon cubes that are like hyper concentrated broth she's like a little bullion cube of like potent womanhood in this movie full of men you know just like representing all of
woman kind and she's such an extraordinary performer she can do it that i ended up feeling like the movie is kind of using the idea of gender to advance the plot rather than using the plot and the beautiful production design to say anything interesting about gender and then that made me feel a little yucky and used so it to me it curdles a bit when you try to think about it and maybe that's just
wanting too much from this airport thriller of a movie or maybe those are the kinds of questions that will begin to come up of this seriously becomes a little bit more for best picture but i think this movie is a bit of a dim bulb underneath all the gorgeousness am i wrong well julio i love your take on the movie right that there's that there's bureaucracy
and spirituality and somehow the catholic church by its very nature has to somehow combine these two and ray finds they're all good but he is so good in this movie he holds it together the way he holds the conclave together and it's very at there's a moment where you've connected very deeply to him to his face and the gravity of his conscience as he wears it
non ostentatiously but unmistakably and you think well he should be Pope but this is addressed in a remarkable line in the movie where someone I think too she says it to him and he says I lack the spiritual depth right he like takes that seriously that both of these things have to somehow be balanced in this one human being and he's not that person so he has self knowledge in the way that the other
aspirants don't I don't want to spoil the movie at all but it's attempt to be deep as the movie clearly was wrapping up I was like now I need they need a gigantic twist or something because it somehow wasn't enough to have just arrived here like what is this movie really about and that's why I think this twist that I think anyone reading any review would understand sort of comes out of left field and redefines the entire film
kind of had to happen and then that means the Julius correct that somehow in the course of what the movie seemed to be about substantively it didn't become all that substantive.
Yeah this movie is a closed system and that's why maybe that's why I let off when Julia said all right what do you think with a little bit of a note of embarrassment before going on to say well basically I had a widely relic in good time watching the movie and everyone should go see it like that sounds like a rave but ultimately this movie is a closed system which is why it feels kind of minor to me you know it's it's great it succeeds in all these things that it sets out to do but it doesn't
feel like an important movie that that lasts and stays with you in the twist which will get to in the in the plus strangely is not cathartic because it's so out of left field that it doesn't really resolve anything that the previous movie was about.
So that's why I guess I started off with a slight note of feeling a bash about my enthusiasm for the movie and it's also why I could see there being a backlash if this does become like the green book of this Oscar season you know Marcaras who's been a guest on our show many times the
great film critic film historian said I think it was just in his kind of social media response to Con Clay if he said this feels and I mean this in a good way like a golden era mirror max movie you know like before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein in the day of like the English patient you know one of those kind of international glossy co-productions that everybody loves but nobody really respects it's so Shakespeare in love.
Right it's incredibly crowd pleasing it doesn't have a whole lot on its mind and there will definitely be movies in the running for best picture that are you know more more innovative and formidable works of art than Con Clay and there definitely will be movies in the Oscar conversation for best picture that are more formidable rocky you know cathartic works of art to grapple with then Con Clay.
I it's a great movie right like sometimes movies are self enclosed chambers of wrapped attention giving right like we're in there in the Con Clay like I just if you calibrate your expectations right I think you will like this movie will not take an airplane to
dignify the experience of watching this movie go to a theater I really I really did enjoy it that much. All right well Con Clay I think we all think you should see it we're going to get into the twist ending in our plus segment so stay tuned for that and become a member if you are curious and we'll move on.
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Remember to head to Zbiotics dot com slash culture and use the code culture at checkout for 15% off. Martha comes to us from director RJ Cutler known for documentaries about figures like Anna Windtour and Billy Eilish in the film he uses archival footage a chorus of her but not seen commentators and a sit down conversation with Martha Stewart to offer a portrait of America's first
self-made female billionaire a woman who built an empire peddling in advanced and aspirational form of domesticity to American women here's a clip from the film exploring Martha Stewart's breakout success following her separation from her husband. The first voice we hear is is old a motley who edited Martha Stewart living magazine and the last one is Stewart herself.
She was worried going on book tour as her separation became public was going to be tricky to navigate but it turned out people didn't care at all. They just wanted to know how to make cakes. Women across the country are lining up to meet this hostess with the most this woman who has shrewdly sold herself to the American public as the queen of perfection.
After Andy left I really lost myself in work the ideas for the future and luckily I had them luckily I could have just been a miserable husband housewife but I didn't let that happen to myself and I'm so happy I didn't. Steve I am so curious what you made of this film and whether it helped recontextualize Martha Stewart for you.
Absolutely I mean I knew that bear out outlines of the story but there was so much I had no clue about beginning with the fact of her upbringing which was this curious mix of idyllic and utterly miserable which of course goes into creating someone like Martha Stewart but the public and private Martha Stewart.
Her father was a beautiful man who was an arse assistant and Martinette he broke his children each in their own way surprisingly Martha Stewart she's the oddest combination of someone capable of acknowledging that but without any attendant introspection or reaction in a weird way.
I think it would be wrong not to admit that there are sociopathic elements to the person who's presented rather nakedly by both by the filmmaker are take cutler and by third parties who are interviewed but also by Martha Stewart now 83 herself in these extensive interviews I mean there's there's an odd lack of a center to her as a human being in some odd sense so beginning with her childhood it fills in all these blank spots for someone like me including what kind of.
I mean I think one has to submit it what an exquisitely beautiful young woman she was how how frequently photographed she was by her lovers and friends how just how striking looking she was and she becomes a model I think model is her first career as that play begins to play out I guess she enters further into her she moves further into her 20 she then becomes a stockbroker at a time when women effectively didn't do that it was a mailman opalized.
Profession that was openly hostile to women is anything other than you know back office support staff and she thrives as that I mean she's clearly a brilliant and a driven woman the stockbroker thing plays out she's married to a man who's in publishing he publishes art books and she begins catering events for him and she just does something as food people tell me almost completely new in the world of catering in terms of presentation thoughtfulness kinds of ingredients and breaks new ground.
There she becomes Martha Stewart what was interesting to me is that her emergence is Martha Stewart happens when she's no longer an exceptionally young person she's a woman of the world well into her 40s and the person we become associated with you know the person we associate with that with that name that moment also coincides with this ethic of the 80s right which I'm obsessed with when the ethic of hyper competition enters all of American life well it never occurred to me how Martha Stewart is part of the world.
She's how Martha Stewart is part of this phenomenon she simply imported the dominant ethic of the time of hyper competition into the domestic sphere that was her great insight that you could be as obsessive as driven as megalomaniacl in a weird way in the home space and as unforgiving to imperfection and so for me what this documentary did most of all is it brought home to me why yes I admire her I really I really you cannot
believe the will to power of this person at one point she's compared to scarlet o'hara scarfing down the turn up or whatever hideously you know like a root vegetable with the dirt still clinging to it in order to survive and and determines to be incongruple as a human being that is Martha Stewart and there's a heroism to that especially you know it's twice as hard 10 times 50 times as hard for a woman at the same time I always sensed the joylessness and the ice coldness of the world.
The ice coldness at the heart of her aesthetic and the heart of her project and you this documentary for all its flaws gets at that weird dialectic and her own dana her own deep pervasive sense of domestic unhappiness right that's the odd dialectic it was the inability to draw warmth and meaning apparently from human relations as they took place inside the home that made her turn it into a stage set for
perfection no matter how many turkeys you cover in puff pastry dana curious for your thoughts.
Yeah actually the Steve led perfectly into what I had to say which I should start with something that is both a disclosure and also a good way to dig into my own feelings about Martha Stewart which is that when I first moved to New York in the late 90s this must have been I tried to figure it out last night based on where I was living and what was going on in the world it must have been 1999 or 2000 I tempt Martha Stewart living.
Oh no you know it was that period you know when you move to a new city in your babysitting and taking whatever temp jobs your friends give you because they can't do them anymore and it was not at all because I was trying to move up in the magazine world at the time I was trying to move up in that academic world right L.O.L.
and but one of the jobs that I had I think for maybe like two different six week periods separated by some other time was being a fact checker at Martha Stewart living during like the kind of golden Martha empire right because I think 2004 was the year of her imprisonment 2003 2004 was the insider trading scandal and the supposed fall for empire which of course she later rebuilt but this was like in the first era right of Queen Martha and it was just such a strange place to work Martha Stewart living.
I think she only came in once and there was definitely sort of a Miranda priestly vibe the day she came in where people who were trying to work their way up the ladder were you know worried but I didn't care because I was just a day job or and the thing that always struck me about her magazine right which I would basically spend my days doing things like you know calling up caterers to make sure that it was true that you know such and such was the price for their fruit basket or whatever it was all just about kind of consumer products but there are always big piles of the magazine.
So I would take the magazine home and there was at the time this feature that was Martha's calendar I think it was at the beginning of the magazine and it would be whatever month it was of course she's always on the cover right it's one of those completely Martha centric publications and there was this calendar that was supposedly her calendar for the month and I used to annotate it this is like a thing I used to do as a kind of gag for my friends as I would annotate the calendar with snarky remarks about you know on the empty days I would put other activities that Martha was doing the next day.
Other activities that Martha was doing and then bring the magazine home again with my friends so the actual printed calendar would say things like you know December 2nd prune back rose bush bushes for the winter and then the next day I would put something like sit at home alone and cry over divorce.
Because the calendar always made her life looks so lonely and empty and so did all the spreads in the magazine and it was just very bizarre to me that this guru that everybody was turning to to make their lifestyle more beautiful just was was almost deliberately foregrounding her own loneliness you know and I think probably the way that it was understood by her and maybe by her fans to was that it was more about independence like she's remaking herself and she's happy alone with her rose bushes.
And of course one can be happy alone with one's rose bushes but there was just always Steve exactly like you were saying just such a sense of deep loneliness to me at the heart of that magazine and its presentation of her lifestyle and by extension the ideal lifestyle and to me was always the paradox of Martha Stewart that I never quite understood and Martha is a very tough nut to crack even in this documentary which does manage to have some moments of kind of exposing that that side of her right like you come out of it Steve like you say with a lot of admiration for her.
And certainly admiration for her you know business sense and her entrepreneurial genius and all of that but you don't come out with very warm feelings toward there was one review that we read where somebody said, oh and Martha's never not likable and I thought I disagree I think she never is likable. I never felt a single moment of warmth toward her and the idea of trying to be close to her seem terrifying but she's very funny. seems somewhat self-aware in a way.
And I think she was not happy with this documentary and has given very vocal interviews about how and not how it was with how it came out. And that he didn't show the parts that he wanted or to show, which essentially were the parts that make her look good. But this is not one of those self-produced pop star documentaries that is all about hageography. And I respect that about it. It's not an expose either. It's clear that RJ Cutler has a lot of respect for Martha.
But there's some moments where he leaves the camera on her face longer than she would want it to be on her face as she struggles to answer some of these questions, usually having to do with self-disclosure. And I think it's worth watching precisely for those moments. I, in general, think it's really worth watching. I mean, so I worked at Timing during that heyday when Martha Stewart Living was a Timing magazine.
So I got a free copy every month on my little desk while I was fact checking sports stories, it's sports illustrated women. And I would take it back to my shambolic Brooklyn apartment and chortle with my friends about like, oh, we're going to make marshmallow peeps from scratch. Like why on earth did you do that? Like, cost 99. I remember fact checking your recipe for making lozenges from scratch. Like, you're not just going to buy some dang lozenges? Coffed up.
Which, you know, I mean, honestly, if you think about this year's like, Treadwave Discourse, it was interesting to me watching this documentary. How often she talks about herself as a teacher and a purveyor of information and a couple of the folks who worked on the magazine with her during its heyday, talk about trying to provide a generation of women who had working moms with housekeeping information that they didn't get otherwise.
So there's really a sense she refers to herself as a teacher like many, many times. And she has this sort of unyielding mastery of her domain. She's not one of those teachers who's really concerned about your growth. She's one of those teachers who's like, this is the way to do it. There's some footage of her after she's convicted, but before she's sentenced, she's hired a documentary into record that Easter are Thanksgiving that she throws during that window.
And the footage from that is revealing and sort of shocking as she like berates various helpers in the kitchen for having the temerity to cut an orange with a paring knife instead of a larger knife. And she's so bothered. Like, you almost feel, I mean, she's being so rude to this person. It does not seem like a productive way to be a teacher, but you also kind of feel that she is so physically bothered by the wrong implement cutting the orange that she can't help it.
Like, I almost felt like what a strange self to be in Martha Stewart's self. And the movie also highlights an interesting thing about her, which has been key to her reinvention, which is she is self-aware enough to recognize that it's funny for her to be a dynamic media duo with Snoop Dogg and to make a bunch of ribald and vicious roasts on the Justin Bieber roast in the 20 teens, which was part of her media come back.
She has a self-awareness, but she does not seem to have introspection or self-knowledge, which is really odd. Like, I don't know that I would have realized how much those things could be different until watching this documentary. And so I think the documentary is quite smart about that and sort of what kind of drivenness and unyieldingness you might need to have to build the empire she built and then sort of what how much you can learn and grow and how much you cannot.
I want to ask you guys about a weird formal choice that the documentary makes, which is Martha's the only talking head we see. They interview colleagues at Martha Stewart, I'm the media, people who edited the magazine, her daughter Sam Waxel, the friend who got her into the insider trading mess, whatever you make of it. It various commentators, including Meg James, a wonderful colleague of mine from Los Angeles Times. There's a ton of interviews throughout. You don't ever see the interviews.
And that's a choice that worked okay for me throughout much of the film, but then also interviewed or a number of the women that she spent time with when she was in prison and reducing those women to just voices with weird illustrations, talking about how she taught them all how to garden and build businesses in prison. I felt, I wish that the film had strayed from its formal. I'm curious what you guys made of that formal thing. I sort of was okay with it until we got there.
And then I was like, this is too interesting. I want to see and hear these women who are in jail with Martha Stewart. Them as just voices feels odd. And I understand I guess if you're making the film, then like why do you draw the line there and not at the daughter and then if you include the daughter, why not include Sam? I mean, maybe, I don't know. But did that work for you, leaving the commentators off screen?
I very much like that choice because it's the corollary to the magazine, which just features her on every cover and to her own solipsism and that loneliness that we've all spoken to about her, that sort of that having the only face in a documentary be the subject for this subject in particular was enormously powerful, which just wasn't diluted at all.
And it just got at that sense of loneliness rooted in the unreality of other people as to your absolutely brilliant point, which is something like that. It occurred to me, but I couldn't never have articulated it. So perfectly, it just didn't know that introspection and self-awareness could be such entirely distinct effects or qualities in the human being until you saw this documentary.
I just want to recall one moment from the movie before we have to move on, which is, she's just been married, she's painfully young, she's on her honeymoon and she goes for whatever reason all by herself to the Dwomo in Florence. And she comes across a stranger, very handsome tall blonde as a mid-myre collection in her telling young man, and they begin to make out in the Dwomo. And so Articolor quite reasonably is intrigued by this story and says, well, how did this happen, right?
And then she's like, the emotions, what emotions? The emotions of being in the Dwomo. And then she proceeds to describe it as if, well, anybody in that moment, would have underneath those frescoes or whatever the fuck they are and the light filtering down from the sky through the whatever and the, any one of us would have planned our lips on a total stranger on our honeymoon. It's not your honeymoon until you've made out with a stranger in the Dwomo.
I was just trying to like, imagine workshopping that with my wife, you know, like, I mean, yes, we were on, I mean, first of all, we're honeymooning in Paris and I'm in the Sandsle piece and by myself and those Delacquop paintings, those Delacquop murals. I mean, why wouldn't I have, you know, singled out this, you know, stranger and begin kissing? I mean, it's like, it doesn't, it's just this so bizarre that she's willing to admit it and speak about it, frankly.
And then she shuts down completely any chain of like, interior, mental and emotional causation by which she, this highly specific human being would have engaged in completely anomalous behavior and then proceeded with the marriage, right? Like not have the revelation that this wasn't a great idea.
Yeah, and the other thing I love about it that it sort of sets for her whole career is she seems unable to process what that was about or how weird it was, but also sets up this idea that extraordinary beauty is what engenders emotion, you know,
like which then brings you back to the puff pastry turkey and the homemade lasanges and, you know, the glorious final drone shot of her gardens at Turkey L, I'm like, oh, maybe she thinks if she can make a world as beautiful as the Duomo then she can populate it with the kind of emotion that she feels and feels she has the right to feel, but seems to have struggled to like build in a substantive way in her life.
I don't know, she's fascinating and the doc is really interesting and we've had so many docs that are self-aware and somewhat introspective celebrities peddling their selfhood to us in a cany fashion, including the reason fiance and Beckham docs and even to some degree, the supermodel doc and this one is a more classic doc where she is truly the subject, much to her surprise and definitely a super interesting watch.
All right, well the film is Martha, it's available on Netflix, check it out and let us know what you think and if you yourself have ever covered a turkey and puff pastry, we are all ears. Have you heard who the latest power couple is? Well, you won't see this coming, it's discover and cash back.
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For our final segment, we are joined by M-FOP, Chris Malanfi, extremely musical friend of the program, to memorialize the legendary American music producer, Quincy Jones, whose influence was so vast, it is truly hard to imagine what America would sound like now without him. Who else to name just a few of his credits, like truly this is a sprinkling on the cupcake of his work and it's the craziest sprinkling I've ever come up with.
Who else worked with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis, produced songs, hit songs as varied as it's my party by Leslie Gore, and don't stop till you get enough by Michael Jackson. Produced Thriller for Cry and I Loud, the best selling album of all time. Corraled all those pop egos we talked about when we talked about the We Are the World documentary for We Are the World.
And just to toss it off, wrote the music that eventually got repurposed into the Austin Powers theme song. Again, this is like 1 1,000th of the uvra, it's insane. Chris, thank you so much for joining us to discuss Jones and his legacy. Thank you Julia, I mean, it's a sad occasion to lose him, but some joyful music to talk about, so that's good. Yeah, and a celebration of what he brought.
One of the reasons we invited you on is because earlier this year, you devoted an episode of your wonderful music podcast hit parade to Quincy Jones and his work. And I'd love it if you could lay out the story a little bit for folks who've been so wrapped up with the election this week. They haven't had time to read the obituaries in Incomia that have been published since Jones died.
Okay, so Quincy Delight Jones Delight, is his middle name, literally, at birth, was born in 1933 on the South side of Chicago. And he had a somewhat tumultuous childhood in that his mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic when he was still a boy and was put in a mental institution and his father remarried. After his father remarried, the family moved to Seattle. So really, Seattle is almost more important, even though Chicago obviously has that rich tradition of music.
Seattle's almost more important to the formation of Quincy. That's where he starts learning how to play the trumpet and becomes really good at it. It's where he meets a young Ray Charles, Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for this meeting. Quincy is 14, Ray is 16, Ray Charles is just relocated to Seattle from Florida and is already making a name for himself as this prodigy on the piano.
And to Quincy, it was something that Quincy had already realized, even before he met Ray Charles, jazz music in particular and jazz as the touchstone of his life was freedom. Particularly for a young black man, still in the period of Jim Crow, jazz represented a way forward and a way out for Quincy. And the thing about him is that he's such a prodigy. He's a very good trumpet player, but what he's even more amazing at is he understands the underpinnings of music.
By the time he finishes what became the Berkeley School of Music, it wasn't even called that when he attended in the 1940s and 50s. He moves to New York, he insinuates himself into the world of people like Lionel Hampton and Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. He's a very, very good brass player, but he's an even better arranger. He's like the man behind the man. He's the guy who knows how to write horn charts as they're called for arranging for bands. And he's able to assemble people.
One of his earliest gigs was he was invited on a European tour by Lionel Hampton and then not long after that, he was invited out by, he was playing in the band of Dizzy Gillespie. When Gillespie was invited to put together a big band of outstanding musicians, he chose Quincy to lead the ensemble. And remember in the mid 50s when this was happening, Quincy is barely into his 20s. So Quincy always kind of had this gravitas and this authority and he was always a good hang.
And that's part of his gift. And then he just starts working with everybody. First in jazz, then in pop and all these vocalists, everybody heroes of his from Ray Charles to Dina Washington to Count Basie to, he meets Frank Sinatra in the 60s and produces two of Frank's most important albums, an album that's co-credited with Count Basie called It Might as Well Be Swing which produces the iconic version of Fly Me to the Moon. Fly Me to the Moon, let me play among the stars.
Let me see what spring is like on a Jupiter and Mars. And a live album called Sinatra at the Sands which is like Sinatra's biggest selling live album. And he, you know, as an executive from Mercury Records, by the way, one of the first black executives in recording industry history, he discovers Leslie Gore, a white Jewish teenage girl from New Jersey and he signs her and records it's my party. It's my party and I cry if I want to, if I want to, if I want to, you a cartoon.
If it happened to you. And that's, by the way, one of my favorite trivia questions about Quincy. What's Quincy's first hot 100 number one hit? It's not anything with Michael Jackson. In 1963, it's my party by Leslie Gore. I mean, holding her hand when he's supposed to be mine. It's my party. And once you know that, you kind of can't on hear it because the horns on that record, you realize, oh, Quincy made this happen. You know, this is why this record sounds this way. I happen to you.
Play on my records. It's a girl group song, but it's got a little bit of funk to it in 1963 terms. So I mean, and that's only the beginning of what then becomes this just streak of activity. All right, I'm glad we started off by hearing Sinatra and Leslie Gore because that lets us see just a few of the incredibly diverse musical influences that Quincy Jones was bringing with him.
I think something that really kept striking me, Chris listening to your incredible two-part Quincy Jones, hit parade, was the way so many musical influences from highbrow to lowbrow sort of an entire history of pop and classical and jazz. And so kind of went pouring into this one person who then kind of released it in changed form into the pop world, if that makes sense.
And another name, since we're dropping big names that crossed paths at one point or another with Quincy Jones, my jaw dropped when I read in some obituary that he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, this music teacher who's legendary for having taught, I don't even know Philip Glass and Aaron Copeland and Oster Piazzola, like all of these huge musical figures of the 20th century, right? And Quincy Jones is part of that lineage as well.
So it's just kind of extraordinary how he would alchemize that amount of musicianship and musical knowledge into turning out three minute pop hits that everybody remembers 60 years after they were recorded. Yeah, all of his music was an amalgam of multiple things. Not unlike Rock and Roll. And one point I made, I was talking to somebody else after my Quincy Jones episode, I was saying that what's interesting about Quincy is that his career rises with Rock and Roll.
But it almost sits alongside Rock and Roll, like actual Rock and Roll didn't interest him that much. He was a jazz guy, but then he fuses his jazz influences with Gro Group Pop in the case of Leslie Gore, or film score music. He starts writing film score music in the mid 60s for films like The Pawn Broker or In Cold Blood, or In The Heat of the Night. Or he starts fusing it with funk by the end of the 60s in early 70s. He starts scoring hit albums under his own name.
So he's one of those producers. If you think about modern day producers from Mark Ronson to Metro Booman, who now have their own names and can actually front albums as producers, Quincy Jones was doing this 60, 65 years ago. And so he's kind of a renaissance man. And his music is a potpourri of influences throughout. And that's part of what makes him so interesting. And why he becomes the polymath that he becomes by the 70s and 80s and starts producing people like Michael Jackson.
Chris, picking up on his adjacency parallel adjacency with some intersecting points with Rock and Roll, I'm curious how self-consciously Quincy Jones was operating especially over the course of the 70s culminating on off the wall and really reviving Michael Jackson's career as an adult, Michael Jackson.
How consciously he was working against the kind of rockest sense of music history, which is Elvis Begette's Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, and this whole notion of kind of lyrical sophistication and sonic sophistication in Rock and Roll. For him was rooted, I would imagine, in a kind of theft, a primal and original theft. There's this famous interview that he gave a few years ago where he says that Beatles, the Stones, they were no play motherfuckers, right? Yes, no play motherfuckers.
Now one of his most famous quotes. I love that quote, but that sense that with Michael Jackson he'd found not only potentially the greatest American entertainer possibly whoever lived and one of the first truly global entertainers.
He'd also found a way of reappropriating that narrative from effectively white boys with guitars and recentering it on a black tradition and pop. And it's as fascinating, though, we are the world happens, Bruce and Bob Dylan are secondary, very much secondary figures, and there's not an electric guitar in sight. I mean, it's in addition to that song being everything it obviously was in terms of its charitable ambitions. It's a statement about that history is over.
We've taken it back, now we're going someplace else. Yeah, I mean, I guess the way I would answer that in terms of Quincy Jones' an avatar of black derived excellence, you know, is that he, even before he actually got to know Michael Jackson, which was on the set of the movie The Wiz, which was directed by his friend Sydney Lumet and Quincy had already done scores for Sydney Lumet so he was asked to work on the music for The Wiz.
Even before he met Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones was always, he was working with the likes of Sinatra and Leslie Gore, but he was teaming with black heroes of his because he sort of regarded black music as kind of the cauldron, the root of musical greatness.
And, you know, not only jazz, most obviously, which is the world he comes out of, but even funk, you know, he starts merging his own music by the end of the 60s on albums like Walking in Space and Body Heat that were hit albums under his own name. He starts fusing his music with funk. He does things like doing a funky version of the Carol King song Smackwater Jack, which he did in 1971. He came to the man with a shotgun in his hand. Shotgun! I'm talking about the back man.
He does the theme to the TV sitcom Sanford and Son. If you've ever heard that, that's Quincy Jones's handy work. He produces Aretha Franklin. He teams with the brothers Johnson who are these two, you know, guitar playing sort of funk and pop and R&B wizards. He, you know, has a hit song in 1978 that's fronted by Shaka Khan called Stuff Like That, you know, that tops the R&B charts. And this is all before Michael Jackson enters his life.
And then what he does for Michael is he figures out a way forward for Michael. And one of the things I like to say about Off the Wall, the 1979 album that Quincy produces for Michael that begins their collaboration is it's kind of, and I may be a bit sweeping when I say this, kind of the first post disco album. It is of disco, but it is beyond disco. It's an album that comes out at the end of 79 after the disco sucks thing is caught on when a lot of people are fed up with disco.
And it's as if Michael Jackson through Quincy Jones is bridging disco into the 80s. There are strings Michael singing about riding the boogie. You know, there's lots of disco touchstones on it, but there's also this foreshadowing of the sound of 80s pop. And it's as if on that album Michael and Quincy are together inventing the sound of 80s pop. And it's amazing.
But then finally enough, it comes up against, I can't remember the quote exactly in a hip-haired episode, but it comes up against the quote-unquote glass ceiling for black artists. It wins nothing practically at the Grammys. There's no recognition of it as a milestone in a black genius or pop genius or any kind of genius. There's not the kind of recognition that he then gets with Thriller, the utter unmitigated triumph.
Well, and Michael and Quincy were very deliberate in what they did with Thriller because, you know, as I point out in the episode, they had already covered a Paul McCartney song on Off the Wall. And then they decided, okay, for the first single for Thriller, it's nobody's favorite song from Thriller. We're actually going to team Michael Jackson on a duet with Paul McCartney, the most insipid song on Thriller, The Girl Is Mine.
And it's the first single and it goes to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts. And it sets up Thriller. And then every single after that is better than The Girl Is Mine. But they are deliberately trying to cross Michael over because, again, as you said, Off the Wall, despite creating four top ten hits, only wins an R&B prize at the Grammys. And Michael's like, I'm not doing that again.
Michael wants to be the King of Pop and Quincy is the conduit through which, you know, he becomes the King of Pop.
It seems like in some ways the story of Quincy's career is a depth of musical knowledge and curiosity and a really Catholic curiosity, like collaborating all over, drawing from all over, finding teachers all over that helps him build an undeniable body of music that cuts against the segregation of pop music in mid-century America and later that you've covered so extensively on your show. And that the kind of undeniable pursuit of undeniable music is just this through line in his career.
And it seems to come from this incredibly voracious, generous curiosity. I mean, just the best of what American culture can produce and the joy that American culture can produce seems to just be studied throughout. And I, it's one of the best things, the most fun things about learning about all of the places that he went and all of the things he accomplished. Chris Quincy Jones was 91 when he died this week.
And it is far from the case that he spent his years after that kind of golden period of producing Michael Jackson's three biggest albums, you know, just resting on his laurels. He continued to an extraordinary degree to remain mixed up in the music industry. And I wanted you to talk about later Quincy Jones. After being, I don't know, in the post 1980s era, some of the, some of the maybe highlights that you wanted to mark.
Well, I mean, probably the biggest highlight comes right at the beginning of the 90s. It's an album he releases in the closing weeks of 1989 and it wins the Grammy for album of the year in 1991 called Back on the Block. Back on the block is, you know, his first album under his own name in about a decade.
And Q's goal on the disc was to span all of his interests and his influences from bebop to hip hop, you know, one track found him mixing jazz grates like Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughn with rappers, cool Modi and Big Daddy Kane. He called in friends from across the industry to provide vocals. He scored a hit with his friend Ray Charles, a remake of the Brothers Johnson hit all the good to you.
He scored a hit with a slow jam called the Secret Garden, which is, you know, still considered one of the great, you know, R&B slow jams of the last, I don't know, 40 years, you know, and he scored multiple chart tarpors. And basically, he then goes to the Grammys the following year and, you know, wins album of the year.
And I've been saying to everybody this year that if Beyonce manages to finally win album of the year, early next year with Cowboy Carter, it'll be because she basically followed the Quincy Jones playbook like that, that album that's packed with guests and is very eclectic and is nominally a country album, but is at least like four or five other things. That's kind of, you know, Beyonce following the Quincy Jones approach.
You know, and he kept doing, you know, albums like that into the 90s and aughts, you know, albums that, you know, joined together different artists like his 1995 album, Q's, Juke Joint, and, you know, working with everybody from babyface to Tamiya, you know, he really, he even appeared on the last album by the weekend in 2022. So, you know, Quincy Jones was just omnipresent in pop and he had a very small C Catholic definition of what qualified for pop and he kind of did it all.
Well Chris, thank you so much for coming to help us think through some of his impact. And I would recommend that all of our listeners, whatever is going on in America at the moment that you're listening to this show, submerge yourself in Quincy Jones's work, it's, it's glorious and it's a sad occasion, but a glorious career to, to celebrate and talk about. So thank you, Chris, for joining us. It was my pleasure.
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Our business item this week is just to tell Slate Plus listeners and non-slate plus listeners about our bonus episode this week. As you know, if you're a Slate Plus member, our Slate Plus segments now come as freestanding episodes in your feed. This week we're going to be doing a classic spoiler-special style plus segment about Conclave, which is one of those twist-laden movies that you can't really talk about without talking about the big rugpole at the end.
So we will separate our Conclave discussion into the main discussion and then some yammering about the twist, which is very fun to talk about. I'm sure we'll get into some interesting territory in that segment because it's a very hot button kind of twist. If you're a Slate Plus member, you will be getting that segment in your feed and if you're not a Slate Plus member and you want to get that segment, you can become one by going to Slate.com slash Culture Plus.
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Chris, you want to stick around and endorse with us? I'd be delighted. All right. We'll start, however, with Dana. Dana, what you got for us this week? You know, I'm going to endorse something that we almost talked about for a few weeks running. This thing sometimes happens with picking topics for our show where there's something that we want to talk about, but it sort of gets buried by other breaking stories and we never do.
And I'm hoping that people don't miss this because it's really wonderful. Have any of you all seen the doc Will and Harper on Netflix, the one about Will Farrell and his trans best friend? I haven't seen it yet. I've heard like 7,000 interviews about it. I haven't seen it. I feel like in a way it was sort of overcovered because then I at least in my world, not many people saw it because they all sort of felt like I've seen so many trailers on Netflix.
I know what it's about, but you sort of have to experience it. I mean, this movie is very simple in its construction, but the friendship at the heart of it is so winning that I cannot imagine it wouldn't appeal to most listeners to our show.
So if you haven't seen the massive over coverage of this Netflix doc when it came out, it's just about the friendship between Will Farrell and Harper's Steel, who was for many years an SNL writer is one of Will Farrell's oldest friends and very recently at a, you know, at the age of, I don't remember if they say exactly how old she is, but, you know, around Will Farrell's age. So well into middle age, she transitioned and that was a shock to almost everyone in her life, including Will Farrell.
And this movie is just about a road trip across America that the two friends take while mostly sitting in the car and talking about their friendship, about the transition, about, you know, Will Farrell sort of getting used to the idea that, you know, his best friend is someone very different than he thought for all those years. And also some encounters with the public. So it is in a way about, you know, moving through the world as a newly transitioned person.
But at heart, it really is just about two really funny people who have been friends for a long time having a conversation. So it has a little bit of a My Dinner with Andre or the trip, you know, those Steve Kuggen, movies, you know, trip movies of just a very intimate portrait of a, of two funny friends. So Will and Harper, it's on Netflix and it goes down easy. Oh, I have a meeting to check that out. I'm glad to hear that I should Steve. What have you got today?
So I'm going to endorse a thing and the way to experience the thing. I adore the new Kira album, Songs of a Lost World. I think it's just a tremendous contribution to like the late phase of the Kira catalog. And I have this totally facile, largely untrue theory of dyads that helps organize my thinking about certain figures, Lenin and McCartney, Mozart, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Dostoy, S.K. Two, which I would add, Morrissey and Robert Smith.
And the wonderful thing about Robert Smith is how beautifully he's acquitted himself in the long run alongside how poorly Morrissey's acquitted himself. There's a great recent New York Times piece in which Robert Smith says, I'm a 65 year old man who wears lipstick. I don't know why anyone's listening to me, you know, my opinion is about anything, much less politics.
But he made this album going off alone himself into his home sound studio on Saturday nights with a tumbler full of, I'm going to imagine it was whiskey but booze. And recording long lush and sort of despairing but exultant soundscapes. They sound very much like Kira songs except almost, you know, totally elongated and protracted out. But their melodies and the songwriting are quite strong.
And there's this funny overlap, Chris, I'm curious if you know the record, but there's just funny overlap between like the 15 year old mall rat, you know, that I once was sort of exulting, you know, to my own diluted self importance and grandiosely exulting to my own diluted self importance when I hear a Kira song and 60 year old me, you know, it's like kind of the old man in you because it's very much a melodramatic album about coming to the end, right?
I mean, and I wouldn't want to denigrate it by calling it only melodramatic. They always use the kind of color of melodrama to get it some thing we actually feel.
It's why those songs are so powerful like we have naturally melodramatic, swooning inclinations inside of us just by being human and he does this great job of riding the line between a really deeply felt authenticity and mockishness that really works in an album about mortality and the experience that I'm going to endorse is in the run up to the election whose day we're recording on. I was feeling what we were all feeling nausea, despair, deep anxiety, dread.
I mean, hate and anger that I hate myself for having to feel. And I was decided to like cook dinner with a pair of ear buds in and listen to this record which I hadn't heard from beginning to end. And it turned out to have that kind of Dana, is it homeopathic or aliopathic therapy where you take the horrible thing and take an intensified tincture of it? Yeah, that would be homeopathy, right? Because it's the same.
It had this wonderful homeopathic effect and how long has it been since you listened to an album from beginning to end where the quote unquote weaker songs that would play so poorly in isolation have a place and a purpose in the arc of the whole thing. I didn't end up thinking of any of the songs as weaker, just less available to appreciating and understanding as singletons or orphans. And it's just the great, I think it's a great record.
Chris, curious to know if you are a sucker for it like I am. Oh, I'm a total sucker for it. I mean, you know, this is my Gen X nostalgia. Several critics have said it's their best album since disintegration. I think I agree with that. What I love about the cure is that Robert Smith knows how to write a pop song. You know, he's written in between days. He's written just like heaven. He's written, you know, Friday, I'm in love.
And yet the album that remains his kind of totemic work and his biggest hit is like a double platinum hit in America too. It even broke the cure on the charts was disintegration in 89, which is dark, dark, dark. And it plays as an album. I mean, when people, you know, go on about how amazing disintegration is, yes, it's got love song on it. It's got hits on it. It's got pictures of you. But the experience of disintegration is taking the cathartic gloom of that album as a total piece.
And that's how this album plays. Yes, they released, you know, a single from it before the album dropped. But that's not really the way to experience it. The way to experience it is the way I experienced disintegration as a high schooler in 1989. You hit play and you just let it play. And let it go. Beginning, middle, and end. It's a coherent whole. The final song is 10 plus minutes long. You get lost in that record if you're inclined. If you like the cure, right?
Like get lost in this record as a record. That's my endorsement. I'm so happy you endorsed that. I just have to say that I actually considered that being my endorsement for this week. Although I haven't yet listened to the album. What I did do was also while cooking dinner. I happened to see on social media that there was a live stream of the cures. I guess sort of, you know, big premiere concert of this album. The first time that they had played all of the new stuff in public.
And it was starting right then, perfectly, as I was about to start making dinner. So maybe at the same time you were listening to the album version. I was listening to a live version, probably including some songs, not off the album mixed in, but just so great to hear Robert Smith in concert and clearly so passionate still about the music he's making. Yeah, it's a gigantic record. Just just, yeah, yeah, it really is. It get lost in it. That's some endorsement, Kismet.
Chris, what are you brain to the table this week? Well, okay. This may be a little surprising that I'm not going with something musical. But, you know, given the day we're taping this, I wanted to endorse something consumable that might bring a respite from the news. And I don't know, just some joy. So I'm recommending a podcast that I discovered about six months ago and it's consistently brought me relief and pleasure throughout 2024. And it's a movie podcast.
I'm a pretty big film junkie, but I don't write about films. So I'm able to derive just pure pleasure from watching movies and thinking and talking about movies. And this podcast is even Dana adjacent. It's called a very good year. Oh, I've been on that show. Yes, it's wonderful. Yes, you have. It really is wonderful. And like I said, I only discovered it about six months ago, but I've been going back and playing the backlog of episodes. The premise is pretty simple, but ingenious.
Each week, the hosts Jason Bailey and Michael Hull invite on a guest to talk about a specific year of movies and present a top five list of favorite movies from that year or maybe not even favorite, like most representative, most interesting, whatever. Like, for example, Dana on the episode you were on, you were one of their first guests when they launched the podcast back in 2022 and Dana picked 1927 for perhaps obvious reasons.
But then after Dana leads off for top five with a Buster Keaton movie, she talks about four other movies that are both classics and curios. And they've really attracted a murderer's row of great guests. For example, our friend Mark Harris came on to talk about the five 1967 movies that he chronicles in his book Pictures at a Revolution.
By the way, he doesn't love all five of those movies, but he knows those movies backwards and forwards or Brian Raftery who wrote a whole book about the movies of 1999 comes on to talk about that year. Sometimes there are folks who blog about movies or even screenwriters or directors just a week or two ago. They had on the filmmaker Daniel Waters who wrote Heathers to talk about the movies of 2008 of all years.
And Waters has really strong opinions about movies and he occasionally even talks shit about them. So he's fascinating. They also place the film year in context. They have their side bars about news headlines from that year and about the top box office grocers and Oscar winners. And then they let the guest opine on those movies too. It's just kind of a weekly joy bomb. Because they now have two years worth of episodes, I've been going back and listening to the backlog.
I hope they find a way to keep it going even after they run out of years of cinema. I actually had an idea of a way they could repeat years. So Jason and Michael, if you're listening, call me. But for now, I'm just loving a very good year. So that's my endorsement. When you run out of years, call Chris Malan, I love it. That sounds fantastic.
I'm going to bring us home with an endorsement that is actually an homage to a one-time guest on this show, John August, the screenwriter and host of script notes. John and his husband through the most ingenious party last month, they threw a 100th birthday party for their house. And they had all their friends over to celebrate their house turning 100. Which in Los Angeles is more of an achievement than it is on the East Coast. They also, they had a scavenger hunt through all the house.
They had people from all corners of their lives there. It was a lovely event. But the thing that they did that is my more specific endorsement is that they hired someone, sometimes script notes producer Stuart Friedel to research and write a history of the house. And this history is so fascinating, it literally starts like in the plasticine era, and goes through the present.
But talks through the history of the neighborhood they live in, excavates, fascinating old pictures of the house, and the notion of conducting such a deep and thorough micro history of the exact place where you live. I feel like whenever you live anywhere, you sort of wonder who lived here before me and what was their life like and what was this neighborhood like in a previous decade. You know, your mind wanders that direction.
But even if like me, you are a history major and journalist with research skills, you don't necessarily then go deep diving in the local archives to search for the ancient permits and the newspaper arc. You don't actually take it beyond wondering. And I just so love that John and Mike took it beyond wondering and actually commissioned a proper history, micro history of their house.
And my endorsement is throw a birthday party for your house, commission micro histories of your home, and you know, thanks to John and Mike for having such an ingenious idea and celebrating an awareness of place. I loved it. It was so delightful. Alright, well thank you so much, Dana Christmas Steve. Thank you. Thank you. It was fun.
You'll find links to some of the things we talked about today on our show page, that's Slate.com slash culture fest and you can email us at culturefest at slate.com. Our introductory theme music is by the composer Nicholas Bertel. Our production assistant is Cap Hong. Our producer is Jared Downing for Steve Meckhaft, Dana Stevens and Chris Melanfee. I'm Julia Turner. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week.
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