All posts tagged: middle age

André 3000’s Flute Album Is Not Background Music

André 3000’s Flute Album Is Not Background Music

In 2017, I spoke with a music historian to understand the trend of flute rap: a boom in rappers rhyming about codeine, cars, and trauma over the soft sound of breath moving through a tube. Ardal Powell, the author of The Flute, told me that nothing surprised him when it came to this instrument. It is possibly the oldest musical device in the world. Neanderthals and 15th-century Swiss mercenaries and 1970s heavy-metal bands found use for it. Why not rappers? The “key thing in the history of the flute, going back thousands of years,” Powell said, is that “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.” No reed or mouthpiece separates the player’s breath from the sound it makes. This observation suggested that the flute, all along, was a bit hip-hop. And at its best, rap can seem like an act of inner channeling, of making the body and mind one. The flute is difficult to master but, fundamentally, intuitive to operate—intuitive like tapping out a rhythm, or like speaking. André 3000’s intuition long ago …

Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery

Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery

One day, about two years ago, I looked in the mirror and was shocked to discover that my once-fabulous tits had transmogrified into a bosom. Whereas breasts—those sexy appendages that had gotten me past velvet ropes and bar tabs aplenty in my 20s and 30s—might be sexy and evocative, the bosom, despite its large size, is solely utilitarian, meant for comforting crying children against or storing Kleenex at weddings and funerals. As she aged, Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck; I could no longer see my neck. Sometime in my 40s, everything above my hips had, you see, been incorporated into the bosom’s new terrain. My head sort of just perched atop my bosom, which sat atop my waist and my still-skinny legs. I had seen this body before: on my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and an assortment of aunts and great-aunts. It was a physique typically packaged, in my family at least, with short haircuts, a purse full of peppermint candies, and blousy, beaded tops for “dress occasions.” It was what I’d …