SOUNDTRACK: MILCK-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #19 (May 7, 2020).
I only know of MILCK from NPR. They talked about her “movement-defining anthem ‘Quiet'” which she played in 2017 at the Women’s March. It was powerful and very moving.
Aside from that song, though, I hadn’t heard anything else from her.
And now, here she is at home singing “her most recent singles, ‘Gold’ and ‘If I Ruled The World.’ She also plays an unreleased song, “Double Sided” which she says is her most personal yet.
Many artists are sincere, but MILCK might be the most sincere performer I’ve ever seen. That sincerity comes across as she speaks between songs, but also in her lyrics. I love this couplet from “Gold.”
Don’t mistake my confidence for arrogance / don’t mistake my self-respect for disrespect.
Then she moves on to the brand new song
For this deeply moving Tiny Desk (home) set, recorded at her home in Los Angeles, MILCK performs those two recent singles, along with an unreleased track called “Double Sided,” a gorgeous tearjerker about the necessity of loving one another regardless of our faults and weaknesses. MILCK’s songs of empowerment, unity and understanding have never resonated more.
“Double Sided” is a powerful song and she is definitely moved by the end.
For the final song, “If I Ruled The World” she introduces it by quoting Gloria Steinem.
Gloria Steinem said that dreaming is a form of planning and this song is dreaming and imagining what our world could look like.
The song a capella for the first verses. This is significant because so far every song of hers that I’ve heard has been about the lyrics. But it’s here that you fully realize what a great voice she has.
Having said that, the lyrics are pretty great, too. As I said, they are very sincere. But it’s wonderful that there are serious ideas coupled with more lighthearted ones
Jenny wouldn’t hate her figure when she’s small, or when she’s bigger
She’d be kissin’ on the mirror, and the WiFi would be quicker
Everybody would recycle, fewer cars, and more bicycles
No more fighting for survival, you would hear this song on vinylYou’d see a doctor if you’re sick, Mary, don’t you worry ’bout it
‘Cause there’d be no crazy bill, no more thousand dollar pillsAll the sexist, racist, bandits would be sent off for rehabbin’
And instead of feeding fear, we’d be feeding half the planet, damn itIf I ruled, it would be less about me, more about you
As the blurb says,
I can always count on MILCK for a good cry. … the Los Angeles-based singer digs into and bares the ugliest sides of human nature, but leaves you feeling nothing but gratitude and awe at just how beautiful life really is.
If you’re not moved by these songs, you’re not really listening.
[READ: May 8, 2020] “Why Birds Matter”
At one point I subscribed to the print edition of National Geographic. There are so many magazines that I like but which I never have enough time to give attention to. National Geographic was one of them. Each issue is packed with amazing pictures and fascinating stories that go along with them. And every once in a while I would see a dozen or so yellow spines staring at me, accusingly.
I remember when this issue came in and there was a cover story from Jonathan Franzen, which I was excited to read. I didn’t have the time to read it when it came in. Later, when I remembered that I wanted to read this cover story I honestly couldn’t remember what magazine it came from. I was sure it as Harper’s, but searches proved otherwise.
Finally I did a search on his articles and this came up and that was it!
I found an online copy of the magazine through my library (it has since been published in a book) and finally got around to reading it. So imagine my surprise when it was actually quite short. There’s an accompanying (amazing) photo essay that makes the entire “article” some twenty pages. But his text is barely five picture-heavy pages.
Nevertheless, he makes so many point better than I could and better than I could even try to summarize that I’m quoting extensively because I think it’s that important.
Franzen is well known as a bird lover. Nell Zink describes him as a bird-lover disguised as an essayist. But why does he love birds so much?
When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one, worth considering in the centennial year of America’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act: Why do birds matter?
My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else.
Birds are everywhere. They live in harsh terrains. They can fly. They are nothing like us, right?
Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Roadrunners kill rattle snakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. The red knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 for the tag on its leg, has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.
Birds are also remarkably colorful. There are birds that are the color of no other things in the natural world.
Perhaps my favorite comment of his is about the diversity of names for the color:
Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.
And yet there are other birds that are, quite simply, remarkable:
a pair of great horn-bills … landed in a fruiting tree. They had massive yellow bills and hefty white thighs; they looked like a cross between a toucan and a giant panda. As they clambered around in the tree, placidly eating fruit, I found myself crying out with the rarest of all emotions: pure joy. It had nothing to do with what I wanted or what I possessed. It was the sheer gorgeous fact of the great hornbill, which couldn’t have cared less about me.
Indeed, most birds don’t particularly care about humans.
I’ve met friendly birds, like the New Zealand fantail that once followed me down a trail, and I’ve met mean ones, like the caracara in Chile that swooped down and tried to knock my head off when I stared at it too long.
They also have skills that any human would be envious of.
Thick-billed murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, peregrine falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: They fly.
Birds also know how to have fun.
I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.)
But there is
one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them.
So, yes, the future of birds depends on us. Franzen is committed. Many people are committed. But the underlying question remains:
Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?
Franzen then asks what we value.
Value has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings.
This is okay for some birds
many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value.
But there are many more who serve no noticeable function. Do we just give up on them?
A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally selfish selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the non human world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish.
But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals, because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it too is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: If we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?
Humans need to be taken down a peg sometimes.
their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things.
And that reminder should not make us mad, it should make us thoughtful and respectful and give us pause to think about what we are doing.
One can only hope. For the birds’ sake and for ours.
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