Hello all! I’ve got two reviews for you today, one directly related to the The End project, the other less so. Enjoy!
I listened to Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold History of the Menthol Cigarette, a history of the menthol cigarette in black America, by prominent historian of medicine Keith Wailoo. It’s an interesting story, how menthol went from being a “health cigarette” – the menthol cooling the throat irritated by tobacco smoke – to being a “youth cigarette” and finally coming to be associated with black people… and, eventually, banned in the US altogether. But it was a confusing and frustrating read, and probably not optimized for audiobook.
Like, I get that the tobacco industry is awful, and targeted black people with menthol cigarette marketing. Wailoo does a good job of showing how they went down that path: from pushing menthol as a “safer cigarette” after the first cancer links to established, to finding that black smokers were more invested in a healthy, clean smoke than most, to the industry realizing it had a good thing and doing everything it could to solidify the loyalty of black smokers. Wailoo lays this out in (often rather plodding) detail- I think he wanted to make a policy impact with this book, so had to really dot his is. He also puts the mustard on it, dramatically speaking, to sell, a lot of “and here the tobacco execs put the cancer sticks in the black man’s hands” type rhetoric.
Here’s what I don’t get: is the argument that black people would have smoked less if Kools weren’t a thing? I don’t think Wailoo says that. And the argument, either from Wailoo or those who have prevailed in having menthols banned, doesn’t seem to be that menthols are more harmful for your health (I remember being told as a kid that menthol had fiberglass in it that shredded your lungs!). It is pretty discouraging how black “community leaders,” including Al Sharpton, would argue on behalf of menthols as a “black thing,” but that seems like standard post-decline behavior.
So, like… it seems like a lot of people want to smoke, despite knowing it's bad for your health. That number seems to be dramatically decreasing as time goes by and people take on board the risks. Good! To be perfectly honest, I tend to think that room ought to exist for people to undertake self-harmful activities, and to prioritize parts of their lives that are not longevity. Basically, I think if a grown up wants to smoke cigarettes, they shouldn’t be forbidden, and I don’t see why having menthol in it or not makes a difference. I guess the idea is that menthol and other flavors are just there to hook kids? I guess that makes sense, and I’m not dead set opposed to banning. But honestly, it sounds like the problem is more A. that people have stressful lives that encourage them to seek cigarettes for relief, B. lackluster healthcare options, and C. the legacy of successful tobacco culture (based in large part on consciously deceptive marketing) in the US and abroad making cigarettes normative. Wailoo did not sell me on the idea that flavor itself had all that much to do with it.
I read Sing Backwards and Weep, the memoirs of grunge singer Mark Lanegan. He’s mostly known for his time in Screaming Trees, though he also did some good solo stuff. Sing Backwards and Weep are the memoirs of a genuine grunge rock dirthead, a kid from a broken home in the rural Pacific Northwest who had a lot of issues and a lot of talent and wouldn’t, couldn’t, hide either from the world. Music and drugs were two escapes that seemed to go well together, but wound up with the drugs nearly-fatally compromising Lanegan’s ability to make music… or sustain metabolic functioning (i.e. he almost died a bunch of times).
Lanegan comes off as honest. I don’t mean that as in every single word is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I mean that there’s a self-consistency that runs through his stories, his perceptions of self and others, the values he expresses and the postures he makes (everyone postures- it’s mostly an issue when it’s a lie, ugly, or both). Looking bad or looking good – and he reliably looks bad more often than good, and his depths are a lot lower than his heights are high – he always seems to be expressing something genuine.
So, he talks about Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love (who likely saved his life by getting him to rehab at the right time- and making sure he stayed), Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell, like one would expect in a memoirs written by someone who knew them, and is less well-known than them. But he talks more about his youth, about his colleagues in Screaming Trees and their long, harsh ride to brief grunge-era glory, about other lesser-known musicians in the clubs and on tour with him, about roadies, dealers, studio technicians. He’s not above telling stories that make him seem cool- about fights won, beautiful women slept with, even a little bit about his high school quarterback days (apparently everyone at school still dissed him despite him being a big handsome young fellow and a star athlete?)... oddly, not much about how great he was as a singer, and he was great. He wasn’t a guy to rest on musical laurels. But he also tells you a lot of inglorious details. He doesn’t mask the stale, animal repetition of the life of someone trapped in heroin addiction (or refuse to tell the occasional amusing anecdote from the same period), the squalor of it, the way it made him a shitty friend. That seems to be what he regrets most, especially given how he could, potentially, have done more for friends who died if he wasn’t so fucked up himself. It feels real, and it’s well-written, too.
Lanegan died, actually two years ago to the day as I’m writing. It’s not public how it happened. It sucks- he was a talented man who a lot of people loved. In my project on Gen X and the decades surrounding the turn of the millennium, I’m not looking for heroes, villains, or that scholarly, highbrow alternative: individual subjects who exemplify given points or threads of my analysis, symbolic characters. I want to put people in context, and see how context acted on them (and vice versa). Context means a lot of different things. It means all the socioeconomic, political, technological etc factors. It also means things that are harder to get at through top-down means like those (useful and necessary as they are). In some ways, I look to memoirists like Lanegan to piece together looser contexts of culture, experience, and maybe even “affect” (still not 100 percent sure what that last one means for theorists, but I have a rough idea what it means for me). I think Sing Backwards and Weep was useful for that, in ways I’d have a hard time exactly articulating right now, and was a good read on its own merits, part of a legacy Lanegan left for us all.
Mithra has been helping provide warm in this trying time