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      John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

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      In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he lived for some years with his elderly mother, Jo Ann, in a large house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course. The federal court that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One of these was that he must not speak to the media. Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care.After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder; his extravagantly strange and violent actions had been bound up in a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley’s treatment was successful, and the judge was satisfied that he presented a very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted. More than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — along with a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a police officer named Thomas Delahanty and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was left permanently disabled — he was, at 67 years of age, truly free. Hinckley had by then opened a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June 15, 2022, the day the restrictions were lifted, he posted the following: “After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!” His following grew, and he quickly began to use his platform to release music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of a dozen performances. Unsurprisingly, these shows got a lot of attention and began to sell out. But every single one of them was canceled before he could play, as a result of backlash, including anonymous threatening emails, received by the venues.This made Hinckley a figure of prurient interest on social media. When he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance, along with a selfie in which he stared directly at the camera with a glazed and entirely affectless expression, the replies were a chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a GIF of Travis Bickle clapping — a reference to Hinckley’s infamous inspiration for his crime, an obsession with “Taxi Driver” and with Jodie Foster, who played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. “Haven’t heard his new stuff but I like his earlier work,” read another. (Jokes about Hinckley’s “early work” follow him everywhere online.) For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption.Hinckley at his office in Williamsburg, Va., in June.Stefan Ruiz for The New York TimesThen, 43 years after that near assassination, in Butler, Pa., a 20-year-old loner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald Trump with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding the former president’s right ear and plunging an already dark and chaotic world even deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinckley now became the focus of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he posted the following message on the platform now known as X: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.” He was quoting his old hero John Lennon, who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a by-now predictable response. There were GIFs of Jodie Foster looking haunted (“Hope she sees this bro”) and of Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. There was an article in The Guardian headlined “Man Who Tried to Assassinate Reagan Says ‘Violence Is Not the Way to Go.’ ” Mostly, people seemed to be able to respond to the message only as evidence of the further derangement of things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Mingus, Blige, Beyoncé: Black Twitter celebrates Kamala Harris’s pop-culture cred

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      Within moments of Joe Biden announcing his decision to hand his presidential campaign over to Kamala Harris, the greatest hits of her meme stardom re-entered circulation: the “We did it, Joe” call, the “Momala” interview with Drew Barrymore. Never mind callbacks to the vice-president quoting her Indian mother’s habit of asking, in frustration, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”Black Twitter users, however, quickly recalled Harris’s august history as the Black girl nextdoor – starting with the 2019 Breakfast Club interview in which Harris defended herself against charges that she was not “African American” because her parents were immigrants. “Look, this is the same thing they did to Barack [Obama],” she said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”There will be countless stories about Harris’s record, voter support and her amorphous role as a headlining campaigner serving under a lame duck, one-term president unfolding through November. But what appears to be resonating most with many Black social media users in the wake of Harris’s surprise promotion is the cultural significance of it all. Here’s a woman who was Oakland-born and Berkeley-raised who has whiled away her share of Sundays in Baptist church.Earlier this week the hashtags #WinWithBlackWomen and #WinWithBlackMen began trending while their eponymous organizations hosted separate video calls gathering support for the vice-president. And in those strategy sessions, which drew tens of thousands of participants, presenters made proud and repeated shoutouts to their “soror” Harris, a product of Howard University and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority – both historically Black institutions. Over the course of two days, the groups raised nearly $3m in a matter of hours.Where the guest speakers on the women’s call tilted toward powerhouses of politics such as Jasmine Crockett and Donna Brazile, the celebrities on the men’s call – which was hosted by the media maven Roland Martin – ranged from the film super-producer Will Packer to the Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle. “I’ve been a friend and a fan of her journey,” the actor-comedian Bill Bellamy said. “She didn’t just come from anywhere.”Harris once traveled through the same Black Hollywood scene that defined fin-de-siècle Black culture. Longtime friends include the OJ Simpson expert Star Jones and 21 Jump Street lead Holly Robinson Peete, who visited the then senator at the California capitol in 2017 to discuss national legislation that would address the policing of Black teens with autism. (“We’re so lucky to have her as a friend and a fighter and a warrior,” Robinson Peete said on her reality show.)For a spell in 2001, Harris dated the chatshow host Montel Williams; not long after the bombshell news of Harris’s promotion landed, Williams retweeted an endorsement of the vice-president from the Maryland governor, Wes Moore – who was also on the #WinWithBlackMen call. “We’ve got 100 days to make sure we protect the future for our children, our families, our communities and neighborhoods by making sure we have a president of the United States who sees us, believes in us and honors us,” Moore said.View image in fullscreenIn Harris’s candidacy, there are unmistakable echoes of Obama, another immigrant’s son in whom Black voters readily saw themselves. This month, the two converged in Las Vegas to send off the USA basketball team before the Olympics, in clips that were widely shared. When Harris shook hands with Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors star mentioned a letter the vice-president had sent following the birth of his fourth child in May. “I appreciate it,” Curry told her. The personal touch recalled another prominent hoops fan who worked in the White House.Even Obama’s and Harris’s music tastes overlap. Where Obama gets rightful credit as the country’s first hip-hop president, from brushing off his shoulders to actually hobnobbing with Jay-Z, Harris is poised to break ground as America’s first b-girl in chief. After the 2020 Democratic national convention, Harris strutted out for her nomination acceptance speech to Mary J Blige’s Work That. “I was so surprised,” Blige told Bravo TV of Harris’s choice – a deep cut, she added. “That made me go back and listen to the Growing Pains album where the song came from. The lyrics in that song are, like, oh my God; I see why she [chose it]. I forgot what I wrote!”Harris’s sharp ear was recognized again on social media again this week as streaming music patrons returned to her 2019 campaign playlist – a mix that includes A Tribe Called Quest, Jazmine Sullivan and Prince. But to hardcore crate-diggers, Harris’s coolest music moment remains her 2023 shopping trip to Black-owned HR Records in Washington DC that saw her come away with vinyl albums from Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers and the Porgy and Bess studio album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. “She knows her music,” the store’s owner, Charvis Campbell, told DCist. “I tried to give her a softball and give her Coltrane. And she was like, ‘No, no, no. Where’s the Mingus?’”Not long after Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential frontrunner, Beyoncé gave her permission to use her song Freedom – Harris had walked out to the 2016 track for her first appearance as a presidential candidate. On Instagram, the radio host DL Hughley posted a remixed video of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us diss record that includes Harris highlights (her strolling with another Black sorority, her dancing with an umbrella in the rain) intercut with photos of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. “Who did this?” Hughley wrote. “Y’all quick!”In the coming months, there will be those who question Harris’s pop culture credentials. But to her supporters in the Black community, online and beyond, every time Harris reflects the culture, she leaves no doubt about who she is. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Kamala IS brat’: Harris campaign goes lime-green to embrace the meme of the summer

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      After Kamala Harris announced her bid for president, she reportedly raised a record-breaking $81m donations in just a day – but her most culturally powerful endorsement may have come from a single tweet.As nearly all Democrats rallied behind the vice-president offering support in tweets and TV interviews, a perhaps unlikely voice weighed in: the British pop singer Charli xcx, who tweeted, “kamala IS brat.”That’s high praise from the musician, who released her album, also titled Brat, last month. Brat is not just a name, but a lifestyle, one inspired by noughties excess and rave culture.The archetypical brat, Charli explained on TikTok, is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Brat summer essentials, again according to Charli, are “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”.Perhaps most importantly, Charli chose a neon lime backdrop for her album cover, one that’s sickeningly sweet, representing both the highs of a long night out and the impending crash of a hangover.Canonical brats include the actor and model Julia Fox, who appeared in the music video for Charli’s 360 alongside a cast of fellow proclaimed it girls such as Chloë Sevigny, Hari Nef, and Emma Chamberlain. Now, Harris joins their ranks.Soon after receiving Charli’s apparent approval, the Harris campaign’s official Twitter page (@kamalahq) changed its backdrop to brat green. Charli’s song 365, an ode to “bumpin’ that” – meaning beats, and club drugs – soundtracks one of the team’s TikTok videos.Politicians have long used celebrities to court the youth vote, walking a fine line between speaking their language and grasping for relevancy. Millennials considered Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Pokémon go to the polls” line from 2016 peak cringe. Last year, Taylor Swift urged fans to vote in primaries – she didn’t say who for – driving a surge in voter registrations.Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris, said he believes it’s “extremely smart for her to lean into the meme”.“It shows a recognition of how critical young voters are to winning in November, and a commitment to meeting them where they are.”So far, there’s been little Brat back-lash, though pundits over the age of 35 seem confused by the topic. CNN’s Jake Tapper dedicated a roundtable to the topic, concluding that he “will aspire to be brat”. Stephen Colbert took up a Brat-themed TikTok dance during The Late Show.David Hogg, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and gun control activist, wrote on X that “The amount [Charli’s] single tweet may have just done for the youth vote is not insignificant.” He later confirmed that “Nancy Pelosi has been informed of the meaning of Brat”.Memes alone do not win elections, but Charli’s tweet livened up a race that Harris’s bid had already revived. But there is more to be done. Kelley Heyer, the TikTok creator who choreographed a popular dance to Charli’s song Apple, said: “If Kamala wants to be brat, then she needs to promise to legalize and protect abortion at a federal level. And also wear apple green.” More

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      in Elections

      Bernice Johnson Reagon, a Musical Voice for Civil Rights, Is Dead at 81

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      A singer, composer, curator and founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, she provided a gospel soundtrack for the civil rights movement.Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped provide the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, then went on to become a cultural historian, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist preacher in Albany, Ga., grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices to the accompaniment of clapping and foot stomping.She was an original member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police or as they were hauled away to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them across the South as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.Ms. Reagon once wrote, “I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she amassed a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music and presented that heritage to the public.During one gospel music presentation, in the 1980s, Ms. Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t do that, grunt or sigh a little,” she instructed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Fans Wore at the Dead and Company Show In Las Vegas

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      Midway through their residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas during a record-breaking heat wave, Dead & Company played its jam band specials over the Fourth of July weekend for an eclectic crowd. The band’s audience — some die-hard fans, others just curious — came from all over the country (and the world) to pledge their own form of allegiance.“You see people who are Sphere tourists who just want to get inside and see what it’s all about. They don’t necessarily have experience listening to the Dead’s music,” said Ashley, 35, a D.J. and an event host from Las Vegas. “It’s totally acceptable because Deadheads are the coolest, most down-to-earth crowds.” (Still, like some other fans, she declined to provide her full name.)Dead & Company, a spinoff of the Grateful Dead that includes both original members of the band and new additions, most notably John Mayer, began its residency at the 18,600-seat Sphere in May. The band will perform at the venue through Aug. 10.The New York TimesAshley had come to hang out at Shakedown Street — the traveling bazaar where vendors sell rose quartz jewelry, crowns of roses, Grateful Dead-themed tarot decks and a virtual sea of tie-dyed shirts.One of the vendors was Alex Mazer, a 40-year-old from Taos, N.M., who also goes by Buttercup. His brand, New Springfield Boogie, makes T-shirts, stickers and internet memes that combine counterculture references and “The Simpsons” (one image combined Bertha, the Grateful Dead’s flower crown-wearing skeleton, with Homer Simpson). Alex said that both characters were icons of American culture, “and they work together in a lot of ways.” He estimated he had already seen 13 Dead & Company shows at the Sphere. “It is an orgy of sensation,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Melodies of Popular Songs Have Gotten Simpler Over Time

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      “Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,” Billy Joel crooned in “Piano Man,” his iconic 1973 barroom ballad. That may have been true enough when Mr. Joel wore a younger man’s clothes, but a new study conducted by computational musicologists at Queen Mary University of London has found that vocal melodies in popular music have become much less complex over time.The study, published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, used mathematical models and algorithms to pinpoint three “melodic revolutions” — in 1975, 1996 and 2000 — that brought increasing simplicity to the two main components of melody: rhythm, or the pattern of sounds and silences in a piece of music, and pitch, the measure of how high or low the notes are.The study looked at the top five Billboard songs every year from 1950 to 2023. Both rhythm and pitch became steadily less complex over that period, the study found. “Conservatively, they have both decreased by 30 percent,” said Madeline Hamilton, a graduate student at Queen Mary University of London who led the research.The 1975 hit “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille contains a lot of unexpected notes and rhythmic complexity.“Breathe” by Faith Hill, the top song of 2000, has no accidentals, lots of repetition and straightforward rhythms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More