Radiolab - 27: The Most Perfect Album

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

More Perfect is back with something totally new and exciting. They just dropped an ALBUM. 27: The Most Perfect Album is like a Constitutional mix-tape, a Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st century. The album features original tracks by artists like Dolly Parton, Kash Doll, and Devendra Banhart: 27+ songs inspired by the 27 Amendments. Alongside the album they'll be releasing short stories deep-diving into each amendment's history and resonance. In this episode, we preview a few songs and dive into the poetic dream behind the First Amendment. The whole album, plus the first episode of More Perfect Season 3 is out now. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. Six. See?

Yeah. Chad Robert. Radio Lab. Are these all 24 amendments? You have songs? Oh, my friend. Did you say 24 amendments? Oh, they're 26.

I don't know how many they were. They're 27. They're 27. You, of all people, I thought we'd know that. I know they add one every so often. So, okay, let me explain this project for you. Okay. Okay, so More Perfect Now is entering its third season.

Right. The first two seasons, what were they? They were extended, investigative, highly reported and researched and elaborated stories about the Supreme Court, cases in front of the Supreme Court. But the idea was of More Perfect was always broader than just the court. I mean, the idea was to look at the argument. that just so happens to happen at the court. And the process of America sort of trying to claw its way out of the mock to get to its higher ideals. Now, those ideals, of course, are outlined in the Constitution, which has been amended 27 times in ways that are crucially important, especially right now.

And most Americans can't name more than one or two of them. I was one of those people before more perfect. And so when I was on my break, I had this idea, crazy idea, which was, could we make an album? Could we make a schoolhouse rock for the 21st century that reanimated these amendments? Oh, modest aspiration. Well, I just think you've got to go big, right? That's a very didactic thing. In those songs, you actually are told exactly how to feel about the concert.

I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. Yes, but the idea was, could we take the spirit of it? But not, like, didactic in the way the old stuff was, but, like, taking these things that we had been covering for two seasons, the amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, one through ten, the other ones from 11 to 27, taking them and because they're so stodgy and musty, like the language. Well, some of them are really opaque. Yeah, I mean, and so the idea was, could we take these stuffy, stodgy, sometimes opaque, but deeply important.

words and bring them to life. So we reached out to a ton of different musicians and asked them, like, would you interpret these amendments? You can talk explicitly about the amendments if you want, or you can turn it into something very personal to you. Well, could they do it, though? Well, yeah, let me, I don't know. Let me just play you a couple.

Let me see. Let me, which I play you one? Should I choose one? Choose one. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to choose women's suffrage. Which one is that?

That's 19. 19, yeah. Oh, you chose a good one, my friend. Who am I going to get musically, first of all? Okay, you're going to get, drum roll, please. Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton? Dolly Parton?

Dolly Parton? Dolly Parton? The Dolly Parton? That maybe you had found somebody an attorney or something. Doll-E-E-Pon. No, no, maybe your middle name, like Robert E. Lee, his first cousin, doll E. Pardon. No, you got Dolly Parton.

Really? Yes. I'll play a little bit of her song. August 18th, 1920, women's suffrage and ratified. Women have been fighting for the legal right to vote since the 1840s. In 1890, the National American Women's Suffrage Association, NAWSA, was established with Susan B. Anthony its leading force. But women have been fighting for.

their rights since the very beginning of time. Said we couldn't dance, then said we couldn't drink. And unless some men allowed it, they said we couldn't think. They said we shouldn't speak till we were spoken to. Well, there was just so much back then we weren't allowed to do. But the first bite of that apple, I guess revealed the truth. That's when he got smart, and that's why at a tree of knowledge, They said we couldn't vote on the streets.

We had to fight for women's rights or blisters on our feet. So good. There's so many great turns of phrases in that song. Wow. Do you want to hear another one? I mean, I'm really curious about like an amendment, like a technical amendment like the 25th.

Like what could you possibly... Oh, let me play the 25th. Do you want to hear that one? Oh, 25th is the one. It's the impeachment one. Oh, that's very interesting. The Secession one. The 25th Amendment.

is the amendment that establishes an order of secession if the president can't do his job. Right. So Devender Banhart is a sort of a freak folk musician. He does like sort of psychedelic folk. Psychedelic folk. It's a whole genre. Hello. My name is Devendra Banhart and I chose the 25th Amendment, which is about succession.

He's an amazing songwriter and he wrote a really funny song that takes you through the line of secession. 1600 Washington, D.C., that's where I am, oh no, for me. Even though I'm at the bottom of the list, a lot I never wanted this, so won't you please, please pay attention to the following line of succession that's been in place since the 1700s till today. It all began when the president had his southern and tors, awakening they're completely rearranged this state of heart and even worse than a newly grown moral compass and a developing code of ethics they got into art and so out the

White House they went and next came the vice president way too much dry wall after seeing Lincoln's ghost float oh so very disapprovingly down the hall And so the speaker of the House of Representatives prepared to lead but due to their own jobs, roles and responsibilities, they rarely spoke. And so ironically, when it came time to talk, they clamped up. And so the president pro-temporary of the Senate showed up. So what he's doing is he's knocking off every person who becomes president, and then you meet the next one in the line.

And I think that sort of the whole conceit is that everybody dies and it also ends up with him being president. Wow. So, so musicians really went to law books and just looked very careful. In some cases, yeah. Yeah. Try one where we just get, somebody took the idea of the amendment and went with a feeling rather than with the legal amendment. Yeah. First Amendment is good.

The First Amendment. Number one, the big one. Let me play that one after the break. Hi, this is Robbie calling from Brooklyn, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad I'm Mubimrod here with Robert Crullwich.

Offering up a preview of an experiment that we're doing for the new season of More Perfect, where we are releasing an album. It's called 27 The Most Perfect album. You can find it on iTunes and Spotify. You can also find all the songs at the Most Perfect Album.org. Now, on the podcast, we're not just putting out music. We're telling stories. We're telling these sort of funny, quirky, poetic, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious,

sort of explainer stories about each of the 27 amendments. I think of them as sort of like audio liner notes for the songs. Let me play the story that we tell in conjunction with the First Amendment in the podcast. Sarakari, producer, more perfect. created this little story. I'm going to drop into the middle of it where she's talking with a guy named Bert Newborn, who is a law professor. And he, to him, the First Amendment, is like a poem. So let's drop into that one. You'll hear reporter Sara Khari, actor Jeffrey Wright, reading the amendments, and Professor Bert Newborn talking about it. First Amendment.

Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. It consists of six ideas. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Two. Or bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Five. And to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Six.

It's only 45 words long. Could have been written on the back of an envelope. These days the First Amendment is wrapped up in all kinds of thorny stuff, like kneeling at football games and hate speech and money in politics. But if you just step back from all of that and you read the text of the First Amendment and you really try to think about what the words are trying to say, you find that the logic behind it is kind of beautiful. The order of the words in the First Amendment is the life cycle of a democratic idea. Here's what he means. So those first two clauses, Congress shall make no law respecting an established.

of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Create a free space inside your mind to think and believe as you wish. That's the founder saying that's space inside your head where you think your thoughts. That's sacred. The government can't touch that. Without that free space, there can be no self-government. So that's the first idea, the freedom of your thoughts. Once you've believed and thought something, then it's natural for you to want to say it.

Which brings us to the next clause. Or bridging the freedom of speech. The speech clause says if you've got an idea formed in the freedom of your mind, by all means, go ahead and share it. So you have the freedom to think a thought, the freedom to speak that thought. But that's not enough. If you really want to make a real dent in a society, so you need some way to be able to speak to a mass of people,

to speak in a very loud voice. Which brings you to the fourth clause. Or of the press. Which is speech. Amplified. Then, once you've gotten your message out to a large number of people, when people have listened to these ideas and moved by them, it's natural for those people to want to do something about it.

To move together, to organize. For the right of the people, peaceably to assemble. So you can think a thought, you can speak that thought, you can create a movement. But that's not enough. Finally, the petition clause, which is the sixth idea, the petition clause says once you've assembled, once you've organized. We demand the protection of our First Amendment rights. We assert. We assert.

Then you have a right to take your argument to the government. And to petition the government for a redress of grievances. We speak for this country. we demand reform now. Enforce the government into confronting it and either accepting it or rejecting it. And then that government, if it says no, is subject to being voted out of office. So that this is Madison giving us the blueprint for democracy. The big bang when democracy begins.

The way I'm hearing it is like co-centrower. circles, like starting inside the mind of one person and then like reverberating out. Yeah, exactly. The First Amendment is a series of concentric circles, beginning within your mind, and then moving to your close acquaintances, then to the society at large, and then finally to the entire polity, to the entire people. That, by the way, is the only time in human history that those six ideas have ever been united in a single text. Only time, I went back and looked at every single rights-bearing document in our tradition, all the way from the Magna Carta through the English Bills of Rights,

through the colonial charters, through the state constitutions, through the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It's never been done before to put the six building blocks of democracy together in a single coherent text. The First Amendment is the ideal city on the hill. It is the ideal community that the founders were trying to establish. And remember, establish for the first time in human history. Wow.

I have never thought of it that way. It's a little bit like some kind of very thoughtful relay race where each, as the baton has passed, it's the next logical step to turning what is inside you. into powerful statements outside of you. Yeah, so that's the First Amendment liner next. Well, actually, the other thing about now that you've got me thinking about, the way that guy described the First Amendment as this progression of ideas, I mean, it just comes almost like just in about a couple of centuries

after people like Shakespeare and Cervantes and began creating interiority. Like this, like, there really wasn't any place to go to hear, someone talking to herself or himself. Yeah. And not even a couple of centuries past. And then you get a government that takes that idea that people have an interior and that interior is distinct and needs protection from the government. And then comes this six point flow.

Wow. I never really thought of that. Yeah, it's a cool idea. But interestingly, the song that that's paired with, on the album. I mean, actually, we got a couple of different submissions for the First Amendment, but one of them came from

a guy named Joey Stiles. He's a native Canadian First Nation Métis hip-hop artist, and he made a song which sort of argues with the spirit of Bert Newborn's take. He sort of looked at sort of all the people that have been left out of that city on the hill.

On my track, Ghost Dance Part 2, I was dealing with the freedom of religion. From 1870 up until 1934 was illegal for Native Americans to practice our ceremonies. I had in mind specifically the ghost dance. As in 1890 at Wounded Knee, 150 to 300, mostly women and children were massacre for ghost dancing. And to me, that shows they were scared. They were scared of us having our culture and ceremonies because they empower us. I truly hope the warrior spirit shines on this track on our natural side of being wild

and freesets the tone. Oh. That is really, I mean, the lyrics and the musical choices are all not there. They really challenge your sense of the amendment a little bit so that these songs,

the way they're written and the words that have been chosen and the moods that they even strike are all either arguments of tempo or arguments of spirit or arguments of history. Yeah, I would say 80, percent of the songs on the record are arguments with the amendments rather than just

celebrations or explanations of them. It's yeah. Well, this is very interesting. It's cool, right? Yeah. It's a very different way to do it. Yeah. So this was just a preview. If you're interested to hear more, go to wherever you get your podcast, search for More Perfect. Sign up. RadioLab.org slash More Perfect will take you there. If you want to hear the record. It's a great record. I'm so proud of it. Go to iTunes, Spotify, wherever. Search for 27, The Most Perfect Album, and you can hear all the songs in their entirety at the most perfect album.org. Okay, I'm Chad Ibum, Rod. And I'm Robert Quilwich. Thanks for listening.