{"id":832,"date":"2017-05-31T23:16:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T06:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/?p=832"},"modified":"2017-05-31T23:22:46","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T06:22:46","slug":"joanna-newsoms-sapokanikan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/2017\/05\/31\/joanna-newsoms-sapokanikan\/","title":{"rendered":"Joanna Newsom&#8217;s &#8220;Sapokanikan&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Joanna Newsom &quot;Sapokanikan&quot; (Official Video)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ky9Ro9pP2gc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Piotr Orlov from NPR <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2015\/08\/20\/432854809\/songs-we-love-joanna-newsom-sapokanikan\">asks<\/a>\u00a0&#8220;<em>What the hell kind of word is &#8216;Sapokanikan<\/em>&#8216;?&#8221; He later answers, &#8220;when parsing the layers of lyrical meaning in Joanna Newsom&#8217;s new track wasn&#8217;t intriguing enough, there is first the matter of the title&#8217;s origin. &#8216;<em>Sapokanikan<\/em>&#8216; was the name of a Native American, Lenape village situated in lower Manhattan pre Dutch arrival, approximately where Greenwich Village now stands \u2014 which somewhat explains the accompanying Paul Thomas Anderson-directed video that finds Newsom wandering the streets and alleys of that New York neighborhood historically associated with cultural change.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Director <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0000759\/\">Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a> is known for both his full length feature films (<em>Magnolia<\/em> (1999), <em>There Will Be Blood<\/em> (2007), and <em>Inherent Vice<\/em> (2014) &#8211; the latter of which features Newsom as a narrator and minor character) and for his music videos for artists including Radiohead, Fiona Apple, and Aimee Mann. The video gives the <em>feeling<\/em> of Anderson&#8217;s trademark long-takes (uninterrupted shots that track character movement without breaks or edits) without actually<em> giving<\/em> the shots themselves. Instead, a series of tracking shots follow Newsom around\u00a0lower Manhattan and Central Park, through bodegas and bouts of unsuspecting crowds. The video can be read as a mobile exercise in mapping and layering the city, in which a history of the city is rewritten over and over again in both real-time (the filming of the video) and in subsequent viewings and performances.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a nice moment at the end of the video in which a change of musical tone is matched by a modification in setting and visual tone, as Newsom &#8211; presumably by coincidence &#8211; encounters an emergency scene. In her words,\u00a0&#8220;<em>Sapokanikan<\/em>\u00a0is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.&#8221; That certainly clears things up.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also worth noting that Newsom often switches away from conventional musical notation in her songwriting process in favour of her own system of written icons and shapes, including half- and full-moons, stars, and other cosmic symbols.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Piotr Orlov from NPR asks\u00a0&#8220;What the hell kind of word is &#8216;Sapokanikan&#8216;?&#8221; He later answers, &#8220;when parsing the layers of lyrical meaning in Joanna Newsom&#8217;s new track wasn&#8217;t intriguing enough, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/2017\/05\/31\/joanna-newsoms-sapokanikan\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Joanna Newsom&#8217;s &#8220;Sapokanikan&#8221;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49980,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49980"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2017mappingtheinvisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}