Episode 172: Transcript
Episode: 172: Hip Hop x Cyberpunk (with clipping.)
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you feel nostalgic for cyberpunk?
Annalee: [00:00:05] You know, a little bit. And I think part of what I'm nostalgic for is the aesthetic of cyberpunk. That kind of gloomy, sexy, half technological body of the hero. I feel like there was something about cyberpunk that had... it was like a tattered 80s glamour. And, you know, we keep kind of trying to go back to that aesthetic. And it's just it's not as like fresh and neon feeling as it was like back when it was new.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:38] It's so true. And, you know, I have a lot of nostalgia, like not just for the books like William Gibson's Neuromancer or Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends or Synners by Pat Cadigan, but also just like the cyberpunk of my youth, which was like, you know, all the media representations, like that weird cyber sex scene in Lawnmower Man and all the music of the 80s and early 90s that had cyberpunk touches or like Tron.
Annalee: [00:01:02] And like Jaron Lanier promising us that we would have virtual reality with music, like, I don't know, in 1992.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:10] There's got to be an alternate history where that came true. And just like all these comic books where people go into cyberspace and it's like, oh, like, whoa, trippy, man.
Annalee: [00:01:19] Mm hmm. Yeah. And I mean, it really culminates with the Matrix movies, which I think are, I mean, you could easily argue that they're kind of late cyberpunk or even punk. I mean, they're still the host cyberpunk, but they also really encapsulate the central part of cyberpunk that I think that's still with us today, which is this idea of cyberspace that you would go into this other digital realm and have this whole other life there, a different body. And that was kind of the dream of cyberpunk. And, you know, we're still waiting for that to happen in reality in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:54] We really are. And like, I feel like people are trying to make it happen, but they're not succeeding. You know, I really want to visit the alternate reality where David Cronenberg's Existenz was as popular as the Matrix. And the Matrix was just this little obscure indie movie that nobody... like I want to live in the universe where like Existenz was like the huge hit.
Annalee: [00:02:14] I don't know. You want the like image of like people jacking into cyberspace with like weird organic things that go into their butt.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:24] And like using chicken bones to make a gun. So when was the first time you encountered cyberpunk as a youth?
Annalee: [00:02:30] Probably seeing Blade Runner. And, you know, I didn't read Neuromancer until I was a little bit older, but I was reading a lot of sci-fi that, you know, had computery stuff, but nothing with that kind of brooding dystopia with the post-humanity and the corporate oligarchy. And to me, that was the thing that really stood out when I was a kid – was because I grew up at a time where a lot of the adults around me were still freaking out about Watergate. And so they were like, “oh, the government. The government is the scary thing.” And cyberpunk came along and was like, “no, dude, it's the corporations.”
Charlie Jane: [00:03:15] A little bit prescient there. And I know that you've talked before about how you grew up on like Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.
[00:03:21] Yeah, for me, my first experience as cyberpunk was probably... I'm going to stay on brand and say it was that one Doctor Who episode from 1976 where the Doctor goes, he goes inside the... actually, they call it the Matrix.
Annalee: [00:03:32] Really? I forgot that.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:34] And yeah, we should re-watch that episode. It's so great. He goes inside the Matrix and everything is trippy and there's like evil clowns. And then also reading Neuromancer had a huge impact on me.
[00:03:45] So you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that went inside a virtual reality universe and never quite found its way out. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of an upcoming novel called Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Annalee: [00:04:01] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm going to just mention my upcoming novella, which is called Automatic Noodle. And it actually has some post cyberpunk elements to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:12] It really does. And it's so good. And later in the episode, we're going to be joined by contributing host, Bethany Brookshire, hosting a segment that we're calling “The Hats of War”. But first, we're going to be talking to the folks from CLPPNG., a Hugo nominated hip hop group who have a new album coming out called Dead Channel Sky, which is absolutely steeped in cyberpunk vibes.
Annalee: [00:04:36] And it's just fricking great.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:39] Also on our mini episode next week, we're going to be talking about a whole new set of studies about whale communication and how whales have language. OK, let's jack in.
[00:04:49] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:05:20] Now we're lucky to be joined by CLPPNG., a Bay Area hip hop group who've been nominated for two Hugo Awards for best related work for their science fiction concept album, Splendor and Misery, and for their song “The Deep”, which was also adapted into an incredible novella by Rivers Solomon. The group's members are Daveed Diggs, William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes. Thank you so much for joining us.
Daveed: [00:05:44] It's our pleasure.
William: [00:05:45] Thank you.
Jonathan: [00:05:46] Hi. Thanks for having us.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:47] Yeah. So what made you all want to revisit cyberpunk? And, you know, what do you think cyberpunk means now in 2025? Is cyberpunk even still relevant?
Daveed: [00:05:58] You know, the early conversations about this record were about the fact that we're currently living in the apocalypse that the cyberpunk fiction of the 80s and 90s predicted. It's just not sexy or cool at all. It's just like it's just kind of mundane and boring, but like it's all happening. And so we that that was really what we started talking about was just, “oh, man, how disappointing is the apocalypse from inside of it? You don't even really know that it happened.” You know, you're just still living.
William: [00:06:31] So, yeah. So the question is, does that make cyberpunk relevant or does that make it completely irrelevant because it's just become the, you know, the sort of the air we breathe? It's just what we're the world we're living in.
Annalee: [00:06:42] Is it when you say that, do you mean like aesthetically, like politically, like what are the things about cyberpunk that you feel like are just now no longer sci-fi?
William: [00:06:52] The sort of the encroachment of, you know, the virtual on all of our lives, the connectedness and the corporate control over that. I mean, just the sort of oppressive, you know, corporate rule that we all live under and just the continuing extreme alienation of capitalism.
Jonathan: [00:07:11] Those all seem to be themes. We just don't get to, you know, get sucked into the computer the way they do in the sprawl, which seems cooler than, you know, just staring at your phone and getting a crick in your neck all day.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:26] Definitely not as glamorous. So, I mean, one thing I was thinking about is that cyberpunk and hip hop kind of came along around the same time. And, you know, how are they linked? Are there like older hip hop albums with cyberpunk themes that y'all were influenced by or books and movies besides the obvious one, like Neuromancer, that you were influenced by in making this album?
Daveed: [00:07:45] There's this sort of sweet spot in like early in the 80s where sort of hip hop production and electronic music and like goth industrial music all kind of were working with the same palette and the same tools before things got sort of micro-genred by record labels in that way. Like there's so many early rap songs that sample Kraftwerk that feel like sort of Europe informing the US, then creating techno, then sort of feeding it back on itself. And these sort of scenes that by the time, you know, we were teenagers were seen to be wildly different and incompatible.
[00:08:24] But you look back at 80s records and listen to the music and you, you know, you realize it all sort of comes from the same soup in that way.
William: [00:08:32] Yeah, I mean, this album kind of came about partly because we were invited to submit a song to a video game and we didn't finish it on time and we liked it still. So it's not in the game, but we had this sitting around and we thought, “well, this is cool. What's the project around this song? What do we, how do we make an album?” Cause we didn't want to just throw it away.
Daveed: [00:08:57] That happens to us a lot that we're like, whatever project we're working on, we make one thing that doesn't fit in it. And we say, well, we like it. So let's, let's just make an album around this one thing. And that's how the horror records took us. How many years to make? I mean, we made the first track for those horror records during the sessions for the CLPPNG. subtitled on Sub Pop. Like there was a whole album in between those in many, many years. And this didn't take quite as long, but it did take some time.
William: [00:09:28] Yeah. So we sort of started working. I mean, we had the folder in our Dropbox are shared where we were sharing our music and putting our demos up was called ‘hackker techno’.
Daveed: [00:09:40] Two K's obviously.
William: [00:09:41] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we were calling the project to each other. Just internally. I commissioned a piece for the press release for this album by a friend of ours named Roy Christopher, who writes about hip hop. And Roy sent me just a stack of his own books. And his first book was about the sort of concomitant evolution of cyberpunk literature and early hip hop and sort of drawing parallels between cultural social situations that that produce those things and some of the ties and in ways in which, you know, early rap saw itself as this sort of cutting edge future repurposing of technology.
[00:10:20] I said something yesterday on, in a different interview that nobody voids the warranty like a hacker or a DJ.
Annalee: [00:10:27] Yeah. It's the hacker ethos in art and music kind of coming together. Yeah.
William: [00:10:33] Yeah. You also, the sort of piling up of all of recorded culture is available to make new culture out of, right? This sort of, you collect old records, you collect sounds from movies and you pile them on top of each other. And, you know, you make a new thing that contains bits of every previous generations art into the new art, which is also a very sort of cyber punky thing, right? The sort of layering of time periods all at the same time.
Jonathan: [00:11:01] I mean, there's so much in the history of like popular electronic music production too, that's just about misuse of gear. You know, people using things in ways other than the manufacturer intended, whether or not they're literally breaking it. But nobody at Roland ever intended for Acid Techno to exist when they made the 303, right? Like the, there's this great print ad of a 303 with Oscar Peterson using it as a baseline accompaniment to himself on piano, you know? And it was really just intended to play bass parts that you, so you could accompany yourself. Unfortunately.
William: [00:11:37] That is not, I can't, can you even imagine what it would sound like for jazz legend Oscar Peterson to play along with an 803 baseline?
Jonathan: [00:11:45] So Oscar Peterson had this crazy electronic music studio. And the only evidence I can find of it is one interview in which you see it and he's got everything. I mean, he's got every piece of gear that was available at the time. And then there's one pretty disappointing album from the nineties that has some electronic stuff on it. But that's the only evidence of any recordings I can find of him actually using that stuff.
Daveed: [00:12:08] There's also in cyberpunk fiction, there's like, there's often like a tendency to create future slang, you know? And that's a, that is a big element of the history of rap music as well. Or I don't know, it's with rap, it's more codifying regional slang, right? And putting it down for posterity and then hopefully reaching other people. Like that's kind of how that goes. But either way, there's like an emphasis on slang terminology too, that was pretty fun to play with.
William: [00:12:39] I was just thinking of, you know, possible inspirations and it occurred to me that in All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane, there's a scene and there's multiple descriptions of what sort of future tech music sounds like. That just popped into my head that I do remember when reading that novel years ago thinking, yeah, that's cool. Someone should actually make that.
Annalee: [00:13:04] Dub thrash. I don't know. I can't remember. That's awesome. I was just thinking about what you're saying. I was thinking earlier about how, in a sense, this album, Dead Channel Sky, came out of video games. Like it was kind of the discarded idea from video game music. And I know William Gibson has said that one of his ideas for Neuromancer came when he was watching people at an arcade playing video games. And he was thinking about how they were kind of inside the game as they were playing. And that was like, he claimed at the time that was the germ of cyberspace.
[00:13:40] I was wondering, thinking about video games and video game sounds and stuff, there's a lot of noises in this album that feel kind of like they're trying to remind us of the 1980s. Like there's a modem sound, which I love. There's lots of other noises that feel like they're kind of retro futurist. Am I getting that right? Were you guys consciously doing that?
Jonathan: [00:14:03] Oh, sure.
William: [00:14:04] Yeah. I think some of them are more 90s. The sort of palette that I'm thinking of is sort of the watery distortion of low bit rate MP3s became a sort of a hallmark for our aesthetic for this album.
Daveed: [00:14:19] It's funny to use that kind of distortion and those kinds of artifacts in music production that then is going to immediately just get more of them when the only way people listen to it is on streaming services, where it's just going to get worse, right?
William: [00:14:33] Glitchier, lower bit rate. We're just going to reduce it, reduce it, reduce it. The CD is going to sound great.
Annalee: [00:14:39] Yeah, future scholars will be debating like, you know, was this introduced in the dissemination of the song or was it built into the narrative?
Jonathan: [00:14:47] You know, a thing that happens with music tech, right? Is that like the thing that was undesirable becomes an aesthetic over time, right? Then the way that people are adding vinyl crackle and tape hiss and tape warble and all of the stuff that like people older than us spent a lot of energy trying to eliminate is now being added back in by plugins designed to do that. To make those sort of broken sounds.
[00:15:11] And so I always try to think and we have all these conversations about like, what's the next version of that? What are the sounds that we hate and try to eliminate from our recordings? And how can we instead just like use those to make music? Even though we think they're ugly and awful, we know that, you know, people younger than us are going to find them beautiful. People younger than us are going to say, oh, remember how like how good Zoom sounded in 2020?
Annalee: [00:15:36] I don't think any people who were kids on Zoom are going to have happy memories of it, really. I don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:45] People sometimes get nostalgic for things that they hated at the time, but it's weird. I've been listening to this album so much and I just am obsessed with it. And one thing that jumped out at me is the sort of the use of second person narration. Daveed, it feels like you're addressing the listener a lot and kind of giving instructions or imperatives. When you talk to the listener like that, what kind of response are you hoping to elicit? What do you feel like is going on there?
Daveed: [00:16:08] I don't know. I try very hard not to concern myself with responses from listeners, but I think I was conscious on this album of wanting it to feel more confrontational than a lot of our albums feel. A lot of our albums are really aggressive and really scary or disturbing or whatever, but they're so bird's eye or they're so granular or they're so imagistic that they don't, to me, feel confrontational. And a lot of the just source material for this just has that feeling of, you know, it's an apocalypse record.
[00:16:44] So it's about, you know, there's impending doom. So I was thinking a lot about Public Enemy while we were writing it. I mean, a lot of my examples or a lot of the things I was basing stuff on, Pusha T, Public Enemy, like these sort of rappers who that style is really foundational for them. So it resulted, I think, in a lot of second person, even though that's one of the tricks of CLPPNG. I don't use first person, so you're sort of left with second and third. And second person is like a technique I've used a lot, but I think you're right. It does appear probably more on this record than it often does.
Annalee: [00:17:19] I keep thinking about how, I mean, all of us are sick of the suffix punk. And, you know, cyberpunk is supposed to be kind of connected to a punk tradition. But you guys are showing that there's actually this really rich, like rap and hip hop tradition that it's connected to. Do you think it's that there's kind of a hidden history of like cyber hip hop, cyber rap that, you know, people don't acknowledge?
Jonathan: [00:17:46] Totally.
William: [00:17:47] Yeah, definitely.
Daveed: [00:17:45] I mean, it was always, yeah, it is in our form based on technology, you know, from jump. And I think hip hop is, I think, understood the Internet quickly, you know, and is tends to be, you know, the kids using the latest technology to get their music out tend to be like the young rappers, you know, like hip hop culture has always moved at a much faster pace than a lot of other a lot of other sort of genres.
[00:18:13] And I think part of that is just because it was always because of the punk ethos of it, because it was always just about using what was available to get around the rules. And like the most important thing was getting it to people. And so the Internet actually is an incredible has always been incredible technique for rappers, for incredible tool for rappers. And I think they got good at it real fast and they tend to be better at it, you know, they tend to be sort of on the cutting edge.
Annalee: [00:18:43] Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the opposite of punk, which is often kind of rejecting technology and like, you know, embracing like older types of tech like zines made of paper and that kind of stuff. So it's it's interesting.
William: [00:18:55] Yeah. Well, I guess, I mean, punk as when punk started, it was using the most cutting edge technology. It just seems to have stagnated. And we staple and Xerox zines together. We still record on tape. But when home record recording was new, that's what, you know, punks did.
[00:19:12] But early, early rap sounds more like something like Cybotron, which is not really rap music, but it's like a precursor to rap, right? Like really Detroit Electro. But like the technology of what like Egyptian Lover, Afrika Bambaataa, and Rammellzee sounds like.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:29] Yeah. I was going to bring those up.
Jonathan: [00:19:32] Those are so good. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:33] Like Street Gems Electro.
Jonathan: [00:19:37] Yeah. That stuff’s great.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:38] They’re incredible. So one of the things, another thing that jumps out at me about this album is that there's a lot of talk about like hacking your consciousness, hacking your gender, rebooting your sense of yourself. Do you think like cyberpunk offers like a metaphor for expanding your awareness or reinventing yourself?
William: [00:19:53] Well, I know we were we were talking about stuff like that, but maybe Daveed can answer for himself. But for me, that seems whether it's possible or not, it's such a cliche of cyberpunk that we wanted to, you know, check that box.
[00:20:07] It's one of those things where we sort of I mean, you know, when I was in grad school, we all used to joke that the only people still in Second Life were like gender studies, graduate students and queer theories like professors. I mean, it's…
Annalee: [00:20:25] No, it's real. It's totally true.
Daveed: [00:20:27] Does it still exist? Is Second Life still a thing?
William: [00:20:28] I don't know if Second Life is still a thing, but it was in 2016 when I when I was still finishing. But yeah, I don't know. When I say it's like it's a cliche of it, I don't mean that that's not still hopeful. You know, I still do have that hope and I still do think that's true.
[00:20:45] Perhaps for me, I'm just sort of becoming less and less optimistic about the figure of the hacker. Maybe just in the last couple of weeks when we've got, you know, government departments being dismantled by people who think that's their aesthetic and think they're hackers and whatever. And but at the same time, hopefully real hackers are still trying to save us.
Daveed: [00:21:10] Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we work so much in genre in this band. So we cliche is really important. It's not really like a dirty word in this band. It's like how what are the identifiers that make us certain that this fits into this world? You know, and so that was definitely one of them for me.
[00:21:29] But it's something it's a thing that we do on a lot of other of our music, too, actually. So it was actually sort of nice to find a context that was still right for that.
William: [00:21:40] Yeah. And I guess it's actually it fits right in with the way Daveed writes throughout the whole project. Right. I mean, these sort of inhabiting characters and having this sort of opportunity that like as if the space of our songs is some sort of virtual space to sort of reinvent and recreate whatever figure he's speaking from and the sort of like layered fracturedness of it. You know, the not saying I but it still is this collection of attributes. Right. It's I mean, they're almost each song is almost, you know, some sort of avatar figure in that space anyway.
[00:22:14] So I hadn't actually thought that that's kind of maybe that's why we just already were doing it here, because it's it's sort of the way the band has worked since the beginning.
Jonathan: [00:22:24] I remember I used to say like when we very first started the band, I was like thinking about the lyrics and the sort of production techniques. It was like if you had this like three dimensional graph of ideas and connections in like rap music and in music production, and instead of like picking a section and picking a little cluster, you made a two dimensional slice into it.
[00:22:47] And so all of the connections were were there, but they were just really roundabout and broken in that two dimensional slice. Like that's what early clipping songs felt like to me. Like that's what I how I sort of visualized what we were trying to do.
[00:22:59] And yeah, no, you're right, Bill. We talked about this like a lot about the way that we wanted this album to feel like kind of a radio station, but like kind of like a three dimensional radio station sort of that's constantly tuning through the songs. Right. But it never occurred to me that that's actually the thing we've been doing this whole time. Anyway, we just like we just like rename the same thing we've done for 12 years.
Annalee: [00:23:25] I like the idea that sounds like you're like brain slices, you know, when you're like imaging a brain. It's like we've got this slice.
Jonathan: [00:23:32] Exactly.
Annalee: [00:23:32] Daveed, I wonder if you could talk about some of the characters in the album. You were you guys were sort of talking around the fact that there's like several different characters. Are there like main characters that you can kind of pick out and tell us about?
Daveed: [00:23:45] Oh, I mean, that would require a better memory than I have to really do specifically. But I think it's funny, we got to play shows coming up. So I've started relearning the songs for the live show, which is like always an insane process for me. It feels like somebody else wrote them.
Annalee: [00:24:02] Yeah.
Daveed: [00:24:03] But the thing about this album is that there's not really characters that are taking us through the whole thing, as there's sometimes happened in the past. Each song is sort of a different. It's supposed to feel kind of mixtape like in that each each song could be a different rapper. They just all happen to have my voice, you know, change the channel I was working on today. And that's sort of like a frustrated soldiers in the midst of some sort of future war, you know. And there's a couple of songs that fit into this same future war idea that like the war has been going on for so long now that we don't even really remember what exactly the directive is, but we know we're at war and we know there's an enemy and we have a lot of tasks to do during the day.
[00:24:46] And that's kind of where that one takes place. “Mirrorshades pt. 2” is like with Cartel Madras. That's like sort of a club song where I'm just doing the hook and some little bridge elements. And they're supposed to be sort of from the perspective of whoever's in charge of like future clubs, who's like working the door, but they're not really bouncers. They're just the person who, you know, the A.I. that's either letting you in or not letting you in based on how cool or not you are.
Annalee: [00:25:18] Based on their algorithm developed in the late twenty first century.
Daveed: [00:25:21] Yeah.
Jonathan: [00:25:23] We start letting the Berghain doorman just be an A.I. To get into Bergen.
William: [00:25:31] That's a captcha to get into Berghain. It's like point out all the stop signs.
Annalee: [00:25:38] We only recognize faces that are a certain shade. Sorry, that's just a bug. I feel like there's a lot of like drug dealer characters too, or people who are pushing it's drugs, but maybe it's propaganda.
William: [00:25:53] I do think that's possibly corny, but also beloved trope in cyberpunk is like what drugs they invent for the future. And we really wanted to do that.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:05] Oh, my God.
William: [00:26:05] Future drugs are so funny to me. And so we definitely for that was I mean, that was sort of the premise of “Run It”, which was the first song we wrote was like we got to make up a drug. So when we when we submit these songs for radio, we get especially from the UK, like the list of phrases they want removed for radio play, like what we have to censor.
[00:26:27] And it's so funny to me because we made up all these like things that, you know, ways of cooking a drug that doesn't exist that they're censoring, but it's not real. It's like they're not… They don't add up to anything. They're like parts of take like the elements taken from every sort of drug and then smashed together in a way that like is completely impossible. That doesn't create, you know, but we have to actually censor these songs and bleep these words out. But they make they make no sense. They're referring to a drug that isn't real at all. And it's very funny to me.
Daveed: [00:26:58] Yeah, it's really funny. But it made me I was a little bit proud of it because I was like, I guess it sounds like drugs. You know, I guess we did the thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:08] I love that so much. I hope some kid listens to the album and tries to replicate that process and…
William: [00:27:14] They’d just end up wasting all their drugs.
Jonathan: [00:27:15] Good luck.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:20] Nancy Reagan would be very happy about that. So thanks so much for joining us. What's next for Clipping and how can people find out more about this album and your group and the tour?
Daveed: [00:27:29] CLPPNG.com CLPPNG.com our website. Clipping with no “i”s because there's no “i” in CLPPNG.
William: [00:27:36] CLPPNG.com
Jonathan: [00:27:37] has all the tour dates and links to merch and records and music and videos.
Annalee: [00:27:42] And tour dates.
Jonathan: [00:27:43] Tour dates. Yeah.
Daveed: [00:27:44] Yeah, we're touring a bunch this year, which is really fun.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:48] Awesome.
Annalee: [00:27:48] Well, thank you so much. And we can't wait for our listeners to jam this album in their ears.
Jonathan: [00:27:54] Thanks.
William: [00:27:55] Thanks you.
Daveed: [00:27:55] Thanks, guys.
[Mirrorshades Clip] [00:27:59]Mirrorshades. Round here you wear your mirrorshades. You cool with that? Mirrorshades. Round here they wear their mirrorshades. Round here they wear their mirrorshades.
[00:28:17] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:19] By the way, did you know this podcast is entirely independent, and we rely completely on the support of you – our listeners – through Patreon. This is especially true now that we’re having contributing guest hosts, like Bethany Brookshire who you’re about to hear from in a moment.
[00:28:36] We’re so lucky to be able to do that, and it’s thanks to your support. Any dollar you give us goes right back into making this podcast happen and helping us to bring more excellent people with totally correct opinions into our podcast crew.
[00:28:49] Plus, if you give to us on Patreon, you get to be part of our whole community. You get to be in our Discord channel where we hang out and just like talk about everything all the time. And you get mini episodes every other week where we just go deeper and wider and more in circles about all the important issues in science fiction and science. Think about it. You know, for whatever you can spare: a few bucks a month, twenty bucks a month, you get to become part of making this podcast happen and everything you give us goes right back into making our opinions that much more correct.
[00:29:21] Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Annalee: [00:29:28] And thank you guys so much for any help that you can give.
[00:29:33] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:29:35] So, lots of people throughout history have demanded that other people pay for their freedoms. Some force their vassals to pay in things like gold, or wheat, or castles. Others demand tribute in hats. Today, we’re joined by our contributing host, Bethany Brookshire, whom you may know from her popular TikTok and Instagram show, called Insomniac Anatomy Academy. She’s also a science journalist and author of the book Pasts, and she’s going to tell us about a 13th century hat that played a major role in war-time negotiations. We are so happy to have you with us, Bethany.
Bethany: [00:30:17] I am so excited to be here and I'm especially happy to be able to share my hat obsession with the world. So how much do you know about the hot hat fashions of the 13th century?
Annalee: [00:30:31] I mean, I feel like there were like a lot of cloaks with hoods. I don't know.
Bethany: [00:30:37] There were hoods.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:39] I'm no, I'm completely hat ignorant.
Bethany: [00:30:42] So hoods actually were not often attached to cloaks. You could actually just buy the hood or make the hood on its own. It was like its own separate piece. But my favorite is a bunch of them had these super long tails on the hood, like off the back of your head. And you could hide stuff in there. Like it was a pocket.
Annalee: [00:30:57] Amazing. Hat pocket.
Bethany: [00:31:00] It was also so long and thin you could use it as a scarf. So like we had those, we had things that I think are pronounced quaff, which are basically these super tight hoods that you could put other hoods on. And this was also the period where people who identified as women were wearing these giant cones on their heads. This was giant cone era.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:17] I love the head cones. The head cones are tight.
Bethany: [00:31:21] But a lot of these were kind of these hats that we associate with Western Europe, right? Robin Hood-esque sort of concept. And I was actually researching the history of the Byzantine Empire. And I stumbled across this odd fact about hats.
[00:31:39] And before I get there, I'm going to set the scene. So like, let me take you back the 13th century. Trencher bread, cheese, small ale. It is 1259. And we are in Western Turkey, where the Mongols are absolutely destroying the Seljuk Turks in an area that was known as the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, which is a title that never ceases to entertain me.
[00:32:03] So the Mongols had originally arrived in this area in like 1241. And it fell to them in 1243. And they were kind of encroaching upon the Byzantine Empire as they got there. And as they would conquer all of these kingdoms, and they conquered so many kingdoms, and as they were conquering all of these kingdoms, they would negotiate tribute.
[00:32:23] They'd run in, they'd be like, we are going to destroy your things, you better pay. So in 1259, they renegotiated the standards of tribute at the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. And those standards of tribute included 3000 felt hats.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:37] Nice.
Bethany: [00:32:39] Yes, like demand hats in your tribute. This is my thing. I'm paying my taxes in hats now. It wasn't just hats, though. It was two million dinars, 500 pieces of cloth, which includes like silk brocade and damask and stuff, as well as 500 horses and 500 mules. Being Mongols, they never stopped demanding horses and mules.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:58] And they had to haul this stuff around with them, right?
Bethany: [00:33:00] Yes.
Bethany: [00:33:00] Like, we're going to take these hats on the road.
Bethany: [00:33:02] Yes, it was like transport for your hat. But I just got fixated because when I heard about this hat, no one said, what it looked like. They just said, oh, it's 3000 hats. I'm like, you can't just leave that there. You can't just like say 3000 felt hats purchased the freedom of an entire kingdom and not tell me what the hat looked like. Like, come on, this must be a great hat.
Annalee: [00:33:25] So wait. Were these hats something that were valuable only to the Mongols or were these like hats that like everybody across Eurasia was dying to get?
Bethany: [00:33:35] So it turns out actually, the hats were very popular across Europe and Asia. Nicholas Morton, who wrote the book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, he was the one who mentioned the hats in his book. He mentioned these 3000 felt hats. And he also mentioned that they were popular in Western Europe, so much so returning crusaders would come back with these hats.
[00:33:56] And so many of them wore them to a church conclave in France in 1119 that the church got mad about it and tried to have them banned. And I am now even more fixated on this hat because like, the church hates it and you can use it to pay for the freedom of an entire country. Like, this hat must be amazing. It must be wide. It must be tall. It must be ostentatious in some way. Like, the hat is getting built up in my mind.
Annalee: [00:34:22] Yeah, and it's interesting because they're kind of politicized. And I actually thought that political hats were more of like a modern day MAGA thing. And so this is wild to see it happening so far back in history.
[00:34:37] So, OK, how did you find out what they look like? Is there like a medieval compendium of hat fashion? Like medieval Vogue that you could just check out? Byzantium Vogue.
Bethany: [00:34:48] Oh, man. I would pay so much money for like medieval fashion.
Annalee: [00:34:53] Yeah.
Bethany: [00:34:53] No, what I basically did was I brought my journalism chops to bear on this and I started hunting down people who studied Mongol art and fashion from the time period. This turned out to be really hard because the Mongols conquered an empire so vast that you start talking to specialists and they're like, “oh, yes, I do specialize in Mongol fashion, but only that of the eastern end of the empire around what is now China.” And then other people are like, “oh, yes, I do specialize in Mongol fashion, but only the Mongol fashion that is in modern day Iran.”
Annalee: [00:35:22] Right.
Bethany: [00:35:24] They're like, I don't know anything about Turkey. But anyway, Nicholas Morton was really kind and gave me some pointers. I found Rachel Schine. She's a medieval scholar and professor of Arabic. And she's on Bluesky. She also gave me some ideas. And I also hunted down Patricia Blessing, a professor at Stanford, Eiren Shea, who's a professor of art history at Grinnell College.
[00:35:44] All of them offered me amazing hat ideas. Many of them sent me wonderful illustrations and like papers of like what these hats might have been. I even found a couple of like museum examples of tattered falling apart hats. The problem is, of course, you know, you're dealing with the steppe, right? The Eurasian steppe. Things don't preserve well out there.
[00:36:07] You know, the city's fall apart. Everything falls apart. And if it's fabric, that's even worse. It's very hard to have any of this survive. And I was also limited to sources that published or translated into English, which is a real limitation because a lot of sources remain still actually written only in Persian. And many of those have only been translated into Arabic. But I did get some hat designs. I got…
Annalee: [00:36:31] Amazing. OK, lay it on us.
Bethany: [00:36:34] So the hat was originally described as felt. So we know it was made of felted material. And the host of The History of Byzantium podcast suggested perhaps a turban made of felt. But I personally begin to sweat even thinking about a turban made of felt.
[00:36:50] A couple of friends, non-historians suggested a fez a la Doctor Who. There is no evidence of that kind of hat existing until at least the 15th century. It was originally called a tarbouche. It did not gain popularity until the 19th century because the Ottomans redesigned their military uniforms with a fez on them.
Annalee: [00:37:08] Okay, so it's not a turban. It's not a fez. What is it?
Bethany: [00:37:13] There are a couple of possibilities. So the first is kind of a baseball-style situation, but coming down over the ears. And it has a very long brim that can be flipped up, but can also be flipped down. So think like a baseball hat. Now line it in fur or felt. Put some nice gold on it. It's also made of leather.
Annalee: [00:37:34] It actually sounds kind of cozy.
Bethany: [00:37:37] It actually looks cute, honestly. And I came across that hat particularly in a couple of manuscripts that were depicting the 13th century legend of Varka and Golshah, which was a very popular Persian legend at the time. And one of the kings in that legend is wearing this hat. So that's one option.
Annalee: [00:37:55] Love it. So option number two.
Bethany: [00:37:58] Option number two is called a kalpak. This is the official hat of . It is tall. It is square. So it's ostentatious. It's tall, square. It's often white with large amounts of embroidery. And it has a brim that can be flipped up or flipped down. And more importantly, it can be folded completely flat.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:17] Oh, that sounds good for travel. And also embroidery.
Bethany: [00:38:21] Yes, covered in embroidery. But it's also interesting because that's the kind of kalpak that you see now reflected in Kyrgyzstan. But like kalpak could mean a lot of things. It's like a beanie in that like, yeah, OK, it's called a beanie. Does it have a pom-pom? Does it have a brim? Is it lined? Just to say beanie is to not narrow it down very much. And the same is true of the kalpak.
[00:38:42] So, for example, some kalpaks are actually really round and you can pull the brim up super, super high. And one example of this is actually the Turkish president Atatürk, who brought the kalpak like back into being the Turkish hat in like the early 20th century. And he wore his with the brim like all the way up. You would be forgiven for thinking this was kind of an inverted looking Fez situation. It is not. It is a kalpak.
Annalee: [00:39:07] It's kind of the popped collar of Turkish nationalism.
Bethany: [00:39:12] It is. But what I find fascinating about this is that I did come across a couple of examples and it could have been any in all of these things. I mean, Xi'an did not exist, right? Nobody was producing stuff en masse.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:27] Fast fashion of the 12th century.
Bethany: [00:39:29] Right. Everything was being made individually in, you know, individual workshops. And so we may actually never know what the three thousand hats per year – per year. That’s a lot of hats. We may neer know what they all looked like. And so there could have been a wide variety of styles of hat, but there are so many options and all of them are honestly...
Annalee: [00:39:52] Yeah. And maybe as you're suggesting, it would be different types of hats at different times. You know, it was just like, give us your latest fashion.
Bethany: [00:40:01] The only thing I can tell you they did demand is it had to have gold on it.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:04] Oh, that makes sense.
Bethany: [00:40:05] That was required.
Annalee: [00:40:07] Let's get into the politics of all this. I'm really curious about why did the Mongols want hats from the people that they conquered? Because you said at the beginning, like, you know, they also wanted a lot of other stuff that made more sense, like they wanted herd animals and they wanted, you know, money.
Bethany: [00:40:24] When you conquer people, like what, you don't ask for hats?
Annalee: [00:40:26] I mean, I'm in the pre-conquest stage of my history, so we'll see what happens.
Bethany: [00:40:32] Yeah. When you get to colonization, make sure you demand a lot of hats. I mean, I think the thing is Mongols – what makes this kind of conquering empire especially interesting is that they're nomadic, right? They did build a bunch of central cities in various parts of the empire, but they never actually really inhabited them full time. They were always kind of like going back and forth.
[00:40:54] And so anything that they demanded as tribute needed to travel. So Europeans might be like, “oh, we demand tribute in the form of these five castles and this many people and their land,” right? The Mongols that doesn't really make sense because they need to take everything with them.
[00:41:12] So they demanded a lot of mobile goods. One of the things they always demanded was Persian rugs. Persian rugs have been a sign of like fancy people for thousands of years.
Annalee: [00:41:23] Incredible. And they're so cozy, especially if you're like camping out in the desert, you know, you want a nice warm rug, like under your tent.
Bethany: [00:41:31] Yeah, you can use them on your walls too, they hold in heat. And of course you would want other things that you can travel with like clothing or hats. If you're a people who lives their whole life on horseback, of course, like hats are important. There's a lot of sun.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:45] I mean, you're going back and forth between different climates, right? It could be really cold in one place. It could be really hot. Like it's a versatile thing.
Bethany: [00:41:52] Yeah, it's a nice, versatile piece of clothing that you can use in any way. You can also use it to reflect your status. You know, like there's no downside to a hat is what I'm saying.
Annalee: [00:42:05] Why were they specifically interested in felt? Was that like a practical consideration or were there other social issues going on?
Bethany: [00:42:05] So felt was actually a very popular fabric at that time. Their tents were made of felt. It holds in a lot of heat, which on the steppe you need that, especially in the winter. It is cold. But I also think what's really interesting to me is that they didn't just want felt hats. They wanted felt hats that were gold. They wanted felt hats that were filigreed. They wanted silk. They wanted damask. They wanted brocade.
[00:42:37] And I love that because it's a sign of what the Mongols were doing at this time. They were growing this empire, right? And they were kind of transitioning from this like massive conquering spree to, “oh, no, we have all this new land. Now we need to rule it. Uh-oh.” And so when you're switching from like conquering to long term governance, you need to outfit things like courtiers, right? You have a court. You need courtiers. The courtiers need outfits.
[00:43:06] And so to me, when they're demanding these hats, they're basically demanding business suits for their administration.
Annalee: [00:43:12] Yeah, totally. Dress for medieval success. That's so cool. I'm wondering, like, how did you get interested in finding out about these hats and how they looked? Like what sucked you into the hat?
Bethany: [00:43:25] I mean, personally, as someone who loves fantasy and sci-fi, I am that person who does want to know what you're wearing.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:32] Oh, hell yeah.
Bethany: [00:43:33] And the same is true through history. You know, we have these images in our heads of what people must have looked like from like tomb effigies or from manuscripts and stuff. But that's not what the majority of people were wearing all the time.
[00:43:46] And then I look at people around me, right? And we're always wearing something. And what we're wearing is always saying something about us. Are you somebody who lives in athleisure? Are you somebody who only has the latest kind of jeans? Like, what is your style and what does that reflect about you?
[00:44:04] And people have always done that, even when you had like one or two dresses to your name, right? They were always made for you or adapted for you. And they reflected you as a person. And so I feel like clothing like this and demands for clothing like this reflect the gotta-have-it style of the period. They reflect fashion, but they also reflect what people valued and how they wanted other people to see them. Like…
Charlie Jane: [00:44:30] Like power.
Annalee: [00:44:31] Yeah, it's funny, because when we look back at the past, I think we always imagine that people had these really expedient reasons for everything. You know, like, oh, they wanted felt because it was warm. And we never make room for the kind of chaotic aesthetic choices that people make all the time where it's like, “yeah, I'm demanding a bunch of hats because I want my troops to look good. You know, I want them to be warm. But like also, we need to like look cool.” And that's this thing that, like you said, it happens all around us. We want people in history to somehow have been like purely practical or like, you know, have existed in this like world without like silliness, basically.
Bethany: [00:45:11] Yeah. And, you know, it makes you think like, I'm sure they also had memes, not memes in the way that we have memes now, but like memes in terms of like group in jokes or group in things that you would wear specific colors or patterns or hats.
[00:45:27] You know, and often when we're looking back on the past, we attribute those things to being like, “oh, well, obviously this was a ritualistic, courtier dress.” And now when we look back like a thousand years from now, on like what famous people were wearing at official ceremonies, we'd be looking at like the Emmy Awards or the Oscars and being like, “ah, ritualized court dress of the early 21st century.”
Charlie Jane: [00:45:52] Oh, one hundred percent.
Bethany: [00:45:54] When the reality is, those people just want to look fancy.
Annalee: [00:45:57] Yeah, exactly. They want that glittery gold.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:00] Yeah. I mean, you know, you think about how today, like there's all this panic about like John Fetterman is wearing, you know, sweatpants on the floor of the Senate or Obama wore a tan suit. It's like we think of like what people wear as like markers of status of how seriously they're taking things.
[00:46:17] I mean, 3000 felt hats. When you have an army that size, it's not for everybody. It's for like your top people. And really, those hats are going to wear out. So you might need like three or four hats per person, right? It's for your most central figures in your sprawling government apparatus.
Bethany: [00:46:34] Yeah. I mean, it was the like the Versace of...
Annalee: [00:46:37] Of foldable warm hats.
Bethany: [00:46:40] The couture of hats of the time. And personally, I mean, I look at these hats now and I got to be real. These hats are cool. They're tall. They're interesting. Like, I'd wear it, is what I'm saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:52] I want a big, tall, square hat.
Bethany: [00:46:53] Would y'all like to join me in bringing back the hat?
Annalee: [00:46:55] Yes, I am ready.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:57] If you can source them, if you can find a place to buy them online, I'm totally wearing one.
Bethany: [00:47:02] And think of how warm they'd be in the winter, because they're all like lined with felt. It'd be so nice.
Annalee: [00:47:05] Well, thank you so much for reporting the story out for us, Bethany. Hats off to you.
Bethany: [00:47:13] Thank you. I tip my hat.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:15] That was amazing.
Bethany: [00:47:17] That was fantastic.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:18] I didn't hat that.
Bethany: [00:47:20] I accept your hat tip. That was truly charming. Thank you. And we're putting links to all of the sources that I used in the show notes, as well as a link to my newsletter, where I actually talk more about my Mongolian hat obsession, because it is awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:33] Hell yeah.
[00:47:35] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:38] Thank you so much for listening. You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just stumbled on us somewhere, you can subscribe in all the places that you subscribe to podcasts. You can leave us a review, and it really helps us a lot if you do that.
[00:47:51] And you can find us on Mastodon, on Instagram, and on Bluesky, where usually Our Opinions or Our Opinions Are Correct in all of those places. We also once again have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:48:04] Thanks so much to our brilliant and intrepid producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks again to Bethany Brookshire. And thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. We'll talk to you later. If we're a patron, we'll be seeing you in Discord.
Both: [00:48:18] Bye!
[00:48:20] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]