Still, it’s an absorbing history. Did you know Malört was originally sold door to door by an elderly Swedish man named Carl Jeppson? Did you know Jeppson’s Malört, as it would become known, was initially sold in stores by a successful Chicago spirits manufacturer and lawyer (George Brode) who spent a year in prison for draft evasion — during World War II? Did you know his former secretary (and later romantic companion) Pat Gabelick steered the Malört brand for decades after Brode died? Did you know it’s made with aptly named wormwood herbs? Did you know Noel collected so many wincing reactions to the taste of Malört — my favorite is “a forest fire, if the forest were made of earwax” — by the end, you have steeled yourself for the inevitable:

OK, I have to taste this myself.

Thus, meeting at a bar.

“Two shots of Malört,” Noel said to the bartender.

We got two small glasses of something kind of … yellow, gasoline-esque. Noel really is a fan of Malört, he explained. He likes to drink it after a big meal. Settles the stomach, he insists. He thinks the dare-ya aspect of drinking a shot of Malört tends to get overblown around Chicago and never really matches the memorable experience of actually drinking Malört. “The lore’s exceeded the awfulness. Most people who try it think it’s less bad than expected — I think. Depends on the palate. If you are used to bitter, strong … Do you drink IPAs? Malört is its own thing and does not taste like anything else. Absinthe is in the same family. It has a point of view.”

He’s in the minority. Or rather, until recently, you might assume so. As the book lays out, about 15 years ago the brand hit a low and was only selling 1,000 cases a year. Since Malört was sold to CH Distillery in 2018, around 35,000 cases are sold annually. And yet, the presiding reaction to Malört is a face scrunch, a shiver, maybe a nervous giggle.

“The reputation,” Noel said, “was why would someone willingly drink this? Or even, why does this exist? Why is this intensely bitter Swedish spirit only available around here?”

I get it.

You probably do too. When I was 11, I was a latchkey kid and I would invite friends over and we would raid the kitchen, find the most disparate ingredients we could come up with — carrots, hot dogs, hot fudge sauce, paprika, gum, a tray of ice — blend it up and dare each other to drink it. Now, every few months there’s a new online food challenge that dares its test subjects to try the seemingly nauseating, spicy or indigestible. Who remembers the One Chip Challenge? (That is, eating one Paqui chip, made of two of the hottest foods around, Carolina Reaper and Naga Viper peppers). The Cinnamon Challenge? The Sprite-Banana Challenge? Those last two led to lots of hospital visits. But in every case, what you’re really asked to swallow is a fear of the unfamiliar.

There are so many questionable viral food videos today, that reactions from famous chefs — Gordon Ramsay comes to mind — is a sub-category. The genius of the popular YouTube series “Hot Ones,” co-created and hosted by former Chicago suburbanite Sean Evans, is predicated on the pressing question of how famous people behave while eating a series of increasingly hot chicken wings. Results vary. Watching New Zealand singer Lorde cruise through was like witnessing a one-minute mile. But watching Jennifer Lawrence (“I feel like I’m going to die!”) was harrowing.

Malört, though, falls into a different category of dare-ya tastes.

Americans call these “acquired tastes.” These are often old, specific and fine with the culture that created them. That name, “Malört,” means “wormwood” in Swedish. Malört arrived in Chicago via Swedish immigrants who’d been drinking it for ages. “So the appeal in Chicago, in the early days, was to Swedish immigrants,” Noel said. “There was a whole line of spirits (from Brode’s Bielzoff Products company) for first-generation immigrants, Scandinavian, German, Polish — they got tastes of home. But when there were not enough first-generation immigrants to appeal to, it was a thing for working-class Chicago. After that, George Brode started to lean into Malört as a gag.”

He ran ads asking: “Are you man enough to drink Jeppson?”

Think of Vegemite, black licorice, anchovies on pizza, haggis, lutefisk — one culture’s no-nonsense go-tos, at least initially, becomes another culture’s insensitive punchlines. Or conversely, a culinary test for belonging, hanging. I remember balking once at biting into a nearly black, sulfur-smelling “thousand-year egg” in a Chinese restaurant, and feeling like a tourist. On the other hand, as an Italian American, the things I have seen done to pasta in the Midwest feel like penance for every time I have hesitated before green bean casseroles.

Malört, Noel reminded me, “is a legit cultural experience, intertwined with the fabric of this city.” Meaning, I assumed: How could I claim to live in Chicago without trying Malört just this once?

“Smell first,” he said.

I edged my nose forward, braced, and it was … fine.

“I’m getting herbal,” Noel said. “All right, now take it all down at once. Do not sip this.” He spoke quickly, like if we’re going to rob this bank then we’re going to rob it now. “OK — onetwothree.”

It was caustic, but less liquid nails than harsh, warm medicine.

“The finish is going off in a couple directions,” Noel said. “You getting that? I’m getting the taste of rubber bands. Dry, and abrasive, but also, sits nicely on the tongue. A little sweetness around the edges to balance it out.”

I tasted pine, I said.

“I totally get pine. I used to say it tastes like Christmas trees. Also, some mint.”

And a touch of licorice. But truly, not so bad. I could feel my legs. Level complete.

“It’s also more memorable than a lot of things in this bar,” Noel said.

So, is there anything you won’t drink, I asked.

He thought. “Oh … milkshake IPAs. Let’s just put it this way, that stuff’s not for me.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Guy does not do a sound-check anymore. His guitar tech does it. These days he arrives at a venue and does not hang around. When home in Illinois, he’s eager to get back to his 14 acres in Orland Park. The older he’s become, the more naturally impatient he’s become, albeit paired with a twinkly smile. When a show is over, he walks from the stage to a waiting car and leaves. He will not talk much on a show day. He doesn’t want to risk his voice. Besides, he knows — everyone who knows him knows — he can talk.

The morning after he headlined the Chicago Blues Festival earlier this summer, he woke at 3:30 a.m. and was at Legends, his South Loop blues club, by 9 a.m., already talking. When he talks about himself, he says he grew up on a farm, where his habits were set.

He’s a believer in old habits, and a vessel of tales retold.

“You know I have been living out here in Chicago for 67 years now,” he said, sort of asking, sort of telling. “But on a farm see, you rise with the sun. We didn’t have a clock. The sun came down, you went home. The sun rose, you were out there in the field. You know, I have been trying to break that habit since I moved here? Doesn’t matter how late I get home from a show, I know I will be up, like, three, four o’clock in the morning.”

He remembers everything.

He’s told his band to warn him if he is ever about to play a song he played 10 minutes earlier. He fears this. He’s heard the stories about his friend B.B. King, how before King died nine years ago he’d play “You Are My Sunshine” five times in a single concert, the band unwilling to correct the boss. That is not Buddy Guy. He remembers the cost of a drink 60 years ago, the color of a guitar 70 years ago, the rhythms of a night in his 20s.

“Some stuff follows me my whole life,” he said.

George “Buddy” Guy, who arrived in Chicago near the end of the Great Migration. Buddy Guy, who became one of Chicago’s great bluesmen, and one of the greatest guitarists ever. Buddy Guy, keeper of an American art form, the music from which all American music flows. Buddy Guy, a one-man chamber of commerce and embodiment of the blues. Buddy Guy, still in the business of playing the Legend Buddy Guy. Buddy Guy, a living storybook to reread once again — a Midwestern life of such cultural consequence and ingrained mythology, it begs a little clarity.

He was born July 30, 1936, in rural Louisiana, and grew up on a farm. He made $2.50 for every 100 pounds of cotton that he picked. He left home at 21 and came to Chicago on Sept. 25, 1957 — which is his other birthday, he likes to tell people. He’s made 19 records under his own name and many others with friends and collaborators. He’s won eight Grammys, and he never took a single guitar lesson.

In fact, he made his first guitar.

But depending on who’s telling that tale, as a child, he made the guitar out of rubber bands or wood or his mother’s hairpins. When I asked about that guitar, he replied: “OK, in the South, we got mosquitos that will take you out of bed! I used to go fishing, they suck your blood, you hit them and the blood runs. We had this chemical to use on them and when the can was empty, it was like an old cigar box. I’d seen a guitar in a magazine I couldn’t afford, so I took two tacks and made a little guitar neck with wire screen wires. Which you could never finger like a guitar. The strings would break. First time I learned to play a real guitar, I walked three miles playing, just for someone to see me. I saw a cousin. I yelled ‘Look at this!’ He said, ‘You got it!’ I said, ‘Don’t stop me or I’ll lose it!’”

His stories start one place and end elsewhere. He can sound so apocryphal at times. Even his son Greg Guy said: “All of them stories of his, I was in doubt myself, but they’re real.”

He bunches up stray facts as if not to waste time. He prefers to condense. On the other hand, he also doesn’t want to be rushed. Not long ago, at a show with the Foo Fighters and other bands, he was performing on a stage that rotated so each act could be cycled on and off stage quickly, but when the stage began rotating to signal the end of his set, Guy stepped off of the disc and continued to play on the non-rotating part. He’s still full of fight and contradiction. One reason he created the Checkerboard Lounge, his famed, long-gone South Side club, was to tour less and spend more time at home with his kids. And that was 50 years ago — as late as 2022, he was still averaging about 130 concerts a year. Everyone who knows him knows he can’t stop, won’t stop. He slips into conversation that he’s never been the equal of the greats who inspired him, those names you know even if you don’t listen to the blues — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. He says this minutes before a show. He says that he’ll try his best but who knows if it’ll be any good. Then within seconds, he’s killing, aiming his guitar neck into his audience.

Like a flamethrower, Carlos Santana described it.

Guy is a Chicagoan via Louisiana, a mash of the Delta branch of the blues and the urban blues pioneered in Illinois. He’s an upholder of tradition whose hook became unpredictability. He might wander off a stage and into bathrooms, playing guitar. He still wanders off the stage at nearly every show, still playing. I asked about this. He said:

“When I don’t do that, somebody will say you must not be feeling good. I got that from the late Guitar Slim in Louisiana. He’d play in Baton Rouge, where I’d moved. Clubs wouldn’t let bands play then until they sold a lot of whiskey. If a band started, they didn’t sell no more, people too busy watching. So they’d tell Slim, ‘Wait another 45 minutes.’ Anyway I’m in front of the stage and his band plays two numbers, then ‘Ladies and gentleman, Guitar Slim!’ But I don’t see nobody. They’re full of (expletive), I think. Then this heavy guy walks in the club holding Slim on his shoulders, like a baby in the park. Slim had this 150-foot cord, red and white hair. He was brought to the stage, climbed off those shoulders then started singing: The things I used to do… House goes crazy. I said to myself if I ever learn the guitar, I want to play like B.B. but act like Slim. When I first got to Chicago, blues guys sat in chairs on stage! Muddy’d be in a chair, like you to me.”

Nobody’d fault him for sitting at 88.

“Yeah, but look — his last years, B.B. sat in a chair. Big airports, I get a wheelchair now. But I’m not happy sitting down. My family was Baptist, and if you get happy, you shout, you get up. That’s what I thought I could bring to blues. The little tricks do get attention.”

That unpredictability is more predictable these days. Guy at 88 has become a comforting figure for those who worry about the future of the blues; he’s arguably the last thread connecting Chicago to the first generation of greats, coming out of the rural Southern poverty that defined early blues. And yet he’s also long past wanting for much. That’s the irony of having a legacy: You’re expected to represent the past even when you’re not that person anymore. Writer Albert Murray once decried American’s understanding of the blues as a “simpleminded expression of frustration and despair,” loved less for its art and craft and sound than as a kind of “therapeutic compensation” for being Black in America. Guy’s last 30 years have played like a period to that thought, brushing off decades of neglect and embracing the joy of the music, not only the pain.

Guy says if he had to start again, he’d do nothing different. It worked, after all. He got a National Medal of Arts from George W. Bush, Kennedy Center Honors from Barack Obama and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by one of his inspirations (B.B. King) and one of his acolytes (Eric Clapton). He has more keys to more cities than he remembers, and his assistant, Annie Lawlor, jokes she’s lost track of all the mayoral proclamations declaring Buddy Guy Day.

But even Buddy Guy knows to stop, or semi-stop.

“The average person expects you still give them what you gave as a 20- or 30-year-old. The truth is, I might try, but it’s getting harder when you’re damned closer to 100.”

By the time Buddy Guy took the stage at Blues Fest, Millennium Park was past capacity. People were being turned away. Backstage, in the bowels of Pritzker Pavilion, musicians heard about fans jumping fences to get in. They shook heads, flattered to hear the excitement for a free annual festival, but keenly aware a lot of that excitement was for Guy: He was history, and, everyone heard, he was going away. Backstage was hectic, loud, like an airport terminal where everyone’s hauling guitars. Except for where Guy waited. He sat in the corner of a couch in his dressing room, flanked by water and chips, surrounded by his children and nephews and their children. Occasionally, a cheer from the huge crowd would penetrate this bunker and Guy would look up, impressed.

“Everyone keeps asking how I’m doing,” he said. “As if I have a choice but play! What’s 88 minus 6? I’ve been working, uh … 82 years. I’m going to try and enjoy what’s left.”

His voice was dreamy and serious, his face taking in family and friends. Blues guitarist Ronnie Brooks, son of the late Lonnie Brooks, an old friend of Guy’s, told me: “Buddy has been taken advantage of a lot. He told me about early days, like spending his last dime to get to a gig, a packed house, energy flowing, then at the end of the night, club owner tells him they didn’t make any money. ‘What you mean, the place was packed?‘ So this owner pulls a gun and says, ‘I said we didn’t make any money.’ I remember one show I played with him: Me and my band got paid, Buddy did not. He took it in stride.”

Guy’s story is so epic and archetypal that it even gets a lost-in-the-wilderness chapter. Soon after he arrived in Chicago in 1957, having few prospects, he walked the South Side for three days with nowhere to go, nowhere to play, ready to call his father in Louisiana and ask for a train ticket home — but then he noticed playing on a corner and was taken to the 708 Club on 47th Street, where he was introduced to a new mentor, Muddy Waters. Tom Hambridge, Guy’s producer and drummer, said: “After you’ve spent so much of your life not being paid what you were worth, even at 88 I bet it’s hard to turn any shows down.”

Guy leaves his dressing room just before he goes on. He walks slowly to the wings of the pavilion, where he receives a small burst of applause from friends. He does a shot of cognac with Clinée Hedspeth, commissioner of the Department of Culture Affairs and Special Events. He does a shot of cognac at every show; that’s his only real indulgence.

He’s fitted with his 1989 Fender, waits to be called, then, with a cocked head, strolls out.

First thing you notice when he opens his mouth is that his singing voice doesn’t fit his frame anymore. Guy is slender now, with a frail appearance that comes with age, yet his voice is big, strong, powerful. He thrusts his hips. He taps his guitar with drumsticks. He works through his own songs and a history of blues tropes, pausing to nod to the British and American superstars of the 1960s who lifted liberally from his style, quoting Cream, Hendrix. He plays at extremes, going quiet to loud abruptly, slow to fast, vice versa. When the time arrives, he wanders off stage.

Connor Korte, his guitar tech, looks alarmed.

This can be like taking care of a grandfather, Korte says later. Guy is swallowed by a crush that’s larger than usual, then despite his playing guitar the entire time he’s off the stage, despite the fact that he’s working, people do what they always do: They pat him on the shoulders, ask to shake his hands, attempt to have conversations with him, then and there. A child blows bubbles in his face. Guy avoids bare hands — “Did you know some people don’t wash their hands?” he asked me — but it’s impossible. If his guitar is knocked out of tune during a crowd walk, Guy tells Korte: Well, that’s part of a live show, that’s real, and if it happens, he’d doing something right.

The irony is that the only time he’s been fired, Guy said later, was when he first played live. “I could sing but didn’t think I was good enough, so I’d turn my back. This guy at the club in Baton Rouge, says I got to turn. I can’t. I start crying. I’m fired. A friend of mine said, ‘Let me show you something.’ He gives me schoolboy scotch. Which to us was just wine, and not that gentle wine. ‘Drink two shots, you’ll turn around!’ Sure enough, I did.”

Regardless of his schtick now, he still lacks an ego on stage. At Blues Fest, the closing jam goes on so long that when Guy wanders quietly off the stage, it’s unclear if he’s returning. He is not. The band continues but he’s already in a freight elevator. The gate rolls down, large metal doors clang in the middle, and Buddy Guy has left the building.

The next morning, at his club, I brought him croissants. He told me not to feed a hunting dog that hasn’t hunted yet: “No — you’re going to make me lazy.” Outside, commuters hustled past and tourists walked over from hotels to snap a photo of Legends. He left the Checkerboard Lounge in 1985 after 13 years. It never made money, he said. When Legends opened in 1989, he wanted to be near tourists and hotels. He doesn’t look like an aging bluesman on a Monday morning. He wore jeans and Dr. Martens. Despite playing an unannounced post-Blues Fest show here hours before, he looked rested. He’s handsome, like an aging actor; indeed, though details aren’t announced, he just shot a small role in a big upcoming vampire movie.

“People will tell you what’s good for you and what ain’t good for you.” He sighs. “We had mules on the farm, not machinery. Two years after I moved here I went home and the mule that used to pull my plow, that mule was dead. The one that didn’t plow, he was looking at me over the fence, like ‘Hey man!…’ Still alive. A few years ago my doctor put me on a tread machine, wired me up. Stress test. I didn’t say nothing until he finished. Then I said I taught my dad to drive, we walked everywhere, we couldn’t afford a car. It’d be 119 degrees and dad walked sunup to sundown. I told that doctor, my dad died at 56, what good did walking do for him? Doctor just smiled.”

Somehow that story segued into food, his favorite subject.

He cooks constantly. He just learned you can ask for fresh chicken at Popeyes, but you might wait a while. He bemoans at the quality of corned beef these days. On the family farm, he ate something other than chicken once a year — a freshly butchered ham at Christmas. His parents were sharecroppers; half of what the family made pulling cotton went to the other family that actually owned the land. The town was Lettsworth, though town is pushing it: Lettsworth, to this day, remains unincorporated Louisiana. Then, they had no irrigation, electricity, plumbing and for a while, no radio. The nearest neighbor was a mile away. “But the moon could shine there! The moon, the stars. They got something called the Dipper. Ever seen it? Me, I saw it every night.”

He left Louisiana at 21, hoping to meet Muddy Waters and start a life. That felt like one and the same. He tiptoed through the blues clubs of the South and West Sides. Legends, Guy notes, is “like 90% white, but when I got to Chicago, the clubs were 90% Black.” There was Theresa Needham of Theresa’s Lounge on South Indiana Avenue who’d meet you at the door wearing an apron and holding a blackjack and a gun. “And there was the Squeeze, which people called the Bucket of Blood because of all the people killed in it. I worked there six months. These places were packed night and morning. You know the guy who came in on a morning? The guy who started work at midnight. You couldn’t get into clubs on a Monday morning. Too crowded.”

He shared stages with so many blues legends in those first years — usually backing them on guitar — Chicago’s major blues label, Chess Records, brought him in to back those artists on vinyl. But Chess didn’t like the volume or distortion of Guy’s guitar. “He confounded Chess,” said Bruce Iglauer, founder of the Chicago-based label Alligator Records. “Musicians were playing short, restrained  solos then. Buddy was ahead of his time, overbending strings, and doing solos lengthier and more frantic than Chess knew.” By then, though, Guy was used to seeing how badly even popular bluesmen were treated. When he first arrived in Chicago he assumed the ones he revered were wealthy. Until he found himself buying them drinks with his last $300. When he brought his best songs to Chess, Guy said they would hand them to more established Chess artists and change the song credit. “We were getting ripped off. But look, Muddy, Wolf, B.B., they didn’t have high school. I went to school in a church. Once you learn to write your name, time to work.”

Guy didn’t even make it into this newspaper until he’d been in Chicago nine years, and even then it was to note he was backing up his partner, harmonica player Junior Wells. (They “need many more hours of practice,” the critic wrote.) For years, they were joined at the hip, but Wells was the star. Says Ronnie Brooks: “They were confident and talented, and they would squabble on stage. But nobody got between them. They were like the real Blues Brothers, man. You could feel it.”

For the first part of the 20th century, blues were a Black tradition, Black musicians, Black audiences. But by the 1960s, as its popularity began to wane, white British acts — Clapton, Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck — were name-checking influences: Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and, for his guitar style, Buddy Guy. Chess started to get requests for whomever was playing on such-and-such’s record. After that, Guy and Wells toured with rock bands, often for audiences expecting tired elderly Black men, not young men in tailored suits.

Guy stayed on the road so much that his son Greg Guy remembers the Fourth of July in the 1980s when he was home. “We had a party and DJ and this music comes on so I ran to the DJ, took that record. I flew it like a Frisbee. I turn around. Dad’s there. ‘What happened to the music?’ DJ said this kid pulled it off. I was 10. I didn’t know that was my dad on that record — I thought it was old people’s music. I said I wanted to hear Prince.” Guy wasn’t financially sound until his late 50s, after he opened Legends and won eight Grammys and sold some records. He’d already been married (and divorced) twice and had eight children. “When I first toured with him in the late ‘90s, he’d be in the news, on Letterman, Clapton would be talking about him all the time,” said singer Shemekia Copeland, whose father, Johnny Copeland, was close to Guy. “He was like proof that if you’re healthy and live long enough in this, you might get the success you deserve.”

Late in July, Legends had an 88th birthday party for the owner. Guy sat where he always sits, on a stool by the front door. Friends, musicians and family circled by, congratulating. His first wife came by. Tourists gawked and snapped pictures; Guy, beneath a pandemic mask, stared past them to the stage. Sometimes a stranger would seem too eager to get close and his security man, wearing a straw cowboy hat, would step in, his palm out, arm’s length. If Legends is something of a museum of the blues, Guy is its showpiece, too alive to risk.

But surviving isn’t thriving.

Guy laments this. When he tells stories, more often than not, he tacks “the late” onto friend’s names. The club will continue; Guy will probably keep playing his annual residency shows each winter. But he has a new album coming in six months and the only place he really sells records anymore, he said, is the gift shop at Legends. Art forms do fade. Genres do die. Guy often mentions Muddy at the end, asking him not to let the blues die. But Guy worries the blues may die. Chicago bluesman Mike Wheeler, whose band played the birthday party, told me “when I was a teenager, kids my age didn’t want anything to do with this music.” He knew the blues because his parents played them. Dan Souvigny, who plays keyboards for Guy, is 24; again, he knows the music from his parents’ records. If your picture of the blues looks like Muddy Waters, the future is dim.

But that’s one future.

Carlos Tortolero, director of Chicago Blues Festival, said: “Everything changes. Will blues go away? No. Will it be the same? Of course not.” Beyoncé plays the blues. Erykah Badu. Jack White. Melody Angel, a young Chicago singer whose music skirts the blues, said: “When the blues got going, it was made up then evolved. That’s why there’s Chicago blues, Memphis blues. It’s evolving, and that’s how I see it continuing. To older fans, it might not sound the same, but it’s not supposed to. You can’t expect it to. To expect that is to say younger artists just have to sound like Muddy and Buddy. But we can learn from them.” Iglauer of Alligator Records tells young blues acts these days that they should sing: “I woke up this morning and my hard drive crashed.”

What Buddy Guy represents, that’s fading, if slowly. Even one of the bumper stickers in the gift shop comes across melancholy: “As far as I can tell, the blues is alive and well.”

So let us now praise famous bluesmen.

By the end of his birthday, most of his family, who run the club, were on stage, jamming. There were cupcakes and more shots of cognac, and words of love. Guy even sang a little, about steel mills and women who’ve kicked him out and not having a friend in the world. He sang the blues.

“Have you ever felt mistreated?” he sang.

Oh yeah, shouted tourists.

“You know the (expletive) what I’m talking about?” he sang.

They did, they promised.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Before The Beatles became stars, Pete Best was replaced on drums with Ringo Starr. But if Ringo was fired after they became THE BEATLES, would it have been The Beatles? Could they have lost George Harrison and been The Beatles? The Rolling Stones recently played two shows at Soldier Field with two original members — Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. But without the laidback yin of Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass to Richards/Jagger’s revved-up yang, was that really the Stones?

There are more important questions in life.

Such as, Who’ll stop the rain?

And who let the dogs out?

But it’s summer concert season and ticket prices are no longer reasonable. Don’t you deserve to know who is actually in ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd these days? They co-headline at Ravinia next month, and though even lawn seats are $72 (before fees), only one of the two original long-bearded guitarists of ZZ Top will be present (Dusty Hill died in 2021), and because guitarist Gary Rossington died last year, the touring band called Lynyrd Skynyrd has exactly zero original members left. Unless you count guitarist Rickey Medlocke, who was briefly a member of the band, for two years, pre-fame; he’s now the closest thing that Skynyrd has to an original member.

But what constitutes the true version of a band is not as common-sensical an answer as it might appear. Being an original member isn’t always important. Take Journey, who played at Wrigley Field with Def Leppard on July 15: Chicago-raised pianist Jonathan Cain didn’t join Journey until after it was a success, but arguably, his power ballads (“Faithfully,” etc.) are more important to the core of Journey than former lead singer Steve Perry. When Styx plays Credit Union 1 Amphitheater in Tinley Park next month, know that Styx — which lost original singer Dennis DeYoung three times, and likely for the last in 1999 — is down to two original members. Or three if you count Tommy Shaw, and really, though he was not one of the original members, you’d have to count Tommy Shaw because he was central to a number of the Chicago band’s signature hits.

That said, Styx is co-headlining with Foreigner, which has no original members. Before they canceled the show, the Commodores were also playing Tinley Park in July, with the Pointer Sisters and the Spinners — and between all three, there were just two original members.

Can they do this?

Probably. According to the Truth in Music Advertising Act — signed into Illinois law in 2006 by occasional Elvis impersonator Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and now law in 34 other states — it is unlawful to conduct a live musical performance through the use of a misleading connection or affiliation. But there are exceptions: if a live act has legal rights to the name, at least one member of the act was a member of the same recording act, the show is identified in advertising as a tribute. Or if someone representing the original band agreed to allow the performances.

The wiggle room could (and does) fill stadiums.

Notice the careful billing of “Jeff Lynne’s ELO,” playing two nights at the United Center in September. Or “Welcome Back My Friends: The Return of Emerson, Lake & Palmer,” playing the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles on July 26: It features drummer Carl Palmer partly playing along to archival footage of his late bandmates. Infamously, as early as the 1960s, thanks to legal parsing, several iterations of the Drifters toured simultaneously. Beach Boys singer Mike Love legally owns the Beach Boy name, but there have been times in recent decades when the official Beach Boys (which played Ravinia in early July) had fewer original Beach Boys than Brian Wilson’s touring group.

Yet you know what’s knottier than legal squabbles? Questions of authenticity.

Even if a live act can do this, should they?

Does their audience even care?

The more I asked music fans and industry professionals if they cared, the more I realized the only correct answer was someone’s incredibly personal cultural calculus.

Marc Solheim, senior talent buyer for Riot Fest, was faced this year with the choice of two versions of the ‘90s band Sublime: one featuring two founding members and lead vocals by Jakob Nowell, the son of late Sublime singer Bradley Nowell; the other was named “Sublime With Rome” and had no original members and was led by a guitarist (Rome Ramirez) who had briefly performed with those two founding members. “For us, it’s all about authenticity, so we went with the one that is as close to the real Sublime as we could get.” He said, however, that what makes a band its authentic version is nebulous and ultimately up to its audience.

Maria Palmer, a Chicago DJ for Rock 95.5, WCHI-FM, keeps her own math simpler: “If the frontman is still kickin’, that’s all the band the people need.” And yet the history of rock is full of bands that got bigger after losing the original singer — AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. Lose a seminal guitarist? Take heart that after the Stones replaced the late Brian Jones with Mick Taylor, they made “Let It Bleed” and “Exile on Main Street.”

Dan Leali, who has been the drummer of the popular Chicago-based tribute band Tributosaurus for the past 23 years (as well as a drummer for Poi Dog Pondering and Liz Phair), can’t imagine Rush without drummer Neil Peart, or The Police without drummer Stewart Copeland, or Led Zeppelin without drummer John Bonham. He stuck with the various versions of Yes — up until founding member Chris Squire died in 2015. He thought Squeeze was pretty good live with and without a few of its original members.

“But I guess it depends on the band? If there’s nobody left but a cousin of an original member or a brother, I understand why musicians do it, but I wouldn’t be interested. The problem is when someone is not there who had been more than the sum of their parts.”

Well said. The Beatles needed all four members to stay the Beatles. Yet regardless of who’s singing, a Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen is no longer Van Halen. Santana would not be Santana without Carlos Santana. Then again, the death of a band’s namesake is not always the end: In the years before rock, the Glenn Miller Orchestra began touring without Miller, who went MIA during World War II. It plays the Arcada in September. Sun Ra, late legend of Chicago jazz, died in 1993, but the Sun Ra Arkestra remains a popular fixture on concert stages.

Technology, of course, will make the question of authenticity even more thorny.

“I went to Coachella in 2012 because I was a huge Tupac fan and never got to see him live,” said Christopher Wares, assistant chair of the music business department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. “He performed as a hologram alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, and it was a beautiful experience. It looked real! It wasn’t Tupac, of course, but was I worried about how authentic my experience was? I’m not sure if I did.

“I think of how the remaining Beatles released that new song last year. So fascinating. They used AI to separate (musical) parts. We never had the tech to separate John Lennon’s voice from his piano, but what we heard was not a clone of him. It wasn’t AI-generated. It was written long ago, performed by Beatles. But was it a Beatles song?”

Wares is a vocal proponent of using AI technology in music, “but as a collaborative tool. It will never replace human expression.” He said the issue of authenticity is a constant on social media among students, though generally, when they discuss authenticity it’s about values and sincerity, rather than slavish fidelity to a genre or an artist’s image.

That’s an old standard, and perhaps why audiences are more generous now with zombie bands playing as 2024 facsimiles of the original: In a digital era, authenticity begs for more than conforming. Besides, as Ware noted, the question of authenticity in pop is ancient. It’s a foundational influence on both rap (“How street are you?”) and country music (“How country are you?”). Part of the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake is some perceived lack of credibility. One reason hip hop itself was distrusted early in its history was its talent for dicing original songs into new original songs, forcing audiences to decide what’s more real. Even publishing (which has authors who don’t write their books) and visual arts (which has artists who dole out the execution of ideas to staff) face this issue.

But rock, especially, was once rooted in credibility.

So much so that even newish members of longtime bands — I’m thinking of Skynyrd here, which replaced late singer Ronnie Van Zant in 1987 with brother Johnny Van Zant — tend to be blood relatives, soundalikes, or just look the part. In fact, the faceless nature of many pre-MTV ‘60s and ‘70s rock acts brings them closer to mid-roster members of a baseball team or supporting actors on a sitcom, coming and going without much loss of identity to the whole. Who remembers what Foreigner looked like anyway? Earth, Wind & Fire and Chicago — those once ubiquitous Illinois hitmakers (who recently played together in Rosemont) — have collectively shed about 50 members over 50-plus years; each has also held on to a surprising core of its original members.

But would you notice if they hadn’t?

Jake Austen, who books the live music at The Promontory in Hyde Park, and has been the longtime editor of the music zine Rocktober, said a lot of vintage vocal groups like the Platters get by because “people understand they are getting a brand,” not the actual members of a group founded in the ‘50s. He said if the act is good, audiences are happy. Still, he was booking disco stars Heatwave (“Boogie Nights”) “until the last member passed away.” They were “amazing,” he said, “but I would not bring back the current version.” Likewise, he’s booked ‘90s stars Tony! Toni! Tone! They were “great” yet he only got two Tonys. Last time he booked them he got one Tony.

He wasn’t happy.

It’s so common now to see few or none of an act’s original members on stage, it’s worth noting bands still largely intact despite many decades together. Indeed, much of Riot Fest this fall is almost a tribute to such dedication and good luck: Chicago’s Fall Out Boy is mostly the group founded in 2001; Public Enemy is still Chuck D and Flavor Flav; Pavement has barely changed in 35 years; aging Los Angeles punks NOFX, the Descendants and Circle Jerks have most founding members after 40-odd years. Even Smashing Pumpkins, playing Soldier Field next month with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, despite 36 years and myriad changes, is still touring with three of four original members.

Conversely, Metallica, also playing Soldier Field next month, has just two founders (Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield) and one key early member (Kirk Hammett), partly because, they fired Dave Mustaine in 1983 — who later founded Megadeth, which is playing Tinley Park in September, though now Mustaine is the only founding member of Megadeth left.

Rock history is complicated, like an unemployment office for the fired and temporary.

“So to be honest, I find it hard to get religious about this,” said author Steven Hyden, whose several books on the history of classic rock include “Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock” and his latest, “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland.” “As long as there have been reunion tours, people have wondered this stuff, but also, I think the definition of what makes a band most has become much more liberal with audiences.

“I’m sure there are people in Chicago who’ll swear Wilco hasn’t been Wilco since Jay Bennett left the band (in 2001) and hasn’t made a good album since. But I wouldn’t.”

He thinks of the Grateful Dead losing Jerry Garcia then adding John Mayer and going back on tour playing Dead tunes, albeit under a newish name. “In what world would that be acceptable? And yet Dead & Company is one of the biggest stadium acts right now.” Likewise, I think of Springsteen going on tour in 1984 without Steven Van Zandt, who left the E Street Band for a solo career. For some faithful, it was a death in the family. Except, in 1984, Springsteen went from leader of a large cult to superstar, and in years since, after actual deaths in the E Street Band (and the return of Van Zandt in 1999), their stage show has become a bittersweet celebration of community and resilience.

“I think of a lot of classic rock now as a sort of agreement with the audience: This is better than nothing,” Hyden said. “As in life, as people get older and more vulnerable, we feel tenderness. We feel it for bands. When all the members of a favorite act were alive and it was possible for them to get back together, I might have felt differently. But as they get older and you no longer have that possibility? The alternative is worse.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Dabble in short punchy books, but devote the season to an epic. You get three months.

I read “The Lord of the Rings” this way, one installment a summer, for years. Now I’m picking through Robert Caro’s (still unfinished) Lyndon Johnson biography this way. Another strategy: Give yourself a quasi-degree in something very specific. Read the complete short stories of the late Alice Munro. The crime novels of Stephen King. Or underrated Penguin Classics: This summer offers a couple of fresh contenders — Harry Crews’ “The Knockout Artist” (about a boxer with a talent for knocking himself out), and “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” unclassifiable writing about being gay under a dictatorship, by Chilean legend Pedro Lemebel.

You’ll clip right along.

Same goes for an excellent new edition of a monster: The Folio Society’s wonderful “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” Susanna Clarke’s contemporary classic about magicians in 19th century England. As a single adventure, it was an 800-plus page cinderblock in 2004. Folio divides all of that into a much brisker trilogy, as it should have been, ideal for devouring in adult-size chunks that you can pass along to a precocious child or spouse, while continuing yourself.

As for the rest of you who just want a new mystery or history for the backyard, this summer is overstocked, even more so than the coming fall season. Yes, I read all of these; now get started.

No-guilt beach reads: One of the great American mystery series continues with “Farewell, Amethystine,” Walter Mosley’s 16th novel about Los Angeles detective Easy Rawlins. This one finds him in 1970, tracking an ex-husband, navigating gender upheaval. “The Sicilian Inheritance,” by airport favorite Jo Piazza, nails a clever twist on a contemporary cliche: Newly single American woman moves to Italy, discovers herself. The twist — she’s pulled into ugly family business — plays like a Palermo breeze.

You got the top pulled down and radio on, baby: “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell” (June 11) is the best kind of summer bio. It’s too critical and wandering to read like hero worship. NPR’s Ann Powers, among the smartest of music critics, captures the restlessness of a Mitchell album, walking through her catalog with eyes and ears open for both unease and transcendence. “Hip-Hop is History” (June 11) nails a similar feeling: It’s less like a timeline than a long hang with the Roots’ Questlove, who digs through the classics, offering reminiscence and discernment.

Family time: ‘Tis the season for other people’s problems. “Same as It Ever Was” (June 18), by Oak Park native Claire Lombardo (“The Most Fun We Ever Had”), and “Long Island Compromise” (July 9) by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), check a lot of boxes — relatable but never dull, reliably bonkers family, funny. But they’re also breezy satires of privilege without sacrificing gravitas. Lombardo hems with modesty to the way minor breaks in routine spiral into epic crisis. Brodesser-Akner, who twists her knife with more relish, begins with actual crisis (a mysterious kidnapping and release), then leaps to the surprising ways it stamps fear into each member of the wealthy family. For austerity: “This Strange Eventful History,” Claire Messud’s somewhat autobiographical saga about several generations of a French family, severed from each other during World War II, and the way time and distance become inevitable.

Tales of future past: “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean” (July 16), by Helen Scales, a marine biologist who doesn’t write like one. Here is a clear-eyed survey of what ails ocean life, shaped by Scales’s own experience and a bracing look at what’s being done. For something completely different: “The Book of Elsewhere” (July 23) is not quite science fiction, or fantasy, but as hard to pin down as you might expect a book authored by British surrealist China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. It’s also fun, a novel-length continuation of Reeves’s hot comic book, “BRZRKR,” a kind of Conan the Barbarian tale with black helicopters.

Rebel yells: “Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History” (Aug. 13) begins with what you (might) know: In 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led an uprising that was inevitably quashed, yet promised more to come. The late historian Anthony E. Kaye, with Gregory P. Downs, retells this in a fascinating new way, centering Turner’s conviction that he was a vessel of God. “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (June 18), by National Book Award-winner Tiya Miles, takes a similar approach to a more familiar American hero: It focuses on Tubman as a spiritual leader and self-taught ecologist. It’s the lyrical biography we’ll need before Tubman — already more myth than person — begins gracing the $20 bill, starting in 2030.

Cruel summer: Personally, it’s not summer unless I stretch out with a new Stephen King, and if that sounds familiar: “You Like It Darker,” his latest collection of stories, is among his smartest, yet tipping toward crime tales and the slightly paranormal. The centerpiece, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” is a stealth, 140-page mystery novel tucked beside a “Cujo” postscript and the gorgeous “Answer Man,” a late-career classic. For best results: Follow with Harlan Ellison’s “Greatest Hits,” a new compilation of vintage tales that shaped sci-fi and horror, inspiring King and Neil Gaiman (who writes the forward). Sentient AI, dystopias, alien copulation, evil twins …

Two absorbing sports books that aren’t actually about sports: Joseph O’Neill’s “Godwin” — like his celebrated 2008 novel “Netherland” — defies quick description. It reads like a fable, opening with the corporate chill of a Pittsburgh office then travels to suburbs of London and soccer fields of Africa. It follows the story of a soccer agent who talks his estranged brother into finding a soccer phenom. “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball,” by former Chicago journalist Keith O’Brien, would make a nice double-header: It’s not biography but taxonomy, a pungent epic about hubris and, in the figure of the disgraced Cincinnati Red, moral vacancy.

It’s not the heat; it’s the brimstone: “Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil” (June 18), by Chicago-based Ananda Lima has an eye-catching premise — you’re reading a collection of stories by the author following a one-night stand with Satan — so clever, it’s a relief to report that’s merely the hook for a substantive first book of major confidence, and belly laughs. Speak of the devil: Randall Sullivan’s “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared” and Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” (July 9) are ideal histories for the warmest weeks, cultural spelunkings into our centuries-old need to portray unencumbered immorality, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the ‘80s Satanic Panic.

One lit life: “Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers” is part author bio, part literary memoir, told by Rebecca McCarthy, a former student of Maclean who kept a lifelong friendship with the Hyde Park legend, a beloved professor at University of Chicago who — famously, very late in life — wrote “A River Runs Through It.”

Just a dream and the wind to carry me: It’s hard to relay how exhilarating, and unsettling, being a speck on the ocean is, with no other specks in sight, horizon to horizon. “Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea,” by maritime historian Richard J. King, gathers dizzying case studies of what drives people to do this, improvising steering systems for sleeping, talking to dolphins out of lonliness. Consider the complicated hero at the heart of Hampton Sides’ excellent best-seller, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” Cook represented the best of global exploration. Until he represented the worst. As forward-thinking as he was with native cultures, he died on a beach in Hawaii, stoned by its people. Sides’s compulsively readable 16th-century history is about the gulf between decency and a boss’s orders.

Summer ennui: If you have read Rachel Cusk — and if you haven’t, there’s your summer reading list — you’re safe to assume her latest novel about creative life, “Parade” (June 18), starts with a darkly funny come-on (an artist paints a portrait of his wife, makes it ugly and it sells), only to end up very far afield. “Fire Exit,” the lacerating debut novel by Morgan Talty, whose story set “Night of the Living Rez” was a 2022 critical smash, delves again into the families in a Native American community, for a tale of a man haunted by descendants present and just out of reach. Speaking of haunting: “We Burn Daylight” (July 30), by the underrated novelist Bret Anthony Johnston (“Remember Me Like This”) delivers another thriller less visceral than traumatic: The story of a cult in Waco, Texas, about to be taken by law enforcement, and the drama that unfolds inside and out. (Any similarities to Branch Davidians are purely intentional.)

Rethinking summer programming: “Something authentic, buried beneath something fake.” That’s how New Yorker TV writer Emily Nussbaum perfectly explains the allure of both “The Bachelor” and “Candid Camera” in “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” (June 25). She works magic, walking on that wavering line between fandom and disgust but never scolding. “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” (July 30), by “Caddyshack” historian Chris Nashawaty, begins with the maxim “Film critics get it wrong all the time,” then proves it. This is Gen-X catnip, a backstage rewind through a momentous movie summer that delivered us “Blade Runner,” “The Thing,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and far more.

Summertime sadness: “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham — whose remarkable “Midnight in Chernobyl” established him as the go-to narrator of tragedies — reads like a backward mystery, starting with the Space Shuttle explosion in 1986, then unwinding through institutional arrogance and the queasy assumption of “acceptable risk” that dooms even the best intentions. Eliza Griswold’s equally immersive “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church” (Aug. 6) documents the conflicts and frayed idealism that pulled a Philadelphia church apart over 30 years, but Griswold — whose “Amity and Prosperity” won the nonfiction Pulitzer in 2019 — grounds much of the story in old-fashioned fly-on-the-wall reporting, tagging along until she’s invisible.

Summer Art Fare: At some point this summer, you may duck into the cool marble halls of a museum. “Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums,” by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, is a lovely wish list of American options, dreamily illustrated, full of histories of the classics (the Art Institute of Chicago), but also battleship museums, Kentucky’s Noah’s Ark, the Rothko Chapel in Texas … “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing,” by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss, should get you through the rest of summer. Here is a brick of insight into that creative purgatory called the process, featuring notebook scribbles, sketches and chats with Sofia Coppola, Gay Talese, Suzan-Lori Parks and many more artists in far-flung fields. “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party” (Aug. 6) could be an engrossing anecdote from those books, the story of why history museums are now occupied by creatures none of us have seen. It follows the accidental discoveries that led to piecing together the first dinosaur skeletons, and what that meant for naturalists and clergy alike.

Election-year reading that isn’t a chore: What ails us, Frank Bruni writes in “The Age of Grievance,” isn’t grievance — this is a nation, of course, founded on the stuff. But rather, “a manner of individualism often indistinguishable from narcissism,” fostering “a violent rupture of our national psyche.” It’s an illuminating rant about humility, and one that echoes throughout “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War,” by James Shapiro. Here, the history is the birth and death of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, and the question of whether a country so fractious can sustain a national theater. Each chapter, often centered on loathsome political hearings, is part rousing, part enraging.

Dipping into the deep end: One of the year’s best books is “I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays” by Nell Irvin Painter, a digressive, accessible summer course on visual aesthetics (Black Power art), Southern history, Black figures both well-known (Sojourner Truth) and obscure (Alma Thomas), but primarily, the art of writing a pointed essay. “The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022” collects the final 46 stories by late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, from his 2019 essay about learning he had advanced lung cancer to his final piece on German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s another art course in a book (with a bonus introduction by Schjeldahl pal Steve Martin). For a decidedly more fun essay: “Any Person Is the Only Self” (June 11), by Elisa Gabbert, which collects her thoughts on Sylvia Plath, Motley Crue, “Point Break,” Proust …

I know what you read this summer: Gabino Iglesias, whose “The Devil Takes You Home” was one of the best books of 2022, summons similar darkness for “House of Bone and Rain” (Aug. 6), returning the author to his native Puerto Rico for more gangs, bad weather and traditions that slowly draw in creepy crawlies. Iglesias is where Paul Tremblay (“Cabin at the End of the World”) was a few years ago. “Horror Movie” (June 11), Tremblay’s latest, is a new jewel, the story of a cursed film, alternating between the screenplay and “the unreality of the entertainment ecosystem” that worships it. (Read before the inevitable horror movie of “Horror Movie.”)

Summer sleepers: “The Swans of Harlem” tells a vibrant, lovingly researched group biography of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, the five Black ballerinas who, at the peak of the civil rights movement, brought new urgency to a segregated art form. “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue” is another unheralded history, a fascinating excavation of the midcentury women — including two Chicagoans, Dorothy Shaver and Geraldine Stutz — whose designs and ideas reinvented American department stores and consumer fashion. In each of these books, a set of women is assembling a world they want. Bringing that history into today: In “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” Kathleen Hanna of Le Tigre and Bikini Kil writes about the grassroots Riot Grrrl movement and her fidelity to a low-fi, DIY independent music scene with bluntness, stumbling through the ‘90s, loaded with exclusionary politics and hope.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Brood XIII, though, is the perfect movie bug.

If this were a film, it would eat you: Some scientists in Springfield would be working on a way to solve world hunger, except good intentions would turn bad and Brood XIII would grow to the size of small dogs and develop a taste for human flesh. More likely, in the next few weeks, as Brood XIII spreads throughout Northeast Illinois, joining up in places with cousin Brood XIX, the worst that will happen is a bunch of dead trees and squirming human flesh.

Still, if you are like me, a connoisseur of bug films, the scenario is unnerving.

They don’t bite, they suck, draining precious bodily fluids (from trees). Their names alone — Brood XIII, The Great Southern Brood, and so forth — sound intentionally ominous, and their origin story — they rise out of the earth simultaneously once every 221 years, when the soil is at least 64 degrees — is basically off-brand Stephen King I.P. There are 2,500 species of cicada, and Illinois will see the ones straight out of central (bug) casting. As many as a trillion are expected, and while evolutionary biologists are not certain how cicadas know to rise out of the soil simultaneously, they suspect it’s partly a show of strength and pragmatism:

Should they emerge all at once, yes, many will perish — but mankind can’t stop them all.

The bug, any bug, as Hollywood has taught for generations, is an unknowable, unstoppable menace, autonomous and so rich in fecundity, it outpaces man’s ability to truly eradicate. In David Cronenberg’s still touching/disgusting 1986 remake of “The Fly,” Jeff Goldblum, in the late stages of his man-to-bug transformation, delivers a sort of movie bug manifesto. He feels the rush of the house fly growing inside him. He tells Geena Davis that “Insects don’t have politics.” Insects, he says, are brutal, they show “no compassion, no compromise — we can’t trust the insect.” It’s an explosion of freedom that people will never know. But right now, he does: “I am an insect who dreamt he was a man, and now that dream is over.”

What man has over bugs is size, but inevitably, that’s never enough, either.

In the meditative 1974 science fiction cult favorite “Phase IV” — the only film directed by Saul Bass, better known for merging graphic design with movie credit sequences in classics such as “Anatomy of a Murder” and  “Psycho” — a scientist in the arid Southwest notes that his nemesis is “so defenseless in the individual, yet so powerful in mass.” He means lowly ants, which in the film, develop an ability to communicate across species and have begun to signal their intentions to man. Their messages are not inviting. The ants leave traps, take out computers, construct “2001”-like monoliths in the desert. Unlike in most bug thrillers, Bass dedicates an inordinate amount of time to watching actual bugs stalking, scurrying, forging. The point being, indeed, they look squishable. Yet there are so many of them, streaming outward in rivers of writhing ink-black malevolence, by the end of the film our hero (Michael Murphy) realizes he is being controlled by ants.

“We didn’t know for what purpose,” he says wistfully, “but we knew we would be told.”

More to the point, in the way-cheesier “Empire of the Ants” (1977), starring Joan Collins as a shady land developer, giant ants hole up in warehouse offices (seriously) and organize people (or at least Floridians) to do their bidding. “My god!” a woman shouts. “They’re herding us like cattle!” The movie bug — like the similar-sounding Borg of “Star Trek” — is a bundle of our uncanniest fears: Bugs are not individuals, bugs have patience, bugs self-sacrifice, bugs move in sync. They are the original hive mind. Like the real thing, movie bugs prove so uncomfortable to man, their verbs alone generate shivers: Bugs crawl, bugs creep, bugs nest, bugs chew, bugs cocoon. Bugs, if they’re doing their cinematic job, revolt. In “The Mist” (2007), Frank Darabont’s exceedingly nightmarish Stephen King adaptation, there’s a scene in which survivors of a giant bug invasion pick find victims pasted to the walls of a storage room, shrouded in webbing. A hand reaches out. A soldier, alive. Yet his skin pulses with nascent spiders. The soldier tumbles from the web and shatters into a puddle of bugs.

Bugs killed this man, we realize, but bugs were also holding him together.

Ew, sure. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I have been a lover of bug movies since my grandmother insisted on reminding me throughout my childhood that killer bees should be arriving from Mexico any day now. Gen X, back me up: Nukes were eventual, but killer bees were always just around the corner.

So, for a brief window in the 1970s, disaster movies merged with those newspaper warnings of coming insect plagues. As bad as the William Shatner vehicle “Kingdom of the Spiders” (1977) was, its images burrowed like termites: children (and their bikes) covered in webs, country roads littered with spiders. Rachel Carson didn’t predict in “Silent Spring” that William Shatner would one day hopscotch through streets of poisonous tarantulas, but “Kingdom of the Spiders” did raise real-world fears that pesticides could kill natural predators, creating imbalances in nature. “Squirm” (1976) promised a world in which extreme weather would lead (somehow) to everyday worms ganging up in carnivorous undulating spaghetti dinners that borrow into your face and make cicada-like cries of digital white noise sounding suspiciously like busted synthesizers.

The peak of this mini-trend was “The Swarm.” Its cast alone is proof that folks in the 1970s were sweating the threat of bug infestations: Henry Fonda plays a scientist, Olivia de Havilland plays a schoolteacher, Richard Chamberlain plays a doctor. Michael Caine, the hero, is shocked when killer bees invade Texas: “The bees have always been our friends!” But they derail trains, cause a nuclear explosion and completely raze Houston. (“Will history blame me or the bees?” asks the general, played by Richard Widmark.) The best part is the earnest disclaimer over the credits that plays now like a parody of environmentalism: “The African killer bee portrayed in this films bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious hard-working American honey bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation.” I mean, the last thing Warner Bros. would need is picketing honey bees.

Especially after generations of mixed messaging.

If bug flicks since the 1970s have been largely concerned with unstoppable infestations of normal-size pests, Hollywood’s depiction of insects prior to Nixon and disco were defined by scale. In 1954, four months before “Godzilla” was initially released in Japan, launching the age of atomic monsters, “Them!” and its giant radioactive ants in the New Mexico desert scrambled there first. The opening scenes remain an effectively spooky template: A child is found wandering, only able to say “THEM!” A trailer is found demolished. A storekeeper is found dead, full of formic acid, a chemical generated by ants. What does it mean? A myrmecologist (Edmund Gwenn, who won an Oscar for playing Santa in “Miracle on 34th Street”) decides atomic testing at the nearby White Sands military base created big ants.

Giant bug movies of the 1950s played like “Frankenstein” smooshed against UFO invasion pictures with a heaping side of Cold War metaphor: Giant locusts (“Beginning of the End”) attack Chicago, a giant spider attacks Arizona (“Tarantula”), giant scorpions (“The Black Scorpion”) attack Mexico City. A few facts about the organized, devious nature of the invading hordes get muttered by scientists and generals, then invariably someone has to “call Washington.” Unless Washington is already threatened (“The Deadly Mantis”). Not unlike when politicians spoke of the Soviets, the predictions could get positively Biblical: “An entire population razed for deliverance!” screamed the trailer for “Black Scorpion.”

And the Bible doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about insects.

Most “are to be hated” (Leviticus 11:20). In fact, it’s a short walk from the Bible to the visceral nausea that characterizes the gnarliest use of bugs in movies. Kate Capshaw swings wildly at millions of bugs in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” but it’s that single centipede that crawls into her hair that gets the audience gagging. One large spider crawls down the belly of a woman in the shower in “Arachnophobia.” There’s a bug scene in Peter Jackson’s remake of “King Kong” full of throbbing fanged pink worms but it’s the way the rescue party swats and spins and waves frantically at themselves that get across the ick.

Even as I write this, I itch.

But it’s hard to say precisely why. Bugs have become a shorthand for countless concerns, from mental collapse (“Bug,” William Friedkin’s 2006 adaptation of the Tracy Letts play), to feeling small (“A Bug’s Life“), to the dehumanization of the proletariat in probably the most celebrated bug story of all, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” But disgust is probably most common.

Nothing coveys revulsion faster than a wiggling dark clump of cockroaches. There’s nothing worse than walking into a cloud of gnats. Movie bugs play off this, like a psychosomatic extension of 3-D, causing physical recoil by merely being. Yet we hardly matter to them. As naturalist E.O. Wilson once wrote: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” When cicadas — whose shrill whine sounds eerily like the evil ants of “Them!” — occupy our streets this summer, keep that mind. They do not want your flesh, and they do not want to herd you like cows.

But they will outlast you.

Step lively.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Which meant, of course, thousands of young children shouting back naughty, naughty words. I wasn’t clutching my pearls in horror. But I was wondering:

Have we all decided — you, me, Olivia, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — that young children can swear now?

Kim Vanhyning, the parent beside me, from the village of Channahon near Joliet, was attending with her two children, ages 9 and 12, and their grandmother Dorothy, who whispered: The kids recently lost their 7-year-old brother to cancer; they had shirts made that read “(Expletive) Cancer.” They knew swear words more intimately than they liked. And yet, Kim said, for tonight, “the rule is: Sing the swear words, but only tonight.”

At their age, I would have felt weird swearing in front of my mom.

Kim Vanhyning nodded: “I know! I wouldn’t have dreamed of cursing in front of my parents.”

“Yup,” her mother said, confirming it.

But these days — screw it, I guess.

I asked many more parents of young children at the United Center how they planned to deal with inevitable hailstorm of bad words, and the responses were so full of nuance — so lacking in generational clutching of their own pearls — that I wondered if attitudes on when and how children swear had shifted. Sure, parents at an Olivia Rodrigo show are likely more indulgent than most. But even within this sample, there’s subtlety. Mary Davis, from the Chicago suburbs, told me her kids “can’t swear tonight or at home, but they know all the swears and are great at finding words to substitute.” Jenny Grippo of McHenry said, “I’m a bad person to ask. I swear a lot. My daughter” — Avery, 10 years old — “she’s used to it, so I’ll let her enjoy the moment and sing whatever she likes, but she can not say swears at home and she can not swear in front of me.”

“I wish,” Avery deadpanned.

Cry about the decline of morality and coarsening of culture, but I would like to thank Olivia, and Taylor, and Beyoncé, and Nicki Minaj and other contemporary Top 40 singers for their contributions to the mainstreaming of swearing. I really like swear words. Though we don’t have mountains of rigorous university-backed studies on the impact of swearing — and even fewer on its effect on children — we do know from what exists that cursing can help manage emotions, and that people who swear extravagantly tend to be among society’s truth tellers. (Lacking filters, they are regarded as warmer people, more trustworthy.) When Taylor Swift released her first album at age 16, the only use of profanity was one utterance of “damn.” Now 34, her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” has seven songs marked as explicit, and according to online linguistic breakdowns on its lyrics, the F-bomb has become her fourth most frequently used word.

Because, well, (expletive) — just living out in the world erodes our filters.

Before you say Olivia Newton-John never relied on cursing, or that the Beatles became superstars without dropping F-bombs, know there were practical reasons they couldn’t. Partly, federal regulations against profanity on radio stations, which drove record sales. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, the places people hear music today carry no such regulations.

“I understand why it would be disconcerting for those of us over 40 to be standing in an arena of 8-year-old girls collectively screaming the F-word, but it’s a pretty natural part of the evolution of music and technology,” said NPR music critic Ann Powers. “If your parents were raised on hip hop, metal and punk, they are probably not shocked.”

And yet, the morning after “Tortured Poets Department” was released, during the drive to school, my daughter, age 7, already memorized the chorus of a song that goes “(Expletive) it if I can’t have him,” and was singing loudly, no worries. I was startled, then winced, without being shocked. Olivia R. sings about driving past “the places we used to go ‘cause I still (expletive) love you, babe.” Beyoncé sings, “Don’t be a (expletive), come take it to the floor.” And I could blame them.

But no, it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

“The stories we tell about the way we use language is the real story of how language is changing,” Jason Riggle, a linguist at the University of Chicago, told me. Our anecdotal truths get closer to the emotional truth of how we feel about cursing than clinical studies. When he said that, I thought of my favorite online video ever: A very young British child stands at the window of a suburban living room and tells her mother, “There’s a (expletive) goat outside.” The mother, sensibly, replies, “It’s just a goat.” But the girl, now frowning and serious, corrects: “No, it’s a (expletive) goat.” And indeed, when the camera pans over, there is a goat in their yard.

My daughter asks to watch this video the way she asks to watch Disney+. It’s my fault for (accidentally) showing it to her in the first place, but her love for it doesn’t worry me: It teaches, in its way, that with naughty language, context always matters. It shows the power of the right emphasis. And that well-timed language can generate a visceral thrill.

When I was a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a bad word on the radio could be a shock. Charlie Daniels singing “son of a bitch” in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,”  should you catch the unbleeped version, landed like a slap. I will never forget the Sunday afternoon I was in the car with my Italian grandmother and we were listening to the Pretenders’ “Precious” on the radio and somehow the DJ’s bleeping finger was slow and Chrissie Hynde sang, very clearly: “But not me baby, I’m too precious — (expletive) off!”

“Mio Dio!,” Grandma said.

Swearing is among the great joys of adulthood. I swear a lot. Why wouldn’t my daughter want to? It serves as anger, punctuation, a laugh, a threat, shorthand. Emma Byrne, a scientist who studies artificial intelligence and wrote a book on swearing (“Swearing is Good For You”), described an experiment in which subjects plunged their hands into ice water; those told to swear as they did this reported feeling less pain. If you ever sat in a car with the windows rolled up and cursed at the top of your lungs, you can attest to the therapeutic benefits of shouting bad words.

Not that everyone is as comfortable with swearing as I am.

Even Olivia Rodrigo has said her producers asked if all this swearing is a bit much. My daughter swears mainly to press my buttons, then reassures me that she would never do it at school, or at someone else’s home, or in Target or anything. I choose to believe her.

Take Laurie Viets of Irving Park, 52. She has 12-year-old twins and a 15-year-old. “We are a swearing family,” she told me. “We have always been. When we first had kids, we asked: ‘Do we stop swearing?’ Well, no, we can’t. Not realistically. I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I just tell (the kids) to swear appropriately. Don’t call each other swear words. And no slurs, of course. And also, don’t make me look bad in front of the other parents.

“Context matters so much with swearing. I was a DJ in Minnesota, which means we also don’t listen to clean versions of songs. Oh, no. We get annoyed when Alexa tries to play the clean versions. It’s like, ‘Alexa, darling, do you not know this family by now?’”

Powers, who wrote a 2017 history, “Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music,” pointed out that when recorded music began more than a century ago, overt sexual metaphor and innuendo, often sung by female blues singers, was among the most popular music: “Like precode Hollywood, before the FCC stepped in, language in popular music was once freer.” She says the switch began with sometimes raunchy 12-inch versions of popular songs made only for discos. Then came punk, hip hop. Still, music itself is a language, and all languages have profanity. As novelist Rumaan Alam wrote in a New Yorker essay about his kids swearing during pandemic quarantine: “Not swearing is just about decorum, and that’s a kind of facade.”

Profanity is a construct we tentatively agree on.

Fundamentally, it’s letters. Famed linguist Geoff Nunberg likens curse words to “magic spells” entirely dependent on social circumstances. I have been substituting “(expletive)” in this story out of respect to readers who might be offended but chances are I’m not fooling anyone about the identity of the actual words. That’s why I almost never play safe versions of songs for my daughter (although my wife, more skittish, usually does). The American Academy of Pediatrics has argued that exposure to profane language could lead to aggressive, numbing behaviors in children. But other studies conducted on swearing and children found mild behavioral changes at most when kids are exposed to offensive language — assuming the language is not derogatory or abusive.

Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, who has been studying the effects of swear words for 50 years, has heard it all. “What I tell parents is it is inevitable,” he told me. “Your children will swear. It’s part of how we evolve.” In fact, his studies have busted myths about swearing. His 2015 paper for the journal Language Sciences, for instance, shredded the folk wisdom that people who swear frequently have limited vocabularies. His findings found no less English fluency between swearers and non-swearers. (Any difference, he said, had more to do with class and income.) He’s not been surprised by the prolific F-bombs in contemporary pop. It’s a merging of trends: Children swear more than they did a generation ago, but also: since more women entered the workforce, more women swear in public.

Consider it a byproduct of gender equity.

Shocking words, of course — homophobic, racist, sexist — still exist. That’s why, in 2022, both Beyoncé and Lizzo backpedaled from the use of “spaz” in their lyrics; the word is ableist. But context is king. My daughter has told me several times, as if it were a recess legend, about a teacher in Michigan who she heard once said a swear word … in school!

Innocence exists in the world.

Though the fact that “The Tortured Poets Department” has 57 profane words means that “language like this is just mainstream enough now for Taylor Swift to use it without fear of alienating fans,” said Riggle. “It means whatever change in society we maybe feared has already happened.” It could also be, he said — having found in studies that those who initiate swearing in a relationship tend to carry more power — a show of female singers displaying strength.

Certainly, if you’re a parent, as Amy Johnson, executive director of Chicago’s Neighborhood Parents Network, said, it’s hard to punish for swearing now “when there are bigger concerns in the world.” Worrying about naughty words can feel like a luxury.

Still, some parents fight the good fight.

Outside the United Center, Cynthia Escalona of Chicago told me her 12-year-old daughter never swears and is not allowed to swear anywhere. “When she’s singing, she just skips over bad words.” She was not allowed to swear along with Olivia Rodrigo.

And yet, her daughter pointed out, “I will be swearing in my head.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

When she first heard about this department, B. Metzger Sampson, executive director of the Chicago Poetry Center, rolled her eyes. That name alone, Tortured Poets Department, “it sort of brings to mind poetry as black berets and a lot of turtlenecks.”

Swift, she said, seemed to have the outdated image of poets as revolutionary brooders.

If Taylor Swift robs a bank in her Patty Hearst beret, I said, you’re going to feel dumb.

“If Taylor Swift robs a bank and redistributes income,” Sampson said, “I’ll accept that.”

Since February, when Swift announced that her next album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” would be arriving on April 19, I’ve wondered about the ins and outs of this department, and if Swift knew what she was doing, aligning herself with poets. We know she would be chairman because that’s how she signed her name to a letter announcing the record. But, I thought, would other songwriters be allowed into this department? Because, as long as there have been song lyrics, there’ve been debates:

Can lyrics ever be poetry?

Are pop lyrics literature?

By the force of Swift’s popularity alone, the album title revives this conversation. In fact, bringing the album up with poets and poetry academics, the first thing many did was parse every word in that title: “The,” for instance, suggests something official, singular, perhaps exclusionary. “Tortured” was a bit much (“Who is torturing Taylor Swift?”), and should be taken as satire or praised for accepting the intense feelings of a working artist, billionaire or not. “Poets” might sound pretentious from a pop star, but that’s also why it could be taken as a bold self-proclamation. And “Department,” well, that’s institutional — “white people get so obsessed with classification,” Sampson said.

What I did not hear was, she’s no poet.

“I am pretty ecumenical in my relationship to cultural production,” said Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, director of the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University. “Some say there’s a distinction between lyrics and poetry. I’m not among them. Donne, Auden were set to music at times. Rap is an inheritor of Old English stress forms. Some lyrics, taken without music, might read like banalities — ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ even the Great American Songbook. A lot of people want to say poetry is the more rigorous form. They are more comfortable saying that a bad lyric is not poetry rather than, well… bad poetry. To me, everything about the distinction is not interesting enough to justify it.”

Not a single poet and musician (and musician-poet) contacted for this story said that lyrics were not literature, or that lyrics could never act as poetry, but rather, we could learn a lot about poetry and pop lyrics by recognizing both similarities and differences. There’s no easy definition. Lyrics require music to reach their truest form — unless they don’t. Poems require a certain musicality before they seem finished — unless they don’t.

Why, some asked, nodding to Tay, do we have to go and make things so complicated?

Adrian Matejka, editor of Chicago-based Poetry magazine, used to teach a course titled “The Poetics of Rap Music” at Indiana University. He said “all rappers are poets but not particularly good poets, and yet because of rap, we also have millions of people listening to poetry right now.” He said he would like Taylor Swift “to do for poetry what she did for Travis Kelce.” But then he thinks of a bar he used to live near, named Poets Bar. He was flattered until he learned that “Poets” part stood for (Expletive) On Everything, Tomorrow is Saturday.

“And you know what? The poet in me will take whatever we’re offered.”

Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer-winning poet and former New Yorker poetry editor, noted that eight years ago, the last time this conversation got hot, after Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize, “people seemed confused. They insisted Dylan was not a poet, and yet Dylan won for literature, not poetry. And yet, if you open any anthology of English poetry, and read chronologically, you are going to wade through acres of song lyrics before you even arrive at the poetry we know. Because poetry came out of an oral tradition.” After Dylan won, the novelist Jodi Picoult tweeted: “I’m happy for Bob Dylan, #doesthatmeanIcanwinagrammy?” Never mind that she can (for best spoken word poetry album), our insistence on siloing creative people reveals a dreary lack of imagination.

Muldoon, who is as serious about writing songs as about writing poems, said: “Sometimes one doesn’t know what one has when you start writing. I’m writing a song at this moment called ‘I Got Hurt in Jersey.’ Which is just something I see on billboards here, law firms advertising about compensation settlements. That line jumped out at me as a song, but I could have just as easily started a poem with those same words, right?”

Chicago’s first poet laureate, avery r. young, carries as much credibility as a stage musician as he does as a poet. “There is as much freedom to be lyrical, or literal, in a lyric as there is in a poem,” he said. “‘Tom’s Diner’ (by Suzanne Vega) is as much a poem as a Shakespearean sonnet. And ‘Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud’ (by James Brown) is as profound a couplet as anything from Langston Hughes. But a lot of people don’t understand the musicality of poems, so poetry gets associated with academia and song lyrics are considered pop culture, and that has everything to do with making money. (Poet) Terrance Hayes could be on a music chart alongside Usher, but there’s a reason Terrance Hayes doesn’t perform during half-time at the Super Bowl.”

If you want to raise the blood pressure of a poet, tell them to stay in their lane.

And yet, critics, audiences, they seem to revel in this.

There’s a long, caustic mirror history of pop stars as poets. John Lennon, at the peak of Beatlemania, released two poetry collections that were politely reviewed. Ever since, for every mild shrug given to collections by Alicia Keys and Lana Del Rey, there’s Jewel, whose sniffily received 1998 poetry book, “A Night Without Armor,” sold more than 2 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling collections of poetry in the United States, ever. Or Entertainment Weekly deciding “Blinking With Fists,” Billy Corgan’s best-selling 2004 poetry book, was “pretentious and confoundingly esoteric.” But then, even the New York Times, in a review of Dylan’s 1971 poetry collection “Tarantula,” decided its publication was “not a literary event because Dylan is not a literary figure.”

That didn’t age well.

The conversation, though, traces its roots to the old hoary argument about high and low culture — which, like many things, begins with the Greeks. “Lyric poetry in the Western tradition was called lyric poetry because at one point it was performed with a lyre,” explained poet Charif Shanahan, who teaches at Northwestern and just received the prestigious Whiting Award for emerging writers. What makes poetry distinctive from lyrics, he argued, is the visual look of a poem on a page, and how its structure can be made to convey a poem’s meaning. But such distinctions were already muddier by the Middle Ages, when troubadours pioneered a mix of lyric poetry, storytelling and music.

By the time Bob Dylan arrives in the 1960s — along with contemporaries and acolytes such as Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Patti Smith — it’s harder for an average person without a poetry background to recognize a difference between a lyric sheet and a poem. About this same time, musician-poets such as Gil Scott-Heron (a major influence on avery r. young) and the Last Poets are intentionally blurring the distinction; it’s no surprise both would later become key sources for hip hop. Even now, Smith, who grew up in Logan Square, will pause during her concerts to read her poetry.

Today, it’s not unusual for an organization such as the Chicago Poetry Center to train the poets it sends into Chicago classrooms on how to use contemporary pop music as a tool for explaining poetry — its rhythms, its pauses and subjects that are written about. Chicago poet Phillip B. Williams (who received a Whiting in 2017) said: “It can be easier to get a meaning of a word from a song. I learned the word ‘blatant’ from Mariah Carey!”

Then he sang: “Oh, I can’t be elusive with you, ‘cause it’s blatant that I’m feeling you …”

“Mariah sings as a complete statement,” he said, “but in a poem, you might not know what’s said until you reach the next line. Then somebody like (musician) Esperanza Spalding drags lines at times. So, it can be less about the words than the execution.”

When I called the celebrated Michigan-born poet Victoria Chang, she was reading some new work and listening closely for the “musicality” in the lines. “When my writing feels flat, I know to pay closer attention to musicality in a poem,” she said. Meaning, bounce, flow, sound. “I’ve been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath, who is incredibly musical. Lyrics are written for music and the writer is also thinking of bringing in music, but read Plath on a page, which she wrote to live on a page, and they don’t need music because they are music. You want to hear something sonically beautiful? The first line of ‘Lady Lazarus’”:

I have done it again.

It’s not such a leap from there to, as Taylor Swift sang:

Look what you made me do.

Adam Bradley, who teaches English and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and specializes in the poetics of lyrics, argues even the ad-libbed ah’s and uh huh’s of contemporary rap somewhat reflect the dance that poets occasionally perform between musicality and making sense. But on the subject of Taylor Swift, he sees a sophisticated writer who sees herself flatly as a poet, though with humor. “She talks without irony on ‘Holy Ground’: Back when you fit my poems like a perfect rhyme. But evokes cliches — which can get used to critique her — in a way that make a cliche resonate, adding something new.”

Think of ‘Invisible String’ on ‘Folklore’:

Cold was the steel of my axe to grind

For the boys who broke my heart

Now I send their babies presents.

That’s terrific, witty writing. And it’s not even among the many songs on the syllabus for Taylor Swift and Her World, a new class at Harvard University, being taught for the first time this spring by poet Stephanie Burt. She discusses Swift as a songwriter, she said. Though context is king. Swift is taught in the class alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge; “Red (Taylor’s Version)” is taught the same day as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59:

If there be nothing new, but that which is

Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled

Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss

The second burden of a former child.

Or as Taylor sang:

Lord, what will become of me

Once I’ve lost my novelty?

Burt is not equating Shakespeare and Swift but showing, reaching across centuries, how both are noticing the expiration date on their youth. Indeed, Muldoon said, while certain singers write lyrics that can “stand up” on a page without any music attached — Dylan, Smith, Joni Mitchell — that’s often coincidental to their intentions. As close as lyrics and poems appear, translation is rarely tidy. While it’s mistakenly assumed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was written to be read live — it plays now like a Patti Smith outtake — Brooklyn musician David Nagler found Carl Sandburg’s less sprightly “Chicago Poems” open to accompaniment. He recorded a 2016 album of Sandburg, with inspiration from Randy Newman and Harry Smith’s “Anthology of Folk Music”; he had help from Chicago musicians, including Sally Timms, Kelly Hogan, Jeff Tweedy, Jon Langford.

But even that took 18 years to get right.

Charles Kim has taught songwriting at the Old Town School of Folk Music for almost 25 years. “Some people don’t want to pay attention to syllabic stress or melody or consider the way music and language have their own priorities,” he told me. “So one thing I tell students who start out writing songs is a song is not a composition stapled to a poem.” He suggests listening to “Here Comes the Sun,” and noticing how banal the lyrics are (“less than a greeting card”) yet paired to music, it’s poetry, with an emotional release.

Happily, there’s middle ground, a place where poetry and music coexist.

Called Chicago.

Specifically, a scene that’s existed for decades, composed mostly of Black musicians and poets, performing on the same stages, pulling inspiration from the musicality of poets before them, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. The national slam poetry movement — a performative form — was born here. Between two local arts organizations alone, Louder Than a Bomb (now, the Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival) and Young Chicago Authors, we’ve witnessed a who-who of songwriter-musician-poet-writers unusually fluid in navigating mediums — Jamila Woods, Kara Jackson, Eve L. Ewing, Nate Marshall, Noname. Jackson, a former U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, wrote a lyric that goes:

He said, ‘You’re just no fun, you’re just no fun’

And if seeing you naked wasn’t such a bargain

it would be a home run, it would be a home run.

That’s a song. But it could be a poem. It could stand up on the page. When avery r. young — long a part of this scene — writes a song lyric, he considers accessibility and melody, and with a poem he thinks of syntax and words on the page. Lately, he also thinks of Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” album, blurring boundaries, “interrogating who gets included in a genre.” And he thinks of Taylor Swift, “being tongue in cheek about being a tortured poet, but then, also maybe just being honest about where she goes when she writes? She’s saying it’s cool just to write — to emote! I mean, I tell everybody who asks that I am an interdisciplinary artist, and really, in the end, it’s all poetry.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

There were so many other things I could have gone with. That set of words seemed right at the time, roughly 90 seconds ago. Now I’m not so sure. Joan Didion once said that writing the first sentence of anything is difficult but by the time you’ve written two, you’re committed and should just keep plowing ahead. The problem is, self-doubt is part of the process. If you began January certain this would be the year you finally wrote a book, and now it’s late March and you’re still frozen in fear, you understand. You need motivation. You need someone like Jami Attenberg, of Chicago suburb Buffalo Grove, in your head. She has this new book, “1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused and Productive All Year Round,” which is sort of the advice book equivalent of that friend who cheers beside a marathon route, tossing out enthusiasm and Gatorade.

It’s intended that way, Attenberg told me. She imagines people leaving her book on their desks and, whenever they can’t get started, reaching for words of unabashed support.

Better her than me.

I hate writing. I mean, I do it for a living, and I love it much of the time; there are those days when it brings a buoyant flush of confidence. But I also hate writing much of the time, too. Because it never gets easier. I once assumed it would. Years ago, when I was in college, on a whim, eager for advice, I called Roger Ebert at the Sun-Times and he answered his phone and I asked him how he was able to write so much, and he said he had a deadline right now and he didn’t have time to talk — which itself was an answer.

Writing advice arrives in many forms. The diaries of famous authors are windows into the struggle. Biographies, too. Chicago’s popular StoryStudio offers classes that guide you through finishing a book in one year. Rebecca Makkai, the acclaimed Chicago-based novelist, is its artistic director. During one of the many pitstops in Attenberg’s book, Makkai notes that her own first book took 10 years to finish, partly because she had children, and partly because she lost faith in what she was writing. Which is less than comforting. There are also classics on writing, full of practical advice both comforting and harrowing — Stephen King’s “On Writing,” William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well,” Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.”

Attenberg, though, has never read a book of writing advice. When she began this one, she imagined she was writing something motivational and repetitive, like the self-help book she once read to stop smoking. Sometimes you need encouragement. So six years ago, Attenberg was sitting with a writer friend, talking about the difficulty of staying motivated. They decided to put themselves through a self-invented two-week boot camp of sorts. The goal was to write 1,000 words a day. After two weeks they’d have 50 pages of a book. Attenberg went online, tweeted about the project and soon, hundreds of strangers were joining them, committed to finishing 1,000 words every day for two weeks. Understand: At this point in her career, Attenberg had already written six books, including the bestselling novel “The Middlesteins.” She still needed motivation.

That’s how awful writing is.

Yet — get this — she loves writing.

“It’s fun,” she said. “I always felt this way. When you don’t have a lot of friends as a kid, it’s a way of making them. In Illinois, growing up, I was a nerdy bookworm. It felt natural to create playgrounds in my head. I’m 52 now and it’s still the most joyful thing — a great way to know yourself. I am writing books I want to read. I don’t hate writing like you say.”

In my defense: The euphoria you get from writing something you can stand is fleeting. James Baldwin, who said many smart things about so many things, has one of the smartest lines ever about the pain of writing: “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” He said the most important thing for a writer starting out is having someone who reads their work and says, “The effort is real.”

But how do you start?

Arthur Miller skipped spring break at the University of Michigan to write a play in six days. Norman Mailer flexed his skills by writing sci-fi that starred a shameless stand-in for Buck Rogers. Eudora Welty would dive right in, knocking out terrible first lines such as: “Monsieur Boule inserted a delicate dagger in Mademoiselle’s left side and departed with a poised immediacy.”

Attenberg was editor of the school newspaper at Buffalo Grove High School and a member of an after-school creative writing workshop. And like any writer at any age who is worth their stuff, she read constantly. (“I don’t know how far you can go if you don’t.”) She created story-filled zines and released them, one by one. These became her first book, a story collection. “I didn’t realize I was writing a book for a while there. I was just writing about dark visions of modern romance and putting them out, then a friend said I should do a book. But I struggled with what it meant to be a writer, and finding time to be one. Learning (story) structure was hard. I’m character driven and would happily have characters chit-chat. I struggled figuring out how to ‘make things happen.’

“The thing is, to start, you don’t go out Friday night. Write at lunch. Bring a notebook on public transportation. This writer, Deesha Philyaw, said be prepared to disappoint people. She meant her family. You carve from your life to support your creative self.”

And what if you suspect your idea is dumb?

Take heart. Dostoevsky said, “There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.” When beginning a new book, John le Carré would remind himself: “‘The cat sat on a mat’ is not the first line… But ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ could work.”

Attenberg knows she has something if she wants to go back to something she wrote. If she is hearing her characters days later, that’s a positive sign. “Usually, I will start to see scenes in the future. So I will write towards those scenes. I will see an ending and write towards it. But the ending is never the real ending, and it becomes a north star. I also have friends and editors who are great advisors, but you should never write towards a marketplace. It always changes. Write the thing you love and it’ll come across to others.

“I also don’t keep a list of ideas. I keep a list of titles. There’s always an idea in a great title. I keep tons of notebooks but I rarely go back to them. For new ideas, I might go to a mall and eavesdrop. You probably won’t find a great story on Twitter, but I do look at vintage clothing on Etsy. You imagine: Who might have owned this clothing? It’s a start.”

Terrific, now how do I stay focused?

Silence is helpful, but, you know, a lot of silence becomes distractingly surreal.

Attenberg listens to music, “but only sung in a foreign tongue or all instrumental.” I can’t write if there are lyrics at all in a piece of background music. Brian Eno’s dreamy soundscapes, such as the perfectly titled “Ambient 1: Music For Airports,” are ideal.

“Good one,” Attenberg said. “Movie soundtracks, too.”

Maya Angelou would rent a hotel room for a few months and leave her home at 6 a.m. every day and write on the hotel bed until 1:30 p.m. or so, then return the next day. Tennessee Williams would wake up before dawn and write with a glass of wine.

Yeah, but that sounds like people with money and time to stay focused.

I asked Attenberg how she figured out how to make money and stay a writer.

“I don’t know if I did,” she said.

Dear reader, if you still have dreams of being a writer but have a weak constitution for humility and struggle, stop reading here. Attenberg worked some in advertising, she was a temp, she would take off more time than allowed. “I went broke a bunch of times. For the first books, I was basically going back and forth between writing and another job. My family worried about me, but they also thought I made these decisions myself. I’d decided to focus on writing even if I didn’t become a bestseller. My fourth book was my breakthrough (“The Middlesteins”), but right before, I had no money in a bank, I had a lot of credit card debt, I didn’t have another career to go into and I had just been dropped by my publisher. Also, I was now 40 and couch surfing for long periods of time.”

For many, sleeping on couches at 40 would be a hard out.

Entire finished novels were scrapped. Advice from agents was left unheeded. None of this is remarkable or unusual for this profession. “Yet all along, I was making decisions to get me to this place,” she said. All of it — good, bad, soul-crushing — was part of becoming a writer. “It didn’t feel like a waste,” she said about the junked books, though the words sounded broader. “Sometimes you do something to get you to somewhere else. You go through the bad to get you to next thing. It’s all part of a bigger picture.”

Now start writing.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

I forget that a good historical novel often brushes past the biggest hurdles and defies our doubts. It must face readers who inevitably question its historical accuracy, while simultaneously understanding: Focus too much on the facts, and the imagination suffers.

This is why I feared the worst for Cristina Henríquez and her fourth book, a historical novel titled “The Great Divide,” just released. Her work, so far, written from suburban Hinsdale, has been some of the warmest, welcoming contemporary fiction on the subject of international borders and families. But the key there is contemporary. Each new book from Henríquez, all acclaimed — “The Book of Unknown Americans,” “The World in Half,” “Come Together, Fall Apart” (a 2006 story collection) — took on cultural legacy and family history yet found its heart not in the monumental but the everyday.

“The Great Divide” is set a century ago during the digging of the Panama Canal, and not on the fringes, but among men constructing it, international emigrants hoping to find work in a prosperous Panama, locals protesting Americans, and Americans both eager to help and make a buck. It’s a brisk 319-page epic about love and violence that, seamlessly, holds history in balance. It’s also one of the buzziest new books of spring. I met with Henríquez recently to discuss the risks and rewards of stepping into historical fiction. This discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Your father is from Panama. Considering how much you have to take on to write historical fiction, does having family from there factor into your approach?

A: Well, it’s a love letter to Panama, in a way, and family. I grew up in Delaware, but we spent summers on vacations there. Not as tourists, but visiting family, getting grandma’s medication from the pharmacy, hanging laundry! I didn’t speak Spanish then and I would feel like an outsider. I think I became a writer trying to piece together into a story what I was hearing. We would go to the canal and sit in the blazing sun and watch ships pass through. My family wasn’t involved in the construction era, 1904 to 1914, but I spoke to my dad a lot while writing, and once, after three years of work, he said, ‘You know, I worked on the canal, after high school, in the dredging and engineering division.’ He’s an engineer. I’m like, ‘OK, that might have been helpful to know three years ago.’

Q: You didn’t think you were writing historical fiction.

A: Not until fairly far into the process, when I realized it was going to get described. It was just a novel set in the past. I was never muted by that and I never felt hung by that.

Q: Do you read a lot of historical fiction?

A: What I have noticed is how many books I have been reading that get categorized as historical fiction, that while I am reading them, well, I didn’t think of them that way, not until later. A lot of big writers work in this (area) now. Jesmyn Ward’s last novel, “Let Us Descend.” Paul Harding’s “This Other Eden.” Daniel Mason (“North Woods”) is on my list to read. Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” (set on a Virginia slave plantation) was a constant companion while I wrote this. “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” too, by Gabriel García Márquez, though it’s ostensibly historical. And “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, again, is ostensibly about the firebombing of Dresden, moving in time, breaking rules.

Q: The problem is when you see the research, I think. I was reading a historical novel recently that would just stop short at times to dump in a lot of background.

A: You start to think of all the interesting things you discovered during research, but how to get them in seamlessly? What do you let go? If it can’t be grafted to a character’s perspective, let it go. I made a note while I was writing: You Are Not a Tour Guide! I don’t have to explain everything I learned about Panama. It’s all in service to the story.

Q: But you did research.

A: An enormous amount. The first six months, before putting pen to paper, all I was reading was about the Panama Canal, and even then it took me five years to finish. And during that time, I’m still only reading about Panama, and pestering the library in Hinsdale for access to journals and articles and maps that I can’t find online. There are Panama Canal scholars, and they would read drafts and give feedback. But then I also went to Panama and found resources there that don’t exist outside of its own libraries.

Q: Did you have to go to Panama?

A: A fiction writer’s job is to imagine something whether they are there or not, but it helped. Could I have done it without my personal connection to the place? Hard to say. People want to know if it is based on family — they always want to know that, no matter what you write. I’m trying to understand why it matters how much is autobiographical. But this was a whole cloth invention of characters and trying to imagine what it was like.

Q: The problem is, the question of accuracy gets all-consuming for audiences.

A: Yes, but with fiction, to a degree, there’s latitude. Edward P. Jones and “The Known World,” he has official men coming to the door to discuss official historical documents. But I remember when asked about it on a TV show, he said he made it all up. I made a lot of this all up. Fiction is my job, but look, you also want to be faithful: I studied train schedules and would think, “Do they leave on the 12:55 or the 1:55? Does it change the timeline of the story?” You do ask these things. On the other hand, if I couldn’t find the name of a street or something, I would make it up. All of which, in a way, proves the premise of the book: Some history hasn’t been told and remains buried, and the fact that you can’t find many of the basic details to explain that, it’s evidence for why you write.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

CHICAGO — This isn’t meant to be answered with certainty, but for a moment, ask yourself:

What is the single best comedy sketch of all time?

From any source — Abbot & Costello, Monty Python, “Saturday Night Live,” “Portlandia,” “Chapelle’s Show.” There’s no ruling body on the question, not even a Rolling Stone-esque comedy magazine to claim that authority. But there is a smart married comedy couple, Elle Key and Keegan-Michael Key, actor (him), producer (her), now co-authors of a slender, conversational book, “The History of Sketch Comedy.” And by the end of that history, they try to answer this question, and thus, must go through Chicago.

Key and Key’s pick? Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’s “The Audition,” from HBO’s influential ‘90s series “Mr. Show.” The setup: Cross auditions for Odenkirk (Second City vet, Naperville native) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Columbia College alum, Norridge native) and asks to perform a monologue ironically titled “The Audition.” The problem: every time he seems to address Odenkirk and Stamatopoulos, they politely reply and Cross must stop — no, no, that’s a part of his monologue. Ahh … OK, start again. But as Cross’ monologue grows increasingly furious — “Someone answer me! Don’t look at each other! Look at me!” — Odenkirk and Stamatopoulos squirm, unsure if they should respond to this actor who is auditioning by pretending — maybe? — to be in an audition.

In their book, Keegan describes the sketch as the “pinnacle of sketch … my turducken.” On the phone recently, in advance of Key and Key’s appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival, they explained: That sketch is “everything you should do,” Elle said. It rises in intensity, it’s built on improv’s yes-anding and the end is unexpected.

Also, they agree.

In fact, to discuss comedy with Key and Key can sound vaguely like a sketch:

“So you both agree on comedy and what the history of comedy should look like?”

Elle: “There was a moment when Keegan was presenting at an award show and I wrote him something and had him stop for laughs — he was on video, waiting for the audience’s reaction as if it were live — and he did fight me on that, because he did not think it would get the laugh I knew he would get. But I can’t think of another time when we disagreed …”

Keegan: “Neither can I.”

Elle: “See, he can’t disagree with me now.”

They have been married five years. She’s from New York City; he’s from Detroit. They spoke from New York, where, as Elle explained, by way of describing her husband: “Keegan jaywalked today. I think that’s huge. I can count on one hand how many times he’s jaywalked in New York City, and I don’t think if I wasn’t with him that he would do it.”

Keegan — whose own contribution to sketch comedy, as half of the duo Key & Peele, would need inclusion in any serious discussion of the funniest sketches ever — keeps a kind of proper, formal bearing in everyday life that serves his sketch characters well. He knows instinctively where a sketch needs to veer out of control, and where it needs a beat of silence. He came up through the Second City ecosystem, first in its satellite Detroit troupe, then through Second City’s e.t.c. cast in Chicago. “There was definitely a difference of styles,” he said. “Detroit was extremely physical and very raw, and there was something much headier about the Chicago stage. That was my experience when I came over from Detroit. Someone in Chicago told me the majority of people in the audience there, for a long time, came from the 60614 ZIP code. They had been trained to watch this kind of sketch. Now there’s more tourism. In Detroit, there was not yet an educated improv or sketch audience, so when we did big physical humor or marriage humor, that was most successful. In Chicago, you could get away with experimenting.”

Not that physical chaos is any less fine-tuned.

I asked what the best sketch shows of the moment are and he said, without pause: HBO’s “Black Lady Sketch Show” — whose breakout Robin Thede went through Northwestern University then Second City — and Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave,” co-created by Detroit native and Chicago Second City star Tim Robinson. The latter, in particular, “strikes me as a descendant of the Marx Brothers,” Keegan said. “I think of Harpo pulling things out of a coat that wouldn’t have existed in a coat, and Tim does that same thing by utilizing minutiae. He finds something 99% of humanity would let go and that’s what his characters give their attention to. The Marx Brothers worked that way. They would stop a plot — however loose that plot was — to be madmen. My favorite moments are when they take a second to just revel in a joke they just told. You could never do that in a movie today, but Tim does. He relishes in obsessing over something small.”

Throughout the book, Key and Key admire chaos, the sort that pairs well with another hallmark of sketch: one-upmanship. A few examples referenced in the book: Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball as competing car salespersons; the legendary parrot sketch from Monty Python; and a great “Kids in the Hall” routine in which two friends have lunch and one tries to remember the name of the movie he saw last night, which is obviously “Citizen Kane.” (“No, that’s not it,” Dave Foley says to every reminder of “Citizen Kane.”)

“Key & Peele,” the remarkable sketch comedy show that Keegan made with Jordan Peele for five seasons on Comedy Central, often basked in this type of gamesmanship, raising the stakes, and raising the stakes, and raising the stakes. Elle and Keegan like to talk the math of such sketches. As she put it — “How you start at 6 then bring it to 412. Some sketches, the scenario will build so much, someone will have to explode.”

“I have been in some of those,” Keegan said.

“Wait, you have?” Elle said.

“Yeah, ‘Key & Peele,’ the valets — they self-immolate. They get carried away.”

Don’t forget, I said, the one with the burger at the BBQ.

“Burger?” Keegan asked.

You’re hovering over Peele, telling him to flip the burger, don’t use cheese …

“Oh! The Kobe beef sketch.”

“Right — ‘This meat came all the way over the Pacific! By boat!’”

“That came from my point of view, only heightened,” Keegan said. “In real life, I wouldn’t bring Kobe beef to a cookout. But if I did, what’s the worst possible thing that would happen? It’d end up in the hands of someone who would not honor the product! Why would I want you cooking my food? ‘You’re not worthy! You’re not worthy!’ That’s me.”

One-upmanship and ego is so baked into vintage sketch even sketches rooted in less myopic topics are still about one-upmanship. The slave auction sketch on “Key & Peele” — in which two slaves, played by Key and Peele, grow outraged that they are not selling — is really about “vanity,” Elle said. “Everyone calls it the slave sketch,” Keegan added, “but that’s just the angle. That’s Jordan sitting in his apartment and going, ‘How can I make someone laugh at this?’” Same with their racist zombie sketch — in which Key and Peele, survivors of a zombie apocalypse, pick up on undead microaggressions. To pull it off as comedy, Keegan said, “you have to be willing to say, ‘I’m not just going to be contrarian for shock value but locate a kernel to exploit — then heighten, heighten …”

There’s patience in sketch comedy that can feel old-school in an age of social media. When a “Key & Peele” or “SNL” or SCTV classic comes across my TikTok or Instagram feed these days, it’s nearly always drained of context and chopped up so much the comedy isn’t allowed room to heighten. Chaos doesn’t have to arrive. It’s already there.

Key and Key call this “DMV Theater,” and it’s a mixed bag: Sketch comedy is so ubiquitous online, it’s thriving. Yet, it’s consumed on the run, in blinks of boredom.

“Kevin Nealon told us in the book that his son will watch ‘SNL’ sketches on YouTube but check the time stamp first,” Keegan said. “What’s fascinating is how older sketches wait for the setup. They simmer. You could have two minutes before you get to the comedy.

“(‘Key & Peele’) never looked at it as being online someday. We orchestrated sketches to live together. We didn’t know they’d get segmented out. Episodes were like albums, where there is a movement to the show, and one thing leads into the next for a reason.”

Python pioneered that, I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s how those sketches were designed, You ever heard the theory that every episode of that series was a dream in the head of a man named Monty Python? You had these incongruous sketches flowing — literally, and now for something completely different. It’s how we dream. It’s probably an apocryphal story, but I love it.”

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