Albeit, music that buzzes and whines, thrums and fizzes. Music that crackles and pulses, rustles and hums like an industrial fan set too high. Music that clomps along with a rhythmic ththththththth, and a wooawhoowooa whoowooawhoo, and sometimes an Eee….erer Eee…erer Eee…erer. Music goes WEEEooo WEEEooo and sounds like a metal sheet in the wind.

That may not sound like music to many of you, but know that in the South, there have been news reports recently of residents calling 911 to complain about the incessant shrill of the cicadas. And that is exactly how a lot of people react to loud, discordant sounds that they don’t understand.

Also known as … music.

But this, you can’t dance to, and there is no melody nor lyrics.

Unless you count the word “pharaoh,” which some say is the sound of the cicadas. “You just can’t hear the tail end of the word, so it all blends together into a wave of ‘pharaohs,’ ” said David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who has a side gig as an experimental musician. He likes to collaborate with nature. Mockingbirds, whales. He’s arriving in Chicago on Wednesday to spend a week jamming with midwestern cicadas in public parks and open fields. He began playing with Illinois insects — him on clarinets and flutes, them on their buggy anatomy — about 13 years ago, and returns whenever a cicada brood emerges.

As collaborators, cicadas are patient, he said.

They don’t fly away. “It’s actually humbling,” he said. “You become one musician among millions, billions. You are one more sound. You fade into their drone. A lot of people think it’s ridiculous, of course, but I always think it’s good for a musician to recognize they are not the center of attention. People will say that this is not music, but then someone else is completely moved by the sound.”

Rothenberg even regards the 13- and 17-year sleep of cicadas as making a form of music, “if you think of it as being performed at a very slow rhythm.” Or, perhaps, as cicadas covering composer John Cage, whose famous piece, “4’33”,” was the long silence and incidental environmental sounds that came from just sitting in front an audience for four minutes and 33 seconds.

As for me, depending on where I am in the Chicago area these days, I also hear a theremin, that weird electronic instrument that requires its player to wave around their arms like a conductor.

Think: the spooky ethereal whirring of UFOs in 1950s sci-fi.

But sometimes I hear the hypnotic oscillation of the great 1970s punk act Suicide. And when several breeds of cicadas clash at once, I imagine the feedback tsunamis of Sonic Youth and Neil Young‘s Crazy Horse. Or even Lou Reed’s noise rock landmark “Metal Machine Music.” Other times I hear the synth soundtracks of old John Carpenter movies, or Michael Mann’s “Thief,” which blew up the Green Mill lounge in Uptown, arguably, symbolically, dislodging jazz.

You get musical variety with cicadas because different breeds produce different kinds of sounds. The result can be a wall of sound, which is also the name given to the recording style of Phil Spector, the famous producer and convicted murderer, whose 1960s classics came off so crowded with instrumentation it was hard to tell where one player ended and another began.

Cicadas sound like that.

Ryan Dunn, whose longtime Wicker Park art space Tritriangle occasionally plays host to hard-to-categorize noise makers, sees a degree of overlap with the music of cicadas: “In many ways, (experimental music) tends to have so much more in common with natural soundscapes, because it doesn’t hem to familiar, preestablished structures of Western music. And animals and insects in nature don’t, either. They are just trying to find a way to be heard the best.”

Chicago-based sound artist Kiku Hibino, whose work is typically heard in spaces like the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Lincoln Park Conservatory, has made a career of drawing connections between the sounds created by nature and electronically created music. He grew up in Japan, often surrounded by cicadas, he said. He would collect their light green shells,  and he remembers the way cicadas chirped playfully whenever he tried to catch them. He describes their late summer song as going something like: “tsuku tsuku boshi.”

The analog synthesizer he favors for his art sounds suspiciously like the high-frequency calls of cicadas. He figures that’s because he never really shook loose childhood memories of the bugs.

In tone and sound, he said, “they are the complete opposite of electronic music in the fundamental way they produce sound. Electronic musicians think with our brains, and create sounds with synthesizers and then send them out to speakers. The cicada is different. Its entire body is a synthesizer with speakers.”

Specifically, a cicada contains a drum-like organ called a tymbal that includes a set of muscles that it pulls inward and snaps back at a rate of 300 to 400 times a second to create its songs.

The result — assuming their volume is quieter than a jet engine — can be meditative, and indistinguishable from the ambient soundscapes of artists like Brian Eno and Philip Glass.

Chicago-based StretchMetal is a record label and booking business that focuses on ambient music. Its signature project is an eight-hour-long Drone Sleepover during which the audience curls up — and usually sleeps — for a dusk-to-dawn concert of uninterrupted electronic droning. Once a month at the Hideout, StretchMetal also stages Drone Rodeo, a two-hour version.

Unlike many electronic artists, Gray Schiller, who curates and runs StretchMetal, said he doesn’t really distinguish between naturally-created and synthesized ambient sounds. The buzz of the cicada may be a “more literal manifestation of the natural world,” he said, but then, “the capacitors inside our synthesizers are made of clay. Our electronics wouldn’t hold power if they weren’t connected to ground or batteries composed of wet earth.”

Take comfort: Cicada season may be nearing its peak in Illinois, but the song of the (recorded) cicada plays on forever, no further than Spotify, where the ambient “First Summer Cicadas” has been streamed more than 181,000 times and “Cicada Sounds” has more than 168,000 listens.

On the other hand, you know who didn’t have Spotify?

The Greek poet Meleager of Gadara, who called the cicada “shrill-voiced.” Or Aesop, who thought of the cicada’s music as a free symphony. Or Margaret Atwood, way up in Canada, who probably has Spotify, but also once wrote of the insect perfectly, as emerging with “the yammer of desire, the piercing one note of a jackhammer, vibrating like a slow bolt of lightning.”

Each of those artists heard a natural performer where others heard a natural pest.

When Hibino was studying music in college, a professor in his first composition course played him a piece of abstract music and asked what he heard. He said he heard a giraffe. He heard a pepper mill grinding. Also, he heard cicadas. No, the professor revealed, it was just white noise.

But for Hibino, “It was my big aha moment, knowing sound can capture a human imagination.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Either way, Godzilla’s been an ideal companion.

However hard it’s been to explain that love. Some people just don’t get Godzilla.

But starting June 7, the Music Box Theatre in Lakeview is making an elaborate, affectionate case for the big guy that generations of G-Fans never thought possible. They call it “Godzilla vs. Music Box,” and, well, I have never felt more seen.

For one week, the esteemed art house will screen 24 of Godzilla’s 35 live-action movies, some Japanese, some American, all made since the atomic giant ate his first train 70 years ago. The centerpiece is a 24-hour marathon of Showa-era Godzilla — aka G-fandom’s shorthand for the classics, the 15 films made in Japan between 1954 and 1975, from the grim Hiroshima/Nagasaki allegory of the original “Godzilla” to later costumed, candy-colored, giant-monster smackdowns, culminating in the inspired lunacy of “Terror of Mechagodzilla.” A marine biologist falls in love with a mad scientist’s daughter, who is really a cyborg controlling Mechagodzilla, a robot built by space aliens, who themselves control a dinosaur with an orange mohawk and unleash both monsters, only to be beaten by Godzilla, with an assist from Interpol.

Who couldn’t fall in love with that?

The weird malleability of a 400-foot-tall monster has meant sometimes Godzilla is a radioactive Ed Asner, a lumbering grump, four horsemen of the apocalypse rolled into one cold-blooded lizard, and sometimes a defender of Earth. Sometimes both at once: “Godzilla Minus One,” last winter’s touching Japanese import, now the highest-grossing Japanese-language film in United States history and the first Godzilla movie to win an Academy Award (for best special effects), delivered an old-school nihilistic vision of the post-World War II doomstroller. Only months later, the Hollywood-made “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” itself a blockbuster, offered us that softer Godzilla — so exhausted he sleeps away his days curled into the Colosseum in Rome.

“Godzilla vs. Music Box” starts smartly with the historical Godzilla, the bad Godzilla. On Friday, there’s a double feature of “Godzilla Minus One” and 2016’s underrated “Shin Godzilla,” with an intermission panel discussion on Godzilla as an “atomic age anti-hero,” featuring local experts on Japanese culture and professor Yuki Miyamoto of DePaul University, whose work focuses on nuclear discourse and environmental ethics.

The birthday party continues Saturday with the marathon (as of this writing, it’s two-thirds sold out); a Sunday night screening of that iffy 1998 “Godzilla” by Roland Emmerich, followed by its Japanese response, “Godzilla 2000”; weeknight showings of a couple of Japanese-made Godzilla films from the ‘90s; a Field Museum entomologist presenting insects and a showing of “Mothra vs. Godzilla”; a screening of the matinee classic “Destroy All Monsters,” presented by TV legend Svengoolie; Godzilla comic book artists; Godzilla tattoo artists; Godzilla historians; Japanese toy vendors, Japanese snacks. If that’s not enough, the Chicago-based Japanese Arts Foundation, which helped organize this party, will continue festivities into the fall, with more G-events. (It’s not related to the Music Box festival, but G-Fest, the international Godzilla convention thrown annually in Rosemont, has its own 30th anniversary next month, July 12-14; more at www.g-festcon.com.)

“Godzilla fans are eating so well right now,” said Kyle Cubr, senior operations manager at the Music Box, who has been pushing for a Godzilla blow-out for years. He tracked down clean copies of the originals. He contacted one of the monster-suit actors for advice on prying prints out of Toho, Godzilla’s Japanese creator. He sought a rare copy of “Rodan” only to learn Quentin Tarantino has the best print and doesn’t part with it. Not until the past year, when Godzilla became G-Money again, have stars aligned. The 70th anniversary arrives in the wake of “Godzilla Minus One,” the ongoing popularity of the new American series from Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. and the success of the Apple TV+ Godzilla streamer with Kurt Russell, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.”

“Godzilla has never been bigger,” Cubr said.

In fact, he’s so big 70 years after his birth that Toho and Legendary now have a reported agreement that Toho can’t release a Godzilla film the same year Legendary releases one; that’s why, despite the success of “Godzilla Minus One,” it vanished from theaters soon after New Year’s Day and arrived on video more than six months after its release. So that Music Box screening — “we received a special exemption,” Cubr explained — is rare right now.

All of which, to this G-Fan of Gen-X vintage, rings bittersweet.

Godzilla toys! Godzilla historians! To be a Godzilla fan decades ago meant an occasional movie still in the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, a goofy Saturday morning cartoon, few toys and a short-lived Marvel comic. I was so starved for Godzilla, I went late to Jimmy Bricker’s birthday party because “Godzilla Vs. Megalon” was on “Creature Double Feature” and I had not seen it. I’m sure I gave him a better excuse.

These days Godzilla is such a familiar, occasionally poignant import that Saira Chambers, executive director of the Japanese Arts Foundation and director of the Japanese Culture Center, decided Godzilla would be the theme of the year for those Chicago organizations. In November, they’re throwing a Godzilla-themed gala. In March, they launched the Godzilla Association for Women, Thems and Non-Femmes. Chambers’ background is in nuclear non-proliferation work, including a stint at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She loves that Godzilla has become a modern Trojan horse for concepts of peace and nuclear power. To that, I would add thoughts on handcrafted filmmaking, Japanese aesthetics, species conservation and disaster preparedness. Godzilla, after 70 years, almost seems respectable. “He embodies ideas we can’t always wrap our heads around,” Chambers said. “But the main thing is that, for whatever reason you hold onto, he’s still capturing lots of hearts. Godzilla’s still around.”

“Godzilla vs. Music Box” runs June 7-13 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.;  www.musicboxtheatre.com

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

His hair is long in places, white and curling upwards at the bottom. He has light peppered stubble that doesn’t quite qualify as a beard. For a lunch date at least, he didn’t bring the boxy eyeglasses he wore for decades. His eyes were pale ocean blues.

But that remarkable mind is there, the pithy commentary on American history, the casual nods to political contradictions and the way American myths trap us in our own narratives, the references to ancient Greeks, the love of Saint Augustine, all still flowing out like a tap.

Only slower.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

He was never invited back to the White House.

As journalist Sam Tanenhaus once wrote, sooner or later “anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills.” He described the feeling of being reviewed by Wills akin to feeling “like a vagrant caught urinating in the master’s hedges.” Indeed, even that pitilessness towards authors whose hot takes don’t measure up to Wills’ scrutiny — it’s still evident in 90-year-old Wills. When I asked if he was still a pacifist, he nodded, reached into the seat of his walker and pulled out a book, on loan from a friend.

This, he waved, this book was supposedly an anti-war book! And really it’s pro-war! He shook his head and said the he appreciated the loan, but — he shook his head again.

A smiling older man, a fellow resident of his building, stopped at our lunch table.

“He’s come to wish me happy birthday,” Wills said, explained, gesturing at me.

“Oh, how old are you?” the friend asked Wills.

“The big 9-0,” Wills said.

“That was a good deal we got, when you were born. We’re all better for it.”

“Happens to all of us.”

“Being born?”

“Getting up there.”

And yet, no less willing to drop a bombshell: Wills decided recently he’s no longer Catholic. The guy who attended church weekly, said his rosary daily, completed five of 13 years of Jesuit training to become a priest (only to get cold feet during the vows), wrote “What Jesus Meant,” “What Paul Meant,” “What the Gospels Meant,” “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis” and “Why I Am a Catholic,” left the Catholic church.

He explained:

“My hero, for a long, long time, has been Saint Augustine. He didn’t believe in the eucharist, he didn’t buy transubstantiation (the conversion of a host into the body and blood of Christ). He fought against a papacy. He was more anti-sex than anyone, and abortion would not have been a problem since, to him, there was no sex outside marriage. But in other ways, he was enlightened. I consider myself an Augustinian Christian.” Wills could not embrace Pope Francis’s canonizing of Pope John Paul II, or continue to reconcile taking communion but not believing in transubstantiation himself.

But mainly, Natalie, his wife of 60 years, died in 2019, and the more he reflected on her own opposition to having a pope, the more decided he could not continue to be Catholic.

While we talked, most everything he said, in time, wound back to Natalie.

“(Her death) changed everything,” he said slowly, looking around the room. “I would always say that I got up in the morning happy because I would be smarter by nightfall because she was there. Almost all of the major changes in my life, she was there for. The night we met, we were both 23 and we realized we had two things in common: Catholicism and the opera. She was brought up in a Catholic household in Connecticut. I was brought up in a Catholic household in Adrian, Michigan. She asked, you buy all the church teachings? I said yeah. She said, even on contraception? I said yeah. She said, come back in 20 years. It didn’t take that long for me to see differently. On abortion, on pacifism, Natalie taught me where I should be going. She was smarter than me. You know I met her on an airplane? She was a flight attendant. She said, ‘You’re too young to be reading that book.’ I was reading Henri Bergson’s ‘Two Sources of Morality and Religion.’ I said, you’ve read this? She said no, but her sociology professor had condemned it. So we talked and argued. There was an empty seat beside me.” They married two years later and moved into her Italian neighborhood, not far from Yale University, where Wills was still in graduate school.

He was not born into a family of intellectuals. The family settled in Michigan after his father left Georgia looking for work during the Great Depression. One grandparent was a strict Christian Scientist. His mother’s brother married his father’s sister. “It became a complicated arrangement of religions and views.” He was brought up anti-communist and became a fan of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose demagogy fueled the Red Scare.

He mainly wanted to become a literary critic. After sending some writing samples to Buckley at the National Review, he was invited in. Buckley had just lost his theater critic — maybe Wills would go to Washington, watch Jimmy Hoffa get questioned by a Senate committee and treat it like theater? After that, Wills met more journalists, only to split ideologically with the National Review and became a fixture of Esquire as the magazine (and others) pioneered a more literary, less rigidly objective New Journalism. He covered Martin Luther King Jr., Nixon, Vietnam, linking past and present, rooting his reporting in historical spelunking, showing exactly what it felt to live through a moment.

He thought of every story “as an opportunity to learn,” he said. “That made me broaden my world. Harold Hayes (the legendary editor of Esquire during the 1960s) would say, ‘I’m interested in this, why not write something about it.’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ And so he would say, ‘Well, then you have a chance here to learn.’”

Natalie was there the whole time.

“She challenged everything I knew, in a way that was convincing. She wore me down.”

Since she died, Wills has not stopped writing. His last byline was in the New York Review of Books a year ago, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and he’s halfway through a new book on the history of women’s rights. But his contract lapsed with book agent Andrew Wylie (who is also literary agent for Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie, among others) and there’s still no publisher attached. He’s talking to his daughter, literary agent Lydia Wills, about a book on leaving Catholicism. He said he doesn’t get many requests to write these days, presumably because “they think I’m old.”

He smiled blankly.

You know, he said, though he moved here in 1980 to join the history department at Northwestern, Natalie was not thrilled. She preferred the East Coast, “but I remember, once, coming home from Scotland, her saying it was a relief to go home. I remember that because it was the first time she called Chicago home, and it had been two years.”

After her death, Wills sold their home on Sheridan Road. He also got rid of most of his library, donating it to Loyola University. But he kept his favorites, which he calls “the core.” Books on the Greeks, Saint Augustine, the dictionary written by Samuel Johnson.

He doesn’t write at night anymore. He writes after meals. He sleeps more. He talks to his three children, all of whom live in the Chicago area, and to his many grandchildren.

He talked so much that he didn’t eat lunch. He boxed up his sandwich and began the slow process of standing with a walker. I thanked him for the time, and he said: “All I got is time.” When I got home, he emailed me the final chapter of his women’s rights book.

It was titled “Natalie.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

That’s proper flag protocol.

The United States, perhaps you didn’t realize, is rich in flag protocol. In fact, I was talking the other day with James Ferrigan, chief protocol expert for the North American Vexillological Association — vexillology being the study of flags — and he said, “In terms of our flag awareness, the United States is the second-most flag-conscious country. We have a code for handling the flag, and a national song about the flag, and millions of us pledge allegiance to their flag daily.” In many countries, the national flag is “just window dressing, and not even allowed to be owned by its citizens unless they get permission.”

If we’re the second-most flag-conscious nation, who’s first?

“Probably North Korea.”

Maybe it’s better to be second then?

“I’m not going there.”

Being such a flag-friendly population — particularly Chicago, having woven its own starred city flag into more T-shirts than Tommy Hilfiger — I bet many of you have noticed something odd about the U.S. flag lately: It seems to be flying at half-staff all the time.

It’s not, not really, and yet it kinda feels like it, right?

You could argue that the Stars and Stripes flies at half-staff so often these days — mourning not only politicians, but police officers, firefighters, members of the military, mass-shooting victims, national tragedies, anniversaries of national tragedies — our half-staff flags are evolving into a new symbol, a reminder of a country in perpetual distress.

A flag at half-staff, at its most basic function, is a sign of mourning, Ferrigan explained. Many vexillologists hate when a politician says the gesture “honors” someone. (“There’s no honor in dying,” Ferrigan insisted.) Half-staff should be about our sadness. Its origins likely date to the use of half-mast flags in the 17th-century Anglo-Dutch Wars, when ships vying for control of the North Sea signaled the death of crew members by letting flags and riggings luff in the wind. “It meant, literally, everything was not shipshape.”

So if a country’s flag flies in mourning constantly, is a larger message being sent?

Ferrigan considered this, then asked: “Or is the importance of the gesture fading?”

This is no simple conversation.

It’s hard to begrudge anyone for wanting to recognize a death, a life of public service or a national tragedy. There are thoughtful reasons why the flag now flies at half-staff more often than it did generations ago, when a flag at half-staff was generally reserved for dead presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators and major disasters. We still have holidays in which the flag has always been flown half-staff, such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Some states fly the flag at half-staff on, for starters, Columbus Day, Flag Day and Thanksgiving. And since the 1990s, more days have been added in which the flag must be flown nationally at half-staff: President Bill Clinton added National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (Dec. 7) and Peace Officers Day (May 15). After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush added Patriot Day (Sept. 11) and a day to remember fallen firefighters (May 4).

Then, about 16 years ago, Illinois and other states began a tradition of flying the U.S. flag at half-staff whenever an Illinois military member, police officer, firefighter or EMS worker was killed in service. Meaning, no matter where in Illinois, say, a firefighter is killed now, the governor gives notice for government buildings to fly the flag at half-staff. The flag must fly for two days, plus the day of the funeral. This meant, in April alone, the flag flew nine days at half-staff for fallen Illinois first responders, or roughly once a week.

It’s a well-meaning gesture, especially touching if you knew the dead.

But in a pragmatic, everyday sense, said Carl “Gus” Porter III, owner of Chicago’s WGN Flag & Decorating Co. (which predates WGN media and has been around since 1916), “Some degree of white noise sets in among the public and people maintaining flags.” While his business does not perform half-staff duties for the city of Chicago’s official flags, it does service many of the city’s flags and poles — and also lowers flags to half-staff for private businesses in the city and suburbs, including offices to hotels. He said that sometime during the waning days of the war in Afghanistan, there was a change.

“People didn’t want us to come lower a flag if we’d have to come again days later,” he said. “Now it’s gotten to the point where we seem to lower the flag for everything, so unless it’s a flag on a government building, I see people starting to ignore half-staff directives. That’s what happens if you take away the uniqueness of the gesture itself.”

Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political studies at the University of Houston, has studied presidential proclamations, including those about flying the U.S. flag, and he said you’re not imagining this: Historically, politicians are lowering the flag more often, partly because “there’s more willingness from presidents to politicize.” One study he conducted found that half-staff has become “a way of narrowcasting support to specific groups that’s politically useful.” (For instance, firefighters and police.) “It reflects the polarization of the country,” so much so that “not lowering a flag is now political action.”

President Donald Trump’s administration, for instance, refused to make half-staff directives in recognition of the death of Sen. John McCain, police officers who died because of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and the shooting of journalists at the Capital newspaper in Maryland.

But then relented.

To be fair, other than McCain, there is little guidance in the U.S. Flag Code on how to approach flying a half-staff flag for anyone who isn’t a government official. The code is specific on certain things: Only a president, state governor or mayor of the District of Columbia can order flags flown half-staff. A president gets 30 days of half-staff; a vice president or Supreme Court chief justice gets 10; a member of Congress two. There are more rules, but the code offers no guidance for who, what or how long a flag can be lowered.

Governors are the quickest to exploit this. Former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio twice ordered flags lowered for police dogs. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey lowered flags for “Sopranos” star James Gandolfini, Whitney Houston, Yogi Berra and E Street Band member Clarence Clemons. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lowered flags for Rush Limbaugh (though several local government officials refused to follow the order). In Oklahoma, flags were lowered for a highway worker killed while filling a sinkhole. In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered flags lowered for one year during the pandemic.

That didn’t sit well with James Schultz, former trustee of the village of Vernon Hills. “Frankly, it stuck in my craw.” He’s an Army veteran and service officer for American Legion Post 1247 in Vernon Hills and the American Veterans Post 66 in Wheeling.

“We were seeing first responders who died during that period and there was no real lowering of the flag for them because it had already already lowered,” he remembered.

So a few years ago he began working with state Rep. Daniel Didech and state Sen. Adriane Johnson on amending the Illinois Flag Display Act to limit the length of time an Illinois governor could leave the U.S. flag at half-staff. Their tweaks passed the Illinois General Assembly in 2021, and now (though the language in the act remains a bit vague) the flag will likely not remain lowered for longer than a late president would receive — 30 days.

Still, technically, do whatever you want.

There’s no penalty for flying the flag too often at half-staff (other than perhaps in the court of opinion). Mayors do not have the right to order U.S. flags to half-staff, but many do anyway. In fact, outside of government, private homes or businesses can lower flags (or leave them in place) whenever they feel like it. Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame lowered the flag to mark the deaths of David Bowie, Little Richard and Eddie Van Halen.

The United States has used half-staff traditions since the death of George Washington, but national standards weren’t codified until the Eisenhower administration. Incidentally, President Dwight Eisenhower issued just 13 half-staff proclamations in eight years. John F. Kennedy issued three; Lyndon Johnson nine; Richard Nixon 16. That number ticked upward during the Ronald Reagan years, with flags lowered for the death of Anwar el-Sadat and the Challenger explosion, among other tragedies. Clinton issued more than 50. George W. Bush issued about 60. And Barack Obama broke everyone’s record with more than 70, marking the death of figures such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, both the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln assassination and the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and mass shootings in Connecticut, Colorado and elsewhere; he also lowered flags for the embassy bombing in Benghazi and the Boston Marathon bombing.

The length of an administration matters.

Trump, who issued directives for the Las Vegas mass shooting, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the first 100,000 COVID deaths, made a few dozen such proclamations. President Joe Biden, who ordered flags lowered for the mass shooting in Highland Park, is on track for roughly the same number of orders as George W. Bush, Rottinghaus said.

“On the other hand,” he added, “if we now overdo the use of half-staff, maybe that in itself should be telling us something, particularly about the frequencies of our tragedies.”

In other words, do we limit the number of days we publicly express empathy?

Or reconsider the problems that are handing us more tragedies to mourn?

After all, if the crew is not happy, let those sails luff.

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.

Parents do bring up childhood swearing as a concern, said Emily Perepa, a clinical social worker with the Family Institute at Northwestern University, but it’s usually not the reason a child goes into therapy. “Music may help a child express emotions, even if they are not using those words themselves out in the world. But are they quoting a lyric? I am less concerned than if it’s impacting them at home or school. Do they swear without processing the emotions behind a lyric? Are they unconcerned when it’s disrespectful to other people?” Marianne Breneman, a life coach for children from Farmington Hills, Michigan, spends a lot of time listening to swearing in middle schools and is mostly concerned with the kids “who can’t form a complete sentence without swearing. My fear isn’t a limited vocabulary but limited emotional regulation.” She tells parents that middle school is where kids swear as a way to try on personalities. Yet, she added, most parents are “not as concerned with swearing as parents were when you and I grew up.”

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

On the other hand, pop music-wise, the members of Devo were present at the dawn of de-evolution. You might even argue they popularized de-evolution. Science-fiction novelists and conceptual artists had been delivering visions of mankind regressing long before Devo crawled out of Akron, Ohio, but Devo committed to the concept, with costumes, videos and a stone-faced satire that reflected their roots. They were a cultural manifesto and also, incidentally, a rock group.

They were founded at Kent State University in 1970, as the campus was still resonating in horror at the deaths of four classmates, shot by National Guardsmen. Neil Young’s “Ohio,” his classic lacerating protest, would be released less than a month later, but Devo (who eventually collaborated with Young) adopted a far longer-term approach to disillusionment.

So long in fact that, just a couple of years ago, Webster’s dictionary finally got around to making the word “devolve” one of its words of the year. (The term “devolution,” however, dates back to the 1920s, probably to religious-based protests against teaching evolution.)

All of this runs through your head while watching a Devo concert in 2024.

And if it doesn’t, it should: Fifty years after forming, Devo has never broken into laughter at its own satire. At least not on stage. They sing “It’s a beautiful world we live in” before montages of extreme poverty. They still play their gloriously disrespectful, herky-jerky cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” They remain a dystopic mirror of pop pretense. They opened with a video of an oily record executive complaining that Devo was the worst decision he’s ever made, and yet, here they are, decades later, still “preaching to the converted.“ They walked out in matching windbreakers with “Reverse Evolution” on the backs; later, for the first of several costume changes, they wore their famous yellow industrial jumpsuits, and, of course, those red “energy domes”/flowerpots (and so did many in the audience). Mark Mothersbaugh, the leader and primary music writer, grabbed his microphone and stomped robotically to the edge of the stage, as angular as the music.

The joke — in 1974, and even more so in 2024 — is that they come off paradoxically more human than far more famous acts that sell themselves as authentic.

Which is also to say, they sound wonderful, tighter than tight, and since much of what they sang about 50 years ago — consumerism as a drug, corporate overlords, conformity, advertising — became the meat and potatoes of daily social media feuds and streaming TV series, it’s a bit easier these days to just enjoy how good some of their songs really are. And also how thrilling a guitar band Devo has become. Songs like “Gates of Steel” and even their signature “Jocko Homo” — with its campy sci-fi chant, “Are we not men? (We are Devo)” — showed off power chords that chuga-chuga-chugging guitar gods like Metallica would envy.

They feel streamlined now, for the better, less performance art than a solid act, and the beauty is that this hasn’t softened or simplified anything. It’s not just that they emerged from Kent State with an absurdist, Dadaesque take on American decline, but that they became a living, subversive protest, in their image and on their records. That refusal to even pretend to be authentic was radical in 1979, and it’s radical now. But what shouts louder are their bangers. “Uncontrollable Urge,” the first song of their first album, which has Mothersbaugh mostly shouting “yeah, yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeah, yeah,” still nails the rush of punk. “Peek-A-Boo” is still a surveillance warning minus the self-importance that would doom serious acts.

The “young alien types” they once celebrated in their songs are now parental units.

But nothing else about Devo feels old.

What I loved about them in 1979 was also what unnerved me. As odd as they were compared with, say, Foreigner, or even Talking Heads, they seemed to regard the audience as even stranger. We were the real aliens. They were responding in a sane, clinical way to an insane culture. That feeling’s still there. Mothersbaugh and Co. peered at the audience. Except everyone’s in on the joke now. With 50 years behind them, they’re now planning the next 50. They flashed a huge graphic promising: 100 years of Devo, coming in 2073.

Devolution be damned.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Like, a lot a lot. The first time I met him was about 30 years ago. I was a graduate student at Northwestern University and assigned to interview somebody, and I had just bought “In Utero,” Nirvana’s follow-up to its blockbuster album “Nevermind.” Albini was the producer of “In Utero,” and one of my favorite albums, The Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” and so I called him, he agreed to chat, and while I remember little of what he said, I remember we talked for hours.

He had studied journalism himself at Northwestern, so he was generous. He had endless opinions on culture and music and what it means to stand by your convictions. I remember at some point simply asking what a record producer did. He said he wasn’t a record producer, he was a record engineer. I asked what that was, and he said it was like a record producer.

A year ago, the last time I spoke to him, I asked about his first concert, and he replied as he replied to everything, with too much knowledge and detail and an opinion so insightful and provocative and hilarious that it sucked the air from the room. The concert was the Edgar Winter Group, Sept. 27, 1975, Montana, where he lived as a teenager. He recalled his father saying people only went to rock shows to buy drugs. He recalled, as Edgar Winter launched into a 20-minute keyboard solo, the “dead-eyed gaze” of Johnny Winter “navigating solo breaks in this tumultuous excess, like Ahab resigned to his fate in a dinghy, tossed by the sea and pernicious corpus of his brother’s prog rock white whale …” He didn’t know if the concert itself was exactly a good idea, but: “An impressionable young Steve thanks whoever set it up for those enduring images of madness and futility.”

Albini talked like that.

He was an intimidating guy, and eventually, a sweet guy. He was, as kids say these days, a “gatekeeper,” the prototypical record store owner who frowns at what you bring to his cash register — though he made records, he didn’t sell them. The day after he died, the satirical website Hard Times posted this headline: “Steve Albini standing outside gates of Heaven telling everyone how much he hates the Smashing Pumpkins.”

He could go off on corporate culture and its deadening effects on artists and consumers (and did so elegantly at times, for literary journals like the Hyde Park-based Baffler). He produced famous records and made lesser-known ones with his bands Big Black and Shellac, but also became, by dint of his taste, a sought-after totem of cultural integrity — a representative of a way of being. Or as comedian Fred Armisen told this newspaper several years ago: “Steve Albini became a huge influence on me, which I don’t know if he knows. He had this philosophy on how to live and be and gave me advice I still keep in mind.” As for Albini, he always kept it blunt: “I wasn’t a fan of Trenchmouth (Armisen’s Chicago-based punk band) — and so that’s not why we would have become friends.”

He was vintage Gen-X sarcastic, ironic, contrarian, defiantly principled. One of the best things ever written on music was Albini’s 1993 essay “The Problem With Music” for the Baffler, in which he laid out finances, empty promises, unnecessary flourishes. It opens with quite the metaphor: a band (“some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances”) standing at one end of a trench filled with waste and at the other end is a music industry “lackey” with a fountain pen and contract. Whoever swims the trench first will get the deal. Only then, the industry insists: “Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

Thomas Frank, the founder of the Baffler, told me in an email that he never knew Albini personally, but that essay for the journal would become its “consummate expression”: “Seeing through the falsehoods of the culture industry was the first order of business, and no one was better at it than Steve Albini.”

By credits alone, Albini was not only a glue stick of underground music, and a major influence around the country as Wicker Park became an early ‘90s music mecca, but a tastemaker for what was once called college radio music and later rebranded “alt rock.”

He held it to ideals that no popular cultural business could entirely satisfy.

He recorded a who’s who of ‘90s Chicago bands (including Urge Overkill, Veruca Salt and Jesus Lizard); alt superstars (PJ Harvey, Bush); and the occasional icon (Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, The Stooges, Cheap Trick). He became known for applying loving sonic care to acts best known by their fields of distortion. He captured, as the cliche went, how a performer sounded live. But attaining clarity, power and honesty seemed deceptively easy. As Albini told Chicago magazine in 1997: “I honestly just feel that music like this deserves to be taken seriously. And that means people who record them should be as concerned about quality as if they were recording the (expletive) Chicago symphony.”

Yet, at the peak of his influence, he also said: “If you wanted to take punk seriously on a more significant level, you could. If you pretend to take dance music seriously on a more significant level, that is a delusional pretension. There really is no substance to it.”

Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick said they first met in the late 1970s. A teenage Albini sold him a guitar. Nielsen’s son Miles, now of the Rockford-based band Rusted Hearts, even helped Albini physically build his Electrical Audio recording studio in Avondale. When Albini later produced Cheap Trick, he was “a stickler, but excellent,” Nielsen said. He had “this reputation as a tough guy,” though Nielsen suspects “a lot of it came from record execs because Steve was so different. He was the most honest person in the music business.

“And that’s a list without a lot of company.”

Still, as Albini got older, he came to regret some of the hardline things he spouted. (He once wrote for a music zine that the Replacements’ breakthrough “Let It Be” was a “sad, pathetic end to a long downhill slide.”) Michael Azerrad, biographer of Nirvana and author of “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” posted Wednesday on X that Albini “was a great artist and underwent the most remarkable and inspiring personal transformation.” With years came warmth, pleasantness. He faced his incendiary urges. After all, here was a man who once, for a Northwestern art class, invited 100 of his enemies to throw stuff at him as he swore at them behind Plexiglass.

People threw dog poop, bricks, bowling pins.

Martin Atkins, former drummer of Public Image Ltd., a Pilsen resident and an industrial mainstay with bands such as Pigface, Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke, recorded with Albini for years. “We would argue,” he said. “He didn’t like the idea that Pigface was touring in a bus. He would say, ‘Oh, what a bunch of (expletive) rock stars!’ And I would go, “Steve, there are 16 of us! What would you want us to do — tour in five mini-vans?

“I remember in Minnesota, coming back from one of his favorite studios, he agreed to drive me to the airport and we argued music for so long that he drove 40 minutes past the airport and I missed my flight. Things were often very cut and dry to Steve, but always centered on the glorious movement of sound. Whatever personal, spiritual, creative problems he might have had, he worked hard to clear them out to get you your sound.”

Indeed, of all the legendary tales of Steve Albini, one of the best is the long letter that he wrote to Nirvana before recording “In Utero,” to lay out his philosophy and expectations:

“I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. … I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. … I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no (expletive) way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

Nirvana, eager to retain a shred of indie cred after becoming the biggest band in the world, was a natural fit with Albini. The problem was, after they made “In Utero,” the record company hated its sound; the band itself began airing doubts. And so, before release, changes were made. Moreover, Albini’s reputation as a pedantic, prickly and iconoclastic collaborator, quick to question someone’s ideology, caught up to him.

He told interviewers major labels didn’t want to work with him; critics accused him of selling out by working with them at all, then being fast to complain if it went badly.

But as goofy as it sounds now, since the concept has lost its meaning: He never could sell out. Not the way we assume artists inevitably do. He retained a pure righteous punk intention, except when such astringent logic failed. Talking about his younger, uncompromising self, he gave himself little room to hide. Last year he told the Guardian newspaper: “The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted — excuse my behavior.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”

In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Armisen said that just the other day Albini had texted him about cymbals. He didn’t get cymbals: “Like I can tell the difference between this one and that one but if I’m honest they both sound like cymbals and I don’t care.”

Armisen concluded: “I always loved hearing him say ‘I don’t care.’”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

In awarding the prize, the Pulitzer committee cited Eig’s book as not only “revelatory” but a biography that “draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.”

Eig was home alone in Lakeview when he heard the announcement.

In a phone interview Monday, he said: “I have been a journalist since I was 16 and, you know, someone wrote in my high school yearbook that I’d win a Pulitzer someday, and I still can’t believe it actually happened. I am so proud of this book and so glad it received recognition. As Taylor Swift said, the work is the award. Still, the award is pretty nice.”

Eig split the award category with author Ilyon Woo’s “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom,” an account of Ellen and William Craft, a 19th century enslaved couple who escaped bondage by posing as “master” (Ellen) and slave (William). The only finalist in the category was Tracy Daugherty’s “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” the story of the famed author of “The Last Picture Show” and “Lonesome Dove.”

Eig, who is 60, attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and began his career as a sports reporter in Upstate New York, though for the past 20 years he’s been one of the most prominent biographers in the United States. He’s written about Lou Gehrig (“The Luckiest Man,” 2005), Jackie Robinson (“Opening Day,” 2007) and Al Capone (“Get Capone,” 2010); his 2017 biography “Ali: A Life,” about Muhammad Ali, was also celebrated as the definitive account of its subject’s life.

But “King” — which challenged decades of popular understandings of the civil rights leader’s short life, including a long-held assumption of animosity towards the more outwardly militant Malcolm X — was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the New York Historical Society’s book prize. Eig toured for most of the past year and spoke as a guest at Baptist churches and even the Apollo Theater for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day festivities. Last fall, the rights to the book were also optioned by Universal Pictures, for a feature to be produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Chris Rock.

Two previous books about King have won Pulitzers: Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954 to 1963,” which won the 1989 Pulitzer for history, and “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference,” by David J. Garrow, which won the 1987 Pulitzer for biography. Garrow, who shared his archive on King with Eig, told the Tribune last spring the new book would succeed his own as the definitive take and was a “leap forward” in understanding.

“It’s kind of hard to top the year I just had,” Eig said on the phone. “This is icing on the cake, but very sweet icing.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com