Indian City

Released in 1984, Idioblast is a lost classic, a future shock narrative ahead of its time, and yet completely of its era, like few artifacts before or since. The cover tips you off from the jump—a crude but effective collage featuring classic Fekner slogans like Toxic Junkie, Growth Decay and Soft Brains Watch The Screen And Buy The Jeans. In an uncanny and tragic coincidence, the very first lyric on the album—“The place to be is on the space shuttle/if you’re brave enough to get on it”—seems to anticipate the Challenger disaster just two years later. But for the most part, the tracks on Idioblast directly reference the concepts that inspired Fekner’s visual art.

There is a street in the Indian city of Muzaffarpur, where men come to watch girls sing and dance… but not only. Beyond the front rooms of its establishments, much darker business is conducted, including prostitution and people trafficking. Today’s ‘dancers’ are the legacy of bygone days, when Hindu priests invited young girls to a big dance and then chose the best to become servants to the gods. These girls were called ‘devadasi’. They would sing and dance as part of temple worship for the rest of their lives.

In City Indian, Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck tell the engaging story of American Indian men and women who migrated to Chicago from across America.

Joint Instructor class lessons