Orlando Reade’s What in Me Is Dark is an insightful book that examines the ongoing legacy of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A fresh consideration of the long and surprising afterlife of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost . . . Edifying, wide-ranging cultural criticism.”
In his own words, here is Orlando Reade’s Book Notes music playlist for his book What in Me Is Dark:
As I wrote my book, I immersed myself in music that my subjects might have listened to – adapting a suggestion made by Marcus Rediker that historians should read poetry from the period they are writing about. Since I was already writing about a poem, I used music to transport myself into their evaporated worlds.
Paul Robeson – John Brown’s Body
One chapter is about the white Americans in the 1850s who fought against slavery. The most famous of them was Captain John Brown. A white abolitionist from Massachusetts, he travelled to Kansas in the 1850s to fight the spread of slavery. He and his sons executed nine pro-slavery ‘ruffians’ in cold blood; shortly after that, one of his sons was killed. In 1859, he raided an arms depot at Harpers Ferry in Virginia, hoping to inspire the slaves to rise up and overthrow slavery across the South. The plan failed. Brown was tried and executed, but only two years later the American Civil War had begun. For this, Herman Melville called him the “meteor of the war”. In the photographs you can see in his eyes a cold fire.
The song “John Brown’s Body” was written soon after by Union troops, turning an existing marching tune into an abolitionist anthem. It was apparently a great favourite with Black soldiers. This version, by the American socialist and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson, with his rich baritone playing against the sprightly, upright beat of the marching band, evokes the beauty and dignity of solidarity, calling across the centuries to those still fighting to win equality and freedom for others.
Jake Xerxes Fussell – The River St. John
I was in San Francisco last year for the funeral of my uncle, a semi-professional motorbike racer who owned two motorbike shops in the Bay Area. My family chartered a sailboat so that we could scatter his ashes in the Bay. The journey out was sombre, and the scattering itself painfully sad, but once we started to sail back, it started to feel more like a celebration. I was talking to my aunt about a poem, when suddenly, the first mate, who was sitting nearby, chimed in and quoted the end of the poem. We got to talking, and she told me that Jake Xerxes Fussell was playing a concert that evening. I hadn’t heard of him before, but I turned up, half-drunk from the wake, and quickly found myself captivated.
The son of a Georgia folklorist and a quiltmaker, Fussell writes and adapts folk songs from the American South. In his work, I hear the mystery that I see in in the nineteenth-century figures I write about, inhabitants of a bygone world that still haunts the present. This song – without doubt one of his finest – is an old fishmongers’ chant from Florida. Fussell’s voice is at once so true and so jaunty, somehow uncannily familiar and significant. A song about fish has come to mean something more, about the absurdity of life itself (as absurd as it feels to say that). What more could you want from a song?
Louis Moreau Gottschalk – Bamboula, Op. 2
While writing a chapter about Milton’s influence on the carnival krewes of New Orleans, I listened to a lot of jazz. It brightened up a dark and lonely London winter, reminding me of two trips I made to the Louisiana city. I also found out about the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk – a composer born in New Orleans in 1829, when the territory had only recently been sold by France. Gottschalk’s family was biracial, like many others in the city, and his work bears the influence of the music of enslaved people, which he would have heard throughout the city. For this, he’s considered a great American composer, though he spent most of his adult life outside the United States.
There’s a mysterious relationship between Gottschalk’s music and jazz, which is said to have been invented in New Orleans’ Congo Square a few decades later, after the American Civil War, when the instruments from military marching bands were being sold cheaply. They came into the hands of Black musicians who used them to make blues – the first properly American music, according to Amiri Baraka – and which, in time, produced jazz. I love the hard, modern elegance of Gottschalk’s piano, trickling and thumping, somewhere between Chopin and Coltrane. It sounds American but in a way that has almost nothing to do with the borders of the modern United States.
The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil
This is an obvious choice, since for the first half of Paradise Lost, Satan seems to be the hero, punished by a distant and cruel God. The poet William Blake famously claimed that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it” – meaning that, as a radical, Milton unconsciously identified with the rebellious Satan rather than the tyrannical God. That’s up for debate – you’ll have to read my book to see what I think. But it’s become clear that the Rolling Stones, and the whole 1960s rock n roll counterculture, are inheritors of Milton’s radical legacy: to sympathise with Satan.
I grew up listening to ’60s music and once thought it the peak of musical achievement. In my twenties I got bored with it but I’ve come back to it recently, partly thanks to Otis Redding’s cover of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, which begins like the more disciplined Rolling Stones song before becoming something far more ragged and inspired, coming perilously close to inventing punk music. Apparently, Otis redding discarded the lyrics sheet halfway through the recording and improvised. But, like the disobedient interpretations of Milton I write about, even the most ambivalent appropriation pays homage to the original.
Public Enemy – Harder Than You Think
Malcolm X read Paradise Lost while in prison in the late 1940s, and it was around this time that he developed his distinctive rhetoric. As I wrote about this, I realized that I had first heard his voice on the 90s rap tracks I listened to as a teenager. I started listening to those tracks again, and found them no less moving than I had at first. The samples come from two vinyl records of Malcolm’s speeches from the short period after he left the Nation of Islam in 1963 and before his assassination in 1965, when he was an independent speaker, whose political thinking was developing ever more internationalist, class- and gender-conscious ways, calling for political autonomy for Black Americans. In the 1980s, amid the destructive War on Drugs and emerging mass incarceration, his distinctive rage felt newly relevant.
The most famous sample is Public Enemy’s track “Bring the Noise”. Public Enemy styled themselves after Malcolm X, who was the public enemy of the United States government, which is widely thought to have had a hand in his murder. His syllables can be heard on the first proper track on their album It Would Take a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back. It opens with the phrase “Too black … too strong … Too black … too strong.” This comes from his famous speech ‘Message to the Grassroots’ (1963), which compares racial integration to coffee, weaking blackness by mixing it. The precision of his syllables communicate his extraordinary combination of energy, discipline, and rigour. A new discovery for me, while writing the book, is another Public Enemy track that doesn’t sample Malcolm X’s words but still channels his rhetoric: ‘Harder Than You Think’. And it is.
Lil Nas X – Montero
There’s a long tradition of radicals being demonized by their enemies, and also of radicals choosing to identify with demons. In the video for this song, the extremely online queer rapper Lil Nas X appears as Satan, king of a place that could be Hell or a fetish club. (One man’s Hell might be another man’s Torture Garden.) When the video first came out, people compared it to Paradise Lost. I took it as a sign that people were still interested in angel sex, like Milton, who describes their infinitely flexible forms of union. We mortals can only imagine. Only Lil Nas X may not be mortal.
Lana Del Rey – Mariners Apartment Complex
Someone I dated while writing the book introduced me to Lana Del Rey. At first, I found her persona really jarring. Her voice on the early records felt somehow offensively thin. But when I listened to the album Norman Fucking Rockwell, the quality of her voice changed that. For me, this song captures the Dystopian glamour of contemporary America, all the things that make it dangerous and unhealthy and exciting, the things that made me want to leave and make me dream about moving back.
Kizz Daniel – Eh God (Barnabas)
Kizz Daniel is a Nigerian pop star who is just starting to become famous outside the Nigerian diaspora. I’ve been listening to him for ten years, since visiting Lagos in 2013, and I’m feeling vindicated by his recent popularity. This song has nothing to do with my book, except that, in the difficult final months of writing, his music was a durable source of joy.
Orlando Reade studied at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received his PhD in English literature in 2020. For a period of five years, he taught in New Jersey prisons. He is now an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University London. His writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, Frieze, and The White Review, where he also served as a contributing editor.