New Book: Celine Dion 'Let's Talk About Love - A Journey to the End of Taste'

[RLAAMJR.]

There were a lot of great songs in LTAL like the collaborations and other songs like "Love Is On The Way"

 

 

I Hate You Then I Love You should have been released.

[Black Kitten]

celine's most overrated album in her carreer. LTAL is like a VARIOUS ARTISTS ALBUM. too many guest artists.

[RLAAMJR.]

celine's most overrated album in her carreer. LTAL is like a VARIOUS ARTISTS ALBUM. too many guest artists.

 

 

Too many guest artists... Yep. BUt it was a mistake'cos Celine can still sell more than 30 million albums without them.

[cannonball]

Did anyone else actually read the book? I'm curious to see what you thought. I just finished it.

 

I really feel like Wilson spent too much time trying to rationalize liking Celine. For a book that was supposed to be about an album, only about a chapter actually talks about the album.

 

The most interesting part of the book was about Celine's lower class background and how she related to the people affected by Hurricane Katrina.

[Shesings2me]

I'm not sure what to think about this. I can't remember where I saw it, but I saw a bad review of this book somewhere. But...let's hope that those who dislike Celine read it and decide to take a chance on her music. It would be great if it could push people to truly listen with an open mind, and become the fans they are due to be!!

[Bellamy]

Learning to love Celine Dion

 

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 02/02/2008

 

Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Let's Talk About Love: a Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

 

Think of sounds that are unpleasant to the ear. Car alarms in the middle of the night; sadistic schoolmasters scraping chalk down a blackboard; geese molesting one another. Then there's Celine Dion: she has sold well over 175 million records across the world, but how many people do you know who will admit to owning one of them?

 

We live in an increasingly eclectic, pick-and-mix musical culture in which whole genres that used to be reviled - disco, prog-rock, metal, easy listening - have been revived; yet still Celine Dion is seen as beyond redemption.

 

In a BBC poll in 2006, her theme tune for the film Titanic, My Heart Will Go On, was voted the most irritating song of all time - over Elton John's Candle In the Wind, Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You and even Bryan Adams's (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.

 

In the television series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Buffy starts to have an inkling that her college roommate is actually a demon when the girl pins a poster of the singer on her wall. South Park features a tune mocking the Quebec-born singer: "When Canada is dead and gone/There'll be no more Celine Dion."

 

Now, here comes the writer and self-declared fan of edgy, avant-garde music Carl Wilson to write about her best-known album, Let's Talk About Love. It is, on the face of it, a rather perverse undertaking, the kind of contrarianism you might have assumed was passé even in the early 1990s, when a wave of Oxbridge graduates managed to blag their way onto the pages of the broadsheets by waxing lyrical about the Steve Wright radio show and the movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

 

Wilson doesn't pretend he's a fan of Dion's music; early on, he describes it as "Oprah Winfrey-approved chicken soup for the consumerist soul". What he's trying to do is perform "an experiment in taste, in stepping deliberately outside one's own aesthetics".

 

Those aesthetics revolve round sonic invention, erotic power, subcultural potency and, sometimes, authorial intention. By contrast, Dion's songs are written by other people, aimed at mainstream and relatively mature audiences, and almost entirely lacking in throb or libidinal promise.

 

Small wonder that Wilson is startled to discover that Dion is beloved in Jamaica, particularly by those living in the island's roughest neighbourhoods where the sound systems often pump out her tunes at full blast.

 

She's just as popular in Asia - cassettes of her songs blare out of market stalls in Kabul's central market - as she is in Ghana, where her lyrics have popularised Valentine's Day. In Iraq, the US military broadcast her music on local radio stations in order to showcase a gentler side of the West.

 

The book is especially interesting on Dion's background. The youngest of 14 children, she was born into a very poor family, several members of which had to share a bed. Her father was a butcher and factory worker. From him she derived her strong work ethic, performing almost nightly at Las Vegas for three years, learning Japanese and Spanish in order to conquer new markets, and sometimes going for days without speaking in order to preserve her voice.

 

Some of her early, French-language songs dealt with dark themes - Aids, the plight of Algerian immigrants in France - and to this day she maintains a strong humanitarian impulse that, in the context of contemporary American political discourse, borders on the revolutionary.

 

A case in point is the extraordinary interview she gave to CNN's Larry King in 2005 (available on YouTube) to talk about her million-dollar donation to the Hurricane Katrina relief fund.

 

Sitting in her dressing room at Caesar's Palace, a mere 30 minutes before appearing on stage, she tried to hold back tears while lashing out against Federal inertia and the demonisation of looters: "Maybe some of those people are so poor… they've never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once… How come it's so easy to send planes in another country to kill everyone in a second."

 

Wilson draws liberally from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theories about how so much of what we call good taste is a matter of social groups trying to create cultural distinction for themselves. His book is intelligent and often moving.

 

He places the singer, accurately I think, in the tradition of schmaltz, a loaded term, but one that describes a pre-urban, pre-Tin Pan Alley form of immigrant music rich in melodrama, romantic excess and working-class sentimentality.

 

His tone gets increasingly emotional as he goes on, convincing in his belief that music criticism should be more empathetic. After finishing the book, I listened again to Let's Talk About Love: it's no classic, but it had certainly grown on me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...02/bowil102.xml

[Prince Whiskers]

OMG I didn't imagine Celine being popular in Jamaica, Ghana and Afghanistan. But then again, if she has a devoted fan "residing" in Mozambique.........

 

Anyway, the critics will be gasping for their breaths when the Diva Dynamite takes over the world starting in South Africa.

[tal-sh2]

WOW, biography book for an album?

Another thing that Celine has reached. I'm so want to read this...

[cannonball]

WOW, biography book for an album?

Another thing that Celine has reached. I'm so want to read this...

 

 

If you do, be careful. It's really more a biography of the author and his rationalizations on why it's okay if he likes Celine if he over analyzes her to death. There's really only one chapter on the album, and when he finally does review it, the review is still more about him than the album.

[CelineAndRene]

I would luv to read this book

[neilg]

I read this today, inside a newspaper supplement. It's quite interesting. Now that my mother's a fan of Ms Dion, she wants to read this book!

 

I don't know what the quality of the scan will be like - my scanner's not working properly after I spilled water on it

[tonybower]

I read this today, inside a newspaper supplement. It's quite interesting. Now that my mother's a fan of Ms Dion, she wants to read this book!

 

I don't know what the quality of the scan will be like - my scanner's not working properly after I spilled water on it

 

Thanks for the article. The scan worked fine! Can you tell me what newspaper you found it in?

 

I'd really like to read this book. Does anybody know how to get a copy?

[neilg]

I think it was in the Telegraph, or something. Actually, my mother gave me the supplement, and threw the rest of the paper away! It says Telegraph on it in tiny letters.

 

There's a telephone number at the start of the article, and a price that says £6,99 + 99p p&p, so I think you can buy it over the phone. Maybe it's too small for people to read on the scan.

[tonybower]

Thanks for the information. Really appreciate it...

Well, I'll have to see if I can get my hands on a copy. Will be interesting to see what this man has to say (though, if I'm honest, I can't help but have some reservations about the title )

[aicee]

What it says "Non-fans regard Céline Dion as ersatz and plastic"?

 

How bad those people are. Those people are probably blind and jealous.

 

"yet to those who love her, no one could be more real," This is what I like most.

[Love,]

If you all have not had a chance to read this FABULOUS BOOK yet, please take the time to.

 

Carl Wilson is truly a gracious person! We had a long and very candid conversation together last year, which led to his writing about my story, my passion, my taste and who I am as a person - which ultimately led to two pages published in his thought-provoking, philosophical, and literary art - "Celine Dion: Let's Talk About Love - Journey to the End of Taste."

 

Below is an article from Guerilla Magazine.

I'm surprised to see my name there. LOL

 

A QUESTION OF TASTE

Nigel Beale

 

In 1913 Igor Stravinsky's composition The Rite of Spring got the same kind of reception I suspect Mats Sundin might get today at an Ottawa Senators' weenie roast. There were riots.

 

Science journalist Johan Lehrer blames the debacle on brain chemicals, stating in Proust Was A Neuroscientist that our brains are specifically designed to sort unfamiliar sounds into patterns. When they succeed we're rewarded with a pleasing shot of dopamine. When they don't, when noise doesn't yield pattern, the dopamine shots keep coming, rendering us disoriented and ornery. But neurons do learn, and after repeated exposure order does prevail. The unfamiliar submits and "noise" again becomes "music," which, according to Lehrer, explains why a mere year after its chair-throwing Parisian debut The Rite of Spring returned to the stage in front of large cheering crowds. Indeed, by 1940 the score was certifiably mainstream and featured prominently in the Disney animation Fantasia.

 

Globe and Mail music critic Carl Wilson thinks this repeated exposure business is nonsense, at least when it comes to explaining the one year turn around. In Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (a clever examination of his hatred of Celine Dion), Wilson says that the rioters would hardly have returned again so soon to see a performance they hated; rather it's the hipsters of the day who would have attended, lured by success de scandale, eager to be shocked. Lehrer’s neurochemical picture is fuzzy, says Wilson, because it doesn’t consider the effects of received concepts and social identifications on “private” neuro-auditory processes.

 

Image

I cite the Lehrer-Wilson stand-off because in it we have all that's required to understand the maddeningly contradictory factors that influence and determine aesthetic valuation: the subjective, objective and societal requisites needed to cultivate a personal conception of “good” taste; the police blockade that keeps us from wearing skinny ties and fluorescent hot pants.

 

Like the CBC, aesthetic judgment has long been yoked with conflicting mandates: to establish a stable, objective foundation against which to evaluate merit through time (in other words, a standard of excellence that can be used to measure new artistry), while simultaneously responding to personal, subjective, fugitive likes and dislikes, specific to locale and period. These opposing forces in the struggle to define good taste have tugged one another back and forth over the ages, gaining and losing muddy yardage on the strength of their respective champions.

 

During the past several decades, objective, stable foundations have been sliding very much on their bottoms, losing ground to the idea that beauty is held in the subjective eye of the beholder. But can a middle ground be found? Can the thoughtful observer draw upon both intellect and intuition to arrive at something collectively acknowledged as “good taste”? To find out, let’s begin at the beginning.

 

TASTE THROUGH TIME

 

As a concept linked to aesthetic preference, taste hit the radar early in the 18th Century. If the old way of thinking asked what made a work of art beautiful, new ways asked not what constituted beauty but rather what qualities of mind made an object seem beautiful, what "pleasures of the imagination," as Joseph Addison put it in 1712.

 

But a problem arose: if beauty exists only known in the mind as a feeling, then anything that triggers this feeling can also be called beautiful and everyone would have their own unique measure. Without some common concept of the aesthetic, outside of private experience, discussion of relative value would be impossible. Image

 

Attempts to reconcile personal, emotional biochemical response with accepted, rationally determined criteria, continued throughout the 1700s. Writers such as Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, for example, suggested that if human minds were structurally the same, and if everyone perceived the same things in largely the same way—through the physical senses of sight and sound, for example—surely the same should hold for a "sense" of the beautiful.

 

Then, in 1790, Emanuel Kant went upstairs, arguing for the existence of a universal faculty of “judgment.” The tastes legislated by this faculty, if properly reflected upon, would be evident to everyone, he said. Beauty transcends the self; it is universal. In The Critique of Judgment, he argued that emotions don't belong at all to beauty and that the beautiful must be admired in and of itself.

 

The trouble with Kant’s “subjective universality” lies in its susceptibility to abuse; to its being usurped, determined and preached by ruling power, similar to how religious leaders pontificate on known unknowns. Kant's objective truths about beauty, despite widespread acceptance, got non-believers legitimately asking, “Sez who?”

 

Two centuries later, Pierre Bourdieu published his own critique of judgment contradicting Kant's notion of a disinterested aesthetic, arguing that taste is decidedly interested; self-interested and social. As Carl Wilson puts it: "if you flinch seeing a copy of [Celine Dion's] Let's Talk about Love or The DaVinci Code on a friend's shelves, what you are trying to shake off is the stain of the déclassé, the threat of social inferiority."

 

In this view, good taste is informed by economic and educational background and is largely a quest for social status as symbolic power; a way to distinguish oneself from others, to establish superiority over those who rank beneath us. "As with money," Wilson says, "cultural and social capital's value depends on scarcity, on knowing what others don't."

 

Similarly, Bourdieu saw taste as distaste, or “disgusts provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the taste of others.” You want your tastes affirmed by your peers, and, just as vitally, dissed by those you disdain. Good taste means pleasing your peers, bad taste means offending them. The ultimate objective is to be “cool.” The attendees at Stravinsky's return performance in 1914 were cool.

 

ENTHUSIASMS AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

 

Perception and opinion, unlike a timeless canon, is malleable. The space you grow up in and the genes you wear determine in good part the impact that art has on you. Getting context and “meaning” can influence and change initial responses. So can persuasive teachers and critics who offer points of reference.

 

For example, without agreed upon aesthetic measurement, War and Peace cannot objectively be valued higher on a literary scale than, say, Peyton Place. But even if beauty of language, profundity of intellectual discussion and emotional connection are accepted as legitimate measures and Tolstoy is deemed the better, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to value him over, say, Dostoevsky or Stendhal.

 

Similarly, lacking a yardstick we cannot say that your experience of Picasso's Guernica is more profound than mine is of Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World. Who's to judge one experience more valuable than the next? Only where evaluative systems are agreed upon, where talk is heard, can stimulating conversation and enlightening insight occur.

 

Image

 

When seen as a harmony between standard values and undisputable personal likes and dislikes, taste seems, to literary critic Brian Phillips, less a problem to be solved than a capability to not only distinguish between the good and the bad in aesthetics, but to sustain a flexible notion of what the good and the bad can be. As Phillips notes in an essay in Poetry magazine, "An audience with a strong capability of taste, drawing from its sense of beauty as objective, can softly enforce a realm in which real discussion is possible, in which a common scale of value licenses the sharing of enthusiasms and disappointments."

 

So let us conclude this: If any useful discussion of taste is to be had at all, there must be a willingness to address merit, to explain pleasure and displeasure beyond "I know what I like." Just as the best criticism clearly and persuasively explains and argues relative merit, so good taste is developed through the study and articulation of likes and dislikes.

 

Fortunately, such study is not as difficult as it might sound. Here then, we modestly offer the reader a methodology for the development of his or her own good taste.

 

Step 1) Take each art form that enchants you. Expose yourself to as much of it as local bylaws permit. Write down a list of the works you admire. Detail your response to them: use those words that best describe your feelings, the qualities that make you feel the way you feel, what you like, what you dislike. For example, isolate those passages in literature that give you the greatest pleasure, that teach you the most profound lessons. This is the benchmark against which to judge everything else. You have formulated your own canon. It contains only the very best and everything must now bow to and be measured by it.

Image

Step 2) Painting appeals to sight, music to hearing, sculpture to sight and touch, fiction to all senses through the imagination. Each has its own aesthetic vocabulary. Learn the lingo. It'll help you to understand and evaluate your feelings. Equally important, each art form is rooted in a discipline of craft. Learning these disciplines and knowing what techniques are used teaches purpose, structure, observation, selective criteria and judgment of execution. It also provides objective evaluative tools which can be used to assess quality of process and the ultimate value of finished work.

 

Step 3) Read the critics, past and present; those generally revered, those whose opinions you respect; those whose you vehemently reject. Identify what they look for. Compare your criteria to theirs'. Perhaps they use a measure that you don't. Add it to your tool bag if it fits. There's nothing so fine as meeting a critic who expresses exactly what you feel, who shares the same enthusiasms that live in your heart.

 

Step 4) To stay cool, do what Carl Wilson did: purposefully seek out the new and address what you hate. Look for those who think what you like sucks and learn their systems of taste. Try to understand them. By so doing you're guaranteed not to stagnate. Your taste will evolve while staying honest and coherent. You'll be able to talk intelligently and contribute to the great conversation with more than the famed Chris Farley-to-Paul McCartney Saturday Night Live declaration: "That was awesome."

 

Finally, a general rule: be gentle. Instead of bashing away with Kant to get everyone to adopt your preferences, relish the plenitudes of tastes out there. Rather than shitting on what others prefer, consider a dialogue: “Here's what it feels like to enjoy the music I like. What does it feel like for you to enjoy yours?”

After all, how critical is good taste to long-term fulfillment in life? One of the best passages in Wilson's book has him experiencing a kind of taste shock after meeting a Celine superfan named Sophoan Sorn.

 

"His taste world is coherent and an enormous pleasure to him,” writes Wilson. “Not only does it seem as valid as my own utterly incompatible tastes, I like him so much that for a long moment his taste seems superior. What was the point again of all that nasty life-negating crap I like?"

 

 

 

 

Ottawa’s Nigel Beale is a writer and broadcaster who specializes in literary journalism. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian’s online book section, hosts a radio program called The Biblio File, and blogs tastefully, most of the time, at www.nigelbeale.com.

Edited July 2, 2008 at 01:13 PM by Love,

[Koolan]

Carl Wilson on the "The Colbert Report"

 

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Carl Wilson
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

[pascaladolphejean]

From: Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise - Articles, a blog, and a book by the music critic of The New Yorker

February 21, 2008

 

Est disputandum

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has asked various writers for their book recommendations. Here's my contribution: "Carl Wilson's Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is part of a paperback book series called 33 1/3, in which writers talk in depth about a pop album they admire. Wilson, a music critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, boldly elects to write about an artist he thinks he can’t stand: Céline Dion. (Yes, the subtitle performs the brilliant feat of conflating two Célines into one.) It’s as much an essay in aesthetics as a description of music; indeed, relatively few of Wilson’s 161 pages are devoted to accounting for the contents of Dion’s 1997 album Let’s Talk About Love, the one with the Titanic song. Instead, Wilson wants to know why he, as a pop listener of intellectual bent, seems almost to have no choice but to detest Dion; why millions of listeners in a hundred or more countries around the world passionately embrace her; why Québécois tend to hear her rather differently than do Americans and Anglophone Canadians; why Pierre Bourdieu was only half right about the economics of cultural taste; why 'schmaltz … is never purely escapist'; why it’s sometimes unaccountably overpowering. At the end of his investigations, Wilson hasn’t exactly turned into a Céline Dion fan, but his views of the pop diva have grown considerably more complex. I finished the book with the delicious feeling that the mystery of music had deepened just a little more." Carl blogs at Zoilus.

[scielle]

I've said this before in other threads, but if you haven't read this yet, you absolutely should. Best Celine-related book out there.

I say Celine-related because it's really more about art / music criticism than anything else, but it's a great read for a Celine fan who feels she's been unfairly maligned. It's thoughtful, balanced and far more convincing than the other books - which are just adulatory in tone and largely aimed at existing fans, preaching to the choir. This is a book you give to a Celine hater who needs to understand your obsession!

 

Anyway, I bring it up again because a) it's recently been released in Spanish and made a bestseller list in Spain, and b ) I follow Carl Wilson on Twitter and have enjoyed the recent traffic -

 

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From Molly Lambert, who wrote that MTV piece a few days ago...

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... which sparked some nice comments.

[Your_Su_Phu]

I've said this before in other threads, but if you haven't read this yet, you absolutely should. Best Celine-related book out there.

I say Celine-related because it's really more about art / music criticism than anything else, but it's a great read for a Celine fan who feels she's been unfairly maligned. It's thoughtful, balanced and far more convincing than the other books - which are just adulatory in tone and largely aimed at existing fans, preaching to the choir. This is a book you give to a Celine hater who needs to understand your obsession!

 

Anyway, I bring it up again because a) it's recently been released in Spanish and made a bestseller list in Spain, and b ) I follow Carl Wilson on Twitter and have enjoyed the recent traffic -

 

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These 3 tweets he re-tweeted are actually mine. I have been a big fan of his book for years, and I actually think he's at the forefront of much of the critical re-evaluation Celine has experienced in recent years. He even did a piece for Slate where he recommended gems from her career that might interest non-fans. That's quite a leap considering that he initially couldn't stand her music.

 

http://www.slate.com...ners_video.html

Edited February 27, 2016 at 10:10 AM by Your_Su_Phu

[Your_Su_Phu]

Some Celine fans were unsure whether or not to take this book as an insult. I can understand why, since at a superficial glance even the title ("Journey to the end of taste") and general snark might give that impression. I've seen people accuse Wilson of being pretentious and condescending. But if you actually read the book, you'll see that he's incredibly sensitive and respectful towards the fans, and to Celine as a person (despite his initial revulsion towards her music). As a member noted above, the book isn't really about Celine, it's just that her LTAL album and career are being used to illustrate a point. The book itself is more about musical taste, the cultural and historical context of Celine's pop career (her working class Quebec roots), schmaltz as a genre, and even classism. He basically implores people to be more empathetic in judging others' musical tastes (which isn't to say you can't have strong or negative opinions about art). I think it's a really important work and it has even been taught in some university classes. Believe it or not, it has softened a lot of critics' derision towards Celine. Even people as varied as James Franco and Lorde have praised it.

 

Celine's team may be unwilling to admit it, or they're just oblivious, but he's contributed in some way to her legacy.

Edited February 27, 2016 at 10:54 AM by Your_Su_Phu

[scielle]

These 3 tweets he re-tweeted are actually mine. I have been a big fan of his book for years, and I actually think he's at the forefront of much of the critical re-evaluation Celine has experienced in recent years.

 

Haha, small world. And I think you're absolutely right.

His book is a great tool for those of us constantly trying to defend our Celine obsession!

 

I think it's a really important work and it has even been taught in some university classes. Believe it or not, it has softened a lot of critics' derision towards Celine.

[...]

Celine's team may be unwilling to admit it, or they're just oblivious, but he's contributed in some way to her legacy.

 

Absolutely. It's a seminal work.

I think he reached out to Celine's camp for the 2nd edition (the one that includes essays by James Franco, Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, Nick Hornby, etc.), but was turned away. And that's too bad. I think Celine's team needs to engage with people like him just as much as the folks at People, Hello, Us Weekly, etc. He's done much more good for her legacy than any of those celebrity magazines ever could. He did a lot to legitimize Celine in the eyes of those who would never have paid her any attention otherwise - it was so nice to see her written about thoughtfully in the New Yorker, NPR, Colbert Report, etc.

 

Worth listening to:

https://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/carl-wilson

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17158023

And lots of other great coverage at http://thisiswhatwetalkabout.blogspot.com/

[crazy4music]

After seeing this book mentioned in several online articles, I was finally able to get it the other day for free on Audible.com It's a very interesting read, and I found myself laughing in some places. I have to say Mr. Wilson did a nice job! I like the fact that he, as a critic who at first was not a Celine fan at all, decided to give her music a chance and try to understand where she, and her fans, were coming from. recommended Edited March 30, 2016 at 09:38 PM by crazy4music

[zuv]

So wait...

The book is not about bashing her and neither it is about telling her fans that they don't have musical taste?

[scielle]

So wait...

The book is not about bashing her and neither it is about telling her fans that they don't have musical taste?

 

Correct.

[crazy4music]

It's actually a great conversation-starter because everyone has different tastes in music, movies, food; diferent opinions; we all have our own likes and dislikes. The question that comes up here is something like: how does this person adore the same thing which I equally despise? Or, how can this person hate something I love? Whereare they coming from? What factors might influence the things they find excellent or intolerable? What abut their culture, where they grew up, what life situations they have encountered? And so many other things that shape who we are can also shape our opinions. And with Celine Dion gaining so much more popularity with "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, this book is asking, maybe, "Why do so many people love her music at the same time as so many others can't stand it?" So, it's not a book that just bashes, nearly so much as seeking to understand other people. At least that's how I've come to see it.

[scielle]

This made me smile -

 

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[lyn]

halfway through this book thanks to the reemergence of this thread...

 

good god it's a fantastic read. Such a comprehensive coverage of culture/Celine! Thanks Carl for the wonderful journey!!

[stone]

Slowly but surely, converters arise! 😂