This song came out in October and it’s been one of my favorite listens since then. That’s mostly thanks to Q-Tip, who produced Danny Brown’s latest album, and to Brown’s excellent taste in samples (he reportedly went into debt optioning sounds for these beats). “Dirty Laundry” is a dark and funky beep-boop that you might categorize as “space-age fly”. Lyrically, the laundry he’s airing is a litany of unconventional backdrops for sexual adventures, from a laundromat to a Burger King bathroom; accordingly, his rapping oscillates between dirty and clean. If that isn’t the circle of life.
For anyone hiding in the bathroom to wait this virus out, you might have the right idea: as you’ll learn in Citylab, the American bathroom was designed to prevent the spread of disease. Virtually every facet of the bathroom we know today was at one point the solution to some outbreak. Indoor plumbing was obviously a big one, adopted in light of the acceptance of germ theory. Wipe-down-able porcelain and enamel proved a big improvement over the wooden commode, aiding in the fight against tuberculosis. Soap dishes, toothbrush holders, towel racks, and other fixtures were developed to hold things apart and, crucially, off of the floor. The real kicker, though, isn’t an addition to the bathroom, but rather of one: during the influenza outbreak in the 1900s, the second bathroom on the ground floor was popularized to give guests a place to wash their hands without introducing germs to the family’s sleeping quarters.
Next up, we imagine how our own sanitary spaces could evolve as we work through this pandemic. The bidet is a clear frontrunner on our list of additions, and I’d argue for implementing sinks either outside our front doors (imagine the fumbling you’d avoid) or in our front hallways so we don’t have to dash through the house, arms up, toward the kitchen sink. (Honestly, why is the kitchen the first point of cleansing contact?) Somebody start a Pinterest board for this #lifestyle #inspo.
Why limit our design amendments to the home? One town in California is already scheming to prevent germ swapping on one key surface: the crosswalk button. In Emeryville as everywhere, it’s always been unclear whether the buttons even work, but now that they’re both questionably useful and actively harmful, the town is automating all their crossing signals so folks can go button-free. Wasn’t that easy?
In the meantime, is anyone else being instagram-targeted by these bionic touch keys? According to an ad for the Cleankey, we could all be using an “Antimicrobial Brass Hand Tool” to “Avoid touching public touchscreens like store checkouts” and “open doors, press buttons & pull levers” while we “kill 99% of bacteria” with an “Antimicrobial Copper Alloy.” I would say this might be worth considering if it were capable of twisting a doorknob, which it is not.
