The Roots drummer, ?uestlove, will be schooling kids left and right this spring as he teaches a class on classic albums at NYU. It’s too bad this isn’t a high school class so my Young MC ‘Principal’s Office’ reference would fit better.
The course will include lectures on albums such as Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Aretha Franklin’s Lady Soul, Led Zeppelin’s IV, Prince’s Dirty Mind, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique.
They’ll also cover what constitutes a “classic” or “seminal” album, looking at the music, lyrics, production, and business behind great albums.
Billboard reports that the course was inspired by an NPR blog post over the summer where an intern reviewed Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, an album he’d never heard before. ?uestlove responded to the dismissive review in the comments, prompting NYU’s Jason King to invite ?uestlove and Weinger to teach the course.
Korean pop music or K-pop has been steadily gaining popularity outside of Korea the last several years, and most of the artists share the trait of having been developed in a music factory. John Seabrook in the New Yorker looks at what the head of the first of these factories calls “cultural technology.” There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in this article.
In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system “cultural technology.” In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, “I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.” He went on, “S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.”
[…]
Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshadow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos (a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree group shot to open the video, followed by a montage of individual closeups).
Peter Dean is a big Beatles fan. And so he set out to reproduce exactly — from photographic evidence only — an old circus poster owned by John Lennon. In true Sgt. Pepper’s fashion, he had a little help from his friends.
This is a reproduction of the poster that inspired John Lennon to write the song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, which appeared on The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is printed in a limited edition of 1,967.
Lennon bought the poster in an antiques shop and hung it in his music room. While writing for Sgt. Pepper one day, he drew inspiration from the quirky, old-fashioned language and set the words to music.
China
Television
North Korea
Vaccine
Brooklyn’s got a winning team (maybe)
Disneyland
Trouble in the Suez
Lebanon
California baseball
U2 (albeit a different one)
Dylan
John Glenn
Birth control
Palestine
Terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran
Foreign debts
Homeless Vets
Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack for P.T. Anderson’s new film, The Master, came out yesterday. It’s available on MP3 from Amazon ($11) and directly from Nonesuch in MP3 and other formats ($12+). Greenwood previously did the soundtrack for Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
From Harlem and upper Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens and the Atlantic Ocean - New York city’s A Line subway route covers over 30 miles, takes two hours to ride from end to end, and is the inspiration for one of jazz’s best known tunes.
Here — with archive images and vibrant present-day photographs from Melanie Burford — New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik takes a ride on one of today’s A trains, and explores the communities living along the route.
I liked this Zadie Smith profile of Jay-Z, and not just for The Wire reference. Smith’s got a nice way with words and handles Jay-Z’s way with words nicely.
In “Decoded,” Jay-Z writes that “rap is built to handle contradictions,” and Hova, as he is nicknamed, is as contradictory as they come. Partly because he’s a generalist. Biggie had better boasts, Tupac dropped more knowledge, Eminem is — as “Renegade” demonstrated — more formally dexterous. But Hova’s the all-rounder. His albums are showrooms of hip-hop, displaying the various possibilities of the form. The persona is cool, calm, almost frustratingly self-controlled: “Yeah, 50 Cent told me that one time. He said: ‘You got me looking like Barksdale’ ” — the hot-blooded drug kingpin from HBO’s “The Wire” — “and you get to be Stringer Bell!” — Barksdale’s levelheaded partner. The rapper Memphis Bleek, who has known Jay-Z since Bleek himself was 14, confirms this impression: “He had a sense of calm way before music. This was Jay’s plan from day one: to take over. I guess that’s why he smiles and is so calm, ‘cause he did exactly what he planned in the ’90s.” And now, by virtue of being 42 and not dead, he can claim his own unique selling proposition: he’s an artist as old as his art form. The two have grown up together.
Dan Spitz played lead guitar for the heavy metal band Anthrax for more than 12 years. Now he’s a master watchmaker.
My favorite stuff to work on is older watches because of how they are made. These watches were way overbuilt so that they would never come back for repair. Just look at the mainplates… They were built at a time before computers were checking everything. If you’ve been working on modern stuff all day, there’s nothing like getting a vintage watch to work on, and when you open it up, you say “Ahhhh, look at that, this rocks!” Like an old muscle car, it’s so basic, so perfect, so overbuilt. It just rocks.
Over at The Verge wub wub wub skztch wubwubwub Joe Flatley Flatley wub wub wub pzzzzt wub WUBB wub Flatley wub wub wub shares the history wub wub wub wub wub wub fwizzort WUBWUBWUB of dubstep here comes the drop
For our purposes, we can begin the story of dubstep at the turn of the 21st century, and with UK garage and two-step; weird, hybrid music that features elements of house music (popcorn snares, glittering high-hats) and a lyrical style that is almost a parody of American hip-hop glamor and excess. “Champagne, Versace and Moschino,” as Zed Bias once put it.
Recently I talked to Damian “Dieselboy” Higgins, the Brooklyn-based drum and bass DJ, producer, and head of the record label Human (and its dubstep and electro imprint Subhuman). Higgins has been on the front lines as long as America has had a rave scene. “Drum and bass kept spawning these micro-cultures, or micro-genres,” he explained. “[There was] two-step, and then grime, and dubstep was the next one. For me, I felt like it came from drum and bass. There are a lot of drum and bass guys who jumped ship and went to it.”
Drum and bass is one of those primarily English forms of dance music that, even today, still sounds alien - the fast tempos (generally well over 150 beats per minute), the intricate syncopation, and the full-on synthetic sound has never been fully accepted by mainstream American ears. Two-step garage took house music and added the foreignness of drum and bass. Or, perhaps conversely, it took drum and bass and added enough elements from house music as to not alienate the ladies in the clubs. It was a form of dance music that was indigenous to London, and for a moment in the late 1990s it was arguably the underground sound of the UK.
The crazy (and possibly high) folks at Backyard Brains hooked an iPod up to a squid in such a way that when the music played, it was converted into electrical impulses that triggered color changes on the squid’s skin, thereby creating the world’s first cephalo-iPod. Here’s a video of the squid’s skin pulsing along to Insane in the Membrane by Cypress Hill:
During experiments on the giant axons of the Longfin Inshore Squid (loligo pealei) at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA; we were fascinated by the fast color-changing nature of the squid’s skin. Squids (like many other cephalopods) can quickly control pigmented cells called chromatophores to reflect light. The Longfin Inshore has 3 different chromatophore colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore has tiny muscles along the circumference of the cell that can contract to reveal the pigment underneath.
New musical obsession: Com Truise. It’s basically all I’ve listened to over the past two weeks.
While subliminally informed by both parental record collections and hints of faded electronics product design, Haley’s Com Truise project isn’t just nostalgia capitalization. There are fragments (read: DNA strands) of Joy Division, New Order, and the Cocteau Twins, but it’s like you’re hearing them through the motherboard of a waterlogged Xbox-demented and modern. He’s got a way of making familiar things sound beautifully hand-smeared.
He’s on SoundCloud and if you like that, check out a couple of his albums: In Decay and Galactic Melt. Got the rec from Dan Cederholm, who tweeted intriguingly, “Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack was brilliant, yes. I’m voting Com Truise for Tron 3.”
In a move that harkens back to composers of old, Beck’s next album, ‘Song Reader’ will be released in December as sheet music of 20 unreleased and unrecorded songs.
The sheet music will come with full colour art works for each song as well as a hardcover carrying case. Two of the 20 songs are instrumentals. The ‘album’ features the tracks ‘Do We? We Do’ and ‘Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard’. The idea behind the release is for fans to play the songs and ‘bring them to life’ themselves.
In 1979, 11 peopled died in a stampede before a stop on The Who’s Quadrephenia tour in Cincinnati when not enough doors were opened to let in the crowd. Providence mayor Buddy Cianci canceled a concert two weeks later at the Providence Civic Center, and The Who hasn’t ever been back to Providence. Last week, the GM of the PCC, now called the Dunkin’ Donuts Center announced he’d accept unrefunded tickets for The Who’s February, 2013 concert.
Tuesday, as the Providence Journal reports, “the patience and tenacity of 10 Who fans was rewarded … at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, where they traded in 14 tickets to the band’s canceled 1979 Providence performance in exchange for tickets to their February 2013 show at the Dunk.” The ProJo has video. Fan Ed McConnell says he knew exactly where his two ‘79 tickets were: one was in a cigar box in a closet and the other one “was stuck on a cork bulletin board in my parent’s house in my brother’s old bedroom.”
PS: Songs by The Who considered of puntastic entry in this post include the following: Going Mobile, I Can See for Miles, I Can’t Explain, I’ve Been Away, Long Live Rock, My Generation, The Kids Are Alright, and Who Are You?
What am I supposed to say to that? That’s ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music? It’s a mismatch. They don’t complement each other. Max and Mingus can play together, by themselves. Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can’t play with them, and they can’t play with Duke.
Now, how are you going to give a thing like that some stars? Record companies should be kicked in the ass. Somebody should take a picket sign and picket the record company.
Mike Tetreault recently let Boston Magazine follow along while he prepared to audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra resulting in an interesting look into the BSO and the life of an elite orchestra musician. There’s even a surprise appearance from Steve Blass Disease.
At 33, Tetreault was putting in 100-hour weeks on a patchwork of gigs he’d pieced together — simultaneously serving as the music director at the Galilee Baptist Church in Denver; teaching at the University of Colorado; and working various gigs with the Boulder Philharmonic, the Fort Collins Symphony, the Colorado Ballet, the Colorado Symphony, and Opera Colorado. Yes, he was doing what he loved for a living, but when he added it all up, it was barely a living at all. He’d made $55,000 the previous year, pretty good — until you factored in all the hours, and the fact that the salary had to support two since his wife, Rachel, had been laid off in 2010 from a communications job with the Colorado Symphony. The couple was living in a 625-square-foot one-bedroom apartment.
In a dispute with Universal over compensation for digital downloads, Def Leppard is taking the extreme and fairly metal step of re-recording their entire back catalog so they can do what they want with the songs. Earlier, they recorded what they’re calling “Forgeries” of ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ to coincide with the movie release of Rock of Ages.
While the business side seems cut and dried, Elliott says the creative part of recreating songs that date back 25 years or more is not. “You just don’t go in and say, ‘Hey guys, let’s record it,’ and it’s done in three minutes,” Elliott notes. “We had to study those songs, I mean down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries of them. Time-wise it probably took as long to do as the originals, but because of the technology it actually got done quicker as we got going. But trying to find all those sounds…like where am I gonna find a 22-year-old voice? I had to sing myself into a certain throat shape to be able to sing that way again. It was really hard work, but it was challenging, and we did have a good laugh over it here and there.”
Concert promoter Alvaro Ramos, who is overseeing the Portuguese leg of Madonna’s MDNA tour, told Britain’s Daily Mirror: “We have to take extreme care, like I have never seen for any other artist.
“We cannot even look at the dressing room after it is ready, or even open the door.”
Kanye West’s producer Mike Dean, who co-produced part of Jay and ‘Ye’s Watch the Throne, has confirmed that there will be a Watch the Throne 2! While Dean revealed that a follow up album is definitely in the works, he was unable to give a specific time for its release.
No, it’s not a typewriter that plays music. The Keaton Music Typewriter was invented in 1936 for the purpose of printing musical notes on sheet music paper.
The Keaton Music Typewriter was first patented in 1936 (14 keys) by Robert H. Keaton from San Francisco, California. Another patent was taken out in 1953 (33 keys) which included improvements to the machine. The machine types on a sheet of paper lying flat under the typing mechanism. There are several Keaton music typewriters thought to be in existence in museums and private collections. It was marketed in the 1950s and sold for around $225. The typewriter made it easier for publishers, educators, and other musicians to produce music copies in quantity. Composers, however, preferred to write the music out by hand.
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