I thought you may like this link, it’s my favorite rendition of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” sung by Cab Calloway in a Betty Boop cartoon (Betty is Snow White):
Cheers,
Len
PS:
Fleischer’s Snow White was animated by ONE person, produced by a Jewish animation studio, in the Depression, featuring images of gambling and alcohol, starring a jazz singer. Take that, Walt.
Calloway’s most famous cartoon appearance is probably as the voice of King Louie in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1969). This just isn’t true. King Louie is Louie Prima. I knew this.
“St. James Infirmary Blues” is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”). There are numerous versions of the song throughout the English-speaking world. It also evolved into other American standards such as “The Streets of Laredo”. “The Unfortunate Rake” is about a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease. Different versions of the song expand on this theme, variations typically feature a narrator telling the story of a youth “cut down in his prime” (occasionally her prime) as a result of some morally questionable actions. For example, when the song moved to America, gambling and alcohol became common causes of the youth’s death.
The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy. It was closed in 1532 when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St. James Palace.
The song was first collected in England in its version as “The Unfortunate Rake” by Henry Hammond by a Mr. William Cutis at Lyme Regis, Dorset in March 1906.
Part of the song’s versatility/ambiguity is that its content can also swing depending on the gender of the singer and the “baby” cut down in his/her prime.
Notable performers of this song include Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Kermit Ruffins, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, King Oliver, Artie Shaw, Big Mama Thornton, Jack Teagarden, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Bobby Hackett, Stan Kenton, Lou Rawls, The Limeliters, Bobby Bland, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Doc Watson, “Spider” John Koerner, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Animals, and more recently The White Stripes, the Triffids, the Stray Cats, the Tarbox Ramblers, Isobel Campbell, The Devil Makes Three and Mark Lanegan, and Tom Jones with Jools Holland. Jazz guitarists Marc Ribot and Ivan “Boogaloo Joe” Jones have recorded instrumental versions.
The sound, style, and look of Janelle Monae’s video for “Tightrope” references a lot of classic pop/art culture: OutKast and Metropolis, certainly, James Brown and Michael Jackson, but also classic R&B performers like Jackie Wilson and avant-garde film like Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
It also reminded me, faintly but insistently, of this classic video of Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers, from the movie Stormy Weather. (What is it with economic depression => dancing in tuxedos?)
I still think this is the easily most amazing display of deliberate human physicality in dance I’ve ever seen. Maybe anywhere. (Hit Twitter at @kottke or @tcarmody if you think you’ve got a better candidate.)
Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Pena Rodriguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Pena Rodriguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund - clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Felix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Felix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive - and discovered the missing scenes.
I wrote a chapter of my dissertation about Lang, so I was pretty familiar with how the film had been hacked and mangled. Early cinema was a lot like the early years of print books. No two extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio are exactly the same, because the printer made small changes and corrected errors before finishing each one. Likewise, filmmakers and producers made edits on the fly, and different countries, and sometimes different theater owners, would recut prints to suit their taste. Without an original master print, most early movies have been restored, screened, and transferred to disc in versions cobbled together from various sources, in most cases still quite different from what was initially shown to the public. Metropolis was really only different in that we knew most of the content of the scenes that had been cut.
If you haven’t seen Metropolis this summer, you may have seen Inception, another science-fiction movie featuring corporate intrigue, a sentimental subplot, and a setting consisting of multiple levels of a highly allegorical dreamlike city. Annalee Newitz goes deeper, finding subtle affinities with the dream-city of Inception and another Metropolis, the utopian city imagined by King Camp Gillette, who woud go on to invent the safety razor.
Gillette wanted to solve the problem of social inequality with his perfect city, which he named Metropolis. The city, which he outlines in his book The Human Drift, would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.
The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city’s residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.
Freud compared the unconscious to a city:
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.
And in The Human Drift, King Gillette talks about a city’s economy like the unconscious, too, and panics and depressions like a neurosis:
Never in the history of the world has business been organized as a whole in any country. It has always been a tangled skein beyond the power of man to unravel. It has been impossible to regulate supply and demand within reasonable limit, simply because every man is for himself, and he never knows what the rest of the world is doing. As a result, we have a constant fluctuation in prices of articles of consumption. At one time the whole country is overstocked with certain lines of goods, and there is a depression of prices. Then the manufacturers shut down or restrict the output, and the next thing we hear is that the whole country is short of these goods. It is here that the institution of speculation, or gambling in necessities, has its birth; and this lack of knowledge and power to regulate supply and demand, is, in part, the cause of our periods of depression and failure.
The solution, in both cases, is to become aware of those subterranean, unknown forces, and bring them into consciousness.
Finally, and less depressingly, there’s Janelle Monae, whose terrific album The ArchAndroid, is part of a suite titled Metropolis, which also creates a kind of imagined not-quite-retro-future that tries to touch on the uneasiness in culture.
Electro-acoustic sample wizards The Books have a new album out, and they have a Tumblr that annotates each track. “A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi” includes a sample of the Mahatma’s voice from a 1931 gramophone recording.
Mostly I think of this track as a P.S.A. Everyone should know what Gandhi’s voice sounds like; it’s timbre communicates so much regardless of what he’s saying, if we can help spread it in our small way it seems worth the 18 seconds.
Nick Zammuto goes on to compare Gandhi’s voice to Einstein’s, whose voice graces a track on the band’s second album. This comparison, and the scarcity of fair-quality recordings of Gandhi’s voice, made me realize how important our memory of an historical figure’s voice can become. Try to imagine FDR, Martin Luther King Jr, or Hitler without thinking of their voice. Yet we don’t know what Lincoln sounded like, or Napoleon, let alone Confucius or Cicero.
I like cover songs. It’s interesting to hear another take on a favorite song. The ones I especially like are covers by bands in a completely different style. A good cover song will add to your enjoyment of the originally, and sometimes let you hear things you didn’t hear before. Wilco’s ‘I am Trying to Break Your Heart” by J.C. Brooks and the Uptown Sound and The Clash’s Train in Vain by Annie Lennox are two that come to mind. I’ve also got a soft spot for acoustic versions of punk songs, but that list could go on a while, so just let the two above take you through Sunday night. Enjoy!
Flavorwire has a post on the etymology of 10 musical genre names. This is the type of thing that you wonder about from time to time, but probably never bothered to look up.
Punk: While “punk” was once (and still, occasionally) catch-all slang for a young delinquent, “punk rock” first appeared in a 1970 Chicago Tribune article, uttered by Ed Sanders of The Fugs. Although the band was one of punk’s immediate ancestors, Sanders went on to define the term as “redneck sentimentality.” The next year, Dave Marsh of Creem used “punk rock” to describe ? and the Mysterians. Its meaning evolved from there, originally encompassing a slew of Nuggets-era garage-rock bands and eventually solidifying into a more rigid description of the mid-’70s bands we think of as “punk.”
Wikipedia has a page dedicated to controversial album art, which I found recently while looking up background on the 23rd birthday of Appetite for Destruction (yipe).
Eric Bana - Out of Bounds (1994)
The cover art features Bana naked from behind while streaking at a crowded AFL game. He is reaching for the ball and his buttocks are covered with the message “contents may offend”. The scene was created digitally, with the overlap of two photos. An alternative cover for the album was later released.
I was really hoping Eric Bana had a musical release in his background because musical releases by actors are usually hilarious, but this one appears to be comedy. Sigh.
Jackson faced a critical moment in his personal development: would his new mega-success and wealth spur him to grow, becoming more confident and independent, or to withdraw further into his gilded fantasy world? His “Thriller” friends marveled at his paradoxical qualities: simultaneously sophisticated as an artist, canny to the point of ruthlessness in business dealings, and breathtakingly immature about relationships. “I dealt with Michael as I would have a really gifted child,” says Landis, “because that’s what he was at that moment. He was emotionally damaged, but so sweet and so talented.”
I have no idea who the singer is or what this music video is about, but I kinda can’t stop watching it.
And hey, look, an informative YouTube comment:
I’m gonna take a stab at interpreting the plot of this video. The child is dying and as some sort of make a wish type thing he’s wants to be a warlord, have an entourage if hot ladies and meet 2 live crew (which I’m guessing the police man and business man have set up, with 4 stand-ins but they are nervous about him realizing its not actually them) … but he buys it, and when he fulfills the three wishes cosmic energy leaves his body and all that glorious trippy shit happens at the end.
I am love love loving Treats, the debut album from Sleigh Bells, a Brooklyn-based duo consisting of a hardcore guitar player and a pop vocalist slash Bronx schoolteacher. You’ve likely heard all about them from Stereogum (“their tracks ram together many sonic worlds”) or Pitchfork (“discordant Brooklyn dancepop duo”) but in case I’m your main source for new music, now you have something novel to listen to this afternoon.
The Metheny vs Kenny G post from the other day reminded me of my OTHER favorite piece of music history on the internet: yelling at his band. I think rant #3 is my favorite, followed closely by rant #2. Click through for audio AND transcripts, but be warned the audio is entirely NSFW unless you work in a place where angry drummers cussing out trombonists and bass players is appropriate. Then it’s completely SFW.
Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of “production as performance” video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term “VideoSong”:
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules: 1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). 2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.
This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.
An interesting article about how composer and programmer David Cope found a unique solution for making computer-composed classical music sound as though it was composed by humans: he wrote algorithms that based new works on previously created works.
Finally, Cope’s program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach’s spirit — and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he’d begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.
Gosh it’s going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental “human” things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.
I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally tracked down the soundtracks for both Moon and Sunshine…hiding in plain sight on iTunes. They are both great in their entirety. If you just want a taste, at least get Welcome to Lunar Industries from Moon and Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) from Sunshine.
Update: Forgot to add that the Sunshine soundtrack is only available through iTunes and the Moon soundtrack is available in the US as an expensive import (and not on Amazon’s mp3 site or anything like that) so your best bet is iTunes there as well.
What I am worried about and don’t want to fall into, is dependence on too many screens to play a set. It’s bad enough having one computer screen. After all, it’s all about the performance and the people. I want to be looking at the crowd and them looking at me, interacting with one another. If we start getting dependant on screens it is going to ruin the art of performance.
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