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Mario Wienerroither takes music videos, strips out all the sound, and then foleys back in sound effects based on what people are doing in the video. You’ll get the gist after about 6 seconds of this Jamiroquai video:
Great stuff. He’s also done Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Prodigy’s Firestarter, and Queen’s I Want to Break Free. (via @faketv)
According to Spike Jonze, there might not be an official release of the soundtrack for Her (performed by Arcade Fire), but the whole thing is somehow currently on the internet for your listening pleasure:
Update: Win Butler of Arcade Fire now says the Her soundtrack will be released in some form eventually.
I always forget about Interview magazine but I really shouldn’t because a) Warhol and b) they consistently pair interesting people together for interviews. Case in point: director Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave, not Bullitt) interviews Kanye West for the Feb 2014 issue.
MCQUEEN: You’ve been on the scene as an artist now for 10 years, which is impressive, given the level of interest and artistry that you’ve managed to sustain in your work. In the process, you’ve become incredibly influential. So you talk about doing all of these other things, which is great, but there’s really no amount of money that could make you more influential than you are now. So my question is: What are you going to do with all of the influence that you have right now?
WEST: Well, influence isn’t my definition of success-it’s a by-product of my creativity. I just want to create more. I would be fine with making less money. I actually spend the majority of my money attempting to create more things. Not buying things or solidifying myself or trying to make my house bigger, or trying to show people how many Louis Vuitton bags I can get, or buying my way to a good seat at the table. My definition of success, again, is getting my ideas out there.
Thanks to Jonathan at The Candler Blog for the pointer; he also notes Glenn Kenny’s super-apt comment:
Clearly the problem with most Kanye West interviews up until now has been the interviewer.
In 1963, Studs Terkel interviewed a 21-year-old Bob Dylan, before he was famous.
In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan.”
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called “The Bear Club”. The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on “The Studs Terkel Program”.
Dangerous Minds has more detail about the interview.
Bob Dylan is a notoriously tough person to interview and that’s definitely the case here, even this early in his life as a public persona. On the other hand, Terkel is a veteran interviewer, one of the best ever, and he seems genuinely impressed with the young man who was just 21 at the time and had but one record of mainly covers under his belt. Terkel does a good job of keeping things on track as he expertly gets out of the way and listens while gleaning what he can from his subject. It’s an interesting match-up.
Dylan seems at least fairly straightforward about his musical influences. He talks about seeing Woody Guthrie with his uncle when he was ten years old (Is this just mythology? Who knows?), and he mentions Big Joe Williams and Pete Seeger a few times.
Much of the rest is a little trickier. Terkel has to almost beg Dylan to play what turns out to be an earnest, driving version of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” Dylan tells Terkel that he’d rather the interviewer “take it off the disc,” but relents and does the tune anyways.
(via @mkonnikova)
Nico Muhly is a young and celebrated classical music composer. His review of Beyonce’s new album is a pretty lyrical composition itself.
This is a beautiful song. On the video, there is a long introduction with piano and strings. Use real strings, please, Beyoncé. The piano might be real but it sounds like the most expensive fake piano on the market. One would love to think that this is a comment on the artificiality of beauty — we’ve become accustomed to an expensive fake in favor of the built-in and beautiful imperfections of reality — but I doubt that was the reason for this particular oversight. Bey: call me; you know where I stay.
(via @fchimero)
We may not have our jetpacks and hover cars, but our future-now has given us Tavi Gevinson interviewing Lorde and that’s just as good.
Tavi: On that note, you have a very unique way of looking at the suburb where you live, which I think you’ve called “the Bubble.” When did you realize the suburbs could be a source of inspiration?
Lorde: Well…this sounds so lame, but I grew up reading your blog, man! [Laughs]
Tavi: Oh no! “Ugh, that’s so LAME, shut up!”
Lorde: [Laughs] But no, I think there is something really cool about that whole Virgin Suicides vibe of making even the bad parts bearable. I hate high school so much, but there’s something kind of cool about walking around on the coldest day listening to “Lindisfarne” by James Blake or something and feeling like something has happened, even though it’s the worst thing ever. The album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire was influential to me in that as way well. I just think that record is really beautiful and nostalgic and so well-written. It’s a super-direct way of talking about what it’s like to grow up [in the suburbs], and I think that’s quite lovely.
You’re asking about stuff I’m not used to talking about in interviews, so I don’t have a stock way of driving the question.
Tavi: OK, then: “Do you feel 17?”
Lorde: AGHHHH! What do you even say to that, honestly?
Tavi: It’s kind of a trap, because if you say yes you’re shitting on their question by making it seem obvious, but if you say no you seem like you think you’re older and better.
Lorde: I always get these weird people being like, “Oh, she’s growing up way too fast, she looks 30.” Oh, god.
Tavi: People always say that. I remember — not to be all Mother Hen —
Lorde: No, go for it!
Tavi: I remember when people started paying attention to what I was doing, and it was like, “She should be getting knocked up like all the other kids her age!” It’s like, you complain when you think teenagers are stupid, and then when they try to do something, you’re all, “Oh, they’re growing up too fast, they don’t know what’s good for them.”
Lorde: It seems like a double standard to me. And there’s another part of it which I find really strange, which is that so many interviewers, even ones that I consider really intelligent and good writers, will do the, like, “Oh, you’re not taking your clothes off like Miley Cyrus and all these girls” thing, which to me is just the weirdest thing to say to someone. But then people will say, “She’s always talking about being bored, that’s petulant,” which I feel like is kind of taking the piss out of teenage emotions-just, like, making light of how teenagers feel. When people react that way about things that every teenager experiences, how can you expect to make anything good?
This oral history about Sir Mix-A-Lot’s hit Baby Got Back is way more interesting than it had any right to be.
Sir Mix-a-Lot: There was one event that really made me think that I should do a song about this, which was irritating the shit out of me. Amy and I were at a hotel on tour, when we saw one of the Spuds MacKenzie ads for Budweiser during the Super Bowl. You’d see these girls in the ad: Each one was shaped like a stop sign, with big hair [and] straight up-and-down bird legs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I was so sick of that shit. Now, Amy never said anything about all this until she realized I was so in favor of her physique. She was an actress, and she started admitting that she felt like she lost a lot of parts because of her hourglass figure. I knew for a fact that many artists felt that if they didn’t use a skinny-model-type woman in their video, then mainstream America would reject the song. But I do not agree with that: If you look at Dolly Parton at her peak, a lot of white guys were like “daammn!” At the same time, when I did casting calls for videos, curvy women wouldn’t show up. They thought they didn’t have a chance. Unless you were in the hood, women who had curves — and I’m not talking about women who are shaped like me, with a gut, but women who ran five miles a day, with a washboard, six-pack stomach and a nice round, beautiful, supple ass — wore sweaters around their waist! Bottom line: Black men like curves. When they’re crooning to women about how beautiful they are in an R&B song, the ladies you see in the video don’t reflect what those guys like. Every time an R&B video was on, I heard women say, “I just saw him down in Oakland, and his girls wasn’t like that.” That made me think that this was more than a funny song, and it wrote itself.
Baby Got Back contributed to the cultural shift that changed that:
Sir Mix-a-Lot: Now, ass isn’t a big deal. I go to the gym, and I’ll hear a white girl saying to her trainer, “I want this to be round.” They realize that it doesn’t mean that you’re out of shape if you have a nice ass. Anybody who’s ever seen a stripper pick up a dollar bill with her ass knows you can’t do that with fat.
About half an hour ago, Beyonce surprised the world (the internet, really) by releasing her 5th album on iTunes. There are 14 songs and videos for every song. Just two days ago, Rolling Stone reported on Columbia Records Chairman Rob Stringer saying, “At some point, Beyonce will put a record out, and when she does, it will be monumental” interpreting that to mean ‘sometime in 2014.’ Not exactly.
I tried to find another example of a musician releasing a surprise album, but the results are polluted with references to Paul Simon’s ‘Surprise,’ which was likely no surprise at all.
Update: Last year at a show in Boston, Godspeed You! Black Emperor started selling copies of their unannounced new album. (thx, tomm)
Update: NME has a list of some other surprise albums. (via @kayluhb)
From Pitchfork, a list of the best album covers from 2013. My favorite is this one from Tyler, The Creator, which looks more or less like the opposite of a rap album.
I also liked Michael Cina’s cover for Fort Romeau (which he adapted from his very fetching art) and of course Yeezus, which is this year’s unignorable album in every way. (via @pieratt)
In celebration of his 44th birthday, Jay Z ranked his solo albums:
Here’s the annotated list:
1. Reasonable Doubt (Classic)
2. The Blueprint (Classic)
3. The Black Album (Classic)
4. Vol. 2 (Classic)
5. American Gangster (4 1/2, cohesive)
6. Magna Carta (Fuckwit, Tom Ford, Oceans, Beach, On the Run, Grail)
7. Vol. 1 (Sunshine kills this album… fuck… Streets, Where I’m from, You Must Love Me…)
8. BP3 (Sorry critics, it’s good. Empire (Gave Frank a run for his money))
9. Dynasty (Intro alone…)
10. Vol. 3 (Pimp C verse alone… oh, So Ghetto)
11. BP2 (Too many songs. Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha)
12. Kingdom Come (First game back, don’t shoot me)
(via @anildash)
In a masterfully edited video, David Ehrlich presents his 25 favorite films of 2013.
Fantastic. This video makes me want to stop what I’m doing and watch movies for a week. It’s a good year for it apparently…both Tyler Cowen and Bruce Handy argue that 2013 is an exceptional year for movies. I’m still fond of 1999… (via @brillhart)
From a 1968 film shot by director Jean-Luc Godard, here’s the Rolling Stones in the recording studio, working on refining Sympathy for the Devil.
(via openculture)
From Rap Genius, a chart showing mentions in rap songs of popular social sites and apps like Twitter and Instagram:
Compare with the graph for the same terms from Google News:
And here’s the graph for general search terms. (I excluded Snapchat from the Google graphs because Google wouldn’t allow 6 search terms at a time…it barely showed up in either case.) Twitter rules the rap roost, but Facebook demolishes everyone in general and news search traffic.
The Rolling Stones favorite American dish is something the band invented called Hot Dogs on the Rocks:
10 frankfurters
5 potatoes, or enough instant mashed potatoes to serve five
1 large can baked beansPrepare instant mashed potatoes, or boil and mash the potatoes. (Use milk and butter, making regular, every-day mashed potatoes.) Cook the frankfurters according to the package directions and heat the baked beans.
On each plate, serve a mound of creamy mashed potatoes ringed by heated canned baked beans. Over all the top of this, slice up the frankfurters in good-sized chunks.
Emily from Dinner is Served made some Hot Dogs on the Rocks; this is what the finished product looks like:
The recipe is from a 1967 “scene-makers cook book” called Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen (at Amazon). In addition to the Stones’ contribution, the book contained recipes like Paul Anka’s Party Spaghetti, Crepes Suzette by Liza Minelli, Leonard Nimoy’s Cold Soup Nimoy, and Barbra Streisand’s Instant Coffee Ice Cream. I dunno…I think I’d take burgers from Sinatra, Dean Martin, or even Hemingway over any of this celebrity fare. (via if charlie parker was a gunslinger)
When Nirvana appeared on Top of the Pops in 1991, they were asked to only sing the lead vocal over an instrumental track. The result was perhaps the most unusual performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit ever, with the band barely playing their instruments in sync with the music and Cobain doing his best Ian Curtis/Morrisey impression.
Pharrell has made a 24-hour music video of people dancing and lip-syncing that’s a cross between Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Girl Walk // All Day.
I have previously reported on Rutherford Chang and his large collection of first-pressings of The Beatles’ White Album.
Q: Are you a vinyl collector?
A: Yes, I collect White Albums.
Q: Do you collect anything other than that?
A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album.
Chang has taken 100 of those records, recorded the audio, and overlaid the resulting 100 tracks into one glorious track. Here’s Side 1 x 100 (Side 2 is available on vinyl only):
The albums, as it turns out, have also aged with some variety. Some played cleanly, others had scratches, noise from embedded dirt, or vinyl wear. And though the recordings are identical, variations in the pressings, and natural fluctuations in the speed of Mr. Chang’s analogue turntable, meant that the 100 recordings slowly moved out of sync, in the manner of an early Steve Reich piece: the opening of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is entirely unified, but at the start of “Dear Prudence,” you hear the first line echoing several times, and by “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” the track is a nearly unrecognizeable roar.
James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) remixed David Bowie’s Love is Lost in the style of minimal music composer Steve Reich. Here’s the video for it by Barnaby Roper:
The video is NSFW, although most of the NS-ness is of the watching scrambled Cinemax on your uncle’s cable in 1985 variety (aka datamoshing).
R. Kelly is some sort of random love song generating genius apparently. On a recent visit to the Rolling Stone offices, R. Ess asked R. Kelly to sing to them about dolphins, ice hockey, newspapers, and Italian heroes. The results R. Hilarious.
(via @leecrutchley who has a new book out.)
This is great fun…the people on every channel of this TV are singing Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Including Bob Dylan himself on VH1. (via @faketv)
From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 1989.
It’s all there…the talent, the confidence, the skills. Compare with a 17-year-old LL Cool J rapping in a Maine gymnasium in 1985. (via ★interesting)
Update: Biggie was rapping on Bedford Ave between Quincy St and Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy. Check it out on Google Maps. (thx, debbie)
This is fun: a selection of pop songs separated into their component tracks (vocals, bass, drums, etc.). You can turn parts on and off as the songs play. Featured artists include The Beatles, Spice Girls, Radiohead, and Amy Winehouse.
The text/interface is in French…just click the dark grey link labelled “> Chanson” for the song listing. (via @ajsheets)
New Zealand journalist Duncan Greive caught onto Lorde early and has written the self-styled “definitive inside account of Ella Yelich-O’Conner’s rise to the top”.
For advertising, Maclachlan calls in Alistair Cain, Universal New Zealand’s head of marketing, and plays an early cut of the television commercial on his computer. Ella wants to keep the date rendered in Roman numerals. It looks crazy (XXVII.IX.MMXIII). She won’t be moved. After an hour, they’re done.
Afterwards, Cain says that in 20 years in the industry he’s never come across an artist so engaged with the minutiae of their presentation. He points up at a giant poster of Lana Del Rey. “With her, we could do whatever we liked,” he says.
Ella is frequently compared to Del Rey, though it infuriates her. Both are white women making pop music soaked in the rhythm and attitude of hip-hop. But Del Rey has a much more conventional narrative — she had an image makeover prior to her breakout Born To Die album, and co-writes her songs with some of the biggest producers and writers in the industry.
Ella’s songs, meanwhile, are very much her vision, and hers alone.
This summer, Lou Reed reviewed Kanye West’s Yeezus, praising the albums contradictions.
Very often, he’ll have this very monotonous section going and then, suddenly — “BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!” — he disrupts the whole thing and we’re on to something new that’s absolutely incredible. That’s architecture, that’s structure — this guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He’ll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That’s what I call a sucker punch.
He seems to have insinuated in a recent New York Times interview that My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy was to make up for stupid shit he’d done. And now, with this album, it’s “Now that you like me, I’m going to make you unlike me.” It’s a dare. It’s braggadoccio. Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have. “I Am a God” — I mean, with a song title like that, he’s just begging people to attack him.
(via @dunstan)
Ben Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, whose independently produced album The Heist went Platinum last year, reflects on the 12 months since the album’s release and his decision to go big in lieu of going home.
I was in Madison, Wisconsin. We were about two-thirds of the way through our first “World Tour,” a title we were beating people over the head with, trying to enforce our premature “stardom” on the world. I was skating around the city, looking for lunch, when Zach called me. And I’ll never forget the way that Zach explained what this deal meant in regards to me.
He said, “Basically, if you sign this deal there is a potential that you will turn into a super star. Your life will change drastically. And once that happens, there is no going back. If we don’t go this direction, there is a ceiling to your career. You can continue to play the same rooms you’ve been playing and have a strong run as an underground rapper. But taking it to the next level will not be attainable. I see positives and negatives to both sides, and will support you either way. What do you want to do”?
I knew immediately that this a decision that would alter my life forever. I knew that getting played on the radio would alienate a core group of fans; that I’d be labeled a sell-out, maybe even a “one hit wonder” if the song got big. But despite those risks, I knew at the core what I wanted.
Macklemore seems like a pretty solid guy, like the type of person who would sing questionable karaoke versions of his own hits:
See also: you’re not selling out, you’re blowing up and my thoughts on staying small or going big. (via bryce)
Black MIDI music composers make “seemingly impossible” music consisting of millions of notes.
Blackers take these MIDI files and run them through software such as Synesthesia, which is kind of an educational version of Guitar Hero for the piano, and bills itself as “piano for everyone.” It’s kind of brilliant to imagine a novice piano player looking for some online tutorials and stumbling across, say, this video of the song Bad Apple, which reportedly includes 8.49 million separate notes.
Here’s a tune with 10 million notes:
And another with 110 million notes that sounds like a random TV channel played at 5000x normal speed. I really thought dubstep was going to be the “those kids and their crazy unlistenable music” transition for me, but that’s nothing compared to this. If this is what the youngs are going to be listening to in three years, count me out.
The boys of CDZA take us through a history of the guitar solo in pop music, from Johnny B. Goode to John Mayer.
(via ★interesting)
I loved every little bit of this letter that producer Steve Albini sent to Nirvana before the recording of In Utero, the band’s final studio album. In it, Albini clearly and succinctly lays out his philosophy about recording music and has specific suggestions for working with Nirvana. But the last few paragraphs, about his payment, are awesome. I’ve reproduced the selection here in full:
#5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.
I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it’s your money, and I insist you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you’d had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it’s worth.
Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I’m going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not effect my enthusiasm for the record.
Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work that I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don’t consider that an issue.
(via @akuban)
The Other F Word is a 2011 documentary about how punk rockers and other countercultural figures made the transition from anti-authoritarianism to parenthood. Features members from Devo, NOFX, Black Flag, Rancid, and also pro skater Tony Hawk. Here’s the trailer:
To be sure, watching foul-mouthed, colorfully inked musicians attempt to fit themselves into Ward Cleaver’s smoking jacket provides for some consistently hilarious situational comedy, but the film’s deeper delving into a whole generation of artists clumsily making amends for their own absentee parents could strike a resonant note with anyone (punk or not) who’s stumbled headfirst into family life.
Available to rent/buy on iTunes and on Amazon.
(via @claytoncubitt)
Here’s a medley of isolated vocals from the Beatles’ Abbey Road:
Many more isolated vocal tracks are available on this subreddit. Here are the instructions for making your own isolated vocal tracks with Audacity, the same open source audio processing app that Tim used to make his slow jams. (thx, tim)
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