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kottke.org posts about music

The 100 Greatest BBC Musical Performances

I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:

Blondie – Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):

Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):

Daft Punk – Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):

Hole – Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):

Joy Division – Transmission (Something Else, 1979):

Radiohead - Paranoid Android (Later Archive 1997):

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Sunshine of Your Love (Happening for Lulu, 1969):

Patti Smith Group – Because the Night (OGWT, 1978):

Arlo Parks and Phoebe Bridgers – Fake Plastic Trees (Radio 1 Piano session, 2020):

Bob Dylan – live at BBC studios (BBC One, 1965), apparently Dylan’s last acoustic concert:

Dizzy Gillespie – Chega de Saudade (Jazz 625, 1965). Don’t miss the musician intro at the ~13:15 mark:

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (TOTP, 1991):

And Rihanna (Umbrella, 2008) and Prince (1993) and Lorde (Royals, 2013) and and and… If you’re anything like me, this list will keep you busy for a few hours.

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Dolly Parton’s Cover of Purple Rain

For her new album Rockstar, Dolly Parton has covered a number of “iconic rock anthems”, including Heart of Glass (feat. Debbie Harry), Stairway to Heaven (feat. Lizzo on the flute), I Hate Myself For Loving You (feat. Joan Jett and The Blackhearts), and Every Breath You Take (feat. Sting). She also recorded a lovely rendition of Prince’s Purple Rain, embedded above. The entire Rockstar video playlist is here.

See also Prince’s cover of Radiohead’s Creep. (via anil dash)

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David Bowie’s Legendary 1972 Performance of Starman on Top of the Pops

In what’s been voted the greatest BBC musical performance of all time, David Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops in 1972 to sing Starman and changed the course of musical history.

The performance launched Bowie to stardom. Thursday 6th July, 1972, is said to be ‘the day that invented the 80’s’ as so many musicians who went on to be household names saw the performance and it changed their lives. Those watching that night included U2’s Bono, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones of the Clash, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Siouxsie Sioux, Toyah Willcox, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and many more.

Here’s more from Colin Marshall at Open Culture, who does a great job contextualizing the performance:

“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”

(via open culture)

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Philip Glass Solo

Philip Glass is coming out with a new album early next year called Philip Glass Solo. It was recorded during the early days of the pandemic at Glass’s home on his piano.

This is my piano, the instrument on which most of the music was written. It’s also the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.

The video above is a lovely clip of him, in his home, playing one of the songs off the album.

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A Pocket-Sized Record Player Circa 1924

a portable record player

Before the iPod, before the Walkman, there was the Mikiphone, a portable record player that folded up into a case that you could fit in your pocket. Invented circa 1924, this portable phonograph was powered by a hand-crank and could play 10-inch records.

At first glance, the closed Mikiphone appears quite compact, easily fitting inside a purse.

However, it requires some assembly, with its components stored within the case, which, when shut, measures just 11.5 cm in diameter and 4.7 cm in thickness.

The recording head and a two-piece Bakelite resonator had to be connected to the foldout tone arm before the shellac disc could be placed on the turntable’s central pin.

This precision engineering feat was awarded first prize at an international music exhibition in Geneva in 1927.

Courtesy of the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, a demonstration of how to assemble the Mikiphone and play records on it:

(via clive thompson)

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The Making of the Last Beatles Song: Now And Then

The four members of the Beatles, assisted by machine learning technology, come together one last time to record a song together, working off of a demo tape recorded by John Lennon in the 70s.

The long mythologised John Lennon demo was first worked on in February 1995 by Paul, George and Ringo as part of The Beatles Anthology project but it remained unfinished, partly because of the impossible technological challenges involved in working with the vocal John had recorded on tape in the 1970s. For years it looked like the song could never be completed.

But in 2022 there was a stroke of serendipity. A software system developed by Peter Jackson and his team, used throughout the production of the documentary series Get Back, finally opened the way for the uncoupling of John’s vocal from his piano part. As a result, the original recording could be brought to life and worked on anew with contributions from all four Beatles.

Here’s the result, a song called Now and Then:

I enjoyed Ben Lindbergh’s take on the new song and its recording.


Two Songs from The Muppet Movie

Tim and Karen Rooftop Wedding.jpg

Tomorrow, November 4th, 2023, is my first wedding anniversary. I married Karen McGrane at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2022. We walked down the aisle to Gonzo’s “I’m Going To Back There Someday.” It was one of the best days of my life.

To celebrate our anniversary, I’m reposting what I wrote shortly after I moved into Karen’s house (which also, somewhat unusually, was the first time we met in person). It’s also the most recent — and since we haven’t renewed our WordPress license, quite possibly the last — post on Snarkmarket.com. I hope Kottke.org readers enjoy it.

Why write a blog post somewhere nobody has published in five years, in a new WordPress interface where you recognize… yeah, nothing? Where somehow you can’t even upload a JPG or PNG file you downloaded from another site “for security reasons” without converting it first? Or get paragraph tags or linebreaks working inside blockquotes? (Really? On Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s own World Wide Web???)

Because sometimes there is no other place to put such things. There is no other place where you want to put such things.

I bought a new laptop late in 2020, one of the new Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pros that was announced just after the election (which was also my birthday). It is easily the best laptop I’ve ever used, let alone owned. I’m typing on it now. (It doesn’t have enough ports; otherwise, it is as perfect a machine as has ever existed until the next one comes out.) Buying that laptop started something for me: a new round of investment in myself after a long period of being fearful and dormant. And shortly after I bought it, I covered it in Muppets stickers.

I’m hardly unique in loving The Muppets; we’re past fifty years of Sesame Street and even longer of Jim Henson’s earlier creations, meaning just about every living generation has been touched by those special creatures one way or another. But the Muppets are a talisman of something I try to guard in myself: tenderness, exaggerated emotion, a desire to experience the world as something new, an urge to creativity and renewal, a fear of rejection, and a sometimes desperate need to be loved in a world where love is often in short supply.

The most famous song from The Muppet Movie is the opening number, “The Rainbow Connection.” It’s sung by Kermit the Frog, as played and performed by Jim Henson himself, and the conceit in the movie is that Kermit is playing and singing the song alone, on a banjo. This conceit is quickly abandoned, at least aurally; a whole orchestra comes in, turning a dead-simple children’s song into something swelling and cinematic. It’s three minutes long, and sung by a puppet, performed by someone who, for all his unbounded talents for voice and performance, can’t really sing. But I think it’s the greatest song ever written for a film. (A surprisingly competitive category!) It’s really worth watching, as many times as you can.

Here is a story about the writing of “The Rainbow Connection.” And here are the lyrics:

[Verse 1]

Why are there so many
Songs about rainbows
And what’s on the other side?

Rainbows are visions
But only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide

So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it
I know they’re wrong, wait and see

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[Verse 2]

Who said that every wish
Would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?

Somebody thought of that
And someone believed it
Look what it’s done so far

What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[Bridge]

All of us under its spell
We know that it’s probably magic

[Verse 3]

Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name

Is this the sweet sound
That calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it:
It’s something that I’m supposed to be

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[End/Outro]

That’s the whole thing.

As a child, I was taught that this song was about hope in tough times — a rejection of cynicism, an attempt to uphold on the threshold of the Reaganite 1980s something of the idealism of the 1960s, from Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech to the antiwar movement, only somewhat looser and more adaptable (if also more inchoate). The song also had a religious element to it: something of my mother’s highly adaptable (and thoroughly idiosyncratic) Catholicism — a belief there was a magical, spiritual universe both separate from and pervading the one we could see. The Rainbow Connection was not heaven in any proper theological sense, but it was the heaven my mother believed in. And, I think, that she still believes in.

And it is those things — insofar as it “is” anything but a sweet song with a good melody — but it’s also something else. And as you get older, and continue to deal with grief and heartache (as I have, many times), and are dealt reversals and disappointments, the other meaning of “The Rainbow Connection” becomes insistent and impossible to ignore.

It is a song about what you can and can’t believe in after a life filled with missed chances, casual cruelties, and dead family and friends. It’s a song shot full of the melancholy many of us remember most clearly in our own childhoods, an ache to your bones that has never gone away. It is every heartbreak you have ever had, every injury suffered to your body, mind, and pride. It is how you think about friendship and community when your community is broken and your friends are all so very far away. It is not about a cohort of happy dreamers, or lovers. It is about how you care for your child inside when all your illusions are gone. It is the last illusion you keep, because without it, you would have nothing left.

The questions “The Rainbow Connection” asks are genuine questions, with a more ironic edge than Kermit places on it in the song itself:

  • “Who said that every wish / Would be heard and answered”? Really ask yourself: who?
  • “Somebody thought of that / And someone believed it.” Who thought of it? Why have any of us ever believed it?
  • “Look what it’s done so far.” What has it done? Have you actually looked? Where are we? All these years of struggle: what were they for? And what have they done?
  • “What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing / And what do we think we might see?” What are we looking for? How would we even know it if we saw it?
  • And if not this, then what? What are the alternatives? Lie down and die? Give in to the world’s cruelty and cynicism and make yourself a part of it? Tranquilize yourself and wait for something to change? Could we even do otherwise? After all… it seems like most people genuinely can do exactly that.

Seen from this perspective, The Muppets are not childlike or naïve at all. They are advancing a powerful critique of how we live and what we believe, and how we’ve come to settle for so much less than what we are capable of. There is a utopian element to “The Rainbow Connection,” but it turns out to be a very slight one. A Minimum Viable Utopia, if you will.

The other song that matters the most to me from The Muppet Movie (which, like Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Prince’s self-titled album, was released shortly before I was born) is Gonzo’s “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday.” And this song, too, has multiple layers that are worth unpacking.

Here are the lyrics:

Verse 1:

This looks familiar
Vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet
It’s too soon to feel yet

Hook:

Close to my soul
And yet so far away
I’m going to go back there
Someday

Verse 2:

Sunrises, night falls
Sometimes the sky calls
Is that a song there?
And do I belong there?

Hook:

I’ve never been there
But I know the way
I’m going to go back there
Someday

Bridge:

Come and go with me
It’s more fun to share
We’ll both be, completely
At home in midair

We’re flying not walking
On featherless wings
We can hold on to love
Like invisible strings

Verse 3:

There’s not a word yet
For old friends who’ve just met

Part heaven, part space
Or have I found my place?

Hook:

You can just visit
But I plan to stay
I’m going to go back there
Someday

I’m going to go back there
Someday

[End/Outro]

This song is somehow even simpler than “The Rainbow Connection,” but it wears its ironies farther out on its sleeves.

The obvious (although not literal) reading of the song is that Gonzo is not talking about any past he remembers, or even really a future he’s waiting for, but about the love and newfound family he’s discovered with his friends now all around him: the Muppets to whom he’s singing the song. Again, as a child, this is what I was taught without having to be told, and for the most part, it’s what I believed.

The second, more critical take on “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” is that it is a profound confession of abandonment and loneliness in Gonzo’s formative years. It is the absence of anything like the heartsoaring love he is stumbling to find words to describe, and his very early and extremely keen awareness of that absence, even before he knew there was hope of anything different. It is less about loss (you have to have something before you can lose it, technically) than lack.

And while you could say that Gonzo is realizing now that he’s found what he’s long been looking for, the fact that he still puts it in the future tense suggests that he’s still feeling something lacking, either in his companions or in himself. He still feels incomplete, blown apart, alone and lonely, en route to something he does not have and has never had, does not know and has never known — something that he can only describe or define by its absence. A negative theology.

You could take this a step further and say that what “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” is really about is the fact that such a place does not exist, has never existed, and if it waits for anyone, it does not wait for the singer. Gonzo — Tim Carmody — is so irreducibly damaged by what has happened to him, so thoroughly alone, that he can only think of love and belonging as a return to a paradise he’s never known and will never in his lifetime see.


The trouble with all of this is that sometimes the impossible happens.

Here I’m going to invoke another important text from my childhood, but I won’t take the time to explicate it, because I can talk about baseball (and specifically, this single plate appearance) forever.

It is hard to talk or even to think about miracles, especially if (like me) you have long since relaxed the God hypothesis. The 18th-century empiricist / skeptical philosopher David Hume defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.

The trouble for Hume with miracles is the trouble for Hume with all knowledge (including very basic relationships of cause and effect): the evidence to genuinely believe in miracles is always lacking. It falls apart given the tiniest bit of criticism — and yet, people are inclined to believe in miracles anyways.

In fact, people all over the world, at every age and in every walk of life, may be more inclined to believe in something impossible they believe they’ve witnessed themselves, alone or in a small group, than an ordinary event witnessed again and again by millions of people. Aristotle, too, understood, this irony, writing in the Poetics that (translations differ, but here is the gist) “the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.” And if you can keep God’s hands off the probable impossible, so much the better.

The world Gonzo prophecies in “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday,” that Kermit imagines in “The Rainbow Connection,” is not supposed to exist. It is an illusion, an impossibility, even if it remains a necessary one. And yet: sometimes, somehow, after you have already set aside your own eligibility for such things, and doubted their real existence for others or their cameos in your own past, you nevertheless, to your own total astonishment, find yourself back there again.

On Saturday, February 6th, I moved back to the city of Philadelphia. I made my nostos, not to the city where I was born (Detroit, which will also always have my heart), but the city I chose when I was 22, and where I spent most of the important years of my life.

I am back. I am home.

You can just visit
But I plan to stay
I’m going to go back there
Someday

Tim and Karen and Beedie

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More Tycho From Burning Man

I am a fan of Tycho’s sunrise DJ sets at Burning Man (here’s 2023’s set), so I was pleased to discover he played a second, shorter DJ set that’s now up on Soundcloud.


My Recent Media Diet, Fall 2023 Edition

I know I always say this, but I didn’t mean for so much time to elapse since the last installment of the media diet. But I have a slightly different reason for the delay this time: I have been really busy with work and family stuff, so much so that I haven’t been reading or watching as much as I usually do. So I needed to wait a couple of months to collect enough stuff.

Anyway. Here’s my recent media diet, a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months. ✌️

The Creator. Original, engaging sci-fi with good action, heart, and something to say. Madeleine Yuna Voyles is the best child actor I’ve seen in years. (A)

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson. I’m still making my way through this one but I’m going to review it now because Virginia Heffernan was absolutely correct in saying that the first part of the book is “the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard”. Richardson ties so many things together so succinctly that by the end of it, Trump feels not like an abberation but more like the result of a plan that conservatives have been striving towards for decades. (A+)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Watched this twice: once in the theater and once at home. I didn’t like this quite as much as Fallout (or Top Gun: Maverick tbh), but this is a top-notch action movie. The tiny car chase on the streets of Rome is 💯. (A-)

The ocean. Still undefeated. (A+)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2. *sigh* Like many of you, I am extremely disappointed with the weird & harmful anti-trans crusade the author of the Harry Potter book series has embarked on over the last few years and it’s prompted me to attempt a reevaluation of my relationship to these movies and books. But I’ve had some difficulty doing so because the Potter wizarding world is so wrapped up in spending quality time with my kids (particularly after their mom and I separated) that it’s hard to have anything but extremely fond feelings for it all. Over a period of five or so years, we read the whole series together at bedtime and I can’t even put into words how meaningful that time together was. We’re listening to the series on audiobook in the car right now…it’s one of the few things my two teens and I really enjoy doing with one another.

Anyway, all that is to say that when some recent changes in our schedule together — good, developmentally appropriate changes for them but changes nonetheless — caused some parental melancholy, I watched these three films on back-to-back-to-back nights just to feel close to my kids in some way. It was just the thing. (A)

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Perhaps not the beach read I needed, but the one I deserved. I liked this maybe a bit better than the movie, but still not nearly as much as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (and its sequel, Dark Sun). (A-)

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. This was excellent. Listening to actual people who lived and worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles — victims, murderers, police officers, bystanders, family members of those who were killed — was completely enthralling and brought the 30-year conflict to life in a way that Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing couldn’t, as good as it was. I’ve been thinking about this series a lot over the past few weeks as the latest tragedy unfolds in Gaza. (A+)

The Repair. Another excellent podcast series from Scene on Radio, this one on climate crisis. I’ve read quite a bit about the climate over the past decade or two, so I thought I knew what to expect going in, but this takes a pretty unique angle. For one thing, they don’t start with the Industrial Revolution…their lead-in to the topic is the Book of Genesis. And it keeps going in unexpected directions from there. I think even a seasoned observer of the crisis will find something interesting here. (A)

The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher. Maybe a better choice of beach read than American Prometheus…I finished this slim, creative tome in one sitting on my final day at the ocean. Here’s a better review than this one. (B+)

The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie: Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th Anniversary Tour. Saw this in New Haven in a former outdoor tennis arena. So wonderfully nostalgic. I’m a bigger fan of Give Up but the track of the evening for me was Transatlanticism by Death Cab…it sent honest-to-god chills down my spine. (A)

The mashed potato pizza from Bar. I’d tried this once before and found it kinda meh. But not this time around…I couldn’t stop eating it. (A)

the exterior of the Hotel Marcel, a brutalist building desgined by Marcel Breuer

Hotel Marcel. If you’ve ever driven on I-95 through New Haven, you’ve probably noticed the brutalist building unceremoniously situated in the Ikea parking lot. Designed by Marcel Breuer, the former Armstrong Rubber Company Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021 and converted to the Hotel Marcel a year later. Pretty cool to be able to stay in such a well-designed building. (B+)

The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This was perfectly fine. But it had that tightly controlled and over-engineered feeling that many franchise movies have these days. (B)

Arrival. Still an absolute banger and one of my all-time faves. And I notice a little something new every time I watch it. (A+)

The Flash. Better than I expected! And I bought the Quick Bite emote in Fortnite. Can we staaaahpp with the multiverse tho? (B+)

Legally Blonde. First time. Enjoyed it! (B+)

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Second time. It’s not the best Indy but I think in the long term, it will be rewatchable. (B+)

Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023. Not quite up to past years, but it’s still in the while-working rotation. (B)

Ahsoka (season one). Hmm. This was slow, enjoyable, boring, engaging — sometimes all at once. Space whales tho? (B)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. This is Wes Anderson, unplugged: simple sets, lots of acting, spare-but-precise cinematography, and a meta narrative. (A-)

Downhill mountain biking. Ollie and I went to a local ski area that offers lift service to mountain bike trails a few weeks ago and did several rides on a intermediate flow trail and it was the most fun I had all summer. I even got some air. (A+)

Boundaries, Burnout and the ‘Goopification’ of Self-Care. For the Ezra Klein Show, guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom (one of America’s leading public intellectuals) interviewed Pooja Lakshmin about what she calls Real Self-Care. Not yoga and juice cleanses but more like setting boundaries and practicing self-compassion. An excellent listen. (A-)

Wool by Hugh Howey. After really enjoying the Apple TV+ series, I was looking forward to dipping into the first book of the trilogy. But I preferred the show…and was also surprised when the book, well before the end, continued on past the events of the show. I stopped reading at that point and will revisit after the show’s second season. (B)

Killers of the Flower Moon. I wanted to like this more than I did. Great acting (particularly by De Niro, Gladstone, and Plemons) and it looked amazing but it lacked oomph. Plus I didn’t have a clear sense of what Scorsese was trying to say… (B+)

Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. I watched these with my son (a budding Nolan fan) and I know this is sacrilege, but my favorite of the series is The Dark Knight Rises. Heath Ledger’s performance though… 🤡🔥. (A-)

I also have a bunch of stuff in progress, including The Vaster Wilds (good so far, need to make more time for it), the new season of The Great British Bake Off (my fave got eliminated in the first episode 😢), and Loki (skeptical this can match the style & weirdness of the first season). I stalled out on season three of The Great but I’m going to go back to it. I’m two episodes into Reservation Dogs (after many recommended it) and I love it already. And I haven’t even started Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad!

How about you? What have you been into lately? Anything you would particularly recommend? Let us know in the comments! (Just don’t argue with my grades…we all already know they don’t make any damn sense!)

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The History of the Electric Guitar Solo

YouTube channel Polyphonic (whose videos I’ve featured before) has taken on an ambitious project: tracing the history of the electric guitar solo from its origins in blues and country music in the American South all the way up to the present day. The series is called Axe To Grind and the first three episodes are available on YouTube (the first two are embedded above). People are sharing their favorite early electric guitar players in the comments of the first video.

The series is also available on the subscription-only Nebula — episodes appear there first and the music excerpts are longer because Nebula doesn’t trample all over creators’ fair use rights like YT does. (via open culture)

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Nile Rodgers & CHIC’s Tiny Desk Concert

Oh, this is a good one: disco, funk, and hip-hop pioneers Nile Rodgers & CHIC play some of the most rousing and joyful music ever witnessed on the Tiny Desk Concert stage / corner of the NPR office. Here’s what they played:

“Le Freak”
“I’m Coming Out”
“We Are Family”
“Get Lucky”
“Good Times”
“Let’s Dance”

Name a better six-song set. I’ll wait. (Ok, maaaaybe this one.)

See also Nile Rodgers Tells the Story of the Iconic Riff on Bowie’s Let’s Dance.

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Feist and Hundreds of Choir Members Sing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ in Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor

Just hit play on this one and watch it. Absolutely magical…it sent shivers down my spine. The organization that arranged this is called Choir! Choir! Choir! and they also did a version of this in Dublin with 1000 people singing in tribute:

I’ve previously featured the group singing David Bowie’s Heroes with David Byrne, who said this of the experience:

What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?

A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.

(via open culture)

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Ella Fitzgerald & Mel Tormé Answer “What Is Jazz?”

This is wonderful: at the 1976 Grammys, Mel Tormé asked Ella Fitzgerald how she explains to people what jazz is and then the pair of them effortlessly launch into a scat duet that is just fantastic to listen to. Ella Fitzgerald, what a voice! Mel Tormé, what a voice! Here’s the pair performing together in the 60s:

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David Byrne’s Dance Rehearsals for Stop Making Sense

Even if you haven’t seen Stop Making Sense, you are likely familiar with the herky jerky dance moves of Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne. In this video, which has only recently been made public, you can see Byrne practicing his now-iconic moves.

40 years ago, David Byrne rehearsed dances for Talking Heads’ upcoming Speaking in Tongues tour by recording video of himself to determine which moves worked better than others, which developed into many of the iconic moves seen in the Stop Making Sense movie, filmed at the end of 1983 and released in 1984. It was recently rereleased by A24 in restored 4K. These videos, recorded in David Byrne’s loft, have been mentioned before in interviews and now after 40 years the footage is finally available!

If you don’t want to sit through the full 25-minute video, here’s an hors d’oeuvres version:

(via open culture)

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The 50 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Ranked

A.V. Club has taken on the task of ranking the best 50 music videos, from the first video ever played on MTV (Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, featuring none other than soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer on keys) to Thriller, Sabotage, Addicted to Love, and Sledgehammer. You can watch the whole list via this playlist on YouTube.

I loved the video for Sledgehammer. I was 12 years old the summer it came out. We didn’t have cable TV then, but I’d turn on MTV anywhere I could, hoping for a glimpse of it. My dad used to take my sister and me on roadtrips all over the country and I vividly remember the rare times we got to stay in a motel (they had to have a swimming pool with a diving board), turning on MTV, and catching that Sledgehammer video a few times every hour. It was only years later, after becoming a Wallace and Gromit fan, that I learned that — of course! — Aardman had done the animation for Sledgehammer.

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Supercut of Songs That Stop on the Word “Stop”

You really have to applaud the effort here: YouTuber Todd in the Shadows made a 33-minutes supercut of every song he could find that stops, even momentarily, on the word “stop”. Here are the ground rules:

If there was even the briefest of stops, I counted it. It’s okay if the band holds the note rather than complete silence. But the entire band has to stop, not just a couple instruments; the singer can keep singing though.

I gotta say I did not watch the whole thing, but the very last clip is *kisses fingers*. (via @peterme)


Why Rappers Stopped Writing

These days, instead of writing down lyrics and bringing them to the studio to record, many rappers are using the improvisational “punch-in method” to craft songs during the recording session.

Is this good for the music? The jury is out, even within hip-hop. But in this behind-the-scenes video — the latest entry in our Diary of a Song series, which documents how popular music is created — we track the generational shift through exclusive studio footage of young rappers like Doechii, Veeze and Lil Gotit, plus interviews with genre veterans including the artist Killer Mike and the producer Just Blaze, to track this creative shift and its effects on the still-experimental genre of hip-hop, 50 years after its birth.

Interesting technique, but there is definitely some music in that video that is not for me.


Eminem’s Lose Yourself, the Super Mario Bros Edition

There I Ruined It is fast becoming one of my favorite web delights — musician Dustin Ballard remixes and mashes beloved songs in an attempt to ruin them. The video embedded above features Eminem’s Lose Yourself sung to the tune of the Super Mario Bros theme song…and it makes me laugh every time I watch it.

You can check out more of There I Ruined It on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

P.S. My idea for a song to ruin: the Happy Days theme song, but it just keeps repeating the days of the week (“Sunday Monday happy days / Tuesday Wednesday happy days…”) in a loop, using the Shepard tone to (seemingly) keep the pitch ever-rising.


Emerald and Stone, a Visual Tribute to Brian Eno

As a tribute to Brian Eno, visual artist Thomas Blanchard made this video of Emerald and Stone, a 2010 song that Eno collaborated on with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams. According to Blanchard, he made the video with no digital visual effects — “the visual compositions have been created out of paint, oil and soap liquid.”

Eno himself is still working and mentoring younger artists…he and Fred Again released an ambient album back in May.


Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023

Every year at Burning Man (pandemic years aside), Tycho does a ~2hr DJ set around sunrise and then releases it on Soundcloud — here’s the 2023 version.

I’ve been listening to this for the past week and while I don’t like it quite as much as the sets from previous years, it’s definitely something to add to the rotation of chill work music.

See Tycho’s BM sets from 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Pretty much the only reason I’d ever want to go to Burning Man (esp after this year) is to catch this set in person sometime.


The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie Cover Depeche Mode

On their current US tour commemorating the 20th anniversaries of their two seminal albums (Give Up and Transatlanticism), The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie have been coming together to perform an encore rendition of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. The video above is their version of it from last weekend’s show in New Haven, which I attended and very much enjoyed, but there are several other versions to choose from on YouTube: Boston, Wash DC, Portland, Rhode Island, etc.


The iPhone Alarm as a Piano Ballad

If you expand the default iPhone alarm into a piano ballad, it sounds quiet lovely actually. The sheet music is available here.

See also Steve Reich Is Calling, two iPhones ringing at slightly different tempos.


Sylvia Robinson, the Mother of Hip-Hop

The other day when I posted about iconic hip-hop samples from the past 50 years, I noticed a name that featured prominently in the early years: Sylvia Robinson. Robinson was the CEO and co-founder of the very first rap record label, Sugar Hill Records. She produced the first rap record, Rapper’s Delight, and the seminal The Message, widely regarded as one of the best and most influential rap and hip-hop tracks ever.

From an essay written on the occasion of her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022:

Sylvia Robinson played many roles in the music world — artist, producer, and, most notably, record executive. But as the founder and leader of the pioneering Sugar Hill label, she revealed herself to be something even rarer. She was a visionary.

In 1979, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang introduced hip-hop to the global mainstream, illustrating the genre’s commercial and creative potential. Robinson had overseen the record’s backing track, assembled the group members, and arranged their vocals — but fundamentally, it was her idea that rap was even viable as recorded music. Her place in history would be secured by that track alone, though it was far from her only impact on the direction of pop.

Here’s a short video that covers the high points of her career:

It’s sad that Robinson and her achievements haven’t been more widely known — this seems like another case (as in computing and other industries) where women played an early vital role and were then forgotten.


The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973-2023)

This started off a little slow for me but once it hit the early-to-mid 80s, I was hooked — and bobbing my head uncontrollably throughout. The visualizations really help you see how the various samples were modified, repeated, and layered to achieve the desired sounds — geniuses at work. Man, watching stuff like this makes me want to learn how to do this. (via waxy


The Beautiful Isolated Vocals for Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U

The music for Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U is already pretty stripped down to emphasize the vocals, but in this video, the vocals are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers.

The song was apparently recorded in one take:

“I actually think the intensity of Sinéad’s performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship,” opines Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the track as well as the accompanying, Grammy Award-winning album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks and sold seven million copies worldwide. “She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who’s a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, so that’s probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation.”

(via openculture)


Radiohead x Kendrick Lamar

A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar’s N95 back in March and I love it:

You can also find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I ran across it when Radiohead shared a snippet of it on TikTok.

FWIW, Dwells seems to be the same DJ Dwells that won the NYC regional of the prestigious DMC DJ competition when he was just 13 years old. (via @jessicabrillhart)


Is This the First Rap Song? (1946)

The roots of hip-hop and rap are various and stretch back in time to the antebellum South and from there to Africa. But by some accounts, a song called Noah by gospel group The Jubalaires was the first instance of recorded music that sounded like rap. Listen for yourself…the relevant bit is right around the 35-second mark:

I’m not a music historian by any stretch, but that sounds 30 years ahead of its time. There are several bad remixes of Noah on YouTube…this one is maybe the best at pairing their singing with a rap beat.


Barbie Girl, in the Style of Six Classical Composers

This is fun: Aqua’s pop hit Barbie Girl, redone in the style of six classical composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, and Ravel. (via @Erikmitk)


Cypress Hill’s Tiny Desk Concert

To help celebrate 50 years of hip-hop, Cypress Hill visited NPR’s studios to perform a Tiny Desk Concert.

While the term “pioneer” is used loosely in pop culture today, few terms describe Cypress Hill’s impact over the past three decades more adequately. They are the first Latino hip-hop group to achieve platinum and multi-platinum status. B Real, Sen and producer DJ Muggs crafted a sound in the ’90s that stretched beyond regional boundaries. It was dark, psychedelic and at times directly addressed mental health before the topic was commonplace. Many dismissed the group as “stoner rappers,” yet the members were fervent advocates for the legalization of weed long before it came to fruition.

Really enjoyed this one…I’m not a particular fan of Cypress Hill but after this, maybe I am?


The Ambient Sounds of Japan’s Jazz Kissas (Listening Cafes)

Craig Mod recently finished a 16-day tour of jazz kissas in northern Japan. Jazz kissas are bar/cafes where one goes to listen to jazz, mostly on records and not live. Mod loosely defies them thusly:

Mostly defined as: Mid-20th century “listening cafes” for jazz music. But there is a lot of variance in this definition. Lots are coffee-focused cafes, fitting into the broader “kissaten” universe. But some are more bar-like, and some even jazz clubs (but for the most part, live music is rare). You can tie yourself in knots splitting hairs over this stuff. Though they’re traditionally known as “jazz kissa” — the shortened version of “kissaten” (fear not: even if you call them “jazz kissaten” you won’t suddenly turn into a pillar of salt). Some are seventy years old. Some forty. Some are five years old. The important defining element is simply: A presiding and effusive ever-abiding love for jazz, jazz, and more jazz.

At each stop, he recorded the ambient sounds of each kissa so that you can experience a little bit of the atmosphere at these places — here’s the full playlist. The recordings were done with a pair of microphones so that the audio is in stereo. This sounds great with a good pair of headphones!