Like budding ten-year-old paleontologists with their dinosaur guides, music nerds who came of age in the 80s and 90s might spend whole days reading about obscure one-off bands and indie, punk, and alternative giants from all over the English-speaking world in Ira Robbins’ encyclopedic Trouser Press Record Guide reference books. Their critical entries were notable especially for what they were not: fan tributes.

Just the other day, for example, I was browsing through the Trouser Press Guide to ‘90s Rock and was startled to read that Depeche Mode’s 101, a live album I listened to repeatedly in my moody middle school years, offered “permanent evidence of the band’s—a pitch-impaired singer crucified on racks of keyboards—concert inadequacy.”

This, I protested, is too much.

But, I admit, that album, played at full volume in headphones, once carried me as an adolescent through a grim three-day trek across the country, in a van with my fractious family, driving the entire length of Arkansas in sub-zero late December and spending New Years’ Eve in a motel room in a desolate nowheresville outside Pine Bluff, AR.

My sense that there might be a romantically gloomy, weirdly seductive world beyond the frosted windows of our shabby Ford Club Wagon is what I will always associate with the album, its musical merits aside. (That and a serious crush on someone who really loved Depeche Mode.) I can’t remember if I’ve listened to it since.

It’s true Depeche Mode got a lot of mileage out of a limited range of skills and musical ideas, but that seems to be no valid criticism in pop music. The best pop songs are those people experience as operatic statements of their own emotional lives. As we see in the opening scenes of the Depeche Mode documentary above, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, their most fervent English fans believe that they too might be Depeche Mode.

U.S., Mexican, and Russian fans romanticizing Basildon, Depeche Mode’s hometown, as a placid English village say more about their own longings than about the band’s sound. Depeche Mode may have looked like a New Wave boy band in the 80s, but that was also the decade in which they were at their noisiest and most experimental, “seamlessly blending concrète sounds—factory din, clanking chains and so forth—into the music,” writes Trouser Press.

The sound—says one English fan of “Depeche” from its beginnings—“came from the bricks” of Basildon, a gritty place with frequent fighting in the streets. The bulk of the densely crowded town’s concrete blocks, and factories sprang up after WWII, a working-class community created to house the London population displaced by the bombings. What set Depeche Mode apart from their synthpop peers and inspirations (aside from Siouxsie Sioux and Damned-inspired fetish cosplay) was the industrial noise that populated their saccharine off-key ballads and naughty S&M tracks.

The sound of working-class streets embedded in their music drew fans from Moscow—where singer Dave Gahan’s birthday has become an unofficial holiday. Their music is “technology, the sounds of life, of reality,” says one Muscovite fan above. Depeche Mode bootlegs, which spread over the Soviet world, get partial credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fans in Tehran risk severe punishment from the Islamic authorities for listening to illicit copies of their albums.

They became gloomier, more navel-gazing and “dismal,” our Trouser Press critic writes, and the quirky sounds of Basildon seemed to fade away, replaced by the cavernous reverb and goth-blues guitar riffs of their 90s apotheosis. Their appeal to sensitive and troubled kids everywhere remained as powerful, if not more so. Our Hobby is Depeche Mode documents the band’s spread around the world in dedicated fan communities. Made in 2007, the film mysteriously disappeared and has only just resurfaced recently, as Dangerous Minds reports. “No one’s quite sure what happened there.”

It will be interesting to compare this rediscovered document with a new Depeche Mode movie, Spirits in the Forest, getting a theatrical release November 21st. Shot by Anton Corbijn, the film, as you can see from trailer (above), also keeps its focus on the fans, mixing six stories, writes Rolling Stone, “shot in each of their hometowns, with footage of the concert” in Berlin promoting the band’s newest album Spirit.

They may never have been the greatest live band or most accomplished of musicians, but Depeche Mode has always known how to work a crowd, and how to speak to the private longings of every individual fan. What more can one ask of international pop stars? Gahan says in a statement about the new concert film, a tradition that reached its apex with the 101 documentary companion to the album, “It’s amazing to see the very real ways that music has impacted the lives of our fans." He's talking about an evident connection that spans generations and crosses many unlikely cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries.

Our Hobby is Depeche Mode will be added to our collection of Free Documentaries.

The film by  Jeremy Deller & Nicholas Abrahams is hosted on Abrahams' Vimeo channel.

via The Quietus

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

When talk of classic rock drummers turns to Keith Moon and John Bonham, I smile and nod. What’s the point in arguing? They were both, in their distinctive ways, incredible—and in their early deaths, immortal legends. Who knows what their careers would have looked like had either lived past 32? But truly, for the all-around breadth of his influence, for the amount of respect he gained in musical circles around the world, no greater classic rock drummer ever lived, in my opinion, than Ginger Baker, may he finally rest in peace.

The famously restless, violently cantankerous drummer died yesterday at age 80, outliving most of his peers, despite living twice as hard for well over twice as long as many of them—a feat of strength we might impute to his athletic physical stamina and frightening will.

Like Moon and Bonham, he combined raw power with serious jazz chops. (Baker insisted he never played rock drums at all.) After his polyrhythmic pummeling defined the sound of supergroups Cream and Blind Faith, he burned out and moved to Africa to find sobriety and new sounds.

Baker traveled the continent with Fela Kuti to learn its rhythms, recording live with Kuti's band in '71. Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen remarked that he understood “the African beat more than any other Westerner.” (See him jamming in Lagos further down.) Baker’s discography includes classic records with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce, Kuti, Hawkwind, and other legends. He traveled the world playing drums for over fifty years. Why, then, did he have such a low profile for much of his later life? A 2012 documentary, Beware of Mr. Baker, based on a 2009 Rolling Stone article, offers some answers.

Baker’s serious drug addiction and terrifying personality alienated nearly everyone around him. The documentary opens with an endorsement from another prickly and unlikable red-haired character, John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten), whose Public Image Limited is yet another project Baker elevated with his playing. “He helped me rise,” says Lydon, and Baker would no doubt agree. He was not a modest man. He was, by most accounts, a right bastard, through and through, all of his life.

But he was too contrarian to be dismissed as a mere narcissist. As a musician, for example, he always thought of himself as a supporting player. “I never had a style,” he said in 2013. “I play to what I hear, so whoever I’m playing with, what they play has a great influence on what I play, because I listen to what people are playing.” His skill at destroying personal relationships was matched by his ability for forming deep, awe-inspiring, if short-lived, musical connections. It’s a dichotomy many drummers inspired by him have struggled to reconcile—taking lessons from Baker the drummer but not from Baker the man.

How do we separate the man from his art? Why try? His mad pirate life makes for an epic saga, and Baker is a wildly exciting main character. He had early ambitions of becoming a professional cyclist. Though they didn’t pan out, he always retained the characteristics: he was both fiercely competitive and fiercely collaborative. Later he picked up an even more rarified team sport—polo—keeping a stable of horses on his gated South African ranch, where he lived in his old age like a colonial ex-baron in a Nadine Gordimer novel. (He eventually had to sell the spread and move back to London.)

Baker was never one to make apologies, so his fans need not make any on his behalf. See him in some classic performances above—at the top, soloing after an interview, at Cream’s Royal Albert Hall farewell concert; then playing a solo in a Cream reunion in that same venue almost forty years later. After footage of him jamming in Lagos in 1971, we see what the internet calls the “BEST DRUM SOLO EVER,” further up. Just above, meet the man himself, in all his unrepentant glory, and hear from those who knew him best, in the full documentary, Beware of Mr. Baker.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Two years ago we posted about a music lover’s life’s work--Stephen Malinowski aka smalin on YouTube--and how he has produced animated, side-scrolling scores to classical music. Older folks will liken them to neon piano rolls. Youngun’s will see a bit of Guitar Hero or Rock Band game design in their march of colorful shapes dancing to everything from Bach to Debussy.

Malinowski let us know that he just recently completed a major work: adapting all of Beethoven’s String Quartets into his particular, always evolving style. And for this he turned to San Francisco’s Alexander String Quartet for their recordings. Says the animator:

I made my first graphical scores in the 1970s, my first animated graphical score in 1985, and the first of these for a movement of a Beethoven string quartet in 2010. In 2014 I began collaborating with the Alexander String Quartet on selected movements of Beethoven string quartets, and in the early months of 2019 we decided to honor the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth by extending our collaboration to the full set. [Note: that anniversary will officially take place next year.]

One important point: Malinowski does not choose colors randomly or because they are pretty. Instead, he uses “Harmonic Coloring”:

I've assigned blue to be the "home pitch" (the tonic, notataed Roman numeral "I") because that seemed the most "settled," and chosen the blue-toward-red direction as the I-toward-V direction because motion toward the dominant ("V") seems more "active" compared with motion toward the subdominant ("IV").

This might not make sense just by reading it, but head to this page to see how the color wheel looks. There you can see how classical music has evolved from the Renaissance (mostly staying with the seven pitches in an octave) to the radical changes of Brahms and then through Debussy to Stravinsky, where it is a riot of color.

Beethoven wrote 16 string quartets between 1798 and 1826, as well as a Große Fuge included here that only had one movement, and gained a notoriety in its day as being a chaotic, inaccessible mess. (They were wrong). The last five, known at the Late Quartets, were written in the last three years of his life. He was completely deaf by this time, suffering from all sorts of medical issues, recovering from brushes with death, and yet... the Late Quartets are considered by many to be his masterpieces, even more notable given that he had come to the quartet form later than other composers and wracked with doubt about his talents.

The final movement of his final string quartet (No. 16) was the last complete work Beethoven would ever write. At the top of the score he wrote “Must it be? It must be!” Death was at the door.

For those ready to learn or ready to revisit these challenging works, Malinowski has made it a treat for the eyes as well as the ears. See the complete playlist of animated string quartets here. Or stream them all, from start to finish, below:

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.