It took nearly 50 years. WKRP in Cincinnati is no longer just a TV sitcom. It’s now a real radio station in Cincinnati.
A Cincy-area FM station, known as “The Oasis,” has adopted the WKRP call letters after acquiring them from a nonprofit radio station in North Carolina. The Raleigh-based station put the call letters up for auction as part of a fundraising effort. And then The Oasis snapped them up.
To mark the official launch last week, the station played the TV show’s theme song for six straight hours. Moving forward, the station will continue playing classic rock from the ’60s through the ’80s — much like the music featured on the 1978–82 sitcom. As a bonus, Gary Sandy, who played program director Andy Travis, has recorded promos for the revived WKRP. If the original show was before your time, you can watch some episodes on YouTube. Enjoy…
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Actually, hold up a sec. We’ll all be happier and more productive if we take a moment to start our work day with Confidence, a peppy musical animation from 1933, starring newly elected PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt and Mickey Mouse precursor, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Few Americans—today we’d refer to them as the 1%—could escape the privations of the Great Depression. The movies were one industry that continued to thrive through this dark period, precisely because they offered a few hours of respite. No one went to the pictures to see a reflection of their own lives. Gorgeous gowns, glamorous Manhattan apartments and romantic trouble certain to be resolved in happy endings…remember Mia Farrow’s beleaguered waitress basking in the Purple Rose of Cairo’s reassuring glow?
Given the public’s preference for escapist fare, director Bill Nolan, the Father of Rubber Hose Animation, could have played it safe by glossing over the backstory that leads Oswald to seek out advice from the Commander in Chief. Instead, Nolan delivered his joyful cartoon animals into nightmare territory, the Depression personified as a cowled Death figure laying waste to the land. It’s weirdly upsetting to see those hyper-cheerful vintage barnyard animals (and a rogue monkey) undergo this graphic enervation.
Oh, for some oral history—I’d love to know how matinee crowds reacted as Oswald raced screaming before a spinning vertigo background, seeking a remedy for a host of non-cartoon problems. Irony is a luxury they didn’t have.
Unsurprisingly, the can-do spirit so central to FDR’s New Deal quickly turned Oswald’s frown upside down. As presidential campaign promises go, this one’s uniquely tailored to the demands of musical comedy. Witness Annie, in which the 32nd president was again called upon to Rex Harrison his way into audience hearts, this time from the wheelchair the creators of Confidence didn’t dare show, some forty years earlier.
The division between entertainment and nation-leading is pretty permeable these days, too.
Accordingly, what really sets this cartoon apart for me is the use of a Presidentially-sanctioned giant syringe as a tool to get Depression-era America back on its feet. A figurative injection of confidence is all well and good, but nothing gets the barnyard back on its singing, dancing feet like a liberal dose, delivered in the most literal way.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or press our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a company called And Vinyly will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record.
You like that punny company name? There’s more: the business lets the dear departed “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased literally spinning in their grave…on a turntable.
The UK-based company has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of people liked the idea and have kept him in business.
It will cost, however. The basic service generally costs between £1000 and £3000 GBP, and it partly depends on how many vinyl records you produce. From what we can tell, you cannot use copyright-protected music to fill up the 18–22 minutes per side. So no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Champions,” unfortunately. But you can put anything else: a voice recording, or the sounds of nature, or complete silence. Get more information over at the company’s FAQ.
No doubt, the service can provide comfort and a memory trigger for those left behind. The above video, “Hearing Madge,” is a short doc about a son who took recordings of his mother and used And Vinyly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.
“I’m sure a lot of people think that it’s creepy, a lot of people think it’s sacrilegious,” the man says. “But I know my mother wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”
Jason Leach, a musician and vinyl collector himself, talks of the immediacy of sound and what it means to many.
“Sound is vibrating you, the room, and it’s actually moving the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so powerful about hearing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actually moving the air and for me that’s powerful.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to Cambridge University, the performance of the piece, which had been lost in time until recently, didn’t come easily:
[T]he task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.
Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.
The song is performed here by Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti and Norbert Rodenkirchen, three members of the medieval music ensemble known as Sequentia.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault remarked in an unpublished interview that Nietzsche’s “wonderful ideas” were “used by the Nazi Party.” But that use, he neglected to mention, came about through a scheme hatched by Nietzsche’s sister, after his mental collapse and death, to edit, change, and otherwise manipulate the thinker’s work in a way The Telegraph deemed “criminal.” Foucault may not have known the full context, but Nietzsche had about as much sympathy for fascism as he did for Christianity—both reasons for his break with composer Richard Wagner.
What Nietzsche loved most was music. Even in the wake of this scandal, with Nietzsche fully rehabilitated at the scholarly level at least, the philosopher is generally read piecemeal, used to prop up some ideology or critical theory or another, a tendency his anti-systematic, aphoristic work inspires.
A more holistic approach yields two important general observations: Nietzsche found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.
Nietzsche almost entered medicine and was himself an artist: “before he engaged himself fully as a philosopher, he had already created a substantial output as poet and composer,” writes Albany Records. In an 1887 letter written three years before his death, Nietzsche claimed, “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” though he also admitted he “might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” In any case, he hoped that at least some of his compositions would become known and heard as complementary to his philosophical project.
Now serious readers of Nietzsche, or those simply curious about his musicianship, can hear some of his compositions online. The music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful, and some of it seems to come right out of the Protestant hymnals he grew up with as the son of a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche composed music throughout his life—a complete chronology spans the years 1854, when he was only ten, to 1887. See The Nietzsche Channel for a thorough list of published Nietzsche recordings and sheet music.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we’re sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, and Bob Dylan have never hesitated to acknowledge his influence. “From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up,” Dylan writes in his autobiography of his first encounter with Johnson’s music. “The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.” Not bad for a recording older than Dylan himself.
In the early nineteen-sixties, the blues as Johnson played it seems to have sounded electrifyingly revelatory to the generation of then-young musicians who managed to hear it, regardless of their own origins. All such recordings date from 1936 or 1937, the fruits of just two sessions in makeshift Texas studios overseen by producer Don Law.
Though the “king of the Delta blues singers” left behind only this small body of work after his still-unexplained death at the age of 27, it’s been endlessly scrutinized by the genre’s enthusiasts. All of them will surely regard as a godsend the newly discovered shellac master test pressing above of “Cross Road Blues,” a song that plays an outsized part in the legend of Robert Johnson, who some say sold his soul to the devil at just such a location in exchange for his formidable guitar skills.
Though it contains no reference to any such unholy pact, nor to any denizen of the underworld, “Cross Road Blues” does have a haunting sound that goes with the shadowy ambience of the man’s short life story. Some of that had to do with the less-than-ideal quality of the recordings that have long circulated, but this test pressing of Johnson’s second take sounds different. Uploaded by sound restorer Nick Dellow, it was originally made in 1940 straight from the metal master by Columbia Records producer George Avakian, who would go on to work with everyone from Miles Davis to Edith Piaf to John Cage. The sonic muddiness of most Robert Johnson releases thus far has done its part to prevent modern-day listeners from getting quite what the big deal was about him. But perhaps the unprecedented clarity of this recording will get the hair of young musicians and mature connoisseurs alike standing on end.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of moving to a new city and immediately being told that you’ve missed its golden age of live music. To an extent, this has happened in more or less every period of the past fifty or sixty years. But what if the person regaling you with those stories had an archive of more than 10,000 concert recordings to back them up? Chicago’s Aadam Jacobs has made just such an archive, and a few years ago he and it became the subject of Katlin Schneider’s documentary Melomaniac. Apart from their stories of Jacobs’ exploits with his increasingly bulky recording rig, the various rock musicians and club owners interviewed therein express one concern above all: what will become of all his tapes in the future?
If you have a certain taste in rock — and especially if you belong to a certain generation — you may well, in the fullness of time, find a Jacobs-recorded show by your favorite band. But you’re just as likely to discover a performance by the best act you’ve never heard of before.
Pursuing his avocation of concert-recording with the industriousness of a professional, and indeed an obsessive one, Jacobs captured multiple shows each night at the height of his activity. He has his particular tastes, as emphasized in Melomaniac, but also demonstrates remarkably little discrimination about which bands are “cool” and which aren’t, to say nothing of their level of commercial success. When Chicago musicians first saw Jacobs’ familiar long-haired, heavy-backpacked figure turn up at their own shows, they knew they had a chance of “making it.” Even so, as Jacobs acknowledges, there’s scant correlation between which bands blew up, which bands he likes as people, and which bands have created his favorite records. His tapes constitute a valuable record of the sound of Chicago between the eighties and the twenty-tens, and it will only grow more so, the more accessible it becomes. But as we enjoy it, we should also bear in mind the efforts of the man who created it, and the love of music he personifies. Enter the archive here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When we think of silence, we think of meditative stretches of calm: hikes through deserted forest paths, an early morning sunset before the world awakes, a staycation at home with a good book. But we know other silences: awkward silences, ominous silences, and—in the case of John Cage’s infamous conceptual piece 4’33”—a mystifying silence that asks us to listen, not to nothing, but to everything. Instead of focusing our aural attention, Cage’s formalized exercise in listening disperses it, to the nervous coughs and squeaking shoes of a restless audience, the ceaseless ebb and flow of traffic and breathing, the ambient white noise of heating and AC…
and the suspended black noise of death metal….
We’re used to seeing 4’33” “performed” as a classical exercise, with a dignified pianist seated at the bench, ostentatiously turning the pages of Cage’s “score.” But there’s no reason at all the exercise—or hoax, some insist—can’t work in any genre, including metal. NPR’s All Songs TV brings us the video above, in which “64 years after its debut performance by pianist David Tudor,” death metal band Dead Territory lines behind their instruments, tunes up, and takes on Cage: “There’s a setup, earplugs go in, a brief guitar chug, a drum-stick count-off and… silence.”
As in every performance of 4’33”, we’re drawn not only to what we hear, in this case the sounds in whatever room we watch the video, but also to what we see. And watching these five metalheads, who are so used to delivering a continuous assault, nod their heads solemnly in silence for over four minutes adds yet another interpretive layer to Cage’s experiment, asking us to consider the performative avant-garde as a domain fit not only for rarified classical and art house audiences but for everyone and anyone.
Also, despite their seriousness, NPR reminds us that Dead Territory’s take is “another in a long line of 4′33″ performances that understand Cage had a sense of humor while expanding our musical universe.” Cage happily gave his experiments to the world to adapt and improvise as it sees fit, and—as we see in his own performance of 4’33” in Harvard Square—he was happy to make his own changes to silence as well.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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