By now, you’ve hopefully seen David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s unlikely encounter in 1977, where they sang a hastily prepared medley of “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy.” It’s a curious Christmas classic, and now the subject of a tribute by The Flaming Lips. Above, watch their psychedelic take on the mashup. And if you need to revisit the original, just head here.
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It couldn’t have lasted—a flame burning twice as bright, and so on. One of the best bands to emerge from the explosion of British new wave and post-punk in the 1980s, The Smiths built a template for thousands of mope-rock bands who followed. Longstanding animosity has meant that their brief time together contains their total legacy. No reunion shows or albums—despite rumors over the decades since they broke up in 1987; no ersatz version of the band, missing key members but limping ever on.
Live albums, compilations, and box sets may have appeared over the years, but they all contain music written, played, and recorded between 1982 and 1987, a period during which the songwriting duo of Morrissey and Marr had as much creative energy and purpose as any of the famous songwriting duos of twenty years earlier. Love them or hate them—there seem to be few people in-between—The Smiths’ importance to alternative and indie rock is inescapable.
Like many other hugely influential bands in popular music, the mythology can eclipse the complexities. Unmentioned in many a glowing account, for example, are the unsung onetime-members who played bass or guitar at points in the band’s short life—most significantly guitarist Craig Gannon, sometimes called the “fifth Smith.” Gannon played on such seminal hits as “Ask” and “Panic” before being let go from the band before they played their final concert, an Artists Against Apartheid benefit at London’s Brixton Academy on December 12th, 1986. See it above in a fan-recorded video.
Delayed after Marr was in a car accident, the concert shows them back to their core four lineup, reunited with fired, then rehired (then arrested) bass player, Andy Rourke. They play “Shoplifters of the World Unite” from their upcoming final album, 1987’s Strangeways, Here We Come; they play The Queen is Dead’s “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” for the first, and last, time live onstage; they end the night where they began, with their very first single, “Hand in Glove.” No one knew at the time that it would be their last gig, including the band.
They continued on for the next few months, recording, making TV appearances, and pondering a major label move. Differences personal, legal, and creative soon drove the four members apart. They have all continued to contribute significantly to the direction of alternative rock, as supporting players, superstar indie guitarists, and, well, Morrissey. We might wish for a more polished document of their last show, but so it is. Fans are extremely unlikely to ever get chance to see it happen again.
“Yes, time can heal,” wrote Morrissey in his often embittered autobiography. “But it can also disfigure. And surviving the Smiths is not something that should be attempted twice.” We should count ourselves lucky—those of us in the love-the-Smiths camp—that they survived as long as they did, producing jangly, gorgeous, snide, maudlin, and morbidly hilarious indie-pop gems from the very beginning to the very end of their maybe-perfectly-concise career.
See the full setlist below:
Ask Bigmouth Strikes Again London/Miserable Lie Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others (only live performance) The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Shoplifters Of The World Unite There Is A Light That Never Goes Out Is It Really So Strange? Cemetry Gates This Night Has Opened My Eyes Still Ill Panic /The Queen Is Dead //William It Was Really Nothing //Hand In Glove
During the past few months of this year, as in those same months of any year, we’ve been hearing a great deal of Christmas music. Some of the songs in the mix — “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Christmas Song” — few of us have ever known a time without, and others make it in because of their seasonally themed lyrical content. But certain songs just sound like Christmas songs, somehow, and to understand what, in musical terms, fills those compositions with the spirit of the holiday season, watch the five-minute Vox explainer above that reveals “the secret chord that makes Christmas music sound so Christmassy.”
First we should distinguish popular Christmas songs from popular non-Christmas songs, especially ones recorded in the past half-century. “Rock ’n’ roll songs (and the subsequent pop songs influenced by the genre) may only contain three or four chords, each chord usually being just a major or a minor — the two chord ‘flavors’ analogous to chocolate and vanilla,” writes Slate’s Adam Ragusea. In contrast, a selection from “the Great American Songbook” might “use a Baskin-Robbins shop full of chords and chord flavors — 7ths and 9ths, half and fully diminished, various inversions, and more” under melodies that “tend to include a lot of chromatic notes (the black notes on the piano when playing in the key of C major).”
In the era when most beloved Christmas standards were conceived, songwriters still made much use of that wide musical palette, the sonic colors of which had as much to do with jazz as with pop. But since the 1960s, writers of pop songs have used these now-exotic harmonies “to get a ‘classic’ sound. For instance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ includes some notes in its choral parts that I think are intended to recall the harmonic vocabulary of those 1940s Christmas standards.” No coincidence, surely, that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” perhaps the only Christmas song written in recent decades to attain the same popularity as the old standards, uses the same compositional techniques.
“I count at least 13 distinct chords at work in ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’ resulting in a sumptuously chromatic melody,” writes Ragusea. “The song also includes what I consider the most Christmassy chord of all — a minor subdominant, or “iv,” chord with an added 6, under the words ‘underneath the Christmas tree,’ among other places.” As in Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” he notes, “the chord comes immediately after a major subdominant chord, giving the effect of a ‘bright’ major subdominant that you might say ‘sighs’ or ‘melts’ into a ‘dark’ minor subdominant spiked with a ‘spicy’ extra tone (the added 6), before the songs settle back into their tonic, or ‘home,’ chords.” And so we come to the unexpected finding — though hardly a displeasing one — that a properly made Christmas song has more than a little in common with a properly made Christmas cocktail.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Their one-take performance was part of Role Call, a regular feature of the Late Late Show with James Corden. Usually, this fan favorite is an excuse for Corden and a megastar guest—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson—to bumble through the most iconic moments of their career.
These kinds of larks are more fun for being a mess, and the live studio audience screams like besotted campers at every goofy quick change and winking inside reference. Blunt and Miranda are definitely game, though one wonders if they felt a bit chagrinned that the film they are promoting, Mary Poppins Returns, is given pride of placement, while the original 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke is strangely absent.
Alas, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is as far back as this skit’s memory goes, presumably because the audience has a greater likelihood of recognizing Marilyn Monroe than say, Howard Keel.
More interesting than the jokey horseplay with Into the Woods and The Muppet Movie is the choice to blithely cast white actors in roles that were written for black women (Dreamgirls, Little Shop of Horrors). I don’t think anyone would try to get away with that on Broadway these days, even in in a spoofy charitable event like Broadway Bares or Easter Bonnet… though if they did, getting Lin-Manuel Miranda on board would be a very good idea.
As to why Hamilton isn’t one of the titles below … it’s not a movie musical—yet!
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It’s that time of year when certain songs conspire with certain moods to hit you right in the ol’ brisket.
Thefeeling is voluptuous, and not necessarily unpleasant, provided there’s a bathroom stall or spare bedroom should you need to flee a party like Cinderella, as some old chestnut threatens to turn you into a blubbering mess.
Let the kiddies deck the halls, jingle bells, and prance about with Rudolph and Frosty. The best secular songs for grown ups are the ones with a thick current of longing just under the surface, a yearning for those who aren’t here with us, for a better future, for the way we were…
There’s got to be some hope in the balance though, some sweetness to savor as we muddle through.
(Judy Garland famously stonewalled on the first version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” until lyricist Hugh Martin agreed to lighten things up a bit. In the end, both got what they wanted. She got her update:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
But the tension between the promise of a better tomorrow and her emotional delivery holds a place for Hughes’ appealingly dark sentiment:
As a rule, the oldies are the goodies in this department.
More recent bids by Coldplay and Taylor Swift have failed to achieve the proper mix of hope and hopelessness.
It’s a difficult balance, but singer-songwriter Ellia Bisker pulls it off beautifully, above, by turning to O. Henry’s enduring short story, “The Gift of the Magi.”
I want to give you something that I can’t afford,
Let you believe with me we’re really not so poor.
You see that package waiting underneath the tree?
It’s just a token of how much you mean to me.
(Spoiler for the handful of people unfamiliar with this tale: he does the same, thus negating the utility of both costly presents.)
In an interview with Open Culture, Bisker praised the O. Henry story’s ironic symmetry:
It’s a little like the death scene in Romeo & Juliet, but without the tragedy. The story itself still feels surprisingly fresh, despite the period details. It has more humor and sympathy to it than sentiment. It surprises you with real emotion.
The Romeo and Juliet comparison is apt. The story covers a time period so brief that the newlyweds’ feelings for each other never stray from purest wonder and admiration.
Bisker’s song starts, as it ends, with a pair of young, broke lovers who only have eyes for each other.
Let’s not forget O. Henry’s parting words:
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Enjoy this musical gift, readers. The artist has made the track free for downloading, though perhaps you could scratch up a few coins in thanks, without pawning your watch or cutting your hair.
Read O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” here.
Quick way to date yourself: name the first Beastie Boys album you bought (or heard). If you somehow got your hands on an original pressing of their first single “Cooky Puss”—released in 1981 when the then-foursome was a New York hardcore band—congratulations, you’re a legend. If you first bought 1986’s Licensed to Ill—their major label debut and coming-out as a crude rap-rock parody threesome (minus fired drummer Kate Schellenbach), precision-engineered to freak your parents out—congrats, you’re old.
In whatever era you discovered them—Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head, Ill Communication… maybe even their last album, 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two—you discovered a different Beasties than the previous generation did. Over the course of their 30-year career, the trio evolved and matured, grew up and got down with new grooves to suit new audiences. That’s always been a very good thing.
As Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA—three personalities as distinctive as the three Stooges—got better at what they did, they transcended the misogynist, meatheaded mid-eighties incarnation they came to look back on with embarrassment and apology. “We got so caught up with making fun of that rock-star persona,” writes Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock) in the huge new Beasties memoir, “that we became that persona. Became what we hated.”
Rob Harvilla calls these very genuine moments of self-reflection the best parts of the book. But with so many stories over so many years, so much brilliant writing, and so many guest appearances from celebrity Beastie Boy fans, that’s a tough call. “Part memoir, part photo-heavy zine, part fan-appreciation testimonial… and part sincere apology,” the book seems both fresh and made to order and a veritable buffet table of nostalgia. Or, as Amy Poehler puts it in her intro to a section on their videos: “These days, their music makes me feel young and old at the same time.”
Behind the silliness and sincerity there is mourning for third Beastie Adam Yauch (MCA), who died of cancer in 2012 and whose voice is conspicuously absent from the book. Yet the two remaining members choose not to dwell. “You brace for the heartbreaking account of Yauch’s diagnosis and death,” Harvilla writes, “but those details go undiscussed. ‘Too fucking sad to writing about’ is all Horovitz has to say.’” The prevailing atmosphere is celebratory, like any good Beastie Boys album—this one a party full of adult peers looking back, laughing, and wincing at their younger selves.
The voices on the page are so vivid you can squint and almost hear them (at one point Horovitz describes unwinding a cassette tape as “pulling 60 minutes of wet fettuccine out of a dog’s mouth”). But we don’t have to imagine what they sound like. Along with the 571-page hardbound cinderblock of a book, the band has released what Rolling Stone hails as the “audiobook of the year,” a “brilliant 13-hour radio play” in which Mike D and Ad-Rock are joined by a majorly star-studded cast of guest readers including Snoop Dogg, Kim Gordon, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Wanda Sykes, Jon Stewart, Ben Stiller, and Bette Midler (that’s just the very short list).
New York hip hop legends LL Cool J, Chuck D, and Rev Run (of Run DMC) show up, as does Brooklyn acting legend Rosie Perez and non-New Yorkers Exene Cervenka and Elvis Costello. (See the full cast list at Audible.) It’s not a memoir, it’s a mixtape. Hear excerpts from the audio book in the SoundCloud clips above and buy it online, or download it for free through Audible.com’s 30-day free trial program. Guaranteed, no matter what age you are, to make you feel young and old at the same time.
Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” may be the creepiest song ever written about an obscure medieval instrument (made all the more so by its use in David Fincher’s Zodiac), but the Hurdy Gurdy did not give his recording its ominous sound. Those droning notes come from an Indian tanpura. Yet they evoke the title instrument, an ingenious musical invention “set up primarily for the purpose of making drones,” Case Western Reserve’s College of Art and Sciences explains. “In the Middle Ages, it was known in Latin as the organistrum and the symphonia, and in French as the vielle à roue (the vielle with the wheel).”
With a sound produced by a “rosined wooden wheel, turned by a crank” that set “a number of strings in continuous droning vibration,” the hurdy gurdy can, it’s true, give off a bit of a folk horror vibe. From its very early, maybe 10th or 11th century origins in liturgical music, hurdy gurdy expert Jim Kendros tells us in the video above, the instrument became associated with European folk music, shrinking from a beast played by two people to more portable dimensions, about the size of a large guitar and resembling a hand-cranked violin with keys for playing melodies on certain strings.
Though it grew smaller and more maneuverable, however, the instrument grew no less complicated. Kendros calls it “the equivalent of a medieval spaceship,” with its more than 80 moving parts.
The hurdy gurdy, or “wheel fiddle,” played in the TED Talk above by Caroline Phillips looks less like a fiddle, or a spaceship, and more like a medieval keytar—just one of the many shapes the instrument could take. All of them, however, had one important feature in common: the hurdy gurdy is “the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings like the bow of a violin to produce music.” Historically, it was used in medieval dance music “because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boom box” of its large body. Try not to shake your body, or to shiver, when Phillips plays a haunting, droning Basque folk song.
The Hurdy Gurdy spread all over Europe, from Britain to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden, where stringed-instrument enthusiasts The Stringdom caught up with virtuoso Hurdy Gurdy player Johannes Geworkian Hellman. He tells us how the hurdy gurdy and its droning sonic cousin, the bagpipes, set off “an early folk revival” as composers took inspiration from peasant music. The interest from medieval upper classes meant better luthiers and higher-quality hurdy gurdies. Now modern interest in the Hurdy Gurdy is growing. While it may take two to three years to handcraft one, “a lot of new instruments are getting made,” says Hellman.
Should you doubt that the 1000-year old hurdy gurdy can still sound hip, listen to Hellman play an electrified version in his hurdy gurdy/accordion duo, Symbio, or hurdy gurdy/dulcimer two-piece, Maija & Johannes. He coaxes from the instrument such a range of rhythms and timbres that it’s easy to see why it was so immensely popular for so long. Yet for all its musical appeal, it is a complex machine, difficult to tune and subject to any number of mechanical problems. Not for the casual amateur, the instrument still requires a dedicated Hurdy Gurdy man or woman to make it sing—a much more common sight than in Donovan’s day but an exceedingly rare one compared to the many centuries of the hurdy gurdy’s heyday. See more hurdy gurdies at the Vintage News.
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