From there, it’s not exactly a straight shot to the David Bowie Isexhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, but the Metropolitan Transit Authority will get you there for the price of a single $2.75 subway fare.
Given that the MTA stopped accepting tokens 15 years ago, you’ll also need to cough up $1 for a MetroCard. You may want to even if you already own one.
In celebration of all things Bowie, the MTA has teamed with Spotify to create 5 limited edition MetroCards, available in vending machines throughout the station for a New York minute—about as long as it takes Bowie fans to descend en masse to snag the instant collectibles of their hero in some of his many guises:
and, most touchingly, the teenage David Jones, aka Bowie, saxophonist for the Kon-Rads.
Underground Bowie mania extends way beyond MetroCards. Until Mother’s Day, the unusually lofty station is festooned with Bowie—everything from fan art to giant reproductions of photos from the current exhibition.
Many of the images are accompanied by a scannable Spotify code to transport riders to a relevant sound file, a nifty echo of the progressive audio museum-goers experience through their headphones.
The global exhibit has London roots, but the MTA is focused on Bowie’s ties to New York with photos and video stills from such locations as Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the late, lamented Magic Shop studio.
Civic pride is also on display in the form of city-specific Bowie quotes posted throughout the station:
I have a great time here: we can go where we want, eat where we want, walk out with our child, go to the park, ride the subway, do the things that any family does.
Ah ha! So he did ride the subway here, as well as in Japan (below).
According to a fan on Bowery Boogie, he also popped up at the New York Public Library’s Mulberry Street branch, just around the corner from the subway’s entrance. To find your way there, consult the bright orange “Bowie’s Neighborhood Map” before leaving the station, where your location is denoted with a lightning bolt.
Why is it, as Brian Gilmore writes at JazzTimes, that “even people who hardly listen to jazz adore this album”? Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue hardly needs an introduction. Many thousands of words have been written about its legendary composition and recording, about the extraordinary ensemble responsible for its existence—Davis, John Coltrane, “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and a young Bill Evans—and about the year of its release, 1959, a watershed moment in the history of jazz, and of nearly all modern music.
“It’s no longer necessary to remind music lovers that Kind of Blue is essential listening,” argues The Guardian’s John Fordham, “and that everybody who wants to make sense of the music of our time ought to have at least some idea of what’s good about it.” Should your education in Kind of Blue be lacking, you can get caught up on the basics in the Polyphonic video just above, which quickly gets to the heart of Davis’ musical innovation: making the definitive break with bebop and setting the standard for modal jazz, and thus the explosion of free jazz innovations to come.
Where most forms of jazz had built increasingly complex chord changes over which soloists improvised, Davis shifted to using modes (the seven modes of modern music) as the basis for song structure. Without needing to get overly technical with music theory, you can understand immediately upon listening to the album that modal composition allowed Davis and his band to slow down, simplify, and create subtle, complex shifts in mood that can be at once lilting, cool, and kind of… blue. Davis had experimented with blues-based modal forms before. Here, he integrates that knowledge with classical ideas and improvisatory brilliance.
“As is now part of jazz folklore,” notes Fordham, “the New York sessions that produced this remarkable album were completed in a handful of takes over just a few hours, with a minimum of compositional materials.” From there, a revolution. It is “The most exquisitely refined of ambient music,” writes Richard Williams in his definitive monograph The Blue Moment, and the one record many music fans would rescue “from a burning house.” It may be the best-selling jazz album of all time. Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen called it “the Bible.” Quincy Jones called his “orange juice,” because he listens to it every day
“No one could disagree with Williams when he connects this with the developments of John Coltrane,” writes Sholto Byrnes, from his “shocking demolition of the dainty brickwork of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘My Favorite Things,’ ” to his masterpiece A Love Supreme. Its influence, according to Williams, runs through the work of Ornette Coleman Steve Reich, John Cale, the Velvet Underground, James Brown, Sly Stone, Soft Machine, Brian Eno, Moby, and so on and so on. If you’ve never quite understood what makes Kind of Blue so great, get a crash course in the video explainer above. Then sit down and listen to it a few hundred times.
The Los Angeles-based choir, Angel City Chorale, above, captured the Internet’s imagination in a big way with their 2013 cover of Toto’s 1982 hit, “Africa,” in which the group’s 160 performers created a realistic-sounding thunderstorm using only their hands.
Delightful! And more common than you may at first think.
The Chorale acknowledges that they owe a great debt to Slovenian vocal group Perpetuum Jazzile’s thunderous 2008 rendition. Stagehands accustomed to creating credible thunderclaps by waving wiggly sheets of aluminum backstage may want to switch to hundreds of feet hopping up and down in unison, as heard at the 1‑minute mark, below.
Go a bit further back to find an actual African choir’s finger-snapping, thigh-smacking “Africa.”
The Kearsney College Choir is based near Durban, South Africa, and they appear to have been the first to open this number with the now-famous rainstorm effect. Its members are school boys ranging in age from 13 to 18. The video below shows them performing the tune in the 2008 World Choir Games, an annual competition that will be taking place on their home turf this year.
Interestingly, there’s not that much rain in the original. Over the years Toto’s songwriters, David Paich and Jeff Porcaro have made various statements about its origins—a guy transfixed by images of suffering Africans on TV, a lonely missionary, a visit to the 1964 World’s Fair’s Africa pavilion …
There’s a bit of rain to be seen in the very 80’s official music video, but nothing that rivals the choirs’ spectacular downpours.
If you’re moved to whip up a tempest of your own, Jbrary’s children’s librarians, Dana Horrocks and Lindsey Krabbenhoft, have created an instructional video that shows just how simple the effect is to master. The real trick is enlisting 100s of friends to do it at the same time.
An Indian guru travels to the West with teachings of enlightenment, world peace, and liberation from the soul-killing materialist grind. He attracts thousands of followers, some of them wealthy celebrities, and founds a commercial empire with his teachings. No, this isn’t the story of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the head of the religious movement in Wild Wild Country. There was no miraculous city in the Oregon wilds or fleet of Learjets and Rolls Royces. No stockpile of automatic weapons, planned assassinations, or mass poisonings. Decades before those strange events, another teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi inspired mass devotion among students around the world with the peaceful practice of Transcendental Meditation.
Rolling Stone’s Claire Hoffman—who grew up in a TM community—writes of the movement with ambivalence. For most of his disciples, he was a “Wizard of Oz-type character,” she says, distant and mysterious. But much of what we popularly know about TM comes from its most famous adherents, including Jerry Seinfeld, Katy Perry, David Lynch, the Beach Boys, and, of course, The Beatles, who famously traveled to India in 1968, meditated with Mia Farrow, Donovan, and Mike Love, and wrote some of their wildest, most inventive music after a creative slump following the huge success of Sgt. Pepper’s.
“They stayed in Rishikesh,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas, considered the capital of yoga. Immersed in this peaceful community and nurtured by an intensive daily meditation practice, the Fab Four underwent a creative growth spurt—the weeks at Rishikesh were among their most fertile songwriting and composing periods, producing many of the songs on The White Album and Abbey Road.” Unlike most of the Maharishi’s followers, The Beatles got a personal audience. The Indian spiritual teacher “helped them through the shock” of their manager Brian Epstein’s death, and helped them tap into cosmic consciousness without LSD.
They left on a sour note—there were allegations of impropriety, and Lennon, being Lennon, got a bit nasty, originally writing The White Album’s “Sexy Sadie” with the lyrics “Maharishi—what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.” But before their falling out with TM’s founder, before even the trip to India, all four Beatles became devoted meditators, sitting for two twenty-minute sessions a day and finding genuine peace and happiness—or “energy,” as Lennon and Harrison describe it in a 1967 interview with David Frost. The next year, happily practicing, and feverishly writing, in India, Lennon received letters from fans, and responded with enthusiasm.
In answer to a letter from a fan named Beth, evidently a devout Christian and apparently threatened by TM and concerned for the bands’ immortal souls, Lennon wrote the following (see his handwritten reply at the top):
Dear Beth:
Thank you for your letter and your kind thoughts. When you read that we are in India searching for peace, etc, it is not that we need faith in God or Jesus — we have full faith in them; it is only as if you went to stay with Billy Graham for a short time — it just so happens that our guru (teacher) is Indian — and what is more natural for us to come to India — his home. He also holds courses in Europe and America — and we will probably go to some of these as well — to learn — and to be near him.
Transcendental meditation is not opposed to any religion — it is based on the basic truths of all religions — the common denominator. Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” — and he meant just that — “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” — not in some far distant time — or after death — but now.
Meditation takes the mind down to that level of consciousness which is Absolute Bliss (Heaven) and through constant contact with that state — “the peace that surpasses all understanding” — one gradually becomes established in that state even when one is not meditating. All this gives one actual experience of God — not by detachment or renunciation — when Jesus was fasting etc in the desert 40 days & nights he would have been doing some form of meditation — not just sitting in the sand and praying — although me it will be a true Christian — which I try to be with all sincerity — it does not prevent me from acknowledging Buddha — Mohammed — and all the great men of God. God bless you — jai guru dev.
With love,
John Lennon
This hardly sounds like the man who imagined no religion. A fan in India wrote Lennon less to inquire and more to acquire, namely money for a trip around the world so that he could “discover the ‘huge treasure’ necessary for achieving inner peace.” Lennon responded with a brief rebuke of the man’s material aspirations, then recommended TM, “through which all things are possible.” (He signs both letters with “jai guru dev,” or “I give thanks to the Guru Dev,” the Maharishi’s teacher. The phrase also appears as the refrain in his “Across the Universe.”)
The letters come from an excellent collection of his correspondence, The John Lennon Letters, which includes other missives extolling the virtues of transcendental meditation. We might take his word for it based on the strength of the creative work he produced during the period. We could also take the word of David Lynch, who describes meditation as the way he catches the creative “big fish.” Or we could go out and find our own methods for expanding our minds and tapping into creative potential.
Delia Derbyshire, composer of the Dr. Who theme song and musical pioneer, has not quite become a household name, but readers of this site surely know who she is, as well should every student of avant garde, electronic, and experimental pop music. Along with other often unsung female electronic composers of the 60s and beyond—like fellow BBC Radiophonic Workshop doyenne, Daphne Oram—Derbyshire brought the early electronic techniques of musique concrete and tape manipulation to a wider audience, who mostly had no idea where the sounds they heard came from.
As part of the unit responsible for creating the sounds of British television, Derbyshire’s unusual instincts took her to places no composer had ever ventured before. In her sound work for a documentary called The World About Us, on the Tuareg people of the Sahara, she “used her voice for the sound of the [camels’] hooves,” writes her onetime colleague Brian Hodgson at The Guardian, “cut up into an obbligato rhythm. And she added a thin, high electronic sound using virtually all the filters and oscillators in the workshop.” As Derbyshire recalls it:
My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty BBC lampshade. It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I hit the lampshade, recorded that, faded it up into the ringing part without the percussive start. I… reconstructed the sound of the workshop’s famous 12 oscillators to give it a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.
What the color of the lampshade had to do with the sound, only Derbyshire could know for sure. But it clearly had a psychological impact on the way she heard it. “I suppose in a way,” she said, “I was experimenting in psycho-acoustics.”
This was an immersive experience for her, and for everyone who heard the results, no matter whether they could identify what it was they were hearing. Derbyshire’s sound design revolutionized the industry, but we cannot overlook her extracurricular work—experimental sound collages and musical pieces made with several close collaborators, including Hodgson, which sound remarkably ahead of their time.
In 1964, Derbyshire collaborated with poet and dramatist Barry Bermange on The Dreams, a work that showed her, Hodgson writes, “at her elegant best.” The two put together a collage, with people describing their dreams in snippets of cut-up monologues, backed by a pulsing, throbbing, buzzing, humming ominous score. (Listen to “Running” further up.) In 1966, she worked with David Bowie’s favorite performer Anthony Newley on “Moogles Bloogles,” above, which Ubuweb calls “an unreleased perv-pop classic in the 1966 novelty vein.” She was not privy to what the song would become. “I’d written this beautiful innocent tune,” she said, “all sensitive love and innocence, and he made it into a dirty old raincoat song. But he was really chuffed!”
In the late sixties, Derbyshire joined Hodgson and bass player David Vorhaus to form White Noise, an experimental electronic pop project whose “Love Without Sound” you can hear at the top of the post (behind scenes from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée.) In 1972, Derbyshire teamed with Hodgson and Don Harper, all “moonlighting from day jobs” at the BBC, for an album called Electrosonic, a “haunting batch of spare electronic tracks.” Just above, hear “Liquid Energy (Bubbling Rhythm)” from that collection.
These tracks represent just a fraction of the Derbyshire music available at Ubuweb’s Delia Derbyshire library, including a compilation of Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack pieces like “Environmental Studies,” above, from 1969, as well as an audio documentary on her work made in 2010. Soon after her early 70s musical experiments, Derbyshire retired from music to work as a radio operator and in an art gallery and bookshop, disgusted with the state of contemporary sound. But in her last few years, she had the pleasure of watching a new generation discover her work. As Hodgson writes in his touching eulogy, “the technology she had left behind was finally catching up to her vision.”
There may be no sweeter sound to the ears of Open Culture writers than the words “public domain”—you might even go so far as to call it our “cellar door.” The phrase may not be as musical, but the fact that many of the world’s cultural treasures cannot be copyrighted in perpetuity means that we can continue to do what we love: curating the best of those treasures for readers as they appear online. Public domain means companies can sell those works without incurring any costs, but it also means that anyone can give them away for free. “Anyone can re-publish” public domain works, notes Lifehacker, “or chop them up and use them in other projects.” And thereby emerges the remixing and repurposing of old artifacts into new ones, which will themselves enter the public domain of future generations.
Some of those future works of art may even become the next Great American Novel, if such a thing still exists as anything more than a hackneyed cliché. Of course, no one seriously goes around saying they’re writing the “Great American Novel,” unless they’re Philip Roth in the 70s or William Carlos Williams (top right) in the 20s, who both somehow pulled off using the phrase as a title (though Roth’s book doesn’t quite live up to it.) Where Roth casually used the concept in a light novel about baseball, Williams’ The Great American Novel approached it with deep concern for the survival of the form itself. His modernist text “engages the techniques of what we would now call metafiction,” writes literary scholar April Boone, “to parody worn out formulas and content and, ironically, to create a new type of novel that anticipates postmodern fiction.”
We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”
In other words, it’ll be Christmas all over again in January every year, and while you can browse the publication dates of your favorite works yourself to see what’s coming available in coming years, you’ll find at The Atlantic a short list of literary works included in next-year’s mass-release, including books by Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and P.G. Wodehouse. Lifehacker has several more extensive lists, which we excerpt below:
Cecil B. DeMille’s (first, less famous, silent version of) The Ten Commandments
Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, including that scene where he dangles off a clock tower, and his Why Worry?
A long line-up of feature-length silent films, including Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitalityand Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim
Short films by Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang (later Little Rascals)
Cartoons including Felix the Cat(the character first appeared in a 1919 cartoon)
Marlene Dietrich’s film debut, a bit part in the German silent comedy The Little Napoleon; also the debuts of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fay Wray
Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers
Two of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links
The Prisoner, volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyrights)
The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
Short stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway
Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda
Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs
Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Yokoyama Taikan’s Metempsychosis
Work by M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, and Man Ray
Again, these are only partial lists of highlights, and such highlights…. Speaking for myself, I cannot wait for free access to the very best (and even worst, and weirdest, and who-knows-what-else) of 1923. And of 1924 in 2020, and 1925 and 2021, and so on and so on….
Just what, exactly, is Roxy Music? Those encountering the band for the first time when their self-titled debut came out in 1972 had questions. Were these 50s R&B throwbacks? Ziggy Stardust/Slade/T‑Rex like glam rockers? Experimental art-rock-retro-futurists dressed like a Stax funk band on acid? Yes, yes, yes, and then some. The album, “at once postmodern, strange, sensual and thrilling,” writes Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot, “mapped out a new frontier, even as bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin dominated the rock landscape.”
In the very same year that Bowie’s Ziggy landed to re-make rock in its image, Brian Ferry and his virtuoso band—including standouts Phil Manzanera on guitar and Brian Eno on synths, tape effects, and various “treatments”—prefigured a somehow even sexier, weirder, funkier, more disturbing future for pop, charting the territory for bands like Duran Duran, the Cars, Eurythmics, Pulp, and too many more to name. Roxy Music was so effortlessly original that once Bowie exhausted his space alien phase, he turned to Ferry and Eno for inspiration.
Like Bowie, Roxy Music favored saxophones, courtesy of Andy Mackay, who also played… the oboe? Manzanera’s psychedelic flights were reminiscent of The Doors’ Robby Krieger, with a Latin American flavor from his early days playing revolutionary Cuban folk songs. Paul Thompson’s rhythmic pounding and smooth, country-ish grooves improbably married Moe Tucker and Kenny Buttrey.
Graham Simpson played the bass with “an exuberant rush,” writes Kot. “They were specialists in their field,” remarks Ferry,” who himself drew from the rockers every British child of the 50s loved, but was also obsessed with Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Billie Holliday, Kurt Weill, the Beats, T.S. Eliot, Fred Astaire, and Cole Porter.
And Eno? “With his deep interest in experimental music,” says Ferry, Eno turned raunchy retro-fusion rock ‘n’ roll into soundtracks for spaceships, his synth lines swooping wildly and burbling ominously behind Ferry’s quavering melisma. “Those textures,” the singer recalled recently, “the synth sounds were washes, colours, textures, mood enhancers, and so on.” Arriving fully-formed in 1972, they “sounded as if they had just beamed down from outer space and brought along the music of the spheres,” Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher writes. “Roxy Music was the sound of the future—but we just didn’t realize it then. Roxy was so overwhelmingly new. No one knew what to think.”
“Try to imagine,” writes Gallagher, “how insane this TV footage looked” at the time. Imagine tuning in to Top of the Pops and catching them playing their debut single “Virginia Plain” (top), a song “named after a packet of cigarettes.” (Read about how they recorded those motorcycle sounds.) Imagine seeing Mackay dressed like a Flash Gordon villain, playing oboe over Eno’s sci-fi synth washes in the intro to “Ladytron” on the Old Grey Whistle Test, or seeing the band confidently stomp through “Re-make/Re-model,” “Ladytron,” and “Grey Lagoons,” on the BBC’s Full House, further up.
In that later 1972 live televised performance, Roxy Music was already delivering the sound of its future with “Grey Lagoons” from the following year’s brilliant For Your Pleasure, the final album to feature Eno, who would go on to even stranger things in his solo work. Now imagine you happened to tune in to The Old Grey Whistle Test in ’73 just in time to catch that album’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” a warbly, sinister, Ballardian love song written for a blow-up doll.
Yesterday, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 2017 album, DAMN, a “virtuosic song collection,” writes the Pulitzer board, “unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” This is the first time (since its inception in 1943) that the prize has gone, notes NPR, “to an artist outside of the classical or jazz community.” Other recipients have included Aaron Copland, Wynton Marsalis, and Ornette Coleman. You can stream DAMN, which comes with a Parental Advisory warning, on Spotify or right below.
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