“Videotape” ends Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows, and like many of their albums, it tends towards the funereal. (Think of the drunken “Life in a Glasshouse” from Amnesiac or “Motion Picture Soundtrack” from Kid A). And at first, it does sound very simple, four plaintive descending chords and Thom Yorke’s high melody over the top of it.
But in this 10 minute video essay from Vox Pop: Earworm, the song’s structure is peeled back to reveal a secret–that the chord sequence is not on the downbeat, but shifted a half-beat earlier. Hence, it is a heavily syncopated song that removes all clues to its syncopation.
Advanced musicians out there might not be blown away by any of this, but for fans of Radiohead and those just coming to music theory, the video is a good introduction to complex rhythm ideas. The fun comes from the backwards way in which Vox and Warren Lain–who devoted a whole 30 minutes to exploring the song–came across the secret.
It starts with video of Thom Yorke trying to play a live version along to a click track, and then to Phil Selway’s drums. For some reason Yorke can’t do it. And that’s because his brain is wanting to put the chords on the downbeat, the most natural, obvious choice. To play off beat, without further rhythmic information, shows the band “fighting against not just their own musical instincts, but their own brainwaves” as the Vox host explains.
There is much discussion in the YouTube comments over whether these 10 minutes are worth the analysis. It’s not that Radiohead invented anything new here–check out the off-beat opening of something like XTC’s “Wake Up”–but more that the band goes through the whole song (at least in the recorded version) without revealing the real rhythm, like playing in a certain key and never touching the root note.
To sum up: Radiohead push themselves in the studio and take those experiments into the live experience and challenge themselves. Which is way more than the majority of rock bands ever do. And bless ‘em, Yorke and co., for doing so.
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.
You don’t have to be a gearhead to instantly recognize the sound of the Roland TR-808. Introduced in 1980, the legendary drum machine is all over the 80s, 90s, and the retro 2000s, from dance progenitors like Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to formative Def Jam releases like Run DMC’s debut and the Beastie Boy’s Licensed to Ill (one of the original machines used on such classics recently went on sale). The 808 provides the backbeat for Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” New Order’s “Shellshock,” and LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali”… track after era-defining track pulses with the iconic drum machine’s deep, thudding kick drum and comically synthetic congas, claves, maracas, handclaps, and cowbells.
Roland has obviously felt the pop cultural winds blowing its way. Yesterday, on 808 Day, the company announced a new iteration, now called the TR-08, as part of its Boutique line. (A previous revival, the TR‑8, saw Roland combine the 808 with the classic 909, renowned in rave circles.) The video at the top features some of the 808’s original adopters—producer Jimmy Jam, rapper Marley Marl, and DJs Jazzy Jeff and Juan Atkins—marveling over the new product. Just above, in case you’ve somehow forgotten, we have a demonstration of famous TR-808 beats from tracks like “Planet Rock” and Cybotron’s “Clear,” songs that made innovative use of samples and which themselves became choice material for dozens of sample-based productions.
The 808 was the choice of drum machine for tinkerers. Its sound was “crowd-sourced,” writes Chris Norris, “with artists building on one another’s modifications of the device. One of the first major innovations came about in 1984,” with the “fine tuning of the 808’s low frequencies and further widening of its bass kick drum to create the sound of an underground nuke test” heard on producer Strafe’s club hit “Set it Off.” The new TR-08 has a much smaller footprint and expands the machine’s capabilities with contemporary features like an LED screen, controls over gain and tuning, battery or USB power, and audio or MIDI through a USB connection.
Arguably “one of the most impactful pieces of modern music hardware,” writes The Verge, upon its debut the 808 “received mixed reviews and was considered a commercial failure as its analog circuitry didn’t create the ‘traditional’ drum sounds” most producers expected. This meant that 808s could be picked up relatively cheaply by bedroom producers and local DJs. As a result, “the trembling feeling of that sound,” Norris writes, “booming down boulevards in Oakland, the Bronx, and Detroit are part of America’s cultural DNA, the ghost of Reagan-era blight” and the renaissance of creativity born in its midst. To get a sense of the breadth of the 808’s musical contributions, listen to the playlist above, with everyone from Talking Heads to 2 LIVE CREW, Phil Collins, and Whitney Houston putting in an appearance.
Every recording medium works as a metonym for its era: the term “LP” conjures up associations with a broad musical period of classic rock ‘n’ roll, soul, doo-wop, R&B, funk, jazz, disco etc.; we talk of the “CD era,” dominated by dance music and hip-hop; the 45 makes us think of jukeboxes, diners, and sock-hops; and the cassette, well… at least one subgenre of music, what John Peel called “shambling,” jangly, lo-fi pop, came to be known by the name “C86,” the title of an NME compilation, short for “Cassette, 1986.” (Readers of the magazine had to clip coupons and send money by postal mail to receive a copy of the tape.)
Soon, however, fewer and fewer people will remember the age of the 78rpm record, the preferred vehicle for the music of the early 20th century. From classical and opera to blues, bluegrass, swing, ragtime, gospel, Hawaiian, and holiday novelties the 78 epitomizes the sounds of its heyday as much as any of the media mentioned above.
While cassettes recently made a nostalgic comeback, and turntables are found in every big box store, we’re generally not equipped to play back 78s. These are brittle records made from shellac, a resin secreted by beetles. They were often played on appliances that doubled as quality parlor furniture.
Thanks now to the Internet Archive, that stalwart of digital cataloguing and curation, we can play twenty five thousand 78s and immerse ourselves in the early 20th century, whether for research purposes or pure enjoyment. Previous efforts at preservation have “restored or remastered… commercially viable recordings” on LP or CD, writes The Great 78 Project, the archive’s volunteer program to digitize musical history. The current effort seeks to go beyond popularity and collect everything, from the rarest and strangest to the already historic. “I want to know what the early 20th century sounded like,” writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, “Midwest, different countries, different social classes, different immigrant communities and their loves and fears.”
You can hear several selections here, and thousands more at this archive of 78s uploaded by audio-visual preservation company, George Blood, L.P. Other 78rpm archives from volunteer collectors and the ARChive of Contemporary Music are being digitized and uploaded as well. You’ll note the recordings are often submerged in crackle and hiss, and generally lack bass and treble (most playback systems of the time could not reproduce the lower and higher ends of the audible spectrum). “We have preserved the often very prominent surface noise and imperfections,” the Archive writes, “and included files generated by different sizes and shapes of stylus to facilitate different kinds of analysis.” Different playback systems could produce markedly different sounds, and the recordings were not always strictly 78rpm.
These conditions of the transfer ensure that we roughly hear what the first audiences heard, though the records’ age and our penchant for 7 speaker audio systems introduce some new variables. None of these recordings were even made in stereo. The 78 period, notes Yale Library, lasted between 1898 and the late 1950s, when the 33 1/2 rpm long-playing record fully edged out the older model. For approximately fifty years, these records carried recorded music, sound, and speech into homes around the world. “What is this?” Kahle asks of this formidable digitization project. “A reference collection? A collector’s dream? A discovery radio station? The soundtrack of the early 20th century?” All of the above. To learn more about The Great 78 Project, including the technical details of the transfer and how you can carefully package up and mail in your own 78rpm records, visit their Preservation page.
In 1997, the Cornell Chronicle announced: “The world’s smallest guitar — carved out of crystalline silicon and no larger than a single cell — has been made at Cornell University to demonstrate a new technology that could have a variety of uses in fiber optics, displays, sensors and electronics.”
Invented by Dustin W. Carr, the so-called “nanoguitar” measured 10 micrometers long–roughly the size of your average red blood cell. And it had six strings, each “about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms.”
According to The Guardian, the vintage 1997 nanoguitar was actually never played. That honor went to a 2003 edition of the nanoguitar, whose strings were plucked by miniature lasers operated with an atomic force microscope, creating “a 40 megahertz signal that is 130,000 times higher than the sound of a full-scale guitar.” The human ear couldn’t hear something at that frequency, and that’s a problem not even a good amp–a Vox AC30, Fender Deluxe Reverb, etc.–could fix.
Thus concludes today’s adventure in nanotechnology.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
We’ve devoted space here before to legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s musical legacy, from his formidable record collection to his many hours of “Peel Sessions,” the recordings he made in BBC studios of artists like David Bowie, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees and so, so many more–usually when they were on the cusp of superstardom or enduring cult status. It was Peel’s particular talent for discovering and promoting such artists that set him apart from his peers. Rather than riding the cultural wave of the moment, he listened at the margins, cultivating and curating what he heard. Whether punk, glam, new wave, hardcore, ska, techno, or industrial, it seems John Peel got there first, and the rest of the industry followed after him.
Peel did not approach his role in a critical vein—sitting in judgment of the music around him. He approached it as an enthusiastic and obsessive fan, which explains much of his appeal to the listeners who loved his broadcasts. He honored those listeners each year by compiling a list of their favorites in what he called “The John Peel Festive 50.” This end-of-the-year event “became a Christmas institution, writes the BBC, “more loved than fairy lights and Christmas crackers.”
Listeners of Peel’s show voted for their three favorite tracks in November. The following month, the highest-ranked “Festive 50” were all played on the air. He described the process as a truly democratic, crowdsourced endeavor, as we would say today.
It’s really just me marking every single vote down in a ledger. There is obviously the temptation to slip something in that I like, especially if it’s just outside the 50, and something crap has gone above it. But I have a very workman-like brain so it just wouldn’t be on to fix it.
Peel “wasn’t always happy with what the listeners voted for,” often feeling “there were too many ‘white boys with guitars’ making an appearance.” The predictability of several of the lists irked him, and seemed to work against the spirit of his mission to tirelessly promote adventurous, experimental music. Peel may have been popular, but in matters of taste, he was no populist. For the most part, however, he remained faithful to the fans’ picks, and noted that he never would have been able to choose the top three songs of the year himself: “I couldn’t get any fewer than a list of 250.”
The tradition, with a few hiccups, continued from its inception in 1976 till Peel’s death in 2004, and the massive Spotify playlist above aggregates the hundreds of those picks—932 songs, to be exact, over 70 hours of music. From Dylan, Clapton, and the Stones to Neko Case—and along the way, no shortage of tracks from the punk and post-punk artists most closely associated with Peel’s show. While the listener’s picks do fall heavily into the “white boys with guitars” category, there’s plenty more besides, including early tracks from Eric B. & Rakim, P.J. Harvey, Stereolab, 10,000 Maniacs, Cocteau Twins, and many more. You can explore the tracks in Peel’s “Festive 50” lists here. They’re sorted by decade: 1970s — 1980s — 1990s — 2000s.
Before the advent of digital studio technology, a degree of imprecision naturally resulted from the recording process. It may now be too easy to erase and correct perceived errors. As Brian Eno has pointed out, “the temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out.” Perhaps that’s why so many of the famous songs containing mistakes in pop culture lore come from a pre-digital age. In any case, such lore abounds. Some of it speculative, some anecdotal, some apocryphal, and much of it clearly evident in close listens and confirmed by the musicians, engineers, and producers themselves.
A recent Reddit thread compiled 500 comments worth of discussion on the subject. One prominent example is Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 “Mack the Knife,” in which she forgets the lyrics to the chorus and improvises. “Talk about failing gracefully,” writes user Bleue22. The album, they note, went on to win a Grammy.
But this example, you may object, comes from a live album—no second takes allowed. And Fitzgerald sets up the error by saying beforehand, “we hope we remember all the words.” (I’d guess she’s using the royal “we,” to which she’s fully entitled.) Nonetheless, her “Mack the Knife” may have no equal.
Still, we don’t lack for studio examples of mistakes in great recordings. If you’re a metal fan, Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All likely holds a special place of honor in your collection. As Kirk Hammett revealed in a 2002 interview with Guitar World after his induction into the magazine’s hall of fame, his solo on the track was only a second or third take, with little rehearsal. “There were no frills, no contemplation, no overintellectualizing,” he says. The result? Amazing, right? But, Hammett continues, “On a couple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch; for 18 years, every time I’ve heard that guitar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me!”
Every guitarist has suffered through this experience while listening back to their records. Few make Guitar World’s hall of fame. The point is that greatness and perfection are not always the best of friends. Another example of the kind of thing that might only haunt a musician: In Steely Dan’s “Aja” from the 1977 Grammy-winning album of the same name, drummer Steve Gadd plays “one of the best drum solos ever recorded,” writes Michael Duncan as Sonic Scoop. Drummers for decades have sought to replicate the moment, especially an idiosyncratic click at 4:57. Turns out, it was “actually a slip of his stick; albeit a well-timed one.” The solo, Duncan notes, was done in one take.
Other examples may have had life-changing consequences for the musician in question. It’s rumored that David Gilmour’s faintly recorded coughing on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” bothered him so much that he quit smoking. In some cases, the mistake can turn into a hook or a musical statement, such as Cindy Wilson’s shout of “Tiiiiiiin Roof! Rusted” in the B‑52’s “Love Shack,” apparently a mistake on Wilson’s part. The phenomenon, granted, tends to manifest in genres that accommodate all varieties of looseness—rock, blues, jazz, etc.—and the great bulk of examples in the Reddit mistake thread come from such recordings. I couldn’t say whether it’s possible to compile such a list in music with far stricter arrangements or reliance on electronic instrumentation.
I also couldn’t say whether mistakes in, say classical or electronic music, would produce such desirable results. What often emerges in these discussions is the degree to which mistakes, unplanned improvisations, or happy accidents can become essential features of a song. Take The Breeder’s “Cannonball,” which intentionally incorporates a mistake bassist Josephine Wiggs repeatedly made in rehearsals, sliding to the wrong note in the solo bass intro, then correcting when the guitars came in. “We all just thought it was hilarious and thought it sounded really great,” she remembered. “It was clear to us at that moment that that was the right thing to do, to keep the wrong note in there.” Does it matter that some recorded mistakes are intentional and others are not? That question may be fodder for another 500-comment-long discussion. Or we could heed the wisdom of Brian Eno or Miles Davis and just go with it either way.
If Senator Al Franken won’t run for President in 2020, perhaps he’d temper fans’ disappointment with a repeat of his early 80’s turn as Mick Jagger, above.
The performance took place at Stockton State, a public university conveniently located in New Jersey–what the late Tom Davis, Franken’s long time Saturday Night Live writing partner and Keith Richards to his Jagger called “the Blair Witch scrub forests twenty-five miles north of Atlantic City.”
Franken’s performance is an immersive triumph, especially for those who remember his best known SNL character, the lispingly upbeat Stuart Smalley.
His Jagger is the opposite of Stuart–butch, preening, athletic … a less than sober student fan in the Stockton State crowd might have drunkenly wondered if he or she had accidentally bought tickets to the Tattoo You tour. Those lips are pretty convincing.
The costuming is dead on too, and Franken did not take the route Chris Farley would later take, lampooning the male strippers of Chippendales. He may not be Jagger-rangy, but he’s certainly fit in an outfit that leaves no room to hide.
As we started “Under My Thumb,” Franken came running out as Mick Jagger, wearing yellow football pants and Capezios and was so good, it was scary. Unfortunately, Franken and Davis at Stockton State never sold very well… maybe it would be re-released if one of us became president, or shot a president.
Knowing that Davis, who died five years ago, would likely never have predicted the outcome of the recent election, and that Senator Franken, outspoken as he is, is in no position to joke about the second option, we suggest truffling up a used copy, if you’d like to see more.
And for comparison’s sake, here are the originals performing to an arena-sized crowd in Arizona in 1981:
Apart from whatever political nightmare du jour we’re living in, it can be easy to dislike Washington, DC. I say this as someone who grew up outside the city, called it home for many years, and generally found its public face of monuments, tourists, politicos, and waves of lobbyists and bureaucrats pretty alienating. The “real” DC was elsewhere, in the city’s historic Black neighborhoods, many now heavily gentrified, which hosted legendary jazz clubs and gave birth to the genius of go-go. And even in the privileged, middle class neighborhoods and DMV suburbs. Among the skate punks and disaffected military brats who created the DC punk scene, a seething, furiously productive punk economy centered around Dischord Records. The small label has been as hugely influential in the past few decades as Seattle’s Sub Pop or Long Beach’s SST.
Formed in 1980 by Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye and his bandmate Jeff Nelson, Dischord is 6 years older than Sub Pop and in several ways it inspired a template for the West Coast. Dave Grohl came from the DC Punk scene, as did Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Rollins and MacKaye were childhood friends and DC natives, and MacKaye went on to form Fugazi, virtually a DC institution for well over a decade.
MacKaye’s brother Alec was a member of Dischord band Faith—one of Kurt Cobain’s admitted influences—and of Ignition with Gray Matter’s Dante Ferrando, who went on, with investments from Dave Grohl, to found the club Black Cat, a central hub of punk and indie rock in DC for 27 years. The more you dig into the musical families of Dischord, the more you see how embedded they are not only in their home city, but in the weft of modern American rock.
The common features of its lineup—political urgency, earnestness, melodic experimentation, unpretentiousness—stand out. Dischord bands could be math‑y and technical, straight edge, vegan, Buddhist, Hare Krishna, fiercely feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war.… These may not sound like the makings of a great party scene, but they made for a committed cadre of hard working musicians and a wide circle of dedicated fans around the country who have kept the label thriving in its way.
What distinguishes Dischord from its more famous peers is the fact that it only releases bands from the DC area. Why? “Because this is the city where we live, work, and have the most understanding,” they write on their site. Still, given the label’s heightened profile in recent years, it’s surprising that so much of its music remains unknown outside of a specific audience. Fugazi is the best-known band on the roster, and for all their major critical importance, they have kept a fairly low profile. But this is the spirit of the label, whose founders wanted to make music, not make stars. Bands like Shudder to Think and Jawbox may have eventually moved to bigger labels, but they did their best work with Dischord.
Dag Nasty, Embrace, Government Issue, Make-Up, Q and Not U, Rites of Spring, Soulside, Void, Untouchables, Slant 6, the Nation of Ulysses.… these are bands, if you don’t know them, you should hear, and already have, in some way, through their enormous influence on so many others: not only Nirvana, but also a contingent of derivative emo bands some of us might prefer to forget. Still the label’s history should not be taken as the gospel canon of DC punk. One of the most influential of DC punk bands, Bad Brains, came out of the jazz scene, invented a blistering mashup of punk and reggae, and get credit for creating hardcore and inspiring Rollins, MacKaye, and their friends. But Bad Brains was “Banned in DC” in 1979, shut out of the clubs. They moved to New York and eventually signed with SST.
Other parts of the scene scorned the clean-living moralism of Dischord, and the label’s sober founders later found themselves “alienated by the violent, suburban, teenage machismo they now saw at their shows,” writes Jillian Mapes at Flavorwire. Dischord became known for championing causes on the left, a legacy that is inseparable from its legend. Not everyone loved their politics, as you might imagine in a city with as many conservative activists and political aspirants as DC. “Great political punk bands—like Priests—still exist in DC,” writes Mapes—and Dischord continues to release great records—“but the ‘80s scene retains its place in history as the pinnacle of political American hardcore music.” And Dischord remains a sometimes unacknowledged legislator of American punk rock in the ‘80s and ’90s. Stream their whole catalog at Bandcamp. You can also download tracks for a fee.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
