Got spare cash burning a hole in your pocket? An urge to commodify your favorite jazz artist? The need for an admittedly beautiful writing instrument? All of the above, you say? Good, because Montblanc recently unveiled a new line of Miles Davis pens. They’ve got the Miles Davis ballpoint pen, fountain pen, and roller pen. But surely the pièce de résistance is the Miles Davis Limited Edition 1926 Fountain Pen, which “tells the story of one of the greatest jazz personalities.” “The surface of the cap and barrel is engraved with symbolic motifs that refer to the five major jazz periods he helped to create.” What’s more, “a star, set with a diamond, is engraved on the barrel, and Miles Davis’s famous album Kind of Blue is reflected in the blue color on the cone.” Swank.
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I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself thinking that some things generate their rewards in a second-hand way.
“Sunday Morning” was the last song VU recorded for that album–a last ditch attempt to write a hit. According to Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, the band’s patron, suggested the theme for the song: “Andy said, ‘Why don’t you just make it a song about paranoia?’ I thought that was great so I came up with ‘Watch out, the world’s behind you, there’s always someone watching you,’ which I feel is the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world cares enough to watch you.” Writes Joe Harvard, in his short book on the album, the song “calls to mind a sleepy, quiet Sunday so perfectly that you can listen to the song repeatedly before registering what it’s really about: paranoia and displacement.”
Above, you watch a new animation created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground & Nico. Created by James Eads and Chris McDaniel, it’ll hopefully get your Sunday underway.
Ten years ago, Jeff Antebi, the founder of the record company Waxploitation, asked musicians and contemporary painters to collaborate on a collection of children’s stories for grown-ups. Today, you can find the fruits of their labor collected in a new, 350-page book project called Stories for Ways & Means. The book features tales by Tom Waits (above), Nick Cave, Bon Iver, The Pixies’ Frank Black and other artists. (Note: the stories contain “outre art, weird images, graphic displays of nasty stuff and cuss words.”) Also, you can now watch a series of short promo films where celebs like Danny Devito, Zach Galifianakis and Nick Offerman read items in the collection.
Danny Devito Reads “Doug the Bug” by Frank Black
Zach Galifianakis Reads “Next Big Thing” by Gibby Haynes
“The Lonely Giant” by Nick Cave, Read by Andre Royo (aka Bubbles from The Wire)
“Wishing Well Fountain,” Written and Narrated by Alison Mosshart
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We’ve seen sales of George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare scenario 1984 peak in recent months. Millions of readers seek to understand the brave new world we live in through Orwell’s vision. Parallels abound. We might reasonably ascribe to the ruling party in the U.S. and its media apparatus the slogan “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” But our experience of reality never fails to validate that old saw about truth and fiction. As Case Western Reserve professor of history John Broich writes, “2017 is stranger than Orwell imagined.”
The state doesn’t need a Ministry of Truth to censure the information that reaches us. We are simply overwhelmed with “alternative authorities and realities” who delegitimize the facts and accelerate “the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the US electorate.” A sad state of affairs. But in every decade since the publication of Orwell’s novel, critics, journalists, and pundits have seen evidence of his dire forecast. In the titular year itself, Manhattan College professor Edmond van den Bossche summed up the general tenor in The New York Times: “In our 1984… the warnings of George Orwell are more than ever relevant.”
Van den Bossche wrote of NATO and the UN. But he might have written about MTV and CNN— both in their infancy—who birthed 24-hour cable news and reality TV. What Orwell understood about state power, later thinkers like Guy DeBord, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard built careers writing about: the importance not only of surveillance, but also of spectacle that blurs the lines of truth and fiction as it overwhelms our senses. It’s largely this key theme, I’d argue, that has rendered 1984 so attractive to some of the most spectacular of musicians, including David Bowie—whose attempts to make an Orwell concept album formed part of his Diamond Dogs—and Rick Wakeman, the virtuoso prog-rock keyboardist of Yes fame.
After releasing as a solo artist such rock-literary adaptations as 1974’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and the following year’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Wakeman turned Orwell’s classic into a rock opera. The 1981 production is an extravaganza of musical excess, with lyrics and vocals by Tim Rice, riveting performances by Chaka Khan (above) and Wakeman’s former Yes bandmate Jon Anderson, and eclectic orchestral instrumentation woven in with Wakeman’s battery of keyboards and synthesizers. The record has become a fan favorite and Allmusic describes it as one of Wakeman’s “most well-rounded albums.”
The perfectionistic Wakeman himself looks back on his 1984 with embarrassment. “In retrospect, a mistake,” he has said. “The wrong album at the wrong time, with all the wrong people around at the time…. I formed the wrong band, (the worst I have ever had), the deal for the stage show fell through and all in all I listen back to the music with my head in my hands.” Luckily, we are not bound to respect an artist’s assessment of his work. Wakeman’s music and Rice’s lyrics take the leaden, gray world of Winston Smith and Julia and turn it into a carnival, moving from soaring ballads to rockers with the sneering vaudevillian satire of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (See especially “The Proles,” above, the penultimate number before the final title track.)
Orwell’s novel is not what one would call an entertaining book; it is gloomy—though not without its own kind of dark humor—and its monochromatic tone was perfectly captured by Michael Radford’s 1984 film adaptation. But it heavily suggested the world to come, one constantly illuminated and obscured by mass media, with screens in every home and pocket, forever broadcasting some colorful distraction. In the videos above, you’ll see excerpts from the movie mixed with dazzling live performance footage of Wakeman and band playing their 1984 live, synced to the studio recordings, courtesy of Youtuber ROLT (Ronaldo Lopes Teixeira.) Watch his full project at the top of the post. The mash-up suitably shows how these very different interpretations—the more straightforwardly dour and the prog-rock operatic—somehow both do justice to Orwell’s prescient novel. Just above, you can hear Wakeman’s full album on Spotify (whose software you can download for free here).
In February, Ted Mills wrote about a new company–And Vinyly–which will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record when your time eventually runs out. The basic service runs $4,000, and it gets you 30 copies of a record containing your ashes. The rub is that you can’t “use copyright-protected music to fill up the 12 minutes per side, so no ‘Free Bird’ or ‘We Are the Champions,’ unfortunately.”
But it does raise the question, as I put on Twitter yesterday… If you could head into eternity pressed into a cherished album, which would you choose? This isn’t necessarily a what-record-would-you-take-to-a-deserted island scenario, taken to the nth degree. Meaning, it’s not necessarily a question of what record would you listen to endlessly, for eternity (although you could choose to make it that). Rather, the question might be: What album do you have a deep, abiding personal connection with? Which record captures your spirit? And, when thrown on the turntable, can keep you sonically in this world?
My pick, Abbey Road.“Come Together” has a bit of anti-establishment bite. “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” tap into something emotional and nostalgia-inducing for me. And, oh, that medley on Side 2! Just click play any time.
Your picks? Please add them to the comments below.
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“I gotta say — not to rant, but — one thing about commercial films is, doesn’t the music almost always really suck?” Jim Jarmusch, director of films like Stranger Than Paradise,Mystery Train, Broken Flowers, and most recently Paterson, put that important question to his audience during a live interview a few years ago. “I’ve seen good movies — or maybe they would be good — just destroyed by the same crap, you know? If you look at films from even in the seventies, it wasn’t that bad. People had some sense of music for films. But maybe that’s just the commercial realm: guys in suits come and tell ’em what kind of music to put on.”
Jarmusch’s own movies draw obsessive fans as well as bewildered detractors, but they’ll never draw the accusation of having their soundtracks assembled by guys in suits. Music seems to matter to his work on almost as fundamental a level as images, not just in the final products but in every stage of their creation as well.
“I get a lot of inspiration from music, probably more than any other form,” he says in the same interview. “For me, music is the most pure form. It’s like another language. Whenever I start writing a script, I focus on music that sort of kickstarts my ideas or my imagination.” The process has also resulted in several high-profile collaborations with musicians, such as Neil Young in the “acid western” Dead Man and the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA in the urban samurai tale Ghost Dog.
You can hear four hours of the music that makes Jim Jarmusch movies Jim Jarmusch movies in the Spotify playlist embedded just above. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, you can download it here.) Its 76 tracks begin, suitably, with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” to which Eszter Balint famously danced in Jarmusch’s breakout feature Stranger Than Paradise. Five years later, Jarmusch cast Hawkins himself as the concierge of a run-down Memphis hotel in Mystery Train. Between those pictures came Down by Law, the black-and-white New Orleans jailbreak picture starring no less an icon of American singing-songwriting than Tom Waits, whose work appears on this playlist alongside that of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, Neil Young and RZA, and many others.
Given the importance of music to his movies, it should come as no surprise that Jarmusch originally set out to become a musician himself, and now, in parallel with his career as one of America’s most respected living independent filmmakers, spends a fair chunk of his time being one. His band Sqürl, formed to record some instrumental pieces to score 2009’s The Limits of Control, has now grown into its own separate entity, and several of their tracks appear on this playlist. Jarmusch described their music to the New York Times Magazine as follows: “It varies between avant noise-rock, drone stuff and some song-structured things with vocals. And some covers of country songs that we slow down and give a kind of molten treatment to” — all of which fits right in with the rest of the music that has shaped his movies.
Let’s go back in time to December 12, 1940 and turn our radio dial to 830 AM WNYC. It’s 6 p.m. in New York and blues singer Lead Belly has his weekly half-hour show (Folk Songs of America) where he sings songs and invites on a guest each week. On this episode he welcomes folk singer “The Dustiest Dustbowler of them all”——as the announcer calls him——Woody Guthrie, who, like the host, delivers three songs with some in between song patter.
This recording sat in the WNYC archives until being dusted off for a rebroadcast in 2007 as part of the Down Home Radio Show. The first year of the Down Home Radio Show coincided with the last year in the life of Professor Henrietta Yurchenco (1916–2007), who was a well known folk and world music radio personality, as well as an ethnomusicologist. One of her earliest radio jobs was producing this very episode for Lead Belly’s Folk Songs of America, when she was only 24. She later went on to work with other stars in the business such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
The 1940 episode was unearthed for a show on outlaw songs, both blues and folk songs that glamorize people that the law saw as common criminals, but the people loved regardless. Lead Belly sings “Frankie and Albert” and Guthrie sings “John Hardy” and “Jesse James.”
Also on the show, Guthrie introduces his own “Ballad of Tom Joad” with a story about watching The Grapes of Wrath movie (1940) three times and then writing his own version. Lead Belly ends the show with “Boll Weevil,” which, being about a much hated insect, is kind of an outlaw ballad of sorts.
The only shame is not hearing the two together, and it’s not known whether they were in the same studio at the time.
Finally the announcer adds that if you like the show, drop a line to Lead Belly courtesy of WNYC and they’ll send you all the lyrics. I wonder if anybody still has a copy of that?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
These days everyone’s hung up on identity. But I don’t mean to talk politics, though my point is maybe inescapably political: the identities our jobs and incomes give us—the status or lack thereof—become so central to who we are in the world that they eclipse other essential aspects, eclipse the things we do strictly because it gives us pleasure to do them.
Music, dance, art, poetry.… These fall under what Alan Lomax called an experience of “the very core” of existence, “the adaptive style” of culture, “which enables its members to cohere and survive.” Culture, for Lomax, was neither an economic activity nor a racial category, neither an exclusive ranking of hierarchies nor a redoubt for nationalist insecurities. Cultures, plural, were peculiarly regional expressions of shared humanity across one interrelated world.
Lomax did have some paternalistic attitudes toward what he called “weaker peoples,” noting that “the role of the folklorist is that of the advocate of the folk.” But his advocacy was not based in theories of supremacy but of history. We could mend the ruptures of the past by adding “cultural equity… to the humane condition of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice,” wrote the idealistic Lomax. “The stuff of folklore,” he wrote elsewhere, “the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people, can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.’”
Lomax’s idealism may seem to us quaint at best, but I dare you to condemn its results, which include connecting Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to their global audiences and preserving a good deal of the folk music heritage of the world through tireless field and studio recording, documentation and memoir, and institutions like the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), founded by Lomax in 1986 to centralize and make available the vast amount of material he had collected over the decades.
In another archival project, Lomax’s Global Jukebox, we get to see rigorous scholarly methods applied to examples from his vast library of human expressions. The online project catalogues the work in musicology of Lomax and his father John, who both took on a “life long mission to document not only America’s cultural roots, but the world’s as well,” notes an online brochure for the Global Jukebox. Lomax believed that “music, dance and folklore of all traditions have equal value” and are equally worthy of study. The Global Jukebox carries that belief into the 21st century.
Since 1990, the Global Jukebox has functioned as a digital repository of music from Lomax’s global archive, as you can see in the very dated 1998 video above, featuring ACE director Gideon D’Arcangelo. Now, updated and put online, the newly-launched Global Jukeboxweb site provides an interactive interface, giving you access to detailed analyses of folk music from all over the world, and highly technical “descriptive data” for each song. You can learn the systems of “Choreometrics and Cantometrics”—specialized analytical tools for scientists—or you can casually browse the incredible diversity of music as a layperson, through a beautifully rendered map view or the colorfully attractive graphic “tree view,” below.
Stop by the Global Jukebox’s “About” page to learn much more about its technical specificities and history, which dates to 1960 when Lomax began working with anthropologist Conrad Arensberg at Columbia and Hunter Universities to study “the expressive arts” with scientific tools and emerging technologies. The Global Jukebox represents a highly schematic way of looking at Lomax’s body of work, and its ease of use and level of detail make it easy to leap around the world, sampling the thrilling variety of folk music he collected.
It is not, and is not meant as, a substitute for the living traditions Lomax helped safeguard, and the incredible music they have inspired professional and amateur musicians to make over the years. But the Global Jukebox gives us several unique ways of organizing and discovering those traditions—ways that are still evolving, such as a coming function for building your own cultural family tree with a playlist of songs from your musical ancestry.
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