One of my favorite music-themed com­e­dy sketch­es of recent years fea­tures a sup­port group of Radio­head fans flum­moxed and dis­ap­point­ed by the band’s post-Ok Com­put­er out­put. The sce­nario trades on the per­plex­i­ty that met Radio­head­’s abrupt change of musi­cal direc­tion with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radio­head fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood dis­or­ders, at least a height­ened propen­si­ty for gen­er­al­ized depres­sion.

“Much of Radiohead’s music is unde­ni­ably sad,” writes Ana­lyt­ics Spe­cial­ist and Radio­head fan Char­lie Thomp­son. Rather than play some­thing “less depress­ing,” how­ev­er, as many an acquain­tance has asked him over the years, Thomp­son decid­ed “to quan­ti­fy that sad­ness, con­clud­ing in a data-dri­ven deter­mi­na­tion of their most depress­ing song.”

Now, pure­ly sub­jec­tive­ly, I’d place “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” in the top spot, fol­lowed close­ly by Amne­sia’s “Pyra­mid Song.” But my own asso­ci­a­tions with these songs are per­son­al and per­haps some­what arbi­trary. I might make a case for them based on lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tions, musi­cal arrange­ment, and instru­men­ta­tion. But the argu­ment would still large­ly depend on mat­ters of taste and accul­tur­a­tion.

Thomp­son, on the oth­er hand, believes in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment.” To that end, he cre­at­ed a “gloom index,” which he used to mea­sure each song in the band’s cat­a­log. Rather than lis­ten­ing to them all, one after anoth­er, he relied on data from two online ser­vices, first pulling “detailed audio sta­tis­tics” from Spotify’s Web API. One met­ric in par­tic­u­lar, called “valence,” mea­sures a song’s “pos­i­tiv­i­ty.” These scores pro­vide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musi­cal per­spec­tive.” (It’s not entire­ly clear what the cri­te­ria are for these scores).

Next, Thomp­son used the Genius Lyrics API to exam­ine “lyri­cal den­si­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly the con­cen­tra­tion of “sad words” in any giv­en song. To com­bine these two mea­sures, he leaned on an analy­sis by a fel­low data sci­en­tist and blog­ger, Myles Har­ri­son. You can see his result­ing for­mu­la for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you under­stand the pro­gram­ing lan­guage R, you can see exam­ples of his analy­sis at his blog, RChar­lie. (Read a less data-laden sum­ma­ry of Thompson’s study at the ana­lyt­ics blog Rev­o­lu­tions.) Thomp­son also plot­ted sad­ness by album, in the inter­ac­tive graph fur­ther up.

So, which song rat­ed high­est on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic ver­sion up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine run­ners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spo­ti­fy playlists above). “Pyra­mid Song” appears at num­ber 5, but “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a pure­ly sub­jec­tive stand­point, this makes me sus­pi­cious of the whole oper­a­tion. But you tell us, read­ers, what do you think of Thomp­son’s exper­i­ment in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment” in music?

Here’s the top 10:

1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Pic­ture Sound­track
4. Let Down
5. Pyra­mid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dol­lars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier …
10. Video­tape

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s “Creep” Played on the Gayageum, a Kore­an Instru­ment Dat­ing Back to the 6th Cen­tu­ry

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

A Free Course on Machine Learn­ing & Data Sci­ence from Cal­tech

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The influ­ence of mod­ern jazz on clas­sic rock extends far beyond too-cool pos­es and too many drugs. In the 1960s, writes Jeff Fitzger­ald at All About Jazz, “a few play­ers were ven­tur­ing beyond the sacred three-chord trin­i­ty and devel­op­ing some seri­ous chops.” John Coltrane’s “extend­ed impro­vi­sa­tions on his unlike­ly top-forty hit ver­sion of ‘My Favorite Things’” gets cred­it for inspir­ing “not only long-form rock hits like The Doors’ sev­en-minute ‘Light My Fire’ and CCR’s eleven-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ but lat­er jam bands from the Grate­ful Dead to Phish.” But of course, the “break­through moment for Rock-Jazz rela­tions” arrived when Miles Davis “devel­oped a Jazz/Rock hybrid called Fusion.”

Davis’ Bitch­es Brew had much crossover appeal, espe­cial­ly to one of those afore­men­tioned jam bands, the Dead, who—a month after the album’s release—invited Davis and his elec­tric band to open for them at the Fill­more West. (Read about, and lis­ten to, that unique event here.)

The pair­ing made sense not only because Davis’ long-form grooves hit many of the same psy­che­del­ic musi­cal recep­tors as the Dead’s extend­ed free-form ses­sions, but also because Jer­ry Gar­cia was some­thing of a jazz-head. Espe­cial­ly when it came to free jazz pio­neer and inven­tor of “Har­molod­ics,” Ornette Cole­man.

“The gui­tarist had been a long time devo­tee” of Cole­man, writes Ben Djarum at Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, and con­tributed his dis­tinc­tive play­ing to three tracks on Coleman’s 1988 album Vir­gin Beau­ty (hear them togeth­er on “Desert Play­ers” above). Garcia’s devo­tion marks him as a true rock con­nois­seur of avant-garde jazz. (Per­haps the only oth­er Cole­man fans in the rock world as indebt­ed to his influ­ence are the also-leg­en­dar­i­ly-drug-fueled indie exper­i­men­tal­ists Roy­al Trux.) It turns out the appre­ci­a­tion was mutu­al. “Cole­man him­self was aware of musi­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Dead and his own group, Prime Time,” which also had two drum­mers.

“Each empha­sizes both melody and look-Ma-no-lim­its impro­vi­sa­tion,” wrote David Fricke in a 1989 Rolling Stone arti­cle about “jazz’s eter­nal icon­o­clast find­ing a new audi­ence” through his asso­ci­a­tion with Gar­cia and com­pa­ny.  Upon wit­ness­ing the Dead play Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1987, and awed by the fans’ ulti­mate ded­i­ca­tion, Cole­man found him­self think­ing, “’Well, we could be friends here.’ Because if these peo­ple here could be into this, they could dig what we’re doing.” It would take six more years, but Cole­man final­ly played with the Dead in 1993 at their annu­al Mar­di Gras cel­e­bra­tion at the Oak­land Col­i­se­um. Where the Davis/Dead match-up 26 years ear­li­er had been a dip­tych, show­cas­ing the strengths of each artist by con­trast with the oth­er, the Coleman/Dead pair­ing was a true col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Not only did Coleman’s Prime Time open the show, but the sax­o­phon­ist joined the Dead onstage dur­ing their sec­ond set—in the midst of an open jam called “Space” (see in playlist below). His horn became a promi­nent­ly inte­grat­ed fea­ture of what one fan remem­bered as “sin­gu­lar­ly the most intense thing I ever wit­nessed.” Such exag­ger­a­tion from Dead­heads seems rou­tine, and sad­ly we have no video, nor could it ever repli­cate the expe­ri­ence. But some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar live record­ings of the entire Dead set may bear out the extreme­ly high praise. “The Oth­er One,” at the top of the post, first stretch­es out into very Cole­man-like ter­ri­to­ry, and the band keeps up beau­ti­ful­ly. After the verse kicks in halfway through, the song soon erupts into “walls of sound, screams, melt­downs, explo­sions….”

“The Oth­er One,” was “a wise choice,” writes Oliv­er Trager in his The Amer­i­can Book of the Dead, “as its rhythm-based pow­er allowed Cole­man to con­tin­ue his broad brush strokes.” After a “lan­guorous” ren­di­tion of “Stel­la Blue,” the penul­ti­mate tune, “Turn on Your Love Light,” above, “pro­vid­ed Cole­man with the per­fect show-end­ing rave­up to let loose in the fash­ion of an old­time, down-home Texas horn honker.” In an inter­view lat­er that same year, Gar­cia called Cole­man “a won­der­ful mod­el for a guy who’s done what we did, in the sense of cre­at­ing his own real­i­ty of what music is and how you sur­vive with­in it. He’s a high-integri­ty kind of per­son and just a won­der­ful man.” As for the night itself, Gar­cia remarked:

It was such a hoot to hear him play total­ly Ornette and total­ly Grate­ful Dead with­out com­pro­mis­ing either one of them. Pret­ty incred­i­ble. Good musi­cians don’t do that kind of char­ac­ter­iz­ing music. like this is this kind of music and that is that kind of thing.

Cole­man should be remem­bered as one of the most refined exam­ples of such a musi­cian for his cham­pi­oning what he called “Har­molod­ic Democ­ra­cy.” You can hear the full Grate­ful Dead set from that Feb­ru­ary, 1993 Mar­di Gras con­cert at Archive.org. The night went so well, notes Trager, that “the musi­cians repeat­ed the for­mu­la with sim­i­lar results in Decem­ber 1993 run­ning through a near­ly iden­ti­cal song list at the Sports Are­na in Los Ange­les.” One can only imag­ine the  audi­ence was equal­ly mes­mer­ized.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Back in the sum­mer of 1975, the Talk­ing Heads were still an unknown band, labor­ing away in obscu­ri­ty. Amidst a sti­fling heat wave, they prac­ticed in every day in a New York City loft. And so it went until they got an ear­ly break–a chance to per­form live at CBGB, as the open­ing act for The Ramones. “Hilly [Kristal, own­er of CBGB, asked John­ny [Ramone] if we could open for them, and John­ny said, ‘Sure, they’re gonna suck, so no prob­lem,’ ” Chris Frantz (Talk­ing Heads drum­mer), recalled in an inter­view with The New York Post. “There were very few peo­ple in the audi­ence, maybe 10 alto­geth­er,” he adds. “Five came to see us and five came to see the Ramones.” The lucky ones.

By 1977, the bands had released their debut albums and embarked on a Euro­pean tour togeth­er. Equal­ly inno­v­a­tive but styl­is­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent, their his­to­ries would remain for­ev­er intertwined–something that’s per­haps best cap­tured by the clip above. If we have our facts right, in Jan­u­ary 1977, the Talk­ing Heads opened a show at the Jab­ber­wocky Club at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty with a cov­er of The Ramones’ 1976 sin­gle “I Wan­na Be Your Boyfriend.”  You can lis­ten to the com­plete 20 minute set below. Also, in the Relat­eds fur­ther down, find footage of both bands play­ing at CBGB in 1974 and 1975.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975)

The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974)

Watch the Talk­ing Heads Play a Vin­tage Con­cert in Syra­cuse (1978)

The punk move­ment gave birth to hun­dreds of bands in a small amount of time, like a petri dish that just explodes under the right con­di­tions. Forty years lat­er, we are still liv­ing in the after­math of that explo­sion and sort­ing things out. Lists need to be made. And if you con­sid­er garage rock to be pro­to-punk, the list can be very long.

Four years ago, L.A. Week­ly cre­at­ed a list of the Top 20 punk albums of all time, but purists might despair to see Green Day on there or just any­thing after the ‘90s.

But they also turned to their colum­nist, Black Flag vocal­ist, intense spo­ken word per­former, and radio dee­jay Hen­ry Rollins, and asked him to cre­ate his own list. See them below, and hear them above (via this playlist).

• The Clash — The Clash (1977)
• Gen­er­a­tion X — Gen­er­a­tion X (1977)
• The Adverts — Cross­ing the Red Sea (1978)
• X Ray Spex — Germ Free Ado­les­cents (1978)
• The Sex Pis­tols — Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks (1977)
• The Ramones — The Ramones (1976)
• Eater — The Album (1977)
• The Damned — Damned Damned Damned (1977)
• The Fall — Hex Enduc­tion Hour (1982)
• The Buz­zcocks — Anoth­er Music In A Dif­fer­ent Kitchen (1978)
• The Saints — (I’m) Strand­ed (1977)
• UK Subs — Anoth­er Kind of Blues (1979)
• Wire — Pink Flag (1977)
• The Lurk­ers — Ful­ham Fall­out (1978)
• Alter­na­tive TV — The Image Has Cracked (1978)
• The Ruts — The Crack (1979)
• The Germs — GI (1979
• X — Los Ange­les (1980)
• The Min­ute­men — The Punch­line (1981)
• Stiff Lit­tle Fin­gers — Inflam­ma­ble Mate­r­i­al (1979)

In his brief intro, Rollins mulls over the eter­nal genre question–where does punk stop and post-punk begin?

Could Wire, also be con­sid­ered Post Punk? Where do you put bands like PIL, Joy Divi­sion, Tele­vi­sion, Pat­ti Smith, Sui­cide, and Killing Joke? What about Gang of Four, 999 and the Ban­shees? For me, as a lean def­i­n­i­tion, I go by the clas­sic UK 1977 grad­u­at­ing class, Pis­tols, Clash, etc., and go from there.

The list, he says, is in no par­tic­u­lar order, but it’s not a sur­prise to see the first Clash album at the top, fol­lowed by the debut albums of the Ramones, the Sex Pis­tols, The Damned, X, Wire, The Buz­zcocks, The Saints, The Germs, X‑Ray Spex, The Adverts, and Stiff Lit­tle Fin­gers. Very few on that list went on to top their debut, or even–such as the Pis­tols and The Germs–record a fol­low-up.

Rollins talked about this in an essay (also for the L.A. Week­ly) on why he loves anoth­er band on his list, the U.K. Subs.

How some of those bands were able to fol­low up with anoth­er album is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of musi­cal his­to­ry, as well as a study of tal­ent, vision and integri­ty. It is where the rub­ber tru­ly meets the road. After the explo­sive excite­ment of the ini­tial batch of songs has set­tled, the band often is left with a suc­cess-derived self-aware­ness that hangs like a cloud over the prac­tice room. The awful­ness of expec­ta­tion enters the equa­tion, and the results are not always good.

Rollins is a fan of the first four U.K. Subs LPs–“they are like desert island LPs. Records you can’t do with­out,” he once said.

Oth­er inter­est­ing choic­es on Rollins’ list: the shame­less Ramones-copy­ists The Lurk­ers, The Minutemen’s first album (instead of the undis­put­ed clas­sic Dou­ble Nick­els on the Dime), the less­er-known Eater, the Ruts, and the Fall’s Hex Enduc­tion Hour, which is punk in aes­thet­ic, but cer­tain­ly not in pro­duc­tion.

For a man who usu­al­ly has some­thing to say, it would have been cool to have some com­men­tary from Rollins on his choic­es. On the oth­er hand, maybe he’d just tell us to shut up. The music speaks for itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

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.

Every now and then, we check in on the fas­ci­nat­ing musi­cal world of Luna Lee–a musi­cian who per­forms West­ern music on the Gayageum, a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an stringed instru­ment which dates back to the 6th cen­tu­ry. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adap­ta­tions of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile;’ David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World;” Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah;” blues clas­sics by John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters; and Pink Floy­d’s “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky.” To keep the tra­di­tion going, today we bring you Luna’s beau­ti­ful take on Radio­head­’s debut sin­gle, “Creep” (1992). For any­one who some­how missed the 90s, we’ve includ­ed the orig­i­nal Radio­head music video below. Enjoy both.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play an Enchant­i­ng Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

Ultra Ortho­dox Rab­bis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

On what he deemed the 30th anniver­sary of hip hop, in 2004, Vil­lage Voice crit­ic Greg Tate wrote that the music’s “ubiq­ui­ty has cre­at­ed a com­mon ground and a com­mon ver­nac­u­lar for Black folk from 18 to 50 world­wide.” Its glob­al reach, how­ev­er, has made it a rich site for “cor­po­rate exploita­tion.” The com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship of hip hop and cap­i­tal­ism is some­thing of a “bit­ter trick.” The music “rep­re­sents Black cul­ture and Black cre­ative license in unique ways to the glob­al mar­ket­place, no mat­ter how com­mod­i­fied it becomes.” And yet it “has now become a seller’s mar­ket, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the mass­es is what­ev­er the board­room approves.”

Tate’s argu­ment that the music and cul­ture of hip hop are insep­a­ra­ble from glob­al­ized cap­i­tal­ism may part­ly explain why it roared into life in the eight­ies as a “con­ver­gence of ex-slaves and ch-hing,” just as the glob­al con­sumer mar­ket­place began to take its mod­ern shape. Young, artis­tic entre­pre­neurs begged, bor­rowed, and stole records and equip­ment, sens­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty for fame and rich­es in the cre­ative recu­per­a­tion of old sounds with new tech­nol­o­gy. Theirs was a lan­guage of ambi­tion and desire, a cel­e­bra­tion of sex and power—the lan­guage of moder­ni­ty writ­ten in com­plex rhyme and call-and-response. A lan­guage spo­ken over gen­er­a­tions and nations, and—now over ten years after Tate’s essay—spo­ken for over forty years of ever-increas­ing mar­ket share.

The ori­gins of hip hop have pro­vid­ed ample mate­r­i­al for enter­tain­ing fic­tion­al­iza­tions like Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down and pop­u­lar his­to­ries like the doc­u­men­tary Hip-Hip Evo­lu­tion. These lin­ear accounts present the genre to us in for­mats we find eas­i­ly digestible. Even as Luhrmann’s series attempts to mim­ic the hyper­ki­net­ic pace of rap, it tells a sto­ry as con­ven­tion­al as they come. To expe­ri­ence the past 40 years of hip hop on the genre’s own terms—its per­pet­u­al call­backs to its ances­tors, its seam­less inter­weav­ing of past and present—it’s almost as though you’d need to expe­ri­ence it all at once. And so you can, in the incred­i­ble mash-up video above from The Hood Inter­net.

Tak­ing over 150 songs from over 100 artists, the video puts them all in con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er “40 Years of Hip Hop” mash­es up “rap­pers from dif­fer­ent eras fin­ish­ing each other’s rhymes over inter­sect­ing beats, all woven togeth­er to make one song.” It’s an impres­sive tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, and one that throws into relief not only hip hop’s smooth, shiny hyper-cap­i­tal­ist embrace of tech­nol­o­gy but also, as the­o­rist and Black Atlantic author Paul Gilroy wrote, its counter-cul­tur­al core as a “means towards both indi­vid­ual self-fash­ion­ing and com­mu­nal lib­er­a­tion.”

See all of the artists rep­re­sent­ed here at the video’s YouTube page and stream or down­load the audio here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

Hip Hop Hits Sung Won­der­ful­ly in Sign Lan­guage: Eminem’s “Lose Your­self,” Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yel­low” & More

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness