The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

in Music, Television | February 13th, 2017

Few of us today, in search of unconventional artistry, would imagine mid-20th-century CBS game shows as a promising resource. But looking back, it turns out that American television of that era — a time and place when more people were exposed to the very same media than any before or since — managed to bring a surprising number of genuine creators before its mainstream-of-the-mainstream audience. In 1960, for instance, experimental composer John Cage performed Water Walk, his piece for a bathtub, pitcher, and ice cubes, on I’ve Got a Secret.

Three years later, Cage’s near-namesake John Cale took the show’s stage to play Erik Satie’s “melancholic yet deadpan, ecclesiastical yet demonic” Vexations. Though Cage didn’t make a reappearance for the occasion, he did have a connection to the music itself.

Dating to 1893 or 1894 and unpublished during Satie’s lifetime, Vexations’ score contains a note from the composer: “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses,” taken by the piece’s interpreters to mean that they should play it 840 times in a row.

Or at least that’s how Cage and collaborator Lewis Lloyd interpreted it when they staged its first public performance in 1963 at the Pocket Theatre in Manhattan. Its rotating roster of players, under the banner of the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, included a 21-year-old Cale. One week later on I’ve Got a Secret, the young Welshman’s participation in this daring performance constituted the secret the players had to guess. Having determined that his achievement has something to do with music, one lady asks the critical question: “Does it have anything to do with endurance?”

Yes, replies Cale, although the episode’s other secret-bearer, Karl Schenzer of the Living Theater, may have performed the real act of endurance as the sole audience member who stayed to watch the whole eighteen hours and forty minutes. (He certainly got a deal: Cage, believing that “the more art you consume, the less it should cost,” gave each audience member a five-cent refund for every twenty minutes they stayed.) I’ve Got a Secret’s home viewers then saw and heard Cale play Vexations, or at least 1/840th of it. They would hear from him again in his capacity as a founding member of the Velvet Underground — a band some of them would learn about a couple years later on the very same network’s Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

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Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico Reunite, Play Acoustic Velvet Underground Songs on French TV, 1972

Watch William S. Burroughs’ Ah Pook is Here as an Animated Film, with Music By John Cale

John Cage Performs Water Walk on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

A Sonic Introduction to Avant-Garde Music: Stream 145 Minutes of 20th Century Art Music, Including Modernism, Futurism, Dadaism & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Livery Stable Blues” (1917)

in Music | February 10th, 2017

Through turn-of-the-century America meandered blues, bluegrass, and “old time” music. Gospel hymns, waltzes, and marches. Perhaps the first truly national musical style, Ragtime took a little bit from all of these and fused them together, influencing everything from the crudest vaudeville to the work of some of Europe’s most innovative composers, including Antonin Dvořák, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie. But ragtime was still very much tied to the past, to its late 19th roots in minstrelsy and marches.

Then in 1917, a sound arrived that was so perfectly in tune with the age that it became singularly evocative of next decade to come. This was jazz, of course, or “jass,” as it was spelled on “Livery Stable Blues,” the first record of such music ever released, composed and played by the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band. The music arrived with the force of the “garage rock of the 1960s…. It was simple music played with so much irreverence that it proved irresistible” to Americans caught up in the country’s rapid urbanization and modernizing.

The first jazz record was transitional music—not necessarily a jazz big bang moment; “looser and more spontaneous than the ragtime that had swept the country at the turn of the century,” writes Geoffrey Himes at Smithsonian, “but lacking the improvised solos and elastic rhythm of jazz to come.” Just as in the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s, most jazz fans first came to know white groups like the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band before they met the black New Orleanians who invented the music.

But immediately after “Livery Stable Blues” the market was awash with both “jass” and “jazz” releases, including the first by a black American jazz act, Wilbur Sweatman and his Jass Band, and a jazz record from the legendary blues pioneer W.C. Handy from Memphis. Between 1916 and 1917, jazz went nationwide: New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and just about everywhere else in-between. As it spread its origins became muddled. “Just how the Jazz Band originated and where it came from is very hard to say,” wrote the sleeve of one later 1917 release.

Music historians agree that jazz was born in the nightclubs and on the streets of New Orleans, the home town of the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band. But “the question of who did what first,” writes Scott Alexander, “and what was ragtime and what was jazz is often a divisive question among those who are interested in early jazz.” Yet when it comes to making pop history, “Livery Stable Blues” had greater impact than somewhat similar-sounding records released around the same time. “The band was a sensation” writes Himes. And almost overnight the sound of jazz became the sound of 20th-century America.

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via Smithsonian

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

The History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & More

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

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Why We Love Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”: An Animated Music Lesson

in Animation, K-12, Life, Music, TED Talks | February 10th, 2017

Remember listening to Peter and the Wolf as a child, how the narrator would explain that certain instruments correspond to particular characters: the duck — an oboe, the wolf — three horns, and so on?

In the above TED-Ed lesson (memorably animated by Compote Collective), music historian Betsy Schwarm fulfills much the same role for The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. (Stream it here.)

Why are we so drawn to this Baroque concerto? Is it because we associate it with brunch?

The hundreds of movies and commercials that have featured it?

(Director Robert Benton chose Vivaldi rather than an original composer for the score of Kramer vs. Kramer, arguing that “Concerto in C Major for Mandolin & Strings” captured the troubled Manhattan couple’s refined lifestyle far better than the John Williams-esque bombast the ear associates with some many other cinematic hits of the period. The 1979 film’s success sent “The Four Seasons” to the top of the charts.)

These pleasant associations no doubt account for some of our fondness, but Professor Schwarm posits that the stories contained in the melodies are what really reel us in.

Basically, we’re in the thrall of a musical weather report, reveling in the way Vivaldi manages to bring to life both the birdies’ sunny spring song and the sudden thunderstorm that disrupts it.

Summer rolls out the meteorological big guns with a hailstorm.

Autumn’s cooler nighttime temperatures keep the wine-flushed peasants from turning their harvest celebrations into a full-on bacchanal.

Winter? Well perhaps you’re tucked up contentedly in front of the fireplace right now, gratified to be hearing your own comfort echoed in the largo section.

Inspired by the landscape paintings of artist, Marco Ricci, Vivaldi penned four poems that drive the movements of his most famous work. Their translations, below, are nowhere near as eloquent to the modern listener’s ear, but you’ll find that reading them along with your favorite recording of the Four Seasons will corroborate Professor Schwarm’s thesis.

Spring – Concerto in E Major

Allegro

Springtime is upon us.

The birds celebrate her return with festive song,

and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes.

Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven,

Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more.

Largo

On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

Allegro

Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of spring.

Summer – Concerto in g‑minor

Allegro non molto

Beneath the blazing sun’s relentless heat

men and flocks are sweltering,

pines are scorched.

We hear the cuckoo’s voice; then sweet songs of the turtle dove and finch are heard.

Soft breezes stir the air….but threatening north wind sweeps them suddenly aside. The shepherd trembles, fearful of violent storm and what may lie ahead.

Adagio e piano — Presto e forte

His limbs are now awakened from their repose by fear of lightning’s flash and thunder’s roar, as gnats and flies buzz furiously around.

Presto

Alas, his worst fears were justified, as the heavens roar and great hailstones beat down upon the proudly standing corn.

Autumn – Concerto in F Major

Allegro

The peasant celebrates with song and dance the harvest safely gathered in.

The cup of Bacchus flows freely, and many find their relief in deep slumber.

Adagio molto

The singing and the dancing die away

as cooling breezes fan the pleasant air,

inviting all to sleep

without a care.

Allegro

The hunters emerge at dawn,

ready for the chase,

with horns and dogs and cries.

Their quarry flees while they give chase.

Terrified and wounded, the prey struggles on,

but, harried, dies

Winter – Concerto in F‑minor

Allegro non molto

Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds;

running to and fro to stamp one’s icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.

Largo

To rest contentedly beside the hearth, while those outside are drenched by pouring rain.

Allegro

We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling.

Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.

We feel the chill north winds coarse through the home despite the locked and bolted doors…

this is winter, which nonetheless brings its own delights.

You can download the Wichita State University Chamber Players’ recording of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for free here.

See how well you retained your TED-ED lesson with a multiple choice quiz, then read more here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in less than three weeks. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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A Sonic Introduction to Avant-Garde Music: Stream 145 Minutes of 20th Century Art Music, Including Modernism, Futurism, Dadaism & Beyond

in Art, Music | February 9th, 2017

Avant-garde composers of the 20th century have left a vexing legacy, beginning perhaps with one of the century’s first minimalists, Erik Satie (1866 –1925), whose career illustrates a central paradox of experimental music: it can seem to most of us totally inaccessible, alien, and frustrating, yet it is also a pervasive influence on the sound of our everyday life.

For example, we are likely to never encounter, much less could most of us endure, the full measure of Satie’s 1893 Vexations, a short piece “melancholic yet deadpan, ecclesiastical yet demonic, strangely lacking direction,” and meant, writes Nick Shave at The Guardian, to be “repeated 840 times.” Long thought an ironic joke, in 1963 John Cage took up the challenge and with a “relay team of pianists, including John Cale,” staged a marathon performance at the end of which only one person remained in the audience.

Then we have the Satie of Gymnopédie No.1, a moving composition we’ve heard countless times in films, television shows, dinner parties, restaurants, etc. This piece and others like it, argues WFMU’s Kenneth Goldsmith, mark the birth of Ambient music, or what Satie puckishly called Furniture Music. “Today,” Goldsmith writes, “Furniture Music is unavoidable,” and everyone from Brian Eno to Aphex Twin to “the entire Muzak phenomenon… owes a debt to The Velvet Gentleman.”

Both the accessible and difficult strains of the eccentric French composer have been equally influential, and “just about every radical musical movement” of the previous century “can trace its roots back to Satie.” As we move through the century—encountering the work of Dada artists, Futurists, symphonic modernists, and musique concrète and early electronic pioneers—we find an enormous breadth of experimentation, both strangely intimidating and often strangely familiar, given how pervasive its influence on film and “furniture” music as well as on contemporary composers.

If you’re new to the dissonant and playful innovations of artists like Satie, F.T. Marinetti, Kurt Schwitters, Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and other provocateurs and radicals of the early decades of the last century, you could hardly do worse by way of introduction than the double compilation album above from LTM Recordings. Titled A Young Person’s Guide to the Avant-Garde and consisting of 26 tracks in total, the compilation includes an excerpt of Igor Stravinsky’s scandalous—for the time—1913 The Rite of Spring, and John Cage’s perplexing 1952 work of silence, 4’33” and begins with a mercifully brief 3‑minute rendition of Satie’s Vexations. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. If you have any problems playing the embedded playlist, please click on this link.)

We also have music from names we typically associate with visual art (Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia) and film (Jean Cocteau). And you will surely recognize the final piece, Ligeti’s “Atmospheres,” from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The collection, writes The Trebuchet in their review, “subtly hints at the fact that film soundtracks are the closest thing we have to grand compositions these days, and in fact the seeds for change were planted long ago during the era when Continental artists and musicians took an interest in the emerging technologies of automobiles, planes, and film.”

Then, of course, there were emerging technologies of sound. A Young Person’s Guide (purchase a copy online here) ends with Ligeti in 1961, and only hints at the electronic avant-garde to come with a 1953 composition from Stockhausen. This is a shame, since the electronic revolution in music opened doors for so many female experimentalists like Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, and Eliane Radigue. As it stands, the collection gives us an all-male lineup of artists—and one sure to provoke exclamations of “What about [insert name here]!”

It’s an understandable reaction to an ambitious but limited survey. For the amateur or “young person” just discovering this musical history, however, A Young Person’s Guide to the Avant-Garde offers a rich, compelling, and frequently confounding selection that can serve as a sturdy springboard for further study and exploration. Those so inspired to hear more can find it in the massive archive of The Avant-Garde Project.

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

The Women of the Avant-Garde: An Introduction Featuring Audio by Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith & More

Hear the Experimental Music of the Dada Movement: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Century Ago

Meet Four Women Who Pioneered Electronic Music: Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Improvises and Plays, Completely Unrehearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

in Music | February 7th, 2017

Most musicians have little chance of achieving lasting wealth and fame. It’s a profession in which only a tiny percentage of people ever “make it”—at least according to the impossibly high standards of celebrity we tend to apply. So why do people stick with it, year after year, through health scares, financial crises, and all the other grown-up hardships that kill many a childhood dream?

We often morbidly focus on rock and roll casualties. Look, however, at the stars who do survive the business decade after decade. Though music may not stave off aging, it clearly has the power to preserve youthful enthusiasm long into what some still call retirement years. The examples are too numerous to list; we could hardly do better than to look at the late career of Bruce Springsteen.

Like many of his generation, Springsteen was turned on to rock and roll by seeing Elvis, then later the Beatles, on The Ed Sullivan Show. And like budding musicians still today, he received his first guitar at 16 as a gift from his mother. (He later wrote a song about it.) Over 50 years later, he’s still got the wide-eyed wonder of his sixteen-year-old self. Or at least he’s willing to take teenage risks, pulling out one song every night during a recent tour with the E Street Band “that we haven’t played since we were, I don’t know, sixteen, or maybe never.”

It takes a youthful degree of fearlessness—or recklessness—to stand on stage in front of thousands of fans and play a totally unrehearsed tune, especially one as wordy and finely-tuned as Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” We know Bruce and the band have chops, so watching them run through a few different keys before they dig in doesn’t produce too much anxiety. Nonetheless, their ability to throw themselves into the total unknown, just for fun, makes the performance seem like the kind of stunt most of us only attempt before we’re taught to settle into much more predictable grown-up routines.

How well do they pull off the Berry classic on the spot and unrehearsed? See for yourself, and then compare it to the eternally youthful man himself, who at 90 years of age will soon release his first new album in 38 years.

Bruce Springsteen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Songwriter & Now Memoirist

Bruce Springsteen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Government. I’ve Come to Play Rock

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

How to Respond to the Challenges of Our Time?: Jazz Legends Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter Give 10 Pieces of Advice to Young Artists, and Everyone Else

in Art, Creativity, Current Affairs, Jazz, Music | February 7th, 2017

Some moments in history strike us as dramatic ruptures. Certainties are superseded, thrown into chaos by a seismic event, and we find ourselves adrift and anxious. What are artists to do? Gripped by the same fears as everyone else, the same sense of urgency, writers, musicians, filmmakers, painters, etc. may find themselves unable to “breathe with unconditional breath / the unconditioned air,” as Wendell Berry once described the creative process.

We might remember the radical break with tradition when the shocking carnage of World War I sent poets and painters into frightening places they had previously left unexplored. Virginia Woolf summed up the situation in her essay The Leaning Tower: “suddenly like a chasm in a smooth road, the [Great] war came.” Shattered as they were, her generation overcame their paralysis. Modernists of the early 20th century were able to speak to their broken age in ways that continue to speak to ours.

But we should temper our belief that bad times make good art by noting that the most visionary creative minds are not simply reactive, responding to tragedy like reporters on a crime scene. As Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock— two of the 20th century’s most consistently innovative musicians—suggest, artists at all times need a set of guiding principles. (See the two play “Memory of Enchantment” above in 2002.) There is always a lot of personal work to do. And in “turbulent and unpredictable times,” the two jazz greats advise, “the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you.”

A platitude, perhaps, but one they illustrated nearly a year ago in an open letter at Nest HQ with some profound, if challenging, prescriptions for our present cultural illnesses. Shorter and Hancock’s counsel is not a reaction to the rupture of the presidential election, but a response to the events that preceded it, “the horror at the Bataclan… the upheaval in Syria and the senseless bloodshed in San Bernardino.” Not passively waiting to find out where the past few years’ violence and unrest would lead, the two have made ethical, philosophical, and spiritual interventions, presenting their philosophy and ethics through jazz, Buddhism, science, art, and literature.

Below, you can read their ten pieces of advice “to the next generation of artists,” or at least excerpts thereof. They begin with a reassuring preface: “As an artist, creator and dreamer of this world, we ask you not to be discouraged by what you see but to use your own lives, and by extension your art, as vehicles for the construction of peace…. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters.” That said, they also want to assure readers that “these thoughts transcend professional boundaries and apply to all people, regardless of profession.”

First, awaken to your humanity

You cannot hide behind a profession or instrument; you have to be human. Focus your energy on becoming the best human you can be. Focus on developing empathy and compassion. Through the process you’ll tap into a wealth of inspiration rooted in the complexity and curiosity of what it means to simply exist on this planet.

Embrace and conquer the road less traveled

Don’t allow yourself to be hijacked by common rhetoric, or false beliefs and illusions about how life should be lived. It’s up to you to be the pioneers.

Welcome to the Unknown

Every relationship, obstacle, interaction, etc. is a rehearsal for the next adventure in life. Everything is connected. Everything builds. Nothing is ever wasted. This type of thinking requires courage. Be courageous and do not lose your sense of exhilaration and reverence for this wonderful world around you.

Understand the True Nature of Obstacles

We have this idea of failure, but it’s not real; it’s an illusion. There is no such thing as failure. What you perceive as failure is really a new opportunity, a new hand of cards, or a new canvas to create upon.

Don’t Be Afraid to Interact with Those Who Are Different from You

The world needs more one-on-one interaction among people of diverse origins with a greater emphasis on art, culture and education. Our differences are what we have in common…. We need to be connecting with one another, learning about one another, and experiencing life with one another. We can never have peace if we cannot understand the pain in each other’s hearts.

Strive to Create Agenda-Free Dialogue

Art in any form is a medium for dialogue, which is a powerful tool… we’re talking about reflecting and challenging the fears, which prevent us from discovering our unlimited access to the courage inherent in us all.

Be Wary of Ego

Creativity cannot flow when only the ego is served.

Work Towards a Business without Borders

The medical field has an organization called Doctors Without Borders. This lofty effort can serve as a model for transcending the limitations and strategies of old business formulas which are designed to perpetuate old systems in the guise of new ones.

Appreciate the Generation that Walked Before You

Your elders can help you. They are a source of wealth in the form of wisdom…. Don’t waste time repeating their mistakes.

Lastly, We Hope that You Live in a State of Constant Wonder

As we accumulate years, parts of our imagination tend to dull. Whether from sadness, prolonged struggle, or social conditioning, somewhere along the way people forget how to tap into the inherent magic that exists within our minds. Don’t let that part of your imagination fade away.

Whether you’re a jazz fan, musician, artist, writer, accountant, cashier, trucker, teacher, or whatever, I can’t think of a wiser set of guidelines with which to confront the suffocating epidemic of cynicism, delusional thinking, rampant bigotry, hatred, and self-absorption of our time. Read Shorter and Hancock’s full open letter at Nest HQ.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre on How American Jazz Lets You Experience Existentialist Freedom & Transcendence

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

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Discover the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Personal Library: Foucault, Joyce, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Buckminster Fuller & More

in Books, Literature, Music, Philosophy | February 6th, 2017

Image by or Rob Bogaerts/Fotocollectie Anefo

To properly honor your cultural role models, don’t try to do what they did, or even to think what they thought, but to think how they thought. This goes at least double for John Cage, the experimental composer whose innovative works can be, and often are, re-staged (go on, have four minutes and 33 seconds of silence to yourself), but it takes a different kind of effort altogether to cultivate the kind of mind that would come up with them in the first place. As a means of activating your own inner Cageness, you could do much worse than read through his personal library, a list of whose books you’ll find at johncage.org.

The volumes number 1126 in total, and if you load the library’s main page, it will present you with a list of ten randomly selected books. (You can get a list of all of them by selecting the “See Entire Library” option on the left sidebar.)

Hitting refresh a few times will give you a sense of the breadth of Cage’s reading: Emma Goldman on anarchism, Chinese poetry gathered by Kenneth Rexroth, M. Conrad Hyers’ Zen and the Comic Spirit (two of Cage’s driving forces if ever I’ve heard them), How to Play Backgammon, essays on Ulysses (an interest shared with Marilyn Monroe), and even essays on John Cage. Here we’ve assembled a list of ten books from Cage’s library of particular interest to the Open Culture reader:

Fundamentals of Music Composition by Arnold Schoenberg
Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies by R. Buckminster Fuller
Aveline Kushi’s Complete Guide to Macrobiotic Cooking by Aveline Kushi
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson
The Virginia Woolf Poems edited by Jackson Mac Low
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
An Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho
The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage by Marjorie Perloff
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci by Leonard Da Vinci
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault

To those who know anything of Cage’s life and interests, his shelves on healthy eating—on which Dining Naturally in Japan: A Restaurant Guide to Wholesome Food also appears, as, naturally given the era and Cage’s acquired northern-Californianness, The Tassajara Bread Book—and especially the eating of mushrooms, come as no surprise, nor might his inclination toward philosophy. But we should note what looks like a particular fascination with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, evidenced by 22 of the books in his library: his best-known works like the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but also his letters, lectures, and notebooks, as well as biographies, commentaries, and Wittgenstein and Buddhism, which Cage must have considered an exciting find indeed.

In one of his most quotable quotes, Cage describes college as “two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.” And indeed, 1126 people can read 1126 books—or many more people can each read a different subset of those books. While you could methodically read your way through Cage’s entire library, and would surely learn a great deal in the process, wouldn’t making use of the unthinking guidance of the ten-random-books function, surrendering the direction of this informal education to the kind of chance that places Paul Bowles next to the common fungi of North American and Charles Ives next to Italian futurism, be a much more Cagean way of going about it?

(h/t @lrlarson)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg & More

in Music, Politics | February 6th, 2017

When I was growing up, protest music meant Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, and—for some few Americans and very many Brits—Billy Bragg: an artist “at home with both socialist politics and heartbreak,” writes Allmusic, “styled on the solo attack of early Dylan and the passion of the Clash.” Known for his pro-labor, anti-Thatcher, anti-war, pro “Sexuality” stances, Bragg has been a stalwart campaigner for peace and justice since the 1980s.

A veteran activist who made appearances at Occupy Wall Street and the recent Women’s March in London, Bragg lately lamented the state of protest music. “Look at what’s happening in the world,” he told The Guardian in 2011, “When I was first plying my trade, people were willing to talk about these issues. Now they’d rather write about getting blasted than changing the world.”

Much has changed since 2011, I don’t need to tell you. And the protest song has returned, from Anohni’s beautiful, haunting 2016 album Hopeless (see “Drone Bomb Me” above) to Pussy Riot’s frighteningly prescient “Make America Great Again,” released just before the election. We’ve heard it said that “protest songs are pointless,” but they’ve carried many a movement through many a seemingly hopeless moment. Bragg himself, still plying his trade, rewrote the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s classic “The Times They Are A‑Changing” as “The Times They Are A‑Changing Back” (at the top), just thirty minutes after the inaugural speech, and “with apologies” to Dylan.

Bragg clearly has deep roots in the genre, but are Anohni and Pussy Riot’s melodic provocations protest music? What about the empowering anthems of Beyoncé or the poetic ruminations of Solange? Just what makes a protest song? Every generation will have their own criteria, and their own pantheon of political artists. Whether you look back to the wry folk songs of Woody Guthrie, to the Golden Age of Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger; to the Beatles or Neil Young; or to punk rock, hip-hop, reggae, or the funk soul of Marvin Gaye, you will find a few favorites on the Spotify playlist above. It features 58 tracks and runs about 4 hours and 15 minutes. If you want a direct link to the playlist, click here. If you need Spotify’s software, please download it here.

To produce the playlist, we culled through best-of lists from Radio X, Rolling Stone, Amnesty International, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the blog Music to Die For, who in 2007 created some strict definitions of a protest song:

– A piece of music that is a great song in its own right. Good words and fine sentiments are not enough. The music must move us.

– A song that has a purpose. A song that doesn’t confine itself to commenting on or bemoaning the ills of the world, but seeks in some small way to change things. It may do this by calling directly for something to happen – “free Nelson Mandela”, by informing us, by appealing to our hearts and our emotions, or by challenging commonly held ideas.

– It follows from this that a true protest song should address a specific issue or issues that are current. Songs about wars and revolutions in days long gone are not included here.

– Finally the song should provoke the listener : shock us, unsettle us, amaze us, inspire us, make us angry, make us sad or make us optimistic. If it doesn’t do any of these things, it hardly deserves to be called a protest song. So be warned : there’s a lot of anger and a lot of emotion in these songs.

I’ll admit, I take issue with some of these criteria—I’d argue, for example, that Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is a timeless protest song that doesn’t reference any specific event or offer a solution (except “judgment day”). But you are free to disagree. Some of the songs on our playlist came from reader suggestions. We’d love to hear some others. What would you add to the list? And how do you define a “protest song”? Feel free to add your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below.

Bob Dylan Plays First Live Performance of “Hurricane,” His Song Defending Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (RIP) in 1975

Bed Peace Revisits John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Vietnam Protests

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

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