The Best Commercial Ever? James Brown Sells Miso Soup (1992)

in Film, Food & Drink, Music, Television, Travel | October 14th, 2016

Most stars are under­stand­ably choosy about what prod­ucts, if any, they’re will­ing to endorse. Seri­ous artists are mind­ful about their rep­u­ta­tions.

The late great God­fa­ther of Soul James Brown lent his prodi­gious tal­ents to McDon­alds (for a price), but it’s worth not­ing that most of the heavy lift­ing was done by a cast of unknowns play­ing tick­et hold­ers for­ti­fy­ing them­selves before a hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed con­cert. Brown arrives at the end, to bedaz­zle every­one in the restau­rant with his fan­cy foot­work, sequined suit, and sheer prox­im­i­ty.

Clear­ly, the Hard­est Work­ing Man in Show Busi­ness had stan­dards.

(Since his death in 2006, his hits have been used to sell ath­let­ic wear, gin, beer, and pork ten­der­loin, proof that these things are hard­er to con­trol from beyond the grave.)

Japan­ese tele­vi­sion is one are­na where many West­ern celebri­ties are will­ing to relax their usu­al poli­cies. The prospect of an enor­mous pay­check for so lit­tle work is hard to beat, though in the age of Youtube, there’s a far greater like­li­hood that their core fans will see the results.

Youtube was not a con­cern in 1992, when Brown filmed the above 15-sec­ond spot for Nissin Cup Noo­dles. No one can accuse him of phon­ing it in. He dances, lip synchs soup-cen­tric Japan­ese lyrics to the tune of Sex Machine, and even—in a longer ver­sion on a kitchen set—pours boil­ing water into the cup, just like mil­lions of bud­get-con­scious artists and stu­dents the world over.

What he doesn’t do is “bite and smile,” a sta­ple of com­mer­cial act­ing. He rais­es a fork­ful of prod­uct to his mouth with an oblig­ing grin, but doesn’t ingest so much as a noo­dle.

For that, we must turn to for­mer body­builder and Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, who sup­ple­ment­ed his movie career as Nissin Cup Noo­dles’ pre­vi­ous Japan­ese TV pitch­man. Not only did he con­sent to fun­ny cos­tumes, he pile dri­ves that ramen like a World Record in Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing depends on it. None of that clown­ing for Brown!

Read­ers, we invite you to con­tribute to our schol­ar­ship of West­ern celebs’ Japan­ese TV com­mer­cials in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Brown Gives You Danc­ing Lessons: From The Funky Chick­en to The Booga­loo

David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Com­mer­cials from the 1960s Through 2013

Jim Henson’s Vio­lent Wilkins Cof­fee Com­mer­cials (1957–1961)

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 March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature for Creating “New Poetic Expressions within the Great American Song Tradition”

in Literature, Music | October 13th, 2016

twitter-dylan-nobel

Image cour­tesy of The Nobel Prize’s Twit­ter stream.

His apoc­a­lyp­tic poet­ry plucks images and forms from the blues, the Bible, the Beats, Sym­bol­ists, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, and a bal­ladeer tra­di­tion dat­ing from medieval French and Eng­lish min­strel­sy to Appalachi­an set­tle­ment to Woody Guthrie, his first muse. His nar­ra­tive voice shifts from work to work as he has ful­ly embod­ied var­i­ous Amer­i­can char­ac­ters for over half a century—folk trou­ba­dour, rock and roll trick­ster, earnest coun­try croon­er, evan­ge­list, weary blues­man, star­ry-eyed jazz singer. “There is no sys­tem­at­ic way of ana­lyz­ing Dylan’s song lyrics or poems,” writes Julia Call­away at the Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies blog; “they span more than five decades of his­tor­i­cal con­text and musi­cal style. But per­haps one of the most inter­est­ing sides of Dylan is how he uses lan­guage and his lyrics to project cer­tain iden­ti­ties, includ­ing folksinger and protest-musi­cian.”

Dylan began in that tra­di­tion with songs like “The Times They Are A‑Changin’” and “A Hard Rains A‑Gonna Fall”—pick­ing up Guthrie’s inflec­tions and man­ner­isms in bal­lads much more sophis­ti­cat­ed than they seemed at first lis­ten. “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” is a “sev­en minute epic,” writes Rolling Stone, “that warns against a com­ing apoc­a­lypse while cat­a­loging hor­rif­ic visions—gun-toting chil­dren, a tree drip­ping blood—with the wide-eyed fer­vor of John the Rev­e­la­tor.” The song “began life as a poem, which Dylan like­ly banged out on a type­writer owned by his bud­dy… Wavy Gravy.” Dylan has been ambiva­lent about whether or not we should call him a poet, but this is how so much of his work took shape—banged out on type­writ­ers in New York apartments—as poet­ry set to music. “Every line in [A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall] is actu­al­ly the start of a whole song,” said Dylan, “but when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”

After over five decades of lyrics packed with allu­sion and dense­ly woven themes and mean­ings, Dylan has had time to write those songs—several more apoc­a­lyp­tic epics set to a few chords on the acoustic gui­tar. “There are some nov­els, some trilo­gies, in fact, with less actu­al con­tent than Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watch­tow­er,’” says the Nerd­writer in the analy­sis of that cryp­tic John Wes­ley Hard­ing song above. One could say the same about cer­tain songs that appear on near­ly every Dylan record, like the 11-minute “Des­o­la­tion Row,” below. Amid only a few mis­steps, Dylan has released album after album, decade after decade, that show­case his unpar­al­leled word­craft in var­i­ous song forms. And some of his finest work has appeared only in recent years, when it seems his career might have come to a close. Despite some mixed reac­tions—and some con­cern for Philip Roth—most peo­ple have respond­ed to news this morn­ing of his win for the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture with a decid­ed, “yes, of course.”

Dylan’s recog­ni­tion by the Nobel Com­mit­tee val­i­dates not only the song­writer him­self, but the form he embraced and shaped. As per­ma­nent sec­re­tary of the Swedish Acad­e­my Sara Danius remarked in her announce­ment, Dylan “cre­at­ed new poet­ic expres­sions with­in the Amer­i­can song tra­di­tion.”  The award rep­re­sents “a recog­ni­tion of the whole tra­di­tion that Bob Dylan rep­re­sents,” says crit­ic David Had­ju, “so it’s part­ly a retroac­tive award for Robert John­son and Hank Williams and Smokey Robin­son and the Bea­t­les. It should have been tak­en seri­ous­ly as an art form a long time ago.” One could argue that Amer­i­can song has already been tak­en as seri­ous­ly as any art form, but that it isn’t lit­er­a­ture.

Sev­er­al peo­ple have done so. As New York Times writer Hiroko Tabuchi put it, “this might be a dis­ap­point­ing day for book­sellers and pub­lish­ers.” Hard­ly. Not only does Dylan have a mem­oir out, Chron­i­cles: Vol­ume One, the first of a planned tril­o­gy, but we may also find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his first book, 1966’s Taran­tu­la. Dylan’s songs and draw­ings have been turned into pic­ture books, pub­lished in col­lec­tions, and pored over in biog­ra­phy after biog­ra­phy, com­men­tary after com­men­tary. And next month, Dylan him­self will release The Lyrics: Since 1962, a com­pre­hen­sive, defin­i­tive col­lec­tion of the song­writer’s lyrics, com­plete with expert anno­ta­tions. You can pre-order a copy here.

The lit­er­ary out­put by and about Dylan should keep book­sellers busy for many months after this announce­ment. But Dylan’s is pri­mar­i­ly a liv­ing, bardic tra­di­tion, lest we for­get that all lit­er­a­ture began as song. So con­grat­u­la­tions to Dylan and for per­haps long-over­due recog­ni­tion of Amer­i­can songcraft as a gen­uine­ly lit­er­ary art form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Young Bob Dylan, Before Releas­ing His First Album, Tell Amaz­ing Tales About Grow­ing Up in a Car­ni­val

Hear Bob Dylan’s Unedit­ed & Bewil­der­ing Inter­view With Nat Hentoff for Play­boy Mag­a­zine (1965)

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

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

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The Night When Charlie Parker Played for Igor Stravinsky (1951)

in Music | October 12th, 2016

parker-stravinsky

Image (left) by William P. Got­tlieb, image (right) by Library of Con­gress, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The his­to­ry of 20th-cen­tu­ry music offers plen­ty of sto­ries of lumi­nar­ies meet­ing, play­ing togeth­er, and some­times even enter­ing into long-term col­lab­o­ra­tion. But it typ­i­cal­ly only hap­pened with­in tra­di­tions: encoun­ters between rock and rock, jazz and jazz, mod­ernism and mod­ernism. And so it still thrills to hear of the time in 1951 when Char­lie Park­er added one more sto­ry to the most sto­ried jazz club of all time by per­form­ing for Igor Stravin­sky at Bird­land. Alfred Appel tells it defin­i­tive­ly in his book Jazz Mod­ernism: From Elling­ton and Arm­strong to Matisse and Joyce:

The house was almost full, even before the open­ing set — Bil­ly Taylor’s piano trio — except for the con­spic­u­ous emp­ty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusu­al for Bird­land. After the pianist fin­ished his forty-five-minute set, a par­ty of four men and a woman set­tled in at the table, rather clam­orous­ly, three wait­ers swoop­ing in quick­ly to take their orders as a rip­ple of whis­pers and excla­ma­tions ran through Bird­land at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravin­sky. He was a celebri­ty, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanc­ti­fied mod­ern jazz by com­pos­ing Ebony Con­cer­to for Woody Her­man and his Orches­tra (1946) — a Covar­ru­bias “Impos­si­ble Inter­view” come true.

As Parker’s quin­tet walked onto the band­stand, trum­peter Red Rod­ney rec­og­nized Stravin­sky, front and almost cen­ter. Rod­ney leaned over and told Park­er, who did not look at Stravin­sky. Park­er imme­di­ate­ly called the first num­ber for his band, and, for­go­ing the cus­tom­ary greet­ing to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the open­ing notes, played in uni­son by trum­pet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck.

They were play­ing “KoKo,” which, because of its epochal break­neck tem­po — over three hun­dred beats per minute on the metronome — Park­er nev­er assayed before his sec­ond set, when he was suf­fi­cient­ly warmed up. Parker’s phras­es were fly­ing as flu­ent­ly as ever on this par­tic­u­lar daunt­ing “Koko.” At the begin­ning of his sec­ond cho­rus he inter­po­lat­ed the open­ing of Stravinsky’s Fire­bird Suite as though it had always been there, a per­fect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the num­ber. Stravin­sky roared with delight, pound­ing his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass send­ing its liquor and ice cubes onto the peo­ple behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked.

Park­er did­n’t just hap­pen to know a few bits of Stravin­sky to whip out as a nov­el­ty; he had, at that point, already deeply inter­nal­ized the work of the man who com­posed The Rite of Spring (1913), the most rhyth­mi­cal­ly com­plex piece of orches­tral music to date.

“Jazz musi­cians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music start­ed play­ing; he was speak­ing some­thing close to their lan­guage,” writes New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross in his book The Rest Is Noise: Lis­ten­ing to the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. “When Char­lie Park­er came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occa­sion by incor­po­rat­ing the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’.”

In a piece on why jazz musi­cians love The Rite of Spring, NPR’s Patrick Jaren­wat­tananon dis­cuss­es oth­er instances where Park­er quot­ed (or paid musi­cal trib­ute to) Stravin­sky: “A per­son­al favorite comes from 1947, when Park­er was a guest soloist on trum­peter and arranger Neal Hefti’s ‘Rep­e­ti­tion,’ as heard on a com­pi­la­tion called The Jazz Scene. Not only does Hefti’s arrange­ment quote the tran­si­tion­al horn motif which sig­nals the sec­ond half of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ move­ment from The Rite, but Park­er riffs on the same motif to start his solo.”

Dylan Thomas: A Cen­te­nary Cel­e­bra­tion con­tains a chap­ter by Daniel G. Williams on Dylan Thomas and Char­lie Park­er, which, in estab­lish­ing Park­er’s engage­ment in “reviv­i­fy­ing the vocab­u­lary of jazz,” gets into how that got him draw­ing from Stravin­sky, whose work Park­er called “music at its best.” Williams quotes Park­er’s trum­peter Howard McGhee as remem­ber­ing that Park­er “knew every­thing, and he hipped me to, like, Stravin­sky and all those guys. I did­n’t know noth­in’ about Stravin­sky.” When Park­er brought The Rite of Spring over to lis­ten to at McGhee’s house, he pref­aced the expe­ri­ence with these words: “Yeah, this cat, he’s kind of cool, you know; he knows what he’s doing.” And the more we learn about what went into Park­er’s music, the more we real­ize that he, too, knew even more thor­ough­ly what he was doing than we’d ever real­ized.

via Jer­ry Jazz Musi­cian/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music of 3 Char­lie Park­er Jazz Clas­sics: “Con­fir­ma­tion,” “Au Pri­vave” & “Bloom­di­do”

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion for Its 100th Anniver­sary

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 Face­book.

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Hear Steve Reich’s Minimalist Compositions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Journey Through His Influential Recordings

in Music | October 11th, 2016

If you’re of a cer­tain vin­tage, you may at var­i­ous times have grooved to The Orb’s chill-out clas­sic “Lit­tle Fluffy Clouds,” the spaced-out sound­scapes of DJ Spooky, the avant-psych of Son­ic Youth, the locked grooves of Tor­toise, the bub­bling fugues of Björk, or the omi­nous rum­blings of postrock god­fa­thers God­speed You! Black Emper­or. And if so, you very like­ly know at least some of the work of min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er Steve Reich, which these artists either sam­pled or drew on for musi­cal inspi­ra­tion. Like many of his avant-garde col­leagues, Reich has “influ­enced gen­er­a­tions of pop, jazz and clas­si­cal musi­cians over the last half-cen­tu­ry,” writes Tom Ser­vice at The Guardian.

While many artists men­tion min­i­mal­ists like Ter­ry Riley, Philip Glass, or John Cage as sem­i­nal influ­ences, few of those com­posers have been as direct­ly woven into the fab­ric of mod­ern music through col­lab­o­ra­tion, sam­pling, and remix­ing as Reich. Ser­vice goes so far as to spec­u­late, “if you were to sub­tract Steve Reich from the total sum of today’s musi­cal cul­ture, I think you’d notice more of a dif­fer­ence than if you took away any oth­er sin­gle fig­ure.” That’s debatable—Reich’s influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture is oblique. But it does describe the degree to which his musi­cal inno­va­tions have per­me­at­ed exper­i­men­tal, indie, and elec­tron­ic music and “giv­en the con­tem­po­rary musi­cal world a license to groove” while still get­ting plen­ty heady and push­ing con­cep­tu­al bound­aries.

Reich’s use of phas­ing effects, drone notes, polyrhyth­mic pat­terns, and “process music” lend each of his com­po­si­tions a trance-like atmos­phere that might be most famil­iar from his 1976 piece “Music for 18 Musi­cians” (top). Here, the “per­cus­sion­ists, string play­ers, clar­inetists, singers and pianists” cre­ate “an ever-chang­ing, kalei­do­scop­ic sound­world” that expands and aug­ments all of Reich’s pre­vi­ous tech­niques for sculpt­ing in time. If the piece sounds famil­iar, though you’ve nev­er heard it before, that’s because of the thor­ough incor­po­ra­tion of Reich into so much mod­ern music, includ­ing per­haps sev­er­al dozen sounda­like film scores and Bri­an Eno’s pio­neer­ing first man­i­fes­ta­tions of what came to be called ambi­ent music.

Reich con­ceived of music as a “per­cep­ti­ble process,” writ­ing in 1968, “I want to be able to hear the process hap­pen­ing through­out the sound­ing music… a musi­cal process should hap­pen extreme­ly grad­u­al­ly.” Indeed, stu­dents of his music have found ways to take apart and dupli­cate those process­es in their own work, some­thing Reich, who has worked with remix artists and Radio­head, appre­ci­ates. (Just above, see Radio­head­’s John­ny Green­wood per­form a solo ver­sion of Reich’s Elec­tric Coun­ter­point in 2011.) Like many of the artists he appre­ci­ates and inspires, much of Reich’s work deals direct­ly with sociopo­lit­i­cal themes, as Ser­vice notes, includ­ing “the Holo­caust, Mid­dle East­ern his­to­ry and pol­i­tics, and con­tem­po­rary con­flict” like the behead­ing of Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Daniel Pearl.

In the Spo­ti­fy playlist fur­ther up, you’ll find a broad sam­pling of per­for­mances of Reich’s less­er-known ear­ly work—like the 1965 tape loop piece “It’s Gonna Rain”—and more famous com­po­si­tions like The Cave, Dif­fer­ent Trains, Music for 18 Musi­cians, Elec­tric Coun­ter­point, Drum­ming, Clap­ping Music, and much more. Just as we can hear the musi­cal process­es devel­op­ing with­in each com­po­si­tion, we can hear the process of Reich’s devel­op­ment over the course of his career as he incor­po­rates influ­ences from Bach to Coltrane to the songs of Kid A. As a con­se­quence of both his groovi­ness and his appeal to mod­ernists of every decade, Reich, writes Ivan Hewett at The Tele­graph, is “both aching­ly hip and a grand old man”—and a seem­ing­ly end­less source of musi­cal inspi­ra­tion since the 1960s.

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here. Below, you can see Reich talk­ing about his most influ­en­tial works in a CBC inter­view record­ed ear­li­er this year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Björk Presents Ground­break­ing Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cians on the BBC’s Mod­ern Min­i­mal­ists (1997)

The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cut­ting-Edge Com­posers, Includ­ing Stravin­sky, Schoen­berg, Cage & More

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

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Watch the Proto-Punk Band The Monks Sow Chaos on German TV, 1966: A Great Concert Moment on YouTube

in Music | October 7th, 2016


Call them pro­to-punk, call them avant-garde, but the Amer­i­can ex-pat group the Monks would have been a tiny foot­note in rock music his­to­ry if it wasn’t for a slow redis­cov­ery of the group’s work. The above video is from their sum­mer 1966 appear­ance on Beat Club, a live pop music show broad­cast in Ger­many.

Enthu­si­as­tic teens bop away to the repet­i­tive stomp of “Monk Chant,” with its trib­al drums from Roger John­ston, a mul­ti-tam­borine attack, and a solo sec­tion which fea­tures both Lar­ry Clark’s man­ic organ and three band mem­bers attack­ing the strings of a prone gui­tar. There’s a sense that any­thing can hap­pen. These guys are glee­ful­ly crazy. (On oth­er songs, band mem­ber Dave Day Havliceck would fur­ther freak out audi­ences with his elec­tric ban­jo.)

Nei­ther ur-hip­pies nor beat­niks, the guys behind the Monks were five Amer­i­can G.I.s who were sta­tioned in Ger­many and first start­ed a more tra­di­tion­al garage rock band called the Five Torquays (not to be con­fused with the surf band from Orange Coun­ty). After one sin­gle, they dropped the cov­er songs and try­ing to ape pop­u­lar trends and turned into the Monks, shav­ing their heads in a monas­tic style and dress­ing in monk’s cloth­ing.

Their bru­tal, repet­i­tive songs and anti-Viet­nam war lyrics were ahead of their time, but the lat­ter was one of the main rea­sons they found it hard to break into the Amer­i­can mar­ket after they released Black Monk Time on Poly­dor Ger­many. That and inter­nal con­flict with­in the band led to the band break­ing up in 1967. You can hear a lot of the Monks in the Vel­vet Under­ground, but it’s hard to say one was an influ­ence on the oth­er. It’s more like one great idea was in the air and only cer­tain peo­ple had their anten­nas up.

The influ­ence of the Monks popped up in the abra­sive and hyp­not­ic sounds of Krautrock sev­er­al years lat­er, and by the late 1980s post-punk band The Fall were cov­er­ing their songs “I Hate You,” “Oh, How to Do Now,” and “Shut Up.”

Jon Spencer, Mike D. of the Beast­ie Boys, Gen­e­sis P. Orridge of Psy­chic T.V., and Stephen Malk­mus of Pave­ment would all cred­it the Monks as an influ­ence.

In 1997, their sole album was rere­leased and two years lat­er the band reunit­ed for a New York con­cert to pro­mote a ret­ro­spec­tive com­pi­la­tion. In 2004, band mem­ber Roger John­ston passed from lung can­cer, and after Transat­lantic Feed­back, a 2006 doc­u­men­tary on the group, sev­er­al oth­er mem­bers had passed away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

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.

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Experience Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Virtual Reality: Download the Free App Created by Queen & Google

in Music, Technology | October 5th, 2016

You don’t just lis­ten to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”; you expe­ri­ence it. Any­one who’s ever heard Queen’s sig­na­ture pro­gres­sive rock epic knows it, and any­one who’s ever per­formed all six min­utes of it at a karaoke bar under­stands it more deeply still. The song, which rumor holds to have cost more to record than any sin­gle to date, made use of the lat­est stu­dio tech­niques; now, tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly imag­in­able when the song hit the charts in 1975 has giv­en us a whole new way to expe­ri­ence “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through either the Google Card­board app or as a 360° video.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Queen, Google Play, and VR devel­op­er Eno­sis, The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence offers a three-dimen­sion­al audio­vi­su­al jour­ney fea­tur­ing “inter­ac­tive ele­ments and spa­tial sound, allow­ing you to step inside the music.” The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Kara Weisen­stein describes it as “peer­ing into Fred­die Mercury’s brain. The musi­cian was famous­ly coy about the song’s mean­ing, and while it doesn’t give any­thing away, this expe­ri­ence ren­ders Mercury’s imag­i­na­tion in resplen­dent pur­ples and blues. The bal­lad is a play­ful won­der­land of bicy­cling skele­tons and ani­mat­ed globes. Dur­ing the opera, the scene is a spooky cave. The rock sec­tion is a neon trip through space, and the coda is a drip­py, inter­galac­tic auro­ra.”

“ ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ is unusu­al, isn’t it?” asks Queen’s lead gui­tarist and self-described VR pro­po­nent Bri­an May in the video on the mak­ing of The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence above. “Even 40 years lat­er, or what­ev­er it is, [the 1975 song] still sounds inno­v­a­tive.” And it began inspir­ing inno­va­tion right after its record­ing, when it led to the six-minute film that, years before MTV, prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed the form of the music video. Does this new project her­ald an era when every sin­gle must, by neces­si­ty, come accom­pa­nied by a full-fledged VR jour­ney? For the moment, that ques­tion remains among the unan­swered, right along­side the one Queen has been ask­ing for over four decades now: “Is this the real life? Is this just fan­ta­sy?”

Enter the The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence here. 

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Music of Queen Re-Imag­ined by “Extra­or­di­nary” Clas­si­cal Pianist, Natalia Pos­no­va

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 Face­book.

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Pete Seeger Teaches You How to Play Guitar for Free in The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide (1955)

in Education, Music | October 4th, 2016

800px-pete_seeger_1986

Image by Josef Schwarz, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Along with earnest polit­i­cal pop­ulism and a renewed inter­est in region­al cul­tures, the folk revival of the fifties and six­ties brought with it a lib­er­at­ing sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty, as young writ­ers, singers, and artists dis­cov­ered that, tru­ly, any­one can play gui­tar. Or rather, any­one can pick up most any stringed instru­ment and, with a few fun­da­men­tals, enjoy the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing and play­ing music in a way that seemed unavail­able or for­bid­ding before peo­ple like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan appeared on the scene.

Both pop­u­lar­iz­ers of Woody Guthrie’s Depres­sion-era bal­lads and of obscure blues and folk artists, Dylan and Seeger took very dif­fer­ent approach­es to their art. The for­mer cul­ti­vat­ed a mys­tique that seems impos­si­ble to pen­e­trate, and that has made him seem—as Todd Haynes’ mas­ter­ful film I’m Not There dramatizes—like a series of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But Seeger has always been Seeger, from his gen­tle, aw-shucks demeanor and warm acces­si­bil­i­ty to his staunch­ly pro­gres­sive mes­sages that speak to chil­dren and reg­u­lar folks as well as to those with more sophis­ti­cat­ed tastes and tal­ents.

So it seems only nat­ur­al that Seeger released an album of gui­tar instruc­tion, The Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide, addressed to both begin­ners and more advanced play­ers. “I guess any musi­cal instru­ment can be as hard to play as you want to make it,” Seeger begins, in one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly flu­id tran­si­tions from song to speech: “If you want­ed to be a per­son like Andres Segovia or Mer­le Travis, why it would take a life­time of train­ing. But for most of us, play­ing a gui­tar can be about as sim­ple as walk­ing.” After that reas­sur­ing com­par­i­son, he does remind us, how­ev­er, that “it took us all a cou­ple years to learn how to walk.”

Seeger begins with first steps—tuning the instrument—and patient­ly leads his lis­ten­ers through some basic chord shapes, strum­ming tech­niques, and then more advanced pick­ing meth­ods, alter­nate tun­ings, and styles like Fla­men­co, “Rhum­ba Rhythm,” and “Mex­i­can Blues.” You can lis­ten to the album track-by-track on Spo­ti­fy, fur­ther up. (You can also find it kick­ing around on YouTube.) Like the great edu­ca­tor he was, Seeger also includes some help­ful visu­al aids in the album’s lin­er notes (see them here), includ­ing draw­ings of chord fin­ger­ings, musi­cal nota­tion, and gui­tar tab­la­ture for those who don’t read music. In addi­tion to his read­able instruc­tions, he also includes the lyrics to all of the folk songs ref­er­enced through­out.

“Prac­tice each small sec­tion over and over,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion, “until it comes easy. Actu­al­ly, if you enjoy play­ing the gui­tar, you shouldn’t think of it as prac­tic­ing, in the for­mal sense. Rather sim­ply play for your own enjoy­ment and that of your friends.” He also rec­om­mends that his lis­ten­ers “beg, bor­row, or steal” the records he ref­er­ences in the book­let, for “they will be of help to you in giv­ing you an idea of the scope and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment.” I can’t think of a music teacher more invit­ing than Seeger, nor a method more relaxed.

A sec­ond vol­ume fea­tur­ing Jer­ry Sil­ver­man appeared soon after, and upped the ante a good bit. “Musi­cal stan­dards are on the rise,” Sil­ver­man says in his intro­duc­tion, “the vir­tu­oso folk gui­tarist is on the scene.” He promis­es to help the “strum­ming pop­u­la­tion… keep pace with the upward spi­ral.” You can be the judge of how suc­cess­ful he is in that effort. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have Silverman’s sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als avail­able, but you can lis­ten to the com­plete Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide: Vol­ume 2 above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Tay­lor Gives Free Acoustic Gui­tar Lessons Online

Learn to Play Gui­tar for Free: Intro Cours­es Take You From The Very Basics to Play­ing Songs In No Time

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

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

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

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

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