Cre­ative Com­mons image by Jean-Luc Ourlin

When we think of 60s avant-gardism, we like­ly think of lit­er­ary fig­ures like William S. Bur­roughs or John Barth, film­mak­ers like Stan Brakhage or Ken­neth Anger, and art stars (and per­haps inven­tor of the “art star”) like Andy Warhol. In music, we may drop names like La Monte Young, Ter­ry Riley, Philip Glass, Sun Ra, or even Ornette Cole­man, who began devel­op­ing his impro­visato­ry the­o­ry of “har­molod­ics” in the late six­ties, chang­ing the way many musicians—in every pos­si­ble style—approached their own exper­i­men­tal­ism.

We may not often be inclined, however—as stu­dents of the avant-garde—to include the name Frank Zap­pa in the com­pa­ny of such “seri­ous” artists. There are many rea­sons for this, many of them attrib­ut­able to delib­er­ate choic­es Zap­pa him­self made to occu­py a space in-between that of a seri­ous exper­i­men­tal com­pos­er and a pop­u­lar rock and roll provo­ca­teur whose music and lyrics par­o­died the coun­ter­cul­ture and whose impos­si­ble-to-clas­si­fy albums skirt­ed nov­el­ty sta­tus.

And yet, writes All­mu­sic, Zap­pa’s “com­ic and seri­ous sides were com­ple­men­tary, not con­tra­dic­to­ry… most of all, he was a com­pos­er far more ambi­tious than any oth­er rock musi­cian of his time and most clas­si­cal musi­cians, as well.” You don’t have to take my word for it—or the word of such a stan­dard­ized ref­er­ence guide as All­mu­sic. You can hear for your­self, for free, a playlist of Zap­pa-as-com­pos­er, thanks to Spo­ti­fy Clas­si­cal Playlists.

Yes, you do have to down­load, if you don’t already have, the free Spo­ti­fy soft­ware. But the rewards are great. You’ll hear inter­pre­ta­tions of Zap­pa in New Orleans-style jazz and funk in tracks like “Zom­by Wolf,” per­formed by Asphalt Orches­tra; musi­cal man­i­festos against con­formism in “Hun­gry Freaks Dad­dy,” per­formed by the Frank Zap­pa Merid­i­an Arts Ensem­ble; satir­i­cal, dystopi­an col­lages like “Food Gath­er­ing in Post-Indus­tri­al Amer­i­ca, 1992,” per­formed by The Yel­low Shark.

The cat­a­log is vast and impos­si­ble to sum­ma­rize, the music per­formed by jazz and clas­si­cal ensem­bles of all kinds. Fans of canon­i­cal Zap­pa will be equal­ly well-served by anoth­er Spo­ti­fy Clas­si­cal Playlist which aims to make all of the eccen­tric guitarist/composer/bandleader/shameless self-pro­moter’s record­ed out­put with his band The Moth­ers of Inven­tion (or just The Moth­ers) avail­able to stream in a chrono­log­i­cal discog­ra­phy.

Depend­ing on your location—and the date you’re read­ing this post—you will be able to hear most or all of 917 tracks over 56 albums, from the debut 1966 album Freak Out! to the posthu­mous 1998 com­pi­la­tion Mys­tery Disc. Read more about Zap­pa-as-com­pos­er and the com­plete Zap­pa discog­ra­phy project at Spo­ti­fy Clas­si­cal. For those with objec­tions to stream­ing music ser­vices, Ulysses—compiler of the Spo­ti­fy Clas­si­cal Playlists—observes that “the man him­self came up with an idea for music sub­scrip­tion in 1983.” Like Zap­pa’s music, and like the man him­self, his pro­pos­al was com­plete­ly ahead of its time—and per­haps ahead of ours as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Young Frank Zap­pa Turns the Bicy­cle into a Musi­cal Instru­ment on The Steve Allen Show (1963)

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

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

If you’re from a fad­ing rock n roll gen­er­a­tion, here’s maybe a way to make peace with today’s pop music scene. Just take Tay­lor Swift hits and hear them sung in the style of The Vel­vet Under­ground.

That’s what folk singer-song­writer J. Till­man — oth­er­wise known as Father John Misty — did for us, per­haps inad­ver­tent­ly, when he record­ed VU-style ver­sions of “Blank Space” and “Wel­come to New York.” Today, not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, marks the release of Ryan Adams’s own bal­ly­hooed album that cov­ers Tay­lor Swift’s 1989, which you can also hear down below.

Ryan Adams’ Cov­ers

via Con­se­quence of Sound

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A cou­ple years ago, we brought you a post on the his­to­ry of the “Amen Break,” six sec­onds of sam­pled drums from a gospel instru­men­tal that—since sam­pling began in the 80s—has became a ubiq­ui­tous rhyth­mic ele­ment in vir­tu­al­ly every pop­u­lar genre of rhythm-based music, from hip-hop, to drum and bass, to EDM. While the tech­nol­o­gy that enabled the “Amen Break” may be unique to the dig­i­tal era, the sam­ple’s end­less iter­a­tions show us some­thing time­less about how music evolves.

Pick­ing up on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 coin­ing of the term “meme,” Susan Black­more argued in The Meme Machine that “what makes us dif­fer­ent” from oth­er ani­mals “is our abil­i­ty to imi­tate…. When you imi­tate ssome­one else, some­thing is passed on. This ‘some­thing’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own.” In this the­o­ret­i­cal schema, the meme is a fun­da­men­tal unit of cul­ture, and the “Amen Break” is indeed a per­fect exam­ple of how such units guide cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion. So is anoth­er very wide­ly imi­tat­ed melod­ic ele­ment in jazz and rock and roll. Var­i­ous­ly tran­scribed as “Doo Ba Doo Pee Dwee Doo Ahh” or “Doo ba dih bee dWee doo daah” or oth­er non­sense syl­lab­ic sequences, it is just as often referred to sim­ply as “The Lick.”

Licks are, in gen­er­al, part of the stan­dard vocab­u­lary of every musi­cian. They come in all forms, writes sax­o­phon­ist, com­pos­er, and music the­o­rist Joe San­ta Maria—“Cool, Skanky, Soft, Crunchy, Salty, Dirty, Screamin’, Sul­try, Tasty”—and they get repeat­ed again and again. But there is one lick in par­tic­u­lar, as you can see and hear in the super­cut above, that—like the “Amen Break”—has man­aged to seed itself every­where. “The Lick,” it seems, “per­vades music his­to­ry.” It shows up in Stravinsky’s “Fire­bird,” Player’s “Baby Come Back,” Christi­na Aguilera’s “Get Mine, Get Yours.” Writes San­ta Maria, “Every­one from Coltrane to Ken­ny G has put this hot lick to the test.” It even has its own Face­book page, where users sub­mit exam­ple after exam­ple of appear­ances of “The Lick.”

Unlike the “Amen Break,” which can be defin­i­tive­ly traced to a sin­gle source (the B‑side of a 1969 sin­gle called “Col­or Him Father”), no one seems to know where exact­ly “The Lick” came from. At some point, its ori­gin ceased to mat­ter. While cer­tain licks are played very self-con­scious­ly, San­ta Maria admits, “to wow and mys­ti­fy,” or “entrance groupies like the pied piper,” the arche­typ­al, defin­i­tive­ly named “The Lick” seems to have worked itself so deeply into our musi­cal uncon­scious that many play­ers and com­posers like­ly have no idea they’re repro­duc­ing a musi­cal quo­ta­tion. For what­ev­er rea­son, and your guess is as good as mine, “The Lick” has become a gen­uine musi­cal meme, a “unit of imi­ta­tion” that prop­a­gates musi­cal cul­ture wher­ev­er it lands.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

A His­to­ry of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

Cab Calloway’s “Hep­ster Dic­tio­nary,” A 1939 Glos­sary of the Lin­go (the “Jive”) of the Harlem Renais­sance

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

The Bea­t­les played their last sta­di­um gig in August, 1966 at Can­dle­stick Park, then stopped tour­ing alto­geth­er. At least pub­licly, they claimed that their new songs, com­ing off of intri­cate­ly-pro­duced albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pep­per, were just too hard to per­form live.

Enter The Fab Faux, the great­est of all Bea­t­les cov­er bands.

Fea­tur­ing Will Lee (bassist for the Late Show with David Let­ter­man), Jim­my Vivi­no (band­leader for Conan), Rich Pagano, Frank Agnel­lo, and Jack Petruzzel­li, The Fab Faux is all about one thing– per­form­ing live the most accu­rate repro­duc­tion of The Bea­t­les’ reper­toire. That includes songs that The Bea­t­les nev­er played live, and par­tic­u­lar­ly songs off of the intri­cate lat­er albums.

Above, you can watch them in action, play­ing the extend­ed med­ley (16 min­utes) that graces the sec­ond side of Abbey Road. Before you watch it, here are a cou­ple things you need to know:

This Fab Faux record­ing of most of side two of ‘Abbey Road’ is a live, in-the-stu­dio per­for­mance for a two-cam­era video shoot.… In the end, there were only three minor gui­tar fix­es and each sec­tion was record­ed in no more than three takes (most were two). There are NO added over­dubs with­in this per­for­mance. The audio is pure — and mixed by Joe Chin­ni­ci.

The video was orig­i­nal­ly record­ed for The Howard Stern Show. If you want to get a feel for how well The Fab Faux nailed it, watch their ver­sion played along­side the orig­i­nal below:

Relat­ed Con­tent

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Abbey Road Stu­dios, Cour­tesy of the New Google Site “Inside Abbey Road”

A Short Film on the Famous Cross­walk From the Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road Album Cov­er

Hear the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks for The Bea­t­les’ Cli­mac­tic 16-Minute Med­ley on Abbey Road