In 2018, the Pixies performed live for BBC Radio 6 Music, playing some new songs (“In the Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain”) and old classics (“Here Comes Your Man”). In that latter category, you’ll find a recording of “Gouge Away,” which I keep coming back to again, and yet again. About the video, one YouTuber had this to say: “This production is just badass. The bass, the drums, everything. This specific recording is a masterpiece. To see it taped is a revelation.” That kind of sums it up. Time to share it with you…
Byrne drove the dancing in Talking Heads 1984 concert film, Stop Making Senseand has collaborated with several notable choreographers over the course of his long and varied career.
In 1981, Twyla Tharp commissioned him to write the score for her physically demanding, experimental ballet, The Catherine Wheel.
In an interview with Vulture, Parson recalled questioning why someone with Byrne’s naturally cool physical instincts would seek an outside party to handle the dancing:
I was like, Huh, you’re my favorite choreographer, what are you doing!? Being able to make movement for yourself and being a choreographer are quite different, and he’s not interested in making movement for other people. He is a dancer. Some of the stuff he does in the show he totally made up for himself.
No question about it. The man has moves.
Here’s Parson’s favorite:
He does this thing where he slaps his hands while crossing the stage in Slippery People that’s so amusing to watch. He goes down on the ground at one point in Once in a Lifetime and I asked him what he was doing, and he was like, “Um, I’m going down to the water in the ground.” He’s imagining things and feeling the music. “Loose” wouldn’t be the word because neither of us are loose at all. He’s incredible as an artist in the way he thinks and acts on things. I’ve always felt that I have a huge amount of freedom.
Feel the Byrne next time you hit the dance floor by heading back up to the top of this post and following along with his instructional video for the socially distanced participatory dance experience he co-hosted for two weeks in New York City’s Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall.
If only every dance teacher showed up in such a buoyant mood (not to mention a utility kilt and English sand shoes…)
Shake your hips!
Puppet legs!
Hold the traffic!
Vibrating arms!
Those lucky enough to score one of the nightly-assigned dancing spots that ensured SOCIAL! would be, as advertised, a socially distanced dance club, executed these, and other dance moves, that Byrne’s pre-recorded voice called for over the powerful P.A. system.
Some parts were instructions for line dances; others were more abstract (“Let me see you move like you’re in a new world”) or historical (“This song is by the first interracial band to play Carnegie Hall”); some were idiosyncratic Byrnisms (“C’mon, baby, let’s think about your tendons”).
Reporters for Vanity Fairand the New York Times(who felt reassured that Byrne is “himself an invitingly imperfect dancer”) listed some of the steps they’d attempted at Byrne’s behest:
Hand-sanitizing (“You’ve got too much! Flick it front, flick it behind!”)
Threaded through crowds on a New York City sidewalk (“Don’t step on that pizza!”)
Reach for the rafters (“Maybe you’re raising your hand in praise or to feel the light or to represent—or because you have a question. Is anybody answering your question? So much uncertainty these days.”)
Presumably, they, like Late Show host Stephen Colbert, below, also learned to “polish the plates.”
More than thirty years after it was first privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English history. Though the ultimate decision of R v Penguin Books Ltd in favor of the publisher opened a cultural floodgate in that country, the novel was also subject to bans elsewhere, including the United States and Japan. Nearly a century after D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and a world apart as regards attitudes about public morality — it can be somewhat difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. But now that the book has entered the public domain in the United States, it could potentially be made artistically and socially dangerous again.
The same could be said of a number of other notable works of literature, from Virginia Woolf’s sex-switching satire Orlando to Bertolt Brecht’s piece of revolutionary theater Die Dreigroschenoper (known in translation as The Threepenny Opera) to a cultural phenomenon-spawning story like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
These and others are named on this year’s Public Domain Day post by Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. If not for multiple extensions of copyright law, she notes, all of them would have originally gone public domain in 1984, and we would now have almost four decades’ worth of additional creations reinterpreting, re-imagining, and re-using them. Still, “better late than never!”
At this point in history, the artifacts freed for anyone’s use aren’t just written works, but also films, musical compositions, and even actual sound recordings. These include classic Disney cartoons Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, which introduced the world to a certain Mickey Mouse; live-action movies from major filmmakers, like Charlie Chaplin’s TheCircus and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; and such songs with broad cultural footprints as “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “Mack the Knife” — or rather “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” in the original German from Die Dreigroschenoper. Alas, those of us who want to do our own thing with Bobby Darin’s version will have to wait until February of 2067.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When A Charlie BrownChristmas first aired 58 years ago, few had any confidence that it would be a hit. Its story and animation, bare-bones even by the standards of mid-nineteen-sixties television, made a positive impression on neither CBS’ executives nor on many of the special’s own creators. They didn’t expect that this very simplicity would turn it into a perennial holiday favorite — nor, presumably, that its soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio would become one of the most beloved Christmas albums in existence. Now that we’re well into the season when the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas is heard every day in homes, cafés, and shopping malls all around the world, why not get an introduction to Guaraldi, the man and his music, from pop culture video essayist Matt Draper?
“Born in San Francisco in 1928, Guaraldi credited his two uncles with sparking his interest in jazz as a child, with the future musician already learning the piano by age seven,” says Draper. After serving in the Korean War and returning home to study music at San Francisco State University, Guaraldi began to “pursue his love of jazz in local clubs.”
He soon formed his trio, and recording their first albums in the mid-nineteen-fifties, he “expanded his use of Latin jazz and bossa nova.” In 1962 Guaraldi scored his first hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a single from an album inspired by Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus. It was a radio broadcast of that song, so the story goes, that caught the ear of Lee Mendelson, who would produce A Charlie Brown Christmas, as he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in a taxicab.
Mendelson initially commissioned Guaraldi to compose the music for A Boy Named Charlie Brown, a television documentary that ultimately never aired. But its recording sessions brought forth “Linus and Lucy,” which became Peanuts’ de facto theme song, and when Coca-Cola agreed to sponsora Peanuts Christmas special in 1965 — a scant six months before Christmas itself — Guaraldi was called back to score it. “A Charlie Brown Christmas is a rather melancholic story centering on Charlie’s search for meaning and worth in the holiday season,” says Draper, “so it’s fitting that a large portion of Guaraldi’s score is tinged with sadness.” Yet “Guaraldi’s melancholy isn’t overwrought or forced; rather, it’s minor and subtle,” unlike the average film score that tries to “beat its listeners over the head with emotion.”
The soundtrack album, which you can hear (and see accompanied by a Yule fireplace) on the official Vince Guaraldi Youtube channel, offers musical variety from the “ton of swinging style” in its version of “O Tanenbaum” to the “waltz brimming with energy” of “Skating” to “Christmas Is Coming,” with its “hints of rock-and-roll.” In the video just above, composer-Youtuber Charles Cornell explains what makes it “without a doubt, the best Christmas album ever” (a title held along with that of the best-selling jazz album in history after Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue), not least its being less “in-your-face Christmas” than other similarly themed recordings. Yet he also acknowledges that Guaraldi’s most beautiful composition for a Peanuts special isn’t in A Charlie Brown Christmas, but It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, from 1966. When next fall fall rolls around, do make “Great Pumpkin Waltz” the first song you hear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The clip above aired back in 2013 on “This Is Radio Clash,” a radio show hosted by the Clash’s Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. “Hello everybody,” this is David Bowie making a telephone call from the US of A. At this time of the year I can’t help but remember my British-ness and all the jolly British folk, so here’s to you and have yourselves a Merry little Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you very much.”
It’s maybe not as memorable as his 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby, but, hey, it’s still a fun little way to get the holiday season in swing.
Bonus: Below hear Bowie sing Presley’s classic “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” I hadn’t heard it before, and it’s a treat.
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Note: With the recent passing of Shane Macgowan, we’re bringing back a post from 2018 and revisiting The Pogues’ song “Fairytale of New York.” The offbeat Christmas classic is currently #5 on the Billboard Singles Chart in the UK.
Drugstore Cowboy, Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, even Bonnie and Clyde… we love a good story about doomed, down-and-out lovers. Whatever emotional reservoir they tap into, when written well and honestly, such stories have broad cultural appeal. Which in part explains the overwhelming popularity of The Pogues’ 1987 classic “Fairytale of New York,” the kind of “anti-Christmas song,” writes Dorian Lynsky at The Guardian, “that ended up being, for a generation, the Christmas song.”
Many holiday stories cynically trade on the fact that, for a great many people, the holidays are filled with pain and loss. But “Fairytale of New York” doesn’t play this for laughs, nor does it pull the old trick of cheap last-minute redemption.
Sung as a duet by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl to the boozy tune of an Irish folk ballad, the song “is loved because it feels more emotionally ‘real’ than the homesick sentimentality of ‘White Christmas.’ ” Even if we can’t identify with the plight of a burned-out Irish dreamer spending Christmas in a New York drunk tank, we can feel the ache of broken dreams set in high relief against holiday lights.
The song’s history itself makes for a compelling tale, whether we believe the origin story in accordion player James Fearnley’s memoir Here ComesEverybody: The Story of the Poguesor that told by MacGowan, who maintains that Elvis Costello, the band’s producer, bet the singer that he couldn’t write a Christmas duet. (Fearnley writes that they were trying to top The Band’s 1977 “Christmas Must Be Tonight.”)
Either way, a Christmas song was a good idea. “For a band like the Pogues, very strongly rooted in all kinds of traditions rather than the present, it was a no-brainer,” says banjo-player and co-writer Jem Finer. Not to mention the fact that MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957.
Finer began the song as a tale about a sailor missing his wife on Christmas, but after the banjo player’s wife called it “corny” he took her suggestion to adapt the “true story of some mutual friends living in New York.” MacGowan took the title from J.P. Donleavy’s 1973 novel A Fairy Tale of New York, which happened to be lying around the recording studio. After a promising start, the song then went through two years of revisions and re-recordings before the band finally settled on the version millions know and love, produced by Steve Lillywhite and released on the 1988 album If I Should Fall From Grace with God.
Originally intended as a duet between MacGowan and bass player Cait O’Riordan, a version recorded with her was “not quite there,” guitarist Philip Chevron has said. Soon after, O’Riordan left the band, and MacGowan recorded the song again at Abbey Road in 1987, singing both the male and female vocal parts himself. Eventually Lillywhite took the track home to have his wife, English singer Kirsty MacColl, record a temporary guide vocal for the female parts. When MacGowan heard it, he knew he had found the right foil for the character he plays in the song.
“Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it and she had a very strong character and it came across in a big way,” MacGowan later remarked in an interview. “In operas, if you have a double aria, it’s what the woman does that really matters. the man lies, the woman tells the truth.” As part of her character’s “viciousness”, she hurls the slur “f*ggot” at MacGowan, who calls her a “slut.” The offensive words have been censored on radio stations, then uncensored, and good cases have been made for bleeping them out (most recently by Irish DJ Eoghan McDermott on Twitter).
MacGowan himself has issued a statement defending the lyrics as in keeping with the characters. “Sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty in order to tell the story effectively,” he writes, adding, “If people don’t understand that I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically as possible then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word but I don’t want to get into an argument.” Whatever position one takes on this, it’s hard to deny that MacGowan, co-writer Finer, and MacColl totally hit the mark when it comes to authenticity.
The genuine emotions “Fairytale of New York” taps into has made it the most beloved Christmas song of all time in TV, radio, and magazine polls in the UK and Ireland. It has become “far bigger than the people who made it,” writes Lynskey. Or, as Fearnley puts it, “It’s like ‘Fairytale of New York’ went off and inhabited its own planet.” An artist can’t ask for more. See making-of videos by the BBC and Polyphonic at the top. Watch the band sloppily mime the song with MacColl on Top of the Pops further up (MacGowan cannot actually play the piano). And just above, see the official video, starring Drugstore Cowboy’s Matt Dillon—filmed inside a real police station on the Lower East Side during a freezing Thanksgiving week in 1987, for maximum holiday vérité.
The received image of the Aztecs, with their savage battles and frequent acts of human sacrifice, tends to imply a violence-saturated, death-obsessed culture. Given that, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn of an Aztec musical instrument discovered in the hands of a sacrificed human body, or that the instrument has come to be known as the “death whistle.” Not that it was an especially recent find: the excavation in question happened in Mexico City in the late nineteen-nineties. But only over the past decade, with the creation of replicas like the one played by the late Xavier Quijas Yxayotl in the clip above, have listeners around the world been able to hear the death whistle for themselves.
“The sound of the death whistle is the most frightening thing we’ve ever heard,” writes Reuben Westmaas at Discovery.com. “It literally sounds like a screeching zombie. We can only imagine what it would be like to hear hundreds of whistles from an Aztec army on the march. We’re not entirely certain what the whistles were used for, however.”
Whatever its application, the distinctive sound of the death whistle is created by blown air interacting “with a well or ‘spring’ of air inside a rounded internal chamber, creating distortions,” as Dave Roos writes at How Stuff Works. In his analysis of the death whistle’s inner workings, mechanical engineer Roberto Velázquez Cabrera gives that component the evocative name “chaos chamber.”
That the death whistle would be used in war and human sacrifice certainly aligns with the reputation of the Aztecs, but the instrument has also inspired other historically informed speculations. In the video from Gizmodo just above, professor of Mesoamerican and Latino studies Jaime Arredondo even suggests that it could have had its therapeutic uses, as a tool to create a “hypnotic, sort of soothing atmosphere.” It could well have been designed to imitate the sound of the wind, given that the sacrificial victim had been buried at the temple of the wind god Ehecatl. And though the death whistle may seem the least likely tool of relaxation imaginable, put your mind to it and just hear it as sounding less like the screech of a zombie than like the fifteenth-century equivalent of a white-noise machine.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
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