The Louisville Leopard Percussionists — they’re a performing ensemble made up of 60 students, all between the ages of 7 and 14, from schools around the Louisville, Kentucky area. Each musician plays several instruments, such as the marimbas, xylophone, vibraphone, drum set, timbales, congas, bongos and piano. And they can rock with the best of them. Perhaps you’ve seen a viral video of the young percussionists playing Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” which Jimmy Page called “too good not to share” on his Facebook page.
If your inner 16-year-old is asking “what about Ozzy?,” well then, we’ve got you covered. Above you can watch The Fabulous Leopard Percussionists rehearsing a version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” the heavy metal classic from 1980. Founded in 1993 by the elementary school teacher Diane Downs, the ensemble has certainly explored other musical forms too. Here, you can see them perform Chick Corea’s “Spain” and Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing” at the International Association of Jazz Educators’ concert in New York City. And Latin-inspired versions of Low Rider/Oye Como Va. Not a bad way to start your day, I must say.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but Michel Gondry was one of the last great music video directors, creating mini-epics just before the music industry collapsed, budgets disappeared, and now your cousin with a Canon 7D is following his friend’s band around in a field and putting *that* up on Vimeo. Maybe Gondry too saw the writing on the wall, because, by the beginning of the ‘aughts, he was inching his way into Hollywood, first with Human Nature and then striking paydirt with the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the best French films ever made that wasn’t French (apart from the director).
But in the twilight of music videos, Gondry’s best work combined new technology with the homemade, DIY aesthetic. His interest in fractals, mathematics, and logical paradoxes and loops went into the mix. As did his interest in the machinery and artifice of movie making. And as did his romantic, autobiographical side. What follows is a small selection of some of his best, most complex music videos.
Gondry directed several videos for Björk, starting with “Human Behavior,” her first solo single, but 1997’s “Bachelorette” (top) goes beyond playful into heartbreaking. A riff on an infinitely recursive poem, a story that is about the telling of itself, the video finds Björk discovering a book in the woods that begins to write itself. As she finds a publisher, gains success, and sees the book turned into a musical, the story is told again, and then again, a play within a play within a play. But each version is analog, not digital, and loses something in the process, and the forest creeps back in to claim its work.
Similarly, in this video for The Chemical Brothers’ song “Let Forever Be” (1999) Gondry sets up two worlds, one on digital video, where our heroine attempts to wake up and go to work at a department store; and another shot on film, where the girl’s numerous doppelgängers parody her struggle and her grip on sanity through choreographed dance numbers. This illustrates a familiar Gondry equation: If A and B, then A+B equals freakout madness time. The colorbars of video production loom nearby to further the idea of irreality, and a cheesy VideoToaster-style effect rescues us at the end.
As far as we know, Radiohead’s “Knives Out” (2001) has nothing to do with hospitals, but Gondry took this cannibalistic song and made one of his most personal videos. Here Thom Yorke stands in for the director, as Gondry offers a mea culpa about a relationship that went past its expiration date, when his girlfriend developed an illness and he couldn’t bear to break up with her. All of that is laid out, in sad, fever-dream detail, in this single-take video that features a lot of his obsessions: toys, television, loops, and a shuffling of symbols and motifs. Look for Gondry’s son briefly playing on the floor.
And finally:
Not to go out with a sour note, here’s Gondry’s adventurous 1994 video for the swallowed-by-history Lucas. “Lucas with the Lid Off” is one of Gondry’s first one-take masterpieces that shows how the magic is made while still being magical. (The current kings of single-take music videos, OK Go, owe their success to Gondry.) It’s also a video that tries to give each sampled loop its own element within the video, looking forward to his work for Daft Punk (“Around the World”) and The Chemical Brothers (“Star Guitar”).
Gondry continues to make videos–he made one last year for Metronomy’s “Love Letters,” but his attention is really elsewhere. Enjoy these gems from his classic era.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
So much of the writing done about the films of Wes Anderson focuses on their visuals — and with good cause. We’ve featured pieces on everything from the design of their settings to the symmetry of their shots to their quotation of other movies. You can’t talk about the aesthetic distinctiveness of Anderson’s work unless you talk about its visual distinctiveness, but you also miss out on a lot if you focus solely on that. We mustn’t forget the importance of sound in all of this, and specifically the importance of music.
Casual Anderson fans might here think of one kind of music before all others: the British Invasion. The Creation’s “Making Time” in Rushmore, the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” in The Royal Tenenbaums, and, to take the concept in as Andersonian a direction as possible, Portuguese-language covers of David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Yet Anderson’s projects have made use of quite a few other musical traditions besides, as you’ll already know if you remember the jazz-scored short version of Bottle Rocket we featured a couple years ago.
But getting the clearest sense of the music might require temporarily separating it from the movies. To that end, we offer you “From Bottle Rocket to The Grand Budapest Hotel,” a Spotify playlist by Michael Park bringing together 172 of the songs included in Anderson’s eight features so far, coming to over nine and a half hours of immaculately curated, 20th century counterculture-rooted music, from not just the Stones and Bowie-via-Seu Jorge but Horace Silver, the Kinks, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, Elliott Smith, Yves Montand, Nick Drake, and the Velvet Underground. (To listen, you need only download and register for Spotify.)
While you listen, why not read through Oscar Rickett’s Vice interview with Anderson’s music supervisor Randall Poster? “Wes always talks about how those guys would wear coats and ties on the cover of their records but that the music was so aggressive and rebellious,” says Poster of the director’s lasting penchant for the British Invasion. “I think that corresponded to [Rushmore protagonist] Max Fischer because he was this kid who, underneath it all, was looking to break through. The music speaks to his character, who is out of time with the world, and I think that’s a running theme in our movies and you can see it with M. Gustave in Grand Budapest Hotel, who is holding on to a more mannered, genteel era.” And what current works of art have expressed genteel rebellion, or rebellious gentility, so well as Anderson’s?
For all their serious brooding and biting digs at the establishment, the members of Pink Floyd were not above having a little fun with their image. Take this 1975 comic book, created by their record cover designer Storm Thorgerson’s company Hipgnosis for the Dark Side of the Moon tour. A “Super, All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls,” the 15-page oddity—pitched, writes Dangerous Minds, “somewhere halfway between ‘professional promotional item’ and ‘schoolboy’s notebook scribbling’”—includes several short comic stories: Roger (“Rog”) Waters is an “ace goal-scorer” for the “Grantchester Rovers” football club. Floyd drummer Nick Mason becomes “Captain Mason, R.N.,” a “courageous and smart” WWII naval hero, and David Gilmour gets cast as stunt cyclist “Dave Derring.” The juiciest part goes to keyboardist Richard Wright, whose salacious exploits as high roller “Rich Right” complete the proto-Heavy Metal vibe of the whole thing.
Perhaps most fun is a silly questionnaire called “Life Lines” that asks each band member about such trivia as age, weight, height, “philosophical beliefs,” “sexual proclivities,” “political leanings,” and “musical hates.” Most of the answers are of the flippant, smartass variety, but I think they’re all sincere when they name their favorite movies: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Seventh Seal, Cool Hand Luke, and El Topo. I’ll let you figure out who chose which one. (Click the image above, then click again, to enlarge.) The penultimate page includes the lyrics to three new songs the band was working on at the time and playing live during the Dark Side of the Moon Tour: “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” and two unreleased tracks, “Raving and Drooling” and “Gotta Be Crazy”—which later turned into “Sheep” and “Dogs,” respectively, on the Animals album.
The comic takes the goofiness of Beatlemania-like merch to a much farther out place—somewhere “beyond the 3rd Bardo.” One member of the International Roger Waters Fanclub, who kept his program comic book for decades after seeing the Dark Side show in San Francisco, writes “I was so wasted on acid at the show, I don’t know how I held on to anything.” Hipgnosis, and Floyd, surely knew their audience. You can download the whole thing here, in high resolution images. See much more Pink Floyd tour memorabilia at the fansite Pinfloydz.com.
George Harrison “never thought he was any good” as a guitarist, says his son Dhani, and so “he focused on touch and control… not hitting any off notes, not making strings buzz, not playing anything that would jar you.” Harrison himself put it this way, in typically self-effacing, mystical fashion: “I play the notes you never hear.” Of course, as most every thoughtful guitar player will tell you, these are exactly the makings of a good—and in Harrison’s case, great—guitarist. A dime a dozen are players who can play speed runs and flashy solos, who have learned every lick from their favorite songs and can re-produce them exactly. But it’s the sensitivity—the personal “touch and control” over the instrument—that matters most, and that can make a player’s tone impossible to duplicate. Harrison’s playing, Dhani says, “is the reason no one can really cover the Beatles faithfully…. At some point there’s going to be a George Harrison solo, and that solo is usually perfect.”
I would certainly say that is the case with the guitar solo in “Here Comes the Sun.” Oh, you’ve never heard it? That’s because the song, as it was originally released on 1969’s Abbey Road didn’t have one. For whatever reason, George Martin decided to leave it out, and the song, we might agree, is perfect without it. But the solo—rediscovered by Martin and Dhani Harrison—is also perfect. You can hear a version of the song with the solo restored at the top of the post, courtesy of Youtube user Kanaal van DutchDounpour. And above, see Dhani, Martin, and Martin’s son Giles rediscovering the solo, which Martin had forgotten about, while playing around with the master tracks of the song in 2012. (The second video first appeared on our site that same year.) At 1:01, the solo suddenly appears. Martin leans in and listens attentively and Dhani says, “It’s totally different to anything I’ve ever heard.” It’s unmistakable Harrison, the “liquid quality” Jayson Greene identified in a Pitchfork appreciation, more evocative of “a zither, a clarinet—something more delicate, nuanced and lyrical than an electric guitar.”
Impossible, I’d say, to duplicate. Even the younger Harrison—perhaps the most faithful interpreter of George’s music—finds himself fudging his father’s solos when covering his songs, playing his own instead. Harrison, says Tom Petty, always had a way of “finding the right thing to play. That was part of the Beatles magic.” He may not be remembered as the most virtuoso of guitarists, he may not have thought much of his own playing, but no one has ever played like him, before or since. See Harrison play an acoustic rendition of “Here Comes the Sun”—sans solo—above at the concert for Bangladesh.
(Note: some readers have pointed out that the solo at the top of the post sounds out of tune. We do not doubt that it is George Harrison’s playing, but it has been edited and possibly even sped up to match the final mastered recording. This is not a professional remix, but only a rough recreation of what the song might have sounded like had the lost solo been included.)
Turns out you can burn some good calories when you’re Burning Down the House. Enjoy a fun clip from Funny or Die, and some other great Talking Heads material from our archive below.
Having just begun rewatching season 3 of the always-relevant The Wire—the season to first introduce Reg E. Cathey’s super-smooth character, mayoral aide Norman Wilson—I was delighted to find an episode of Studio 360 that features the actor reading a text by jazz great Charles Mingus. Even more delightful is the subject of his text: instructions for toilet training your cat. I cannot testify to their efficacy; it seems like a labor-intensive process, and my own cats seem pretty content with their litterbox. But if anyone could accomplish such a feat, it was Mingus, a man who once ripped the strings from a piano with his bare hands (so it’s said in the documentary 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz), and who won a Grammy for an essay defining jazz, written just a few years after he helped redefine it.
Mingus may have had a notoriously short temper, but as a composer, he was infinitely patient. Apparently this also goes for his role as a cat trainer. He spent weeks teaching his cat, Nightlife, to use human facilities, and detailed the process in a pamphlet, The Charles Mingus CAT-alogue for Toilet Training Your Cat, available for cat fanciers and Mingus fans by mail order.
Hear Cathey read the instructions in part in the video at the top and in full in the audio above. Studio 360 describes this odd document as “full of charming advice and meticulous pedagogical detail.” It is indeed that. In four concise steps, Mingus lays out the program, simple as can be—or so he makes it seem.
Mingus writes, “It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife.” He also admits that aspiring trainers may need to modify the program somewhat, “in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was.” One can imagine less gifted cats struggling with this unusual method. One can also imagine more ornery, less cooperative breeds simply refusing to play along. Like Mingus himself, cats have a well-deserved reputation for doing their own thing. Should you be intrepid enough to attempt the Mingus method with your own feline companion, all I can say to you is what Mingus says at the end of his instructions—Good Luck.
The art of the album cover is ground we cover here often enough, from the jazz deco creations of album art inventor Alex Steinweiss to the bawdy burlesques of underground comix legend R. Crumb. We could add to these American references the iconic covers of European graphic artists like Peter Saville of Joy Divisions’ Unknown Pleasures and Storm Thorgerson of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.These names represent just a small sampling of the many renowned designers who have given popular music its distinctive look over the decades, and without whom the experience of record shopping—perhaps itself a bygone art—would be a dreary one. Though these creative personalities work in a primarily commercial vein, there’s no reason not to call their products fine art.
But in a great many cases, the images that grace the covers of records we know well come directly from the fine art world—whether appropriated from pieces that hang on museum walls or commissioned from famous artists by the bands. Such, of course, was the case with the much-ballyhooed cover of Lady Gaga’s Artpop, a candy-colored collaboration with pop art darling Jeff Koons, who gets a namecheck in the Gaga single “Applause.” Gaga has put a unique spin on the mélange of pop and pop art, but she hardly pioneered such collaborations.
Long before Artpop, there was Warhol, whose promotion of the Velvet Underground included his own design of their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The cover originally featured a yellow banana record buyers could peel away, as Flavorwire writes, “to reveal a suggestively pink flesh-toned banana.” The “saucy covers” required “special machinery, extra costs, and the delay of the album release,” but Warhol’s name persuaded MGM the added overhead was worth it. It’s a gamble that hardly paid off for the label, but pop music is infinitely better off for Warhol’s promotion of Lou Reed and company’s dark, droning art rock.
Of the many millions of bands inspired by that first Velvets’ release, The Smiths also looked to Warhol for inspiration when it came to the even more suggestive album cover (above) for their first, self-titled record in 1984. This time, the image comes not from the pop artist himself, but from his protégée Paul Morrissey—a still from his salacious, Warhol-produced film Flesh. Just one of many savvy uses of monochromatic film stills and photographs by the image-conscious Steven Patrick Morrissey and band.
Ten years earlier, another Smith, Patti, posed for the photograph above, a Polaroid taken by her close friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. At the time, the two were roommates and “just kids” struggling jointly in their starving artisthood. In her National Book Award-winning memoir of their time together, Smith describes the “exquisitely androgynous image” as deliberately posed in a “Frank Sinatra style,” writing, “I was full of references.” Mapplethorpe, of course, would go on to infamy as the focus of a conservative congressional campaign against “obscene” art in 1989, which tended to make his name synonymous with sensationalism and scandal and obscured the breadth of his work.
Like the Velvets and Patti Smith, the members of Sonic Youth have had a long and fruitful relationship with the art world, pursuing several art projects of their own and collaborating frequently with famous fine artists. The relationship between their noisy art rock and the visual arts crystalizes in their many iconic album covers. My personal favorite, and perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch, is Raymond Pettibon’s cover for 1990’s Goo, inspired from a photograph of two witnesses to a serial killer case. Pettibon, brother to Black Flag founder and guitarist Greg Ginn, is much better known in the punk rock world than the fine art world, but Sonic Youth has also collaborated with established high art figures like Gerhard Richter, whose painting Kerze (“Candle”) graces the cover of their acclaimed 1988 album Daydream Nation (above).
Another example of a band using already existing artwork—this time from a painter long dead—the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies comes from the still life A Basket of Roses by 19th century French realist Henri Fantin-Latour. Designer Peter Saville, who, as noted above, created the look of New Order’s previous incarnation, chose the image on a whim. Writes Artnet, “the art director for the post-punk band… had originally planned to use a Renaissance portrait of a dark prince to tie in with the Machiavellian theme of the title, but failed to find anything he liked. While visiting [the National Gallery in London], Saville picked up a postcard of the Fantin-Latour work, and his girlfriend joked that he should use it as the cover.” Saville thought it was “a wonderful idea.” As Saville explains his choice, “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive.”
Another art-rock band, the Talking Heads—formed at the Rhode Island School of Design and originally called “The Artistics”—went in a very high art direction for 1983’s new wave masterpiece Speaking in Tongues, their fifth album. Though we’re probably more familiar with frontman David Byrne’s cover art for the album, the band also produced a limited edition LP featuring the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, which you can see above. Byrne, writes Artnet, approached Rauschenberg “after seeing his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery” and Rauschenberg agreed on the condition that he could “do something different.” He certainly did that. The cover is a “transparent plastic case with artwork and credits printed on three 12 inch circular transparent collages, one per primary color. Only by rotating the LP and the separate plastic discs could one see—and then only intermittently—the three-color images included in the collage.” The artist won a Grammy for the design.
You can see many more fine art album covers by painters like Banksy, Richard Prince, and Fred Tomaselli and photographers like Duane Michaels and Nobuyoshi Araki at Artnet and Flavorwire. The selection of enticing album covers above will hopefully also propel you to revisit, or hear for the first time, some of the finest art-pop of the last four decades. Finally, we leave you with a bizarre and seemingly unlikely collaboration, above, between pop-surrealist Salvador Dalí and Honeymooners comedian Jackie Gleason for Gleason’s 1955 album Lonesome Echo. No weirder, perhaps, than Dalí’s work with Walt Disney, it’s still a rather unexpected look for the comedian, in his role here as a kitschy easy listening composer. Gleason’s many album covers tended toward the Mad Men-esque cheap and tawdry. Here, he gets conceptual. Dalí himself explained the work thus:
The first effect is that of anguish, of space, and of solitude. Secondly, the fragility of the wings of a butterfly, projecting long shadows of late afternoon, reverberates in the landscape like an echo. The feminine element, distant and isolated, forms a perfect triangle with the musical instrument and its other echo, the shell.
Make of that what you will. I’d say it’s the one album on this list with a cover much more interesting by far than the music inside.
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