Last month, De La Soul celebrated the 25th anniversary of their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising by letting fans download nearly their entire back catalog of albums for free.
This month, the hip hop trio is giving away new music — their mixtape “Smell the Da.I.S.Y.,” which features their collaborations with the late-great hip hop artist, J Dilla.
Happy downloading.…
You may never have heard of “Dylanology” before, but rest assured that the field covers the intellectual territory you suspect it does. Even if you have heard of Dylanology, you may never have heard of A.J. Weberman, the man who holds reasonable claim to having fathered the discipline. In John Reilly’s musically biographical 1969 short film above, The Ballad of A.J. Weberman, we witness the titular Bob Dylan obsessive engaging in one of his many research methods: in this case, the also neologism-anointed pursuit of garbology. This “science” has Weberman go through Dylan’s trash “in order to gather scraps of evidence to support his theories,” says the diligent fan’s entry in the web’s Bob Dylan Who’s Who. These theories include, according to Rolling Stone’s Marc Jacobson, the notion that “Dylan, the most angel-headed head of the generation, had fallen prey to a Manchurian Candidate-style government plot to hook him up to sensibility-deadening hard dope.”
The page also mentions that “after three years of self-publicity” as the “world’s leading Dylanologist,” Weberman “finally met Dylan in 1971.” But much of his notoriety comes not just from having met Dylan in the flesh, not just from habitually digging through Dylan’s garbage, and not just (or so he claims) having taken a rightful beating at the hands of Dylan, but from having conversed with Dylan, candidly and at length, over the telephone. These chats eventually emerged on vinyl as the album Robert Zimmerman vs. A.J. Weberman, and you can hear the whole thing at Ubuweb, or below:
Introduction
January 6, 1971
January 9, 1971
“The conversations were recorded in January, 1971, in the weeks following a demonstration outside Bob’s NYC apartment organized by Weberman [ … ] a misguided 60’s radical who felt (correctly enough) that by the early 70’s, rock music had ceased to be a force for radical political upheaval in the U.S. and had been co-opted by the establishment,” writes one contributor to the Dylan Who’s Who. “Like any of Bob’s songs, they must be heard to be truly understood.”
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Bill Murray began his singing shtick on Saturday Night Live back in the 70s. Anyone who watched the show during its heyday will surely remember his “Nick Winter” lounge singer character belting out the tune of the Star Wars theme song. Years later, Mr. Murray tickled us with a karaoke scene in Lost in Translation. And yet another decade later we find him singing “The House of the Rising Sun,” the American folk song recorded numerous times since 1934, but perhaps most famously by The Animals in 1964. Bill’s version took place last night at the annual Caddyshack Celebrity Golf Charity Event. If you enjoy hearing Bill sing, you should really listen to him read poetry. We’ve got the below.
via Rolling Stone
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This spring, one of the best-preserved Strads in existence will go up for auction at Sotheby’s. Built some time between 1700 and 1720, during the very best period of Stradivari’s work, the viola is a real rarity, one of only ten in existence. Maybe that justifies the starting price of $45 million. What does that prized strad actually sound like, you might wonder? Filmed by The New York Times, the clip above features David Aaron Carpenter (called “The Hottest Violist of the 21st Century”) playing Suite No. 3 in C by Johann Sebastian Bach. If you’re a viola aficionado, we would be curious to get your take on what you hear.
via NYTimes
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When I first entered college in the mid-‘90s, the phenomenon of pop culture studies in academia seemed like an exciting novelty, bound to the ethos of the Clinton years. Often incisive, occasionally frivolous, pop culture studies made academia fun again, and reinvigorated the world of scholarly publishing and college life in general. All manner of fandom ruled the day: we took classes in hip hop videos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alanis Morrissette redefined irony, and nearly everyone got hired right after graduation (see for reference the cult classic 1994 film PCU). These days I don’t need to tell you that the prospects for new grads are considerably reduced, but I’m very happy to find academic societies and journals still organized around TV shows, fantasy novels, and pop music. Today we bring you two examples from the world of Classic Rock & Roll Studies (to coin a term). First up we have BOSS, or “The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies.”
Springsteen Studies is not new. In fact, a massive Springsteen symposium called “Glory Days”—jointly sponsored by Virginia Tech, Penn State, and Monmouth University—has taken place twice in West Long Branch, New Jersey since 2005 and is currently preparing for its next event. BOSS, however, only just emerged, the first scholarly Springsteen journal ever published. The first issue will appear in June of this year, and the editors are now soliciting 15 to 25 page academic articles for their January, 2015 issue. Describing themselves as a “scholarly space for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy,” BOSS seeks “broad interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to Springsteen’s songwriting, performance, and fan community.” Springsteen scholars: check the BOSS site for deadlines and contact info.
Unlike most scholarly journals, BOSS is open-access, so fans and admirers of all kinds can read the sure-to-be fascinating discussions it fosters as it works toward securing “a place for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy.” Springsteen Studies’ advocacy appears to be working—Rutgers University plans to add a Springsteen theology class, covering Springsteen’s entire discography, and other institutions like Princeton and the University of Rochester have offered Springsteen courses in the past.
In another first for a specialized pop culture field, the first-ever academic conference on the work of Pink Floyd will be held this coming April 13 at Princeton University. Called “Pink Floyd: Sound, Sight, and Structure,” the event promises to be a multi-media extravaganza, featuring as its keynote speaker Grammy-award winning Pink Floyd producer and engineer James Guthrie. (See Guthrie and others discuss the production of the surround-sound Super Audio CD of Wish You Were Here in the video above). In addition to Guthrie’s talk, and his surround sound mix of the band’s music, the conference will offer “live compositions and arrangements inspired by Pink Floyd’s music,” an “exhibition of Pink Floyd covers and art,” and a screening of The Wall. Papers include “The Visual Music of Pink Floyd,” “Space and Repetition in David Gilmour’s Guitar Solos,” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals: The Genius of Early Floyd.” Admission is free, but you’ll need to RSVP to get in. The town of Princeton will join in the festivities with “Outside the Wall,” a series of events and specials on drinks, dining, art, and music.
While these events and publications may seem to locate pop culture studies squarely in New Jersey, those interested can find conferences all over the world, in fact. A good place to start is the site of the PCA (“Pop Culture Association”), which hosts its annual conference next month in Chicago, and the International Conference on Media and Popular Culture will be held this May in Vienna. Pop culture and media studies still seem to me to be particular products of the optimistic ‘90s (due to my own vintage, no doubt), but it appears these academic fields are thriving, despite the vastly different economic climate we now live in, with its no-fun, belt-tightening effects on higher ed across the board.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
While the Internet may not have helped global music sales, it’s certainly been a boon for fans wanting to listen to otherwise-inaccessible music, especially classical music. We often post classical musical finds on Open Culture. Take for example this compendium of freely downloadable music from over 150 classical composers, this open version of Bach’s Goldberg variations and all of Bach’s organ works, and then this collection of 85,000 free classical scores. Today, we bring you another fantastic resource: the World Concert Hall.
Just over a century after the first radio performance of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Il Pagliacci,” and Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” were broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910, the World Concert Hall has made it its mission to bring free live classical concerts to the world. The website contains a collection of links to free radio performances each week, allowing listeners to tune into live concerts performed across the globe. You can browse performances according to the site’s schedule, or choose from a selection of classical radio stations in a large number of countries. As you might expect, the U.S has the largest selection by far, with 80 stations. But for more curious music lovers, World Concert Hall also offers a taste of what other fans are listening to in other countries, like China, Japan, and Israel.
Interested in checking out Mendelssohn’s concerto for violin, piano, and strings at Brussels’ Klara Festival (today, 7pm, GMT) or Irina Iordachescu and the Romanian Radio National Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s last works (Friday, 5pm, GMT)? Listen to your heart’s content at World Concert Hall.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.
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I can think of very few tasteful phenomena to have come to prominence in the seventies, but David Bowie’s albums and Dick Cavett’s talk shows both make the short list. In the middle of that decade, Bowie certainly made the television rounds; we previously featured his 1975 appearance opposite Cher, and today we have his appearance opposite Cavett from the previous year. “David Bowie is a superstar in a category that has never actually been defined,” says the host about the rocker, to audience cheers, “because as soon as a critic tries to say what he is, he changes, like a chameleon.” It seems that Bowie, then at the height of his self-transformative tendencies, could reduce even the most eloquent man on television to that not-quite-accurate cliché. As the former host told Esquire thirty years after this broadcast, “Doesn’t a chameleon exert tremendous energy to become indistinguishable from its environment?”
Yet Cavett ultimately holds his own with Bowie, a feat I doubt many of the rest of us could pull off then or now. The appearance involves more than just music; while Bowie does perform, he also sits down to talk, something that his fans hadn’t yet seen him do in 1974. To many of them, he remained for the most part a mystery, albeit an astutely rocking one. “Who is he? What is he?” Cavett rhetorically asks the crowd. “Man? Woman? Robot?” In the event, they discuss his school days, his ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the unforgettable Diamond Dogs cover art, his step back from “glitter,” why other people would have feared interviewing him, and whether he pictures himself at sixty (in the far-flung year of 2007). How easy to forget, in this age when we can often converse with our idols by merely sending them an @ reply on Twitter, how much a showman like Bowie could leave to our imaginations. He remains admirably secretive by today’s standards, but back in the seventies, anything he said would have come as a revelation — especially if prompted by no less artful a conversationalist.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
During a visit to Vanderbilt University last year, Billy Joel fielded a question from a freshman, Michel Pollack. To paraphrase: “My favorite song of yours is New York State of Mind. Can I play it for you on the piano while you sing?” To which Joel replied, “Ok.” And off they went. It’s a lovely impromptu moment. But it was a little too much for Pollack. A little overwhelmed by the whole experience, he got a 69 on his calculus exam the next day. But who could blame him. We have more impromptu musical moments below.
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