Founding Fathers, A Documentary Narrated By Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True History of Hip Hop

in Music | April 26th, 2016

Cranky, aging rock stars may kvetch and bitch, but it doesn’t really matter. Hip Hop is here to stay. The musical revolution that began in the Bronx has gone global, acquired billions of dollars in holdings, and pushed every other form of popular music to adapt to the world it created over the past several decades. And whether you’re a casual fan or die-hard hip hop head, you’ve probably learned a list of names—the names of the founding fathers of the genre: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Africa Bambaataa, the Sugar Hill Gang, DJ Kool Herc, Kurtis Blow….

The list goes on. Those are the inventors of rap, right? The men—and too often unsung women—who turned seventies disco, funk, and R&B into something else entirely, who re-invented NYC street and club culture, and eventually the world with only their voices, dances, graffiti, attitudes, turntables, and mobile sound systems? Not exactly. Maybe it wasn’t the Bronx in the late ‘70s. Maybe it was Brooklyn and Queens in the late ‘60s. And maybe the founding fathers had names like Grandmaster Flowers, Nu Sounds, King Charles, Master D, Charisma Funk.…

Never heard of ‘em? You’re not alone. The documentary above, Founding Fathers—narrated by Chuck D of the immortal Public Enemy—makes the case that these obscure pioneers did it first, and never received the credit they deserve after the uptown artists picked up their styles and ran with them. The claim is attested not only by veterans of this original Brooklyn party scene, but also by New York scenester Fab 5 Freddy and Queens historian Danny Wells (who traces the origins of the genre back to Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers), among other observers—and by the end of the film, you’ll have a very different understanding of where the music came from.

We learn that rapping began in 1970 with the rhyming patter of radio and club DJs, who imitated and one-upped each other in friendly competition over disco records, then created the call-and-response refrains that characterized the genre early on. And the musical “mixology” of hip hop began at the end of the ’60s with Brooklyn DJ Grandmaster Flowers—“the first Grandmaster”—who got his start in public parks. DJing then evolved into an almost athletic event with twin brothers The Disco Twins. Constructed mainly from interviews and archival footage, Founding Fathers presents a history of hip hop that you’ve never heard before, one created by local stars who didn’t achieve worldwide fame and glory, but who nonetheless forever changed the way the world sounds.

Founding Fathers (made available on Founding Fathers Youtube channel) will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via Kottke

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

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Scientific Study Reveals What Made Freddie Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cappella Splendor

in Music | April 26th, 2016

Rock and roll hagiography presents us with a canon of instrumental saints, guitar gods, drum demiurges, bass demons. It’s true, the frontman has often enjoyed a near-messianic status (it’s almost always been a man), but rock history has granted less authority to the voice as an instrument and allowed for all kinds of non-traditional—and not always particularly pleasant or accomplished—voices. The influence and imitation of folk and blues and the rise of punk and metal has given rock singers plenty of license to growl, howl, mumble, scream, and moan instead of singing in any classical sense.

But then there’s Freddie Mercury, who elevated rock vocals to operatic heights. Whether you love his intense, soaring vibrato or not, there’s no denying his unmatched virtuosity. Now—as they often do when it comes to music—scientists have “confirmed the obvious,” as Consequence of Sound puts it: Freddie Mercury’s voice was something special.

The specific findings of a new study, however, tell us things we probably didn’t intuit. Like Tuvan throat singers, it seems that Mercury’s singing and speaking voice vibrated both ventricular and vocal folds, creating rich subharmonics and a vibrato faster than that of any other singer.

To put that in plainer terms, researchers found, Consequence of Sound writes, that Mercury “was vibrating something in his throat even Pavarotti couldn’t move.” That is indeed surprising. But we must be cautious in interpreting the results obtained by this group of Austrian, Czech, and Swedish researchers, who published their study on April 15th in the infelicitously named journal Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology. Since Mercury died in 1991, the scientists were unable to gather what they refer to as “physiological or biomechanical data of vocal fold vibration” from the subject himself. Instead, they examined, among others, recordings from The Acapella Collection, a bootleg compilation of isolated Mercury vocal tracks, and attempted to correct for studio manipulation.

You can hear a few of those amazing recordings here (“We are the Champions” at the top, “Somebody to Love” below it, “Keep Yourself Alive” further down, “I Want to Break Free,” above, “I Want it All” below, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the bottom.) To examine Mercury’s speaking voice, they analyzed samples from six different interviews. To get a further sense of how Mercury made the sounds he did, the team used a ringer, a Mercury imitator named Daniel Zangger-Borch. As he duplicated Mercury’s vocals, they filmed his larynx at 4,000 frames per second to visualize how the Queen singer might have employed his own instrument.

But of course, this is only an approximation, and—given that Mercury’s voice was in a class of its own—it’s difficult to understand how another singer could have recreated his one-of-a-kind technique. In any case, the research conclusions are intriguing, especially since the study suggests that not only did Mercury’s vibrato and subharmonic technique create his thoroughly unique vocal sound, but that they also may have contributed to his “eccentric and flamboyant stage persona.” The researchers were unable to substantiate, however, the popular idea that Mercury’s voice spanned a full four octaves. You can read the full study, in all its minute technical detail, here.

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance

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

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Mesmerizing Animation, Made of Photos from Early-1900s America, Lets You Travel in a Steampunk Time Machine

in Animation, History | April 26th, 2016

Surely you remember Cheers, if only from the sitcom’s syndicated reruns ceaselessly aired around the world. And if you remember Cheers, you’ll remember no part of it more vividly than its opening credits sequence, which broke from the well-established tradition of showing the faces of the series’ cast members.

Instead, writes Stephen Cole at Fonts in Use, the studio charged with creating the sequence “collected archival illustrations and photographs of bar life, culled from books, private collections, and historical societies. They hand-tinted the images and paired them with typography inspired by a turn-of-the-century aesthetic.”

As fondly as we remember their work, the art of bringing turn-of-the-century photos to life has come a long way indeed since Cheers debuted in 1982. Take, for instance, the short above: The Old New World by Russian photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov, who in just over three and a half minutes takes us right back to early-1900s America. “The photos show New York, Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore between 1900 and 1940, and were obtained from the website Shorpy,” writes Petapixel’s Michael Zhang, quoting Zakharov’s own description of the work as a “photo-based animation project” as well as a chance to “travel back in time with a little steampunk time machine.”

You can see a gallery of more of the materials that went into The Old New World at Behance. Just as those Cheers opening credits evoked the conviviality of old-time tavern culture, Zakharov’s film evokes what it meant — or at least, to all of us currently alive and thus without any living memory of that era, what we think it meant — to live in the headiest cities going in the headiest country going, places whose booming industry and culture held out seemingly infinite promise, even on quiet days.

Should Netflix picks Cheers as their next beloved sitcom to revive, they might consider going to Zakharov for a new title sequence. He’s certainly got all the pictures of Boston he’d need.

via Petapixel

London Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Layered Onto Footage from 2013

James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

Watch 1920s “City Symphonies” Starring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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 Prince and Miles Davis’ Rarely-Heard Musical Collaborations

in Music | April 25th, 2016

The days and weeks after a celebrity death tend to fill up with public inquiries. The vaguer the circumstances, the more questions proliferate, lead to investigations, trials, depressing tabloid paydays…. But many fans don’t linger over procedural goings-on or prurient details. Many wonder instead “What if?”—as in, how do we reckon the artistic loss? What projects went uncompleted? What kind of collaborations might have been on the horizon?

The speculative answers to the latter question often give us far more interesting results than the real thing. While David Bowie’s work with Freddie Mercury and Queen is unquestionably masterful, for example, his joint effort with Mick Jagger now just makes us laugh. Bowie worked with nearly everyone it seems—there are few match-ups left to ponder…. Well, everyone that is except Prince. What if….?

And now that Prince has left us, we might wonder about all of the superduos that might have formed had he lived into his sixties and beyond. One collaboration that did bear some fruit during his lifetime came just in time for Prince’s superstar partner, Miles Davis, who died in 1991. During the latter half of the ‘80s, the two formed a bond, based on mutual admiration for each other’s music, of course, as well as for each other’s image and generally uncompromising personality.

In fact, since at least 1982, Davis, writes his biographer Ian Carr, became “almost obsessively interested in the androgynous, multi-talented black pop star… whom he rated very highly as an artist.” In the short (almost inaudible) interview clip above, Davis describes Prince as a synthesis of James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Chaplin. He also compared Prince to Sly Stone and Little Richard, writes Carr, and commented, “He’s a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington.”

For his part, Prince supposedly saw in Davis an older version of himself. After the two artists met in 1985, they crossed paths several more times in the following years, with Miles appearing onstage to play a solo at a Paisley Park New Year’s Eve benefit and recording a solo on the Prince/Chaka Khan song “Sticky Wicked” in 1988. What’s particularly interesting about Prince and Davis’s musical love affair is that the resulting music played to both artists’ strengths, instead of attempting to meld their styles into something out of character.

Davis’ experiments with ‘80s R&B tropes in his 1986 album Tutu stem from their work together, and the record was originally intended as a Prince collaboration. At the top of the post, you can hear an unreleased track originally written for Tutu called “Can I Play With U?” and featuring Prince’s vocals. Tutu ended up going in a different direction, and received some highly mixed reviews, but it retained much of the spirit of Prince. And for Miles—who since the late sixties had absorbed and transformed influences from so many contemporary styles—this seemed perfectly fitting.

The Tutu collab may not have panned out—Prince was apparently unhappy with the results and scrapped his songs—but the two didn’t give up on each other. On the contrary, much of the music Davis played and recorded at the end of his life was written by Prince. Above, hear one such composition, the suggestively named “Penetration,” in a 1991 performance. Though Prince’s funk roots shine through, it’s also a work very much in Davis’s fusion wheelhouse. Although Davis died before the two could complete their long-awaited collaborative album, we don’t have to wonder “What if?”

Much of the music they wrote together survives in live performances like that above and has circulated in a Davis bootleg titled Miles Davis Plays Prince and a Prince bootleg titled Crucial. Does the music on these recordings live up to the outsized talent and personalities of these two geniuses? Probably not—whatever could? But it shows us the direction Davis would have continued to move in had he lived on, and also gives us a way to think about the significant jazz influences in Prince’s music, a subject rarely discussed but worthy of much more consideration.

via Billboard

Prince (RIP) Performs Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: “Controversy,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & More

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead in 1970: Hear the Complete Recordings

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

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Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius

in Literature | April 25th, 2016

Franz Kafka — he wrote that story about the guy who turns into a bug, and lot of stuff about complex and implacable bureaucracy, right? What more do you need to know? Well, given the enduring use (and abuse) of the adjective “Kafkaesque,” the man’s work must tap into some deeper reality of the human condition than our fears of waking up transformed into something gross and inhuman or getting trapped in the purgatory of vast, soulless, and irrational systems. Here to explain a little bit more about that deeper reality, we have this explanatory animated video above from Alain de Botton’s School of Life.

Kafka, says de Botton, “was a great Czech writer who has come to own a part of the human emotional spectrum which we can now call the ‘Kafkaesque,’ and which, thanks to him, we’re able better to recognize and to gain a measure of perspective over and relief from.” We find ourselves in Kafka’s world whenever “we feel powerless in front of authority: judges, aristocrats, industrialists, politicians, and most of all, fathers. When we feel that our destiny is out of our control. When we’re bullied, humiliated, and mocked by society, and especially by our own families. We’re in Kafka’s orbit when we’re ashamed of our bodies, of our sexual urges, and feel that the best thing for us might be to be killed or squashed without mercy, as if we were an inconvenient and rather disgusting bedbug.”

You might expect any writer who takes those as his themes to have led a troubled life, and this video gets into detail about Kafka’s: the self-hatred of his youth, his unsuccessful relationships with women, the agonizing disease that kept him in pain, and everything else that shaped his writing of not just The Metamorphosis but the novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, all left unfinished, to his own mind, in his short lifetime. But in a way, his dreary life story ends well: “Within a few years of his death, his reputation began. By the second World War, he was recognized as one of the greatest writers of the age.”

Acknowledging the Kafkaesque in our world has become important to many of us, but according to this video’s view of Kafka, you can’t fully understand it unless you understand the writer’s relationship with his “terrifyingly psychologically abusive” father. “Any boy who has ever felt inadequate in front of or unloved by a powerful father will at once relate to what Kafka went through in his childhood,” says de Botton, who has himself spoken publicly about growing up in the similarly dark shadow of his own “cruel tyrant” banker father. But even if you didn’t suffer in the same way, you’ll find something to at least crack the frozen sea within you in the work of this writer who stands as “a monument in German literary history,” and at the same time “a sad, ashamed, terrified part of us all.”

Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka WritingThe Metamorphosis

The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907–1917

The Animated Franz Kafka Rock Opera

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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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In Search of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Secluded Hut in Norway: A Short Travel Film

in Philosophy, Travel | April 25th, 2016

If you like philosophy and road tripping, then you’ll want to put Wittgenstein in Norway in your YouTube queue. Posted this month by Kirsten Dirksen, the short film takes through the beautiful countryside of Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first starting in 1913. Dirksen gives this preface to the film:

Over 100 years ago, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein went to the fjords of Norway to escape the scholarly world of Cambridge. His former teacher Bertrand Russell wrote, “I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people.”

Not content with simply moving to the isolation of rural Norway- at the end of the Sognefjord (the deepest and second longest fjord)- Wittgenstein built his hut across the lake and halfway up a mountain from the nearest town (Skjolden). Measuring just 7 by 8 meters, the small cabin dubbed “Little Austria” (his native country) became his home on and off throughout his life (his longest stay here was 13 months).

Wittgenstein was fleeing the distractions and interruptions of a more social lifestyle and hoping to confront only his own thoughts. “Whoever is unwilling to descend into himself,” he wrote, “because it is too painful, will of course remain superficial in his writing.’” He wrote some of his most important work here (a precursor to his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and some of his “Philosophical Investigations”).

Today all that remains of his hut are its stone foundation and a very faint hikers trail up the mountain, though some Norwegians are trying to change this. Artists Marianne Bredesen, Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas and Siri Hjorth (in collaborations with the Wittgenstein Society in Skjolden and funded by Public Art Norway) threw an all-expenses-paid vacation to bring fellow Oslo residents to the ruin. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s argument that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday”, they are calling their art holiday “Wittgenstein on Vacation”. For part one, they entertained their guests with a weekend of lectures, meals and a Wittgenstein interpretation at the site of his cabin. We captured some of the show on our own journey to this disappearing piece of history.

Other videos about simple living, self-sufficiency, small homes, and philosophies of life can be found on Dirksen’s YouTube channel.

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How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Watering Video

in Art, Technology | April 25th, 2016

As depicted above, ink making is as voluptuous a process as making a high end candy bar. Having grown up around the printing floor of a daily newspaper, I know that ink’s pungent aroma is the opposite of chocolate‑y, but my mouth still started to water. Was it the commercial-ready classical soundtrack or hearing Chief Ink Maker Peter Welfare comparing the pigment’s gooey “vehicle” to honey?

I won’t be dipping my tongue in the ink pot any time soon, but the multistep four color process by which powdered cyan, magenta, yellow, and black hues become press-bound ink proved far more sensual than expected.

Ink making in the 21st-century is a combination of Old and New World techniques.

The history of ink and printing is very old indeed. The Chinese developed moveable type around 1045 and used it to print paper money. The Gutenberg Press was up and running by 1440. The rollers, vats, and mixing tools in use at the Printing Ink Company, Welfare’s family business, are not so far removed from the tools used by early practitioners.

Workers at the Printing Ink Compnany use their fingers to test their product’s tackiness, a predictor of its on-press performance. Presumably, you develop a feel for it after a while.

State of the art computer programs provide further quality control, analyzing for consistency of color and gloss with an accuracy that eludes even the most practiced human eye.

The results can be seen on everything from brochures to fine art prints.

via Coudal

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Frida!

in Art | April 22nd, 2016

In a pretty great gif. That’s all.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

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Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979

in Animation, Film, Music | April 22nd, 2016

Tom Waits For No One, above, is surely the only film in history to have won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement for its creator and a first place award at the Hollywood Erotic Film and Video Festival.

Director John Lamb and his partner, Bruce Lyon also deserve recognition for their taste in source material. Singer Tom Waits’ “The One That Got Away” is about as cool as it gets, and the animated Waits is a dead ringer for his then-28-year-old counterpart, with eyes and choppers slightly exaggerated for maximum effect.

The short was conceived as a demo model. Lyon and Lamb hoped to convince Ralph Bakshi, director of the feature-length, X‑rated, cartoon adaptation of R Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, to use their newly patented “pencil preview” technique on an upcoming project. The result is definitely more provocative than the non-narrative bouncing ball videos developers would use to show off fledgling CGI techniques a decade or so later.

A portion of raw footage below shows Waits and professional stripper Donna Gordon—who had previously appeared in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—slinking around a largely bare soundstage. The crew amassed 13 hours of video that were whittled down to 5,500 Rotoscoped frames. These were individually re-drawn, inked, and hand-painted onto celluloid acetate.

Gordon, whose animated look appears to have exerted quite an influence on the following decade’s cartoon femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit, recollected that her co-star was “very nice, shy and quiet” and that he smelled strongly of cigarettes and booze.

Just as Gordon’s fantasy stripper eluded the animated Waits, this innovative film failed to find distribution, and without commercial release, it sank into obscurity.

(I invite Waits fans to join me in imagining an alternate universe, in which it becomes the greatest Saturday morning cartoon ever, providing morning-after comfort to very particular breed of hungover early-80s nighthawks.)

Tom Waits For No One will be added to the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Sell & Spin: The History of Advertising, Narrated by Dick Cavett (1999)

in Business, Television | April 22nd, 2016

“According to a study published Monday by researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, humans experience the most intense feelings of happiness when pressing the ‘skip ad’ button before watching a video on the internet.” That comes from The Onion, whose satirical reporting hits the mark as usual. If we know one thing about advertising for sure, we know that we don’t like it — or at least we don’t like many of its current manifestations, so much so that we willingly engage in the arms race of downloading special programs to block them, which advertisers soon find a way to defeat, requiring us to find new evasive tactics, which forces advertises to cut another path to us, and so on.

How has it come to this? You can learn exactly how from Sell & Spin, the 1999 television documentary above. “From ancient phrases etched in stone to today’s cutting-edge multimedia commercials, selling has always meant grabbing attention,” says its narrator, the respected talk-show host Dick Cavett. “The point? Moving the product. The means? Tapping into desire — creating need.” From the first known advertisement, a wine shop’s sign from ancient Babylon, to the eve of the high-tech 21st century, Cavett and a host of advertising experts tell the story of not just how advertising became an industry in the first place, but how it became the huge, shape-shifting industry we regard today as both wildly creative yet somehow sinister.

Even the most ad-loathing viewer will recognize many of the iconic examples of this ultra-commercial art form of the thousands this documentary includes: Burma-Shave roadsigns, the smoke-blowing Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, the Volkswagen Beetle touting itself as a “lemon” on a whole magazine page, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”; mascots from Tony the Tiger to the Marlboro Man (a symbol of freedom, we hear, for postwar office workers shackled to their desks) to the Taco Bell chihuahua; and of course Coca-Cola’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” whose conception the final episode of Mad Men fictionalized by putting into the mind of its protagonist, 1960s Madison Avenue “creative” Don Draper.

That acclaimed recent television drama both glamorized and criticized the culture of the 20th-century advertising industry, which may have operated as cynically and opportunistically as the businesses it worked for, but which nevertheless crafted some of the most enduring words and images in our modern culture. But what of the “mad men” of today, charged with the thankless (if often remunerative) task of coming up with those videos we get such a kick out of clicking past? Sell & Spin shows us the very beginning of their work, taking place on a now-quaint-looking cyberspace that had only just moved beyond Burma Shave-simple banner ads.

“Nobody quite knows how to use it effectively,” says Jay Chiat of the internet toward the documentary’s end. As the co-founder of Los Angeles’ formidable Chiat/Day advertising industry, he knew the mechanics of the craft well indeed, more than thoroughly enough to recognize both the medium’s potential and the extent to which nobody had yet tapped it. How we all use the internet has changed dramatically since Chiat died in 2002, but his words still ring true. It’s still early days for internet advertising, and its maddest men (and women) — the ones who fully reject the old industry commandment to “irritate your way into peoples’ consciousness — have yet to arrive on the scene.

Sell & Spin will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials

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A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rollicking Fake Advertisements from the 1960s

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Delight in Prince’s Extraordinarily Poignant Cover of Radiohead’s “Creep

in Music | April 22nd, 2016

Prince didn’t cover a song, he possessed it. He took over its limbs and made it do things it had never done before—dance wildly down the aisles, scream, shout, and fall to the ground. When he covered a song, it got religion the way people only do in the movies. And if you had the privilege to see it happen, you too became a believer in every word and note. As the producer Fafu, a onetime member of his army of players and techs, testified yesterday: “I never saw Prince make a mistake—in anything.” It may sound like a musician who fits that description would have to be some kind of robot; Prince was precisely the opposite, the apotheosis of what a human being could do with voice, guitar, and virtually every other instrument.

Unsurprisingly, Prince’s all-powerful control over his musicianship extended to most other areas of his life. He “was hard on people,” Fafu remembered, “I don’t want to paint an ugly picture, but he was tough. You wanted to please daddy.” He was equally hard on people who disseminated his recordings and performances in unauthorized ways. But in at least one case, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke fought back, forcing Prince to unblock access to Youtube footage of his 2008 Coachella version of “Creep.” And wow, are we glad he did. See it above (especially poignant is his gospel delivery of the line, “you just want to have controoool.”), and be reborn.

Prince reminds us that every hard rock ballad since the early ‘80s owes him a royalty check, and that just one of his screams, one of his explosive guitar fills, even one of his pregnant pauses, had more power and beauty in it than some entire albums. Prince didn’t have to want to be special. He just was.

As I shared yesterday, he was without a doubt the most incredible live performer I have ever experienced, so much so that I generally prefer his live recordings—bootlegged or otherwise—to his studio stuff. Millions of people feel likewise, and thanks to one fan, we have the full audio of that headlining Coachella show. Hear it all here (and see the setlist further down)—the ridiculously catchy funk/soul hits, the between-song inspirational patter, the soaring, snarling guitar solos, and the covers: including “Creep,” “Come Together,” Sarah Mclachlan’s “Angel,” songs by Santana, The Time, Sheila E., and, no kidding, The B‑52’s “Rock Lobster.”

via Live for Music

Prince (RIP) Performs Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: “Controversy,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & More

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

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Founding Fathers, A Documentary Narrated By Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True History of Hip Hop

Scientific Study Reveals What Made Freddie Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cappella Splendor

Mesmerizing Animation, Made of Photos from Early-1900s America, Lets You Travel in a Steampunk Time Machine

Hear Prince and Miles Davis’ Rarely-Heard Musical Collaborations

Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius

In Search of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Secluded Hut in Norway: A Short Travel Film

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Watering Video

Frida!

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979

Sell & Spin: The History of Advertising, Narrated by Dick Cavett (1999)

Delight in Prince’s Extraordinarily Poignant Cover of Radiohead’s “Creep

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