Sinéad O’Connor’s Raw Isolated Vocals for “Nothing Compares 2 U”
Prince first recorded a demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1984. Then Sinéad O’Connor made the song her own … and made it famous. Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the 1990 track, remembers the circumstances behind the recording: Speaking to Sound on Sound, he recalls: “I think the intensity of Sinéad’s performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship.” “She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who’s a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, so that’s probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation.” In the isolated track above, you can hear all of the rawness of the moment, captured just as Birkett heard it that day.
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Pakistani Musicians Play a Wonderful Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five”
How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. (Watch them perform it here.) Before he died in 2012, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard. Once you watch the performance above, you’ll know why.
According to The Guardian, The Sachal Studios Orchestra was created by Izzat Majeed, a philanthropist based in London. When Pakistan fell under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, Pakistan’s classical music scene fell on hard times. Many musicians were forced into professions they had never imagined — selling clothes, electrical parts, vegetables, etc. Whatever was necessary to get by. Today, many of these musicians have come together in a 60-person orchestra that plays in a state-of-the-art studio, designed partly by Abbey Road sound engineers.
You can purchase their album, Sachal Jazz: Interpretations of Jazz Standards & Bossa Nova, on Amazon. It includes versions of “Take Five” and “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Note: This post originally appeared on our site over a decade ago. For obvious reasons, we’re bringing it back.
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Read More...Sinéad O’Connor Makes Her First US Television Appearance: Watch Her Sing “Mandinka” on Late Night with David Letterman (1988)
On September 7, 1988, a skinny, near bald, 21-year-old mother took the mic midway through Late Night with David Letterman and blew the socks off both the live studio audience and the folks viewing at home.
She also appeared as an unwilling participant in a cheesy greenroom sketch with fellow guests comedian Robert Klein, crooner Jerry Vale, and a female day player costumed as a sexy cigarette girl from another era.
It’s a stupid, retrograde bit that’s become even worse with age, but young Sinead O’Connor’s refusal to play along with the problematic premise was as true to form as her howling performance of Mandinka off her first album, The Lion and the Cobra.
Performing in a studded jean jacket and Claddagh ring, she made her live US television debut with eyes mostly closed.
Letterman introduced her as a “remarkable, young singer and writer from Ireland.”
It’s fun to see the truth of that canned line hitting the house band as the song progresses. Bandleader Paul Shaffer looks especially tickled by the ferocity of O’Connor’s performance and her confident musicianship.
In her memoir Rememberings, O’Connor explains that the song was inspired by the 1977 television adaptation of Alex Haley’s semi-autobiographical historical novel Roots:
I was a young girl when I saw it, and it moved something so deeply in me, I had a visceral response. I came to emotionally identify with the civil rights movement and slavery, especially given the theocracy I lived in and the oppression in my own home.
She reprised Mandinka several months later at the Grammy Awards. She may have lost Best Female Rock Vocal Performance to established legend Tina Turner, but the LA Times waggishly declared her “black halter top, bare midriff, torn, faded blue jeans and large black work shoes” the “outfit of the evening”:
The latest addition to her shaved-head look is a tattoo of militant rap group Public Enemy’s insignia–a view through a telescopic gun sight–over her left ear. None of which detracted from her electrifying performance of her song “Mandinka.”
“I thought it was a little odd that they asked me to perform, because of the way I look,” a nervous-looking O’Connor told the press backstage. “But I find it encouraging that they asked, because it’s an acknowledgment that they are prepared not to be so safe about the music and push forward with people slightly off the wall.”
Two years later, her cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, abetted by her defiant appearance, made her a household name. Nominated for four Grammys, she declined an invitation to perform at the ceremony. She also declined her award for Best Alternative Music Performance.
In a letter to the sponsoring organization, the Recording Academy of the United States, she argued against the music industry’s priorities, its overt tendency to rank artists based on their commercial success:
As artists I believe our function is to express the feelings of the human race–to always speak the truth and never keep it hidden even though we are operating in a world which does not like the sound of the truth. I believe that our purpose is to inspire and, in some way, guide and heal the human race, of which we are all equal members.
Those looking for early-90s examples of man-splaining might appreciate Recording Academy President Michael Greene’s response, in which he overlooked the Letterman appearance, claiming the Grammys provided O’Connor with her first nationally televised exposure in the States:
We applaud that Sinead feels so strongly about these issues and believe that her convictions only add to the seriousness of her work. But she may be misguided. We respect her immensely as an artist… But I’m afraid that Sinead may not be properly informed about the difference between the overtly commercial aspects of popularity contests as opposed to the Grammys, which are voted on by the creative community.
O’Connor doubled down, attempting to rally her fellow musicians to shine a light on society’s ills, telling the LA Times that “It’s not enough any more to just sit in your chair and say, ‘Yeah, it’s terrible.’:”
Musicians are in a position to help heal this sickness, but I’d say 90% of the artists in the music business fail in that responsibility. You must acknowledge if you are an artist that you are a role model for young people, whether you like it or not. If you don’t want to accept that responsibility, you shouldn’t be an artist. With power comes responsibility.
The industry, including awards shows, sends out the message that selling more records is good rather than telling the truth.
Honoring commercial success is the obvious purpose of the American Music Awards telecast, but it’s also the intent of the Grammys as well.
I think if artists were to be awarded for what they had achieved in so far as telling the truth … as far as healing the human race, then I’d say Van Morrison or Ice Cube, people like that should be honored.
That statement lends an extra poignancy to our viewing of O’Connor and Morrison’s 1995 Letterman appearance, when, backed by the Chieftans, they duetted on Have I Told You Lately?
In the wake of O’Connor’s death at 56 last week, the media reminded us of the time she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as a way of drawing attention to the Catholic church’s coverup of sexual abuse by the clergy.
They reminded us of the time Frank Sinatra claimed he’d like to “kick her ass” when she wouldn’t submit to singing the National Anthem before a concert.
They reminded us of her correspondence with Miley Cyrus, wherein she warned the younger singer not to “obscure (her) talent by allowing (her)self to be pimped” either consciously or unconsciously.
Meanwhile, Letterman bassist Will Lee reacted to the news by revisiting that 1987 appearance on his Instagram:
Sinead O’Connor RIP — I always felt her pain, but now I don’t have to. She is free. Her death comes as a shock to the system because I always hoped she would find resolve, but she went too soon….
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Behold A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design: The 19th Century Book That Introduced Western Audiences to Japanese Art (1880)
In 1880, architect Thomas W. Cutler endeavored to introduce his fellow Brits to Japanese art and design, a subject that remained novel for many Westerners of the time, given how recently the Tokugawa shogunate had “kept themselves aloof from all foreign intercourse, and their country jealously closed against strangers.”
Having written positively of China’s influence on Japanese artists, Cutler hoped that access to Western art would not prove a corrupting factor:
The fear that a bastard art of a very debased kind may arise in Japan, is not without foundation…The European artist, who will study the decorative art of Japan carefully and reverently, will not be in any haste to disturb, still less to uproot, the thought and feeling from which it has sprung; it is perhaps the ripest and richest fruit of a tree cultivated for many ages with the utmost solicitude and skill, under conditions of society peculiarly favorable to its growth.
Having never visited Japan himself, Cutler relied on previously published works, as well as numerous friends who were able to furnish him with “reliable information upon many subjects,” given their “long residence in the country.”
Accordingly, expect a bit of bias in A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design (1880).
That said, Cutler emerges as a robust admirer of Japan’s painting, lacquerware, ceramics, calligraphy, textiles, metalwork, enamelwork and netsuke carvings, the latter of which are “are often marvelous in their humor, detail, and even dignity.”
Only Japan’s wooden architecture, which he confidently pooh poohed as little more than “artistic carpentry, decoration, and gardening”, cleverly designed to withstand earthquakes, get shown less respect.
Cutler’s renderings of Japanese design motifs, undertaken in his free time, are the lasting legacy of his book, particularly for those on the prowl for copyright-free graphics.
Cutler observed that the “most characteristic” element of Japanese decoration was its close ties to the natural world, adding that unlike Western designers, a Japanese artist “would throw his design a little out of the center, and cleverly balance the composition by a butterfly, a leaf, or even a spot of color.”
The below plant studies are drawn from the work of the great ukiyo‑e master Hokusai, a “man of the people” who ushered in a period of “vitality and freshness” in Japanese art.
A sampler of curved lines made with single brush strokes can be used to create clouds or the intricate scrollwork that inspired Western artists and designers of the Aesthetic Movement.
While Cutler might not have thought much of Japanese architecture, it’s worth noting that his book shows up in the footnotes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Take a peek at some Japanese-inspired wallpaper of Cutler’s own design, then explore A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design by Thomas W. Cutler here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...How the Ancient Greeks Invented the First Computer: An Introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism (Circa 87 BC)
At the center of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a device quite like the real ancient Greek artifact known as the Antikythera mechanism, which has been called the world’s oldest computer. “Every Indiana Jones adventure needs an exotic MacGuffin,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Meilan Solly, and in this latest and presumably last installment in its series, “the hero chases after the Archimedes Dial, a fictionalized version of the Antikythera mechanism that predicts the location of naturally occurring fissures in time.” After undergoing Indiana Jonesification, in other words, the Antikythera mechanism becomes a time machine, a function presumably not included in even the least responsible archaeological speculations about its still-unclear set of functions.
But according to Jo Marchant, author of Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer, the Antikythera mechanism really is “a time machine in a sense. When you turn the handle on the side, you are moving backward in time, you’re controlling time. You’re seeing the universe either being fast-forwarded or reversed, and you’re choosing the speed and can set it to any moment in history that you want.”
She refers to the fact that a handle on the side of the mechanism controls gears within it, which engage to compute and display “the positions of celestial bodies, the date, the timing of athletic games. There’s a calendar, there’s an eclipse prediction dial, and there are inscriptions giving you information about what the stars are doing.”
It seems that the Antikythera mechanism could tell you “everything you need to know about the state and workings of the cosmos,” at least if you’re an ancient Greek. But it also tells us something important about the ancient Greeks themselves: specifically, that they’d developed much more sophisticated mechanical engineering than we’d known before the early twentieth century, when the device was discovered in a shipwreck. According to the BBC video above on the details of the Antikythera mechanism’s known capabilities, Arthur C. Clarke thought that “if the ancient Greeks had understood the capabilities of the technology, then they would have reached the moon within 300 years.” A grand old civilization that turns out to have been on a course for outer space: now there’s a viable premise for the next big architectural adventure film franchise.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...A Collection of Hokusai’s Drawings Are Being Carved Onto Woodblocks & Printed for the First Time Ever
If you know anything about the ukiyo‑e masters of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan like Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Katsushika Hokusai, you know that they became renowned through woodblock prints. But in almost all cases, a woodblock print begins in another medium: the medium of the drawing, where the artist works out the image before committing (or having it committed) to a block of wood for printing. This process, as Tokyo-based Canadian printmaker David Bull explains in the video above, entailed the destruction of the original drawing — or at least it did a couple of centuries ago, before the advent of copy machines, let alone high-resolution digital scanners.
Our time has not only these technologically advanced tools, but also, as previously featured here on Open Culture, a wealth of rediscovered drawings by Hokusai himself. “The existence of these exquisite small drawings had been forgotten,” says the site of the British Museum. “Last publicly recorded at a Parisian auction in 1948, they are said to have been in a private collection in France before resurfacing in 2019.”
Having acquired the 103 images that constitute this Great Picture Book of Everything, the British Museum has entered into a collaboration with Bull, whose workshop Mokuhankan is taking a selection of these drawings — never printed in Hokusai’s day — and carving them into woodblocks for the first time ever.
You can enjoy this project, called Hokusai Reborn, by following its progress on Bull’s Youtube channel; the first two episodes of the series appear just above. You can also purchase a subscription to receive copies of the actual prints now being made from Hokusai’s drawings at Mokuhankan. “The prints will be 13.5 x 18.5 cm in format (slightly larger than 5 x 7 inches),” says the page at the studio’s site with more information on that, “and will be made on a thin version of our usual hosho washi, made in the workshop of Iwano Ichibei,” one of Japan’s officially designated Living National Treasures. This sales model is in keeping with the commercial model of ukiyo‑e in the Edo period of the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, when a burgeoning merchant class formed a robust customer base for its artisans. Here we have an unexpected opportunity to become one of those customers — and, perhaps, to own the next Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
via Metafilter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...GWAR Performs a Tiny Desk Concert: When Heavy Metal Meets NPR
In February 2020, a parody news site posted the headline: “GWAR asks NPR’s Tiny Desk Staff if They’re Ready to Get Their A******* Ripped Open.” In July 2023, NPR made good on the joke, inviting the heavy metal band to perform their own tiny desk concert. NPR writes: “As the band of intergalactic monsters strapped guitars to their battle-worn bodies, thunder and rain pounded the NPR building outside. As if the late Oderus Urungus was pissing his blessing from Valhalla, the prophecy had finally been fulfilled: GWAR came to destroy the Tiny Desk once and for all.” Enjoy.
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Read More...Does Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity Suggest That There Is an Afterlife?: A Theoretical Physicist Explains
“Let’s talk about the physics of dead grandmothers.” Thus does theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder start off the Big Think video above, which soon gets into Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The question of how Hossenfelder manages to connect the former to the latter should raise in anyone curiosity enough to give these ten minutes a watch, but she also addresses a certain common category of misconception. It all began, she says, when a young man posed to her the following question: “A shaman told me that my grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Is this right?”
Upon reflection, Hossenfelder arrived at the conclusion that “it’s not entirely wrong.” For decades now, “quantum mechanics” has been hauled out over and over again to provide vague support to a range of beliefs all along the spectrum of plausibility. But in the dead-grandmother case, at least, it’s not the applicable area of physics. “It’s actually got something to do with Einstein’s theory of special relativity,” she says. With that particular achievement, Einstein changed the way we think about space and time, proving that “everything that you experience, everything that you see, you see as it was a tiny, little amount of time in the past. So how do you know that anything exists right now?”
In Einstein’s description of physical reality, “there is no unambiguous notion to define what happens now; it depends on the observer.” And “if you follow this logic to its conclusion, then the outcome is that every moment could be now for someone. And that includes all moments in your past, and it also includes all moments in your future.” Einstein posits space and time as not two separate concepts, but aspects of a single entity called spacetime, in which “the present moment has no fundamental significance”; in the resulting “block universe,” past, present, and future coexist simultaneously, and no information is ever destroyed, just continually rearranged.
“So if someone you knew dies, then, of course, we all know that you can no longer communicate with this person. That’s because the information that made up their personality disperses into very subtle correlations in the remains of their body, which become entangled with all the particles around them, and slowly, slowly, they spread into radiation that disperses throughout the solar system, and eventually, throughout the entire universe.” But one day could bring “some cosmic consciousnesses which will also be spread out, and this information will be accessible again” — in about a billion years, anyway, which will at least give grandma’s reassembled intelligence plenty to catch up on.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...Wes Anderson Explains How He Built Asteroid City, the Fictional American Desert Town in His New Film
Wes Anderson’s latest picture Asteroid City is named for the small Arizona town (population: 87) in which its central story takes place. That town, in turn, is named for the incident that made it (modestly) famous: the impact of an asteroid that left behind a large crater. That crater was one of the features that Anderson and his production designers had to make for the shoot — but then, so was everything else in Asteroid City, which had to be raised whole in an out-of-the-way area of Spain. Unlikely though it may sound in itself, the cinematic project of re-creating the American West in southern Europe isn’t without precedent: the “Spaghetti Westerns” of the nineteen-sixties and seventies also relied on the Spanish desert to provide the right atmosphere of sublime desolation.
Just as movies like A Fistful of Dollars or Django are rooted in a certain conception of the second half of the nineteenth century, so Asteroid City is rooted in a certain conception of the middle of the twentieth. This comes through most clearly in the architecture of their sets.
“The thing was to try to make buildings that were as evocative of the time as we possibly could,” Anderson says in the short making-of video above. But this thoroughly midcentury-provincial setting also needed its mysterious elements: the crater, of course, but also the observatory and “the freeway on-ramp there that goes to nowhere.” The fully assembled Asteroid City felt like not just a set, but something approaching an actual place: “Once it was built, we could be a tiny group in this what seemed like an abandoned town.”
Anyone who’s spent enough time road-tripping across the United States of America will recognize that, continental location notwithstanding, Asteroid City captures something essential about that country’s more remote settlements, inhabited or not, located in arid regions or otherwise. This required the fabrication of not just buildings but the flora, fauna, and geological formations of an entire landscape, practically all of it adherent to Anderson’s signature handmade aesthetic scheme, which somehow convinces through artificiality. Even detractors of Anderson’s work surely derive pleasure from the resulting quality of sheer physicality, some of which also owes to his still shooting on good old 35-millimeter film — as this video’s publisher, Kodak, doesn’t hesitate to remind us.
via Laughing Squid
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...Watch the Newly-Released Trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Starring Joaquin Phoenix
Ridley Scott’s 1977 film The Duellists stars Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as Frenchmen in the early nineteenth century. Both of their characters are military officers, Keitel’s a Bonapartist and Carradine’s an anti-Bonapartist, and their relationship plays out over a duel-punctuated sixteen-year period during and just after the Napoleonic Wars. The Duellists is required viewing for any student of Scott-as-auteur, not just due to its being his debut feature, but also to its presumptive connections to his latest work. Even working on a low budget 45 years ago, Scott and his collaborators managed to perform an acclaimed re-creation of Napoleon’s France. What has he accomplished on the far grander canvas of Napoleon, which comes out on November 22nd?
Napoleon, as previously featured here on Open Culture, is also the title of the greatest movie Stanley Kubrick never made. Judging by its newly released trailer, Ridley Scott’s film isn’t exactly a stylistic homage to Kubrick, though one doubts that Kubrick’s work was all too far from Scott’s mind during the project — as indeed it wasn’t in the making of The Duellists, which was heavily influenced by Barry Lyndon.
But as a historical drama, Napoleon seems to have more obviously in common with Scott’s own swords-and-sandals blockbuster Gladiator, which included a memorable performance by Joaquin Phoenix as Marcus Aurelius’ power-mad son Commodus, who kills his father in order to make himself emperor.
Phoenix plays another imperial role in Napoleon: that of the titular military commander who rose to rule the French Empire for more than a decade. Bringing Napoleon’s story to the screen afforded Scott the chance to stage no fewer than six battle sequences — including, as Smithsonian.com’s Teresa Nowakowski notes, “the Battle of Austerlitz, a military engagement that went down in history as one of Napoleon’s greatest successes. The trailer depicts the pivotal moment when Napoleon’s forces fired artillery into the ice on which enemy troops were retreating,” an episode well-suited to Scott’s instinct for spectacle. However much his particular sensibilities may differ from Kubrick’s, it’s easy to understand why both directors would be drawn to the subject of Napoleonic ambition.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
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