How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The word “seminal” does a lot of work in expressions like “seminal band/album/track, etc.” Yes, it’s an adjective denoting “majorly influential,” even “essential.” It’s also an adjective relating directly to the male reproductive system. The conceptual use of the term does not necessarily exclude women, who can perfectly well be said to “seed” artistic movements. But it does suggest that creativity is an inherently masculine act. To take a broader view, we could say that art is non-binary; it includes all of the generative principles involved in the act of creation, including gestation, birthing, and nurturing new art forms.
In this vein, we might call German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk a “seminal matrix” of musical activity, an economy of creative work led by two fathers — Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter — who midwived a techno/electro revolution, and — indirectly — through early spin-off projects like NEU!, an experimental post-punk/New Wave revolution.
The best known of the “Krautrock” bands to emerge in the 1970s, early versions of Kraftwerk included in its ranks German producer Conny Plank (unofficially) as well as drummer Klaus Dinger, and guitarist Michael Rother, both of whom went on to play in the aforementioned NEU! and “seminal” avant-garde bands like Harmonia and La Düsseldorf.
In its early, anarchic phase, “Kraftwerk’s music neither referenced nor evoked the robotic,” writes Simon Reynolds at NPR. “They started, in the final years of the 1960s, as post-psychedelic progressives — long hair and all. (Watch their first recorded gig in 1970 here.) In 1968, Hütter and Schneider met at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid, near Düsseldorf, where they studied piano and flute, respectively. Sharing an interest in improvisation and avant-garde electronics, as well as a fondness for The Velvet Underground, the Doors and the multimedia provocations of Fluxus, they joined with three other musicians and recorded the album Tone Float under the name Organisation.”
This early avant-garde phase continued for a time, but once Dinger and Rother left and were replaced by Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, Kraftwerk began its unlikely climb up the charts, and into the hands of remixers and DJs everywhere, with 1975’s Autobahn. “That is the point at which they went from a krautrock curio to a world-historical force,” Reynolds writes, “when the single edit of the 24-minute title track became an international hit in 1975.” The song retains some instrumental elements from the band’s previous incarnations — “twinkling guitar and wafting flute feature alongside synth pulses and drum machine.”
But the melding of man and machine was well underway. “Crucially, it was music stripped of individualized inflection and personality” — not only were Kraftwerk beyond 70s gender stereotypes, they were charting the course for the post-human before the term had any currency. “We go beyond the individual feel,” Schneider told Sounds magazine. “We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine. Sometimes we play the music, sometimes the music plays us, sometimes… it plays.” Kraftwerk may have played German stereotypes for humor in music videos and live performances, but their detachment was no act — their approach from the late 1970’s onward was entirely the opposite of rock and roll’s self (indulgent)-expression.
Why, then, does Kraftwerk belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Just inducted this year, their presence is truly indisputable. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say, as the Hall of Fame does, that they “are the foundation upon which all synthesizer-based rock and electronic dance music is built.… Kraftwerk’s influence can be heard in the work of David Bowie and Brian Eno, the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, the electronic-rock integration of U2, the ‘robot rock’ of Daft Punk, the production techniques of Kanye West, and in countless EDM and dubstep artists.”
This is just to name a tiny sampling of the musicians influenced by the perfectionistic German foursome. The case can and has been made that for the sheer breadth of their influence, Kraftwerk is more important than even the Beatles to the history of popular music, for rather than mastering and transforming the music of the 20th century’s first half, they invented the rock and roll of the future. See many more classic Kraftwerk videos at this YouTube channel.
Related Content:
The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” from 1979
Kraftwerk’s First Concert: The Beginning of the Endlessly Influential Band (1970)
The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influential Band Since the Beatles
Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Violinist Breaks a String While Performing Tchaikovsky in Concert, and Gracefully Recovers
Having evolved over centuries — indeed, millennia — the formal elegance and sonic beauty of stringed instruments continue to inspire their players toward ever-greater heights of virtuosity. But of course, the attainment of virtuosity itself doesn’t come easy, and whatever altitude you reach, you’ll still be dogged by some of the same problems you were as a novice. What violinist, for instance, could ever fully put out of their mind the possibility of a string’s breaking as they play, whether at home or in Carnegie Hall? Not celebrity player Ray Chen, surely, given that it’s happened to him at least twice in the past five years.
Being a Youtuber as well, Chen has turned these onstage misfortunes to his advantage. Just last week he put up “Violinist string BREAKS during Tchaikovsky,” a video that captures his latest such experience while playing with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Far from grinding to a halt, the performance continues with only a minor hitch.
After making a valiant attempt to soldier on short an E string, Chen switches to what appears to be the backup plan. Without the option of singing the blues while changing the string himself, as B.B. King did at Farm Aid, he swaps his instrument with that of the concertmaster, who passes it down the line. Unfazed, Chen continues playing right where he left off.
Chen followed a similar procedure after a string break in 2017, while playing in Brussels with the Taiwan Philharmonic. Then, as now, he uploaded the footage to his Youtube channel, where it has racked up more than 1.6 million views. The brief clip also captures his final toss onto the floor of the spare pack of strings he’d had the good sense to place in his pocket beforehand. The accolades posted in the comments below bring to mind the story of 19th-century violinist Carl Herman Unthan. Born without arms, Unthan became a virtuoso by playing instead with his feet — which he also used to change a string that broke on him in concert. This proved astonishing enough that he’s said later to have deliberately weakened strings in order to repeat the spectacle for other audiences. Just imagine if he’d had Youtube.
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...John Cleese Presents His 5‑Step Plan for Shorter, More Productive Meetings (1976)
Let’s face it, meetings are boring at best and at worst, chaotic, volatile, and potentially violent. And let’s also face it: to get through life as functioning adults, we’re going to have to sit through one or two of them — or even one or two of them a week.
Maybe we’re the one who calls the meetings, and maybe they all feel like a waste of time. One solution is to have more informal meetings. This can be especially tempting in the age of work-from-home, when it’s impossible to know how many meeting attendees are wearing pants. Fewer rules can raise the spontaneity quotient, but allowing for the unexpected can invite disaster as well as epiphany.
On the other end of the scale, we have the formality of parliamentary rules of order, such as those introduced by U.S. Army officer Henry Martyn Robert in 1876. Robert, whose father was the first president of Morehouse College, gained a wealth of experience with unproductive meetings as he traveled around the country with the Army. One particular meeting became a defining experience, as one account has it:
While in San Francisco, the local leader of his community didn’t show up for a church meeting. Henry Robert was asked to preside over the town hall (without any prior notice). Let’s just say that on this particular evening in 1876, he did a bad job. An hour into the meeting, people were screaming and the church actually erupted into open conflict.
Sadly, this sort of thing has become almost routine at town halls and school board meetings. But it needn’t be so at the office. Nor, says John Cleese in the brief video above, do meetings need to follow the formality of parliamentary procedure.
Cleese’s rules are simpler even than the simplified Roberts or Rosenberg’s Rules of Order, an even more simplified version of Robert’s Rules. Furthermore, Cleese avoids using words like “Rules” which can be a turn-off in our egalitarian times. Instead, he presents us with a “5‑Step Plan” for holding better and shorter meetings.
1. Plan — Clear your mind about the precise objectives of the meeting. Be clear why you need it and list the subjects.
2. Inform — Make sure everyone knows exactly what is being discussed, why, and what you want from the discussion. Anticipate what information and people may be needed and make sure they’re there.
3. Prepare — Prepare the logical sequence items. Prepare the time allocation to each item on the basis of its importance not its urgency.
4. Structure and Control — Take the evidence stage before the interpretation stage and that before the action stage and stop people jumping ahead or going back over ground.
5. Summarize all decision and record them straight away with the name of the person responsible for any action
Easy, right? Well, maybe not so easy in practice, but these steps can, at the very least, illuminate what’s wrong with your meetings, which may currently resemble one of Cleese’s many parodies of business culture. Nobody videophoned it in at the time, but trying to figure out who’s supposed to be doing what can still take up an afternoon. Let Cleese’s five steps bring order to the chaos.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch the Jackson 5’s First Appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (1969)
Who discovered the Jackson 5?
Motown founder Berry Gordy?
Empress of Soul Gladys Knight?
Diva Diana Ross?
Everyone in attendance for Amateur Night at the Apollo on August 13, 1967?
For many unsuspecting Americans, the answer may as well have been television host Ed Sullivan, who introduced the “sensational group” of five young brothers from Gary, Indiana to viewers in December 1969, two years after their Amateur Night triumph. Thirteen years earlier, a wall of sound emanating from a live in-studio audience of teenage girls told Sullivan’s home viewers that another young sensation — Elvis Presley — must be something special.
The Jackson 5 needed no such help.
While there are many close-ups of their fresh young faces, the control room wisely chose to zoom out much of the time, in appreciation of the brothers’ precision choreography.
The brightest star was the youngest, eleven-year-old Michael, taking lead vocals in purple fedora and fringed vest on a cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand.”
Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon provide support for a bit of hokum that positions Michael at the center of an elementary school romance, by way of introduction to a full throated cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Loving You”:
We toasted our love during milk break. I gave her my cookies! We fell out during fingerpainting.
Author Carvell Wallace reflects on this moment in his 2015 New Yorker review of Steve Knopper’s biography MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson:
Halfway through, he forgets his lines and freezes, looking back at his older brothers for help. It’s an alarmingly vulnerable moment, one only possible in the era of live television. You feel bad for him. It suddenly doesn’t seem right that a kid should be made to perform live in front of an entire country. Yet he somehow finds his way back and stumbles through.
When the music starts, we see something else entirely. The first note he sings is as confident, sure, and purposeful as any adult could ever be. He transforms from nervous child at a talent show into timeless embodiment of longing. Not only does he sing exactly on key but he appears to sing from the very bottom of his heart. He stares into the camera, shakes his head, and blinks back tears in perfect imitation of a sixties soul man. And it feels, for a moment, as though there are two different beings here. One is a child—a smart kid, to be sure, and cute, but not more special than any other child. He is subject to the same laws of life—pain, age, confusion, fear—as we all are. The other being seems to be a spirit of sorts, one who knows only the truest expression of human feeling. And this spirit appears to have randomly inhabited the body of this particular mortal kid. In so doing, it has sentenced him to a lifetime of indescribable enchantment and consummate suffering.
Michael’s explosive performance of the Jackson 5’s first national single, “I Want You Back,” released just two months before their Sullivan Show appearance, gives us that “spirit” in full force.
It’s also not hard to imagine that the brothers’ thrillingly executed choreography is the result of a literally punishing rehearsal regimen, a factor of the King of Pop’s troubled legacy.
The Sullivan Show appearance ensured that there would be no stopping this train. Five months later, when the Jacksons returned to the Sullivan Show, “I Want You Back” had sold over a million copies, as had “ABC,” which they performed as a medley.
Boyhood is fleeting, making Jacksonmania a carpe diem type situation.
The period from 1969 to 1972 saw an onslaught of Jackson 5‑related merch and a funky Saturday morning cartoon whose pilot tarted up the Diana Ross origin story with an escaped pet snake.
It was good while it lasted.
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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primaologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Painting: A Deep Dive
This past summer we featured a short video introduction to the Mona Lisa here on Open Culture. You’d think that if any painting didn’t need an introduction, that would be the one. But the video’s creator James Payne showed many of us just how much we still have to learn about Leonardo’s most famous work of art — and indeed, perhaps the most famous work by any artist. On his Youtube channel Great Art Explained, Payne offers clear and powerful analyses of paintings from van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Hopper’s Nighthawks to Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych and Picasso’s Guernica. But there are some images to which a fifteen-minute video essay can’t hope to do justice.
In those cases, Payne has been known to follow up with a deluxe expanded edition. Taking on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, he followed up three individual fifteen-minute videos — for a triptych, a neat union of form and substance — with a full-length treatment of the whole work.
Payne’s full-length version of his Mona Lisa video more than doubles the length of the original. “This is the more comprehensive version I always wanted to do,” he notes, adding that it “uses some of the information from the first film (but in higher resolution with better sound and with clearer graphics), as well as answering the hundreds of questions: Why doesn’t she have eyebrows? Is it a self-portrait? Is she only famous because she was stolen? How do we know what he was thinking?”
This time around, Payne has more to say about how Leonardo created such a compelling portrait on a technical level, but also why he came to paint it in the first place. On top of that, the expanded format gives him time to examine the much more conventional portraits Leonardo’s contemporaries were painting at the time, as well as what’s known as the Prado Mona Lisa. A depiction of the same sitter that may even have been painted simultaneously by one of Leonardo’s students, it makes for an illuminating object of comparison. Payne also gets into the 1911 theft and recovery that ultimately did a great deal for the painting’s reputation, as well as its 1963 exhibition in America that, thanks to television, turned it into a mass-media icon. By now we’ve all had more glimpses of the Mona Lisa more times than we can remember, but it takes enthusiasm like Payne’s to remind us of all the ways we can truly see it.
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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...The Nine Greatest Films You’ve Never Seen
Whether we know it or not, we have all absorbed a cinematic vocabulary and set of film historical references through the film and television we’ve watched throughout our lives. We can leave it to the filmmakers, critics, and cinephiles to memorize glossaries of techniques. It’s enough that we understand what’s happening on screen because hundreds of visual narratives have been constructed in more or less the same way. This language did not come out of a primordial soup but took shape over the last 120 years or so: from the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès to Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve and so on — each stage along the way absorbing influences and ideas from the most innovative films.
Take, for example, My Dinner with Andre, an intensely philosophical film that consists of only two main characters, one setting, and no real plot to speak of. Instead, the film exploits the techniques of shot/reverse shot to their fullest, creating extraordinary intimacy between two characters, and the viewer, with the camera. Louis Malle’s 1981 film became a standard for filmed existential conversations. Yet behind it stands an even more iconic conversation, one literally concerned with life and Death. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a cinematic reference for countless movies, and a film that undoubtedly expanded the ways filmmakers could tell stories.
But there is another film we should see, says the Cinematic Cartography above, if we want to know where else the philosophical conversation in film might go: Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri’s 1976 The Fifth Seal, a grim morality play set in Nazi-occupied Hungary in which four friends in a bar propose a thought experiment that becomes terrifyingly real. The film cuts between the conversation on screen and scenes of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. “All through the film,” one critic writes, “an intelligent viewer will note the characters in the film constantly reassess their philosophical stance or points of view, according to circumstances.”
The entire movement of the film turns on a single question, a stark restatement of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Rather than a philosophical conversation between two stable points of view, The Fifth Seal shows us perspectives that shift according to the characters’ self-perceptions, our perceptions of them, and the influence of Bosch on what we see, adding layers of dramatic irony and extra-diegetic tension. Influential in its own way, if The Fifth Seal had been as widely seen as The Seventh Seal, we might have seen cinema take a different turn in the last few decades. Such is the case with all nine films discussed. See them listed below, learn about them in brief in “The Greatest Films You Don’t Know,” above, and imagine the directions cinema might go if it took more cues from these undervalued classics.
0:00 Introduction (Ashes and Snow, A Time to Live A Time to Die, Strangers In Good Company, Borom Sarat, Dead Man’s Letter’s, Killer of Sheep, Napoleon, Still Life)
1:50 The Fifth Seal — Az ötödik pecsét (Dir: Zoltán Fábri)
7:29 The House Is Black — خانه سیاه است (Dir: Forough Farrokhzad)
9:57 Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks — 铁西区 (Dir: Wang Bing)
14:12 As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Dir: Jonas Mekas)
18:37 The Enclosed Valley — La vallée close (Dir: Jean-Claude Rousseau)
19:37 Pastoral: To Die in the Country — 田園に死す (Dir: Shūji Terayama)
23:44 Punishment Park (Dir: Peter Watkins)
28:03 The Cremator — Spalovač mrtvol (Dir: Juraj Herz) 30:28 O Pagador de Promessas (Dir: Anselmo Duarte)
31:39 Conclusion (Lucifer Rising, An Elephant Sitting Still, Marketa Lazarova, White Noise, Platform, The Burmese Harp)
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...9‑Year-Old Henry Thomas Delivers a Remarkable Screen Test for E.T.
I can guarantee almost every day I get someone going, ‘Hey, you’re the guy from E.T.’, usually followed by, ‘What are you doing now?’ And not a day has gone by when someone hasn’t shouted ‘E.T. phone home’ at me.” — Actor Henry Thomas
Should I ever bump into Henry Thomas, I may exclaim, “Okay, kid, you got the job,” just like director Steven Spielberg does at the end of the remarkable screen test, above.
Thomas, now — brace yourself — 50, was just 9 when Spielberg flew him in from Texas to audition for the role of Elliot in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on the strength of his single screen credit, playing Sissy Spacek’s son in Raggedy Man.
Before we go further, a cautionary tale.
Another youngster had the part of Elliot all sewn up until screenwriter Melissa Mathison hosted a Dungeons and Dragon game to get a feel for the chemistry between the film’s child actors.
“In about three minutes it became very clear that nobody liked this little boy,” casting director Marci Liroff recalls. Ouch.
That would be a heavy burden to carry through life, knowing that youthful bossiness cost you the role of a lifetime.
Enter Henry Thomas.
Spielberg’s longtime collaborator, producer Kathleen Kennedy, recalled that he was no great shakes reading from prepared sides of the script, but then came an improv with legendary casting director Mike Fenton.
If only every aspirant method actor shared Thomas’ knack for emotional recall. During the improv, as the pressure to give up the beloved alien creature hidden in his closet mounted, he drew on memories of his pet chihuahua, Urso, who had been killed by a neighbour’s dog in front of him.
“Poor Urso, it may have won me the role but it was a sad price to pay,” Thomas told The Mirror some 30 years later.
His performance reduced every adult in the room to tears.
It was also remarkable for its subtlety. As Spielberg remarked in a 1982 interview with Premiere magazine:
He’s a very controlled, methodical performer who measures what he does and feels what he does and yet broadcasts it in a totally subtle way. His performance is so controlled, unlike most kid performers, who seem to be giving you 150 percent on every shot. Henry’s performance is just a bread crumb at a time, but he takes you in a wonderful direction to a very, very rousing catharsis. He’s just a “once in a lifetime” kid.
The director likened Thomas’ tears in the final moments of E.T. to the arrival of the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind — “a super-colossal special effect” rooted in human emotion.
By then, Thomas no longer needed an assist from Urso:
I couldn’t stop crying because I worked with E.T. every day and he was real to me.
The connection was not immediate. Thomas’ laughing response to his first gander at the alien reassured Spielberg that the child actor could handle comedy but Thomas, a huge Raiders of the Lost Ark fan, had been hoping for something a bit more swashbuckling. As he told Esquire’s Paul Schrodt:
When I saw this alien with the weird feet and the telescopic neck, I was like, ‘What the hell is this? Where is my lightsaber?’ But I guess I got a flying bicycle, so I can’t complain.
It’s wasn’t exactly a Hollywood ending, perhaps because Thomas didn’t stay in Hollywood, but rather returned to school in San Antonio, where he fell prey to kids who resented the overnight sensation in their midst.
On the other hand, he has worked steadily as an actor since leaving home at 17, and abided by his resolution to avoid drugs and other pitfalls that plague some other child stars. (“I never wanted to give anyone the satisfaction of getting that picture of me robbing a liquor store.”)
In his interview with The Mirror, tongue firmly in cheek, he speculated about possible E.T. sequels and admitted that he’d hate to see someone other than himself playing Elliott:
It could be like an intergalactic reunion with Elliott and E.T. at a beach resort… I don’t think Spielberg will touch it, although I’d love to see Elliott and E.T. sitting at the end of the bar: “How’s it been for you man?” “Good, man, another beer?”
A few years later, the stars did indeed reunite for a holiday advert that owes a large debt to Peter Pan, and puts its thumb on the scale with a clip of Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas.”
As if Henry Thomas needs help making us cry.
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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primaologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Metallica Teaches a New Masterclass on How to Build & Sustain a Band
Since its launch in 2015, Masterclass has not only expanded the variety of its online course offerings but sought out ever-bigger names for its teachers. Names don’t come much bigger than Metallica in the world of heavy metal, and indeed in the world of rock music in general. Hence the broad title of the new Masterclass “Metallica Teaches Being a Band.” Having been a band for 40 years now, they presumably know more than a little about everything involved in that enterprise: not just recording hit albums like Master of Puppets and songs like “Enter Sandman,” but also weathering dramatic changes in both the music business and popular culture while cooperating for the good of the group.
Not that, to the men of Metallica, such cooperation has always come naturally. “There’ve been times when it’s been fractured and it looks like we were on the verge of breaking up,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett in the trailer for their Masterclass above.
He joined the band in 1983, which means he has very nearly as long a standing in the band as its founders, lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. All of them, along with bassist Robert Trujillo, appear here as teachers to share their accumulated wisdom, have to do as it may with songwriting, performance, interpersonal communication, or the management of time and anger.
Like all Masterclasses, Metallica’s course is divided into many easily watchable video lessons, most with a practical slant. Musically inclined viewers, even those with no interest in becoming heavy-metal icons, will benefit from learning to work “From Riff to Song,” the principles of “Putting Together an Album,” and the art of “Navigating Egos.” But for Metallica fans in particular — whom, collectively, the band consider their fifth member — few lessons in any Masterclass could be as gripping as the deconstructions of “Enter Sandman,” “Master of Puppets,” and “One.” They do all this in a calmer, more reflective psychological place than the bitter, near-dysfunctional one in which the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster found them — but not so calm and reflective that they can’t finish the course off with, as Hammett puts it, “a bad-ass performance.”
When you sign up to become a Masterclass member ($180 per year), you will have access to Metallica’s course plus 100 others.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
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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...When The Who Saved New York City After 9/11: Watch Their Cathartic Madison Square Garden Set (October 20, 2001)
A little more than a month after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reeling from that day, Madison Square Garden hosted The Concert for New York City. A benefit concert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sacrifice of NYC’s fire and police departments, which had lost many members during that day. (The former had lost 343 firefighters.) But like a lot of things about that day twenty years later, it has sort of vanished down the cultural memory hole.
However, if you need reminding, the Who came out of retirement and delivered what some considered the set of the night. Tom Watson, writing in Forbes magazine, called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.”
The concert was free to any firefighter or policeman who came in uniform. Watson describes the vibe thus:
“To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a river of emotion and beer, which, if you wore a uniform — or your late loved one’s cap — was free. The thousands of cops in attendance studiously ignored thousands of other cops and firefighters lighting up a little reefer. Large bottles of high proof spirits were produced. The Garden was the biggest Irish wake in history.”
In a moment like this, a lot of the artists headed towards jingoism. It was understandable. Songs about America (David Bowie), songs about New York City (Billy Joel), songs about freedom (Paul McCartney), songs about heroes (also Bowie). But, what the crowd wanted that night was catharsis, and that’s what the Who brought.
The set is the Who at their most anthemic, but also the most representative of the classic rock radio these uniformed men and women and their families grew up with: “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Reilly,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and ending with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” However the line “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” is quietly deleted. Not this time, cynicism.
The concert was exactly what was needed for the grief of the community. And death hangs over the whole event, as camera cut to family members holding up photos of lost loved ones, while the World Trade Center rubble still smoldered.
And then there’s what nobody knew at the time: this would be bassist John Entwistle’s last gig before his fatal heart attack eight months later. So many of the remaining first responders would die from the toxic chemicals breathed in on 9/11, and still they fight for some recompense from the government that honored them at first. Mayor Giuliani…well, we know what happened to him. And that ass whoopin’ we promised the Middle East wound up kicking America’s economy in the butt instead.
Twenty years later the performance still holds up, a moment in time just before we all got fooled again.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Play a Kandinsky: A New Simulation Lets You Experience Kandinsky’s Synesthesia & the Sounds He May Have Heard When Painting “Yellow-Red-Blue”
Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. Maybe you can too, but since studies so far have suggested that the underlying condition exists in less than five percent of the population, the odds are against it. Known as synesthesia, it involves one kind of sense perception being tied up with another: letters and numbers come with colors, sequences take on three-dimensional forms, sounds have tactile feelings. These unusual sensory connections can presumably encourage unusual kinds of thinking; perhaps unsurprisingly, synesthetic experiences have been reported by a variety of creators, from Billy Joel and David Hockney to Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla.
Few, however, have described synesthesia as eloquently as Kandinsky did. “Color is the keyboard,” he once said. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.”
That quote must have shaped the mission of Play a Kandinsky, a collaboration between Google Arts and Culture and the Centre Pompidou. Enlisting the compositional services of experimental musicians Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, it gives even us non-synesthetes a chance to experience the intersection of sound and not just color but shape as well, in something of the same manner as the pioneering abstract painter must have.
As explained in the Listening In video above, Kandinsky heard yellow as a trumpet, red as a violin, and blue as an organ. An image of sufficient chromatic and formal variety must have set off a symphony in his head, much like the one Play a Kandinsky gives us a chance to conduct. As an interface it uses his 1925 painting Yellow-Red-Blue, each element of which, when clicked, adds another synesthetic layer of sound to the mix. These visual-sonic correspondences are based on Kandinsky’s own color theories as well as the music he would have heard, all processed with the formidable machine-learning resources at Google’s command. “What was he trying to make us feel with this painting?” Play a Kandinsky asks. But of course he didn’t have just one set of emotions in mind for his viewers, and making that possible was perhaps the most enduring achievement of his journey into abstraction.
Related Content:
Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Make Art in Some Rare Vintage Video
An Artist with Synesthesia Turns Jazz & Rock Classics Into Colorful Abstract Paintings
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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