1,000 Musicians Perform “My Hero” in a Moving Tribute to Foo Fighters’ Drummer Taylor Hawkins
If you follow music news, or just scan entertainment headlines, you might have noticed that a few weeks after his death, beloved Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins’ final days became a controversial subject. According to a Rolling Stone article quoting Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Hawkins was exhausted by the Foo Fighters’ touring schedule. He needed a break, and he didn’t get one. Both drummers have issued statements disavowing the article. Meanwhile, as GQ noted, a Rolling Stone “Instagram post highlighting the article is being slammed by critical fans in the comments.”
Arguing over hearsay about a musician’s state of mind before his death seems like a poor way to remember him soon after he’s gone. If you’d rather steer clear of this scene, the original Rolling Stone piece is still worth checking out for its introduction: a feelgood story from three days before Hawkins, 50, was found in his Bogotá hotel room.
After Foo Fighters canceled a headlining concert in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, due to weather, Hawkins ended up hanging out with nine-year-old drummer Emma Sofía Peralta outside the Sheraton. She’d brought her drum kit and played for him. He posed for a photo with her, “crouching next to her and flashing the sort of warm, toothy smile that established him as one of the most beloved drummers in rock.”
More details of Hawkins’ death may become public, or they may not. But they shouldn’t obscure the reason he was famous in life. Like everyone else in the band, but most especially his “twin” Dave Grohl, Hawkins always looked like he was having the time of his life, whether onstage or meeting fans. The band won mass devotion not only through stellar songwriting and performances but through sheer, unbridled enthusiasm: the kind of spirit that drove 1000 musicians to stage a concert covering “Learn to Fly” in 2015, in a bid to bring the Foo Fighters to the town of Cesena, Italy. It worked, and thus was born the Rockin’ 1000 concept.
Getting a handful of rock musicians to show up on time is a feat in itself, much less 1000 of them, all playing not only on time but in time as well. Rockin’ 1000 has pulled this off consistently since they started, and their tribute above to Hawkins above is no different — a stadium-sized cover version of “My Hero” that conveys all the emotion of the original while multiplying it by the amplitude of a hundred marching bands. A fitting remembrance of what Hawkins meant to his fans if ever there was one.
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Watch the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins (RIP) Give a Drumming Masterclass
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Is Batman? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #124 Debates the Character, the Legacy, and the New Film
In light of the recent release of Matt Reeves’ film The Batman, we consider the strange alternation of darkness and camp that is Batman. Is he even a super hero? What’s with his rogues’ gallery? What’s with DC’s anti-world-building?
Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by philosophy prof/NY Times entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, improv comedian/educator Anthony LeBlanc, and Marketing Over Coffee host John J. Wall, all of whom are deeply immersed in the comics, and we touch on other recent shows in the Batman universe.
Some relevant articles include:
- “Batman Actors Ranked from Worst to Best” from Den of Geek
- “All the Batman Movies, Ranked” by Eliana Docterman
- “The Best Order to Watch All the Batman Movies” in by Austen Goslin
- “The Top 27 Best Batman Comics and Graphic Novels” from IGN
- “5 Things ‘The Batman’ Got Right And 3 Things It Got Wrong” by Haley Petersen
Follow us @law_writes, @anthonyleblanc, @johnjwall, and @MarkLinsenmayer.
Hear more Pretty Much Pop. Support the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.
Read More...Dying from Overwork: Disturbing Looks Inside Japan’s Karoshi and China’s “996” Work System
By most measures, Japan boasts the highest life expectancy in the world. But that ranking, of course, doesn’t mean that every Japanese person sees old age. Though the country’s rate of violent crime is low enough to be the envy of most of the world, its suicide rate isn’t, and it says even more that the Japanese language has a word that refers specifically to death by overwork. I first encountered it nearly thirty years ago in a Dilbert comic strip. “In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It’s called karōshi,” says Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. “I don’t want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.”
You can see the phenomenon of karōshi examined more seriously in the short Nowness video at the top of the post. In it, a series of Japanese salarymen (a Japanese English term now well-known around the world) speak to the exhausting and unceasing rigors of their everyday work schedules — and, in some cases, to the emptiness of the homes that await them each night.
The CNBC segment just above investigates what can be done about such labor conditions, which even in white-collar workplaces contribute to the heart attacks, strokes, and other immediate causes of deaths ultimately ascribed to karōshi. In a grim irony, Japan has the lowest productivity among the G7 nations: its people work hard, yet their companies are hardly working.
Initiatives to put a stop to the ill effects of overwork, up to and including karōshi, include mandatory vacation days and office lights that switch off automatically at 10:00 p.m. Among the latest is “Premium Friday,” a program explained in the Vice video above. Developed by Keidanren, Japan’s oldest business lobby, it was initially received as “a direct response to karōshi,” but it has its origins in marketing. “We wanted to create a national event that bolstered consumption,” says the director of Keidanren’s industrial policy bureau. By that logic, it made good sense to let workers out early on Fridays — let them out to shop. But Premium Friday has yet to catch on in most Japanese enterprises, aware as they are that Japan’s economic might no longer intimidates the world.
The aforementioned low productivity, along with a rapidly aging and even contracting population, contributed to Japan’s loss of its position as the world’s second-largest economy. It was overtaken in 2011 by China, a country with overwork problems of its own. The Vice report above covers the “996” system, which stands for working from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m, six days a week. Prevalent in Chinese tech companies, it has been blamed for stress, illness, and death among employees. Laws limiting working hours have thus far proven ineffective, or at least circumventable. Certain pundits never stop insisting that the future is Chinese; if they’re right, all this ought to give pause to the workers of the world, Eastern and Western alike.
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The Employment: A Prize-Winning Animation About Why We’re So Disenchanted with Work Today
Charles Bukowski Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Brutally Honest Letter (1986)
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The “All of Bach” Project Is Making Performances of Every Bach Piece Available Online: Watch 346 High-Quality Recordings
Granted a wish to travel back in time, many a Bach lover would leap to Thuringia, in a pre-unified Germany, circa the early 1700s, or to Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, the courts of Weimar and Köthen, or Leipzig. There, Bach composed his concertos, suites, fugues, preludes, canons, chorales, organ works, solo pieces, as well as unique works like the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier. He wrote principally for churches and sovereigns who had his music performed in what we now call its original settings.
Of course, we can’t hear Bach’s Baroque masterworks the way his contemporaries did, though we can try. But imagine standing in St. Paul’s Church, hearing the composer play his organ works himself in the early 1720s. (Built in 1231, the church survived WWII, only to be demolished for redevelopment under the East German regime in 1968.) Imagine hearing Bach’s chamber works played in the ornate chambers of the 18th century. It’s a nice dream, but I think we’re fortunate to live in his distant future, and to have experienced his music through three-hundred years of interpretations, new arrangements and instrumentation, and thousands of recordings.
Bach might barely recognize the way some of his works have been interpreted. He might object to beloved, yet unorthodox recordings by Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos. He might abhor the notion of recording altogether. Who knows. But the music is no longer his. As Yo Yo Ma has tried to show in his life’s work, Bach belongs to everyone. The Netherlands Bach Society shares this belief, and has endeavored to upload live performances of “All of Bach” to their website and YouTube. The opportunity to see Bach’s works performed live in Amsterdam, viewable from anywhere at any time, would seem like devilry to those in Bach’s day.
“Since the start of this unique project,” writes the Society, “more than 350 of the total of 1080 works by Johann Sebastian Bach have been performed and recorded in special ways” in this attempt to “share Bach’s music with the whole world” through “excellent audio visual recordings of the highest quality.” These performances include settings very like the originals, if very far away in time: “Cantatas are filmed in a church, for instance, and chamber music at the musician’s homes.” They also include highlights such as the Six Cello Suites at the Rijksmuseum and Brandenburg Concert no. 4 at Felix Maritis.
See highlighted performances here and just above, watch newly-added (as of February) performances of The Well-Tempered Clavier, “48 keyboard pieces in all 24 keys,” the Netherlands Bach Society notes, “the sort of challenge Bach enjoyed.” This is the composer at his freest — “In contrast to the iron discipline Bach had to apply to his church compositions, here he could abandon himself to Intellectual Spielerei without worrying about deadlines.” Help the Netherlands Bach Society continue their ambitious project with a donation here.
Related Content:
How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant.
Hear J.S. Bach’s Music Performed on the Lautenwerck, Bach’s Favorite Lost Baroque Instrument
Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film
Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a time before the internet, before radio and television, before drones and weapons of mass destruction. Thus one naturally questions the relevance of his political theories to the twenty-first century. Yet in discussions about the dynamics of power, no name has endured as long as Machiavelli’s. His reputation as a theorist rests mostly on his 1532 treatise Il Principe, or The Prince, in which he pioneered a way of analyzing power as it was actually wielded, not as people would have liked it to be. How, he asked, does a ruler — a prince — attain his position in a state, and even more importantly, how does he maintain it?
You can hear Machiavelli’s answers to these questions explained, and see them illustrated, in the 43-minute video above. It breaks The Prince down into seven parts summarizing as many of the book’s main points, including “Do not be neutral,” “Destroy, do not would,” and “Be feared.”
These commandments would seem to align with Machiavelli’s popular image as an apologist, even an advocate, for brutal and repressive forms of rule. But his enterprise has less to do with offering advice than with describing how real figures of power, princes and otherwise, had amassed and retained that power.
The video comes from Eudaimonia, a Youtube channel that has also featured similarly animated exegeses of Stoicism and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Its creator makes these ancient sources of knowledge accessible with not just his cartoonish illustrations, but also his inclusion of illuminating examples from more recent history. In the case of The Prince, these come from eras like the Russian Revolution, World War II, and even our own time of instant global communication, attention-hungry media, and a seemingly weak political class. In much of the world, we live in a time much less nasty and brutish than Machiavelli’s. But looking at the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of our own leaders, we have to admit that the principles of The Prince may not have gone out of effect.
To delve deeper into the world of Machiavelli, you can watch a BBC documentary on the Renaissance political theorist below.
Related content:
What Does “Machiavellian” Really Mean?: An Animated Lesson
Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap
Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course
Allan Bloom’s Lectures on Machiavelli (Boston College, 1983)
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...
Discover the Dystopian Surrealist Art of Polish Painter & Photographer Zdzisław Beksiński
“In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh — whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish — thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” — Guillermo del Toro
The life and death of Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor Zdzisław Beksiński has been sensationalized, made into a cursed tragedy in the telling of events late in his life that, taken together, all seem horrifying enough: the death of the artist’s wife from cancer in 1998, the suicide of his son, Tomasz, one year later, and, finally, his own stabbing death in 2005 at the hands of his caretaker’s teenage son. If we add to this account Beksiński’s childhood in Nazi-occupied, then Soviet-occupied Poland, we have ample reason to speculate about the meaning of his nightmarish visions.
But the “Nightmare Artist,” as he’s called in the video above, wants us to stay away from making meaning of any kind. Unlike artists whose work can seem inseparable from their statements of purpose (or personal or historical tragedies), Beksiński had nothing to say about his art or his life.
He preferred that others keep silent as well, though he himself hated silence, working to loud classical music and rock. Music, he said — not literature, film, history, or even other artists — was his only inspiration. The impression we get from these scant details and Beksiński’s disturbing work, is of an individual probably best left alone.
Judging an artist’s body of work by the worst things that have happened to them, however, is manifestly unfair. For the majority of his life, Beksiński embodied the famous Flaubert quote about a regular, orderly creative life. He studied architecture, went on to supervise construction projects and then design buses. Like many people, he hated his job (he left the bus company in 1967). He developed a passion for photography, sculpture, and painting. With no formal art training, he struck out on a successful fifty-year career as a prolific Surrealist, becoming a master of oil painting. Was he tormented? Those who knew him describe him as mild-mannered, pleasant, even funny. He seems to have been quite content.
Do we resist interpretation as Beksiński wanted? How can we, when the imagery of death in his work seems itself to interpret events that inevitably shaped his world? Beksiński was born in Sanok, in southern Poland, in 1929. When the Nazis came to Poland a decade later, Sanok’s population was “about 30% Jewish,” notes the Collector, “nearly all of which was eliminated by the war’s end.” Decades later, Nazi iconography and crowds of gaunt, corpse-like figures began to recur in Beksiński’s paintings, which he described as “photographing dreams.” These horrors predominate in his most popular work, even though Beksiński’s vision had more breadth than casual fans might know.
His sense of humor is evident in his photography, and in early, more abstract, paintings, he displays a much lighter touch. (See a broad sampling of Beksiński’s work at Artnet.) In the 90s, he began experimenting with computer graphics and “was granted his wish of being able to add surrealistic alterations to photographs,” bringing his career “full circle as he returned to his first medium,” notes Culture.pl. Yet, like his contemporary H.R. Giger, where Beksiński’s name is known, he’s usually known as a painter of nightmares and heavy metal album covers — and for good reason.
The Several Circles video on Beksiński above (which opens with a content warning) shows why his “epic universe of hellscapes” has proven so inescapable to the critics who embraced his work, the gallerists who sold it, and those who have discovered it since the artist’s tragic death.
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An Introduction to Surrealism: The Big Aesthetic Ideas Presented in Three Videos
The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How the Byzantine Empire Rose, Fell, and Created the Glorious Hagia Sophia: A History in Ten Animated Minutes
If you only know one fact about the Roman Empire, it’s that it declined and fell. If you know another, it’s that the Roman Empire gave way to the Europe we know today — in the fullness of time, at least. A good deal of history lies between our twenty-first century and the fall of Rome, which in any case wouldn’t have seemed like such a decisive break when it happened. “Most history books will tell you that the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE,” says the narrator of the animated TED-Ed lesson above. “This would’ve come as a great surprise to the millions of people who lived in the Roman Empire up through the Middle Ages.”
This medieval Roman Empire, better known as the Byzantine Empire, began in the year 330. “That’s when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, moved the capital of the Roman Empire to a new city called Constantinople, which he founded on the site of the ancient Greek city Byzantium.” Not only did Constantinople survive the barbarian invasions of the Empire’s western provinces, it remained the seat of power for eleven centuries.
It thus remained a preserve of Roman civilization, astonishing visitors with its art, architecture, dress, law, and intellectual enterprises. Alas, many of those glories perished in the early thirteenth century, when the city was torched by the disgruntled army of deposed ruler Alexios Angelos.
Among the surviving structures was the jewel in Constantinople’s crown Hagia Sophia, about which you can learn more about it in the Ted-ED lesson just above. The long continuity of the holy building’s location belies its own troubled history: first built in the fourth century, it was destroyed in a riot not long thereafter, then rebuilt in 415 and destroyed again when more riots broke out in 532. But just five years later, it was replaced by the Hagia Sophia we know today, which has since been a Byzantine Christian cathedral, a Latin Catholic cathedral, a mosque, a museum (at the behest of secular reformer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), and most recently a mosque again. The Byzantine Empire may be long gone, but the end of the story told by Hagia Sophia is nowhere in sight.
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An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again
360 Degree Virtual Tours of the Hagia Sophia
Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recreated in Authentic Byzantine Chant
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The Greatest Hits of Alan Watts: Stream a Carefully-Curated Collection of Alan Watts Wisdom
“My name, ‘Alan,’ means ‘harmony’ in Celtic and ‘hound’ in Anglo-Saxon. Accordingly, my existence is, and has been, a paradox, or better, a coincidence of opposites.”
Zen Buddhism is full of paradoxes: practical, yet mystical; seriously formal, yet shot through with jokes and plays on words; stressing intricate ceremonial rules and communal practices, yet just as often brought to life by “wild fox” masters who flout all convention. Such a Zen master was Alan Watts, the teacher, writer, philosopher, priest, and calligrapher who embraced contradiction and paradox in all its forms.
Watts was a natural contrarian, becoming a Buddhist at 15 — at least partly in opposition to the fundamentalist Protestantism of his mother — then, in the 1940s, ordaining as an Episcopal priest. Though he left the priesthood in 1950, he would continue to write and teach on both Buddhism and Christianity, seeking to reconcile the traditions and succeeding in ways that offended leaders of neither religion. His book of theology, Behold the Spirit, “was widely hailed in Christian circles,” David Guy writes at Tricycle magazine. “One Episcopal reviewer said it would ‘prove to be one of the half dozen most significant books on religion in the twentieth century.’ ”
As a Buddhist, Watts has come in for criticism for his use of psychedelics, addiction to alcohol, and unorthodox practices. Yet his wisdom received the stamp of approval from Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese Zen teacher often credited with bringing formal Japanese Zen practice to American students. Suzuki called Watts “a great bodhisattva” and died with a staff Watts had given him in hand. Watts didn’t stay long in any institution because he “just didn’t want his practice to be about jumping through other people’s hoops or being put in their boxes,” writes a friend, David Chadwick, in a recent tribute. Nonetheless, he remained a powerful catalyst for others who discovered spiritual practices that spoke to them more authentically than anything they’d known.
Watts, a self-described trickster, “saw the true emptiness of all things,” said Suzuki’s American successor Richard Baker in a eulogy — “the multiplicities and absurdities to the Great Universal Personality and Play.” It was his contrarian streak that made him the ideal interpreter of esoteric Indian, Chinese, and Japanese religious ideas for young Americans in the 1950s and 60s who were questioning the dogmas of their parents but lacked the language with which to do so. Watts was a serious scholar, though he never finished a university degree, and he built bridges between East and West with wit, erudition, irreverence, and awe.
Many of Watts’ first devotees got their introduction to him through his volunteer radio broadcasts on Berkeley’s KPFA. You can hear several of those talks at KPFA’s site, which currently hosts a “Greatest Hits Collection” of Watts’ talks. In addition to his 1957 book The Way of Zen, these wonderfully meandering lectures helped introduce the emerging counterculture to Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, forgotten mystical aspects of Christianity, and the Jungian ideas that often tied them all together.
No matter the tradition Watts found himself discussing on his broadcasts, listeners found him turning back to paradox. Hear him do so in talks on the “Fundamentals of Buddhism”, and other talks like the “Spiritual Odyssey of Aldous Huxley,” the “Reconciliation of Opposites” and a talk entitled “Way Beyond the West,” also the name of his lecture series, more of which you can find at KPFA’s “Greatest Hits” collection here.
via Metafilter
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Italian Advice on How to Live the Good Life: Cigarettes, Tomatoes, and Other Picturesque Small Pleasures
“I guess everybody’s got a dream and we’re all hoping to see it come true,” muses Giovanni Mimmo Mancusou, a philosophical native of Calabria, the lovely, sun-drenched region forming the toe of Italy’s boot, above. “A dream coming true is better than just a dream.”
Filmmakers Jan Vrhovnik and Ana Kerin were scouting for subjects to embody “the very essence of nostalgia” when they chanced upon Mancusou in a corner shop.
A lucky encounter! Not every non-actor — or for that matter, actor — is as comfortable on film as the laidback Mancusou.
(Vrhovnik has said that he invariably serves as his own camera operator when working with non-actors, because of the potential for intimacy and intuitive approach that such proximity affords.)
Mancusou, an advocate for simple pleasures, also appears to be quite fit, which makes us wonder why the film’s description on NOWNESS doubles down on adjectives like “aging”, “older” and most confusingly, “wisened.”
Merriam-Webster defines “wizened” with a z as “dry, shrunken, and wrinkled often as a result of aging or of failing vitality” … and “wisened” not at all.
Perhaps NOWNESS meant wise?
We find ourselves craving a lot more context.
Mancusou has clearly cultivated an ability to savor the hell out of a ripe tomato, his picturesque surroundings, and his ciggies.
“Serenity, joy, ecstasy” is embroidered across the back of his ball cap.
His manner of expressing himself does lend itself to a “poetic thought piece”, as the filmmakers note, but might that not be a symptom of struggling to communicate abstract thoughts in a foreign tongue?
We really would love to know more about this charming guy… his family situation, what he does to make ends meet, his actual age.
Home movies accompany his nostalgic reverie, but did he provide this footage to his new friends?
Did they hunt it down on ebay? It definitely fits the vibe, but is the man with the eyebrows Mancusou at an earlier age?
Our star pulls up to a small petrol station, declares, “All right, here we go,” and the next frame shows him wearing a headlamp and magnifier as he peers into the workings of a pocket watch:
Time out of mechanical. It’s magic.
Is this a hobby? A profession? Does he repair watches in a darkened gas station?
The filmmakers aren’t saying and the blurred background offers no clues either. Curse you, depth of field!
We’re not even given his home coordinates.
The film, part of the NOWNESS series Portrait of a Place, is titled Paradiso, and there is indeed a village so named adjacent to the town of Belvedere Marittimo, but according to census data we found on line, it has only 14 residents, 7 male.
If that’s where Mancusou lives, he’s either 45–49, 65–69, 70–74, or one of two fellows over age 74…and now we’re really curious about his neighbors, too.
No shade to Signor Mancuso, but we’re glad to know we’re not the only viewers left unsatisfied by this portrait’s lack of depth.
One commenter who chafed at the lack of specificity (“this video is a random portrait of basically anyone in the world that is happy with the little he has”) suggested the omissions contribute to an Italian stereotype familiar from pasta sauce commercials:
People in Italy actually work and have ambitions you know? And often are very well-educated and hard-working. The perspective of Italy that you have comes from the American media and Italian post-war neorealism. Indeed, Oscar-winning Italian people complained about the fact that what the media wants is seeing Italians wearing tank tops doing nothing if not mafia or smelling the roses.
Watch more entries in the NOWNESS Portrait of a Place series 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. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...
Haruki Murakami Jazz Mixes: Hear Playlists of Jazz Pieces Namechecked in Norwegian Wood and 1Q84
Haruki Murakami has long since broken with the traditional model of the novelist, not least in that his books have their own soundtracks. You can’t go out and buy the accompanying album for a Murakami novel as you would for a movie, granted, but today you can even more easily find online playlists of the music mentioned in them. A die-hard music lover, Murakami, has been name-checking not just musicians but specific songs in his work ever since his first novel, 1979’s Hear the Wind Sing. Eighteen years later, he titled a whole book after a Beatles number; the tale of yearning and disaffection in 1960s Tokyo that is Norwegian Wood would become his breakout bestseller around the world.
When Norwegian Wood first came out in Korea, where I live, it did so as The Age of Loss (상실의 시대). That title is still referenced in the video above, an hourlong mix of songs from the novel posted by the Korean Youtube channel Jazz Is Everywhere. (This doesn’t surprise me: here–where Murakami’s many avid fans in Korea refer to him simply as “Haruki”–more of his work has been translated into Korean than ever will be into English.)
Selections include the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby,” Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Desafinado,” Thelonious Monk’s “Honeysuckle Rose,” and Miles Davis’ “So What.” More recently, Jazz Is Everywhere put up a mix of songs from Murakami’s 2011 novel 1Q84, featuring the likes of Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington.
These mixes focus on jazz, one of Murakami’s most beloved genres; as is well known, he even ran his own jazz bar in Tokyo before turning novelist. (Its name, Peter Cat, now adorns a book café here in Seoul.) But the 1Q84 mix ends with Leoš Janáček’s decidedly un-jazzy Sinfonietta, a somewhat jarring orchestral piece that became an unlikely hit in Japan soon after 1Q84’s publication. This only hints at the variety of Western music of which Murakami has made literary use, much as he has transposed the techniques of the Western novel (a translator from English in his spare time, he has also produced a Japanese version of The Great Gatsby) into his native language. An eclectic, improvisational, and often understated style of storytelling has resulted — which, much like jazz, has proven to know no cultural boundaries.
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Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar
A 26-Hour Playlist Featuring Music from Haruki Murakami’s Latest Novel, Killing Commendatore
A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Record Collection
Sonic Explorations of Japanese Jazz: Stream 8 Mixes of Japan’s Jazz Tradition Free Online
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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