Behold 3D Recreations of Pompeii’s Lavish Homes–As They Existed Before the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
“I pray that to their share of noble fortunes [Zeus] send no Nemesis of jealous will, but in prosperity and free from ills, exalt them and their city.” Pindar, Olympian Ode 8
Why are humans awestruck by natural disaster? Or — more to the point — why are we dumbfounded when disasters destroy cities? We should hardly be surprised at this point when nature does what it invariably does: tectonic plates shift, volcanoes erupt, hurricanes and typhoons sweep the coasts…. These things have always happened on Earth, with or without our help, and for many millions of years before anything like us showed up.
Like the mythical Narcissus, we can only see ourselves and assume everything that happens must be for us. After the Great Lisbon Earthquake in Portugal in 1755, “Lisbon’s devout Catholic population saw the ruined city as divine punishment,” writes Laura Trethewey.
“The Protestant countries of Europe also saw the destruction as punishment, but for backward Catholic behavior.” Meanwhile, philosophers like Voltaire, who wrote Candide to satirize responses to the quake, saw the catastrophe as more evidence that a creator, if such a being had ever cared, cared no more.
In Greek and Roman mythology, the gods never stop meddling, punishing, rewarding, etc. Narcissus is tempted to gaze at himself by Nemesis, the goddess who meets hubris with swift retribution. While generally invoked as a leveler of individuals who overstep, she also levels cities, as fifth century BC Greek poet Pindar suggests when he begs Zeus to spare the island city of Aegina from her wrath. Perhaps, then, it was Nemesis, winged vengeance herself, that the citizens of Pompeii believed bore down upon them, as molten lava, smoke, and ash.
From its earliest status as a Roman-allied city (then Roman colony), Pompeii grew into a very wealthy area, its surrounding lands rich with villas and farms, its city center anchored by its Amphitheater, Odeon, Forum Baths and temples, its running water arriving from the Serino Aqueduct. Maybe they had it too good? Maybe their extravagant good fortune caused too much jealously in the neighbors? Maybe the gods demanded balance. It’s very human to think so — to ascribe divine will, in the lack of explanation, for why something so filled with teeming life should be destroyed for no reason at all.
It must have been the gods, who looked down on Pompeii’s wealth and grew jealous themselves. In these 3D animated videos, see why ancient Pompeiians would have been proud of their city, recreated here in part by Sweden’s Lund University and Storied Past Productions. “While in Pompeii few could reach the elite,” notes the latter in their description of the video above, “many tried to recreate ‘the good life’ in their own ways.… From grand urban villas, to small private homes, to smaller apartments.” In these walkthroughs, you can “see all the different things ‘home’ could mean in ancient Pompeii.” You might also, if you aren’t careful, find yourself getting a little envious of these doomed ancient urbanites.
Related Content:
Pompeii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesuvius
The Little-Known Bombing of Pompeii During World War II
Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pompeii
A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pompeii
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Discover 18 Underground Bands From Ukraine
When it comes to supporting the Ukrainian people in their battle against the Russian invasion, it helps when an opportunity matches our own interest. On this site that means directly funding the artists of Ukraine if possible. Fortunately, this new video from YouTube creator Bandsplaining will point you in the direction of 18 Ukrainian underground bands that deserve a listen and your money (if so choose).
While his channel is devoted to “Weird stories and lesser-known genres that don’t get covered by Pitchfork,” Bandsplaining doesn’t usually go in for current events, but as he explains, he is interested in music history, and bands that have continued to create under extreme and dangerous conditions.
“Music scenes that existed six weeks ago are now at risk of vanishing completely,” he says. The list is completely subjective, and only hints at the Ukrainian music scene. Each major city has its clubs, and its fans, and its own homegrown labels. The sadness of watching the video is wondering what might have been bombed out of existence.
I suspect none of the bands or musicians will be well known to most readers, though DakhaBrakha might be—they performed an excellent set for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series.
Including a band well-known enough for public radio might not be that “underground” but Bandsplaining really means musicians who don’t sound mainstream.
Ukraine has its own particular psych/metal sound, exemplified here by Shiva the Destructor, La Horsa Bianca, Stone Jesus, and Somali Yacht Club. Lviv’s Sherpa the Tiger play modern Krautrock grooves. For electronica it has the coldwave of Kurs Valüt, Voyage Future’s ambient music, and the low-fi hip-hop of Provod.
There’s also older music history dug up here—the tale of Valentina Goncharova, the classically trained violinist who turned to free jazz and musique concrete, or pianist Ihort Tsymbrovsky, whose 1995 private cassette release is now considered way ahead of its time.
Bandsplaining checks in with some of these bands to see their current fates. Some have moved, some are fighting, saving refugees, and doing what they can. His genuine interest in their lives makes this video more than just a listsicle.
Most of this music is available through Bandcamp, which does mean a majority of the money is going back to the musicians themselves. And any YouTube revenue from the video will go back to the bands too, Bandsplaining says, or Ukrainian charities.
Lastly, the YouTube comments for the video contains hundreds more recommendations from fans of Ukrainian music. Bandsplaining has opened the floodgates.
Related Content
How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II
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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...Draw Along with Beloved Cartoonist & Educator Lynda Barry: Free Drawing Exercises Online
How do you rescue a day that’s gone pear shaped?
Stopping to drink a glass of water is one of our longtime go tos.
If there’s a box of matches handy, we might perform Yoko Ono’s Lightning Piece.
Most recently, we’ve taken to grabbing some paper and a trusty black felt tip to spend a few minutes doing one of beloved cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry’s all-ages draw-alongs.
Barry began uploading these videos early in the pandemic, for “friends at home who are about to turn four or five or six or seven or any age really.”
Each demonstration begins with an oval. There’s no prologue. Just dive on in and copy the motions of Barry’s slow moving, refreshingly unmanicured hands, captured in a DIY god shot.
Less than four minutes later, voila! A smiling crocodile! (It’s magical how a facial expression can be changed with one simple line.)
The soundtracks to these little narration-free exercises are an extra treat. We’ve always admired Barry’s musical taste. It’s a real mood booster to cover a cheetah in spots to the tune of a marimba orchestra.
Barry’s also a big cumbia fan, conjuring a kitty to Lito Barrientos’ Cumbia En Do Menor, a lion to Los Mirlos’ Cumbia de los Pajaritos, and a Stegosaurus to Romulo Caicedo’s Cumbia Cavela.
Now that you’ve got a cheetah under your belt, you’re ready to progress to a ScorpionLeopard, one of Draw Along with Lynda B’s “strange animals.”
Barry does offer some commentary as these cryptids take shape.
We suspect her pioneering work with a group of four-year-olds in the University of Wisconsin’s Draw Bridge program leads her to anticipate the sorts of burning questions a pre-schooler might have with regard to these beasts. Her classroom experience is evident. Whereas others might think a steady stream of bright chatter is necessary to keep very young participants engaged, Barry’s thoughtful words develop in real time along with her drawing:
This is a tough animal. It has a big stinger on the back. This is a rough animal… angry. Put the eyebrows like this. It makes them look angry. What kind of teeth do you think this animal has? I don’t think they have little bitty teeth. I think they have big fangs.
Others in the “strange animal” family: a CatDogSealFish, an octophant, and a catterfly (featuring a cameo by Barry’s inquisitive pooch’s snout.)
Draw along with Lynda Barry on this YouTube playlist.
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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...The New York Public Library Provides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catcher in the Rye, Stamped & More
Each year in mid-September, we celebrate Banned Books Week, and each year I see a handful of people arguing that the celebration, or memorial, is self indulgent and out of touch. No one in the U.S. seriously tries to ban books, right? Book banning — as Gayle King said last September on CBS Mornings — is “an issue we tend to associate with the past.”
Yet even before the recent moral panics over “critical race theory” and gender and sexuality issues, teachers and librarians would have strongly disagreed that attempts to ban books ever went away. Books are challenged all the time in front of school boards, and have, many times in the recent past, appeared on lists handed around by state and federal legislators.
The latest round of book bannings represents an escalation, rather than a return, of the tactic. Not that lawmakers are likely to have read any of 850 or so books on a recent list of suspects. But too many seem eager to endorse bills that restrict what students can read, teachers can teach, and libraries can lend — legislation solely based on the standard of “comfort.” As in… if the facts of American history make some students (or their parents) uncomfortable, then damn the facts of American history.….
Ta-Nahasi Coates — whose Between the World and Me was banned in some communities in 2020 — tells King that this is no coincidence. “For most of American history,” he says, “African American authors have not had the purchase on the American conscience that they do right now.” The same goes for LGBTQ authors and writers from other marginalized groups, whose books are challenged and banned in schools and libraries with aggressive frequency.
What Coates calls a “purchase on the American conscience” is what we might also call empathy — a quality that good writing inspires in curious readers, and that many people seem to find threatening. Every democracy, however, must learn that it is “ignorance [that] is dangerous,” as president of the New York Public Library Tony Marx writes, “breading hate and division.” Learning about, and caring about, the experiences of others does the opposite.
To keep banned books freely available to readers who want access to them, the New York Public Library has partnered with publishers in a project called Books for All to reach readers wherever they may be. Marx emphatically states the need for such an effort:
The recent instances of both attempted and successful book banning — primarily on titles that explore race, LGBTQ+ issues, religion, and history — are extremely disturbing and amount to an all-out attack on the very foundation of our democracy.… The Library’s role is to make sure no perspective, no idea, no identity is erased.
There are currently four books offered under the project’s aegis through the end of May, and they’re available to readers across the United States:
Speak | Laurie Halse Anderson (Square Fish / Macmillan Publishers)
King and the Dragonflies | Kacen Callender (Scholastic)
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You | Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers / Hachette Book Group)
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger (Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group)
To access these titles, all of which have faced bans or challenges, you will need to download the NYPL’s free reader app, SimplyE, for iOS or Android–all from the Books for All site. Then you can read the book right away “with our without a library card,” the library notes. “No waits, no fines.”
One hopes the Books for All project will expand to offer more titles from the increasingly greater number of books being pushed out of public view because they make those in power uncomfortable. Or, better yet, one hopes that dozens of similar projects will arise; that the slogan “books for all” can become a reality, regardless of who makes policy. Learn more and sign up for your free SimplyE account at the Books for All site.
Related Content:
The 850 Books a Texas Lawmaker Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Students Feel Uncomfortable
America’s First Banned Book: Discover the 1637 Book That Mocked the Puritans
Read 14 Great Banned & Censored Novels Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Library of Esoterica: Taschen’s Visual History of Tarot, Astrology & Witchcraft
Generations and generations of Americans dissatisfied with life in their hometowns have acted on the same migratory impulse: to go west. Many have done so in order to make their fortunes, but a fair few have been seeking varieties of satisfaction altogether less tangible. In the human spirt in general and the American spirit in particular, there is a yearning for “secret knowledge” of reality’s hidden workings. Those whose spirits most yearn for that knowledge tend to end up in California, the logical end of American civilization. There they’ve found vibrant communities of yogis, spiritualists, Aenerians, theosophists, healers, Unarians, alchemists, Rosicrucians, witches, tarot readers, astrologers… the list goes on.
More recently, California has also been home to Taschen’s American headquarters, the acclaimed publishers of lavishly produced books on art and culture with no compunction about exploring the fringes of human experience. A couple of years ago we featured their visual history of tarot Divine Decks here on Open Culture; now they’ve put out a three-volume coffee-table Library of Esoterica that includes books on not just tarot but astrology and witchcraft as well.
Assembled and designed to Taschen’s usual aesthetically painstaking standard, the set comes edited by writer and filmmaker Jessica Hundley, who used the opportunity to open the most “inclusive and seductive way into these practices, which is through the art” they’ve inspired.
That’s what she told Los Angeles Times’ Steffie Nelson, who writes that “Hundley has been fascinated by alternative spiritualities and the occult since she was a goth-punk teenager on the East Coast.” Later she moved to Los Angeles, “drawn to the city’s legacy of esoteric exploration and its renown as a place where dreams are made manifest and identity is mutable.” This project’s worldwide search for art and other materials related to these fields of esoterica began at Los Angeles’ own Philosophical Research Society, founded in the nineteen-thirties by mystic Manly P. Hall. With its richly reproduced imagery and accompanying explanatory essays, the Library of Esoterica offers a reading experience liable to open anyone’s doors of perception. The age of Aquarius may be over, but there’s a seeker born every minute.
The Library of Esoterica can be purchased as a complete collection. Or you can purchase separate installments on Astrology, Tarot and Witchcraft.
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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...How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II
Photograph by Pierre Jahan/Archives des museés nationaux
Twice, we’ve brought you posts explaining how the Mona Lisa – the most famous painting in the world – went from near obscurity to global notoriety almost overnight, after an employee of the Louvre purloined and tried to hide it in 1911. Accusations flew – including very public accusations against Pablo Picasso; salacious rumors circulated; the enigmatic smile of Lisa del Gioconda — the Florentine silk merchant’s wife depicted in the painting – appeared in black and white photographs in newspapers around the globe. When she returned to the museum, visitors couldn’t, and still cannot, wait to see her in person. As great as that story is, what happened a few decades later under the Nazi-controlled Vichy government makes for an even better tale.
By the 1930s, the Mona Lisa was deemed the most important work of art in France’s most important museum. With due respect to the Monuments Men (and unsung Monuments Women), before the Allies arrived to rescue many of Europe’s priceless works of art, French civil servants, students, and workmen did it themselves, saving most of the Louvre’s entire collection. The hero of the story, Jacques Jaujard, director of France’s National Museums, has gone down in history as “the man who saved the Louvre” — also the title of an award-winning French documentary (see trailer below). Mental Floss provides context for Jaujard’s heroism:
After Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938, Jaujard… lost whatever small hope he had that war might be avoided. He knew Britain’s policy of appeasement wasn’t going to keep the Nazi wolf from the door, and an invasion of France was sure to bring destruction of cultural treasures via bombings, looting, and wholesale theft. So, together with the Louvre’s curator of paintings René Huyghe, Jaujard crafted a secret plan to evacuate almost all of the Louvre’s art, which included 3600 paintings alone.
On the day Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact, August 25, 1939, Jaujard closed the Louvre for “repairs” for three days while staff, “students from the École du Louvre, and workers form the Grands Magazines du Louvre department store took paintings out of their frames… and moved statues and other objects from their displays with wooden crates.”
The statues included the three ton Winged Nike of Samothrace (see a photo of its move here), the Egyptian Old Kingdom Seated Scribe, and the Venus de Milo. All of these, like the other works of art, would be moved to chateaus in the countryside for safe keeping. On August 28, “hundreds of trucks organized into convoys carried 1000 crates of ancient and 268 crates of paintings and more” into the Loire Valley.
Included in that haul of treasures was the Mona Lisa, placed in a custom case, cushioned with velvet. Where other works received labels of yellow, green, and red dots according to their level of importance, the Mona Lisa was marked with three red dots — the only work to receive such high priority. It was transported by ambulance, gently strapped to a stretcher. After leaving the museum, the painting would be moved five times, “including to Loire Valley castles and a quiet abbey.” The Nazis would loot much of what was left in the Louvre, and force it to re-open in 1940 with most of its galleries starkly empty. But the Mona Lisa — at the top of Hitler’s list of artworks to expropriate — remained safe, as did many thousands more artworks Jaujard believed were the “heritage of all humanity,” as Inge Laino, Paris Muse Director, says in the France 24 segment above.
Related Content:
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The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,00 Works of Art
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Ergonomics Experts Explain How to Set Up Your Desk
Ergonomics aren’t a joke, Jim. — Dwight Schrute, The Office
Technological innovations are snowballing faster than ever in the third decade of the 21st-century. A home office set-up that would have been cause for pride in 2019 seems woefully inadequate now.
Just ask anyone whose desk job pivoted to virtual in March of 2020.
So, perhaps don’t take physical therapist’s Jon Cinkay’s nearly three year old advice in the above Wall Street Journal video as gospel, but rather as a chance to check in with your carpal tunnels, your aching neck and back, and your favorite refurbished office furniture outlet.
Cinkay assumes that your desk is a standard 29 — 30” tall, which is not the case here, but okay…
Our bodies’ unique dimensions mean that no desk can be a one-size-fits-all proposition, and Cinkay makes a robust case for making modifications:
1. Adjust your desk chair
Cinkay recommends adjusting the seat height until your elbows are bent at a 90-degree angle when your fingers are on the keyboard. (As of this writing, keyboards have not yet become obsolete.)
In a 2020 article for the Hospital of Special Surgery, he also recommends making sure your chair’s armrests can fit under your desk to avoid postural compromises when reaching for your keyboard or mouse.
He also wisely advises looking for a chair with a minimum 30-day warranty so you don’t get stuck with an expensive mistake.
2. Consider a footstool
If cranking your desk chair to the perfect height leaves your feet dangling, you’ll need a footstool to help your knees maintain a proper 90-degree bend. If you can’t invest in a high tech adjustable footstool, a ream of paper will do in a pinch.
Tech expert David Zhang, who we’ll hear from soon below, rests his cute striped socks on a yoga mat.
Who among us does not have dozens of things that could be pressed into service as a footstool?
I am left to ponder the fate of the decorative needlepointed footstools my late grandmother and her sisters scattered around their living rooms.
Can an actual footstool be considered a footstool hack?
3. Adjust the height of your monitor
To avoid neck pain, use a monitor stand to position the top of the screen level with your eyes. If you’re working with a laptop, you’ll need a stand, a separate keyboard and and a mouse.
Cinkay’s monitor stand hack is — you guessed it — a ream of paper.
Mine is 5000 Years of the Art of India which is about the same thickness as a ream of paper and was in easy reach at the library where I work.
To judge by some of the comments on Cinkay’s Wall Street Journal video, his keyboard dates to the Stone Age.
Whatever his keyboard vintage, the aforementioned article did suggest gel wrist rests to relieve pressure on the sensitive carpal tunnel area, but watch out! Zhang is not a fan!
4. Get a Headset
Leaving aside the fact that the phone in question appears to be a landline, a headset allows you to keep your head on straight, thus minimizing neck and shoulder pain.
5. Remember that you’re not chained to your desk
Of all the ergonomic advice offered above, this seems likeliest to remain evergreen.
Take a snack break, a water break, a bathroom break, and while you’re at it toss in a couple of the stretches Cinkay recommends.
(The Mayo Clinic has more, including our favorite shoulder stretch.)
Zhang’s desk-centric video was uploaded in 2017, when keyboard trays were already becoming a relic of a bygone era.
As mentioned, he’s anti-wrist rest. If your wrists are in need of support, and they are, get a palm rest!
Zhang’s also critical of drawers and — unusual for 2017 — standing desks though like Cirkay, he’s a big fan of standing up and moving around.
His video description includes some common sense, ass-covering encouragement for viewers with irregular symptoms or pain to seek professional help. We think this means medical professional, though unsurprisingly, ergonomic assessment is a fast growing field. It’s expensive but possibly costs less in the long run than rushing out to buy whatever a stranger on the internet tells you to.
To that end, we appreciate Zhang’s transparency regarding his channel’s participation in the Amazon Services LLC Associates affiliate advertising program.
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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...Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library
As much joy as internet memes have given you over the years, you may have struggled to explain them to those unfamiliar with the concept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to articulate the power of found images crudely overlaid with text to, say, your parents, imagine attempting to do the same to an ancestor from the fourteenth century. Introducing memes to a medieval person, the best strategy would presumably be to begin not with sardonic Willy Wonka, the guy distracted by another girl, or The Most Interesting Man in the World, but memes with familiar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the national library of the Netherlands, you can now make some of you own with ease.
“On www.medievalmemes.org visitors can use images taken from the Dutch national library’s medieval collection and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme generator, people actively create new contexts for these historic images by adding current captions. The available images are accompanied by explanatory videos, providing viewers with background information and showing them that, much like today, people in the Middle Ages used images to comment on their surroundings and current affairs.” You might repurpose these lively pieces of medieval art for such twenty-first-century topics as clubbing, online shopping, or the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, originally created for a book of miracles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warning of what can happen if you don’t learn your prayers properly.” Below that is “a sort of Mediaeval cartoon” from 1183 about the techniques involved in properly slaughtering a pig. And just above, we see what happened when “the Kenite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sisera, into her tent. Sisera had been violently oppressing the Kenites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though created for a picture Bible 592 years ago, this picture surely has potential for transposition into commentary on the very different perils of life in the twenty-twenties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowledge that even your medieval forebears would have known that feel.
Related content:
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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 Stevie Wonder’s Amazing Drum Solo, and See Why He May Be the “Greatest Drummer of Our Time”
When Prince passed away, many a non-Prince fan suddenly found out that the man was not only a brilliant songwriter, singer, dancer, guitarist, pianist, stylist, and superstar, but that he was also a virtual one-man band in the studio, able to play almost any instrument, in exactly the way he wanted it played. Prince fans knew this, as do fans of the musician who made Songs in the Key of Life — or what Prince called the greatest album ever recorded. And if Prince were here, he would agree: Stevie Wonder deserves more appreciation for his multi-musicianship while he’s still with us.
Yes, of course, we know him for his “staggering songwriting and vocal skills,” writes PC Muñoz at Drum! magazine, for his “prowess as a formidable, inventive keyboardist (and pop music synthesizer pioneer)” and “his virtuoso-level skills on harmonica.”
But do we know Stevie Wonder as a drummer? Well, “newsflash for those who didn’t know,” Muñoz announces: “Stevie Wonder also happens to be one badass drummer.” (In fact, his very first gig, at 8 years old, was on the drums.) Not that he hasn’t received his just due from fellow musicians, far from it.
Eric Clapton called Wonder “the greatest drummer of our time” in 1974 — “hefty praise” (and maybe a bit of a swipe), wrote music journalist Eric Sandler, “coming from a man who played with Ginger Baker.” See a demonstration of Wonder’s formidable feel and groove behind the kit in the drum solo at the top of the post. But, of course, you’ve already heard his drumming — all, or most, of your life perhaps — on his albums, including most every track on Talking Book, Songs in the Key of Life, and Innervisions — songs like “Superstition,” “Higher Ground,” “Living for the City” … all Stevie.
“I grew up practicing to Stevie Wonder’s music,” drummer Eric Carnes tells Muñoz, “but I actually didn’t know he was often the drummer on his own stuff. Until I was in my twenties.” Carnes goes on to describe the hallmarks of Wonder’s style: “very relaxed – not so crisp and not so metronomic. He’s using different parts of the stick at different times, and his hi-hat parts change throughout the song. A lot of times, each chorus in a given song is played slightly differently, too. He escalates a song over a long period of time, really growing the whole piece, instead of topping out early; it gives the music somewhere to go.”
Bill Janovitz of the band Buffalo Tom — in a very thorough paean to Songs in the Key of Life – points to the “innate sense of groove in his drumming.… There is a musical inventiveness that might stem from being a well-rounded multi-instrumentalist, as opposed to someone who strictly defines themselves as a drummer.”
In his appreciation of Wonder’s drumming at Slate, Seth Stevenson also highlights Wonder’s “expressiveness.… No two measures sound the same.” He offers a mini best-of roundup of Wonder’s recorded drumming moments:
My favorite Wonder drum track comes on ‘Too High,’ the first song on Innervisions. Subtle snare rolls, sudden tom-tom tumbles, jazzy ride-cymbal swings – they’re all scrumptious and all in the greater service of the song. This is not the approach of a hired drummer attempting to carve out his own terrain. It’s the work of a multi-instrumentalist composer who fits his vision for each part into an interlocking whole.
Stevenson and Janovitz speak to a thread in so many discussions of “virtuoso” musicians: composers who are also musical prodigies have ways of playing instruments in an idiom only they can understand. One imagines that if we had recordings of Mozart or Bach – both prodigious multi-instrumentalists from very young ages – we would hear classical instruments played in ways we’ve never heard them played before. The magic of recording — and Stevie Wonder’s recordings especially — means we can hear the drums on his songs exactly as he heard, and played, them, and exactly as he wanted them played.
Related Content:
Catch Stevie Wonder, Ages 12–16, in His Earliest TV Performances
See Stevie Wonder Play “Superstition” and Banter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack
The case of the copyright history of Fritz Lang’s influential sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is as convoluted as the history of its film print. Lang’s vision, and his original almost-three-hour cut was doomed to censorship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more socialist scenes. It’s been edited, colorized, put back together and restored. Wikipedia currently lists nine different versions. Similarly, who owns the film had shifted from distributors back to public domain, then *out* of public domain the more original footage was rediscovered. And then comes 2023, where Metropolis will once again land in the public domain, at least in America. Will we see as many legal battles as we will see new remixes and re-scores? Probably a bit of both.
Its original orchestral score is available, but many fans also seek out a score more befitting its futurist origins. Something more electronic.
In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTuber “KarmaGermany’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th century was born to be paired with Lang’s technological vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düsseldorf. Their icy romantic melodies strike the right balance between Metropolis’ battle, then synthesis, of machinery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even created a song called “Metropolis,” which becomes the actual score above.
Like watching the Wizard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” seems written for the film, with its opening fanfare over the shots of the future city waking up, then how it switches to its motorik beat as the workers begin their alienating factory day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some editing at play here.)
Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full catalog (it dives back into the band’s spacier early work for the films more tender moment), others have gone a more official route. Kraftwerk contemporary and member of Cluster, Dieter Moebius recorded a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metropolis. It was released posthumously in 2015, and it is one of his spookier works.
Prior to that, techno DJ and composer Jeff Mills (no relation) composed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accompanying edit, and married his career in both ambient and futuristic electronic beats.
If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your techno whistle, that clip was just the opening scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Originally two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 minutes to pace it up including removing the subtitle cards between shots and placing them over [the] picture instead.”
The last instruction from McWilliam could apply to whatever score you choose, as long as it’s for Metropolis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound system.”
Related Content
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
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.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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