The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024)
Hear a second or two of Vernon Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Balance and Rehearsal” from the JBL sound-test album Session, and you’re back in 1999; of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You,” and you’re back in 2001. What, you don’t know any of those songs? Perhaps you’re more familiar with them in a different form: chopped up, pitched up or down, and looped over and over again in the songs “Groove Is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite, “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim, and “One More Time” by Daft Punk. None of those hits would be conceivable without the clips they incorporate from older recordings, those named here and a variety of others besides.
Three and a half decades ago, few ordinary listeners would have understood how a song could be constructed out of other songs; today, most of us know it as the technology and art of sampling. We tend to associate it with hip-hop, and indeed, last year we featured here on Open Culture Tracklib’s video on the most iconic hip-hop samples of the past half-century.
But the same channel has also put out the video above, which similarly breaks down the constituent sonic ingredients of electronic dance hits from “Groove Is in the Heart” onward. If you’ve ever wanted to know what, exactly, went into Snap!‘s “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” Moby’s “Porcelain,” Skrillex’s “First of the Year,” or James Hype and Miggy Dela Rosa’s “Ferrari,” this is your chance.
Those over a certain age may recognize all the titles of the songs included on the first twenty or so years of the video’s timeline, and almost none thereafter. But they may well know the bodies of work from which they sample, including those of Aaron Neville, Freeez, Brian Wilson, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Melba Moore. For the last couple of generations of listeners, seeking out the sources of a sample in a favorite song has become a reliable method of discovering the music of past eras. By the same token, listeners already well-versed in the music of those eras can hear it anew in the tracks to which kids are currently dancing, working out, or simply “vibing.” Whatever your generation, once you hear how “Get Ready for This” was constructed, you’ll never experience a basketball game quite the same way again.
via Kottke
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the Bridge May Soon Be Realized
We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets put on a ferry, the last of its kind in Europe. But a stretch of road spanning the volatile Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the mainland, has been a dream deferred since antiquity, when Pliny the Elder wrote of Roman notions of building a floating bridge — which, with its potential to disrupt the waterway’s considerable north-south trade, was eventually scrapped.
It seems that Italians have been joking about the impossibility of a bridge to Sicily ever since. These two videos from Get to the Point and The B1M explain the history of this continually frustrated infrastructural project, and the political maneuvers that have recently begun to make it seem very nearly semi-possible.
Though the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis of which Homer sung may not be a threat, the challenges are still many and varied, from the depth of the strait and the regional seismic activity that would necessitate building the largest single-span bridge in the world to the interference of local mafia groups who make their living by driving up the costs of construction works while also making sure that they’re never completed.
Two years ago, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni approved a decree to proceed with construction, but whether it will realize its projected completion by 2032 is anybody’s guess. The very idea of such a structure has such cultural resonance that its existence — as well as its collapse — was envisioned to great effect in the recent Italian crime drama The Bad Guy. Though critically acclaimed, that series was also condemned in some political quarters for perpetuating negative stereotypes of the country: stereotypes that could potentially be refuted by getting some ambitious new infrastructure finished. If Italy can get the Strait of Messina Bridge built, after all, what couldn’t it do?
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision
Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in the new Smarthistory video above. Throughout its fifteen minutes, she and her colleague Steven Zucker explain as much as possible of this jam-packed triptych — not that even a lifetime would be long enough to understand it fully.
“Bosch confounds our ability to even talk about what we see,” says Harris. “His imagination has run wild. He’s just invented so many things here that we could never even have thought about in our wildest imaginations.” Zucker cites one art-history theory that this triptych represents Bosch’s attempt to “elevate the visual arts to the level of creativity that was permitted in literature.”
Even in Bosch’s late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, writers had an enviably free hand in choosing and presenting their subject matter; because the directly representative form of painting, by contrast, “had always been at the service of religion, it was inherently more conservative.”
It’s entirely possible — and other analyses previously featured here at Open Culture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was working at the service of religion. But it could also be that The Garden of Earthly Delights, in its vast middle panel, tells “an alternate story,” as Zucker puts it. “What if the temptation had not taken place? What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent, and had populated the world? And so, is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality, played out in Bosch’s imagination?” Not that such a vision would have readily been accepted in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his intentions alone could lead us to a complete interpretation of his work. As any novelist knows, sometimes your characters simply take over, and it could hardly have been within even Bosch’s powers to deny the desires of a cast so teeming and bizarre.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism
From WIRED comes this: NYU professor and “authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth? Professor Ben-Ghiat answers these questions and many more on Tech Support: Dictator Support.” Watch the video above and pick up a copy of Ben-Ghiat’s timely, bestselling book: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
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Read More...Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960)
The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST see from the beginning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, given how early in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a policy: “Every theatre manager, everywhere, has been instructed to admit no one after the start of each performance of Psycho,” declares Hitchcock himself in its print advertisements. “We said no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States or the Queen of England (God bless her).” Even in 1960, ordinary moviegoers still had the habit of entering and leaving the theater whenever they pleased. With Psycho’s marketing campaign, Hitchcock meant to alter their relationship to cinema itself.
As for the trailer’s form and content, audiences would never have seen anything like it before. Containing no actual footage from the film — and indeed, constituting something of a short film itself — it instead offers a tour of its main locations personally guided by Hitchcock. Those are, of course, the Bates Motel and its proprietor’s house, “which is, if I may say so, a little more sinister looking, less innocent-looking than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, horrible events took place.”
In his telling, these buildings are not film sets, but the genuine sites of heinous crimes, about which he proves only too happy to provide suggestive details. We complain that today’s trailers “give the movie away,” and that seems to be Hitchcock’s enterprise here.
But after these six minutes, what, in a world that had yet to see Psycho, would you really know about the movie? It would seem to involve some sort of grisly murders, and you’d surely be dying, as it were, to know of what sort and how grisly. Who, moreover, could fail to be startled and intrigued by Hitchcock’s sudden reveal of a screaming blonde woman behind the motel-room shower curtain? Hitch fans might have recognized her as Vera Miles, who’d been in The Wrong Man in 1956 and the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents the next year. They might also have noticed the name of no less a movie star than Janet Leigh, and wondered what she was doing in such a sensationalistic-looking genre picture. One thing is certain: when they finally did take their seat for Psycho — before showtime, of course — they had no idea what they were in for.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...A 6‑Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study
Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his initial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”
Created in 1978 from seconds-long tape loops from a much longer improv session with musicians including Robert Wyatt, Music for Airports started the idea of slow, meditative music that abandoned typical major and minor scales, brought in melodic ambiguity, and began the exploration of sounds that were designed to exist somewhere in the background, beyond the scope of full attention.
For those who think 50 minutes is too short and those piano notes too recognizable, may we suggest this 6‑hour, time-stretched version of the album, created by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s granular as hell, but you could imagine the whole piece unspooling unnoticed in a terminal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the acceptance of death happens, when you’ve given up on ever getting home?)
Unlike Music for Films, which featured several tracks Eno had given to filmmakers like Derek Jarman, it took some time for Music for Airports to be realized in its intended location: being piped in at a terminal at La Guardia, New York, sometime in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing.
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The album seemed destined for personal use only, but then in 1997 the modern ensemble Bang on a Can played it live, translating the randomness of out-of-sync tape loops into music notation. Over the years they’ve performed it at airports in Brussels, the Netherlands and Liverpool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Terminal 2 of San Diego International. Writing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza reported that “crying babies, echoes of rolling suitcases and boarding passes serving as tickets to the concert failed to remind anyone that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest airports in the country. Even the telltale announcements were there: Airport security is everyone’s responsibility. Do not leave bags unattended.”
And then in 2018, London City Airport played the original album in a day-long loop for the album’s 40th anniversary.
As site-specific multi-media art builds popularity in the 21st century with increasingly cheaper and smaller technology, we might hope to hear ambient drones, and not classic rock or pop, in more and more landscapes.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More
Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that English-speakers learn in everyday life. As for why the English word comes directly from the Italian, perhaps it has something to do with the history of writing on the walls — a history that, in Western civilization, stretches at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. The Fire of Learning video above offers a selection of translated pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graffiti found etched into the preserved walls of Pompeii: “Marcus loves Spedusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secundus took a crap here” (written three times); “Atimetus got me pregnant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.”
Crude though some of these may sound, the narrator emphasizes that “many, many of the prominent pieces of graffiti, especially in Pompeii, are too sexual or violent to show here,” comparing their sensibility to that of “a high-school bathroom stall.” You can read more of them at The Ancient Graffiti Project, whose archive is browsable through categories like “love,” “poetry,” “food,” and “gladiators” (as decent a summary as any of life in ancient Rome).
Romans didn’t just write on the walls — a practice that seems to have been encouraged, at least in some places — they also drew on them, as evidenced by what you can see in the figural graffiti section, as well as the examples in the video.
Another rich archive of ancient graffiti comes from a surprising location: the Egyptian pyramids, then as now a major tourist attraction. Rather than posting their reviews of the attraction on the internet, in our twenty-first-century manner, ancient Roman tourists wrote directly on its surface. “I visited and did not like anything except the sarcophagus,” says one inscription; “I can not read the hieroglyphics,” complains another, in a manner that may sound awfully familiar these millennia later. “We have urinated in our beds,” declares another piece of writing, discovered on the door of a Pompeii inn. “Host, I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no chamber pot.” Consider it confirmed: the ancient world, too, had Airbnb guests.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism
It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous journey in order to undertake an even more arduous course of study under a recognized master; nor are the forms of Buddhism they practice always recognizable to the layman. What’s more surprising is that the transplantation into and hybridization with other cultures that has brought about so many novel strains of Buddhism was going on even in the ancient world.
Take, for example, the “Greco-Buddhism” described in the Religion for Breakfast video above, the story of which involves a variety of fascinating figures both universally known and relatively obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexander the Great, who, as host Andrew Henry puts it, “conquered a massive empire stretching from Greece across central Asia all the way to the Indus River, Hellenizing the populations along the way.”
But “the cultural exchange didn’t just go one way,” as evidenced by the still-new Buddhist religion also spreading in the other direction, illustrated by pieces of text and works of art clearly shaped by both civilizational currents.
Other major players in Greco-Buddhism include the philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who traveled with Alexander and took ideas of the suspension of judgment from India’s “gymnosophists”; Ashoka, emperor of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, an avowed Buddhist who renounced violence for compassion (and proselytization); and King Menander, “the most famous Greek who converted to Buddhism,” who appears as a character in an early Buddhist text. It can still be difficult to say for sure exactly who believed what in that period, but it’s not hard to identify resonances between Buddhist principles, broadly speaking, and those of such widely known ancient Greek schools of thought as Stoicism. Both of those belief systems now happen to have a good deal of currency in Silicon Valley, though what legacy they’ll leave to be discovered in its ruins a couple millennia from now remains to be seen.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational Film
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the episode above, one of nine, directed by none other than It’s A Wonderful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your magic carpet,” begins the special, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imagination.” As a guide for our imagination, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays enlists the humanities—specifically three puppets representing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and, somewhat incongruously for its detective theme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who plays the foil as an incurious spoilsport. The show’s host, Frank Baxter (“Dr. Research”) was actually a professor of English at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carlson, explaining scientific concepts with confidence.
The one-hour films became very popular as tools of science education, but there are good reasons—other than their datedness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them critically. At times, the degree of speculation indulged by Baxter and the writers strains credulity. For example, writes Geoff Alexander in Academic Films for the Classroom: A History, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess (above) “introduces the viewer to bizarre concepts such as the possibility of ‘steering’ hurricanes away from land by creating bio-hazards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and introducing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fossil fuel industry-friendly scenarios nonetheless openly acknowledged the possibility of man-made climate change and looked forward to solar energy.
Along with some dystopian weirdness, the series also contains a good deal of explicit Christian proselytizing, thanks to Capra. As a condition for taking the job, “the renowned director would be allowed to embed religious messages in the films.” As Capra himself said to AT&T president Cleo F. Craig:
If I make a science film, I will have to say that scientific research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit… I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.
At times, writes Alexander, “the religious perspective is taken to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quotation from Psalms and admonishes “viewers who would dare to question the causal relationship between solar energy and the divinity.” The Unchained Goddess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.
Afterward, a director named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexander, “did not overtly proselytize” and “relied less on animated characters interacting with Dr. Baxter.” (Watch the Crump-directed Gateways to the Mind above, a more sober-minded, yet still strangely off-kilter, inquiry into the five senses.) The last film, The Restless Sea was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Les Clark, and starred Disney himself and Baxter’s replacement, Sterling Holloway.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952)
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but as it happened, they never shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their collaboration didn’t come about until 1952, the same year that Singin’ in the Rain dramatized the already distant-feeling advent of talking pictures. That hit musical deals with once-famous artists coping with a changing world, and so, in its own way, does Limelight, the film that finally brought Chaplin and Keaton together, dealing as it does with a washed-up music-hall star in the London of 1914.
A specialist in downtrodden protagonists, Chaplin — who happened to have made his own transition from vaudeville to motion pictures in 1914 — naturally plays that starring role. Keaton appears only late in the film, as an old partner of Chaplin’s character who takes the stage with him to perform a duet at a benefit concert that promises the salvation of their careers. In reality, this scene had some of that same appeal for Keaton himself, who had yet to recover financially or professionally after a ruinous divorce in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and had been struggling for traction on the new medium of television.
Though Limelight may be a sound film, and Chaplin and Keaton’s scene may be a musical number, what they execute together is, for all intents and purposes, a work of silent comedy. Chaplin plays the violin and Keaton plays the piano, but before either of them can get a note out of their instruments, they must first deal with a series of technical mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. This is in keeping with a theme both performers essayed over and over again in their silent heyday: that of the human being made inept by the complications of an inhuman world.
But of course, Chaplin and Keaton’s characters usually found their ways to triumph at least temporarily over that world in the end, and so it comes to pass in Limelight — moments before the hapless violinist himself passes on, the victim of an onstage heart attack. In the real world, both of these two icons from a bygone age had at least another act ahead of them, Chaplin with more films to direct back in his native England and Europe, and Keaton as a kind of living legend for hire, called up whenever Hollywood needed a shot of what had been rediscovered — not least thanks to TV’s re-circulation of old movies — as the magic of silent pictures.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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