Marie Curie Attended a Secret, Underground “Flying University” When Women Were Banned from Polish Universities
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Marie Curie has long stood in the pantheon of scientists for her research on radioactivity — research so close to the subject that, as we posted about last year, her papers remain radioactive over a century later. She’s also become the most prominent historical role model for female students with an interest in science, not least because of the obstacles she had to surmount to arrive at the position where she could do her research in the first place. Born in 19th-century Poland to a family financially humbled by their participation in political struggles for independence from Russia (whose authorities took laboratory instruction out of the country’s schools), she hardly had a smooth road to follow, or even much of a road at all.
“I was only fifteen when I finished my high-school studies, always having held first rank in my class,” Curie wrote of those years. “The fatigue of growth and study compelled me to take almost a year’s rest in the country.” But when she returned to the capital, she couldn’t continue her formal learning there, given the University of Warsaw’s refusal to admit women. So she continued her learning informally, getting involved with the “Flying University” (or “Floating University”) that in the late 19th and early 20th century clandestinely offered an education in ever-changing locations, often private houses, throughout the city. (Over 5,000 Poles, male and female, benefited from its services, including the writer Zofia Nałkowska and doctor Janusz Korczak.)
Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity author Naomi Pasachoff writes that “the mission of the patriotic participants of the Floating University,” as its name is also translated, “was to bring about Poland’s eventual freedom by enlarging and strengthening its educated classes.” Youngsters eager to read more about Curie’s experience there might like to read Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, whose authors Ann E. Steinke and Roger Xavier write of Curie’s experience listening to “lessons on anatomy, natural history, and sociology. In turn she gave lessons to women from poor families.” She would later describe her time there as the origin of her interest in experimental scientific work.
With their sights set on Western Europe, Curie (then Maria Skłodowska) and her sister Bronislawa (known as Bronya) made a pact: “Maria would work as a governess to help pay for Bronya’s medical studies in Paris. As soon as Bronya was trained and began to earn money, she would help cover the costs of Maria’s university training.” Curie earned two degrees in Paris in 1893 and 1894, and her first Nobel Prize in 1903. The Flying University lasted until 1905, and the operation would later return to activity in the late 1970s and early 80s with Poland under the thumb of communism. We now live in more enlightened times, with proper educations, scientific or otherwise, available to students male or female across most of the world — thanks to the will that drove unconventional institutions like the Flying University, and its unconventional students like Marie Curie.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Wonderfully Offbeat Assignments That Artist John Baldessari Gave to His Art Students (1970)
In 1970, when conceptual artist John Baldessari was teaching studio art at the experimental CalArts campus near Valencia, CA, the assignments he handed out to his class were art in themselves. Humorous, confounding, sometimes very specific but often like zen koans, the assignments must have come as a shock, especially to those students with a more traditional sense of what constitutes art.
They probably didn’t know that Baldessari was questioning art itself and in the middle of a crisis. That year he had taken all his previous painted work from 1953 — 1966 and cremated it at a San Diego mortuary. He turned from painting to photography. And he expected his students to rethink everything they thought they knew.
Looking back at his class assignments, which you can see here, here, and here, it’s like seeing the seeds of ideas that were to be turned into whole careers by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Wayne White, Komar & Melamid, and others.
Here’s a selection of favorites:
- One person copies or makes up random captions. Another person takes photos. Match photos to captions.
- Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air.
- Photograph backs of things, underneaths of things, extreme foreshortenings, uncharacteristic views. Or trace them.
- Repaired or patched art. Recycled. Find something broken and discarded. Perhaps in a thrift store. Mend it.
- Imitate Baldessari in actions and speech.
- Punishment: Write “I will not make any more art” / “I will not make any more boring art” / “I will make good art” (or something similar) 1000 times on wall. (Apparently, Baldessari punished himself.)
Some of these assignments are intentionally silly. Some could produce good work. But all are meant to wake the artist up to the possibilities of the form.
via Austin Kleon/CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art
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Watch Chris Burden Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971)
Metropolis II: Chris Burden’s Amazing, Frenetic Mini-City
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. 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...The Beatles “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Gets a Dreamy New Music Video from Cirque du Soleil
The Beatles gave us enough. You couldn’t ask for more. But if you want to get a little greedy, you could ask for a few more songs from George. Though crowded out by the prolific Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, Harrison squeezed in some Beatles songs that rival their best. Shall I refresh your memories? “Taxman.” “I Want to Tell You.” “It’s All Too Much.” “Something.” “Here Comes the Sun.” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” You owe them all to George.
Written in 1968 for The White Album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is ranked #136 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list, “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Clapton played the solo on the original recording–the same solo Prince shredded at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony. And it’s perhaps partly thanks to that Prince performance, witnessed so widely when the musician passed earlier this year, that we now have this: a new video paying tribute to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” featuring scenes from LOVE, Cirque du Soleil’s mesmerizing Beatles production that’s been running in Las Vegas since 2006. If you like the beautiful LOVE soundtrack, you’ll enjoy the remixed version of Harrison’s song and all of the dreamy Cirque du Soleil visuals that accompany it above.
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Watch George Harrison’s Final Interview and Performance (1997)
Read More...Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopian Novel Features a Fascistic Presidential Candidate Who Promises to “Make America Great Again”
Image by Nikolas Coukouma, via Wikimedia Commons
The Internet has been abuzz and atwitter these past few months with stories about prophetic predictions of the rise of Trump, buried in ancient texts like Back to the Future II, and an episode of The Simpsons from 2000. Then there’s Mike Judge’s now ten-year-old satire Idiocracy. While not specifically modeled after a Trump presidency, its depiction of the country as a violent, backward dystopia, armed and corporate-branded to the teeth, sure does resemble the kind of place many imagine Trump and his supporters might build. These allusions and direct references don’t necessarily provide evidence of the writers’ clairvoyance; after all, Trump has threatened us with his candidacy since 1988, with mostly unserious statements. But they do show us that we’ve seen this version of the future coming for the last thirty years or so.
One prediction you may have missed, however, offers us a much more sober take on the rise of a frightening neo-fascist during a time of fear and civil unrest. As Twitter user @oligopistos pointed out, in the second book of her Earthseed series, The Parable of the Talents (1998), Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction writer Octavia Butler gave us Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, a violent autocrat in the year 2032 whose “supporters have been known… to form mobs.” Jarret’s political opponent, Vice President Edward Jay Smith, “calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, and a hypocrite,” and—most presciently—Jarret rallies his crowds with the call to “make America great again.”
Though Trump has trademarked it, the slogan did not originate with him, nor even with Butler’s Jarret character—the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign used it, as Matt Taibbi pointed out Rolling Stone last year. (Historians have even shown that another of Trump’s slogans, “America First,” was used by Charles Lindbergh and “Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s.”) Again, proto-Trumpism has been in the zeitgeist for a long time. While Butler may have used “Make American Great Again” from her memory of Reagan’s first campaign, the way her character employs it speaks to our moment for a number of reasons.
It’s true that Senator Jarret differs from Trump in some significant ways: “Jarret’s beef is with Canada instead of Mexico,” writes Fusion, and “instead of business acumen as his main credential, religion is Jarret’s stump. He’s the head of a group called Christian America, which is intolerant of other religious views, and whose supporters burn ‘witches’—meaning Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists—at the stake.” Our current candidate may have co-opted the religious right, but he doesn’t speak their language at all. Nonetheless, he has made promises that give secularists and non-Christians chills, and religious intolerance has formed the backbone of his campaign and of the rhetoric that has driven his party to the far right.
Jarret and the fanaticism he inspires become central the novel’s story, but the crucial background in Butler’s 1998 depiction of a post-apocalyptic 2032 are the conditions she identifies as giving rise to the Senator’s rule (and which she described in the first book, Parable of the Sower). In Talents, the narrator’s father Taylor Franklin Bankole writes,
I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos…. I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
In Butler’s fiction, the rise of Senator Jarret and his mobs is an outcome of the same kinds of impending crises we face now, and that far too many of our leaders dutifully ignore as they stage increasingly acrimonious and bizarre forms of political theater. Butler’s indirect warning to us in Parable of the Talents may be less about the demagogic leader and his cult—though they pose the most dire existential threat in the book—than about the causes and conditions that created “the Pox,” the kind of social collapse that Kurt Vonnegut warned of ten years before Butler in his time-capsule letter to the people of 2088, vaguely identifying similar kinds of “climatic, economic, and sociological” crises to come. Would that we could abandon empty spectacle and heed these Cassandras of the near future.
Related Content:
In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice
Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today
Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Largest Ever Tribute to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” Choreographed by a Flashmob in Berlin
When I’m feeling depressed or uninspired, I can always count on one of my favorite visionary musicians to remind me just how much wild weirdness and unexpected beauty the world contains. That person is Kate Bush, and for all of her many brilliant songs—too many to name—the touchstone for true fans will always be her first single, “Wuthering Heights,” written when she was only 16, recorded two years later, and turned into two astonishing videos. The first, UK version does Kate’s ethereal strangeness justice, without a doubt, placing her on a dark stage, in flowing white gown, fog machine at her feet, showcasing her idiosyncratic dance moves with several double-exposure versions of herself. All very Kate, but we’d seen this kind of thing before, if only at the meetings of our high school drama club.
It really wasn’t until the second, U.S. video’s release that audiences fully grasped the uniqueness of her genius. In this version, above, the young prodigy—who trained, by the way, with David Bowie’s mime and dance teacher Lindsay Kemp—appears in a flowing, Bohemian red gown, matching tights, and black belt, haunting a “wiley, windy” moor like Catherine Earnshaw, the doomed heroine of Emily Brontë’s novel.
Everything about this: the flowers in her hair, the editing tricks that have her fading in and out of the shot like a ghost, and most especially the fully uninhibited dance moves—not confined this time to the boundaries of a stage (which could never contain her anyway)…. It’s perfect, the very acme of melodramatic theatricality, and simply could not be improved upon in any possible way.
And so when fans seek to pay tribute to Kate Bush, they invariably call back to this video. In 2013, Kate Bush parody troupe Shambush! organized a group dance in Brighton, with 300 eager fans in red dresses and wigs, each one doing their best Kate Bush impression in a synchronized comedy homage. This year, on July 16th, a flashmob gathered in Berlin’s Tempelhof Field for “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever,” breaking the Shambush! record for most Kate Bush-attired dancing fans in one place. See them at the top of the post. Other flashmobs assembled around the world as well, in London, Wellington, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and elsewhere, reports German site Tonspion. Melbourne, it seems put on a particularly “strong showing of Bush-mania” (watch it above), according to Electronic Beats, who also suggest that next year the organizers “switch it up and find a good forest for a ‘The Sensual World’ flashmob.” That is indeed a stunning video, and it’s very hard to choose a favorite among Bush’s many visual masterpieces, but I’d like to see them try the wartime choreography of “Army Dreamers” next.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Four Interactive Maps Immortalize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has, in the almost 60 years since its publication, inspired its readers to do many things: some try their hands at writing their own carefully composed yet carelessness-exuding prose, but others find themselves moved to replicate the American road trip whose story Kerouac uses that near-inimitable style to tell. They might do so by following the author’s own hand-drawn map, or the more recently composed set of Google driving directions we featured a couple years ago. But now they have another detailed research tool in the form of Dennis Mansker’s interactive maps.
Mansker, himself the author of a book called A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War, has put together not one but four On the Road maps, each one detailing one of the road trips Kerouac used to create his Beat narrative of America: Map One follows his summer 1947 trip from New York to San Francisco by way of Denver and back again; Map Two, his winter 1949 trip from Rocky Mount, North Carolina to San Francisco by way of New Orleans; Map Three, his spring 1949 trip from Denver to New York by way of San Francisco; Map Four, his spring 1950 trip from New York to Mexico City by way of Denver.
“Click on one of the placemarkers on the map to see a quotation from the book,” Mansker explains. “Zoom in it to see the location on the map. In many cases where the narrative wasn’t clear on a given place, I’ve had to approximate — apply a ‘best guess’ solution to a given location.” He also provides information on the three cars, a 1949 Hudson, a 1947 Cadillac Limousine, and a 1937 Ford Sedan (as well as a Greyhound Bus (protagonist Sal Paradise’s transportation mode of choice “when he couldn’t boost a ride” with the irrepressible Dean Moriarty) which “themselves became sort of minor characters during the course of the adventures.”
“He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt,” writes Kerouac of Dean’s return to Sal’s life in the small city that figured early in that first 1947 road trip. “He was gone,” says Sal of Dean’s departure from his life as he recovers from a fever in Mexico City, the last stop of Kerouac’s 1950 road trip. “When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.” If you love Kerouac’s novel, by all means follow in his tire tracks — just make sure to find a more reliable traveling companion.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...
Enroll in a Free Online Course about ‘The Hobbits’ (aka Homo floresiensis)
You might have seen a new type of ancient human on the news recently, nicknamed, affectionately, ‘the hobbit’ (not because they were taking the ring to Mordor, but because of their rather diminutive stature).
If you didn’t, here’s the news in brief: a team of scientists went digging for the first Australians and instead found a completely new (and tiny) ancient human. Since then they’ve been trying to work out what happened to these small ancestors of ours.
To share their findings, some of the scientists involved in understanding ‘the hobbit’ have put together a 4 week free online course to explain how the discovery unfolded…
The course has been created with FutureLearn and will take you inside the world of this new species, giving you a run through modern scientific archaeological techniques along the way.
Here’s what’s on the syllabus:
Week 1 — Human Origins and Introduction to Archaeology
Learn about where you, me and everyone came from — before getting onto the moment ‘the hobbit’ was discovered.
Week 2 — Archaeological Methods: In the Cave
You think a festival is bad? Get to grips with how science translates in somewhere without electricity or water.
Week 3 — Archaeological Science: In the Lab
Understand what happens once all the archaeological finds are delicately hauled back to the lab.
Week 4 — Future Directions
‘The Hobbit’, despite it’s size, is having a big impact in the world of archaeology — find out exactly what this little ancient human might mean for the story of our origins.
Intrigued? Join the course today — it started this week, and you’re not too late to join.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. She has never conducted ground-breaking science in a cave, or discovered a new species, but there’s still time.
Read More...William S. Burroughs Drops a Posthumous Album, Setting Readings of Naked Lunch to Music (NSFW)
Image by Christiaan Tonnis, via Wikimedia Commons
William S. Burroughs may have died almost twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean his fans have gone entirely without new material since. This year, for instance, has seen the release of the Naked Lunch author’s new spoken word album Let Me Hang You, which you can listen to free on Spotify. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) Its content, in fact, comes straight from that form- and taboo-breaking 1959 novel, which Burroughs committed to tape — along with a trio of accomplished experimental musicians — not long before his passing, and which thus got lost along the way to commercial release.
“But more than 20 years later,” writes the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli, “those surreal recordings — which featured music from the guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, along with the pianist Wayne Horvitz and the violist Eyvind Kang — are getting a second life as an album with an assist from the independent musician King Khan, best known for his raucous live shows as an eccentric punk and soul frontman.” Fans of Burroughs’ roughest-edged material can rest assured that, in these sessions, the writer focused on speaking the “unspeakable” parts of Naked Lunch: “think sex, drugs, and defecation,” Coscarelli says.
Hard as it may seem to believe that a novel written well over half a century ago, let alone one written by an author born more than a century ago, could retain its power to shock, this newly published musical interpretation of Burrough’s substance-inspired, random-access, “obscenity”-laden text freshens its transgressive impact. “One particularly jagged track on the record is ‘Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole,’ ” writes Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow. “As Burroughs stiltedly reads his own bizarre prose in which the titular Snide recites every lurid, gritty detail he notices while watching a junky ‘female hustler,’ Khan and his fellow musicians play a brittle, upbeat groove and funky, bluesy guitar solos.” Finally, someone has taken this work of the most offbeat of all the Beats and set it to a beat.
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William S. Burroughs on Saturday Night Live, 1981
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Download Alfred Stieglitz’s Proto-Dada Art Journal, 291, The First Art Magazine That Was Itself a Work of Art (1916)
You’ve likely heard a good deal recently—especially if you hang around these parts—about the 100th anniversary of Dada, supposedly begun when poet and Cabaret Voltaire owner Hugo Ball penned his manifesto in 1916 and began disseminating the ideas of the nascent anti-art movement. This makes a convenient origin story, as they say in the comics, and helps us contextualize the avant-garde explosion that followed. But, historically speaking, there is no such thing as creation ex nihilo, and the beginnings of Dada—before Ball coined the name—lie further back in time. (We might refer to the distinction Edward Said makes between a divine “origin” and a secular “beginning.”)
We could, as many do, situate the beginnings of Dada in the previous century, in Alfred Jarry’s bizarre 1896 play Ubu Roi or Erik Satie’s minimalist late 19th century Gymnopedies. We might also refer to an arts magazine in New York that preceded Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Ball’s single issue Cabaret Voltaire. Edited by famed photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, the journal 291 ran for 12 issues between 1915 and 1916 and is known, writes Dada-Companion.com, as “the first expression of the dada esthetic in the United States; proto-dada, actually, dada avant la lettre, before dada had started in Zürich in 1916.” Along with the University of Iowa, Ubuweb hosts the entire 12-issue print run, “a financial fiasco” in its day, “failing to sell more than eight subscriptions on vellum and a hundred on ordinary paper…. In the end Stieglitz sold the entire backstock to a ragpicker for $5.80.”
Despite this inglorious end, 291 is notable not only for its proto-dada status—and for featuring the work of modernists like Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, and later Dada and Surrealist artist Francis Picabia; the magazine also “occupies an interesting position among the journals of modernist art” as “the first magazine to style itself as a work of art in its own right.” You can get a sense of its artistry in the covers you see here, and download every issue of the magazine at Ubuweb or at the University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive. You’ll also see the magazine’s unusual format—from odd little topical items of the sort you’d find in a local newspaper to fascinating visual poetry like “Mental Reactions,” below, by Agnes Ernst Meyer. What we can’t get from the digital copies, unfortunately, is the full sense of 291’s “dramatic form” in its “gigantic folio format.”
The modernist journal “took its original inspiration from Apollinaire’s Soirées de Paris,” a journal founded in 1912 by the French poet and critic and his friends, “emphasizing caligrammatic texts and an abstracted kind of satirical drawing.” And though 291 may have had a very limited reach during its material existence, its influence continued into the era of Dada when Francis Picabia styled his own journal, 391, after Steiglitz’s publication. “Published 1917–1924 in Barcelona, New York, Zürich, and Paris in nineteen issues,” writes Booktryst, 391 helped Picabia distribute his own take on Dada, until he denounced the movement in 1921 and “issued a personal attack against [Surrealist Andre Breton] in the final issue.” The University of Iowa also hosts digital versions of all 19 issues of Picabia’s 391, which you can view and download here.
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The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anarchic, Irrational “Anti-Art” Movement of Dadaism
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Hear 280 Blues, Country, Reggae & Rock Songs Keith Richards Namechecks in His Memoir, Life
Image by Machocarioca, via Wikimedia Commons
You don’t have to, like, stretch your brain or anything to rattle off a list of Keith Richards’ influences. If you’ve ever heard a Rolling Stones song, you’ve heard him pull out his Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry riffs, and he’s never been shy about supporting and naming his idols. He’s played with Waters, Berry, and many more blues and early rock and roll greats, and after borrowing heavily from them, the Stones gave back by promoting and touring with the artists who provided the raw material for their sound.
Then there’s the 2002 compilation The Devil’s Music, culled from Richards’ personal favorite collection of blues, soul, and R&B classics, and featuring big names like Robert Johnson, Little Richard, Bob Marley, Albert King, and Lead Belly, and more obscure artists like Amos Milburn, and Jackie Brenston. You may also recall last year’s Under the Influence, a Netflix documentary by 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville, in which Richards namechecks dozens of influential musicians—from his mum’s love of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, to his and Jagger’s youthful adoration of Waters and Berry, to his rock star hangouts with Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf.
Point is, Keith Richards loves to talk about the music he loves. A big part of the Stones’ appeal—at least in their 60s/early 70s prime—was that they were such eager fans of the musicians they emulated. Yes, Jagger’s phony country drawls and blues howls could be a little embarrassing, his chicken dance a little less than soulful. But the earnestness with which the young Englishmen pursued their Americana ideals is infectious, and Richards has spread his love of U.S. roots music through every medium, including his 2010 memoir Life, a wickedly ironic title—given Richards’ No. 1 position on the “rock stars most-likely-to-die list,” writes Michiko Kakutani, “and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.”
It’s also a very poignant title, given Richards’ single-minded pursuit of a life governed by music he’s loved as passionately, or more so, as the women in his life. Richards, Kakutani writes, dedicated himself “like a monk to mastering the blues.” Of this calling, he writes, “you were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.” In the course of the book, Richards mentions over 200 artists, songs, and recordings that directly inspired him early or later in life, and one enterprising reader has compiled them all, in order of appearance, in the Spotify playlist above.
You’ll find here no surprises, but if you’re a Stones fan, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t put this one on and listen to it straight through without skipping a single track. When it comes to blues, soul, reggae, country, and rock and roll, Keith Richards has impeccable taste. Scattered amidst the Aaron Neville, Etta James, Gram Parsons, Elvis, Wilson Pickett, etc. are plenty of classic Stones recordings that feel right at home next to their influences and peers.
With the exception of reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff and Sly & Robbie, most of the tracks are from U.S. or U.S.-inspired artists (Tom Jones, Cliff Richard). Again, no surprises. Not everyone Richards appropriated has appreciated the homage (Chuck Berry long held a grudge), but were it not for his fandom and apprenticeship, it’s possible a great many blues records would have gone unsold, and some artists may have faded into obscurity. Thanks to playlists like these, they can live on in a digital age that doesn’t always do so well at acknowledging or remembering its history.
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Chuck Berry Takes Keith Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
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