How Steely Dan Wrote “Deacon Blues,” the Song Audiophiles Use to Test High-End Stereos

in Music | April 29th, 2016

Every Steely Dan fan remem­bers the first time they lis­tened to their music — not just heard it, but lis­tened to it, active­ly tak­ing notice of Wal­ter Beck­er and Don­ald Fagen’s com­plex­ly anachro­nis­tic lyrics (long scru­ti­nized by the band’s exegetes), jazz-and-rock-span­ning com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique, ultra-dis­cern­ing selec­tion of ses­sion musi­cians, and immac­u­late stu­dio craft which, by the stan­dards of the 1970s, raised pop­u­lar music’s bar through the ceil­ing.

Often, that first real lis­ten­ing ses­sion hap­pens in the neigh­bor­hood of a high-end stereo deal­er. For me, the album was Two Against Nature, their turn-of-the-21st cen­tu­ry come­back, but for many more, the album was Aja, which came out in 1977 and soon claimed the sta­tus of Steely Dan’s mas­ter­piece. At the end of side one comes “Dea­con Blues,” one of their best-loved songs as well as a pro­duc­tion that puts audio­phile lis­ten­ing equip­ment to the test. You can see a break­down of what went into it in Nerd­writer’s new video “How Steely Dan Com­pos­es a Song” above.

“There’s a rea­son why audio­philes use Steely Dan records to test the sound qual­i­ty of new speak­ers,” says host Evan Puschak. “The band is among the most son­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed pop acts of the 20th and 21st cen­turies,” in both the tech­ni­cal and artis­tic sens­es. He goes on to iden­ti­fy some of the sig­na­ture ele­ments in the mix, includ­ing some­thing called the “mu major cord”; the record­ing meth­ods that allow “every instru­ment its own life” (espe­cial­ly those played by mas­ters like gui­tarist Lar­ry Carl­ton and drum­mer Bernard Pur­die); the strik­ing effect of “mid­dle reg­is­ter horns slid­ing against each oth­er”; and even sax­o­phone soloist Pete Christlieb, whom Beck­er and Fagen dis­cov­ered by chance on a Tonight Show broad­cast.

Puschak does­n’t ignore the lyrics, with­out a thor­ough analy­sis of which no dis­cus­sion of Steely Dan’s work would be com­plete. He men­tions the band’s typ­i­cal­ly wry, sar­don­ic tone, their detached per­spec­tive and notes of uncer­tain­ty, but in the case of this par­tic­u­lar song, it all comes with a “hid­den earnest­ness” that makes it one of the most poignant in their entire cat­a­log. “ ‘Dea­con Blues’ is about as close to auto­bi­og­ra­phy as our tunes get,” admits Fagen in the tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary clip just above, which puts him and Beck­er back into the stu­dio to look back at the song track by iso­lat­ed track.

“We’re both kids who grew up in the sub­urbs. We both felt fair­ly alien­at­ed. Like a lot of kids in the fifties, we were look­ing for some kind of alter­na­tive cul­ture — some kind of escape, real­ly — from where we found our­selves.” Beck­er describes the song’s epony­mous pro­tag­o­nist, who dreams of learn­ing to “work the sax­o­phone” in order to play just how he feels, “drink Scotch whiskey all night long, and die behind the wheel,” as not a musi­cian but some­one who “just sort of imag­ines that would be one of the myth­ic forms of loser­dom to which he might aspire. Who’s to say that he’s not right?”

You can learn even more about the mak­ing (and the mag­ic) of “Dea­con Blues” in Marc Myers’ inter­view with Beck­er and Fagen in the Wall Street Jour­nal last year. “It’s the only time I remem­ber mix­ing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feel­ing like I want­ed to hear it over and over again,” says Beck­er. “It was the com­pre­hen­sive sound of the thing.” Fagen acknowl­edges “one thing we did right” in the mak­ing of the song: “We nev­er tried to accom­mo­date the mass mar­ket. We worked for our­selves and still do.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

Peter Frampton Plays a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, Featuring Acoustic Versions of His Classic Songs

in Music | April 28th, 2016

Hav­ing recent­ly released a new album fea­tur­ing acoustic ver­sions of his big hits, Peter Framp­ton is now back on tour, play­ing in some small­er venues across the U.S. But no venue–not the Gillioz The­atre in Spring­field, Mis­souri, nor the Tobin Cen­ter for Per­form­ing Arts in San Anto­nio, Texas–is quite as small as the one we’re fea­tur­ing today. Above, watch Framp­ton per­form at the desk of NPR’s All Songs Con­sid­ered. The per­for­mance is part of NPR’s Tiny Desk series, and the setlist includes acoustic ver­sions of “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Lines On My Face,” and “All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side).” Oth­er recent Tiny Desk per­for­mances include Gra­ham Nash, Wilco, Natal­ie Mer­chant, and Ben Folds. Enjoy.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Young Patti Smith Rails Against the Censorship of Her Music: An Animated, NSFW Interview from 1976

in Music | April 28th, 2016

The lat­est install­ment from Blank on Blank’s series of ani­mat­ed videos drops us inside the bohemi­an Por­to­bel­lo Hotel in Lon­don. It’s May, 1976, and we hear a young Pat­ti Smith rail­ing against the cen­sor­ship of her music, using some colorful–that is to say, NSFW–words. She talks Rim­baud. The poet­ry and com­bat of rock. The dreams and hal­lu­ci­na­tions that feed her music. The stuff that would even­tu­al­ly earn her the cred to be called The God­moth­er of Punk.

The audio is part of a longer, two-hour inter­view with Mick Gold, which is avail­able through Ama­zon and iTunes. Enjoy.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith’s Cov­er of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Pat­ti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Map­plethor­pe

The “Brain Dictionary”: Beautiful 3D Map Shows How Different Brain Areas Respond to Hearing Different Words

in English Language, Science | April 28th, 2016

We’ve all had those moments of strug­gle to come up with le mot juste, in our native lan­guage or a for­eign one. But when we look for a par­tic­u­lar word, where exact­ly do we go to find it? Neu­ro­sci­en­tists at Berke­ley have made a fas­ci­nat­ing start on answer­ing that ques­tion by going in the oth­er direc­tion, map­ping out which parts of the brain respond to the sound of cer­tain words, using func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) to watch the action on the cere­bral cor­tices of peo­ple lis­ten­ing to The Moth Radio Hour — a pop­u­lar sto­ry­telling pod­cast you your­self may have spent some time with, albeit under some­what dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances.

“No sin­gle brain region holds one word or con­cept,” writes The Guardian’s Ian Sam­ple on the “brain dic­tio­nary” thus devel­oped by researcher Jack Gal­lant and his team. “A sin­gle brain spot is asso­ci­at­ed with a num­ber of relat­ed words. And each sin­gle word lights up many dif­fer­ent brain spots. Togeth­er they make up net­works that rep­re­sent the mean­ings of each word we use: life and love; death and tax­es; clouds, Flori­da and bra. All light up their own net­works.”

Sam­ple quotes Alexan­der Huth, the first author on the study: “It is pos­si­ble that this approach could be used to decode infor­ma­tion about what words a per­son is hear­ing, read­ing, or pos­si­bly even think­ing.” You can learn more about this promis­ing research in the short video from Nature above, which shows how the team mapped out how, dur­ing those Moth lis­ten­ing ses­sions, “dif­fer­ent bits of the brain respond­ed to dif­fer­ent kinds of words”: some regions lit up in response to those hav­ing to do with num­bers, for instance, oth­ers in response to “social words,” and oth­ers in response to those indi­cat­ing place.

You can also browse this brain dic­tio­nary your­self in 3D on the Gal­lant Lab’s web site, which lets you click on any part of the cor­tex and see a clus­ter of the words which gen­er­at­ed the most activ­i­ty there. The oth­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists quot­ed in the Guardian piece acknowl­edge both the thrilling (if slight­ly scary, in terms of thought-read­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties in the maybe-not-that-far-flung future) impli­ca­tions of the work as well as the huge amount of unknowns that remain. The response of the pod­cast­ing com­mu­ni­ty has so far gone unrecord­ed, but sure­ly they’d like to see the research extend­ed in the direc­tion of oth­er lin­guis­ti­cal­ly inten­sive shows — Marc Maron’s WTF, per­haps.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Becom­ing Bilin­gual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

Watch a Shot-by-Shot Remake of Kubrick’s The Shining, a 48-Minute Music Video Accompanying the New Album by Aesop Rock

in Film, Music | April 28th, 2016

In this increas­ing­ly atom­ized world of music, how does one get a new record release noticed above the hum of the inter­net? If you’re Bey­on­cé, you just drop the whole thing unan­nounced and watch the media play catch up. If you’re not Bey­on­cé you might con­sid­er rap­per Aesop Rock’s tac­tic.

This week, the word­smithi­est of hip hop artists and ani­ma­tor Rob Shaw released a shot-by-shot remake of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, cre­at­ed with minia­tures and made with what looks like spare change as a bud­get. All of which plays as back­ground video to a full stream of The Impos­si­ble Kid, Aesop Rock’s sev­enth album and his first in four years.

Rob Shaw cre­at­ed the hip­ster rats skits for Port­landia as well as videos for They Might Be Giants and pre­vi­ous Aesop Rock tracks, but this Shin­ing remake is some­thing else. First you notice the glee­ful cheap­ness of the pro­duc­tion, but then as Aesop Rock’s rap lyrics flow over the visu­als, mem­o­ry starts to fill in the gaps of the images. Shaw’s hand­i­work is lit­er­al­ly in the video: we can see his hand in the bath­tub scene, or his body’s shad­ow as he moves the wood­en Jack Tor­rance down the Overlook’s halls. And the tiny cam­era repli­cates the film’s Steadicam shots well, cre­at­ing a work that is like a delir­i­um of the actu­al movie.

Now, does this have any­thing to do with The Impos­si­ble Kid, real­ly? Well, the rap­per did go to live in a Port­land barn after divorce and the death of a friend, and instead of writ­ing “All Work and No Play…” over and over wrote this album, and nobody got hurt. Either way, by the time you’ve fin­ished watch­ing you’ll have heard the album, and that’s just one way to play the new music game.

via Noisey

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load & Play The Shin­ing Board Game

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing Reimag­ined as Wes Ander­son and David Lynch Movies

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.

What Makes the Stradivarius Special? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Soprano Voice, With Notes Sounding Like Vowels, Says Researcher

in Music, Science | April 27th, 2016

What makes vio­lins made by the Stradi­vari and Guarneri fam­i­lies as valu­able to musi­cians as they are to col­lec­tors? And how do we mea­sure the opti­mal sound qual­i­ty of a vio­lin? One answer comes from vio­lin mak­er Anton Krutz, who spec­u­lates that these high­ly-prized clas­si­cal instru­ments sing so sweet­ly because they are “made with pro­por­tions and spi­rals based on Gold­en Ratio geom­e­try.”

Per­haps. But Joseph Nagy­vary, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in bio­chem­istry at Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty, dis­cov­ered anoth­er, less lofty rea­son for the dis­tinc­tive sound of these cov­et­ed instru­ments. As Texas A&M Today reports, dur­ing his 25 years of research on Stradi­var­ius and Guarneri vio­lins, Nagy­vary found that the two mak­ers “soaked their instru­ments in chem­i­cals such as borax and brine to pro­tect them from a worm infes­ta­tion that was sweep­ing through Italy in the 1700s. By pure acci­dent the chem­i­cals used to pro­tect the wood had the unin­tend­ed result of pro­duc­ing the unique sounds that have been almost impos­si­ble to dupli­cate in the past 400 years.”

Though vio­lins have always been made to imi­tate the human voice, the unique­ness of the Stradi­vari and Guarneri vio­lins, Nagy­vary set out to prove, results in espe­cial­ly human­like tones. In a recent 2013 study pub­lished in the stringed instru­ment sci­ence peri­od­i­cal Savart Jour­nal, Nagy­vary pre­sent­ed research show­ing, writes Live Sci­ence, that these prized Ital­ian instru­ments “pro­duced sev­er­al vow­el sounds, includ­ing the Ital­ian ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds and sev­er­al vow­el sounds from French and Eng­lish.” Whether by chem­i­cal acci­dent or grand geo­met­ric design, “the great vio­lin mas­ters were mak­ing vio­lins with more human­like voic­es than any oth­ers of the time.”

Seek­ing, as Nagy­vary says in the short video above, to “define what was the stan­dard of excel­lence for the vio­lin sound,” he decid­ed to mea­sure the Stradi­vari and Guarneri-made instru­ments against the orig­i­nal mod­el for their tim­bre: the female sopra­no voice. To com­pare the two, he had Itzhak Perl­man record a scale on a 1743 Guarneri vio­lin, then asked Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera sopra­no Emi­ly Pul­ley to record her voice while she sang var­i­ous vow­el sounds. Nagy­vary ana­lyzed the har­mon­ic con­tent of both record­ings with a com­put­er pro­gram and mapped the results against each oth­er.

His project, writes Texas A&M Today, effec­tive­ly “proved that the sounds of Pulley’s voice and the violin’s could be locat­ed on the same map… and their respec­tive graph­ic images can be direct­ly com­pared.” The Guarneri vio­lin does indeed exact­ly mim­ic the tones of the singing human voice, repli­cat­ing vow­el sounds from Old Ital­ian and oth­er Euro­pean lan­guages.

Nagy­vary thinks his find­ings “could change how vio­lins may be valued”—for their sound rather than for the label inside the instru­ment. A vio­lin mak­er him­self, the for­mer bio­chem­istry pro­fes­sor also sug­gests a more prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion for his research find­ings: they might teach vio­lin mak­ers how to improve the qual­i­ty of their instru­ments. Nagyvary’s sci­en­tif­ic approach may offer luthiers the exact chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion and the mea­sur­able tonal qual­i­ties of the Stradi­var­ius, enabling them to final­ly dupli­cate these beloved Renais­sance instru­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

The Art and Sci­ence of Vio­lin Mak­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Prince Plays Unplugged and Wraps the Crowd Around His Little Finger (2004)

in Music | April 27th, 2016

Google the words “Prince” and “shade.” Go ahead. It’s worth it. Or just click here, lazy­bones. Lis­ti­cle after arti­cle on how the depart­ed genius was the “King of Shade.” And seri­ous­ly, check out the memes. What the hell am I ram­bling on about? What’s “shade”? If you’re feel­ing unhip, look no fur­ther than the video above, which has the added bonus of fea­tur­ing The Artist in a solo acoustic per­for­mance at New York’s Web­ster Hall for an MTV Unplugged episode, doing a kind of high­lights reel of some of his best-loved songs.

He is, of course, bril­liant. You don’t need me to rhap­sodize about what an amaz­ing musi­cian Prince was. You already knew that, and if you didn’t, the Inter­net has told you so sev­er­al hun­dred times over and, for once, it did­n’t exag­ger­ate one bit. But back to the shade. In Prince’s case, the sub­tle side-eye, the with­er­ing looks of dis­dain and dis­ap­proval, the WTF sneers…. When you take in the full range of the man’s expres­sions, you’ll see why Miles Davis com­pared his stage per­sona to Char­lie Chap­lin—he wasn’t just a musi­cal genius, bene­fac­tor to many, film star, sexy MFer…. He was also a phys­i­cal come­di­an.

Watch him toy with the audi­ence above. He invites them to sing along as he starts with “Cream.” They do so bad­ly off-key, Prince stops and throws shade. Audi­ence shuts up, suit­ably shamed, then cracks up. Repeat. It’s fan­tas­tic crowd inter­ac­tion from a man who could put on a Broad­way-wor­thy pro­duc­tion with all the smoke and pyrotech­nics and a cast of thou­sands, or who could sit onstage alone with an acoustic gui­tar and wrap the crowd around his lit­tle fin­ger. (Lat­er dur­ing “Sweet Thing” he turns the mic around and lets the audi­ence take over com­plete­ly.) And his acoustic blues chops ain’t bad either. See the full per­for­mance here.

As an added bonus, above, see Prince’s very first tele­vised inter­view, broad­cast on MTV in 1985 and shot on the set of the “Amer­i­ca” video. Watch him answer pre­screened ques­tions and explain to us how, “I’m just like every­one else. I need love… and water.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Prince and Miles Davis’ Rarely-Heard Musi­cal Col­lab­o­ra­tions

See Prince (RIP) Play Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

Prince (RIP) Per­forms Ear­ly Hits in a 1982 Con­cert: “Con­tro­ver­sy,” “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

An Ancient Philosophical Song Reconstructed and Played for the First Time in 1,000 Years

in History, Music | April 26th, 2016

Above and below, you can watch musi­cians per­form “Songs of Con­so­la­tion,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poet­ic por­tions of Roman philoso­pher Boethius’ mag­num opus The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy,” an influ­en­tial medieval text writ­ten dur­ing the 6th cen­tu­ry. Accord­ing to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the per­for­mance of the piece, which had been lost in time until recent­ly, did­n’t come eas­i­ly:

[T]he task of per­form­ing such ancient works today is not as sim­ple as read­ing and play­ing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was writ­ten in a way that record­ed melod­ic out­lines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musi­cians would recog­nise them; rely­ing on aur­al tra­di­tions and the mem­o­ry of musi­cians to keep them alive. Because these aur­al tra­di­tions died out in the 12th cen­tu­ry, it has often been thought impos­si­ble to recon­struct ‘lost’ music from this era – pre­cise­ly because the pitch­es are unknown.

Now, after more than two decades of painstak­ing work on iden­ti­fy­ing the tech­niques used to set par­tic­u­lar verse forms, research under­tak­en by Cam­bridge University’s Dr Sam Bar­rett has enabled him to recon­struct melodies from the redis­cov­ered leaf of the 11th cen­tu­ry ‘Cam­bridge Songs’.

The song is per­formed here by Ben­jamin Bag­by, Han­na Mar­ti and Nor­bert Rodenkirchen, three mem­bers of the medieval music ensem­ble known as Sequen­tia.

via Cam­bridge/IFL Sci­ence

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to a Record­ing of a Song Writ­ten on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Cen­tu­ry Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ing

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

See The Guidon­ian Hand, the Medieval Sys­tem for Read­ing Music, Get Brought Back to Life

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Founding Fathers, A Documentary Narrated By Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True History of Hip Hop

in Music | April 26th, 2016

Cranky, aging rock stars may kvetch and bitch, but it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter. Hip Hop is here to stay. The musi­cal rev­o­lu­tion that began in the Bronx has gone glob­al, acquired bil­lions of dol­lars in hold­ings, and pushed every oth­er form of pop­u­lar music to adapt to the world it cre­at­ed over the past sev­er­al decades. And whether you’re a casu­al fan or die-hard hip hop head, you’ve prob­a­bly learned a list of names—the names of the found­ing fathers of the genre: Grand­mas­ter Flash & The Furi­ous Five, Africa Bam­baataa, the Sug­ar Hill Gang, DJ Kool Herc, Kur­tis Blow….

The list goes on. Those are the inven­tors of rap, right? The men—and too often unsung women—who turned sev­en­ties dis­co, funk, and R&B into some­thing else entire­ly, who re-invent­ed NYC street and club cul­ture, and even­tu­al­ly the world with only their voic­es, dances, graf­fi­ti, atti­tudes, turnta­bles, and mobile sound sys­tems? Not exact­ly. Maybe it wasn’t the Bronx in the late ‘70s. Maybe it was Brook­lyn and Queens in the late ‘60s. And maybe the found­ing fathers had names like Grand­mas­ter Flow­ers, Nu Sounds, King Charles, Mas­ter D, Charis­ma Funk.…

Nev­er heard of ‘em? You’re not alone. The doc­u­men­tary above, Found­ing Fathers—nar­rat­ed by Chuck D of the immor­tal Pub­lic Enemy—makes the case that these obscure pio­neers did it first, and nev­er received the cred­it they deserve after the uptown artists picked up their styles and ran with them. The claim is attest­ed not only by vet­er­ans of this orig­i­nal Brook­lyn par­ty scene, but also by New York scen­ester Fab 5 Fred­dy and Queens his­to­ri­an Dan­ny Wells (who traces the ori­gins of the genre back to Louis Arm­strong, Mal­colm X, and the Black Pan­thers), among oth­er observers—and by the end of the film, you’ll have a very dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of where the music came from.

We learn that rap­ping began in 1970 with the rhyming pat­ter of radio and club DJs, who imi­tat­ed and one-upped each oth­er in friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion over dis­co records, then cre­at­ed the call-and-response refrains that char­ac­ter­ized the genre ear­ly on. And the musi­cal “mixol­o­gy” of hip hop began at the end of the ’60s with Brook­lyn DJ Grand­mas­ter Flowers—“the first Grandmaster”—who got his start in pub­lic parks. DJing then evolved into an almost ath­let­ic event with twin broth­ers The Dis­co Twins. Con­struct­ed main­ly from inter­views and archival footage, Found­ing Fathers presents a his­to­ry of hip hop that you’ve nev­er heard before, one cre­at­ed by local stars who did­n’t achieve world­wide fame and glo­ry, but who nonethe­less for­ev­er changed the way the world sounds.

Found­ing Fathers (made avail­able on Found­ing Fathers Youtube chan­nel) will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rick Rubin Revis­its the Ori­gins of Def Jam Records & the NYU Dorm Room Where It All Began

How ABC Tele­vi­sion Intro­duced Rap Music to Amer­i­ca in 1981: It’s Painful­ly Awk­ward

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Scientific Study Reveals What Made Freddie Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cappella Splendor

in Music | April 26th, 2016

Rock and roll hagiog­ra­phy presents us with a canon of instru­men­tal saints, gui­tar gods, drum demi­urges, bass demons. It’s true, the front­man has often enjoyed a near-mes­sian­ic sta­tus (it’s almost always been a man), but rock his­to­ry has grant­ed less author­i­ty to the voice as an instru­ment and allowed for all kinds of non-traditional—and not always par­tic­u­lar­ly pleas­ant or accomplished—voices. The influ­ence and imi­ta­tion of folk and blues and the rise of punk and met­al has giv­en rock singers plen­ty of license to growl, howl, mum­ble, scream, and moan instead of singing in any clas­si­cal sense.

But then there’s Fred­die Mer­cury, who ele­vat­ed rock vocals to oper­at­ic heights. Whether you love his intense, soar­ing vibra­to or not, there’s no deny­ing his unmatched vir­tu­os­i­ty. Now—as they often do when it comes to music—scientists have “con­firmed the obvi­ous,” as Con­se­quence of Sound puts it: Fred­die Mercury’s voice was some­thing spe­cial.

The spe­cif­ic find­ings of a new study, how­ev­er, tell us things we prob­a­bly didn’t intu­it. Like Tuvan throat singers, it seems that Mercury’s singing and speak­ing voice vibrat­ed both ven­tric­u­lar and vocal folds, cre­at­ing rich sub­har­mon­ics and a vibra­to faster than that of any oth­er singer.

To put that in plain­er terms, researchers found, Con­se­quence of Sound writes, that Mer­cury “was vibrat­ing some­thing in his throat even Pavarot­ti couldn’t move.” That is indeed sur­pris­ing. But we must be cau­tious in inter­pret­ing the results obtained by this group of Aus­tri­an, Czech, and Swedish researchers, who pub­lished their study on April 15th in the infe­lic­i­tous­ly named jour­nal Logo­pe­dics Pho­ni­atrics Vocol­o­gy. Since Mer­cury died in 1991, the sci­en­tists were unable to gath­er what they refer to as “phys­i­o­log­i­cal or bio­me­chan­i­cal data of vocal fold vibra­tion” from the sub­ject him­self. Instead, they exam­ined, among oth­ers, record­ings from The Acapel­la Col­lec­tion, a boot­leg com­pi­la­tion of iso­lat­ed Mer­cury vocal tracks, and attempt­ed to cor­rect for stu­dio manip­u­la­tion.

You can hear a few of those amaz­ing record­ings here (“We are the Cham­pi­ons” at the top, “Some­body to Love” below it, “Keep Your­self Alive” fur­ther down, “I Want to Break Free,” above, “I Want it All” below, and “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” at the bot­tom.) To exam­ine Mercury’s speak­ing voice, they ana­lyzed sam­ples from six dif­fer­ent inter­views. To get a fur­ther sense of how Mer­cury made the sounds he did, the team used a ringer, a Mer­cury imi­ta­tor named Daniel Zang­ger-Borch. As he dupli­cat­ed Mercury’s vocals, they filmed his lar­ynx at 4,000 frames per sec­ond to visu­al­ize how the Queen singer might have employed his own instru­ment.

But of course, this is only an approx­i­ma­tion, and—given that Mercury’s voice was in a class of its own—it’s dif­fi­cult to under­stand how anoth­er singer could have recre­at­ed his one-of-a-kind tech­nique. In any case, the research con­clu­sions are intrigu­ing, espe­cial­ly since the study sug­gests that not only did Mercury’s vibra­to and sub­har­mon­ic tech­nique cre­ate his thor­ough­ly unique vocal sound, but that they also may have con­tributed to his “eccen­tric and flam­boy­ant stage per­sona.” The researchers were unable to sub­stan­ti­ate, how­ev­er, the pop­u­lar idea that Mercury’s voice spanned a full four octaves. You can read the full study, in all its minute tech­ni­cal detail, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness