The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes

in History, Music | November 25th, 2013

Outside of modern jazz, bass players have a hard time. People either forget they exist—“John Bonham, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and … oh yeah, that other guy…”—or they get caricatured as the goofiest members of the band, due perhaps to the instrument’s unwieldiness and the rocking-at-the waist motions its awkward dimensions inspire. The physical postures of bassists have lent far too many perfect photographic moments to the viral Bass Dogs tumblr, which imagines bass players tickling giant, often embarrassed-looking dogs.

But meme-ing aside, the bass occupies a crucial space, covering a frequency range and rhythmic dimension without which we could not be truly moved by modern pop or classical music, either in spirit or body. And while the low end doesn’t clamor for our attention—like the upper ranges of a chanteuse’s voice, a wailing lead guitar, or crashing cymbals—and can get lost in the tinny sounds of earbuds and cheap radios, we simply cannot do without the sound of the bass. To demonstrate what a propulsive force the bass has been in the evolution of music over the centuries, collective CDZA—who have previously entertained and enlightened us about the guitar solo—feature bassist Michael Thurber in a greatest-hits-who’s‑who history lesson, “The Story of the Bass.”

We begin with that baroque precursor to the contra bass (or double bass), the viola da gamba, which Bach wrote for in his cello suites and in da gamba and harpsichord pieces. When we come to the 18th century, we are in the double bass world of brilliant virtuoso player and composer Domenico Dragonetti, beloved of Haydn and Beethoven (hear a mesmerizing Dragonetti concerto above). We then move through the 19th century with names like Serge Koussevitzky, popularizer of the 4‑string double bass we know today.

With jazz in the ‘20s , the finger plucking style comes to stand in for the tuba of proto-jazz Sousa bands. Then the 4‑note walking bassline comes to the fore, brought most famously by Duke Ellington bassman Wellman Braud. In the 40s and 50s, bass took a spotlight with, among many others, three more sometime Ellington bassists: Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford, and, especially, Charles Mingus.

The video zooms through country/bluegrass/rockabilly double bass innovations with a too-brief mention of slap bass technique before Thurber straps on a classic electric to introduce but one of Leo Fender’s contributions to modern music. The first electric bass debuted in 1951, and at the time, only one person played it, Monk (erroneously called “Mark” by CDZA) Montgomery, one of a trio of musical brothers, who played for Lionel Hampton’s band.

As we get into the post-war period, the bass evolves as rapidly as the technologies of amplification, broadcast, and recording. With the dominance of Motown in the sixties, the bass takes a lead role in R&B, with the immortal James Jamerson leading the way (above with Jackson 5). And with British rock and roll, the bass is again pushed to the forefront by, of course, Paul McCartney. New techniques abound—John Entwistle of The Who’s finger plucking style, Larry Graham’s slapping, the funk/rock/soul signatures of Nathan Watts, John Paul Jones, and Chris Squire. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters stands alone as a singular voice on the bass.

Once Thurber reaches off-the-wall instrumentalists like Jaco Pastorious (above) and Flea (one is saddened Les Claypool doesn’t get a name check), we’re off to the races, anything goes, and other clichés. Or how about a pun? It’s a bass race to redefine the instrument until the oughties, when it settles back in for folk and sixties rock revivalism and explodes in the synth lines of the hard dance revivalism of dubstep. It’s a rollicking ride, and as any 8‑and-a-half minute history lesson is bound to be, a survey in broad strokes that surely leaves out a couple or dozen of your favorites (Bootsie Collins? Geddy Lee? Peter Hook? Kim Deal? Robbie Shakespeare?). But on the whole, it’s an instructive tour of a neglected or maligned instrument that deserves much more respect than it gets.

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

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Filmmaker Michel Gondry Presents an Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

in Animation, Film, Philosophy | November 25th, 2013

Even if you regularly read Open Culture, where we make a point of highlighting unusual intersections of cultural currents, you probably never expected a collaboration between the likes of Michel Gondry and Noam Chomsky. Gondry we’ve known as an imaginative filmmaker behind features like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind (as well as music videos for artists like Beck, Kanye West, and the White Stripes), one driven to pursue a Continental whimsy tempered by a dedication to elaborate, difficult-looking hand craft and an apparent interest in American culture.

Chomsky we’ve known, depending on our interests, as either a noted linguist or a controversial writer and speaker on politics, society, and the media. Gondry’s new documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, the project that brings them together at least, showcases both the less-seen purely philosophical side of Chomsky, and the also rarely acknowledged inquisitive, conversational side of Gondry. In the New York Times “Anatomy of a Scene” clip at the top, the director explains his process.

Naturally, Gondry went through a fairly unusual process to make the film, given that he based the whole thing on nothing more elaborate than a long-form in-office conversation with the MIT-based professor and activist. To get the footage he needed of Chomsky talking, he brought in — naturally — his vintage wind-up Bolex 16-millimeter film camera. He then wove those shots in with his also highly analog hand-drawn animation, which illustrates Chomsky’s ideas as he describes them — and as Gondry prods him for more. “The camera is very loud,” Gondry explains over a deliberately shaky frame, “and that’s why I have to draw it each time you hear it.” Just above, you can watch the film’s trailer, which offers Chomsky’s voice as well as Gondry’s. “Why should we take it to be obvious that if I let go of a ball,” we hear the interviewee ask, “it goes down and not up?” We also hear the interviewer admit that he “felt a bit stupid here,” but these two men’s considerable differences — in generation, in nationality, in sensibility, in their concerns, in the forms of their work — provide all the more reason to listen when they talk. And if you find the intellectual trip not to your taste, just behold the visual one.

Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley, 1969

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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U2 Releases a Nelson Mandela-Inspired Song, “Ordinary Love”

in Music | November 24th, 2013

Worth a quick mention: U2 has released “Ordinary Love,” a song written for the new film Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. “The band saw various cuts of the film over the summer and worked diligently to write a song that truly reflects Nelson Mandela,” The Hollywood Reporter quotes film producer Harvey Weinstein as saying. And now, accompanying the song, U2 has put out a “lyric video” directed by Irish illustrator Oliver Jeffers and American artist Mac Premo. The song itself doesn’t raise my hopes that the band is breaking out of what feels like a decade-long creative rut. But it’s their first studio track in four years since 2009’s No Line on the Horizon. So, if you’re a diehard U2 fan, it will perhaps sate you until next spring, when the band is scheduled to release its next studio album,

Nelson Mandela Archive Goes Online (With Help From Google)

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Noam Chomsky on Commemorating the JFK Assassination: It “Would Impress Kim Il-Sung”

in Current Affairs, History | November 24th, 2013

In recent decades, historians have tried to offer a balanced assessment of JFK’s life and legacy, offering clear-eyed accounts of his handling of foreign and domestic policy, and raising questions about his infidelities and health problems, all the while chipping away at the Camelot myth. On Friday, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the hagiography returned, and even perennial cads like Rush Limbaugh had little bad to say about America’s 35th president. He simply insisted that JFK would be a conservative, if still alive today.

Perhaps the only notable exception was Noam Chomsky. Never a fan of Kennedy (or probably any other American president for that matter), Chomsky was asked by Truthout, “Do you find it odd that the country is focusing on a 50th anniversary remembrance of the Kennedy assassination?” A leading question, no doubt, to which Chomksy replied, “Worship of leaders is a technique of indoctrination that goes back to the crazed George Washington cult of the 18th century and on to the truly lunatic Reagan cult of today, both of which would impress Kim Il-sung. The JFK cult is similar.” It’s what you get when you live in “a deeply indoctrinated society.” If you’re ready to have Chomsky throw more cold water (or is it combustible gasoline?) on the JFK legacy, head over to Truthout for more.

P.S. Don’t shoot the messenger on this…

via Leiter Reports

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature and Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley, 1969

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Rocks Stars Who Died Before They Got Old: What They Would Look Like Today

in Life, Music, Photography | November 24th, 2013

Live fast.

Die young.

Spare yourself the grim realities of the state fair reunion tour circuit.

On the other hand, it’s deathly hard to control one’s image from beyond the grave. Especially when you’ve got an award-winning PR Agency and a photo manipulation company teaming up to imagine how you might look had you survived!

The twelve unlucky recipients of these posthumous makeovers remain household names (see the gallery here), even though it’s nearly twenty years since the last of their number drew breath. Like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain was but 27 when he passed, though at the time of his birth, the other three were all old enough to be his mommy or daddy. Fitting, then, that he appears to be the baby of the golden group.

Music writer Elijah Wald and popular music scholar Reebee Garofalo offer insights below each portrait in the gallery about where the subjects might now find themselves in their careers. It’s all conjecture, but their experience ensures that their opinions can be taken as educated guesses, at least.

Less convincing are the sartorial choices on display. Dennis Wilson in a Hawaiian shirt, okay, but were he alive, might not Keith Moon follow suit with former-bandmates Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, both of whom have adopted the sleek, monochromatic wardrobe favored by aging rock gods?

And who here thinks the 78-year-old Elvis would traipse around in the sort of short-sleeved poly-blend shirt my late grandfather wore to his weekly men’s prayer breakfast?

For pity’s sake, age does not automatically imply drabness!

(Who’s that I see over there? Could it be Yoko Ono, looking great at 80, in a top hat and tap pants? Even if she were looking less-than-fit, it would still be a bold choice! I doubt she wears that get-up to the grocery store, but the progression of time has not robbed her of the ability to make a deliberate visual impression.)

What is refreshing—though not necessarily believable—is how none of the resurrected icons in these portraits seem to have gone in for plastic surgery.

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Animated Video: Kurt Cobain on Teenage Angst, Sexuality & Finding Salvation in Punk Music

Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, most recently Peanut. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Existentialism Files: How the FBI Targeted Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination

in Philosophy, Politics | November 22nd, 2013

Today, as you must surely know, marks the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and also surely marks a revival of interest in the myriad conspiracy theories that abound in the absence of a satisfactory explanation for the events at Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. One theory I’ve never heard floated before comes to us via Andy Martin, lecturer in French at Cambridge University and author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus. In an article for Prospect magazine, Martin writes:

To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Castro, Hoover, and LBJ, we can now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Department reports of the 1960s had drawn attention to Sartre’s membership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. And—prophetically?—Sartre had “dismissed the US as a headless nation.” […] Could he, after all, have been the Second Shooter?

It’s probably fair to say that Martin’s tongue is wedged firmly in his cheek throughout this opening of his fascinating chronicle of the FBI’s surveillance of Sartre and his onetime friend and editor Albert Camus. But Martin’s interest in the misalliance of Sartre and the Feds is very serious. What he finds during his investigation of the FBI files on existentialism is that “the G‑men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.”

While we have become accustomed, since the days of Joe McCarthy, to ideological witch hunts, it seems that Sartre and Camus served as test cases for the sort of thing that frequently plays out in overheated Congressional hearings and media denunciations—agents with furrowed brows and little philosophical training desperately trying to work out whether such and such abstruse academic is part of a grand conspiracy to undermine truth, justice, the American Way, etc.. Sartre appeared early on the anti-Communist radar, though, ironically, he did so as a plant of sorts, brought over in 1945 by the Office of War Information as part of a group of journalists the United States’ government hoped would put out good propaganda.

“Hoover wondered,” however, writes Martin, “what kind of good propaganda you can hope to get out of the author of Nausea and Being and Nothingness.” It turned out, not much, but a year later Hoover latched on to Sartre’s friend and editor Albert Camus, whose name he and his agents spelled, variously, as “Canus” or “Corus.” Where Sartre had breezed into the country—smitten by its literature and music—Camus was held at immigration on Hoover’s orders. He would spend a brief, depressing time and never return.

How we get from post-war surveillance of French existentialist philosophers to Sartre and the grassy knoll is a long and complicated tale, befitting the paranoid imaginings of J. Edgar Hoover. He was, after all, the conspiracy theorist par excellence and “he needed to know,” writes Martin, “if Existentialism and Absurdism were some kind of front for Communism. To him, everything was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto.” What Hoover feared from Sartre, however, was that the latter was himself an influential believer in a conspiracy, one that cast doubt on the FBI’s strongly-held belief that Oswald was the lone gunman.

Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist.” The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left little room for philosophical nuance and literary ambiguity, after all. But they never stopped watching Sartre, convinced that “there must be some kind of conspiracy between communists, blacks, poets and French philosophers.” As it turns out, there were several—political and aesthetic conspiracies involving such terrifying figures as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These poets and close relations of Sartre did, indeed, help foment revolution in the Caribbean and elsewhere—but theirs are stories for another day.

Read Martin’s Prospect article here.

Albert Camus Writes a Friendly Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Personal and Philosophical Rift

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Dutchman Masters the Art of Singing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Backwards

in Music, Random | November 22nd, 2013

This has “viral video” written all over it. The only problem is that it was filmed and released back in 2003, just two years before YouTube changed our world. But who knows, maybe with your help, the video could enjoy some posthumous viralness. Or is it virality or viralosity?

The clip above features Jeroen Offerman, a Dutch visual artist who, a decade ago, spent three months learning to sing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” entirely backwards. He filmed himself singing the song in reverse, while standing in front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, then flipped the direction of the video (hence the pedestrians walk backwards), all in order to show how well he mastered the art of singing Zeppelin in reverse.

On his website he explains ******@******ls.html”>the project in greater detail, writing:

“The Stairway at St.Paul’s” is based on the hysteria that surrounded certain music-recordings of the 60’s and the 70’s. Some rock bands, like the Beatles, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin were supposed to have put hidden messages in their records that could only be heard when played backwards. These messages though, would subconsciously be picked up by the listener who would then react in response to them.

In this way the band Judas Priest ended up in a court case because their records had ‘induced’ children to commit suicide. Also, the Beatles were supposed to suggest through their records that Paul McCartney, one of their main band members, had died in a car crash and was replaced by a look-a-like.

The most famous example though, is Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, a song about a woman buying herself a way in to heaven. The mystic lyrics seem to urge us to follow the right path in life. But, as one line in the song already says, “sometimes words have two meanings”, and so, when played backwards, this song is supposed to urge us to worship evil.

It’s time to dive in to your record-collection and find out if it was all true. But first let us watch this video. So turn up the volume and remember the first time you smoked a cigarette…

Things get pretty great around the 6:07 mark.

I’m praying that this isn’t all a goof.

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Hear Led Zeppelin’s First Recorded Concert Ever (1968)

Led Zeppelin Plays One of Its Earliest Concerts (Danish TV, 1969)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

November 22, 1963: Watch Errol Morris’ Short Documentary About the Kennedy Assassination

in History, Photography | November 22nd, 2013

We live in a fine time for conspiracy theorists, in at least a couple of senses. First and more broadly, given the power of the internet, they’ve never had closer at hand the semi-incriminating, half-hidden pieces of information on which they build and with which they bolster their suspicions. Nor have they ever had a more effective means of gathering and discussing their findings. Second and more specifically, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has come upon us. This has set all those fascinated by that grim historical event, from the soberest of skeptics to the sheerest paranoiacs, evaluating and re-evaluating it even more thoroughly than usual. Above you’ll find the short November 22, 1963 by Errol Morris, a clear-eyed documentarian and interviewer fascinated not only with those who conspire and those who theorize about such conspiracies, but also with the grander implicit questions about what we know and what we don’t, what we can know and what we can’t, and whether we even know what we can and can’t know in the first place. (The title of his new feature-length documentary about Donald Rumsfeld: The Unknown Known.)

“The more you investigate a crime, the more it becomes crystal-clear what happened,” says Josiah “Tink” Thompson, scholar of Søren Kierkegaard, private detective, and author of Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (a book with which anyone who has seen Richard Linklater’s Slacker will already feel some familiarity). “I don’t think any other crime I know of in history has been investigated with the kind of intensity that this has. And yet I don’t think we get any closer to knowing what happened now than we were 40, 45 years ago.” This opens a discussion of how all the photographic evidence of 11/22/63, up to and including the awesomely scrutinized Zapruder film, bears on the matter. “Is there a lesson to be learned?” Morris asks. “Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated.” And just as November 22, 1963 follows up The Umbrella Man, Morris’ previous piece with Thompson, Thompson has a sequel of his own in the works: a book called Last Seconds in Dallas. JFK assassination nuts — and I mean that in the nicest way — have their reading ahead of them.

November 22, 1963 will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.

Related content:

Revisiting JFK on YouTube

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Filmmaker Errol Morris Gives Us “11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote?”

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Actress Grace Kelly Reflects on the Life & Legacy of JFK in an Artfully Animated Video

in Animation, History | November 21st, 2013

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy Assassination, Blank on Blank has released another one of its distinctive animated videos. This one features Grace Kelly, the glamorous American actress and Princess of Monaco, contemplating her personal encounters with JFK, the heady days of Camelot, and the legacy of America’s 35th president. When asked whether the president died in vain on that day in Dallas, she offered these eloquent words:

Well, it might not seem so today, but I, for one, cannot believe that a man of Mr. Kennedy’s stature and achievements was put upon this earth for no other purpose than to stop an assassin’s bullet, or that the lesson will be wholly lost. It is only since the twentieth century that the majesty of Abraham Lincoln has been appreciated. I believe that God allows these certain tragedies to happen in order to emphasize the man and his achievements and to inspire those who follow to have the strength and the will to accomplish his unfulfilled dreams.

This interview was recorded on June 19, 1965, as part of an oral history project designed to preserve the memory of the late president. The project recorded interviews with people from all walks of life–from bus drivers to Leonard Bernstein–but, as David Gerlach, founder of Blank on Blank explains to us, few people have heard these recordings over the years. Now, however, a Boston-based radio project has turned them into an hourlong radio documentary called We Knew JFK: Unheard Stories, and it’s available online here.

You can read a transcript of the Grace Kelly interview courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum.

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Interview Reborn as an Animated Cartoon

Marshall McLuhan on the Stupidest Debate in the History of Debating (Nixon v JFK)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol

in Art, Letters, Literature | November 21st, 2013

Every successful artist must master the art of accepting rejection. “Fail better,” said Beckett in his grim euphemism for perseverance. “I love my rejection slips,” wrote Sylvia Plath in every hopeful poet’s favorite quote. “They show me I try.” Plath—who also wrote “I am made, crudely, for success”—collected scores of rejection letters, receiving them even after the considerable success of 1960’s The Colossus and Other Poems. The 1962 letter above (click here to view in a larger format), from The New Yorker, doesn’t exactly reject a Plath submission, but it does recommend cutting the entire first section of “Amnesiac” and resubmitting “the second section alone under that title.” “Perhaps we’re being dense,” demurs editor Howard Moss.

The rejection must have been all the more painful since Plath was under a contract with the magazine, which entitled her to “an annual sum for the privilege of having a ‘first reading’ plus subsequent publishing rights to her new poetry,” Plath scholars tell us. And yet “much to her distress she mainly received rejections during November and December 1962.” The poem was eventually broken in two, with the first half published as “Lyonnesse,” but not by Plath herself but by publishers after her death. Hear Plath read the full poem as she intended it in her edition of Ariel, above.

Kurt Vonnegut received an impersonal, and it would seem, long-overdue rejection letter from editor of The Atlantic Edward Weeks in 1949. Weeks writes breezily that he found Vonnegut’s “samples” during the “usual summer house-cleaning,” announcing its slush-pile status. Weeks does at least give the impression that someone, if not him, had read Vonnegut’s submissions. The aspiring writer was 27 years old, striking out “just a few years after surviving the bombing of Dresden as a POW,” Letters of Note informs us, and still twenty years away from publishing his groundbreaking novel Slaughterhouse Five. Letters of Note also provides us with the transcript below for the badly faded typescript.

The Atlantic Monthly

August 29, 1949

Dear Mr. Vonnegut:

We have been carrying out our usual summer house-cleaning of the manuscripts on our anxious bench and in the file, and among them I find the three papers which you have shown me as samples of your work. I am sincerely sorry that no one of them seems to us well adapted to for our purpose. Both the account of the bombing of Dresden and your article, “What’s a Fair Price for Golden Eggs?” have drawn commendation although neither one is quite compelling enough for final acceptance.

Our staff continues fully manned so I cannot hold out the hope of an editorial assignment, but I shall be glad to know that you have found a promising opening elsewhere.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed, ‘Edward Weeks’)

Of course visual artists are not immune. Andy Warhol received the above rejection letter from New York’s Museum of Modern Art when he attempted to donate a drawing in 1956. To its later chagrin, the museum wouldn’t let him give his work away:

Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled Shoe which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.

I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.

The Warhol rejection circulated a few years ago after the MoMA tweeted Letters of Note’s post on it (read the full transcript there). Its most galling feature: a postscript that reads, with dismissive courtesy, “The drawing may be picked up from the museum at your convenience.”

No Women Need Apply: A Disheartening 1938 Rejection Letter from Disney Animation

New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Successful New Yorker Cartoon

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video

in Media, Music, Television | November 21st, 2013

Björk’s first international hit, “Human Behaviour” (1993) received scant radio play in North America. Rather, the Icelandic singer’s fame only grew as a result of MTV’s heavy rotation of the surrealist music video that accompanied the song, directed by Academy Award winner Michel Gondry. Despite the debt of celebrity she owed to television, Björk was not always a fan.

In the undated video above, Björk expounds on her Christmastime TV-watching habits. Immediately, the video takes an odd—or, I suppose, characteristically Björk-esque—turn when the young singer decides to take her TV apart:

But now I’m curious. I’ve switched the TV off and now I want to see how it operates. How it can make, put me into all those weird situations. So… It’s about time.

The various components prove fascinating, and Björk proceeds to describe the television’s hardware in her whimsical, otherworldly manner:

This is what it looks like. Look at this. This looks like a city. Like a little model of a city. The houses, which are here, and streets. This is maybe an elevator to go up there. And here are all the wires. These wires, they really take care of all the electrons when they come through there. They take care that they are powerful enough to get all the way through to here. I read that in a Danish book. This morning.

The most puzzling part of the video comes when Björk mentions that her cavalier approach to television is relatively new. Until recently, she had been guarded about her viewing habits:

I remember being very scared because an Icelandic poet told me that not like in cinemas, where the thing that throws the picture from it just sends light on the screen, but this is different. This is millions and millions of little screens that send light, some sort of electric light, I’m not really sure… Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you’re so busy doing that, you don’t watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized.

Thanks to the wisdom contained within an unnamed Danish book, however, Björk has grown more at ease with the potential of television’s being used for mind control and hypnosis. At the end of the clip, she offers a final pearl of wisdom:

You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.

via The Atlantic

Iceland in the Midnight Sun

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes

Filmmaker Michel Gondry Presents an Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

U2 Releases a Nelson Mandela-Inspired Song, “Ordinary Love”

Noam Chomsky on Commemorating the JFK Assassination: It “Would Impress Kim Il-Sung”

Rocks Stars Who Died Before They Got Old: What They Would Look Like Today

The Existentialism Files: How the FBI Targeted Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination

Dutchman Masters the Art of Singing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Backwards

November 22, 1963: Watch Errol Morris’ Short Documentary About the Kennedy Assassination

Actress Grace Kelly Reflects on the Life & Legacy of JFK in an Artfully Animated Video

Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol

A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video

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