The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear

in Writing | February 8th, 2019

The United Nations, as you may or may not know, has designated 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. By fortunate coincidence, this year also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Alphabets Project. In 2009, its founder writes, “times were dark for indigenous and minority cultures.” Television and the internet had driven “a kind of cultural imperialism into every corner of the world. Everyone had a screen or wanted a screen, and the English language and the Latin alphabet (or one of the half-dozen other major writing systems) were on every screen and every keyboard” — putting at a great disadvantage those who could only read and write, say, Mandombe, Wancho, or Hanifi Rohingya.

2019, by contrast, turns out to be “a remarkable time in the history of writing systems” when, “in spite of creeping globalization, political oppression, and economic inequalities, minority cultures are starting to revive interest in their traditional scripts.”

A variety of these scripts have found new lives as the material for works of art and design, and they’ve also received new waves of preservation-minded attention from activist groups and governments alike. But that doesn’t guarantee their survival through the 21st century, an unfortunate fact toward which the Endangered Alphabets Project’s Atlas of Endangered Alphabets exists to draw attention.

Not all the scripts included in the Atlas are alphabets — “some are abjads, or abugidas, or syllabaries. A couple are even pictographic systems” — but all lack “official status in their country, state, or province” and “are not taught in government-funded schools.” All once enjoyed “widespread acceptance and use within their cultural and linguistic community,” but none do any longer, and though none are actually extinct, all suffer from endangerment as a consequence of their declining or emerging status (as well as, often, of “being dominated, bullied, ignored, or actively persecuted by another, more powerful culture”). You can explore the endangered languages by scrolling, zooming, and clicking the world map on the atlas’ front page.

Or you can browse them all, from Adlam to Zo, on an alphabetically ordered list — ordered, of course, by the Roman alphabet, but full of examples of writing systems that differ in many and often surprising ways from it. Take, for example, the African Ditema tsa Dinoko script, which allows the writer to express with not just shape but color. Developed between 2010 and 2015 to write southern Bantu languages, it takes its forms from southern African murals of the kind painted by Esther Mahlangu, whose BMW art car appears in the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets’ gallery. BMW might consider commissioning another one emblazoned with official Ditema tsa Dinoko letters. With promotion that snazzy, what writing system could possibly go extinct?

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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In the 1920s America, Jazz Music Was Considered Harmful to Human Health, the Cause of “Neurasthenia,” “Perpetually Jerking Jaws” & More

in History, Music | February 7th, 2019

These are some interesting stories about the Nazis and jazz, including one about a very bad jazz propaganda band created by Goebbels himself. But we need not mention these at all, or even leave the shores of jazz’s birthplace to find examples of extreme reactions to jazz by authoritarian figures who hated and feared it for exactly the same reasons as the Nazis. Chief among such American enemies of jazz was raging anti-Semite Henry Ford, who feared that jazz was, you guessed it, a Jewish plot to infect the country with racially inferior “musical slush.”

Ford used white country music and square dancing in public schools as weapons of warfare against jazz in the 1920s, thereby displacing blackface minstrelsy as the dominant form of paranoid response to black music in middle America. Another crusader, Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics between 1930 and 1962, more or less invented the war on drugs with his reefer madness war on jazz. He said it sounded like “the jungles in the dead of night” and could “lure white women.” Anslinger relentlessly persecuted Billie Holiday and went after Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

It was within this early 20th century milieu that other institutional powers—some of the country’s most powerful—declared a war on jazz for supposed reasons of public health. (A movement, incidentally, given to an enthusiasm for eugenics and forced sterilization at the time.) Historian Russell L. Johnson has documented this campaign in the journal Health and History, and Jessie Wright-Mendoza describes many of his findings at JStor Daily.

Milwaukee’s public health commissioner claimed that the music damaged the nervous system, and a Ladies’ Home Journal article reported that it caused brain cells to atrophy. In Cincinnati, a maternity hospital successfully petitioned to have a nearby jazz club shut down, arguing that exposing newborns to the offending music would have the effect of “imperiling the happiness of future generations.”

Jazz was “unrhythmical,” opponents argued, and so was disease. Q.E.D. In 1923, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a ruling that shut down a jazz club, citing in their opinion a belief the music “wears upon the nervous system and produces that feeling which we call ‘tired.’” Doctors warned that too much jazz could cause neurasthenia, a catch-all for anxiety, depression, headaches, fatigue, etc. But jazz could also cause patients to become “nervous and fidgety” with “perpetually jerking jaws.” Whatever it did, jazz was hazardous.

Oddly, just as in the Nazi’s fervent attempts to control jazz, as Czech writer Josef Skvorecky once described it, and as in Joseph Goebbels attempts to co-opt the music for white supremacy, the architects of America’s jazz panic found the remedy for jazz in jazz. But segregated jazz. They turned “hot jazz” into “sweet jazz,” a style “interpreted by mainly white musicians to appeal to a wider commercial audience.”

It hardly needs to be said that anyone really afflicted with a passion for jazz ignored this prescription, as did every jazz musician worth listening to. Read more about Johnson’s history of the American fear of jazz at JStor Daily.

via Ted Gioia

Hear the Nazi’s Bizzaro Propaganda Jazz Band, “Charlie and His Orchestra” (1940–1943)

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

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The East German Secret Police’s Illustrated Guide for Identifying Youth Subcultures: Punks, Goths, Teds & More (1985)

in Fashion, History | February 7th, 2019

Ask Germans who lived under the German Democratic Republic what they feared most in those days, and they’ll likely say the agents of the Ministry for State Security, best known as the Stasi. Ask those same Germans what they laughed at most in those days, and they may well give the same answer. As one of the most thoroughly repressive secret police forces in human history, the Stasi kept a close eye and a tight grip on East German society: as one oft-told joke goes, “Why do Stasi officers make such good taxi drivers? You get in the car and they already know your name and where you live.” But this fearsome vigilance went hand-in-hand with technological limitation as well as plain ineptitude: “How can you tell that the Stasi has bugged your apartment?” another joke asks. “There’s a new cabinet in it and a trailer with a generator in the street.”

When the Stasi turned this kind of crude but intense scrutiny to certain aspects of life, the results almost satirized themselves. Take, for instance, this circa-1985 internal guide used to identify the “types of negative decadent youth cultures in the German Democratic Republic,” posted on Twitter by musician and writer S. Alexander Reed and later translated into English by a few of his followers.

The chart breaks down the supposedly decadent youth cultures of mid-1980s East Germany into eight groups, describing their interests, appearance, political inclinations, and activities in the columns below. The rock-and-roll-oriented “Teds,” dressed in a “50s style,” don’t seem to rouse themselves for anything besides “birth and death days of idolized rock stars.” The “Tramps,” a “classic manifestation of the negative-decadent youth in the 70s,” adhere to the trends of a somewhat more recent era.

The fans of “extremely hard rock” known as “Heavies” once held a “deprecative attitude towards state and society,” but seemed at the time to become “increasingly society-conforming.” Other youth cultures considered decadent by the Stasi bore labels that might still sound familiar across the world. The “Goths,” a “satanic and death cult,” are noted for their “glorification of creepy effects” and for being “fans of the group The Cure.” Though they may have been “hardly noticed operationally,” the “punks” presented a more clear and present threat, what with their “deprecative to hostile political attitude, rejection of all state forms and societal norms,” “anarchist thoughts,” and belief in “total freedom.”

You can see the chart in a larger size here, and if you’d like to examine the real thing, you have only to visit Leipzig’s Museum in der Runden Ecke (or view it online here). The document resides in its collection of the tools of the Stasi trade, including, in the words of Atlas Obscura, “old surveillance cameras, collections of confiscated personal letters, and crisp uniforms letting visitors get a glimpse into the world of brutal state espionage.” Germans who remember all the power the Stasi could potentially wield over their lives — a power, for all they knew, about to descend on them any moment — must still feel a chill upon seeing one of those crisp uniforms. Now we know that their wearers might, upon laying eyes on Birkenstocks (“literally: ‘Jesus slippers‘”), red and black worn together (“contrasts as a symbol of anarchy”), or a mohawk (or “Iriquois”) haircut, have felt apprehensive themselves.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious Sings Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: Is Nothing Sacred?

in Music | February 7th, 2019

In the great garden of forking paths and alternative timelines there are two other versions of The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle that Julian Temple never directed. One would have been directed by Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame, but “he behaved gloriously badly to Malcolm (McLaren)” according to John Lydon many years later. The other was to be written by film critic Roger Ebert and directed by buxom beauty lover Russ Meyer (who Lydon called “shabby” and “a senile old git.”) But you do have to wonder what the hell either of those films might have been like.

Would either of them contained the above classic scene–probably the only scene worth the price of admission–where Sid Vicious both murders the classic “My Way” and several rich people in the front row.

Killing sacred cows has long been a part of the West’s sense of humor, long before punk. Spike Jones and his City Slickers regularly destroyed classic warhorses like The Blue Danube and The Nutcracker. The Bonzo Dog Band in the UK took on “The Sound of Music” and left no survivors. And the Residents lovingly destroyed pop music of the ‘60s on Third Reich ‘n’ Roll and their cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” When it comes to pop culture, nothing is sacred. Not even Frank Sinatra.

By the time Temple joined the McLaren’s film project, Lydon was not speaking to his manager. And when they got close to shooting the “My Way” sequence in Paris, Sid Vicious didn’t want to take part. Julien Temple remembered:

I would go to the studio every night and come back to report to Malcolm that the guy didn’t want to do the song. Sid would spend all the time in the studio trying to learn the bass. We would have to come back and tell Malcolm we had wasted another night’s money. Malcolm grew tired of it. He picked up the phone and started screaming at Sid about what a useless junkie he was and so on. Meanwhile, Sid had given the phone over to Nancy and while that was going on, suddenly the door of Malcolm’s hotel room flew off its hinges. Sid crashed into the room wearing his swastika underpants and motorbike boots. He dragged Malcolm out of bed and started hitting him. Then Sid chased a naked Malcolm down the corridor intent on beating the shit out of him.

Now, that might have been a more interesting scene than the theater massacre, but who knows? McLaren wanted everything in the film to be bigger than life and to his credit, this pummeling of a cover–which had a second life as the ending song to Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas–is still a proper two-finger salute. But in a twist, it would be Sid Vicious and the flame of British punk that would be quickly snuffed out upon its release. Vicious died February 2, 1979.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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A Short History of How Punk Became Punk: From Late 50s Rockabilly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pistols

in Music | February 6th, 2019

Seems there was a time when the dominant story of punk was the story of British punk. If you knew nothing else, you knew the name Sid Vicious, and that seemed to sum it up. Maybe it was only in the mid-nineties, around the time Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain released Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk that more people began to popularly understand the lineage of late sixties garage rock, the Velvet Underground, Detroit’s Iggy and the Stooges, and the early CBGB scene in the mid-seventies crowned by the sound of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads.

Now even that story can seem oversimplified, sketched out in brief on the way to discussing the literary triumph of Patti Smith, cultural interventions of David Byrne, career highlights of punk power couple Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, or the many, always fascinating doings of Iggy Pop.

The Ramones roared back into fashion twenty years ago, and the demise of CBGB in 2007 brought on waves of marketing nostalgia of almost Disney-like proportions. Most everyone who pays attention to pop culture now knows that late-seventies punk wasn’t a movement that arrived out of nowhere, bent on destroying the past, but a continuity and evolution of earlier forms.

But the Trash Theory video at the top reaches back even earlier than garage bands like the Monks and the Sonics—typically cited as some of the earliest common ancestors of punk and rock and roll. Punk was “rock and roll bored down to its bare bones,” says the narrator, and begins with a rockabilly artist who called himself The Phantom and tried to outdo Elvis in 1958 with the raucous single “Love Me.” The Phantom himself may not have embraced the label at all, but like Link Wray, he was still something of a proto-punk. Wray’s raunchy, gritty instrumental “Rumble,” also released in 1958, inspired huge numbers of guitarists and aspiring musicians, including young Iggy Pop, who cities it as a primary reason he joined a band.

From there, we’re on to “elemental” tracks like The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird,” The Sonic’s “Psycho,” The Monk’s “I Hate You,” and Love’s “7 and 7,” all clear progenitors of the sound. And the Mysterians, of garage classic “96 Tears,” were the first band to be described as punk by the mainstream press. The Kinks and The Who set templates in Britain while the Velvets perfected sleazy, experimental noise back in New York. The MC5 in Detroit helped bring us The Stooges. The Modern Lovers’ 1972 “Roadrunner” launched hundreds of bands.

The video is a convincing short history showing how punk arose naturally from trends in the late 50s and 60s that clearly pointed the way. Like every such history, especially one undertaken in the span of fifteen minutes, it leaves out some pretty heavyweight figures who should have a central place in the narrative. Irritated YouTube commenters have pointed out lapses like The New York Dolls (see them further up in 1973), without whom there would have been no Sex Pistols. (Proto-punk Detroit band Death does get a mention, though their influence is negligible since they went mostly unheard until 2009.)

Also needing inclusion as early punk pioneers are Television (check them out in ’78) and Richard Hell and the Voidoids (above in 1980’s Blank Generation). And these are just a few missing New York bands. Any devotee of this musical history will come up with a dozen or so more from both sides of the Atlantic who deserve mention in the early history of punk. And that’s why, I guess, that popular history keeps getting told and retold. As soon as it starts to get stale, it seems, there’s always more to add.

The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Punking Out, a Short 1978 Documentary Records the Beginning of the Punk Scene at CBGB’s

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

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Watch The Journey, the New Ridley Scott Short Film Teased During the Super Bowl

in Film, Television | February 6th, 2019

Established in 1933, Turkish Airlines celebrated its 85th anniversary last year with a higher profile than ever before. Born in 1937, Ridley Scott turned 81 last year and has shown no decline whatsoever in his enthusiasm for filmmaking. This year found those two institutions brought together by another, the Super Bowl, which offered the occasion to air a thirty-second teaser for The Journey, a six-minute film commissioned by Turkish Airlines and directed by Scott. (The same game also, Open Culture readers will have noticed, featured a Burger King commercial with Andy Warhol eating a Whopper.) The visually rich story of one woman pursuing another to and through Istanbul, the short marks the first commercial the Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator director has made in well over a decade.

“I decided to go back and click into advertising,” Scott says in the behind-the-scenes video below. “I love the chase and the speed of the job.” And in this case the job was to show off the luxury of Turkish Airlines’ first-class cabins and also the city of Istanbul itself, which Scott had never visited before.

But on his first trip there, Istanbul impressed him with its harbor, its mosques, and surely many other of the elements of which The Journey makes use, including the airport. “The Istanbul airport was modern and efficient, European, and what first struck me is how foreign it did not feel,” writes American reporter Suzy Hansen in Notes on a Foreign Country of her own first visit to Istanbul, drawing a stark contrast with “the decrepit airport in New York I had just left.”

And Hansen had flown into Istanbul’s old airport, not the new one opened just last year and designed as the largest in the world. Whether The Journey will bring more business to Turkish Airlines’ flights into and out of it (the final shot finds our heroine en route to Bali) remains to be seen, especially since the Super Bowl teaser seemed to cause confusion about what was being sold. It nevertheless fits nicely into Scott’s acclaimed body of advertising work. In its early period came a 1974 bread commercial voted England’s favorite advertisement of all time; in its middle period, of course, came the 1984 Super Bowl spot that introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. Given the energy Scott’s work in commercials and features still exudes, it feels somehow unsuitable to use the term “late period” at all.

Ridley Scott Demystifies the Art of Storyboarding (and How to Jumpstart Your Creative Project)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Origins of the “Amen Break,” The Most Sampled Piece of Recorded Music Ever

in Music | February 6th, 2019

You may not find the reference easily in a Google search. But hang around electronic musicians, DJs, or producers long enough, and you’ll probably hear someone talk about an “Amen song.” They don’t mean gospel, not directly, but the famed “Amen break,” a six-second drum loop sampled from a 1969 soul instrumental recording of the gospel song “Amen, Brother” from the B‑Side of a Grammy-winning record by Washington, DC-based group The Winstons. Played by drummer G.C. Coleman, who died in 1996, it has likely become “the most sampled piece of recorded music ever,” as the Great Big Story video above points out.

We’ve previously featured the more extensive documentary history of the Amen break below by writer Nate Harrison. The Great Big Story video is not that, but rather a short, 4‑minute tour through the sample’s origins by way of Bronx DJ Lou Flores, “Breakbeat Lou,” who included “Amen, Brother” on a compilation of songs made specifically for DJs.

If you’ve never understood what’s so captivating about this beat, listen to Flores describe its sonic qualities. It’s “probably one of the most organic, larger-than-life, big presence style of drums… there’s so many depths to this particular track,” he says, listing the specific effect of each piece of the drum kit.

There really is “nothing else like it.” And, paradoxically, it exists everywhere, slowed down as the backbeat of early hip-hop, sped up to inhuman speeds in drum ‘n’ bass; appearing in some form or another in the repertoire of almost every contemporary artist, producer, and drummer. The Amen break has popped up in over 3,000 songs, from David Bowie to Slipknot to Skrillex to Public Enemy to N.W.A. to… well, it may be easier to name popular musicians of the last thirty years who haven’t been at least Amen-adjacent at some point in their lives. Like certain standards in jazz or movements from classical hits, everyone knows it, even if they don’t know they know it.

What’s refreshing about the brief explainer is that, rather than try to cover this kind of musicological territory in a few minutes, it focuses on the break’s first popularizer, Flores, who was drawn out of his retirement from music because of the viral phenomenon of the Amen break. He’s an affable guide to the most famous sample in history, happy that his corner of the Bronx contributed so much to the culture by helping turn sampled music into an original and inventive art form. Learn much more about the history of the Amen break in the documentary above and at our previous post here.

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

A Brief History of Sampling: From the Beatles to the Beastie Boys

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

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A Vintage Grand Piano Gets Reengineered to Play 20 Different Instruments with a Push of Its Keys

in Music | February 6th, 2019

The Ukrainian Band “Brunettes Shoot Blondes” took a broken, vintage grand piano and reengineered it, turning it into “a hybrid, containing 20 instruments.” Now, when you press the keys, the “piano hammers beat a marimba, tambourine, cymbals or even castanets. There are also special mechanical devices that allow for the playing of cello, violins and organ.” Watch it in action above…

via Colossal/Laughing Squid

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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!

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Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

in Animation, Film | February 5th, 2019

I recently heard someone quip that proposals to cut the Academy Awards are tantamount to suggesting that the NFL trim down the Super Bowl. Certainly for many who would rather watch the former any day of the week, even the play-by-play of technical categories repays attention. Yet people who think of the Oscars as a major sporting event with big stars and blockbusters going head-to-head can still appreciate the show as more than spectacle. How else, for example, would most of us learn about brilliant animated short films like the National Film Board of Canada’s Animal Behaviour, made by husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine and nominated in this year’s Oscars? (See the trailer above.)

Snowden and Fine previously won an Oscar in 1995 for Bob’s Birthday, a hilarious short about an unhappy British dentist. Their latest film takes a charming, anthropomorphic route to the question Fine poses as, “Should what comes naturally to you be something that you seek to change to please others, or should others accept you as you are?”

Group therapy participants seeking acceptance include Lorraine, a leech with separation anxiety, Victor, an ape with anger issues, and Cheryl, a praying mantis, writes the National Film Board, “who can’t seem to keep a man.”

The NFB informs us that Animal Behaviour is their 75th Oscar-nomination in the category of Animated Short Film, and whether you’re inclined to watch this part of the awards or not, you can get caught up with their extensive playlist of 66 Oscar-winning and nominated films on YouTube. (Bob’s Birthday is not available, at least in the U.S., but you can watch it here.) See Snowden and Fine’s first film, George and Rosemary, a story in which “two golden agers prove that passion isn’t reserved for the very young.”

Watch the very impressive stop-motion animation of 2007’s Madame Tutli-Putli, an “exhilarating existential journey” directed by Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski. See Chris Landreth’s 2013 Oscar-winning computer-animated short, Ryan, about a character “living every artist’s worst nightmare.”

And see the 2007 Oscar-winning existential animated short The Danish Poet, directed by Torill Kove and featuring narration by Liv Ullmann. The offerings are vast and varied, displaying the very best of Canadian animation, a national art that usually goes unseen and unacknowledged by audiences outside its borders. But after watching several of these films you might agree that NFB animation deserves its long history of recognition at the Oscars. See the complete playlist of films here.

Many of these films can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Free Animated Films: From Classic to Modern

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

in Music | February 5th, 2019

Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.

In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Royal Tenenbaums among others.

In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.

Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?

Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2015.

Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Kids Show (1989)

Watch Herbie Hancock Rock Out on an Early Synthesizer on Sesame Street (1983)

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

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch a Towering Orchestral Tribute to Kate Bush: A 40th Anniversary Celebration of Her First Single, “Wuthering Heights”

in Music | February 5th, 2019

Some Americans like their pop musicians to be more accessible, less theatrical, and eccentric—and generally more desperate for the approval of their audience. Kate Bush, thankfully, has never seemed bothered by this need. She could leave the spotlight when she needed to, or leave the music business altogether for a time, and yet remain a creative force to be reckoned with for four decades now. Her legacy has permeated contemporary music since she appeared in 1978, then retired from the stage the following year after her first tour to focus solely on writing, recording, and making short musical films.

Her debut, The Kick Inside, proved that an original new songwriter worth watching had arrived, and she delivered on the promise in ten studio albums and a career she seemed to sum up in the title of “This Woman’s Work,” from 1989’s The Sensual World. It is work she has always done in her own delightfully odd, passionate, eccentrically British, theatrical, and deftly literary way, all qualities that have made her a massive star in the UK and a hero to artists like Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Grimes, Florence and the Machine, and too many more to name.

Bush’s unusual traits also make her a perfect artist to pay tribute to in an orchestral setting, as Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony has done in the 2018 concert also titled “This Woman’s Work” and featuring the very-Bush-worthy vocal talents of guest singers Jennie Abrahamson and Malin Dahlström. It’s “a towering tribute,” the Symphony writes, “with hit songs and pure poetry in special arrangements by Martin Schaub.” And it arrived to mark a special moment indeed: the 40th anniversary of the release of Bush’s brilliantly strange debut single “Wuthering Heights.” See the full performance at the top of the post and excerpted songs throughout, including Abrahamson’s cover of “This Woman’s Work,” above.

Appearing in the ghostly guise and ethereally high-pitched voice of Cathy Earnshaw, doomed heroine of Emily Brontë’s novel, Bush captivated millions in two videos that are now absolute classics. She drew on the mime theatrics of her teacher Lindsay Kemp, who previously mentored David Bowie, and gave us the indelible image of a woman possessed by weird imagination, uncanny musical talent, and some frightening dance moves. The images and sounds she created in just those 3 and a half minutes are iconic. Or, putting it a little differently in a short BBC documentary, John Lydon says, “Kate Bush and her grand piano… that’s like John Wayne and his saddle… her shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief.”

If you came to Bush later in her career, say during 1985’s huge Hounds of Love, and somehow missed her unbelievable first fine art-rock performances on film, watch both the white and red dress versions first, then watch the Gothenburg Symphony’s glowing, career-spanning tribute to a woman who “laid the groundwork for [a] generation of performers,” as Marc Hirsh writes at NPR. Even though he is an American who does not care for Kate Bush, Hirsh can’t seem to help enumerating the very reasons she is so special to so many, and he features a number of her videos that demonstrate why she’s an artist her fans love “from the very core of their being.”

via Metafilter

Kate Bush’s First Ever Television Appearance, Performing “Kite” & “Wuthering Heights” on German TV (1978)

The Largest Ever Tribute to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” Choreographed by a Flashmob in Berlin

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

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

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