Tag: Music

Marvin Gaye’s Impromptu Musical Convoy

“You should have been on the rest of the tour,” Big John told me, referring to Marvin’s last cross-country excursion before leaving America behind.

“We drove to Denver and Milwaukee and New York and Chicago—all over,” said Cammon. “Marvin could relax on the bus. It was his method of getting away. One time, I remember, he got on the CB and started talking, telling people that he was Marvin Gaye. When they asked him to prove it, he started singing. Well, they sure-enough believed him then, and soon we were leading a caravan of thirty cars and trucks. This went on for a hundred miles. Finally he had me pull over at a truck stop, and everyone stopped along with us. He broke open a half-dozen bottles of champagne, and we had a beautiful party.

Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye
David Ritz

Lou Barlow – What’s In My Bag?

Oct 14, 2013
Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh, The Folk Implosion) goes shopping at Amoeba Music in Hollywood.

Check out his picks:
Blotto – Hello! My Name Is Blotto, What’s Yours? (12″) http://bit.ly/2jL2Fx4
Ty Segall – Singles 2007-10 (LP) http://bit.ly/2jqF4k5
Evergreen – Evergreen (LP)
The Elevators – Frontline (LP)
Peter Schilling – Major Tom (12″)
Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra (LP) http://bit.ly/2jSi5l0
The Folk Implosion – Take A Look Inside… (CD)
Bob Clark – A Christmas Story (DVD)

Buy Dinosaur Jr albums: http://bit.ly/17qlhEd
Buy Sebadoh albums: http://bit.ly/GOvTWK

In My Day People Weren’t So Nostalgic All the Time – The Paradox of Nostalgia

In fact, I think that the alt-country and Americana scenes can be too precious in their efforts to resist the polluting influence of the country industry, and in their attempts to evoke a simpler world through archaic slang and ostentatious hats. Maybe this judgment is simply a kind of reverse snobbery, a way for me to feel superior to the kind of people who feel superior to the kind of people who love “commercial” country music. (Snobbery, I’ve learned, is hard to define, and even harder to avoid; there is virtually no way to judge popular music without making some judgment about the people who listen to it.) This judgment surely reflects, too, my general allergy to any music that strains to be “retro,” even though I realize that a current of nostalgia runs through all popular culture. (It sometimes seems that popular music is more nostalgic than it used to be, which could mean that my distaste for nostalgia is itself a form of nostalgia for a pre-nostalgic past.)

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
Kelefa Sanneh

Punk Rock Purity

In one issue, Yohannan criticized Bikini Kill for agreeing to play a concert with the Go-Go’s, because the concert was sponsored by Budweiser. Others wondered about musical boundaries: if MRR was a punk zine, did that mean it only covered bands that sounded, more or less, like the Ramones? In October 1992, Yohannan announced that the zine would no longer review records that were “more on the metal side of life, or the hard rock side of life, or the folk side of life,” even if they came from established independent labels. One of the columnists, Kent McClard, objected to the magazine’s eagerness to draw boundaries, suggesting that “politics and honesty” should be more important than musical categorization. McClard left soon after to found a new zine, HeartattaCk, which was devoted to the proposition that “hardcore is a state of mind, not a musical style,” and which therefore promised to write about “all records and CDs that are sent in for review regardless of musical style,” as long as they did not have universal product codes. (“The U.P.C. code is big business,” McClard explained.)

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
Kelefa Sanneh

Can I Get a Witness? Dusty Springfield

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien OBE[1] (16 April 1939 – 2 March 1999), known professionally as Dusty Springfield, was an English singer whose career spanned over five decades. With her distinctive mezzo-soprano sound, she was a significant singer of blue-eyed soul, pop and dramatic ballads, with French chanson, country, and jazz also in her repertoire. During her 1960s peak, she ranked among the most successful British female performers on both sides of the Atlantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusty_Springfield

Ice Ice Baby – Vanilla Ice – The Annotated Vanilla Ice

“Ice Ice Baby” is a hip hop song by American rapper Vanilla Ice, and DJ Earthquake. It was based on the bassline of “Under Pressure” by British rock band Queen and British singer David Bowie, who did not receive songwriting credit or royalties until after it had become a hit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Ice_Baby

Singles can be rough going, especially very popular ones. It’s often hard to admit that you were one of the eight billion people who streamed “Gangnam Style” at its hottest. That’s how irony culture works. My biggest records in DJ sets now are “Ice Ice Baby” and “U Can’t Touch This,” and I wouldn’t have dared play them at any hip-hop cred party twenty years ago. All the songs I spin for ironic purposes are now legit parts of people’s enjoyment.

Music Is History
Questlove

word to your mother
An anachronistic corruption of the phrase “word to the mother”, which was a popular reference to Africa or “The Motherland” during the late 1980s Afrocentric movement. While the replacement of “the” with “your” effectively obliterated the term’s Afrocentric roots, it continued to be used in the same manner, that is, to express agreement. Alternatively, the “your” could take on sinister connotations, implying that speaker was sexually intimate with the listener’s mother, as in “say hi to your mom for me“, or, in keeping with the whack terminology, “props to your mom, she’s da bomb”. Finally, the phrase might mean nothing at all, and be used to ineptly feign street cred, in the style of Vanilla Ice.

Lithium – Nirvana

On the simplicity of Nirvana’s music
I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s proved to be so effective. The guitar playing is very simple. The drumming is very simple. … We would record a song in one or two takes. It was very pure and honest and real. And I think when Kurt wrote songs, he really tried to capture that simplicity because he realized that that’s kind of a direct route to someone’s heart or soul or mind.

On Cobain fluctuating between being fun and reclusive
When I moved up and started living in that small apartment with them, I mean, this was someone that I had never met before. I didn’t know at first — I thought, maybe he’s quiet, maybe he’s shy, maybe he has social anxieties, whatever it is. There were times, too, where he was outrageously funny and really fun to be around. The two of us would get $7 and go to the grocery store and spend half an hour in the freezer section looking for the perfect TV dinner. And those moments were so much fun. So it wasn’t always doom and gloom. …

A lot of the times when we’d go to the apartment after rehearsal, I slept on the couch, so I would kind of get on my couch and he would go in his room, close the door. Little did I know that most of that time he was writing in his journals, and more often than not, the next day at rehearsal, he would have a new song. So I think he had moments of being introverted and sort of reclusive, but that was also balanced with someone that was pretty fun to be around and pretty great to be in a band with, because when we counted into a song, it exploded, and it was real, man, it was real.

Dave Grohl retraces his life-affirming path from Nirvana to Foo Fighters
Fresh Air, NPR

In Praise of Bad Music – Proust Quote

Detest bad music if you will, but don’t hold it in contempt. As it is played and sung much more often and much more passionately than good music, so much more than the latter has it gradually been filled with the dreams and tears of mankind. For that reason you should venerate it. Its place, insignificant in the history of art, is huge in the sentimental history of societies. Respect for – I do not say love for – bad music is not merely a form of what might be called the charity of good taste or its scepticism, it is, more than that, the awareness of the importance of the social role of music. How many melodies, worthless in the eyes of an artist, become the confidants chosen by a whole host of romantic young men and of women in love.

Pleasures and Days
Marcel Proust

Instantly Recognizable Lyrics

Celtiri
SOME….

thisdudeabidestwice
BODY

Rand0m_Pers0m
ONCE

tom_cruises_closet
TOLD

xiaosleftpinky
ME

steamingsilver
THE

tom_cruises_closet
WORLD

5hrek_is_hot
IS

UnassumingSingleGuy
GONNA
…

CarmelCoffeePrincess
Yo I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want

OldSoulRobertson
So tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

Picante_Duke
I tell you what I want, what I really really want

Midnight712
So tell me what you want, what you really, really want

goodgollymizzmolly
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna

 

KISS and the Arbiters of Cool

I asked Gene if he remembered that line and he said, “Yes. The rock press was always attracted to the Talking Heads, Television, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols—bands who couldn’t sell out a stadium or even an arena. There is a side to that media completely devoid of connection to the people who make up most of the rock audience, a holier-than-thou Jon Landau disease, as if they are telling kids that they and they alone know what’s important. We are still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but there are three thousand licensed Kiss products, a Kiss toothbrush that plays ‘(I Want to) Rock and Roll All Nite’ when you put it in your mouth, and everything from Kiss caskets to Kiss condoms. There are no Radiohead condoms.”

Bumping Into Geniuses
Danny Goldberg