Kanye and Jay-Z are doing a second album together!
Kanye West's producer Mike Dean, who co-produced part of Jay and 'Ye's Watch the Throne, has confirmed that there will be a Watch the Throne 2! While Dean revealed that a follow up album is definitely in the works, he was unable to give a specific time for its release.
Maybe they'll call it Watch the Throner?
No, it's not a typewriter that plays music. The Keaton Music Typewriter was invented in 1936 for the purpose of printing musical notes on sheet music paper.
The Keaton Music Typewriter was first patented in 1936 (14 keys) by Robert H. Keaton from San Francisco, California. Another patent was taken out in 1953 (33 keys) which included improvements to the machine. The machine types on a sheet of paper lying flat under the typing mechanism. There are several Keaton music typewriters thought to be in existence in museums and private collections. It was marketed in the 1950s and sold for around $225. The typewriter made it easier for publishers, educators, and other musicians to produce music copies in quantity. Composers, however, preferred to write the music out by hand.
A bunch of cute kids review Bangarang by Skrillex.
What is dupstep?
I've never heard of that.
Daddy loves dubstep.
A couple of the kids were asked what "the drop" meant:
I think the drop is when you drop being sensible.
When it gets really quiet and then it gets really really really loud. BANG!
(via ★interesting)
As a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, James Winters and his family made this parody of the video Sabotage with kids playing all the roles.
Charming, although I might have gone with squirt guns instead of the more realistic item.
(via @moth)
At McSweeney's, John Peck whips up some bandwiches.
Bjork: Sliced narwhal, mustard, whole wheat bread.
Grateful Dead: Lemon verbena sorbet, peanut butter, clarified hemp butter, deep-fried brownie bites, M&Ms, stale focaccia.
Sex Pistols: Deep-fried Frank Sinatra LP, Russian mustard, spackle, tacks, stale rye bread.
John Cage: Silence, warmth, indirect sunlight, the memory of lettuce, the idea of bread.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Bacon-double cheeseburger, mescaline pesto, sourdough bread.
Wooooo! The Hood Internet has just released the sixth installment of their Mixtape series. You can listen to the whole thing here:
or download it here. Their five previous Mixtapes are some of the most-played music in my collection...I'm listening to volume five right now actually.
Matt Yglesias argues that because of the way copyright is viewed by the public and interpreted by lawmakers and the courts, making an album like The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique would be nearly impossible today.
The death on Friday of Adam Yauch, best known as the Beastie Boys' MCA, surely sent many of us back to old albums we may not have heard for a while. And anyone who threw on Paul's Boutique, the Boys' best album, was surely struck by the sense that they don't make records like that anymore. That's not just because tastes and styles have changed. The entire album is based on lavish sampling of other recordings. "Shake Your Rump," which leads Slate's #MCATracks playlist, features samples of 14 songs by 12 separate artists. In all, the album is thought to have as many as 300 total samples. The sampling gave Paul's Boutique a sound that remains almost as distinctive today as it was when it was released in 1989.
Perhaps the main reason-and certainly the saddest reason-that it still sounds distinctive is that a rapidly shifting legal and economic landscape made it essentially impossible to repeat.
Put in a year and hear popular songs from that year with Radio Time Machine. If you have a Rdio account, you can hear full songs. See also YouTube Time Machine. (via @fchimero)
Directed by Ice-T, Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap is a documentary about the birth and evolution of rap and hip hop music.
Ice-T takes us on an intimate journey into the heart and soul of hip-hop with the legends of rap music. This performance documentary goes beyond the stardom and the bling to explore what goes on inside the minds, and erupts from the lips, of the grandmasters of rap. Recognized as the godfather of Gangsta rap, Ice-T is granted unparalleled access to the personal lives of the masters of this artform that he credits for saving his life. Interspersed with the performers' insightful, touching, and often funny revelations are classic raps, freestyle rhymes, and never before heard a cappellas straight from the mouths of the creators. What emerges is a better understanding of, and a tribute to, an original American art form that brought poetry to a new generation.
(via @gavinpurcell)
Stereogum writer Tom Breihan saw a Skrillex show at SXSW and loved it. In fact, it was his favorite act. His takeaway was that the Skrillex many people deride as a one-trick WUB WUB WUB pony on the basis of his albums is an extremely effective and talented live DJ.
But what I found was one of the more dynamic sets I heard during all of SXSW. Skrillex, see, knows what he's doing. He does what great DJs do: He layers sounds and ideas on top of each other, building tension and releasing it, moving fluidly from one thing to the next. Parts sounded like the sort of early-'90s hardcore techno that was popular with people who wore lots and lots of smiley faces. Other parts sounded like the sort of dark, broody late-'90s breakbeat techno that was popular with scary white guys with dreads. There was also a lot of robotic one-drop reggae in there. Early on, Skrillex played a big chunk of Damian Marley's "Welcome To Jamrock" unmolested. Later, he dug out Ini Kamoze's "World-A-Music," the song that Marley sampled on "Jamrock." All of it fit in seamlessly. None of it was built around bass-drops.
Letters of Note has a letter written by an 18-year-old Keith Richards to his aunt about meeting Mick Jagger for the first time since they were childhood friends.
Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the 'Carousel' some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody's all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week. SWINGIN'.
The Stones played their first show three months after the letter was written. (via ★thoughtbrain)
Alive Inside is a documentary that follows social worker Dan Cohen as he discovers that music can "awaken" people suffering from degenerative memory loss (Alzheimer's, etc.). Here's a clip in which a man goes from a near-coma state to talking about his favorite songs after listening to music for awhile on headphones.
(via ★swissmiss)
Alan Gilbert is the music director of the New York Philharmonic and in this video, he talks about what a conductor does. I've been to the Philharmonic a few times in the past year and have wondered about the role of the conductor...specifically, is he actually doing anything up there to affect the music being played in realtime and could the orchestra play without him? The conductor obviously has a huge role in shaping the piece in rehearsal, but it seems like his presence on stage during the performance itself might be more performance than utility. But that's just a guess.
Update: I got an informative response about this from professional classical musician Chris Brody:
You're absolutely right that one of the main things an orchestra conductor does is to prepare the orchestra in rehearsal for the way he/she wants the piece to sound in performance. A lot of stuff is conveyed in that way that the conductor then won't need to attempt to convey in real time during the performance. And furthermore, as you suspect, conductors are often in some sense kind of "dancing" for the audience during performances, in ways that are strictly superfluous to making the musicians play correctly, though sometimes an enjoyable part of the concert experience.
In order for a concert performance to come off correctly, someone has to take responsibility for giving what musicians call "cues"-concrete gestures that enable everyone to know when to start playing. In chamber music (classical music played in small groups), one of the players will do this, usually with an exaggerated, rhythmically timed gesture that connotes "taking a breath to start playing right NOW" or "preparing my bow to play the string right NOW", and so on. In fact, there are entire smallish orchestras, like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, that play with no conductor, because members of the ensemble give cues when they are needed.
In larger (orchestral) settings, it is convenient to have a conductor to give cues instead. Of course, there are some pieces that are played with metronomic strictness, and the conductor in fact will have fairly little to do during those performances. You might have noticed that pieces from the Baroque and Classical periods are usually quite strict in time, and it is no coincidence that there was no such thing as a professional conductor until the nineteenth century-music prior to that was usually quite playable with the first-chair violinist ("concertmaster") or the keyboardist giving a few cues as needed. (Conductors were occasionally used prior to the nineteenth century, but not so much that it was anyone's entire job.)
Some pieces, by contrast, have a lot of changes of tempo, or a lot of starting and stopping. In cases like that, a conductor is really an indispensable part of having a performance come off non-disastrously! Furthermore, a lot of pieces are written in a complicated enough texture or rhythm that the musicians cannot necessarily hear what the beat is all the time, and need some visual help to stay together (this is especially true of very slow music, and of a lot of twentieth-century music).
Aside from this, when ensembles don't need help staying together, the conductor will do a lot of gesturing to elicit slight changes in dynamic level, expressive character, and so on, from the musicians. Very good ensembles, when working with a conductor they respect, will absolutely respond in real time to these gestures. Less good ensembles will often not be able to do so and will mostly watch the conductor for cues. Also, ultra-elite ensembles are sometimes known to ignore the conductor during performances if they think he/she isn't adding much value (a dirty secret of professional musicians!), or of course if they do not have confidence in the conductor's ability to keep them together.
A couple more things that might interest you. Basic conducting is done via the use of "patterns" that correspond to certain time signatures. When a conductor conducts music in 3/4 (3 beats per measure), there will be 3 precise places that the baton is expected to be during the measure, and the musicians can always look up and follow that pattern. (The basic patterns are shown in this video.) If you watch, let's say, a high-school band, you will see the conductor use these patterns very strictly and literally. In orchestral conducting, two things are different. First, the musicians don't need much help keeping time, so the patterns are either heavily modified or abandoned entirely-although you can often see downbeats and things if you look for them. Second, orchestral conductors conduct WAY ahead of the beat the musicians are actually playing. This helps the musicians respond in real time to the conductor's instructions. From the audience's perspective, therefore, it can be nearly impossible to see the connection between what the conductor is doing and what you're hearing from the musicians-they're probably substantially out of sync.
Looks like I have a lot more to look for the next time I go to the symphony. (thx, chris!)
Friday was the 15th anniversary of the death of The Notorious B.I.G. The Fader has a look back at the life of Biggie, as told through pictures of the places he went and the people he knew.
I started working with Big in '91. I was 21, he was 15. I met him through a friend of mine. They hustled together on Bedford and Quincy. People in the neighborhood knew him as the hottest rapper around. Everybody that stepped in his path, he ate 'em up. He earned that stripe from that one battle he had on Bedford and Quincy. I was the one that was playing the music. This man used to live right upstairs from the pool room. Every day in the summer we'd play the music out. It just so happened that Big came around, so we brought the grill out, we brought the music out. They got on the mic and went at it. It went on from there. Cars stopped, it got real crowded out there. We rocked it 'til 12, one o'clock that night. It was a good look. Everybody that came at his back, he took out.
Biggie would have turned 40 this year.
After Wendy's tweeted that "Dubstep sounds like a broken Frosty machine", illustrator Chris Piascik made this:
It took me a few seconds to notice the Skrillex-ification of Wendy. Awesome. Prints are available or you can get it on a t-shirt. (via @unlikelywords)
Short video profile of Sam Zygmuntowicz, a Brooklyn violin maker.
I like the robotic violin player that appears around 2:15, presumably used to test a violin's sound characteristics. (via ★interesting)
That is the rumor, and a very exciting one indeed.
I'm gonna play some Board of Canada now. I'm a bit of a Boards of Canada evangelist. They're my favorite band, I think. Maybe them and The Beatles. But, they are a band, again, a bit like The Fall. It's like once you get into them, or rather, once something clicks you just wanna hear everything they've released. This track I'm gonna play, it's from their last full album, which is The Campfire Headphase from 2005. They've got a new album coming out soon and I think it's gonna be a double album and I'm so excited, I really am-to hear their new one. Um, I just love them.
(via @jadabumrad)
Daft Punk already sort of sounds like they make their music using vintage video game systems but Da Chip is what that would actually sound like. Better than I expected. (via @shauninman)
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz frequently turns to rap music for business wisdom.
Much of rap is about business, whether the drug business, the music industry or work ethic, said Adam Bradley, an associate professor specializing in African-American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder who wrote "Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" and co-edited "The Anthology of Rap."
"It comes out of the fact that rap is such a direct mode of expression, maybe more so than any other music lyric, because of the emphasis on language, of words above melody or harmony," Mr. Bradley said.
People think of rap lyrics as being only about money, women, status and cocaine, he said, but more pervasive themes are leadership, collaboration and the vulnerability beneath the swagger -- all relevant in business.
Reminds me of this line by Jonah Peretti:
"Remember, you're not selling out," Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post, told Denton. "You're blowing up. Think in terms of hip-hop, not indie rock."
Sleigh Bells' new album, Reign of Terror, is out today. It got an 8.2 over at Pitchfork if you care about such things.
This is so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can't even tell if it's any good or not: a mashup of Jay-Z and Kanye's Niggas in Paris and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
(via ★davidfg)
Peter Sellers did four different spoken word versions of The Beatles' She Loves You: as Dr. Strangelove, with a Cockney accent, with an Irish accent, and with an upper crust English accent (my fave):
Yeah, Sellers is pretty good with accents. (via ★bump)
You may remember Martin Klimas from his photos of shattering figurines (which I love).
His latest project involves arranging paint just above massive speakers, turning the sound up, and photographing the results. This is Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians":
I wonder what dubstep looks like? (via @pomeranian99)
An internet sleuth used the lyrics of Ice Cube's It Was a Good Day to figure out when his exceptional day occurred.
CLUE 3: "The Lakers beat the Super Sonics"
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY 23 1993 where the Lakers beat the Super Sonics...
Update: Someone fact-checked the original calculation and found it wanting. (thx, trevor)
Adele's Rolling in the Deep has been covered thousands of times on YouTube...here's 70 of those performances cut together into one seamless song.
(via ★davidfg)
The Fournitures Generales Pour Le Piano is a shop in Paris that sells parts for piano repair. The owner runs the shop himself, sells fewer and fewer parts each year, and dreams of building a one-string instrument which sounds like a piano, lute, and harp all at the same time.
See also the decline in piano quality over the last 100 years. (thx, judy)
On the Clipart covers blog, you'll find noted album covers redone with clip art and Comic Sans.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the first time in recent history, American pop culture (fashion, art, music, design, entertainment) hasn't changed dramatically in the past 20 years.
Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there's the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what's odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past -- the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s -- looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.
Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There's no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock 'n' roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising -- all of it. It's even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
This video, which takes its audio from a 2007 interview, takes a crack at defining it.
So, a dubstep or grime is kinda like this ultra slow, ultra dirty spawn of hip hop, but it's almost at a breakbeat speed, but it's at a halftime breakbeat speed. So it feels, like, abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.
Since the evolution of music has slowed since, say, the early 1980s, I thought it would be a long time before a popular genre of music came along that seemed, to my old ears, to be noisy garbage...but then dubstep came along. Industrial, happy hardcore, metal, punk, glitch, and even drum & bass I can appreciate, but dubstep makes me want to yell at children to get off lawns. And I actually like that door stopper noise!
You've probably seen the NY Times correction that everyone's talking about. Ok, not everyone, just everyone who works in media. Anyway, here it is:
An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children's TV show "My Little Pony" that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
Here is said article. Jim Romenesko talked to Amy Harmon, the reporter who wrote the article, and uncovered this magical tidbit:
I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as "dubtrot," -- a take-off on "dubstep,'' get it? -- in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.
Dubtrot! And leave it Urban Dictionary to gild the lily.
Dubstep music relating to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Often created by bronies, dubtrot can include dubstep remixes of songs from the show and original pieces created as homage or in reference to the show.
Bronies! Defined as:
The term used to describe the fan community(usually of the older group, males and females) of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Anyway, would you like to listen to some dubtrot? Of course you would: Rainbowstep, Rainbow Dubtrot, and fluttershymix.
Been grooving on Pretty Lights lately. I recommend downloading one of several EPs from his site (for free + suggested donation) or getting disc two of Filling Up the City Skies.
And if you were a Chicago Bulls fan in the 90s, don't miss his remix of the Bulls intro music in the Unreleased 2010 Remixes collection (find it on the downloads page).
One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:
See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)
Woo, a new compilation from The Hood Internet just "dropped". I am picking it up right now. (Am I doing this right? Yo?) Anyway, free music that's good! Clicky clicky.
Trent Reznor's and Atticus Ross' soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in the can and will be released in one week. For now, you can pre-order the soundtrack or download a free six-song sampler. Reznor and Ross won an Oscar for their The Social Network soundtrack.
Every song by The Beatles played simultaneously. The start times are staggered so that every song ends at the same time.
As a commenter notes, "Gets very complicated in the end. So did the Beatles." (via waxy)
Moby has a web site where filmmakers can download his music for use in non-profit projects. Cool!
this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short. to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password. you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short. the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
Something to keep in mind when you're tempted to slap a Sigur Ros song on your viral video. (via ken murphy)
Drinkify matches up the music you're listening to with a suggested drink. According to the site, Daft Punk pairs best with 6 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin served neat, Philip Glass should be accompanied by a bottle of red wine, The Clash goes with 1 oz. cocaine + 1 oz. grenadine served in a highball, and you can probably guess what you drink while listening to Snoop Dogg:
(via coudal)
Michael J. Fox recently took the stage at his annual benefit for Parkinson's disease and played a familiar favorite: Johnny B. Goode. Marvin, get on the phone to your cousin!
And if that's not Mike Fox awesomeness for one day, here he is on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
If you like M83 and have listened to their new album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, you'll probably love this M83 backup singer audition video.
I literally LOL'd when he started singing. (via stellar)
Saw Koyaanisqatsi last night (with great seats), accompanied by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble...Glass played one of the emsemble's two keyboards. It was really fantastic.
KOYAANISQATSI, [Godfrey] Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.
The entire film is available on both YouTube and Hulu.
Dancing skills + sword fighting skills + old lady sitting motionless in a chair skills + huge boom box skills + dog almost gets beheaded skills + it gets magical around 52 seconds =
(via @thanland)
From Beth Maher, a Flash video game featuring rapper Kreayshawn (Gucci Gucci). And it uses Silkscreen! (via clusterflock)
There is a sense amongst my generation that Michael Winslow's best performing days are behind him. (You'll remember Winslow as Officer Sound Effects from Police Academy.) After all, we live in the age of the beatboxing flautist. You might change your tune after watching Winslow do Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love. The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I've heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!
And then it goes bananas right around 1:30. This is a must-see. (via @beep)
Premiering on HBO this week, a Martin Scorsese documentary on George Harrison, everyone's favorite Beatle who wasn't John or Paul.
Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese traces Harrison's live from his musical beginnings in Liverpool though his life as a musician, a seeker, a philanthropist and a filmmaker, weaving together interviews with Harrison and his closest friends, performances, home movies and photographs. Much of the material in the film has never been seen or heard before. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of the most talented artists of his generation and a profoundly intimate and affecting work of cinema.
A piano technician reports that the best pianos were built around 1900 and we'll never again see their like...the quality of today's pianos just doesn't measure up.
The finest pianos in the world were built about a hundred years ago. Due to evolution in engineering, exhaustion of raw materials, and flagging business standards, we will never see their like again. Some people may build very good pianos; new forms of the instrument may exceed (in narrow ways) the magnificent machines built a few decades either side of the year 1900. But, from a musical perspective, there will never be a "better" piano than the typical concert grand of a century ago.
(via @kdawson)
YouTube has 45 minutes of previously unreleased footage of a Halloween concert Nirvana played in 1991 at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.
The DVD contains the full performance (there's also a Blu-ray version out in a few months). I think this might be one of my answers to "what would you do if you had a time machine?"... (via devour)
Update: The video seems to be down right now...not sure if it'll be back or not. Sorry...
I am reminded this morning of that rarest of birds, the lyrics site that doesn't suck: Rap Genius. RG breaks down rap songs line-by-line and not only explains all the references but attempts to "critique rap as poetry". Here's Gotta Have It from Watch the Throne.
(Ain't that just like D. Wade? Wait)
Jay may be saying that Kanye and he are like LeBron and D-Wade. 1a and 1b. Great at what they do, hated because they brag about how good they are as a unit (and just because they ARE good). I guess that means Memphis Bleek is Jason Williams
The "wait" part may have been Jay giving pause to the LeBron/Wade reference after their epic fail during the 2011 NBA Finals. Jay is more likely to jab at LeBron now, because he was unhappy with the way his friend mishandled his "Decision" to go to Miami. He left Jay, a minority owner of the New Jersey Nets, in the dark with the rest of the NBA when he chose to take his talents to South Beach.
The other day while listening to Watch the Throne I wondered if someone had made a supercut of all of Kanye's "HUH"s, "HANH"s, and "UHH"s...and of course someone has.
HENH??!
The New York Philharmonic, joined by Philip Glass himself, will perform the score for Koyaanisqatsi while the film is projected on a screen above the stage.
Lose yourself in Philip Glass's powerful music for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, performed live by the Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, as the landmark film is projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage.
There will be two performances, Nov 2 and Nov 3 at 7:30pm at Avery Fisher Hall. There are still tons of great seats available, but get 'em while you can. Excited!
Loving this new Trillwave 2 mix from The Hood Internet.
If you like that, here's the first Trillwave mix.
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play So What.
See also Confirmation by Charlie Parker and Giant Steps by John Coltrane.
Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan reviewed Jay-Z and Kanye's album, Watch the Throne...and it is hilarious.
2. Lift Off (ft. Beyonce) - I almost aint wanna even comment on this shit son.... I dont even kno what to say bout it yo. This shit sounds like the anthem the fairies in Ferngully would use to go to war against evil humans to or some shit b. This shit is like Shia LeBeouf in song form yo. Lissenin to this shit is like havin ya ears penetrated by a million microscopic dicks namsayin. Shit sounds like niggas doin aerobics on a magical cloud of daisies. How many meadows did Kanye cartwheel across before he decided to make this beat? Seriously yo....
Seriously.
Update: The review was not written by Ghostface but it is still hilarious. (thx, all)
Not even country music can ruin that song. But as you well know Taylor, Eminem's version is the best of all time. (via @anildash)
Audiosurf is a racing game where the courses are determined by the music you play from your own library. There are all sorts of YouTube clips of the gameplay (which is reminiscent of Guitar Hero)...here's a representative one:
Music critic Anthony Tommasini goes to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and treats the game as a musical piece.
For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher's mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.
The most assertive soloists are the vendors. My favorite was a wiry man with nasal snarl of a voice who practically sang the words "Cracker Jack" as a three-note riff: two eighth notes on "Cracker," followed by a quarter note on "Jack," always on a falling minor third. (Using solf`ege syllables, think "sol, sol, mi.") After a while I heard his voice drifting over from another section, and he had transposed his riff down exactly one step.
Can rap be charming? Maybe so...Chris Sullivan set up in Union Square and beatboxed so that anyone who wanted to could come up and rap:
(via @dens)
Sesame Street characters, including Grover on the flute, perform the Beastie Boys' Sure Shot.
(via devour)
NPR has an interesting piece on how the internet shaped the American rave scene in the 90s.
At first, the connections were done the old-fashioned way. "By 1994, there was already kind of an established network of party-throwers and partygoers [in Detroit]," says Rob Theakston, a Detroit rave veteran. "At that point, the scene was maybe 200 kids max. Everything was very phone-based. [You'd] call the phone lines the day of to get directions, and even then, a lot of the direction lines would just give the vicinity because you would already know: 'Oh, Harper and Van Dyke -- that's the old theater. We know where the party's going to be.' They wouldn't give you the exact address for the authorities to find out."
(via @moth)
A chef cooks a vegan pad thai dish to a black metal song.
Cut the tofu! Turn the plate! (thx, jay)
A drumstick hitting a cymbal at 1000 frames/sec. More flex there than I would have assumed.
(via mlkshk)
Rave On Buddy Holly is an album-length compilation of Buddy Holly cover songs sung by the likes of Cee Lo Green, Fiona Apple, Lou Reed, and Paul McCartney. You can listen now on Soundcloud, via the embed below, or pre-order the album on Amazon.
This looks to be about a year old, but it's new to me: 57 minutes and 37 seconds of goodness from The Hood Internet.
It's a little more chill than their usual stuff -- "Trillwave is the soundtrack to the party after the afterparty or maybe to a sun-drenched backyard barbecue the next day" -- but I like it a lot so far. (via @djgeekdout)
Do you get that funny feeling that you've heard Lady Gaga's Born This Way somewhere before? Maybe when it was called Express Yourself or Waterfalls or God is a DJ?
A+ for the performance too. Everything is a Remix, folks.
You may remember the New York version. This is the same deal -- asking people on the street what song they're listening to on their headphones -- except in London.
(via stellar)
From 1962, Alex Haley interviews Miles Davis for Playboy magazine.
Why is it that people just have to have so much to say about me? It bugs me because I'm not that important. Some critic that didn't have nothing else to do started this crap about I don't announce numbers, I don't look at the audience, I don't bow or talk to people, I walk off the stage, and all that.
Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player. I only can do one thing -- play my horn -- and that's what's at the bottom of the whole mess. I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician. Most of what's said about me is lies in the first place. Everything I do, I got a reason.
The article is SFW but the ads are NSFW...here's a completely SFW version.
Sometimes the simple things in life are best...like a compilation of clips of The Doctor shooting guns with a gansta rap soundtrack.
(via ★interesting)
Tyler Cullen went out on the streets of NYC and asked random passers-by what song they were listening to on their headphones.
Turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
Lovely short film clip of BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Delia Derbyshire demonstrating how to make electronic music using tape loops. Look at the beat matching!
It was Derbyshire who gave the original Doctor Who theme its distinctive sound. (via ★danielpunkass)
That's not a typo...Lady Gaga's Born This Way is only a buck on Amazon.
Angry Birds is still the top paid app in the App Store. And Pomplamoose is still twee and adorable. (via ★glass)
A gem of a Q&A from Quora: How valid is the implied legal advice in Jay-Z's "99 Problems"? The lyrics, in part:
"Well do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back
And I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that
And the answer:
Consenting to a voluntary search is never a good idea, especially if you have felony weight on you. The standard to search the glove compartment is actually fairly low in California, since it's accessible to the driver. I'm not sure how the locked status interferes with it being a glove compartment. The trunk can be opened if the car is impounded, for inventory reasons, which is a common way to get evidence. However, a locked case inside the trunk will not be opened (depends on the state).
(via ★kellan)
The Onion A/V Club has put together a short, alphabetical guide to obscure, semi-obscure, and I-forget-that-other-people-might-find-that-obscure references/allusions in the music of The Beastie Boys.
It's called "'Electric Like Dick Hyman': 170 Beastie Boys references explained." Here's a representative entry:
Drakoulias, George ("Stop That Train" from "B-Boy Bouillabaisse," Paul's Boutique)
Def Jam A&R man George Drakoulias helped discover the Beastie Boys for Rick Rubin, and later became a producer for Rubin's American Recordings, working on albums by The Black Crowes, The Jayhawks, and Tom Petty. There's no record of him ever working at an Orange Julius.
I obsessed over this stuff as a kid, especially with Paul's Boutique: I was nine years old, living in Detroit's 8 Mile-esque suburbs, not New York, hadn't seen any cult movies from the 70s not titled Star Wars, and had no internet to consult. I was literally pulling down encyclopedias from the shelf and asking my parents (who generally likewise had no clue) obnoxious questions to try to figure out what the heck they were talking about.
In a post I wrote here last summer, I said that hip-hop's culture of musical sampling and what Ta-Nehisi Coates called "digging in the crates" for old records helped ensure that a significant chunk of my generation would be into history.
But it was definitely the references, too. Whether silly or serious, you couldn't listen to The Beastie Boys or Public Enemy or Boogie Down Productions and not try to sort through these casually dropped names, memes, and places and try to reconstruct the worlds where they came from.
On the eve of the release of the Beastie Boys' latest album, New York Magazine has an interesting history of the band as told through interviews of the band and others who were there.
They accidentally knew what they were doing.
Following a leak of the new album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, the band is now streaming the full album on their web site. (via stellar)
If there was a Star Wars version of Coachella, some of the bands playing at the festival would be called Kessel Run DMC, Guided by Millions of Voices That Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced, and C-3PO Speedwagon.
Otomata is a generative sequencer...it play music in a loop determined by the motions of cells like those in Conway's Game of Life. Fun stuff.
This set of rules produces chaotic results in some settings, therefore you can end up with never repeating, gradually evolving sequences. Go add some cells, change their orientation by clicking on them, and press play, experiment, have fun.
(via stellar)
This wedding invite designed by Kelli Anderson has a 45 RPM record player built right into it.
Here's more info on how the musical invite was constructed.
The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented "arm." With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song. The sewing needle travels the length of the song and produces the sound. Its vibrations are amplified by the thin, snappy paper to which it is adhered. To keep the needle down on the record, we reinforced the back of the "tent" with a spray-mounted half page of heavier cardstock. To reduce friction between the acetate flexidisc and the backing cover, we had the inside of the booklet laminated to be slick and conducive to hand-spinning.
(via stellar)
They each have a personal brand web site -- Gwyneth has GOOP and Jay-Z has the recently launched Life + Times -- so they recently decided to interview each other about that. Here's Z Qing G:
SC: Personally I was very surprised at your extensive knowledge of hip-hop songs. Particularly how you can sing '90s hip-hip songs word for word. I can't even do that! How does a girl from Spence discover hip-hop?
GP: I first was exposed to hip-hop when I was about 16 (1988) by some boys who went to collegiate. The Beastie Boys were sort of the way in for us preppie kids. We were into Public Enemy, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. But then I went to LA the summer between my junior and senior year of high school and I discovered N.W.A which became my obsession. I was fascinated by lyrics as rythym and how Dre had a such different cadence and perspective from say, Eazy-E, who I thought was one of the most ironic and brilliant voices hip-hop has ever had. It was an accident that I learned every word of Straight Outta Compton and to love something that a.) I had no real understanding of in terms of the culture that it was emanating from and b.) to love something that my parents literally could not grasp. But I was hooked. I can't remember what I ate for dinner last night but I could sing to you every single word of N.W.A's "Fuck Tha Police" or [Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's] "It Takes Two." Go figure.
And here's G Qing Z:
GP: You are the coolest man on Earth, how the f did you get like that?
SC: I'm around great women, starting with my mom. Women keep men cool. The hotter the chick the cooler the guy ... that sounds like a really bad rap line!
What a couple of huge cornballs! And I mean that in the best way possible.
The motions of a Brazilian textile plant set to a classical music soundtrack.
(via stellar)
If you liked Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack, you might like Tron Legacy R3CONF1GUR3D with remixes by Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, and M83. It's just out today and I haven't listen to it yet, so caveat emptor.
And that's saying something. But look at this gem of a thread: I like big butts and I cannot lie, but is there some evolutionary reason as to why? Some of the answers:
My homeboys tried to warn me, but that butt you got makes me so confident of your current well-being and future child-rearing potential
So, ladies! (Yeah!) Ladies (Yeah!)
If you wanna roll in my Mercedes (Yeah!)
Then turn around! Stick it out! Even white boys have to make sure that their partner is of high genetic caliber so they can pass on their genes successfully.
My anaconda don't want none unless you have a high likelihood of producing healthy offspring with a minimal chance of genetic disabilities, hun.
(via @stevenbjohnson)
Lady Gaga released a country version of her latest single, Born This Way. This isn't a remix or cover...it's an official release by Gaga.
I don't care for country music much, but this really makes me smile. (via ★capndesign)
Nate Dogg died yesterday; he was 41 years old.
With his deep, melodic voice and smooth soul rumble, Dogg was one of the key elements in the rise of the West Coast G-Funk sound pioneered by Death Row Records in the early 1990s. Though overshadowed by such peers as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Warren G, Nate was a critical participant in a number of major left-coast gangsta hits, including G's "Regulate" and Dre's iconic solo debut, 1992's The Chronic.
Tim Carmody gives props to Radiohead for their rare combination of longevity and relevance.
Still, I think music fans and cultural observers need to grapple with this a little: Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey, came out 18 years ago. Here's another way to think about it: when that album came out, I was 13; now I'm 31. And from at least The Bends to the present, they've commanded the attention of the musical press and the rock audience as one of the top ten -- or higher -- bands at any given moment. You might have loved Radiohead, you might have been bored by them, you might have wished they'd gone back to an earlier style you liked better, but you always had to pay attention to them, and know where you stood. For 18 years. That's an astonishing achievement.
As Anil has his hands busy with a new baby, I'll wade in here and point out that Tim's examples don't include any pop, rap, R&B, or hip hop. Jay-Z hasn't been around as long as Radiohead, but he's getting there. The Beastie Boys had at least 15 years. Madonna and Michael Jackson each had 20 culturally relevant years, more or less. I'm probably forgetting a few, but yeah, that's still not a long list.
This is my favorite bit of news today: one of the little girls (the one on the left) on the Siamese Dream album cover is now actually the bass player for the Smashing Pumpkins.
The source for this is Billy Corgan on Twitter:
Just found out the weirdest news: our bass player Nicole (@xocoleyf) just admitted she is one of the girls on the cover of Siamese Dream. She said she didn't want us to know because she thought maybe we wouldn't let her be in the band.
Next you're going to tell me that the Nirvana baby has joined up with Shepard Fairey...no wait, that happened too! (via @kathrynyu)
...or rather, it recognized my face, looked up what music I liked on Facebook and Hunch, and played it for me. Meet AutomaticDJ:
A short documentary report from a thousand years into the future about The Beatles.
First-hand records are certainly scarce. There's a lot we don't know about The Beatles, but we do know that these four young men -- John Lennon, Paul MacKenzie, Greg Hutchinson, and Scottie Pippen -- were some of the finest musicians that ever existed. The Beatles rose to prominence when they travelled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan's annual Woodstock festival.
So, LCD Soundsystem is retiring and to see off their fans, they decided to perform one last show at Madison Square Garden. Except that they didn't think they'd sell the place out and didn't pay too much attention to how the tickets were being sold. When the tickets went on sale last week, they sold out immediately. Many fans didn't get tickets, the band's family and friends didn't get tickets, and even some of the band didn't get tickets. Scalpers bought thousands upon thousands of tickets and the band is hopping mad. So they're adding four more NYC shows right before the MSG gig to give their fans a chance to see them and to screw the scalpers by increasing the supply (and therefore lowering demand and prices).
oh-and a small thing to scalpers: "it's legal" is what people say when they don't have ethics. the law is there to set the limit of what is punishable (aka where the state needs to intervene) but we are supposed to have ethics, and that should be the primary guiding force in our actions, you fucking fuck.
It would be fun if all those scalpers got stuck with thousands of unsellable MSG tickets.
Arcade Fire won album of the year for The Suburbs at the Grammys last night and a lot of people don't even know what an Arcade Fire is. Including Rosie O'Donnell.
(via @waferbaby)
At least out of nowhere for me...I had no idea this album was coming. Anyway, it's called The King of Limbs and the digital copy is out on Feb 19th. Huzzah!
Nomis is an iOS app that looks at the artists in your iPhone or iPod's music library and shows you their latest and upcoming releases. Showed me a couple things I was unaware of: the new Cut Copy and an Underworld album from September that I'd missed. The only bummer is that it's kind of absurdly slow in looking through your library. (thx, brandon)
A nearly shot-for-shot version of Joy Division performing Transmission live in 1979...with Playmobil characters.
Usher's OMG sounds suspiciously close to a Christmas carol that Homer wrote in an episode of The Simpsons. Take a listen:
Yes. Yes! YES! It's MIXMAS! The Hood Internet has released their fifth mixtape. Download commencing now.
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin "perform" Steve Reich's Clapping Music. This is mesmerizing.
(via @sippey)
Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram.
Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)
From Life magazine circa 1971, a selection of photos of rock stars (Jackson 5, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Grace Slick) with their parents taken in their parents' homes. Here's Eric Clapton with his grandmother.
That same series also contains the great photo of The Jackson 5 astride their scooters. (via andrea inspired)
Reminds me of Gondry's Star Guitar video with a bit of MC Escher mixed in.
(viva la sandwich)
This is surprisingly well done.
Continuing with the unexpected Kanye groove on kottke.org this morning.
This might be even funnier than the Kanye Jordan Twitter acct.
Just in time for that family Christmas party: 99 Christmas songs for $1.99 at Amazon's MP3 store.
Isle of Tune is a musical sequencer with a twist...you build little roads with houses, trees, streetlights, etc. that cars can then drive past, making music as they go. This is currently the top-rated island:
And here's Michael Jackson's Beat It. Neat! (via prosthetic knowledge)
It's called 01 and 10...ok, it's not really a lost album. But apparently if you take the first five songs from OK Computer (from 1997) and the first five songs from In Rainbows (from 2007) and alternate them, the songs fit together musically and lyrically to form a coherent album.
Consider that In Rainbows was meant to complement OK Computer, musically, lyrically, and in structure. We found that the two albums can be knit together beautifully. By combining the tracks to form one playlist, 01 and 10, we have a remarkable listening experience. The transitions between the songs are astounding, and it appears that this was done purposefully.
The lyrics also seem to complement each other. There appears to be a concept flowing through the 01 and 10 playlist. Ideas in one song is picked up by the next, such as "Pull me out of the aircrash," and "When I'm at the pearly gates, this will be my videotape."
(via prosthetic knowledge)
Patrick Filler took Ben Greenman's New Yorker holiday party playlist (one song for each year from 1925 to 2010) and made a Rdio playlist out of it so that you can listen to the whole shebang online.
For the New Yorker holiday party, Ben Greenman whipped up a music playlist containing one hit song from each year of the New Yorker's history, from 1925 to 2010.
At the party, the mix worked like a charm. Jazz and blues greeted the early arrivals, and as the party picked up, the mood became romantic (thanks to the big-band and vocal recordings of the late thirties and forties), energetic (thanks to early rock and roll like Fats Domino and Jackie Brenston in the early fifties), funky (James Brown in 1973, Stevie Wonder in 1974), and kitschy (the eighties), after which it erupted into a bright riot of contemporary pop and hip-hop (Rihanna! Kanye! M.I.A.! Lil Jon!). It was rumored, though never proven, that party guests were leaving right around the songs that marked their birth years.
Where the hell is Hey Ya!? Oh, right. Crazy in Love.
The Inception iPhone app takes the music from the movie and remixes it with the sounds around you (office chatter, street noise, etc.).
Inception The App transports Inception The Movie straight into your life. New dreams can be unlocked in many ways, for example by walking, being in a quiet room, while traveling or when the sun shines. You will get realtime musical experiences, featuring new and exclusive music from the Inception soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer.
Bad: I can hear the people in the office talking, which is the precise thing I'm attempting to prevent by wearing headphones.
I have enjoyed nothing (nothing!) more over the past week or so than Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. Amazon's got the mp3 album today for only $3.99.
The latest big thing from Google: beatboxing. Just go to this page on Google Translate and press "Listen". I laughed out loud. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Interesting piece on how Kanye West's latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, got made. Lots of good creative process bits, like this extensive quote from Kanye kollaborator Q-Tip:
"I'd never worked the way Kanye was working in Hawaii. Everybody's opinions mattered and counted. You would walk in, and there's Consequence and Pusha T and everybody is sitting in there and he's playing music and everyone is weighing in. It was like music by committee. [Laughs.] It was fresh that everybody cared like that. I have my people that listen to my stuff-I think everybody does-but his thing is much more like, if the delivery guy comes in the studio and Kanye likes him and they strike up a conversation, he'll go, 'Check this out, tell me what you think.' Which speaks volumes about who he is and how he sees and views people. Every person has a voice and an idea, so he's sincerely looking to hear what you have to say-good, bad, or whatever.
"In art, whether it was Michelangelo or Rembrandt or all these dudes, they'll sketch something, but their hands may not necessarily touch the paint. Damien Hirst may conceptualize it, but there's a whole crew of people who are putting it together, like workers. His hand doesn't have to touch the canvas, but his thought does. With Kanye, when he has his beats or his rhymes, he offers them to the committee and we're all invited to dissect, strip, or add on to what he's already started. By the end of the sessions, you see how he integrates and transforms everyone's contributions, so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He's a real wizard at it. What he does is alchemy, really."
BTW, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still on sale at Amazon for $3.99.
The remastered version of NIN's Pretty Hate Machine is out today. You can get the CD or vinyl at Amazon or mp3s at iTunes.
Here's video of a full orchestral performance of John Cage's famous 4'33" composition, in which none of the performers plays his or her instrument; it's four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient noise.
You're not going to think it's worth it, but watch the whole performance. (thx, liz)
A translation of 50 Cent's hit single In Da Club into the Queen's English.
When I arrive in my Mercedes-Benz
I find the nightclub is full of actors
Basically, a lot of different people want to have sex with me
And I mean A LOT
I fear change
Xzibit is preparing a marijuana cigarette
I am very good at interpretive dance
Gunshot injuries have had no effect on my gait
(via @dansays)
On Monday night, at a screening of the movie "Due Date," Courtney Love told a reporter from Style.com that she was trying to take better care of herself.
Or, perhaps not:
Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance -- "Not you," she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her -- to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.
"I really must get out of here," Mr. Kiefer said.
"Just a minute," Ms. Love said, as she pushed her feet, shoes and all, through a pair of pink knickers that she said cost $4,000. She grabbed a trench coat, walked through the hotel lobby with her breasts exposed to an assortment of prominent fashion figures, including Stefano Pilati, the Yves Saint Laurent designer, and then exited the hotel.
Like Ms. Love, this profile of her is anything but boring.
In heavy rotation in iTunes this week: Crystal Castles' "Not in Love" featuring vocals by Robert Smith of The Cure.
The only way this could be better is with Brian Johnson's vocals stitched in there.
If this profile of Jay-Z in the WSJ is any indication, the guy doesn't seem to have any problems anymore.
In his office, by a coffee table stacked with art books (Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha), his Forbes magazine and a humidor, he perches on the edge of a chair with his fingers tucked into his pockets. He says he'll always rap about variations on the same themes: drug hustling, business boasts, luxury hopscotching from Gucci to Louis Vuitton to the new Dior suit he says is a perfect fit. They're all narrative devices:
"I'm just describing a scene, but the crux of the story is the message. Almost like a movie. Setting: South of France. This is what's happening. This guy from out the projects who didn't graduate from high school is now living this sort of life. And this is how he got here."
This is the best thing you'll see all day. Please just watch:
The Beastie Boys and Eminem stuff killed me. Who knew Fallon could sing? (via @hodgman)
Long interview with Barack Obama in Rolling Stone. Most of it is politics, but they also discussed music.
My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There's still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards.
A lot of classical music. I'm not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.
Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president's personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.
Speaking of Steven Johnson and new books, Alex Ross has a post about how Johnson's long zoom concept has influenced his music writing *and* has a new book of his own out soon called Listen to This (at Amazon). See how deftly I knitted that together in a Johnsonian way? Ahem. Anyway, here's what Listen to This is about:
It offers a panoramic view of the musical scene, from Bach to Björk and beyond. In the Preface, I say that the aim is to "approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world." I treat pop music as serious art and classical music as part of the wider culture; my hope is that the book will serve as an introduction to crucial figures and ideas in classical music, and also give an alternative perspective on modern pop.
The best part is that Ross' web site contains an extensive collection of audio, video, and images of the works mentioned in the book.
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