This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Koyaanisqatsi isn’t quite as haunting if you replace Philip Glass with the music from the Wii Shop Channel. pic.twitter.com/PkN9X4ucMZ
— Andy Kelly (@ultrabrilliant) March 22, 2016
In this clip from Koyaanisqatsi, Andy Kelly replaced Philip Glass’ score with music from the Wii Shop Channel. As he notes, the movie doesn’t seem quite as haunting now. (via @daveg)
UbuWeb is hosting a massive collection of electronic and electroacoustic songs from 1937-2001.
This is from a 62 CD set called “The History of Electroacoustic Music” that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Brazilian student. It’s sketchy. The torrent vanished and the collection has long been unavailable.
It’s a clearly flawed selection: there’s few women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it’s admirable and contains a ton of great stuff.
Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection.
(via open culture)
Update: The tongue-in-cheek Flash-only interface is terrible, but if you get past that, Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music is an amazing resource. (via @xRageous)
It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies. I have watched more than a dozen of these and they are all great, but I picked Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood, and Terminator 2 to embed here.
Watch as Orkestra Obsolete plays a version of New Order’s Blue Monday using only instruments that would have been available in the 1930s, including the diddley bow, the harmonium, the zither, the theramin, and the musical saw. (via @tcarmody)
David W. Niven collected jazz records from as early as 1921 and with the help of the Internet Archive, copies of those records have been made available online…that’s 1000 hours of jazz.
My 20-year-old cousin introduced me to jazz when I was 10. It was a 10” 78 RPM OK recording of “My Heart” made in Chicago on November 12, 1925, by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five with Kid Ory, trombone; Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Lil Armstrong, piano; and Johnny St. Cyr, banjo. On the reverse was “Cornet Chop Suey.”
(via @ftrain)
Evan Puschak of Nerdwriter fame asked an interesting question on Twitter yesterday:
It’s 2006. You’re DJing a club. You have a 2016 iPod. What song do you put on to make everyone go nuts?
Puschak compiled the responses into a Spotify playlist:
What would you pick? It depends on what sort of club you’re talking about but in general, for maximum impact, it would have to be instantly catchy but also with adventurous production that sounds like it’s from the future (in a way that, say, Uptown Funk doesn’t).
When the song that became Thriller was first considered for the album that also became Thriller, it was called Starlight and had totally different lyrics.
We need some starlight starlight sun
There ain’t no second chance we got to make it while we can
You need the starlight some starlight sun
I need you by my side you give me starlight starlight tonight yeah
Songwriter Rod Temperton explains:
Originally, when I did my Thriller demo, I called it Starlight. Quincy said to me, ‘You managed to come up with a title for the last album, see what you can do for this album.’ I said, ‘Oh great,’ so I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles, and came up with the title ‘Midnight Man’. The next morning, I woke up, and I just said this word… Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualise it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as ‘Thriller’.
That story reminds me of the scene in the hot tub in Boogie Nights where Eddie Adams chooses his stage name:
I just want a name, I want it so it can cut glass, you know, like razor sharp. When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign. I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign — it just blows up because the name is so powerful … It says “Dirk Diggler.”
Thriller and Dirk Diggler. Both great names. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Howard Shore, composer of the orchestral score for The Lord of the Rings, uses leitmotif to help tell the story, in the form of recurring thematic musical phrases that accompany certain actions, places, or characters. For instance, there’s a Shire theme that plays when the hobbits are central to the action but which becomes less important as their physical distance from the Shire increases. Wagner famously used leitmotif in his Ring cycle and so did John Williams in Star Wars…Vader’s theme is a good example.1
This has me wondering: has anyone done a close “reading” of the music in The Force Awakens? I bet the placement of some of the musical themes give clues as to the Force sensitivity, parentage, and origin of some of the characters that we’re wondering about.↩
Ethnographer Christina Xu discovered a few of the nicknames that young Chinese fans have devised for American pop stars.
Nicki Minaj - 麻辣鸡 (má là ji): a slant transliteration of “Minaj”. Means spicy chicken (ma la is a spice combo commonly used in Sichuan cooking).
Drake - 公鸭 (gōng yā): Literally “male duck”, as in the definition of a “drake”. I laughed out loud when I finally figured this one out.
Kanye West - 侃爷 (kǎn yé): a transliteration of Kanye. In Beijing dialect, this means someone who brags a lot with no actions to follow it up.
Update: According to @billyroh’s coworker, Rihanna is known to some as “the Pop Queen of Shandong Province”.
At first I was like, whhhhhhhy? And then I was all, whhhhyyyy do I like this so much? Britney has always had something but damned if I know what it is.
The product of a collaboration between Polygraph and Billboard, this interactive timeline lets you listen to the top rap song in the US from 1989 to 2015 as you see the single jockeying in the top 10.
James Corden does this thing on the Late Late Show where he drives around with singers doing karaoke in a car. Yesterday, he picked up Adele and they drove around singing a few of her songs and then she did, without dropping a word, Nicki Minaj’s verses from Monster1 (starts at about the 10:15 mark). Soooo good. (via @djacobs)
Which is, for my money, one of the rap performances of all time, album or no.↩
David Bowie died Sunday from cancer. Dave Pell at Nextdraft has a nice roundup of links, writing:
In the NYT obituary, Jon Pareles writes: “Mr. Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider: an alien, a misfit, a sexual adventurer, a faraway astronaut.” Maybe that’s why there is such an outpouring of emotion at the news of David Bowie’s death at the age of 69. Everyone feels like an outsider and Bowie made being an outsider feel more like being ahead of the curve. Today, there are people who are famous for nothing. David Bowie was famous for everything.
Bowie was also quite keen on the Internet:
Quartz calls him a tech visionary, and there’s this from a 1999 Rolling Stone article: “David Bowie has pulled another cyber-coup by becoming the first major-label artist to sell a complete album online in download form.”
He didn’t get the future exactly right, but authorship and intellectual property has been “in for such a bashing” lately and music sales are down down down:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. “So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”
Spotify is the running water and YouTube is the electricity. (Illustration by Helen Green.)
From Complex, a listing of the best rapper alive for each year since 1979, from Grandmaster Caz to Biggie to Nicki to Drake.
Christopher Wallace was only alive for 67 days in 1997, but with a talent so immense, that’s all it took for him to be the most dominant rapper of the year. In the months after Biggie’s March 9 death, it’s almost as if his stock rose. The untimely loss of someone so young, with so much heft in the language of hip-hop, was like a call to reflection. Infatuation with his wit, wordplay, and delivery soared, and 1997, in spite of tragedy, was Biggie’s biggest year.
Life After Death was released just over two weeks after Biggie passed and peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The album was an ambitious two-disc set with a tracklist comprised of every type of song imaginable. While the diverse styles and subject matter — his daughter’s college plan, kinky sex, hotel heists, a fully-sung ballad — were an organic product of Biggie’s incomparable range, the strategy of Life After Death’s sequencing has become the de facto approach for rap albums in the years since. It’s an incredibly influential project, before you even press play.
In the first few seconds of this video, Margaret Leng Tan introduces herself:
I’m the first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juilliard and now I play the toy piano. Life works in mysterious ways.
You can hear more of Tan’s toy piano music on Spotify. (via @robinsloan)
Radiohead were commissioned to write the theme song for Spectre, the newest James Bond movie. The movie’s producers decided to go in a different musical direction, so the band recently put the rejected song up on Soundcloud. Enjoy. (via df)
Update: They took the full version down from Soundcloud but it’s up on Spotify.
I have really been digging this Burning Man sunrise DJ set from Tycho. (via @arainert)
Prince covered Radiohead’s Creep at the Coachella music festival in 2008. The video got yanked due to copyright infringement but it’s back up. For the moment anyway and perhaps forever…Prince’s Twitter account linked to it. (via @anildash (who else??))
At the risk of turning this into an Adele fan site, here are the isolated vocals for her performance of “Hello” for Saturday Night Live. They are raw and flawless and real and everything pop music isn’t these days.
Update: That YouTube video got yanked, but I found the vocals on Soundcloud. We’ll see how long that’ll last.
Update: Welp, that lasted about 10 minutes. Digg has embedded their own video. How fast will that one disappear?
This is all sorts of charming. BBC held an Adele impersonator contest and arranged for Adele to compete in disguise as a woman named Jenny. I love the looks on the women’s faces when they realize what’s going on.
See also Jewel’s undercover karaoke and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis surprising a bus full of passengers with a performance.
This long interview with former Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher is a goldmine of rock star swagger, a master class in not giving a shit, and the dictionary definition of unfiltered. I mean:
Am I aware of a hierarchy? I’m aware that Radiohead have never had a fucking bad review. I reckon if Thom Yorke fucking shit into a light bulb and started blowing it like an empty beer bottle it’d probably get 9 out of 10 in fucking Mojo. I’m aware of that.
I used to put us at number seven. It went The Beatles, the Stones, the Sex Pistols, The Who, The Kinks… who came in at six? I don’t know. We were at seven. The Smiths were in there, The Specials. Where would I put us now? I guess I’d probably put us in the top 10. We weren’t as great as the greats but we were the best of the rest. We did more than The Stone Roses could fucking even fathom. We’re better than The Verve: couldn’t fucking keep it together for more than six months at a time. If all the greats are in the top four, we’re in the bottom of the top four, we’re kind of constantly fighting for fifth, just missing out. Just missing out on the top four, I’d say.
He just has opinions on everything and everyone and says them on the record:
I fucking hate whingeing rock stars. And I hate pop stars who are just… neh. Just nothing, you know? “Oh, yeah, my last selfie got 47-thousand-million likes on Instagram.” Yeah, why don’t you go fuck off and get a drug habit, you penis?
This one just made me laugh:
My fragrance? Oh it’s coming, it’s coming. Toe-Rag it’s going to be called. And the bottle’s going to be a massive toe.
Ahhhhhhh, I can’t stop quoting:
I guaran-fucking-tee you this: The Stone Roses never mentioned “career” in any band meetings. Ever. Or Primal Scream, or The Verve. Oasis certainly never mentioned it. I bet it’s mentioned a lot by managers and agents now: “Don’t do that, it’s bad for your career.” “What? Fuck off!” Like when we went to the Brits and we’d won all those awards and we didn’t play. The head of the Brits said, “This’ll ruin your career.” Fucking, wow. I say to the guy, “Do you know how high I am? You know who’s going to ruin my career? Me, not you. Bell-end. More Champagne. Fuck off.”
Ok, that’s enough. Just go read the thing.
The University of California, Santa Barbara library is digitizing its collection of wax cylinders from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over 10,000 audio files from the collection are now available online.
The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Grammy Foundation, and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free.
This searchable database features all types of recordings made from the late 1800s to early 1900s, including popular songs, vaudeville acts, classical and operatic music, comedic monologues, ethnic and foreign recordings, speeches and readings.
(thx, greg)
BBC Radio One got David Attenborough to narrate the first minute or so of Adele’s video for Hello as if it were a nature documentary. Solid gold. Although I am a little cross they made Attenborough say the words “hashtag flip phone”. :|
Bonus pseudo-Attenborough: the episode of Human Planet on The Douche.
Did you know The Beatles have a YouTube channel? On which they have only posted three videos in the past year? Do you even know who The Beatles are? I mean, they aren’t on Spotify or any other streaming music service so maybe that won’t be an absurd question soon. After all, current and future generations will have a lot to say about the future popularity of the band and if they don’t hear the music, well…
For now, enjoy a live performance of Revolution from 1968. (Update: I have been informed by music nerds that only the vocals are live on this.)
From Dorothy, a beautiful print of the history of electronic music mapped onto the circuit board of a theremin, one of the first electronic instruments.
Our Electric Love Blueprint celebrates over 200 inventors, innovators, composers and musicians who (in our opinion) have been pivotal to the evolution of electronic music from the invention of the earliest known sound recording device in 1857 to the present day. Key pioneers featured include Léon Theremin, Bob Moog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, John Cage, New Order and Aphex Twin.
Some amazing person has collected the full tracks of the songs that were sampled by the Beastie Boys on six of their best-known albums and provided them as a downloadable zip file. That’s 286 tracks, 22 hours of music, and encoded between 256kbps and 320kbps.
Obviously not every sample or drum break can or ever will be identified, but this is about as close as it’s gonna get! With the completion of this eighteen year long ongoing project, I want to personally thank each and every single person out there that has lent insight, shared knowledge, or provided me with any of the tracks that were used to compile this amazing piece of history. It goes without saying that much love, gratitude, and respect is owed to the Beastie Boys for introducing me (and you) to some amazing music via sampling that may otherwise not be heard, let alone acknowledged in this light.
Some of the included tracks:
Led Zeppelin - When The Levee Breaks
Kurtis Blow - Christmas Rappin’
Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Jimi Hendrix - Foxey Lady
Stephen Sondheim - Act I: Company
Peggy Lee - Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay
See also Paul’s Boutique Without Paul’s Boutique, where Tim Carmody provides some context behind the Beasties’ sampling:
The remix is fun to listen to, but mostly, it just reminds you that Paul’s Boutique sounds amazing because its sampled sources were amazing. Like De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, released the same year, Paul’s Boutique lifts tracks that would cost a small mint to borrow from today. (Three Feet High has never had an official digital release because the rights holders still can’t sort out the royalties.) The Beatles, The Supremes, The Ramones, Curtis Mayfield, Dylan, Hendrix, Sly, Bernard Hermann, and James Brown (of course) are all there. But mostly, it’s a love letter to old-school New York City hip hop: Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy 5, The Sugarhill Gang, The Funky 4 +1, and contemporaries like Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy are the glue that holds the whole project together.
Now, if you know Paul’s Boutique well, you can’t hear those older songs any more without hearing Paul’s Boutique. There’s specific moments in those songs that hide there waiting for you to trip over them, like quotations of ancient Greek in an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem. Beastie Boys didn’t just find a way to make older music sound new; they found a way to invent their own precursors.
(via @tcarmody)
The Hood Internet has released their ninth mixtape. Ninth! The highlight so far as I listen for the first time: Daft Punk’s Around the World mixed with The Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face. (via @mathowie)
Update: Downloads and track listing are available on The Hood Internet’s website.
Kent Jones has directed a documentary on the 1962 meeting where a young François Truffaut interviewed a seasoned Alfred Hitchcock about his films (the output of which was a beloved book). As the narration from the trailer says, “[Truffaut] wanted to free Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer”, to which Peter Bogdanovich adds, “it conclusively changed people’s opinions about Hitchcock”.
In 1962 Hitchcock and Truffaut locked themselves away in Hollywood for a week to excavate the secrets behind the mise-en-scène in cinema. Based on the original recordings of this meeting — used to produce the mythical book Hitchcock/Truffaut — this film illustrates the greatest cinema lesson of all time and plummets us into the world of the creator of Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo. Hitchcock’s incredibly modern art is elucidated and explained by today’s leading filmmakers: Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader.
Truffaut’s recontextualization of Hitchcock and his work reminds me of the point Matt Daniels recently made about younger generations deciding how work from older artists is remembered in his post about timeless music:
Biggie has three of the Top 10 hip-hop songs between 1986 and 1999. This is a strong signal that future generations will remember Biggie as the referent artist of 80s and 90s hip-hop. And there’s No Diggity at the top — perhaps it’s that glorious Dr. Dre verse.
Hip hop heads will lament the omission of Rakim, Public Enemy, or Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. It’s a depressing reality that exists for every genre and generation: not every artist will be remembered. The incoming generation will control what’s relevant from the 90s and carried into the future, independent of quality and commercial success. For rock, that might be Blink-182. For electronica, that might be Sandstorm.
Take Star Wars as another example. I’ve had conversations recently with other parents whose young kids are really into the series. The way they experience Star Wars is different than my generation. We saw Episodes IV-VI in the theater, on VHS, and on DVD and then saw Episodes I-III in the theater accompanied by various degrees of disappointment and disregard. Elementary school-aged kids today might have watched the prequels first. They read the comics, play the video games, and watch the Clone Wars animated series. To many of them, the hero of the series is Anakin, not Luke.1 And Generation X, as much as we may hate that, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.2 Unless… there is… another… (via subtraction)
Thanks to Anil or David for this insight…I can’t remember which one of you said it.↩
You know, the Anakin-as-the-true-hero view has its merits, despite how it was presented in the prequels. Anakin was a good kid who fell because he couldn’t handle the power given him but, in the end, was redeemed by the actions of his children. That’s a solid heroic narrative arc. And, glad you noticed, it ties neatly into what I’m trying to say about younger generations rehabbing older ones.↩
Hip-hop group Run the Jewels have released a remix album called Meow the Jewels of their second album that features various meows, purrs, yowls, and other cat noises. Congratulations Internet, we have achieved Peak Cat.
Socials & More