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We all know music when we hear it — or at least we think we do — but how, exactly, do we define it? “Imagine you’re in a jazz club, listening to the rhythmic honking of horns,” says the narrator of the animated TED-Ed video above. “Most people would agree that this is music. But if you were on the highway, hearing the same thing, many would call it noise.” Yet the closer we get to the boundary between music and noise, the less clear it gets. The composer John Cage, to whose work this video provides an introduction, spent his long career in those very borderlands: he “gleefully dared listeners to question the boundaries between music and noise, as well as sound and silence.”
The best-known example of this larger endeavor is “4’33”,” Cage’s 1952 “solo piano piece consisting of nothing but musical rests for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.” Though known as a “silent” composition, it actually makes its listeners focus on all the incidental sounds around them: “Could the opening and closing of a piano lid be music? What about the click of a stopwatch? The rustling, and perhaps even the complaining, of a crowd?”
A few years later, he implicitly asked similar questions about what does and does not count as music to television viewers across America by performing “Water Walk” — whose instruments included “a bathtub, ice cubes, a toy fish, a pressure cooker, a rubber duck, and several radios” — on CBS’ I’ve Got a Secret.
Many who watched that broadcast in 1960 would have asked the same question: “Is this even music?” This may have well have been the outcome for which Cage himself hoped. “Like the white canvases of his painting peers” in that same era, his work “asked the audience to question their expectations about what music was.” As he explored more and more deeply into the territory of unconventional methods of instrumentation, notation, and performance, he drifted farther and farther from the composer’s traditional task: “to organize sound in time for a specific intentional purpose.” Seven decades after “4’33”,” some still insist that John Cage’s work isn’t music — but then, some say the same about Kenny G.
Related content:
Watch John Cage Play His “Silent” 4’33” in Harvard Square, Presented by Nam June Paik (1973)
The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive
John Cage Performs “Water Walk” on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)
An Impressive Audio Archive of John Cage Lectures & Interviews: Hear Recordings from 1963-1991
How to Get Started: John Cage’s Approach to Starting the Difficult Creative Process
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Ryuichi Sakamoto was born and raised in Japan. He rose to prominence as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most influential Japanese band in pop-music history. Last week, he died in Japan. But he also claimed not to consider himself Japanese. That reflects the dedication of his life’s work as a composer and performer to cross-cultural inspiration, collaboration, and synthesis. How fitting that the announcement of his death this past weekend should elicit an outpouring of tributes from fans and colleagues around the world, sharing his work from a variety of different stylistic and technological periods in a variety of different languages.
Fitting, as well, that the first documentary made about Sakamoto as a solo artist should have been directed by a Frenchwoman, the photographer Elizabeth Lennard. Shot in 1984, Tokyo melody: un film sur Ryuichi Sakamoto captures not only Sakamoto himself on the rise as an international cultural figure, but also a Japan that had recently become the red-hot center — at least in the global imagination — of wealth, technology, and even forward-looking imagination. It was in the Japanese capital that Sakamoto recorded Ongaku Zukan, or Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, the album that showed the listening public, in Japan and elsewhere, what it really sounded like to make music not just in but of the late twentieth century.
Or perhaps it was music for the End of History. “Japan has become the leading capitalist country,” Sakamoto says in Tokyo Melody. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. The season of politics is over. People don’t think of rebelling. On the other hand they have a real hunger for culture.” Then comes the footage of wax model food and obsessively ersatz nineteen-fifties-style greasers: clichéd representations of urban Japan at the time, yes, but also genuine reflections of the somehow refined mix-and-match retro-kitsch sensibility that had come to prevail there. “Mainstream culture has lost its authority,” Sakamoto adds. “There is a floating notion of values. Technology is progressing by itself. The gears move more and more efficiently. We feel possibilities appearing that exceed our imagination and our horizons.”
For nearly forty years therafter, Sakamoto would continue to explore this range of possibilities — sublime, bizarre, or even threatening — through his music, whether on his own releases, his projects with other artists, or his many film soundtracks for a range of auteurs including Nagisa Ōshima (for whom he also acted, alongside David Bowie, in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence), Brian De Palma, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Alejandro Iñarritu. In Tokyo Melody he reveals one secret of his success: “When I work with Japanese, I become Japanese. When I work with Westerners, I try to be like them.” Hence the way, no matter the artistic or cultural context, Sakamoto’s music was never identifiable as either Japanese or Western, but always identifiable as his own.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
As Helen Reddy sang in the 70s:
You live your life in the songs you hear
On the rock n’ roll radio…
The 80s ushered in a new era, leaving the music industry forever changed, though the songs themselves retained their power to speak to us on a deeply personal level.
In 1979, the English New Wave band The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” – which famously became the very first song played on MTV the following year (1980) – was getting a lot of attention.
40 years later Puerto Rican rapper and reggaeton artist Bad Bunny dominates, which speaks not only to the public’s evolving musical tastes but also to the expanded access and opportunities of the Internet age.
Listening to all 512 songs on Boogiehead’s mashup Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 in their entirety would take over 24 hours, so Boogiehead settles instead on a single representative phrase, getting the job done in a whirlwind 50 minutes. Watch it above.
For many of us, that’s all it takes to unleash a flood of memories.
Queen, Madonna, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson make strong showings, as do, more recently, Rhianna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, and Ariana Grande.
Elsewhere, there are reminders that fame is not just fleeting, but often tethered to a single hit.
That said, sometimes those hits have remarkable staying power.
Witness Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come On Eileen from 1982, with its prescient lyric “I’ll hum this tune forever…”
And some songs turn out to be an unexpected slow burn. How else to explain one of the third-to-last earworms on Boogiehead’s list, “Running Up That Hill” from English singer-songwriter Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love?
Its appearance on the hit series Stranger Things led it to go viral on TikTok, netting the 64-year-old Bush a host of new fans in their teens and 20s as well as a couple million dollars. Talk about old wine in new bottles!
Forbes’ Peter Suciu observes how songs’ shelf lives and in-roads are longer and wider than they were in the 80s and 90s:
Running Up That Hill has certainly become more popular now than it was when it was released – and one factor could be that social media has changed the way people listen to music. In 1985, when Michael Jackson was the undisputed King of Pop, Kate Bush would have been relegated to “alternative” music radio stations, which were few and far between, or college radio.
Readers, what song from Boogiehead’s Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 do you most wish would make a comeback? Which of the newer songs could you imagine listening to forty years from now? Let us know in the comments.
Listen to the playlist of every song featured on the Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film that came out two years later. “Music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head,” Byrne says in a bizarre contemporary self-interview previously featured here on Open Culture. To make that fact visible onstage, “I wanted my head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.”
Hence costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Talking Heads fans have long referred to as the “big suit.” Byrne has always been willing discuss its origins, which he traces back to a trip to Japan. There, as he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen a lot of traditional Japanese theater, and I realized that yes, that kind of front-facing outline, a suit, a businessman’s suit, looked like one of those things, a rectangle with just a head on top.”
A friend of his, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, said that “everything is bigger on stage.” “He was referring to, I think, gestures and the way you walk and what not,” Byrne told David Letterman in 1984. But he took it literally, thinking, “Well, that solves my costume problem right there.”
Though Byrne only wore the big suit for one number, “Girlfriend Is Better” (from whose lyrics Stop Making Sense takes its title), it became the acclaimed film’s single most iconic element, referenced even in children’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it “a perfect psychological fit,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.” The association hasn’t been without its frustrations; he once speculated that his tombstone would be inscribed with the phrase “Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?” But now that Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration, nearly 40 years after its first release, he’s accepted that the time has finally come to pick it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it still fits.
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Talking Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Concert Film You Haven’t Seen
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Let me quote myself: “From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released Everything is a Remix, a four-part series that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, draw on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new. In the initial series, Ferguson focused on musicians, filmmakers, writers and even video game makers. Now, a little more than a decade later, Ferguson has resurfaced and released a fifth and final chapter in his series, with this episode focusing on a different kind of artist: artificial intelligence.” Above, you can watch the complete edition of “Everything is a Remix,” with all parts combined into a single, hour-long video. A transcript of the entire production can be found here. Watch. Ponder. Create.
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Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit early to be subjected to the kinds of DNA analysis that have become so prevalent today. Luckily, the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century still adhered to the custom of saving locks of hair from the deceased — particularly lucky for an archaeology student named Tristan Begg and his collaborators in the study “Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven,” published just this month in Current Biology. In the video from Cambridge University just above, Begg introduces the research project and describes what new information it reveals about the composer whose life and work have been so intensively studied for so long.
“Working with an international team of scientists, I identified five genetically matching, authentic locks of hair and used them to sequence Beethoven’s genome,” Begg says. “We discovered significant genetic risk factors for liver disease and evidence that Beethoven contracted the Hepatitis B virus in, at the latest, the months before his final illness.”
And “while we couldn’t pinpoint the cause of Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems, we did find modest genetic risk for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,” an autoimmune disease. History remembers Beethoven as a not particularly healthy man; now we have a clearer idea of which conditions he could have suffered.
But this study’s most revelatory discoveries concern not what has to do with Beethoven, but what doesn’t. The famous lock of hair “once believed to have been cut from the dead composer’s head by the fifteen-year-old musician Ferdinand Hiller” turns out to have come from a woman. Nor was Beethoven himself “descended from the main Flemish Beethoven lineage,” which is shown by genetic evidence that “an extramarital relationship resulted in the birth of a child in Beethoven’s direct paternal line at some point between 1572 and 1770.” This news came as a shock to “the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study,” writes the New York Times‘ Gina Kolata. But then, Beethoven’s music still belongs to them — just as it belongs to us all.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
CBGB is a state of mind – Patti Smith
All good things must come to an end, but it hurt when CBGB’s, New York City’s celebrated – and famously filthy – music club shuttered for good on October 15th, 2006, a victim of skyrocketing Lower East Side rents.
While plenty of punk and New Wave luminaries cut their teeth on the legendary venue’s stage – Talking Heads, The Ramones, Blondie – final honors went to Patti Smith, a CBGB’s habitué, whose seven-week residency in 1975 earned her a major record deal.
In her National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, Smith described her first impressions of the place, when she and her guitarist Lenny Kaye headed downtown to catch their friend Richard Hell’s band, Television, following the premiere of the concert film, Ladies & Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones at the Ziegfeld:
CBGB was a deep and narrow room along the right side, lit by overhanging neon signs advertising various brands of beer. The stage was low, on the left-hand side, flanked by photographic murals of turn-of-the-century bathing belles. Past the stage was a pool table, and in back was a greasy kitchen and a room where the owner, Hilly Krystal, worked and slept with his saluki, Jonathan…
It was a world away from the Ziegfeld. The absence of glamour made it seem all the more familiar, a place that we could call our own. As the band played on, you could hear the whack of the pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki barking, bottles clinking, the sounds of a scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.
Some 30 years later, Kaye prepared to bid CBGB goodbye, telling the New York Times, “It’s like it’s grown its own barnacles:”
You couldn’t replicate the décor in a million years, and dismantling all those layers of archaeology of music in the club is a daunting task.
The Village Voice observed that it was “a crazy, emotional night for everyone in the crowd and for everyone on the stage,” and the New York Times reported how Smith documented the club’s awning with a Polaroid, explaining, “I’m sentimental…”
But Smith, who actively encouraged young fans to resist worshiping at the altar of the club’s reputation when they could be starting scenes of their own, also pushed back against sentimentality, telling the crowd, “It’s not a fucking temple — it is what it is.”
That may be, but her three-and-a-half-hour performance, above, was still one for the history books, from the opening reading of Piss Factory (I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City /I’m gonna be so bad I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return) to the closing in memoriam recitation (Joe Strummer…Johnny Thunders…Stiv Bators…Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee Ramone…)
Smith took care that other artists who helped make the scene were represented in her below set lists, from Blondie and Lou Reed to Television and the Dead Boys:
Piss Factory 0:22
Kimberly/Tide is High 12:40
Pale Blue Eyes 20:30
Lou (Reed) had a gift of taking very simple lines, ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ and make it so they magnify on their own. That song has always haunted me. (The Associated Press)
Marquee Moon/We Three 29:02
Television will help wipe out media. They are not theatre. Neither were the early Stones or the Yardbirds. They are strong images procduce from pain and speed and the fanatic desire to make it. They are also inspired enough below the belt to prove that SEX is not dead in rock ‘n’ roll. (Rock Scene)
Distant Fingers 38:48
Without Chains 47:50
We had emotional duties, and I respected that. But I also thought it was important to do a song like that. (Rolling Stone)
Ghost Dance 55:30
Birdland 1:00:08
Sonic Reducer 1:11:52
Redondo Beach 1:16:00
Free Money 1:20:44
Pissing in a River 1:28:27
Gimme Shelter 1:33:50
I was thinking about the words to that: “War, children, it’s just a shot away.” To me, a song like that is more meaningful than ever. (Rolling Stone)
Space Monkey 1:43
Blitzkrieg Bop / Beat on the Brat / Do You Remember Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio? / Sheena Is a Punk Rocker 1:48:30
Ain’t It Strange 1:55:20
So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star 2:02:11
Babelogue/Rock n Roll N – – – – – – 2:10:17
Happy Birthday to Flea 2:21:38
For Your Love 2:22:15
My Generation 2:27:22
Land/Gloria 2:36:51
Even though I wrote the poem at the beginning of “Gloria” in 1970, it took all those years to evolve, to merge into “Gloria.” And that was pretty much done at CBGB. We recorded Horses in 1975, and did all the groundwork at CBGB. (Rolling Stone)
Elegie 2:55:57
As I was reading that little list, those people seemed in that moment — because of the intense emotional energy in that room — to be alive. Everyone in the room knew or heard of or loved one of those people. That collective love and sorrow and recognition made those people seem as alive as any of us. (Rolling Stone)
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
In the early 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th century BCE. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the hurrian language,” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music ever discovered, a 3,400 year-old cult hymn. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, professor of Assyriology at the University of California, produced the interpretation below in 1972. (She describes how she arrived at the musical notation—in some technical detail—in this interview.) Since her initial publications in the 60s on the ancient Sumerian tablets and the musical theory found within, other scholars of the ancient world have published their own versions.
The piece, writes Richard Fink in a 1988 Archeologia Musicalis article, confirms a theory that “the 7-note diatonic scale as well as harmony existed 3,400 years ago.” This, Fink tells us, “flies in the face of most musicologists’ views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks.”
Kilmer’s colleague Richard Crocker claimed that the discovery “revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music.” So, academic debates aside, what does the oldest song in the world sound like? Listen to a midi version below and hear it for yourself. Doubtless, the midi keyboard was not the Sumerians instrument of choice, but it suffices to give us a sense of this strange composition, though the rhythm of the piece is only a guess.
Kilmer and Crocker published an audio book on vinyl (now on CD) called Sounds From Silence in which they narrate information about ancient Near Eastern music, and, in an accompanying booklet, present photographs and translations of the tablets from which the song above comes. They also give listeners an interpretation of the song, titled “A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit,” performed on a lyre, an instrument likely much closer to what the song’s first audiences heard. Unfortunately, for that version, you’ll have to make a purchase, but you can hear a different lyre interpretation of the song by Michael Levy below, as transcribed by its original discoverer Dr. Richard Dumbrill.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014. It’s old but gold. So we hope you enjoy revisiting it again.
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Above, Snarky Puppy drummer Larnell Lewis explains drumming in 13 levels of difficulty, from easy to complex, showing how “drum techniques build upon each other as the easiest levels incorporate the hi-hat, bass and snare drums, and more difficult levels include polyrhythms, the floor tom, ride cymbals, syncopation and much more.” It’s fun to watch. In another video from the same series produced by Wired magazine, musician Jacob Collier explains the concept of harmony with increasing difficulty to five different people– a child, a teen, a college student, a professional, and jazz legend Herbie Hancock. Enjoy…
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First released in 1984, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed concert film Stop Making Sense featured the Talking Heads at the height of their creative and musical powers. The film starts with David Byrne, alone on a bare stage, with a boombox and his big white suit, performing “Psycho Killer.” Then, with each new song, he’s joined by different bandmates and an assemblage of gear and lights, all showing, step-by-step, how a concert gets made. It’s an inventive film. And it’s coming back to theaters this August, restored no less in 4K resolution.
Above, in the official trailer, watch Byrne retrieve his oversized suit from the dry cleaners some 40 years late, then try it on for size. Turns out, it still fits….
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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, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!
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Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (hear the original EP version here) became, according to the BBC, “a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties.” If you frequented a dance club during the 1980s, you know the song.
The original “Blue Monday” never quite won me over. I’m much more Rolling Stones than New Order. But I’m taken with the adaptation above. Created by the “Orkestra Obsolete,” this version tries to imagine what the song would have sounded like in 1933, using only instruments available at the time— for example, writes the BBC, the theremin, musical saw, harmonium and prepared piano. Quite a change from the Powertron Sequencer, Moog Source synthesizer, and Oberheim DMX drum machine used to record the song in the 80s. Enjoy this little thought experiment put into action.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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If you don’t listen to rap, you’ve heard the same questions over and over in response to that confession. One of the most common is “But have you heard De La Soul?” — which in recent years was easier said than done, at least on streaming platforms. “What kept De La’s tunes out of rotation was a frustrating morass of outdated contracts and record label parsimony,” writes Oliver Wang at NPR. One complication had to do with sampling, a standard hip hop practice conducted in such a far-reaching, freewheeling, and elaborate manner by De La Soul that the prospect of renegotiating each and every sonic snippet they’d cleared in the CD-and-tape era inspired untold corporate intransigence.
But as of this month, “all this has finally been rectified. The group’s most important recordings are now legally available on the internet.” None of them is more important than their debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, originally released in 1989 and added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2010.
As Wang writes, the album “reshaped the public imagination of what hip-hop could be. The core trio — Posdnuos, Trugoy and DJ Pasemaster Mase — assisted by mentor/producer Prince Paul all came straight outta the wilds of suburban Long Island, rapping about advice-spouting crocodiles, Martian transmissions, and an artistic meta-concept they dubbed The D.A.I.S.Y. (Da Inner Soul, Y’all) Age.”
Clearly, De La Soul had a set of artistic priorities all their own. “Sample-hungry rap producers had spent the previous few years mining the James Brown and P-Funk catalogs and though De La sampled from both on their debut, they were more likely to create memorable musical moments from children’s television songs (‘The Magic Number’), obscure doo-wop singles (‘Plug Tunin”) and classic ’80s pop hits (‘Say No Go’),” to say nothing of a learn-at-home French record. The first time I remember hearing De La Soul was when an early-morning college-radio DJ put on the 3 Feet High track “Eye Know,” which samples Steely Dan — as well as the Mad Lads, Lee Dorsey, and Otis Redding.
As if 3 Feet High and Rising weren’t enough of a cavalcade of wonders, it comes as only one of six De La Soul albums newly available to stream. On the group’s official Youtube channel and other streaming platforms, you can also hear De La Soul Is Dead (1991), Buhloone Mindstate (1993), Stakes Is High (1996), and the Art Official Intelligence pair Thump and Bionix (2001), each of which marks an expansion of the group’s already considerable ambitions. They all join the already-streamable albums released over the twenty years up to the death of founding member David “Trugoy” Jolicoeur last month, an event that may put end to De La Soul as a recording entity. But if you do listen through their expansive and inventive body of work, be prepared for another question: have you heard A Tribe Called Quest?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon we bring you this: a busker fittingly playing “Time” in front of the nearly 2000-year-old Pantheon in Rome. That the police try to break up the show hardly matters. The busker continues, and returns on other days to play “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb.” If you’re a Pink Floyd fan, this scene may call to mind Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, the 1972 concert documentary that featured the band playing eight songs amidst the ruins of Pompeii. Rock among the rocks. You can explore that scene here.
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Coming after the maturation of the market for high-fidelity stereo systems but before the advent of home video, the nineteen-seventies provided just the right cultural and economic conditions for a heroic age of the record album. What’s Going On, Blue, Blood on the Tracks, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run, Rumours, Aja: that these and other seventies releases always rank high on best-of-all-time lists can be no accident. But no other mega-selling album of that decade achieved quite the combination of commercial and critical success as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was originally released fifty years ago yesterday — and which remains on the Billboard charts today.
“In 1973, Pink Floyd was a somewhat known progressive rock band,” writes neuroscientist and music producer Daniel Levitin, but The Dark Side of the Moon “catapulted them into world class rock-star status.”
Its masterful engineering “propelled the music off of any sound system to become an all-encompassing, immersive experience” comprising songs that “flow into one another symphonically, with seamless musical coherence, as though written as part of a single melodic and harmonic gesture. Lyric themes of madness and alienation connect throughout,” enlivened by an “array of new electronic sounds, spatialization, pitch and time bending” as well as “clocks, alarms, chimes, cash registers, footsteps” and other elements not normally heard in rock music.
This description comes from an essay Levitin wrote for the Library of Congress in 2012, when The Dark Side of the Moon was inducted into the US National Recording Registry. For the album’s fiftieth anniversary, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition invited him to psychoanalyze it on-air. “Themes of madness and alienation permeate the record,” he says, making reference to the story of departed Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. But “we can’t know for sure which specific lyrics were about Barrett, as opposed, more generally, to mental anguish,” a condition bound to afflict anyone too deep into the rock-star lifestyle.
In The Dark Side of the Moon‘s lyrics Levitin hears Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters’ metaphorical treatment of the difficult decision to fire Barrett, as well as his realization that “life wasn’t going to start later. It had started. And the idea of ‘Time’ was to grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny.” As on the album as a whole, the theme comes through in not just the words but the soundscape: “Right off the bat, they’re playing with time. You hear that clop-clop sound, like a heartbeat or a clock ticking. And you think that the higher-pitched one is the downbeat. But as soon as the instruments come in, you realize you’re off the beat, and everything’s upside down. And your sense of time is distorted.”
Musical artistry accounts in part for the album’s massive success in part, but only in part. Storm Thorgerson’s iconic cover art, still seen on the walls of college dorm rooms today, also had something to do with its success as both cultural phenomenon and consumer product. But it could hardly have sold more than 45 million copies to date without chancing to hit the zeitgeist at a favorable angle: as Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason said, it was “not only about being a good album but also about being in the right place at the right time.” And with the heroic age of the album long over, The Dark Side of the Moon — a newly re-recorded version of which Waters announced just this year — isn’t about to be eclipsed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Before Super Bowl LVII fades too far into the background (being an Eagles fan, it can’t fade fast enough for me), it’s worth flagging this great ASL performance of Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Above, you can watch Justina Miles, a nursing student at HBCU Bowie State University, become “the first female deaf performer for the Super Bowl’s halftime show,” notes CNBC. Before this, Miles went viral when her ASL performance of Lil’ Kim’s “Crush on You” exploded on TikTok. As one commenter noted on YouTube, this may be the best Super Bowl performance since Prince.
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Punk is not only not dead, it’s getting a fresh burst of energy, thanks to The Unglamorous Music Project, a female collective in Leicester.
In accordance with punk tradition, musical ability is not a primary concern.
Shockingly, life experience is.
With five, six, and seven decades worth, Unglamorous Music Project participants have no illusions about how women their age – with the possible exception of Patti Smith – are perceived.
Rather than content themselves with crumbs and conform to societal expectations, they are going hard in newly formed bands like The Wonky Portraits, Dada Women, BOILERS, Velvet Crisis and The Verinos, above.
“This is definitely not ‘cutesy grannies have a go at punk’ band,” BOILERS’ Allison “Fish” Dunne emphasized to The Guardian:
I’ve got no fucks to give any more about what anyone thinks of me…We write our own music and we’ve got a lot to say about everything we’re angry about. I’ve been enraged for years.
The Verinos’ 61-year-old Ruth Miller, founder of The Unglamorous Music Project, told RNZ how she tapped into an unexpectedly rich reservoir of previously unacted upon mature female musical impulse, when she mentioned her plan to form a band to the friend with whom she drank coffee and talked politics.
The friend confessed that she’d long wanted to take up the drums, and on the strength of that comment was drafted as drummer for the Verinos, after watching one instructional YouTube video.
A “really cool looking older woman” with “sticking up hair” whom Miller approached in a restaurant, asking, “Excuse me, are you in a band?” earned her place by answering “No, but I’ve always wanted to learn bass.”
I think as a woman, you hit a particular age and you think, “Well, I don’t care what anyone thinks. It’s my life, and I really want to do music again, and it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. They don’t have to listen…”
But they do like it! It’s incredibly appealing, that idea of seeing a group of older women who are just themselves.
Miller believes that rather than paying for private lessons and concentrating on the “proper” way to play music, beginners should let go of their inhibitions and have a go at playing communally.
The principles of the Unglamorous Music Project spell it out even more explicitly:
Perhaps an unspoken principle, given the Project’s emphasis on fun, is assuming Ramones-style stage names, a la Vim, Vi, Volcano, Vixen and VeeDee Verino.
If you’re inspired to join the movement, mark your calendar for March, 8, International Women’s Day and join Miller’s Facebook group, 66 Days to your Debut.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
The vinyl record–we’ve shown you how they were made way back in 1937, and also in 1956. But how about nowadays, during the renaissance of vinyl? Above, Wired visits Jack White’s Third Man Records vinyl pressing plant in Detroit, Michigan to “find out exactly what goes into the creation of a vinyl record; from cutting and pressing to making sure they sound great.” If you’re in the Detroit area, you can take a tour of Third Man Records’ pressing plant. Get more info here.
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In the year 1966, “it seemed to Western youth that The Beatles knew — that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records.” So writes Ian McDonald in the critical study Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. But some had been looking to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr as pop-culture oracles since they put out their first album in 1963. Unlike the youth-oriented stars who came before, they fully inhabited the roles of both performers and creators. If anyone knew how to read the zeitgeist of that decade, surely it was the Beatles.
Hence the appearance of each Beatle in Melody Maker magazine’s “Blind Date” feature, which captured its subjects’ spontaneous reactions to the singles on the charts at the moment. When Lennon sat for a Blind Date in January of 1964, he gave his verdict on songs from Manfred Mann, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Ray Charles, and Ricky Nelson — as well as the now-less-well-known Marty Wilde, Millicent Martin, and The Bruisers.
You can see the article turned into a full audiovisual production, complete with clips of the music, at the Youtube channel Yesterday’s Papers. There you can also compare its playlist to that of McCartney’s session just three years later, but on a transformed musical landscape populated by the likes of The Small Faces, Donovan, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Byrds.
For that last California band McCartney expresses appreciation, if also reservations about what then seemed to him their stylistic stagnation: the late David Crosby, he notes, “knows where they should be going musically.” Other than calling the then-passé Gene Pitney’s “In the Cold Light of Day” a song he’s heard “hundreds of times before, although I haven’t actually heard this record,” he keeps his assessment characteristically positive. More surprising are Starr’s harsh verdicts on the pop music of December 1964, not just the songs themselves (though the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” notably fails to impress him), but also the judgment of the audiences they target. “Being good,” he says of the Daylighters’ “Oh Mom,” “it won’t sell.”
Of Sandra Barry’s “We Were Lovers (When The Party Began),” Starr comments that it “sounds like an Englishman trying to be American, which never works properly.” Having grown up worshiping American rock-and-roll and started their own careers anxious about being received as foreign interlopers, the Fab Four show a natural sensitivity to this transatlantic dynamic in pop music. “It’s good if it’s English, mediocre if it’s American,” says Harrison of a song before finding out that the singer is his countryman Glyn Geoffrey Ellis, better known as Wayne Fontana. “Those breaks are so British,” Lennon says of a Unit 4 + 2 single of December 1965, and he doesn’t seem to mean it as a good thing. But when McCartney calls a Kiki Dee number “British to the core” the following year, it’s hard not to hear a note of admiration.
On Yesterday’s Papers’ Blind Date playlist, you can see and hear more nineteen-sixties and seventies music reviews from Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Dusty Springfield, Frank Zappa, Brian Jones, Roger Daltrey, Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, and many other icons of twentieth-century popular music besides.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.
Back in 2016, we showed you Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” getting played on a 1905 fairground organ. But now we’re stepping it up a level, and letting you behold this: organist Joshua Stafford performing the same Queen classic on a Midmer-Losh pipe organ. Built with 33,112 pipes, it’s apparently the “largest pipe organ ever constructed, the largest musical instrument ever constructed, and the loudest musical instrument ever constructed.” You can find it in the Main Auditorium of the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, NJ. Enjoy.
h/t Allie
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Back in April 2020, animator Henning M. Lederer launched his “Books & Sleeves” project where he turns abstract geometric patterns, all featured on vintage book and record covers, into mesmerizing moving images. Above, you can watch the second installment of the project, which doesn’t disappoint.
In the past, we’ve also featured more of Lederer’s creative work–from his animations of mid-century minimalist book covers and vintage psychology and philosophy books, to his animation of a 1926 lithograph that famously portrays the human body as a modern factory. Be sure to give them all a watch.
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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, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!
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