Links and Thoughts 7: 14 May 2014
Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy
Good Morning.
No: the daily music embed usually has nothing to do with the rest of the post — but thanks for asking.
Media: Physical media, not the other type –
“The week-long course aimed to provide students with an introduction to identification, handling and preservation of a range of audiovisual formats, with students receiving hands-on experience with motion picture film, magnetic media, audio technologies and video. In the pictures above, students are seen exploring the insides of VHS, U-matic casettes, magnetic tape and more. The workshop included training on basic conservation treatments, such as splicing and tear repair of motion picture film, preservation winding of films, and cleaning of material.”
http://ebookporn.tumblr.com/post/85568173337/studentconservators-blog-ever-considered-the
Food: The surprisingly complex story (drug cartels! climate change! citrus viruses!) behind $1 limes -
The Soaring Price of Limes Means Trouble : AlterNet
Music: “The vocals are Jackson, but the production is not, and it shows.”
Michael Jackson’s New Album And Why We Can’t Say Goodbye To Dead Musicians
Jackson comes with… baggage. But the songs were good, dammit. I don’t think we give MJ enough credit as an arranger and producer — sure, he was self-taught and relied on recording himself singing a cappella riffs, horns, and drum parts into an audio tape recorder — but if you have to teach yourself pop music composition, there are worse ways to do it than hanging around Motown studios in the 70s.
I still don’t understand the persistent, rabid (and worldwide) fan base he inspires, but I guess I wasn’t part of the target audience in the 80s.
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Today’s Book Recommendation is The Rolling Stone Album Guide — from 1992. Do not be fooled into thinking the 2004 update made the guide any better — and besides, you can get the 1992 edition for like $3 (plus shipping). A book (physical book) like this isn’t about the latest music anyway. When you can listen to free samples online of just about any track off any album anyway, one hardly needs an independent arbiter of taste to tell you what’s good. These days we also have wikipedia, of course, and any artist’s discography is no more than 5 seconds and a google search away. The reason to pick up the Album Guide then, is its importance as a historical document — for $3 — and a handy music education that you can leave on top of the toilet tank and flip through at your leisure for the next decade.
That, and you (pop and rock fan) need this thing for the Jazz and Blues album reviews.
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Diary entry for 14 May:
Music is an important part of my life. Though obviously, we would all say that.
(If you don’t, you are a sad, sad person and I pity the life you must be suffering through.)
According to reputable sources [soundcheck, nytimes, cracked] your musical tastes are formed in your early teens and for many of us, they get stuck there — that’s not to say you won’t discover new bands later in life, but the new bands will often sound like the old ones.
I’m not sure where my own taste comes from, to tell you the truth, because I like stuff that came out the year I was born, and years and decades before that. It also doesn’t explain how new music revolutions get started — If we key in on the music when we were, say, 14, then where did your&my favorite artists catch the bug when they were 14? Shouldn’t that sound and my favs’ sound, well, sound the same? There’s also the phenomenon of the garage band: kids grabbing instruments and practicing with friends, you know, in high school. They start out copying their favorite artists (and thus many a bad cover band is born) but the acts that make it—a few years later in their early 20s—are obviously bringing something else to the table, not just the style they imprinted on at 14.
It’s a really interesting idea — and may explain the periodic revivals of things like funk, ska, and punk, or the pendulum swing between pared-back guitar-bass-drums ‘rock’ and lusher arrangements with strings and choirs and shit. One trend inevitably leads to a reaction by the other, and each time we bring back the “old” sound, critics inevitably gush about how this is the “real” sound.
Me? Eh. I like it all — but if you can add a horn line and a slap bass to it, you’ll make me happier.
My eclectic tastes can be traced back to elementary and middle school music education programs: I was in the band. 14 is when I started playing in Jazz Band, in fact, after playing instruments for 7 years at that point, and sax for 4. So while my peers were listening Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, and yes, Michael Jackson — as well as watching MTV, which for you kids out there, was a music-thing back in the 80s kind of like YouTube, unrelated to whatever currently calls itself ‘MTV’ — *I* was getting some grounding in the jazz music and standards of the 30s, 40s, and 50s on top of all that pop, plus my dad’s vinyl collection (folk from the 70s, mostly; not that I would play ‘em but he would, on weekends) — and ice that whole cake with the emerging radio format “classic rock”, which was also a new thing once:
“Classic rock is a radio format which developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format features music ranging generally from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, primarily focusing on commercially-successful hard rock, blues rock, and arena rock popularized in the 1970s.” — wikipedia
Pile on even more: I grew up in the American south and so had to listen to some country music (unless I never left the house) — plus exposure to this one cover band, out of New York and even more 60s music that ended up on a lot of 80s movie soundtracks and…
well, yeah: I heard it all. I ended up liking a lot of music, and a lot of different types of music, even some that would seem mutually incompatible.
I didn’t discover funk until college. Junior year, I think, by way of James Brown and his backing band, the JBs, and I found my way to James Brown through the samples used by Hip Hop — when you read an article citing James Brown as the most sampled artist, you think to yourself, “hm, I need to listen to some early James Brown”.
So from 1930s Jazz through ‘standards’ and early rock and roll and both the rock and folk sides of the 60s and into everything-but-disco in the 70s (but disco too, because I lived through the 70s) and on to the “new” music of the late 80s — which included the 2nd wave of heavy metal and the ‘golden age’ of hip hop (MTV and most of the media were still calling it ‘rap’ back then, as I recall) — and right up until Nirvana (which is a bright dividing line in music to me, at least, from ‘what was’ to ‘what is’, maybe because I was 17 or so at the time) I was exceptionally well versed in music, including weird stuff my friends had never heard of. My favorite band was Morphine. I collected choral music, with a decided preference for settings of the requiem mass. I played pop music in the stands at GT football games, and weirder stuff in music classes. I legitimately like Rush and own all their studio albums (I’m not as particular about collecting the live albums, though).
I think the only reason I didn’t become a music critic (aside from my love of Rush, which in most people’s eyes automatically disqualifies me) is because I can find it hard to say anything *bad* about music – there’s almost always something good to listen to, even if it’s only the ‘hit single’ off the album . And if it’s bad, truly bad, why would I want to listen to it to begin with?
[Morphine – “You speak my language” & “Honey white”]
To top it all off, folks tell me I have a “radio voice”. Maybe that’s my calling: not that we need radio DJs anymore — even back in the 80s when I was listening to ‘classic rock’ the role of the DJ was being replaced by market-tested corporate playlists. These days, your “local” radio is supplied via satellite from Clear Channel corporate out of NORAD or somewhere before being rebroadcast — and the only place you still listen to radio, maybe, is in your car. The rest of the time you have an iPod or your phone or the internet, streaming music…
…or you trawl YouTube for hours each week looking for great songs to share on social media – A DJ for an audience of maybe a dozen (who knows how many people actually click to open the links) and a radio show that plays out in slow motion, 4 minutes at a time, every day. Good Morning. —M.
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