Prof. Iggy Pop Delivers the BBC’s 2014 John Peel Lecture on “Free Music in a Capitalist Society”

What Alan Freed did for rock ‘n ‘ roll in the ‘50s, DJ John Peel did for punk and new wave in the 70s and 80s, play­ing ground­break­ing artists like Joy Divi­sion on his show and curat­ing essen­tial in-stu­dio per­for­mances in his Peel Ses­sions. But long before he first played the Ramones on his BBC show in 1976, Peel played the 1969 debut album by the Stooges, the scrap­py Detroit garage band whose front­man, Iggy Pop, would lat­er be grant­ed the title “god­fa­ther of punk.” He’s cer­tain­ly lived up to it, con­sis­tent­ly, writes Kris Needs at Clash, “dump­ing on rock ‘n’ roll’s pre­vi­ous­ly set-in stone inhi­bi­tions.” Each new gen­er­a­tion has giv­en Pop a new set of restric­tions to dump on, but many of them could, per­haps, boil down to the same thing, the very con­di­tion Peel so often diag­nosed in pop cul­ture: the pack­ag­ing and sell­ing of rock ‘n’ roll that com­pro­mis­es its raw pow­er and dimin­ish­es its artists.

Who bet­ter then to deliv­er the 2014 John Peel Lec­ture for the BBC at the UK Radio Fes­ti­val, despite the fact that Iggy Pop—who Rolling Stone describes as “a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks”—has nev­er deliv­ered a lec­ture before? But he has always been wit­ty and wise, on albums and inter­views, and he is now—as was Peel for over three decades—a BBC DJ, a role that grants him a cer­tain amount of crit­i­cal author­i­ty.

It’s not his only side gig. Dur­ing his lec­ture, Pop admits he’s had to begin “diver­si­fy­ing my income,” appear­ing, for exam­ple, in insur­ance ads for UK insur­ance com­pa­ny Swift­cov­er (England’s been good to him). “If I had to depend on what I actu­al­ly get from sales,” says Pop, “I’d be tend­ing bars between sets.” This is the sit­u­a­tion he addresses—the plight of the artists, the labels, and the fans in today’s mar­ket­place. The top­ic of his lec­ture: “free music in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety.”

Iggy is crit­i­cal of the U2/Apple alliance and their intru­sive and unpop­u­lar recent mass album release, but he prais­es Thom Yorke’s deci­sion to release his lat­est solo album on peer-to-peer file shar­ing ser­vice Bit­Tor­rent for $6. Acknowl­edg­ing that Bit­Tor­rent “is a pirate’s friend,” he claims nonethe­less that “all pirates want to go legit, just like I want­ed to be respectable.” This last remark may come as a sur­prise from the guy who want­ed to be your dog, but although he defines cap­i­tal­ism as dom­i­nat­ing and destruc­tive, Pop isn’t anti-entrepreneurial—he’s sim­ply a cham­pi­on of the lit­tle guy. He denounces dig­i­tal theft, call­ing it “bad for every­thing,” but he doesn’t want to see file-shar­ers jailed, which is “a lot like send­ing some­body to Aus­tralia a cou­ple hun­dred years ago for poach­ing his lordship’s rab­bit.”

The larg­er prob­lem is the media con­glom­er­ates, includ­ing not only major labels, but also, and maybe more so, Apple and Google sub­sidiary YouTube, who are “try­ing to put the squeeze” on the indies, “the only place to go for new tal­ent, out­side of the Mick­ey Mouse Club.” Over­all, the talk is a very sober and sober­ing look at the music indus­try from an old pro who has clear­ly paid care­ful atten­tion to the trends. And although his glass­es and stance behind a podi­um might make him look the part, Pop is a lit­tle less pro­fes­so­r­i­al than con­ver­sa­tion­al, deliv­er­ing some bad news with sev­er­al dos­es of opti­mism and good humor, and exhibit­ing an unabashed will­ing­ness to mix tech, cre­ativ­i­ty, and com­merce in a TED-like way.

The com­plete lec­ture was broad­cast on BBC DJ Marc Riley’s show, and you can stream it here for the next four weeks (the talk begins at 37:00, but lis­ten to the first thir­ty min­utes of the show for some excel­lent music and an intro­duc­tion to John Peel). And if you’re in a hur­ry, catch the high­lights of Iggy’s lec­ture in The Guardian’s “Cliff­sish Notes ver­sion” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From The Stooges to Iggy Pop: 1986 Doc­u­men­tary Charts the Rise of Punk’s God­fa­ther

Iggy Pop Con­ducts a Tour of New York’s Low­er East Side, Cir­ca 1993

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Typed Portraits of Literary Legends: Kerouac, Saramago, Bukowski & More

Artists have used all sorts of odd media to cre­ate por­traits, every­thing from gui­tar picks to dice to wood­en eggs. Add to this list Brazil­ian type artist Álvaro Fran­ca, who uses the type­writer. Instead of com­pos­ing lit­er­ary por­traits of his heroes, Fran­ca types out lit­er­al por­traits. The prin­ci­ple of the pic­tures are the same grey-scale print­ing used in news­pa­pers or, if you spent time in the com­put­er lab in the 1990s, those dot matrix images that were such the rage among com­put­er nerds. Using a com­put­er, Fran­ca breaks the image down into dis­crete pix­els and adds one or more key­strokes to that pix­el. ‘I’ and ‘O’ seem to work for lighter greys while visu­al­ly dense let­ters like ‘x’and “m” are used for the dark­er end of the spec­trum.

As he writes in on his web­site:

Type­writ­ten Por­traits is an exper­i­men­tal art project. Dur­ing my exchange in the Cam­bridge School of Art, I devel­oped a tech­nique for imag­ing gray scale with the type­writer and, from there, I made por­traits of five of my favorite authors in lit­er­a­ture who worked on type­writ­ers. The series is still ongo­ing and there are plans for five more pic­tures.

You can see a time-lapse video of Fran­ca cre­at­ing a por­trait of beat icon Jack Ker­ouac above. And below you can see a few more pic­tures includ­ing Charles Bukows­ki and Jose Sara­m­a­go here.

bukowski typed

 

via Boing Boing

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Draw­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Animated Sheet Music of 3 Charlie Parker Jazz Classics: “Confirmation,” “Au Privave” & “Bloomdido”

We’ve shown you two exceed­ing­ly rare pieces of footage that cap­ture jazz sax­o­phon­ist Char­lie “Bird” Park­er in action: one fea­tur­ing him play­ing with Dizzy Gille­spie, his fel­low “found­ing father of bebop,” in 1952; and anoth­er, from two years before, where he plays with the likes of Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzger­ald. But since so lit­tle motion-pic­ture mate­r­i­al of Park­er exists, his fans must have savored even see­ing just the sheet music of his piece “Con­fir­ma­tion” ani­mat­ed when we post­ed it last year, along­side oth­er such videos bring­ing to life the nota­tion of works by greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “To see it ani­mat­ed,” wrote Josh Jones, “is to see Park­er dance a very dif­fer­ent step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with com­plex melod­ic para­graphs instead of chordal phras­es.” Indeed.

And the source of those videos, Dan Cohen’s Youtube chan­nel Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music, has even more Park­er in store. Here you can also enjoy Cohen’s ani­ma­tions of “Au Pri­vave,” that 1951 bebop stan­dard with the mys­te­ri­ous­ly un-French French title, and Park­er’s 1953 blues “Bloom­di­do.” These will, nat­u­ral­ly, pro­vide a rich watch­ing and lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence to those well-versed in the mechan­ics of both music nota­tion and the forms of jazz, but even if you know noth­ing at all about either sub­ject, these ani­ma­tions more than repay the short time spent. If you’d like to get less an expla­na­tion than a feel of how sheet music works, and indeed how jazz works, you could do much worse than get­ting it through a visu­al­iza­tion of Park­er’s inim­itable play­ing — and you might well come away with just a lit­tle bit more of a grasp on what, exact­ly, makes it inim­itable in the first place. “After spend­ing sev­er­al hours pre­cise­ly tim­ing Char­lie Park­er’s eighth and six­teenth notes,” writes Cohen, “I have come to the con­clu­sion that the dude can swing.” Indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Jazz Greats Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young & Ella Fitzger­ald (1950)

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Watch Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Char­lie Parker’s “Con­fir­ma­tion” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear Michel Foucault’s Final UC Berkeley Lectures, “Discourse and Truth” (1983)

We’ve writ­ten quite a bit in pre­vi­ous posts about French philoso­pher Michel Fou­cault’s time in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia dur­ing the final years of his life, and for good rea­son. Dur­ing these years he became some­thing of an aca­d­e­m­ic super­star in the Unit­ed States, deliv­er­ing lec­tures to packed halls at UC Berke­ley, NYU, UCLA, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont, becom­ing fet­ed in aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments across the human­i­ties, and receiv­ing men­tion in TIME mag­a­zine. He also, sad­ly, con­tract­ed AIDS and passed away in 1984, leav­ing the intrigu­ing fourth vol­ume of his exhaus­tive His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty unfin­ished. It remains unpub­lished at his request.

The title of the mys­te­ri­ous fourth vol­ume, Con­fes­sions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair), pro­vides us with the con­nec­tive tis­sue between his final project and the lec­tures Fou­cault record­ed in Eng­lish at Berke­ley. Those lectures—including “The Cul­ture of the Self” and “Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty”—betray his obses­sion with con­fes­sion, with truth-telling as an act of self-mak­ing.

In a sense, Foucault’s Berke­ley lec­tures crys­tal­ized his life’s work. Just above, in his final Berke­ley lec­ture series, “Dis­course and Truth: the Prob­lema­ti­za­tion of Par­rhe­sia,” Fou­cault deliv­ers what may be the most plain-spo­ken state­ment of his gen­er­al the­sis: “My inten­tion was not to deal with the prob­lem of truth, but with the prob­lem of the truth-teller or truth-telling as an activ­i­ty.”

Such direct­ness of speech is, in fact, the mean­ing of that obscure Greek term, par­rhe­sia, with which Fou­cault frames his dis­cus­sion. Mean­ing “free speech,” the word—rather than, as we might think, relat­ing to the exer­cise of one’s first amend­ment rights—“refers to a type of rela­tion­ship between the speak­er and what he says.”

For in par­rhe­sia, the speak­er makes it man­i­fest­ly clear and obvi­ous that what he says is his own opin­ion. And he does this by avoid­ing any kind of rhetor­i­cal form which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the par­rhe­si­astes uses the most direct words and forms of expres­sion he can find.

Fou­cault, of course, reveals this kind of speech—as elab­o­rat­ed in Greek phi­los­o­phy and the work of Euripi­des— to be a per­for­mance with its own com­pli­cat­ed set of rules and codes. “Truth-telling as an activ­i­ty,” Fou­cault con­cludes, presents the con­cept of truth as “true state­ments and sound rea­son­ing” with a num­ber of seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able prob­lems. Put most plain­ly, our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties, Fou­cault argues, make enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed any notion of objec­tiv­i­ty.

Hear all six of the 1983 lec­tures above or stream or down­load MP3s from UC Berkeley’s library site. The full text of each lec­ture is also avail­able on Foucault.info and down­load­able as PDFs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Michel Foucault’s Lec­ture “The Cul­ture of the Self,” Pre­sent­ed in Eng­lish at UC Berke­ley (1983)

Hear Michel Fou­cault Deliv­er His Lec­ture on “Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty” at UC Berke­ley, In Eng­lish (1980)

Michel Fou­cault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Theorist’s Con­tro­ver­sial Life and Phi­los­o­phy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

The Cry of Jazz: 1958’s Highly Controversial Film on Jazz & Race in America (With Music by Sun Ra)

“Jazz is dead.” You can imag­ine how that state­ment, poten­tial­ly inflam­ma­to­ry even today, shook things up when film­mak­er Edward Bland dared to say it in 1958. He did­n’t cause the stir so much by say­ing the words him­self, but by putting them in the mouth of Alex, one of the main char­ac­ters in his con­tro­ver­sial “semi-doc­u­men­tary” The Cry of Jazz. Alex appears in the film as one of sev­en mem­bers of a racial­ly mixed jazz appre­ci­a­tion soci­ety, strag­glers who stay behind after a meet­ing and fall into a con­ver­sa­tion about the nature, ori­gin, and future of jazz music. “Thanks a lot, Bruce, for show­ing me how rock and roll is jazz,” says an appre­cia­tive Natal­ie, one of the white women, to one of the white men. Enter, swift­ly, Alex, one of the black men:

“Bruce? Did you tell her that rock and roll was jazz?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s what I told her. Is there some­thing wrong with that?”

“Bruce, how square can you get? Rock and roll is not jazz. Rock and roll is mere­ly an off­spring of rhythm and blues.”

the_cry_of_jazz

Debate ensues, but Alex ulti­mate­ly pre­vails, leav­ing all races present speech­less with his abil­i­ty to unite the nar­ra­tive of jazz music with the nar­ra­tive of the black Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence. We have here less a fic­tion film or a doc­u­men­tary than a type of heat­ed didac­tic essay — a cry itself, in some sense — unlike any oth­er motion pic­ture on the sub­ject. “The movie caused an uproar,” writes the New York Times’ Paul Vitel­lo in Bland­’s 2013 obit­u­ary. “Notable intel­lec­tu­als took sides. The nov­el­ist Ralph Elli­son called it offen­sive. The poet LeRoi Jones, lat­er known as Amiri Bara­ka, called it pro­found­ly insight­ful. An audi­ence dis­cus­sion after a screen­ing in 1960 in Green­wich Vil­lage became so heat­ed that the police were called. The British crit­ic Ken­neth Tynan, in a col­umn for The Lon­don Observ­er, wrote that it ‘does not real­ly belong to the his­to­ry of cin­e­mat­ic art, but it assured­ly belongs to his­to­ry’ as ‘the first film in which the Amer­i­can Negro has issued a direct chal­lenge to the white.’ ”

Where The Cry of Jazz oper­ates most straight­for­ward­ly as a doc­u­men­tary, it cap­tures the era’s extant styles of jazz (whether you con­sid­er them liv­ing or, as Alex insists, dead) as per­formed by the com­pos­er-band­leader Sun Ra and his Arkestra just a few years before his total self-trans­for­ma­tion into a sci-fi pharaoh. This pro­vides a “pul­sat­ing track of sound under the nar­ra­tion and serves to punc­tu­ate the protagonist’s long, engross­ing lec­ture with appro­pri­ate seg­ments of per­for­mance footage and musi­cal coun­ter­point,” writes poet John Sin­clair. “Inquis­i­tive view­ers may gain immense­ly from expo­sure to Bland’s fierce­ly icon­o­clas­tic expo­si­tion on the state of African Amer­i­can cre­ative music on the his­tor­i­cal cusp of the mod­ern jazz era and the free jazz, avant garde, New Black Music move­ment of the 1960s.” And on the issue of the death of jazz, I sub­mit for your con­sid­er­a­tion just four of the albums that would come out the next year: Ornette Cole­man’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Charles Min­gus’ Min­gus Ah Um, the Dave Brubeck Quar­tet’s Time Out, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. A top­ic cov­ered in the film, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.

Find more great doc­u­men­taries in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Child’s Intro­duc­tion to Jazz by Can­non­ball Adder­ley (with Louis Arm­strong & Thelo­nious Monk)

Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Leg­end Djan­go Rein­hardt

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Take Big History: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Billion Years of History, Funded by Bill Gates

Last month, The New York Times Mag­a­zine pub­lished a long piece called “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a His­to­ry Class …”, which begins with these very words:

In 2008, short­ly after Bill Gates stepped down from his exec­u­tive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the east­ern bank of Lake Wash­ing­ton and walked down­stairs to his pri­vate gym in a bag­gy T‑shirt, shorts, sneak­ers and black socks yanked up to the mid­calf. Then, dur­ing an hour on the tread­mill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watch­ing DVDs from the Teach­ing Company’s “Great Cours­es” series. On some morn­ings, he would learn about geol­o­gy or mete­o­rol­o­gy; on oth­ers, it would be oceanog­ra­phy or U.S. his­to­ry.

As Gates was work­ing his way through the series, he stum­bled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big His­to­ry” — an unusu­al col­lege course taught by a jovial, ges­tic­u­lat­ing pro­fes­sor from Aus­tralia named David Chris­t­ian. Unlike the pre­vi­ous DVDs, “Big His­to­ry” did not con­fine itself to any par­tic­u­lar top­ic, or even to a sin­gle aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline. Instead, it put for­ward a syn­the­sis of his­to­ry, biol­o­gy, chem­istry, astron­o­my and oth­er dis­parate fields, which Chris­t­ian wove togeth­er into noth­ing less than a uni­fy­ing nar­ra­tive of life on earth.

Cap­ti­vat­ed by Dr. Chris­tian’s abil­i­ty to con­nect big and com­plex ideas, Gates thought to him­self, “God, every­body should watch this thing!” And, soon enough, the phil­an­thropist con­tact­ed the pro­fes­sor and sug­gest­ed mak­ing “Big His­to­ry” avail­able as a course in high schools across the US (with Bill foot­ing the bill.)

In 2011 the Big His­to­ry Project, a course with a sig­nif­i­cant dig­i­tal com­po­nent, was pilot­ed in five high schools. Now, a few years lat­er, it’s being made freely avail­able, says the Times, “to more than 15,000 stu­dents in some 1,200 schools, from the Brook­lyn School for Col­lab­o­ra­tive Stud­ies in New York to Green­hills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Gates’s alma mater, Lake­side Upper School in Seat­tle. And if all goes well, the Big His­to­ry Project will be intro­duced in hun­dreds of more class­rooms by next year and hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, more the year after that, scal­ing along toward the vision Gates first expe­ri­enced on that tread­mill.”

Why do I tell you this? Part­ly because the Big His­to­ry Project is open to you as well. On the Big His­to­ry web­site, you will find a pub­lic course, offer­ing a four-to-six hour tour of Big His­to­ry. It’s an abbre­vi­at­ed intro­duc­tion to 13.8 bil­lion years of his­to­ry. I could think of less effi­cient ways to spend an after­noon.

After you’re done, if you want to fill in a few gaps, don’t miss our col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. It cov­ers his­to­ry, biol­o­gy, physics and all of the rest.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Down­load of The His­to­ry Man­i­festo: His­to­ri­ans New Call for Big-Pic­ture Think­ing

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

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Photos of Hiroshima by Hiroshima Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

hiroshima mon amour pix

Hiroshi­ma Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s land­mark 1960 med­i­ta­tion on war and mem­o­ry, was Emmanuelle Riva’s first star­ring role. She plays a mar­ried actress (catch a scene here) who, while mak­ing a movie in Japan, has an affair with a Japan­ese archi­tect played by Eiji Oka­da. Screen­writer Mar­guerite Duras chis­els away at the actress’s Gal­lic reserve over the course of the film as mem­o­ries of the war, not to men­tion guilt over the affair, over­whelm her. Resnais lingers on Riva’s face as she comes apart. Her per­for­mance is as brave as it is exact. French film crit­ic Jean Domarchi once stat­ed, “Hiroshi­ma is a doc­u­men­tary on Emmanuelle Riva.”

HMA 2

As it turns out, Riva was doc­u­ment­ing Hiroshi­ma too. While film­ing on loca­tion, she took a series of pho­tographs of every­day life of a city still recov­er­ing from the war. They are a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of life from a Japan that has long dis­ap­peared. The Hiroshi­ma Riva cap­tured was still dom­i­nat­ed by dirt roads and wood­en build­ings. Peo­ple still reg­u­lar­ly wore tra­di­tion­al geta wood­en shoes.

hma 3

Chil­dren seemed to be a favorite sub­ject for Riva. She pho­tographs a flock of ele­men­tary school stu­dents walk­ing to school; a pair of boys fish­ing before the gen­baku dome – ground zero for the bomb; and a gag­gle of kids star­ing agog into the lens, no doubt curi­ous at the sight of a styl­ish French woman with an expen­sive cam­era.

hma 4

Years lat­er, Riva’s pic­tures were col­lect­ed into a book called Hiroshi­ma 1958, which, sad­ly, seems to be avail­able only in Japan. Riva, of course, went on to a cel­e­brat­ed act­ing career, includ­ing an Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed turn in Michael Haneke’s har­row­ing love sto­ry Amour.

hma 5via RocketNews24

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evoca­tive Film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Talk About Film­mak­ing (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Inter­view

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The Distortion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Created “a McDonald’s Generation of Music Consumers”

It’s an old joke at this point—the hipster’s retro-obses­sion with vinyl is an affec­ta­tion as bogus as lou­vered sun­glass­es and high-waist­ed acid washed jeans, right? Well, there are plen­ty of peo­ple who buy records and lis­ten to them, too. There are even peo­ple who buy and lis­ten to cas­sette tapes, imag­ine that! You can count me in both camps, and it isn’t because—or only because—I love the look and feel of these ana­log cul­tur­al arti­facts or that I’m nos­tal­gic for sim­pler times. It’s because I love the sound. Even cheapo cas­sette tapes can often sound bet­ter to me than the medi­um of music we’ve all grown so accus­tomed to over the last decade or so—the MP3.

Begin­ning in the CD era, the so-called “Loud­ness Wars” more or less killed the dynam­ics of record­ed music, push­ing every sound to the absolute limit—from the most del­i­cate­ly plucked acoustic gui­tar string to a black met­al singer’s most demon­ic roar. With­out the pleas­ing push-pull of musi­cal dynam­ics, songs lose their depth and pow­er. Once the music is released as prod­uct, it suf­fers anoth­er indig­ni­ty in the data com­pres­sion of MP3s and stream­ing ser­vices, for­mats that—according to high-end audio com­pa­ny Harmon—“have dimin­ished the qual­i­ty and flat­tened the emo­tion” of music. In the short film above, The Dis­tor­tion of Sound, Har­mon brings togeth­er a num­ber of engi­neers, pro­duc­ers, and musi­cians, includ­ing big names like Quin­cy Jones, Slash, Hans Zim­mer, and Snoop Dogg to dis­cuss what Har­mon acoustic engi­neer Dr. Sean Olive, calls “the val­ley of sound qual­i­ty” we’ve sup­pos­ed­ly reached in the last five years.

Harmon’s Chief Engi­neer Chris Lud­wig claims that data com­pres­sion (not audio compression—a dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy), “removes up to 90% of the orig­i­nal song.” With our low-qual­i­ty MP3s and cheap, tin­ny ear­buds and lap­top speak­ers, says Zim­mer, we’ve become “a McDonald’s gen­er­a­tion of music con­sumers.” It’s a depress­ing real­i­ty for audio­philes and musi­cians, but Har­mon has the solu­tion and Dis­tor­tion of Sound is essen­tial­ly an adver­tise­ment for it. Whether or not you buy in is your call, but along the way, you’ll get an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to the record­ing process and the his­to­ry of record­ed music. Scroll down to the bot­tom of the “Dis­tor­tion of Sound” page to see how Har­mon is “bring­ing sound qual­i­ty back.” They aren’t doing it with tape decks and turnta­bles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Reveals the New Killer Gad­get That Will Save Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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