The American Revolution: A Free Course from Yale University

in History, Online Courses, Yale | December 28th, 2017

When you have a lit­tle time, you can drop in on a free course that revis­its a sem­i­nal moment in U.S. history–the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. Taught by Yale his­to­ri­an Joanne Free­man, the course explores how the Rev­o­lu­tion brought about “some remark­able transformations–converting British colonists into Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, and a clus­ter of colonies into a con­fed­er­a­tion of states with a com­mon cause.” You can access the 25 lec­tures above, or on YouTube and iTunes. Also find a syl­labus for the course on this Yale web site.

“The Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion” will be added to our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

14,000 Free Images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion Now Avail­able Online

A Mas­ter List of 1,300 Free Cours­es From Top Uni­ver­si­ties: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lec­tures

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The Improbable Time When Orson Welles Interviewed Andy Kaufman (1982)

in Comedy, Television | December 27th, 2017

“Sit­coms are the low­est form of enter­tain­ment,” declares Andy Kauf­man as por­trayed by Jim Car­rey in Milos For­man’s biopic Man on the Moon. “I mean, it’s just stu­pid jokes and canned laugh­ter.” The scene comes in the peri­od of Kauf­man’s life in the late 1970s when, grow­ing ever more well-known on the back of acts like his “For­eign Man” char­ac­ter, he receives an offer to take part in ABC’s Taxi. The real-life Kauf­man, even­tu­al­ly con­vinced to join the show’s cast, devel­oped the For­eign Man into the unplace­able mechan­ic Lat­ka Gavras. Quite pos­si­bly Taxi’s most mem­o­rable char­ac­ter, Lat­ka also won the appre­ci­a­tion of no less demand­ing a cul­tur­al fig­ure than Orson Welles.

Guest-host­ing the Merv Grif­fin Show in June of 1982, Welles describes Taxi as a show that has “kept tele­vi­sion from being a crim­i­nal felony” just before bring­ing Kauf­man on for a brief (and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly straight­for­ward) chat. He heaps praise on Kauf­man’s per­for­mance as Lat­ka, adding, “I want to know why it is that you go and wres­tle with peo­ple when you can act so well.” Kauf­man had shown up wear­ing a neck brace, an acces­so­ry sig­ni­fy­ing the end of his stint as a pro­fes­sion­al wrestler, one of the many inex­plic­a­ble but some­how com­pelling choic­es in a short career that blurred the lines between com­e­dy, per­for­mance art, and life itself.

“Nobody ever came from nowhere more com­plete­ly,” Welles says, draw­ing a big stu­dio-audi­ence laugh with this descrip­tion of not just Lat­ka but Kauf­man as well. Asked how he came up with such a dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter voice, Kauf­man says only that he “grew up in New York, and you hear a lot of dif­fer­ent voic­es in New York” (“You don’t hear that one,” replies Welles). He also cites the accents of a high-school friend from South Amer­i­ca and a col­lege room­mate from Iran. Less than four years lat­er, both Kauf­man and Welles would be gone (and actor Ron Glass, look­ing on from the oth­er side of the couch, joined them this past Novem­ber).

Or at least both men would be gone if you don’t cred­it the rumors about Kauf­man hav­ing elab­o­rate­ly faked his death. “I don’t know whether it’s the inno­cence of the fel­low or the feel­ing you have that he is not stu­pid­er than every­body, but maybe smarter, that adds to the fas­ci­na­tion,” Welles says. Again he speaks osten­si­bly of Kauf­man’s For­eign Man/Latka per­sona, but his words apply equal­ly to the man who not just played but peri­od­i­cal­ly — and some­times unpre­dictably — became him. 33 years after Kauf­man’s death, or in any case dis­ap­pear­ance from life, that fas­ci­na­tion remains as strong as ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Look Back at Andy Kauf­man: Absurd Com­ic Per­for­mance Artist and Endear­ing Weirdo

Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells in 1940: The Leg­ends Dis­cuss War of the Worlds, Cit­i­zen Kane, and WWII

Orson Welles’ Last Inter­view and Final Moments Cap­tured on Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

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Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes: Discover the Postmodern MTV Variety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Television Age (1985–87)

in Art, Television | December 27th, 2017

“In the future, every­one will be world-famous for 15 min­utes,” said Andy Warhol. Actu­al­ly, no, he didn’t. But Warhol sug­gest­ed to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nat Finkel­stein that every­one want­ed to be famous, to which Finkel­stein added, “yeah, for 15 min­utes.” It’s a slight­ly dif­fer­ent mean­ing. (The idea first appeared in its well-known form in a 1968 pro­gram for a Warhol exhi­bi­tion in Swe­den.)

Is it true that every­one wants to be famous? It’s cer­tain­ly true that Andy Warhol want­ed to, and for much longer than 15 min­utes. Like the hard­est-work­ing YouTube celebri­ty today, he didn’t wait to be dis­cov­ered but set about mak­ing it hap­pen him­self.

But while he achieved pop art star­dom in the 60s, Warhol tru­ly longed to be on TV, a dream that took a lit­tle longer to mate­ri­al­ize. His first pro­gram, a New York pub­lic-access inter­view show, debuted in 1979, then a sec­ond ver­sion in 1980 (see Richard Berlin inter­view Frank Zap­pa on Andy Warhol’s T.V. in 1983). Over a peri­od of four years, he brought on a host of major celebri­ties, but attract­ed a nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed audi­ence.

In ’81, Warhol final­ly got a main­stream TV break when he “made his way to NBC,” notes Alexxa Got­thardt, “with a series of spots for Sat­ur­day Night Live…. Warhol’s for­ay into tele­vi­sion allowed him to become even more of a celebri­ty him­self.” His per­sis­tent efforts paid div­i­dends when he joined the nascent 1985 MTV line­up with one of its first non-music-video shows, Andy Warhol’s Fif­teen Min­utes.

As you can see in the pro­mo at the top of the post, the show promised a “ride down­town” and a “ride to the wild side.” It did not dis­ap­point. A sort of post­mod­ern vari­ety show, the pro­gram “put every­body togeth­er,” explains Andy Warhol Muse­um cura­tor Ger­a­lyn Hux­ley, “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The strug­gling artists and the ris­ing stars.” Just above, you can see Ian McK­ellen recite Shake­speare while garage rock­ers the Flesh­tones play some psy­che­del­ic grooves behind him.

Above, see Deb­bie Har­ry inter­view Court­ney Love, “a flam­boy­ant ris­ing star,” just come from the suc­cess of Sid and Nan­cy.  Fur­ther down, the Ramones bitch about the state of rock and roll in 1987, then play “Bon­zo Goes to Bit­burg,” a scathing response to Ronald Reagan’s dis­turb­ing vis­it to Ger­many on the 40th anniver­sary of V‑E Day. (The song con­tains the line, “You’re a politi­cian don’t become one of Hitler’s chil­dren.”) These are but a tiny sam­pling of the many hun­dreds of artists who traipsed through the sound­stage of Warhol’s show: dozens of peo­ple appeared in a sin­gle episode—as many as 30 guests in some of the lat­er shows.

Run­ning for two years, until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s Fif­teen Min­utes intro­duced mil­lions of peo­ple to the artist in just the way he’d always want­ed. “More and more kids were watch­ing MTV,” says his pro­duc­er Vin­cent Fre­mont. “I don’t know if they knew that Andy was a famous artist, but to them he was cer­tain­ly a tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty.” And on TV, Warhol wrote in 1975, a per­son “has all the space any­one could ever want, right there in the tele­vi­sion box.” If you’re Andy Warhol, you also have all the celebri­ty guests any­one could ever want.

See a com­plete list of the five episodes that aired between 1985 and 1987—full of stars, ris­ing stars, and scores of fas­ci­nat­ing unknowns—at Warholstars.org.

via Art­sy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zap­pa on His Cable TV Show, and Lat­er Recalls, “I Hat­ed Him More Than Ever” After the Show

Andy Warhol’s Brief Moment of Pro­fes­sion­al Wrestling Fame (1985)

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Min­utes

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

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

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What Is a Life-Changing Realization You Wish You’d Had Sooner in Life?

in Life | December 27th, 2017

The cal­en­dar date may be arbi­trary, a quirk of his­to­ry that could have been otherwise—but it’s no coin­ci­dence, I think, that New Year’s pro­duces a reflec­tive mood, a time of look­ing both back­ward and for­ward, espe­cial­ly in those parts of the world cur­rent­ly held in winter’s chill and dark, await­ing the thaw of spring. The turn of the Gre­go­ri­an cal­en­dar seems to beg us to pro­duce some sober wis­dom amidst the rev­el­ry of the hol­i­days: to account for what we’ve learned, rumi­nate on inten­tions, take gen­er­al stock of our per­son­al stores.

It’s also a time when we con­nect with our younger selves (many of us hav­ing just spent a few days vis­it­ing par­ents, home­towns, and child­hood bed­rooms). Those younger selves can seem cal­low and naïve in hind­sight, and though it’s hard­ly any use liv­ing with regret, we might wish with some degree of rue that we could have han­dled some things better—and applied the hard-won real­iza­tions of the present much ear­li­er. It’s a com­mon enough sen­ti­ment, han­dled per­fect­ly in The Faces’ “Ooh La La.”

I wish, for exam­ple, that I had learned how to med­i­tate years before I did. It might have saved my young, moody, impul­sive self a world a grief. (But then again, with­out that grief, would I have ever learned to med­i­tate?) Recent­ly, a MetaFil­ter user revis­it­ed a post from 2013 that asked the ques­tion (“What is a life chang­ing real­iza­tion that you wish you’d had soon­er?”) to the inter­net com­mu­ni­ty at large. The respons­es ranged from the fair­ly gener­ic (“it’s okay if you don’t want to be friends with your exes”) to the per­son­al, spe­cif­ic, and col­or­ful. See a sam­pling of the answers below from both the orig­i­nal 2013 thread and the recent 2017 repost:

Love leaves scars. And that’s a good thing. We want to be per­ma­nent­ly affect­ed by the ones that we love. Oth­er­wise, it’s not real­ly love. And like any oth­er scar, it begins as a painful wound, goes through the peri­od of laud­able pus dur­ing which you drain out all the bad stuff, and then, even­tu­al­ly, heals to a pain­less but vis­i­ble scar.

This seems kin­da sil­ly, but a cou­ple of years ago I real­ized that I am under no oblig­a­tion to fin­ish a book that I don’t like. As a read­er, that was such an epiphany! 

The most impor­tant and dan­ger­ous tool in the lives of aver­age peo­ple is com­pound inter­est.

Behav­iour is dri­ven by emo­tion, not ratio­nal thought: instead of try­ing to force myself to do things by berat­ing myself, I get my emo­tions in order first by syn­the­sis­ing the feel­ing of hav­ing already done it. My pro­cras­ti­na­tion has been rad­i­cal­ly reduced, and I’m freer to get on and do the things I need to do.

Take oth­er people’s head injuries seri­ous­ly. Some­one who’s just had a blow to the brain is not qual­i­fied to judge whether it is “no big deal.” 

Hon­or the parts of your­self that are elu­sive and mys­te­ri­ous and maybe unin­tel­li­gi­ble to oth­er peo­ple. Whether that means embrac­ing an iden­ti­ty like “queer non­bi­na­ry trans woman” or becom­ing more com­fort­able with cry­ing and not know­ing why or not hav­ing opin­ions and answers at hand… Prac­tice not know­ing. 

I’m par­tial to these offer­ings because I find them mov­ing, fun­ny, or con­ver­sant with what­ev­er mea­ger wis­dom I like to think I’ve acquired after much tri­al and error. But what about you? As 2017 winds to a close—a year fraught with more stress and anx­i­ety than most—which answers leap out to you? Or, if you’re brave and feel like shar­ing, what would you like to pass on to your younger, more bum­bling self if you could go back and have a sit-down with him or her? Please pass along your thoughts and wis­dom in the com­ments below.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Will You Real­ly Achieve Hap­pi­ness If You Final­ly Win the Rat Race? Don’t Answer the Ques­tion Until You’ve Watched Steve Cutts’ New Ani­ma­tion

“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Bet­ter”: How Samuel Beck­ett Cre­at­ed the Unlike­ly Mantra That Inspires Entre­pre­neurs Today

Watch “Alike,” a Poignant Short Ani­mat­ed Film About the Endur­ing Con­flict Between Cre­ativ­i­ty and Con­for­mi­ty

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

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Mark Twain on Why “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice, Bigotry and Narrow-Mindedness, and Many of Our People Need It Sorely on These Accounts” (1869)

in Books, Travel | December 26th, 2017

Pub­lic Domain image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Human­i­ty has come up with many neg­a­tive stereo­types of Amer­i­cans, some of them not entire­ly ground­less: the wide­ly held belief, for exam­ple, that Amer­i­cans don’t get out much. I admit the truth of that one as an Amer­i­can myself — albeit an Amer­i­can who now lives in Asia — because I cer­tain­ly did drag my feet on get­ting a pass­port and get­ting out there in the world at first. Per­haps I can take com­fort in the fact that no less a colos­sus of Amer­i­can let­ters began his inter­na­tion­al trav­els even lat­er than I did, though when he did get around to it, he got even more out of it: not only The Inno­cents Abroad, one of the best-loved trav­el books of all time, but an insight into what makes trav­el so vital a pur­suit in the first place.

The trav­els Mark Twain recounts in the book began in 1867 on the char­tered ves­sel Quak­er City, which took him and a group of his coun­try­men through Europe and the Holy Land, an itin­er­ary includ­ing a stop at the 1867 Paris Exhi­bi­tion and jour­neys through the Papal States to Rome and through the Black Sea to Odessa, all fol­low­able on a hyper­text map at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­gini­a’s Mark Twain in His Times page. “In his account Mark Twain assumes two alter­nate roles,” says the Library of Amer­i­ca, “at times the no-non­sense Amer­i­can who refus­es to auto­mat­i­cal­ly ven­er­ate the famous sights of the Old World (pre­fer­ring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon sim­ple­ton, a gullible vic­tim of flat­ter­ers and ‘frauds,’ and an awe-struck admir­er of Russ­ian roy­al­ty.”

Whether you read The Inno­cents Abroad in the Library of Amer­i­ca’s edi­tion or in one of a vari­ety of free for­mats down­load­able from Project Guten­berg, you’ll even­tu­al­ly come to Twain’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the entire project: not the writ­ing project with its hand­some remu­ner­a­tion and name-mak­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty, but the project of trav­el itself. Though many ele­ments of the Old World expe­ri­ence, as well as pro­longed expo­sure to his fel­low Amer­i­cans, put his for­mi­da­ble com­plain­ing abil­i­ty to the test, the “breezy, shrewd, and com­i­cal manip­u­la­tor of Eng­lish idioms and America’s mytholo­gies about itself and its rela­tion to the past” (as the Library of Amer­i­ca describes him) ulti­mate­ly admits that

I have no fault to find with the man­ner in which our excur­sion was con­duct­ed. Its pro­gramme was faith­ful­ly car­ried out—a thing which sur­prised me, for great enter­pris­es usu­al­ly promise vast­ly more than they per­form. It would be well if such an excur­sion could be got­ten up every year and the sys­tem reg­u­lar­ly inau­gu­rat­ed. Trav­el is fatal to prej­u­dice, big­otry and nar­row-mind­ed­ness, and many of our peo­ple need it sore­ly on these accounts. Broad, whole­some, char­i­ta­ble views of men and things can not be acquired by veg­e­tat­ing in one lit­tle cor­ner of the earth all one’s life­time.

Dis­tinct­ly Twain­ian words, of course, but many oth­er writ­ers have since also tried to express the unique­ly mind-expand­ing prop­er­ties of spend­ing time out­side your home­land. As Rud­yard Kipling mem­o­rably put it to his own coun­try­men, a few decades after The Inno­cents Abroad, in “The Eng­lish Flag,” “What should they know of Eng­land who only Eng­land know?”

Or as one writer friend of mine, well-known for the glob­al­ized nature of his books and well as of his own iden­ti­ty, once said, “If Amer­i­cans don’t trav­el, we’re like a man who lives in a hov­el assum­ing every­one else lives in a worse hov­el.” But it always comes back to Twain, who knew that “noth­ing so lib­er­al­izes a man and expands the kind­ly instincts that nature put in him as trav­el and con­tact with many kinds of peo­ple” — and who also knew that nobody quite real­ized “what a con­sum­mate ass he can become until he goes abroad.” We can all think of much worse rea­sons to head across the ocean than that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 Amer­i­can Com­fort Foods He Missed While Trav­el­ing Abroad (1880)

A Jour­ney Back in Time: Vin­tage Trav­el­ogues

Free: Read 9 Trav­el Books Online by Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

Join Clive James on His Clas­sic Tele­vi­sion Trips to Paris, LA, Tokyo, Rio, Cairo & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

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Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | December 26th, 2017

You can’t go near the lit­er­ary press late­ly with­out hear­ing men­tion of Nathan Hill’s sprawl­ing new nov­el, The Nix, wide­ly praised as a com­ic epic on par with David Fos­ter Wallace’s Infi­nite Jest. Nov­el­ist John Irv­ing, to whom Hill has drawn com­par­isons, goes so far as to com­pare the nov­el­ist to Charles Dick­ens. Such praise goes too far, if you ask Cur­rent Affairs edi­tor Bri­an­na Ren­nix. In a caus­tic review essay, Ren­nix unfa­vor­ably mea­sures not only The Nix, but also the post­mod­ern nov­els of Wal­lace, Pyn­chon, McCarthy, Franzen, and DeLil­lo, against the bag­gy Vic­to­ri­an seri­al­ized works of writ­ers like Dick­ens and George Eliot. “Books like Mid­dle­march,” she writes, “took seri­ous­ly the idea that nov­els had the pow­er to trans­form human life, not merely—as seems to be the goal of a lot of post­mod­ern novels—to riff off its foibles for the pur­pose of mak­ing the author look clever.”

It’s pos­si­ble to appre­ci­ate Rennix’s essay as a read­er of more ecu­meni­cal tastes—as some­one who hap­pens to enjoy Dick­ens and Eliot and all the authors she dis­miss­es. There’s much more to the post­mod­ern nov­el than she allows, but there are also very good rea­sons par­tic­u­lar to our age for us turn, or return, to Dick­ens.

In the TED-Ed video above, script­ed by lit­er­ary schol­ar Iseult Gille­spie (who pre­vi­ous­ly made a case for Vir­ginia Woolf), we get some of them. For all the fun he had with human foibles, Dick­ens was also a social real­ist, the great­est influ­ence on lat­er lit­er­ary nat­u­ral­ism, who “shed light on how his society’s most invis­i­ble peo­ple lived.” Unlike many nov­el­ists, in his own time and ours, Dick­ens had the per­son­al expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in such con­di­tions to draw on for his authen­tic por­tray­als.

Nonethe­less, Dick­ens’ did not allow his enor­mous pop­u­lar suc­cess to blunt his com­pas­sion and con­cern for the plight of work­ing peo­ple and the poor and social­ly mar­gin­al­ized. The engross­ing, high­ly enter­tain­ing plots and char­ac­ters in his nov­els are always pressed into ser­vice. We might call his motives polit­i­cal, but the term is too often pejo­ra­tive. The “Dick­en­sian” mode is a human­ist one. Dick­ens’ did not push spe­cif­ic ide­o­log­i­cal agen­das; he tried, as Alain de Bot­ton says in his intro­duc­to­ry video above, “to get us inter­est­ed in some pret­ty seri­ous things: the evils of an indus­tri­al­iz­ing soci­ety, the work­ing con­di­tions in fac­to­ries, child labor, vicious social snob­bery, the mad­den­ing inef­fi­cien­cies of gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy.” He tried, in oth­er words, to move his read­ers to care about the peo­ple around them. What they chose to do with that care was, of course, then, as now, up to them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Charles Dick­ens’ Life & Lit­er­ary Works

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dick­ens Sto­ries, Fea­tur­ing Clas­sic Record­ings by Lau­rence Olivi­er, Orson Welles & More

Why Should We Read Vir­ginia Woolf? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

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

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Photographer Nan Goldin Now on Instagram

in Photography | December 26th, 2017

A quick heads up: Back in August, Cindy Sher­man, one of the best-known pho­tog­ra­phers work­ing today, launched an Insta­gram account where she has post­ed 600 new pho­tos and strange self-por­traits. Now you can look for­ward to explor­ing an Insta­gram account belong­ing to anoth­er influ­en­tial Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Nan Goldin. So far, you’ll only find 19 pho­tos, includ­ing the one above, cap­tioned as “Self por­trait as a Dom­i­na­trix Boston 1977 (a long time ago).” But hope­ful­ly that’s just the begin­ning.

Gold­in’s Insta­gram account makes its debut at the same time that Stei­dl Books has re-released Nan Goldin: The Beau­ti­ful Smile–the mem­oir in which Goldin famous­ly pho­tographed, writes The New York Times, the sub­jects who “have been those clos­est to her: Trans­sex­u­als, cross-dressers, drug users, lovers, all peo­ple she befriend­ed when she moved to New York” and who lived in what main­stream crit­ics would cold­ly call the ‘mar­gins of soci­ety’.” The high­ly-praised book is now out again.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cindy Sherman’s Insta­gram Account Goes Pub­lic, Reveal­ing 600 New Pho­tos & Many Strange Self-Por­traits

Say What You Real­ly Mean with Down­load­able Cindy Sher­man Emoti­cons

Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Launch­es Free Course on Look­ing at Pho­tographs as Art

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How Fleetwood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Exploring the “Sonic Paintings” on the Classic Album, Rumours

in Music | December 26th, 2017

Pret­ty much every­one with a pass­ing famil­iar­i­ty with Fleet­wood Mac knows at least a lit­tle some­thing about the per­son­al tumult behind their land­mark 1977 album Rumours: it’s one of rock’s most famous soap operas,” writes Jor­dan Run­tagh at Rolling Stone. Chris­tine McVie put it even more suc­cinct­ly— “Dra­ma. Dra-ma.”

But isn’t this how great songs get writ­ten, as we find out when we read the auto­bi­ogra­phies and inter­views of great song­writ­ers, who sub­li­mate their per­son­al ups and downs in lyrics that touch the emo­tion­al lives of mil­lions? The saga of Fleet­wood Mac just hap­pens to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly juicy exam­ple, giv­en that the band mem­bers’ roman­tic anguish most­ly came from failed rela­tion­ships with each oth­er.

The tale will for­ev­er be a cau­tion­ary one for musi­cians, though it’s hard­ly much of a deter­rent. Just lis­ten to those songs! But as Evan Puschak—otherwise known as video essay­ist the Nerdwriter—shows above, it takes a lot more than a bad breakup with the gui­tar play­er to make time­less pop art. Rumours “feels alive, months and years and decades after its cre­ation.” It’s so much more than the sum of its parts, even if those parts are rare and indis­pens­able: the con­sid­er­able musi­cian­ship on dis­play, the song­writ­ing expe­ri­ence, and espe­cial­ly the “vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed bud­get and time” Warn­er Broth­ers allot­ted the band.

Such extrav­a­gance is vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble for any­one else to come by. Still, noodling indef­i­nite­ly with fan­cy instru­ments and equip­ment does not a great album make. Puschak takes Ste­vie Nicks’ “Dreams” as an exam­ple of how the band excelled in the stu­dio. Writ­ten “in about 10 min­utes,” as Nicks tells it, while she sat in a “big black-vel­vet bed with Vic­to­ri­an drapes” in a stu­dio belong­ing to Sly Stone, the song’s stu­dio ver­sion shows off the lush, lay­ered pro­duc­tion the band spent the bet­ter part of a year bring­ing to her two-chord demo.

“Dreams”—one of the most mes­mer­iz­ing songs in the band’s canon—acquired its hyp­not­ic qual­i­ties through the use of a looped drum pat­tern, puls­ing, repet­i­tive bassline, and the sub­tle col­oration of gui­tar tex­tures that give the decep­tive­ly sim­ple song its ebb and flow.

The sto­ry of Rumours is as much about fan­tas­tic songcraft, musi­cian­ship, arrang­ing, and pro­duc­tion as it is about tri­umph over the human resources night­mare behind the scenes. The per­son­al inspi­ra­tion for these songs makes for good gos­sip, but these are not life events any­one needs to emu­late to make art. Fleet­wood Mac’s col­lec­tive inven­tive­ness, emo­tion­al hon­esty, and skill are what ulti­mate­ly make them such an inspi­ra­tion to musi­cians, and cre­ative types in gen­er­al. For anoth­er exam­ple of how they built the archi­tec­tur­al mar­vels on Rumours, see the short take above from Poly­phon­ic about the album’s mood­i­est song, “The Chain.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ste­vie Nicks “Shows Us How to Kick Ass in High-Heeled Boots” in a 1983 Women’s Self Defense Man­u­al

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Inside the Mak­ing of The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Heart’s Club Band, Rock’s Great Con­cept Album

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

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