How Good Are Your Headphones? This 150-Song Playlist, Featuring Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out

Pho­to via Adaman­tios at Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Back in the Mad Men hey­day of high-end home stereo, audio­philes could buy records full of sound-but-not-exact­ly-music, specif­i­cal­ly engi­neered to test the lim­its of — or sim­ply show off — their per­son­al sys­tems. Less tech­ni­cal­ly obses­sive but still proud hi-fi own­ers could drop the nee­dle on one of the albums known almost as well for the rich­ness of its sound as the artistry of its music, such as Frank Sina­tra’s In the Wee Small Hours or Charles Min­gus’ Min­gus Ah Um. The web­site, What Hi-Fi?, includes both of those 1950s land­marks on their list of twelve of the best vinyl test records, which goes on to men­tion Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light, and Radio­head­’s In Rain­bows, all worth a lis­ten no mat­ter your set­up.

But what if you lis­ten, as so many of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry do, not on vinyl through speak­ers but on dig­i­tal data inter­net-streamed through head­phones? Spo­ti­fy (whose free soft­ware you can down­load here) has assem­bled a 150-song playlist designed to give you a sense of how well those head­phones are serv­ing you, bring­ing togeth­er the work of such audio-con­scious artists as the afore­men­tioned Neil Young (a vocal crit­ic of today’s music for­mats), David Bowie, Suzanne Vega (known as “the Moth­er of the MP3”), Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, and those con­sum­mate stu­dio genius­es Steely Dan (albeit not “Dea­con Blues,” long their audio­phile-pre­ferred stereo-test­ing song). Mixed in with the big­ger names, you’ll also hear from musi­cians less wide­ly known but no less ded­i­cat­ed to craft­ing rich and var­ied sound­scapes.

You don’t have to be Neil Young, though, to object to the very premise of the playlist, argu­ing that inter­net-streamed music, which first under­goes dig­i­ti­za­tion and com­pres­sion, can offer noth­ing but a bad­ly sub­stan­dard lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence — let alone when through a pair of head­phones, and often cheap ear­buds at that. But as all the best record­ing and mix­ing engi­neers know today, you should­n’t release an album unless you’ve first lis­tened to it close­ly through some­thing hum­bler than your ultra-high-end stu­dio mon­i­tors or fan­cy pro­fes­sion­al head­phones, mak­ing sure it sounds accept­able on every­thing all the way down to lap­top and cell­phone speak­ers. Bear in mind, a music fan who’s nev­er giv­en a thought to audio qual­i­ty might well, when they’ve test­ed their cheap ear­buds with this nev­er­the­less son­i­cal­ly scin­til­lat­ing playlist, find them­selves want­i­ng to hear not just more, but bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

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

Suzanne Vega, “The Moth­er of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Din­er” with the Edi­son Cylin­der

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

The noto­ri­ous four-year affair between Han­nah Arendt and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger has occa­sioned many a bit­ter aca­d­e­m­ic debate, for rea­sons with which you may already be famil­iar. If not, Alan Ryan sums it up suc­cinct­ly in a 1996 New York Review of Books essay:

She was a Jew who fled Ger­many in August 1933, a few months after Hitler’s assump­tion of pow­er. He was elect­ed Rec­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, and in a noto­ri­ous inau­gur­al address hailed the pres­ence of the brown-shirt­ed storm-troop­ers in his audi­ence, claimed that Hitler would restore the Ger­man peo­ple to spir­i­tu­al health, and end­ed by giv­ing the famil­iar stiff-armed Nazi salute to cries of “Sieg Heil.” The thought that these two were ever soul­mates is hard to swal­low.

Arendt went on to write The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism and Eich­mann in Jerusalem, in which she used the phrase “banal­i­ty of evil” for the Nazi func­tionary on tri­al at Nurem­berg. Hei­deg­ger refused to dis­cuss his col­lab­o­ra­tion pub­licly and “remained silent about the exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews, about the ter­ror­ism of Hitler’s regime.” But as we’ve learned from his recent­ly pub­lished jour­nals, the so-called Black Note­books, he was pri­vate­ly a “con­vinced Nazi,” as Peter Gor­don observes, who “did not awak­en from his philo­soph­i­cal-polit­i­cal fan­tasies. They only grew more extreme.”

But indeed, Arendt and Hei­deg­ger were in love, dur­ing an affair that began when she was an 18-year-old stu­dent and he her mar­ried 36-year-old pro­fes­sor. Their let­ters show an illic­it rela­tion­ship devel­op­ing from cau­tion to infat­u­a­tion. Hei­deg­ger waxed roman­ti­cal­ly philo­soph­i­cal:

.…we become what we love and yet remain our­selves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find noth­ing that suf­fices.

We can only thank with our selves. Love trans­forms grat­i­tude into loy­al­ty to our selves and uncon­di­tion­al faith in the oth­er. That is how love steadi­ly inten­si­fies its inner­most secret.

But both of them knew the rela­tion­ship could not last, and Hei­deg­ger sug­gest­ed that mov­ing on from him would be in her best inter­est as a young schol­ar. In 1929, Arendt met and became engaged to a Ger­man jour­nal­ist and class­mate in Heidegger’s sem­i­nar. She sent her pro­fes­sor a note on her wed­ding day which begins, “Do not for­get me, and do not for­get how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the bless­ing of my life.”

Before his Nazi appoint­ment, Arendt wrote to her for­mer lover and men­tor in 1932 or 33 upon hear­ing rumors “about Heidegger’s sym­pa­thy with Nation­al Social­ism.” (Her let­ter has been lost.) He replied with a num­ber of excus­es for spe­cif­ic acts—such as refus­ing to super­vise Jew­ish students—and assured her of his feel­ings, but “nowhere in the let­ter is there any denial of Nazi sym­pa­thies,” writes Adam Kirsch at The New York­er. The two met after the war in Freiburg, and Hei­deg­ger lat­er sent Arendt a pas­sion­ate, poet­ic let­ter in 1950, extolling the “excit­ing, still almost unspo­ken under­stand­ing” between them, “emerg­ing from an affin­i­ty that was cre­at­ed so quick­ly, that comes from so far away, that has not been shak­en by evil and con­fu­sion.”

Lat­er, in a 1969 birth­day trib­ute essay “Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger at Eighty,” Arendt penned what has gen­er­al­ly been tak­en as an exon­er­a­tion of Hei­deg­ger. In it, she “com­pared Hei­deg­ger to Thales,” writes Gor­don, “the ancient philoso­pher who grew so absorbed in con­tem­plat­ing the heav­ens that he stum­bled into the well at his feet.” The truth is quite a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than that, and quite a bit less lofty. But as Maria Popo­va elo­quent­ly writes, their rela­tion­ship “expos­es the com­plex­i­ty and con­tra­dic­tion of which the human spir­it is woven, its threads nowhere more ragged than in love.” Read many more excerpts from their let­ters at Brain Pick­ings. And find com­plete let­ters col­lect­ed in the vol­ume, Let­ters: 1925–1975 — Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Han­nah Arendt.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Heidegger’s “Black Note­books” Sug­gest He Was a Seri­ous Anti-Semi­te, Not Just a Naive Nazi

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks Phi­los­o­phy with a Bud­dhist Monk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1963)

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

A Complete Digitization of Eros Magazine: The Controversial 1960s Magazine on the Sexual Revolution

Last year we told you about the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Avant Garde mag­a­zine, a short-lived but influ­en­tial 1960s mag­a­zine, which fea­tured lith­o­graphs by John Lennon and artis­tic pho­tographs of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. Today, we’re pleased to announce the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Avant Garde’s sis­ter mag­a­zine, Eros. Also a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Ralph Ginzburg (edi­tor) and Herb Lubalin (art direc­tor), Eros posi­tioned itself as a quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine on love and sex in Amer­i­ca. Author­i­ties, how­ev­er, did­n’t take kind­ly to a mag­a­zine cov­er­ing the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion. Not in 1962. And when Eros pub­lished its fourth issue, Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al, indict­ed Ginzburg for dis­trib­ut­ing obscene lit­er­a­ture through the mail and vio­lat­ing fed­er­al anti-obscen­i­ty laws. Ginzburg was con­vict­ed (a deci­sion lat­er affirmed by the Supreme Court) and sen­tenced to five years in prison. Ulti­mate­ly, he served eight months.

Thanks to Mindy Seu, a new­ly-cre­at­ed web­site lets you read dig­i­tal copies of Eros. All four issuesSpring 1962, Sum­mer 1962Autumn 1962, and Win­ter 1962. When you vis­it the site, click the word “Index” in the top right cor­ner, and then you can eas­i­ly nav­i­gate through indi­vid­ual pages.

As you do, keep one thing in mind: Eros was no flim­sy mag­a­zine. Accord­ing to The New York Times, it was a “stun­ning­ly designed hard­cov­er ‘mag­book’,” cov­er­ing “a wide swath of sex­u­al­i­ty in his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, art and lit­er­a­ture” and fea­tur­ing arti­cles by the likes of Nat Hentoff.

Also, if you click on “Resources” once you’re on the new site, you can read arti­cles about Eros mag­a­zine and the con­tro­ver­sial tri­al.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of the 1960s Mag­a­zine Avant Garde: From John Lennon’s Erot­ic Lith­o­graphs to Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Last Pho­tos

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

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Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau, It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism”

In 1917, a hand­ful of Europe’s lead­ing avant-garde artists col­lab­o­rat­ed on a project that it’s hard to believe actu­al­ly exists. Con­ceived “in the fer­tile, cre­ative mind of Jean Cocteau,” writes Muse­wor­thy, the bal­let Parade com­bined the tal­ents of Cocteau, Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so, and Sergei Diaghilev’s dance com­pa­ny the Bal­lets Russ­es in a cubist slice of dream­like life. Its brings pop­u­lar enter­tain­ments into the high art of bal­let, some­thing sim­ply not done at the time, and fea­tures a very ear­ly use of sound effects in the score, added by Cocteau, to Satie’s annoy­ance. Parade was Satie’s first bal­let and the first (but not the only) time he would work with Picas­so.

Cocteau’s short, one-act sce­nario presents us with a troupe of car­ni­val per­form­ers try­ing to entice passers­by into their shows. They are unsuc­cess­ful, this troupe, con­sist­ing of a Chi­nese magi­cian,  young Amer­i­can girl, a pair of acro­bats, a horse, and sev­er­al dancers in huge card­board cubist cos­tumes so heavy and awk­ward they can hard­ly move.

But “if any­one found Picasso’s cos­tume designs a bit wacky, they’d sure be pleased with his gor­geous set designs,” Muse­wor­thy notes, point­ing out the back­drop above. Indeed it was hard­ly unusu­al for an avant-garde mod­ernist painter to design for the bal­let; “Sal­vador Dali, Marc Cha­gall, Andre Derain, Joan Miro, and Léon Bakst all worked on cos­tumes and scenery, much of it for the Bal­lets Russ­es.”

But there was some­thing espe­cial­ly infu­ri­at­ing about this piece for audi­ences. (You can see an excerpt from a recent pro­duc­tion at the top, and a low qual­i­ty video of a longer per­for­mance above.) The pre­miere pro­voked an even big­ger riot than Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had four years ear­li­er. It’s said that Erik Satie was slapped in the face by an angry attendee. “Crit­ics weren’t much kinder than the mass­es,” Muse­wor­thy adds. After one scathing review, Satie sent the crit­ic angry post­cards call­ing him a “block­head,” “cretin,” and an “arse.” He was con­vict­ed of libel but man­aged to evade a prison sen­tence.

Picas­so, on the oth­er hand, “came out of the Parade deba­cle quite well” and would mar­ry one of the dancers, Olga Khokhlo­va the fol­low­ing year. His high­ly-regard­ed design and cos­tum­ing part­ly inspired the poet Guil­laume Apol­li­naire to coin in his pro­gram notes the word “sur­re­al­ism” before Sur­re­al­ism became an artis­tic phe­nom­e­non in Paris. As such, Parade should maybe be required view­ing for every stu­dent of Sur­re­al­ist art, dance, film, etc. from Dali to David Lynch.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

A Son­ic Intro­duc­tion to Avant-Garde Music: Stream 145 Min­utes of 20th Cen­tu­ry Art Music, Includ­ing Mod­ernism, Futur­ism, Dadaism & Beyond

Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Sym­phonies & Bal­lets in a Com­plete, 32-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist

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

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby


“In 1970, Hunter S. Thomp­son went to the Ken­tucky Der­by, and he changed sports jour­nal­ism and broad­cast­ing for­ev­er.” Or so claims his­to­ri­an Dou­glas Brink­ley, the oft-imi­tat­ed but nev­er repli­cat­ed writer’s lit­er­ary execu­tor, in the short Gonzo @ the Der­by. Direct­ed by Michael G. Rat­ner and first com­mis­sioned by ESP­N’s 30 for 30, the thir­teen-minute doc­u­men­tary tells the sto­ry of how, hav­ing made his name with a book on the Hel­l’s Angels, the 33-year-old, Louisville-born Thomp­son took a gig with the rebel­lious and short-lived Scan­lan’s Month­ly to go back to his home­town and report on its famous horse race — and how he almost inad­ver­tent­ly defined a whole new kind of jour­nal­ism as a result.

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the Unit­ed States looked like a coun­try in seri­ous tur­moil: “Every­thing seemed to be com­ing unglued in Amer­i­ca,” says Brink­ley. “Kent State and the Black Pan­thers and the rebel­lion that’s going on around the nation, and yet here is this old-fash­ioned Ken­tucky Der­by fes­ti­val going on.” The late War­ren Hinck­le III, who edit­ed Scan­lan’s, had one ques­tion: “Who went to these damn things?” And so Thomp­son, described here by for­mer Rolling Stone man­ag­ing edi­tor John Walsh as “the quin­tes­sen­tial out­sider who likes to make him­self the quin­tes­sen­tial insid­er,” went — with nei­ther press cre­den­tials nor reser­va­tions — to find out the answer.

Thomp­son did not, as every fan knows, find out alone. Scan­lan’s also flew in, all the way from Eng­land, an illus­tra­tor by the name of Ralph Stead­man. When Thomp­son and Stead­man man­aged to meet amid the gre­gar­i­ous chaos of Der­by-time Louisville, nei­ther man could have known how inex­tri­ca­bly the cul­ture would soon asso­ciate their work, the for­mer’s fever­ish, impres­sion­is­tic yet hyper­sen­si­tive prose and the lat­ter’s untamed-look­ing, dis­tinc­tive­ly mon­strous art­work. Both of them found their voic­es in pre­sent­ing real­i­ty not as it was, but as grim­ly height­ened as it could feel to them, and both, giv­en the era, occa­sion­al­ly did so with the aid of mind-alter­ing sub­stances.

At the Ken­tucky Der­by, how­ev­er, they stuck to alco­hol — as did, if you believe Thomp­son’s report­ing, all the rest of the atten­dees, and in an at once hel­la­cious­ly debauch­er­ous and sin­is­ter­ly gen­teel way at that. “Unlike most of the oth­ers in the press box, we did­n’t give a hoot in hell what was hap­pen­ing on the track,” he writes in the final prod­uct of he and Stead­man’s trip, “The Ken­tucky Der­by Is Deca­dent and Depraved.” (Find it in the col­lec­tion, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time.) “We had come there to watch the real beasts per­form.” Yet even as they gazed, backs to the hors­es, upon the sheer grotes­querie of what Brink­ley calls “the white South­ern pow­er elite,” they real­ized that they, too, amid their blus­ter­ing fak­ery, half-remem­bered alter­ca­tions, and near-con­stant bing­ing, had become beast­ly them­selves.

After all that, Thomp­son, back in New York to write up the sto­ry, feared that he did­n’t have a sto­ry at all. In des­per­a­tion, he told not of what hap­pened at the 1970 Ken­tucky Der­by but of how he and Stead­man expe­ri­enced the 1970 Ken­tucky Der­by, leav­ing plen­ty of room for spec­u­la­tion, remem­brance, artis­tic license, and unver­i­fi­able mad­ness that even­tu­al­ly devolves into the raw notes he scrib­bled amid the storm of high-soci­ety South­ern squalor. Could he have pos­si­bly sus­pect­ed what a potent com­bi­na­tion that and Stead­man’s illus­tra­tions (described as “sketched with eye­brow pen­cil and lip­stick”) would make? Bill Car­doso, then edi­tor of the Boston Globe, under­stood its pow­er when he first read the arti­cle, even coin­ing a word to describe it: “This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.”

The short doc­u­men­tary, “Gonzo @ the Der­by,” will be added to our list of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Hunter S. Thomp­son — and Psilo­cy­bin — Influ­enced the Art of Ralph Stead­man, Cre­at­ing the “Gonzo” Style

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets in a Gun­fight with His Neigh­bor & Dis­pens­es Polit­i­cal Wis­dom: “In a Democ­ra­cy, You Have to Be a Play­er”

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by The Hell’s Angels: Where’s Our Two Kegs of Beer? (1967)

Play­ing Golf on LSD With Hunter S. Thomp­son: Esquire Edi­tor Remem­bers the Odd­est Game of Golf

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The History of Electronic Music Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inventors, Composers & Musicians

No his­tor­i­cal leap for­ward has changed human cul­ture more than the har­ness­ing and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of elec­tric­i­ty. It may seem banal to point out such a truism—of course, noth­ing in the mod­ern world would be what it is with­out the furi­ous activ­i­ty of Thomas Edi­son, Niko­la Tes­la, and so many oth­er inven­tors and ear­ly elec­tri­cal engi­neers. But the scope of electricity’s role in the music of the past hun­dred plus years becomes tru­ly awe-inspir­ing when we see it mapped out in the blue­print-like graph­ic above, “Elec­tric Love,” inspired by cir­cuit dia­grams from the 1950s for a Theremin. (You can view the graph­ic in a larg­er, zoomable fash­ion here.)

As we not­ed in an ear­li­er post, design­er of “Elec­tric Love” James Quail has cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar dia­gram for Alter­na­tive and Indie rock, based on the cir­cuit lay­out for a 1954 tran­sis­tor radio. In the elec­tron­ic music ver­sion here, not only does Quail draw on old­er tech­nol­o­gy, but he reach­es back to ear­li­er ances­tors as well: to Edi­son, Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell rival Elisha Gray, and Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville, inven­tor of the obscure ear­ly record­ing device the pho­nau­to­graph.

It’s a choice that fore­grounds just how much tech­ni­cians and engi­neers con­tributed direct­ly to the sound of the mod­ern world. Among them, of course, is the late Robert Moog, inven­tor of the portable ana­log syn­the­siz­er that become ubiq­ui­tous in near­ly every genre of mod­ern music, and whose work “was actu­al­ly based,” notes Wired, “on tech­nol­o­gy from the 1800s.”

When it comes to the musi­cians who took this tech­nol­o­gy and trans­formed it into avant-gardism and dance records, the rela­tion­ships are com­plex and per­haps impos­si­ble to ful­ly rep­re­sent in sim­ple terms giv­en the num­ber of indi­rect influ­ences through sam­pling tech­nol­o­gy. But “Elec­tric Love” does an admirable job of show­ing how dif­fuse and diverse the music made by ana­log and dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has been. From the musique con­crete of Pierre Schaf­fer, the exper­i­men­tal­ism of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen and Arnold Schoen­berg, com­mer­cial avant-garde of Delia Der­byshire and Wendy Car­los, min­i­mal­ism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, new wave of Kraftwerk, house and hip hop of Der­rick May, Afri­ka Bam­baataa and Kool DJ Herc, ambi­ent sound­scapes of Bri­an Eno, jit­tery elec­tron­i­ca of Aphex Twin, syn­th­pop of Depeche Mode and New Order…

It’s seem­ing­ly all there, and every­thing in-between, con­nect­ed, Quail says, accord­ing to “com­mon link[s]—whether that’s a style, or an instru­ment, or an influ­ence on one anoth­er.” Even The Bea­t­les and Pink Floyd show up, pre­sum­ably for their cre­ative stu­dio exper­i­ments. On the whole, how­ev­er, most of the small­er names here are much less famil­iar by com­par­i­son to Quail’s Alter­na­tive chart, but for true fans of elec­tron­ic music, this only means there’s more to dis­cov­er in this visu­al com­pendi­um of “over 200 inven­tors, inno­va­tors, artists, com­posers and musi­cians.” You can pur­chase “Elec­tric Love” as a print from design house Dorothy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

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

Dan Rather Introduces Rastafarianism to the U.S. in a 60 Minutes Segment Featuring Bob Marley (1979)


Like many peo­ple, I learned the basic tenets of Rasta­far­i­an­ism from Bob Mar­ley and the Wail­ers, Peter Tosh, Steel Pulse, and lat­er adopters Bad Brains. Marley’s world­wide fame not only spread the reli­gion from Kingston to Lon­don to New York, but it also inspired no small num­ber of non-Rasta­far­i­ans to wear the Pan-African col­ors of red, green, and gold, grow dread­locks, and sing about “Baby­lon” and “I and I.” The irony of sub­ur­ban Amer­i­cans in col­lege dorms adopt­ing the trap­pings of a post­colo­nial reli­gion with an unabashed­ly anti-West­ern, Afro­cen­tric core pre­dates most recent con­tro­ver­sies over “cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion,” but one rarely sees a bet­ter exam­ple of the phe­nom­e­non.

Con­sumers of Jamaican Rasta­far­i­an cul­ture in the past few decades, how­ev­er, have rarely had to go very far to find it, and to find it appeal­ing. Since the 1960s, the strug­gling island nation has relied on “Brand Jamaica,” writes Lucy McK­eon at The New York Review of Books, “a glob­al brand often asso­ci­at­ed with protest music, laid-back, ‘One Love’ pos­i­tiv­i­ty, and a pot-smok­ing coun­ter­cul­ture.” The themes most non-Ras­ta fans of Bob Mar­ley derive from his music also dri­ve a lucra­tive tourism indus­try. Both tourists and casu­al lis­ten­ers tend to ignore the music’s eso­teric the­ol­o­gy. But reg­gae as par­ty and protest music is only part of the sto­ry.

Those who dig deep­er into the music’s belief sys­tem usu­al­ly find it quite odd—by the stan­dards of old­er reli­gious cul­tures whose own odd­ness has long been nat­u­ral­ized. Rasta­far­i­ans revere a recent his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, Ethiopi­an Emper­or Haile Selassie (born Ras Tafari), as the mes­si­ah, based on a sup­posed prophe­cy made by influ­en­tial Pan-African­ist Mar­cus Gar­vey (who also inspired the found­ing of the Nation of Islam). Rasta­far­i­an­ism is also inte­gral not only to reg­gae, but to what began in the 1930s as “a fight for jus­tice by dis­en­fran­chised Jamaicans, peas­ant labor­ers and the urban under­em­ployed alike, in what was then a British colony.”

You will gath­er a lit­tle bit of this his­to­ry from the video above, “The Rasta­far­i­ans,” a 15-minute 60 Min­utes seg­ment from 1979 with Dan Rather. But you get it through a con­de­scend­ing­ly prej­u­di­cial net­work news fil­ter, a sen­si­bil­i­ty appalled by the movement’s black­ness and pover­ty. Rather describes Rasta­far­i­an­is­m’s ori­gins among the “black mass­es” in “the ghet­to, the slums of Kingston.” In the “squalor of these slums,” he tells his audi­ence, poor res­i­dents found solace in the words of Gar­vey, “a Jamaican slumd­weller.” Rather rep­re­sents a view deeply con­cerned with the move­men­t’s “crim­i­nal ele­ment” among “true believ­ers” and “ghet­to hus­tlers” alike. This rather com­pul­sive­ly one-note pre­sen­ta­tion hard­ly cap­tures the rich his­to­ry of Rasta­far­i­an­ism, which began not in the “slums,” but in a moun­tain set­tle­ment called Pin­na­cle in the 1930s.

In 1940—a decade into the settlement’s found­ing and growth into a colony of hun­dreds, some­times thou­sands of people—a reporter named John Car­ra­dine observed, “The Rasta­far­i­ans are not essen­tial­ly a reli­gious sect.… They are rather an eco­nom­ic com­mu­ni­ty.” Founder of the Pin­na­cle com­mu­ni­ty Leonard Per­ci­val How­ell pro­mot­ed what he “report­ed­ly called ‘a social­is­tic life’ based on prin­ci­ples of com­mu­nal­ism and eco­nom­ic inde­pen­dence from the colo­nial sys­tem.” Under Gar­vey’s tute­lage, How­ell had absorbed Marx­ist and social­ist doc­trine, but the reli­gion was his own pecu­liar inven­tion. Gar­vey dis­missed it as a “cult,” and amidst its nation­al­ism, it har­bors sev­er­al anti-Semit­ic and anti-Catholic teach­ings.

Like all zeal­ous nation­al­ist-reli­gious move­ments, Rasta­far­i­ans have defined them­selves as much by the per­ceived Baby­lon they stand against as by the promised land they hope to inher­it. Rasta­far­i­an­ism may have been trans­formed into a nation­al­ist prod­uct, both by its most suc­cess­ful musi­cians and the tourist indus­try, but its asso­ci­a­tion with Gar­vey’s ideas also links it with a Pan-African­ism that called for peo­ple of the African dias­po­ra in Europe, the U.S., and the Caribbean to secede from oppres­sive colo­nial sys­tems and either emi­grate or form alter­na­tive, self-suf­fi­cient economies. The first Rasta­far­i­ans did just that by grow­ing gan­ja, and their com­mu­ni­ty thrived into the mid-fifties, when gov­ern­ment crack­downs and pres­sure from Win­ston Churchill drove them from their land and into the cap­i­tal city.

The spread of the reli­gion in Kingston coin­cid­ed with an anti-colo­nial move­ment that even­tu­al­ly won inde­pen­dence in 1962, and with the blend­ing of rur­al and urban musi­cal styles hap­pen­ing in the midst of social and polit­i­cal change. All of these threads are insep­a­ra­ble from the bur­geon­ing reg­gae scene that even­tu­al­ly con­quered every beach town and resort across the word. As for the the­ol­o­gy, we might say that Ethiopia’s Emper­or encour­aged his ele­va­tion to the role of Jah on Earth with his own cre­ative revi­sion­ism. At his lav­ish and wide­ly-pub­li­cized coro­na­tion, Rather reports, the new monarch was “crowned King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Con­quer­ing Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” Quite a bid for god-on-earth­hood. And for a strug­gling Jamaican under­class, quite an inspi­ra­tion for visions of a glo­ri­ous future in a renewed African king­dom.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

John­ny Cash & Joe Strum­mer Sing Bob Marley’s “Redemp­tion Song” (2002)

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

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

Yes­ter­day, on Twit­ter, Priscil­la Page remind­ed us of the time when “Ste­vie Nicks showed us how to kick ass in high-heeled boots in her body­guard’s self-defense book,” call­ing our atten­tion to the lit­tle-known 1983 book, Hands Off!: A Unique New Sys­tem of Self Defence Against Assault for the Women of Today.

The book itself was writ­ten by Bob Jones, an Aus­tralian mar­tial arts instruc­tor who dou­bled as a secu­ri­ty guard for Fleet­wood Mac, The Bea­t­les, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Joe Cock­er and oth­er stars. And it fea­tured what Jones called “mnemon­ic movements”–essentially a series of nine subconscious/reflexive self-defense moves (like a swift knee to the groin). See Jones’ web­site for a more com­plete expla­na­tion of the exer­cise rou­tine that also pro­vid­ed, he notes, a great car­dio work­out.

Ste­vie Nicks agreed to take part in a pho­to­shoot where she would help demon­strate the nine mnemon­ic move­ments. Jones recalls,” This lady was a pro­fes­sion­al: in two hours I had a hun­dred of the most mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos ever offered to the mar­tial arts, and just one would make the cov­er [above].”

“On this day of the shoot I was stand­ing in my mar­tial arts train­ing uni­form, wear­ing my Black Belt. Then Ste­vie appeared, her hair done to resem­ble the mane of a lion. She was psy­ched up for some seri­ous pho­tograph­ing. Ste­vie wore her famil­iar thick-soled, thick-heeled, knee-high brown suede kid leather boots. High roll-over socks appeared over the top of these ele­gant Swedish boots and hung ten­ta­tive­ly around her knees.” “In these kick­ing-style pho­tographs the sun also made her dress par­tial­ly see-through: just enough to be artis­ti­cal­ly inter­est­ing.”

Hands Off is now long out of print. But you can find a series of images from the book on the Voic­es of East Anglia and Dan­ger­ous Minds web­sites.

via Priscil­la Page/Coudal

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rad­i­cal French Phi­los­o­phy Meets Kung-Fu Cin­e­ma in Can Dialec­tics Break Bricks? (1973)

Kung Fu & Mar­tial Arts Movies Online

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