Notations: John Cage Publishes a Book of Graphic Musical Scores, Featuring Visualizations of Works by Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles & More (1969)

in Books, Music | January 10th, 2018

If you know just one piece by avant-garde com­pos­er and all-around ora­cle of inde­ter­mi­na­cy John Cage, you know 1952’s 4′33″, which con­sists, for that length of time, of no delib­er­ate­ly played sounds at all. You’d think that if any piece could be played with­out a score, Cage’s sig­na­ture com­po­si­tion could, but he did make sure to write one, and we fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago. Look at that score, of sorts, and you’ll sense that Cage had an inter­est not just in uncon­ven­tion­al music, but in equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al ways of notat­ing that music. Hence the Nota­tions project, Cage’s 1969 book col­lect­ing pieces of scores by 269 dif­fer­ent com­posers and accom­pa­ny­ing them with short texts.

Assem­bling the book from mate­ri­als archived at the Foun­da­tion for Con­tem­po­rary Arts, Cage did include a page of one of his own scores, though not that of 4′33″ but of Music of Changes, a piano piece he’d com­posed the year before it for his friend David Tudor.

Tudor, a pianist as well as a com­pos­er of exper­i­men­tal music in his own right, also gets a page in Nota­tions from his 1958 work Solo for Piano (Cage) for Inde­ter­mi­na­cy. Lest this sound like a too-neat struc­ture of reci­procity, rest assured that in the com­po­si­tion of the book’s text, as Cage explains in the book’s intro­duc­tion, inde­ter­mi­na­cy ruled, with “a process employ­ing I‑Ching chance oper­a­tions” dic­tat­ing the num­ber of words to be writ­ten, about which scores, and in what size and type­face as well.

Nota­tions, which also includes scores from the Bea­t­les, Leonard Bern­stein, Paul Bowles, Charles Ives (from whose archive Cage picked a blank piece of song paper), Gyor­gy Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, Igor Stravin­sky, Toru Takemit­su, and many oth­ers, inspired a more recent fol­low-up project called Nota­tions 21, which you can learn about in the video just below. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between musi­col­o­gist and com­pos­er There­sa Sauer and design­er Mike Per­ry, that 2009 book col­lects more than a hun­dred pieces of cre­ative nota­tion from some of the com­posers fea­tured in Cage’s orig­i­nal, but also many who weren’t com­pos­ing or indeed even alive in his day.

Nota­tions 21 stands as a tes­ta­ment to Cage’s endur­ing influ­ence as not just a com­pos­er but as the pro­mot­er of a world­view all about har­ness­ing the forces of chance to enrich our lives, and to put us in a clear­er frame of mind to see what comes next. “Musi­cal nota­tion is one of the most amaz­ing pic­ture-lan­guage inven­tions of the human ani­mal,” Ross Lee Finney writes in the text of the orig­i­nal Nota­tions. “It didn’t come into being of a moment but is the result of cen­turies of exper­i­men­ta­tion. It has nev­er been quite sat­is­fac­to­ry for the composer’s pur­pos­es and there­fore the exper­i­ment con­tin­ues.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

Watch Gyor­gy Ligeti’s Elec­tron­ic Mas­ter­piece Artiku­la­tion Get Brought to Life by Rain­er Wehinger’s Bril­liant Visu­al Score

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

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

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

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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David Bowie: The Last Five Years Is Now Airing/Streaming on HBO

in Film, Music | January 10th, 2018


FYI: David Bowie died two years ago today. And to com­mem­o­rate the anniver­sary, HBO has just start­ed air­ing David Bowie: The Last Five Years, a 90-minute BBC doc­u­men­tary that revis­its Bowie’s less pub­lic final years. If you don’t already have HBO, you could always watch the doc by sign­ing up for a free tri­al for HBO Now (HBO’s stream­ing ser­vice). Here’s a quick summary/overview of the film:

In the last years of his life, David Bowie end­ed near­ly a decade of silence to engage in an extra­or­di­nary burst of activ­i­ty, pro­duc­ing two ground­break­ing albums and a musi­cal. David Bowie: The Last Five Years explores this unex­pect­ed end to a remark­able career.

On the 2003–2004 “Real­i­ty” tour, David Bowie had a fright­en­ing brush with mor­tal­i­ty, suf­fer­ing a heart attack dur­ing what was to be his final full con­cert. He then dis­ap­peared from pub­lic view, only re-emerg­ing in the last five years of his life to make some of the most impor­tant music of his career. Made with remark­able access, Fran­cis Whately’s doc­u­men­tary is a rev­e­la­to­ry fol­low-up to his acclaimed 2013 doc­u­men­tary David Bowie: Five Years, which chron­i­cled Bowie’s gold­en ‘70s and early-‘80s peri­od.

While illu­mi­nat­ing icon­ic moments of his extra­or­di­nary and pro­lif­ic career, David Bowie: The Last Five Years focus­es on three major projects: the albums The Next Day and the jazz-infused Black­star (released on Bowie’s 69th birth­day, two days before his death in 2016), and the musi­cal Lazarus, which was inspired by the char­ac­ter he played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Dis­pelling the sim­plis­tic view that his career was sim­ply pred­i­cat­ed on change, the film includes reveal­ing inter­views with many of Bowie’s clos­est cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tors, includ­ing: Tony Vis­con­ti, Bowie’s long-time pro­duc­er; musi­cians who con­tributed to The Next Day and Black­star; Jonathan Barn­brook, the graph­ic design­er of both albums; Robert Fox, pro­duc­er of Lazarus, along with cast mem­bers from the show, pro­vid­ing a unique behind-the-scenes look at Bowie’s cre­ative process; and Johan Renck, direc­tor of Bowie’s final music video, “Lazarus,” which was wide­ly dis­cussed as fore­shad­ow­ing his death.

You can watch a trail­er for the new film up above.

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:

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

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Watch Gyorgy Ligeti’s Electronic Masterpiece Artikulation Get Brought to Life by Rainer Wehinger’s Brilliant Visual Score

in Art, Music | January 9th, 2018

Even if you don’t know the name Györ­gy Ligeti, you prob­a­bly already asso­ciate his music with a set of mes­mer­iz­ing visions. The work of that Hun­gar­i­an com­pos­er of 20th-cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal music appealed might­i­ly to Stan­ley Kubrick, so much so that he used four of Ligeti’s pieces to score 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of them, 1962’s Aven­tures, plays over the final scenes in an elec­tron­i­cal­ly altered form, which drew a law­suit from the com­pos­er who’d been unaware of the mod­i­fi­ca­tion. But he did­n’t do it out of purism: though he wrote, over his long career, almost entire­ly for tra­di­tion­al instru­ments, he’d made a cou­ple for­ays into elec­tron­ic music him­self a decade ear­li­er.

Ligeti fled Hun­gary for Vien­na in 1956, soon after­ward mak­ing his way to Cologne, where he met the elec­tron­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive likes of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen and Got­tfried Michael Koenig and worked in West Ger­man Radio’s Stu­dio for Elec­tron­ic Music.

There he pro­duced 1957’s Glis­san­di and 1958’s Artiku­la­tion, the lat­ter of which lasts just under four min­utes, but, in the words of The Guardian’s Tom Ser­vice, “packs a lot of dra­ma in its diminu­tive elec­tron­ic frame.” Ligeti him­self “imag­ined the sounds of Artiku­la­tion con­jur­ing up images and ideas of labyrinths, texts, dia­logues, insects, cat­a­stro­phes, trans­for­ma­tions, dis­ap­pear­ances,” which you can see visu­al­ized in shape and col­or in the “lis­ten­ing score” in the video above.

Cre­at­ed in 1970 by graph­ic design­er Rain­er Wehinger of the State Uni­ver­si­ty of Music and Per­form­ing Arts Stuttgart, and approved by Ligeti him­self, the score’s “visu­als are beau­ti­ful to watch in tan­dem with Ligeti’s music; there’s an espe­cial­ly arrest­ing son­ic and visu­al pile-up, about 3 mins 15 secs into the piece. This isn’t elec­tron­ic music as post­war utopia, a la Stock­hausen, it’s elec­tron­ics as human, humor­ous dra­ma,” writes Ser­vice. Have a watch and a lis­ten, or a cou­ple of them, and you’ll get a feel for how Wehinger’s visu­al choic­es reflect the nature of Ligeti’s sounds. Just as 2001 still launch­es sci-fi buffs into an expe­ri­ence like noth­ing else in the genre, those sounds will still strike a fair few self-described elec­tron­ic music fans of the 21st cen­tu­ry as strange and new — espe­cial­ly when they can see them at the same time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch What Hap­pens When 100 Metronomes Per­form Györ­gy Ligeti’s Con­tro­ver­sial Poème Sym­phonique

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

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

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

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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Spheres Dance to the Music of Bach, Performed by Glenn Gould: An Animation from 1969

in Animation | January 9th, 2018

From Nor­man McLaren and René Jodoin comes a 1969 short ani­ma­tion called “Spheres.” Here, you can watch “spheres of translu­cent pearl float weight­less­ly in the unlim­it­ed panora­ma of the sky, group­ing, regroup­ing or col­lid­ing like the styl­ized burst of some atom­ic chain reac­tion.” All the while, “the dance is set to the musi­cal cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.” A per­fect com­bi­na­tion.

This film par­tic­i­pates in a long tra­di­tion of ani­ma­tions explor­ing geom­e­try, some of which you can find in the Relat­eds right below.

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:

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try & Hard Work: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion (1965)

Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of a Tri­an­gle: Watch the 1977 Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion That Demys­ti­fies Geom­e­try

Watch “Geom­e­try of Cir­cles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

 

 

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A Short Animated Introduction to Karl Marx

in Economics, Politics | January 9th, 2018

Is Karl Marx’s cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism still rel­e­vant to the 21st cen­tu­ry? Can we ever read him inde­pen­dent­ly of the move­ments that vio­lent­ly seized state pow­er in his name, claim­ing to rep­re­sent the work­ers through the sole will of the Par­ty? These are ques­tions Marx­ists must con­front, as must all seri­ous defend­ers of cap­i­tal­ism, who can­not afford to ignore Marx. He under­stood and artic­u­lat­ed the prob­lems of polit­i­cal econ­o­my bet­ter than any the­o­rist of his day and posed a for­mi­da­ble intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge to the val­ues lib­er­al democ­ra­cies claim to espouse, and those they actu­al­ly prac­tice through eco­nom­ic exploita­tion, per­pet­u­al rent-seek­ing, and the alien­at­ing com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of every­thing.

In his School of Life video explain­er above, Alain de Bot­ton sums up the received assess­ment of Com­mu­nist his­to­ry as “dis­as­trous­ly planned economies and nasty dic­ta­tor­ships.” “Nev­er­the­less,” he says, we should view Marx “as a guide, whose diag­no­sis of capitalism’s ills helps us to nav­i­gate toward a more promis­ing future”—the future of a “reformed” cap­i­tal­ism. No Marx­ist would ever make this argu­ment; de Botton’s video appeals to the skep­tic, new to Marx and not whol­ly inoc­u­lat­ed against giv­ing him a hear­ing. His ideas get boiled down to some most­ly uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ments: Mod­ern work is alien­at­ing and inse­cure. The rich get rich­er while wages fall. Such the­ses have attained the sta­tus of self-evi­dent tru­isms.

More inter­est­ing and provoca­tive is Marx’s (and Engels’) notion that cap­i­tal­ism is “bad for cap­i­tal­ists,” in that it pro­duces the repres­sive, patri­ar­chal domin­ion of the nuclear fam­i­ly, “fraught with ten­sion, oppres­sion, and resent­ment.” Addi­tion­al­ly, the impo­si­tion of eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions into every aspect of life ren­ders rela­tion­ships arti­fi­cial and forms of life sharply con­strained by the demands of the labor mar­ket. Here Marx’s eco­nom­ic cri­tique takes on its sub­tly rad­i­cal fem­i­nist dimen­sion, de Bot­ton says, by claim­ing that “men and women should have the per­ma­nent option to enjoy leisure,” not sim­ply the equal oppor­tu­ni­ty to sell their labor pow­er for equal amounts of inse­cu­ri­ty.

The video won’t sway staunch­ly anti-com­mu­nist minds, but it might make some view­ers curi­ous about what exact­ly it was Marx had to say. Those who turn to his mas­ter­work, Das Kap­i­tal, are like­ly to give up before they reach the twists and turns of the argu­ments de Bot­ton out­lines in broad strokes. The first and most famous vol­ume is hard going with­out a guide, and you’ll find few­er bet­ter than David Har­vey, Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy and Geog­ra­phy at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York’s Grad­u­ate Cen­ter.

Harvey’s Com­pan­ion to Marx’s Cap­i­tal has guid­ed read­ers through the text for years, and his lec­tures on Marx have done so for stu­dents going on four decades. In the video above, see an intro­duc­tion to Harvey’s lec­ture series on vol­ume one of Marx’s Cap­i­tal, and at our pre­vi­ous post, find com­plete videos of his full lec­ture series on Vol­umes One, Two, and part of Vol­ume Three. Har­vey doesn’t claim that a kinder, gen­tler cap­i­tal­ism can be found in Marx. But as to the ques­tion of whether Marx is still rel­e­vant to the vast­ly accel­er­at­ed, tech­no­crat­ic cap­i­tal­ism of the present, he would unequiv­o­cal­ly answer yes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

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

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A Map of George Orwell’s 1984

in Literature, Maps | January 9th, 2018

Many fic­tion­al loca­tions resist map­ping. Our imag­i­na­tions may thrill, but our men­tal geolo­ca­tion soft­ware recoils at the impos­si­bil­i­ties in Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities—a series of geo­graph­i­cal­ly whim­si­cal tales told by Mar­co Polo to Genghis Khan; or Chi­na Miéville’s The City and the City, in which two metropolises—Besźel and Ul Qoma—occupy much of the same phys­i­cal space, and a secre­tive police pow­er com­pels cit­i­zens to will­ful­ly “unsee” one city or the oth­er.

That’s not to say such maps can­not be made. Calvino’s strange cities have been illus­trat­ed, if not at street lev­el, in as fan­ci­ful a fash­ion as the nar­ra­tor describes them. Miéville’s weird cities have received sev­er­al lit­er­al-mind­ed map­ping treat­ments, which per­haps mis­take the novel’s care­ful con­struc­tion of metaphor for a kind of cre­ative urban plan­ning.

Miéville him­self might dis­avow such attempts, as he dis­avows one-to-one alle­gor­i­cal read­ings of his fan­tas­tic detec­tive novel—those, for exam­ple, that reduce the phe­nom­e­non of “unsee­ing” to an Orwellian means of thought con­trol. “Orwell is a much more overt­ly alle­gor­i­cal writer,” he tells There­sa DeLuc­ci at Tor, “although it’s always sort of unsta­ble, there’s a cer­tain kind of map­ping where­by x means y, a means b.”

Orwell’s spec­u­la­tive worlds are eas­i­ly decod­ed, in oth­er words, an opin­ion shared by many read­ers of Orwell. But Miéville’s com­ments aside, there’s an argu­ment to be made that The City and the City’s “unsee­ing” is the most vivid­ly Orwellian device in recent fic­tion. And that the fic­tion­al world of 1984 does not, per­haps, yield to such sim­ple map­ping as we imag­ine.

Of course it’s easy to draw a map (see above, or in a larg­er for­mat here) of the three impe­r­i­al pow­ers the nov­el tells us rule the world. Frank Jacobs at Big Think tidi­ly sums them up:

Ocea­nia cov­ers the entire con­ti­nents of Amer­i­ca and Ocea­nia and the British Isles, the main loca­tion for the nov­el, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.
Eura­sia cov­ers Europe and (more or less) the entire Sovi­et Union.
Eas­t­a­sia cov­ers Japan, Korea, Chi­na and north­ern India.

These three super­states are per­pet­u­al­ly at war with each oth­er, though who’s at war with whom is unclear. “And yet… the war might just not even be real at all”—for all we know it might be a fab­ri­ca­tion of the Min­istry of Truth, to man­u­fac­ture con­sent for aus­ter­i­ty, mass sur­veil­lance, forced nation­al­ism, etc. It’s also pos­si­ble that the entire­ty of the novel’s geo-pol­i­tics have been invent­ed out of whole cloth, that “Airstrip One is not an out­post of a greater empire,” Jacobs writes, “but the sole ter­ri­to­ry under the com­mand of Ing­soc.”

One com­menter on the map—which was post­ed to Red­dit last year—points out that “there isn’t any evi­dence in the book that this is actu­al­ly how the world is struc­tured.” We must look at the map as dou­bly fic­tion­al, an illus­tra­tion, Lau­ren Davis notes at io9, of “how the cred­u­lous inhab­i­tant of Airstrip One, armed with only maps dis­trib­uted by the Min­istry of Truth, might view the world, how vast the realm of Ocea­nia seems and how close the sup­posed ene­mies in Eura­sia.” It is the world as the minds of the nov­el­’s char­ac­ters con­ceive it.

All maps, we know, are dis­tor­tions, shaped by ide­ol­o­gy, belief, per­spec­ti­val bias. 1984’s lim­it­ed third-per­son nar­ra­tion enacts the lim­it­ed views of cit­i­zens in a total­i­tar­i­an state. Such a state nec­es­sar­i­ly uses force to pre­vent the peo­ple from inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fy­ing con­stant­ly shift­ing, con­tra­dic­to­ry pieces of infor­ma­tion. But the nov­el itself states that force is large­ly irrel­e­vant. “The patrols did not mat­ter… Only the Thought Police mat­tered.”

In Orwell’s fic­tion “sim­i­lar out­comes” as those in total­i­tar­i­an states, as Noam Chom­sky remarks, “can be achieved in free soci­eties like Eng­land” through edu­ca­tion and mass media con­trol. The most unset­tling thing about the seem­ing sim­plic­i­ty of 1984’s map of the world is that it might look like almost any­thing else for all the aver­age per­son knows. Its ele­men­tary-school rudi­ments metaphor­i­cal­ly point to fright­en­ing­ly vast areas of igno­rance, and pos­si­bil­i­ties we can only imag­ine, since Win­ston Smith and his com­pa­tri­ots no longer have the abil­i­ty, even if they had the means.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

A Map Shows What Every Coun­try in the World Calls Itself in its Own Lan­guage: Explore the “Endonyms of the World” Map

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

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Hear the 50 Best Post-Punk Albums of All Time: A Nostalgia-Inducing Playlist Curated by Paste Magazine

in Music | January 8th, 2018

Post­mod­ernism began as an archi­tec­tur­al term to describe the loss of a seem­ing­ly sta­ble social order and the build­ing of new forms in the 1960s and 70s. The new archi­tec­ture was an elab­o­rate patch­work of high and low cul­ture and past and present design trends. In both the­o­ry and prac­tice, post­mod­ernism delight­ed in odd jux­ta­po­si­tions and self-ref­er­en­tial irony. It did not shy away from pol­i­tics but made sar­don­ic crit­i­cal com­men­tary its méti­er rather than the total­iz­ing agen­das of late mod­ernism.

Post­mod­ernism added to mod­ernism’s genre-hop­ping a broad­er cul­tur­al scope and wider inclu­siv­i­ty of forms of expres­sion. We can see a sim­i­lar cul­tur­al shift hap­pen­ing in pop­u­lar music in the mid- to late-20th cen­tu­ry. The pop and rock of the six­ties frag­ment­ed into dozens of radio friend­ly gen­res, all of which met their crit­i­cal match in the aggres­sive­ness of punk, a move­ment with high aes­thet­ic com­mit­ments and a cor­re­spond­ing desire to det­o­nate cul­tur­al norms by any means nec­es­sary.

When we arrive at the “post-punk,” we find all things counter-cul­ture rub­bing up against each oth­er, fill­ing the void left by the old social order with new sounds and visions, some deter­mined­ly grim, some play­ful and iron­ic, near­ly all of them dance­able.

A fine descrip­tion for what the world of “post-punk” looked like comes from a recent per­son­al essay by the poet Patrick Ros­al:

It was the ear­ly 1980s, a brief few years when punk rock kids, b‑boys, new wave freaks, and dis­co fiends might all get down on the same dance floor: this one in moc­casin boots this one in a track suit with three side-stripes down the sleeves and legs, this one in a bag­gy neon sweater and extra eye­lin­er.

This was a time when bands like Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed (John Lydon’s post Sex Pis­tols project) and Bauhaus incor­po­rat­ed dub reg­gae rhythms, basslines, and stu­dio effects into the core of their sound. The Clash had already embarked on such exper­i­ments, and Clash gui­tarist Mick Jones took things fur­ther with Big Audio Dyna­mite, a punk/funk/reggae/hip hop hybrid that didn’t make the list of Paste Mag­a­zine’s “50 Best Post-Punk Albums,” but was cer­tain­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a strain of post-punk expan­sive­ness.

Bauhaus doesn’t make the list either, but Pub­lic Image Limited’s 1979 Met­al Box appears, at num­ber 14, an album of wob­bly, dub-inflect­ed “death dis­co” that won a spe­cial place in the hearts and record col­lec­tions of an eclec­tic group of fans as the eight­ies dawned. At #36 we find the equal­ly exper­i­men­tal Dub Hous­ing, the 1978 sec­ond album of Ohio’s Pere Ubu, a project that coa­lesced in the midst of Cleveland’s punk scene to make what front­man David Thomas called “avant garage.”

These dis­parate bands define post-punk as much as do the jan­g­ly, south­ern, Byrds-influ­enced sounds of R.E.M. or The dB’s, the surf-rock revival­ism of The B52’s, jazzy, angu­lar art-rock of Tele­vi­sion, jit­tery, So-Cal punk/jazz/country/funk of Min­ute­men, dark drone of Joy Divi­sion, chaot­ic blues-punk of Birth­day Par­ty, anar­chic noise and motorik beats of Swell Maps or Son­ic Youth, sham­bling rants of The Fall, new roman­tic pop of The Smiths or Orange Juice, satir­i­cal syn­th­punk of Devo…. The list can and does go on and on. You can see the full 50 at Paste Mag­a­zine, cho­sen and anno­tat­ed by the magazine’s writ­ers. Above, we’ve com­piled 48 of these albums in a Spo­ti­fy playlist—save Met­al Box and Dub Hous­ing, which are not avail­able on Spo­ti­fy.

This is music made by peo­ple “inter­est­ed in see­ing where music could go.” Many of them for­mer punks, many new to the scene. Many of them left behind these ear­ly exper­i­men­tal phas­es to become more con­ven­tion­al­ly genre-based, while some had only start­ed to push in new direc­tions lat­er in their career. Some of these bands arrived at a sound, made it their own, and rarely devi­at­ed, some shift­ed and changed through­out their career; some burned bright­ly, or dark­ly, for a short time, leav­ing indeli­ble marks of odd great­ness in a time when pop­u­lar music took more risks than before or maybe since.

At least that’s what it feels like look­ing back. If this is a nos­tal­gia trip for you, you’ll find it’s pret­ty com­pre­hen­sive, with the inevitable omis­sion of a favorite album, band, or two (where, I must ask, is My Bloody Valen­tine?) If you’re new to the range of this music, con­sid­er that, for all the vagary a term like “post-punk” might evoke, like the “post­mod­ern,” it has a spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal con­text, one in which a hand­ful of artists saw tremen­dous cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty amidst a gen­er­al sense of cul­tur­al malaise.

via Paste Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Hear the 20 Favorite Punk Albums of Black Flag Front­man Hen­ry Rollins

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

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A Map Shows What Every Country in the World Calls Itself in its Own Language: Explore the “Endonyms of the World” Map

in Maps | January 8th, 2018

I live in South Korea, but the South Kore­ans don’t call it South Korea. The coun­try has its own lan­guage, of course, and that lan­guage has its own name for the coun­try, dae­han min­guk (대한 민국), or more com­mon­ly hanguk (한국) — not that it stops the glob­al brand­ing-friend­ly let­ter K, which has made its way from “K‑pop” to “K‑beauty” to even (albeit much less suc­cess­ful­ly) things like “K‑food.” As far as our much-report­ed-on north­ern neigh­bor, South Kore­ans call it bukhan (북한), but its inhab­i­tants call their land joseon min­ju­jueui inmin gongh­waguk (조선민주주의인민공화국). And as with Korea South and North, so with every coun­try in the world: each one has an endonym.

“An endonym is the name for a place, site or loca­tion in the lan­guage of the peo­ple who live there. These names may be offi­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed by the local gov­ern­ment or they may sim­ply be wide­ly used.” So says the front page of the Endonym Map, which labels every coun­try (or dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry) in the world with its endonym, writ­ten in the lan­guage’s own script.

When you first learned the names of for­eign coun­tries, you actu­al­ly learned their exonyms, their names in a for­eign lan­guage: yours. “South Korea” and “North Korea” are exonyms, as are names like “Japan,” “Fin­land,” “Turkey,” and “France.” Nihon-koku (日本国), Suomen tasaval­ta, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, and la République française all appear on the Endonym Map, as do many oth­er well-known coun­tries you might at first glance assume you’ve nev­er heard of. 

The map’s cre­ator notes that “the most com­mon offi­cial or nation­al lan­guage in the world is Eng­lish, with 86 coun­tries or ter­ri­to­ries,” which rep­re­sents “one-third the num­ber of total coun­tries and approx­i­mate­ly 30% of the plan­et’s land area.” Because of that, peo­ple all over the world do tend to know the Eng­lish exonym for their own coun­try, but that’s hard­ly an excuse not to learn its real name should you decide to pay them a vis­it. And that counts as the first step toward actu­al­ly learn­ing its lan­guage, a jour­ney that the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s lan­guage-learn­ing map we fea­tured last year can help you plan. Hwait­ing, as we say here in the Kore­anized Eng­lish — or Eng­lishized Kore­an? — of hanguk.

You can view the Endonym Map in a larg­er, zoomable for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Favorite Lit­er­ary Work of Every Coun­try Visu­al­ized on a World Map

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

1934 Map Resizes the World to Show Which Coun­try Drinks the Most Tea

“Every Coun­try in the World”–Two Videos Tell You Curi­ous Facts About 190+ Coun­tries

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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