The better-safe-than-sorry approach to musicians pretending to play on TV while viewers hear a pre-recorded track seems like the antithesis of rock and roll. Yet since the earliest days of The Ed Sullivan Show, audiences have accepted the convention without complaint. When the fakery unintentionally fails, reactions tend toward mockery, not outrage. Critics rail, the UK’s Musician’s Union has often balked, but bands and fans play along, everyone operating under the presumption that the banal charade is harmless.
Leave it to those spoilsports Nirvana to refuse this pleasant fiction on their Top of the Pops appearance in 1991.
Like American counterparts from American Bandstand to Soul Train, Britain’s Top of the Pops had a long tradition: “For over 40 years,” writes Rolling Stone, “everyone from the Rolling Stones to Madonna to Beyoncé stopped by… to perform their latest single as either a lip-sync or sing along with a prerecorded backing track.” All musicians were expected to mime playing their instruments, a comical sight, for instance, in appearances by The Smiths, in which viewers hear Johnny Marr’s multiple overdubbed guitars but see him playing unaccompanied.
The Smiths approached their Top of the Pops appearances with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. At their 1983 debut performance, Morrissey mimed “This Charming Man” using a fern as a microphone. Still, the band gamely pretended to play, like everyone else did. But when Nirvana hit the TOTP stage, with Cobain singing to a backing track of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” they wouldn’t observe any of the niceties. YouTube channel That Time Punk Rocked writes:
Cobain opts for slow, exaggerated strums during the few times he touches his guitar, sings an octave lower (he later confirmed he was imitating Morrisey from The Smiths), and attempts to eat his microphone at one point. He also changes some of the lyrics, exchanging the opening line “load up on guns, bring your friends,” for “load up on drugs, kill your friends.” Dave Grohl hits cymbals and skins at random, doing more dancing than drumming. Krist Novoselic even swings his bass above his head. And despite these ridiculous antics, the crowd goes absolutely insane.
Maybe the crowd went wild because of those ridiculous antics, or maybe no one even noticed, as when a crowd of thousands in Argentina hardly seemed to notice when Nirvana openly mocked them after the audience abused their opening act. This may be one burden of stardom Cobain came to know too well—protests register as performance and sticking it the man onstage just makes the man more money. But the video remains “one of the greatest middle fingers” to musical miming captured on camera—recommended viewing for every salty young band preparing for their first TV gig.
The truth young idealistic lovers learn: relationships are messy and complicated—filled with disappointments, misunderstandings, betrayals great and small. They fall apart and sometimes cannot be put back together. It’s easy to grow cynical and bitter. Yet, as James Baldwin famously wrote, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” You read, that is, the life stories and letters of writers and artists who have experienced outsized romantic bliss and torment, and who somehow became more passionately alive the more they suffered.
When it comes to personal suffering, Frida Kahlo’s biography offers more than one person could seem to bear. Already disabled by polio at a young age, she found her life forever changed at 18 when a bus accident sent an iron rod through her body, fracturing multiple bones, including three vertebrae, piercing her stomach and uterus. Recalling the old Gregorian hymn, Kahlo’s friend Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa remarked that she “lived dying”—in near constant pain, enduring surgery after surgery and frequent hospitalizations.
In the midst of this pain, she found love with her mentor and husband Diego Rivera—and, it must be said, with many others. Kahlo, writes Alexxa Gotthardt at Artsy, “was a prolific lover: Her list of romances stretched across decades, continents, and sexes. She was said to have been intimately involved with, among others, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, dancer Josephine Baker, and photographer Nickolas Muray. However, it was her obsessive, abiding relationship with fellow painter Diego Rivera—for whom she’d harbored a passionate crush since she laid eyes on him at age 15—that affected Kahlo most powerfully.”
Her letters to Rivera—himself a prolific extra-marital lover—stretch “across the twenty-seven-year span of their relationship,” writes Maria Popova; they “bespeak the profound and abiding connection the two shared, brimming with the seething cauldron of emotion with which all fully inhabited love is filled: elation, anguish, devotion, desire, longing, joy.”
Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.
So begins the letter pictured at the top. In another, equally passionate and poetic letter, pictured further up, she writes:
Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.
Kahlo and Rivera fell in love in 1928, when she asked him to look at her paintings. Over her mother’s objections, they married the following year. After ten tumultuous years, they divorced in 1939, then remarried in 1940 and stayed partnered until her death in 1954. Over these years, she poured out her emotions in letters, many, like those above, first written in her illustrated diary. Letters to and from her many lovers have also just emerged in a trove of personal artifacts, recently liberated from a bathroom at Casa Azul where they had been kept under lock and key at Rivera’s behest.
Both artists’ many affairs caused tremendous pain and “created rifts between them personally,” notes Katy Fallon at Broadly, although “their relationship has been mythologized past recognition,” in the way of so many other famous couples. In the most egregious betrayal, Rivera even slept with Kahlo’s younger sister Cristina, his favorite model, an act that inspired Frida’s 1937 painting Memory, the Heart, a self-portrait in which she stands with a metal rod piercing her chest, her hands seemingly amputated, face expressionless. We learn the wrong lessons from romanticizing “everything” about Frida and Diego’s life, Patti Smith suggests in her tribute to Kahlo’s love letters. But there is also danger in passing judgment.
“I don’t look at these two as models of behavior,” Smith says, but “the most important lesson… isn’t their indiscretions and love affairs but their devotion. Their identities were magnified by the other. They went through their ups and downs, parted, came back together, to the end of their lives.” In a 1935 letter to Rivera, read by pianist Mona Golabek above, Kahlo forgives his affairs, calling them “only flirtations…. At bottom, you and I love each other dearly, and thus go through adventures without numbers, beatings on doors, imprecations, insults, international claims. Yet, we will always love each other…. All the ranges I have gone through have served only to make me understand in the end that I love you more than my own skin.”
To restate what should be obvious from the second, if not first glance, none of Alcott’s titles are real. His aesthetically convincing mock-ups pay tribute to favorite songs by favorite artists: David Bowie, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Elvis Costello…
The start of the school year finds him in a Dylan mood, rendering some of his best known hits in a variety of pulp genre formats:
Bob Dylan is the perfect subject for this project, because his work has always been all about quotation and repurposing. From the very beginning, he took old songs, changed the lyrics and called them his own…. And it’s not just the melodies, he’s also not shy about lifting phrases and whole lines from other sources. One of the fun things about being a Bob Dylan fan is being able to spot the influences. It’s not just lifting lines from classic blues songs, where we don’t really know who “wrote” the originals, it’s real, identifiable, copyright-protected material. And you never know where it’s going to come from, a book about the Yakuza from Japan, a cookbook, an old Time Magazine article, or 1940s noir pictures.
I was watching a classic Robert Mitchum noir, Out of the Past, and Mitchum is talking to someone, and they mention San Francisco, and Mitchum says “I always liked San Francisco, I was there for a party once.”
And I was like “Wait, what?” Because that’s a line from a really obscure Dylan song, “Maybe Someday,” off his album Knocked-Out Loaded.
I was like “Wait, why did that line stick in Dylan’s mind? Why did he decide to quote that? Is it just the way Mitchum says it? What happened there?” And suddenly a song I hadn’t thought about much became a lot more interesting.
So for my Dylan covers, I try to carry on that tradition of taking quotes and repurposing them. So “Just Like a Woman” becomes a story in a science-fiction pulp, and “Like a Rolling Stone” becomes an expose on juvenile delinquency, and “Rainy Day Women” becomes a post-apocalyptic adventure story.
In a way, it’s what this project is all about, taking discarded pieces of culture and sticking them back together with new references to make them breathe again.
From a design standpoint, it’s a great illustration of the heavy lifting a single well-chosen punctuation change can do.
The magazine’s title is an extra gift to Dylan fans.
The Blonde-on-Blonde Chroniclescontinue with Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Does it matter that the breast-plated, and for all practical purposes bottomless warriors are raven tressed?
It’s not the fallout rain. It isn’t that at all. The hard rain’s gonna fall is in the last verse…That means all the lies, you know, that people get told on their radios and in newspapers. All you have to think for a minute, you know. Trying to take people’s brains away, you know. Which maybe has been done already. I hate to think it’s been done. All the lies, which I consider poison.
This writer can think of another reason citizens might find themselves fighting for their lives in a rowboat level with the very tippy top of the Empire State Building. So, I suspect, can Alcott.
Or maybe we’re wrong and climate change is nothing but fake news.
Alcott gets some mileage out of another rain-based lyric on Maggie’s Farm, a steamy rural romp whose creased cover is also part and parcel of the genre.
Who’s that young punk on the cover of Like a Rolling Stone? Beats me, but the girl’s a dead ringer for Warhol superstar, Edie Sedgwick, the purported inspiration for the song that shares the novel’s name. Ms. Sedgwick’s real life figure was much less voluptuous, but if the genre covers that sparked this project demonstrate anything, it’s that sex sells.
Visions of Johanna is positively understated in comparison. While many pulp authors toiled in obscurity, let us pretend that Nobel Prize winner and (faux) pulp-novelist Dylan wouldn’t have. Especially if he had a series like the pseudonymous Brett Halliday’s popular Mike Shayne mysteries. At that level, the cover wouldn’t really need quotes.
Though what harm would there be? There’s plenty of negative space here. Readers, which line would you splash across the cover if you were this prankster, Alcott?
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
You can see more of Todd Alcott’s Mid-Century Pulp Fiction Cover project, and pick up archival quality prints from his Etsy shop.
People lose their religion all the time. It happens in all sorts of ways. And R.E.M.’s 1991 song “Losing My Religion” has spoken to so many in the midst of these experiences that we might wonder if singer/songwriter Michael Stipe had a similar life change when he wrote those lyrics. Not so much, he says above in an interview with Dutch station Top 2000 a gogo. “What the song is about has nothing to with religion,” he says.
The lyric comes from an old Southern colloquialism meaning that something so upsetting has happened “that you might lose your religion.” Stipe used that old-time notion as a metaphor for unrequited love, a different kind of faith, one he describes in painfully tentative terms: “holding back, then reaching forward, then pulling back again, then reaching forward again.”
He explains another of the song’s ambiguities hidden within the elliptical lyrics: “You don’t ever really know if the person that I’m reaching out for is aware of me, if they even know that I exist.” It’s the heady turmoil of a romantic crush raised to the heights of saintly suffering. A brooding, alt-rock version of love songs like “Earth Angel.” Given the role of devotion in so much religious practice, there’s no reason the song can’t still be about losing one’s religion for listeners, but now we know what Stipe himself had in mind.
Some other fun facts we learn about this huge hit: Stipe recorded the song almost naked and kind of pissed-off—he had pushed to deliver his vocals in one emotional take, but the studio engineer seemed half-asleep. And his awkward, angular dance in the oh-so-90s video directed by Tarsem Singh, above? He pulled his inspiration from Sinead O’Connor’s St. Vitus dance in 1990s’ “The Emperor’s New Clothes” video and—no surprise—from David Byrne’s “riveting” herky-jerky moves.
While the record company saw the song’s mass appeal, bassist Mike Mills expresses his initial surprise at their choice of “Losing My Religion” as Out of Time’s first single: “That’s a great idea. It makes no sense at all, it’s 5 minutes long, it has no chorus, and a mandolin is the lead instrument. It’s perfect for R.E.M. because it flouts all the rules.” This period saw the band further developing its moody downbeat folk side, yet the album that produced this song also gave us “Shiny Happy People,” the poppiest, most upbeat song R.E.M.—and maybe any band—had ever recorded, a true testament to their emotional range.
The following year, Automatic for the People came out, drawing on material written during the Out of Time sessions and again featuring two singles that vastly contrasted in tone, maudlin tearjerker “Everybody Hurts” and the celebratory Andy Kaufman tribute “Man on the Moon.” Another song from that album that didn’t get as much attention, “Try Not to Breath,” hearkens back to a much earlier R.E.M. folk song, the Civil War-themed “Swan Swan H” from Life’s Rich Pageant.
As we hear the band explain above in an episode of Song Exploder, the song began its life on a Civil War-era instrument, the dulcimer. Then its sonic influences expanded to include two of Peter Buck’s favorite musical genres, surf rock and spaghetti western. The episode contains many more fascinating insider insights from R.E.M. about “Try Not to Breathe,” which may be one of the saddest songs they’ve ever written, a song about choosing to die rather than suffer.
Hear the song’s original demo and references to Blade Runner, get a glimpse into Stipe’s visual songwriting process, and learn the very personal inspiration from his family history for lyrics like “baby don’t shiver now, why do you shiver now?” Unlike “Losing My Religion,” this song does, in some ways, pull musically and emotionally from Stipe’s religious background.
Even thirty years after his death, Richard Feynman remains one of the most beloved minds in physics in part because of how much attention he paid to things other than physics: drawing and painting, cracking safes, playing the bongos, breaking spaghetti. But a physics enthusiast might object, and reasonably so, that all those activities actually have a great deal to do with physics, given the physical phenomena they all demonstrate and on which they all depend. In recent years, considerable scientific attention has even gone toward spaghetti-breaking, inspiring as it did Feynman — and computer scientist Danny Hillis, who happened to be in the kitchen with him — to pose a long-unanswerable question: How come it always breaks into a million pieces when you snap it?
Maybe spaghetti doesn’t always break into a million pieces, exactly, but it never breaks in two. Discovering the secret to a clean two-part break did require a million of something: a million frames per second, specifically, shot by a camera aimed at a purpose-built spaghetti-breaking device. The results of the research, a project of students Ronald Heisser and Vishal Patil during their time at MIT, came out in a paper co-authored by MIT’s Norbert Stoop and Université Aix Marseille’s Emmanuel Villermaux, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team found, writes MIT News’ Jennifer Chu, “that if a stick [of spaghetti] is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.”
As for why spaghetti breaks into so many pieces without the twist, a question taken on by the Smarter Every Day video just above, French scientists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch won the Ig Nobel Prize by figuring that out in 2005: “When a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a ‘snap-back’ effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick.” If you twist the stick first, “the snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the opposite direction from which it was bent, is weakened in the presence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essentially unwind to its original straightened configuration, releases energy from the rod, preventing additional fractures.”
So now we know. But the fruits of what might strike some as an obsessive and pointless quest could well further the science of fracturing, which Patil describes to the Washington Post as an outwardly “chaotic and random” process. This research could lead, as Chu writes, to a better “understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.” That’s all a long way from the kitchen, certainly, but even the most revolutionary advancements of knowledge grow out of simple curiosity, an impulse felt even in the most mundane or frivolous situations. Richard Feynman understood that better than most, hence subsequent generations of scientists’ desire to pick up whatever piqued his interest — even broken bits of Barilla No. 5.
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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