Pho­to via the Clem Burke Drum­ming Project

Musi­cians from clas­sic bands take all sorts of unex­pect­ed paths in their late careers. We’ve seen Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart col­lab­o­rate with NASA, Talk­ing Heads front­man David Byrne take on—among a dozen oth­er roles—the man­tle of librar­i­an, and Bruce Spring­steen gui­tarist Steven Van Zandt become a cur­ricu­lum devel­op­er. Turn­ing musi­cal expe­ri­ence to con­scious­ness-expand­ing avo­ca­tion has pro­duced very admirable results—perhaps no more so than in the case of two musi­cians who have used the lat­est research on music ther­a­py to help kids with autism.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson’s “Rock Your Speech” project, inspired by his autis­tic son Liam’s pos­i­tive response to music. Now reports from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester describes how drum­mer Clem Burke of Blondie fame has invest­ed his celebri­ty into research on how drum­ming can help kids on the spec­trum improve learn­ing and enhance social inter­ac­tions. It must be not­ed that Burke has not come late­ly to the sci­ence. His Clem Burke Drum­ming Project (CBDP), an asso­ci­a­tion of aca­d­e­mics, drum­mers, uni­ver­si­ty part­ners, and hon­orary “Doc­tor of Rock” Burke, just cel­e­brat­ed its 10-year anniver­sary.

The project has pre­vi­ous­ly researched “the phys­i­cal demands of drum­ming; enhanced health and well­be­ing of drum­ming; enhanced brain struc­ture and func­tion fol­low­ing drum­ming prac­tice,” and oth­er drum­ming-relat­ed sub­jects, includ­ing a drum­ming video game for stress relief. The lat­est find­ings, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester and Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­tre Hart­pury, show that “drum­ming for 60 min­utes a week can ben­e­fit chil­dren diag­nosed with autism.” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester notes that pre­lim­i­nary results of a ten-week drum­ming inter­ven­tion com­pris­ing two 30-minute drum­ming ses­sions per week showed:

• A vast improve­ment in move­ment con­trol while play­ing the drums, includ­ing dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, tim­ing.
• Move­ment con­trol was also enhanced while per­form­ing dai­ly tasks out­side the school envi­ron­ment, includ­ing an improved abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate dur­ing home­work.
• A range of pos­i­tive changes in behav­iour with­in school envi­ron­ment, which were observed and report­ed by teach­ers, such as improved con­cen­tra­tion and enhanced com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peers and adults

These sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits do not apply only to stu­dents with autism; “Rock drum­ming,” says lead researcher and CBDP co-founder Mar­cus Smith, can be “a potent inter­ven­tion for indi­vid­u­als expe­ri­enc­ing brain dis­or­ders” of all kinds, and can also improve dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, and tim­ing (nat­u­ral­ly).

Although a num­ber of stud­ies over the years have made head­lines with sim­i­lar claims, the Clem Burke Project’s ten years of research into the effects of drum­ming on brain health and behav­ior give this study par­tic­u­lar weight. Still, as always in sci­en­tif­ic research, more evi­dence can help refine the appli­ca­tions. Anoth­er researcher in the study, Dr. Ruth Lowry, sounds both excit­ed and cau­tious­ly opti­mistic in her assess­ment of the find­ings, express­ing hopes that more research will “pro­vide fur­ther evi­dence that not only does rock drum­ming have pos­i­tive ben­e­fits in terms of changes in dex­ter­i­ty and con­cen­tra­tion but that wider social and behav­iour­al con­duct ben­e­fits can be observed.”

Maybe Dr. Clem Burke and his team should start a side project with Tom Peters­son, whose musi­cal inter­ven­tions in the lives of kids with autism seem to be find­ing exact­ly such wider ben­e­fits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Helps Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Steven Van Zandt Cre­ates a Free School of Rock: 100+ Free Les­son Plans That Edu­cate Kids Through Music

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

Spend time lis­ten­ing to 1980s hits, Japan­ese pop, or dis­co clas­sics on Youtube, and you’ll almost cer­tain­ly encounter Mariya Takeuchi’s addic­tive song “Plas­tic Love.” Though first released in 1985 in Japan, it remained almost entire­ly unknown in the rest of the world until a few years ago, when it all of a sud­den attained an enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty. Now, hav­ing racked up more than 20 mil­lion views, the song has quite a few peo­ple — even many of those who have put it into heavy rota­tion on their per­son­al playlists — ask­ing what it is and where it came from. The video essay above, by explain­er of ani­ma­tion and Japan­ese music Stevem, breaks down the his­to­ry of “Plas­tic Love,” both as an obscure 80s Japan­ese pop song and an inter­net-era phe­nom­e­non.

“Plas­tic Love” has become the best-known exam­ple of “city pop,” a genre we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture and one Stevem describes as “a type of music that was reflec­tive of the new, shiny, mod­ern Japan” that emerged as the coun­try’s rebuilt econ­o­my boomed in the 1970s and 80s. “Con­sid­er­ing Japan did­n’t, nor could they, have a mil­i­tary, some of this mon­ey was fun­neled into new tech­nol­o­gy: cas­settes, Walk­mans, VHSs, cars, TVs, video game con­soles.”

The sound­track to “the cos­mopoli­tan lifestyle in full swing” took “bits and pieces from New Wave, synth pop, dis­co, jazz, and what­ev­er else was rel­e­vant at the time and shoved them into a blender to make what could be some of the sharpest pop music to come out of the Land of the Ris­ing Sun.”

The young Mariya Takeuchi was one of the era’s first defin­ing pop idols. Scor­ing a num­ber-one album in 1980, she low­ered her pro­file over the next few years, mar­ry­ing the singer-song­writer Tat­suro Yamashita (now rec­og­nized as a city pop icon in his own right) and col­lab­o­rat­ing with him on an album called Vari­ety, with which she re-emerged in 1984, retak­ing the top spots on the Japan­ese charts. “Plas­tic Love” comes as its sec­ond track, lay­ing down a “shim­mer­ing hyp­not­ic groove, strik­ing you with its beat and nev­er let­ting go.” Not only “a med­i­ta­tion on heart­break, it real­ly speaks to the hol­low, plas­tic feel­ing of what peo­ple do to fill in the sor­rows of their life and lone­li­ness,” acts such as “buy­ing com­mer­cial goods in the hopes that they will make us feel more and avoid deal­ing with our own per­son­al anguish.”

What­ev­er the song’s musi­cal strengths, it took an algo­rithm to bring them to world­wide atten­tion. Youtube, which 80s Japan­ese pop enthu­si­asts dis­cov­ered ear­ly as a way of shar­ing their music,  has become a ver­i­ta­ble “record store in the dig­i­tal space, affect­ing how peo­ple define their taste in the mod­ern era, mass-pro­duc­ing the feel­ing of find­ing these obscure gems on your own in a way that feels nat­ur­al, doing it so well with the pup­pet strings that you don’t even see them.” “Plas­tic Love,” as Vice’s Ryan Basil puts it, “is a rare tune that doesn’t exact­ly need words to expert­ly describe a spe­cif­ic, defined feel­ing – one of lust, heart­break, love, fear, adven­ture, loss, all caught up in the swirling midst of a night out on the town.” Count­less music fans here in the 21st cen­tu­ry — liv­ing in Takeuchi’s home­land Japan, else­where in Asia as I do, in the West, or any­where besides — can now make the sur­pris­ing dec­la­ra­tion he does: “It is, at the moment, my favorite pop song in the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Loads of “City Pop,” the Elec­tron­ic-Dis­co-Funk Music That Pro­vid­ed the Sound­track for Japan Dur­ing the Roar­ing 1980s

Every­thing is a Remix: The Full Series, Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty, Released in One Pol­ished HD Video on Its 5th Anniver­sary

Rita Hay­worth, 1940s Hol­ly­wood Icon, Dances Dis­co to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

Japan­ese Musi­cians Turn Obso­lete Machines Into Musi­cal Instru­ments: Cath­ode Ray Tube TVs, Over­head Pro­jec­tors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

Among a num­ber of influ­en­tial women in elec­tron­ic music whom we’ve pro­filed here before, French avant-garde com­pos­er Eliane Radigue stands out for her sin­gle-mind­ed ded­i­ca­tion to “a cer­tain music that I wished to make,” as she says in the video por­trait above, “this par­tic­u­lar music and no oth­er.” Her com­po­si­tions are haunt­ing and med­i­ta­tive, “pre­fig­ur­ing the con­cept of ‘deep lis­ten­ing,’ expressed by Pauline Oliv­eros some years lat­er,” as Red Bull Acad­e­my notes in an exten­sive pro­file of Radigue.

Using feed­back, tape loops, field record­ings, and, begin­ning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, Radigue “devel­oped sound­scapes… an inter­weav­ing of elec­tron­ic drones, sub­se­quent­ly assim­i­lat­ed to what would lat­er be called drone music.” But she has reject­ed the term as too sta­t­ic, stress­ing the vari­a­tions and con­stant change in her music:

In Radigue’s work, sounds inter­act with each oth­er like the cells of an organ­ism, pro­gress­ing in glis­san­do in an extreme­ly slow and sub­tle way. “I had found my own vocab­u­lary. For me, main­tain­ing the sound did not inter­est me as such; it was pri­mar­i­ly a means to bring out the over­tones, har­mon­ics and sub­har­mon­ics. This is what made it pos­si­ble to devel­op this inner rich­ness of sound.”

Radigue seems par­tic­u­lar­ly self-assured, pos­sessed of an intu­itive sense of her work’s direc­tions from the begin­ning. “I can­not start a piece if I don’t have an idea of what it would become, but what I would call the spir­it,” she says in an inter­view with Elec­tron­ic Beats.

“The spir­it of what I want­ed to do should be there… And I keep that spir­it, that theme in mind, quite often sev­er­al months before I start to do some­thing. So, when I come to make the sounds it’s already there.”

But her career took many turns on a path through the com­po­si­tion­al cen­ters of mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music. After study­ing tra­di­tion­al music the­o­ry as a child, she left her home in Nice at 19 and mar­ried the artist Arman. She was swept into an “excit­ing bohemi­an life” that would soon take her, in 1955, into the orbit of musique con­crete pio­neers Pierre Scha­ef­fer and Pierre Hen­ry.

While work­ing as an intern for the com­posers (“If I claimed to be more, I don’t think they would have accept­ed me, because they were both the damn­d­est machos!”), Radigue learned their meth­ods and col­lab­o­rat­ed on their com­po­si­tions. In 1967, she worked with Hen­ry on L’Apocalypse de Jean, a piece designed to last for 24 hours. She end­ed her (unpaid) appren­tice­ship that year and began focus­ing on her own work, like Vice Ver­sa (1970, excerpt­ed fur­ther up) and Geerl­rian­dre (1972, above) and Trip­tych (1978, below).

You can hear more of Radigue’s work at Ubuweb, includ­ing a more recent syn­the­siz­er piece record­ed in 1992, as well as a 1980 inter­view for pro­gram The Morn­ing Con­cert with Charles Amirkhan­ian. That same year, she became a con­vert to Tibetan Bud­dhism, and her work—like the Adnos series, below—was inspired by the religion’s his­to­ry, her own med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and texts like the Bar­do Thodol.

As the puls­ing, dron­ing, hum­ming com­po­si­tions she cre­at­ed through­out the late 20th cen­tu­ry have become inte­gral to the sound of the 21st, Radique has moved on, since 2001, to writ­ing work for acoustic instru­ments. She made her last elec­tron­ic piece, I’lle-Re-sonante, in 2000. The move came in part from requests she received from musi­cians, but it also rep­re­sents a delib­er­ate turn away from mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. “There’s always some­thing miss­ing with dig­i­tal,” she says, even if it is some­how clean­er and clear­er.”

Radigue has always favored the absorp­tion of ana­logue sound, intent on tam­ing its unpre­dictabil­i­ty as a med­i­ta­tor tames the dart­ing, leap­ing, busy mind. “My music is always chang­ing,” she says, “It comes from the first access I had to elec­tron­ic sounds which was the wild sounds com­ing from feed­back,” the noise of a micro­phone and a speak­er get­ting too close to each oth­er. “If you find the right place, which is very nar­row, then you can move it very slow­ly and it changes but that requires a lot of patience.”

The word could define her entire approach, one rad­i­cal­ly opposed to instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and quick fix­es, focused sin­gu­lar­ly on out­comes while also ful­ly present for the process.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

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

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

I hate to be one of those peo­ple who goes on about how punk was an all-Amer­i­can phe­nom­e­non before it crossed the pond. But hell, I’ve no less an author­i­ty on the coun­ter­cul­ture than William S. Bur­roughs on my side, or on the side of Legs McNeil, at least, the music jour­nal­ist who just hap­pened to give punk its name by co-found­ing Punk mag­a­zine in 1975. Of McNeil’s sem­i­nal oral his­to­ry Please Kill Me, Bur­roughs remarks, “This book tells it like was.” More accu­rate­ly, it lets the music’s fron­tiers­men and women tell it, start­ing with Lou Reed and the Vel­vets and oth­er main­stays in Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry scene.

McNeil’s book sur­veys a num­ber of major Amer­i­can scen­esters, most of them from New York, with the excep­tion of The Stooges from Detroit, and one excep­tion­al band from, of all places, Cleve­land, Ohio. The Dead Boys rarely get their due, but they were as influ­en­tial as the Ramones in the down­town New York scene. Along with Iggy Pop, Dead Boys’ lead singer Stiv Bators indulged in the kind of thrilling onstage deprav­i­ty main­stream audi­ences came to think of as the spe­cial prove­nance of the Sex Pis­tols. In the mid-sev­en­ties, these bands, along with Pat­ti Smith, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, etc. invent­ed all the moves punk came to be known for.

An excel­lent com­pan­ion to McNeil’s print doc­u­men­tary, the short, 1978 film Punk­ing Out, above, sur­veys three key down­town New York bands—the Ramones, the Dead Boys, who moved to the city in ‘76, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. (Hell gave McNeil’s book its title, design­ing a t‑shirt with a bulls­eye paint­ed on it and the words “please kill me” scrawled above. He admit­ted he was “too much of a cow­ard” to wear it.) All three bands played cen­tral roles in the CBGB’s scene, and Hell—who also played in Neon Boys, Tele­vi­sion, and the Heartbreakers—gets cred­it for more or less invent­ing punk fashion—from spiked hair to DIY cloth­ing designs held togeth­er with safe­ty pins.

Made by Mag­gi Car­son, Juliusz Kos­sakows­ki and Ric Shore, the film serves as its own oral his­to­ry of sorts, fea­tur­ing inter­views with fans and the bands and CBGB’s own­er Hilly Kristal (who says, “the more crowd­ed and the loud­er it is, I think, the less vio­lence.”) Watch it for the his­to­ry, but also for the clas­sic per­for­mances, cap­tured from every angle in black and white, with sur­pris­ing­ly decent audio. And if you’d like to own your own copy, you can pur­chase it here for $11.95. The film’s site quotes one fan giv­ing it the ulti­mate old guy thumbs-up: “Great!!! Buy it for your kids!” It’s edu­ca­tion­al, for sure. Punk­ing Out belongs on every punk syl­labus right next to Please Kill Me.

Note: You can check out a copies of Punk­ing Out from the New York Pub­lic Library, and you can have them shipped any­where in the world.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sit­com Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club That Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of CBGB, the Ear­ly Home of Punk and New Wave

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

Ret­ro­spec­tives of Pink Floyd tend to devolve into rehash­ing fights between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, but there’s good rea­son for that. Some of the band’s best work came out of this per­son­al and cre­ative ten­sion, espe­cial­ly their most beloved song, “Com­fort­ably Numb,” which, as we know it, emerged as a com­pro­mise between two dif­fer­ent visions.

Unlike, say, Lennon and McCart­ney, who made some excel­lent music with­out each oth­er, Gilmour and Waters nev­er shined as bright­ly as when they con­tributed to each other’s work. Part of the bit­ter­sweet­ness of “Com­fort­ably Numb,” then, is that it rep­re­sents, as Gilmour him­self admit­ted, “the last embers of mine and Roger’s abil­i­ty to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly togeth­er.”

The song began life as a skele­tal demo left­over from song­writ­ing ses­sions for Gilmour’s first, 1978 solo album, but it only came togeth­er, with lyrics by Waters, dur­ing ses­sions for the fol­low­ing year’s epic The Wall.

When it came time to work that album’s songs—essentially a Roger Waters’ solo con­cept pre­sent­ed to the band—Gilmour wise­ly took the rudi­men­ta­ry pro­gres­sion off the shelf and offered it to his band­mate. It con­sist­ed then, as you can hear above, of noth­ing more than the chord pro­gres­sion in the cho­rus and a vocal melody con­veyed by “doo doo doos.” In the inter­view clip below, Gilmour talks about the demo’s “gen­e­sis” on a “high strung gui­tar.”

Despite the del­i­cate acoustic strum­ming of the demo, Gilmour want­ed the Floyd ver­sion of the song to have a hard­er edge. Waters, on the oth­er hand, want­ed a big, the­atri­cal sound. As Waters remem­bers it in an inter­view with Absolute Radio at the top, the dis­agree­ment boiled down to a rhythm track, and the nego­ti­a­tion involved tak­ing pieces of the verse and cho­rus from two dif­fer­ent ver­sions and piec­ing them togeth­er.

Writer Mark Blake, cit­ing co-pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin, describes the argu­ment in much more detail, as between a “stripped-down and hard­er” take and what Ezrin calls “the grander Tech­ni­col­or, orches­tral ver­sion” Waters liked. “That turned into a real arm-wres­tle,” Ezrin recalled. “But at least this time there were only two sides to the argu­ment. Dave on one side; Roger and I on the oth­er.” After much wran­gling, “the deal was struck,” Blake explains: “The body of the song would com­prise the orches­tral arrange­ment; the out­ro, includ­ing that final, incen­di­ary gui­tar solo, would be tak­en from the Gilmour-favoured, hard­er ver­sion.”

As the song was inte­grat­ed into Waters’ con­cep­tu­al scheme (which Gilmour lat­er admit­ted he found “a bit whinge­ing”), ear­ly ver­sions like “The Doc­tor,” above, show the grit­ti­er sound Gilmour want­ed. This take also show­cas­es some lyri­cal howlers (“I am a physi­cian / who can han­dle your con­di­tion / like a magi­cian”) that, thank­ful­ly, didn’t make the final cut. The Final Cut also hap­pens to be the title of The Wall’s fol­low-up, anoth­er Waters’ solo con­cept and the effec­tive end of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gilmour for good.

Learn­ing the his­to­ry of “Com­fort­ably Numb” makes us appre­ci­ate all of the maneu­ver­ing that went into turn­ing the song into the mas­ter­piece it became. In lis­ten­ing to it again (below, in a video with the wrong album cov­er), I’m amazed at how split­ting the dif­fer­ence between two com­pet­ing cre­ative direc­tions cre­at­ed a piece of music that could not be improved upon in any way. If you can think of such a thing hap­pen­ing before or since, in any art form, I’d love to hear about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Pink Floyd Albums: The Evo­lu­tion of the Band Revealed in 209 Tracks (1967–2014)

Under­stand­ing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Trib­ute to Depart­ed Band­mate Syd Bar­rett

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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