Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950–2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More

in Books, Philosophy | April 16th, 2018

Image by Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Faced with the ques­tion, “who are the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the 20th cen­tu­ry?,” I might find myself com­pelled to ask in turn, “in respect to what?” Ethics? Polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy? Phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, mind, sci­ence, reli­gion, race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty? Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Fem­i­nism, Crit­i­cal the­o­ry? The domains of phi­los­o­phy have so mul­ti­plied (and some might say siloed), that a num­ber of promi­nent authors, includ­ing emi­nent phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Robert Solomon, have writ­ten vehe­ment cri­tiques against its entrench­ment in acad­e­mia, with all of the atten­dant pres­sures and rewards. Should every philoso­pher of the past have had to run the gaunt­let of doc­tor­al study, teach­ing, tenure, aca­d­e­m­ic pol­i­tics and con­tin­u­ous pub­li­ca­tion, we might nev­er have heard from some of history’s most lumi­nous and orig­i­nal thinkers.

Solomon main­tains that “noth­ing has been more harm­ful to phi­los­o­phy than its ‘pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion,’ which on the one hand has increased the abil­i­ties and tech­niques of its prac­ti­tion­ers immense­ly, but on the oth­er has ren­dered it an increas­ing­ly imper­son­al and tech­ni­cal dis­ci­pline, cut off from and for­bid­ding to every­one else.” He cham­pi­oned “the pas­sion­ate life” (say, of Niet­zsche or Camus), over “the dis­pas­sion­ate life of pure rea­son…. Let me be out­ra­geous and insist that phi­los­o­phy mat­ters. It is not a self-con­tained sys­tem of prob­lems and puz­zles, a self-gen­er­at­ing pro­fes­sion of con­jec­tures and refu­ta­tions.” I am sym­pa­thet­ic to his argu­ments even as I might object to his whole­sale rejec­tion of all aca­d­e­m­ic thought as “sophis­ti­cat­ed irrel­e­van­cy.” (Solomon him­self enjoyed a long career at UCLA and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin.)

But if forced to choose the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the late 20th cen­tu­ry, I might grav­i­tate toward some of the most pas­sion­ate thinkers, both inside and out­side acad­e­mia, who grap­pled with prob­lems of every­day per­son­al, social, and polit­i­cal life and did not shy away from involv­ing them­selves in the strug­gles of ordi­nary peo­ple. This need not entail a lack of rig­or. One of the most pas­sion­ate of 20th cen­tu­ry thinkers, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, who worked well out­side the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem, also hap­pens to be one of the most dif­fi­cult and seem­ing­ly abstruse. Nonethe­less, his thought has rad­i­cal impli­ca­tions for ordi­nary life and prac­tice. Per­haps non-spe­cial­ists will tend, in gen­er­al, to accept argu­ments for philosophy’s every­day rel­e­vance, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and “pas­sion.” But what say the spe­cial­ists?

One phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor, Chen Bo of Peking Uni­ver­si­ty, con­duct­ed a sur­vey along with Susan Haack of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, at the behest of a Chi­nese pub­lish­er seek­ing impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal works for trans­la­tion. As Leit­er Reports read­er Tra­cy Ho notes, the two pro­fes­sors emailed six­teen philoso­phers in the U.S., Eng­land, Aus­tralia, Ger­many, Fin­land, and Brazil, ask­ing specif­i­cal­ly for “ten of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial philo­soph­i­cal books after 1950.” “They received rec­om­men­da­tions,” writes Ho, “from twelve philoso­phers, includ­ing: Susan Haack, Don­ald M. Borchert (Ohio U.), Don­ald David­son, Jur­gen Haber­mas, Ruth Bar­can Mar­cus, Thomas Nagel, John Sear­le, Peter F. Straw­son, Hilary Put­nam, and G.H. von Wright.” (Ho was unable to iden­ti­fy two oth­er names, typed in Chi­nese.)

The results, ranked in order of votes, are as fol­lows:

1. Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions

2. W. V. Quine, Word and Object

3. Peter F. Straw­son, Indi­vid­u­als: An Essay in Descrip­tive Meta­physics

4. John Rawls, A The­o­ry of Jus­tice

5. Nel­son Good­man, Fact, Fic­tion and Fore­cast

6. Saul Krip­ke, Nam­ing and Neces­si­ty

7. G.E.M. Anscombe, Inten­tion

8. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words

9. Thomas Kuhn, The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tions

10. M. Dum­mett, The Log­i­cal Basis of Meta­physics

11. Hilary Put­nam, The Many Faces of Real­ism

12. Michel Fou­cault, The Order of Things: An Archae­ol­o­gy of the Human Sci­ences

13. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

14. Robert Noz­ick, Anar­chy, State and Utopia

15. R. M. Hare, The Lan­guage of Morals and Free­dom and Rea­son

16. John R. Sear­le, Inten­tion­al­i­ty and The Redis­cov­ery of the Mind

17. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Lim­its of Phi­los­o­phy, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Moral Luck: Philo­soph­i­cal Papers 1973–1980

18. Karl Pop­per, Con­jec­ture and Refu­ta­tions

19. Gilbert Ryle, The Con­cept of Mind

20. Don­ald David­son, Essays on Action and Event and Inquiries into Truth and Inter­pre­ta­tion

21. John McDow­ell, Mind and World

22. Daniel C. Den­nett, Con­scious­ness Explained and The Inten­tion­al Stance

23. Jur­gen Haber­mas, The­o­ry of Com­mu­nica­tive Action and Between Facts and Norm

24. Jacques Der­ri­da, Voice and Phe­nom­e­non and Of Gram­ma­tol­ogy

25. Paul Ricoeur, Le Metaphore Vive and Free­dom and Nature

26. Noam Chom­sky, Syn­tac­tic Struc­tures and Carte­sian Lin­guis­tics

27. Derek Parfitt, Rea­sons and Per­sons

28. Susan Haack, Evi­dence and Inquiry

29. D. M. Arm­strong, Mate­ri­al­ist The­o­ry of the Mind and A Com­bi­na­to­r­i­al The­o­ry of Pos­si­bil­i­ty

30. Her­bert Hart, The Con­cept of Law and Pun­ish­ment and Respon­si­bil­i­ty

31. Ronald Dworkin, Tak­ing Rights Seri­ous­ly and Law’s Empire

As an adden­dum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” there­fore Prof. Chen asked Haber­mas to rec­om­mend some addi­tion­al Euro­pean thinkers, and received the fol­low­ing: “Axel Hon­neth, Kampf um Anerken­nung (1992), Rain­er Forst, Kon­texte der Cerechtigkeit (1994) and Her­bert Schnadel­bach, Kom­men­tor zu Hegels Rechtephiloso­phie (2001).”

The list is also over­whelm­ing­ly male and pret­ty exclu­sive­ly white, point­ing to anoth­er prob­lem with insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion that Solomon does not acknowl­edge: it not only excludes non-spe­cial­ists but can also exclude those who don’t belong to the dom­i­nant group (and so, per­haps, excludes the every­day con­cerns of most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion). But there you have it, a list of the most impor­tant, post-1950 works in phi­los­o­phy accord­ing to some of the most emi­nent liv­ing philoso­phers. What titles, read­ers, might get your vote, or what might you add to such a list, whether you are a spe­cial­ist or an ordi­nary, “pas­sion­ate” lover of philo­soph­i­cal thought?

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

Oxford’s Free Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: Stream 41 Lec­tures

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course 

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

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

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Frank Zappa Debates Whether the Government Should Censor Music in a Heated Episode of Crossfire: Why Are People Afraid of Words? (1986)

in Music, Politics | April 16th, 2018

“The biggest threat to Amer­i­ca today is not com­mu­nism. It’s mov­ing Amer­i­ca toward a fas­cist theoc­ra­cy, and every­thing that’s hap­pened dur­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion is steer­ing us right down that pipe.”

That’s Frank Zap­pa, a self-declared “con­ser­v­a­tive” bat­tling a theo­crat and two estab­lish­ment pun­dits on this clip from a 1986 episode of polit­i­cal debate show Cross­fire. It was one of many TV inter­views Zap­pa did dur­ing the mid-‘80s when the “Par­ent Music Resource Cen­ter” head­ed by what he called “Wash­ing­ton Wives” got them­selves over­ly con­cerned about rock music lyrics and, as usu­al, thought of the chil­dren. (One of those Wives was Tip­per Gore, then-wife of Al Gore). There were con­gres­sion­al hear­ings, one of the only times Zap­pa was on the same team as Twist­ed Sister’s Dee Sny­der and soft-folkie John Den­ver).

The whole ker­fuf­fle was one and a piece with the rise of the Reli­gious Right under Reagan’s admin­is­tra­tion, and even­tu­al­ly boiled down to a “Parental Advi­so­ry” stick­er slapped on LP and CD cov­ers. Zap­pa saw the move as a cyn­i­cal ploy to intro­duce moral­is­tic cen­sor­ship to the arts while bur­nish­ing the careers of up-and-com­ing sen­a­tors like Al Gore (and that cer­tain­ly worked out for him).

The 20 minute clip is notable for the dif­fer­ences com­pared to the present. Watch­ing this con­tentious debate between four men all sit­ting very close to each oth­er is rare nowadays—the clos­est we get is on Bill Maher’s week­ly show, where­as the rest of cable news is a col­lec­tion of talk­ing heads beam­ing in from sep­a­rate stu­dios. The men­dac­i­ty and vit­ri­ol direct­ed towards Zap­pa is also sur­pris­ing, espe­cial­ly as Zappa’s own lyrics weren’t the ones being attacked—those of Madon­na and Prince were instead. The hot­head­ed blath­er out of reli­gious zealot John Lofton is a won­der to behold, a man so theo­crat­ic he lat­er railed against Ann Coul­ter and Sarah Palin for leav­ing the kitchen and get­ting into pol­i­tics. “I love it when you froth” quips Zap­pa, although even his sto­icism is undone at one point. “Tell you what—kiss my ass!” Zap­pa blurts out after Lofton calls him an idiot.

Both Tom Braden and Robert Novak are stodgy belt­way broth­ers, osten­si­bly on the left and right, and can’t help crack up a bit when Zap­pa points out Lofton’s luna­cy. Nobody wins the debate; Amer­i­ca and your own brain cells lose.

Zap­pa would lat­er ded­i­cate sev­er­al songs and a whole album (Frank Zap­pa Meets the Moth­ers of Pre­ven­tion) to the cha­rade. The music indus­try acqui­esced and required warn­ing labels that prob­a­bly had zero per­cent effec­tive­ness apart from ugly­ing up album art­work, and a decade lat­er mp3s would implode the indus­try.

Nobody frets about lyrics any more—how quaint!—but fear mon­ger­ing and moral pan­ic con­tin­ue, includ­ing the recent non-starter issue over video game vio­lence. Words are just words, Zap­pa says. That bat­tle now appears to be tak­ing place on Twit­ter instead between the left and the right, and Repub­li­cans have dropped all pre­tens­es over foul lan­guage hav­ing nom­i­nat­ed Trump. (Even the evan­gel­i­cals seem to be okay with it.)

And then there’s this brief moment from the clip, which feels like part of a radio sig­nal beam­ing into the present:

“What I tell kids, and I’ve been telling kids for quite some time,” says Zap­pa, “is first, reg­is­ter to vote, and sec­ond, as soon as you’re old enough, run for some­thing.”

If that doesn’t sound like 2018 to you, I’ve got a W.A.S.P. CD to sell you.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Frank Zap­pa Explains the Decline of the Music Busi­ness (1987)

Ani­mat­ed: Frank Zap­pa on Why the Cul­tur­al­ly-Bereft Unit­ed States Is So Sus­cep­ti­ble to Fads (1971)

The Bizarre Time When Frank Zappa’s Entire­ly Instru­men­tal Album Received an “Explic­it Lyrics” Stick­er

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Malcolm Gladwell Explains Where His Ideas Come From

in Creativity, Writing | April 16th, 2018

For many read­ers out there, the pub­li­ca­tion of a new Mal­colm Glad­well arti­cle ranks as an event demand­ing imme­di­ate atten­tion. They’ll read what­ev­er he writes, not just because they enjoy his style but because they trust his instinct for find­ing fas­ci­nat­ing sub­jects, from cof­fee to health care, col­lege rank­ings to dog train­ing, shop­ping malls to school shoot­ings. How did he devel­op that instinct? He reveals aspects of his idea-gen­er­at­ing process in the sev­en­teen-minute inter­view with New York­er edi­tor David Rem­nick just above. It turns out that, just as with most of us — or as it would ide­al­ly go with most of us — Glad­well’s ideas sprout organ­i­cal­ly from his strengths.

But those strengths, in turn, sprout organ­i­cal­ly from his weak­ness­es. An ear­ly New York­er assign­ment, hand­ed down by then-edi­tor Tina Brown, had Glad­well cov­er­ing the 1989 attack on the woman referred to, at the time, as the Cen­tral Park Jog­ger. Instead of doing the kind of pro­longed, emo­tion­al inter­views many reporters would have done with the vic­tim’s friends and fam­i­ly, he instead con­tact­ed the sur­geon who oper­at­ed on her, end­ing up with a piece on “prac­tice vari­a­tion in med­i­cine,” the phe­nom­e­non where­by dif­fer­ent med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers in dif­fer­ent regions of the coun­try end up going about their job in per­sis­tent­ly dif­fer­ent ways. “They can’t seem to get every­one on the same page,” as Glad­well frames the prob­lem.


The inter­sec­tion of the New York­er’s tra­di­tion of and expec­ta­tion for long-form pieces with his own inabil­i­ty to per­form tra­di­tion­al reportage gave Glad­well a sense of where he should look for promis­ing leads. Reject­ing char­ac­ter as a hook, he instead goes look­ing for intrigu­ing the­o­ries, oper­at­ing on the con­cep­tion of most writ­ers as “expe­ri­ence-rich and the­o­ry-poor.” Instead of sim­ply report­ing on the lat­est school shoot­ing, for instance, he wrote about a Stan­ford soci­ol­o­gist’s the­o­ry of riots that he could apply to the phe­nom­e­non of school shoot­ings them­selves. His next book, about which he reveals a thing or two in this inter­view, deals in part with a dif­fer­ent kind of shoot­ing: that com­mit­ted by police.

“I have the advan­tage of com­ing to it late,” Glad­well says to Rem­nick, explain­ing how his per­spec­tive and thus his writ­ing on the sub­ject might dif­fer from those of oth­ers. That sim­ple state­ment may hold the key to Glad­well’s vault of ideas: with no oblig­a­tion to give a run­down of the facts as they emerge, he can step back for a moment (be it a few months or a few decades) and get a sense of which sto­ries will ulti­mate­ly take the right shape to con­nect to the many broad, intrigu­ing ideas, in the form of aca­d­e­m­ic the­o­ry or oth­er­wise, with which he’s already famil­iar­ized him­self. As much as Glad­well seems like a writer of the moment (and here he describes his “ur-read­er” as a fortysome­thing Trad­er Joe’s exec­u­tive who only has time for three books a year, plus pod­casts), he gets a fair bit of mileage out of one of the most old-fash­ioned assets of them all: a well-stocked mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Writ­ing in Cof­fee Shops: Why Mal­colm Glad­well Does It, and You Should Too

Mal­colm Glad­well to Teach His First Online Course: A Mas­ter Class on How to Turn Big Ideas into Pow­er­ful Sto­ries

Where Do Ideas Come From? David Lynch, Robert Krul­wich, Susan Orlean, Chuck Close & Oth­ers Reveal Their Cre­ative Sources

John Cleese on the Ori­gin of Cre­ativ­i­ty

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

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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Radiooooo: Discover the Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | April 13th, 2018

Radio has always been a fair­ly trans­portive medi­um.

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, entire fam­i­lies clus­tered round the elec­tron­ic hearth to enjoy a vari­ety of enter­tain­ments, includ­ing live remote broad­casts from the glam­orous night­clubs and hotels where celebri­ty band­lead­ers like Count Basie and Duke Elling­ton held sway.

1950s teens’ tran­sis­tors took them to a head space less square than the white bread sub­urbs their par­ents inhab­it­ed.

Dur­ing the Viet­nam War, South Viet­namese sta­tions played home­grown ren­di­tions of the rock and soul sounds dom­i­nat­ing Amer­i­can air­waves.

The Radiooooo.com site (there’s also a ver­sion avail­able for the iPhone and Android) allows mod­ern lis­ten­ers to expe­ri­ence a bit of that mag­i­cal time trav­el­ing sen­sa­tion, via an inter­ac­tive map that allows you to tune in to spe­cif­ic coun­tries and decades.

The con­tent here is user-gen­er­at­ed. Reg­is­ter for a free account, and you too can begin shar­ing eccen­tric faves.

Find a user whose tastes mir­ror your own? Click their pro­file for a stat card of tracks they’ve favor­it­ed and uploaded, as well as any oth­er sundry details they may feel like shar­ing, such as coun­try of ori­gin and age.

There are fun awards to be earned here, with the most sought after pelts going to the first to upload a song to an emp­ty coun­try, or upload a track from 1910–1920. (Cameroon, 1940 … go!)

As with an actu­al radio, you are not select­ing the actu­al playlist, though you can nudge the nee­dle a bit by tog­gling to your desired mood—slow, fast and/or weird.

And you need not lim­it your­self to a sin­gle des­ti­na­tion. Embark on a strange musi­cal trip by using Radiooooo’s taxi func­tion to car­ry you to mul­ti­ple coun­tries and decades. (I closed my eyes and wound up shut­tling between Ukraine and Mau­ri­ta­nia in the 60s and 80s.)

Dot­ted around the map are island icons, where the ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion is sort­ed accord­ing to themes like Hawaii, Nev­er­land (“for chil­dren big and small”), and 8‑Bit video game music. Le Club, float­ing mid­way between Europe and North Amer­i­ca, con­tains brand new releas­es from con­tem­po­rary labels.

The Now Play­ing win­dow includes an option to buy, when pos­si­ble, as well as the artist’s name and album art­work. Share, like, get your groove on…

And stay tuned for Radiooooo’s lat­est baby, Le Globe, an inter­ac­tive 3‑D map of the world and a decade selec­tor dial mount­ed on a “beau­ti­ful con­nect­ed object.”

The bound­aries are extreme­ly per­me­able here.

Have a browse through Radiooooo’s Insta­gram feed for a feast of cov­er art or head to France for one of their in-per­son lis­ten­ing par­ties. (There’s one next week in the secret lis­ten­ing room of Paris’ Grand Hotel Amour.)

Read­ers, if your explo­rations unearth an excep­tion­al track, please share it in the com­ments, below.

Down­load the Radioooo app for Mac or Android here, or lis­ten on the web­site. (You may need to fool around with var­i­ous browsers to find the one that works best for you.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 1,500+ Gen­res of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insane­ly Thor­ough Inter­ac­tive Graph

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Google’s Music Time­line: A Visu­al­iza­tion of 60 Years of Chang­ing Musi­cal Tastes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her radio dial is set to Roma­nia 1910 in antic­i­pa­tion of the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain , Mon­day, April 23 at the New York Soci­ety Library. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Famous Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Comes Back to Life in an Off-Kilter Animation

in Animation, Physics | April 13th, 2018


Schrödinger’s Cat is one of the more famous thought exper­i­ments in mod­ern physics, cre­at­ed by Aus­tri­an physi­cist Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935.  The Tele­graph sum­ma­rizes the gist of the exper­i­ment as fol­lows:

In the hypo­thet­i­cal exper­i­ment … a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioac­tive sam­ple, a Geiger counter and a bot­tle of poi­son.

If the Geiger counter detects that the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al has decayed, it will trig­ger the smash­ing of the bot­tle of poi­son and the cat will be killed.

The exper­i­ment was designed to illus­trate the flaws of the ‘Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion’ of quan­tum mechan­ics, which states that a par­ti­cle exists in all states at once until observed.

If the Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion sug­gests the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al can have simul­ta­ne­ous­ly decayed and not decayed in the sealed envi­ron­ment, then it fol­lows the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham’s Six­ty Sym­bols YouTube chan­nel pro­vides a more com­plete expla­na­tion. But with or with­out any fur­ther intro­duc­tion, you can watch the off-kil­ter ani­ma­tion, above, which imag­ines the ori­gins of the orig­i­nal exper­i­ment. It was cre­at­ed by Chav­dar Yor­danov for an ani­ma­tion show in Lon­don.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site ear­ly last year.

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:

80 Free Online Physics Cours­es

When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Lead­ing Physics Jour­nal (1975)

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Quan­tum Mechan­ics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple

Ani­ma­tions of 6 Famous Thought Exper­i­ments

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How Sampling Transformed Music and Created New Tapestries of Sound: An Interactive Demonstration by Producer/DJ Mark Ronson

in Music | April 13th, 2018

We know the ori­gin sto­ry of hip hop as the prod­uct of an enter­pris­ing sub­cul­ture of young, most­ly African-Amer­i­can, West Indi­an, and Lati­no tastemak­ers in the Bronx (or first in Brook­lyn, accord­ing to an alter­nate his­to­ry). We’ve seen at least one of the dozens of doc­u­men­taries and drama­ti­za­tions cen­tered on this piv­otal moment in musi­cal his­to­ry in the late 70s/early 80s—when pio­neers like DJ Kool Herc and Grand­mas­ter Flash began using two turnta­bles and a mix­er to splice togeth­er bars of dis­co, soul, funk, and many oth­er kinds of music to turn them into an entire­ly new form.

In time, sam­pling became the prove­nance of ded­i­cat­ed dig­i­tal machines, which, in con­cert with drum machines and clas­sic turntable tech­niques, formed the basis of the sound of hip hop, dance, and pop music as we know them today. From local NYC roots came a glob­al phenomenon—which has tak­en “cen­ter stage on Netflix’s orig­i­nal music pro­gram­ming,” as Forbes notes, with the stream­ing com­pa­ny invest­ing mil­lions in new hip hop-themed con­tent. Still, even with the music’s main­stream­ing and glob­al reach, it’s a bit odd to see the piv­otal role of sam­pling explained by Eng­lish DJ and pop pro­duc­er Mark Ron­son, on a TED Talk Stage, through a remix of a few dozen oth­er TED talks.

But Ron­son turns this clever pre­sen­ta­tion into an immer­sive exam­ple of the ways that sam­pling allows cre­ators to become part of a “shared event” and to make new nar­ra­tives or alter the old ones. “That’s what the past 30 years of music has been,” he says, “that’s the major thread.” Sam­pling, he argues, is not about “hijack­ing nos­tal­gia whole­sale,” but about cre­at­ing new tapes­tries of sound. “Albums like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Ris­ing and the Beast­ie Boy’s Paul’s Bou­tique,” he notes, “loot­ed from decades of record­ings to cre­ate these son­ic, lay­ered mas­ter­pieces that were basi­cal­ly the Sgt. Pepper’s of their day.”

I think Ronson’s right—no these weren’t pio­neer­ing, exper­i­men­tal rock albums, as purists might point out, but the com­par­i­son is valid for the sheer vari­ety, inven­tive­ness, and son­ic com­plex­i­ty of the arrange­ments. (And like The Bea­t­les, these artists were involved in their share of law­suits, though in their case for copy­right infringe­ment.) Artists mak­ing albums built pri­mar­i­ly out of sam­ples aren’t “too lazy to make their own music,” Ron­son says, or “try­ing to cash in on the famil­iar­i­ty of the orig­i­nal stuff.” Most artists and pro­duc­ers, indeed, look for the most obscure sam­ples they can find, with some pret­ty obvi­ous excep­tions.

Rather, Ron­son argues, like the influ­ence of the Delta blues on British inva­sion rock­ers, sam­pling is a way for artists to pay trib­ute to music that moves them and to take its dis­tinc­tive­ness and make it their own, “to co-opt that music for the tools of their day.” To put it in oth­er terms, sam­pling is both a form of love and theft. Ron­son fol­lows his argu­ment with some per­son­al his­to­ry of his own musi­cal jour­ney, then gets back behind his DJ rig for a demon­stra­tion of Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di,” the fifth most sam­pled song of all time, as re-appro­pri­at­ed by The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G. and “cul­tur­al tour-de-force” (he says with tongue in cheek), Miley Cyrus.

Like it or not, sam­pling is here to stay, now the source of vir­tu­al­ly every build­ing block of many pop­u­lar gen­res, from snare drums and cym­bals to gui­tars and effects. But maybe this isn’t just a new phe­nom­e­non of the dig­i­tal age or a spe­cif­ic arti­fact of the hip hop rev­o­lu­tion, but just anoth­er exam­ple of Kir­by Ferguson’s cul­tur­al the­o­ry of every­thing in his four part video essay series, Every­thing is a Remix.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

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

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Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glorious Original State with Animated GIFs: The Temple of Jupiter, Luxor Temple & More

in Architecture, History | April 13th, 2018

The “sev­en won­ders of the world”: all of us have all heard the phrase so many times, but can we name the spe­cif­ic won­ders to which it refers? Though the list took its final form in the Renais­sance, it orig­i­nates all the way back with the ancient Greeks who want­ed a sense of the most majes­tic man-made land­marks that lay with­in their ter­ri­to­ry. These were even­tu­al­ly nar­rowed down to the Great Pyra­mid of Giza, the Hang­ing Gar­dens of Baby­lon (whether they real­ly exist­ed or not), the Tem­ple of Artemis at Eph­esus, the Stat­ue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mau­soleum at Hali­car­nas­sus, the Colos­sus of Rhodes, and the Light­house of Alexan­dria.

Today we offer you an alter­na­tive set of ancient won­ders, made even more won­drous by a tech­nol­o­gy whol­ly unimag­in­able to ancient Greeks: the ani­mat­ed GIF. You see here four of the set, which in total includes the Parthenon in Greece, the Pyra­mid of the Sun and the Nohoch Mul Pyra­mid in Mex­i­co, the Tem­ple of Lago Argenti­na in Rome, the Tem­ple of Lux­or in Egypt, the Tem­ple of Jupiter in Italy, and Hadri­an’s Wall in Eng­land.

The GIFS, which trace the lines of the orig­i­nal struc­tures over the ruins and then fill them in pho­to­re­al­is­tic detail, are the work of hus­band-wife team Maja Wrońs­ka and Prze­mek Sobiec­ki.

“Despite their ‘ruinous’ con­di­tion, these struc­tures have influ­enced many of history’s great archi­tects, and con­tin­ue to be an inspi­ra­tion today,” writes Design­boom’s Rob Reu­land. “These sites have been deplet­ed by time and by con­quest, parts are reused, oth­ers just fall away with neglect. See­ing them restored is a bit like hop­ping in the Delore­an and crank­ing the flux capac­i­tor, and revers­ing their slow decay.” And as a com­menter adds below, “the next thing would be this in com­bi­na­tion with AR-glass­es while vis­it­ing the site” — the ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, in oth­er words, of the won­ders of the ancient world and the won­ders of the mod­ern one. See all sev­en of the ani­mat­ed GIFs here.

via Expe­dia/design­boom

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

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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What Makes This Song Great?: Producer Rick Beato Breaks Down the Greatness of Classic Rock Songs in His New Video Series

in Music | April 12th, 2018

Last night I had din­ner at a local restau­rant that hap­pened to have a playlist on of great songs from my high school years. As one after anoth­er came on I thought, “wow, I for­got how good these songs are.” But after a while I real­ized I couldn’t real­ly sep­a­rate the songs them­selves from my mem­o­ries of lis­ten­ing to them back in the old days. Nos­tal­gia, as we know, plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in how we respond to record­ed music. But as to the ques­tion of what makes a song great to begin with, what sep­a­rates it from thou­sands of oth­er songs released around the same time… this is much more dif­fi­cult for many peo­ple to answer.

We might pull out one or two musi­cal elements—“this beat is amaz­ing” or “those heavy gui­tars are awe­some” or “her voice is just so powerful”—before falling back on sub­jec­tive cri­te­ria about how the song makes us feel and what we think of when we hear it. Most peo­ple can’t iden­ti­fy with pre­ci­sion how and why cer­tain songs sound like they do because devel­op­ing such an ear takes years of train­ing. It’s a skill learned by study­ing the­o­ry, record­ing, and musi­cal tech­nique, and by lis­ten­ing crit­i­cal­ly to lots and lots of music. Ask a musi­cian, pro­duc­er, or engi­neer what makes a song great and you might get a sem­i­nar on its mix­ing, arrange­ment, chord pro­gres­sions, and use of stu­dio effects.

That’s what we get in the YouTube series What Makes This Song Great?, cre­at­ed by musi­cian and pro­duc­er Rick Beato. Here, as Metafil­ter writes, he “breaks down the musi­cal struc­ture and pro­duc­tion tech­niques in pop­u­lar songs. Work­ing from the stems [pre-mixed group­ings of drums, gui­tars, vocals, keys, etc] of each song, he dis­cuss­es every­thing from Sting’s Lydi­an mode bassline, to the use of Neu­mann mics to cap­ture the inten­si­ty of Chris Cor­nel­l’s vocals; from sidechain com­pres­sion in an Ari­ana Grande song, to the use of a flat 6th to intro­duce a melan­choly air into the vocal melody of a Tool song.”

Now, everyone’s enti­tled to their tastes, and you might find your­self look­ing over his choic­es and think­ing of some of them, “this song’s not great!” And, well, fair enough. But give it a chance any­way. Because you can gain new lev­els of appre­ci­a­tion even for music you don’t sub­jec­tive­ly enjoy, just by learn­ing how that music was con­struct­ed. When I first began to learn about the skill and effort that goes into writ­ing, record­ing, mix­ing, and mas­ter­ing stu­dio-qual­i­ty music, the expe­ri­ence was quite hum­bling, and I found myself lis­ten­ing to songs I didn’t love, exact­ly, but could very much appre­ci­ate from a tech­ni­cal point of view.

I also found my tastes expand­ing, even to include some pop music I had dis­missed as mean­ing­less fluff. Because I could hear inter­est­ing uses of reverb, or stereo pan­ning, or delay, or chord voic­ings. In short, with care­ful, informed, lis­ten­ing, you can learn to appre­ci­ate the archi­tec­ture of record­ed music, rather than just the choice of exte­ri­or paint col­ors or obvi­ous dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments. And songs don’t always need to land emo­tion­al­ly to still tick­le your inter­est. Does that mean that I’m now a fan of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” (top)? Well, no. But instead of rolling my eyes when it comes on, I can hear the small things (see what I did?) Beato points out and think, okay, that is actu­al­ly kin­da cool.

The lit­tle hook in the intro, that one mut­ed chord in the open­ing pro­gres­sion, a sus4 chord thrown in for a dis­so­nant instant. Maybe it also helps that, with the vocals stripped out, this could be anoth­er three-chord punk song and not that song, but, hey, it’s a learn­ing process. Many of the oth­er songs in the series might be more uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged as “great” for their musi­cian­ship and songcraft. But that doesn’t mean we can’t glean some­thing from all of Beat­o’s videos. Get­ting expert per­spec­tives like his can expand our appre­ci­a­tion for any kind of music, and the best pro­duc­ers and musi­cians tend to have the most eclec­tic tastes.

Fur­ther up, see Beato’s videos on The Police’s “Every Lit­tle Thing She Does is Mag­ic,” Steely Dan’s “Kid Charle­magne,” Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of,” and, just above, Tom Pet­ty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” And check out all of the videos on his chan­nel here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

The MC5’s Wayne Kramer Demon­strates the Cor­rect & Offi­cial Way to Play “Kick Out the Jams” on the Gui­tar

Hear Mar­vin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capel­la: The Haunt­ing Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track

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

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