Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

in Politics, Technology, Television | April 4th, 2018

Overpopulation, manipulative politics, imbalances of societal power, addictive drugs, even more addictive technologies: these and other developments have pushed not just democracy but civilization itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Huxley saw it that way, and he told America so when he appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview in 1958. (You can also read a transcript here.) “There are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom,” he told the newly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.”

Huxley’s best-known novel Brave New World has remained relevant since its first publication in 1932. He appeared on Wallace’s show to promote Brave New World Revisited (first published as Enemies of Freedom), a collection of essays on how much more rapidly than expected the real world had come to resemble the dystopia he’d imagined a quarter-century earlier.

Some of the reasons behind his grim predictions now seem overstated — he points out that “in the underdeveloped countries actually the standard of living is at present falling,” though the reverse has now been true for quite some time — but others, from the vantage of the 21st century, sound almost too mild.

“We mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology,” Huxley says in that time before smartphones, before the internet, before personal computers, before even cable television. We also mustn’t be caught by surprise by those who seek indefinite power over us: to do that requires “consent of the ruled,” something acquirable by addictive substances — both pharmacological and technological — as well as “new techniques of propaganda.” All of this has the effect of “bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery.”

Wallace’s questions bring Huxley to a question of his own: “What does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.” But democracy-debilitating commercial and political propaganda appeals “directly to these unconscious forces below the surfaces so that you are, in a way, making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice on rational ground.” Hence the importance of teaching people “to be on their guard against the sort of verbal booby traps into which they are always being led.” The skill has arguably only grown in importance since, as has his final thought in the broadcast: “I still believe in democracy, if we can make the best of the creative activities of the people on top plus those of the people on the bottom, so much the better.”

Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

An Animated Aldous Huxley Identifies the Dystopian Threats to Our Freedom (1958)

Aldous Huxley Predicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000

Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics Enthusiast, Lectures About “the Visionary Experience” at MIT (1962)

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 Faceboo k.

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One of the Best Preserved Ancient Manuscripts of The Iliad Is Now Digitized: See the “Bankes Homer” Manuscript in High Resolution (Circa 150 C.E.)

in History, Literature | April 4th, 2018

Each time I sit through the end credits of a film, I think about how weird auteur theory is—that a work of cinema can be primarily thought of the singular vision of the director. Typical examples come from artier fare than the usual Hollywood blockbuster in which crews of thousands of stuntpeople, special effects technicians, and animators (and several dozen “producers”) make essential contributions. In the case of, say, David Lynch or Wes Anderson—or earlier directors like Godard or Kubrick—one can’t deny the evidence of a singular mind at work. Even so, we tend to elevate directors to the status of godlike artificers, surrounded by a few angelic helpers behind the camera and a few star actors in front of it. Everyone else is an extra, including, very often, the actual writers of a film.

Of course, the notion of the auteur comes from the general theory of authorship that identifies literary works as the product of a single intellect. French theorists like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have cast suspicion on this idea. When it comes to writing from the manuscript age, hundreds or thousands of years old, it can be next to impossible to identify the author of a work.

Many an ancient work comes down to us as the product of “Anonymous.” In the case of the major Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, we have a name, Homer, that most classics scholars treat as a convenient placeholder. As a University of Cincinnati classics site notes, “Homer” could stand for “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were collected.”

Though written references to Homer date back to the sixth century B.C., giving credence to the historical existence of the legendary blind poet, he might have been more director than author, bringing together into a coherent whole the labor of hundreds of different storytellers. For historian Adam Nicolson, author of Why Homer Matters, “it’s a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Homer is an ‘it.’ A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared.” The narrative poetry attributed to Homer, Nicolson suggests, might go back a thousand years before the poet supposedly put it to papyrus.

You can read this National Geographic interview with Nicolson (or buy his book) to follow the argument. It isn’t particularly original—as Daniel Mendelsohn writes at The New Yorker, “the dominant orthodoxy” for over a hundred years “has been that The Iliad evolved over centuries before finally being written down” sometime around 700 B.C. We have no manuscripts from that early period, and no one knows how much the poem evolved through scribal errors in the transmission from manuscript to manuscript over centuries. This is one of many questions literary historians ask when they approach papyri like that at the top—an excerpt from the so-called “Bankes Homer,” the most well-preserved specimen of a portion of The Iliad, containing Book 24, lines 127–804, and dating from circa 150 C.E.

Purchased in Egypt in 1821 by Egyptologist William John Bankes, and acquired by an adventurer named Giovanni Finati on the island of Elephantine, the papyrus scroll, which you can see in full and in high resolution at the British Library site, was created like most other “literary papyri” for hundreds of years. As the British Library describes the process:

Professional scribes made copies from exemplars at the request of clients, transcribing by hand, word by word, letter by letter. Until around the 2nd century CE these manuscript books took the form of rolls composed of papyrus sheets pasted one to the other in succession, often over a considerable length.

In addition to the text itself, notes the site History of Information, the manuscript contains “breathing marks and accents made by an ancient diorthotesor ‘corrector’ to show correct poetic pronunciation.” The ancient practice of “correcting” was a pedagogical technique used for training students to properly read the text. Likely for hundreds of years before there was a text, the poem would be committed to memory, and recited by anonymous bards all over the Greek-speaking world, probably changing in the telling to suit the tastes and biases of different audiences. Who can say how many, if any, of those ancient bards bore the name “Homer”?

Again you can see the Bankes Homer in high resolution here.

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

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Stream a 144-Hour Discography of Classic Jazz Recordings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman & More

in Jazz, Music | April 4th, 2018

There have been many influential jazz record labels throughout the previous century and into the current one, but there is no more recognizable label than Blue Note Records. Blue Note is “unquestionably the most iconic jazz label there has ever been,” claims the site Udiscover Music in a post on the “50 Greatest” Blue Note albums. Indeed, “it may well be the most iconic record label of all time… a brand recognized the world over for the ‘finest in jazz.’”

Outside of the label identities in certain subcultures like punk and electronic music, no other name so instantly conjures up a fully-formed, distinctive look and sound. It is the monochrome look of dapper, too-cool musical giants in tailored suits and skinny ties, and the sound, primarily, of the Hard Bop era—of Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, and, of course, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane, artists who totally enlarged the boundaries of jazz. (See the trailer above for the Sophie Huber documentary Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes.)

By design, Blue Note’s unforgettable 50s and 60s album covers—most created by artist Reid Miles and photographer Francis Wolff—suggest brimfuls of possibility. “Right from the beginning,” says producer and writer Michael Cuscuna in the video above, “they really took their covers seriously.”

But this would have meant little if they hadn’t taken the music just as seriously as the stylish artwork that adorns it. Founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, the label first served as a home for more traditional big band and swing, but in the late forties, Blue Note seemed to realize better than any other commercial entity that the future of jazz had arrived, thanks in part to saxophonist and talent scout Ike Quebec.

“Not really in the pantheon of Blue Note players of the 1960s,” writes Burning Ambulance (he died in early ’63), Quebec is still central to the label’s success. As an A&R man, he signed Monk and Bud Powell, and “it’s been said that he did a lot of uncredited arranging on other musicians’ sessions, too.” His later recordings fit right in with his more famous peers (check out his “Blue and Sentimental”). Quebec’s own work doesn’t come up in many Blue Note retrospectives, including the Spotify discography above, and that’s too bad. But it’s hard to complain when you’ve got so many incredible, iconic Blue Note recordings in one place.

Created by Junior Bonner, the Blue Notes Records Discography playlist is not “complete” in that it contains every album the label ever released—an impossible expectation, surely, especially since Blue Note is still going strong. But, with a run time of 144 hours, it more than sufficiently covers the roster of the label’s greatest players, including several many of us probably haven’t heard before in much depth. Hardcore audiophile record collectors should visit LondonJazzCollector and Jazzdisco.org to get the full Blue Note catalog of every Blue Note artist and release. But lovers of jazz who don’t mind digital streaming instead of precious vinyl and shellac will be thrilled with this impressive anthology.

Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Recordings by Great Female Jazz Musicians

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

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The Illustrated Medicinal Plant Map of the United States of America (1932): Download It in High Resolution

in Chemistry, Health, Maps, Nature | April 3rd, 2018

Two years ago, we highlighted collector David Rumsey’s huge map archive, which he donated to Stanford University in April of 2016 and which now resides at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center. The opening of this physical collection was a pretty big deal, but the digital collection has been on the web, in some part, and available to the online public since 1996. Twenty years ago, however, though the internet was decidedly becoming an everyday feature of modern life, it was difficult for the average person to imagine the degree to which digital technology would completely overtake our lives, not to mention the almost unbelievable wealth and power tech companies would amass in such short time.

Similarly, when the above 1932 Medicinal Plant Map of the United States (see in a larger format here) first appeared—one of the tens of thousands of maps available in the digital Rumsey collection—few people other than Aldous Huxley could have foreseen the exponential advances, and the rise of wealth and power, to come in the pharmaceutical industry.

But the pharmacists had a clue. The map, produced by the National Wholesale Druggists’ Association, “was intended to boost the image of the profession,” writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “at a time when companies were increasingly compounding new pharmaceuticals in labs,” thereby rendering much of the drug-making knowledge and skill of old-time druggists obsolete.

Although the commercial pharmaceutical industry began taking shape in the late 19th century, it didn’t fully come into its own until the so-called “golden era” of 1930–1960, when, says Onion, researchers developed “a flood of new antibiotics, psychotropics, antihistamines, and vaccines, increasingly relying on synthetic chemistry to do so.” Over-the-counter medications proliferated, and pharmacists became alarmed. They sought to persuade the public of their continued relevance by pointing out, as a short blurb at the bottom left corner of the map notes, that “few people realize the extent to which plants and minerals enter into the practice of pharmacy.”

The map appeared during “Pharmacy Week” in October, when “pharmacists in Anglo-Saxon countries” promote their services. Losing sight of those important services, the Druggists’ Association writes, will lead to suffering, should the traditional pharmacist’s function “be impaired or destroyed by commercial trends.” Thus we have this visual demonstration of competence. The map identifies important species—native or cultivated—in each region of the country. In Kentucky, we see Nicotina tabacum, whose cured leaves, you guessed it, “constitute tobacco.” Across the country in Nevada, we are introduced to Apocynum cannabinum, “native of U.S. and Southern Canada—the dried rhizome and roots constitute the drug apocynum or Canadian hemp.”

The better-known Cannibus sativa also appears, in one of the boxes around the map’s border that introduce plants from outside North America, including Erythroxylon coca, from Bolivia and Peru, and Papaver somniferum, from which opium derives. Many of the other medications will be less familiar to us—and belong to what we now call naturopathy, herbalism, or, more generally, “traditional medicine.” Though these medicinal practices are many thousands of years old, the druggists try to project a cutting-edge image, assuring the map’s readers that “intense scientific study, expert knowledge, extreme care and accuracy are applied by the pharmacist to medicinal plants.”

While pharmacists today are highly-trained professionals, the part of their jobs that involved the making of drugs from scratch has been ceded to massive corporations and their research laboratories. The druggists of 1932 saw this coming, and no amount of colorful public relations could stem the tide. But it may be the case, given changing laws, changing attitudes, the backlash against overmedication, and the devastating opioid epidemic, that their craft is more relevant than it has been in decades, though today’s “druggists” work in marijuana dispensaries and health food stores instead of national pharmacy chains.

View and download the map in a high resolution scan at the David Rumsey Map Collection, where you can zoom in to every plant on the map and read its description.

via Slate

The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Is Now Free Online

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

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

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Hidden Ancient Greek Medical Text Read for the First Time in a Thousand Years — with a Particle Accelerator

in Books, History, Physics, Stanford, Technology | April 3rd, 2018

Image by Farrin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Commons

Long before humanity had paper to write on, we had papyrus. Made of the pith of the wetland plant Cyperus papyrus and first used in ancient Egypt, it made for quite a step up in terms of convenience from, say, the stone tablet. And not only could you write on it, you could rewrite on it. In that sense it was less the paper of its day than the first-generation video tape: given the expense of the stuff, it often made sense to erase the content already written on a piece of papyrus in order to record something more timely. But you couldn’t completely obliterate the previous layers of text, a fact that has long held out promise to scholars of ancient history looking to expand their field of primary sources.

The decidedly non-ancient solution: particle accelerators. Researchers at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) recently used one to find the hidden text in what’s now called the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. It contains, somewhere deep in its pages, “On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs,” an “important pharmaceutical text that would help educate fellow Greek-Roman doctors,” writes Amanda Solliday at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Originally composed by Galen of Pergamon, “an influential physician and a philosopher of early Western medicine,” the work made its way into the 6th-century Islamic world through a translation into a language between Greek and Arabic called Syriac.

Image by Farrin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Commons

Alas, “despite the physician’s fame, the most complete surviving version of the translated manuscript was erased and written over with hymns in the 11th century – a common practice at the time.” Palimpsest, the word coined to describe such texts written, erased, and written over on pre-paper materials like papyrus and parchment, has long since had a place in the lexicon as a metaphor for anything long-historied, multi-layered, and fully understandable only with effort. The Stanford team’s effort involved a technique called X‑ray fluorescence (XRF), whose rays “knock out electrons close to the nuclei of metal atoms, and these holes are filled with outer electrons resulting in characteristic X‑ray fluorescence that can be picked up by a sensitive detector.”

Those rays “penetrate through layers of text and calcium, and the hidden Galen text and the newer religious text fluoresce in slightly different ways because their inks contain different combinations of metals such as iron, zinc, mercury and copper.” Each of the leather-bound book’s 26 pages takes ten hours to scan, and the enormous amounts of new data collected will presumably occupy a variety of experts on the ancient world — on the Greek and Islamic civilizations, on their languages, on their medicine — for much longer thereafter. But you do have to wonder: what kind of unimaginably advanced technology will our descendants a millennium and a half years from now be using to read all of the stuff we thought we’d erased?

via SLAC

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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 Faceboo k.

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Meet Nadia Boulanger, “The Most Influential Teacher Since Socrates,” Who Mentored Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones & Other Legends

in Music | April 3rd, 2018

We recently featured a video of Brian Eno giving controversial advice to artists: “don’t get a job.” Easier said than done, of course, but he makes a compelling case. Along the way, he says something interesting about the fetish we make of genius—an obsessive focus on lone, and almost always male, artists as self-made, heroic embodiments of greatness. “Although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals,” he says, “they’re nearly always generated by communities.” (He proposes the neologism “scenius” in place of “genius” to describe “cooperative intelligence.”) Eno would probably agree that great art not only comes out of creative communities of peers, but also from the influence of great teachers.

One such figure, Nadia Boulanger (1887 –1979), has been described as “the most influential teacher since Socrates.” This is hardly hyperbole. As Clemency Burton-Hill notes at the BBC, “her roster of music students reads like the ultimate 20th Century Hall of Fame. Leonard Bernstein. Aaron Copland. Quincy Jones. Astor Piazzolla. Philip Glass,” and so on.

“It is no exaggeration, then, to consider Boulanger the most important musical pedagogue of the modern—or indeed any—era.” She was also a talented composer, a mentor and fierce champion of Igor Stravinsky, and the first woman to conduct major symphonies in Europe and the U.S., such as the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Boulanger had her own take on genius: “We are as fools to say, ‘he’s a genius,’” she opines in the interview at the top. She also describes her method of weeding out unserious students by asking them, “Can you live without music?” If the answer is yes, she tells them “thank the Lord and goodbye!” Even at an advanced age, her fiercely uncompromising approach is palpable, a quality Philip Glass remembers from his first meeting with her in 1964, when “she was already a relic,” writes Matthew Guerrieri at Red Bull Academy. She identified a bar from one of Glass’s compositions as “written by a real composer,” says Glass. “It was “the first and last time she said anything nice to me for the next two years.”

American composers subjected themselves to Boulanger’s harsh discipline as a “rite of passage,” visiting her in her Paris apartment where she did most of her teaching. She also made her way through “leading conservatoires,” Burton-Hill notes, “including the Juilliard School, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.” Boulanger’s early life is as fascinating as her teaching career; she was the definition of “a tough, aristocratic Frenchwoman,” as Glass describes her, and grew up surrounded by music. Her father, Ernest, was a composer, conductor, and singing professor. Her younger sister Lili, who died in 1918 at the age of 24, was the more talented composer. (Nadia, writes Burton-Hill, was “riven with envy.”)

A few years after Lili’s tragic death, Nadia abandoned composition to focus primarily on her teaching, mentoring students with tremendous promise and those with less evident gifts alike. “Anyone could be a Boulanger student,” Guerrieri writes (provided they couldn’t live without music): “Those with lesser skills were taken in alongside prodigies and professionals.” She did not discriminate on any basis, though her political attitudes make her a difficult figure for many people to fully embrace. “She espoused nationalism, monarchism and, although her good manners kept it from her often-Jewish students, anti-Semitism.” She held democracy in contempt and did not believe women should vote. And she was especially hard on her female students. (When one woman finally met her approval, Boulanger addressed her as “Monsieur.”)

Boulanger was as traditional in her musical attitudes—spurning Arnold Schoenberg’s innovations, for example—as in her politics. Yet she worked with jazz musicians like Jones and Donald Byrd, and with composers like Joe Raposo, “the musical chameleon behind the songs of Sesame Street and The Electric Company.” She was an encouraging presence in the lives of her students long after they had gone on to success and fame. When Leonard Bernstein sent her the score to West Side Story, she pronounced, “I am enchanted by its dazzling nature” (though she added a critique about its “facility”). Perhaps her most radical student, Philip Glass, has never been accused of musical conservatism. But through his difficult course of study with Boulanger, he says, “I learned to hear.”

“To undergo Boulanger’s rigorous training,” writes Guerrieri, “was to absorb her sense of music history: evolution, not revolution.” Then again, many of history’s revolutionaries have also been some of the keenest students of tradition, usually assisted, guided, and trained by history’s great teachers.

via @dark_shark/Red Bull Academy

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

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Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

in Art, Economics, Music | April 2nd, 2018

“Once upon a time, artists had jobs,” writes Katy Waldman in a recent New York Times Magazine piece. “Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims.” Or Willem de Kooning painting signs, James Dickey writing slogans for Coca-Cola, William Carlos Williams writing prescriptions, Philip Glass installing dishwashers – the list goes on.

Waldman suggests that we consider day jobs not just bill-paying grinds but delivery systems for “the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience.” Brian Eno thinks differently. “I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” he says in the clip above, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to persuade you not to have a job.’ ”

That doesn’t mean, he emphasizes, that you should “try not to do anything. It means try to leave yourself in a position that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are.”

Easier said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to “work to a future where everybody is in a position to do that,” enacting some form of universal basic income, the general idea of which holds that society will function better if it guarantees all its members a certain standard of living regardless of employment status. But if that standard rises too high, might it run the risk of softening the rigors and loosening the limitations needed to encourage true creativity? Musician Daniel Lanois, who has worked with Eno on the production of several U2 albums as well as ambient music projects, describes learning that lesson from his collaborator in the Louisiana Channel video just above.

“At the peak of my sonic experimentations with Brian Eno, we only ever used four boxes,” says Lanois. “That’s when we started getting these really beautiful textures and human-like sounds from machines. We got to be experts at those few tools.” The limitations under which they worked in the studio may not have followed from any particular philosophy, but the actual experience taught them how a richer artistic result can arise, paradoxically, from more straitened circumstances. Since the beginning of art, its practitioners have always had to find innovative ways around obstacles, whether those obstacles have to do with technology, sides, time, money, or anything else besides. As Lanois reassuringly puts it, “I can imagine that if you have limitation, even financial limitation, that might be okay, man.”

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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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

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

in Music | April 2nd, 2018

Marvin Gaye’s mega-hit, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” turns 50 this year.

Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight got the first cracks at the now iconic Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield tune, but Gaye’s 1968 rendition is the famous one, the bestselling Motown single of the decade.

Gaye’s former brother-in-law, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, is perhaps the only one who wasn’t impressed, refusing to believe it could be a viable single until its enthusiastic reception by radio DJs and the listening public convinced him otherwise. In short order, In The Groove, the 1968 album on which it first appeared, was retitled with the name of its monster hit.

It’s given a considerable boost to the dancing raisins, Lawrence Kasdan’s film, The Big Chill, and the many emerging talents who’ve sampled the track in the decades following the singer’s untimely death.

Strip all that away.

For an even purer listening experience, strip away its famous orchestration, described by Time Magazine’s Gilbert Cruz as “ a single drum shot,” “a dangerous-sounding electric-piano riff,” and “a portentous tambourine rattle.”

As author Nelson George, an historian of African American music, observed in his 1984 essay, “Marvin Gaye’s Abiding Unrest”:

In the ’60s Marvin bent his voice to the wishes of Motown, but he did so his way, vocally if not musically. He claimed he had three different voices, a falsetto, a gritty gospel shout, and a smooth midrange close to his speaking voice…. His version of “Grapevine” is so intense, so pretty, so goddamn black in spirit, it seems to catalogue that world of black male emotions Charles Fuller evokes in his insightful Soldier’s Play.

The superlatives that accompany Gaye’s 6th place ranking on Rolling Stone’s 2010 list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time speak to both the emotional power he brought to his work, as well as his “brilliant musicality”:

These days we have Pro Tools and a thousand tracks, and you can do different vocals on every track. But back then you really had to innovate, like the way Marvin answered himself in songs, or all that really distant backing work, where his voice is all the way in the back and echoing. It’s haunting; he delivered every single song with such clarity…

Even ex-wife Janis Gaye had sweet words for that voice in a recent interview with Voice Council magazine. Among the shocking revelations that got left out of her tell-all memoir about their tempestuous relationship—Gaye was a primarily self-taught artist who smoked unfiltered Camels:

…sometimes he would walk around like Pavarotti just to make the kids laugh. But, yes, he would also run through scales, drink tea with honey and lemon and little concoctions of cayenne pepper with vinegar and things like that. But he didn’t warm up before every performance.

Listen to “Let’s Get It On,” “Sexual Healing,” and other isolated vocal tracks from Marvin Gaye’s hit list here.

via Twisted Sifter

Listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie on the Isolated Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pressure,’ 1981

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her at the New York Society Library on April 23 for her monthly low-budget variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

One of the Best Preserved Ancient Manuscripts of The Iliad Is Now Digitized: See the “Bankes Homer” Manuscript in High Resolution (Circa 150 C.E.)

Stream a 144-Hour Discography of Classic Jazz Recordings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman & More

The Illustrated Medicinal Plant Map of the United States of America (1932): Download It in High Resolution

Hidden Ancient Greek Medical Text Read for the First Time in a Thousand Years — with a Particle Accelerator

Meet Nadia Boulanger, “The Most Influential Teacher Since Socrates,” Who Mentored Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones & Other Legends

Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

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

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