Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Greatest Performances: “Shredding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

Grow­ing up around met­al­heads gave me an appre­ci­a­tion for the gui­tar hero­ics of bands like Metal­li­ca, Iron Maid­en, Judas Priest, etc. But one band every­one loved, I didn’t get. David Lee Roth, Sam­my Hagar (let’s not speak of the Cherone era)… it didn’t mat­ter to me. Van Halen seemed to be hav­ing way too much sleazy fun to fit my nar­row ideas of met­al. No spikes, no skulls, no black mass­es. “Run­nin’ with the Dev­il” sounds like a camp­fire song, I said….

Sit down, they said, shut up, and lis­ten to “Erup­tion.” So I did. And I said, Oh. Then I lis­tened care­ful­ly to all the rest. I didn’t become a fan of Van Halen, the band. But it was obvi­ous that Eddie Van Halen him­self, who passed away yes­ter­day from can­cer at the age of 65, deserves the rep­u­ta­tion as the most inno­v­a­tive gui­tarist since Hen­drix. His end­less cre­ativ­i­ty pow­ered the band through its tumul­tuous line­up changes; his play­ing com­plete­ly changed the design of met­al gui­tars, not to men­tion the met­al solo; his DIY gui­tar designs turned him into a builder of his own line of gui­tars and ampli­fiers.

There didn’t seem to be any­thing he couldn’t do with the instru­ment, but unlike many a gui­tar vir­tu­oso, Van Halen was entire­ly self-taught. “Nine­ty per­cent of the things that I do on gui­tar, if I had tak­en lessons and learned to play by the book,” he once said, “I would not play at all the way I do… Cross­ing a Gib­son with a Fend­er was out of neces­si­ty, because there was no gui­tar on the mar­ket that did what I want­ed.” He’s refer­ring to the “Franken­stein” guitar—a heav­i­ly mod­i­fied Fend­er Strat—one of many such gui­tars he built, rewired, and paint­ed to suit his needs.

Van Halen first showed off his pio­neer­ing two-hand tap­ping and vibra­to dive bombs on the first of many “Franken­strats” in “Erup­tion,” record­ed as a short instru­men­tal inter­lude between “Run­nin’ with the Dev­il” and “Jamie’s Cryin’” on the 1978 debut Van Halen. He had innu­mer­able moments of bril­liance, in the stu­dio and onstage, in decades after­ward, includ­ing his unfor­get­table gui­tar work on “Thriller” and “Beat It,” clas­sic solos that “will nev­er be matched,” as Quin­cy Jones tweet­ed in trib­ute yes­ter­day. (See “Beat It” live in a very low-qual­i­ty video above.)

But gui­tarists still turn to “Erup­tion”, again and again, as “the peak of gui­tar per­for­mance,” Esquire’s cul­ture edi­tor Matt Miller writes. “It’s true,” Miller con­cedes, “there were no short­ages of self-indul­gent gui­tar solos in the ‘70s, but this one changed the game of how they would sound and what they would mean, head­ing in to the ‘80s. Every solo that fol­lowed would try to emu­late the sound of Eddie’s mind-melt­ing ‘Erup­tion.’” Van Halen insist­ed the solo wasn’t as com­pli­cat­ed as fans made it out to be. There remains an “entire YouTube sub­cul­ture ded­i­cat­ed to kids try­ing to play” the solo, to mas­ter the tone and tech­nique of the man who may have been the most met­al gui­tarist of them all.

We’ve bare­ly touched on Van Halen’s lega­cy as a soloist and inven­tor of weird gui­tars, sounds and effects, and not at all on his equal­ly impor­tant roles as a show­man, song­writer, key­board play­er, and rhythm gui­tarist. No mat­ter how ridicu­lous­ly fast and tech­ni­cal met­al becomes, or how many extra strings play­ers add to Eddie’s six, no one has ever matched his lev­el of style and inven­tion. It is no less the case in 2020 as it was in the late 70s that one can point to his solos and say, “with no hyper­bole,” writes Miller, “this is shred­ding.” Tru­ly, shred­ding was Eddie Van Halen’s very essence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

15-Year-Old French Gui­tar Prodi­gy Flaw­less­ly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yng­wie Malm­steen & Steve Vai

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

The Evo­lu­tion of the Rock Gui­tar Solo: 28 Solos, Span­ning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Min­utes

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

What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today

Edgar Allan Poe died 171 years ago today, but we still don’t know why. Of course, we all must meet our end soon­er or lat­er, as the lit­er­ary mas­ter of the macabre would well have under­stood. His incli­na­tion toward the mys­te­ri­ous would have pre­pared him to believe as well in the pow­er of ques­tions that can nev­er be answered. And so, per­haps, Poe would have expect­ed that a death like his own — ear­ly, unex­pect­ed, and of final­ly unde­ter­minable cause — would draw pub­lic fas­ci­na­tion. But could even he have imag­ined it con­tin­u­ing to com­pel gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of urban-leg­end and Amer­i­can-lore enthu­si­asts, whether or not they’ve read “The Raven” or “The Fall of the House of Ush­er”?

Poe’s end thus makes ide­al mate­r­i­al for Buz­zfeed Unsolved, a video series whose oth­er pop­u­lar episodes include the death of Vin­cent van Gogh, the dis­ap­pear­ance of D.B. Coop­er, and the assas­si­na­tion of John F. Kennedy. In 25 min­utes, “The Macabre Death Of Edgar Allan Poe” sum­ma­rizes the writer’s remark­ably unlucky life and gets into the detail of his equal­ly unlucky death, begin­ning on Sep­tem­ber 27th, 1849, when “Poe left Rich­mond by steam­er, stop­ping the next day in Bal­ti­more. For the next five days, Poe’s where­abouts are unknown.” Then, on Octo­ber 3rd, he was found “deliri­ous, immo­bile, and dressed in shab­by cloth­ing” in “a gut­ter out­side of a pub­lic house that was being used as a polling place.”

“Rap­ping at death’s cham­ber’s door, Poe was tak­en to Wash­ing­ton Col­lege Hos­pi­tal that after­noon.” (The nar­ra­tion works in sev­er­al such ref­er­ences to his writ­ing.) “Assumed to be drunk, the weak and weary Poe was brought to a spe­cial room reserved for patients ill from intox­i­ca­tion.” Alas, “Poe nev­er ful­ly regained con­scious­ness to be able to detail what had hap­pened to him,” and expired on Octo­ber 7th at the age of 40. The hosts exam­ine sev­er­al of the the­o­ries that attempt to explain what hap­pened (nine­teen of which we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture): did a binge trig­ger his known phys­i­cal intol­er­ance of alco­hol? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he get beat­en up by his fiancée’s angry broth­ers? Was he a vic­tim of “coop­ing”?

Coop­ing, a “vio­lent form of vot­er fraud that was extreme­ly com­mon in Bal­ti­more at that time,” involved rov­ing gangs who “would kid­nap a vic­tim and force him to vote mul­ti­ple times in a vari­ety of dis­guis­es.” This jibes with the loca­tion and state in which Poe was found — and because “vot­ers were often giv­en some alco­hol after vot­ing as a cel­e­bra­tion,” it also explains his appar­ent stu­por. But none of the major the­o­ries actu­al­ly con­tra­dict each oth­er, and thus more than one could be true: “Edgar Allan Poe may very well have been beat­en and kid­napped in a coop­ing scheme, sent into a stu­por with alco­hol after vot­ing, and unable to recov­er due to a brain tumor.” How­ev­er it hap­pened, his death became a final sto­ry as endur­ing as — and even grim­mer than — many of his tales of the grotesque.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mys­tery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 The­o­ries on What Caused the Poet’s Demise

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Famous Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Vin­cent Price & Basil Rath­bone

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mé (1875)

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith

Is there no end to the seem­ing­ly end­less fas­ci­na­tion with super­hero media? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Travis Smith, who teach­es polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty, to dis­cuss. Travis sees their res­o­nance as a mat­ter of metaphor: How can we do more with the abil­i­ties we have? His book Super­hero Ethics: 10 Com­ic Book Heroes, 10 Ways to Save the World, Which One Do We Need Now? match­es up heroes like Bat­man vs. Spi­der-Man for eth­i­cal com­par­i­son: Both “act local­ly,” but Bat­man would like to actu­al­ly rule over Gotham, while Spi­der-Man engages in a more “friend­ly neigh­bor­hood” patrol.  What phi­los­o­phy should gov­ern the way we try to do good in the world?

Lurk­ing in the back­ground is the cur­rent release of sea­son two of the Ama­zon series The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ graph­ic nov­els, which assumes that pow­er cor­rupts and asks what reg­u­lar folks might do in the face of cor­po­rate-backed invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. This cyn­i­cal take is part of a long tra­di­tion of ask­ing “what if super-heroes were lit­er­al­ly real?” that goes through Watch­men all the way back to Spi­der-Man him­self, who faces finan­cial and oth­er mun­dane prob­lems that Super­man was immune to.

Giv­en Travis’ book, we did­n’t real­ly need sup­ple­men­tary arti­cles for this episode, but you can take a look at this inter­view with him to learn more about his com­ic book loves and the Cana­di­an her­itage that led him to start fight­ing crime (you know, indi­rect­ly, through eth­i­cal teach­ing).

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

Ted Turner Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Socialist?;” Sagan Responds Thoughtfully (1989)

Social­ism should not be a scare word in the U.S. Were it not for social­ists like Eugene V. Debs and the labor move­ments orga­nized around his pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, reforms like the 8‑hour work­day, work­er safe­ty pro­tec­tions, women’s suf­frage, min­i­mum wage, the abo­li­tion of child labor, and vaca­tion and sick time would like­ly nev­er have made it into a major party’s plat­form. The lega­cy of this strain of social­ism in the U.S. endured, Jill Lep­ore writes at The New York­er, “in Pro­gres­sive-era reforms, in the New Deal, and in Lyn­don Johnson’s Great Soci­ety,” all wide­ly sup­port­ed by self-described lib­er­als.

Yet while social­ist poli­cies are broad­ly pop­u­lar in the U.S., the word may as well be a writhing, high-volt­age wire in main­stream dis­course. The same was true in the Rea­gan 80s, when so many pro­gres­sive reforms were undone: mil­i­tary spend­ing bal­looned, social spend­ing was cut to the bone, and home­less­ness became a major cri­sis, exac­er­bat­ed by the A.I.D.S. epi­dem­ic the admin­is­tra­tion mocked and ignored. In 1989, at the end of the president’s two terms, Ted Turn­er lobbed the charge of “social­ism” at Carl Sagan in a CNN inter­view. The astro­physi­cist and famed sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor refused to take the bait.

Rather than denounc­ing or dis­tanc­ing him­self from social­ists, he made it clear that the label was less impor­tant to him than the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions under which mil­lions of peo­ple suf­fered as a result of delib­er­ate pol­i­cy choic­es that could be oth­er­wise. “I’m not sure what a ‘social­ist’ is… I’m talk­ing about mak­ing peo­ple self-reliant, peo­ple able to take care of them­selves,” he says, in an echo of Debs’ praise of the virtue of “sand.” But this sort of self-reliance is not the same thing as the kind of myth­ic, Old West rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism of con­ser­vatism.

Sagan acknowl­edges the real­i­ty that self-reliance, and sur­vival, are impos­si­ble with­out the basic neces­si­ties of life, and that the coun­try has the means to ensure its cit­i­zens have them.

I believe the gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to care for the peo­ple…. There are coun­tries which are per­fect­ly able to do that. The Unit­ed States is an extreme­ly rich coun­try, it’s per­fect­ly able to do that. It choos­es not to. It choos­es to have home­less peo­ple.

Sagan men­tions the U.S. infant mor­tal­i­ty rate, which then placed the coun­try at “19th in the world” because of a refusal to spend the mon­ey on health­care need­ed to save more infant lives. “I think it’s a dis­grace,” he says. Instead, bil­lions were allo­cat­ed to the mil­i­tary, espe­cial­ly the Strate­gic Defense Ini­tia­tive, called Star Wars: “They’ve already spent some­thing like $20 bil­lion dol­lars on it, if these guys are per­mit­ted to go ahead they will spend a tril­lion dol­lars on Star Wars.”

Is object­ing to a vast waste of the country’s resources and human poten­tial “social­ism”? Sagan doesn’t care what it’s called—the word doesn’t scare him away from point­ing to the facts of inequal­i­ty. The prob­lems have only wors­ened since then. Mil­i­tary spend­ing has grown to an obscene amount—more than the next ten coun­tries com­bined. The fig­ure usu­al­ly giv­en, $705 bil­lion, is actu­al­ly more like $934 bil­lion, as Kim­ber­ly Amadeo explains at The Bal­ance.

“Monop­o­lies have risen again,” writes Lep­ore, “and income inequal­i­ty has spiked back up to where it was in Debs’ life­time.” Newsweek reports that in 2018, “America’s Health Rank­ings found that the U.S. was ranked 33rd out of the 36 Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-oper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment coun­tries for infant mor­tal­i­ty.” We have only just begun to reck­on with the dev­as­tat­ing pol­i­cy out­comes exposed by the coro­n­avirus. As Sagan would say, these prob­lems are not acci­den­tal; they are the result of delib­er­ate choic­es. We could have a very dif­fer­ent society—one that invests its resources in peo­ple instead of weapons, in life instead of death. And we could call it what­ev­er we want­ed.

See the full Sagan-Turn­er inter­view here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Young Carl Sagan Appear in His First TV Doc­u­men­tary, The Vio­lent Uni­verse (1969)

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: A Toolk­it That Can Help You Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Sep­a­rate Sense from Non­sense

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

How Vividly Colorized Photos Helped Introduce Japan to the World in the 19th Century

Since the mid-20th cen­tu­ry hey­day of Sony tran­sis­tor radios, the world has asso­ci­at­ed Japan with high tech­nol­o­gy. But between the mid-17th and mid-19th cen­tu­ry, the world could bare­ly asso­ciate Japan with any­thing at all. The iso­la­tion­ist pol­i­cy of sakoku, or “closed coun­try,” kept the Land of the Ris­ing Sun vir­tu­al­ly free of out­side influ­ence — espe­cial­ly West­ern reli­gious and colo­nial influ­ence — until, in 1853, the Amer­i­can Navy com­modore Matthew Per­ry rolled up in his “Black Ships” and demand­ed an open­ing of its ports. There­after, accord­ing to the Vox Dark­room video above, “for­eign­ers com­ing to Japan brought their clothes, their cul­ture, and their cam­eras.”

The cam­eras in par­tic­u­lar made it pos­si­ble for every­one around the world to final­ly get a glimpse of this mys­te­ri­ous island nation they’d pre­vi­ous­ly known only in their imag­i­na­tion. Pho­tog­ra­phy, itself an excit­ing­ly new tech­nol­o­gy at the time, rapid­ly boomed in the new­ly opened Japan as an indus­try.

“Pho­tog­ra­phers — most­ly Euro­pean, but some Japan­ese — doc­u­ment­ed Japan’s land­scape and peo­ple, cre­at­ing col­lectible and high­ly prized images of Japan­ese cul­ture,” first in black-and-white and sub­se­quent­ly with ear­ly col­oriza­tion meth­ods. Then, as would hap­pen over and over again in sub­se­quent decades, West­ern tech­nol­o­gy and Japan­ese crafts­man­ship unit­ed to take it to the next lev­el.

An Ital­ian-British pho­tog­ra­ph­er named Felice Beato “made expert-qual­i­ty hand-col­or­ing the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of this era of Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­phy,” draw­ing on a “large body of high­ly trained arti­sans from the ukiyo‑e wood­block print indus­try.” By the time for­eign­ers began using cam­eras to cap­ture images of Japan­ese life, the Japan­ese had already been cap­tur­ing Japan­ese life with ukiyo‑e, or “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” for cen­turies. Pho­tog­ra­phers soon dis­cov­ered they could tap into the “exper­tise of patient pre­ci­sion in the appli­ca­tion of col­or on to flat images that had been in place in Japan for gen­er­a­tions.”

This new wave of Japan­ese “col­or” pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dios set them­selves apart with mas­ter­ful water­col­or­ing that “added to the sense of real­ism in these images, which made them even more col­lectible.” Some pho­tog­ra­phers, such as Kusak­abe Kim­bei, got even more artis­tic, “stag­ing elab­o­rate, some­times myth­ic scenes of Japan­ese cul­ture” in the stu­dio, then adding not just water­col­ors but oth­er visu­al effects: in Girl in Heavy Storm, the pho­to­graph above, “the ‘rain’ is sim­u­lat­ed by scratch­es into the glass plate neg­a­tive.” Her kimono is also pinned in places to the back­ground, all in the name of cap­tur­ing anoth­er of the indus­try’s “sup­pos­ed­ly typ­i­cal scenes of Japan­ese life.” Even when it’s right before your eyes, Japan is in the imag­i­na­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Col­or Pho­tos: See the Stereo­scop­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of T. Ena­mi

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs from 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan: 110 Images Cap­ture the Wan­ing Days of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Soci­ety

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Watch Chill­ing Footage of the Hiroshi­ma & Nagasa­ki Bomb­ings in Restored Col­or

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Only Time Prince & Miles Davis Jammed Together Onstage: Watch the New Year’s Eve, 1987 Concert

A too-pre­cious genre of inter­net meme has depart­ed pub­lic fig­ures who did not know each oth­er in life meet­ing in heav­en with hugs, high-fives, and winc­ing­ly earnest exchanges. These sen­ti­men­tal vignettes are almost too easy to par­o­dy, a kitschy ver­sion of the “what if” game, as in: what if two cre­ative genius­es could col­lab­o­rate in ways they nev­er did before they died?

What if John Lennon had formed a band with Eric Clap­ton—as Lennon him­self had once pro­posed? Or what if a Jimi Hendrix/Miles Davis col­lab­o­ra­tion had come off, as Hen­drix envi­sioned the year before his death? More than just fan­ta­sy base­ball, the exer­cise lets us spec­u­late about how musi­cians who influ­enced each oth­er might evolve if giv­en the chance to jam indef­i­nite­ly.

When it comes to Miles, there are few who haven’t been influ­enced by the jazz great, whether they know it or not. Prince Rogers Nel­son knew it well. The son of a jazz pianist, Prince grew up with Miles’ music. Although he “grav­i­tat­ed to the worlds of rock, pop, and R&B,” writes pianist Ron Dro­tos, Prince “seems to have seen jazz as a way to express him­self in a broad­er way than he could through more com­mer­cial styles alone.”

Prince was so inter­est­ed in explor­ing jazz—and Davis’ par­tic­u­lar form of jazz—in the 80s that he formed a band anony­mous­ly, called Mad­house (actu­al­ly just him and horn play­er Eric Leeds), and released two albums of fusion instru­men­tals. The influ­ence went both ways. “Miles con­sid­ered Prince to have the poten­tial to become anoth­er Duke Elling­ton and even mod­eled his own 1980’s music part­ly on Prince’s style,” with 1986’s Tutu stand­ing out as an exam­ple. What if the two musi­cians had worked togeth­er? Can you imag­ine it?

They did not—to our knowl­edge, although Prince’s vault is vast—collaborate on an album, but they did cre­ate one stu­dio track togeth­er, “Can I Play With U?” And the two vir­tu­oso com­posers and musi­cians jammed togeth­er onstage, once, at Pais­ley Park, on New Year’s Eve, 1987. The con­cert was a ben­e­fit for the Min­neso­ta Coali­tion for the Home­less and the last time Prince per­formed the Sign O’ the Times stage show. At the tail end of the con­cert, Davis steps onstage for “an ice-cold appear­ance,” Okay­play­er notes. “As a com­pan­ion to the release of a deluxe edi­tion” of the album, “the late icon’s estate has relin­quished the full two-hour-plus set.”

Watch the con­cert at the top (trust me, don’t just skip ahead to see Davis at 1:43:50). Just above, you can see an hour­long “pre-show” taped with Maya Rudolph, “life­long Prince devo­tee,” Emmy-win­ning come­di­an, and daugh­ter of Min­nie Rip­per­ton. Oth­er guests include Prince’s long­time side­man and col­lab­o­ra­tor on his jazz project, Eric Leeds. “If you’re here, then you’re cool, like me,” Rudolph jokes, “and you know a lot about Prince.” Or maybe you don’t. Let Rudolph and her guests fill you in, and imag­ine Prince and Davis mak­ing celes­tial jazz-funk for­ev­er, between high-fives, in the Great Beyond.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aca­d­e­m­ic Jour­nal Devotes an Entire Issue to Prince’s Life & Music: Read and Down­load It for Free

When Miles Davis Dis­cov­ered and Then Chan­neled the Musi­cal Spir­it of Jimi Hen­drix

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

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

Watch the Dadaist Masterpiece Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928): Hans Richter’s Film Was So Avant Garde It Was Desecrated by the Nazis

The hats won’t stay on heads. The bowtie won’t be tied. The gun can’t shoot and the tar­get can’t keep still. When objects them­selves rebel, some­thing ter­ri­ble is upon the land, and anar­chism will out. This is one of the take­aways from painter Hans Richter’s 1928 DADA short film Ghosts Before Break­fast, or Vor­mit­tagsspuk in its orig­i­nal Ger­man (lit­er­al­ly “Morn­ing Spook”). And you might take that a very dif­fer­ent way than the audi­ence in 1928. That is fine. This is Dada. It is a bomb thrown into the mind.

But actu­al events and prob­lems sur­round the film and its after­math. By the end of the 1920s Richter was near­ly two decades into his abstract/cubist paint­ing career, and at the begin­ning of the decade he had already been exper­i­ment­ing with the rel­a­tive­ly new medi­um of film. His 1921 Rhyth­mus 21 was one of the first films to attempt to bring abstract ideas–shapes, light, rhythm– to the medi­um. Writ­ing in a Ger­man peri­od­i­cal around 1926, he said “…cin­e­ma can ful­fill cer­tain promis­es made by the ancient arts, in the real­iza­tion of which paint­ing and film become close neigh­bors and work togeth­er.”

Ah, but could music and silent film work togeth­er? In 1927 he was asked by the Ges­sellschaft Fur Neu Musik in Berlin to work with com­pos­er Paul Hin­demith on a piece to screen at their annu­al fes­ti­val. Hin­demith sug­gest­ed some­thing pleas­ant, some­thing set in the coun­try­side. Richter ran out of time and shot some­thing in an impro­vi­sa­tion­al style. But, you know, some­times dead­lines real­ly bring out the best in peo­ple. If the lega­cy of Ghosts Before Break­fast is any indi­ca­tion, it did. It’s con­sid­ered by many to be one of the best Dada films for pure inven­tion and play­ful­ness.

If Ghosts has any nar­ra­tive it’s this: objects con­found their human own­ers, while a clock relent­less­ly counts down the min­utes to noon, a play on the Ger­man phrase “Es ist fünf vor zwölf,” lit­er­al­ly “five min­utes to 12” or “time in run­ning out.” (There’s also a duck).

Richter throws it all in: there’s back­wards film, neg­a­tive film, cut-out and stop-motion ani­ma­tion, in-cam­era spe­cial effects. And as a through­line, one of the sim­plest effects: four, then three, then two ghost­ly bowler hats float­ing in the sky, just out of the reach of their own­ers.

And the artist called in his friends to help: Richter used Bauhaus stu­dent and sculp­tor Wern­er Gra­eff, Hin­demith him­self, com­pos­er Dar­ius Mil­haud and his cousin/wife Madeleine Mil­haud, and film edi­tor Willi Pfer­dekamp to pop­u­late the film.

Ghosts has a trag­ic after­life: the Nazis burned the orig­i­nal film and the score Hin­demith wrote for it. How­ev­er that has left a flow­er­ing of music in its wake, as com­posers have tried to fill the gap: Ian Gar­den­er, Jean Has­se, the band The Real Tues­day Weld, and oth­ers. Steve Roden com­posed four ver­sions for a LACMA ret­ro­spec­tive of Richter’s work, using var­i­ous Dadaist tac­tics, includ­ing record­ing a Hin­demith vinyl he had pre­pared with sand­pa­per.

All scores have resist­ed per­fect syn­chro­niza­tion, how­ev­er. Indeed, in 1947 Richter him­self spoke out against that desire:

We should find a way to let the sound and the pic­ture move on its own in the same direc­tion, but nev­er­the­less, sep­a­rate­ly. This refers to the spo­ken word as well as to the musi­cal and oth­er sounds.

Near­ly 100 years old, Ghosts Before Break­fast is still set­ting the table for us, ready with a strong brew of truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Mas­ter­pieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale (1924)

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Cel­e­brate the Avant-Garde Move­ment Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians

In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a bea­con,” writes Robin Kin­ross at Eye, among a host of Civ­il Rights era inde­pen­dents that helped jazz “escape the racial-com­mer­cial con­straints applied by White Amer­i­cans, and find its own place, unpa­tro­n­ised and rel­a­tive­ly free of exploita­tion.” That label, Blue Note, ush­ered in the birth of the cool—both cool jazz and its many hip signifiers—as much through graph­ic design as through its metic­u­lous approach to record­ing.

Blue Note album cov­ers may seem prin­ci­pal­ly dis­tin­guished by the pho­tog­ra­phy of Fran­cis Wolff, whose instincts behind the cam­era pro­duced visu­al icon after icon. But the label’s style depend­ed on the lay­out, graph­ic design, and let­ter­ing of Reid Miles, who drew on min­i­mal­ist Swiss trends in “over 500 album cov­ers for Blue Note Records,” design­er Rea­gan Ray writes. “He pio­neered the use of cre­ative­ly-arranged type over mono­chro­mat­ic pho­tog­ra­phy, which is a style that is still wide­ly used in graph­ic design today.”

As we not­ed in a recent post on Blue Note’s leg­endary design team, Reid’s let­ter­ing some­times edged the pho­tog­ra­phy to the mar­gins, or off the cov­er alto­geth­er. Jazz greats were giv­en the free­dom to cre­ate the music they want­ed, but it was the design­ers who had to sell their cre­ativ­i­ty to the pub­lic in a visu­al lan­guage.

They had done so with dis­tinc­tive type­faces before Reid, of course. But the art of let­ter­ing became far more inter­est­ing through his influ­ence, both more play­ful and more refined at the same time.

Since type­face has always played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s com­mer­cial suc­cess, Ray decid­ed to com­pile sev­er­al hun­dred sam­plings of album let­ter­ing of jazz musician’s names, “for easy brows­ing and analy­sis” of type­face as an essen­tial ele­ment all on its own. The gallery may attempt “to cov­er most of the genre’s sig­nif­i­cant musi­cians,” but there are, Ray admits, many inevitable omis­sions.

Nonethe­less, it’s a for­mi­da­ble visu­al record of the var­i­ous looks of jazz in let­ter­ing, and the visu­al iden­ti­ties of its biggest artists over the course of sev­er­al decades. Ray does not name any of the design­ers, which is frus­trat­ing, but those in the know will rec­og­nize the work of Reid and oth­ers like album cov­er pio­neer Alex Stein­weiss. You may well spot let­ter­ing by Mil­ton Glaser, whom Ray pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered in a huge curat­ed gallery of the famous designer’s album art.

The names behind the big names mat­ter, but it’s the musi­cians them­selves these indi­vid­u­al­ized type­faces are meant to imme­di­ate­ly evoke. Con­sid­er just how well most all of these exam­ples do just that—representing each artist’s music, peri­od, and image with the per­fect font and graph­ic arrange­ment, each one a unique logo. Some­what like the music it rep­re­sents, Ray’s gallery is, itself, a col­lec­tive tour-de-force per­for­mance of visu­al jazz.

Vis­it Ray’s gallery here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed & Brought to Life

The Ground­break­ing Art of Alex Stein­weiss, Father of Record Cov­er Design

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

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