8 Hours of David Bowie’s Historic 1980 Floor Show: Complete & Uncut Footage

Bowie com­pletists rejoice. Eight hours of footage from his 1973 tele­vi­sion pro­gram “The 1980 Floor Show,” have found their way to YouTube, includ­ing, Boing Boing notes, “uncut footage… mul­ti­ple takes, back­stage moments, and all of the dance rehearsals.” The show — actu­al­ly an episode of the NBC series The Mid­night Spe­cial curat­ed by Bowie — lived up to its title (itself a pun on “1984,” the open­ing song of the broad­cast), with elab­o­rate dance num­bers, major cos­tume changes, and sev­er­al guest per­form­ers: The Trog­gs, Aman­da Lear, Car­men, and — most impor­tant­ly — Mar­i­anne Faith­full, in career free-fall at the time but also in top form for this cabaret-style vari­ety show.

When Mid­night Spe­cial pro­duc­er Burt Sug­ar­man approached Bowie about doing the hour-long show, the singer agreed on the con­di­tion that he could have com­plete cre­ative con­trol. He chose to hold rehearsals and per­for­mances at London’s Mar­quee Club. The audi­ence con­sist­ed of 200 young fans drawn from the Bowie fan club. Faith­full was “actu­al­ly invit­ed as one of the reserve acts,” notes Jack What­ley at Far Out, “ready to be called upon should some­one else drop out.”

“The show was heav­i­ly adver­tised in the US press in the run up to the broad­cast,” not­ed Bowie 75 in 2018, “but has nev­er been shown out­side the US or offi­cial­ly released,” though bootlegs cir­cu­lat­ed for years. Shoot­ing took place over three days in late Octo­ber, just a few months after Bowie played his final show as Zig­gy Star­dust at the Ham­mer­smith Odeon The­atre, cryp­ti­cal­ly announc­ing at the end, “not only is it the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.” Bowie then went on to release Aladdin Sane and his cov­ers record Pin-Ups the fol­low­ing year, drop­ping the Zig­gy char­ac­ter entire­ly.

But Bowie brought Zig­gy back, at least in cos­tume, for one last gig in “The 1980 Floor Show,” wear­ing some of the out­fits Kan­sai Yamamo­to designed for the Zig­gy Star­dust tours and still sport­ing the sig­na­ture spiked red mul­let he would con­tin­ue to wear as his dystopi­an Hal­loween Jack per­sona on 1974’s Dia­mond Dogs. “The 1980 Floor Show” pro­mot­ed songs from Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups while visu­al­ly rep­re­sent­ing the tran­si­tion from Bowie’s space alien vis­i­tor per­sona to a dif­fer­ent kind of out­sider — an alien in exile, just like the char­ac­ter he played a few years lat­er in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. As Maria Math­eos writes at Has­ta:

Zig­gy no longer played gui­tar: Bowie had meta­mor­phosed into Aladdin Sane. Parad­ing across the stage in red plat­form boots and a patent-leather black and white bal­loon leg jump­suit, referred to by design­er Yamamo­to as the ‘Tokyo pop’ jump­suit, Bowie sought to assault the sens­es of his audi­ence. Com­plete­ly over the top? Yes. Verg­ing on a par­o­dy of excess? Pos­si­bly. Would he have want­ed us to take him seri­ous­ly? He cer­tain­ly did not (take him­self seri­ous­ly).

With Aladdin Sane, Bowie gave us a hyper­bol­ic exten­sion of his pri­or alien dop­pel­ganger; adding that his char­ac­ter, a pun on ‘A Lad Insane’, rep­re­sent­ed “Zig­gy under the influ­ence of Amer­i­ca.”

See how Bowie con­struct­ed that new, and short-lived, per­sona from the mate­ri­als of his for­mer glam super­star char­ac­ter, and see the rev­e­la­tion that was Mar­i­anne Faith­full. The singer per­formed her 1964 hit, writ­ten by The Rolling Stones, “As Tears Go By,” solo. But the high­light of the show, and of her mid-sev­en­ties peri­od, was the duet of Son­ny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” with which she and Bowie closed the show. “The cos­tumes of the pair are mag­i­cal.” What­ley writes,” with Bowie “in full Zig­gy attire… aka his ‘Angel of Death’ costume—while Faith­full has on a nun’s habit that was open at the back.”

Bowie report­ed­ly intro­duced the song with the tossed-off line, “This isn’t any­thing seri­ous, it’s just a bit of fun. We’ve hard­ly even rehearsed it.” You can scroll through the 8 hours of footage at the top to see those rehearsals, and so many more pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able Bowie moments caught on film.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Mar­i­anne Faith­full in His Last Per­for­mance As Zig­gy Star­dust

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

David Bowie Became Zig­gy Star­dust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Orig­i­nal Footage

David Bowie’s Final Gig as Zig­gy Star­dust Doc­u­ment­ed in 1973 Con­cert Film

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Any­way (1998)

 

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

 

 

Cornel West Teaches You How to Think Like a Philosopher

Cor­nel West has nev­er shied away from dis­agree­ment, which is one of the qual­i­ties that has kept him promi­nent as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al for decades. Anoth­er is his intense, even lyri­cal style of express­ing those dis­agree­ments — and every­thing else he has to say besides. In his aca­d­e­m­ic career he’s built a rep­u­ta­tion as not exact­ly the aver­age pro­fes­sor, as his for­mer stu­dents at Har­vard, Yale, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris, and oth­er schools have expe­ri­enced first-hand. Now, online edu­ca­tion plat­form Mas­ter­class has made his dis­tinc­tive ped­a­gogy avail­able to any­one will­ing to pay USD $20-per-month mem­ber­ship price with its brand new course “Cor­nel West Teach­es Phi­los­o­phy.”

“This class revolves around three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions,” West says in the trail­er above. First, “What does it mean to be human?” Sec­ond, “What are the forms of love that con­sti­tute the best of our human­i­ty: love of truth, love of good­ness, love of beau­ty?” Third, “How does com­mu­ni­ty, tra­di­tion, her­itage shape and mold our con­cep­tions of who we are as human beings?”

This mate­r­i­al, one sens­es, will be less straight­for­ward­ly prac­ti­cal than in some oth­er Mas­ter­class­es; but then, is there any view­er to whom it could be irrel­e­vant? What­ev­er our par­tic­u­lar field of endeav­or, each of us is, as West puts it, “a feath­er­less, two-legged, lin­guis­ti­cal­ly con­scious crea­ture, born between urine and feces, whose body will soon be the culi­nary delight of ter­res­tri­al worms.”

Yet in West­’s view, we can also reach toward high­er things. This requires the prop­er atti­tude toward wis­dom, the love of which is at the root of the very term phi­los­o­phy: hence the lessons in West­’s Mas­ter­class ded­i­cat­ed to “How to Think Like a Philoso­pher” and “How Phi­los­o­phy Serves Human­i­ty.” Lat­er he goes deep­er, and at one point even “unset­tles the mind and empow­ers the soul by illu­mi­nat­ing the del­i­cate inter­play between hope, opti­mism, and despair.” Car­ry­ing on the expan­sive tra­di­tion of W. E. B. Du Bois, West has cre­at­ed a role for him­self that encom­pass­es the work of aca­d­e­m­ic, activist, pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, and even music-lover. For his ded­i­cat­ed lis­ten­ers and read­ers, his les­son on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the “jazz-like con­cep­tion of phi­los­o­phy” it encour­ages will sure­ly be worth Mas­ter­class’ price of admis­sion alone. Explore the course here.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Cor­nel West’s Free Online Course on W.E.B. Du Bois, the Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Pub­lic Intel­lec­tu­al

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Neil deGrasse Tyson Teach­es Sci­en­tif­ic Think­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a New Online Course

Phi­los­o­phy for Begin­ners: A Free Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty

How to Teach and Learn Phi­los­o­phy Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Col­lec­tion of 450+ Phi­los­o­phy Videos Free Online

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 or on Face­book.

How German Expressionism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Camera Shot That Defined Classic Films by Welles, Hitchcock, Tarantino & More

Expres­sion­ism was an art move­ment that set out to take the internal—emotions, the human con­di­tion itself—and make it exter­nal, with paint­ings that made no attempt to recre­ate real­i­ty. It was a break with the clas­si­cal schools of art that had come before. It was mod­ern, very mod­ern, very col­or­ful, and excit­ing as hell. And it was soon to run head­long into that most mod­ern of art forms, film­mak­ing, in the 1920s.

In the above mini-doc on the Dutch Angle, that cant­ed fram­ing so beloved of film noir, and appar­ent­ly every shot in the first Thor movie, Vox traces its roots back to Expres­sion­ism, and par­tic­u­lar­ly back to Ger­many of the 1910s where schools like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reit­er were assault­ing real­ism with bru­tal paint­ings. They sensed some­thing was chang­ing in the sub­con­scious of peo­ple and in the coun­try itself. And the movie The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari was the cul­mi­na­tion of that hor­rif­ic vibe.

Three expres­sion­ist painters, Her­mann Warm, Wal­ter Reimann, and Wal­ter Rohrig designed the crooked, bizarre, and night­mar­ish sets for that film. They look like the paint­ings of Ernst Lud­wig Kirch­n­er or Fritz Bleyl, but denud­ed of col­or. Expres­sion­ism had entered film. (Warm, Reimann, and Rohring had worked on, and con­tin­ued to work as set designers/art direc­tors for many films at that time, but most are lost or destroyed.) Ger­many being cut off from the Hol­ly­wood film indus­try at the time had led to this strange new direc­tion, but once Hitler rose to pow­er, many artists came to Hol­ly­wood, and expres­sion­ist tech­niques infect­ed Hol­ly­wood.

The Dutch Angle (real­ly, the Deutsche Angle, before being Ger­man became prob­lem­at­ic) was a way of turn­ing ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal lines in a scene into diag­o­nals. They sug­gest some­thing had gone wrong, that real­i­ty has been knocked off its axis. It became part of the vocab­u­lary of film noir, which was also filled with expres­sion­is­tic light­ing, high con­trast black and white, light and shad­ows.

Those direct emo­tion­al par­al­lels have been leached from the Dutch angle from its overuse. It’s been used in many a film as a way to jazz up a scene, or some­times just as a way to get sev­er­al ele­ments into a tight frame. It’s ubiq­ui­ty in music videos and com­mer­cials has made it almost invis­i­ble.

But when the Dutch angle is used the right way by tal­ent­ed direc­tors, from Hitch­cock to Spike Lee and Quentin Taran­ti­no, the effect still works. The angle makes a shot stand out, it can jar us, it can show inte­ri­or con­fu­sion and moral may­hem. And when that hap­pens it can take us back to the Expressionist’s orig­i­nal goal. It can reveal our inner truths, and remind us of the times when we have felt off cen­ter, when the world was not on the lev­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

Watch The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, the Influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film (1920)

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.

Bach on a Möbius Strip: Marcus du Sautoy Visualizes How Bach Used Math to Compose His Music

“A math­e­mati­cian’s favorite com­pos­er? Top of the list prob­a­bly comes Bach.” Thus speaks a reli­able source on the mat­ter: Oxford math­e­mati­cian Mar­cus du Sautoy in the Num­ber­phile video above. “Bach uses a lot of math­e­mat­i­cal tricks as a way of gen­er­at­ing music, so his music is high­ly com­plex,” but at its heart is “the use of math­e­mat­ics as a kind of short­cut to gen­er­ate extra­or­di­nar­i­ly com­plex music.” As a first exam­ple du Sautoy takes up the “Musi­cal Offer­ing,” and in par­tic­u­lar its “crab canon,” the genius of which has pre­vi­ous­ly been fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Writ­ten out, Bach’s crab canon “looks like just one line of music.” But “what’s curi­ous is that when you get to the end of the music, there’s the lit­tle sym­bol you usu­al­ly begin a piece of music with.” This means that Bach wants the play­er of the piece to “play this for­wards and back­wards; he’s ask­ing you to start at the end and play it back­wards at the same time.” His com­po­si­tion thus becomes a two-voice piece made out of just one line of music going in both direc­tions. It’s the under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics that make this, when played, more than just a trick but “some­thing beau­ti­ful­ly har­mon­ic and com­plex.”

To under­stand the crab canon or Bach’s oth­er math­e­mat­i­cal­ly shaped pieces, it helps to visu­al­ize them in uncon­ven­tion­al ways such as on a twist­ing Möbius strip, whose ends con­nect direct­ly to one anoth­er. “You can make a Möbius strip out of any piece of music,” says du Sautoy as he does so in the video. “The stun­ning thing is that when you then look at this piece of music” — that is the fifth canon from Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions — “the notes that are on one side are exact­ly the same notes as if this thing were see-through.” (Nat­u­ral­ly, he’s also pre­pared a see-through Bach Möbius strip for his view­ing audi­ence.)

In 2017 du Sautoy gave an Oxford Math­e­mat­ics Pub­lic Lec­ture on “the Sound of Sym­me­try and the Sym­me­try of Sound.” In it he dis­cuss­es sym­me­try as present in not just the Gold­berg Vari­a­tions but the twelve-tone rows com­posed in the 20th cen­tu­ry by Arnold Schoen­berg and even the very sound waves made by musi­cal instru­ments them­selves. Just this year, he col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Oxford Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra to deliv­er “Music & Maths: Baroque & Beyond,” a pre­sen­ta­tion that draws math­e­mat­i­cal con­nec­tions between the music, art, archi­tec­ture, and sci­ence going on in the 17th and 18th cen­turies. Bach has been dead for more than a quar­ter of a mil­len­ni­um, but the con­nec­tions embod­ied in his music still hold rev­e­la­tions for lis­ten­ers will­ing to hear them — or see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take an Intel­lec­tu­al Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Dou­glas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Win­ning Book Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: An Eter­nal Gold­en Braid

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Visu­al­iz­ing Bach: Alexan­der Chen’s Impos­si­ble Harp

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant

The Math Behind Beethoven’s Music

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 or on Face­book.

Carl Sagan Warns Congress about Climate Change (1985)

With­out cli­mate change, we could­n’t inhab­it the Earth as we do today. The green­house effect, by which gas­es in a plan­et’s atmos­phere increase the heat of that plan­et’s sur­face, “makes life on Earth pos­si­ble.” So says Carl Sagan in the video above. He adds that with­out it, the tem­per­a­ture would be about 30 degrees centi­grade cool­er: “That’s well below the freez­ing point of water every­where on the plan­et. The oceans would be sol­id.” A lit­tle of the cli­mate change induced by the green­house effect, then, is a good thing, but “here we are pour­ing enor­mous quan­ti­ties of CO2 and these oth­er gas­es into the atmos­phere every year, with hard­ly any con­cern about its long-term and glob­al con­se­quences.”

It’s fair to say that the lev­el of con­cern has increased since Sagan spoke these words in 1985, when “cli­mate change” was­n’t yet a house­hold term. But even then, his audi­ence was Con­gress, and his fif­teen-minute address, pre­served by C‑SPAN, remains a suc­cinct and per­sua­sive case for more research into the phe­nom­e­non as well as strate­gies and action to mit­i­gate it.

What audi­ence would expect less from Sagan, who just five years ear­li­er had host­ed the hit PBS tele­vi­sion series Cos­mos, based on his book of the same name. Its broad­cast made con­ta­gious his enthu­si­asm for sci­en­tif­ic inquiry in gen­er­al and the nature of the plan­ets in par­tic­u­lar. Who could for­get, for exam­ple, his intro­duc­tion to the “thor­ough­ly nasty place” that is Venus, research into whose atmos­phere Sagan had con­duct­ed in the ear­ly 1960s?

Venus is “the near­est plan­et — a plan­et of about the same mass, radius, den­si­ty, as the Earth,” Sagan tells Con­gress, but it has a “sur­face tem­per­a­ture about 470 degrees centi­grade, 900 Fahren­heit.” The rea­son? “A mas­sive green­house effect in which car­bon diox­ide plays the major role.” As for our plan­et, esti­mates then held that, with­out changes in the rates of fos­sil fuel-burn­ing and “infrared-absorb­ing” gas­es released into the atmos­phere, there will be “a sev­er­al-centi­grade-degree tem­per­a­ture increase” on aver­age “by the mid­dle to the end of the next cen­tu­ry.” Giv­en the poten­tial effects of such a rise, “if we don’t do the right thing now, there are very seri­ous prob­lems that our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren will have to face.” It’s impos­si­ble to know how many lis­ten­ers these words con­vinced at the time, though they cer­tain­ly seem to have stuck with a young sen­a­tor in the room by the name of Al Gore.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Watch “Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty,” an Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary about Cli­mate Sci­ence, Uncer­tain­ty & Know­ing When to Trust the Experts

Bill Gates Lets Col­lege Stu­dents Down­load a Free Dig­i­tal Copy of His Book, How to Avoid a Cli­mate Dis­as­ter

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

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 or on Face­book.

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album Love and Theft, he lift­ed the title from a book of the same name by Eric Lott, who stud­ied 19th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music’s musi­cal thefts and con­temp­tu­ous imper­son­ations. The ambiva­lence in the title was there, too: musi­cians of all col­ors rou­tine­ly and lov­ing­ly stole from each oth­er while devel­op­ing the jazz and blues tra­di­tions that grew into rock and roll. When British inva­sion bands intro­duced their ver­sion of the blues, it only seemed nat­ur­al that they would con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion, pick­ing up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and get­ting a lit­tle slip­pery about the ori­gins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s his­to­ry.

In truth, most UK blues rock­ers who picked up oth­er people’s songs changed them com­plete­ly or cred­it­ed their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tra­di­tion but it was eth­i­cal busi­ness prac­tice. Fans of Led Zep­pelin, on the oth­er hand, now lis­ten to their music with aster­isks next to many of their hits — foot­notes sum­ma­riz­ing court cas­es, mis­at­tri­bu­tions, and down­right thefts from which they prof­it­ed. In many cas­es, the band would only admit to steal­ing under duress. At oth­er times, they freely con­fessed in inter­views to tak­ing songs, tweak­ing them a bit, and giv­ing them­selves sole cred­it for com­pos­ing and/or arrang­ing.

A list of ten “rip offs” in Rolling Stone piece on Led Zeppelin’s pen­chant for theft is hard­ly exhaus­tive. It does not include “Stair­way to Heav­en,” for which the band was recent­ly sued for lift­ing a melody from Spirit’s “Tau­rus.” (An inter­net user saved the band’s case by find­ing that both songs used an ear­li­er melody from the 1600s.)

Dur­ing those recent court pro­ceed­ings, the pros­e­cu­tion quot­ed from a 1993 inter­view Jim­my Page gave Gui­tar World:

“[A]s far as my end of it goes, I always tried to bring some­thing fresh to any­thing that I used. I always made sure to come up with some vari­a­tion. In fact, I think in most cas­es, you would nev­er know what the orig­i­nal source could be. Maybe not in every case – but in most cas­es. So most of the com­par­isons rest on the lyrics. And Robert was sup­posed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that – which is what brought on most of the grief. They couldn’t get us on the gui­tar parts of the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics.”

The blame shift­ing was “not quite fair to Plant,” the court found, “as Page repeat­ed­ly took entire musi­cal com­po­si­tions with­out attri­bu­tion.” He stood accused of doing so, for exam­ple, in “The Lemon Song,” lift­ed from Howl­in’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.” After a law­suit, the song is now co-cred­it­ed to Chester Bur­nett (Howl­in’ Wolf’s real name). For his part, Plant read­i­ly blamed Page when giv­en the chance. In his book Led Zep­pelin IV, Bar­ney Hoskyns quotes the singer’s thoughts on the “Whole Lot­ta Love” con­tro­ver­sy:

I think when Willie Dixon turned on the radio in Chica­go twen­ty years after he wrote his blues, he thought, ‘That’s my song.’ … When we ripped it off, I said to Jim­my, ‘Hey, that’s not our song.’ And he said, ‘Shut up and keep walk­ing.’

Led Zeppelin’s musi­cal thiev­ery does not make them less tal­ent­ed or inge­nious as musi­cians. They took oth­ers’ mate­r­i­al, some of it whole­sale, but no one can claim they didn’t make it their own, meld­ing Amer­i­can blues and British folk into a tru­ly strange brew. The Poly­phon­ic video above on their use of oth­ers’ music begins with a quote from “poet and famous anti-semi­te” T.S. Eliot, express­ing a sen­ti­ment also attrib­uted to Picas­so, Faulkn­er, and Stravin­sky:

Imma­ture poets imi­tate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into some­thing bet­ter, or at least some­thing dif­fer­ent.

As far as copy­right goes, Zep­pelin didn’t always cross legal lines. But as Jacqui McShee said when Page reworked a com­po­si­tion by her Pen­tan­gle band­mate, Bert Jan­sch, “It’s a very rude thing to do. Pinch some­body else’s thing and cred­it it to your­self.” Maybe so. Still, nobody ever won any awards for polite­ness in rock and roll, most espe­cial­ly the band that helped invent the sound of heavy met­al. See a score­board show­ing the num­ber of orig­i­nals, cred­it­ed cov­ers and uncred­it­ed thefts on the band’s first four albums here.’

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Zep­pelin Took My Blues Away: An Illus­trat­ed His­to­ry of Zeppelin’s “Copy­right Indis­cre­tions”

How Led Zeppelin’s “Stair­way to Heav­en” Recre­ates the Epic Hero’s Jour­ney Described by Joseph Camp­bell

When Led Zep­pelin Reunit­ed and Crashed and Burned at Live Aid (1985)

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

How the World’s First Anti-Vax Movement Started with the First Vaccine for Smallpox in 1796, and Spread Fears of People Getting Turned into Half-Cow Babies

A car­toon from a Decem­ber 1894 anti-vac­ci­na­tion pub­li­ca­tion (Cour­tesy of The His­tor­i­cal Med­ical Library of The Col­lege of Physi­cians of Philadel­phia)

For well over a cen­tu­ry peo­ple have queued up to get vac­ci­nat­ed against polio, small­pox, measles, mumps, rubel­la, the flu or oth­er epi­dem­ic dis­eases. And they have done so because they were man­dat­ed by schools, work­places, armed forces, and oth­er insti­tu­tions com­mit­ted to using sci­ence to fight dis­ease. As a result, dead­ly viral epi­demics began to dis­ap­pear in the devel­oped world. Indeed, the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple now protest­ing manda­to­ry vac­ci­na­tions were them­selves vac­ci­nat­ed (by man­date) against polio, small­pox, measles, mumps, rubel­la, etc., and hard­ly any of them have con­tract­ed those once-com­mon dis­eases. The his­tor­i­cal argu­ment for vac­cines may not be the most sci­en­tif­ic (the sci­ence is read­i­ly avail­able online). But his­to­ry can act as a reli­able guide for under­stand­ing pat­terns of human behav­ior.

In 1796, Scot­tish physi­cian Edward Jen­ner dis­cov­ered how an injec­tion of cow­pox-infect­ed human bio­log­i­cal mate­r­i­al could make humans immune to small­pox. For the next 100 years after this break­through, resis­tance to inoc­u­la­tion grew into “an enor­mous mass move­ment,” says Yale his­to­ri­an of med­i­cine Frank Snow­den. “There was a rejec­tion of vac­ci­na­tion on polit­i­cal grounds that it was wide­ly con­sid­ered as anoth­er form of tyran­ny.”

Fears that injec­tions of cow­pox would turn peo­ple into mutants with cow-like growths were sat­i­rized as ear­ly as 1802 by car­toon­ist James Gilray (below). While the anti-vac­ci­na­tion move­ment may seem rel­a­tive­ly new, the resis­tance, refusal, and denial­ism are as old as vac­ci­na­tions to infec­tious dis­ease in the West.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“In the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, British peo­ple final­ly had access to the first vac­cine in his­to­ry, one that promised to pro­tect them from small­pox, among the dead­liest dis­eases in the era,” writes Jess McHugh at The Wash­ing­ton Post. Small­pox killed around 4,000 peo­ple a year in the UK and left hun­dreds more dis­fig­ured or blind­ed. Nonethe­less, “many Britons were skep­ti­cal of the vac­cine.… The side effects they dread­ed were far more ter­ri­fy­ing: blind­ness, deaf­ness, ulcers, a grue­some skin con­di­tion called ‘cow­pox mange’ — even sprout­ing hoofs and horns.” Giv­ing a per­son one dis­ease to fright­en off anoth­er one prob­a­bly seemed just as absurd a notion as turn­ing into a human/cow hybrid.

Jen­ner’s method, called var­i­o­la­tion, was out­lawed in 1840 as safer vac­ci­na­tions replaced it. By 1867, all British chil­dren up to age 14 were required by law to be vac­ci­nat­ed against small­pox. Wide­spread out­rage result­ed, even among promi­nent physi­cians and sci­en­tists, and con­tin­ued for decades. “Every day the vac­ci­na­tion laws remain in force,” wrote sci­en­tist Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace in 1898, “par­ents are being pun­ished, infants are being killed.” In fact, it was small­pox claim­ing lives, “more than 400,000 lives per year through­out the 19th cen­tu­ry, accord­ing to the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion,” writes Eliz­a­beth Earl at The Atlantic“Epi­dem­ic dis­ease was a fact of life at the time.” And so it is again. Covid has killed almost 800,000 peo­ple in the U.S. alone over the past two years.

 

Then as now, med­ical quack­ery played its part in vac­cine refusal — in this case a much larg­er part. “Nev­er was the lie of ‘the good old days’ more clear than in med­i­cine,” Greig Wat­son writes at BBC News. “The 1841 UK cen­sus sug­gest­ed a third of doc­tors were unqual­i­fied.” Com­mon caus­es of ill­ness in an 1848 med­ical text­book includ­ed “wet feet,” “pas­sion­ate fear or rage,” and “dis­eased par­ents.” Among the many fiery lec­tures, car­i­ca­tures, and pam­phlets issued by oppo­nents of vac­ci­na­tion, one 1805 tract by William Row­ley, a mem­ber of the Roy­al Col­lege of Physi­cians, alleged that the injec­tion of cow­pox could mar an entire blood­line. “Who would mar­ry into any fam­i­ly, at the risk of their off­spring hav­ing filthy beast­ly dis­eases?” it asked hys­ter­i­cal­ly.

Then, as now, reli­gion was a moti­vat­ing fac­tor. “One can see it in bib­li­cal terms as human beings cre­at­ed in the image of God,” says Snow­den. “The vac­ci­na­tion move­ment inject­ing into human bod­ies this mate­r­i­al from an infe­ri­or ani­mal was seen as irre­li­gious, blas­phe­mous and med­ical­ly wrong.” Grant­ed, those who vol­un­teered to get vac­ci­nat­ed had to place their faith in the insti­tu­tions of sci­ence and gov­ern­ment. After med­ical scan­dals of the recent past like the Tuskegee exper­i­ments or Thalido­mide, that can be a big ask. In the 19th cen­tu­ry, says med­ical his­to­ri­an Kristin Hussey, “peo­ple were ask­ing ques­tions about rights, espe­cial­ly work­ing-class rights. There was a sense the upper class were try­ing to take advan­tage, a feel­ing of dis­trust.”

The deep dis­trust of insti­tu­tions now seems intractable and ful­ly endem­ic in our cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, and much of it may be ful­ly war­rant­ed. But no virus has evolved — since the time of the Jen­ner’s first small­pox inoc­u­la­tion — to care about our pol­i­tics, reli­gious beliefs, or feel­ings about author­i­ty or indi­vid­ual rights. With­out wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion, virus­es are more than hap­py to exploit our lack of immu­ni­ty, and they do so with­out pity or com­punc­tion.

via Wash­ing­ton Post

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dying in the Name of Vac­cine Free­dom

How Vac­cines Improved Our World In One Graph­ic

How Do Vac­cines (Includ­ing the COVID-19 Vac­cines) Work?: Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions

Elvis Pres­ley Gets the Polio Vac­cine on The Ed Sul­li­van Show, Per­suad­ing Mil­lions to Get Vac­ci­nat­ed (1956)

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

Meet the Oud, the “King of All Instruments” Whose Origins Stretch Back 3500 Years Ago to Ancient Persia

The word oud might make some peo­ple think of fra­grances. Tom Ford’s Oud Wood cur­rent­ly sets fash­ion­istas back between $263 and $360 a bot­tle: oud can refer to “agar­wood,” a very rare ingre­di­ent in per­fumes. But reg­u­lar Open Cul­ture read­ers may be more famil­iar with the bowl-shaped instru­ment that made its way to Europe from North Africa dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, giv­ing rise to the lute (al-oud… The word oud, or ud, in Ara­bic sim­ply means “wood.”) The oud is, after all, a direct, if dis­tant, ances­tor of the mod­ern gui­tar, a sub­ject we like to cov­er here quite a bit.

Some of the videos we’ve fea­tured on the his­to­ry of the gui­tar have starred clas­si­cal gui­tarist and stringed instru­ment spe­cial­ist Bran­don Ack­er. Just above, he intro­duces view­ers to the tun­ing, tim­bre, and play­ing tech­niques of the oud, “one of the most pop­u­lar instru­ments in Ara­bic music,” writes the site Maqam World. It is also one of the old­est. Ack­er leaves his “com­fort zone of West­ern Clas­si­cal music” in this video because of his fas­ci­na­tion with the oud as an ances­tor of the lute, “one of the most impor­tant instru­ments of the musi­cal peri­od we call the Renais­sance.”

The oud, whose own ances­tor dates back some 3500 years to ancient Per­sia, first arrived with the Moors dur­ing their 711 AD inva­sion of Spain. Although new to Europe, it was known in the Ara­bic world as “the king or sul­tan of all instru­ments” and had evolved from a four string instru­ment to one with (typ­i­cal­ly) eleven strings: “that’s five dou­bled strings tuned in unisons and then one low string, which is sin­gle.” Ack­er goes on to demon­strate the tun­ing of the sin­gle string and dou­bled “cours­es,” as they’re called. The strings are plucked and strummed with a long pick called a “risha” (or “feath­er”), also called a “mizrap” when play­ing a Turk­ish oud, or a “zakhme” in Per­sian.…

Wher­ev­er it comes from, each oud fea­tures the famil­iar bowed back, made of strips of wood (hence, “oud”), the flat­top sound­board with one to three sound­holes,  and the fret­less neck. “The oud has a warm tim­bre and a wide tonal range (about 3 octaves),” notes Maqam World. The instru­ment is tuned to play music writ­ten in the Ara­bic maqam, “a sys­tem of scales, habit­u­al melod­ic phras­es, mod­u­la­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties, etc.,” but it has tak­en root in many musi­cal cul­tures in North Africa, the Mid­dle East, and Europe. Ack­er may come to the oud as a fan of the Euro­pean lute, but the old­er instru­ment is much more than an evo­lu­tion­ary ances­tor of the Euro­pean Renais­sance; it is the “sul­tan” of a rich musi­cal tra­di­tion that con­tin­ues to thrive around the Mediter­ranean world and beyond.

Famous mod­ern oud play­ers come from Egypt, Syr­ia, Pales­tine, and Iraq, where Rahim AlHaj was born. The musi­cian “learned to play the oud at age 9,” NPR writes, “and lat­er grad­u­at­ed with hon­ors and a degree in music com­po­si­tion from the Insti­tute of Bagh­dad,” while also earn­ing a degree in Ara­bic lit­er­a­ture. AlHaj used his tal­ents in the under­ground move­ment against Sad­dam Hus­sain’s rule, and after impris­on­ments and beat­ings, was exiled in 1991. Now based in New Mex­i­co, “he per­forms around the world, and has even col­lab­o­rat­ed with Kro­nos Quar­tet and R.E.M.” See him per­form for Tiny Desk Con­cert above and hear more oud in con­tem­po­rary con­cert set­tings here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar: See the Evo­lu­tion of the Gui­tar in 7 Instru­ments

What Gui­tars Were Like 400 Years Ago: An Intro­duc­tion to the 9 String Baroque Gui­tar

Hear Clas­sic Rock Songs Played on a Baroque Lute: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps,” “White Room” & More

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

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