As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has no doubt generated decent revenue, even given the platform’s oft-lamented payout rates. But compare that number to the more than half-a-billion streams of “Blackbird,” also on the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of “Revolution 9”’s place in the band’s oeuvre. Simply put, even ultra-hard-core Fab Four fans tend to skip it. Regardless, as Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, “this eight-minute exercise in aural free association is the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artifact.”
Masterminded by John Lennon, “Revolution 9” is not exactly a song, but rather an elaborate “sound collage,” assembled in broad adherence to an aesthetic developed by such avant-garde creators as William S. Burroughs, The Beatles’ graphic designer Richard Hamilton, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. “While the cut-up texts of Burroughs, the collages of Hamilton, and the musique concrète experiments of Cage and Stockhausen have remained the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia,” writes MacDonald, “Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”
In the new Polyphonic video above, Noah Lefevre takes a dive into those progenitors and their work, providing the context to understand how “the Beatles’ weirdest song” came together. Points of interest on this cultural-historical journey include composer Pierre Schaeffer’s resistance-headquarters-turned-experimental-music-lab Studio d’Essai; Nazi Germany, where the early Magnetophon tape recorder was developed; the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa’s Studio Z; and the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, a 1967 happening that hosted “Carnival of Light,” a Beatles composition never heard again since.
What did Lennon, in collaboration with George Harrison and Yoko Ono (with whom he’d only just got together), think he was doing with “Revolution 9”? “To the extent that Lennon conceptualized the piece at all, it is likely to have been as a sensory attack on the citadel of the intellect,” writes MacDonald, “a revolution in the head aimed, as he stressed at the time, at each individual listener — and not a Maoist incitement to social confrontation, still less a call for general anarchy.” Indeed, as Lefevre points out, it expressed his ambivalence about the very concept of 1968-style revolt as much as the comparatively conventional “Revolution 1,” which comes earlier on the album. The sixties may be long over, but Lennon’s attitude hasn’t lost its relevance: we still hear an endless stream of promised solutions to society’s problems, and we’d still all love to see the plan.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains no actual music. But the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse news: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies train their models on copyrighted work without a license.
Such a move, in the words of the project’s leader Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as well.
“The government’s willingness to agree to these copyright changes shows how much our work is undervalued and that there is no protection for one of this country’s most important assets: music,” KateBush writes on her own website. “Each track on this album features a deserted recording studio. Doesn’t that silence say it all?”
As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, “it is understood that Kate Bush has recorded one of the dozen tracks in her studio.” Those tracks, whose titles add up to the phrase “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a manner that might well have pleased John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to passing cars to crying babies to vaguely musical sounds emanating from somewhere in the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.K. government’s deliberations, Is This What We Want? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailable) may have pioneered a new genre: protest song without the songs.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian Room in The Fairmont San Francisco. Recorded by music producer Norman Granz, the album featured contemporary pop songs that showcased Fitzgerald’s ability to transcend jazz standards. Take, for example, a version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” Below you can hear what the original (recorded in 1967) sounded like in the hands of Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton, and then experience Ella’s own unexpected version above. It’s quite the juxtaposition.
Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninasalmost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above, which as of this writing has crossed the 2.5 million mark. So has this video on Las Meninas from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. What element of this particular painting has stoked such fascination, generation after generation after generation? Easier, perhaps, to ask what element hasn’t.
“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez produced dozens of paintings of the Spanish royal family,” says the narrator of the Rabbit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meninas is different: “the painting appears more like a snapshot of daily life than a typical visage of royals posing to be painted.”
The figures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daughter Infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez himself, at work on a painting — which may be a portrait of the king and queen, reflected as they are on the mirror in the back wall, or perhaps the very image we’re looking at. Or could we possibly be Philip and Mariana ourselves?
On the rearmost plane of Las Meninas stands the queen’s chamberlain Don José Nieto Velázquez (possibly a relation of the artist), on whom it can hardly be a coincidence that all of the painting’s lines converge, like a vanishing point on the horizon. Diego Velázquez’s representation of himself bears an even more conspicuous detail: the knighthood-symbolizing red cross called the Order of Santiago. Born a commoner, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close proximity to the royals, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspirations to join their ranks. Presumably, the Order of Santiago was added after the painting was complete, since Las Meninas is dated to 1656, but Velázquez wasn’t finally knighted until 1659, close to the end of his life.
Different theories exist to explain who exactly added that red cross to the painting, as covered by YouTuber-gallerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the centuries, Las Meninas has its unsolvable historical mysteries, despite its unusually well-documented creation. But for serious art enthusiasts, the most compelling question remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meninas, with all its splendid effects, is a vigorous argument for the virtue of painting,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mirror, the vanishing point, and the multiple centers of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is saying to the viewer” — whether that viewer is King Philip, or someone across the world nearly four centuries later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.
While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore of Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.
Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Clubends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect.
But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Who invented rock and roll? Ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you. It was Chuck Berry. Or was it Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard? Muddy Waters? Robert Johnson? Maybe even Lead Belly? You didn’t, but if you asked me, I’d say that rock and roll, like country blues, came not from one lone hero but a matrix of black and white artists in the South—some with big names, some without—trading, stealing licks, spotlights, and hairdos. Country crooners, bluesmen, refugees from jazz and gospel. Maybe looking to cash in, maybe not. Did the teeny-bopper star system kill rock and roll’s outlaw heart? Or was it Buddy Holly’s plane crash? Big Payola? There’s a million theories in a million books, look it up.
Who resurrected rock and roll? The Beatles? The Stones? If you ask me, and you didn’t, it was one man, Jimi Hendrix. Anyone who ever cried into their beer over Don McLean’s maudlin eulogy had only to listen to more Hendrix.
He had it—the swagger, the hair, the trading, stealing, licks: from the blues, mostly, but also from whatever caught his ear. And just as those valorized giants of the fifties did, Hendrix covered his competition. Today, we bring you Hendrix playing The Beatles. Above, see him, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell do “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, mere days after the song’s release. As we wrote in a previous post, “The album came out on a Friday, and by Sunday night, Jimi Hendrix learned the songs and opened his own show with a cover of the title track.” And, might we say, he made it his very own. “Watch out for your ears, okay?” says Hendrix to the crowd. Indeed.
Just above, from ‘round that same time, hear Hendrix and Experience cover “Day Tripper,” one of many recordings made for BBC Radio, collected on the album BBC Sessions. Fuzzed-out, blistering, booming rock and roll of the purest grade. And below? Why it’s an extremely drunk Jim Morrison and a super loose Hendrix jamming out “Tomorrow Never Knows,” or something vaguely like it. Morrison’s vocal contributions come to nothing more than slurred moaning. (He’s very vocal in another cut from this session, called alternately “Morrison’s Lament” and “F.H.I.T.A”—an acronym you’ll get after a listen to Morrison’s obscene refrain.)
This raw take comes from a jam sometime in 1968 at New York’s The Scene club. Also playing were The Scene house band The McCoys, bassist Harvey Brooks, and Band of Gypsys drummer Buddy Miles. Johnny Winter may or may not have been there. Released on bootlegs called Bleeding Heart, Sky High, and Woke Up This Morning and Found Myself Dead, these sessions are a must-hear for Hendrix completists and lovers of deconstructed virtuoso blues-rock alike. After what Hendrix did for, and to, rock and roll, there really was nowhere to go but back to the skeletal bones of punk or into the outer limits of avant psych-noise and fusion. Don McLean should have written a song about that.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a quarter-century ago. Judging by the discussion that continues among its fervent (and often proselytizing) fans, it’s easy to forget that its title isn’t How to Become Powerful. Granted, it may sometimes get filed in the self-help section, and certain of the laws it contains — “Never outshine the master,” “Always say less than necessary,” “Enter action with boldness” — read like straightforward recommendations. Yet like Machiavelli, one of the book’s many historical sources, it’s much more interesting to read as a study of power itself.
In the video above from Greene’s official YouTube channel, you can hear all 48 laws accompanied by brief explanations in less than 30 minutes. Some of them may give you pause: are “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit,” “Pose as a friend, work as a spy,” and “Crush your enemy totally” really meant to be taken straightforwardly?
Perhaps they both are and aren’t. Descriptive of the ways in which individuals have accrued power over the course of human history (images of whom provide visual accompaniment), they can also be metaphorically transposed into a variety of personal and professional situations without turning you into some kind of evil mastermind.
When The 48 Laws of Power came out in 1999, we didn’t live on the internet in the way we do now. Re-read today, its laws apply with an uncanny aptness to a social-mediated world in which we’ve all become public personalities online. We may not always say less than necessary, but we do know how important it can be to “court attention at all costs.” Some of us “cultivate an air of unpredictability”; others “play to people’s fantasies,” in some cases going as far as to “create a cult-like following.” The most adept put in work to “create compelling spectacles” in accordance with “the art of timing,” taking care to “never appear too perfect.” Though Machiavelli himself would understand practically nothing about our technology, he would surely understand our world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile as a science communicator, it will hardly come as a surprise that he displays a certain sensitivity to cinematic departures from scientific fact. His personal low watermark on that rubric is the 1979 Disney production The Black Hole, which moves him to declare, “I don’t think they had a physicist in sight of any scene that was scripted, prepared, and filmed for this movie.”
As for Tyson’s “single favorite movie of all time,” that would be The Matrix, despite how the humans-as-batteries concept central to its plot violates the laws of thermodynamics. (Over time, that particular choice has been revealed as a typical example of meddling by studio executives, who thought audiences wouldn’t understand the original script’s concept of humans being used for decentralized computing.) The Matrix receives an S, Tyson’s highest grade, which beats out even the A he grants to Ridley Scott’s The Martian, from 2015, “the most scientifically accurate film I have ever witnessed” — except for the dust storm that strands its protagonist on Mars, whose low air density means we would feel even its highest winds as “a gentle breeze.”
You might expect Tyson to poke these sorts of holes in every sci-fi movie he sees, no matter how obviously schlocky. And indeed he does, though not without also showing a healthy respect for the fun of filmgoing. Even Michael Bay’s notoriously preposterous Armageddon, whose oil-drillers-defeat-an-asteroid conceit was mocked on set by star Ben Affleck, receives a gentleman’s C. While it “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Tyson explains (noting it’s since been outdone by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall), “I don’t care that it violated the law of physics, because it didn’t care.” For a more scientifically respectable alternative, consider Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, the lesser-known of 1998’s two Hollywood asteroid-disaster spectacles.
If you’re thinking of holding a Tyson-approved sci-fi film festival at home, you’ll also want to include The Quiet Earth, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Contact, and Gravity, not to mention the nineteen-fifties classics The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. But whatever else you screen, the experience would be incomplete without 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s joint vision of man in space. “Am I on LSD, or is the movie on LSD?” he asks. “One of us is on LSD for the last twenty minutes of the film.” But “what matters is how much influence this film had on everything — on everything — and how much attention they gave to detail.” If you’ve ever seen 2001 before, go into it with an open mind — and bear in it the fact that, as Tyson underscores, it was all made a year before we reached the moon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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