Soundtrack Composer Craig Wedren (Zoey’s Playlist, Glow, Shrill) Joins Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #41 on TV Musicals

Craig was the front-man of the brainy punk band Shud­der to Think from the mid-’80s through the ’90s and has cre­at­ed music for many TV shows and films. He joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt due to his involve­ment with the cur­rent NBC musi­cal dram­e­dy Zoey’s Extra­or­di­nary Playlist, which along with Glee, Crazy Ex-Girl­friend, Nashville, Rise, etc. rep­re­sents a new era of musi­cals as main­stream TV.

Why are shows like this being cre­at­ed at this point in our cul­tur­al his­to­ry? These shows all use some nar­ra­tive expla­na­tion for why there’s singing (i.e. the songs are diagetic) instead of just hav­ing the char­ac­ters sing as in a clas­sic musi­cal or a film like The Great­est Show­man or La La Land. Most of these also make heavy use of cov­er tunes and/or par­o­dies in a way that stage musi­cals usu­al­ly don’t. And of course there’s often a heavy use of auto­tune and more star-based cast­ing than is the norm for stage pro­duc­tions.

Some arti­cles to pro­vide an overview of the top­ic:

Note that Craig does­n’t cre­ate the actu­al songs that the cast mem­bers sing for Zoey’s, just the inter­sti­tial music, but he’s writ­ten heaps of songs and is in a great posi­tion to talk with us about every­thing from Cop Rock to Mama Mia. We also touch on musi­cal episodes in Com­mu­ni­ty and Buffy the Vam­pire Slay­er, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, karaoke in film, Adam Schlesinger, Stop Mak­ing Sense (also see David Byrne’s mobile band on Col­bert) and a weird Net­flix lip-sync dra­ma called Sound­track,

Lis­ten to Craig talk about his own tunes on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music and watch his dai­ly Sab­bath Ses­sions at facebook.com/craigwedrenmusic or on YouTube. Hear the song he wrote for School of Rock.

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 or start with the first episode.

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

When we con­sid­er the many iden­ti­ties of David Bowie — Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — we often neglect to include his trans­for­ma­tion into an inter­net entre­pre­neur. In line with Bowie’s rep­u­ta­tion for being ahead of his time in all endeav­ors, it hap­pened sev­er­al tech booms ago, in the late 1990s. Fore­see­ing the inter­net’s poten­tial as a cul­tur­al and com­mer­cial force, he got ahead of it by launch­ing not just his own web site (which some major artists lacked through the end of the cen­tu­ry), but his own inter­net ser­vice provider. For $19.95 a month (£10.00 in the UK), BowieNet offered fans access not just to “high-speed” inter­net but to “David Bowie, his world, his friends, his fans, includ­ing live chats, live video feeds, chat rooms and bul­letin boards.”

So announced the ini­tial BowieNet press release pub­lished in August 1998, which also promised “live in-stu­dio video feeds,” “text, audio and video mes­sages from Bowie,” “Desk­top themes includ­ing Bowie screen­savers, wall­pa­per and icons,” and best of all, a “david­bowie e‑mail address (your na**@da********.com).” While the dial-up of the inter­net con­nec­tions of the day was­n’t quite equal to the task of reli­ably stream­ing video, many of BowieNet’s approx­i­mate­ly 100,000 mem­bers still fond­ly remem­ber the com­mu­ni­ty cul­ti­vat­ed on its mes­sage boards. “This was in effect a music-cen­tric social net­work,” writes The Gar­dian’s Kei­th Stu­art, “sev­er­al years before the emer­gence of sec­tor lead­ers like Friend­ster and Myspace.”

Unlike on the the vast social net­works that would lat­er devel­op, the man him­self was known to drop in. Under the alias “Sailor,” writes Newsweek’s Zach Schon­feld, “Bowie would some­times share updates and rec­om­men­da­tions or respond to fan queries.” He might endorse an album (Arcade Fire’s debut Funer­al earned a rave), express increduli­ty at rumors (of, say, his play­ing a con­cert with Paul McCart­ney and Michael Jack­son to be beamed into out­er space), crack jokes, or tell sto­ries (of, say, the time he and John Lennon sat around call­ing into radio sta­tions togeth­er). As Ars Tech­ni­ca’s inter­view with BowieNet co-founder Ron Roy con­firms, Bowie did­n’t just lend the enter­prise his brand but was “tremen­dous­ly involved from day one.” As Roy tells it, Bowie kept BowieNet fresh “by explor­ing new tech­nolo­gies to keep fans engaged and excit­ed. He always preached [that] it’s about the expe­ri­ence, the new.”

It helped that Bowie was­n’t sim­ply look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the rise of the inter­net. As the 1999 ZDTV inter­view at the top of the post reveals, he was already hooked on it him­self. “The first thing I do is get e‑mails out of the way,” he says, describ­ing the aver­age day in his online life. “I’m e‑mail crazy. And then I’ll spend prob­a­bly about an hour, maybe more, going through my site.” Even in the ear­ly days of “the con­tro­ver­sial mp3 for­mat,” he showed great enthu­si­asm for putting his music online. He con­tin­ued doing so even after tech­nol­o­gy sur­passed BowieNet, which dis­con­tin­ued its inter­net ser­vice in 2006. Now, as the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic keeps much of the world at home, many high-pro­file artists have tak­en to the inter­net to keep the show going. David Bowie fans know that, were he still with us, he’d have been the first to do it — and do it, no doubt, the most inter­est­ing­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1999, David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good and Bad of the Inter­net: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Com­mer­cials from the 1960s Through 2013

How David Bowie Deliv­ered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Zig­gy Star­dust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

John Tur­tur­ro Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Inter­net

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Metallica Is Putting Free Concerts Online: 6 Now Streaming, with More to Come

So, you pull up to the Metal­li­ca show and dou­ble check to make sure you have every­thing you need. Cash? Check. Change of clothes for when you stum­ble back to the car exhaust­ed and sweaty? Check. Earplugs? …. Where are the damn earplugs?

Oh man. You for­got the ear plugs.

Any­one got an extra pair of ear plugs? You’re boned. What to do? You’re gonna need your ears for the next few days for your sum­mer camp gig. Those kids are loud enough with­out tin­ni­tus.

You con­sid­er, for a split sec­ond, ditch­ing your tick­et and call­ing a cab. But c’mon. Screw your hear­ing, this is 1991, you’re in Muskegon, Michi­gan, and The Black Album just came out. You’re gonna miss the show? No way, man.

Ah, but it’s not 1991, you’re (prob­a­bly) not in Muskegon, Michi­gan, and you’re stay­ing home because there’s a dead­ly virus going around the world. The good news is you can still catch the show.

Watch it at the top, from the com­fort of your cozy nest. More good news? You don’t need those earplugs any­more. Turn it way down low and let “Enter Sand­man” lull you to sleep.

When you wake up, trav­el back to last June, to the love­ly Slane Cas­tle, to see Metal­li­ca play Meath, Ire­land, just above. Dime the vol­ume knob until your neigh­bors com­plain. Put on your head­phones and blast it till your ears bleed and you pass out. There’s more where that came from.

“Metal­li­ca may be stay­ing home due to the coro­n­avirus but that doesn’t mean they aren’t here to rock your face off,” Bill­board report­ed last month. “The band, who announced on Mon­day (March 23) that they have been forced to post­pone a sched­uled South Amer­i­can spring tour…. Just launched a new week­ly con­cert series called Metal­li­ca Mon­days.”

This announce­ment being sev­er­al weeks ago, there are now sev­er­al con­certs post­ed on the band’s YouTube chan­nel—six at this moment, includ­ing a 2009 gig in Copen­hagen, Den­mark, one of many places where Metallica’s loud, fast (till The Black Album), death-obsessed thrash met­al trav­eled and trans­formed into even loud­er, faster, more death-obsessed met­al sub­gen­res.

Maybe you were at one of these shows? If so, relive the glo­ry. If you’ve nev­er seen the band live, know that this is but a pale imi­ta­tion, as are all filmed con­certs, whether you stream them on your smart­phone or your 85” TV. But if you want to know what it was like for that kid in Muskegon who for­got his ear plugs, try that head­phone trick. Then head over to Metallica’s YouTube chan­nel on Mon­day for the next show.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metallica’s “Enter Sand­man” Sung in the Style of David Bowie

Metallica’s Bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo Plays Metal­li­ca Songs Fla­men­co-Style, Joined by Rodri­go y Gabriela

Pink Floyd Stream­ing Free Clas­sic Con­cert Films, Start­ing with 1994’s Pulse, the First Live Per­for­mance of Dark Side of the Moon in Full

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

Radiohead Covers The Smiths & New Order (2007)

If you grew up at a cer­tain time, with a cer­tain melan­cholic dis­po­si­tion and mor­bid sense of humor, you grew up lis­ten­ing to the music of the Smiths. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, you’re rough­ly around the same age as the mem­bers of Radio­head, who also grew up lis­ten­ing to the Smiths. Ergo, there’s a good chance you’re a fan of Radio­head, a band whose own melan­cholic, mor­bid mood draws from the best Alter­na­tive bands (as they were called once) of the 80s and 90s, while updat­ing the sound of that mood on every suc­ces­sive album.

On the 20th anniver­sary of Radiohead’s mas­sive-sell­ing Ok Com­put­er, gui­tarist Ed O’Brien remem­bered their hum­ble begin­nings in a Rolling Stone oral his­to­ry, invok­ing those bands whose records you like­ly own in hard copy if you fit the pro­file above:

We start­ed off at the time of the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, that era. By the end of that peri­od, or the mid­dle of that peri­od, there was the Pix­ies, Hap­py Mon­days and Stone Ros­es and all these things. We dipped our toe, not very effec­tive­ly, in each. But in doing so we came out with a sound. We came up with our thing. And that’s how we got signed.

No mat­ter how far they end­ed up stray­ing from gui­tar rock, their ear­ly influ­ences have always been an inte­gral part of their cre­ative DNA. On the 10th anniver­sary of Ok Com­put­er, well into their trans­for­ma­tion from alt-rock super­stars to exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic band, Radio­head filmed a two-and-a-half-hour web­cast, play­ing old and new songs, tak­ing turns DJing, and cov­er­ing one of my favorite Smiths’ songs, “The Head­mas­ter Rit­u­al” from 1985’s Meat is Mur­der.

It’s a track tai­lor-made for them—a song that “express­es fury at a kind of school life that has been for­got­ten,” writes Katharine Vin­er, but which the fierce­ly anti-author­i­tar­i­an Thom Yorke remem­bered well. Years into his suc­cess­ful career, he still smart­ed from his unpleas­ant school years.

In inter­views, writes Will Self at GQ, he’s often “waxed dis­con­so­late­ly about his dis­com­bob­u­lat­ed child­hood, the fre­quent changes of school, and the bul­ly­ing at those schools because of his paral­ysed eye.” If you grew up lis­ten­ing to the Smiths, you too may have a per­son­al affin­i­ty for “The Head­mas­ter Rit­u­al.”

And you prob­a­bly also fre­quent­ly wal­lowed to Joy Division—a band that, like Radio­head, rad­i­cal­ly changed musi­cal direc­tion, albeit for a much more trag­ic rea­son. After the sui­cide of lead singer Ian Cur­tis, Joy Divi­sion reformed as New Order, synth-pop super­stars and prog­en­i­tors of acid house. On their first record, Move­ment, they had a lot of post-punk brood­ing to get out of their sys­tem, with songs like ICB (which stands for “Ian Cur­tis Buried”) and “Cer­e­mo­ny,” orig­i­nal­ly a Joy Divi­sion song.

Fur­ther up, see Radio­head cov­er “Cer­e­mo­ny,” a song that defines an era—one, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, in which Radio­head grew up. And maybe you did, too. But chances are, if you grew up lis­ten­ing to Radio­head, you know their influ­ences no mat­ter when you were born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

Radio­head Puts Every Offi­cial Album on YouTube, Mak­ing Them All Free to Stream

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

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

In the 60s and 70s, rock and folk bands intro­duced ear­ly Euro­pean music to the mass­es, with Medieval, Renais­sance, and Baroque strains run­ning through the songs of Simon and Gar­funkel, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Fair­port Con­ven­tion, and even Led Zep­pelin. For the most part, how­ev­er, arrange­ments stayed mod­ern, save the appear­ance of a few, still-rel­e­vant folk instru­ments like man­dolins, dul­cimers, and nylon-string gui­tars.

One can draw many lines in pop­u­lar cul­ture from this development—to prog-rock bal­ladry, goth rock’s dirges, metal’s medieval obses­sions, and what­ev­er that tech­no Gre­go­ri­an chant thing was in the 90s. In so many of these evo­lu­tion­ary moves, the trend has been toward more tech­nol­o­gy and away from acoustic music. So, how can play­ers of old Euro­pean instru­ments inter­est con­tem­po­rary audi­ences in their sound?

One pop­u­lar way they’ve done so is by play­ing hits from bands who drew from the tra­di­tion (and from a few who very much didn’t)—hits like Procul Harum’s Chaucer-ref­er­enc­ing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

At the top, Baroque lute play­er Daniel Estrem gives a solo instru­men­tal per­for­mance of the soul­ful tune, throw­ing in a sec­tion of Bach’s “Air on the G String,” to which “A Whiter Shade of Pale” alludes. (I wasn’t con­scious­ly com­bin­ing rock with clas­si­cal,” com­pos­er Gary Brook­er lat­er said. “It’s just that Bach’s music was in me.”) The song’s con­tra­pun­tal struc­ture trans­lates beau­ti­ful­ly to the lute, as does the sin­is­ter musi­cal­i­ty of Cream’s “White Room,” above, a song with a vague­ly Medieval-sound­ing descend­ing melody in its clas­sic psych-rock vers­es.

Of course, Euro­pean folk and clas­si­cal informed the increas­ing­ly com­plex com­po­si­tions of the Bea­t­les, includ­ing George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” (or at least its first fin­ger­picked acoustic gui­tar demo ver­sion). In his take on the clas­sic, above, Estrem recov­ers the song’s folk influ­ence and retains its shifts in mood, from mourn­ful lament to hope­ful melody. Of course, Estrem not only has to trans­late these songs to a dif­fer­ent musi­cal idiom but to a very dif­fer­ent instrument—one with a tun­ing unlike the gui­tar on which so many pop songs are writ­ten.

Com­mon lutes at the end of the Renais­sance had 10 cours­es (a “course” is a set of two strings tuned to the same pitch). These instru­ments used “a more har­mon­i­cal­ly based ‘D minor tun­ing,’ instead of the more ‘gui­tar-like’ tun­ing that con­tin­ued to be used for the viol in the baroque era,” notes Case West­ern Reserve’s Ear­ly Music Instru­ment Data­base. They were suit­ed to a very dif­fer­ent kind of music than, say, the blues. But whether or not we ful­ly under­stand the chal­lenge of arrang­ing “House of the Ris­ing Sun” (called “the first folk rock song” when the Ani­mals record­ed it) for the Baroque lute, we can cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate the results. Estrem makes a gen­tly plucked, elo­quent­ly word­less argu­ment for giv­ing the instru­ment a star­ring role in pop­u­lar music again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play Amaz­ing Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

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

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Launch a 24/7 Livestream on YouTube, Featuring Rare Footage from the Band’s Archives

Last week, Nick Cave announced “It’s 10.30 Wednes­day evening, and if the world wasn’t in lock­down, I’d be onstage in Toulouse, France singing my heart out with The Bad Seeds. But I’m not. I’m doing the next best thing—sitting at home watch­ing Bad Seed TeeVee. Pure non-stop joy!” And you can too. Above, watch a new 24/7 YouTube livestream that will fea­ture, writes NME, “rare and unseen footage from the band’s archives,” includ­ing “pro­mo videos, inter­views, live footage, out­takes and oth­er exclu­sive unseen footage from the band’s archives.” Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Cre­ates a List of His Top 10 Love Songs

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Rolling Stones Release a Timely Track, “Living in a Ghost Town”: Their First New Music in Eight Years

If there were ever a time to rush a pan­dem­ic-themed project to mar­ket, this is it. The move can seem well-inten­tioned, gen­er­ous, or cyn­i­cal, depend­ing on the artist and the audi­ence. The Rolling Stones proofed them­selves against the lat­ter crit­i­cism ages ago by build­ing cyn­i­cism into their brand. They know what their audi­ence wants, and they con­sis­tent­ly deliv­er, decade after decade, play­ing the hits. When vague social com­men­tary slips into a Stones tune, it vibrates at the same fre­quen­cy as their trade­mark sleaze.

But why would we expect rel­e­vance from a band that hasn’t released any new music in eight years? “On their most recent tour,” writes Alex­is Petri­dies at The Guardian, “which began in 2017 and would still be on course were it not for the coro­n­avirus pandemic—the most up-the-minute addi­tion to their setlist was 25 years old.” Who indeed “would have thought that the Rolling Stones would be ear­ly to mar­ket with a Covid-19-themed song?” They cer­tain­ly don’t need the mon­ey.

In fact, the band wrote and began record­ing the song in Feb­ru­ary 2019. “It wasn’t writ­ten for now,” Mick Jag­ger told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music inter­view. “But it was writ­ten about being in a place which was full of life, and then now (is) all bereft of life, so to speak. And when I went back to what I’d writ­ten orig­i­nal­ly lyri­cal­ly, it was all full of… well, I didn’t use them in the lyrics, it was all full of plague terms and things like that.” Jag­ger and Richards decid­ed they had to release the song, part of a col­lec­tion of new mate­r­i­al the band was work­ing on. Or as Richards put it in a state­ment:

So, let’s cut a long sto­ry short. We cut this track well over a year ago in L.A. for part of a new album, an ongo­ing thing, and then s— hit the fan. Mick and I decid­ed this one real­ly need­ed to go to work right now and so here you have it.

Richards sounds almost apolo­getic about the rushed ver­sion you hear above, which they fin­ished remote­ly after the lock­downs began, but in his inter­view with Lowe, he says he’s pleased. “We sort of did it from out­er space. But I actu­al­ly liked the way it turned out.” The track has a tight, bluesy, stripped-down dub groove. Shots of Sir Mick read­ing lyrics from his iPad, in what is pre­sum­ably his home stu­dio, add a Zoom meet­ing-like vibe to the video. “We’ve worked on it in iso­la­tion,” Jag­ger says.

He also admits he rewrote the lyrics, “but didn’t have to rewrite very much, to be hon­est. It’s very much how I orig­i­nal­ly did it. I was just jam­ming. I was just play­ing a gui­tar and just wrote it like that. I don’t know what frame of mind I must’ve been in. I mean, it was semi-humor­ous, then it got less humor­ous….” I think we’ve all said some­thing like that, many times, over the last few years. The Stones were in the right place and right time to play out the end of the 1960s, when things got decid­ed­ly less humor­ous. But who would have guessed they’d show up over fifty years lat­er to sound­track our cur­rent 21st cen­tu­ry tragedy?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Revis­it the Infa­mous Rolling Stones Free Fes­ti­val at Alta­mont: The Ill-Fat­ed Con­cert Took Place 50 Years Ago

A Big 44-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

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

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Streaming Free on YouTube Today Only

Pink Floyd is help­ing you get through the coro­n­avirus by stream­ing free con­cert films on YouTube. First came Pulse, a 22-song set from the 1994 Divi­sion Bell tour. Now comes Pink Floyd: Live at Pom­peii, a 1972 con­cert film fea­tur­ing the band per­form­ing with­in the ancient Roman amphithe­atre at Pom­peii. It’s a clas­sic. Watch it above. And learn more about the film in our pri­or post here.

Note: The film is only stream­ing free on YouTube for 24 hours. So watch it while you can. Once the film goes dark, you can watch out­takes here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

Pink Floyd Stream­ing Free Clas­sic Con­cert Films, Start­ing with 1994’s Pulse, the First Live Per­for­mance of Dark Side of the Moon in Full

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch the First of an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pom­peii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast