The Heller family writes: “Solitary confinement does strange things to the best of us and this quarantine was really having an effect. My wife texted me and said, ‘we need to remake a music video.’ I thought that sounded like a lot of work, but her persistence paid off and here we are. Enjoy!”
Ten years ago, a study by David Harmon and Jonathan Loh showed that in 30 years’ time, the world had seen a twenty percent decline in linguistic diversity. Indigenous languages and local dialects have continued to dwindle, in the U.S. and around the globe. “There are a lot of pressures in the world that are enticing or even forcing people to switch from generally smaller, more geographically restricted languages, to larger languages,” Harmon told National Geographic, “especially global languages like Mandarin Chinese, English, or Spanish.”
This pressure has been exerted on indigenous languages for centuries. Yet hundreds have survived, including Quechua, a family of languages descended from the Inca, and spoken by almost 4 million people in Peru alone. With many more speakers in Bolivia, Argentina, and elsewhere, it is Latin America’s most widely spoken Indigenous language.
It may seem to be thriving, but Quechua speakers are widely treated with contempt in Peru, though they make up roughly 13% of the population. They are the country’s poor and ignored. Quechua has been grossly understudied in academia and until recently has had almost no major media presence.
The language’s absence from centers of power has made it less accessible to newer generations—whose parents would not teach them Quechua for fear of stigmatizing them—and more likely to die out without intervention. It became “synonymous with discrimination” and “social rejection,” says Hugo Coya, director of a recent Peruvian news program entirely in Quechua. Coya aims to change that, as does Peruvian scholar Roxana Quispe Collantes, who defended the first Quechua doctoral thesis last year. Their work will surely have significant impact, but perhaps not nearly as much as the debut of a 14-year-old Peruvian singer and rapper, Renata Flores, who had a viral hit five years ago with her Quechua cover of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” (top).
Flores, now 19, has followed up with a string of songs in Quechua that have “brought huge success,” writes Vice, “millions of views on YouTube; features and interviews in Peruvian media and foreign press like The Clinic, Telemundo, El Paid, AJ+ Español, CNN, and BBC; fans in Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the United States, Spain, Italy, China, Algeria, and counting. And with it, Flores is challenging the very way people value languages, especially indigenous ones.” Her music may speak the language of a specific region, but does so in a global idiom, combining “trap, hip-hop, and electronic influences with Andean instruments.”
Flores’ success in bringing such widespread attention to Quechua shows another major cultural shift of the past few years. Internet culture, once assumed to be ephemeral and of little lasting value, has become the coin of the realm, as academic humanities struggle, political institutions implode, and journalism fails. The joke so often goes that historians of the future will have to fill textbooks (or interactive virtual reality lessons) with tweets, posts, and memes. Viral YouTube stars like Flores are also making history, their videos primary documents of how a language that is marginalized in its home country reached out and found millions of fans around the world.
“The message conveyed to Quechua speakers” by most treatments of their culture in Peru, “is that their identities are part of the region’s past,” writes Julie Turkewitz in a New York Times profile of Flores. Harmon makes a similar connection: “there is a strong possibility that we’ll lose languages that people are using as their main vehicle of expression, which they may regard as one of the linchpins of their self-identity.” When national narratives, media, and education relegate a contemporary language to a pre-colonial past, it tells millions of people they essentially don’t exist in the modern world. Flores, who grew up with Quechua, counters that message with style.
Flores and other Quechua singers not only reaffirm their cultural identity, but they put their language in conversation with contemporary pop music and political concerns. Taking on “female power, government corruption, war and international pop culture polemics,” writes Turkewitz, Flores continues a legacy her one-time musician parents helped launch decades earlier, a Quechua-language blue-rock movement called Uchpa. Now her family helps her record her own songs in their music school. But like most young artists she began with covers. See her play a Quechua version of “House of the Rising Sun” as a 14-year-old contest winner, further up; see her very first concert, at the same age, in her hometown of Ayacucho, below. And see what she’s been up to since then in the videos above and on her YouTube channel.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
The Doobie Brothers–they can’t tour this summer and celebrate their 50th anniversary. But they can give you this: a performance of 1974’s “Black Water” performed virtually, live, in isolation. Make sure you catch the fan contributions toward the end…
Since the beginning of hip hop and turntablism, the best DJs have been the best crate diggers, people who would spend hours flipping thru old vinyl, unknown titles, rare cuts, and sometimes seriously out-of-fashion, embarrassing old records for those brief moments of music that when looped, could be spun into modern magic.
At the same time, hip hop sampling has also been a minefield for copyright law, so much that modern DJs shy away from sampling lest they spend months and or years seeking clearing rights.
Artist and computer scientist Brian Foo knows where there are plenty of crates that have yet to be dug: the Library of Congress. Already the author of several projects that turn data into music, Foo received a grant from the Library this year to do something amazing with their collection and offer it to the public.
Citizen DJ is the result and currently you can play around with the beta version. The above video features Foo leading you through the site, and I highly recommend you watch it before diving in.
Sound sources come from the Library’s many collections: Edison sound recordings, Variety Stage recordings, Joe Smith’s interviews with early 20th century celebrities, a collection of American dialect recordings, government information films, and their more modern free music archives.
You can browse these as a color-coded graphic tapestry or as a list, with plenty of filters to narrow down your search. Once you find a sound you like you can chop it up in a sequencer and then bring in loops, change the bpm, and create some very, very odd modern music. (If you’re lucky it will also be funky!) Everything can be downloaded offsite into a (digital audio workstation) DAW of your choice.
Whatever you make, by the way, is yours to do with whatever you want, and that includes selling it as your own track. (Although it’s best-practice to credit the source and the Library).
Foo notes that the project is fully launching in late summer, but is really looking for your feedback, whether you are a professional musician or a curious citizen. (We also want to hear anything that you wind up making, so let us know.)
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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