Shane Mac­Gowan died yes­ter­day, less than a month shy of his 66th birth­day — and thus less than a month shy of Christ­mas, which hap­pened to be the same day. Though coin­ci­den­tal, that asso­ci­a­tion has made per­fect sense since 1987, when the Pogues, the Celtic punk band front­ed by Mac­Gowan, released “Fairy­tale of New York.” That duet between Mac­Gowan and Kirsty Mac­Coll (the sto­ry of whose pro­duc­tion we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) still reigns supreme as the Unit­ed King­dom’s Christ­mas song, and by now it tends also to make it onto more than a few hol­i­day-sea­son playlists in Amer­i­ca and across the world.

Giv­en the pop­u­lar­i­ty of “Fairy­tale of New York,” many lis­ten­ers know Mac­Gowan for noth­ing else. But he was, in fact, a fig­ure of con­sid­er­able impor­tance to the punk rock of the nine­teen-eight­ies and nineties, to which he brought not just a thor­ough­ly Irish sen­si­bil­i­ty but also a strong sense of lit­er­ary craft.

Few well-known punk rock­ers could inhab­it a place with a song in the way he could, or tap into the prop­er ver­nac­u­lar to inhab­it a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter. (Even the words he gave Mac­Coll to sing as a hard-bit­ten nine­teen-for­ties woman of the streets have caused no end of strug­gles with cen­sors.) For this rea­son, he had the respect of many anoth­er seri­ous song­writer: Nick Cave, for instance, with whom he record­ed a cov­er of “What a Won­der­ful World” in 1992.

Dur­ing much of Mac­Gowan’s life­time, his musi­cal achieve­ments were at risk of being over­shad­owed by the har­row­ing facts of his life, includ­ing his mas­sive, sus­tained con­sump­tion of drugs and alco­hol and the vari­ety of injuries and ail­ments it brought about. In 2015, British tele­vi­sion even aired a spe­cial about the replace­ment of his long-lost teeth — which, to judge by the Pogues’ per­for­mance of the folk song “The Irish Rover” with the Dublin­ers above, were bare­ly hang­ing on even in the late eight­ies. But in a way, this dis­solute appear­ance was an insep­a­ra­ble part of a dis­tinc­tive artis­tic spir­it. Shane Mac­Gowan was a rare thing in the world of punk rock (to say noth­ing of the world of hit Christ­mas songs): not just an Irish lit­er­ary voice, but an Irish lit­er­ary char­ac­ter.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sto­ry of The Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the Boozy Bal­lad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christ­mas Songs of All Time

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Trib­ute to Sinéad O’Connor & Per­forms “Noth­ing Com­pares 2 U”

James Joyce Plays the Gui­tar (1915)

Stream a Playlist of 68 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

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.

What hap­pens when Ulysses Owens Jr–a Jazz musi­cian and jazz edu­ca­tor at Juil­liard–hears Nir­vana’s “In Bloom” for the first time (minus the drum parts), and then attempts to drum along? What is he lis­ten­ing for? How does he imme­di­ate­ly craft an appro­pri­ate drum part? And how does it com­pare to Dave Grohl’s orig­i­nal? Watch above, and you can see how it unfolds…

Relat­ed Con­tent

Watch 13 Lev­els of Drum­ming, from Easy to Com­plex, Explained by Snarky Pup­py Drum­mer Lar­nell Lewis

How Can You Tell a Good Drum­mer from a Bad Drum­mer?: Ringo Starr as Case Study

11 Hyp­not­ic, Close-Up Min­utes Watch­ing Tool’s Leg­endary Drum­mer Dan­ny Carey in Action

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

Pink Floy­d’s The Dark Side of the Moon turned 50 ear­li­er this year, which per­haps makes it seem easy to dis­miss as an arti­fact of a bygone era. It belongs to a peri­od in pop­u­lar music his­to­ry when musi­cians and bands were approach­ing their albums with ever-greater aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al ambi­tions — what I’ve come to call the medi­um’s “hero­ic age” — whose prod­ucts can strike twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry lis­ten­ers as exces­sive, pre­ten­tious, and even unhinged. But in spite of the ambi­ence of dorm-room THC haze that has long hung around it, The Dark Side of the Moon remains rel­e­vant today, deal­ing as it does with such eter­nal themes as youth, choice, mor­tal­i­ty, and mad­ness — to say noth­ing of time and mon­ey.

That’s how Poly­phon­ic cre­ator Noah Lefevre frames it in the video above, an hour-long track-by-track analy­sis of the Floy­d’s best-known album. It’s actu­al­ly a com­pi­la­tion of all eight episodes of a series orig­i­nal­ly released in 2020, which, much like The Dark Side of the Moon Itself, ben­e­fits from being expe­ri­enced not in parts but as a whole.

Lefevre describes the album as “about the stress­es and strug­gles that make human exis­tence what it is. It’s about all the noise that con­stant­ly sur­rounds us, and about try­ing to cut through that noise to find truth, beau­ty, and mean­ing.” He also quotes Pink Floyd front­man Roger Waters ascrib­ing to it the state­ment that “all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influ­ence of some dark force in our natures pre­vents us from seiz­ing them.”

The Dark Side of the Moon has endured not just by deal­ing with those themes, but also by doing so with a cin­e­mat­ic son­ic rich­ness. That owes much to the work of Alan Par­sons, who engi­neered the record­ing, but most of the album’s long con­cep­tion hap­pened out­side the stu­dio. “It start­ed out with a few weeks in a rehearsal space dur­ing which Pink Floyd wrote a rough out­line for the piece,” says Lefevre. “Then the band took that on tour, even though it was far from com­ple­tion. They per­formed six­teen dates in the UK, play­ing the album in full each night”; all the while, they “worked through the album, fine-tun­ing it and devel­op­ing it.” This explains why the result — which, like all of Pink Floy­d’s albums, you can hear free on Youtube — sounds painstak­ing­ly pro­duced yet organ­ic. Give The Dark Side of the Moon anoth­er lis­ten today, and you’ll under­stand why it’s per­sist­ed like the con­di­tion of mod­ern life itself.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pink Floyd’s Entire Stu­dio Discog­ra­phy is Now on YouTube: Stream the Stu­dio & Live Albums

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon Turns 50: Hear It Get Psy­cho­an­a­lyzed by Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin

Down­load Pink Floyd’s 1975 Com­ic Book Pro­gram for The Dark Side of the Moon Tour

A Live Stu­dio Cov­er of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Fin­ish

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

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.