The music collective Playing for Change is back. This time, they have Jackson Browne performing his 1970s hit, “Doctor, My Eyes,” supported by musicians from Brazil, Jamaica, India, Puerto Rico, France and beyond. Browne is also joined by Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel, who played on the original 1972 song, and they still sound amazing. Enjoy.…
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Not that it ranks especially high. In fact, it comes in at number 50, leading into a selection of videos from artists popular in a range of subsequent periods: Talking Heads, George Michael, Nirvana, LL Cool J, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift. As the artistic ambitions of the music video grew, it reflected not just a song’s cultural moment, but put several such moments in play at once.
In Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot,” “a clip of Elvis Presley is followed by space-jazz pioneer Sun Ra; a snatch of underground comic book auteur Harvey Pekar on Late Night with David Letterman flits by.” For the “high water mark for kitschy 1990s irony” that is Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” “Spike Jonze sets the video in the 1950s… but it’s the ’50s as seen on Happy Days, a sitcom that painted a rosy picture of the Eisenhower years.”
Jonze also draws inspiration from seventies television for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” a tribute to the cop shows of that era that makes up for an apparent lack of budget with sheer humor and energy (a reminder of the director’s origin in skateboarding videos). I remember my millennial peers getting excited about that video in the 90s, as, in the 200s, they’d get excited about Michel Gondry’s all-LEGO animation of the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl.” This was roughly when Britney Spears was breaking through to superstardom, thanks not least to videos like “Baby One More Time,” which combines the slickness of teen pop with the chintz of teen life. “The idea for Britney’s iconic schoolgirl uniform and pigtails came from the singer herself: director Nigel Dick followed her lead, then had wardrobe buy every stitch of clothing in the video from Kmart.”
This was also before Youtube, whose ascent made the music video more viable than it had been in years. The AV Club’s list does include a few videos from the past decade and a half— Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” — but on the whole, it underscores that there’s never been another time like the eighties. That decade that went from “Ashes to Ashes” to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,”“Relax,”“Money for Nothing,”“Walk This Way,” “Take on Me,” and “Rhythm Nation” — to say nothing of institutions like Duran Duran, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, all of whom make the list more than once, but none of whom take its top spot. That goes to Peter Gabriel, whose stop-motion fantasia “Sledgehammer” is MTV’s all-time most-played music video. “If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them,” Gabriel once said. He meant its painstaking production, but he could just as easily have been talking about the place it attained in pop culture.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
You may not hear the term mash-up very often these days, but the concept itself isn’t exactly the early-two-thousands fad that it might imply. It seems that, as soon as technology made it possible for enthusiasts to combine ostensibly unrelated pieces of media — the more incongruous, the better — they started doing so: take the synchronization of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, known as The Dark Side of the Rainbow. But even back in the seventies, the art of the proto-mash-up wasn’t practiced only by rogue projectionists in altered states of mind, as evidenced by the 1976 20th Century Fox Release All This and World War II, which assembled real and dramatized footage of that epoch-making geopolitical conflict with Beatles covers.
Upon its release, All This and World War II “was received so harshly it was pulled from theaters after two weeks and never spoken of again,” as Keith Phipps writes at The Reveal.
Those who actually seek it out and watch it today will find that it gets off to an even less auspicious start than they might imagine: “A clip of Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) skeptically receiving the news of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ declaration in the 1939 film City in Darkness gives way to a cover of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ by ’70s soft-rock giants Ambrosia. Accompanying the song: footage of swastika banners, German soldiers marching in formation, and a climactic appearance from a smiling Adolf Hitler, by implication the organizer of the ‘mystery tour’ that was World War II.”
The other recording artists of the seventies enlisted to supply new versions of well-known Beatles numbers include the Bee Gees, Elton John, the Who’s Keith Moon, and Peter Gabriel, names that assured the soundtrack album (which you can hear on this Youtube playlist) a much greater success than the film itself, with its fever-dream mixture of newsreels Axis and Allied with 20th Century Fox war-picture clips.
As for what everyone involved was thinking in the first place, Phipps quotes an explanation that soundtrack producer Lou Reizner once provided to UPI: “It would have been easy to take the music of the era and dub it to match the action on screen. But we’d have lost the young audience. We want all age groups to see this picture because we think it makes a statement about the absurdity of war. It is the definitive anti-war film” — or, as Phipps puts it, the definitive “cult film in search of cult.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Jimmy Buffett wrote “Margaritaville” in 1977. It ended up being his only song to reach the pop Top 10. But the song carried him for the next 45 years. When you think Margaritaville, you think of an easy-breezy way of life. And that simple idea infused the brand of Buffett’s Margaritaville business empire. Between the song’s birth and the singer’s death this weekend, Buffett created a Margaritaville business empire that included bars, restaurants, casinos, beach resorts, retirement communities, cruises, packaged foods, apparel, footwear, and beyond. This spring, Buffett improbably made Forbes’ list of billionaires. Above, you can watch a young Jimmy Buffet perform “Margaritaville” in 1978, right at the beginning of the song’s long journey from hit, to brand, to commercial empire.
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Another chapter from the Annals of Unlikely Performances…
Last week, we highlighted Chuck Berry performing with the Bee Gees on a 1973 episode of the Midnight Special. It’s a pairing that doesn’t work on paper. But, on stage, it’s magic. The same goes for when Berry sang with Tom Jones on a 1974 episode of the same show. It’s magic once again.
If you’re a veteran OC reader, you know that Jones could sing with anyone. On his variety show, This Is Tom Jones, he shared the stage with Janis Joplin, not to mention Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Stevie Wonder. It worked. Just watch the expression on Janis and Crosby’s face.
Now 83, Tom Jones and his voice are still going strong. Below, you can watch him sing “Samson And Delilah” in 2021.
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Brian Eno turned 75 years old this past spring, but if he has any thoughts of retirement, they haven’t slowed his creation of new art and music. Just last year he put out his latest solo album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, videos from whose songs we featured here on Open Culture. However compelling the official material released by Eno, the bodies of fan-made work it tends to inspire also merits exploration. Take French visual artist Thomas Blanchard’s short film “Emerald and Stone” above, which visualizes the eponymous track from Eno’s 2010 album Small Craft on a Milk Sea, a collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams.
“Emerald and Stone,” which you’ll want to watch in full-screen mode, consists entirely of “riveting imagery built from a simple concoction of paint, soap and water.” So says Aeon, in praise of the film’s “ephemeral dreamworld of flowing music and visuals that’s easy to sink into.”
Its drifting, glittering bubbles have a planetary look, contributing to a visual aesthetic that suits the sonic one. Like many of the other compositions on Small Craft on a Milk Sea, “Emerald and Stone” will sound on some level familiar to listeners who only know Eno’s earlier work developing the genre of ambient music in the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
That same era witnessed — or rather, heard — the rise of “new age” music, which played up its associations with outer space, seas of tranquility, the movement of the heavenly bodies, and so on. Eno’s work was, at least in this particular sense, somewhat more down-to-earth: he called his breakout ambient album Music for Airports, after all, having created it with those utilitarian spaces in mind. Appropriately enough, Blanchard’s short for “Emerald and Stone” evokes the cosmos without departing from the fine grain of our own world, and appears abstract while having been made wholly from everyday materials. Eno himself would surely approve, having premised his own on not escaping reality, but placing it in a more interesting context.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
The YouTube channel There I Ruined It creates new versions of songs using AI-generated voices. For Dustin Ballard, the channel’s creator, the point is to “lovingly destroy your favorite songs.” Take the example above. Here, an AI version of Johnny Cash’s voice sings the lyrics of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” set to the music of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Recently, Ballard explained his approach to Business Insider:
My process for these is a little different than most people. I first record the vocals myself so that I can do my best imitation of the cadence of the original singer. Then I use one of their own songs (like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ rather than the original ‘Barbie Girl’ music) to add to the illusion that this is a ‘real’ song in the artist’s catalog, though clearly all done in jest. Finally, I use an AI voice model trained on snippets of the original artist’s singing to transform my voice into theirs. I have a guy in Argentina I often call upon for this training (although the Johnny Cash one already existed).
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