The Hidden Secrets in “Daydreaming,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Radiohead Music Video

in Film, Music | August 22nd, 2016

Paul Thomas Anderson, as his fans will tell you, makes the kind of large-scale cinema nobody else does anymore: intense of emotion, involved of story, colorfully populated, wide of aspect ratio (and even, in the case of The Master, shot on 70-millimeter film), no superheroes asked, none given. Having displayed unwavering commitment to his visions from the very beginning, it makes sense that, on his latest music video, he would work with Radiohead, a band no less committed to their own. Radiohead fans know the ambitiousness of a Radiohead song or album when they hear it, but what makes the video Anderson directed for “Daydreaming,” their single released this past May, Andersonian?

“Like many great works of art, Radiohead’s latest music video makes you struggle for its inner meaning,” says Rishi Kaneria in his explanatory video “Radiohead: the Secrets of ‘Daydreaming.’ ” His narration describes the video’s ostensibly simple form: “an older, tired-looking Thom Yorke” — Radiohead’s singer and co-founder — “opening door after door, and like a ghost, walking through the background of seemingly random people’s lives,” all “a metaphor for the choices Thom has had to make in his life, of the doors he’s stepped through, while never quite knowing what’s on the other side. Because he can never go back, we see him constantly pushing forward, continually searching for meaning and an ultimate resting place. ”

Kaneria keys in on details that only those with a thorough knowledge of the life and work of Yorke and his band could notice. In real life, Yorke had just split up with his partner of 23 years; in the video, he walks through 23 doors. In the video, he wears an outfit designed by Rick Owens; in real life, his partner was named Rachel Owens. (Well, Rachel Owen, but close enough.) The various rooms through which York passes contain women, usually mothers, even in a hospital ward. Can we consider that a reference to his recuperation from a “severe car crash in 1987, especially considering there’s a wheel on the wall”?

When Yorke’s character finally finds solace beside a fire in a cave, he speaks a backwards phrase to the camera which, reversed, sounds like, “Half of my life, half of my love.” 23 years, of course, constitutes just about half of the 47-year-old Yorke’s life — and, Kaneria notes, the number of years since the band began recording. The video also performs other exegeses numerical, lyrical, and visual, and zodiacal, everywhere finding references to Rachel as well as to Radiohead — song titles, album art, even the settings of past music videos — to the point that we see “how Thom’s personal life with Rachel is inescapably saturated and surrounded by all things Radiohead.”

Nobody ever called balancing the demands of domestic life and those of perhaps the biggest rock band in the world easy. Still, few recent works of art have illustrated this kind of struggle as vividly as the “Daydreaming” video, and Anderson, not just one of the most famous and respected filmmakers alive but a husband and a father to four children, surely knows something about it as well. So often compared to his cinema-redefining predecessors from Robert Altman to Stanley Kubrick, he must also know as well as Yorke does what it means to have your work subjected to such close scrutiny — and to want to create work that will repay that scrutiny.

The Anderson-Radiohead connection goes as least as far back as 2007’s There Will Be Blood, scored by the band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Anderson commissioned Greenwood’s musical services again for his next two pictures, The Master, and Inherent Vice, and last year made a documentary called Junjun about Greenwood’s solo album of the same name. No matter how much of Kaneria’s presented revelation you believe, “Daydreaming” sits as suitably with the rest of Anderson’s filmography as it does in its treatment of an old theme: you can’t enjoy every kind of satisfaction — but from the lifelong battle to do so, mostly against oneself, emerges art.

How Paul Thomas Anderson Dropped Out of NYU Film School in 2 Days; Studied Literature with David Foster Wallace

Radiohead’s “Creep” Performed in a Vintage Jazz-Age Style

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radiohead & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

Radiohead-Approved, Fan-Made Film of the Band at Roseland for 2011′s The King of Limbs Tour

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Gives Teenage Girls Endearing Advice About Boys (And Much More)

Radiohead: Making Videos Without Cameras (or Lights)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

in Music, Television | August 17th, 2016

“This is not a test!” the host shouts into his microphone. “This is an actual show!” If you lived in New York and had cable in the late 1970s, you may have witnessed it yourself — and you may well have needed the reminder, because this show neither looked nor felt like anything that ever aired before. A fixture on public access Channel D and Channel J from 1972 to 1982, it threw down a redefinition of televisual possibilities that hasn’t just survived as a time capsule of the downtown Manhattan scene at its creative rolling boil, but retains its anarchic charge to this day. Welcome, whether you first tuned in back then or have only just tuned in on the internet now, to Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.

O’Brien, who co-created and presided over the show, didn’t always shout, but when he did, he managed to retain his deadpan self-possession. He even kept his cool when hanging out, live on the air, with the regulars of a guest list including “David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, the B‑52s, Chris Burden, George Clinton, Iggy Pop, Steven Meisel, Mick Jones, James Chance, John Lurie, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, the Screamers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nile Rodgers, Kid Creole, the Offs, Alex Chilton, the Brides of Funkenstein, Arthur Russell, David McDermott, and Charles Rocket, just to name a few.” At its height, TV Party let its audience hang out with such luminaries almost every week as well — literally, if they managed to find their way to the studio.

Having attained subcultural fame as the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, the Cleveland-born O’Brien also engaged in such straightforwardly countercultural efforts as writing for, and later editing, the infamous journal of the cannabis lifestyle High Times.

That bit of status drew an invitation to appear on the early public-access variety program The Coca Crystal Show. The experience immediately inspired him to create one of his own, a strike against the threat to free speech he sensed when mass media meant just a few mainstream television channels. And so O’Brien, along with Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, launched TV Party, a drug-fueled re-interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, “the TV show that’s a party,” as he put it in a memorably askew phrasing on its very first broadcast, “but which could be a political party.”

Here we have a few particularly memorable TV Party evenings, including a performance by the not-of-this-earth proto-glam-rocker Klaus Nomi, an interview of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (who became a regular presence on the show and a “little brother” figure to the crew), and an episode with Blondie. Vice put up a TV Party best-of a couple years ago, which has let a new generation experience what now seems strikingly like a predecessor of the shows created for the internet video platforms they frequent today. It also includes a 90-minute documentary about the history of TV Party, which provides the necessary historical and cultural context for those unfamiliar with the New York O’Brien describes as “like a third-world country.” Shot in the ghostly black-and-white one associates with 1970s video artists, its visual elements either psychedelically bleeding into or jaggedly cutting between one another, “the show could get abstract quickly,” remembers O’Brien.

But in upholding its mission to erase the distinction between performer and audience, TV Party belongs as much to the late 70s as it does to the 21st century. It used to the fullest extent possible the freedom of public-access television, very much the Youtube of its day. (Certainly the callers-in could sound just as abusive as Youtube commenters.) It even ended in the highly modern fashion of not getting canceled, but simply fading away, the stretches between episodes growing longer and longer. “Maybe Chris and I will start it up again,” O’Brien speculates in the documentary, but he presumably has his hands full with his latest talk show: Tea at the Beatrice with Glenn O’Brien, created especially for the internet. The sensibility may have changed — nobody fires up a joint on camera anymore — but the excitement of exploring uncharted media territory remains.

Klaus Nomi: The Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hypnotic Performance on SNL (1979)

The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Three-Hour Mixtape Offers a Sonic Introduction to Underground Goth Music

in Music | August 17th, 2016

Image by Pedro Figueiredo, via Wikimedia Commons

Why, in my day we called it “post-punk” and we walked miles to find it in catacombs with secret passwords, far away from any mall apparel stores or beverage-sponsored music festivals….

Mostly rubbish, though I have heard many an old campaigner say as much, decrying Goth rock as a recent, devolution from more serious, avant-garde trends. Some amalgam of The Doors, Leonard Cohen, Nico and the Velvet Underground, The Damned, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Hammer horror films, early goth rock went spare, atmospheric, and punky, like the early Cure, or baroque, morose, and cabaret like Bauhaus, or any other number of respectable art-rock directions.

These bands, many of my cohort believe, had integrity, and much better taste than kids today. All that get off my lawn-ness makes an easy target, as does the increasing popularity of a genre of music made for and by unpopular people.

Mix blog Secret Thirteen, curator of the goth rock mix above, admits as much. “Goth has never been an easy affair to discuss,” reads the mix intro in idiosyncratic English: “Kitschy atmosphere of massive contemporary goth festivals and stereotyping discourses usually overwhelmed the textural and emotional core of goth.” Contemporary perceptions, fair or not, obscure the diversity—stylistically, that is… of the music, with its “diverse elements including Dada movement, surrealist aesthetics, post-modernism, French ‘fin-de-siecle’ poetry, 19^th century romanticism, punk, kraut, glam, shoegaze, ambient, folk, etc….”

Indeed, it’s all there, when a band with the abrasive low-camp, grindhouse punk of Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party shares a musical lineage with the early synthpop of Ministry (with DJ-scratching!) and the medieval- and world music-obsessed Dead Can Dance. But the key operator in these extremes is theatricality. Since Siouxsie Sioux’s fishnets and swastikas, Dave Vanian’s vampire costumes and pancake makeup, and Robert Smith’s enormous weeping willow hair and onstage mist-shrouded cathedrals of despair, goth has had to make overwrought spectacles of itself, at times horribly tacky ones.

But the Secret Thirteen mix, compiled by founder Justinas Mikulskis, reminds us it’s really about the music, by putting together “the deep cuts,” writes Electronic Beats, “none of this ‘Bela’s Lugosi’s Dead’ stuff” (referring to Bauhaus’ biggest hit).

Here instead we find “the boisterous deathrock of Mighty Sphincter, Specimen’s Batcave thrashiness, the artsy weirdness of Red Wedding and early 4AD stalwarts Mass.” It’s a very 80s mix, but unless you were digging deep in the crates of alternative record stores at the time, few names may be familiar. The Birthday Party shows up, and a band called Kommunity FK that had a very minor hit. Former Sex Pistol John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. appears with their pounding rant “Religion II.” The Virgin Prunes also make the cut, number 42 in the mix—a very much overlooked, and very disturbing band, often only known for their childhood and family association with U2. Find a complete list of the tracks at the bottom of this page.

It is overall, I think, an excellent way to approach “goth”—or one definition of it—free from the wardrobe squabbles and generational condescension. The mix, writes Secret Thirteen, isn’t intended as “encyclopedic or anthological” in nature, but is “rather presented as a narrative with unexpected twists and turns showcasing a wide variety of elements, moods.” Sort of like a good story by Poe, or a good B horror movie.

via Electronic Beats

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork

in Gender, Music | August 16th, 2016

Women have always been central to punk rock, even though they had to fight very hard to get and stay there. As veteran punk journalist and musician Vivien Goldman writes at Pitchfork, “Resistance to our existence was an acknowledged fact of life.” And yet, “punk freed female musicians,” she argues. She knows of what she speaks, having observed firsthand the “laddist boystown” of rock before punk broke barriers for women, and having been a part of that barrier-breaking herself. Goldstein’s essay introduces us to a playlist (stream it above) compiled by the Pitchfork staff called “The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs,” which in a way acts as a critical complement to a recent publishing trend.

In the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about what central moments in punk looked like in memoirs from big names like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, the Slits’ Viv Albertine, and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. In Girl in a Band : A Memoir, Gordon describes scraping by in the “postapocalyptic hell” of New York circa 1979; Albertine’s book shows us the “astonishing level of violence” the Slits faced on the streets of London around the same time; and Brownstein’s autobiography immerses us in the mid-90s Pacific Northwest scene and her band’s attempt to “expand the notion of what it means to be female.”

That’s not even to mention Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir or Kathleen Hanna’s public remembrances. The wave of press does risk obscuring something crucial, however; punk has always had its stars, but its primary appeal has been that anyone, no matter who, can do it, and all of the women above began in that spirit. Even if many of the women who left their stamp on early and later punk did not become famous, their fans remember them, as do the many thousands of people who heard them and then went out to start their own bands.

But the angle in Pitchfork’s compilation is not simply “women in punk.” Their 33-song playlist follows the specific thread of what they call “feminist punk,” meaning “songs that make their feminist messages clear—not just songs by punks who are feminists.” The rubric means that in addition to all of the artists mentioned above, and obscure bands like The Bags and The Brat, the all-male Fugazi get a mention for their song “Suggestion,” in which Ian MacKaye sings from a woman’s perspective about “the aggressive objectification of women’s bodies.” The song is a “tentpole for male feminism in punk,” and we can think of it as a kind of benign tokenism and an important moment for other male punk bands who followed suit in denouncing the patriarchy.

The playlist spans four decades, beginning with Patti Smith in 1975 and ending with Downtown Boys in 2015. The best-known artists happen to arrive in the late 70s and the mid-90s (Hanna makes the list thrice with three different bands). Not coincidentally, these are the moments—in England and the U.S.—when feminist punks made the most noise, and Goldman points out just how much the women in these eras had in common:

Because women’s contributions are so often hidden from herstory, when the riot grrrl movement began in America, those women were virtually unaware that their UK sisters had been fighting parallel battles two decades earlier. But the Americans were way better funded and organized than we had been, lurching through no-woman’s‑land to make ourselves heard. It took awhile before Kurt Cobain championed the Raincoats and Sonic Youth bonded with the Slits.

Punk may be dead, or it may remain what Goldstein calls the “global music of rebellion.” Either way, Pitchfork’s playlist—with its critical commentary on each selection—offers young female artists making music in their bedrooms a sense of continuity with a long line of mostly DIY feminist punks who made “fissures and cracks, some crumbling walls” in the edifice of rock’s boy’s club. Goldman warns her target readers—who so clearly are those young bedroom guitarists, singers, producers, etc.—against complacency, but also leaves them with some clear, concise advice: “Where possible, please create a community with complementary skills. Nowadays, it often starts online. Still, try and find a way to actually, physically be with your new creative cohorts. Because nothing beats jamming with your sisters.”

See Pitchfork for the full, annotated playlist with Goldman’s introduction and hear the full playlist in order at the top of the post.

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Patti Smith Documentary Dream of Life Beautifully Captures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Mashup Weaves Together 57 Famous Classical Pieces by 33 Composers: From Bach to Wagner

in Creativity, Music | August 15th, 2016

Musical mash up artist Grant Woolard has found a perfectly ethical way to sidestep copyright issues. Sample the greatest hits of long dead classical composers.

The pragmatically titled “Classical Music Mashup,” above, weaves 57 melodies by Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, and 30 other greats into one six minute composition.

Woolard invites listeners to separate out the strands, most of which will sound familiar, even if you are unable to name that tune.

(One sharp-eared listener not only accepted the challenge, but posted a complete listing of all the composers and compositions in chronological order with time stamps. Those who don’t mind SPOILERS can view it at the end of this post.)

Those who crave an even more interactive assignment can download the sheet music (for a small fee), then recruit two more pianists to perform the six-handed piece.

You can also buy an audio track of the composition here.

And now, the list of Woolard’s raw ingredients, compliments of youtube commenter, Yifeng Huang:

1. Mozart Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K525 0:01

2. Haydn Symphony 94 “Surprise” II 0:01

3. Beethoven Symphony 9 IV (Ode to Joy) 0:06

4. Mendelssohn Wedding March in Midsummer Night’s Dream, second theme 0:06

5. Dvorak Humoresque No.7 0:13

6. Wagner Lohengerin, Bridal Chorus 0:13

7. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1 0:19

8. Saint-Saens Carnival of Animals: Swan 0:19

9. Bach Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 Prelude 1 0:19

10. Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture 0:29

11. Bach Cello Suite No. 1 0:32

12. Mendelssohn Song without Words “Spring” 0:33

13. Schubert Ave Maria 0:40

14. Schubert Symphony 8 “Unfinished” 0:46

15. Verdi “La Donna è Mobile” in Rigoletto 0:51

16. Boccherini String Quartet in E, Op.11 No.5, III. Minuetto 0:55

17. Beethoven für Elise 1:03

18. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 1:04

19. Paganini Capriccio 24 1:11

20. Mozart Piano Sonata No.11 III (Turkish March) 1:15

21. Grieg Piano Concerto 1:22

22. Mozart Requiem Lacrimosa 1:26

23. Schubert Serenade 1:30

24. Chopin Prelude in C minor 1:35

25. Strauss II Overture from Die Fledermaus (Bat) 1:46

26. Brahms 5 Lieder Op.49, IV. Wiegenlied (Lullaby) 1:46

27. Satie Gymnopedie 1:56

28. Debussy Arabesque 2:00

29. Holst Planets, Jupiter 2:05

30. Schubert Trout 2:14

31. Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 2:28

32. Mozart Variation on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 2:41

33. Schumann Op.68, No.10 Merry Peasant 2:47

34. Schubert Military March in D 2:54

35. Bach* (could be Petzold) Minuet in G 3:00

36. Mozart Piano Sonata No.16 in C, K545 3:07

37. Offenbach Can-can in “Orpheus in the underworld” 3:08

38. Beethoven Piano Sonata No.8 “Pathetique” II 3:18

39. Mozart Die Zauberflöte Overture 3:24

40. Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Overture 3:31

18′. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 3:44

41. Beethoven Symphony 5 “Fate” 3:47

6′. Wagner Wedding March 3:52

42. Rachmaninoff Prelude Op.3 No.2 in C# minor 3:53

18′. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 3:56

43. Chopin Piano Sonata No. 2 III. Funeral March 4:11

44. Williams Imperial March in Star War 4:19

45. Tchaikovsky Marche Slave 4:25

46. Smetana Ma Vlast II. Moldau 4:38

47. Tchaikovsky Nutcracker — Flower Waltz (not the main theme!) 4:45

48. Borodin Polovtsian Dances 4:45

49. Strauss II Blue Danube 4:58

50. Vivaldi Four Seasons I. Spring 5:03

51. Handel Messiah, Hallelujah 5:03

52. Handel The Entrance of the Queen of Sheba 5:08

53. Elgar Pomp and Circumstance Marches No. 1 5:15

54. Pachelbel Canon in D 5:21

55. Mozart Symphony No. 35 in D major (Haffner) K. 385, IV. Finale, Presto 5:27

56. Chopin Etude Op.25 No.9 in G flat, “Butterfly” 5:34

57. Bach Gavotte from French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816 5:42

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch What Happens When 100 Metronomes Perform György Ligeti’s Controversial Poème Symphonique

in Art, Music | August 12th, 2016

A loose association of mid-20th century artists including at times John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Bueys, the Fluxus group produced a lot of strange performative work and anti-art stunts influenced by similar provocations from earlier Dada artists. The movement’s “patron saint,” Martha Schwendener writes at The New York Times, was Marcel Duchamp, whose “idea of art (or life) as a game in which the artist reconfigures the rules is central to Fluxus.” Also central was Duchamp’s concept of the “ready-made”—everyday objects turned into objets d’art by means part ritual and part prank.

We can think of the piece above in both registers. György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, a composition involving 100 metronomes and ten operators, fit right in with Fluxus during Ligeti’s brief association with them.

Written in 1962—and yes, it has a written score—Ligeti’s piece “owes much of its success to its presentation as a ridiculous spectacle,” writes composer Jason Charney, who has made a digital recreation. Ligeti provides specific instructions for the performance.

The work is performed by 10 players under the leadership of a conductor … Each player operates 10 metronomes … The metronomes must be brought onto the stage with a completely run-down clockwork … the players wind up the metronomes … at a sign from the conductor, all the metronomes are set in motion by the players.

These are followed almost to the letter in the video at the top of the page, with the added bonus of holding the performance in a Gothic church. What does it sound like? A cacophonous racket. A waterfall of typewriters. And yet, believe it or not, something interesting does happen after a while; you become attuned to its internal logic. Patterns emerge and disappear in the reverberation from the church walls: A wave of robot applause, then soothing white noise, then a movement or two of a factory symphony.…

“The score,” notes Matt Jolly, who shot the video, “calls for a long silence and then up to an hour of ticking. We decided to shorten this considerably. The metronomes are supposed be fully wound but we had to limit that to 13 turns on average.” The ingenuity of Ligeti’s piece far surpasses that of any mere prank, as does the logistical and material demand. The composer fully acknowledged this, providing specifics as to how performers might go about securing their “instruments,” hard to come by in such large quantity even in 1962. (Mechanical metronomes are now all but obsolete.) Charney quotes from Ligeti’s helpful suggestions, which include enlisting the services of an “executive council of a city, one or more of the music schools, one or more businesses, one or more private persons….”

I doubt he meant any of this seriously. Dutch Television canceled a planned 1963 broadcast of Poème symphonique from an early performance in the Netherlands. The event included speeches by local politicians and an audience who had no idea what to expect. As you might imagine, they did not react favorably. Like the earlier anti-art Ligeti’s idea draws from, he explicitly framed the composition as “a special sort of critique,” whose score is “admittedly rather ironic” and in which he rants vaguely against “all ideologies” and “radicalism and petit-bourgeois attitudes” alike. How seriously he means this is also anyone’s guess. And yet, prank or art, people continue to perform the piece, as in the even shorter rendition above, which goes even further in removing the human element by designing a machine to start all the metronomes simultaneously.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

A Free POTUS Summer Playlist: Pres. Obama Curates 39 Songs for a Summer Day

in Music | August 12th, 2016

Like he did last summer, President Obama has put together two eclectic music playlists–one for a hot summer day, and another for a summer evening. And they’re both pretty chill, the stuff vacations are made of. If you have Spotify (download it here), you can start streaming all of the songs below. And if you want to know more about Clinton and Trump’s favorite songs, check out this piece on Rolling Stone.

The President’s Summer Playlist: Daytime

LoveHate Thing — Wale
Smooth Sailin’ — Leon Bridges
Elevator Operator — Courtney Barnett
Home — Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Many the Miles — Sara Bareilles
Tightrope — Janelle Monae
Classic Man — Jidenna
So Ambitious — Jay‑Z, feat. Pharrell
Me Gustas Tu — Manu Chao
Forever Begins — Common
The Man — Aloe Blacc
As We Enter — Nas & Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley
Sinnerman — Nina Simone
U Got the Look — Prince
Rock Steady — Aretha Franklin
Good Vibrations — Beach Boys
Don’t Owe You A Thang — Gary Clark Jr.
Man Like That — Gin Wigmore
II B.S. (edit) — Charles Mingus

The President’s Summer Playlist: Nighttime

If I Have My Way — Chrisette Michelle
Espera — Esperanza Spalding
Tell It Like It Is — Aaron Neville
Alright — Ledisi
Trapped By A Thing Called Love — Denise Lasalle
Lady — D’Angelo
So Very Hard to Go — Tower of Power
Midnight Sun — Carmen McCrae
Cucurrucucu Paloma — Caetano Veloso
Green Aphrodisiac — Corinne Bailey Rae
I’ll Be There for You / You’re All I Need — Mary J Blige / Method Man
Lover Man — Billie Holiday
Criminal — Fiona Apple
Acid Rain — Chance the Rapper
My Funny Valentine — Miles Davis
Do You Feel Me — Anthony Hamilton
I Get Lonely — Janet Jackson
Lean In — Lizz Wright
All Day Music — War
Say Yes — Floetry

via CNN.

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A Six-Hour Playlist of Shel Silverstein’s Poems & Songs: Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic & More

in Audio Books, Comedy, K-12, Music, Poetry | August 12th, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Ah, the dog days of summer…

Is your family hot and cranky? Crammed together in a car for the long ride home? Has boredom set in, despite the thousands of Pokémon still at large?

The perfect antidote, dear readers, is this six-hour playlist of poet and musician Shel Silverstein’s best loved work. If you need Spotify, download it here.

Uncle Shelby himself kicks things off with an invitation to all dreamers, wishers, liars, hopers, pray-ers, magic-bean-buyers, and pretenders.

That net seems sufficiently wide to encompass just about everyone, even (especially!) the sullen teen who wasn’t allowed to stay home by him or herself.

Silverstein did not subscribe to the dry narrative style that E.B.White used to such great effect on the audiobook of Charlotte’s Web.

Instead, he cracks himself up, hissing, yipping and howling his way through Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. A veteran of Off-Broadway and the author of over a hundred one-act plays, Silverstein clearly relished performing his own work.

(As evidence, we submit “Warning,” an instructional poem concerning the sharp-toothed snail dwelling inside every human nose.)

His unhinged gusto is doubly pleasing when one recalls the attempts to ban his work from libraries and elementary schools due to the presence of demons, devils, ghosts, and a manipulative little girl who makes good on her threat to die if her parents won’t buy her a pony.

The back end of the playlist is a testament to the poet’s musical abilities. Perhaps the best known song in his massive catalog is Johnny Cash’s hit “A Boy Named Sue,” above. In addition to Cash and Silverstein’s own hoarse tenor, you’ll encounter the likes of Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare and longtime Silverstein collaborator Dr. Hook.

My only regret is the absence of my personal favorite Silverstein poem …it seems unlikely that such a track exists, but I do love imagining the havoc it could wreak in the family car. Children, don’t forget your eggs.

Shel Silverstein Narrates an Animated Version of The Giving Tree (1973)

Studs Terkel Interviews Bob Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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