The first compact discs and players came out in October of 1982. That means the format is now 40 years old, which in turn means that most avid music-listeners have never known a world without it. In fact, all of today’s teenagers — that most musically avid demographic — were born after the CD’s commercial peak in 2002, and to them, no physical medium could be more passé. Vinyl records have been enjoying a long twenty-first-century resurgence as a premium product, and even cassette tapes exude a retro appeal. But how many understand just what a technological marvel the CD was when it made its debut, with (what we remember as) its promise of “perfect sound forever”?
“You could argue that the CD, with its vast data capacity, relatively robust nature, and with the further developments it spurred along, changed how the world did virtually all media.” So says Alec Watson, host of the Youtube channel Technology Connections, previously featured here on Open Culture for his five-part series on RCA’s SelectaVision video disc system.
But he’s also made a six-part miniseries on the considerably more successful compact disc, whose development “solved the central problem of digital sound: needing a for-the-time-absurdly massive amount of raw data.” Back then, computer hard drives had a capacity of about ten megabytes, whereas a single disc could hold up to 700 megabytes.
Figuring out how to encode that much information onto a thin 120-millimeter disc required serious resources and engineering prowess (available thanks to the involvement of two electronics giants, Sony and Philips), but it constituted only one of the technological elements needed for the CD to become a viable format. Watson covers them all in this miniseries, beginning with the invention of digital sound itself (including the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem on which it depends). He also explains such physical processes as how a CD player’s laser reads the “pits” and “lands” on a disc’s surface, producing a stream of numbers subsequently converted back into an audio signal for our listening pleasure.
The CD has also changed our relationship to that pleasure. “If CDs marked a new era, it is perhaps as much in the way they suggest specific ways of interacting with recorded music as in questions of fidelity,” writes The Quietus’ Daryl Worthington. “The fact CDs can be programmed, and tracks easily skipped, is perhaps their most significant feature when it comes to their legacy. They loosened up the album as a fixed document.” Paradoxically, “they’re also the format par excellence for the album as a comprehensive, self-contained unit to be played from start to finish.” Even if you can’t remember when last you put one on, fourteen million of them were sold last year, as against five million vinyl LPs and 200,000 cassettes. At 40, the CD may no longer feel like a miraculous technology, but we can hardly count it out just yet.
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.
When Joni Mitchell heard the great cabaret artist Mabel Mercer in concert, she was so struck by the older woman’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” the enduring ballad Mitchell wrote at the tender age of 23, that she went backstage to show her appreciation:
… but I didn’t tell her that I was the author. So, I said, y’know, I’ve heard various recordings of that song, but you bring something to it, y’know, that other people haven’t been able to do. You know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it.
Well, she took offense. I insulted her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was concerned. So I got out of there in a hell of a hurry!
But I think I finally became an old lady myself and could sing the song right.
This is just one of many candid treats to be found in Mitchell’s interview with Elton John, for his Apple Music 1 show Rocket Hour.
For the most part, Mitchell’s reminiscences coalesce around various iconic tracks from her nearly sixty years in the music industry.
“Carey,” off Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, sparks memories of an exploding stove during a hippie-era sojourn in Matala on Crete’s south coast, with an Odyssey reference thrown in for good measure.
“Amelia” was hatched, as were most of the tunes on 1976’s Hejira, while Mitchell was on a solo road trip in a secondhand Mercedes, an experience that caused her to dwell on the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic solo. (She scribbled down lyrics that had come to her at the wheel whenever she pulled over for lunch.)
Regarding “Sex Kills” from 1994’s Turbulent Indigo, John quotes a Rolling Stone article in which Mitchell discussed the “ugliness” she was detecting in popular music:
I think it’s on the increase. Especially towards women. I’ve never been a feminist, but we haven’t had pop songs up until recently that were so aggressively dangerous to women.
“What did you mean by that?” John asks. “ People saying rap music with ‘my hos’ and stuff like that?”
She may not seem overly fussed about it now, but don’t get her started on what young women wear to the Grammys!
John also invited Mitchell to discuss three songs that have influenced her.
Her picks:
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s “Charleston Alley” (a musical epiphany as a high schooler at a college party)
Edith Piaf’s “Les Trois Cloches” (a musical epiphany as an 8‑year-old at a birthdayparty)
And Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (dancing ‘round the jukebox at Saskatoon swimming pool)
Circling back to “Both Sides Now,” Mitchell prefers the orchestral arrangement she recorded as an alto in 2002 to the original’s girlish soprano, with its possibly unearned perspective. (“It’s not a song for an ingenue…”)
When I performed it, the orchestra gathered around me and I’ve played with classical musicians before and they were always reading the Wall Street Journal behind their sheet music and they always treat you like it’s a condescension to be playing with you, but everybody, the men — Englishmen! — were weeping!
There’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions that crosses our desk a lot at this time of year. It’s the one in which he declares Armistice Day, which coincidentally falls on his birthday, sacred:
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
Here, here!
Hopefully Shakespeare won’t take umbrage if we skip over his doomed teenaged lovers to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s 11/11 Centennial with songs inspired by his work.
The driving force behind the KTE Tim Langsford, a drummer who mentors Autistic students at the University of Plymouth, was looking for ways to help his “foggy mind remember the key concepts, characters, and memorable lines that occur in each” of Vonnegut’s 14 books.
The solution? Community and accountability to an ongoing assignment. Langsford launched the Plymouth Vonnegut Collective in 2019 with a typewritten manifesto, inviting interested parties to read (or re-read) the novels in publication order, then gather for monthly discussions.
His loftier goal was for book club members to work collaboratively on a 14-track concept album informed by their reading.
They stuck to it, with efforts spanning a variety of genres.
The psychedelic God Bless You, Mister Rosewatermixes quotes from the book with edited clips of the collective’s discussion of the novel.
The project pushed Langsford out from behind the drum kit, as well as his comfort zone:
It has taken an awful lot to be comfortable with the songs on which I sing. However, I have tried to invoke KV’s sense of creation as if no one is watching. It doesn’t matter so do it for yourself…. Although do I contradict that by sharing these things to the internet rather than trashing them unseen or unheard?!
Ah, but isn’t one of the most beautiful uses of the Internet as a tool for finding out what we have in common with our fellow humans?
Congratulations to our fellow Vonnegut fans in Plymouth, who will be celebrating their achievement and the legendary author’s 100th birthday with an event featuring poetry, art, music and film inspired by the birthday boy’s novels.
Folk rocker Al Stewart is another who “was drawn by the Sirens of Titan.” The lyrics make perfect sense if the novel is fresh in your mind:
The band gave the author a writing credit. He repaid the compliment with a fan letter:
I was at my daughter’s house last night, and the radio was on. By God if the DJ didn’t play our song, and say it was number ten in New York, and say how good you guys are in general. You can imagine the pleasure that gave me. Luck has played an enormous part in my life. Those who know pop music keep telling me how lucky I am to be tied in with you. And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn’t I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that’s really worth a damn. I envy you guys.
If that isn’t nice, we don’t know what is.
Vonnegut’s best known work, the time-traveling, perennially banned anti-war novel,Slaughterhouse-Five, presents an irresistible songwriting challenge, judging from the number of tunes that have sprouted from its fertile soil.
She titled her recent EP of five Vonnegut-inspired songs, Everything is Sateen, a nod to the Sateen Dura-Luxe house paint Vonnegut’s abstract expressionist, Rabo Karabekian, favors in Bluebeard.
We’re fairly confident that Hwang’s No Answer, offered above as a thank you to crowdfunders of a recent tour, will be the bounciest adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five you’ll hear all day.
Keep listening.
Sweet Soubrette, aka Ellia Bisker, another Bushwick Book Club fixture and one half of the goth-folk duo Charming Disaster, leaned into the horrors of Dresden for her Slaughterhouse-Five contribution, namechecking rubble, barbed wire, and the “mustard gas and roses” breath born of a night’s heavy drinking.
Songwriting musicologist Gail Sparlin’s My Blue Heaven: The Love Song of Montana Wildhack — seen here in a library performance — is as girlish and sweet as Valerie Perrine’s take on the character in George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Back in 1988, Hawkwind’s The War I Survived suffused Slaughterhouse-Five with some very New Wave synths…
The chorus of Sam Ford’s wistful So It Goes taps into the novel’s time traveling aspect, and touches on the challenges many soldiers experience when attempting to reintegrate into their pre-combat lives :
That ain’t the way home
Who says I wanna go home? I’m always home I’m always home.
Having invoked Vonnegut’s evergreen phrase, there’s no getting away without mentioning Nick Lowe’s 1976 power pop hit, though it may make for a tenuous connection.
Hi ho!
Still, tenuous connections can count as connections, especially when you tally up all the references to Cat’s Cradle’s secret government weapon, Ice Nine, in lyrics and band names.
Then there are the submerged references. We may not pick up on them, but we’re willing to believe they’re there.
Pearl Jam’s front man Eddie Vedder wrote that “books like Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Player Piano…they’ve had as much influence on me as any record I’ve ever owned.”
A memorable Breakfast of Champions illustration is said to have lit a flame with New Order, propelling Vonnegut out onto the dance floor.
And Ringo Starr edged his way to favorite Beatle status when he tipped his hat to Breakfast of Champions, dedicating his 1973 solo album to “Kilgore Trout and all the beavers.”
There are dozens more we could mention — you’ll find some of them in the playlist below — but without further ado, let’s welcome to the stage Special K and His Crew!
Yes, that’s Phish drummer (and major Vonnegut fan) Jon Fishman on vacuum.
But who’s that mystery front man, spitting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?
Happy 100th, Kurt Vonnegut! We’re glad you were born.
The danger of enjoying jazz is the possibility of letting ourselves slide into the assumption that we understand it. To do so would make no more sense than believing that, say, an enjoyment of listening to records automatically transmits an understanding of record players. One look at such a machine’s inner workings would disabuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the universe of jazz would disabuse us of the notion that we understand that music in all the varieties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that extensive hasn’t been easy to come by until this month, when design studio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blueprint.
Measuring 80 centimeters by 60 centimeters (roughly two and half by two feet), the Jazz Love Blueprint visually celebrates “over 1,000 musicians, artists, songwriters and producers who have been pivotal to the evolution of this ever changing and constantly creative genre of music,” diagramming the connections between the defining artists of major eras and movements in jazz.
These include the “innovators that laid the foundations for jazz music” like Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, “original jazz giants” like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, “inspired musicians of bebop” like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and such leading lights of “spiritual jazz” as John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and the late Pharoah Sanders.
You probably know all those names, even if you only casually listen to jazz. But you may not have heard of such players on “the current vibrant UK scene” as Ezra Collective, Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Kokoroko, and Moses Boyd, or those on “the exploding US scene” like Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and Makaya McCraven. The map includes not only the individuals but also the institutions that have shaped jazz in all its forms: clubs like Birdland and Ronnie Scott’s, record labels like Blue Note, Verve, and ECM. Even the most experienced jazz fans will surely spot new listening paths on the Jazz Love Blueprint. Those with an electronic or mechanical bent will also notice that the whole design has been based on the circuit diagram of a phonograph: the very machine that set so many of us on the path to our love of jazz in the first place.
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.
Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.
In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Royal Tenenbaums among others.
In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.
Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?
Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2015.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
After trying for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show finally landed an interview with Bruce Springsteen–an interview that lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes and covered a tremendous amount of ground. Along the way, Springsteen talked about his song-writing process and the origins of his classic songs, and then performed some acoustic versions, alternating between guitar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stirring performances of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”
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The making of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploited a few years later by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into fractiousness and bloat began when Roger Waters firmly established himself as captain on 1977’s Animals, his tribute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, leading keyboardist Richard Wright to worry they were “in danger of becoming slaves to our equipment.” Certain moments during the 1977 In the Flesh tour in support of the album seem right out of a Christopher Guest brainstorm.
One night in Frankfurt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Comfortably Numb. Fans threw bottles. Crowds felt further alienated when Waters started wearing headphones onstage, trying to sync the music and visuals. During a five-night run at London’s Wembley Empire Pool, “officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line” (due to a minor panic caused by an earlier escaped pig). “Roger Waters oversaw the inspection, barking orders to the pig’s operators… “ ‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’ ”
Moments like these could have added levity to Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall, starring Bob Geldof as the main character, disaffected rock star Pink. Waters hated the movie at the time, though later said, “I’ve actually grown quite fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a particularly jolly state.” A prisoner of his own success, Waters resented inebriated fans who were (understandably) distracted by stage shows that threatened to overwhelm the music. Seeing fans singing along in the front row instead of listening intently sent him into a rage, leading to the infamous spitting incident, as recalled by touring guitarist Snowy White: “It was a funny gig. It was a really weird vibe… to look across the stage and see Roger spitting at this guy at the front… It was a very strange gig. Not very good vibes.”
This is still only backstory for the album and tour to come — the making of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. Waters based the jaded Pink on himself and former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, who did not return from his own onstage meltdown. Waters found himself wishing he could build a wall between himself and the fans. The band liked his demo ideas and voted to move forward with the project. Then things really went sour. Pink Floyd began to fall apart during the recording sessions. As engineer James Guthrie remembers, at the start, “they were still playing together, rather than one guy at a time, which is the way we ended up recording in France.” Fractures between Waters and Richard Wright would eventually lead to Wright’s firing from the band.
Most of the personal disputes were already established before The Wall. Certainly Roger’s relationship with Rick, but things did deteriorate further on that level during the making of the album. There were some very difficult moments, but I don’t think there was ever a question of Roger not finishing the album. He’s a very strong person. Not easily deterred from his path. If everyone else had walked out, he would still have finished it.
Waters would have toured the album by himself as well — as he did after he left the band following 1983’s The Final Cut, a Pink Floyd album in name only. As it was, The Wall tour ended up sending the band into debt. Only Richard Wright made a profit, playing with the band as a salaried musician. For all the stage mishaps and interpersonal feuds — despite it all — Pink Floyd did what they set out to do. “We knew when we were making it,” says David Gilmour, in recollections mellowed by time and age, “that it was a good record.” It still stands, some forty-three years later, as one of the greats. Learn how it earned the distinction, and what that greatness cost the band that made it.
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Ding, ding, ding, de de, ding, ding–the bassline for Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” is simple and unforgettable. In Sao Paulo, British bassist Charles Berthoud paid tribute to John Deacon’s riff, performing it with 200 other bassists. Berthoud plays a beautiful lead; the others keep the rhythm going. Evidently, the event was sponsored by Rockin’ 1000, a collective that stages gigs where hundreds of musicians perform rock classics together. You can find more of their videos in the Relateds below.
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