Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

in Music | February 19th, 2025

Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

If you dig through their Youtube archive, you can also revisit performances of two Talking Heads classics–“Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House.” (Both below.) Which brings us to the video above. According to Consequence of Sound, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has long been a big fan of Choir!Choir!Choir!. He writes on his web site:

I’ve sat mesmerized watching online videos of the Canadian group Choir! Choir! Choir! They somehow manage to get hundreds of strangers to sing beautifully together—in tune and full-voiced—with rich harmonies and detailed arrangements. With almost no rehearsal—how do they do it??

They manage to achieve lift off—that feeling of surrender when groups sing together—when we all become part of something larger than ourselves.

And back in 2018, Byrne got to experience some of that lift off firsthand. Hear him sing a moving version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” with Choir!Choir!Choir! Enjoy.

Psycho Killer

Burning Down the House

Producer Tony Visconti Breaks Down the Making of David Bowie’s Classic “Heroes,” Track by Track

David Bowie’s “Heroes” Delightfully Performed by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

Depeche Mode Releases a Goosebump-Inducing Cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More

in Current Affairs, Music | February 14th, 2025

At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a profile about him, but The New York Times’ David Peisner takes a different approach, describing him recording a song in his home studio. “Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs,” Peisner continues. This practice has produced “viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms.”

Welles’ subjects have included “the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic, and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model.” You can hear his musical takes on these news-pegged subjects on his YouTube channel, along with such other much-viewed, ripped-from-the-headlines songs as “Fentanyl,” “Walmart,” “Whistle Boeing,” and “We’re All Gonna Die.”

For his younger listeners, his subject matter (and his perspective on it) have a kind of currency much intensified by life on social media; for his older listeners, his manner and musicianship recall a golden age of the protest singer that many would have assumed a wholly closed chapter of cultural history.

It will, perhaps, disappoint both relevant demographics that Welles’ forthcoming debut album Middle includes none of these viral hits, nor anything much like them. “The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” Peisner quotes him as saying, later writing that the album “surfs between surrealistic fantasy worlds and Welles’s own inner life.” This counterintuitive move is understandable: given his obvious chops honed with the inspiration of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and John Prine, being pigeonholed as a singer of the news on TikTok has probably never been his ultimate goal. A couple of decades from now, music critics may declare that Oliver Anthony walked so that Jesse Welles could run.

Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft

The Acoustic Guitar Project Gives Songwriters Worldwide a Guitar and One Week to Write a Song

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Written Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

John Prine’s Last Song Was Also His First to Go No. 1: Watch Him Perform “I Remember Everything”

The Efficacy of Protest Songs — Four Songwriters Discuss on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #121

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

in History, Music, Technology | February 13th, 2025

In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryptic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buyers, technology-minded musicians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music created by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who understood the potential of playing and manipulating the sounds of real-life instruments (or of anything else besides) digitally, money was no object.

The history of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, incorporating interviews from its Australian inventors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. According to Ryrie, No Jacket Required actually did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musicians sampled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musicians, using the technology not yet widely known as digital sampling would have felt like magic; to listeners, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d never heard before, or at least never used in that way. Take the “orchestra hit” originally sampled from a record of Stravinsky’s The Firebird (and whose story is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became practically inescapable.

We might call the orchestra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faintly vocal sample known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across genres. A desire for those particular effects brought a lot of musicians and producers onto the bandwagon throughout the eighties, but it was the early adopters who used the Fairlight most creatively. The earliest among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French documentary above gathering sounds to sample, blowing wind through pipes and smashing up televisions in a junkyard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a special fervor, using not just its sampling capabilities but also its groundbreaking sequencing software (included from the Series II onward) to create her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill,” which made a surprise return to popularity just a few years ago.

The Fairlight’s high-profile American users included Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren, and Herbie Hancock, who demonstrates his own model alongside the late Quincy Jones in the documentary clip above. With its green-on-black monitor, its gigantic floppy disks, and its futuristic-looking “light pen” (as natural a pointing device as any in an era when most of humanity had never laid eyes on a mouse), it resembles less a musical instrument than an early personal computer with a piano keyboard attached. It had its cumbersome qualities, and some leaned rather too heavily on its packed-in sounds, but as Hancock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in control to get pleasing results out of it: “It doesn’t plug itself in. It doesn’t program itself… yet.” To which the always-prescient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”

How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Kids Show (1989)

How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music

Everything Thing You Ever Wanted to Know About the Synthesizer: A Vintage Three-Hour Crash Course

The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

in Animation, Music | February 6th, 2025

Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visual as well. But these qualities, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been challenged for at least three centuries, not least by composers themselves. Take Antonio Vivaldi, whose Le quattro stagioni, or The Four Seasons, of 1718–1720 evoke not just broad impressions of the eponymous parts of the year, but a variety of natural and human elements characteristic to them. In the course of less than an hour, its listeners — whether of the early eighteenth century or the early twenty-first — “see” spring, summer, autumn, and winter unfold vividly before their mind’s eye.

Now, composer Stephen Malinowski has visualized The Four Seasons in an entirely different way. As previously featured here on Open Culture, he uses his Music Animation Machine to create what we might call graphical scores, which abstractly represent the instrumental parts that make up widely loved classical compositions in time with the music itself.

On this page, you can watch four videos, with each one visualizing one of the piece’s concerti. Fans of the Music Animation Machine will notice that its formerly simple visuals have taken a big step forward, though what can look at first like a psychedelic light show also has a clear and legible order.

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For “Spring” and “Autumn,” Malinowski animates performances by violinist Shunske Sato and musicians of the Netherlands Bach Society; for “Summer” and “Winter,” performances by Cynthia Miller Freivogel and early-music ensemble Voices of Music (previously featured here for their renditions of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and “Air on the G String,” Pachelbel’s Canon, and indeed The Four Seasons). Generally understandable at a glance — and in many ways, more illuminating than actually seeing the musicians play their instruments — these scores also use a system called “harmonic coloring,” which Malinkowski explains here. This may add up to a complete audiovisual experience, but if you’d also like a literary element, why not pull up The Four Seasons’ accompanying sonnets while you’re at it?

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Brought to Life in Sand Animations by the Hungarian Artist Ferenc Cakó

Yes’ Rick Wakeman Explores Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Why It Was the First Concept Album

Watch Classical Music Come to Life in Artfully Animated Scores: Stravinsky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

in Music | February 2nd, 2025

Not everyone on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their disposal, and not everybody stayed up until midnight. But fortunately at least one person did, in order to tape the first two hours of a new cable channel called MTV: Music Television. Did they know it would be historic? MTV certainly hoped it would be: they equated the premiere of this 24/7 video version of radio with the moon landing. People born long after this time might wonder why a MTV Music Video award statuette was honoring Buzz Aldrin. But at the time, it made sense. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock and Roll.” It was a statement: less than three decades after the first rock and roll single, this genre of music had won—-it had colonized the planet. And beyond the planet, the next stop: the universe.

It’s fitting the execs chose as their first selection The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Visuals were not just going to be an adjunct to the music, they were going to become inextricably linked. Either MTV was prescient about the visual decade to come or they in fact caused it to happen. Music videos or short films had been around since the invention of sound in the cinema, but MTV was *all* videos, *all the time*, brought to Americans due to the deregulation of the television industry in 1972 and the slow growth of cable channels.

After a Pat Benatar video, the VJs introduce themselves—-Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, J.J. Jackson, Alan Hunter, and Martha Quinn (all soon to be household names and crushes)-—and then straight into a block of commercials: school binders, Superman II, and Dolby Noise Reduction. A strange group of advertisers, to be sure. Goodman returns to ask, blindly, “Aren’t those guys the best?” Goodman has no idea what has preceded him.

Yes, the first day of MTV was pretty rough. In fact, it’s a bit like a DJ who turns up to a gig to find they’ve left most of their records across town. In the first two hours we get two Rod Stewart songs, two by the Pretenders, two by Split Ends, another Pat Benatar video, two from Styx, and two from the concert film for the People of Kampuchea. We also get completely obscure videos: PH.D. “Little Susie’s on the Up”, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters “When Things Go Wrong”, Michael Johnson “Bluer Than Blue”. This is D‑list stuff. No wonder MTV premiered at midnight.

From these humble beginnings the channel would soon find its groove and two years later it would become ubiquitous in American households.

People predicted the end of MTV right from the beginning. It would be a fad, or it would run out of videos to play. Forty years later, the channel has rebranded itself into oblivion. And while music videos still get made, none have the effect that those first two decades had on generations of viewers. To paraphrase the Buggles, we have seen the playback and it seems so long ago.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

The Internet Archive Rescues MTV News’ Web Site, Making 460,000+ of Its Pages Searchable Again

Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

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Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull (RIP) Singing “As Tears Go By” in 1966

in Music | January 31st, 2025

Note: Yesterday, Marianne Faithfull passed away at age 78. In her memory, we’re bringing back a favorite from deep in our archive. It originally appeared on our site in June 2012.

When you want to learn a thing or two about Jean-Luc Godard, you turn to New Yorker film critic Richard Brody. I do, anyway, since the man wrote the book on Godard: namely, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. He followed up our post on Godard’s film of Jefferson Airplane’s 1968 rooftop concert with a tweet linking us to a clip from Godard’s feature Made in U.S.A

That film came out in 1966, two years before the immortal Airplane show but well into Godard’s first major burst of daring creativity, which began with 1959’s Breathless and lasted at least until Sympathy for the Devil, his 1968 documentary on — or, anyway, including — the Rolling Stones. Brody pointed specifically to the clip above, a brief scene where Marianne Faithfull sings “As Tears Go By,” a hit, in separate recordings, for both Faithfull and the Stones.

Brody notes how these two minutes of a cappella performance from the 19-year-old Faithfull depict the “styles of the day.” For a long time since that day, alas, we American filmgoers hadn’t had a chance to fully experience Made in U.S.A. Godard based its script on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Jugger but never bothered to secure adaptation rights, and the film drifted in legal limbo until 2009. But today, with that red tape cut, crisp new prints circulate freely around the United States. Keep an eye on your local revival house’s listings so you won’t miss your chance to witness Faithfull’s café performance, and other such Godardian moments, in their theatrical glory. The cinephilically intrepid Brody, of course, found a way to see it, after a fashion, nearly thirty years before its legitimate American release: “The Mudd Club (the White Street night spot and music venue) got hold of a 16-mm. print and showed it — with the projector in the room — to a crowd of heavy smokers. It was like watching a movie outdoors in London by night, or as if through the shrouding mists of time.”

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Watch David Bowie & Marianne Faithfull Rehearse and Sing Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” (1973)

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sympathy for the Devil”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Watch Derek Jarman’s Daring 12-Minute Promo Film for Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 Comeback Album Broken English (NSFW)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

in History, Music | January 27th, 2025

Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the twenty-first century can easily understand. Our ability to hear practically any song we could possibly desire on command has changed our relationship to the art itself. Most of us now relate to it not as we would a special, even momentous event, but as we do to the water and electricity that come out of our walls — or, to put it in mid-nineteenth-century terms, as we do to our furniture.

Despite having been born in 1866 himself, Erik Satie understood humanity’s need to listen to music without really listening to it. The Inside the Score video above tells the story of how he developed musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” The artist Fernand Léger, a friend of Satie’s, recalled that after the two of them had been subjected to “unbearable vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the need for “music which would be part of the ambience, which would take account of it. I imagine it being melodic in nature: it would soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” The result was five deliberately ignorable compositions, each tailored to an ordinary space, which he wrote between 1917 and 1923.

Regarded in his lifetime less as a respectable composer than an unserious eccentric, he only managed to get one of those pieces played — and even when he did, everyone ignored his instructions to chat instead of listening. It was well after his death (in 1925) that such also-unconventional musical figures as John Cage and Brian Eno became famous for works similarly premised on a re-imagination of the relationship between music and listener. Eno, in particular, is now credited with the development of “ambient music” thanks to his albums like Music for Airports. Their popularity surely wouldn’t have surprised Satie; whether he could have foreseen ten-hour mixes of “chill lo-fi beats to study to” is another question entirely.

Watch Animated Scores of Erik Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1”

Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau, It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)

Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

in Music, Television | January 23rd, 2025

In the eighties, people lamented the attention-span-shortening “MTV-ization” of visual culture. By the mid-nineties, networks were trying to figure out how to get viewers to sit through music videos at all. A solution arrived in the form of Pop-Up Video, a program pitched by creators Woody Thompson and Tad Low to VH1 when that much-less-cool MTV clone found itself struggling to stay carried by cable providers. It had an appealingly low-budget concept: take existing music videos, and spice them up with text bubbles containing facts about the artists, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and amusing (if semi-relevant) trivia.

“We got a lot of resistance from VH1. They owned Blockbuster Video at the time, so they knew no one rented foreign films because no one wanted to read the TV.” So recalls Low in a Billboard interview about the history of the show, which originally ran from 1996 to 2002 (with a brief revival in 2011 and 2012). Like many cultural phenomena beloved of millennials, Pop-Up Video has received the oral-history treatment more than once: Uproxx also did one a couple years earlier. These articles are entertaining in the same way as Pop-Up Video itself, opening up the doors of the factory and offering a glimpse of how pop-cultural sausage gets made.

Launched well before the age of Wikipedia, Pop-Up Video required intensive research. That meant not just internet searches, but phone calls to directors, production designers, hairstylists, carpenters, caterers, and anyone else who might have worked on a particular music video (if not the musicians, few of whom knew how their videos were made, and even fewer of whom were willing to dish dirt on themselves). These often complicated, rushed, and otherwise troubled productions tended to produce memorable stories, which participants turned out to be happy to tell years later — not that the network or the artists’ management were always happy with the results.

Also like many cultural phenomena beloved of millennials, the show was saturated with the famously irreverent sensibility of Generation X. Tasked with delivering fun facts, its writers didn’t hesitate to knock celebrities off their pedestals while they were at it, and with a sense of humor that came to be recognized as deceptively intelligent. (Head writer Alan Cross has spoken of being inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, and Low by a favorite writer who made “extensive use of footnotes,” which brings another three-initial name to mind.) You can watch over 100 “popped” music videos on this Youtube playlist, with more at the Internet Archive. Alas, many have never come available online, but then, Pop-Up Video did make a virtue of ephemerality.

via Metafilter

The 50 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

How Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bastion of Internet Culture: A Short Documentary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull (RIP) Singing “As Tears Go By” in 1966

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

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