Watch Wes Anderson’s Animated Music Video for The French Dispatch, Featuring a Track by Jarvis Cocker

The French Dis­patch came out near­ly two weeks ago, after hav­ing been pushed back more than a year by COVID-19. But delay­ing the release of a Wes Ander­son movie sure­ly counts among the least regret­table harms of the pan­dem­ic, which has caused mil­lions of deaths world­wide. Among the lives lost was that of Daniel Bevilac­qua, known in France as the chan­son singer Christophe. Set in that coun­try — and more specif­i­cal­ly, the fic­tion­al city of Ennui-sur-Blasé — in the 1960s, The French Dis­patch fea­tures a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Christophe’s 1965 hit “Aline” that now plays as some­thing of a trib­ute to the late pop-cul­tur­al icon. Sung by Pulp front­man Jarvis Cock­er, it comes accom­pa­nied by the Ander­son-direct­ed ani­mat­ed music video above.

Cock­er has worked with Ander­son before. In the direc­tor’s 2009 stop-motion adap­ta­tion of Roald Dahl’s The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox he pro­vid­ed the voice of a singing farmer named Petey; in The French Dis­patch he does the same for a pop star called Tip-Top, and has even record­ed a full-length album in char­ac­ter.

Released on the very same day as The French Dis­patch, Chan­sons d’En­nui Tip-Top con­tains a dozen cov­ers of songs orig­i­nal­ly pop­u­lar­ized by the likes of Serge Gains­bourg, Brigitte Bar­dot, Jacques Dutronc, and Françoise Hardy. (Atten­tive cinephiles, the core audi­ence for all things Ander­son, will also note the pres­ence on the track list of Claude Channes’ “Mao Mao,” first heard in Jean-Luc Godard­’s La Chi­noise.)

Chan­sons d’En­nui Tip-Top exudes the retro-mind­ed Cock­er’s love of 1960s French pop music, just as The French Dis­patch exudes Ander­son­’s love of… well, every­thing Ander­son loves, much of which appears in the “Aline” music video. Its metic­u­lous­ly hand-drawn look comes from Javi Aznarez, who’d orig­i­nal­ly been hired to apply his art to the sets of the film itself. Fol­low­ing Tip-Top as he dances through an elab­o­rate two-dimen­sion­al ren­di­tion of Ennui-sur-Blasé, it intro­duces not only the set­ting (in a stark cut­away man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of The Life Aquat­ic) but all the major char­ac­ters and the actors who play them. Owen Wil­son, Anjel­i­ca Hus­ton, Edward Nor­ton, Bill Mur­ray: the gang, it seems, is all here — “here” being a cer­tain idea of post­war France best real­ized, per­haps, by imag­i­na­tions like Ander­son and Cock­er’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Releas­es the Offi­cial Trail­er for His New Film, The French Dis­patch: Watch It Online

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop-Motion Film Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

Wes Anderson’s Ani­mat­ed Books

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

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.

Behold 84 Great Novels Reinterpreted as Modernist Postage Stamps

Ali John­son and Jim Quail of Liv­er­pool-based design stu­dio Dorothy had a hit with their music-based graph­icswhich recast sem­i­nal alter­na­tivepsy­che­del­icelec­tron­ic, and post-punk albums as over­sized postage stamps.

Now, they’ve turned their atten­tion and knack for high­ly con­densed visu­al respons­es to the realms of lit­er­a­ture.

Their Mod­ern Clas­sics col­lec­tion, above, syn­the­sizes 42 titles into some­thing emblem­at­ic and essen­tial.

How many have you read?

How many would you be able to iden­ti­fy based on image alone?

It’s easy to grasp why the hori­zon fig­ures promi­nent­ly in On The RoadThe Grapes of Wrath, and The Road.

And under­stand­ably, the eyes have it when it comes to 1984A Clock­work Orange, and Slaugh­ter­house-Five.

Else­where, the visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions cre­ate con­nec­tions that may take read­ers by sur­prise.

(Stay tuned for a mas­ter’s the­sis that teas­es out the­mat­ic par­al­lels between The Col­or Purple’s quilts and Hold­en Caulfield’s red hunt­ing hat in The Catch­er in the Rye.)

Accord­ing to John­son, she and Quail, avid read­ers both, fell out sev­er­al times over which titles to include (and, by exten­sion, exclude).

Eng­lish teach­ers at mid­dle and high school lev­el will rejoice at the num­ber of syl­labus favorites that made the cut.

Poten­tial stamp-themed cre­ative assign­ments abound.

The conch may be an obvi­ous choice for Lord of the Flies, but what of The Great Gats­by’s green light?

Why not the eyes of Doc­tor T. J. Eck­le­burg?

swim­ming pool?

Or one of those beau­ti­ful shirts?

Dis­cuss!

Then make your own stamp!

Stu­dents are far less like­ly to be con­ver­sant in the 42 ear­li­er works com­pris­ing Dorothy’s lit­er­ary Clas­sics stamps, though musi­cal and movie adap­ta­tions of Lit­tle WomenDrac­u­la, and Les Mis­er­ables should pro­vide a toe­hold.

Our igno­rance is such, we may need to reread Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jane Eyre … or at least Google the sig­nif­i­cance of a spoon and all those orange and red tri­an­gles.

(Back in our pre-dig­i­tal youth, Cliff’s Notes were the pre­ferred Philis­tine option…)

Dorothy’s stamp prints of Clas­sics and Mod­ern Clas­sics are avail­able for pur­chase on their web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

Though released just a few weeks ago, Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune seems already to have gar­nered more crit­i­cal acclaim than David Lynch’s 1984 adap­ta­tion of the same mate­r­i­al. This com­par­i­son is, of course, unfair: Lynch was work­ing under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions in a dif­fer­ent time, not to men­tion with a marked­ly dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty. And in fact, Lynch’s ver­sion of the ambi­tious, saga-launch­ing nov­el by Frank Her­bert does have its fans, or at least view­ers will­ing to praise cer­tain of its aspects. Lovers of 1980s music, for exam­ple, val­ue its score com­posed by the vir­tu­osic rock band Toto — with the excep­tion, that is, of a track from Bri­an Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois.

Bri­an Eno in par­tic­u­lar is cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing ambi­ent music, and “Prophe­cy Theme,” heard on the Dune sound­track album as well as in the film itself, con­jures up an atmos­phere as effec­tive­ly as any oth­er piece of his work in the genre. “David flew me to Los Ange­les to see Dune,” Eno recalls in New York Times inter­view about his recent­ly released com­pi­la­tion Bri­an Eno (Film Music, 1976–2020), which includes the track.

It wasn’t fin­ished then. And I don’t know whether his inten­tion or his hope was that I would do the whole sound­track, but I didn’t want to, any­way. It was a huge project, and I just didn’t feel like doing it. But I did feel like mak­ing one piece for it, so that’s what I did.”

Dune was indeed a for­mi­da­ble under­tak­ing, and one that ulti­mate­ly proved too big for Lynch. Some fans would argue, even after the suc­cess­ful first install­ment from Vil­leneuve, that it’s too big for any film­mak­er. But the world Her­bert cre­at­ed, one both sweep­ing and uncom­mon­ly detailed, has inspired many a cre­ator to pro­duce impres­sive work for projects both real­ized and unre­al­ized. Per­haps it counts as a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty that the lat­est Dune film, with its appar­ent clean-slate approach to pre­vi­ous attempts at adap­ta­tion, did­n’t com­mis­sion a score from Eno, whose sig­na­ture son­ic tex­tures could nice­ly have com­pli­ment­ed Vil­leneu­ve’s instinct for the sub­lime. But then, a stu­dio can’t go far wrong with Hans Zim­mer either.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

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.

Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots

When Microsoft released Win­dows 95, they did­n’t skimp on the pub­lic­i­ty. Their pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the oper­at­ing sys­tem even includ­ed tele­vi­sion spots sound­tracked with the Rolling Stones’ hit “Start Me Up.” The lyrics of its cho­rus neat­ly suit­ed the prod­uct, which came with a re-engi­neered inter­face fea­tur­ing a then-nov­el fea­ture called the Start menu. Though hard­ly new even then, the song did also car­ry faint asso­ci­a­tions with inno­va­tion, hav­ing orig­i­nal­ly been released on August 14, 1981, just two weeks after the launch of a cable chan­nel called MTV. Its music video thus received a great deal of air­play, prov­ing to the pub­lic that the Stones could stay on the cut­ting edge.

By the 1980s, rel­e­vance was by no means guar­an­teed to any band formed in the 1960s. More than proven though the point may be today, the Michael Lind­say-Hogg-direct­ed music video for “Start Me Up” demon­strat­ed that even a group of rock­ers in or near their for­ties could per­form with the same uncon­tain­able vital­i­ty they always had.

Even now, forty years after that, the group’s sur­viv­ing mem­bers show no incli­na­tion to retire, and the high­est tech­nol­o­gy has only just begun to catch up to them. I refer, of course, to Spot, the mod­el of robot dog pre­vi­ous­ly seen here on Open Cul­ture moon­walk­ing and twerk­ing to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” In the years since then, it seems he’s learned to move like Jag­ger — as well as Richards, Wyman, Wood, and Watts.

In “Spot Me Up,” four Spot mod­els togeth­er repli­cate about a minute of the “Start Me Up” video. That each robot real­ly does seem to con­vey traces of the per­son­al­i­ty of its par­tic­u­lar Stone — even the one tasked with repli­cat­ing a glance from the late Char­lie Watts, a force of sub­tle­ty behind the drum kit for more than half a cen­tu­ry — speaks to the engi­neer­ing skill mar­shaled by Boston Dynam­ics, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy spin­off where Spot was invent­ed. Not every­one has warmed to the life­like move­ments of their robots, a line­up that also includes the for­mi­da­ble humanoid Atlas. But dance videos like these serve as a form of pub­lic rela­tions for its prod­ucts, which were designed for not the stage but fac­to­ries, mines, and pow­er plants — places where they can do what any fan of the Stones in the 80s would sure­ly call the dirty work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Richards Demon­strates His Famous 5‑String Tech­nique (Used on Clas­sic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

The Rolling Stones Release a Time­ly Track, “Liv­ing in a Ghost Town”: Their First New Music in Eight Years

The Robots of Your Dystopi­an Future Are Already Here: Two Chill­ing Videos Dri­ve It All Home

Twerk­ing, Moon­walk­ing AI Robots — They’re Now Here

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man First Graders in Adorable Card­board Robot Out­fits

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.

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Experimental Score for the New Dune Film

If you have not yet seen the first install­ment of Denis Villeneuve’s reimag­in­ing of Dune, you will find no spoil­ers here, though if you’ve read Frank Herbert’s cult clas­sic nov­el and/or seen David Lynch’s film adap­ta­tion (or even the for­get­table TV minis­eries from 20 years ago), you are famil­iar with the sto­ry. You can, how­ev­er, hear Hans Zim­mer’s com­plete sound­track above. If you love it, and if film crit­ic Mick LaSalle is right, you’re in for a treat: “If you like the music here, you’ll prob­a­bly like the movie,” LaSalle writes in a San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle review. “If you hate it, you can’t pos­si­bly enjoy Dune.”

The film’s music is relent­less and cre­ates a “sense of some­thing strange and unfa­mil­iar,” mak­ing sure “we nev­er for­get we’re watch­ing an entire­ly alien uni­verse.” Vet­er­an block­buster com­pos­er Hans Zim­mer cre­at­ed this son­ic atmos­phere with stu­dio effects and non­tra­di­tion­al instru­men­ta­tion, though one famil­iar ele­ment remains, as he tells Indiewire:

I kept think­ing, wher­ev­er you are in the future, the instru­ments will change due to tech­nol­o­gy, and we could be far more exper­i­men­tal, but the one thing that remains is the human voice, which there is a lot of.

Those voic­es include that of singer Lisa Ger­rard, for­mer­ly of Dead Can Dance, who “came up with this lan­guage that is all her own. It could be from the future, it could be from a dif­fer­ent world.”

Zimmer’s approach almost mir­rors that of his first big break, the score for 1988’s Rain Man, of which he said in 2008, “The Ray­mond char­ac­ter does­n’t actu­al­ly know where he is. The world is so dif­fer­ent to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own world music for a world that does­n’t real­ly exist?” Villeneuve’s Dune gives us an entire inter­plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion for which to invent music that did­n’t exist before. “I felt like there was a free­dom to get away from a West­ern Orches­tra,” Zim­mer told The New York Times, in a major under­state­ment.

One piece of music, played as the Atrei­des fam­i­ly arrives on Arrakis, involved 30 bag­pipers, record­ed togeth­er in Edin­burgh while social­ly dis­tanced. “Along with syn­the­siz­ers,” writes The New York Times’ Dar­ryn King, “you can hear scrap­ing met­al, Indi­an bam­boo flutes, Irish whis­tles, a jud­der­ing drum phrase that Zim­mer calls an ‘anti-groove,’ seis­mic rum­bles of dis­tort­ed gui­tar” and “a war for that is actu­al­ly a cel­lo.” The result “might be one of Zimmer’s most unortho­dox and most provoca­tive” pieces of work, and a far cry from the music that accom­pa­nied David Lynch’s beau­ti­ful fail­ure of a film in 1984.

Zim­mer claims nev­er to have seen Lynch’s film nor heard the sound­track by soft-rock super­stars Toto, unwill­ing to com­pro­mise the Dune he’d been imag­in­ing since he first read the book. “I’ve been think­ing about Dune for near­ly 50 years,” he says. Lynch has been try­ing to for­get his film for almost as long. The dense, com­pli­cat­ed mess of an adap­ta­tion so con­fused film execs and test audi­ences that the stu­dio added intro­duc­to­ry expo­si­tion, above, and hand­ed out glos­saries to audi­ences at the first screen­ings (though not, pre­sum­ably, flash­lights).

The choice of super­stars Toto, of “Africa” fame, brought audi­ences of Lynch’s film a “lux­u­ri­ant and pecu­liar sound­track,” sup­ple­ment­ed by the Vien­na Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and a com­po­si­tion by Bri­an Eno. But it also inte­grat­ed famil­iar 80’s rock touch­es (as in “Desert Theme,” above), giv­ing the alien world Lynch imag­ined both a famil­iar son­ic tex­ture and a dat­ed sound. Thir­ty-sev­en years lat­er, sci­ence fic­tion films need no such com­fort­ing appa­ra­tus to make them palat­able. As both Vil­leneuve and Zim­mer real­ized in their work on Dune, a film about a total­ly unfa­mil­iar future civ­i­liza­tion — even one filled with humans who look like us — can look and sound as strange as tech­nol­o­gy and imag­i­na­tion will allow.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

Watch the First Trail­er for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­el

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

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

Metallica Teaches a New Masterclass on How to Build & Sustain a Band

Since its launch in 2015, Mas­ter­class has not only expand­ed the vari­ety of its online course offer­ings but sought out ever-big­ger names for its teach­ers. Names don’t come much big­ger than Metal­li­ca in the world of heavy met­al, and indeed in the world of rock music in gen­er­al. Hence the broad title of the new Mas­ter­class “Metal­li­ca Teach­es Being a Band.” Hav­ing been a band for 40 years now, they pre­sum­ably know more than a lit­tle about every­thing involved in that enter­prise: not just record­ing hit albums like Mas­ter of Pup­pets and songs like “Enter Sand­man,” but also weath­er­ing dra­mat­ic changes in both the music busi­ness and pop­u­lar cul­ture while coop­er­at­ing for the good of the group.

Not that, to the men of Metal­li­ca, such coop­er­a­tion has always come nat­u­ral­ly. “There’ve been times when it’s been frac­tured and it looks like we were on the verge of break­ing up,” says gui­tarist Kirk Ham­mett in the trail­er for their Mas­ter­class above.

He joined the band in 1983, which means he has very near­ly as long a stand­ing in the band as its founders, lead vocalist/rhythm gui­tarist James Het­field and drum­mer Lars Ulrich. All of them, along with bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo, appear here as teach­ers to share their accu­mu­lat­ed wis­dom, have to do as it may with song­writ­ing, per­for­mance, inter­per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, or the man­age­ment of time and anger.

Like all Mas­ter­class­es, Metal­li­ca’s course is divid­ed into many eas­i­ly watch­able video lessons, most with a prac­ti­cal slant. Musi­cal­ly inclined view­ers, even those with no inter­est in becom­ing heavy-met­al icons, will ben­e­fit from learn­ing to work “From Riff to Song,” the prin­ci­ples of “Putting Togeth­er an Album,” and the art of “Nav­i­gat­ing Egos.” But for Metal­li­ca fans in par­tic­u­lar — whom, col­lec­tive­ly, the band con­sid­er their fifth mem­ber — few lessons in any Mas­ter­class could be as grip­ping as the decon­struc­tions of “Enter Sand­man,” “Mas­ter of Pup­pets,” and “One.” They do all this in a calmer, more reflec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal place than the bit­ter, near-dys­func­tion­al one in which the 2004 doc­u­men­tary Metal­li­ca: Some Kind of Mon­ster found them — but not so calm and reflec­tive that they can’t fin­ish the course off with, as Ham­mett puts it, “a bad-ass per­for­mance.”

When you sign up to become a Mas­ter­class mem­ber ($180 per year), you will have access to Metal­li­ca’s course plus 100 oth­ers.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Metal­li­ca Play “Enter Sand­man” Before a Crowd of 1.6 Mil­lion in Moscow, Dur­ing the Final Days of the Sovi­et Union (1991)

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Metal­li­ca Is Putting Free Con­certs Online: 6 Now Stream­ing, with More to Come

Who Invent­ed Heavy Met­al Music?: A Search for Ori­gins

Car­los San­tana & Tom Morel­lo Launch Online Cours­es on How to Play the Gui­tar

Her­bie Han­cock to Teach His First Online Course on Jazz

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.

When The Who Saved New York City After 9/11: Watch Their Cathartic Madison Square Garden Set (October 20, 2001)

A lit­tle more than a month after the ter­ror­ist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reel­ing from that day, Madi­son Square Gar­den host­ed The Con­cert for New York City. A ben­e­fit con­cert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sac­ri­fice of NYC’s fire and police depart­ments, which had lost many mem­bers dur­ing that day. (The for­mer had lost 343 fire­fight­ers.) But like a lot of things about that day twen­ty years lat­er, it has sort of van­ished down the cul­tur­al mem­o­ry hole.

How­ev­er, if you need remind­ing, the Who came out of retire­ment and deliv­ered what some con­sid­ered the set of the night. Tom Wat­son, writ­ing in Forbes mag­a­zine, called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.”

The con­cert was free to any fire­fight­er or police­man who came in uni­form. Wat­son describes the vibe thus:

“To say that occu­pan­cy laws were stretched that night is to under­sell the size of the place. Pic­ture a Knicks game, then dou­ble the crowd. From the start, the build­ing ran on a riv­er of emo­tion and beer, which, if you wore a uni­form — or your late loved one’s cap — was free. The thou­sands of cops in atten­dance stu­dious­ly ignored thou­sands of oth­er cops and fire­fight­ers light­ing up a lit­tle reefer. Large bot­tles of high proof spir­its were pro­duced. The Gar­den was the biggest Irish wake in his­to­ry.”

In a moment like this, a lot of the artists head­ed towards jin­go­ism. It was under­stand­able. Songs about Amer­i­ca (David Bowie), songs about New York City (Bil­ly Joel), songs about free­dom (Paul McCart­ney), songs about heroes (also Bowie). But, what the crowd want­ed that night was cathar­sis, and that’s what the Who brought.

The set is the Who at their most anthemic, but also the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the clas­sic rock radio these uni­formed men and women and their fam­i­lies grew up with: “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Reilly,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and end­ing with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” How­ev­er the line “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” is qui­et­ly delet­ed. Not this time, cyn­i­cism.

The con­cert was exact­ly what was need­ed for the grief of the com­mu­ni­ty. And death hangs over the whole event, as cam­era cut to fam­i­ly mem­bers hold­ing up pho­tos of lost loved ones, while the World Trade Cen­ter rub­ble still smol­dered.

And then there’s what nobody knew at the time: this would be bassist John Entwistle’s last gig before his fatal heart attack eight months lat­er. So many of the remain­ing first respon­ders would die from the tox­ic chem­i­cals breathed in on 9/11, and still they fight for some rec­om­pense from the gov­ern­ment that hon­ored them at first. May­or Giuliani…well, we know what hap­pened to him. And that ass whoopin’ we promised the Mid­dle East wound up kick­ing America’s econ­o­my in the butt instead.

Twen­ty years lat­er the per­for­mance still holds up, a moment in time just before we all got fooled again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Moon, Drum­mer of The Who, Pass­es Out at 1973 Con­cert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

Kei­th Moon’s Final Per­for­mance with The Who (1978)

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Play a Kandinsky: A New Simulation Lets You Experience Kandinsky’s Synesthesia & the Sounds He May Have Heard When Painting “Yellow-Red-Blue”

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky could hear col­ors. Maybe you can too, but since stud­ies so far have sug­gest­ed that the under­ly­ing con­di­tion exists in less than five per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, the odds are against it. Known as synes­the­sia, it involves one kind of sense per­cep­tion being tied up with anoth­er: let­ters and num­bers come with col­ors, sequences take on three-dimen­sion­al forms, sounds have tac­tile feel­ings. These unusu­al sen­so­ry con­nec­tions can pre­sum­ably encour­age unusu­al kinds of think­ing; per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, synes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences have been report­ed by a vari­ety of cre­ators, from Bil­ly Joel and David Hock­ney to Vladimir Nabokov and Niko­la Tes­la.

Few, how­ev­er, have described synes­the­sia as elo­quent­ly as Kandin­sky did. “Col­or is the key­board,” he once said. “The eye is the ham­mer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that pur­pose­ly sets the soul vibrat­ing by means of this or that key.”

That quote must have shaped the mis­sion of Play a Kandin­sky, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Google Arts and Cul­ture and the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou. Enlist­ing the com­po­si­tion­al ser­vices of exper­i­men­tal musi­cians Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, it gives even us non-synes­thetes a chance to expe­ri­ence the inter­sec­tion of sound and not just col­or but shape as well, in some­thing of the same man­ner as the pio­neer­ing abstract painter must have.

As explained in the Lis­ten­ing In video above, Kandin­sky heard yel­low as a trum­pet, red as a vio­lin, and blue as an organ. An image of suf­fi­cient chro­mat­ic and for­mal vari­ety must have set off a sym­pho­ny in his head, much like the one Play a Kandin­sky gives us a chance to con­duct. As an inter­face it uses his 1925 paint­ing Yel­low-Red-Blue, each ele­ment of which, when clicked, adds anoth­er synes­thet­ic lay­er of sound to the mix. These visu­al-son­ic cor­re­spon­dences are based on Kandin­sky’s own col­or the­o­ries as well as the music he would have heard, all processed with the for­mi­da­ble machine-learn­ing resources at Google’s com­mand. “What was he try­ing to make us feel with this paint­ing?” Play a Kandin­sky asks. But of course he did­n’t have just one set of emo­tions in mind for his view­ers, and mak­ing that pos­si­ble was per­haps the most endur­ing achieve­ment of his jour­ney into abstrac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Real­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a His­toric Bauhaus The­atre Pro­duc­tion (1928)

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

An Artist with Synes­the­sia Turns Jazz & Rock Clas­sics Into Col­or­ful Abstract Paint­ings

Artist Turns Famous Paint­ings, from Raphael to Mon­et to Licht­en­stein, Into Inno­v­a­tive Sound­scapes

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.

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