Is the Viral “Red Dress” Music Video a Sociological Experiment? Performance Art? Or Something Else?

in Life, Media, Music | August 4th, 2021

Before it set itself on fire, HBO’s Game of Thrones res­onat­ed deeply with con­tem­po­rary moral­i­ty, becom­ing the most meme-wor­thy of shows, for good or ill, online. Few scenes in the show’s run — per­haps not even the Red Wed­ding or the nau­se­at­ing finale — elicit­ed as much gut-lev­el reac­tion as Cer­sei Lannister’s naked walk of shame in the Sea­son 5 finale, a scene all the more res­o­nant as it hap­pened to be based on real events.

In 1483, one of King Edward IV’s many mis­tress­es, Jane Shore, was marched through London’s streets by his broth­er Richard III, “while crowds of peo­ple watched, yelling and sham­ing her. She wasn’t total­ly naked,” notes Men­tal Floss, “but by the stan­dards of the day, she might as well have been,” wear­ing noth­ing but a kir­tle, a “thin shift of linen meant to be worn only as an under­gar­ment.”

What are the stan­dards of our day? And what is the pun­ish­ment for vio­lat­ing them? Sarah Brand seemed to be ask­ing these ques­tions when she post­ed “Red Dress,” a music video show­cas­ing her less than stel­lar singing tal­ents inside Oxford’s North Gate Church. In less than a month, the video has gar­nered well over half a mil­lion views, “impres­sive for a musi­cian with hard­ly any social media foot­print or fan base,” Kate Fowler writes at Newsweek.

“It takes only a few sec­onds,” Fowler gen­er­ous­ly remarks, “to real­ize that Brand may not have the voice of an angel.” Or, as one clever com­menter put it, “She is actu­al­ly hit­ting all the notes… only of oth­er songs. And at ran­dom.” Is she ludi­crous­ly un-self-aware, an heiress with delu­sions of grandeur, a sad casu­al­ty of celebri­ty cul­ture, forc­ing her­self into a role that doesn’t fit? Or does she know exact­ly what she’s doing…

The judg­ments of medieval mobs have noth­ing on the inter­net, Brand sug­gests. “Red Dress” presents what she calls “a cin­e­mat­ic, holis­tic por­tray­al of judg­ment,” one that includes inter­net sham­ing in its cal­cu­la­tions. Giv­en the amount of online ran­cor and ridicule her video pro­voked, it “did what it set out to do,” she tells the BBC. And giv­en that Brand is cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a master’s degree in soci­ol­o­gy at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, many won­der if the project is a soci­o­log­i­cal exper­i­ment for cred­it. She isn’t say­ing.

Jane Shore’s walk end­ed with years locked in prison. Brand offered her­self up for the scorn and hatred of the mobs. No one is point­ing a pike at her back. She paid for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing peo­ple laugh at her, and she’s espe­cial­ly enjoy­ing “some very, very wit­ty com­ments” (like those above). She’s also very much aware that she is “no pro­fes­sion­al singer.”

The style in which I sing the song was impor­tant because it reflect­ed the sto­ry. The vocals don’t seem to quite fit, they seem out of place and they make peo­ple uncom­fort­able… and the video is this out­sider doing things dif­fer­ent­ly and caus­ing dis­com­fort and elic­it­ing all this judge­ment.

All of this is vol­un­tary per­for­mance art, in a sense, though Brand has shown pre­vi­ous aspi­ra­tions on social media to become a singer, and per­haps faced sim­i­lar ridicule invol­un­tar­i­ly. “Part of what this project deals with,” she says, is judg­ment “over­all as a cen­tral theme.” She cred­its her­self as the direc­tor, pro­duc­er, chore­o­g­ra­ph­er, and edi­tor and made every cre­ative deci­sion, to the bemuse­ment of the actors, crew, and stu­dio musi­cians. Yet choos­ing to endure the gaunt­let does not make the gaunt­let less real, she sug­gests.

The shame rained down on Shore was part misog­y­ny, part pent-up rage over injus­tice direct­ed at a hat­ed bet­ter. When any­one can pre­tend (or pre­tend to pre­tend) to be a celebri­ty with a few hun­dred bucks for cin­e­matog­ra­phy and audio pro­duc­tion, the bound­aries between our “bet­ters” and our­selves get fuzzy. When young women are expect­ed to become brands, to live up to celebri­ty lev­els of online pol­ish for social recog­ni­tion, self-expres­sion, or employ­ment, the lines between choice and com­pul­sion blur. With whom do we iden­ti­fy in scenes of pub­lic sham­ing?

Brand is coy in her sum­ma­tion. “Judg­men­tal behav­ior does hurt the world,” she says, “and that is what I’m try­ing to bring to light with this project.” Judge for your­self in the video above and the … inter­est­ing… lyrics to “Red Dress” below.

 

Came to church to praise all love
Sit­ting, com­ing for some­one else
It didn’t stew well for me
But I said it was a lover’s deed

Didn’t trust my own feels
Let some­one else behind my wheel
Said it was love dri­ving me
But the only one who should steer is me

Cuz what they saw

They see me in a red dress
Hop­ping on the dev­il fest
Think­ing of lust
As they judge in dis­gust
What are you doing here?

They see me in a red dress
Hop­ping on the dev­il fest
Think­ing of lust
As I judge in dis­gust
What am I doing here?

Let­tin’ some­one else steer

I saw a love, pre­cious and fine
Thought I should do any­thing for time 
Time to change the hearts and minds
Of peo­ple not like me in break or stride

Shouldn’t be me, try­ing to change
Thought I’d be some­thing if I remained 
It just ain’t me singing of sins
Watch­ing exclu­sion get­ting its wins

Cuz what they saw

They see me in a red dress
Hop­ping on the dev­il fest
Think­ing of lust
As they judge in dis­gust
What are you doing here?

They see me in a red dress
Hop­ping on the dev­il fest
Think­ing of lust
As I judge in dis­gust
What am I doing here?

Let­tin’ some­one else steer

Came to church 
To praise love
Com­ing for
Some­one else

But all the eyes
Judg­ing in dis­guise
They don’t see me
Just the lies

They see me in a red dress
No dif­fer­ent from the rest
Start­ing to trust
As they join in a rush
What are we doing here?

They see me in a red dress
No dif­fer­ent from the rest
Start­ing to trust
As I lose my dis­gust
What am I doing here?

Strik­ing the fear

They see me in a red dress

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

The 15 Worst Cov­ers of Bea­t­les Songs: William Shat­ner, Bill Cos­by, Tiny Tim, Sean Con­nery & Your Excel­lent Picks

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

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

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How Steven Van Zandt Organized the Sun City Boycott and Helped Catalyze the Anti-Apartheid Movement (1985)

in Music, Politics | August 3rd, 2021

Actor and musi­cian Steven Van Zandt — known to Spring­steen fans as E Street Band gui­tarist Lit­tle Steven — played the steady voice of rea­son Sil­vio Dante on The Sopra­nos. With­out his guid­ing hand and sense of style, Tony would not have made it as far as he did. How much of Steven Van Zandt was in Sil­vio? Maybe a lot. As Van Zandt told Vice in a 2019 inter­view, he invent­ed the char­ac­ter and gave it to David Chase, who turned his vision of “big bands, cho­rus girls, Jew­ish Catskills comics” into the Bada Bing, a “strip club for the fam­i­ly.”

It’s not hard to imag­ine Sil­vio in his shiny suits get­ting onstage with the Boss, but he would nev­er have played Van Zandt’s role as an anti-racist activist. After leav­ing the E Street Band in 1984, Van Zandt start­ed orga­niz­ing musi­cians against apartheid for what would become an unprece­dent­ed action against Sun City, “a ritzy, whites only resort in South Africa,” Josh Haskell writes at ABC News, “that Van Zandt and his group Artists Unit­ed Against Apartheid decid­ed to boy­cott.”

Van Zandt and leg­endary hip hop pro­duc­er Arthur Bak­er brought togeth­er what rock crit­ic Dave Marsh calls “the most diverse line up of pop­u­lar musi­cians ever assem­bled for a sin­gle ses­sion” to record “Sun City,” a song that “raised aware­ness about apartheid,” says Haskell, “dur­ing a time in the 1980s when many Amer­i­cans weren’t aware of what was hap­pen­ing.” It wasn’t dif­fi­cult to bury the news pre-inter­net. Since the South African gov­ern­ment received tac­it sup­port from U.S. cor­po­ra­tions and the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, there was hard­ly a rush to char­ac­ter­ize the coun­try too neg­a­tive­ly in the media.

Van Zandt him­self remem­bered being “shocked to find real­ly slav­ery going on and this very bril­liant but evil strat­e­gy called apartheid,” he said in 2013. “At the time, it was quite coura­geous for the artists to be on this record. We crossed a line from social con­cerns to polit­i­cal con­cerns.” The list of famous artists involved in the record­ing ses­sions and video is too long to repro­duce, but it notably includ­ed hip-hop and rock roy­al­ty like Bruce Spring­steen, DJ Kool Herc, Bob Dylan, Pat Benatar, Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Run D.M.C., Peter Gabriel, Kur­tis Blow, Bono, Kei­th Richards, Bon­nie Raitt, Joey Ramone, Gil Scott-Heron, and Bob Geld­of.

As with oth­er occa­sion­al super­groups assem­bled at the time (by Geld­of) to raise funds and/or aware­ness for glob­al caus­es, there’s a too-many-cooks feel to the results, but the music is sec­ondary to the mes­sage. Even so, “Sun City” turned out to be a pio­neer­ing crossover track: “too black for white radio and too white for black radio,” says Van Zandt. Instead, it hit its stride on tele­vi­sion in the ear­ly days of MTV and BET: “They real­ly embraced it and played it a lot. Con­gress­men and sen­a­tors’ chil­dren were com­ing up to them and telling them about apartheid and what they saw hap­pen­ing in South Africa. That put us over the edge.”

When pop, punk, rock, and hip-hop artists linked arms, it “re-ener­gized the whole anti-apartheid move­ment, says Van Zandt, which had kind of hit a wall at that point and was not get­ting much trac­tion.” Unlike oth­er super­group protest songs, “Sun City” also gave its lis­ten­ers an inci­sive polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion, sum­ming up the sit­u­a­tion in the lyrics. You can see a 1985 doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the song just above. “The refrain of ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City’ is a sim­ple one,” notes the Zinn Edu­ca­tion Project, “but the issues raised in the song and film are not.” See the lyrics (along with the artists who sang the lines) here, and learn more about the his­to­ry of South African apartheid at the Zinn Ed Project.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When South Africa Banned Pink Floyd’s The Wall After Stu­dents Chant­ed “We Don’t Need No Edu­ca­tion” to Protest the Apartheid School Sys­tem (1980)

Peter Gabriel Re-Records “Biko,” His Anti-Apartheid Protest Song, with Musi­cians Around the World

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Robben Island Where Nel­son Man­dela and Oth­er Apartheid Oppo­nents Were Jailed

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

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The Cramps Legendary Concert at a California Psychiatric Hospital Gets Revisited in the New Documentary, We Were There to Be There: Watch It Online

in Music | August 2nd, 2021

“Some­body told me you peo­ple are crazy, but I’m  not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me.” — Lux Inte­ri­or

In the late 1970s and ear­ly 1980s, “San Fran­cis­co was a much more con­ser­v­a­tive place,” says Colum­bia University’s Lin­coln Mitchell in the doc­u­men­tary above, We Were There to Be There. The new film chron­i­cles the leg­endary 1978 appear­ance of psy­chobil­ly punks The Cramps and SF-based art-rock­ers The Mutants at the Napa State Hos­pi­tal, an his­toric psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty in the famous wine-grow­ing area. At the time, Cal­i­for­ni­a’s for­mer gov­er­nor Ronald Rea­gan was con­tend­ing for the pres­i­den­cy after slash­ing social ser­vices at the state lev­el.

There were few polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies in the area for those con­fined to Napa State, as the new doc­u­men­tary above by Mike Plante and Jason Willis shows. Pro­duced by Field of Vision, the film “explores the events that led to CBGB main­stays the Cramps dri­ving over 3,000 miles to per­form,” notes Rolling Stone’s Claire Shaf­fer. We Were There to Be There begins with this cru­cial socio-polit­i­cal con­text, remem­ber­ing the show as “both a land­mark moment for punk rock and for the per­cep­tion of men­tal health care with­in U.S. pop­u­lar cul­ture.”

The doc also explores how the per­for­mances could have made such an impact, when they were “seen by almost no one,” as Phil Bar­ber writes at Vice: “about a dozen devot­ed punkers who drove up with the bands from San Fran­cis­co, and per­haps 100 or 200 patients.” Indeed, the show’s mem­o­ry only sur­vived thanks to “about 20 min­utes of footage of The Cramps’ set shot by a small oper­a­tion called Tar­get Video,” a col­lec­tive formed the pre­vi­ous year by video artist Joe Rees and col­lab­o­ra­tors Jill Hoff­man, Jack­ie Sharp, and Sam Edwards.

The show came about through Howie Klein, a fix­ture of the San Fran­cis­co punk scene who wrote for local zines and booked the club Mabuhay Gar­dens before becom­ing pres­i­dent of Reprise Records. Napa State’s new direc­tor Bart Swain had been stag­ing con­certs for the res­i­dents. Klein promised to send an ear­ly new wave band but sent The Mutants and The Cramps instead, to Swain’s ini­tial dis­may. (He was sure he would be fired after the show.)

Released in 1984, the edit­ed Tar­get release opens with a shot of an atom­ic blast and doesn’t let up. “Maybe you’ve seen the video. If so, you haven’t for­got­ten it,” writes Bar­ber: “The black-and-white images are dis­tort­ed and poor­ly lit. The audio is rough. It’s a trans­fix­ing spec­ta­cle. The Cramps make no attempt to paci­fy their men­tal­ly ill admir­ers. Nor do they wink at some inside joke. They just rip.”

Tar­get Video toured the U.S. and Europe, screen­ing its polit­i­cal­ly-charged punk con­cert films for eager young kids in the Reagan/Thatcher era, who saw a very dif­fer­ent approach to treat­ing peo­ple suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness in the footage from Napa State. The doc­u­men­tary includes inter­views with the Mutants, whose per­for­mance did­n’t make it on film, and fix­tures of the San Fran­cis­co scene like Vicky Vale, pub­lish­er of RE/Search, who pro­vide crit­i­cal com­men­tary on the event.

Despite its rep­u­ta­tion as a bizarre nov­el­ty gig, the show came off as con­trolled chaos — just like any oth­er Cramps gig. “It was a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful thing,” says Jill Hoff­man-Kow­al of Tar­get Video. “What we did for those peo­ple, it was lib­er­at­ing. They had so much fun. They pre­tend­ed they were singing, they were jump­ing on stage. It was a cou­ple hours of total free­dom. They did­n’t judge the band, and the band did­n’t judge them.”

We Were There to Be There will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Cramps Play a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal in Napa, Cal­i­for­nia in 1978: The Punk­est of Punk Con­certs

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

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

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Take an Intellectual Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

in Computer Science, Creativity, Math, MIT, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology | August 2nd, 2021

In 1979, math­e­mati­cian Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Esch­er, and com­pos­er J.S. Bach walked into a book title, and you may well know the rest. Dou­glas R. Hof­s­tadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: an Eter­nal Gold­en Braid, his first book, thence­forth (and hence­forth) known as GEB. The extra­or­di­nary work is not a trea­tise on math­e­mat­ics, art, or music, but an essay on cog­ni­tion through an explo­ration of all three — and of for­mal sys­tems, recur­sion, self-ref­er­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, etc. Its pub­lish­er set­tled on the pithy descrip­tion, “a metaphor­i­cal fugue on minds and machines in the spir­it of Lewis Car­roll.”

GEB attempt­ed to reveal the mind at work; the minds of extra­or­di­nary indi­vid­u­als, for sure, but also all human minds, which behave in sim­i­lar­ly unfath­omable ways. One might also describe the book as oper­at­ing in the spir­it — and the prac­tice — of Her­man Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a nov­el Hesse wrote in response to the data-dri­ven machi­na­tions of fas­cism and their threat to an intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion he held par­tic­u­lar­ly dear. An alter­nate title (and key phrase in the book) Mag­is­ter Ludi, puns on both “game” and “school,” and alludes to the impor­tance of play and free asso­ci­a­tion in the life of the mind.

Hesse’s eso­teric game, writes his biog­ra­ph­er Ralph Freed­man, con­sists of “con­tem­pla­tion, the secrets of the Chi­nese I Ching and West­ern math­e­mat­ics and music” and seems sim­i­lar enough to Hof­s­tadter’s approach and that of the instruc­tors of MIT’s open course, Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey. Offered through the High School Stud­ies Pro­gram as a non-cred­it enrich­ment course, it promis­es “an intel­lec­tu­al vaca­tion” through “Zen Bud­dhism, Log­ic, Meta­math­e­mat­ics, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Recur­sion, Com­plex Sys­tems, Con­scious­ness, Music and Art.”

Stu­dents will not study direct­ly the work of Gödel, Esch­er, and Bach but rather “find their spir­its aboard our men­tal ship,” the course descrip­tion notes, through con­tem­pla­tions of canons, fugues, strange loops, and tan­gled hier­ar­chies. How do mean­ing and form arise in sys­tems like math and music? What is the rela­tion­ship of fig­ure to ground in art? “Can recur­sion explain cre­ativ­i­ty,” as one of the course notes asks. Hof­s­tadter him­self has pur­sued the ques­tion beyond the entrench­ment of AI research in big data and brute force machine learn­ing. For all his daunt­ing eru­di­tion and chal­leng­ing syn­the­ses, we must remem­ber that he is play­ing a high­ly intel­lec­tu­al game, one that repli­cates his own expe­ri­ence of think­ing.

Hof­s­tadter sug­gests that before we can under­stand intel­li­gence, we must first under­stand cre­ativ­i­ty. It may reveal its secrets in com­par­a­tive analy­ses of the high­est forms of intel­lec­tu­al play, where we see the clever for­mal rules that gov­ern the mind’s oper­a­tions; the blind alleys that explain its fail­ures and lim­i­ta­tions; and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever actu­al­ly repro­duc­ing work­ings in a machine. Watch the lec­tures above, grab a copy of Hofstadter’s book, and find course notes, read­ings, and oth­er resources for the fas­ci­nat­ing course Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey archived here. The course will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

The Mir­ror­ing Mind: An Espres­so-Fueled Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dou­glas Hofstadter’s Ground­break­ing Ideas

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

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757 Episodes of the Classic TV Game Show What’s My Line?: Watch Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, Salvador Dali & More

in Games, Music, Politics, Science, Television | July 30th, 2021

What would the host and pan­elists of the clas­sic prime­time tele­vi­sion game show What’s My Line? have made of The Masked Singer, a more recent offer­ing in which pan­elists attempt to iden­ti­fy celebri­ty con­tes­tants who are con­cealed by elab­o­rate head-to-toe cos­tumes and elec­tron­i­cal­ly altered voiceovers.

One expects such shenani­gans might have struck them as a bit uncouth.

Host John Charles Daly was will­ing to keep the ball up in the air by answer­ing the panel’s ini­tial ques­tions for a Mys­tery Guest with a wide­ly rec­og­niz­able voice, but it’s hard to imag­ine any­one stuff­ing for­mer First Lady Eleanor Roo­sev­elt into the full body steam­punk bee suit the (SPOILER) Empress of Soul wore on The Masked Singer’s first sea­son.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s Oct 18, 1953 appear­ance is a delight, espe­cial­ly her pan­tomimed dis­gust at the 17:29 mark, above, when blind­fold­ed pan­elist Arlene Fran­cis asks if she’s asso­ci­at­ed with pol­i­tics, and Daly jumps in to reply yes on her behalf.

Lat­er on, you get a sense of what play­ing a jol­ly par­lor game with Mrs. Roo­sevelt would have been like. She’s not above fudg­ing her answers a bit, and very near­ly wrig­gles with antic­i­pa­tion as anoth­er pan­elist, jour­nal­ist Dorothy Kil­gallen, begins to home in on the truth.

While the ros­ter of Mys­tery Guests over the show’s orig­i­nal 17-year broad­cast is impres­sive — Cab Cal­loway, Judy Gar­land, and Edward R. Mur­row to name a few — every episode also boast­ed two or three civil­ians hop­ing to stump the sophis­ti­cat­ed pan­el with their pro­fes­sion.

Mrs. Roo­sevelt was pre­ced­ed by a bath­tub sales­man and a fel­low involved in the man­u­fac­ture of Blood­hound Chew­ing Tobac­co, after which there was just enough time for a woman who wrote tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials.

Non-celebri­ty guests stood to earn up to $50 (over $500 today) by pro­long­ing the rev­e­la­tion of their pro­fes­sions, as com­pared to the Mys­tery Guests who received an appear­ance fee of ten times that, win or lose. (Pre­sum­ably, Mrs. Roo­sevelt was one of those to donate her hon­o­rar­i­um.)

The reg­u­lar pan­elists were paid “scan­dalous amounts of mon­ey” as per pub­lish­er Ben­nett Cerf, whose “rep­u­ta­tion as a nim­ble-wit­ted gen­tle­man-about-town was rein­forced by his tenure on What’s My Line?”, accord­ing to Colum­bia University’s Oral His­to­ry Research Office.

The unscript­ed urbane ban­ter kept view­ers tun­ing in. Broad­way actor Fran­cis recalled: “I got so much plea­sure out of ‘What’s My Line?’ There were no rehearsals. You’d just sit there and be your­self and do the best you could.”

Pan­elist Steve Allen is cred­it­ed with spon­ta­neous­ly alight­ing on a bread­box as a unit of com­par­a­tive mea­sure­ment while ques­tion­ing a man­hole cov­er sales­man in an episode that fea­tured June Hav­oc, leg­end of stage and screen as the Mys­tery Guest (at at 23:57, below).

“Want to show us your bread­box, Steve?” one of the female pan­elists fires back off-cam­era.

The phrase “is it big­ger than a bread­box” went on to become a run­ning joke, fur­ther con­tribut­ing to the illu­sion that view­ers had been invit­ed to a fash­ion­able cock­tail par­ty where glam­orous New York scene­mak­ers dressed up to play 21 Pro­fes­sion­al Ques­tions with ordi­nary mor­tals and a celebri­ty guest.

Jazz great Louis Arm­strong appeared on the show twice, in 1954 and then again in 1964, when he employed a suc­cess­ful tech­nique of light mono­syl­lab­ic respons­es to trick the same pan­elists who had iden­ti­fied him quick­ly on his ini­tial out­ing.

“Are you relat­ed to any­body that has any­thing to do with What’s My Line?” Cerf asks, caus­ing Arm­strong, host Daly, and the stu­dio audi­ence to dis­solve with laugh­ter.

“What hap­pened?” Arlene Fran­cis cries from under her pearl-trimmed mask, not want­i­ng to miss the joke.

Tele­vi­sion — and Amer­i­ca itself — was a long way off from acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of inter­ra­cial fam­i­lies.

“It’s not Van Clyburn, is it?” Fran­cis ven­tures a cou­ple of min­utes lat­er.…

Expect the usu­al gen­der-based assump­tions of the peri­od, but also appear­ances by Mary G. Ross, a Chero­kee aero­space engi­neer, and physi­cist Helen P. Mann, a data ana­lyst at Cape Canaver­al.

If you find the con­vivial atmos­phere of this sem­i­nal Good­son-Tod­man game show absorb­ing, there are 757 episodes avail­able for view­ing on What’s My Line?’s YouTube chan­nel.

Allow us to kick things off on a Sur­re­al Note with Mys­tery Guest Sal­vador Dali, after which you can browse chrono­log­i­cal playlists as you see fit:

1950–54

1955–57

1958–60

1961 ‑63

1964–65

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

How Amer­i­can Band­stand Changed Amer­i­can Cul­ture: Revis­it Scenes from the Icon­ic Music Show

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophis­ti­ca­tion to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Clas­sic Inter­views Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Don Felder Plays “Hotel California” at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a Double-Neck Guitar

in Music | July 30th, 2021

Pete Town­shend played one. Jim­my Page famous­ly bran­dished one. John McLaugh­lin basi­cal­ly start­ed his own post-Miles Davis jazz group based around one. But the dou­ble-neck gui­tar played by Don Felder on The Eagles “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” may be the best known to all the chil­dren of the 1970s. The white gui­tar went on dis­play in 2019 for the exhi­bi­tion “Play It Loud” at New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, which also fea­tured such his­tor­i­cal instru­ments as the hum­ble Mar­tin acoustic that Elvis Pres­ley played on the Sun Ses­sions, to Eddie Van Halen’s Franken­stein gui­tar. (And in a bit of DADA sculp­ture, the Met also dis­played the remains of a drum set that Kei­th Moon destroyed dur­ing a live gig.)

As part of the exhibit’s pro­mo­tion­al tour, Don Felder, long since out of the Eagles and with a law­suit behind him, picked up the gui­tar for a few min­utes on CBS This Morn­ing and played both the intro acoustic pick­ing part and the famous solo from “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia.’ Even though he isn’t mic’d up, you can still hear him singing along. He gives a cheek­i­ly sat­is­fied laugh at the end.

“Hotel Cal­i­for­nia”, the music at least, is all Don Felder. It began life as one of many demos and sketch­es he’d record while liv­ing in a Mal­ibu rental and look­ing after his one-year-old daugh­ter. This one was giv­en the short­hand title “Mex­i­can Reg­gae” as it com­bined a lit­tle bit of each. Don Hen­ley and Glenn Frey spot­ted its poten­tial imme­di­ate­ly, and wrote some of their best lyrics, both very spe­cif­ic (“Her mind is Tiffany twist­ed” is about Henley’s jew­el­ry design­er ex-girl­friend) and universal—-California, the state of mind, the fame machine, is the Isle of the Lotus Eaters, seduc­tive and destruc­tive.

The demo and the stu­dio record­ing did not use the Gib­son EDS-1275, but Felder pur­chased the gui­tar to use on tour.

Felder told The Sound NZ:

“When I got to the sound­stage to rehearse how we were going to go out and play the ‘Hotel Cal­i­for­nia’ tour, I said, ‘How am I going to play all these gui­tars with dif­fer­ent sounds?’ So I sent a gui­tar tech out to a music store and said, ‘Just buy a dou­ble neck with a 12-string and a six-string on it, I’ll see if I can make it work. So he brought it back, he brought back this white gui­tar, and I said, ‘Why did you get a white one? Why did­n’t you get a black one or a red one? Why so girly look­ing?’. He said, ‘That’s all they had.’ So I took a drill, drilled a hole at the top of it, wired it, so it was real­ly two sep­a­rate gui­tars,”

“Girly” or not—-sigh, Mr. Felder, sighhh—-that gui­tar still sounds pret­ty damn good.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What the Eagles’ “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” Real­ly Means

The Hor­rors of Bull Island, “the Worst Music Fes­ti­val of All Time” (1972)

Watch The Band Play “The Weight,” “Up On Crip­ple Creek” and More in Rare 1970 Con­cert Footage

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.

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How ABBA Won Eurovision and Became International Pop Stars (1974)

in Music | July 27th, 2021

Euro­vi­sion, the flashy orig­i­nal song con­test that cap­ti­vates Euro­peans, tends to get round­ly mocked in the U.S., where we choose our stars by hav­ing them sing oth­er people’s songs on TV in ridicu­lous cos­tumes. Nonethe­less, Amer­i­cans have fall­en in love with many a con­test win­ner, and that’s no more true than in the case of ABBA, the Swedish pop-dis­co jug­ger­naut who broke through to inter­na­tion­al star­dom when they won in 1974 with “Water­loo,” cho­sen twice as the great­est song in the competition’s his­to­ry.

The two cou­ples — Agnetha Fält­skog and Björn Ulvaus; Ben­ny Ander­s­son and Anni-Frid Lyn­gstad — first formed as Fes­t­folket (“Par­ty Peo­ple”) in 1970, and Ulvaus and Ander­s­son began sub­mit­ting songs to Swedish nation­al con­test Melod­ifes­ti­valen. In 1973, they sub­mit­ted “Ring Ring,” final­ly placed third, then released an album called Ring Ring as Björn & Ben­ny, Agnetha & Fri­da. They had tak­en on a new glam rock look and sound, and the album was a hit in parts of Europe and South Africa, but didn’t break the UK and US charts.

It was time for anoth­er name change, an ana­gram formed from the first let­ters of their first names. (They were oblig­ed to ask per­mis­sion from a local fish can­nery called Abba, who agreed on con­di­tion the band didn’t make the can­ners “feel ashamed for what you’re doing.”) The name, pro­duc­er Stig Ander­son thought, would trans­late inter­na­tion­al­ly, and the band would sing in Eng­lish for their next sin­gle, the song that would launch their rapid ascent into seem­ing­ly eter­nal rel­e­vance.

How did “Water­loo” not only break ABBA into star­dom but also “rein­vent pop music” as we know it? As the Poly­phon­ic video at the top explains, it did far more than raise the bar for every Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance since. ABBA brought glam, glit­ter, and the­atri­cal bom­bast into pop, using Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” stu­dio tech­niques to coax an enor­mous, envelop­ing sound from their vocal har­monies, gui­tars, pianos, horns, drums, etc., and tak­ing heavy inspi­ra­tion from Eng­lish band Wizzard’s song “See My Baby Jive,” while “pulling back on the rock” and lean­ing into clean­er, more dance-floor-friend­ly pro­duc­tion.

ABBA wise­ly put Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s vocal har­monies in the cen­ter, and they took a decid­ed­ly quirky turn from glam rock’s love of sleazy come-ons and songs about aliens. Orig­i­nal­ly called “Hon­ey Pie,” the band’s break­out hit became “Water­loo” when Stig Ander­son turned it into an odd ref­er­ence to Napoleon’s sur­ren­der, “such a nov­el con­ceit for a song that it’s hard to for­get.” ABBA con­tin­ued this tra­di­tion in short sto­ry-songs like “Fer­nan­do,” first writ­ten with dif­fer­ent lyrics in Swedish for Lyn­gstad, then rewrit­ten in Eng­lish by Ulvaeus as a tale about two old cam­paign­ers from the Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can War.

Smart song­writ­ing, catchy hooks, impec­ca­ble vocal har­monies, and flashy beau­ty — once the world saw and heard ABBA, few could resist them. But it took their unique­ly the­atri­cal (at the time) Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance to break them out, as Ulvaeus says. “We knew that the Euro­vi­sion Song Con­test was the only route for a Swedish group to make it out­side Swe­den.” The win was huge, but the con­test was a means to an end. True val­i­da­tion came with hit after hit, as ABBA proved them­selves indis­pens­able to wed­ding dance floors every­where and “com­plete­ly trans­formed what it meant to be a pop star.” See their orig­i­nal Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance of “Water­loo” just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to ABBA’s “Danc­ing Queen” Played on a 1914 Fair­ground Organ

When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musi­cal, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Pro­duced for the The­atre” (1984)

This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mam­ma Mia” in a Big Cold Riv­er

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

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The Making of a Violin from Start to Finish: Watch a French Luthier Practice a Time-Honored Craft

in Music | July 27th, 2021

Two fam­i­lies have been cred­it­ed with mak­ing the great­est vio­lins of the clas­si­cal peri­od: the Stradi­vari and the Guarneri. The first luthiers with those names were trained in the work­shops of the Amati fam­i­ly, whose patri­arch, Andrea, found­ed a lega­cy in Cre­mona in the mid 1500s when he gave the vio­lin the form we know today, invent­ing f‑holes and per­fect­ing the gen­er­al shape and size of the instru­ment and oth­ers in its fam­i­ly.

But there’s far more to the sto­ry of the vio­lin than its famous Ital­ian mak­er names sug­gest, though these still stand for the height of qual­i­ty and pres­tige. Vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ters arose else­where in Europe soon after the Stradi­vari and Guarneri set up shop. In France, the town of Mire­court became “syn­ony­mous with French vio­lins and the craft,” notes Corilon vio­lins.

From 1732 on, French Mire­court crafts­men fol­lowed the strict rules of their guild to uphold their high stan­dards, and appren­tices trained there were in demand far beyond the con­fines of the town. They fre­quent­ly went on to found their own stu­dios in oth­er cities, espe­cial­ly Paris. Some­times they lat­er returned to Mire­court after sev­er­al years of suc­cess else­where. As a result the local art of mak­ing French vio­lins had a strong effect on the out­side world, whilst at the same time incor­po­rat­ing oth­er influ­ences. 

Famous Mire­court mak­ers includ­ed Nico­las Lupot, called “the French Stradi­var­ius.” The pri­ma­ry influ­ence came from Cre­mona, but “impor­tant tech­ni­cal insights were adapt­ed from Ger­man vio­lin mak­ing.”

The city entered a new phase when Didi­er Nico­las became the first to man­u­fac­ture vio­lins seri­al­ly in Mire­court at the turn of the 19th cen­tu­ry. His fac­to­ry “employed some 600 peo­ple, mak­ing his busi­ness the first large-scale oper­a­tion of its kind in the tra­di­tion-rich town in north­ern Frances Vos­ges moun­tains,” and inau­gu­rat­ing an indus­tri­al peri­od that would last until the late 1960s.

The post-indus­tri­al late-20th cen­tu­ry saw the col­lapse of Mire­court’s great vio­lin-mak­ing com­pa­nies, but not the end of the city’s fame as France’s vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ter, thanks in great part to Nico­las’ found­ing of L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie, “where excel­lent mas­ters and vio­lin mak­ers keep the time-hon­ored art alive and dynam­ic.” The city’s “guild her­itage” lives on in the work of con­tem­po­rary mak­ers like Dominique Nicosia.

A mas­ter luthi­er and instruc­tor at the school in Mire­court, Nicosia shows us in the video at the top the time-hon­ored tech­niques employed in the mak­ing of vio­lins in France for hun­dreds of years, using met­al tools he also makes him­self. Watch the tra­di­tion come alive, learn more about the famous vio­lin-mak­ing city, which remains the bow-mak­ing cap­i­tal of the world here, and see Nicosia pass his skills and knowl­edge to a new gen­er­a­tion in the video above from L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Watch the World’s Old­est Vio­lin in Action: Mar­co Rizzi Per­forms Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 on a 1566 Amati Vio­lin

Behold the “3Dvarius,” the World’s First 3‑D Print­ed Vio­lin

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

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