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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They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell Releases an EP of Songs in Latin

in Language, Music | July 20th, 2021

Those who know Latin know Wheelock’s Latin as the time-hon­ored resource for learn­ing the lan­guage of the Cae­sars. They also know how many years of inten­sive study and prac­tice goes into trans­lat­ing the textbook’s hefty clas­si­cal pas­sages. Read­ing Latin is one thing — writ­ing in the lan­guage is quite anoth­er: some­thing very few peo­ple do for any rea­son, oth­er than a per­verse kind of enjoy­ment that is most def­i­nite­ly a niche affair.

What about songwrit­ing in Latin? Pro­fes­sor Whee­lock doesn’t offer any spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for com­pos­ing pop music in the dead lan­guage, though clas­sics teacher and for­mer British Labour Par­ty MP Eddie O’Hara once trans­lat­ed Bea­t­les songs (see “O Teneum Manum” and “Dei Duri Nox” here). For a more casu­al approach, one could turn to a resource more in line with con­tem­po­rary teach­ing meth­ods — Duolin­go, where you can “learn a lan­guage for free. For­ev­er.”

For some rea­son, John Lin­nell, one of the two Johns in 90s alt-rock band They Might Be Giants, decid­ed on the Duolin­go approach while hun­kered down at home dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, and — because he’s a song­writer, and a right good one, at that — he decid­ed to com­pose some catchy pop songs in Latin. Catchy, he could do (I’m still singing the cho­rus of “Bird­house in Your Soul” thir­ty-two years lat­er.) But the Latin, not so much.

After tak­ing a short course, Lin­nell writes, “I fig­ured I could write a few songs… I was soon dis­abused of the notion. I can bare­ly string two words togeth­er in Latin, and to bor­row from Mark Twain, I would rather decline two drinks than one Latin noun.” A career Latin­ist and child­hood friend Lin­nell calls “School­mas­ter Smith” came to his aid, trans­lat­ing his Eng­lish lyrics into Latin for him. “All cred­it for any suc­cess in this project is due to him,” he avers, “and any mis­takes and fail­ures are entire­ly mine.”

Trapped at home with his son Hen­ry, who played gui­tar on the 4‑track EP, Lin­nell record­ed and released Roman Songs (along with a t‑shirt!). Why? “All I can tell you,” he shrugs, “is that I’m deeply jeal­ous of peo­ple who are flu­ent in a sec­ond lan­guage and can apply that skill to their cre­ative work in a way that doesn’t seem like cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion of the most offen­sive and embar­rass­ing kind.”

No ancient Romans around to accuse Lin­nell of steal­ing their cul­ture, but they’d be hard pressed to rec­og­nize if they were. “HAEC QVOQVE EST RES” (“This is Also the Case”) and “TECVM CIRCVMAMBVLARE NOLO” (“I Don’t Want to Walk Around with You”) sound like clas­sic They Might Be Giants tunes. (The oth­er John, Mr. Flans­burgh, “strong­ly encour­aged this project and art direct­ed the pack­age,” Lin­nell writes.)

In fact, they sound so much like They Might Be Giants songs, I almost wish they were in Eng­lish, but as a lover of Latin I have to admit, it’s fun to learn these phras­es and melodies and walk around singing them like a Roman pop star. Lin­nell may be a lit­tle in the dark about his moti­va­tions, but I say, good on him: if there’s any way to make Latin live again, this may be it. Now we just need some­one tal­ent­ed and real­ly bored to step up and deliv­er clas­si­cal raps to keep momen­tum going…. Pick up Lin­nel­l’s Roman Songs EP here.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Trans­lat­ed Bea­t­les Songs into Latin for His Stu­dents: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

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

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When Rage Against the Machine Interviewed Noam Chomsky (1999)

in Music, Politics | July 20th, 2021

“The first great [eco­nom­ic] exper­i­ment was a ‘bad idea’ for the sub­jects, but not for the design­ers and local elites asso­ci­at­ed with them. This pat­tern con­tin­ues until the present: plac­ing prof­it over peo­ple.” — Noam Chom­sky, Prof­it Over Peo­ple

“A glob­al decom­po­si­tion is tak­ing place. We call it the Fourth World War: neoliberalism’s glob­al­iza­tion attempt to elim­i­nate that mul­ti­tude of peo­ple who are not use­ful to the pow­er­ful — the groups called ‘minori­ties’ in the math­e­mat­ics of pow­er, but who hap­pen to be the major­i­ty pop­u­la­tion in the world.” — Sub­co­man­dante Mar­cos

Whether we think of glob­al neolib­er­al­ism — to the extent that we think about it — as the iner­tia of cen­turies-old eco­nom­ic the­o­ry or as delib­er­ate geno­cide, the effects are the same. The major­i­ty of the world’s pop­u­la­tion suf­fers under mas­sive inequal­i­ty, includ­ing, now, vac­cine inequal­i­ty, lead­ing to rag­ing COVID epi­demics in some parts of the world as oth­er places emerge from lock­downs and resume “nor­mal” oper­a­tions. The “Cap­i­tal­ist Hydra,” as Zap­atista leader Sub­co­man­dante Mar­cos once called it, always seems to grow more heads.

Indeed, most plans to alle­vi­ate glob­al pover­ty and dis­ease seem to fur­ther enrich the archi­tects and immis­er­ate the tar­gets of their pur­port­ed care. Noam Chom­sky has point­ed out repeat­ed­ly that neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic rules are only applied to sub­ject pop­u­la­tions, since the wealthy ignore the strict con­di­tions they impose by force and coer­cion on oth­ers, call­ing the out­comes a nat­ur­al sort­ing of “win­ners and losers.” Ongo­ing glob­al eco­nom­ic prac­tices have accel­er­at­ed a cli­mate cri­sis that impacts the major­i­ty of the world’s (poor) pop­u­la­tion, send­ing mil­lions on a col­li­sion course with bru­tal­i­ty at the bor­ders as they flee to oth­er parts of the world for bare sur­vival.

The mul­ti­ple crises we now face were clear­ly evi­dent at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, when Rage Against the Machine played Mex­i­co City for the first time in 1999. They released the con­cert footage in a video titled The Bat­tle of Mex­i­co City in 2001, the same year the indige­nous guer­ril­la force EZLN — pop­u­lar­ly known as the Zap­atis­tas — marched on Mex­i­co City. (Con­cert audio was released on vinyl this past June.) The video release includ­ed inter­views with Chom­sky and then-EZLN mil­i­tary leader Mar­cos, and you can see them both here.

At the top, Chom­sky responds to a ques­tion about NAFTA, a “free-trade” agree­ment that proved his point about how such poli­cies do the oppo­site of what they pro­pose, ben­e­fit­ting the very few instead of the many. Chom­sky, who ana­lyzed the ways that the gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate media man­u­fac­tured con­sent for their poli­cies dur­ing the Viet­nam War, wasn’t tak­en in by the hype. The agree­ment nev­er had any­thing to do with free trade, he says, but with lock­ing Mex­i­co into pro­grams of “struc­tur­al adjust­ment” that kept peo­ple in pover­ty and the coun­try depen­dent on eco­nom­ic terms dic­tat­ed from out­side its bor­ders.

From the per­spec­tive of the indige­nous peo­ple in Mex­i­co fight­ing for an autonomous region in Chi­a­pas, the strug­gle is not only against the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, but also an inter­na­tion­al eco­nom­ic order that impos­es its will on the coun­try and its cit­i­zens, who then turn on the poor­est and most dis­pos­sessed among them in con­di­tions of man­u­fac­tured scarci­ty. Indige­nous Mex­i­cans, like oth­er inter­nal­ly sub­ject­ed peo­ple around the world, are deemed expend­able, fig­ured as a “prob­lem” to be solved or elim­i­nat­ed. What is so strik­ing about these per­spec­tives, twen­ty years after the release of The Bat­tle of Mex­i­co City, is just how pre­scient, even prophet­ic, they sound today.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Requiem for the Amer­i­can Dream: Noam Chom­sky on the 10 Prin­ci­ples That Have Led to Unprece­dent­ed Inequal­i­ty in the US 

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Ground­break­ing Lin­guis­tic The­o­ries

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

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Neil Young Plays “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Devo: Watch a Classic Scene from the Improvised Movie Human Highway (1980)

in Film, Music | July 19th, 2021

For Neil Young fans, the words “Human High­way” can mean one of three dif­fer­ent things, two of which are so unlike the third, it’s as if they came from dif­fer­ent artists. First, there’s “Human High­way,” the song, one of Young’s gen­tle acoustic rags, with Nico­lette Lar­son­’s soft vocal har­monies and lots of ban­jo and fid­dle. It land­ed on 1978’s Comes a Time but debuted five years ear­li­er, near­ly becom­ing the title track for a CSNY album that nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, a leg­endary fol­low-up to Déjà Vu.

None of this has any­thing to do with Human High­way, the 1980 film direct­ed by Neil Young (as “Bernard Shakey”) and Dean Stock­well, which tells the “sto­ry,” if it can be called, of a crooked din­er own­er in a small town next to a nuclear pow­er plant staffed by the mem­bers of Devo as “nuclear garbageper­sons.” The cast is cult film roy­al­ty: “Den­nis Hop­per is a psy­chot­ic cook named Crack­ers,” notes crit­ic Steven Puchal­s­ki, “Sal­ly Kirk­land is a belea­guered wait­ress; [Stock­well] is the new own­er, Young Otto (son of the late Old Otto); plus Neil Young and Russ Tam­blyn are fright­en­ing­ly con­vinc­ing as two noo­dle-head­ed gas pump oper­a­tors, Lionel and Fred.”

The film is set on the last day before a nuclear apoc­a­lypse, a slap­stick take on the time’s nuclear anx­i­ety and Young’s stance against nuclear pow­er. His nerdy Lionel idol­izes rock star Frankie Fontaine (also Young), then becomes him in a dream sequence full of “wood­en Indi­ans” — his back­ing band. He then jams out with Devo for ten min­utes (top) one of the high­lights of the film, a per­for­mance of “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Mark Moth­ers­baugh tak­ing lead vocals as Devo char­ac­ter “Boo­ji Boy” (pro­nounced “boo­gie boy”).

“By nor­mal stan­dards,” Puchal­s­ki writes, “the movie sucks, but it’s a Mutant Must-See for Rock-‘N’-Schlock Com­pletists.” It could also be one of the most influ­en­tial indie films of the eight­ies, argues Den of Geek’s Jim Knipfel, leav­ing its mark on every­thing from Alex Cox’s Repo Man to David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet (in which Hop­per and Stock­well play some­what sim­i­lar char­ac­ters) and Twin Peaks (in which Russ Tam­blyn appears), to Tim Bur­ton’s Pee Wee Her­man’s Big Adven­ture.

Or maybe Young “was sim­ply cursed to be ten min­utes ahead of his time,” giv­en that hard­ly any­one saw Human High­way in 1982. Shot over four years, and most­ly financed by Young him­self, Human High­way saw a lim­it­ed release in L.A. then dis­ap­peared until a 1996 VHS edit of the film brought it some renown and crit­i­cal reap­praisal. (Its cov­er quot­ed an agent at William Mor­ris say­ing, “It’s so bad, it’s going to be huge.”) The film has since become a cult clas­sic, war­rant­i­ng spe­cial screen­ings like a reunion in 2016 at L.A.‘s Regal The­ater fea­tur­ing Young, Tam­blyn, Devo’s Ger­ald Casale, actress Char­lotte Stew­art, and Cameron Crowe. (See a trail­er for the DVD direc­tor’s cut release just above.)

At one point dur­ing the Q&A, Young turned to Crowe and asked, “Do you think we could get this movie made today?”. The film was made under unique con­di­tions: “no script, impro­vised dia­logue and a dai­ly rou­tine that began with some­one ask­ing him ‘What’s the plan today, Neil?’ to which he always replied ‘The plan today is no plan!’ ” It could get made, if Neil want­ed to finance it (and a younger cast could han­dle the amount of drugs that clear­ly went into mak­ing the film). Giv­en the num­ber of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels and Young’s fame, it could also very like­ly find a wide audi­ence.

But in 1982, releas­ing a self-financed film, even if you were Neil Young, proved much more chal­leng­ing. And in the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies, one of the few ways for inno­v­a­tive New Wave bands like Devo to get wider notice was to catch the ear of stars like Young, who dis­cov­ered them on stage in 1977 and knew he had to get them on film — before “Whip It” and their first defin­ing hits came out — and show the rest of us what we were miss­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Releas­es a Nev­er-Before-Heard Ver­sion of His 1979 Clas­sic, “Pow­derfin­ger”: Stream It Online

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Presents His Per­son­al Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

Who Is Neil Young?: A Video Essay Explores the Two Sides of the Ver­sa­tile Musician–Folk Icon and Father of Grunge

When Neil Young & Rick “Super Freak” James Formed the 60’s Motown Band, The Mynah Birds

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

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

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A Dancer Pays a Gravity-Defying Tribute to Claude Debussy

in Dance, Music, Physics | July 16th, 2021

Most dancers have an intu­itive under­stand­ing of physics.

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Yoann Bour­geois push­es this sci­ence beyond the stan­dard lifts, leaps, and pirou­ettes, draw­ing on his train­ing at the Cen­tre Nation­al Des Arts du Cirque for a piece mark­ing the cen­te­nary of com­pos­er Claude Debussy’s death, above.

Giv­en the occa­sion, the choice of Clair de Lune, Debussy’s best loved piano work, feels prac­ti­cal­ly de rigueur, but the tram­po­line comes as a bit of a shock.

We may not be able to see it, but it plays such an essen­tial role, it’s tempt­ing to call this solo a pas de deux. At the very least, the tram­po­line is an essen­tial col­lab­o­ra­tor, along with pianist Alexan­dre Tha­rau and film­mak­er Raphaël Wertheimer.

Bour­geois’ expres­sive­ness as a per­former has earned him com­par­isons to Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton. His chore­og­ra­phy shows that he also shares their work eth­ic, atten­tion to detail, and love of jaw­drop­ping visu­al stunts.

Don’t expect any ran­dom boing­ing around on this tramp’.

For four and a half min­utes, Bour­geois’ every­man strug­gles to get to the top of a stark white stair­case. Every time he falls off, the tram­po­line launch­es him back onto one of the steps — high­er, low­er, the very one he fell off of…

Inter­pret this strug­gle how you will.

Psy­che, a dig­i­tal mag­a­zine that “illu­mi­nates the human con­di­tion through psy­chol­o­gy, philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing and the arts” found it to be “an abstract­ed inter­pre­ta­tion of a child­like expe­ri­ence of time.” One view­er won­dered if the num­ber of steps — twelve — was sig­nif­i­cant.

It’s no stretch to con­ceive of it as a com­ment on the nature of life — a con­stant cycle of falling down and bounc­ing back.

It’s love­ly to behold because Bour­geois makes it look so easy.

In an inter­view with NR, he spoke of how his cir­cus stud­ies led to the real­iza­tion that “the rela­tion­ship between phys­i­cal forces” is what he’s most inter­est­ed in explor­ing. The stairs and tram­po­line, like all of his sets (or devices, as he prefers to call them), are there to “ampli­fy spe­cif­ic phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non”:

In sci­ence, we’d call them mod­els – they’re sim­pli­fi­ca­tions of our world that enable me to ampli­fy one par­tic­u­lar force at a time. Togeth­er, this ensem­ble of devices, this con­stel­la­tion of con­struct­ed devices, ten­ta­tive­ly approach­es the point of sus­pen­sion. And so, this makes up a body of research; it’s a life’s research that doesn’t have an end in itself. 

The rela­tion­ship with phys­i­cal forces has an elo­quent capac­i­ty that can be very big; it has the kind of expres­sion that is uni­ver­sal.

Watch more of Youann Bour­geois’ physics-based chore­og­ra­phy on his YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1913

Quar­an­tined Dancer Cre­ates Shot-for-Shot Remake of the Final Dirty Danc­ing Scene with a Lamp as a Dance Part­ner

One of the Great­est Dances Sequences Ever Cap­tured on Film Gets Restored in Col­or by AI: Watch the Clas­sic Scene from Stormy Weath­er

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

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

in Music, Television | July 16th, 2021

In a Pon­ti­ac adver­tise­ment that aired just before the 1969 episode of Amer­i­can Band­stand above, the year’s mod­els are tout­ed as “break­away cars” — vehi­cles for escape with­out rebel­lion. The ad shows a hand­ful of get­aways, all end­ing at the deal­er­ship, presided over by a bland sales­man who smiles and nods his approval. It’s an appo­site choice for the pro­gram that fol­lows — a show which, for 37 years, gave Amer­i­can audi­ences safe teenage rebel­lion in the whole­some con­tain­er of Dick Clark’s fic­tion­al 50s record shop.

As the episode opens, the cam­era pans around the bod­ies of teenage dancers, as if they were this year’s newest mod­els, then lands on the smil­ing, square-jawed Clark, the seem­ing­ly age­less host who gave approval to the pro­ceed­ings for the folks back home. What was he sell­ing?

View­ers could con­sume the lat­est dance trends and pop hits in their liv­ing rooms, then jour­ney to the local record shop — just like the one on set! The show’s reach was huge, and most every artist who made an appear­ance crossed over into main­stream suc­cess.

Amer­i­can Band­stand began its life in 1952 on a local ABC affil­i­ate sta­tion in Philadel­phia. Then it was called Band­standand its hosts were radio per­son­al­i­ty Bob Horn and for­mer ad sales­man Lee Stew­art, whom, it was thought, “could bring some of his clients on board as adver­tis­ers,” as Steve Cohen writes at the Cul­tur­al Crit­ic. “Stew­art had no charis­ma and even­tu­al­ly was dropped from the pro­gram.” Horn con­tin­ued until 1956, when he was fired from the show after a drunk-dri­ving arrest. The show’s whole­some image belied sor­did begin­nings.

Clark joined at the young age of 26 to replace Horn, the hard-drink­ing, chain-smok­ing 40-year-old. Estab­lish­ing an easy rap­port with the show’s young dancers, who came from the local West Philadel­phia Neigh­bor­hood, Clark helped return Band­stand to respectabil­i­ty, then pushed for it to go nation­al, which it did in 1957, “beam­ing images of clean-cut, aver­age teenagers,” notes History.com, “danc­ing to the not-so-clean-cut Jer­ry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lot­ta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ to 67 ABC affil­i­ates across the nation.” (A gross­ly iron­ic musi­cal choice.)

Renamed Amer­i­can Band­stand, the new­ly nation­al pro­gram fea­tured a num­ber of new ele­ments that became part of its trade­mark, includ­ing the high school gym-like bleach­ers and the famous seg­ment in which teenage stu­dio guests rat­ed the newest records on a scale from 25 to 98 and offered such crit­i­cisms as “It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.” But the heart of Amer­i­can Band­stand always remained the sound of the day’s most pop­u­lar music com­bined with the sight of the show’s unpol­ished teen “reg­u­lars” danc­ing and show­ing off the lat­est fash­ions in cloth­ing and hair­styles.

Four years after becom­ing the show’s host, Clark became a mil­lion­aire at age 30. Hauled before Con­gress in 1960 to answer pay­ola charges, he admit­ted to tak­ing a few bribes, promised to divest, and skat­ed away on charm while a busi­ness part­ner con­fessed and resigned. At the time, he described him­self as “hav­ing an inter­est in 33 busi­ness­es,” Becky Krys­tal writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “rang­ing from music pub­lish­ers to, as The New York Times report­ed, an oper­a­tion that made and sold a stuffed kit­ten for sale on Amer­i­can Band­stand called the Plat­ter-Puss.” His busi­ness mod­el was decades ahead of the indus­try.

“A man with an unerr­ing sense of what Amer­i­cans want­ed to hear and see,” Krys­tal writes (or a sense of who to ask), Clark “achieved his great­est renown for an abil­i­ty to con­nect with the taste of the post-World War II baby-boom gen­er­a­tion. By the show’s 30th anniver­sary, almost 600,000 teenagers and 10,000 per­form­ers had appeared on the pro­gram. Among those to make ear­ly nation­al appear­ances includ­ed Bud­dy Hol­ly, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turn­er, and Simon and Gar­funkel. Dance crazes such as the Twist and the Watusi could be traced to the ‘Band­stand’ stu­dio.”

Amer­i­can Band­stand did­n’t only dis­sem­i­nate pop cul­ture to the mass­es; it also has been cred­it­ed with help­ing to inte­grate Amer­i­can cul­ture with its inte­grat­ed for­mat. It’s a claim large­ly spread, his crit­ics allege, by Clark him­self. Amer­i­can Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Matthew Del­mont argues that, while the show sold an image of inte­gra­tion, allow­ing a few Black kids from the large­ly inte­grat­ed West Philly neigh­bor­hood to appear, it also employed dis­crim­i­na­to­ry tac­tics to exclude the major­i­ty of Black stu­dents who want­ed to dance.

Clark may have bowed to the pres­sure of the times, but he was a con­sum­mate sales­man who nev­er lost a chance to make a buck. As Del­mont says, he began tout­ing the show’s his­to­ry of inte­gra­tion when Amer­i­can Band­stand faced stiff com­pe­ti­tion in the 70s from upstart rival Soul Train,a show that taught a new, post-boomer, post-Civ­il Rights gen­er­a­tion of kids how to dance, and whose smooth-voiced cre­ator-host Don Cor­nelius made the square-jawed Clark look like a total square. See many more clips and edit­ed episodes of Amer­i­can Band­stand from 1963–1970, before Soul Train con­sid­er­ably upped the ante for dance shows every­where, on YouTube here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Lydon & Pub­lic Image Ltd. Sow Chaos on Amer­i­can Band­stand: The Show’s Best and Worst Moment (1980)

Talk­ing Heads’ First TV Appear­ance Was on Amer­i­can Band­stand, and It Was a Lit­tle Awk­ward (1979)

Dick Clark Intro­duces Jef­fer­son Air­plane & the Sounds of Psy­che­del­ic San Fran­cis­co to Amer­i­ca: Yes Par­ents, You Should Be Afraid (1967)

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

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Do We Outgrow the Music of Our Youth? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #99

in Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | July 15th, 2021

What long-term effects do songs that we’re exposed to ear­ly have on our adult tastes? As chil­dren we (hope­ful­ly) learn to love music, but then our crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties and peer pres­sure kick in, and many ear­ly influ­ences become unac­knowl­edged or trans­formed into guilty plea­sures. Is the gen­er­a­tion gap in musi­cal taste real­ly just due to how styles change over time (and we old folks just don’t get the new sound), or are there more fun­da­men­tal rea­sons why it’s eas­i­er for younger peo­ple to absorb new music?

Today’s pan­el includes your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er plus Eri­ca Spyres, Bri­an Hirt, and The Hus­tle pod­cast host Jon Lam­ore­aux. They share their own expe­ri­ences, songs from yes­ter­year that they have com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings about now, and get into relat­ed top­ics like the activ­i­ties of for­mer pop stars and nos­tal­gia in film sound­tracks.

A few par­tic­u­lar tracks that we men­tion are Go West­’s “King of Wish­ful Think­ing,” Jo Box­ers’  “Just Got Lucky,” Jethro Tul­l’s “Songs from the Wood,” and The Cars’ “Mag­ic.” Can a pret­ty Steve Howe intro redeem this Asia cheese­fest?

A few arti­cles we con­sult­ed includ­ed:

Fol­low Jon’s pod­cast @thehustlepod. To get an idea of the for­mats of The Hus­tle as com­pared to Mark’s Naked­ly Exam­ined Music, why not take a deep dive on Grand Funk Rail­road­’s amaz­ing Mark Farn­er who appeared on both? …NEM, Hus­tle.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Releases a Super Creepy Version of “Creep”

in Music | July 14th, 2021

Like many bands with a killer, career-launch­ing debut sin­gle, Radio­head has had a long, love-hate rela­tion­ship with 1992’s “Creep”. There’s no way they would have become sta­di­um fillers with­out it, but they’re also under­stand­ably sick of it. Accord­ing to setlist.fm, they played it over 310 times between 1992 and 1998, and then they kind of dropped it from their gigs once they entered their Kid A phase. Only in 2016, dur­ing the Moon Shaped Pool tours did they add it back into the set.

But man, 2016 seems like a lonnnnnng time ago, doesn’t it? Everybody’s still fig­ur­ing out the future of live con­certs. Nobody is sure how far ahead is safe enough to announce tick­et sales. Will venues be open or shut again? Into the fray of uncer­tain­ty comes this odd­i­ty: a nine-plus minute ver­sion of “Creep” cred­it­ed to Thom Yorke. (“Thom Yorke should col­lab with Radio­head more often” says one wag in the YouTube com­ments). You want Creep, ya say? Well, here’s a LOT of it.

Thom Yorke takes his vocals, stretch­es them out until they’re cor­rupt­ed dig­i­tal­ly, and fills the airy gaps with acoustic gui­tar, adding twice as many bars as the orig­i­nal. As NPR said, Yorke’s vocals sound like a “rant from a man who’s lost his mind to old age and iso­la­tion.” (Hence the “Very 2021 Remix” title). It was about 30 years ago, we have to add, though we hate to admit it. Elec­tron­ic bur­bles and bass throbs enter halfway through and fur­ther dis­turb the already dis­turb­ing.

Yorke cre­at­ed the mix for fash­ion design­er Jun Taka­hashi, whose ani­mat­ed art­work runs in a loop for the video. The song accom­pa­nies Takahashi’s UNDERWORLD Fall 2021 col­lec­tion run­way show.

As Pitch­fork points out, Yorke has con­tributed music to fash­ion shows before:

n 2016, he con­tributed an orig­i­nal song called “Coloured Can­dy” to Rag & Bone’s 2017 Spring/Summer show­case. Years pri­or, he con­tributed the songs “Stuck Togeth­er” and “Twist” for anoth­er one of the fash­ion label’s shows.

Yorke, by the way, hasn’t been lay­ing low dur­ing the plague year. In May of this year he debuted a new side band called The Smile at Glas­ton­bury, called out the John­son gov­ern­ment as “spine­less” regard­ing their response to COVID and the live music scene, and shared a 30-minute mix of new music on BBC Radio 6. What comes next? Stay tuned.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Radio­head Bal­lets: Watch Bal­lets Chore­o­graphed Cre­ative­ly to the Music of Radio­head

Thom Yorke’s Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track on Radiohead’s 1992 Clas­sic, ‘Creep’

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

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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