Wis­dom, humour, com­pas­sion, under­stand­ing, bril­lian­cy of intel­lect, unselfish­ness, mod­esty, courage—he had all these attrib­ut­es… The gov­ern­ment quite clear­ly nev­er under­stood the extent to which Steve Biko was a man of peace. He was mil­i­tant in stand­ing up for his prin­ci­ples, yes, but his abid­ing goal was a peace­ful rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of all South Africans.

—Don­ald Woods

When South African police mur­dered Steve Biko in deten­tion on August 18, 1977, they thought they were rid­ding them­selves of a thorn in their side, that in killing him, they could for­get about him. Senior TIME edi­tor Tony Karon, who grew up in white South Africa, record­ed what the Min­is­ter of Police said when announc­ing Biko’s death to “a con­fer­ence of the rul­ing par­ty”: “I am not glad and I am not sor­ry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold. I can say noth­ing to you. Any per­son who dies… I shall also be sor­ry if I die.” Then, writes Karon, “they laughed. Like B‑movie Nazis.”

Despite the apartheid state’s best efforts to destroy him, Biko’s death made him a mar­tyr. “I didn’t know Steve Biko,” writes Karon, “but his death made clear to me, and hun­dreds of young white peo­ple like me, what mil­lions of black South Africans knew from expe­ri­ence…. The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thou­sands of lives before his, and many thou­sands more would be killed after Biko’s mur­der. But no death shook my world, and the coun­try all around me, more than Steve Biko’s.”

Biko helped found the South African Student’s Orga­ni­za­tion (SASO) while study­ing med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Natal, and he found­ed the Black Con­scious­ness Move­ment to advo­cate “self-aware­ness and self-reliance for Black peo­ple,” writes Mohammed Elnaiem at JSTOR Dai­ly. It was a move­ment to cen­ter the expe­ri­ences of Black South Africans. Yet as Biko under­stood the term, “Black” was a polit­i­cal class: his was “a move­ment for peo­ple who are oppressed,” he said, includ­ing so-called “col­ored” and Indi­an South Africans. “We believe,” says Biko in the inter­view above, “in a non-racial soci­ety.”

The gov­ern­ment “soon real­ized,” Karon writes, “the rad­i­cal move­ment was a threat to racial hier­ar­chy in the coun­try,” with its legal divi­sions of caste and class. They could not stop Biko’s mes­sage from res­onat­ing around the world. News of his arrest and death spread quick­ly and remained a pow­er­ful sym­bol of the regime’s bru­tal­i­ty. In the music world, the news took the form of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Released in 1980, the song became a major hit. It was, wrote crit­ic Phil Sut­cliffe, “so hon­est you might even risk call­ing it truth.” Gabriel him­self, on the 40th anniver­sary of Biko’s death, wrote that “both music and lyric are sim­ple but writ­ten to be direct and emo­tion­al.”

He did not need to embell­ish, espe­cial­ly in the song’s final line: “the eyes of the world are watch­ing now, watch­ing now.” Indeed, they were, as they are now, even in our states of pan­dem­ic iso­la­tion, watch­ing the con­tin­ued police bru­tal­i­ty of gov­ern­ments built on racism, colo­nial­ism, slav­ery, apartheid, and exclu­sion. It’s an ide­al time for Gabriel to re-release “Biko,” and re-record it with Play­ing for Change, the orga­ni­za­tion gath­er­ing famous and non-famous musi­cians around the world in remote col­lab­o­ra­tive cov­ers of famous songs with uni­ver­sal res­o­nance. “Biko” belongs in their com­pa­ny.

At the top, you can see the per­for­mance, which opens with the stun­ning voic­es of The Cape Town Ensem­ble choral group. Then bassist Meshell Nde­geo­ce­lo, Beni­nese singer Angélique Kid­jo, and cel­list Yo-Yo Ma join in with a Japan­ese per­cus­sion group and oth­er musi­cians as Gabriel deliv­ers the lyrics with as much con­vic­tion as he did over forty years ago. Just above, see a mov­ing live per­for­mance of “Biko” from 1987, in a video direct­ed by Lol Creme. Intro­duc­ing the song, Gabriel calls the activist “a man who preached non­vi­o­lence in a state that has racism enshrined in its con­sti­tu­tion.” Or as the lyrics put it in their dev­as­tat­ing­ly direct way: “It was busi­ness as usu­al / in police room 619.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Musi­cians Around the World Play The Band’s Clas­sic Song, “The Weight,” with Help from Rob­bie Robert­son and Ringo Starr

Musi­cians Around the World Play “Lean on Me,” the Uplift­ing Song by Bill With­ers (RIP)

We all reach an age when the music of our youth becomes “the oldies.” When it comes to music as dynam­ic, inno­v­a­tive, and far-reach­ing as hip-hop, that age can feel sur­pris­ing­ly young. Or so it seemed to me, a child of the 90s, when the 21st cen­tu­ry dawned. Now, sep­a­rat­ed from the artists I grew up lis­ten­ing to by a gulf of almost thir­ty years, I can say they are all cer­ti­fi­ably old school, which I sup­pose makes me cer­ti­fi­ably old.

But con­sid­er this—in 1993, a year I once con­sid­ered some­thing of a gold­en age of hip-hop—the music had already trav­eled twen­ty years and thou­sands of miles from its Bronx ori­gins to become a world­wide phe­nom­e­non. Its great­est inno­va­tors, the men and women who invent­ed the sound, were by then very much old school.

In fact, every­one who wasn’t get­ting down to the sound sys­tem of DJ Kool Herc in the New York of the ear­ly sev­en­ties is a late­com­er to the scene, includ­ing punks like Blondie who imme­di­ate­ly seized on its rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“In 1973,” Hen­ry Louis Gates informs us in the video at the top from the Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes series, the Jamaican-born Herc “set up his turnta­bles and intro­duced a tech­nique at a South Bronx house par­ty that would change music as many peo­ple knew it. His abil­i­ty to switch from record to record—as well as iso­late and repeat music breaks—led to the dis­cov­ery of the hip hop genre.”

It was the sound of a thou­sand radios play­ing, all over the city, with the noise fil­tered out, beats made from the breaks, and the chaos cut into pieces and stitched togeth­er into music again; the sound of turntab­lism, a series of tech­niques, from Herc’s break-beats to the “Trans­former scratch” to jug­gling beats: switch­ing between “two iden­ti­cal records at light­ning fast speed,” as a PBS guide explains, “loop­ing or re-com­bin­ing indi­vid­ual sounds to pro­duce an entire­ly new beat.”

These new means of using play­back devices as instru­ments led “from rework­ing exist­ing tracks to com­pos­ing music” from the com­po­nents, a mad sci­en­tist approach that pre­ced­ed the age of the MC, whose pri­ma­ry pur­pose was to hype the crowd in the music’s ear­ly days, instead of deliv­er­ing the news of the streets in ever more-com­plex rhyme schemes. In the short videos above, you can learn more about Herc’s rev­o­lu­tion. Just above, hear from the man him­self and his for­mer neigh­bors, who went to his first par­ties in the com­mu­ni­ty room of his South Bronx apart­ment build­ing.

Herc took the dis­co DJ’s tech­nique of using two turnta­bles, but played punk and funk records instead, seiz­ing on the obser­va­tion that the crowd went wild dur­ing instru­men­tal breaks. “How would it be,” he thought, “if I put them all togeth­er?” Call­ing it “mer­ry-go-round,” Herc showed off his new idea, after first announc­ing it to the crowd, and got just the reac­tion he’d hoped for. The rest is a his­to­ry we should know. But if we leave out the turntab­lists, the DJs who built the beats that made the music what it is, no mat­ter how old school they sound to us now, we’re miss­ing some­thing crit­i­cal, an exper­i­men­tal rev­o­lu­tion that changed the world.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Jazz Became the “Moth­er of Hip Hop”

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

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

It takes a cer­tain amount of hubris to write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”—to write, that is, a sec­u­lar hymn, a non-reli­gious gospel hit for burned-out six­ties’ folkies. Maybe only a trag­ic flaw could inspire a com­pos­er “com­ing off the back of four hit albums and two num­ber one sin­gles in four years” to soothe the dis­af­fec­tion of down-and-out Amer­i­cans who could see the bot­tom from where they stood in 1969, a year noto­ri­ous for its cul­tur­al dis­af­fec­tion and polit­i­cal gloom.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s sta­tus as super­star hit­mak­ers at the end of the decade per­haps made it hard­er for view­ers of Songs of Amer­i­ca—the tele­vi­sion film in which “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” debuted—to take them seri­ous­ly.

When the duo first appears on screen in the musi­cal doc­u­men­tary, of sorts, Gar­funkel “brings up the sub­ject of America’s immi­nent bicen­ten­ni­al,” writes Dori­an Lynskey for the BBC, and “a cam­era-con­scious Simon gazes into the dis­tance and asks solemn­ly: ‘Think it’s gonna make it?’”

Direct­ed by Charles Grodin with over half a mil­lion in CBS mon­ey, the film’s “mood of pen­sive pom­pos­i­ty comes to dom­i­nate.” It won few con­verts, despite the show­stop­per of a song. “The aver­age CBS view­er didn’t want to see the world crum­bling,” again, in Songs of Amer­i­ca.

The heav­i­est sequence was a dark twist on the film’s trav­el­ogue theme, jux­ta­pos­ing clips of the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King on the cam­paign trail with footage of mourn­ers watch­ing Bob­by Kennedy’s funer­al train go by. The musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment was unfa­mil­iar: a kind of white gospel song, state­ly and hymn-like, build­ing to a shat­ter­ing cli­max as the long black train sped through America’s bro­ken heart. One mil­lion view­ers respond­ed by turn­ing the dial and watch­ing the fig­ure skat­ing on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. Songs of Amer­i­ca wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years. 

While the movie failed, the song, and album, became instant­ly clas­sic and rose to No. 1. “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” also entered the cul­tur­al lex­i­con as though it had emerged from the misty pre-record­ing his­to­ry of the 19th cen­tu­ry, when songs were writ­ten and rewrit­ten by anony­mous folk claim­ing divine inspi­ra­tion. “The cel­e­brat­ed New Orleans musi­cian Allen Tou­s­saint liked to say: ‘That song had two writ­ers: Paul Simon and God.’ ”

The real sto­ry involves no super­nat­ur­al intervention—it does involve a kind of “love and theft” (as Bob Dylan admit­ted, allud­ing to a book on black­face min­strel­sy), through the influ­ence of the Swan Sil­ver­tones’ record­ing of the 19th-cen­tu­ry spir­i­tu­al, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.” Simon lis­tened to the record “over and over again in his Upper East Side apart­ment… thun­der­struck by a line impro­vised by lead singer Claude Jeter: ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.’” (When Simon met Jeter two years lat­er, he appar­ent­ly “wrote him a cheque on the spot.”)

Inspi­ra­tion flowed through him. “I have no idea where it came from… It just came, all of a sud­den,” he remem­bers in the clip fur­ther up from the 2011 doc­u­men­tary The Har­mo­ny Game. “I remem­ber think­ing this is con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than I usu­al­ly write.” He rec­og­nized right away that he had penned what he would call “my great­est song”… “my ‘Yes­ter­day.’” The com­par­i­son is notable for its con­trast of atti­tudes.

Paul McCartney’s mega-bal­lad extols the virtues of nos­tal­gia and pines for sim­pler times; Simon’s chan­nels Black Amer­i­can gospel, look­ing beyond per­son­al pain to the plight of oth­ers. It also takes its chord pro­gres­sion from a Bach chorale adapt­ed by 19th-cen­tu­ry hymn writ­ers. That’s not to say “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water,” doesn’t evoke the per­son­al. The lyrics “Sail on sil­ver girl” speak direct­ly to his soon-to-be wife Peg­gy Harp­er, “who had recent­ly fret­ted about find­ing her first grey hairs.” The rest came from tra­di­tions of reli­gious music.

Simon gave the vocal to Gar­funkel because he thought “only Artie’s choir­boy voice could do jus­tice to the song,” Lynskey writes. Gar­funkel felt intim­i­dat­ed by the song and “liked the sound of Paul’s falset­to.” Simon took his hes­i­ta­tion as an affront. “Such was the state of their part­ner­ship in 1969.” It’s clear in the open­ing min­utes of Simon’s solo 1970 inter­view with Dick Cavett at the top that the icon­ic folk team would soon be part­ing ways, for a time at least. Cavett has some fun with Simon about the authen­tic­i­ty of his song­writ­ing. “Maybe I lied… a cou­ple of times,” he answers, some good-natured Queens defi­ance aris­ing in his voice. “I was pre­tend­ing to be some­one else.”

Cavett then (at 5:25) asks the “impos­si­ble question”—how does one write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”? Simon pulls out his gui­tar and oblig­es, show­ing how the chords first came from Bach. He gets big laughs and applause for his def­i­n­i­tion of feel­ing “stuck” before he dis­cov­ered the Swan Sil­ver­tones. “Every­where I went led me to where I didn’t want to go.” It’s maybe as uni­ver­sal a feel­ing as has ever been put in song.

“Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” turned 50 in Jan­u­ary of 2020, a month or so before so the nation Simon eulo­gized pre­ma­ture­ly in Songs of Amer­i­ca fell into seri­ous­ly trou­bled waters. In our stuck­ness, maybe his clas­sic bal­lad, and espe­cial­ly its call to reach beyond our­selves, can help get us over like noth­ing else. See Simon and Gar­funkel play it live just above in their first Cen­tral Park reunion con­cert in 1981.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

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

Prince is hav­ing an after­life the oppo­site of most rock stars. Where the years after death seems to bring our gods down to human size, the more sto­ries I hear about Prince, the more I am con­vinced he was either beyond human or one of the very few con­stant­ly work­ing at max­i­mum poten­tial. But not only that, he also helped oth­ers real­ize their own poten­tial, espe­cial­ly mem­bers of his tour­ing band.

I hope that’s your take­away after hav­ing watched not just this mini-doc of his 2007 Super Bowl Half­Time show, but read­ing this thor­ough­ly enter­tain­ing oral his­to­ry of the event from The Ringer. Even if foot­ball is not your thing, and you con­sid­er the half­time show to be cheesy, this one year was not. Prince con­sid­ered it one of his crown­ing achieve­ments, and it was going to be the end point of the mem­oirs he planned to write.

Half-time shows had tra­di­tion­al­ly been the venue for march­ing bands and col­or guard, but by the 1990s they had turned into Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions, with pop stars and dancers. How­ev­er, they had also been dealt a blow with Nip­ple­gate, when Justin Tim­ber­lake ripped open Janet Jackson’s corset and exposed a met­al pastie in 2004. Mid­dle Amer­i­ca reeled, peo­ple thought of the chil­dren, the FCC levied some fines, and the NFL went into defen­sive mode, pro­gram­ming the kind of Boomer-safe artists that would please as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble: The Rolling Stones and Paul McCart­ney. (I mean, all amaz­ing artists, mind you. Just noth­ing dan­ger­ous.)

Prince was dif­fer­ent. He wasn’t going to do this like an aging rock star, just come on out and play the hits. He could have done and he cer­tain­ly had the back cat­a­log to do so. Instead, he put togeth­er a show that could stand on its own, a mix of his hits and a wild selec­tion of cov­er ver­sions: Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, “Proud Mary”, Hendrix/Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er”, and the Foo Fight­ers’ “Best of You.”

The day of the Super Bowl in Mia­mi it rained, Flori­da-style. Mon­soon weath­er. Yet, Prince and his band went ahead, defy­ing the ele­ments. The dancers—Maya and Nan­cy McClean—put grips on their high heel boots so as not to slip on the glass-like stage, formed in the shape of Prince’s “sym­bol”. There was an under­stand­able pan­ic: would some­body be elec­tro­cut­ed? Would this be Prince’s last con­cert?

But no. Prince seemed to tran­scend the ele­ments. Ruth Arzate, Prince’s per­son­al assistant/manager asked the musician’s hair­styl­ist: “Am I hal­lu­ci­nat­ing or is there no rain on him?” You could see a cou­ple of droplets on his shoul­der. And we’re look­ing and she’s like, “It just looks like a fine mist on his face.””

Prince end­ed the con­cert with “Pur­ple Rain,” which you can see above, singing *in the rain* and then bust­ing out a solo for the ages behind bil­low­ing fab­ric as a shad­ow, wield­ing that sym­bol gui­tar like a glo­ri­ous phal­lus.

Half­time show pro­duc­tion design­er Bruce Rogers says it best:

“To me, it’s about one guy in the mid­dle of a hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple and a hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple on tele­vi­sion, and it’s your moment to be Prince at the Super Bowl and Moth­er Nature is drop­ping thou­sands and thou­sands of gal­lons of rain. I always thought how cool the guy is to rise up and just get stormed upon, and just bring what he brought. That was so spe­cial.”

There are sev­er­al take­aways from the Ringer piece: how Prince would glide around on cus­tom-made Heelys. How he would per­form in meet­ings with a full band instead of just play­ing a CD. How when a cable acci­den­tal­ly got run over before the show a road­ie lit­er­al­ly held the stripped cable togeth­er for 20 or so min­utes, run­ning the risk of elec­tro­cu­tion, to keep the show going. But my favorite take­away is this quote, from Chica­go Tribune’s Mark Caro: “He took this mas­sive­ly over­scaled event and just sort of bent it to his will.”

Super Bowl XLI became a Prince con­cert with a foot­ball game on either side of it, and that’s because he made it so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

Four Clas­sic Prince Songs Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Cov­ers: When Doves Cry, Lit­tle Red Corvette & More

Prince Plays a Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solo On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps”

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.