If the age of Amer­i­can musi­cal satire is behind us, Tom Lehrer may have end­ed it sim­ply by being unsur­pass­ably good at it. No less a com­e­dy-song mas­ter than “Weird Al” Yankovic still walks among us, of course, but he spe­cial­izes in broad par­o­dy rather than bit­ing irony. Despite hav­ing retired from pub­lic life, Lehrer too lives on, and at 92 has tak­en action to assure his work a longer exis­tence by releas­ing it into the pub­lic domain. On his offi­cial site you’ll see a state­ment from the man him­self: “All the lyrics on this web­site, whether pub­lished or unpub­lished, copy­right­ed or uncopy­right­ed, may be down­loaded and used in any man­ner what­so­ev­er.”

Direct­ly below his mes­sage you’ll find a list of near­ly 100 of Lehrer’s songs, which when clicked lead to down­load­able PDFs of their lyrics, and in some cas­es their sheet music as well. Ready for you to repur­pose are such sig­na­ture num­bers as “The Masochism Tan­go,” “Poi­son­ing Pigeons in the Park,” and “The Ele­ments,” a ver­sion of the “Major-Gen­er­al’s Song” from Gilbert and Sul­li­van’s Pirates of Pen­zance that name-checks each and every one of the phys­i­cal ele­ments known in 1959.

That Lehrer has also includ­ed the “Aris­to­tle ver­sion” of “Ele­ments” — in full, “There’s earth and air and fire and water” — just hints at the many play­ful touch­es to be found in this col­lec­tion of mate­ri­als.

Not just a singer-song­writer but a math­e­mati­cian who worked at both the Los Alam­os Sci­en­tif­ic Lab­o­ra­to­ry and the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency dur­ing the Cold War, Lehrer did­n’t shy away from address­ing the tech­ni­cal, the polit­i­cal, and the top­i­cal in his music. “Wern­her von Braun” sends up the rock­et sci­en­tist secret­ly recruit­ed by the Unit­ed States from defeat­ed Nazi Ger­many (“Don’t say that he’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal / Say rather that he’s apo­lit­i­cal”). “New Math” gives a sim­i­lar treat­ment to the Sput­nik-spooked U.S.‘s ill-advised scram­ble to reform math­e­mat­ics edu­ca­tion, and I got a laugh out of the song in child­hood despite grow­ing up long after the retrench­ment of New Math itself.

Whether hear­ing or read­ing Lehrer’s lyrics today, one mar­vels at both how they’ve retained their bite, and how wide­ly they were con­sid­ered too edgy for air­play in the 1950s. The BBC, for exam­ple, banned ten of the twelve songs on his debut album, includ­ing “Be Pre­pared,” which spins the Boy Scout’s mot­to into an ode to mis­be­hav­ior (“Be pre­pared to hold your liquor pret­ty well / Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell”). But now we’re free to craft new con­texts to make them trou­bling again, and with the hol­i­days com­ing up, this assures us very Lehrer Thanks­giv­ings, Christ­mases (“Mix the punch, drag out the Dick­ens / Even though the prospect sick­ens”) and Hanukkahs (“Here’s to Judas Mac­cabeus / Boy, if he could only see us / Spend­ing Hanukkah in San­ta Mon­i­ca”) to come. Enter his site here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Tom Lehrer Sing the Names of 102 Chem­i­cal Ele­ments to the Tune of Gilbert & Sul­li­van

Tom Lehrer’s Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly and Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Inclined Singing and Song­writ­ing, Ani­mat­ed

Cel­e­brate Har­ry Potter’s Birth­day with Song. Daniel Rad­cliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune “The Ele­ments”

We’re All Doomed!: Weird Al Yankovic Tries to Make Sense of the Dis­as­trous Trump vs. Biden “Debate”

The Music, Books & Films Lib­er­at­ed into the Pub­lic Domain in 2020: Rhap­sody in Blue, The Mag­ic Moun­tain, Sher­lock, Jr., and More

Every Pos­si­ble Melody Has Been Copy­right­ed, and They’re Now Released into the Pub­lic Domain

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Get­ting banned from a venue can hurt a band’s career, but in most every case I’ve heard about, it’s a cloud with a gold­en lin­ing. Hard­core band Bad Brains built a lega­cy on get­ting banned in all of D.C.‘s clubs. Elvis Costello’s career didn’t seem to suf­fer much when he was banned from Sat­ur­day Night Live in 1977. Jimi Hen­drix’s ban­ning from the BBC did­n’t hurt his image any. Then there’s the Doors….

The band earned the dis­tinc­tion of being the first to have a mem­ber arrest­ed live onstage in the infa­mous “New Haven inci­dent” of 1967. Three months ear­li­er, they per­formed live, no mim­ing, on The Ed Sul­li­van Show. Things did not go as smooth­ly as the pro­duc­ers may have hoped,” writes Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock. No, Jim Mor­ri­son didn’t expose him­self or antag­o­nize the audi­ence.

On the con­trary, giv­en the Doors’ oth­er noto­ri­ous “inci­dents,” the offense is as mild as it gets—Morrison sim­ply sang the lyrics to “Light My Fire” as writ­ten, defy­ing pro­duc­ers’ request that he change “Girl, we couldn’t get much high­er” since it sound­ed like a drug ref­er­ence. Not only did they ask Mor­ri­son to change the lyric, but they also appar­ent­ly asked him to sing “Girl, we couldn’t get much bet­ter,” which doesn’t even rhyme.

One can see why he would have resist­ed.

“Band mem­bers have giv­en vary­ing accounts of whether they ever agreed to change the line or not,” UCR notes. Accord­ing to The Ed Sul­li­van Show site, a pro­duc­er came into the dress­ing room, told the band they should smile more, and told them the line was “inap­pro­pri­ate for a fam­i­ly show on nation­al tele­vi­sion.” As soon as he left the room, Mor­ri­son said, “We’re not chang­ing a word.”

The band went on after Rod­ney Dan­ger­field, a last-minute replace­ment for anoth­er com­ic. They played “Peo­ple Are Strange,” then the offend­ing song. Dan­ger­field became a reg­u­lar on the Sul­li­van show. The Doors–booked for six more appearances–never went on again, though they had plen­ty of oth­er TV book­ings and wild, dis­as­trous stage shows to keep them busy.

When informed after the show that they’d been banned, Mor­ri­son report­ed­ly said a most Jim Mor­ri­son thing: “Hey, man, we just did the Sul­li­van show.”

Watch a clip of the per­for­mance just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From Sat­ur­day Night Live (1977)

The Night John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on Sat­ur­day Night Live, And They Got Banned from the Show

Jimi Hen­drix Wreaks Hav­oc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969)

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

Like the great prog drum­mers of old—Bill Bru­ford, Neil Peart, Phil Collins—Tool’s Dan­ny Carey is an arti­san. They don’t make drum­ming like that any­more. He says so him­self (sort of) in an inter­view with Music Radar about his side project Leg­end of the Seag­ull­men with Mastadon’s Brent Hinds. Remem­ber­ing how Robert Fripp would stand on the edge of the stage, watch­ing Tool play when King Crim­son opened for the mod­ern prog-met­al giants, Carey remarks, “We weren’t sync­ing to some bull­shit like so many oth­er bands. We were actu­al­ly play­ing live. It’s a sad thing when almost every band you see isn’t doing that. It’s the clicks and back­ing tracks that are keep­ing time. I’ve nev­er played to a click on stage in my life.”

A “click track,” for those who don’t know, is exact­ly what it sounds like: a play­back of clicks (or any per­cus­sive sound) to the desired tem­po, pumped into a musician’s ear­piece to keep them play­ing in time. A use­ful tool of the record­ing stu­dio, many musi­cians, as Carey says, now use it on stage, along with vocal pitch cor­rec­tion soft­ware and pre-record­ed back­ing tracks to make sure every­thing sounds exact­ly like it does on record.

All of this tech­nol­o­gy ruins the feel of live per­for­mance, Carey main­tains. He would know. He’s been play­ing live since the 80s and play­ing with Tool since the band formed thir­ty years ago. He also jams every oth­er month, he says, “with these weird dudes who played with Miles Davis or Mahav­ish­nu Orches­tra.” So… yeah. The dude’s got some clas­sic chops.

But tech­nol­o­gy isn’t all bad in live music, far from it. Being a drum­mer used to mean that hard­ly any­one could see you on a big stage. You might be the most tal­ent­ed, best-look­ing mem­ber of the band, but you were hid­den away behind your kit with the singers and gui­tarists soak­ing up the glo­ry. Even when cer­tain celebri­ty rock drum­mers get their own stages (with their own mini-roller coast­ers), it can be impos­si­ble to see what they’re doing up close. No longer. Thanks to unob­tru­sive cam­eras that can stream video from any­where, no cor­ner of the stage need be obscured. We can watch a Tool show from over Carey’s shoul­der, as in the video of “Pneu­ma,” live in con­cert, at the top, pro­duced by drum equip­ment com­pa­ny Vic Firth to demon­strate Carey’s new sig­na­ture sticks.

It’s bet­ter to let Carey’s play­ing speak for itself, but for ref­er­ence, “Pneu­ma” comes from Tool’s very eager­ly-await­ed 2019 album Fear Inocu­lum, just one of many tracks “filled with twist after turn, con­ven­tion­al song struc­ture be damned,” Ilya Stemkovsky writes at Mod­ern Drum­mer, “with Carey at the cen­ter of the storm, pro­vid­ing the heav­i­est, most mas­sive bot­tom pos­si­ble. He even gets his own solo per­cus­sion track, ‘Choco­late Chip Trip,’ on which he incor­po­rates gongs and bells, among oth­er sounds.” Maybe this live view, and Tool’s well-deserved Gram­my Win for Best Met­al Per­for­mance this year for “7empest,” will inspire more drum­mers to drop the click and bring back what Carey calls the “ded­i­ca­tion to your vibe” from the days of arti­sanal drum­ming.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

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

When the pan­dem­ic ends and trav­el resumes, you’ll hope­ful­ly find pup­peteers Diana Romero and Andrés Mat­u­rana enter­tain­ing folks, both young and old, on the streets of Madrid. Above, watch them enter­tain passers­by with a mar­i­onette of Fred­die Mer­cury singing the Queen clas­sic, “I Want to Break Free.” Down below, you can see their mar­i­onette take on the Bea­t­les.

Here’s some quick back­sto­ry on their work:

Perip­lo Pup­pets are Diana Romero and Andrés Mat­u­rana: design­ers and mak­ers of pup­pets and sto­ries. We began in 2003 with TitiriBea­t­les at the Ram­blas of Barcelona and study­ing self-taught at Insti­tut del Teatre Library. We trav­eled with our pup­pets through the streets of Europe and Amer­i­ca gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ence, until in 2009 we decid­ed to live in Madrid and be a The­atre com­pa­ny. …We focus on audio­vi­su­al per­for­mance mix­ing video map­ping, string pup­pets, and latex pup­pets to make shows that involve the audi­ence.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Make an Adorable Cro­cheted Fred­die Mer­cury; Down­load a Free Cro­chet Pat­tern Online

Meet Fred­die Mer­cury and His Faith­ful Feline Friends

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

Fred­die Mer­cury Reimag­ined as Com­ic Book Heroes

If you’re a read­er of this site, it’s like­ly you known the name Klaus Nomi, the diminu­tive Ger­man singer who stunned New Wave audi­ences in New York with his angel­ic sopra­no voice and opera cov­ers. If you know of Nomi, you like­ly know of Nina Hagen, who start­ed releas­ing records in her native East Ger­many in the late 70s, mix­ing opera with punk, funk, and reg­gae and cov­er­ing clas­sics from Tina Turn­er to The Tubes “White Punks on Dope.” She became a major star, but her name does not come up often these days. She is long over­due for a revival.

Like Nomi, Hagen was a mas­ter of fright make-up and exag­ger­at­ed, Expres­sion­ist faces. She did not, how­ev­er, have an alien alter-ego or col­lec­tion of space­suits. What she had was a whol­ly orig­i­nal style all her own, full of eccen­tric vocal­iza­tions crit­ic Robert Christ­gau com­pared to The Exor­cist’s Lin­da Blair.

Her stage shows were what Hagen her­self described as “inde­scrib­able.” She applied her “umpteen-octave range,” as Christ­gau wrote, with­out restraint to every imag­in­able kind of mate­r­i­al, from cabaret to Nor­man Greenbaum’s “Spir­it in the Sky.”

Impos­si­ble to clas­si­fy, Hagen was beloved by the likes of the Sex Pis­tols and the Slits. Less than a decade after her 1978 debut with the Nina Hagen Band, she appeared in Tokyo with the Japan­ese Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra in a con­cert broad­cast to 15 coun­tries, per­form­ing the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. (See her that same year, 1985, sing from Car­men in Copen­hagen, Den­mark, just above.) She con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty lat­er in life, fre­quent­ly sings gospel tunes, and released an album called Per­son­al Jesus in 2010 fea­tur­ing a cov­er of the icon­ic Depeche Mode song.

Hagen emerged in 1978 along­side a num­ber of the­atri­cal female singers with preter­nat­u­ral­ly unset­tling voic­es, debut­ing at the same time as Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, and Dia­man­da Galas (who has received her own com­par­isons to Lin­da Blair). But her own jour­ney was par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al. “Lis­ten­ing to Hagen chat mat­ter-of-fact­ly about her life,” wrote The Irish Times in a review, “Madon­na seems like Doris Day in com­par­i­son, while your pre­tender Lady Gaga is, in Hagen’s own words, ‘a pop pros­ti­tute who has more to do with biki­ni adver­tis­ing.’”

Put more in more pos­i­tive terms, the singer honed her the­atri­cal “quick-change” per­sona through a “bar­rage of influ­ences,” the New York Times not­ed. Crit­ics were divid­ed over her eclec­ti­cism. Rolling Stone called her 1982 solo, Eng­lish-lan­guage debut the “most unlis­ten­able” album ever made, an unfair­ly harsh assess­ment that did­n’t stop her from exper­i­ment­ing with even more dis­so­nant, dis­ori­ent­ing sounds.

As Hagen her­self tells her sto­ry:

I grew up in East Berlin, in a fam­i­ly of artists. I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old I was imi­tat­ing the singers; lat­er I stud­ied opera. But we also got West­ern tele­vi­sion and radio, from the Amer­i­cans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hip­pie and gave flow­ers to police­men. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for Lon­don, I became a punk.

She became a punk diva, that is. Hagen’s vocal range—which you can hear demon­strat­ed in the thor­ough video analy­sis above—over her band’s prog-like jams (as in “Naturträne), con­jured up both angels and demons. She evokes dread with gut­tur­al growls and wide-eyed stares, she can look “child­like, sweet or ter­ri­fy­ing,” or all three at once, and she nev­er lacks the essen­tial qual­i­ty an opera singer needs to make it in rock and roll: a sense of humor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Klaus Nomi Per­forms with Kraftwerk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1982)

Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaude­ville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978)

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

How to Lis­ten to Music: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

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

“Through the entire­ty of his short life Jimi Hen­drix was an avid fan of sci­ence fic­tion. As a young child Hen­drix and his broth­er Leon would escape their trou­bled upbring­ing by dream­ing up sto­ries of far-off plan­ets and fly­ing saucers.” So begins the Poly­phon­ic video above, an explo­ration of how sci-fi informed the apoc­a­lyp­tic images and spaced-out sounds in Hendrix’s songs. His love of sci­ence fic­tion “only inten­si­fied as an adult,” espe­cial­ly when Hen­drix moved in with Chas Chan­dler, who would become his man­ag­er and pro­duc­er, and who owned a large col­lec­tion of sci-fi nov­els.

The books Hen­drix read at the time pro­vid­ed him with the mate­r­i­al he need­ed for a psy­che­del­ic rev­o­lu­tion. He turned the “pur­plish haze” in Philip Jose Farmer’s Night of Light into “Pur­ple Haze.” The song’s lyrics ref­er­ence the dis­ori­ent­ing state of mind char­ac­ters in Farmer’s sto­ry expe­ri­ence from cos­mic radi­a­tion, while they also allude, of course, to oth­er kinds of altered states. Hen­drix didn’t just weave sci-fi themes and ref­er­ences into his songs. He and Chan­dler com­posed space-rock epics that expand­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the elec­tric gui­tar and the record­ing stu­dio.

“Third Stone from the Sun” is writ­ten “from the per­spec­tive of an alien scout who is observ­ing Earth from afar.” Though he deflects with humor and innu­en­do, the alien char­ac­ter in the song express­es com­plete dis­gust with human­i­ty: “Your peo­ple I do not under­stand / So to you I shall put an end.” In “Up from the Skies,” Hen­drix sings from “the per­spec­tive of one who lived on Earth long ago, and is dis­mayed at the state of the plan­et when he comes back to vis­it.” Call­ing the Earth a “peo­ple farm,” he says to the plan­et as a whole, “I heard some of you got your fam­i­lies / Liv­ing in cages.”

The video links Hendrix’s use of sci­ence fic­tion as social com­men­tary to some of the best-known writ­ers of the genre, includ­ing Aldous Hux­ley, Isaac Asi­mov, Stanis­law Lem, and Ursu­la K. LeGuin. These are wor­thy com­par­isons, to be sure, but there is anoth­er tra­di­tion in which to sit­u­ate him, one that had been at work in pop­u­lar music since Sun Ra first stepped onstage and claimed to be from out­er space. Hendrix’s respons­es to the “apoc­a­lyp­tic” images of the Viet­nam War and the mass protest, civ­il unrest, and racial strife in the U.S. draws on an Afro­fu­tur­ist lex­i­con as much as from pre­dom­i­nate­ly white sci-fi.

Coined in 1995 by crit­ic Mark Dery in con­ver­sa­tion with sci­ence fic­tion giant Samuel R. Delany, crit­ic Greg Tate, and Pro­fes­sor Tri­cia Rose, the term “Afro­fu­tur­ism” describes a hybrid sci-fi aes­thet­ic that ties togeth­er past, present, and future Black expe­ri­ences. “From Sun-Ra to Janelle Monáe, the appro­pri­a­tion of oth­er-world­ly and alien iconog­ra­phy estab­lish­es Afro-futur­ists as out­siders,” writes Mawe­na Yehoues­si. Afro­fu­tur­ism is the cre­ative expres­sion of dou­ble con­scious­ness: C. Bran­don Ogbunu traces the genre back to W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1920 short sto­ry “The Comet” and argues that the abil­i­ty of Black artists to view the cul­ture as both insid­ers and out­siders can “help us to con­sid­er uni­vers­es of bet­ter alter­na­tives.”

Hendrix’s nar­ra­tors describe apoc­a­lyp­tic visions, but they do so from the point-of-view of oth­er, bet­ter worlds, or bet­ter times, or, in “A Mer­man I Should Turn to Be”—perhaps one of Hendrix’s most tren­chant critiques—an under­sea refuge.

Well it’s too bad that our friends, can’t be with us today
Well it’s too bad
‘The machine, that we built,
Would nev­er save us’, that’s what they say
(That’s why they ain’t com­ing with us today)
And they also said it’s impos­si­ble for a man to live and breathe under
Water, for­ev­er,
Was their main com­plaint
And they also threw this in my face, they said:
Any­way, you know good and well it would be beyond the will of God,
And the grace of the King (grace of the King)
(Yeah, yeah)

The per­spec­tive seems to antic­i­pate the pes­simistic, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic visions of Octavia But­ler. It’s a view Afro­fu­tur­ist the­o­rist Kod­wo Eshun links to the expe­ri­ences of peo­ple of the African dias­po­ra gen­er­al­ly, who “live the estrange­ment that sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers envi­sion. Black expe­ri­ence and sci­ence fic­tion are one and the same.” Afro­fu­tur­ism has “always looked for­ward,” Tay­lor Crump­ton writes at Clever, pro­vid­ing a “blue­print for cul­tur­al growth.” In Hendrix’s songs, we feel the urgent ten­sion between a world on fire and a desire to escape, resolv­ing, Poly­phon­ic con­cludes, with “hope in a new way of liv­ing.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Rare Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Per­form­ing “Voodoo Child” in Maui, Plus a Trail­er for a New Doc­u­men­tary on Jimi Hendrix’s Leg­endary Maui Per­for­mances (1970)

Behold Moe­bius’ Many Psy­che­del­ic Illus­tra­tions of Jimi Hen­drix

Watch a 5‑Part Ani­mat­ed Primer on Afro­fu­tur­ism, the Black Sci-Fi Phe­nom­e­non Inspired by Sun Ra

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