Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Search for Origins

in Music | May 10th, 2021

Where exact­ly did “heavy met­al” start? Like a sim­i­lar question—“what is the first rock and roll song?”–there’s not so much a direct answer as a spread­ing of ingre­di­ents over a num­ber of years, all of which com­bine to cre­ate “heavy met­al,” and its numer­ous sub-gen­res that have sprung forth from it. There’s not so much a year of ori­gin as there is a year after which one can­not claim a begin­ning. (Now that’s a sen­tence!)

If you’re con­fused, this quick his­to­ry by Poly­phon­ic will answer all of your ques­tions, and hope­ful­ly turn you on to a few tracks you’ve nev­er heard before.

So what makes a heavy met­al track? Well, first you have to have some loud, heavy, dis­tort­ed gui­tars. Poly­phon­ic goes back to blues musi­cians, as so many rock gui­tarists con­tin­ue to do, to sug­gest the gui­tar sounds of Pat Hare and Joe Hill Lewis as pre­cur­sors to that sound. Next you have to have some light­ing-fast fin­ger­work all over the frets—maybe the hyper­fast riffage of surf rock leg­end Dick Dale will do?

That’s all fine and good. But we need to get *heavy* in this met­al. And it was the Brits who took on this job. Cre­at­ing a mood and exper­i­ment­ing with sound marked bands like the Bea­t­les, Stones, and The Who, as they tried to out-do each oth­er. When Paul McCart­ney heard that The Who had deliv­ered the heav­i­est song so far in “I Can See for Miles” (which now sounds sur­pris­ing­ly twee com­pared to lat­er Who songs), he sat down with the band and blast­ed out “Hel­ter Skel­ter.” Take that, Pete Town­shend.

The Bea­t­les weren’t steeped in the blues, but so many oth­er British bands were, and here’s where blues picked up the gaunt­let thrown down by these heavy, dron­ing, bass-laden sounds. While the British Inva­sion bands wore their Eng­lish­ness on their (record) sleeves, trad- and psych-blues bands like Cream and Led Zep­pelin want­ed to sound Amer­i­can. Things got loud­er, crunchi­er, slow­er, and dark­er. They got real­ly dark with Black Sab­bath, which named them­selves after the Mario Bava hor­ror film, and brought anoth­er ingre­di­ent to the stew: dark, fan­tas­tic, Satan­ic imagery. Final­ly, Deep Pur­ple brought the ban­shee screech­ings of Ian Gillan as a final part to the puz­zle. Put it all togeth­er and what you have is heavy met­al, man.

Heavy Met­al has gone on to delight gen­er­a­tions and piss off all the right peo­ple at the same time. It’s giv­en rise to a new sub genre every year, and come out of it with a hard-earned respectabil­i­ty.

The above ani­mat­ed video from Pitch­fork will get you caught up with the evo­lu­tion into chart dom­i­na­tion and back out into purist obscu­ri­ty.

And for those who would rather lis­ten to a his­to­ry rather than watch one, check this out.

Poly­phon­ic hits most of the well known sign­posts on the jour­ney, but if you think an essen­tial song is miss­ing, let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dev­il­ish His­to­ry of the 1980s Parental Advi­so­ry Stick­er: When Heavy Met­al & Satan­ic Lyrics Col­lid­ed with the Reli­gious Right

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

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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Foo Fighters Perform “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson: When Live Music Returns

in Uncategorized | May 10th, 2021

At Sat­ur­day’s ben­e­fit con­cert, “Vax Live: The Con­cert to Reunite the World,” the Foo Fight­ers took the stage and per­formed “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Bri­an John­son. It’s a tan­ta­liz­ing taste of the world to come, if we all do our part…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Demen­tia Patients Find Some Eter­nal Youth in the Sounds of AC/DC

1,000 Musi­cians Per­form Foo Fight­ers’ “Learn to Fly” in Uni­son in Italy

Rick Ast­ley Sings an Unex­pect­ed­ly Enchant­i­ng Cov­er of the Foo Fight­ers’ “Ever­long”

 

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Japanese Carpenters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joineries While Taking Apart a Traditional House

in Architecture | May 7th, 2021

Accord­ing to myth, the first Japan­ese poet, Susano‑o, the storm god, named the activ­i­ty of build­ing as equal to the works of nature. Trav­el blog Kan­sai Odyssey writes, “Susano‑o felt rather inspired” while at Suga Shrine in Shi­mane Pre­fec­ture, “and recit­ed the first poem in Japan­ese lit­er­a­ture.” Rough­ly trans­lat­ed, it reads: “In Izu­mo, where the clouds form, / I see a fence of clouds. / To pro­tect my wife, I too, built a fence. / These clouds are as my fence.”

An embrace of the nat­ur­al world inter­min­gles in Japan­ese cul­ture with a craft tra­di­tion renowned the world over, not least in the build­ing arts. “Since the 12th Cen­tu­ry,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal, “Japan­ese arti­sans have been employ­ing a con­struc­tion tech­nique that uses just one sim­ple mate­r­i­al: wood. Rather than uti­lize glue, nails, and oth­er fas­ten­ers, the tra­di­tion of Japan­ese wood join­ery notch­es slabs of tim­ber so that the grooves lock togeth­er and form a stur­dy struc­ture.”

Although most­ly prac­ticed in the repair and preser­va­tion of his­toric build­ings these days, Japan­ese join­ery still inspires mod­ern wood­work­ers, engi­neers, and archi­tects for its incred­i­ble pre­ci­sion and endurance. Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese build­ings are “struc­tures built from nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and the knowl­edge and skills passed down gen­er­a­tions,” writes Yamanashi-based car­pen­ter Dylan Iwaku­ni. “Through the fine skills and knowl­edge, Japan­ese Wood­en Archi­tec­ture has been stand­ing for (thou­sands of) years.”

In the video at the top, you can see Iwaku­ni and his team’s excite­ment as they dis­cov­er tra­di­tion­al join­ery while dis­as­sem­bling a 100-year-old Japan­ese house. The video shows each joint in close-up, adding a title that names its par­tic­u­lar type. “As it became a tra­di­tion in Japan,” wrote Col­in Mar­shall in a pre­vi­ous post on Iwakuni’s craft, “this car­pen­try devel­oped a canon of join­ing meth­ods.” All of the joints, from the very sim­ple to the mind-bog­gling­ly puz­zle-like, were of course cut by hand. No pow­er tools in medieval Japan.

Just above, see Iwaku­ni intro­duce the art of join­ery, and see sev­er­al more of his demon­stra­tions here. Those inter­est­ed in going fur­ther should see our pre­vi­ous posts at the links below. Find even more hands-on resources at the Japan Wood­craft Asso­ci­a­tion.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

Free Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Joints & Fur­ni­ture: Down­load Tsug­ite

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

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

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An Immersive Pink Floyd Museum Exhibition Is Coming to the U.S.: Get Tickets Online

in History, Music | May 7th, 2021

While it’s not tech­ni­cal­ly incor­rect to call Pink Floyd a rock band, the term feels some­how unequal to the descrip­tive task at hand. One does­n’t so much lis­ten to albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as expe­ri­ence them, and this went even more so for their elab­o­rate, increas­ing­ly colos­sal live per­for­mances. A ret­ro­spec­tive of Pink Floy­d’s his­to­ry, which stretched back to 1965, must do jus­tice to Pink Floy­d’s tran­scen­dent ambi­tion: this was the goal of Pink Floyd: Their Mor­tal Remains, an exhi­bi­tion that first opened at Lon­don’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um in 2017 and is now prepar­ing to make its Unit­ed States debut at Los Ange­les’ Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um this sum­mer.

“You arrive into Their Mor­tal Remains via a life-size repli­ca of the band’s Bed­ford van, their black-and-white tour­ing vehi­cle in the mid-Six­ties,” Rolling Stone’s Emi­ly Zem­ler writes of the V&A show. “The sto­ry is told by let­ters, draw­ings, posters, video footage, news­pa­per clip­pings, music instru­ments, tick­et stubs and odd objects, some of them repli­cas.”

The items on dis­play come not just from the pro­fes­sion­al life of the band but the per­son­al lives of it mem­bers as well: “Syd Barrett’s red-orange bicy­cle,” for instance, or “the actu­al cane used on Waters dur­ing his ear­ly years” to deliv­er pun­ish­ment for mis­be­hav­ior at school.

Also on dis­play are no few notable musi­cal instru­ments, includ­ing a kit paint­ed for drum­mer Nick Mason with ukiyo‑e artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa. “Once it’s behind glass, it just looks a mil­lion dol­lars,” Mason says in one of Their Mor­tal Remains’ trail­ers, appear­ing in his capac­i­ty as a con­sul­tant to the project. It main cura­tor, graph­ic design­er Aubrey “Po” Pow­ell, co-cre­at­ed the cov­er art for The Dark Side of the Moon, and brings to bear a thor­ough knowl­edge of Pink Floy­d’s music, their his­to­ry, and their sen­si­bil­i­ty. “It’s way out of scale to any­thing that you’ve ever seen before,” he says of the exhi­bi­tion’s design, “and that sort of jour­ney is very rem­i­nis­cent of psy­che­delia, of being on psy­che­del­ic drugs.”

In its way, the alter­ation of con­scious­ness is as essen­tial to the Pink Floyd phe­nom­e­non as the incor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy (sub­ject of a recent Mason-host­ed BBC pod­cast series) and the expan­sion of rock music’s son­ic ter­ri­to­ry. On a deep­er lev­el, there’s also what V&A direc­tor Tris­tram Hunt calls “an Eng­lish pas­toral idiom,” which will cer­tain­ly make for an intrigu­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion when Their Mor­tal Remains com­pletes its instal­la­tion in the thick of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. There it will run from August 3rd to Novem­ber 28th, though tick­ets are already on sale at the Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um’s web site. Though in Los Ange­les the con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stances that have tra­di­tion­al­ly accom­pa­nied their music are now more legal than ever, be warned that what Sal­vador Dalí said of him­self also holds true for Pink Floyd: they are drugs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd Drum­mer Nick Mason Presents the His­to­ry of Music & Tech­nol­o­gy in a Nine-Part BBC Pod­cast

Bruce Spring­steen and Pink Floyd Get Their First Schol­ar­ly Jour­nals and Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­fer­ences

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)

in Music, Technology, Television | May 6th, 2021


We can break pop­u­lar music into two peri­ods: before the Moog and after the Moog. Upon its debut in 1964, that syn­the­siz­er made a big splash in the small but long-estab­lished elec­tron­ic-music world by, among oth­er inno­v­a­tive qual­i­ties, being small­er than an entire room. Over the next few years, inven­tor Bob Moog (whose pre­vi­ous line was in theremins) refined his epony­mous brain­child to the point that it became acces­si­ble to com­posers not already on the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy. But for Wendy Car­los, the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy was where she’d spent most of her life; hence her abil­i­ty to cre­ate the first best­selling all-Moog album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach.

By the begin­ning of the 1970s, great pub­lic curios­i­ty had built up about these new music-mak­ing machines, thanks to Car­los’ work as well as that of com­posers like the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s Daphne Oram. It was the BBC that pro­duced the clip above, in which Car­los explains the fun­da­men­tals of not just the Moog but sound syn­the­sis itself.

She even plays a bit of the sec­ond move­ment of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­to #4, Car­los’ ren­di­tion of which on Switch-On Bach’s fol­low-up The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er moved no less an author­i­ty than Glenn Gould to call it “the finest per­for­mance of any of the Bran­den­burgs — live, canned, or intu­it­ed — I’ve ever heard.”

In this footage, more than half a cen­tu­ry old as it is, only an evi­dent skill at oper­at­ing the Moog and under­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ples of syn­the­siz­ers sug­gest Car­los’ iden­ti­ty. At that time in her career she was still known as Wal­ter Car­los, and she has since spo­ken of hav­ing main­tained that image by apply­ing a pair of fake side­burns for pub­lic appear­ances. (She would return to the BBC to do anoth­er Moog demon­stra­tion as Wendy nine­teen years lat­er.) Today one dares say those mut­ton chops look a bit obvi­ous, but it isn’t as a mas­ter of dis­guise that Car­los has gone down in his­to­ry. Rather, her work has showed the way for gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians, well out­side of cam­pus lab­o­ra­to­ries, to make use of elec­tron­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed sounds in a man­ner that res­onates, as it were, with the wider lis­ten­ing pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, “the Record of the Decade” (1968)

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Bob Moog Demon­strates His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Moog Mod­el D Syn­the­siz­er

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch “Colette,” the Oscar-Winning Short Documentary (2021)

in Film | May 6th, 2021

Thanks to The Guardian, you can now watch online “Colette,” the film that recent­ly won the Acad­e­my Award in the cat­e­go­ry of best doc­u­men­tary short. The British news­pa­per sets the stage as fol­lows:

90-year-old Colette Marin-Cather­ine con­fronts her past by vis­it­ing the Ger­man con­cen­tra­tion camp Mit­tel­bau-Dora where her broth­er was killed. As a young girl, she fought Hitler’s Nazis as a mem­ber of the French Resis­tance. For 74 years, she has refused to step foot in Ger­many, but that changes when a young his­to­ry stu­dent named Lucie enters her life. Pre­pared to re-open old wounds and revis­it the ter­rors of that time, Marin-Cather­ine offers impor­tant lessons for us all.

In a sep­a­rate inter­view, film­mak­ers Antho­ny Giacchi­no and Alice Doyard “explain how they found out about the sto­ry of Colette and why they decid­ed to make a doc­u­men­tary about her.”

“Colette” will be added to our list of online doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Online Eric Hob­s­bawm: The Con­so­la­tions of His­to­ry, a Doc­u­men­tary Explor­ing the Life & Work of the Influ­en­tial His­to­ri­an

Glass: The Oscar-Win­ning “Per­fect Short Doc­u­men­tary” on Dutch Glass­mak­ing (1958)

Why Man Cre­ates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Look at Cre­ativ­i­ty (1968)

Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short, The Dot and the Line, Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try and Hard Work (1965)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijua­na Brass (1966)

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Beautiful 19th-Century Indian Drawings Show Hatha Yoga Poses Before They Reached the West

in Art, Books, Health, Religion | May 6th, 2021

Yoga as an ath­let­ic series of pos­tures for phys­i­cal health came into being only about 100 years ago, part of a wave of gym­nas­tics and cal­is­then­ics that spread around the West­ern world in the 1920s and made its way to India, com­bin­ing with clas­si­cal Indi­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and asanas, a word which trans­lates to “seat.”  Yoga, of course, had exist­ed as a clas­si­cal spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline in India for thou­sands of years. (The word is first found in the Rig Veda), but it had lit­tle to do with fit­ness, as yoga schol­ar Mark Sin­gle­ton found when he delved into the roots of yoga as we know it.

Asana prac­tice was often mar­gin­al, even scorned by some 19th cen­tu­ry Indi­an teach­ers of high caste as the domain of “fakirs” and men­di­cant beg­gars. “The first wave of ‘export yogis,’” writes Sin­gle­ton, “head­ed by Swa­mi Vivekanan­da, large­ly ignored asana and tend­ed to focus instead on pranaya­ma [breath prac­tice], med­i­ta­tion, and pos­i­tive think­ing…. Vivekanan­da pub­licly reject­ed hatha yoga in gen­er­al and asana in par­tic­u­lar.”

In the 20th cen­tu­ry, yoga became asso­ci­at­ed with Indi­an nation­al­ism and anti-colo­nial resis­tance, and import­ed West­ern pos­es were com­bined with asanas for a pro­gram of intense phys­i­cal train­ing.

West­ern­ized yoga has obscured oth­er tra­di­tions around the world that devel­oped over hun­dreds or thou­sands of years. For his book with James Mallinson, Roots of Yoga, Sin­gle­ton con­sult­ed “yog­ic texts from Tibetan, Ara­bic, Per­sian, Ben­gali, Tamil, Pali, Kash­miri, Old Marathi, Avad­hi, Braj Bhasha, and Eng­lish,” notes the Pub­lic Domain Review, who bring our atten­tion to this ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry series of images from a text called the Joga Pradīpikā, made before clas­si­cal yoga became known in the west by adven­tur­ous thinkers like Hen­ry David Thore­au.

A few mil­len­nia before it was the prove­nance of lycra-clad teach­ers in bou­tique stu­dios, asana prac­tice com­bined rig­or­ous, often quite painful-look­ing, med­i­ta­tive pos­tures with mudras (“seals”), hand ges­tures whose ori­gins “remain obscure,” though yoga his­to­ri­an Georg Feuer­stein argues “they are undoubt­ed­ly the prod­ucts of inten­sive med­i­ta­tion prac­tice dur­ing [which] the body spon­ta­neous­ly assumes cer­tain sta­t­ic as well as dynam­ic pos­es.” The col­lec­tion of draw­ings in the 118-page book depicts 84 asanas and 24 mudras, “with explana­to­ry notes in Bra­ja-Bhasha verse,” notes the British Library, and one image (top) relat­ed to Kun­dali­ni yoga.

What­ev­er the var­i­ous prac­tices of yog­ic schools in both the East­ern and West­ern world, “the meth­ods and lifestyles devel­oped by the Indi­an philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al genius­es over a peri­od of at least five mil­len­nia all have one and the same pur­pose,” writes Feuer­stein in his sem­i­nal study, The Yoga Tra­di­tion: “to help us break through the habit pat­terns of our ordi­nary con­scious­ness and to real­ize our iden­ti­ty (or at least union) with the peren­ni­al Real­i­ty. Indi­a’s great tra­di­tions of psy­chos­pir­i­tu­al growth under­stand them­selves as paths of lib­er­a­tion. Their goal is to lib­er­ate us from our con­ven­tion­al con­di­tion­ing and hence also free us from suf­fer­ing.”

Under a broad umbrel­la, yoga has flour­ished as an incred­i­ble wealth of tra­di­tions, philoso­phies, reli­gious prac­tices, and schol­ar­ship whose strands weave loose­ly togeth­er in what most of us know as yoga in a syn­the­sis of East and West. Learn more at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and have a look at their new book of his­toric images, Affini­ties, here, a curat­ed jour­ney through visu­al cul­ture.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

How Yoga Changes the Brain and May Guard Against Alzheimer’s and Demen­tia

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

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Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blistering “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo (2004)

in Music | May 5th, 2021

Recent­ly, I was walk­ing with a young rel­a­tive who, upon pass­ing a mur­al of the late Prince Rogers Nel­son, looked up at me and asked, “who is that?,” where­upon my eyes grew wide as saucers and I began the tale of a musi­cal hero who con­quered every instru­ment, every musi­cal style, every chord and scale, etc. It was a sto­ry fit for young ears, mind you, but myth­ic enough, I guess, that it inspired my rel­a­tive to stop me mid-sen­tence and ask in awe, “was he a god?” To which I stam­mered, caught off guard, “well, kind of…..”

Human­ly flawed though he was, Prince comes as close as any recent fig­ure to musi­cal divin­i­ty in the flesh. He seemed to con­jure and cre­ate effort­less­ly, ex nihi­lo, nev­er seem­ing to tire and always look­ing as though he just stepped off of a cloud. Now we know a lit­tle more about the source of some of that seren­i­ty, but it dimin­ish­es his leg­end not one bit. If not a god, he was at least some sort of wiz­ard.

Prince’s famous­ly epic live solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induc­tion Cer­e­mo­ny in the star-packed jam­boree cov­er of George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” holds up as a won­drous­ly suc­cinct case in point to show the chil­dren. Now, the per­for­mance has been re-edit­ed in a “director’s cut” by the broadcast’s orig­i­nal direc­tor Joel Gallen. Thom Dunn at Boing Boing quotes his expla­na­tion: “there were sev­er­al shots that were both­er­ing me. I got rid of the dis­solves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince dur­ing his solo.” (See the orig­i­nal below.)

“For­tu­nate­ly,” notes Dunn, “Gallen pre­served the dis­ap­pear­ing gui­tar at the end.” No one knows to this day where the gui­tar went, not even Tom Pet­ty and the Heart­break­ers drum­mer Steve Fer­rone, who was on stage behind Prince at the time. The stunt was unre­hearsed, and so was every­thing about the solo — no one had any idea what was going to hap­pen, a fright­en­ing prospect on live tele­vi­sion but a risk one must take, I sup­pose, when work­ing with the Pur­ple One.

In 2016, Gallen told The New York Times the sto­ry, worth quot­ing in full, of the performance’s rehearsal, a moment of pri­vate humil­i­ty from Prince behind his live bravu­ra show onstage.

The Pet­ty rehearsal was lat­er that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his gui­tar. He says hel­lo to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the mid­dle solo, where Prince is sup­posed to do it, Jeff Lyn­ne’s gui­tar play­er just starts play­ing the solo. Note for note, like Clap­ton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps for­ward to go into the solo, and this guy starts play­ing that solo too! Prince does­n’t say any­thing, just starts strum­ming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, noth­ing mem­o­rable.

They fin­ish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of hud­dle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This can­not be hap­pen­ing. I don’t even know if we’re going to get anoth­er rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy can­not be play­ing the solos through­out the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, for­get the mid­dle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t wor­ry about it.” And then he leaves. They nev­er rehearsed it, real­ly. Nev­er real­ly showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basi­cal­ly telling me, the pro­duc­er of the show, not to wor­ry. And the rest is his­to­ry. It became one of the most sat­is­fy­ing musi­cal moments in my his­to­ry of watch­ing and pro­duc­ing live music.

No, kid, he wasn’t a god, just a guy who could do things no one else could. He was a genius.

via Boing Boing / Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

Watch Prince Per­form “Pur­ple Rain” in the Rain in His Tran­scen­dent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

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

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Watch Online Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History, a Documentary Exploring the Life & Work of the Influential Historian

in Film, History | May 5th, 2021

Cour­tesy of The Lon­don Review of Books, you can now watch Eric Hob­s­bawm: The Con­so­la­tions of His­to­ry:

In this doc­u­men­tary, Antho­ny Wilks traces the con­nec­tions between the events of Eric Hob­s­bawm’s life and the his­to­ry he told, from his teenage years in Ger­many and his com­mu­nist mem­ber­ship, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the mak­ings of New Labour, tak­ing in Ital­ian ban­dits, Peru­vian peas­ant move­ments and the devel­op­ment of nation­al­ism in the mod­ern world, with help from the assid­u­ous obser­va­tions of MI5. The film fea­tures con­tri­bu­tions from Frances Stonor Saun­ders, Richard J. Evans, John Foot, Ste­fan Colli­ni, Mar­lene Hob­s­bawm and Don­ald Sas­soon, as well as Hob­s­bawm him­self in exten­sive archive footage.

To learn more about Hob­s­bawm, read the 2019 New York­er pro­file “Eric Hob­s­bawm, the Com­mu­nist Who Explained His­to­ry.”

The film will be added to our list of online doc­u­men­taries and our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5 Free Online Cours­es on Marx’s Cap­i­tal from Prof. David Har­vey

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

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Watch “Degrees of Uncertainty,” an Animated Documentary about Climate Science, Uncertainty & Knowing When to Trust the Experts

in Current Affairs, Data, Science | May 5th, 2021

We should just trust the experts. But wait: to iden­ti­fy true exper­tise requires its own kind of even more spe­cial­ized exper­tise. Besides, experts dis­agree with each oth­er, and over time dis­agree with them­selves as well. This makes it chal­leng­ing indeed for all of us non-experts — and we’re all non-experts in the fields to which we have not ded­i­cat­ed our lives — to under­stand phe­nom­e­na of any com­plex­i­ty. As for grasp­ing cli­mate change, with its enor­mous his­tor­i­cal scale and count­less many vari­ables, might we as well just throw up our hands? Many have done so: Neil Hal­lo­ran, cre­ator of the short doc­u­men­tary Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty above, labels them “cli­mate denial­ists” and “cli­mate defeatists.”

Cli­mate denial­ists choose to believe that man­made cli­mate change isn’t hap­pen­ing, cli­mate defeatists choose to believe that it’s inevitable, and both there­by let them­selves off the hook. Not only do they not have to address the issue, they don’t even have to under­stand it — which itself can seem a fair­ly daunt­ing task, giv­en that sci­en­tists them­selves express no small degree of uncer­tain­ty about cli­mate change’s degree and tra­jec­to­ry. “The only way to learn how sure sci­en­tists are is to dig in a lit­tle and view their work with some healthy skep­ti­cism,” says Hal­lo­ran. This entails devel­op­ing an instinct not for refu­ta­tion, exact­ly, but for exam­in­ing just how the experts arrive at their con­clu­sions and what pit­falls they encounter along the way.

Often, sci­en­tists “don’t know how close they are to the truth, and they’re prone to con­fir­ma­tion bias,” and as any­one pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the sci­ences knows full well, they work “under pres­sure to pub­lish note­wor­thy find­ings.” Their pub­li­ca­tions then find their way to a media cul­ture in which, increas­ing­ly, “trust­ing or dis­trust­ing sci­en­tists is becom­ing a mat­ter of polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty.” As he did in his pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary The Fall­en of World War II, Hal­lo­ran uses ani­ma­tion and data visu­al­iza­tion to illu­mi­nate his own path to under­stand­ing a glob­al occur­rence whose sheer pro­por­tions make it dif­fi­cult to per­ceive.

This jour­ney takes Hal­lo­ran not just around the globe but back in time, start­ing in the year 19,000 B.C. and end­ing in pro­jec­tions of a future in which ring seas swal­low much of Ams­ter­dam, Mia­mi, and New Orleans. The most impor­tant stop in the mid­dle is the Age of Enlight­en­ment and the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 17th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, when sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy rose to promi­nence and brought about  an unprece­dent­ed human flour­ish­ing — with cli­mat­ic con­se­quences that have begun to make them­selves known, albeit not with absolute cer­tain­ty. But as Hal­lo­ran sees it, “uncer­tain­ty, the very thing that clouds our view, also frees us to con­struct pos­si­ble answers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Muhammad Ali Explains Why He Refused to Fight in Vietnam: “My Conscience Won’t Let Me Go Shoot My Brother… for Big Powerful America” (1970)

in History, Sports, Television | May 5th, 2021

In April of 1967, Muham­mad Ali arrived at the U.S. Armed Forces Exam­in­ing and Entrance Sta­tion in Hous­ton, Texas. “Stand­ing beside twen­ty-five oth­er nerve-racked young men called to the draft,” writes David Rem­nick at The New York­er, Ali “refused to respond to the call of ‘Cas­sius Clay!’” Offered the choice of going to Viet­nam or to jail, he chose the lat­ter “and was sen­tenced to five years in prison and released on bail.” Ali lost his title, his box­ing license, his pass­port, and — as far as he knew at the time — his career. He was new­ly mar­ried with his first child on the way.

When Ali refused to go to Viet­nam, he was “already one of America’s great­est heavy­weights ever,” notes USA Today. “He’d won an Olympic gold medal for the Unit­ed States in Rome when he was just 18 and four years lat­er, against all odds, defeat­ed Son­ny Lis­ton to win his first title as world cham­pi­on.” Ali, it seemed, could do no wrong, as long as he agreed to play a role that made Amer­i­cans com­fort­able. He refused to do that too, becom­ing a Mus­lim in 1961, chang­ing his name in 1964, and speak­ing out in his inim­itable style against racism and Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism.

Ali stood on prin­ci­ple as a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor at a time when resist­ing the Viet­nam War made him extreme­ly unpop­u­lar. Sports Illus­trat­ed called him “anoth­er dem­a­gogue and an apol­o­gist for his so-called reli­gion” and pro­nounced that “his views of Viet­nam don’t deserve rebut­tal.” Tele­vi­sion host David Susskind called him “a dis­grace to his coun­try” and even Jack­ie Robin­son felt Ali was “hurt­ing… the morale of a lot of young Negro sol­diers over in Viet­nam.”

Robin­son gave voice to a sen­ti­ment one hears often from crit­ics of polit­i­cal­ly out­spo­ken ath­letes: “Cas­sius has made mil­lions of dol­lars off of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, and now he’s not will­ing to show his appre­ci­a­tion to a coun­try that’s giv­ing him, in my view, a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty.” But the coun­try also gave Ali the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take his case to the Supreme Court, as his lawyer told Howard Cosell in the ABC news seg­ment at the top. “Ali had no inten­tion of flee­ing to Cana­da,” DeNeen L. Brown writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “but he also had no inten­tion of serv­ing in the Army.”

Ali strung togeth­er a liv­ing giv­ing speak­ing engage­ments at anti-war events around the coun­try for the next few years as he fought the ver­dict. It was hard­ly the liv­ing he’d made as cham­pi­on. But “my con­science won’t let me go shoot my broth­er, or some dark­er peo­ple, or some poor hun­gry peo­ple in the mud for big pow­er­ful Amer­i­ca,” he said. “And shoot them for what? They nev­er called me [the N word], they nev­er lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nation­al­i­ty, rape and kill my moth­er and father…. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor peo­ple? Just take me to jail.”

Ali remained promi­nent­ly in the pub­lic eye through­out his appeal. He had become a “fix­ture on the TV talk show cir­cuit in the pre­ca­ble days of the 1960s and ‘70s,” writes Stephen Battaglio in a LA Times review of the recent doc­u­men­tary Ali & Cavett. He remained so dur­ing his hia­tus from box­ing thanks in no small part to Dick Cavett, who had Ali on fre­quent­ly for every­thing from “seri­ous dis­cus­sions of race rela­tions in the U.S. to play­ful con­fronta­tions aimed at pro­mot­ing fights.” Cavett’s show “pro­vid­ed a com­fort zone for Ali, espe­cial­ly before he became a beloved fig­ure.” And it gave Ali a forum to counter pub­lic slan­der. In the clip above from 1970, he talks about how his sac­ri­fices made him a cred­i­ble role mod­el for trou­bled young peo­ple.

He seems at first to com­pare him­self to ear­ly Amer­i­can pio­neers, Japan­ese kamikaze pilots, and the first astro­nauts when Cavett asks him about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of going to jail, but his point is that he thinks he’s pay­ing a small price com­pared to what oth­ers have giv­en up for progress — “We’ve been in jail 400 years,” he says. “The sys­tem is built on war.” The fol­low­ing year, the Supreme Court would dis­miss the case against him, swayed by the argu­ment that Ali opposed all war, not just the war in Viet­nam. He saw Cavett as a wor­thy spar­ring part­ner, help­ing the late-night host earn a place on Nixon’s list of ene­mies. It would become a place of hon­or in the com­ing years as Ali won back his career, his rep­u­ta­tion, and his title in the “Rum­ble in the Jun­gle” four years lat­er, and the Viet­nam War became a cause for nation­al shame.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Muham­mad Ali Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of His Poem on the Atti­ca Prison Upris­ing

“Muham­mad Ali, This Is Your Life!”: Cel­e­brate Ali’s Life & Times with This Touch­ing 1978 TV Trib­ute

When Jack John­son, the First Black Heavy­weight Cham­pi­on, Defeat­ed Jim Jef­fries & the Footage Was Banned Around the World (1910)

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

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