Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee & More
It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast, the academic poet, can seem like something of a unicorn, or dragon.
…Or like the ominous talking raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.
The divide between theory and practice is a recent development, a product of state budgeting, political brinksmanship, the relentless publishing mills of academia that force scholars to find a pigeonhole and stay there.… In days past, poets and scholar/theorists frequently occupied the same place at the same time—Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and, of course, Poe, whose perennially popular “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illustration for his theory of composition just as thoroughly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objective correlative.”
Poe’s object, the titular creature, is an “archetypal symbol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “unity of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” satisfies all of his other criteria for literature as well, such as achieving its intent in a single sitting, using a repeated refrain, and so on.
Should we have any doubt about how much Poe wanted us to see the poem as the deliberate outcome of a conceptual scheme, we find him three years later, in 1849, the year of his death, delivering a lecture on the “Poetic Principle,” and concluding with a reading of “The Raven.”
John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner remarked after attending one of these talks that “the attention of many in this city is now directed to this singular performance.” At that point, Poe, who hardly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suffer the indignity of having all of his work go out of print during his brief, unhappy lifetime. Moncure and the Examiner thereby furnished readers “with the only correct copy ever published,” previous appearances, it seems, having contained punctuation errors.
Nonetheless, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven“ ‘s first appearances made him semi-famous. His readings were a sensation, and it’s a sure bet that his audiences came to hear him read the poem, not deliver a lecture on its principles. Oh, for some proto-Edison in the room with an early recording device. What would it be like to hear the mournful, grief-stricken, alcoholic genius—master of the macabre and inventor of the detective story—intone the raven’s enigmatic “Nevermore”?
While Poe’s speaking voice has receded irretrievably into history, his poetic voice may live close to forever. So mesmerizing are his meter and diction that many great actors known especially for their voices have become possessed by “The Raven.”
Likely when we think of the poem, what first comes to the mind’s ear is the voice of Vincent Price, or James Earl Jones, Christopher Lee, or Christopher Walken, all of whom have given “The Raven” its due.
And so have many other notables, such as the great Stan Lee, Poe successor Neil Gaiman, original Gomez Addams actor John Astin, and venerable Beat poet/scholar Anne Waldman (listen here). You will find those recitations here at this round-up of notable “Raven” readings, and if this somehow doesn’t satiate you, then check out Lou Reed’s take on the poem, the Grateful Dead’s musical tribute, “Raven Space,” or a reading in 100 different celebrity impressions.
Finally, we would be remiss not to mention The Simpsons’ James Earl Jones-narrated parody, a worthy teaching tool for distracted young visual learners. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Halloween yarn fit for the Treehouse of Horror or any number of enjoyable exercises in spooky oratory—rather than the theoretical thought experiment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotisserie in his grave as Homer snores in a wingback chair? Probably. But as the author told us himself at length, the poem works! It still never fails to excite our morbid curiosity, enchant our gothic sensibility, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we never really needed Poe to explain it to us.
You can find other literary readings in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The 38 States of America: Geography Professor Creates a Bold Modern Map of America (1973)
Unless you belong to an older generation, you probably can’t remember the last time the map of the United States underwent any major change. For decades, the boundaries have remained pretty fixed. And yet the map, as we know it, shouldn’t necessarily be considered set in stone.
If billionaire Tim Draper has his way, California voters will decide in 2018 whether California, the home to nearly 40 million people, should be divided into three states called “Northern California,” “Southern California,” and plain “California.” His argument being that California has become too large to govern, and that power should be moved toward smaller, more locally governed entities. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, another group is pushing for California to leave the union altogether. Right there, we have two initiatives that could change the map as we know it.
And then there was the time when, back in 1973, George Etzel Pearcy, a California State University geography professor, proposed re-drawing the map of the nation, reducing the number of states to 38, and giving each state a different name. In his creative reworking of things, California would be split into two states–“El Dorado” and “San Gabriel”. Texas would divide into “Alamo” and also “Shawnee” (along with remnants of Oklahoma). And the Dakotas would fuse into one big “Dakota.” In case you’re wondering, Pearcy chose the names by polling geography students.
The logic behind the new map was explained in a 1975 edition of The People’s Almanac.
Why the need for a new map? Pearcy states that many of the early surveys that drew up our boundaries were done while the areas were scarcely populated. Thus, it was convenient to determine boundaries by using the land’s physical features, such as rivers and mountain ranges, or by using a simple system of latitude and longitude.… The practicality of old established State lines is questionable in light of America’s ever-growing cities and the increasing mobility of its citizens. Metropolitan New York, for example, stretches into 2 adjacent States. Other city populations which cross State lines are Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Chicago, and Kansas City. The “straddling” of State lines causes economic and political problems. Who should pay for a rapid transit system in St. Louis? Only those citizens within the boundaries of Missouri, or all residents of St. Louis’s metropolitan area, including those who reach over into the State of Illinois?…
When Pearcy realigned the U.S., he gave high priority to population density, location of cities, lines of transportation, land relief, and size and shape of individual States. Whenever possible lines are located in less populated areas. In the West, the desert, semidesert, or mountainous areas provided an easy method for division. In the East, however, where areas of scarce population are harder to determine, Pearcy drew lines “trying to avoid the thicker clusters of settlement.” Each major city which fell into the “straddling” category is neatly tucked within the boundaries of a new State. Pearcy tried to place a major metropolitan area in the center of each State. St. Louis is in the center of the State of Osage, Chicago is centered in the State of Dearborn. When this method proved impossible, as with coastal Los Angeles, the city is still located so as to be easily accessible from all parts of the State…
According to Rob Lammle, writing in Mental Floss, Pearcy initially got support from “economists, geographers, and even a few politicians.” But the proposal–mainly outlined in a book called A 38 State U.S.A.–eventually withered in Washington, the place where ideas, both good and bad, go to die.
Below you can watch an animation showing how US map has changed in 200 years.
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Read More...John Ashbery Reads “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Poet John Ashbery has passed away, at the age of 90. About the poet, Harold Bloom once said. “No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time. He is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.” In 1976, Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Above, you can hear him read the title poem, his masterpiece. The Guardian calls “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by the 16th century Italian painting of the same name.” The text of the poem appears on the Poetry Foundation website.
Find other poetry readings in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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, BlueSky or Mastodon.
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!
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Read More...Jared Leto Stars in a New Prequel to Blade Runner 2049: Watch It Free Online
Blade Runner, as anyone who’s seen so much as its first shot knows, takes place in the Los Angeles of November 2019. Though the film flopped when it came out in 1982, the acclaim and fans it has drawn with each of the 35 years that have passed since didn’t take long to reach the kind of critical mass that demands a sequel. After numerous rumors and false starts, the October release of Blade Runner 2049, produced by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and directed by Arrival director Denis Villeneuve, now fast approaches. The new movie’s promotional push, which has so far included trailers and making-of featurettes, has now begun to tell us what happened between 2019 and 2049.
“I decided to ask a couple of artists that I respect to create three short stories that dramatize some key events that occurred after 2019, when the first Blade Runner takes place, but before 2049, when my new Blade Runner story begins,” says Villeneuve in his introduction to the brand new short above.
Taking place in the Los Angeles of 2036, the Luke Scott-directed piece “revolves around Jared Leto’s character, Niander Wallace,” writes Collider’s Adam Chitwood, who “introduces a new line of ‘perfected’ replicants called the Nexus 9, seeking to get the prohibition on replicants repealed,” the government having shut replicant production down thirteen years before due to a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack for which replicants took the blame.
A timeline appeared at Comic-Con this past summer covering the events of the thirty years between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, though in very broad strokes: in 2020 “the Tyrell Corporation introduces a new replicant model, the Nexus 8S, which has extended lifespans,” in 2025 “a new company, Wallace Corp., solves the global food shortage and becomes a massive super power,” in 2049 “life on Earth has reached its limit and society divides between Replicant and human.” The two other short films to come should just about tide over fans until the release of Blade Runner 2049 — not that those who’ve been waiting for a new Blade Runner movie since the 1980s can’t handle another month.
The short Blade Runner 2049 prequel, entitled “Nexus: 2036,” will be added to our list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting
The threat of widespread violence and unrest descends upon the country, thanks again to a collection of actors viciously opposed to civil rights, and in many cases, to the very existence of people who are different from them. They have been given aid and comfort by very powerful enablers. Veteran activists swing into action. Young people on college campuses turn out by the hundreds week after week. But for many ordinary people with jobs, kids, mortgages, etc. the cost of participating in constant protests and civil actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, given many awful examples in recent history, the cost of inaction may be also.
What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huerta, after all. Few of us are revolutionaries and few may wish to be. Not everyone is brave enough or talented enough or knowledgeable enough or committed enough or, whatever.
The problem with this kind of thinking is a problem with so much thinking about politics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as superior beings—to do everything for us. This can mean delegating all the work of democracy to sometimes very flawed individuals. It can also mean we fundamentally misunderstand how democratic movements work.
In the video above, Noam Chomsky addresses the question of what ordinary people can do in the face of seemingly insurmountable injustice. (The clip comes from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of people are working all the time, and they’re working in their communities or their workplace or wherever they happen to be, and they’re building up the basis for popular movements.”
In the history books, there’s a couple of leaders, you know, George Washington or Martin Luther King, or whatever, and I don’t want to say that those people are unimportant. Martin Luther King was certainly important, but he was not the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King can appear in the history books ‘cause lots of people whose names you will never know, and whose names are all forgotten and who may have been killed and so on were working down in the South.
King himself often said as much. For example, in the Preface of his Stride Toward Freedom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 mostly ordinary, anonymous people who made the Montgomery Bus Boycott happen—“While the nature of this account causes me to make frequent use of the pronoun ‘I,’ in every important part of the story it should be ‘we.’ This is not a drama with only one actor.”
As for public intellectuals like himself engaged in political struggle, Chomsky says, “people like me can appear, and we can appear to be prominent… only because somebody else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “helping people develop courses of intellectual self-defense” against propaganda and misinformation. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Responding in a 1963 interview above to a critical question about his methods, he counters the suggestion that nonviolence means sitting on the sidelines.
I think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing. There’s a great deal of difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance. Nonresistance leaves you in a state of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency, whereas nonviolent resistance means that you do resist in a very strong and determined manner.
Both Chomsky, King, and every other voice for justice and human rights would agree that the people need to act instead of relying on movement leaders. Whatever actions one can take—whether it’s engaging in informed debate with family, friends, or coworkers, writing letters, making donations to activists and organizations, documenting injustice, or taking to the streets in protest or acts of civil disobedience—makes a difference. These are the small individual actions that, when practiced diligently and coordinated together in the thousands, make every powerful social movement possible.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More
We tend to think of film as roughly divided into the “black and white” and “color” eras, the latter ushered in by such lavish Technicolor productions as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. But we also know it’s not as simple as that: those pictures came out in Hollywood’s “golden year” of 1939, but some filmmakers had already been experimenting with color, and the golden age of black-and-white film would continue through the 1960s. Movies today still occasionally dare to venture into the never-entirely-shuttered realm of the monochrome, but on the whole, color reigns supreme.
Even though most movies now use color, few use it to its fullest advantage. Color gives viewers something more to look at, of course, but it can also give a movie its visual identity. Think of the films you’ve seen that you can call back most vividly to mind, almost as if you had a projector inside your head, and most of them will probably have a distinctive color palette.
The most memorable cinematic images, in other words, will have been composed not just with any color they happened to need, but with a very specific set of colors, deliberately assembled by the filmmakers for its particular expressiveness.
For a few years now, the Twitter account Cinema Palettes has drawn out and isolated those colors, ten per film, for all to see. “Though based on a momentary still, each spectrum of shades seems to encapsulate its movie’s overall mood,” writes My Modern Met’s Leah Pellegrini, pointing to “the somber, otherworldly blues of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the dreamlike pinks and purples of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the cloyingly pretty pastels of Edward Scissorhands, and the earthly, organic greens and browns of Atonement.”
It will surprise nobody to see the work of Wes Anderson, famed for the care he gives not just to color but every visual element of his film, appear more than once on the feed. Here we see Cinema Palettes’ selections from The Royal Tenenbaums, as well as from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The project reveals an aspect of filmmaking that few of us may think consciously about, but nevertheless reflects the nature of cinema itself: the best films select not just the right colors but the right aspects of reality itself to present, to intensify, to diminish, and to leave out entirely.
Explore more films and colors at Cinema Palettes.
via My Modern Met and h/t Natalie W‑S
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zimmer Soundtracks: Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight & Much More
No name has become more synonymous with the very concept of “movie music” than that of Hans Zimmer. Beginning in the 1980s by composing for such cult filmmakers of distinctive vision as Jerzy Skolimowski, Nico Mastorakis, and Nicolas Roeg, Zimmer soon rose to Hollywood heights, creating the scores for big hits like Rain Man, The Lion King, As Good as It Gets, Gladiator, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In recent years, he has entered into an ongoing collaboration with the director Christopher Nolan, himself an indie favorite turned blockbuster king, scoring his Batman movies as well as Inception, Interstellar, and Nolan’s new World War II picture Dunkirk, whose unusual sonic intensity the Vox video above explains.
“My weakness is that I didn’t go to music school, and that my formal education is two weeks of piano lessons,” Zimmer told Indiewire a couple years ago, after the release of Interstellar. “My strength is that I know how to listen,” and “the way Chris Nolan and I work is we listen to each other.”
Unlike many productions where “the composer is this nearly uncontrollable element that comes into the film” and to whom the director must defer, Zimmer starts working on Nolan’s movies from the beginning, a process he describes as a conversation: “While he was writing, while he was shooting, I was writing, and the music was happening sort of in a — to use an Interstellar term — parallel universe, really.” With no need for the dreaded “temp score,” the drama of Zimmer’s music and Nolan’s stories develop together.
You can hear the results of Zimmer’s process in this nine-hour playlist, which includes Zimmer’s work for Nolan’s films up to Dunkirk–its sound based in part on the ticking of a watch Nolan had given him–and others besides. (The playlist also includes Zimmer’s soundtracks for Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Black Hawk Down, Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, and The Thin Red Line.) If it leaves you with the desire to learn a bit more about how this instinctive master of movie music does it, have a look at the trailer above for “Hans Zimmer Teaches Film Scoring,” his $90 course from the online educational platform Masterclass. The very first piece of wisdom he offers reflects the fact that his instinct for back-and-forth collaboration extends well beyond his partnership with Nolan to his view on the craft itself: “In music, you’re basically having a conversation” — with your artistic collaborators, with your fellow musicians, with anyone to whom you can listen.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Video Essayist Kogonada Makes His Own Acclaimed Feature Film: Watch His Tributes to Its Inspirations Like Ozu, Linklater & Malick
We’ve featured the work of many cinema-loving video essayists (myself included) here on Open Culture, none of it more artistic than that of a man who goes by the name of Kogonada. Whether dealing with the films of auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitchcock, or Wes Anderson, he finds new and striking ways — often free of traditional narration, and sometimes even free of spoken words altogether — to show us how their cinematic visions work, and in so doing to create new cinematic visions of his own. But when, we Kogonada fans have long wondered, would this mysterious fellow make a movie of his own?
The answer arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in the form of Columbus, Kogonada’s feature directorial debut. “Columbus gets its title from the city where it’s set — Columbus, Indiana, home to a remarkable collection of renowned works of modern architecture,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, one of the many critics to have already lavished praise on the newly released picture.
“Those buildings provide an extraordinary premise for the drama, which is a visionary transformation of a familiar genre: a young adult’s coming-of-age story. For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sexual awakening or a family revelation; it’s the tale of an intellectual blossoming, thanks to a new friendship that arises amid troubled circumstances.”
Those troubled circumstances have to do with the parents of the two main characters: Casey, a recent high-school graduate who’s stayed in town to care for a mother trying to kick a methamphetamine habit, and Jin, a fortysomething translator who’s flown in from his home in Korea (birthplace of both the Midwest-raised Kogonada and the film’s Los Angeles-raised star John Cho) to watch over his father, an architectural theorist plunged into a coma by a stroke. “These parallel lines meet when Casey offers to show the stranger her town,” writes Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in his review. “ ‘Meth and modernism are really big here,’ she tells Jin, as he becomes increasingly intrigued by this girl who sees the art and the humanity in buildings.”
Soon Jin and Casey take “baby steps toward a relationship, in a manner that recalls Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.” That film, and its successors Before Sunset and Before Midnight, figure heavily into Kogonada’s video essay on Linklater, “On Cinema & Time.” Other influences, cited by critics as well as Kogonada himself, include Terence Malick, whose way with the elemental he examined in “Fire & Water,” and Yasujiro Ozu, whose films got him thinking about cinema in the first place. As he put it to Indiewire, he started by thinking he would “try to figure out what it is about his films that initially felt very unimpressive, but kept haunting me,” to understand why Ozu “isn’t easy to just reduce to something — he certainly is not this sort of traditionalist, he’s certainly not a western modernist, he is something else and whatever he was exploring and offering felt so relevant, even today.”
Kogonada’s video essays “Way of Ozu” and “Passageways” reveal not just the Japanese master’s use of architectural spaces, but Kogonada’s interest in such spaces. Columbus brings the depth of that interest to the fore: “The director provokes awareness of the Modernist Columbus by treating it as one of the film’s characters,” writes Architectural Record’s Dante A. Ciampaglia. “It’s both protagonist and nemesis for Casey and Jin as they wander the city, explore its architectural bounty, and find it both reflecting inner struggles and inspiring epiphanies.” As Kogonada himself puts it, “I think that’s the thing that interests me, the relationship between empty spaces and life itself.” May he find many more opportunities to explore it onscreen.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Nano Guitar: Discover the World’s Smallest, Playable Microscopic Guitar
In 1997, the Cornell Chronicle announced: “The world’s smallest guitar — carved out of crystalline silicon and no larger than a single cell — has been made at Cornell University to demonstrate a new technology that could have a variety of uses in fiber optics, displays, sensors and electronics.”
Invented by Dustin W. Carr, the so-called “nanoguitar” measured 10 micrometers long–roughly the size of your average red blood cell. And it had six strings, each “about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms.”
According to The Guardian, the vintage 1997 nanoguitar was actually never played. That honor went to a 2003 edition of the nanoguitar, whose strings were plucked by miniature lasers operated with an atomic force microscope, creating “a 40 megahertz signal that is 130,000 times higher than the sound of a full-scale guitar.” The human ear couldn’t hear something at that frequency, and that’s a problem not even a good amp–a Vox AC30, Fender Deluxe Reverb, etc.–could fix.
Thus concludes today’s adventure in nanotechnology.
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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!
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Read More...Stream 935 Songs That Appeared in “The John Peel Festive 50” from 1976 to 2004: The Best Songs of the Year, as Selected by the Beloved DJ’s Listeners
Image by Zetkin, via Wikimedia Commons
We’ve devoted space here before to legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s musical legacy, from his formidable record collection to his many hours of “Peel Sessions,” the recordings he made in BBC studios of artists like David Bowie, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees and so, so many more–usually when they were on the cusp of superstardom or enduring cult status. It was Peel’s particular talent for discovering and promoting such artists that set him apart from his peers. Rather than riding the cultural wave of the moment, he listened at the margins, cultivating and curating what he heard. Whether punk, glam, new wave, hardcore, ska, techno, or industrial, it seems John Peel got there first, and the rest of the industry followed after him.
Peel did not approach his role in a critical vein—sitting in judgment of the music around him. He approached it as an enthusiastic and obsessive fan, which explains much of his appeal to the listeners who loved his broadcasts. He honored those listeners each year by compiling a list of their favorites in what he called “The John Peel Festive 50.” This end-of-the-year event “became a Christmas institution, writes the BBC, “more loved than fairy lights and Christmas crackers.”
Listeners of Peel’s show voted for their three favorite tracks in November. The following month, the highest-ranked “Festive 50” were all played on the air. He described the process as a truly democratic, crowdsourced endeavor, as we would say today.
It’s really just me marking every single vote down in a ledger. There is obviously the temptation to slip something in that I like, especially if it’s just outside the 50, and something crap has gone above it. But I have a very workman-like brain so it just wouldn’t be on to fix it.
Peel “wasn’t always happy with what the listeners voted for,” often feeling “there were too many ‘white boys with guitars’ making an appearance.” The predictability of several of the lists irked him, and seemed to work against the spirit of his mission to tirelessly promote adventurous, experimental music. Peel may have been popular, but in matters of taste, he was no populist. For the most part, however, he remained faithful to the fans’ picks, and noted that he never would have been able to choose the top three songs of the year himself: “I couldn’t get any fewer than a list of 250.”
The tradition, with a few hiccups, continued from its inception in 1976 till Peel’s death in 2004, and the massive Spotify playlist above aggregates the hundreds of those picks—932 songs, to be exact, over 70 hours of music. From Dylan, Clapton, and the Stones to Neko Case—and along the way, no shortage of tracks from the punk and post-punk artists most closely associated with Peel’s show. While the listener’s picks do fall heavily into the “white boys with guitars” category, there’s plenty more besides, including early tracks from Eric B. & Rakim, P.J. Harvey, Stereolab, 10,000 Maniacs, Cocteau Twins, and many more. You can explore the tracks in Peel’s “Festive 50” lists here. They’re sorted by decade: 1970s — 1980s — 1990s — 2000s.
Note: Here’s a direct link to the Spotify playlist, and if you need Spotify’s software, download it here.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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