Category Archives: Popular music

by | October 25, 2013 · 1:00 am

Songs of Sam Lucas

sam lucas

Songs of Sam Lucas by Sandra Jean Graham is an open-access resource that streams recordings of 12 songs attributed to Lucas (ca. 1840–1916), one of the most celebrated entertainers of his generation, supplemented by a background essay, extensive liner notes, and illustrations.

Lucas created a significant body of black popular song that serves as an important window into the post-Civil War era. His songs illustrate a range of strategies: conformity to minstrel stereotypes, an attempt to recuperate the dignity of black traditional song, and ultimately liberation from minstrelsy through the adoption of white popular song style.

Recordings of Lucas’s songs are extremely rare; this site gives the public a chance to become acquainted with the music of this performer whose career spanned minstrelsy, variety, vaudeville, theater, and silent film.

Above, a newspaper photograph of Lucas from 1911; the full article is here.

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by | September 17, 2013 · 1:00 am

Hank Williams’s subversive narratives

 

The extraordinary popularity of Hank Williams’s songs in the late 1940s and early 1950s played a crucial role in transforming country music from a regional and class-bound genre to a staple of mass popular culture.

Yet Williams’s narratives exuded a fatalism and despair about personal relationships, resisted romantic optimism, and avoided the kinds of closure and transcendence historically associated with male subjectivity.

His refusal to embrace dominant cultural narratives gave an individual voice to collective fears and hopes about the body, romance, gender roles, and the family.

This according to “‘Everybody’s lonesome for somebody’: Age, the body and experience in the music of Hank Williams” by Richard D. Leppert and George Lipsitz (Popular music IX/3 [October 1990] pp. 259–274).

Today is Williams’s 90th birthday! Below, a live recording of his classic expression of male vulnerability.

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by | July 5, 2013 · 1:00 am

Phonetic translation

kylling-softice-poelser

The first generation of Danish rock musicians started out as fans of international stars, learning the songs by listening to the records. The lyrics they sang often were nonsense,  as they had been written down from the recordings by teenagers with only limited English skills. The sound of the words and the language was more important than the semantic meaning of the lyrics.

This practice was highlighted in the mid-1970s, when two bands, Shu-bi-dua and Bamses Venner, released debut albums that contained Danish versions of rock classics and contemporary international hits. Both bands employed phonetic translations, translating the sound of the words instead of the meaning. A well-known example is Shu-bi-dua’s Kylling med soft ice og pølser (Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages), which is the title of a Danish version of Roberta Flack’s Killing me softly with his song.

Kylling og softice og pølser/Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages
Det er min favourite menu/That’s my favorite menu
Mon der noget bedre/Surely there’s nothing better
End pølsegrillens røg/Than grilled sausage smoke
Og så en herlig hot-dogs med brutale løg/And then heavenly hotdogs with raw onions
To tykke og en kage/Two fat ones and a cake
Og godt med begge dele/And good both ways
Kylling og softice og pølser/Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages
Det er min favourite menu/That’s my favorite menu …

You can hear the song here.

This according to “Kylling med soft ice og pølser”: Populærmusikalske versioneringspraksisser i forbindelse med danske versioner af udenlandske sange i perioden 1945–2007 by Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, a dissertation accepted by Københavns Universitet, Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab in 2007.

BONUS: In 1972 Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol (below) poked a stick in the ribs of Italian singers who pretended to speak and understand English. Celentano’s song consisted of nonsense lyrics that in many cases sound remarkably close to North American English speech.

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Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Popular music

by | June 30, 2013 · 1:00 am

Malmsteen and classical music

 

Two televised performances galvanized the young Yngwie Malmsteen: one by Jimi Hendrix when Malmsteen was 8, and, when he was 13, one by a violinist playing works by Paganini.

Malmsteen has openly embraced the premises of classical music more than any rock musician before him. With his fetishization of instrumental technique and his move toward absolute music he adopted classical music’s style and vocabulary, models of virtuosic rhetoric, and modes of practice, pedagogy, and analysis; he also adopted the social values that underpin these activities.

This according to Running with the devil: Power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music by Robert Walser (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993, pp. 94–98).

Today is Malmsteen’s 50th birthday! Below, the birthday boy holds forth.

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by | April 30, 2013 · 1:00 am

Willie Nelson goes to pot

 

“I was about six when I started smoking cedar bark and grapevine, and rolling up Bull Durham” writes Willie Nelson. “I was trading a dozen eggs for a pack of Camels.”

“Then I ran into beer and whiskey, pills, and then pot. By then I was twenty-five years old and my lungs were killing me….So then I said to myself, “Hey, you’re not getting high on cigarettes, and they killed half your family….”

“So I started quitting everything. No more cigarettes at all. I started running again and getting back in shape.”

“I took my cigarettes and threw them away. I rolled up twenty joints and put them in the cigarette package, and every time I wanted a cigarette, I smoked a hit or two off a joint instead. One joint would last all day and it worked for me.” (Roll me up and smoke me when I die: Musings from the road [New York: HarperCollins, 2012] p. 121).

Today is Nelson’s 80th birthday! Below, the book’s namesake.

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by | April 26, 2013 · 1:00 am

Telek, Bridie, and schismogenesis

telek-bridie

In early 1997 the Australian label Origin Records released Telek, a collaboration between the popular Tolai vocalist George Mamua Telek and the Australian keyboard player and producer David Bridie that was packaged as a debut recording for Telek, even though he was already well known in his native Papua New Guinea.

A repackaged and resequenced version released by Origin later that year and titled Go long we long lon bush won critical acclaim, prompting yet another repackaged and resequenced release shortly thereafter.

These collaborations exemplify a positive and productive outcome of what Steven Feld has termed a schismogenetic relationship between the West and the non-West, indicating that such syncretic projects need not collapse difference, and may even produce a complementary development of existing local characteristics.

This according to “Questions of origin: George Telek and David Bridie’s collaborative recordings” by Denis Crowdy and Philip Hayward (Kulele: Occasional papers on Pacific music and dance III [2001] pp. 85–105). Below, a Telek–Bridie collaboration.

Related article: A lullaby for world music

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by | April 19, 2013 · 1:00 am

Globalized Bollywood

 

The Hindi film song Thoda resham lagta hai (It takes a little silk), written by Bappi Lahiri for the 1981 film Jyoti, was long forgotten before it was rediscovered in 2002 by the American producer DJ Quik.

Based around an unauthorized 35-second sample of the recording, the Truth Hurts song Addictive prompted Lahiri to sue Dr. Dre (the executive producer of the song), Aftermath Records, and Universal Music (Aftermath’s parent company and distributor) for $500 million.

Beyond Lahiri’s claims of cultural imperialism, obscenity, and outright theft, DJ Quik’s rearrangement of the song was, in turn, adopted by music producers, including Lahiri himself, in a wide variety of international genres, including Indian, American, and Jamaican contexts. Yet even as this well-traveled tune evokes different historical and local meanings, it evokes an eroticized Other in each context, including its original one.

This according to “It takes a little lawsuit: The flowering garden of Bollywood exoticism in the age of its technological reproducibility” by Wayne Marshall and Jayson Beaster-Jones (South Asian popular culture X/3 [October 2012] pp. 249–260). Above, a screen shot from the Addictive video; below, the song in its original context. (Yes, that’s the voice of the great Lata Mangeshkar!)

Related article: From Bollywood to fusion

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by | April 12, 2013 · 1:00 am

Caballé, Mercury, and Barcelona

 

After Queen’s 1985 tour of Spain, the group’s frontman Freddie Mercury amazed his fans by declaring on Spanish television that the Spaniard he most longed to meet was Montserrat Caballé. Mercury hoped to collaborate with the legendary diva, and in March 1987 he finally arranged a meeting in the Garden Room of the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona with a grand piano, state-of-the art recording and playback equipment, and a sumptuous buffet.

She later described the scene: “We spent the whole time listening to music, eating, and improvising…Barcelona as such did not exist at that time—it was only a musical sketch of just a few bars that Freddie sang. But I liked it and he promised to develop it for me to celebrate the Olympic success.” (Barcelona had just been selected for the 1992 Summer Olympics.)

Mercury worked quickly on the song, and Caballé’s recital in London later that month dovetailed with a recording session at his home. Working until 6:00 in the morning, they produced what effectively became Barcelona’s unofficial Olympic anthem.

This according to Montserrat Caballé: “Casta diva” by Stephen Taylor and Robert Pullen (London: Gollancz, 1995, pp. 302–05).

Caballé is 80 years old today! Below, a memorable performance of Barcelona.

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by | March 27, 2013 · 1:00 am

A lullaby for world music

 

The term world music arose among academics in the 1960s as a way to promote interest in the study of diverse musics. By the 1980s, world music was a marketing category whose success was propelled by the interest and involvement of popular music stars; by the 1990s, it had become a booming commercial enterprise on its own. Critical and scholarly responses to this development involve two types of narrative: the anxious and the celebratory.

Creative responses have included examples like the inclusion of Hugo Zemp’s field recording of the song Rorogwela, available on the CD Solomon Islands: Fateleka and Baegu Music from Malaita (UNESCO/Audivis, 1990), as Sweet lullaby on the worldbeat CD Deep forest (Sony Music, 1992), where it was given drum machine and synthesizer accompaniment and backing vocals.

The marketing of tropes like green enviroprimitivism and spiritual new age avant-garde romanticism has created a situation where a “sweet lullaby” is a fitting metaphor for the soothing multicultural aura surrounding the industrialized globalization of music.

This according to “A sweet lullaby for world music” by Steven Feld (Public culture XII/1 [2000] pp. 145–171). Above, the 2012 WOMAD festival; below, the official Sweet lullaby music video.

Related article: Telek, Bridie, and schismogenesis

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by | March 17, 2013 · 1:00 am

Dead fiction

dead fiction

The storyteller speaks: Rare & different fictions of the Grateful Dead (Bellingham: Kearney Street Books, 2010) is a Grateful Dead-inspired collection of literary short stories. Genres represented include horror, romance, time-travel, family saga, zombie, western, science fiction, and mystery noir.

Below, Jerry Garcia discusses storytelling in Terrapin station.

Related article: Dead studies

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