Search Results for: music on money
The dark side of the rainbow
Fifty years ago today Pink Floyd’s album The dark side of the moon soared to number one on the US Billboard chart, beginning a record-breaking 741-week chart run; it has since sold over 45 million copies worldwide, making it the … Continue reading
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Filed under Curiosities, Film music, Popular music
Piatigorsky’s youthful adventure
Already a cello prodigy with a full scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, the ten-year-old Gregor Piatigorsky found himself stranded in Astrahan’ due to one of his father’s failed enterprises. Tall enough to pass as a teenager, he found a temporary … Continue reading
Filed under Curiosities, Performers, Romantic era
Moroccan insult contests
A performance that occurred almost daily in a public square in Marrakech in the early 1980s traded on ethnic identity for fun and profit. The performance began with an Arab duo singing in Arabic; as a crowd began to gather … Continue reading
Filed under Africa, Curiosities, Humor
Women and gramophones
A letter published in the June 1925 issue of Gramophone noted the magazine’s general absence of women correspondents: “are the sweet little things too shy, or what?” A response published in August of that year dismissed the idea of women … Continue reading
Filed under Curiosities, Mass media, Reception, Women's studies
Shine and the Titanic
Religious African Americans saw the sinking of the Titanic as an example of God’s intervention in human affairs, as a divine overriding of the advantages conferred by wealth and mastery of technology. Their secular songs about the disaster either nihilistically … Continue reading
Filed under Black studies, Humor
Doctor Love’s diagnoses
The Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Paul Matavire was widely celebrated for his witty but sharply pointed songs addressing themes of intimacy, romance, and social relations, earning him the nickname Doctor Love. Matavire’s well-calculated social commentary, disseminated through sungura music, continues to hold … Continue reading
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Filed under Humor, Performers, Popular music
Rosie Flores and “Working girl’s guitar”
In an interview, Rosie Flores discussed the title cut of her 2012 album Working girl’s guitar: There’s a friend of mine who does, well, everything. He does bodywork, he’s written books on rolfing, how to play the banjo, and how … Continue reading
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Filed under Performers, Popular music
The Smithsonian Institution’s Object of the Day, October 5, 2019: Elaine Brown’s “Seize the Time” (1969)
The First Songs of the American Revolution On a January evening in 1969, members of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) congregated in Los Angeles to mourn comrades Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, two UCLA students who had just been … Continue reading
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Filed under Black studies, Politics
Bali remixed and revisited
In May 2019 Songlines Magazine and the PRS Foundation launched a competition to find the best remix of David Attenborough’s recording of a performance of Balinese gendér wayang, a style of Indonesian gamelan that features a quartet of ten-keyed metallophones. Among the reactions of gamelan enthusiasts was concern that … Continue reading
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Filed under Asia, Curiosities
