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Last weekend, Nathaniel Wood took over The New Yorker’s Instagram account, posting dispatches from Coachella, and, created GIFs of bands, crowds, and California scenes that will make you wish you were there: http://nyr.kr/XTUwJ4
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Last weekend, Nathaniel Wood took over The New Yorker’s Instagram account, posting dispatches from his adventures at Coachella, and, luckily for those of us who didn’t attend, he also made GIFs of the music festival. Click here to view them: http://nyr.kr/XTUwJ4
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"Wet-dog records, in the end, productively arrest the process of pop-culture consumption. The best albums—or rather, those considered classics—reward repeated listening, but they also have an indisputable initial impact. The wet dogs seem like disappointments at first, and grow into something more than respectability. They’re records that draw listeners back in, that require an audience’s help to complete, that provide cheering proof that an artist’s goal isn’t necessarily success so much as creative exploration."
— Ben Greenman on Morrissey’s “Kill Uncle” and the Wet-Dog-Record Theory http://nyr.kr/14952PI -
Trailer Trash
It seemed as though we had survived a dark time, and made it safely to the other side, when roughly two minutes and twenty seconds of the new “Star Trek” trailer had elapsed without the appearance of a certain ear-splitting and maddeningly ubiquitous action-movie-trailer musical cue. And then, about eight seconds from the finish, there it was: “duhhhhn,” that low and loud synthesized hum—ominous and brain-addling. (Click here for repeated torture.) And although another big-effects thrill ride had been promised in the single deep note, hope for a better today was dashed.
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By now, this accursed bass drone feels as if it has always been a part of our cinematic lives. Yet its reign of sonic terror has been relatively brief, dating, with a few antecedents, to a string of trailers made for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” from 2010…
Ian Crouch on the loud bass hum in movie trailer music: http://nyr.kr/10YX0EJ
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Boyz II Man
Sasha Frere-Jones listens to Justin Timberlake’s latest album, “The 20/20 Experience,” and asks, “Can we be content with good nature and hard work when something more intense seems to lie beneath the surface? He never promised us a great transformation, and yet we’re still waiting for it.” Continue reading.
Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
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"It’s not that I thought I had heard every pop singer from the sixties. That would be hubristic. But I thought that I had heard of most of them: not only the major artists but also the minor ones, the imitators, the fringe bands, the one-hit wonders, the novelty acts. I had not, however, heard of Tandyn Almer. And so when I saw that the excellent record label Sundazed was releasing an album of Almer’s demos, I stared at the name for a while. Tandyn Almer. It didn’t even seem like a real name so much as a Scrabble spill…"
— Ben Greenman discovers the 1960s songs of Tandyn Almer: http://nyr.kr/YdfkcR(Source: newyorker.com)
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The Return of Patrick Cohen
I’m grateful simply to know that Cohen is well and performing, grateful for the recordings that exist—and thinking of the kind of life that it takes to get to hear him play now as well as the one that it takes for him to play as he does. Better fewer but better, so to speak. I’m reminded of an anecdote that Merkel told me, regarding Cohen’s 1999 performance in Mozart’s house in Salzburg: “He gave a concert on Mozart’s piano. It was broadcast. I said to him, ‘Not much applause.’ He said there was only space for fifteen people.
Richard Brody writes about Patrick Cohen and a story that gets to the very core of music-making, as an art and as a way of life: http://nyr.kr/Yb9QiY
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"Hemphill sees the Hip Hop Word Count as a resource for settling arguments. “There’s a lot of disputes in rap—who influenced whom—who came first,” he said. “Everybody is always asking, ‘Who is the goat rapper, the greatest of all time?’ Mostly, it’s settled by who has the loudest voice in the room, but now people will be able to put some metrics to it. Is it the guy with the most complicated lyrics, or the most innovative? The one with the densest words? You could even answer something like ‘Which sneaker is more hip-hop, Nike or Adidas?’ ”
Hemphill entered both terms in the database. “Two hundred and fifty-two entries for Adidas, and Nike has five hundred and fifty-eight,” he said. With the reserve of the social scientist, however, he added, “But you have to take into account that Nike is way easier to rhyme than Adidas."— Alec Wilkinson talks to Tahir Hemphill about Hip Hop Word Count, a database of fifty thousand rap songs, beginning in 1979, that traces how words travel through rap music, and how slang evolves: http://nyr.kr/ZGIOib(Source: newyorker.com)
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"He was… in so many ways was unfit to live in the world. He had a very difficult time in the world, but completely submerged himself in art. He honestly seemed happy in that balance. It’s like he created his own world outside of the normal world, and lived there, I think, happily."
— Music producer and co-founder of Def Jam Records Rick Rubin remembers hip-hop video director Ric Menello: http://nyr.kr/165BT5b(Source: newyorker.com)
