Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Post-War Hillbillies: Western Swing, Honky Tonk and Bluegrass
Hank Williams - Hey Goodlookin' + Lovesick Blues
Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys - Muleskinner Blues + Blue Moon Of Kentucky
Monday, May 30, 2016
Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker
The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross
Even the New Yorker catches up:
"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”
These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"
The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II
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| Rufus Thomas, DJ Extraordinaire |
in Garofalo:
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
Pre-War Specialties
Robert Johnson - Love in Vain
Blind Willie Johnson, "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"
"The most transcendent piece in all American music" (Ry Cooder)
Blind Willie Johnson, "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"
"The most transcendent piece in all American music" (Ry Cooder)
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Art & Folk
Beethoven - Symphony N.9 d-moll Op. 125 (extract)
Text by Schiller here.
Text by Heine here.
Text by Eichendorff here.
Text by Shakespeare here.
The virtuoso instrumentalist and composer as superstar: Franz Liszt.
Good interview on WNYC's Soundcheck with Tim Blanning author of The Triumph of Music, a 'social history' of musicians in the west and how they went from being considered merely servants to being 'stars'. This is an excellent example of metacontextual musical knowledge. Required listening.
Download entire interview mp3 here. Stream interview.
Download entire interview mp3 here. Stream interview.
from North Vietnam: A Brao Song
from the Mississippi Delta: Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was The Night
from the Mississippi Delta: Alan Lomax Collection - Arwhoolie (Cornfield Holler)
from the Mississippi Delta: Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was The Night
from the Mississippi Delta: Alan Lomax Collection - Arwhoolie (Cornfield Holler)
from Ireland: The Dubliners - Home Boys Home
from Democratic Republic of Congo: Konono No. 1 - Ditshe Tshiekutala
from India: Ravi Shankar - Dhun
But this is not 'folk music' as we defined it, rather it is an example of the 'high' in a different cultural and social context.Monday, May 23, 2016
Music Becomes A Thing
Readings Week 1&2:
in Garofalo, Rockin' Out:
-Introduction + Chapter 1: Tin Pan Alley
in Cambridge Companion:
-Introduction + Chronology
-Theberge, "'Plugged In': Technology & Popular Music"
-Frith, "The Popular Music Industry"
-Frith, "Pop Music"
-Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular"
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.
from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing
Grimes, "Genesis" Live Session for KEXP
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