“September,” Earth, Wind, and Fire
Jaybird has a doozy of a question:
One of the thought experiments I’ve toyed with recently is going back to 1959 and playing a record producer a song that will totally break his brain into a million little pieces. Here are the rules:
1) It has to be musically accessible. None of this Slayer “Raining Blood” stuff.
2) It has to use tools that will be immediately recognizable to the listener. You can use electric guitars and drums and even synthesizers… but no autotune. This means, probably, recognizable lyrics.
3) No swearing. (I came up with this rule when I described this game to Maribou and she immediately said “Cee-Lo“)
4) You don’t get to say The Misfits’ “Last Caress“. Yeah, that would win. Okay. Fine. Let’s think about second place, shall we?
A few other possibilities: “Hand in Hand,” Elvis Costello, “Louie, Louie,” The Kingsmen, “Rudy Can’t Fail” or “Lost in the Supermarket” from The Clash, “Billie Jean,” Michael Jackson, and “Purple Rain,” Prince.
The obvious route to take here is hip-hop. Take your pick. Dre, just to go with royalty? Or maybe Run DMC? I am not sure my own head isn’t still a little shattered.
But I also wonder: Which songs would the record executive hear and say, “Wow… that’s pretty good. I could see that being on the radio right now.” That is, we often think of “timelessness” in terms of, “people will get it 50 years from now.” But does it go in the opposite direction? And would acceptance in 1959 be seen as a compliment by the artist? Should it be?Report
I’m thinking of songs that would fall under the latter category – that’s what I took Jaybird’s “musically accessible” condition to mean. And yeah, I think there’s something to be said for music that transcends a particular cultural moment.Report
I’m not getting the first criterion. “Musically accessible” disqualifies Slayer but not hip hop? What does “musically accessible” even mean?
Anyway, it seems like “Eleanor Rigby” would be plenty. Or any random song from Yes. Then tell them these guys would be filling up Wembley Stadium in twenty years.Report
It’s definitely a loosey-goosey term. I was more going for the “it has to have a discernable melody”. Not necessarily one easy enough to hum… but “I know it when I see it” and John Cage and Slayer are both way the heck over there.
(Ironically, John Cage performed Water Walk on national television a year after the year in which this thought experiment is performed.)Report
Does Hendrix count? I can imagine that blowing the mind of a record producer in 1959, while still being immediately accessible.Report
I don’t see why not. He certainly meets the criteria (and, indeed, melted my face when I first heard him).Report
Was it hendrix or the orange sunshine?Report
As a Southern Baptist, the Hendrix was more than sufficient.
“Burning the Midnight Lamp”
“Are you Experienced”
“Hey Joe”Report
I’d go with “Hey Joe”. “Machine Gun” would have worked, though.Report
A friend of mine (Hey, Fish! Wassup!) and I got into an argument over whether Hendrix’s’s’s version of The National Anthem was unpatriotic or not.Report
I think given the source, it’s totally patriotic. Just like “Machine Gun” is a very pro-troops song, it’s just anti-war.
But I think he probably almost got shot over playing the National Anthem back when he did it in 1969. Ten years earlier I don’t think it would have gone over well.Report
There is only one song I still identify with 1969, Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf.
It is the most appropriate song to sing at the top of your lungs, running like an un-emancipated Negro being pursued by dogs, toward a Huey helicopter at the edge of a rice paddy, while nasty Communistic Asian Persons are shooting at you like a plastic duck in a shooting gallery at Coney Island.Report
So was I, but it did not stop the full speed ahead “Bass Strings” existence for several years. I saw Cream in a small club and they were probably the best rock musicans ever, but had the stage presence of the New York Symphony without a conductor.Report
Oh yeah, since Hendrix was in the 101st airborn I think he should be able to play the SSB any blooming way he wants.Report
Well Hendrix, played by Michael J Fox, did freak out all the squares in Back to the Future.Report
“I’m sorry guys. You’re just too darned loud.”Report
2112?Report
The Wall would be another good one.Report
Dark Side of the Moon, too.Report
A confession.
I hate Dark Side of the Moon. With the hate of 1000 suns. I change the station if I even suspect I’ll be forced to listen to “Time” or “Money”.Report
Granted, “Money” is a soiled pair of underwear it’s so overworn.Report
“My Generation”? ’65, but compared to the pre-Beatles era, it makes me think of the epigraph to the film version of MASH(1970):
Korea, 1950
A hundred years agoReport
The Year the Music Died, 1959, featured a whole lotta brain breaking. It was also the year Jimi Hendrix bought his first electric guitar. Keith Richards was buying Big Bill Broonzy records and Alexis Korner was introducing London to American blues musicians at his London Blues and Barrelhouse Club. I don’t think any producer of the era would be much-surprised by what rock and roll would become over time, for rock and roll was all about scandalizing the squares. Jazz, too, would have its impact on the white-hot emotion of the 1960s, Ornette Coleman was tearing up jack in those days, to the delight of some.
Payola, not talent, put songs on the Hit Parade and Dick Clark’s program. That much hasn’t changed.Report
“Head Like a Hole,” Nine Inch Nails
Industrial rock was not just a revolution in popular music but also in sound production itself. All of the sounds in that song are discernable in a way you can say “Yeah, I know how to get that sound on a recording.” But combined into the Industrial texture, the chanting, animal sounds, clanking machinery–all toned, producing harmonic structure–make a sound that wouldn’t have been surpassed in sensual excess except by actual war.
What’s more, that song is completely singable. It’s as easy to pick out the melody as that of “Hey, Jude.” Yeah, NIN would blow your 1959 producer’s mind.Report
That’s a really good suggestion.Report
When it comes to chanting and animal sounds, that’s what the squares in their Pat Boone white shoes were saying about the Blues at the time. Plus ça change, like every intelligent and willful child who swears he’ll never do like his Daddy and Momma did, every new iteration of cool steals from its Daddy’s collection of recordings when it starts making its own music.Report
Dude. I was all over NIN too. Didn’t even see your comment. I thought about “Head Like A Hole” but picked a different song that I thought would be even more disturbing to a 1959 music producer, at least on a lyrical level.Report
“Bohemian Rhapsody.”
It may seem cheesy, but a six-minute-long mini rock opera would have split a lot of brains into a million little pieces back in when the 45 was king. It uses instruments available at the time, the lyrics make sense and are sung to be understoood and yet it’s so completely different in style and structure from anything that existed then.Report
Any of the jazz rock fusion stuff would work. Spin some Bitches Brew from Miles David or Weather Report would cause a hemorrhage. Hell that stuff does that to some jazz fans to this day.Report
I can see some Mahavishnu Orchestra stuff doing that. The record guy is sitting there trying to tap his foot, ’cause their stuff is funky enough for tapping, but he’s trying to do it to some sort of whacked out 5/4 time signature and always finding himself ending up on the upbeat when he thinks he should be on the downbeat.Report
Well, back in the day when Gil Evans was working with Miles Davis on Sketches of Spain in 1960, jazz was experimenting with the orchestra, as Debussy and Ravel had done, back in their day.
Rock had always admired jazz, and when jazz went highbrow, rock wanted a piece of that, too. Alas for Pomp Rock like Emerson Lake and Palmer, that it went over the top, recycling old chestnuts, never looking back to the days when classical music had been truly experimental. Only Frank Zappa made the leap from rock to jazz and classical, and that only because he didn’t give a rat’s ass about public opinion. His heroes had been the experimentalists.
I spent a lot of time playing keyboards, working with the then-new Moog synths, sequencers and software. Prog relied too much on bombast and became as irrelevant as its bombastic idols. I loved Joe Zawinul, still consider him a minor deity among keyboard players. But fusion… well, it would in time become Smoove Jazz, the baby shit genre, its chords never varying far from the tonic, a gelded ox, ponderously puffin’ on its schweet saxophone. The squares of 1959 would just eat up Smoove Jazz like banana pudding.Report
“Hot for Teacher”, Van HalenReport
What are we looking to do — blow people’s minds with the production skills, or trying to blow their minds with the content? If you’re looking to freak them out with production, I might nominate “Ladies and Gentlemen, We’re Floating in Space” (and that’s the original Elvis, “Fools Rush In” version) by Spiritualized. If we’re going with content, I nominate “The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts 1-3” by Neutral Milk Hotel.
The Spiritualized track won’t present anything that a record producer circa 1959 wouldn’t understand, but put together in a way that I think they’d find completely alien.
The Neutral Milk Hotel presents a level of imagery and emotional directness that I think would be equally alien to our bespeckled knob-twiddler.Report
Not necessarily the production (though that couldn’t hurt). What I’m going for, I guess, is the creation of a sensation like when Homer’s mom first saw Joe Namath’s sideburns.Report
I don’t get that reference, but I will heartily endorse the Neutral Milk Hotel suggestion.Report
It’s from the “Mother Simpson” episode of the Simpsons.Report
The flipside of this question would be what songs recorded in or around that era blew your mind when you first heard them.Report
That’s where this eventually leads, yeah.
You eventually just end up with a bunch of mind-blowing songs with the older ones remembered by the older folks in the audience.
“Minnie the Moocher”
“Aw, that’s nothing! Battle Hymn of the Republic!”
“Aw that’s nothing! Ave Maria!”
“Aw that’s nothing! Psalm 98!”
“Aw that’s nothing!”Report
Okay, well it was made in the early 60s, but it still blows my mind that this song was ever recorded:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDj1sYEKWp0Report
The last verse of Bob Dylan’s Dream, 1963.
“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that”
There were times when old Bob had the magic and could reveal it all in just one line.Report
Yeah… sigh. Every Bob Dylan cover is better than the original. Bob Dylan sings like a donkey brays.Report
As always, you miss the point.Report
Listen to the Judy Collins cover and tell me I’ve missed the point.Report
F*ck the cover…as I said you miss the point.
Cisco Huston, Ramblin’ Jack Eliot, Lead Belly, Woody; these guys lived it, wrote it, sang it. Bob caught the spirit and he examined the times and found them wanting and he showed your generation how and why you were missing the point.
Judy’s a beautiful singer and that’s the problem. The only ‘beautiful’ singer that gets anywhere near these men is Joanie and she was a f*cked up progressive.
dude the song’s written and sung from the experience of life, not some church choir alto who’s screwing around and smokin’ doobies because its what’s done.aReport
Bob old pal, I wish you would play nice. Wasn’t Woody a serious union man? Also, since rumor has it that it was Dylan who turned the Beatles on and it would not suprise me one iota if all the people you mentioned periodically had an illegal smile, what is your point?Report
Dex, whoa, I don’t castigate people who relax in the evening with a doobie, hell, that’s their decision, though I’m told its illegal (“…if you see me tonight with an illegal smile, it didn’t cost very much, but it lasts a long while”).
Woody was a commie with the words, “Jesus, Jesus” on his lips at the time of his death, and a non-public union man, and aint’ a damn thing wrong with private unions.
Life is miasmatic at best, though sometimes, if you love God you can work through or be given a view of the light, and be among those who’ve achieved/benn blessed with a certain noetic understanding. Dexter, we’re a fallen specie and if that ain’t enough there’s the ever popular libido dominandi…no one said it was easy.Report
It’s not necessary that Bob (or anyone else) agree with an artist’s politics, friendships, or personal life choices to appreciate the quality of the art produced.Report
Old musician’s joke. Some people can write the tune. But they’re not always the best people to unload the tune.
Bob Dylan’s cryptic wisdom has confounded, amused and inspired lots of folks, but it doesn’t make him a better singer. He’s not alone with this problem, either. Richard Thompson destroyed his best instrument when he divorced Mary.Report
Eh. Sometimes the Byrds blew Dylan away. His “Chimes of Freedom” is a monotonous rant, while theirs kicks ass, But their Mister Tambourine Man is a pretty good pop song, while his is pure beauty.Report
Nobody I have ever met confused Dylan with a great tenor, but the man could write very good songs, and set the mood. “Sail on Sara” comes to mind.Report
No one in modern times wrote better. And, if the song had to come from the heart, to sing of man, and and who he was and his journey toward God, no one was better than he and Woody.Report
Dylan is a lousy singer and a great vocalist. When he sets his mind to it, you can hear every word, every syllable. He has presence; he communicates.
To illustrate my little distinction here, Robin Zander of Cheap Trick is a great singer and a lousy vocalist. No character, no presence. Dylan has character out the wazoo. [Mick Jagger fits this, too.]Report
When Mr. van Dyke is right, he’s very right.Report
Tom, I don’t know, but I’d put Leonard Cohen in the same category–lousy singer, great vocalist. Actually though, I’d scratch the last comment–I’ve never heard Suzanne (one of the greatest songs ever written) ever sung more beautifully–it’s an absolute masterpiece and the words do indeed “float down like golden honey”. He has a very distinctive voice-takes a little while to appreciate–but it’s a precious and expressive instrument–am a big fan of Mr. Cohen’s and incredibly, he’s still a happy minstrel delighting fans all ove the world. Of course, his voice now is about an octave lower than his Suzanne days.Report
Heidegger March 12, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Savant Robert, am I nuts? I hold very deeply my Ph. D. earned at the Rush Limbaugh Institute od Conservative Studies. I already solved the deficit problem by sending the U.S. budget of 1804 to Geitner to be implemented immediately. And I even had time to solve the “global warming” hoax by proving we need MORE CO2 in our atmosphere not less. We might even bring back the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. I was having this discussion with Jason earlier.
I’ll be happy to share the Nobel winnings with all the people on this sight!
Come on Jason, what do you think his lawyer is going to say?? That he’s a model of sound mental and physical health? I DO believe that after careful consideration, they have resumed the policy of putting mints on top of the poor lads pillow, so I hope makes you just a little bit happy.
You’re entire political universe seems to revolve around, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo……Abu Ghraib looked like more like a sequel to Animal House than Papillon and it appears to me that Andrew Sullivan is so endlessly upset and forlorn over this issue, for the simple reason he was not able to participate in these events.
Why don’t you read Tammy Bruce and then ask her about Sullivan’s sexually repulsive, B&D classified ads. What he was looking and searching for, would make the Marquis de Sade blush. Please note that ALL participants in the Abu Ghraib incident have been prosecuted to the very fullest extant of the law.
Now if you want to see what real torture looks like, I suggest you look at the video of Mengele-like “medical” procedures of cutting off of fingers, toes, breaking wrists with a sledge hammer, pushing people off high rooftops, ripping off tongues, throwing prisoners off of a wall into a pack of attack dogs. It’s all there. Feeding men into a shredder feet first. Endless be-headings with swords, even kitchen knives. How about having children raped in front of their parents? I can’t seem to recall any mention of these atrocities coming from you or your acolytes. No, it’s been an endless, monomaniacal obsession with “Weekend At Bernies”, er, I mean Abu Ghraib. No, it’s your cowardly, spineless representatives, Liberal and Lefties who had a super majority in the Senate, a very large majority in the House and the White House–but hey, the just ran like scattering little rats in heat rather try and make their case. Bush and Cheney pretty much said, “well get it on”. They knew what a bunch of chicken shit liberals there are in the House and Senate. They run like lemmings rather face any kind of heat or conflict. And Jason, do you really want to get into comparisons between how the Soviets treated their POWs and how we treat ours? I didn’t think so. Can you at least own up to the fact that Liberals ran like scared little rats abadoning ship. You had it all. You had all the men and women in their places to investigate Bush and Cheney and anyone else whom you thought was complicit in these “war crimes” and “torture” .What happened? Zilch. Zero. You guys did NOTHING.
So here, please watch this. I warn you, ONLY watch this on an empty stomach.
http://fdd.typepad.com/fdd/2006/01/alert_saddams_c.html
Jason: “What you’re seeing here is punitive medical health, much like in the Soviet Union, used for political reasons and not for protecting anyone at all.” MUCH LIKE IN THE SOVIET UNION?????? Jason is NOT referring to the Saddam torture videos. He’s talking about Manning not being allowed to wear his Mickey Mouse pajamas to sleep in at night. Private Manning is a traitor and should be shot at dawn. Do you really want to get into a comparison of the Soviet Union’s treatment of prisoners accused of aiding the enemy and how Private Manning is being treated in the Marine Brig. I didn’t think so. I doubt the Soviets ever even had a living prisoner accused of such charges.
Article 81 -Conspiracy
Article 92 -Failure to obey order or regulation
Article 94, UCMJ Sedition
Article 104, UCMJ Aiding the Enemy
Article 108 UCMJ Military property of the United States–sale, loss, damage, destruction, or wrongful disposition
Article 121 UCMJ Larceny and wrongful appropriationReport
Okay, site was what I meant.
And this is immortal beauty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-mIHk2rM0QReport
“Hocus Pocus” by Focus.Report