SLATE
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Raves For Sale
How to buy a favorable book review.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Friday, Jan. 19, 2007, at 3:43 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Friday, Jan. 19, 2007, at 3:43 PM ET
Vanity presses for amateur writers who want to see their manuscripts in print were once limited to a small group of publishers. The service, now called "books-on-demand" or "print-on-demand," has proliferated in the digital era. Amazon.com's recently acquired print-on-demand division, BookSurge.com, offers several tiers of publishing programs with menus of services starting at $99.
The most interesting add-on BookSurge offers is, for $399, a personally crafted review written by "New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh." (Ellen Tanner Marsh's bodice-rippers Reap the Savage Wind and Wrap Me in Splendor graced the New York Times trade- paperback bestseller list in 1982 and 1983.) Not surprisingly, many BookSurge titles boast enthusiastic reviews by Marsh. "For anyone seeking a health program that really works ... a motivating and significant book," Marsh gushed about The Beer Drinkers [sic] "Diet". "We are drawn into this seaboard existence, seeing the stars pronging the sails at night, the flying fish that land on deck, and even the birds that fly, unaware, into the mast," Marsh cooed over The Last Voyage of the Cosmic Muffin. Some of these paid-for raves turn up on Amazon. "This well-organized, fun and fact-crammed guide will make any parent a hero … exploring and enjoying all that Long Island has to offer," Marsh enthused about Be the Coolest Parent on Your Block: Your Guide to Long Island and the Internet For Families
Below is a sample Marsh review that self-publishing author Bruce F. Bowman purchased for his book, Exposed: Turn Up the Heat. Unlike most book reviewers, Marsh is receptive to input from authors. If you click onto the next page, you'll see an e-mail that BookSurge LLC's editorial services coordinator, Thomas Kephart, wrote Bowman regarding his "New York Times Review." Quoth Kephart: "Ms. Marsh agreed that your suggestions were more descriptive, therefore she used your wording to make the changes you desired." Kephart's e-mail makes that other New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, seem, in comparison, downright stuck-up. [see Slate for document]
Friday, January 19, 2007
The dark side of the Camera Phone
SLATE
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The Camera Phone
The gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on.
By Michael Agger
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007, at 6:21 PM ET
Ten years ago, Philippe Kahn was walking around a hospital with a cell phone and a digital camera. His dadly mission: to share pictures of his newborn baby girl. With an assist from Radio Shack, he linked the two devices together and e-mailed photos to family and friends around the world. The day marked a twin birth of sorts: the cell phone camera and daughter Sophie.
Kahn regards his invention with paternal pride: "I built it to document the birth of my daughter. For us, it has always been a positive thing." So he was taken aback recently when, with the Saddam-hanging video circling the globe, an interviewer compared him to the inventor of the Kalashnikov. First there was Prince Harry's Nazi costume, then the shaming of Kate Moss, then the Michael Richards racist explosion, but, for some, Saddam's hanging marks the low point for Kahn's creation. A camera on a phone has only aided the perverted, the nosy, the violent, and the bored.
That's not exactly fair, but it's not exactly wrong, either. As Kahn told Wired in 2000: "With this kind of device, you're going to see the best and the worst of things." The best would include photo caller-ID, amateur sports highlights, and the quick citizen snaps taken in the wake of the London bombings. Yet, despite the fun and occasional worthiness, the cell phone camera has launched a thousand jackasses. One representative example: Sportscaster Sean Salisbury was suspended by ESPN last month, reportedly for showing female co-workers cell phone photos of his "equipment."
When video technology was added to phones (with little fanfare), the madness went up a notch. English youths devised a pleasant game called "happy slapping," which involves assaulting random strangers while your mates record the whole thing. The happy slapping craze spread throughout Europe last year, leading to outraged op-eds and calls to ban cell phones from schools. While the phenomenon is marked by more than a touch of media hysteria, you can certainly find disturbing videos on YouTube. (The French, naturally, replied with "Streetkissing.") There have also been news reports of graphic videos showing beatings and accidents, such as an unfortunate boy in Birmingham, United Kingdom, who impaled himself on his bicycle. Teenagers have employed cell phone cameras for old-fashioned humiliation, too: The parking lot fight is now captured on video and shared. To be an adult is to be grateful to have escaped the digital hazing of high school.
In glorious retrospect, it seems like a terrifically bad idea to give the world a spy camera that looks and functions like a cell phone. Peeping Toms quickly realized the potential for upskirt pics and shower-room souvenirs. Chicago tried to block cell phones from gyms, and a California legislator has proposed a law requiring the cell phone to make a shutter snapping sound or flash a light when a picture is taken. We have trained ourselves to be wary when a cell phone is pointed at us, but the device's relative inconspicuousness still creates problems. In Saudi Arabia, women have been taking pictures of other women unveiled at weddings and e-mailing them to matchmakers, a practice that has caused uproar in a culture in which any sort of image can be cause for loss of honor.
The cell phone camera, constant companion, has also been championed as an anti-crime device. There have been several Rodney King moments, with bystanders pulling out their cameras to record sketchy police activity. One woman took a shot of a flasher on a New York subway, a photo that ended up on the cover of the New York Post the next day. There is also a mini-boom in sites to catch people who park like idiots, stare too long, and mistreat your kids. Think of this as the positive side of living in 1984.
The more difficult question, the one that lurks outside the media glare, is how the cell phone camera is altering our private lives. In the perceptive book Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, Nancy Martha West writes how Kodak, with the introduction of the personal camera, taught Americans to both conceive of their lives in terms of fondly remembered events and to edit out unpleasant memories. In Victorian America, for example, arranging to take a photo of a dead relative was not uncommon—a part of the grieving process. Under the reign of Kodak and its advertising, we became family historians of happiness. Now that digital cameras have taken over, the old photo album is giving way to the personal Flickr page, bringing with it a different set of assumptions of what to present (a whole lot more photos, for starters) and whom to share it with.
The ubiquity of the cell phone camera means that every moment in our lives is photographable. One consequence of this is an altered perception of the gravity of our day-to-day routines. We are now more aware of ourselves as observers of "history." When a van catches fire in front of our house, we and our neighbors are now out on the lawn recording. We e-mail this to our friends, who testify to the enormity of the event, and then we all await the next sensation. This impulse can be positive, but it also fuels the increasingly destructive American habit of oversharing. The snapshot speaks with a small voice: I'm alive and I saw this. The cell phone camera picture or video is a shout from the rooftop: Check out this crazy thing that happened to me.
Picture sharing has also made us more aggressive in situations in which we feel insecure, such as in the presence of celebrities. Susan Sontag described the essentially hostile nature of taking pictures as a form of "soft" murder. In the age of cell phones, this scalp-hunting sensibility is achieving full flower. Let's say you're in Asbury Park and you see Bruce Springsteen with his kids. The old impulse would have been to ask the Boss if you could take your picture with him. The new impulse is to snap the shot with a cell phone camera and sell it to a site like Scoopt. No wonder famous people don't want to hang out with us.
So, before we move on to the next racist comedian or cocaine-snorting supermodel, let's put the Saddam video in context. It is a weird echo of the Zapruder film, another piece of amateur footage that caught the death of a leader. The differences are stark, of course. Zapruder captured Kennedy while standing openly in the Dallas sunlight. The official who videoed Saddam did so furtively, pointing his camera to the ground at times. But they both testify to the power of first-person witnessing, and how a digital copy of that witnessing can upend neat narratives and certainties. We'll see the best of things, we'll see the worst of things, we'll see everything.
The Browser would like to thank the excellent Web site picturephoning.com.
Michael Agger is a Slate associate editor. You can reach him at michael.agger@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2157736/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
the browser
The Camera Phone
The gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on.
By Michael Agger
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007, at 6:21 PM ET
Ten years ago, Philippe Kahn was walking around a hospital with a cell phone and a digital camera. His dadly mission: to share pictures of his newborn baby girl. With an assist from Radio Shack, he linked the two devices together and e-mailed photos to family and friends around the world. The day marked a twin birth of sorts: the cell phone camera and daughter Sophie.
Kahn regards his invention with paternal pride: "I built it to document the birth of my daughter. For us, it has always been a positive thing." So he was taken aback recently when, with the Saddam-hanging video circling the globe, an interviewer compared him to the inventor of the Kalashnikov. First there was Prince Harry's Nazi costume, then the shaming of Kate Moss, then the Michael Richards racist explosion, but, for some, Saddam's hanging marks the low point for Kahn's creation. A camera on a phone has only aided the perverted, the nosy, the violent, and the bored.
That's not exactly fair, but it's not exactly wrong, either. As Kahn told Wired in 2000: "With this kind of device, you're going to see the best and the worst of things." The best would include photo caller-ID, amateur sports highlights, and the quick citizen snaps taken in the wake of the London bombings. Yet, despite the fun and occasional worthiness, the cell phone camera has launched a thousand jackasses. One representative example: Sportscaster Sean Salisbury was suspended by ESPN last month, reportedly for showing female co-workers cell phone photos of his "equipment."
When video technology was added to phones (with little fanfare), the madness went up a notch. English youths devised a pleasant game called "happy slapping," which involves assaulting random strangers while your mates record the whole thing. The happy slapping craze spread throughout Europe last year, leading to outraged op-eds and calls to ban cell phones from schools. While the phenomenon is marked by more than a touch of media hysteria, you can certainly find disturbing videos on YouTube. (The French, naturally, replied with "Streetkissing.") There have also been news reports of graphic videos showing beatings and accidents, such as an unfortunate boy in Birmingham, United Kingdom, who impaled himself on his bicycle. Teenagers have employed cell phone cameras for old-fashioned humiliation, too: The parking lot fight is now captured on video and shared. To be an adult is to be grateful to have escaped the digital hazing of high school.
In glorious retrospect, it seems like a terrifically bad idea to give the world a spy camera that looks and functions like a cell phone. Peeping Toms quickly realized the potential for upskirt pics and shower-room souvenirs. Chicago tried to block cell phones from gyms, and a California legislator has proposed a law requiring the cell phone to make a shutter snapping sound or flash a light when a picture is taken. We have trained ourselves to be wary when a cell phone is pointed at us, but the device's relative inconspicuousness still creates problems. In Saudi Arabia, women have been taking pictures of other women unveiled at weddings and e-mailing them to matchmakers, a practice that has caused uproar in a culture in which any sort of image can be cause for loss of honor.
The cell phone camera, constant companion, has also been championed as an anti-crime device. There have been several Rodney King moments, with bystanders pulling out their cameras to record sketchy police activity. One woman took a shot of a flasher on a New York subway, a photo that ended up on the cover of the New York Post the next day. There is also a mini-boom in sites to catch people who park like idiots, stare too long, and mistreat your kids. Think of this as the positive side of living in 1984.
The more difficult question, the one that lurks outside the media glare, is how the cell phone camera is altering our private lives. In the perceptive book Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, Nancy Martha West writes how Kodak, with the introduction of the personal camera, taught Americans to both conceive of their lives in terms of fondly remembered events and to edit out unpleasant memories. In Victorian America, for example, arranging to take a photo of a dead relative was not uncommon—a part of the grieving process. Under the reign of Kodak and its advertising, we became family historians of happiness. Now that digital cameras have taken over, the old photo album is giving way to the personal Flickr page, bringing with it a different set of assumptions of what to present (a whole lot more photos, for starters) and whom to share it with.
The ubiquity of the cell phone camera means that every moment in our lives is photographable. One consequence of this is an altered perception of the gravity of our day-to-day routines. We are now more aware of ourselves as observers of "history." When a van catches fire in front of our house, we and our neighbors are now out on the lawn recording. We e-mail this to our friends, who testify to the enormity of the event, and then we all await the next sensation. This impulse can be positive, but it also fuels the increasingly destructive American habit of oversharing. The snapshot speaks with a small voice: I'm alive and I saw this. The cell phone camera picture or video is a shout from the rooftop: Check out this crazy thing that happened to me.
Picture sharing has also made us more aggressive in situations in which we feel insecure, such as in the presence of celebrities. Susan Sontag described the essentially hostile nature of taking pictures as a form of "soft" murder. In the age of cell phones, this scalp-hunting sensibility is achieving full flower. Let's say you're in Asbury Park and you see Bruce Springsteen with his kids. The old impulse would have been to ask the Boss if you could take your picture with him. The new impulse is to snap the shot with a cell phone camera and sell it to a site like Scoopt. No wonder famous people don't want to hang out with us.
So, before we move on to the next racist comedian or cocaine-snorting supermodel, let's put the Saddam video in context. It is a weird echo of the Zapruder film, another piece of amateur footage that caught the death of a leader. The differences are stark, of course. Zapruder captured Kennedy while standing openly in the Dallas sunlight. The official who videoed Saddam did so furtively, pointing his camera to the ground at times. But they both testify to the power of first-person witnessing, and how a digital copy of that witnessing can upend neat narratives and certainties. We'll see the best of things, we'll see the worst of things, we'll see everything.
The Browser would like to thank the excellent Web site picturephoning.com.
Michael Agger is a Slate associate editor. You can reach him at michael.agger@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2157736/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Music industry threatens ISPs over piracy
The Independent Online
Music industry threatens ISPs over piracy
By Nic Fildes
Published: 18 January 2007
The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.
John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated "in weeks rather than months". Barney Wragg, the head of EMI's digital music division, said the industry had been left "with no other option" but to pursue ISPs in the courts.
The IFPI wants ISPs to disconnect users who refuse to stop exchanging music files illegally. Mr Kennedy said such activity is in breach of a customer's contract with the ISP and disconnecting offenders the IFPI had identified would significantly reduce illegal file sharing.
Mr Kennedy said talks with internet companies have been ongoing over the past year, but no action has been taken. "I realised I was being filibustered ... if they still want to filibuster, their time will run out," he said.
The IFPI took legal action against 10,000 individuals in 18 countries during 2006. It won a spate of significant legal victories against peer-to-peer platforms such as Kazaa that was forced to pay a $115m (£58m) settlement.
A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said ISPs are "mere conduits of information" that can not be held liable for offences committed by customers. "ISPs cannot inspect every packet of data transmitted over their networks," he said.
Geoff Taylor, the executive vice-president and general counsel of IFPI, said that ISPs are in the best position to stop copyright infringements. "While it might be possible to argue that an ISP is exempt from liability for damages, that does not mean rights holders can't obtain an injunction to stop infringements of their copyright," he said.
A spokeswoman for Tiscali, a UK ISP, said the onus is on the IFPI to prove that the user is engaged in illegal activity and that the music organisation should share the cost of resolving disputes. Last year, due to a lack of evidence, Tiscali refused to close the accounts or hand over the details of 17 customers who the British Phonographic Industry claimed were involved in illegal file sharing.
During 2006, global digital music sales doubled to about $2bn on the back of an 89 per cent surge in music downloads to 795 million. The success of the digital music market has been underlined by bands like Koopa which is expected to score a Top-40 hit this week despite having no record label or any physical copies of their CD on sale.
Music industry threatens ISPs over piracy
By Nic Fildes
Published: 18 January 2007
The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.
John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated "in weeks rather than months". Barney Wragg, the head of EMI's digital music division, said the industry had been left "with no other option" but to pursue ISPs in the courts.
The IFPI wants ISPs to disconnect users who refuse to stop exchanging music files illegally. Mr Kennedy said such activity is in breach of a customer's contract with the ISP and disconnecting offenders the IFPI had identified would significantly reduce illegal file sharing.
Mr Kennedy said talks with internet companies have been ongoing over the past year, but no action has been taken. "I realised I was being filibustered ... if they still want to filibuster, their time will run out," he said.
The IFPI took legal action against 10,000 individuals in 18 countries during 2006. It won a spate of significant legal victories against peer-to-peer platforms such as Kazaa that was forced to pay a $115m (£58m) settlement.
A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said ISPs are "mere conduits of information" that can not be held liable for offences committed by customers. "ISPs cannot inspect every packet of data transmitted over their networks," he said.
Geoff Taylor, the executive vice-president and general counsel of IFPI, said that ISPs are in the best position to stop copyright infringements. "While it might be possible to argue that an ISP is exempt from liability for damages, that does not mean rights holders can't obtain an injunction to stop infringements of their copyright," he said.
A spokeswoman for Tiscali, a UK ISP, said the onus is on the IFPI to prove that the user is engaged in illegal activity and that the music organisation should share the cost of resolving disputes. Last year, due to a lack of evidence, Tiscali refused to close the accounts or hand over the details of 17 customers who the British Phonographic Industry claimed were involved in illegal file sharing.
During 2006, global digital music sales doubled to about $2bn on the back of an 89 per cent surge in music downloads to 795 million. The success of the digital music market has been underlined by bands like Koopa which is expected to score a Top-40 hit this week despite having no record label or any physical copies of their CD on sale.
DJ arrested for mixtapes
NYTimes
January 18, 2007
With Arrest of DJ Drama, the Law Takes Aim at Mixtapes
By KELEFA SANNEH
In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”
Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.
On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.
DJ Drama (whose real name is Tyree Simmons) and Mr. Cannon were each charged with a felony violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization law(known as RICO) and held on $100,000 bond.
The compilations produced by DJ Drama and his protégés are known as mixtapes, though they appear on CDs, not cassettes. Mixtapes have become a vital part of the hip-hop world. They are often the only way for listeners to keep up with a genre that moves too quickly to be captured on albums. On a mixtape you can hear unreleased remixes, sneak previews from coming CDs, casual freestyle rhymes, never-to-be-released goofs.
Mixtapes are, by definition, unregulated: DJs don’t get permission from record companies, and record companies have traditionally ignored and sometimes bankrolled mixtapes, reasoning that they serve as valuable promotional tools. And rappers have grown increasingly canny at using mixtapes to promote themselves. The career of 50 Cent has a lot to do with his mastery of the mixtape form, and now no serious rapper can afford to be absent from this market for too long.
As mixtapes evolved from a street-corner phenomenon to a cornerstone of the hip-hop industry, record companies tried to figure out ways to cash in. Mixtape D.J.’s like DJ Clue, DJ Kay Slay and others have released major-label compilations full of tracks that abide by copyright rules. But it’s not easy to turn a mixtape into something you can legally sell: part of the fun is hearing rappers remake one another’s songs and respond to one another’s taunts; a great mixtape captures the controlled chaos that hip-hop thrives on.
DJ Drama’s mixtapes are often great. He has turned “Gangsta Grillz” into a prestige brand: each is a carefully compiled disc, full of exclusive tracks, devoted to a single rapper who is also the host. Rappers often seem proud to be considered good enough for a “Gangsta Grillz” mixtape. On “Dedication,” the first of his two excellent “Gangsta Grillz” mixtapes, Lil Wayne announces, “I hooked up with dude, now we ’bout to make history.” The compilation showed off Lil Wayne more effectively than his albums ever had, and “Dedication” helped revive his career. When some unreleased tracks by T.I. leaked to the Internet, T.I. teamed up with DJ Drama for a pre-emptive strike: together, they created a mixtape called “The Leak.”
As mixtapes have grown more popular, they have also grown easier to purchase, despite that official-sounding declaration — “For Promotional Use Only” — printed on every one. Sites like mixunit.com specialize in selling them, and big record shops and online stores have followed suit. As of yesterday DJ Drama was sitting in jail, but dozens of his unlicensed compilations were still available at the iTunes shop.
Brad A. Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “A sound recording is either copyrighted or it’s not.” And he said the DJ Drama case, like most piracy cases, began with illegal product, which was then traced back to the distributor. Chief Baker said that before the raid, DJ Drama and Mr. Cannon were sent cease-and-desist letters from a local lawyer.
There have been mixtape busts before: in 2005, five employees of Mondo Kim’s, in the East Village in New York, were jailed after the store was found to be selling unlicensed mixtapes. But the arrest of a figure as prominent as DJ Drama is unprecedented. Record companies usually portray the fight against piracy as a fight for artists’ rights, but this case complicates that argument: most of DJ Drama’s mixtapes begin with enthusiastic endorsements from the artists themselves.
It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, “Tha Carter II” (Cash Money/Universal), sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate.
Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta.
January 18, 2007
With Arrest of DJ Drama, the Law Takes Aim at Mixtapes
By KELEFA SANNEH
In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”
Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.
On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.
DJ Drama (whose real name is Tyree Simmons) and Mr. Cannon were each charged with a felony violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization law(known as RICO) and held on $100,000 bond.
The compilations produced by DJ Drama and his protégés are known as mixtapes, though they appear on CDs, not cassettes. Mixtapes have become a vital part of the hip-hop world. They are often the only way for listeners to keep up with a genre that moves too quickly to be captured on albums. On a mixtape you can hear unreleased remixes, sneak previews from coming CDs, casual freestyle rhymes, never-to-be-released goofs.
Mixtapes are, by definition, unregulated: DJs don’t get permission from record companies, and record companies have traditionally ignored and sometimes bankrolled mixtapes, reasoning that they serve as valuable promotional tools. And rappers have grown increasingly canny at using mixtapes to promote themselves. The career of 50 Cent has a lot to do with his mastery of the mixtape form, and now no serious rapper can afford to be absent from this market for too long.
As mixtapes evolved from a street-corner phenomenon to a cornerstone of the hip-hop industry, record companies tried to figure out ways to cash in. Mixtape D.J.’s like DJ Clue, DJ Kay Slay and others have released major-label compilations full of tracks that abide by copyright rules. But it’s not easy to turn a mixtape into something you can legally sell: part of the fun is hearing rappers remake one another’s songs and respond to one another’s taunts; a great mixtape captures the controlled chaos that hip-hop thrives on.
DJ Drama’s mixtapes are often great. He has turned “Gangsta Grillz” into a prestige brand: each is a carefully compiled disc, full of exclusive tracks, devoted to a single rapper who is also the host. Rappers often seem proud to be considered good enough for a “Gangsta Grillz” mixtape. On “Dedication,” the first of his two excellent “Gangsta Grillz” mixtapes, Lil Wayne announces, “I hooked up with dude, now we ’bout to make history.” The compilation showed off Lil Wayne more effectively than his albums ever had, and “Dedication” helped revive his career. When some unreleased tracks by T.I. leaked to the Internet, T.I. teamed up with DJ Drama for a pre-emptive strike: together, they created a mixtape called “The Leak.”
As mixtapes have grown more popular, they have also grown easier to purchase, despite that official-sounding declaration — “For Promotional Use Only” — printed on every one. Sites like mixunit.com specialize in selling them, and big record shops and online stores have followed suit. As of yesterday DJ Drama was sitting in jail, but dozens of his unlicensed compilations were still available at the iTunes shop.
Brad A. Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “A sound recording is either copyrighted or it’s not.” And he said the DJ Drama case, like most piracy cases, began with illegal product, which was then traced back to the distributor. Chief Baker said that before the raid, DJ Drama and Mr. Cannon were sent cease-and-desist letters from a local lawyer.
There have been mixtape busts before: in 2005, five employees of Mondo Kim’s, in the East Village in New York, were jailed after the store was found to be selling unlicensed mixtapes. But the arrest of a figure as prominent as DJ Drama is unprecedented. Record companies usually portray the fight against piracy as a fight for artists’ rights, but this case complicates that argument: most of DJ Drama’s mixtapes begin with enthusiastic endorsements from the artists themselves.
It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, “Tha Carter II” (Cash Money/Universal), sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate.
Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers
Interesting post at tech dirt:
History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers
from the no,-seriously... dept
As regular readers know, I've been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven't read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they're interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject. It's Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Beyond giving readers a general overview of a variety of different economic theories, the book actually makes them all sound really interesting. It's a good book not necessarily because of the nitty gritty of economics (which it doesn't cover), but because it makes economics interesting, and gives people a good basis to then dig into actual economic theory and not find it boring and meaningless, but see it as a way to better understand what these "philosophers" were discussing.
Reading through an early chapter, though, it struck me how eerily a specific story Heilbroner told about France in 1666 matches up with what's happening today with the way the recording industry has reacted to innovations that have challenged their business models. Just two paragraphs highlight a couple of situations with striking similarities to the world today:
"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods."
Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.
http://www.techdirt.com/
History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers
from the no,-seriously... dept
As regular readers know, I've been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven't read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they're interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject. It's Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Beyond giving readers a general overview of a variety of different economic theories, the book actually makes them all sound really interesting. It's a good book not necessarily because of the nitty gritty of economics (which it doesn't cover), but because it makes economics interesting, and gives people a good basis to then dig into actual economic theory and not find it boring and meaningless, but see it as a way to better understand what these "philosophers" were discussing.
Reading through an early chapter, though, it struck me how eerily a specific story Heilbroner told about France in 1666 matches up with what's happening today with the way the recording industry has reacted to innovations that have challenged their business models. Just two paragraphs highlight a couple of situations with striking similarities to the world today:
"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods."
Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.
http://www.techdirt.com/
Monday, January 15, 2007
Fernanda de Utrera
I missed this last summer. Fernanda de Utrera's obituary in English.
The Independent Online
Fernanda De Utrera
Flamenco singing star
Published: 11 September 2006
Fernanda Jiménez Peña (Fernanda de Utrera), flamenco singer: born Utrera, Spain 8 February 1923; died Utrera 24 August 2006.
When the vocalist Fernanda de Utrera died, El País hailed her as "surely, the best solearera of all time". She had a command of several flamenco song idioms, but soleá, said to be related to soledad (solitude) - and all the desolation that that word summons - was her forte.
She was born Fernanda Jiménez Peña in 1923 in Utrera in Andalusia - her gitano (gypsy) nom de flamenco referred to her home town - into the Peña clan of hereditary musicians.
The year before her birth, the flamenco world had been turned upside down. Historically, flamenco had been tainted with deep-rooted prejudices against gypsies and taunts of primitivism. In June 1922, a group of freethinkers including the composer Manuel de Falla, the poet-writer Federico García Lorca and the painter Ignacio Zuloaga staged in Granada the Concurso de Cante Jondo - the convocation of deep song. By offering good prize money, they attracted leading and new gitano heroes and heroines such as La Niña de los Peines (Pastora Pavón) and Andrés Segovia. For the first time in Spanish gitano history, Spain began to accept flamenco as a cultural form worthy of being treated seriously.
Fernanda grew up in a new era in which flamenco began to liberate its performers from generations of ghetto mindset. As a small girl, she was hailed as a child prodigy, attracting listeners from near and (even) far to hear her singing. In his 1992 book In Search of the Firedance: Spain through flamenco, James Woodall wrote of her "extraordinary career" -
in that she has travelled the world over with her flamenco song, like a star, though, like a gypsy, she could not think of settling anywhere else other than amongst her family and fellow flamencos in Utrera. She has lived there all her life . . .
She and her younger sister Bernarda sang in Edgar Neville's 1952 documentary film about flamenco dance and song, Duende y misterio de Flamenco ("Flamenco's Duende and Mystery", retitled Flamenco on its US release in 1954). Its inclusion of such as Antonio Mairena's martinete, a song form combining singing and the rhythmicality of anvil ringing, took flamenco into new worlds.
In 1957 Mairensa prevailed upon Fernanda's father to allow Fernanda and Bernarda to pursue their muse - they were usually billed as Fernanda y Bernarda de Utrera. One anecdote has it that, rather than cause their mother to worry, they never let on that they were going to the 1964 New York World's Fair, saying they were off to an equally fantastical but imaginable place called Barcelona. Their mother gave them flour to take so they had bread and a source of income.
Fernanda de Utrera appeared in Radio Televisión Española's extensive series, shown between 1971 and 1973, on the rites and regionalities of flamenco cante (song), baile (dance) and toque (playing, literally, "beat" or "tap"). Her special was televised in 1973; the various series appeared as a 12-DVD set under the generic title Rito y Geografía del Baile (2003). In 1993, both sisters appeared in Pedro Almodóvar's film Kika. Fernanda's other film appearances, usually as herself, included Doris Dörrie's ¿Bin ich schön? (Am I Beautiful?, 1998) and Carlos Saura's Flamenco (1994), in which she sings a soleá.
The sisters' lives remained intimately interwoven, with such albums as Cante flamenco: Fernanda y Bernarda de Utrera (1990), until Fernanda's art was silenced by Alzheimer's.
Ken Hunt
The Independent Online
Fernanda De Utrera
Flamenco singing star
Published: 11 September 2006
Fernanda Jiménez Peña (Fernanda de Utrera), flamenco singer: born Utrera, Spain 8 February 1923; died Utrera 24 August 2006.
When the vocalist Fernanda de Utrera died, El País hailed her as "surely, the best solearera of all time". She had a command of several flamenco song idioms, but soleá, said to be related to soledad (solitude) - and all the desolation that that word summons - was her forte.
She was born Fernanda Jiménez Peña in 1923 in Utrera in Andalusia - her gitano (gypsy) nom de flamenco referred to her home town - into the Peña clan of hereditary musicians.
The year before her birth, the flamenco world had been turned upside down. Historically, flamenco had been tainted with deep-rooted prejudices against gypsies and taunts of primitivism. In June 1922, a group of freethinkers including the composer Manuel de Falla, the poet-writer Federico García Lorca and the painter Ignacio Zuloaga staged in Granada the Concurso de Cante Jondo - the convocation of deep song. By offering good prize money, they attracted leading and new gitano heroes and heroines such as La Niña de los Peines (Pastora Pavón) and Andrés Segovia. For the first time in Spanish gitano history, Spain began to accept flamenco as a cultural form worthy of being treated seriously.
Fernanda grew up in a new era in which flamenco began to liberate its performers from generations of ghetto mindset. As a small girl, she was hailed as a child prodigy, attracting listeners from near and (even) far to hear her singing. In his 1992 book In Search of the Firedance: Spain through flamenco, James Woodall wrote of her "extraordinary career" -
in that she has travelled the world over with her flamenco song, like a star, though, like a gypsy, she could not think of settling anywhere else other than amongst her family and fellow flamencos in Utrera. She has lived there all her life . . .
She and her younger sister Bernarda sang in Edgar Neville's 1952 documentary film about flamenco dance and song, Duende y misterio de Flamenco ("Flamenco's Duende and Mystery", retitled Flamenco on its US release in 1954). Its inclusion of such as Antonio Mairena's martinete, a song form combining singing and the rhythmicality of anvil ringing, took flamenco into new worlds.
In 1957 Mairensa prevailed upon Fernanda's father to allow Fernanda and Bernarda to pursue their muse - they were usually billed as Fernanda y Bernarda de Utrera. One anecdote has it that, rather than cause their mother to worry, they never let on that they were going to the 1964 New York World's Fair, saying they were off to an equally fantastical but imaginable place called Barcelona. Their mother gave them flour to take so they had bread and a source of income.
Fernanda de Utrera appeared in Radio Televisión Española's extensive series, shown between 1971 and 1973, on the rites and regionalities of flamenco cante (song), baile (dance) and toque (playing, literally, "beat" or "tap"). Her special was televised in 1973; the various series appeared as a 12-DVD set under the generic title Rito y Geografía del Baile (2003). In 1993, both sisters appeared in Pedro Almodóvar's film Kika. Fernanda's other film appearances, usually as herself, included Doris Dörrie's ¿Bin ich schön? (Am I Beautiful?, 1998) and Carlos Saura's Flamenco (1994), in which she sings a soleá.
The sisters' lives remained intimately interwoven, with such albums as Cante flamenco: Fernanda y Bernarda de Utrera (1990), until Fernanda's art was silenced by Alzheimer's.
Ken Hunt
David Byrne feature In the NYT
NYTimes
January 14, 2007
Music
Indie Rock’s Patron Saint Inspires a New Flock
By WILL HERMES
WEARING a striped sports jacket and very sharp blue suede shoes, David Byrne stepped into an elevator at 32 East 57th Street in Manhattan last October. He was on his way to the Pace/MacGill Gallery for the opening of his art show “Furnishing the Self — Upholstering the Soul.”
Mr. Byrne was alone and running a bit late; the reception had begun a half-hour ago. “Anybody up there?” he asked cheerily.
Of course there was. There was a healthy crowd: a mix of what looked like well-heeled uptowners, scruffy Brooklyn bohemians and clean-scrubbed Asian art students. But those who still saw Mr. Byrne as the singer from Talking Heads, who came to catch a glimpse of a real live rock star, were surely surprised by the modesty of the event. And anyone might have been surprised by the artwork itself: simple, whimsical studies of chairs, either drawn with ink on paper, embroidered on framed furniture upholstery or constructed from odd materials, including a steel file cabinet, old encyclopedias and uncooked macaroni.
Yet the show (which has closed, but is documented at davidbyrne.com) was consistent with the idiosyncratic tone of Mr. Byrne’s whole post-Talking Heads career, which has balanced playfulness and erudition with a dollop of disorientation. He has been an author and photographer (the book “Strange Rituals”), a film director (the documentary “Ilé Aiyé” and the feature film “True Stories”), a television host (the sadly defunct PBS performance series “Sessions at West 54th”), a PowerPoint programmer (the DVD/book “E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information),” which documents his attempt to recast the Microsoft presentation software as an art medium), a record producer, a soundtrack composer.
These days this 54-year-old polymath has been particularly busy. He is the curator of the 2007 Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, which next month will feature a program of experimental folk music (including Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Adem, Cibelle and CocoRosie) and a multi-artist concert based on the conceit of a single drone note. It will also include two nights of Mr. Byrne’s work: a performance of music from “The Knee Plays,” his 1985 theatrical collaboration with Robert Wilson, and a preview of “Here Lies Love,” his new multimedia song cycle based on the life and reign of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.
If that seems an unlikely subject, well, consider the fact that Mr. Byrne, like Ms. Marcos, clearly appreciates a good pair of shoes. “Hush Puppies came out with all these wild colors like seven, eight years ago,” he said after his opening, referring to his turquoise footwear. “I thought: ‘Who the hell is going to buy these? They look like they’re for some Vegas singer.’ I figured they wouldn’t be around long, so I got those and a yellow pair and a lime-green pair.”
Perhaps more surprising is that while Mr. Byrne has been busy being a curator, sculpturing, drawing, mounting theatrical pieces about deposed foreign leaders and buying shoes, he has also become, without fanfare or Talking Heads reunion tours, perhaps the single greatest influence on the current generation of indie rockers. Four of the most hotly anticipated CDs of 2007 — by the Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, !!! and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — are coming from bands that, each in its individual way, show a clear stylistic debt to Mr. Byrne and his old group.
Mr. Byrne spoke recently over a late- afternoon coffee at his studio near Chinatown, sitting at a wooden farm table under a row of windows overlooking Broome Street. The walls of the loft space (a former sweatshop, he noted) are lined with book and CD shelves, or hung with curious objects, including a painting by the Rev. Howard Finster (who illustrated the cover of the Talking Heads album “Little Creatures”) and a pair of banners salvaged from a Mason hall.
Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow. He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. (“We didn’t get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines,” he said, “but we had a lot of fun.”) He has even become a blogger, and a self-disclosing one at that.
“I was a peculiar young man,” he wrote in a reflective entry last April. “Borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.”
Lately Mr. Byrne has also been creating book-art projects with the writer and graphic designer Dave Eggers. The most recent is “Arboretum,” a reproduced sketchbook of curious free-associative riffs in the form of evolutionary trees and Venn diagrams that he prefaced with a series of questions: “What are these drawings? Why did I do them? Will they be of interest to anyone else? Of any use? Do they need to be useful?”
Here’s another question: Why so many media? “Some are better for saying a particular thing than others,” Mr. Byrne explained. “I think it’s also part of that punk do-it-yourself attitude, of being like: ‘Well, I don’t care that I’m not an expert in this. I know my limitations, but I think I can express what I want to express within those limitations.’ You know — like I may only know three chords, but that’s all I need.”
Mr. Byrne knows far more than three chords. And having attended, albeit briefly, the Rhode Island School of Design, he is not a fine-art naïf. But his can-do attitude appeals to young musicians, who understand that music careers now often involve Web design, blogging and filmmaking. So does his reputation for forward thinking, as on last year’s Web-enhanced reissue of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” his 1981 collage-funk collaboration with Brian Eno, and his more recent solo work.
“He’s just kind of pursued what he finds interesting and hasn’t been specifically chasing after an audience, and I have a lot of respect for that,” said Win Butler of the Arcade Fire. That band has performed with Mr. Byrne on various occasions, and its cover of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” is a blogosphere favorite. “I don’t think of him as a pop star, really. He’s like a scientist, or a professor.”
Mr. Byrne appreciates being acknowledged by younger musicians, but he doesn’t seem nostalgic for the days when he was one himself. He likes the tributes best, he said, when they come from bands that “don’t sound anything like me, or Talking Heads.”
Relations between Mr. Byrne and his former bandmates are famously strained, although they did manage to reunite for a few songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2002. Mr. Byrne’s attitude seems best expressed in a short essay included in “Once in a Lifetime,” one of two extravagant Heads CD retrospectives released in the last few years.
Addressing himself and his music in the third person (something he does in conversation too), he noted that he was “just not the same person” who created his early work, and that he “can’t go to that place anymore.” Progress and evolution are more important, he wrote, at any cost.
Yet his latest musical project may capture the musical kinetics of Talking Heads better than anything Mr. Byrne has done since the band broke up in 1991. “Here Lies Love” was inspired by Imelda Marcos’s love of disco, so great that she installed a dance floor, complete with mirror ball, on the roof of the presidential palace in Manila. The work in progress was conceived for performance in a dance club, with an audience doing what one generally does in such places. (If the Carnegie Hall crowd needs to boogie at the Feb. 3 concert, perhaps the ushers will understand.)
Mr. Byrne, who was born in Scotland and raised in Baltimore and has traveled widely, says he was attracted to Ms. Marcos’s story in part as a way to understand the inner workings of dictators, always a timely endeavor.
“How do they justify — how does anyone justify — what might seem to be atrocious behavior?” he recalled wondering. In this case, he thought, maybe “dance music could be some sort of link: the way people sort of lose themselves at a rave or a club — maybe there’s something about it that connects to the feeling of somebody in power. Kind of a heady feeling, like you’re up in the clouds. And I thought maybe I could tell the story in that kind of setting. I thought that would be really neat.”
Last February, at a rehearsal space amid the art galleries on West 26th Street, he prepared the “Here Lies Love” material for its world premiere, which took place in March at the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts in Australia. Two singers flanked him on his right: Dana Diaz-Tutaan, who plays the Marcos role, and Ganda Suthivarakom, who plays Estrella Cumpas, the housekeeper-nanny who effectively raised Ms. Marcos. Dressed in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit branded with the logo of Luaka Bop (his world music label), with his glasses perched low on his nose, Mr. Byrne played chucka-chucka chords on a blond Fender guitar.
Above the musicians — the keyboardist Tim Regusis, the bassist Paul Frazier, the drummer Graham Hawthorne and the percussionist Mauro Refosco — the video designer Peter Norman projected remarkable clips from the Marcos era: Imelda dancing with Gerald R. Ford, dining with Donald Trump, kibitzing with Richard M. Nixon and George P. Shultz. Some scenes read as vaguely comic; others were genuinely disturbing, like a segment capturing hardscrabble street life in Manila.
The songs conjured New York disco-rock of the ’70s and ’80s: a fusion that Talking Heads spearheaded, of course, and that is currently undergoing a revival. But the sound is not simply Heads redux. For one thing, much of the material is sung by the female vocalists, not Mr. Byrne. Furthermore, his (absent) collaborator on the project is the D.J. Norman Cook, a k a Fatboy Slim, who seemed to have added modern heft and a techno sheen to some of the beats.
Another sign of Mr. Byrne’s constant forward motion is his voracious appetite for new music. He’s a regular visitor to the annual South by Southwest music festival Austin, Tex., where he will be a featured speaker in March. And any concertgoer in New York City is apt to spot him regularly, hanging out near the back of a room, generally without an entourage, his shock of near-white hair adding a few inches to his already impressive height. Last year he could be spotted sipping white wine in the lobby of Town Hall before a Cat Power performance, applauding the debut of Gnarls Barkley at Webster Hall and cheering the Brazilian funk artist Otto (who appears on a forthcoming Luaka Bop compilation) at Joe’s Pub.
“He really keeps his finger on the pulse,” said Ms. Diaz-Tutaan, whom Mr. Byrne became interested in after hearing the CD her band, Apsci, recorded for the tiny progressive hip-hop label Quannum. “That’s really inspiring to me — that this guy who has been around for such a long time and has been one of my musical influences is keeping up with things on a more underground level. He’ll just ride his bike to a venue, go in, check out the band and ride home.”
Mr. Byrne doesn’t seem to think there’s anything particularly remarkable about it. “Sure, I go out a lot,” he said. “I’m in New York, and I’m a music fan. But sometimes I go out to these shows and I go ‘Where are my peers?,’ you know? Where are the musicians from my generation, or the generation after mine? Don’t they go out to hear music? Do they just stay home? Are they doing drugs? What’s going on?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Or maybe they’re just not interested anymore. They’re watching ‘Desperate Housewives.’ ”
January 14, 2007
Music
Indie Rock’s Patron Saint Inspires a New Flock
By WILL HERMES
WEARING a striped sports jacket and very sharp blue suede shoes, David Byrne stepped into an elevator at 32 East 57th Street in Manhattan last October. He was on his way to the Pace/MacGill Gallery for the opening of his art show “Furnishing the Self — Upholstering the Soul.”
Mr. Byrne was alone and running a bit late; the reception had begun a half-hour ago. “Anybody up there?” he asked cheerily.
Of course there was. There was a healthy crowd: a mix of what looked like well-heeled uptowners, scruffy Brooklyn bohemians and clean-scrubbed Asian art students. But those who still saw Mr. Byrne as the singer from Talking Heads, who came to catch a glimpse of a real live rock star, were surely surprised by the modesty of the event. And anyone might have been surprised by the artwork itself: simple, whimsical studies of chairs, either drawn with ink on paper, embroidered on framed furniture upholstery or constructed from odd materials, including a steel file cabinet, old encyclopedias and uncooked macaroni.
Yet the show (which has closed, but is documented at davidbyrne.com) was consistent with the idiosyncratic tone of Mr. Byrne’s whole post-Talking Heads career, which has balanced playfulness and erudition with a dollop of disorientation. He has been an author and photographer (the book “Strange Rituals”), a film director (the documentary “Ilé Aiyé” and the feature film “True Stories”), a television host (the sadly defunct PBS performance series “Sessions at West 54th”), a PowerPoint programmer (the DVD/book “E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information),” which documents his attempt to recast the Microsoft presentation software as an art medium), a record producer, a soundtrack composer.
These days this 54-year-old polymath has been particularly busy. He is the curator of the 2007 Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, which next month will feature a program of experimental folk music (including Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Adem, Cibelle and CocoRosie) and a multi-artist concert based on the conceit of a single drone note. It will also include two nights of Mr. Byrne’s work: a performance of music from “The Knee Plays,” his 1985 theatrical collaboration with Robert Wilson, and a preview of “Here Lies Love,” his new multimedia song cycle based on the life and reign of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.
If that seems an unlikely subject, well, consider the fact that Mr. Byrne, like Ms. Marcos, clearly appreciates a good pair of shoes. “Hush Puppies came out with all these wild colors like seven, eight years ago,” he said after his opening, referring to his turquoise footwear. “I thought: ‘Who the hell is going to buy these? They look like they’re for some Vegas singer.’ I figured they wouldn’t be around long, so I got those and a yellow pair and a lime-green pair.”
Perhaps more surprising is that while Mr. Byrne has been busy being a curator, sculpturing, drawing, mounting theatrical pieces about deposed foreign leaders and buying shoes, he has also become, without fanfare or Talking Heads reunion tours, perhaps the single greatest influence on the current generation of indie rockers. Four of the most hotly anticipated CDs of 2007 — by the Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, !!! and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — are coming from bands that, each in its individual way, show a clear stylistic debt to Mr. Byrne and his old group.
Mr. Byrne spoke recently over a late- afternoon coffee at his studio near Chinatown, sitting at a wooden farm table under a row of windows overlooking Broome Street. The walls of the loft space (a former sweatshop, he noted) are lined with book and CD shelves, or hung with curious objects, including a painting by the Rev. Howard Finster (who illustrated the cover of the Talking Heads album “Little Creatures”) and a pair of banners salvaged from a Mason hall.
Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow. He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. (“We didn’t get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines,” he said, “but we had a lot of fun.”) He has even become a blogger, and a self-disclosing one at that.
“I was a peculiar young man,” he wrote in a reflective entry last April. “Borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.”
Lately Mr. Byrne has also been creating book-art projects with the writer and graphic designer Dave Eggers. The most recent is “Arboretum,” a reproduced sketchbook of curious free-associative riffs in the form of evolutionary trees and Venn diagrams that he prefaced with a series of questions: “What are these drawings? Why did I do them? Will they be of interest to anyone else? Of any use? Do they need to be useful?”
Here’s another question: Why so many media? “Some are better for saying a particular thing than others,” Mr. Byrne explained. “I think it’s also part of that punk do-it-yourself attitude, of being like: ‘Well, I don’t care that I’m not an expert in this. I know my limitations, but I think I can express what I want to express within those limitations.’ You know — like I may only know three chords, but that’s all I need.”
Mr. Byrne knows far more than three chords. And having attended, albeit briefly, the Rhode Island School of Design, he is not a fine-art naïf. But his can-do attitude appeals to young musicians, who understand that music careers now often involve Web design, blogging and filmmaking. So does his reputation for forward thinking, as on last year’s Web-enhanced reissue of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” his 1981 collage-funk collaboration with Brian Eno, and his more recent solo work.
“He’s just kind of pursued what he finds interesting and hasn’t been specifically chasing after an audience, and I have a lot of respect for that,” said Win Butler of the Arcade Fire. That band has performed with Mr. Byrne on various occasions, and its cover of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” is a blogosphere favorite. “I don’t think of him as a pop star, really. He’s like a scientist, or a professor.”
Mr. Byrne appreciates being acknowledged by younger musicians, but he doesn’t seem nostalgic for the days when he was one himself. He likes the tributes best, he said, when they come from bands that “don’t sound anything like me, or Talking Heads.”
Relations between Mr. Byrne and his former bandmates are famously strained, although they did manage to reunite for a few songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2002. Mr. Byrne’s attitude seems best expressed in a short essay included in “Once in a Lifetime,” one of two extravagant Heads CD retrospectives released in the last few years.
Addressing himself and his music in the third person (something he does in conversation too), he noted that he was “just not the same person” who created his early work, and that he “can’t go to that place anymore.” Progress and evolution are more important, he wrote, at any cost.
Yet his latest musical project may capture the musical kinetics of Talking Heads better than anything Mr. Byrne has done since the band broke up in 1991. “Here Lies Love” was inspired by Imelda Marcos’s love of disco, so great that she installed a dance floor, complete with mirror ball, on the roof of the presidential palace in Manila. The work in progress was conceived for performance in a dance club, with an audience doing what one generally does in such places. (If the Carnegie Hall crowd needs to boogie at the Feb. 3 concert, perhaps the ushers will understand.)
Mr. Byrne, who was born in Scotland and raised in Baltimore and has traveled widely, says he was attracted to Ms. Marcos’s story in part as a way to understand the inner workings of dictators, always a timely endeavor.
“How do they justify — how does anyone justify — what might seem to be atrocious behavior?” he recalled wondering. In this case, he thought, maybe “dance music could be some sort of link: the way people sort of lose themselves at a rave or a club — maybe there’s something about it that connects to the feeling of somebody in power. Kind of a heady feeling, like you’re up in the clouds. And I thought maybe I could tell the story in that kind of setting. I thought that would be really neat.”
Last February, at a rehearsal space amid the art galleries on West 26th Street, he prepared the “Here Lies Love” material for its world premiere, which took place in March at the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts in Australia. Two singers flanked him on his right: Dana Diaz-Tutaan, who plays the Marcos role, and Ganda Suthivarakom, who plays Estrella Cumpas, the housekeeper-nanny who effectively raised Ms. Marcos. Dressed in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit branded with the logo of Luaka Bop (his world music label), with his glasses perched low on his nose, Mr. Byrne played chucka-chucka chords on a blond Fender guitar.
Above the musicians — the keyboardist Tim Regusis, the bassist Paul Frazier, the drummer Graham Hawthorne and the percussionist Mauro Refosco — the video designer Peter Norman projected remarkable clips from the Marcos era: Imelda dancing with Gerald R. Ford, dining with Donald Trump, kibitzing with Richard M. Nixon and George P. Shultz. Some scenes read as vaguely comic; others were genuinely disturbing, like a segment capturing hardscrabble street life in Manila.
The songs conjured New York disco-rock of the ’70s and ’80s: a fusion that Talking Heads spearheaded, of course, and that is currently undergoing a revival. But the sound is not simply Heads redux. For one thing, much of the material is sung by the female vocalists, not Mr. Byrne. Furthermore, his (absent) collaborator on the project is the D.J. Norman Cook, a k a Fatboy Slim, who seemed to have added modern heft and a techno sheen to some of the beats.
Another sign of Mr. Byrne’s constant forward motion is his voracious appetite for new music. He’s a regular visitor to the annual South by Southwest music festival Austin, Tex., where he will be a featured speaker in March. And any concertgoer in New York City is apt to spot him regularly, hanging out near the back of a room, generally without an entourage, his shock of near-white hair adding a few inches to his already impressive height. Last year he could be spotted sipping white wine in the lobby of Town Hall before a Cat Power performance, applauding the debut of Gnarls Barkley at Webster Hall and cheering the Brazilian funk artist Otto (who appears on a forthcoming Luaka Bop compilation) at Joe’s Pub.
“He really keeps his finger on the pulse,” said Ms. Diaz-Tutaan, whom Mr. Byrne became interested in after hearing the CD her band, Apsci, recorded for the tiny progressive hip-hop label Quannum. “That’s really inspiring to me — that this guy who has been around for such a long time and has been one of my musical influences is keeping up with things on a more underground level. He’ll just ride his bike to a venue, go in, check out the band and ride home.”
Mr. Byrne doesn’t seem to think there’s anything particularly remarkable about it. “Sure, I go out a lot,” he said. “I’m in New York, and I’m a music fan. But sometimes I go out to these shows and I go ‘Where are my peers?,’ you know? Where are the musicians from my generation, or the generation after mine? Don’t they go out to hear music? Do they just stay home? Are they doing drugs? What’s going on?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Or maybe they’re just not interested anymore. They’re watching ‘Desperate Housewives.’ ”
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Alice Coltrane dies at 69
Jazz performer Alice Coltrane dies at 69
Sun Jan 14, 7:13 PM ET
Alice Coltrane, a jazz performer and composer and wife of the late saxophone legend John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.
Coltrane died Friday of respiratory failure at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center, said her sister, Marilyn McLeod.
For nearly 40 years, Coltrane managed the archive and estate of her husband, a pivotal figure in the history of jazz. He died of liver disease in 1967 at age 40.
A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand.
Born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, she began learning classical piano at age 7. She studied jazz piano briefly in Paris before moving to New York, where she met her future husband in 1963.
At that time, she was playing with bandleader Terry Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two.
John Coltrane "saw something in her that was beautiful," Gibbs told the Los Angeles Times.
She left Gibbs' band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s. She played tour dates with Coltrane's group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.
"John not only taught me how to explore but to play thoroughly and completely," Alice Coltrane said in comments published in "The Black Giants."
After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children but continued to play.
Early albums under her name, including "A Monastic Trio" and "Ptah, the El Daoud," received critical praise.
Her last recording, "Translinear Light," came in 2004. Her last performances came in an abbreviated tour last fall with her saxophonist son, Ravi.
Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills.
Sun Jan 14, 7:13 PM ET
Alice Coltrane, a jazz performer and composer and wife of the late saxophone legend John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.
Coltrane died Friday of respiratory failure at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center, said her sister, Marilyn McLeod.
For nearly 40 years, Coltrane managed the archive and estate of her husband, a pivotal figure in the history of jazz. He died of liver disease in 1967 at age 40.
A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand.
Born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, she began learning classical piano at age 7. She studied jazz piano briefly in Paris before moving to New York, where she met her future husband in 1963.
At that time, she was playing with bandleader Terry Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two.
John Coltrane "saw something in her that was beautiful," Gibbs told the Los Angeles Times.
She left Gibbs' band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s. She played tour dates with Coltrane's group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.
"John not only taught me how to explore but to play thoroughly and completely," Alice Coltrane said in comments published in "The Black Giants."
After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children but continued to play.
Early albums under her name, including "A Monastic Trio" and "Ptah, the El Daoud," received critical praise.
Her last recording, "Translinear Light," came in 2004. Her last performances came in an abbreviated tour last fall with her saxophonist son, Ravi.
Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Saxophonist Michael Brecker dead at 57
Tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker dead at age 57 in New York City
1 hour, 58 minutes ago
By Nahal Toosi
NEW YORK (AP) - Michael Brecker, a versatile and highly influential tenor saxophonist who won 11 Grammys over a career that spanned more than three decades, died Saturday at age 57.
Brecker died in a hospital in New York City of leukemia, said his longtime friend and manager, Darryl Pitt.
In recent years, the saxophonist had struggled with myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells. The disease, known as MDS, often progresses to leukemia.
Throughout his career, Brecker recorded and performed with numerous jazz and pop music leaders, including Herbie Hancock, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, his website said. His most recently released recording, Wide Angles, appeared on many top jazz lists and won two Grammys in 2004.
His technique on the saxophone was widely emulated and his style was much-studied in music schools throughout the world. Jazziz magazine recently called him "inarguably the most influential tenor stylist of the last 25 years," said a news release from his family.
Though very sick, Brecker managed to record a final album, as yet untitled, that was completed just two weeks ago. Pitt said the musician was very enthusiastic about the final work.
"In addition to the love of his family and friends, his work on this project helped keep him alive and will be another jewel in his legacy," Pitt said.
Brecker, who had a home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., was born in 1949 in Philadelphia to a musically inclined family. His father would take his sons to performances of jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington.
Brecker, who first studied clarinet and alto saxophone, decided to pursue the tenor saxophone in high school after being inspired by the work of John Coltrane, his website said. He followed his brother, Randy, a trumpet player, to Indiana University, but he left after a year for New York.
In 1970, he helped found the jazz-rock group Dreams. He later joined his brother in pianist and composer Horace Silver's quintet. Michael and Randy also started the successful jazz-rock fusion group the Brecker Brothers. The two also owned the now-defunct New York City downtown jazz club Seventh Avenue South.
His solo career began in 1987, when his self-titled debut was voted "Jazz Album of the Year" in both Down Beat and Jazziz magazines.
His struggle with the blood disease led him and his family to publicly encourage people to enrol in bone marrow donor programs. His own search for a donor led to an experimental blood stem cell transplant that "did not work as hoped," said a May 2006 entry on his website.
His illness silenced his music at times but raising awareness of bone marrow drives gave him a new focus.
"It's something that doesn't come naturally...I obviously miss playing and writing music," Brecker said in 2005.
"On the other hand, this whole experience has allowed me to be a conduit to attract attention for a cause that's much larger than me...for people to go get tested (for the marrow donor program) because I know a lot of lives will be saved."
1 hour, 58 minutes ago
By Nahal Toosi
NEW YORK (AP) - Michael Brecker, a versatile and highly influential tenor saxophonist who won 11 Grammys over a career that spanned more than three decades, died Saturday at age 57.
Brecker died in a hospital in New York City of leukemia, said his longtime friend and manager, Darryl Pitt.
In recent years, the saxophonist had struggled with myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells. The disease, known as MDS, often progresses to leukemia.
Throughout his career, Brecker recorded and performed with numerous jazz and pop music leaders, including Herbie Hancock, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, his website said. His most recently released recording, Wide Angles, appeared on many top jazz lists and won two Grammys in 2004.
His technique on the saxophone was widely emulated and his style was much-studied in music schools throughout the world. Jazziz magazine recently called him "inarguably the most influential tenor stylist of the last 25 years," said a news release from his family.
Though very sick, Brecker managed to record a final album, as yet untitled, that was completed just two weeks ago. Pitt said the musician was very enthusiastic about the final work.
"In addition to the love of his family and friends, his work on this project helped keep him alive and will be another jewel in his legacy," Pitt said.
Brecker, who had a home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., was born in 1949 in Philadelphia to a musically inclined family. His father would take his sons to performances of jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington.
Brecker, who first studied clarinet and alto saxophone, decided to pursue the tenor saxophone in high school after being inspired by the work of John Coltrane, his website said. He followed his brother, Randy, a trumpet player, to Indiana University, but he left after a year for New York.
In 1970, he helped found the jazz-rock group Dreams. He later joined his brother in pianist and composer Horace Silver's quintet. Michael and Randy also started the successful jazz-rock fusion group the Brecker Brothers. The two also owned the now-defunct New York City downtown jazz club Seventh Avenue South.
His solo career began in 1987, when his self-titled debut was voted "Jazz Album of the Year" in both Down Beat and Jazziz magazines.
His struggle with the blood disease led him and his family to publicly encourage people to enrol in bone marrow donor programs. His own search for a donor led to an experimental blood stem cell transplant that "did not work as hoped," said a May 2006 entry on his website.
His illness silenced his music at times but raising awareness of bone marrow drives gave him a new focus.
"It's something that doesn't come naturally...I obviously miss playing and writing music," Brecker said in 2005.
"On the other hand, this whole experience has allowed me to be a conduit to attract attention for a cause that's much larger than me...for people to go get tested (for the marrow donor program) because I know a lot of lives will be saved."
Friday, January 12, 2007
Payback for a hip-hop pioneer
Chicago Tribune
MUSIC: PREVIEW
Payback for a hip-hop pioneer
By Patrick Sisson
Special to the Tribune
January 12, 2007
"The Payoff Mix," a Frankenstein according to one of its creators, was a song that raised questions that still haunt artists and record labels.
In 1983, New York producer Steve Stein and his friend Douglas DiFranco, a studio engineer, created the tune, a technically precise and occasionally humorous reworking of "Play that Beat Mr. D.J." by G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid, and entered it in a remix contest sponsored by the Tommy Boy label.
While it wasn't the first track to juxtapose samples, it was certainly memorable. Recording under the name Double Dee & Steinski, the pair blended the original track's early hip-hop beats with dozens of unauthorized musical samples including a snippet from a Boy George song and a Humphrey Bogart vocal clip from "Casablanca."
The duo went on to record two similar tracks, "The James Brown Mix" and "History of Hip-Hop," which together with "The Payoff Mix" are collectively known as The Lessons, before amicably splitting up in 1985. The pair received $100 and a few T-shirts for their contest victory at the time, but the tracks have since lived on as early examples of the potential and artistry of sampling.
"There was nothing that got in our way, certainly not copyright," said Steinski, who appears at the Smart Bar on Friday. "The vapor and fog of intellectual property was not so thick as it is now. We had completely molded this piece and made this Frankenstein monster."
While "The Payoff Mix" received limited radio play after it won the contest, the "monster" never saw official release, since clearing all the samples would have been a nightmarish task for the Tommy Boy legal staff. (While numerous bootleg versions of the tracks have been pressed, Steinski says the original prize from Tommy Boy is the only money he's ever made from The Lessons.)
But those issues didn't discourage the now 55-year-old producer from making more musical mixes that blend genres and freely plunder from pop culture. Performing a deejay set Thursday at Smart Bar along with Zulu Nation founder and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, Steinski is continuing to embrace the hip-hop notion of re-purposing and re-defining music.
"I play anything I get a hold of that works for me," he said. "That's my definition of what hip-hop is."
During recent deejay gigs in the United States and Europe, Steinski, who has a day job in advertising, blends everything from Brazilian and soul music to hip-hop and obscure vocal samples with a popular computer program named Ableton Live. He's also recorded, but never released, numerous cut-and-paste-style bootlegs since The Lessons, including "The Motorcade Sped On," a 1986 track about the Kennedy assassination that adds a funky beat to Walter Cronkite's somber announcements, and "It's Up to You," a satiric mosaic of music and quotations by former president George H. W. Bush mixed during the Gulf War.
"For a long time, up to the beginning of 2006, I accepted the idea of what I was doing was illegal," said Steinski. "It was very much off the edge. And then I started reading stuff by Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar who invented the Creative Commons idea of copyright, and it really opened me up to the idea that certain things shouldn't be locked up the way they are, unavailable to artists. It's like this amazing digital technology is being completely crippled for the benefit of major corporations."
More than 20 years after The Lessons, digital technology has made similar musical re-combinations, sometimes called mash-ups, not just easier but commonplace. Acquiring, sampling and rearranging songs requires nothing more than an Internet-connected computer and some easy-to-use software--certainly not the studio expertise, time and crates of vinyl records that Double Dee & Steinski had to use in the '80s.
The popularity of these post-modern audio collages reflects Steinski's influence on current hip-hop artists. He appeared in the 2001 turntablism documentary "Scratch" and was asked to make a mix for the hip Stones Throw label. Both DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist performed with Steinski during a live re-enactment of The Lessons in San Francisco in 2000 and both made tracks called Lesson Four in honor of the original.
"At that time, I think The Lessons were the first of their kind," said Cut Chemist. "It was way more intricate than other mix records. And you could definitely tell they were coming from a more hip-hop angle. They were just utilizing all these obscure breaks. Steinski is the king of the dialogue record. He kind of flipped my wig when I played with him. He dropped this sample from a record about sewing that went, `I spend hours at my sampler.' In a million years, I couldn't find something that dope."
Digital technology has also kept alive, and in most cases inflamed, the legal issues that prevented The Lessons from ever receiving official release. Labels feel that unauthorized sampling of music violates copyright laws and allows the sampling artist to illegally profit from the original artist's work.
Artists feel that the absolute control over copyright and the hefty fees labels charge for sampling discourages artistic freedom and puts an unfair and often unrealistic price tag on material that should be in the public domain. It also discounts the amount of work that goes into making original, creative recordings.
And, more than 20 years after Steinski helped make The Lessons, an equitable solution that artists and labels agree upon still hasn't been discovered.
Gregg Gillis, who records for the Bloomington, Ill.-based Illegal Art label under the name Girl Talk, released "Night Ripper" last year, a critically acclaimed album meticulously constructed from hundreds of small, sometimes microscopic, samples of popular hip-hop, dance and indie rock songs that weren't cleared by the major labels.
Gillis has been a staple at nightclubs this year, but according to Illegal Art founder Philo T. Farnsworth, there's only so much profit Illegal Art can gain from the album before the music industry might begin to file lawsuits. He feels it's silly, since there's a market for this work and more flexible copyright laws could be enacted that would ensure everyone involved made a fair buck from the album.
"The Steinski stuff was a good example," said Farnsworth. "It was such a huge underground hit and if the industry could have made a way for it to have existed legally, they could have been profited from that material.
"They're shooting themselves in the foot by limiting certain types of expression."
- - -
Birth of a movement
Were it not for sampling pioneer Steve Stein (a.k.a. Steinski) and Afrika Bambaataa, the first rapper ever, so much might not exist--such as the work of:
RUN-DMC
Public Enemy
Biz Markie
Wu-Tang Clan
Beastie Boys
Chemical Brothers
Danger Mouse
Girl Talk
MUSIC: PREVIEW
Payback for a hip-hop pioneer
By Patrick Sisson
Special to the Tribune
January 12, 2007
"The Payoff Mix," a Frankenstein according to one of its creators, was a song that raised questions that still haunt artists and record labels.
In 1983, New York producer Steve Stein and his friend Douglas DiFranco, a studio engineer, created the tune, a technically precise and occasionally humorous reworking of "Play that Beat Mr. D.J." by G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid, and entered it in a remix contest sponsored by the Tommy Boy label.
While it wasn't the first track to juxtapose samples, it was certainly memorable. Recording under the name Double Dee & Steinski, the pair blended the original track's early hip-hop beats with dozens of unauthorized musical samples including a snippet from a Boy George song and a Humphrey Bogart vocal clip from "Casablanca."
The duo went on to record two similar tracks, "The James Brown Mix" and "History of Hip-Hop," which together with "The Payoff Mix" are collectively known as The Lessons, before amicably splitting up in 1985. The pair received $100 and a few T-shirts for their contest victory at the time, but the tracks have since lived on as early examples of the potential and artistry of sampling.
"There was nothing that got in our way, certainly not copyright," said Steinski, who appears at the Smart Bar on Friday. "The vapor and fog of intellectual property was not so thick as it is now. We had completely molded this piece and made this Frankenstein monster."
While "The Payoff Mix" received limited radio play after it won the contest, the "monster" never saw official release, since clearing all the samples would have been a nightmarish task for the Tommy Boy legal staff. (While numerous bootleg versions of the tracks have been pressed, Steinski says the original prize from Tommy Boy is the only money he's ever made from The Lessons.)
But those issues didn't discourage the now 55-year-old producer from making more musical mixes that blend genres and freely plunder from pop culture. Performing a deejay set Thursday at Smart Bar along with Zulu Nation founder and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, Steinski is continuing to embrace the hip-hop notion of re-purposing and re-defining music.
"I play anything I get a hold of that works for me," he said. "That's my definition of what hip-hop is."
During recent deejay gigs in the United States and Europe, Steinski, who has a day job in advertising, blends everything from Brazilian and soul music to hip-hop and obscure vocal samples with a popular computer program named Ableton Live. He's also recorded, but never released, numerous cut-and-paste-style bootlegs since The Lessons, including "The Motorcade Sped On," a 1986 track about the Kennedy assassination that adds a funky beat to Walter Cronkite's somber announcements, and "It's Up to You," a satiric mosaic of music and quotations by former president George H. W. Bush mixed during the Gulf War.
"For a long time, up to the beginning of 2006, I accepted the idea of what I was doing was illegal," said Steinski. "It was very much off the edge. And then I started reading stuff by Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar who invented the Creative Commons idea of copyright, and it really opened me up to the idea that certain things shouldn't be locked up the way they are, unavailable to artists. It's like this amazing digital technology is being completely crippled for the benefit of major corporations."
More than 20 years after The Lessons, digital technology has made similar musical re-combinations, sometimes called mash-ups, not just easier but commonplace. Acquiring, sampling and rearranging songs requires nothing more than an Internet-connected computer and some easy-to-use software--certainly not the studio expertise, time and crates of vinyl records that Double Dee & Steinski had to use in the '80s.
The popularity of these post-modern audio collages reflects Steinski's influence on current hip-hop artists. He appeared in the 2001 turntablism documentary "Scratch" and was asked to make a mix for the hip Stones Throw label. Both DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist performed with Steinski during a live re-enactment of The Lessons in San Francisco in 2000 and both made tracks called Lesson Four in honor of the original.
"At that time, I think The Lessons were the first of their kind," said Cut Chemist. "It was way more intricate than other mix records. And you could definitely tell they were coming from a more hip-hop angle. They were just utilizing all these obscure breaks. Steinski is the king of the dialogue record. He kind of flipped my wig when I played with him. He dropped this sample from a record about sewing that went, `I spend hours at my sampler.' In a million years, I couldn't find something that dope."
Digital technology has also kept alive, and in most cases inflamed, the legal issues that prevented The Lessons from ever receiving official release. Labels feel that unauthorized sampling of music violates copyright laws and allows the sampling artist to illegally profit from the original artist's work.
Artists feel that the absolute control over copyright and the hefty fees labels charge for sampling discourages artistic freedom and puts an unfair and often unrealistic price tag on material that should be in the public domain. It also discounts the amount of work that goes into making original, creative recordings.
And, more than 20 years after Steinski helped make The Lessons, an equitable solution that artists and labels agree upon still hasn't been discovered.
Gregg Gillis, who records for the Bloomington, Ill.-based Illegal Art label under the name Girl Talk, released "Night Ripper" last year, a critically acclaimed album meticulously constructed from hundreds of small, sometimes microscopic, samples of popular hip-hop, dance and indie rock songs that weren't cleared by the major labels.
Gillis has been a staple at nightclubs this year, but according to Illegal Art founder Philo T. Farnsworth, there's only so much profit Illegal Art can gain from the album before the music industry might begin to file lawsuits. He feels it's silly, since there's a market for this work and more flexible copyright laws could be enacted that would ensure everyone involved made a fair buck from the album.
"The Steinski stuff was a good example," said Farnsworth. "It was such a huge underground hit and if the industry could have made a way for it to have existed legally, they could have been profited from that material.
"They're shooting themselves in the foot by limiting certain types of expression."
- - -
Birth of a movement
Were it not for sampling pioneer Steve Stein (a.k.a. Steinski) and Afrika Bambaataa, the first rapper ever, so much might not exist--such as the work of:
RUN-DMC
Public Enemy
Biz Markie
Wu-Tang Clan
Beastie Boys
Chemical Brothers
Danger Mouse
Girl Talk
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
A Downsized Soprano Deborah Voigt
LA Times
OPERA
Still big where it counts
Soprano Deborah Voigt has downsized since a famous firing. Her voice? Plush. And she's got that job back.
By Irene Lacher
Special to The Times
January 10, 2007
BEFORE (2001)
AFTER (2006)
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New York -- In his office at London's Covent Garden, Peter Mario Katona keeps a thick file of hate mail. The Royal Opera's director of casting even framed one particularly unquotable letter and hung it on his wall.
His sin? Firing American soprano Deborah Voigt before she could sing her signature title role in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 2004.
Her sin? She was too fat to fit into Ariadne's little black dress.
"I think he looks at it with a little more humor than I do," Voigt says dryly, one gastric bypass and 140 pounds later.
The sacking of the leading dramatic soprano echoed around the world, parsed by People magazine and other news outlets not noted for following the vicissitudes of high culture. But in a happy ending better suited to Hollywood than the opera stage, where the heroine usually succumbs to some tragic fate, Katona has invited her back to perform in June 2008.
"So I'm going back to sing Ariadne in the production I was let go for," says Voigt, whom the Los Angeles Opera will present in concert with pianist Brian Zeger at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday night. "In that production. In that black dress. Won't that be a circus?" The following year, she'll return to Covent Garden to sing the role of Puccini's fetching chanteuse, Tosca. Then she will reward her fans by singing Brünnhilde in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle starting during the 2010-11 season.
Known for her wicked sense of humor as well as her command of the Strauss and Wagner repertoire, Voigt's blue eyes dance at the thought of a mushroom cloud of press surrounding her moment of triumph. She's too ladylike to express her glee at the turn of events, but, asked if she finds the prospect satisfying, she can't resist a silent response in a universal language — she flicks her chin with her fingertips and smiles.
Voigt, 46, has reason to relish Covent Garden's comeuppance. Only a month earlier, she realized a long-held ambition to sing the title role of Strauss' "Salome," one of the most brazen seductresses in opera, in a staged production. The suddenly slim diva took it all off — or at least appeared to — on the stage of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, stripping down to a body suit at the end of Salome's debauched dance of the seven veils.
The critics applauded, not merely for Voigt's success in accomplishing the physical transformation, but in surviving it. Since the surgery in June 2004, her performances have been scrutinized for evidence of vocal impairment, but critics are proclaiming her voice as potent as ever. In his review of "Salome," John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "most of her singing was gleaming and voluptuous, its power and warm, womanly vocal quality undiminished."
Voigt says she underwent the gastric bypass for health reasons, not career, although her artistic opportunities have clearly blossomed as a result.
Still, she realizes that the random stranger she encounters on a plane will likely know her as that opera singer who lost all that weight, not the interna-tionally acclaimed Ariadne she is.
She is asked how she feels about the fact that the world at large is more compelled by her weight than her art.
"Would I like to have the same sort of international recognition for being the best singer in the world?" she muses. "Yeah, that would be nice. But part of the reason that story took off is that it really resonated with people. We are weight obsessed.
"And also because I think people have preconceived notions about what opera is and what opera singers are and 'it ain't over till the fat lady sings,' so how can you fire the fat lady? I think that really shocked people. They thought this was the last area of high culture that wasn't going to be bastardized by people's visual concepts."
'She's not like anyone else'
Opera News will recognize Voigt's place in the classical music firmament on Jan. 28, when it presents her with a 2006 Opera News Award for distinguished achievement, an honor she will share with such luminaries as James Levine, the veteran music director of the Metropolitan Opera.
In the magazine's salute to Voigt in the current issue, Janet A. Choi writes that hearing the diva's Ariadne prompted her to experience the "kind of freefall [encountered] during the best moments in opera, when grounding disappears and one is weightless, fully absorbed into the art."
Opera News Editor F. Paul Driscoll says the magazine is equally impressed with Voigt's unique path to divadom and her willingness to redefine it. "We feel she has done a great job in defining what an opera star means to her. She's not like anyone else."
Often noted for her accessibility and frankness, she's a prima donna for the age of mass media, where narcissism doesn't play well up close. And if "easygoing diva" sounds like an oxymoron, it's not in her case. That's because Voigt puts a particularly American spin on being an international opera star.
"She is very much a contemporary American woman, and that has always been a bit of a dichotomy within opera, because opera is not, by its nature, an American art form," Driscoll says. "So the question of how American singers — men and women — exist within this art form, which is inaccessible in language and sometimes musically, is always a knotty problem. I think by staying true to themselves, they're able to take what they need from this art form and still have it come out in a way that's unique to them."
Finding her voice
Voigt, born Debbie Joy outside Chicago, stumbled into opera after her family moved to Placentia when she was 14. As a student at El Dorado High School, she developed a taste for the Carpenters and musical theater, singing the roles of Auntie Mame and Marian the librarian in school productions. When Voigt was looking for a voice teacher, she happened upon Pat Fichtner, an opera singer married to her high school choral conductor.
"That is really how it started," Voigt says. "I had no idea what opera was. Because I had been involved in theater, I liked the combination of drama and music and I also enjoyed the study of voice from a technical perspective. And that is still very interesting to me, how any variation of muscle movement in the body or jaw movement or head turning can and will adjust the sound of your voice. And so that's a kind of logical progression to opera if you're trying to refine your instrument as much as possible."
Voigt attended Chapman College and Cal State Fullerton but dropped out to enroll as an apprentice in San Francisco Opera's Merola Program. Her breakout performance came in 1991, when she made her debut singing Ariadne with the Boston Lyric Opera. The role prompted the New York Times' John Rockwell to proclaim her "one of the most important American singers to come along in years."
Voigt, a divorcée based in Florida, warmly greets a visitor during a recent pause from her busy schedule to spend the holidays in New York. Simply dressed in black slacks and top and a bottle-green velvet jacket, she's still beaming from her recent triumph as Salome, which earned her a lengthy standing ovation every night. Performing the role in a staged production had been a goal of hers since she first sang the final scene in concert eight years earlier.
"I remember thinking, 'I'm going to regret my whole life if I don't sing this onstage,' because I knew that I had the voice for it and I knew I had the acting chops for it, but there was no way that anyone was going to cast me, and rightfully so," she says. "It would not have been believable in this day and age and the way that we are beginning to see opera and the way that opera is being marketed."
Much earlier in her career, Voigt's characteristic candor elicited a publicist's dismay. He chastised her for being too open and counseled her to create some kind of mystique for herself.
"I didn't give that much attention," she recalls. "And then he said, 'What you really need is a good scandal.' And I laughed at the time and we joked about what the scandal would be. But looking back, I think that of anything that I gleaned from that experience and that relationship, that was probably the most accurate. Because that's what's going to get people's attention. They're going to want to know, how's the girl who got fired from Covent Garden with the little black dress doing? What's going to stick in their minds is that story."
OPERA
Still big where it counts
Soprano Deborah Voigt has downsized since a famous firing. Her voice? Plush. And she's got that job back.
By Irene Lacher
Special to The Times
January 10, 2007
BEFORE (2001)
AFTER (2006)
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New York -- In his office at London's Covent Garden, Peter Mario Katona keeps a thick file of hate mail. The Royal Opera's director of casting even framed one particularly unquotable letter and hung it on his wall.
His sin? Firing American soprano Deborah Voigt before she could sing her signature title role in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 2004.
Her sin? She was too fat to fit into Ariadne's little black dress.
"I think he looks at it with a little more humor than I do," Voigt says dryly, one gastric bypass and 140 pounds later.
The sacking of the leading dramatic soprano echoed around the world, parsed by People magazine and other news outlets not noted for following the vicissitudes of high culture. But in a happy ending better suited to Hollywood than the opera stage, where the heroine usually succumbs to some tragic fate, Katona has invited her back to perform in June 2008.
"So I'm going back to sing Ariadne in the production I was let go for," says Voigt, whom the Los Angeles Opera will present in concert with pianist Brian Zeger at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday night. "In that production. In that black dress. Won't that be a circus?" The following year, she'll return to Covent Garden to sing the role of Puccini's fetching chanteuse, Tosca. Then she will reward her fans by singing Brünnhilde in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle starting during the 2010-11 season.
Known for her wicked sense of humor as well as her command of the Strauss and Wagner repertoire, Voigt's blue eyes dance at the thought of a mushroom cloud of press surrounding her moment of triumph. She's too ladylike to express her glee at the turn of events, but, asked if she finds the prospect satisfying, she can't resist a silent response in a universal language — she flicks her chin with her fingertips and smiles.
Voigt, 46, has reason to relish Covent Garden's comeuppance. Only a month earlier, she realized a long-held ambition to sing the title role of Strauss' "Salome," one of the most brazen seductresses in opera, in a staged production. The suddenly slim diva took it all off — or at least appeared to — on the stage of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, stripping down to a body suit at the end of Salome's debauched dance of the seven veils.
The critics applauded, not merely for Voigt's success in accomplishing the physical transformation, but in surviving it. Since the surgery in June 2004, her performances have been scrutinized for evidence of vocal impairment, but critics are proclaiming her voice as potent as ever. In his review of "Salome," John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "most of her singing was gleaming and voluptuous, its power and warm, womanly vocal quality undiminished."
Voigt says she underwent the gastric bypass for health reasons, not career, although her artistic opportunities have clearly blossomed as a result.
Still, she realizes that the random stranger she encounters on a plane will likely know her as that opera singer who lost all that weight, not the interna-tionally acclaimed Ariadne she is.
She is asked how she feels about the fact that the world at large is more compelled by her weight than her art.
"Would I like to have the same sort of international recognition for being the best singer in the world?" she muses. "Yeah, that would be nice. But part of the reason that story took off is that it really resonated with people. We are weight obsessed.
"And also because I think people have preconceived notions about what opera is and what opera singers are and 'it ain't over till the fat lady sings,' so how can you fire the fat lady? I think that really shocked people. They thought this was the last area of high culture that wasn't going to be bastardized by people's visual concepts."
'She's not like anyone else'
Opera News will recognize Voigt's place in the classical music firmament on Jan. 28, when it presents her with a 2006 Opera News Award for distinguished achievement, an honor she will share with such luminaries as James Levine, the veteran music director of the Metropolitan Opera.
In the magazine's salute to Voigt in the current issue, Janet A. Choi writes that hearing the diva's Ariadne prompted her to experience the "kind of freefall [encountered] during the best moments in opera, when grounding disappears and one is weightless, fully absorbed into the art."
Opera News Editor F. Paul Driscoll says the magazine is equally impressed with Voigt's unique path to divadom and her willingness to redefine it. "We feel she has done a great job in defining what an opera star means to her. She's not like anyone else."
Often noted for her accessibility and frankness, she's a prima donna for the age of mass media, where narcissism doesn't play well up close. And if "easygoing diva" sounds like an oxymoron, it's not in her case. That's because Voigt puts a particularly American spin on being an international opera star.
"She is very much a contemporary American woman, and that has always been a bit of a dichotomy within opera, because opera is not, by its nature, an American art form," Driscoll says. "So the question of how American singers — men and women — exist within this art form, which is inaccessible in language and sometimes musically, is always a knotty problem. I think by staying true to themselves, they're able to take what they need from this art form and still have it come out in a way that's unique to them."
Finding her voice
Voigt, born Debbie Joy outside Chicago, stumbled into opera after her family moved to Placentia when she was 14. As a student at El Dorado High School, she developed a taste for the Carpenters and musical theater, singing the roles of Auntie Mame and Marian the librarian in school productions. When Voigt was looking for a voice teacher, she happened upon Pat Fichtner, an opera singer married to her high school choral conductor.
"That is really how it started," Voigt says. "I had no idea what opera was. Because I had been involved in theater, I liked the combination of drama and music and I also enjoyed the study of voice from a technical perspective. And that is still very interesting to me, how any variation of muscle movement in the body or jaw movement or head turning can and will adjust the sound of your voice. And so that's a kind of logical progression to opera if you're trying to refine your instrument as much as possible."
Voigt attended Chapman College and Cal State Fullerton but dropped out to enroll as an apprentice in San Francisco Opera's Merola Program. Her breakout performance came in 1991, when she made her debut singing Ariadne with the Boston Lyric Opera. The role prompted the New York Times' John Rockwell to proclaim her "one of the most important American singers to come along in years."
Voigt, a divorcée based in Florida, warmly greets a visitor during a recent pause from her busy schedule to spend the holidays in New York. Simply dressed in black slacks and top and a bottle-green velvet jacket, she's still beaming from her recent triumph as Salome, which earned her a lengthy standing ovation every night. Performing the role in a staged production had been a goal of hers since she first sang the final scene in concert eight years earlier.
"I remember thinking, 'I'm going to regret my whole life if I don't sing this onstage,' because I knew that I had the voice for it and I knew I had the acting chops for it, but there was no way that anyone was going to cast me, and rightfully so," she says. "It would not have been believable in this day and age and the way that we are beginning to see opera and the way that opera is being marketed."
Much earlier in her career, Voigt's characteristic candor elicited a publicist's dismay. He chastised her for being too open and counseled her to create some kind of mystique for herself.
"I didn't give that much attention," she recalls. "And then he said, 'What you really need is a good scandal.' And I laughed at the time and we joked about what the scandal would be. But looking back, I think that of anything that I gleaned from that experience and that relationship, that was probably the most accurate. Because that's what's going to get people's attention. They're going to want to know, how's the girl who got fired from Covent Garden with the little black dress doing? What's going to stick in their minds is that story."
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Open Mic Opera
from the January 05, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0105/p20s01-almp.html
Backstory: A night at the open mic opera
A circuit of San Diego bars, cafes, and restaurants hosts amateurs and professionals as they belt out strains of 'O Sole Mio.'
By Eilene Zimmerman | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
SAN DIEGO
At the front of a small lounge in The Westgate hotel, a man named Martin - badly in need of a shave - is singing a sad song in Spanish. Or Italian. I'm not sure. It's open mic opera night, and the place is packed. Martin finishes and the crowd erupts in applause, punctuated by shouts of " Autre! Autre!" But I'm sandwiched between people who glance furtively behind me, toward the entrance. Something important is about to happen. I feel as if I'm in a secret club, only I don't know the secret. That is, until tenor Daniel Hendrick strides into the room, his long blond coif bouncing.
"It's "DanIEL!" It's "DanIEL!" people whisper excitedly, leaning Frenchly on the second syllable. Grown women - and I mean senior citizens - are squealing in anticipation.
As he approaches the microphone, my friend and opera guide Claudette Rortvedt whispers to me with a knowing wink: "Watch! The chandeliers will vibrate."
Mr. Hendrick steps back from the microphone. "You know me," he says, laughing, "I don't need a microphone." It's no joke. This very large man, who performs with professional opera companies, might as well be Pavarotti as far as I'm concerned. All eyes are glued to him as he holds one insanely high note after another. It is some of the most powerful music I've ever heard. The song's last note is long and high and Hendrick does it justice, closing his eyes and spreading his arms wide for the finish.
***
Open mic opera? In southern California - land of blond surfers and fish tacos? Yes, The Westgate is just part of a circuit of San Diego bars, cafes, and restaurants where amateur, semiprofessional, and professional singers perform.
The phenomenon isn't new, but it's becoming more common. For the past two to three decades there have been restaurants with nights given over to singers performing opera scenes or customers wanting to get up and belt out a few arias, says Duff Murphy, host of The Opera Show on Los Angeles's radio station KUSC.
"Things like opera education programs in schools and smaller opera companies in the US have made the music more popular now," says Mr. Murphy.
Open mic opera isn't just popular with the over-50 crowd either; at The Westgate there are plenty of attractive 20- and 30-somethings. "There is an element of cool - especially among more intellectually charged musicians - in attending opera performances," observes Murphy.
The growing popularity of open mic opera isn't surprising, says Robert Hansen, executive director of the National Opera Association, because opera programs at colleges and universities are "bursting at the seams."
"There is a huge population out there now of singers who want some sort of opportunity to sing, whether they make a living doing it, [or do it] for pocket money or just for the love of singing," he says.
***
The audience and atmosphere at The Westgate, and at other opera hangouts to which Ms. Rortvedt - a French native - guided me, is decidedly European and South and Central American, with just a spattering of people like me, a minivan-driving American mom. These are the kinds of people who greet one another by kissing both cheeks. The large majority of the crowd are regulars.
Joe Cruz, a retired producer and director who moved here from L.A. a year ago, started coming to see the opera singers almost as soon as he unpacked. "A lot of us - an inside group - get together at dinner parties and someone always breaks into song. You can't stop these people from singing," Mr. Cruz says.
He sits next to a grouchy older man who keeps asking people to stop talking: "We came to hear them, not you!" Cruz whispers, "He's a regular."
Chantal Roché, a French compatriot of Rortvedt's, enters the room. She makes her living as a singer - everything from opera to Sinatra - performing at private engagements and, on off nights, at places like The Westgate. I introduce myself and Ms. Roché takes my hand as if she knows me, confiding: "People tell me all the time, I sound like Edith Piaf.... I don't know if it's helping my career, because I can sing in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. I usually do the popular Italian arias."
When Roché sings, her vibrato commands attention. She came to the US "a long time ago" when she was a mom raising kids. But in her 40s she decided to pursue a lifelong dream. She sold her skincare business, had some headshots taken, recorded a CD, and transformed herself into a singer.
***
Cafe Bassam is one of the only places in San Diego where people still smoke cigars indoors and opera has been on the menu for a decade. Rortvedt says the place reminds her of Europe.
"In France and Italy, especially, there are cafes all over where you can go in and hear singing, hear opera.... I come here, and I feel like I'm home," she says.
Young people passing by, peek in, hear the booming voice of Luigi Luevano, and decide to stay for coffee.
Mr. Luevano has an impressive vocal range, although he has never had a lesson.
More than just an opera singer, Luevano is an entertainer, and people come as much for his singing as his comedy. Though he is the main attraction at Bassam's, anyone can stand up and sing, and a woman from the San Diego Lyric Opera steps up to join him. "This is my ex-wife," he says. She rolls her eyes. Then he walks toward a young woman sitting alone and extends his hand. "And this is my next wife." She blushes as he sings to her in Italian.
A pretty young woman in a long gold skirt sings next. By day she's an artist, at night, a singer who has trouble hitting the high notes and tends to go flat. But the crowd is generous.
Then Jef Olson, a tall, slim singer who resembles a young Art Garfunkel, takes the microphone and fills the small room with his haunting, melancholy voice.
When it's Luevano's turn again he signals to his accompanist that he wants "Solamente Una Vez" ("Only One Time"). "Solamente" ends, and he starts up with an Italian song that translates to "Tell Her I Love Her," making a show of loosening his tie - black with white polka dots - before hitting the high note.
Luevano also sings on Friday nights at La Dolce Vita, a small Italian restaurant in the chic suburb of La Jolla. The night I'm there, Olson and Roché are also singing. At one point the owner, Enzo Castiglione, begins playing the bongo drums. Olson, Roché, and Luevano decide to sing "O Sole Mio" as the finale. Their voices fill the room; everyone stops chewing, jaws hang open.
"That's what's so fun about open mic opera," says radio host Murphy. "Darned if you don't find some of those singers, who may not have the most beautiful voices, somehow convey the sentiment the composer was looking for better than anyone else. They aren't trying to win a contest or contract," he says. "They just want to make music."
Backstory: A night at the open mic opera
A circuit of San Diego bars, cafes, and restaurants hosts amateurs and professionals as they belt out strains of 'O Sole Mio.'
By Eilene Zimmerman | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
SAN DIEGO
At the front of a small lounge in The Westgate hotel, a man named Martin - badly in need of a shave - is singing a sad song in Spanish. Or Italian. I'm not sure. It's open mic opera night, and the place is packed. Martin finishes and the crowd erupts in applause, punctuated by shouts of " Autre! Autre!" But I'm sandwiched between people who glance furtively behind me, toward the entrance. Something important is about to happen. I feel as if I'm in a secret club, only I don't know the secret. That is, until tenor Daniel Hendrick strides into the room, his long blond coif bouncing.
"It's "DanIEL!" It's "DanIEL!" people whisper excitedly, leaning Frenchly on the second syllable. Grown women - and I mean senior citizens - are squealing in anticipation.
As he approaches the microphone, my friend and opera guide Claudette Rortvedt whispers to me with a knowing wink: "Watch! The chandeliers will vibrate."
Mr. Hendrick steps back from the microphone. "You know me," he says, laughing, "I don't need a microphone." It's no joke. This very large man, who performs with professional opera companies, might as well be Pavarotti as far as I'm concerned. All eyes are glued to him as he holds one insanely high note after another. It is some of the most powerful music I've ever heard. The song's last note is long and high and Hendrick does it justice, closing his eyes and spreading his arms wide for the finish.
***
Open mic opera? In southern California - land of blond surfers and fish tacos? Yes, The Westgate is just part of a circuit of San Diego bars, cafes, and restaurants where amateur, semiprofessional, and professional singers perform.
The phenomenon isn't new, but it's becoming more common. For the past two to three decades there have been restaurants with nights given over to singers performing opera scenes or customers wanting to get up and belt out a few arias, says Duff Murphy, host of The Opera Show on Los Angeles's radio station KUSC.
"Things like opera education programs in schools and smaller opera companies in the US have made the music more popular now," says Mr. Murphy.
Open mic opera isn't just popular with the over-50 crowd either; at The Westgate there are plenty of attractive 20- and 30-somethings. "There is an element of cool - especially among more intellectually charged musicians - in attending opera performances," observes Murphy.
The growing popularity of open mic opera isn't surprising, says Robert Hansen, executive director of the National Opera Association, because opera programs at colleges and universities are "bursting at the seams."
"There is a huge population out there now of singers who want some sort of opportunity to sing, whether they make a living doing it, [or do it] for pocket money or just for the love of singing," he says.
***
The audience and atmosphere at The Westgate, and at other opera hangouts to which Ms. Rortvedt - a French native - guided me, is decidedly European and South and Central American, with just a spattering of people like me, a minivan-driving American mom. These are the kinds of people who greet one another by kissing both cheeks. The large majority of the crowd are regulars.
Joe Cruz, a retired producer and director who moved here from L.A. a year ago, started coming to see the opera singers almost as soon as he unpacked. "A lot of us - an inside group - get together at dinner parties and someone always breaks into song. You can't stop these people from singing," Mr. Cruz says.
He sits next to a grouchy older man who keeps asking people to stop talking: "We came to hear them, not you!" Cruz whispers, "He's a regular."
Chantal Roché, a French compatriot of Rortvedt's, enters the room. She makes her living as a singer - everything from opera to Sinatra - performing at private engagements and, on off nights, at places like The Westgate. I introduce myself and Ms. Roché takes my hand as if she knows me, confiding: "People tell me all the time, I sound like Edith Piaf.... I don't know if it's helping my career, because I can sing in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. I usually do the popular Italian arias."
When Roché sings, her vibrato commands attention. She came to the US "a long time ago" when she was a mom raising kids. But in her 40s she decided to pursue a lifelong dream. She sold her skincare business, had some headshots taken, recorded a CD, and transformed herself into a singer.
***
Cafe Bassam is one of the only places in San Diego where people still smoke cigars indoors and opera has been on the menu for a decade. Rortvedt says the place reminds her of Europe.
"In France and Italy, especially, there are cafes all over where you can go in and hear singing, hear opera.... I come here, and I feel like I'm home," she says.
Young people passing by, peek in, hear the booming voice of Luigi Luevano, and decide to stay for coffee.
Mr. Luevano has an impressive vocal range, although he has never had a lesson.
More than just an opera singer, Luevano is an entertainer, and people come as much for his singing as his comedy. Though he is the main attraction at Bassam's, anyone can stand up and sing, and a woman from the San Diego Lyric Opera steps up to join him. "This is my ex-wife," he says. She rolls her eyes. Then he walks toward a young woman sitting alone and extends his hand. "And this is my next wife." She blushes as he sings to her in Italian.
A pretty young woman in a long gold skirt sings next. By day she's an artist, at night, a singer who has trouble hitting the high notes and tends to go flat. But the crowd is generous.
Then Jef Olson, a tall, slim singer who resembles a young Art Garfunkel, takes the microphone and fills the small room with his haunting, melancholy voice.
When it's Luevano's turn again he signals to his accompanist that he wants "Solamente Una Vez" ("Only One Time"). "Solamente" ends, and he starts up with an Italian song that translates to "Tell Her I Love Her," making a show of loosening his tie - black with white polka dots - before hitting the high note.
Luevano also sings on Friday nights at La Dolce Vita, a small Italian restaurant in the chic suburb of La Jolla. The night I'm there, Olson and Roché are also singing. At one point the owner, Enzo Castiglione, begins playing the bongo drums. Olson, Roché, and Luevano decide to sing "O Sole Mio" as the finale. Their voices fill the room; everyone stops chewing, jaws hang open.
"That's what's so fun about open mic opera," says radio host Murphy. "Darned if you don't find some of those singers, who may not have the most beautiful voices, somehow convey the sentiment the composer was looking for better than anyone else. They aren't trying to win a contest or contract," he says. "They just want to make music."
Jimmy Buffet at 60
SLATE
music box
A Pirate Looks at 60
Jimmy Buffett's midlife crises.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007, at 4:41 PM ET
Jimmy Buffett turned 60 this past Dec. 25, a day he undoubtedly spent in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind, in close proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with birthday number 50, which, as recounted in his autobiography A Pirate Looks At Fifty (1998), Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia and drinking copiously, while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals going forward: "Learn celestial navigation," "Swim with dolphins," "Start therapy." Anyone who has heard a Jimmy Buffett record will know that therapy is totally unnecessary. Buffett has been writing and singing confessional songs for three decades, but he's never shown the slightest sign of discontentment—shrugging away the world's sadness, and his own indulgences, with an amused "I know it's all my fault" while oozing over to the bar for another round.
And who can blame him? Buffett is one of the music business' singular success stories. He has parlayed an unlikely subject—getting shitfaced while cruising the Gulf Coast in your power boat, basically—into a multimillion-dollar industry, a perennial place on Forbes' list of highest-grossing entertainers, and the most passionate concert audience this side of the Deadheads. (He also has written a couple of New York Times best sellers, operates a chain of seaside bars, and has his own seaplane airport, Lone Palm. Take that, Mick Jagger.) Buffett has done all this without altering his music one iota—indeed, without any evident effort at all. He's a bard of hedonism, the sunbaked, can't-be-bothered-to-stir-from-this-beach-chair variety. His songs are nudged along by lazy rhythms and gentle country-rock acoustic strumming, and accented by the rounded ping of steel drums—the universal sonic signifier of Caribbean languor. He takes the stage of sold-out arenas and baseball stadiums in the same T-shirt and baggy beach shorts that he wears aboard ship, and can't even bring himself to put on a pair of shoes. Does he even own shoes?
I learned about the Buffett dress code the hard way, when I turned up wearing street clothes at a Madison Square Garden concert on a chilly evening last September. I had heard tales of Buffett's rabid fans, the Parrotheads, and was prepared for an onslaught of Hawaiian shirts. But that was just the beginning of the Club Med-wear. I came up the subway stairs to find a phalanx of men in their 40s striding down Seventh Avenue in plastic leis and grass skirts. Headgear ranged from Carmen Miranda-style fruit baskets to baseball caps topped with foam shark fins. Waiting in line at the Garden turnstiles, I stood next to a fellow with a papier-mâché outboard motor belted around his waist.
Buffett sells a lot of records—his latest album, Take the Weather With You, topped the country charts when it was released last October. But it's touring that has made his fortune, and to really understand Buffett, you have to spend a couple of hours in a room with 15,000 people singing along with every lyric while batting giant inflatable sharks overhead. "Parrotheads are known, to, um … begin their preparations early," Buffett said to cheers shortly after taking the stage, and indeed, much of the audience was unmistakably blotto well before the first steel drum sounded. Buffett sang a stately new song, "Here We Are," which marvels at the enduring, well-soused fellowship of Parrotheads: "Who would have thought this game, this flame would still be burning?/ Who would have guessed that all these blenders would still be churning? ... Here we are, with our fins up and our feathers flashing/ Here we are, with our coconut shell brassieres, chanting." Video screens flanking the stage played footage of the Parrotheads' famous parking lot antics. It looked like a giant frat party—a Girls Gone Wild video, with the part of the 19-year-old co-eds played by paunchy middle-aged men—but for Buffett, Parrotheads are heroic nonconformists, and their bacchanals have vague spiritual overtones. In "Here We Are" he sings: "Here we are, all the black sheep family outcast and a freak or two. … We're the offbeat Uncle Freds who spill their wine on you. … We're the dreamy Deadheads who just like us and Dave Matthews."
Parrotheads are as devoted as Deadheads and Dave Matthews fans—doubtless many in attendance at the Garden had followed Buffett up the coast in their minivans. But musically, Buffett has nothing in common with jam bands. He fronts a slick 12-piece group, the Coral Reefers, and they breeze through the same songs, in the same way, note for note, night upon night, year after year. Buffett has a knack for ingratiating singalong melodies and sharply detailed lyrics, and he's ruthlessly single-minded. Few pop stars have carved out so distinct a theme and stuck to it unwaveringly for so long, with such fearless zeal for bad puns: "Last Mango in Paris," "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes," "Off To See the Lizard," "Floridays," "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful," "Jamaica Mistaica," "License To Chill."
Buffett is not the first American pop singer to sell tropical fantasies. The tradition stretches from Tin Pan Alley's Hawaiian ballads of the 1910s, to Bing Crosby's and Elvis Presley's revivals of the theme, to '50s-'60s exotica and Don Ho, on down through Buffett to country beach bum Kenny Chesney. But where the other performers have mystified the islands, Buffett is unsentimental and journalistic. In admirable detail, his songs depict tourist traps, where the locals exist only to pour your drinks and cheeseburgers in paradise are on the menu. Buffett is unambivalent about this ugly Americanism—he's all for it. Buffett's music is often hideously tacky, objectionable on both moral and aesthetic grounds, but you have to give him credit for capturing a milieu and a mindset. He'll never get the respect given to his generation's more celebrated troubadours, but he may prove more valuable to future social historians as a chronicler of late-20th-century American folkways. Go to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for poetry and pretty tunes, but if you want to know how baby boomers ate, drank, and screwed on vacation, reach for Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads.
By all accounts, Buffett lives the life he sings about. For his fans, most of whom aren't multimillionaires with large pleasure craft, the experience is vicarious: The closest many will come to a Caribbean lagoon is a kiddie pool in the parking lot of a Jimmy Buffett concert. Yet Buffett's songs are not so much about an escape to a place as a flight from time. His true theme is the Me Generation midlife crisis. Buffett's tunes are sunny and easygoing, but they have a desperate undercurrent: the hopeless hope that the party need never end, that you can, as one song put it, "grow older but not up," remaining reckless and responsibility-free deep into adulthood.
Two decades ago, in "Pirate Looks at Forty," Buffett cast his plight in mock-historical terms: "Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late/ The cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder/ I'm an over-40 victim of fate." More recently, in the Parrothead anthem "Here We Are," Buffett put it in starker terms. "It's the child in us we really value," Buffett sings. That message has proven to be very good for business, and there's no reason to doubt Buffett's sincerity. Somewhere right now—probably a very warm, palmy place—the pirate is looking at 60 in the same way that he will look at 70, and, if his liver holds up, 80. Through a boozy haze, with the blue ocean gleaming on the horizon just over the rim of a shot glass, it looks awful lot like 18.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2156928/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The History of Skin
NYTimes
January 9, 2007
A Conversation With Nina G. Jablonski
Always Revealing, Human Skin Is an Anthropologist’s Map
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
In an era of academic hyper-specialization, Dr. Nina G. Jablonski has an amazingly broad résumé. At 53, she heads the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University. She’s also a primatologist, an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist.
Last year, Dr. Jablonski led an expedition to China, where she dug for human fossils in an attempt to learn how early man coped with climate change. This month, she’s in Kenya, where she and Meave Leakey are putting together a study on prehistoric monkeys.
For more than a decade, Dr. Jablonski has been trying to get her arms around a ubiquitous and yet mysterious topic: the biology, evolution and social function of human skin. The results of her studies have been published by the University of California Press as “Skin: A Natural History.”
“Skin has been studied to absolute death by dermatologists,” Dr. Jablonski said jokingly during a recent visit to New York City. “They know it inside and out from the point of view of diseases that afflict it. What we wanted to learn was how human skin came to be as it is and what that meant for humanity.”
Q. What set you off on writing a natural history of human skin?
A. I had an insight in 1981, when I was teaching gross anatomy to medical students at the University of Hong Kong. The students had been presented with a cadaver to dissect, and they were tremendously frightened of it. However, their attitude changed the very moment they cut through the skin. With the skin gone, they began seeing it as a mere body devoid of a personal history, and they could get on with their work.
That moment showed me how much of what we consider our humanity is imbued in our skin. It stayed with me for a long time. Then about 15 years ago, I joined a project studying the natural history of skin color. The topic was so engrossing that I began looking into the larger question of what our skin does and is.
Q. And what have you found?
A. That skin is the most underappreciated of our organs. Unless we’re having the sort of problem that brings us to a dermatologist, we take our skin for granted. We never think of it as working very hard for our body or doing valuable things for us socially.
But when you really start thinking about it, it’s a factory that produces vitamin D, sweat, hormones, oils, wax, pigments — substances we need. Skin is a raincoat in that it protects us from water, bugs and noxious chemicals. It’s also a billboard which we adorn with powder, tattoos, piercing and scars to give off instant messages about our history, health, values and availability for mating.
On an evolutionary level, there are three remarkable facts about skin. It comes in colors, of course. Compared to other mammals, our skin is relatively hairless. And it’s sweaty. In the last few million years, humans became the sweatiest of mammals.
Q. Is that important?
A. Absolutely. It’s often said that our large brains are what made it possible for us to evolve from ape to human. But those big brains could never have developed if we didn’t have exceptionally sweaty skin.
It happened this way. There was a tremendous takeoff in human evolution about two million years ago when primates who could no longer be called apes appeared in the savannahs of East Africa. These early humans ran long distances in open areas. In order to survive in the equatorial sun, they needed to cool their brains. Early humans evolved an increased number of sweat glands for that purpose, which in turn permitted their brain size to expand. As soon as we developed larger brains, our planning capacity increased, and this allowed people to disperse out of Africa. There’s fossil evidence of humans appearing in Central Asia around this time.
Q. In a nutshell, what has your research shown about why humans have varying skin colors?
A. That it’s not about race — it’s about sun and about how close our ancestors lived to the Equator. Skin color is what regulates our body’s reaction to the sun and its rays. Dark skin evolved to protect the body from excessive sun rays. Light skin evolved when people migrated away from the Equator and needed to make vitamin D in their skin. To do that, they had to lose pigment. Repeatedly over history, many people moved dark to light and light to dark. That shows that color is not a permanent trait.
Q. Did early humans decorate their skin?
A. We don’t know. There’s no human skin in the fossil record. The oldest preserved skin we have is that of Ötzi, the Neolithic iceman whose mummified body was found in the Alps in 1991. Ötzi lived about 5,000 years ago. Interestingly, he has tattoos. But we can only guess what they mean.
Modern humans, we love to alter our skin. You’ll find very few people walking around today with unadorned skin. They might make permanent changes — piercing, scarring, tattooing — to memorialize events and announce their identity. Or they might use cosmetics for temporary alterations to announce their attractiveness, mood or sexual availability. The bottom line: humans are the self-decorating ape.
Q. I get the feeling that you think cosmetic use is some kind of ancient evolutionary behavior. Are we reading you correctly?
A. Evolution is all about attracting a mate and getting a chance to reproduce, so yes, makeup helps with that. When a woman uses eyeliner to make her eyes appear larger, she’s giving off a message: “I want you to see me as attractive.” Large eyes in a woman are almost universally seen as appealing. This is not just a girl thing. Male body paint in East Africa emphasizes forbidding facial expressions. They announce a man’s prowess as a warrior and as a mate.
Q. How do you feel about your own skin?
A. I like it. It is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I’m a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the desert sun too long. I enjoy watching my skin change because it’s one of the few parts of my body that I can watch. We can’t view our livers or heart, but this we can. And yes, I use cosmetics. Like other humans, I have a penchant for changing my appearance easily and quickly. It also helps me feel more confident. That may seem silly, but I still do it.
Q. You made news in 2004 when you discovered the world’s oldest chimpanzee fossil. These were chimp teeth about a half-million years old. Where did you find them?
A. In a drawer at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. I was rummaging through this bag labeled “fossil monkeys” and I saw it. “This doesn’t look like monkey,” I thought. It turned out they were from an early chimp. That find proved important because there had been no chimpanzee this old in the fossil record. By analyzing it, we’ve learned that chimpanzees in their current form have probably existed for longer than previously thought. (Laughs) Since my find, people have been rummaging through dusty museum drawers everywhere!
January 9, 2007
A Conversation With Nina G. Jablonski
Always Revealing, Human Skin Is an Anthropologist’s Map
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
In an era of academic hyper-specialization, Dr. Nina G. Jablonski has an amazingly broad résumé. At 53, she heads the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University. She’s also a primatologist, an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist.
Last year, Dr. Jablonski led an expedition to China, where she dug for human fossils in an attempt to learn how early man coped with climate change. This month, she’s in Kenya, where she and Meave Leakey are putting together a study on prehistoric monkeys.
For more than a decade, Dr. Jablonski has been trying to get her arms around a ubiquitous and yet mysterious topic: the biology, evolution and social function of human skin. The results of her studies have been published by the University of California Press as “Skin: A Natural History.”
“Skin has been studied to absolute death by dermatologists,” Dr. Jablonski said jokingly during a recent visit to New York City. “They know it inside and out from the point of view of diseases that afflict it. What we wanted to learn was how human skin came to be as it is and what that meant for humanity.”
Q. What set you off on writing a natural history of human skin?
A. I had an insight in 1981, when I was teaching gross anatomy to medical students at the University of Hong Kong. The students had been presented with a cadaver to dissect, and they were tremendously frightened of it. However, their attitude changed the very moment they cut through the skin. With the skin gone, they began seeing it as a mere body devoid of a personal history, and they could get on with their work.
That moment showed me how much of what we consider our humanity is imbued in our skin. It stayed with me for a long time. Then about 15 years ago, I joined a project studying the natural history of skin color. The topic was so engrossing that I began looking into the larger question of what our skin does and is.
Q. And what have you found?
A. That skin is the most underappreciated of our organs. Unless we’re having the sort of problem that brings us to a dermatologist, we take our skin for granted. We never think of it as working very hard for our body or doing valuable things for us socially.
But when you really start thinking about it, it’s a factory that produces vitamin D, sweat, hormones, oils, wax, pigments — substances we need. Skin is a raincoat in that it protects us from water, bugs and noxious chemicals. It’s also a billboard which we adorn with powder, tattoos, piercing and scars to give off instant messages about our history, health, values and availability for mating.
On an evolutionary level, there are three remarkable facts about skin. It comes in colors, of course. Compared to other mammals, our skin is relatively hairless. And it’s sweaty. In the last few million years, humans became the sweatiest of mammals.
Q. Is that important?
A. Absolutely. It’s often said that our large brains are what made it possible for us to evolve from ape to human. But those big brains could never have developed if we didn’t have exceptionally sweaty skin.
It happened this way. There was a tremendous takeoff in human evolution about two million years ago when primates who could no longer be called apes appeared in the savannahs of East Africa. These early humans ran long distances in open areas. In order to survive in the equatorial sun, they needed to cool their brains. Early humans evolved an increased number of sweat glands for that purpose, which in turn permitted their brain size to expand. As soon as we developed larger brains, our planning capacity increased, and this allowed people to disperse out of Africa. There’s fossil evidence of humans appearing in Central Asia around this time.
Q. In a nutshell, what has your research shown about why humans have varying skin colors?
A. That it’s not about race — it’s about sun and about how close our ancestors lived to the Equator. Skin color is what regulates our body’s reaction to the sun and its rays. Dark skin evolved to protect the body from excessive sun rays. Light skin evolved when people migrated away from the Equator and needed to make vitamin D in their skin. To do that, they had to lose pigment. Repeatedly over history, many people moved dark to light and light to dark. That shows that color is not a permanent trait.
Q. Did early humans decorate their skin?
A. We don’t know. There’s no human skin in the fossil record. The oldest preserved skin we have is that of Ötzi, the Neolithic iceman whose mummified body was found in the Alps in 1991. Ötzi lived about 5,000 years ago. Interestingly, he has tattoos. But we can only guess what they mean.
Modern humans, we love to alter our skin. You’ll find very few people walking around today with unadorned skin. They might make permanent changes — piercing, scarring, tattooing — to memorialize events and announce their identity. Or they might use cosmetics for temporary alterations to announce their attractiveness, mood or sexual availability. The bottom line: humans are the self-decorating ape.
Q. I get the feeling that you think cosmetic use is some kind of ancient evolutionary behavior. Are we reading you correctly?
A. Evolution is all about attracting a mate and getting a chance to reproduce, so yes, makeup helps with that. When a woman uses eyeliner to make her eyes appear larger, she’s giving off a message: “I want you to see me as attractive.” Large eyes in a woman are almost universally seen as appealing. This is not just a girl thing. Male body paint in East Africa emphasizes forbidding facial expressions. They announce a man’s prowess as a warrior and as a mate.
Q. How do you feel about your own skin?
A. I like it. It is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I’m a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the desert sun too long. I enjoy watching my skin change because it’s one of the few parts of my body that I can watch. We can’t view our livers or heart, but this we can. And yes, I use cosmetics. Like other humans, I have a penchant for changing my appearance easily and quickly. It also helps me feel more confident. That may seem silly, but I still do it.
Q. You made news in 2004 when you discovered the world’s oldest chimpanzee fossil. These were chimp teeth about a half-million years old. Where did you find them?
A. In a drawer at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. I was rummaging through this bag labeled “fossil monkeys” and I saw it. “This doesn’t look like monkey,” I thought. It turned out they were from an early chimp. That find proved important because there had been no chimpanzee this old in the fossil record. By analyzing it, we’ve learned that chimpanzees in their current form have probably existed for longer than previously thought. (Laughs) Since my find, people have been rummaging through dusty museum drawers everywhere!
Monday, January 08, 2007
Yes! Elvis and Nixon Revisited
Elvis-Nixon meeting has fans shook up
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press WriterMon Jan 8, 8:56 AM ET
The meeting between two of the most improbable cultural icons of the 1970s lasted all of 30 minutes, but it has fascinated the nation for years.
A photo of a cloaked and bejeweled Elvis Presley solemnly shaking hands with a grim-faced President Nixon remains the No. 1 requested document from the National Archives, nearly four decades after the secret meeting took place on Dec. 21, 1970.
Now, on what would be the King's 72nd birthday, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace is giving the curious public a good, long look at the relics of the coming together of The King and The President — and it's got Elvis fans all shook up.
The free exhibit Monday includes the outfit Elvis wore (a black velvet overcoat, a gold-plated belt and black leather boots); Nixon's outfit (a gray woolen suit, tie and size 11 1/2 black shoes); letters; and a World War II .45-caliber Colt revolver that Elvis gave to Nixon.
"The two of them together somehow is almost incomprehensible," said Bud Krogh, Nixon's former deputy counsel who set up the impromptu meeting that day 36 years ago. "The king of rock and the president of the United States shaking hands in the Oval Office doesn't compute for a lot of people."
The chain of events that led to the meeting began when a stretch limousine carrying Elvis pulled up outside the White House. One of his guards handed over a letter from Elvis addressed to Nixon requesting a meeting to discuss how the rock star could help Nixon fight drugs — including getting credentials as a "federal agent at large."
"I will be here as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal Agent," Elvis wrote. "I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good."
The Secret Service agents alerted Krogh. A self-confessed Elvis fan, Krogh met with Elvis, decided he was sincere and scrambled to get him into a noon meeting with Nixon.
About 2 1/2 hours later, Elvis walked into the Oval Office wearing his flamboyant outfit, as well as sunglasses and two huge medallions. But when Elvis entered the Oval Office, Krogh recalls, he froze.
"I think he was just awed by where he found himself. I ended up having to help him walk across over to the president's desk," he said.
Elvis and Nixon talked for about 30 minutes, during which Elvis showed Nixon pictures of his daughter and a pair of cufflinks given to him by Spiro Agnew. He also showed Nixon police badges from around the country and asked again for a badge from the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Nixon agreed to give him the badge — but only after learning that the chief of the narcotics bureau had turned down the same request earlier that day and told him the only person who could overrule his decision was the president.
"Oh man, we were set up! But it was fun," said Krogh. "He said all the right words about trying to do the right thing and I took him at his word, but I think he clearly wanted to get a badge and he knew the only way he was going to get it."
At Elvis' request, the meeting remained secret for more than a year — until The Washington Post broke the story on Jan. 27, 1972.
Since then, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace has more than made up for Elvis' ruse: T-shirts, cups, notepads and watches bearing the famous black-and-white photo remain the top-selling items at the museum's gift shop.
"We've known for years that that photograph is an icon image," said Sandy Quinn, the museum's assistant director. "It is The President and The King."
_____
On the Net: http://www.nixonlibrary.org
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