A great story from producer Hal Davis that mostly comes from the biography Diana. Best part:
"No one really liked disco here at Motown," producer Hal Davis said in J. Randy Taraborrelli's biography, Diana. "The company wasn't heavily into it, so I figured I'd take advantage of that. When I did the track for 'Love Hangover,' I knew it was a hot track. But when I played it for Diana, well, she wasn't too sure about it. She was used to singing more lush songs by producers like Michael Masser and the public sort of identified her with arrangements like "Touch Me In The Morning." She liked the lyric to 'Love Hangover,' but people thought I was a little off for even suggesting that Diana do this song."
Davis went on to describe the evening that Diana recorded the Pam Sawyer-Marilyn McLeod song. "It was a late session; we started at about nine o'clock at night. I had it all planned out because I know how Diana is about atmosphere in the studio.
So I told them to have some hot red lights put around and also a strobe light. Diana came in, took her shoes off, and got into it sort of slow. The song had two tempos, starting off kind of sultry, which was easy for her. But when we got to the disco part, I remember her laughing and saying, 'I can not do that!'
"So at that point, I had them turn the lights on and we had the place jumpin' like a disco. That's all she needed; she just took off after that. It turned out to be a lot of fun for her and she even improvised a little Billie Holiday in there that I didn't expect. There's even a part in there where she's laughing on the track. I didn't edit it because I wanted to keep that sense of spontaneity."
Diana is quoted by Taraborrelli on the session: "It was a spontaneous thing that we captured on record and if I had to go back in and do it again, I couldn't have. The music was me and I was the music. Things came out of my mouth that I didn't even expect."
From superseventies.
Showing posts with label disco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disco. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Wendy's pulls free CD over Donna Summer lyrics
Racy lyrics lead Wendy's to pull CD from kid meals
June 12, 2010
updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago
ATLANTA — The fast food-chain Wendy's has pulled a disco CD included in kids' meals because of racy lyrics in one of the songs.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of the songs on the Disco Fever CD was Donna Summer's "Last Dance." The song has two sets of lyrics. One version includes the words "so bad." But some heard the alternative lyrics "so horny" on the CD, which had been marked as safe for 3 years old and up.
The Atlanta-based chain announced on its website Saturday that it would continue to put three other CDs in the kids' meals. Those CDs include the songs "ABC" by Jackson 5 and "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang. The website said Wendy's is "no longer offering" the Disco Fever CD but doesn't mention the reason.
A reader sent this related video suggestion from Newsy.com [thanks!]:
pp
June 12, 2010
updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago
ATLANTA — The fast food-chain Wendy's has pulled a disco CD included in kids' meals because of racy lyrics in one of the songs.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of the songs on the Disco Fever CD was Donna Summer's "Last Dance." The song has two sets of lyrics. One version includes the words "so bad." But some heard the alternative lyrics "so horny" on the CD, which had been marked as safe for 3 years old and up.
The Atlanta-based chain announced on its website Saturday that it would continue to put three other CDs in the kids' meals. Those CDs include the songs "ABC" by Jackson 5 and "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang. The website said Wendy's is "no longer offering" the Disco Fever CD but doesn't mention the reason.
A reader sent this related video suggestion from Newsy.com [thanks!]:
pp
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Friday, June 05, 2009
Grunge's Long Shadow: In praise of "in-between" periods in pop history
SLATE
music box
Grunge's Long Shadow
In praise of "in-between" periods in pop history.
By Simon Reynolds
Posted Friday, May 29, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET
Pop music history is biased toward "the right place and the right time." Just like its respectable elder relative, rock history, with its decisive battles and seismic elections, pop history fixates on origins and breakthroughs, magic years of transformation, cusp points when undergrounds go overground. It gives far less attention to those stretches of time between the upheavals—years of drift and diaspora, periods without an easily discernible "vibe," zeits devoid of geist. Geographically, too, pop historians favor major metropolises over the provinces and suburbs. Time and again, they locate the motor of pop change in small cliques operating out of major cities like New York and Berlin or secondary cities like Manchester, U.K., or Seattle that briefly assert themselves as the place to be.
I've been an obsessive music fan for 30 years, a "professional fan," aka critic, for 22 of them, yet I've ever managed to be in "the right place at the right time" only once, maybe twice. Pretty poor going for someone living first in London and then in New York. But partly because of this recurrent feeling of belatedness and partly because I spent my teenage years in a suburban commuter town, I've long had a special interest in those expanses of pop time that get skipped over quickly by pop chroniclers.
Makers of rockumentary series for TV are the worst offenders. It rankles a bit that the late '80s are now treated as a mere prequel to grunge. The recently aired Seven Ages of Rock on VH1 Classic was a marked improvement on earlier TV histories of rock, which tended to jump straight from Sex Pistols to Nirvana. But its episode on U.S. alternative rock nonetheless presented groups like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth as preparing the ground for Nirvana. That's not how it felt at the time: Sonic Youth and the rest seemed fully formed significances in their own right, creative forces of monstrous power, time-defining in their own way (albeit through their refusal of the mainstream). My Melody Maker comrade David Stubbs wrote an end-of-year oration proclaiming 1988—annum of Surfer Rosa, Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything—to be the greatest year for rock music. Ever!
We actually believed this, and our fervor was infectious, striking an inspirational, Obama-like chord with young readers heartily sick of the idea that rock's capacity for renewal had been exhausted in the '60s or the punk mid-'70s. Yet that period will never truly be written into conventional history (despite efforts like Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life) because it doesn't have a name. It's too diverse, and it's not easily characterized. For instance, the groups were "underground," except that by 1988 most of them—Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers—had already signed, or soon were to sign, to majors. Finally, it'll never get fairly written into history because, damn it, grunge did happen.
Being turned into a prequel isn't the only indignity that can befall one of those in-betweeny phases of rock history. The other humiliating fate is to be deemed an aftermath. Reclaiming one such period of "fallout" was the polemical drive behind my post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again and its new companion volume Totally Wired. It was an attempt to challenge the perennial fixation on punk as the Big Bang and the corresponding tendency to see what came next as a scattered diminuendo, an entropic dissipation of focus and energy. Instead, I wanted to recover my own lived sense of the period not as a dwindle into disparateness but as the true fruition of punk's ideals. The after-zones of rock history are hard to grasp precisely because they're so various. This rich muddle demands identifying labels that are umbrella-broad and open-ended. Hence post-punk, not a genre so much as a space of possibility, out of which new genres formed: Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, and many more.
I can think of at least a couple more "post-" terms that could usefully redraw the map of pop music history:
Post-disco. Disco is often said to have died in 1979. That's when the "disco sucks" backlash peaked with the infamous July 12 "Disco Demolition" night rally at Comiskey Park in Chicago, when thousands of disco records were blown up on the field midway between a double-header; it's the year when radio dropped the disco format en masse as opportunistically as it had jumped on the bandwagon in the first place, the year when record sales for the genre began to slide precipitously. Casablanca, disco's leading label, started to get into financial difficulties, while Studio 54, its most famous club, closed in February 1980. But people didn't stop dancing, and disco music didn't vanish from the Earth. Instead, the genre mutated while the movement itself fragmented into a panoply of subscenes that appealed to specific tribes of the once-united disco nation, styles like hi-NRG (a tautly sequenced, butt-bumping sound big in the hard-core gay clubs), freestyle (beloved by Hispanic youth in New York and Miami), Italodisco (the bastard bambino of Giorgio Moroder), and electrofunk (a sound associated with New York labels like West End and Prelude, artists like Peech Boys, and producers like Arthur Baker). With these and other post-disco offshoots, the classic sonic signifiers of heyday mid-'70s disco—the shuffling high-hat driven beat, walking bass lines, tempestuous string-swept orchestrations—faded away as the music became increasingly electronic, based around drum machines, sequenced bass lines, and synth-licks. But the torrid diva vocals endured, as did disco's raison d'être (igniting the dance floor, providing release on the weekends), along with much of the infrastructure of a clubbing industry that disco had built during the '70s.
Bridging the so-called death of disco and the birth of house, all this early-to-mid-'80s music lacks a name beyond drably functional and neutral terms like "dance" or "club music." Post-disco is better because this was music created by and for people—in New York, Miami, Montreal, and, if truth be known, most of the United Kingdom and Europe—who refused to accept the official decree of disco's demise. But they didn't just stick with the classic disco sound frozen forever as golden oldies; their restless demand for "fresh" forced the music to keep moving forward. And it wasn't the case that disco went completely underground during this period, either: The careers of Madonna, New Order, and the Pet Shop Boys were largely launched off the back of ideas spawned in the post-disco era.
Post-psychedelic. The reigning view of psychedelia, at least in America, is as a slightly embarrassing fad that was served notice early in 1968, when Bob Dylan released the recorded-in-two-days simplicity of John Wesley Harding. Dylan acolytes swiftly followed suit, from the Band, with their equally steeped in rootsy Americana Music From Big Pink, to the Byrds with their country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The sharp critical view to take on Sgt. Pepper's has long been that it's a pretentious mess compared with its predecessor Revolver; sharper still is the claim that Rubber Soul is better than the already-getting-quite-psychedelic Revolver. The stance is strengthened by the Beatles' own rapid retreat circa 1968 from studio-as-instrument frippery with the Chuck Berry-styled "Back in the USSR," the 12-bar bluesy "Revolution," and the gritty "Get Back." Likewise, the Rolling Stones followed Their Satanic Majesties Request, their debacle attempt to match Sgt. Pepper's, with the stripped-bare virility of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man," while the Doors recovered their mojos with the hard, bluesy Morrison Hotel. In the final year of the decade that had once hurtled full-tilt into the future and out into the cosmos, Creedence Clearwater Revival's faux-Southern rock 'n' roll dominated American airwaves, while the United Kingdom was overrun with blues bores.
But just as disco never died in a lot of hearts, there were plenty of people active at the end of the '60s and into the early '70s who kept faith with the visions of 1967. They kept on making music that, while not always blatantly trippy, nonetheless took its bearing from landmark psychedelic records like Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, the Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Traffic's Dear Mr. Fantasy, Donovan's A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, Soft Machine's self-titled debut. I'm not just talking about the obviously out-there kosmische rock and space rock of the era (Tangerine Dream, Can, Faust, Hawkwind, Gong) but some of the maverick singer-songwriters of the early '70s: the late John Martyn with his rippling after-trails of echoplex guitar, Robert Wyatt's astral scat song and tape-as-canvas daubing, Tim Buckley's zero-gravity vocal acrobatics on Starsailor. Ex-Soft Machine singer Kevin Ayers' solo career flitted between Donovan-like ditties full of quaint English charm to transcendental tapestries of guitar-flicker such as his Nico-paean "Decadence." Even certain artists we normally file under "glam" were indelibly marked by psychedelia: Roxy Music's personnel included Brian Eno, a Syd Barrett admirer and believer in using the recording studio to create sonic phantasms, and the obviously Hendrix-damaged Phil Manzanera.
Like the after-disco and after-punk phases, this is a rich, diffuse era that suffers for the lack of a name. It's not exactly "progressive," although at various points it overlaps the terrain we generally think of as "prog rock," while at its other boundaries it intersects with "folk" and "singer-songwriter." What unifies it more than style or sound is a shared infrastructure (the artists were mostly clustered around certain key labels—Harvest, Island, Charisma, Virgin, UA, Elektra), along with a common set of preoccupations, values, and approaches: the classic 1967-style fascination for the bucolic and the childlike, a spirit of gentle and genteel experimentalism, a whimsical sense of humor tinged with melancholy. At the time, people often talked of "the underground"—a nebulous concept at best, based around sensibility more than anything, but again speaking to these artists having a common departure point circa 1967. This underground blurred into the mainstream: Most of the groups were on "head"-oriented boutique imprints of major labels (Harvest, for instance, being a sub-label of EMI) or on large independent labels like Island that, while aesthetically autonomous and highly adventurous, relied on major-label distribution. Moreover, some key figures from this quasi-underground—Kevin Ayers' former sideman Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd—would eventually release some of the biggest-selling albums of the era while never totally losing their links to their old comrades.
Post-punk, post-disco, post-psychedelic: Ungainly as they are, these terms seem necessary to me, providing a handle on elusive but fertile regions of music history. Fuzzy at both temporal ends (they slow-fade into indistinctness while never totally going away), they're hard to perceive as distinct eras in their own right. Their richness challenges history's fixation on the "event," the "turning point," the "revolutionary moment." And their diversity challenges the historian: How to locate and convey the "feel" of an era, the communality of consciousness shared by all those belated souls who lived and created under the sign of the "post-"?
P.S. There are some other "post-" genres out there, but to my mind, they describe something quite different from the above. Take post-rock, a term that mysteriously emerged in the early '90s to describe experimental guitar bands that increasingly abandoned guitars altogether. (Oh, OK, it was me who came up with that one.) But post-rock doesn't have the same temporal aspect that post-disco or post-punk have; it's not about the ripples set in motion by a galvanizing "event." Rather, it evokes a sense of "going beyond" the strictures of a genre of music without completely abandoning its legacy of attitudes and assumptions. For similar reasons, the term post-metal seems increasingly useful to describe the vast and variegated swath of genres (the thousand flavors of doom/black/death/grind/drone/sludge/etc., ad infinitum) that emerged from the early '90s onward. Sometimes beat-free and ambient, increasingly the work of home-studio loners rather than performing bands, post-metal of the kind released by labels like Hydra Head often seems to have barely any connection to metal as understood by, say, VH1 Classic doc-makers. The continuity is less sonic but attitudinal: the penchant for morbidity and darkness taken to a sometimes hokey degree; the somber clothing and the long hair; the harrowed, indecipherably growled vocals; the bombastically verbose lyrics/song titles/band names. It's that aesthetic rather than a way of riffing or a palette of guitar sounds that ties post-metal back to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath.
Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.
music box
Grunge's Long Shadow
In praise of "in-between" periods in pop history.
By Simon Reynolds
Posted Friday, May 29, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET
Pop music history is biased toward "the right place and the right time." Just like its respectable elder relative, rock history, with its decisive battles and seismic elections, pop history fixates on origins and breakthroughs, magic years of transformation, cusp points when undergrounds go overground. It gives far less attention to those stretches of time between the upheavals—years of drift and diaspora, periods without an easily discernible "vibe," zeits devoid of geist. Geographically, too, pop historians favor major metropolises over the provinces and suburbs. Time and again, they locate the motor of pop change in small cliques operating out of major cities like New York and Berlin or secondary cities like Manchester, U.K., or Seattle that briefly assert themselves as the place to be.
I've been an obsessive music fan for 30 years, a "professional fan," aka critic, for 22 of them, yet I've ever managed to be in "the right place at the right time" only once, maybe twice. Pretty poor going for someone living first in London and then in New York. But partly because of this recurrent feeling of belatedness and partly because I spent my teenage years in a suburban commuter town, I've long had a special interest in those expanses of pop time that get skipped over quickly by pop chroniclers.
Makers of rockumentary series for TV are the worst offenders. It rankles a bit that the late '80s are now treated as a mere prequel to grunge. The recently aired Seven Ages of Rock on VH1 Classic was a marked improvement on earlier TV histories of rock, which tended to jump straight from Sex Pistols to Nirvana. But its episode on U.S. alternative rock nonetheless presented groups like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth as preparing the ground for Nirvana. That's not how it felt at the time: Sonic Youth and the rest seemed fully formed significances in their own right, creative forces of monstrous power, time-defining in their own way (albeit through their refusal of the mainstream). My Melody Maker comrade David Stubbs wrote an end-of-year oration proclaiming 1988—annum of Surfer Rosa, Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything—to be the greatest year for rock music. Ever!
We actually believed this, and our fervor was infectious, striking an inspirational, Obama-like chord with young readers heartily sick of the idea that rock's capacity for renewal had been exhausted in the '60s or the punk mid-'70s. Yet that period will never truly be written into conventional history (despite efforts like Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life) because it doesn't have a name. It's too diverse, and it's not easily characterized. For instance, the groups were "underground," except that by 1988 most of them—Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers—had already signed, or soon were to sign, to majors. Finally, it'll never get fairly written into history because, damn it, grunge did happen.
Being turned into a prequel isn't the only indignity that can befall one of those in-betweeny phases of rock history. The other humiliating fate is to be deemed an aftermath. Reclaiming one such period of "fallout" was the polemical drive behind my post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again and its new companion volume Totally Wired. It was an attempt to challenge the perennial fixation on punk as the Big Bang and the corresponding tendency to see what came next as a scattered diminuendo, an entropic dissipation of focus and energy. Instead, I wanted to recover my own lived sense of the period not as a dwindle into disparateness but as the true fruition of punk's ideals. The after-zones of rock history are hard to grasp precisely because they're so various. This rich muddle demands identifying labels that are umbrella-broad and open-ended. Hence post-punk, not a genre so much as a space of possibility, out of which new genres formed: Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, and many more.
I can think of at least a couple more "post-" terms that could usefully redraw the map of pop music history:
Post-disco. Disco is often said to have died in 1979. That's when the "disco sucks" backlash peaked with the infamous July 12 "Disco Demolition" night rally at Comiskey Park in Chicago, when thousands of disco records were blown up on the field midway between a double-header; it's the year when radio dropped the disco format en masse as opportunistically as it had jumped on the bandwagon in the first place, the year when record sales for the genre began to slide precipitously. Casablanca, disco's leading label, started to get into financial difficulties, while Studio 54, its most famous club, closed in February 1980. But people didn't stop dancing, and disco music didn't vanish from the Earth. Instead, the genre mutated while the movement itself fragmented into a panoply of subscenes that appealed to specific tribes of the once-united disco nation, styles like hi-NRG (a tautly sequenced, butt-bumping sound big in the hard-core gay clubs), freestyle (beloved by Hispanic youth in New York and Miami), Italodisco (the bastard bambino of Giorgio Moroder), and electrofunk (a sound associated with New York labels like West End and Prelude, artists like Peech Boys, and producers like Arthur Baker). With these and other post-disco offshoots, the classic sonic signifiers of heyday mid-'70s disco—the shuffling high-hat driven beat, walking bass lines, tempestuous string-swept orchestrations—faded away as the music became increasingly electronic, based around drum machines, sequenced bass lines, and synth-licks. But the torrid diva vocals endured, as did disco's raison d'être (igniting the dance floor, providing release on the weekends), along with much of the infrastructure of a clubbing industry that disco had built during the '70s.
Bridging the so-called death of disco and the birth of house, all this early-to-mid-'80s music lacks a name beyond drably functional and neutral terms like "dance" or "club music." Post-disco is better because this was music created by and for people—in New York, Miami, Montreal, and, if truth be known, most of the United Kingdom and Europe—who refused to accept the official decree of disco's demise. But they didn't just stick with the classic disco sound frozen forever as golden oldies; their restless demand for "fresh" forced the music to keep moving forward. And it wasn't the case that disco went completely underground during this period, either: The careers of Madonna, New Order, and the Pet Shop Boys were largely launched off the back of ideas spawned in the post-disco era.
Post-psychedelic. The reigning view of psychedelia, at least in America, is as a slightly embarrassing fad that was served notice early in 1968, when Bob Dylan released the recorded-in-two-days simplicity of John Wesley Harding. Dylan acolytes swiftly followed suit, from the Band, with their equally steeped in rootsy Americana Music From Big Pink, to the Byrds with their country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The sharp critical view to take on Sgt. Pepper's has long been that it's a pretentious mess compared with its predecessor Revolver; sharper still is the claim that Rubber Soul is better than the already-getting-quite-psychedelic Revolver. The stance is strengthened by the Beatles' own rapid retreat circa 1968 from studio-as-instrument frippery with the Chuck Berry-styled "Back in the USSR," the 12-bar bluesy "Revolution," and the gritty "Get Back." Likewise, the Rolling Stones followed Their Satanic Majesties Request, their debacle attempt to match Sgt. Pepper's, with the stripped-bare virility of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man," while the Doors recovered their mojos with the hard, bluesy Morrison Hotel. In the final year of the decade that had once hurtled full-tilt into the future and out into the cosmos, Creedence Clearwater Revival's faux-Southern rock 'n' roll dominated American airwaves, while the United Kingdom was overrun with blues bores.
But just as disco never died in a lot of hearts, there were plenty of people active at the end of the '60s and into the early '70s who kept faith with the visions of 1967. They kept on making music that, while not always blatantly trippy, nonetheless took its bearing from landmark psychedelic records like Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, the Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Traffic's Dear Mr. Fantasy, Donovan's A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, Soft Machine's self-titled debut. I'm not just talking about the obviously out-there kosmische rock and space rock of the era (Tangerine Dream, Can, Faust, Hawkwind, Gong) but some of the maverick singer-songwriters of the early '70s: the late John Martyn with his rippling after-trails of echoplex guitar, Robert Wyatt's astral scat song and tape-as-canvas daubing, Tim Buckley's zero-gravity vocal acrobatics on Starsailor. Ex-Soft Machine singer Kevin Ayers' solo career flitted between Donovan-like ditties full of quaint English charm to transcendental tapestries of guitar-flicker such as his Nico-paean "Decadence." Even certain artists we normally file under "glam" were indelibly marked by psychedelia: Roxy Music's personnel included Brian Eno, a Syd Barrett admirer and believer in using the recording studio to create sonic phantasms, and the obviously Hendrix-damaged Phil Manzanera.
Like the after-disco and after-punk phases, this is a rich, diffuse era that suffers for the lack of a name. It's not exactly "progressive," although at various points it overlaps the terrain we generally think of as "prog rock," while at its other boundaries it intersects with "folk" and "singer-songwriter." What unifies it more than style or sound is a shared infrastructure (the artists were mostly clustered around certain key labels—Harvest, Island, Charisma, Virgin, UA, Elektra), along with a common set of preoccupations, values, and approaches: the classic 1967-style fascination for the bucolic and the childlike, a spirit of gentle and genteel experimentalism, a whimsical sense of humor tinged with melancholy. At the time, people often talked of "the underground"—a nebulous concept at best, based around sensibility more than anything, but again speaking to these artists having a common departure point circa 1967. This underground blurred into the mainstream: Most of the groups were on "head"-oriented boutique imprints of major labels (Harvest, for instance, being a sub-label of EMI) or on large independent labels like Island that, while aesthetically autonomous and highly adventurous, relied on major-label distribution. Moreover, some key figures from this quasi-underground—Kevin Ayers' former sideman Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd—would eventually release some of the biggest-selling albums of the era while never totally losing their links to their old comrades.
Post-punk, post-disco, post-psychedelic: Ungainly as they are, these terms seem necessary to me, providing a handle on elusive but fertile regions of music history. Fuzzy at both temporal ends (they slow-fade into indistinctness while never totally going away), they're hard to perceive as distinct eras in their own right. Their richness challenges history's fixation on the "event," the "turning point," the "revolutionary moment." And their diversity challenges the historian: How to locate and convey the "feel" of an era, the communality of consciousness shared by all those belated souls who lived and created under the sign of the "post-"?
P.S. There are some other "post-" genres out there, but to my mind, they describe something quite different from the above. Take post-rock, a term that mysteriously emerged in the early '90s to describe experimental guitar bands that increasingly abandoned guitars altogether. (Oh, OK, it was me who came up with that one.) But post-rock doesn't have the same temporal aspect that post-disco or post-punk have; it's not about the ripples set in motion by a galvanizing "event." Rather, it evokes a sense of "going beyond" the strictures of a genre of music without completely abandoning its legacy of attitudes and assumptions. For similar reasons, the term post-metal seems increasingly useful to describe the vast and variegated swath of genres (the thousand flavors of doom/black/death/grind/drone/sludge/etc., ad infinitum) that emerged from the early '90s onward. Sometimes beat-free and ambient, increasingly the work of home-studio loners rather than performing bands, post-metal of the kind released by labels like Hydra Head often seems to have barely any connection to metal as understood by, say, VH1 Classic doc-makers. The continuity is less sonic but attitudinal: the penchant for morbidity and darkness taken to a sometimes hokey degree; the somber clothing and the long hair; the harrowed, indecipherably growled vocals; the bombastically verbose lyrics/song titles/band names. It's that aesthetic rather than a way of riffing or a palette of guitar sounds that ties post-metal back to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath.
Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Heatwave Live on German TV circa 1977
A rare video that makes me thankful for YouTube. A ridiculous live performance by Heatwave, one of the funkiest bands of the disco era (at least for their first two albums). How ridiculous? Well, it ends with the bass player and guitar player grooving while sitting on the shoulders of the two lead singers. If you can get past the common YouTube sound sync problems, it's one hell of a show.
As an aside, I would love to write an article on Rod Temperton and the disco funk sound, so if anyone knows contact info for him I would be grateful.
Looking back, it is sad to see Johnnie Wilder (he's the lead singer on the right) so energetic and vital knowing what happened to him in 1979. He died in 2006; you can read Johnnie Wilder's obituary in Billboard here.
As an aside, I would love to write an article on Rod Temperton and the disco funk sound, so if anyone knows contact info for him I would be grateful.
Looking back, it is sad to see Johnnie Wilder (he's the lead singer on the right) so energetic and vital knowing what happened to him in 1979. He died in 2006; you can read Johnnie Wilder's obituary in Billboard here.
Friday, June 29, 2007
DJ Oakenfold Plays Concert w/Boston Pops
Pioneering DJ sets sights on Hollywood
By Jason Szep2 hours, 3 minutes ago
Paul Oakenfold is famous as a DJ, but this week the pioneer of "trance" dance music assumed the unusual role of playing with a 75-piece orchestra for well-heeled, champagne-sipping classical music lovers.
By playing in one of America's oldest symphony halls with the Boston Pops, he is remixing the conventional image of a DJ -- a job that has itself morphed from obscure nightclubs to celebrity status as DJs tour the globe like rock stars, put their spin on popular music and produce original work.
In an interview with Reuters, the 43-year-old Briton said his Pops performance reflected the evolution of DJs and dovetails with his work scoring music for Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Collateral."
"I'm comfortable with an orchestra because of working in film. I'm just trying to attempt more and more," said Oakenfold, who moved from Britain to Hollywood five years ago.
"From these couple of shows we are already in talks maybe to tour something around the world and hook into local orchestras," he said. "It's a challenge for me and something that I would enjoy doing."
But playing with the Boston Pops in such an intimate setting caused him some anxiety.
"I'm so used to people dancing right here in front," he said from the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall, surrounded by CD players, a turntable, synthesizer and mixer.
"They are just going to be sitting there looking up at me, so I'm a bit worried," he said before performing.
Oakenfold, one of the most influential figures in global club culture of the past 15 years, is known for remixing songs by Madonna and U2. His audience has developed beyond nightclubs into stadiums filled with thousands -- at fees as high as $50,000 a gig.
MOODY ATMOSPHERICS
The Boston performance, touted as a world premiere by the Boston Pops, was ambitious.
Oakenfold mixed samples and pre-recorded drum tracks, "scratched" on a turntable by nudging a vinyl record back and forth against the stylus, and played a synthesizer as the orchestra performed and a drummer kept pace with an electronic drum kit and another synthesizer.
The piece, part of a nearly two-hour "EdgeFest" concert by the Pops, was written by Los Angeles composer Felix Brenner and drew loud applause.
As Oakenfold played, some of the electronically produced parts were barely audible over the orchestra, creating moody atmospherics, although one section featured thundering electric bass drums that clearly startled the audience.
"You're talking about human versus the machine," said Brenner, describing the addition of a DJ to the orchestra as a live "symphonic remix."
"We're pushing that envelope. I approached a lot of different people to do this but most were scared of the idea. But Paul said 'That sounds cool.' So we got together with it."
Oakenfold's two-day Pops performance comes as classical music is gaining popularity.
Thanks to "crossover" acts such as Josh Groban, classical was the fastest-growing musical genre in 2006, with album sales up 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, many popular genres fell, including rap which dropped 20.7 percent, and R&B, which was down 18.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Oakenfold, who last year toured with Madonna and remixed Justin Timberlake's single "My Love," said the music that made him famous -- house and trance -- will never be as mainstream as hip hop and other music popularized by the likes of MTV.
"You just don't have the artists and the videos, radios are not playing it," he said.
The Boston Pops, famous for light classical music, is in the third year of its "Pops on the Edge" series that has also featured singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and soulful Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket as it seeks a broader audience.
By Jason Szep2 hours, 3 minutes ago
Paul Oakenfold is famous as a DJ, but this week the pioneer of "trance" dance music assumed the unusual role of playing with a 75-piece orchestra for well-heeled, champagne-sipping classical music lovers.
By playing in one of America's oldest symphony halls with the Boston Pops, he is remixing the conventional image of a DJ -- a job that has itself morphed from obscure nightclubs to celebrity status as DJs tour the globe like rock stars, put their spin on popular music and produce original work.
In an interview with Reuters, the 43-year-old Briton said his Pops performance reflected the evolution of DJs and dovetails with his work scoring music for Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Collateral."
"I'm comfortable with an orchestra because of working in film. I'm just trying to attempt more and more," said Oakenfold, who moved from Britain to Hollywood five years ago.
"From these couple of shows we are already in talks maybe to tour something around the world and hook into local orchestras," he said. "It's a challenge for me and something that I would enjoy doing."
But playing with the Boston Pops in such an intimate setting caused him some anxiety.
"I'm so used to people dancing right here in front," he said from the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall, surrounded by CD players, a turntable, synthesizer and mixer.
"They are just going to be sitting there looking up at me, so I'm a bit worried," he said before performing.
Oakenfold, one of the most influential figures in global club culture of the past 15 years, is known for remixing songs by Madonna and U2. His audience has developed beyond nightclubs into stadiums filled with thousands -- at fees as high as $50,000 a gig.
MOODY ATMOSPHERICS
The Boston performance, touted as a world premiere by the Boston Pops, was ambitious.
Oakenfold mixed samples and pre-recorded drum tracks, "scratched" on a turntable by nudging a vinyl record back and forth against the stylus, and played a synthesizer as the orchestra performed and a drummer kept pace with an electronic drum kit and another synthesizer.
The piece, part of a nearly two-hour "EdgeFest" concert by the Pops, was written by Los Angeles composer Felix Brenner and drew loud applause.
As Oakenfold played, some of the electronically produced parts were barely audible over the orchestra, creating moody atmospherics, although one section featured thundering electric bass drums that clearly startled the audience.
"You're talking about human versus the machine," said Brenner, describing the addition of a DJ to the orchestra as a live "symphonic remix."
"We're pushing that envelope. I approached a lot of different people to do this but most were scared of the idea. But Paul said 'That sounds cool.' So we got together with it."
Oakenfold's two-day Pops performance comes as classical music is gaining popularity.
Thanks to "crossover" acts such as Josh Groban, classical was the fastest-growing musical genre in 2006, with album sales up 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, many popular genres fell, including rap which dropped 20.7 percent, and R&B, which was down 18.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Oakenfold, who last year toured with Madonna and remixed Justin Timberlake's single "My Love," said the music that made him famous -- house and trance -- will never be as mainstream as hip hop and other music popularized by the likes of MTV.
"You just don't have the artists and the videos, radios are not playing it," he said.
The Boston Pops, famous for light classical music, is in the third year of its "Pops on the Edge" series that has also featured singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and soulful Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket as it seeks a broader audience.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The Horror of Disco Excess
I often defend disco music from its detractors; I love the analog beats, Latin influence, and the serious grooves laid down by many a rhythm section. But believe me, I am well aware of the horrible excess that was disco. I clearly recall my disgusted disbelief of seeing Rick Dees' "Disco Duck" on American bandstand, and the crap of the Village People, Xanadu, and the like. Even as a young,insecure teenager, I knew this stuff was crap. Here at Andrew Sullivan's website is a YouTube clip of a godawful movie appearance by the Village People, circa 1980. The film? "Can't Stop the Music." Well, somebody should have.
The horror...the horror...
If you survive that, the film version of YMCA is also astounding.
Okay, to continue this tour of disco pain, here is the aforementioned Rick Dees appearance on American Bandstand, one of the lowest points in music history. Of course, the reason this was on American Bandstand is because it had topped the charts.
The horror...the horror...
If you survive that, the film version of YMCA is also astounding.
Okay, to continue this tour of disco pain, here is the aforementioned Rick Dees appearance on American Bandstand, one of the lowest points in music history. Of course, the reason this was on American Bandstand is because it had topped the charts.
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