How Boomboxes Got So Badass

28 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

(Reprinted from Collectors Weekly) By Hunter Oatman-Stanford  December 16th, 2013

oomboxes are, by definition, excessive. With their deafening bass thud and dazzling chrome dials, these electric beasts are heavy enough to tone your biceps. Also known as “ghetto blasters” or “jamboxes,” they rose to fame in the 1980s along with hip-hop, flourishing as a tool for sharing and mixing the latest beats. Yet despite their widespread popularity, the innovators who conceived of these devices are still largely unknown, consigned to anonymity by the corporations that manufactured their creations.

Miles Lightwood hopes to change that. He’s the founder of Boomboxラジカセ Creators, an online archive and forthcoming documentary film devoted to identifying the individuals behind the most successful boomboxes of all time. So far, Lightwood has only located a handful original designers and engineers, a few of whom are already deceased, but he hopes that with the help of the Internet’s global community, more will be found before they pass away…

Read more: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-boomboxes-got-so-badass/

Orville Peck: The Savior of Country Music

21 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

(via THE DOG DOOR CULTURAL)  By Oliver Houyte

He wears handmade masks adorned with fringe, from under which his two blue eyes pierce. He is covered in tattoos, visible through his open vests. He wears colorful Stetson hats and cowboy boots. His music is replete with whistles and the sound effects of hooves, bull-whips, and gunshots. His lyrics are at once unabashedly mawkish and languorously erotic. He is gay. He is anonymous. He is the messiah of country music and he goes by Orville Peck.

Peck’s debut album, Pony, was released in early 2019 and has already become a classic, a must have for any true fan of country music, and a pool of perfect temperature for anyone willing to dip their toe into the genre for the first time. Country, as a genre, has always been massively underrated by mainstream listeners as an art form. The mainstream listeners are not to blame, however. What is to blame is the parade of terrible country musicians of the last 30 or so years. Musicians who have decided, in one way or another, that they’d spite those mainstream listeners by becoming caricatures: singing about their daddy’s pick-up truck, tractors, guns, the flag, and empty beer cans. Despite years of association, these singers and these subjects don’t represent country music. They represent only bad songwriting and nothing more…

Read more: https://www.dogdoorcultural.com/music/orville-peck-the-savior-of-country-music

 

Quora: Why do people criticize Paul McCartney for writing the lyric “the movement you need is on your shoulder”?

21 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

(via Quora) Answered by Alex Johnston, Guitar & bass, BA Hons in music theory, tech and musicology

I’ll tell you why I do. And it’s a symptom of something which, for me, blemishes a good deal of the Beatles’ later work.

In general, I am very fond of ‘Hey Jude’ and consider it one of the best songs that McCartney ever wrote. I think that the cunning rhyme scheme really works, and the pleasingly laconic but warm-hearted lyric is one of the best the band ever had. And don’t even get me started on the music. It’s a lovely song.

However, when McCartney first played the song to Lennon, he hadn’t yet finished it.

The song has two bridge/middle eight sections, whatever you want to call them, which serve as a kind of alternative verse. The first one goes like this:

And anytime you feel the pain
Hey Jude, refrain
Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders
For well you know that it’s a fool
Who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder…

Read more: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-criticize-Paul-McCartney-for-writing-the-lyric-the-movement-you-need-is-on-your-shoulder

On Music…

21 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

The Coming Death of Just About Every Rock Legend

15 Sep 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

(via The Week) by Damon Linker August 31, 2019

Rock music isn’t dead, but it’s barely hanging on.

This is true in at least two senses.

Though popular music sales in general have plummeted since their peak around the turn of the millennium, certain genres continue to generate commercial excitement: pop, rap, hip-hop, country. But rock — amplified and often distorted electric guitars, bass, drums, melodic if frequently abrasive lead vocals, with songs usually penned exclusively by the members of the band — barely registers on the charts. There are still important rock musicians making music in a range of styles — Canada’s Big Wreck excels at sophisticated progressive hard rock, for example, while the more subdued American band Dawes artfully expands on the soulful songwriting that thrived in California during the 1970s. But these groups often toil in relative obscurity, selling a few thousand records at a time, performing to modest-sized crowds in clubs and theaters…

Read more: https://theweek.com/articles/861750/coming-death-just-about-every-rock-legend

Baby Hold On: Why Eddie Money Was the Patron Saint of Rock Uncool

15 Sep 2019 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

CIRCA 1985: Eddie Money poses for a portrait circa 1985. (Photo by Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images)

(via Rolling Stone) by David Browne

As he himself would have admitted, Eddie Money was no one’s idea of a conventional rock star. His stage moves were always a little gawky and spasmodic, his borderline hoarse voice in need of a lozenge or two. Emerging during the punk era though never part of it, he preferred the stadium-friendly shout-along choruses of mainstream rock and adopted the suit-and-tie New Wave look while keeping his hair unfashionably long. He was even an NYPD cop — a career move that, while utterly honorable, didn’t jibe with the traditional, anti-establishment rock & roll handbook...

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/eddie-money-appreciation-884179/

 

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