Today is my day with the cancer doctor so I want to leave you with some history….it is never too late to learn.
Think back to the early 2000s and all the mash-up about this hip hop song or another…..Congressional mental midgets held hearings to try and ban the music of a generation…..thank goodness their attempts to ban music did not succeed but it did elevate the sells of the songs and albums in question.
The conservative South has always had a hard on for music if it was not clean and wholesome (whatever that means)….in my youth songs were deemed too shameful for radio…..I am talking about rock icons and their traditionally great songs….songs like Louie, Louie, Gloria, Light My Fire, etc etc. They wanted anything that did not conform to what these narrow minded twats considered proper…..
T o show you how bad it was I have a video explaining what songs were banned and why….it is a lengthy video but you will see just how far conservatives in the South will go to control what people listen to as music.
Rock classics were not acceptable to the conservative religious twats in the South and were banned from the radio.
A little something for a Friday afternoon….simply because I am bored with the news….
Do you like music?
I like all types depending on the situation….when I am on the ‘puter I listen to classical guitar or blues….otherwise it is music from my past….Cream, Canned Heat, Electric Prunes, etc etc.
A recent study finds that music is being dumb down since its glory days…..
If you’ve ever seen the viral clip of popular radio tunes that all use the same four chords, this latest study will, well … strike a chord. The research published earlier this month in the journal Scientific Reports isn’t about chords per se, but about rhythm and pitch—both of which scientists say have become increasingly less complex in pop songs over the past 75 years or so. Computational musicologists from Queen Mary University of London used mathematical models and algorithms to examine the top five songs on the Billboard charts from 1950 to 2023, which Smithsonian notes included such hits as the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” and Madonna’s “Vogue.”
Study leader Madeline Hamilton says they found that the complexity of both rhythm and pitch fell by about 30% over that time period in the more than 360 songs they listened to. The researchers also discovered that there were three distinct “melodic revolutions”—in 1975, 1996, and 2000—where song melodies became exceedingly simplified. Hamilton says that the mid-’70s shift came down right around the time disco and stadium rock came on the scene, while the later two tracked with the rise in popularity of rap and electronic music, as well as MTV.
Hamilton says that just because a melody is simple, it doesn’t mean the song overall is, or that it’s necessarily lacking. “It’s not that music is getting less complex,” she tells the New York Times. “The melody is getting less complex, but maybe the chords are getting more complex, or maybe the production.” Hamilton says she needed “sanity checks” during her experiment, which at one point had her in COVID lockdown listening to songs in a dorm room for 10 hours a day. She says she now finds it difficult to listen to many popular songs, with one in particular that “haunts” her: UB40’s 1993 cover of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Listen if you dare.
If you would like to see more of this study then I have a spot for you….
A musical icon from the 60s has died….this time it is one of my favorites….Kris Kristofferson.
Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died, reports the AP. Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said. He was 88. McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given. Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas, native wrote such classics standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine, and Tom T. Hall. “There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas. He was a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England and turned down an appointment to teach at the US Military Academy at West Point to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal “Blonde on Blonde” double album.
His music will live on but he will be missed.
In closing I leave you with a couple of my favorite songs …..
This one is from the American Outlaws, The Highwaymen tour with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings….
Great music for the soul of us old farts….thank you Kris!
I finally got the new PC set-up and all seems to be working well but since it is Windows I am sure something will go off the rails at anytime.
Enough mundane stuff….onward!
It is a Sunday and a time for FYI and a little history or both…but not today…..I want to write about a personal observation….or was it an experience?
If you are awaiting some look back at a retro tune from the 70s then you will be sadly disappointed.
Back in the day I was a crazy music fan….I awaited the release of albums and would dash to the music store to get the newest before they were sold out…..such groups as CSN&Y, Guns N Roses, Eagles, Blues Breakers, Cream, etc and then there were the individual artists like Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, Johnny Rivers, etc…..but over the years my enthusiasm for the newest music has waned….I just assumed that is was because I was getting old and did not particularly care about the newest groups and individuals.
To me the singers and artist of today sound all alike…..does not matter whether it is so-called country or pop….very little variation so it has become boring to me and I lost interest. Where’s the imagination?
I just read it is not that I am getting older but rather the quality of the music today.
It’s not so much my skin or my increasingly creaking knees ― the thing that’s been making me feel old recently is my Spotify playlist.
From the Sugababes’ iconic Round Round to Buddy Holly’s Dearest and Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, most of the tunes on my most-played catalogue come from before this century (a lot of them from before I was even born).
The fear that I’ve become an insufferable, “they don’t make them like they used to” naysayer is real. But fellow cranks, take heart ― new research suggests that the belief isn’t all in our bitter, non-gen-Z heads.
The researchers looked at rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock genres because those are the most popular ones.
They used listener data from last.fm and Genius’ lyric database to see how popular music’s lyrics have changed over time, looking at Genius page views to see whether listeners were interested in the lyrics in particular.
They assessed lyrics’ “lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotion, and complexity descriptors.”
Getting older does not mean that you lose your taste in music.
As I look back at my music choices I recall waiting on pins and needles for the release of Super Session with Stephen Still, Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield…..one of the best albums I ever bought.
After many years of no Beatles there is a New Hope on the horizon and it comes out today.
Sixty years after the onset of Beatlemania and with two of the quartet now dead, artificial intelligence has enabled the release next week of what is promised to be the last “new” Beatles song. The track, called “Now And Then,” will be available Thursday as part of a single paired with “Love Me Do,” the very first Beatles single that came out in 1962 in England, it was announced Thursday, per the AP. “Now And Then” comes from the same batch of unreleased demos written by the late John Lennon, which were taken by his former bandmates to construct the songs “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” released in the mid-1990s. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison worked on “Now And Then” in the same sessions, but technological limitations stood in the way.
With the help of artificial intelligence, director Peter Jackson cleared those problems up by “separating” Lennon’s original vocals from a piano used in the late 1970s. The much clearer vocals allowed McCartney and Starr to complete the track last year. The survivors packed plenty into it. The new single contains guitar that Harrison had recorded nearly three decades ago, a new drum part by Starr, with McCartney’s bass, piano, and a slide guitar solo he added as a tribute to Harrison, who died in 2001. McCartney and Starr sang backup. McCartney also added a string arrangement written with the help of Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George Martin. As if that wasn’t enough, they weaved in backing vocals from the original Beatles recordings of “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Because.”
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s quite an exciting thing.” Harrison’s widow, Olivia, said he felt in the 1990s that the technical problems made it impossible to release a song that met the band’s standards. With the improvements, “he would have wholeheartedly” joined McCartney and Starr in completing the song now if he were still alive, she said. On Wednesday, a 12-minute film that tells the story of the new recording will be made public. Later in the month, expanded versions of the Beatles’ compilations “1962-1966” and “1967-1970” will be released. “Now And Then,” despite coming much later than 1970, will be added to the latter collection.
Will this be the hit that all seem to think?
Have a great weekend and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
A member of one of my all time favorite bands, the Band, has died…..Robbie Robertson at age 80.
Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and songwriter for the Band—a Canadian American group that famously backed Bob Dylan while achieving Rock and Roll Hall of Fame success in its own right—died Wednesday. Robertson, 80, died in Los Angeles after a long illness, CBC News reports. He wrote or co-wrote the Band’s most famous songs, including “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek.” The group lasted just eight years, but its best work seemed timeless. “I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday—that had this lost-in-time quality,” Robertson said in 1995. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen said of the Band in 2020, per the New York Times.
Born in Toronto to a mother of Mohawk and Cayuga heritage and a Jewish father who died before his birth, Robertson became enamored of the music played by relatives when he visited the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. Robertson received advice there that he said he followed as he built his career: “Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.” His first band opened for Arkansas singer Ronnie Hawkins when Robertson was 16, and Hawkins soon recorded of couple of Robertson’s songs. Hawkins’ backup musicians included Levon Helm on drums; the rest of the Band was put together in 1961-62 in Ontario. The Band released its first album, Music From Big Pink, in 1968.
The album landed with seismic effect, a blast of Americana music delivered at the height of the psychedelic movement. It helped lead Eric Clapton to leave Cream, the Beatles to launch a stripped-down Let It Be, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin to write and record their own music, per Rolling Stone. The Band built a following playing the Woodstock and Isle of Wight festivals and was proclaimed the “future of country rock” on a Time magazine cover in 1970. “I always thought, from the very beginning, that this music was born of the blues and country music, Southern stuff,” Robertson said, per Variety. “The Mississippi Delta area, and the music came down from the river and from up the river and met, and it made something new.
Robbie and The Band gave me many hours of listening enjoyment.
I was sadden when The Band call it quits and their movie The Last Waltz is a fitting tribute to Robbie and the others…..
I have been a fan of the Eagles since their beginning in 1971….I even saw them in NOLA at the Warehouse when they opened for Poco.
We lost Glen Frey a few years back and now another band member has died, Randy Meisner.
A second founding member of seminal rock band the Eagles has died. Randy Meisner, the group’s original bassist and the writer and lead singer of iconic hit “Take It to the Limit,” was 77, CNN reports. “The Eagles are sad to report that founding member, bassist, and vocalist, Randy Meisner, passed away last night (July 26) in Los Angeles at age 77, due to complications from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease (COPD),” a statement posted by the band Thursday reads. “Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band. His vocal range was astonishing, as is evident on his signature ballad, ‘Take It to the Limit.'”
Meisner played with Poco and Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band before forming the Eagles in 1971 with Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Bernie Leadon, People reports. He left the band in 1976 because he was tired of touring, and did not perform with it again until its 1998 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He was invited to participate in the band’s 2013 world tour (he reportedly had not been invited to the 1994 reunion) but declined due to health reasons. Frey died in 2016 at age 67, and Leadon left the band in 1975. The band, which starts its farewell tour later this year, now consists of its last remaining original member, Henley; Timothy B. Schmit, Meisner’s replacement; Joe Walsh, Leadon’s replacement; Vince Gill, Frey’s replacement; and occasionally Frey’s son Deacon.
Sorry to see a true talent leave us….
IST good thoughts for his family and may he now rest in peace.
It would be appropriate to end this post with his amazing voice.
50 years ago the icon Pink Floyd album, ‘Dark Side Of The moon’ was released and on this anniversary there is a plan to re-release the album to commemorate the occasion.
And as usual these days nothing goes by without some sort of conspiracy or controversy and Pink Floyd is no different….
Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” turns 50 this year, and just as iconic as the album itself, which spent a jaw-dropping 18-plus years on the Billboard charts, is the cover art designed by British graphic designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell. Widely considered one of the most famous album designs of all time, the artwork features a beam of light refracting through a triangular prism, coming out the other side as a rainbow. Thorgerson said he was inspired by a photo he saw in a physics textbook. On Thursday, to mark the upcoming anniversary and promote its commemorative box set, the band uploaded a new logo to its social media accounts, showing a white triangle against a black background, with the number “50” inside it, and a rainbow filling in the zero.
What should’ve been an exciting time for Floyd fans to join together to celebrate the album, however, turned into an online battle, as some who’d apparently forgotten about the original cover art started accusing the band of suddenly becoming “woke” by using the rainbow, often seen as a symbol of gay pride, to promote LGBTQ rights, per USA Today. “Lose the rainbow, you’re making yourself look stupid,” one commenter wrote, as seen in a viral screenshot now circulating. “Just another band pandering,” noted another. Some even noted they wouldn’t be listening to Pink Floyd anymore because of the logo update.
Louder reports that other fans soon came to the rescue to educate these “less enlightened” detractors. “Boycotting Pink Floyd (as if it would matter) because you don’t understand prisms and can’t remember the original cover is beyond parody,” one person wrote. Still others came just to watch the comments fly back and forth. One of the most popular remarks: “Man, some people took ‘we don’t need no education’ too seriously.” At any rate, as that fight continues on social media, planetariums across the world plan on playing the album in March, along with “stunning visuals [of] the solar system and beyond,” per an announcement from the band. The $300 box set, which will include remastered versions of both the original album and the 1974 live recording, releases on March 24. Watch science at work in creating rainbows in this Pink Floyd promo here.
Maybe these detractors should have stayed awake in science class.
One of may favorite groups back in the day was CSN&Y…..sad news from the music world….David Crosby of that same group has died….age 81….
David Crosby, a singer-songwriter and founding member of two hugely influential and successful folk-rock groups—the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—has died. He was 81. His family announced his death Thursday, saying only that it came after a long illness. Crosby had remained active on Twitter up until Wednesday, Variety reports, when he joked about heaven, posting, “I heard the place is overrated… cloudy.” And he’d released an album, Live at the Capitol Theater, last month. Crosby, who contributed to both groups’ intricate and sublime harmonies, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, once with each band.
Crosby grew up in Los Angeles. His father, Floyd, was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, per Rolling Stone. He took a brief spin at college, then pursued a music career, starting as a solo act in folk clubs. He joined a band in 1964, when the Beatles had made bands all the rage, that already included Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark. Two incarnations later, the Jet Set were the Byrds, to which Crosby added his signature harmony on such hits as “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” As a songwriter, he was overshadowed by McGuinn and Clark, who fired him in 1967 as tensions in the band escalated. They gave him a list of reasons, including his songwriting, and said he was impossible to work with. “All of which is partly true, I’m sure, sometimes,” Crosby later said, adding, “But it was a drag.”
At Joni Mitchell’s house a few months later, Crosby ran into Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. They sang a song together three times, learning how their voices could best blend in harmony. “When we sang that third time,” Nash later said, “my life changed.” The first Crosby, Stills & Nash album came out in May 1969 with three songs written or co-written by Crosby: “Guinnevere,” “Wooden Ships,” and “Long Time Gone.” The record was a hit, and the group began a tour after adding Neil Young. Their second concert ever was at Woodstock, in front of an audience of almost 500,000. In his memoir, Crosby wrote: “For that one moment we did something that tells you what’s possible with human beings. … Woodstock was a time where were was a prevailing feeling of harmony.”
His voice and his music will be missed….in memory of his music…..
You will be missed….and thank you for great memories.
In my youth I was a huge Pink Floyd fan and that has never waned…..so I was surprised when I heard the new Pink Floyd recording….dedicated to the brave and beleaguered people of Ukraine…….
Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour says he thought the band would never release new music again after the death of keyboard player Rick Wright in 2008—but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed everything. At midnight Friday, the psychedelic rock legends will release new single “Hey, Hey, Rise Up,” with proceeds going to support the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund, reports Pitchfork. It’s the band’s first original new music since the Division Bell album, which came out in 1994, when Vladimir Putin was still working in local government in St. Petersburg.
The song, which features vocals from an Instagram post by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the Ukrainian band Boombox, is based on World War I protest song “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” the New York Times reports. Founding Pink Floyd member Nick Mason is on drums, but Roger Waters, who left the band in 1985, was not involved. Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law, tells the Guardian that he wanted to find a way to help the country. “It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation,” he says.
Gilmour says he contacted Mason and other musicians and convened a recording session last week, using samples of Khlyvnyuk’s voice. The Ukrainian singer left the band’s US tour in February to fight for his homeland. Gilmour says he last spoke to the singer Tuesday. “He said he had the most hellish day you could imagine, going out and picking up bodies of Ukrainians, Ukrainian children, helping with the clearing up,” Gilmour tells the Guardian. “You know, our little problems become so pathetic and tiny in the context of what you see him doing.” He says Khlvnyuk was pleased with the song and told him: “One day we’ll play it together and have a good stout afterwards, on me.”
Now listen to the first new recording by Pink Floyd in 30 years….
