Quincy Jones sat in the Tenafly, New Jersey den of 16-year-old vocal student Lesley Gore,
playing demo after demo, looking for the right song to cut for her first record. Out of over 200 tapes, Jones and Gore had moved only one to the "maybe" pile, and so that song,
It's My Party, was recorded on March 30, 1963 in a Manhattan studio. After the session Mercury president Irving Green warned Gore not to get her hopes up, but Gore gratefully told him that it had been a great experience anyway, and it was okay if he didn't want to release it. However, later that evening Jones learned that
Phil Spector had just recorded "It's My Party" for
The Crystals, so Jones rushed back to the studio to press 100 test copies of the single and immediately mailed them to key radio stations across the country.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Sep 13, 2011 -
69 comments
Taylor Hicks wins American Idol.... It could be something worth talking about given how powerful the show has become: #1 show on television, contributed to over 30 million records (records -- yes records not itunes singles) sold, and a show where Queen, Rod Stewart, and, tonight, TAFKAP (or he could be Prince again) are clamoring to be on it. Moroever, some conventional wisdom seems to support that the show is not karaoeke-izing pop music and instead contributes to it
surprisingly positively. While it might not lead to debates on metafiler, arguments as to what makes a good Idol can be seen
here.
posted by skepticallypleased
on May 24, 2006 -
141 comments
Vote For The Worst American Idol contestant and be a foot solider against cornball programming. In the battle between an Internet movement and television producers, so far
the rouge site has the lead. But as we get closer to the show's finale, can the contrarians keep the
worst contestants in the mix?
posted by herc
on May 7, 2005 -
23 comments
Nick Hornby discusses pop music in this NY Times essay: "Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off?
In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool - a stranger to all notions of postmodernism - but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well."
posted by grumblebee
on May 26, 2004 -
28 comments
