For the 2012 iTunes Music Festival, 65 acts (including
P!nk,
One Direction,
David Guetta ,
Jessie J,
OneRepublic,
Ellie Goulding,
Andrea Bocelli,
Matchbox Twenty,
Muse and many others) performed at the Roundhouse in London throughout the month of September. 40 performances are available in full online.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 29, 2012 -
9 comments
Before
hip-hop beefs, there were response records, also known as
answer songs, usually replies to well-known songs. There are a few key eras: blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s, including a number of responses to "
Work With Me, Annie" (1954), recorded by
Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, with answers including "
Annie had a Baby," and "
The Wallflower" by Etta James; and Big Mama Thornton's "
Hound Dog" (1953), with a quick response by
Louis Innis and Charlie Gore, made a mere week after the original was released, and
Rufus Thomas' "
Bear Cat" (1953),
Sun Records' first hit. Country, rock & roll, doo-wop and pop music picked up where the blues left off, with most activity in the 1950s to 60s. Two examples from this era are
"Are You Lonesome To-night" and "Who Put The Bomp," and responses to both. The most well known from the next decade was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "
Sweet Home Alabama" (1974), a response to Neil Young's "
Southern Man" (1970) and "
Alabama" (1972). Until the 2000s, no answer songs had charted as high as the original hits. That changed with
Frankee's "
F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)" (2004), a response to
Eamon's "
Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" (2003), which was the first answer song to reach number 1 in the UK. Six years later and across the pond, Katy Perry's "
California Gurls" was a response to "
Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z. It was the first answer song to reach No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100. More Responses inside.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 31, 2012 -
53 comments
...there’s some desperation to this junk version of “Dancing in the Street,” with both parties trying to affirm their A-1 celebrity status. One of the more pernicious effects of the whole Live Aid/Farm Aid/Band Aid spectacle was to cement the hierarchy of the “legend” rock acts and a smaller tier of anointed successors from the slightly-younger generation (Tom Petty, Sting, Dire Straits, U2). It was the height of the Boomer Counter-Reformation. The late Eighties would see the over-publicized returns of everyone from Steve Winwood to the Monkees to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to a revamped George Harrison to a MOR version of Pink Floyd to Robbie Robertson pretending that he was Peter Gabriel (a version of Gabriel who couldn’t sing) to an all-star Yes and a Zeppelin-sampling Robert Plant, culminating in the return of the “revitalized” Stones in 1989, the touring company now reincorporated into a gleaming multinational. As Marcello Carlin said back when Popular covered this single: “Suddenly we were once again reminded who in pop and rock mattered and who didn’t…With their massacre of “Dancing In The Street,” Bowie and Jagger seemed to relish rubbing it in.“
-
The Annotated Jagger/Bowie "Dancing in the Street"
posted by anazgnos
on Jan 17, 2012 -
180 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
In 1989, Hollywood heavy metal band Rock Sugar was stranded on a desert island. For the last twenty years, the only music they had to listen to was the 80's pop CD collection of a 13 year old girl. And now,
Rock Sugar has come home.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Feb 15, 2010 -
46 comments
November 13, 2001: Musical unknown Andrew W.K.
(Previously 1, 2) releases his debut album "I Get Wet." It is a simple rock record of power chords and unabashed, un-ironic party music -- exemplified perfectly both by its first song, "
It's Time To Party," or its lead single, "
Party Hard" -- released during a month of American
depression,
paranoia, and
insincerity that borders on nihilism. The album finds mainstream success,
selling over 30K copies in its first three weeks, with songs from the record
appearing in commercials, movies, and television shows, not to mention heavy rotation on MTV and awesome appearances on
Conan and
Saturday Night Live. [more inside]
posted by Damn That Television
on Dec 30, 2009 -
355 comments
Boys dared to grow their hair and girls dared to wear mini skirts and in Korea indecency officers patroled the street with scissors and rulers, publicly cutting hair too long and checking if skirts were too short. Shin Joong-hyung, was there with his 70s hit,
Beauty, as were other musicians and artists like
Sanullim and the
Key Boys.
[more inside]
posted by kkokkodalk
on Nov 5, 2009 -
12 comments
100 Best Icelandic Pop & Rock Albums all streamable in full for free. Icelandic state broadcaster RÚV and Icelandic subscription music website
tónlist.is have published what they, their team of experts and the Icelandic public consider to be the 100 best Icelandic rock and pop albums of all time. Björk, Sigur Rós, Múm and The Sugarcubes don't need much introduction but below the cut there are short description of the other artists.
[via RÚV] [more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on May 6, 2009 -
47 comments
Concert promoter LiveDaily has an acoustic live sessions program (video starts playing). It's been running since March of this year and so far 33 artists have performed:
Priscilla Ahn,
The Raveonettes,
Black Lips,
Paddy Casey,
Dawn Landes,
Lykke Li,
The Duke Spirit,
Frightened Rabbit,
Foreign Born,
The Dodos,
The Virgins,
Radar Bros.,
Langhorne Slim,
Shwayze,
Joseph Arthur,
Missy Higgins,
Wild Sweet Orange,
Le Switch,
Deadly Syndrome,
Steve Poltz,
Weather Underground,
Imaad Wasif,
Rogue Wave,
David Ford,
Takka Takka,
Black Ghosts,
The Airborne Toxic Event,
Tally Hall,
Lionel Loueke,
Calico Horse,
Rademacher,
Judith Owen and
Carrie Rodriguez
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 30, 2008 -
10 comments
The Guardian has compiled a list of their
top fifty arts videos, the majority being from either rare or obscure sources and uploaded onto YouTube.
posted by djgh
on Aug 30, 2008 -
13 comments
The best music of 2007 according to
Stereogum, Pitchfork, All Music, NME, PopMatters, The A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, TIME, MTV, the Guardian, eMusic, Amazon, Spin Magazine, Q, Largehearted Boy, and
more. Among the most frequently listed are
Radiohead, Spoon, Arcade Fire, Of Montreal, Feist, and
The National.
posted by Soup
on Dec 18, 2007 -
68 comments
Think
the Osmond Brothers didn't rock?
Think again.
"In spite of their squeaky clean image, the Osmonds had a soulful, sometimes raucous sound which was a precursor of the power pop of later years." Color my preconceived notions shattered.
posted by KevinSkomsvold
on Nov 12, 2007 -
89 comments
BBC Introducing is an excellent way to keep tabs on what's fresh in the British popular music scene without having to live in a rainsoaked armpit. There are four podcasts for you to download, the flagship
Best of Unsigned Podcast,
Homegrown Mix with Ras Kwame,
Scotland Introducing and BBC Radio Northampton's
Weekender. All feature bands that are either unsigned or just recently signed and the music ranges from hip hop to punk rock to what sounds awfully like the soundtrack for a NES game with half-hearted chanting over it. This is an excellent resource whether you're casual searcher for new songs or the kind of anorak who knows which British indie band was first to use an 808.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 5, 2007 -
9 comments
Neutral Milk Hotel demos, videos, and bootlegs. Brainchild of enigmatic, now-reclusive singer/songwriter
Jeff Mangum (not Magnum!), the "fuzz-folk" project known as Neutral Milk Hotel began and ended in the 90s and only released
two LPs, but is still held as a touchstone by many
indie rock critics.
More
live recordings can be found at the site for
Elephant 6, the collective which included NMH and
other bands like Beulah, Circulatory System, Elf Power, and Apples in Stereo.
The complete discography and more MP3s. Some
lyrics. (
Previously)
posted by ludwig_van
on Feb 22, 2006 -
62 comments
Wolfgang's Vault :
Bill Graham, of
Fillmore fame, was born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin. He grew up to invent, more or less, the modern rock 'n' roll promotion industry. He also had an eye for the future, stashing away
posters,
T-shirts,
backstage passes,
tickets, and
photography for posterity (us).
Now, 15 years after his death, you have him to thank not only for
$350 Rolling Stones tickets but also for
$3800 Rolling Stones posters.
Purchased from
Satan at a crossroads Clear Channel a few years back, the vault also contains a bunch of audio and video
that Clear Channel didn't know it had and which we may or may not ever get to experience.
posted by bigmike
on Jan 6, 2006 -
13 comments
Music photography goodness - some UK-based photographers with plenty of image galleries of rock and pop bands:
Peter Hill (also see his
livejournal for more pics),
Ami Barwell,
Michael Williams,
Scarlet Page,
Graham Smith (on
livejournal too),
Emma Porter, and the
already mentioned Andrew Kendall (
lj).
Also
UrbanImage which licenses the work of several photographers and has sections on
jazz,
hip hop,
grime,
reggae,
punk, etc. as well as
travel photography and other
cool stuff (free registration required to access single galleries and images).
posted by funambulist
on Oct 15, 2005 -
5 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
