The Music of Jacques Brel is an article by music journalist Amy Hanson about the career of pop music legend Jacques Brel and his effect on popular music in the English language. A lot of songs and covers are mentioned in the article, below the cut are links to the songs that I could find videos of online.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 6, 2010 -
49 comments
Silly old Grace Jones is, what, now -- 62? You remember her. Yeah, but how about recalling this -- her '
Walking in the Rain'? Remember that?
Just a copy, a bad one. Of a
bad song, by eighties New Wave droners
Flash and the Pan.
Yecch. Songwriter? Diminutive George Young, there with the Chinese eyes and cigar. Born in Scotland, he was taken with music and especially the British invasion when he was a teen.
Earlier, he was a guitarist for the mid-sixties group The Easybeats, who recorded an absolute classic, '
Friday on My Mind,' which he co-wrote. He's still the short one there, incidentally. David Bowie famously covered it,
on Pin-ups.
Anyway, his folks moved to Australia while he was still in his teens, which in parts explains why the Easybeats are considered the greatest sixties group
from 'down under.' Hey, who knew?
And who knew
this? George's little brothers did
even better than
he did,
Rock n' Roll wise.
posted by toma
on Jul 3, 2010 -
58 comments
"Having vaulted from the fringes of pop culture into the mainstream after a newly atomic America became obsessed with films about mutants and aliens, SF literature matured and flowered throughout the '60s and beyond, just as rock 'n' roll did the same.
It was inevitable that the two would mix."
posted by gman
on Jun 23, 2010 -
47 comments
For the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley (yesterday in most time zones), here is an Elvis Impersonator doing famous TV theme songs:
The Flintstones,
The Partridge Family,
Rawhide,
WKRP (opening theme, wish he'd try the end theme),
Danger Man (Secret Agent Man, the full-length Johnnie Rivers version),
The Brady Bunch,
The Love Boat and
Cheers (maybe next time Frasier's 'scrambled eggs song'?).
Other wacky musical repurposing from the same silly singer includes David Bowie (celebrating his 62nd birthday on the 8th) doing Elvis'
Viva Las Vegas.
posted by oneswellfoop
on Jan 8, 2010 -
13 comments
Synth Britannia "Documentary following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage.
In the late 1970s, small pockets of electronic artists including the Human League, Daniel Miller and Cabaret Voltaire were inspired by Kraftwerk and JG Ballard and dreamt of the sound of the future against the backdrop of bleak, high-rise Britain."
posted by vronsky
on Nov 19, 2009 -
14 comments
Amanda Lear is one of the greatest enigmatic personalities to emerge from the 70's. Known in equal measures for her disco hits (such as
Enigma,
Queen of Chinatown, and
Follow Me WARNING, youtube link) and her affairs with David Bowie, Brian Ferry of Roxy Music (and thus appearing on their
For Your Pleasure album cover) and Salvador Dali. Her past was
hazy at best. The most debated aspect of her past (so prevalent as to be mentioned even in
reviews of her paintings is what sex she was born (One popular telling of the rumor even claimed it was
Dali who paid for her surgery to become a woman). Her more recent, very private life took a tragic turn in 2000 when her home in France burned down killing her husband, the equally interesting
Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villele. [MI]
posted by piratebowling
on Mar 13, 2006 -
17 comments
An unexpected side effect of iTunes. Remember
Bowie Bonds? Introduced in 1997, bonds tied to future profits of music artists (besides Bowie, James Brown and the Isley Brothers offered them) tanked with the advent of online filesharing. Thanks to iTunes, some on Wall Street are betting that the Bowie Bond is a concept with a future.
posted by me3dia
on Aug 23, 2005 -
16 comments
60 school kids from the 70s singing Bowie's Space Oddity. An incredible recording. A 60 student chorus of western Canadian rural school children belting out, among other things, Good Vibrations, Desperado, and, the cream of the crop, I think, Klaatu's Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. mp3 samples on the page. It is amazing. Read David Bowie's quip. (And the quip from the American Orff-Schulwerk Association is classic.)
posted by mmarcos
on Nov 8, 2001 -
48 comments
