...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
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
Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution is a CBS News special, broadcast in April 1967. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein and is probably one of the first examples of pop music being examined as a 'serious' art form. The film features many scenes shot in Los Angeles in late 1966, including interviews with Frank Zappa and Graham Nash, as well as the now legendary Brian Wilson solo performance of "Surf's Up." (MLYT) [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator
on Apr 29, 2011 -
15 comments
Elis Regina was perhaps the biggest Brazilian popstar of her time. The clip in the first link is a single song from a TV special she did in 1973, at the height of her powers, and which has been
put online in its entirety. The song, Águas de Março, was a Tom Jobim composition, which they
sang together on the album Elis & Tom, which also featured such gems as
Corcovado,
Inútil paisagem and
Triste. Over her career Elis Regina worked with a who's who of Brazilian popular music, and there's quite a lot of material out there. The best places I've found are YouTube channels
elisetom1974,
Eurachel and, though the Elis Regina material is mixed in with other stuff,
jordaoqualquer is a treasure trove. Elis Regina died from an alcohol and cocaine overdose in 1982, 36 years of age. Last year NPR had a
short appreciation of her as part of its 50 Great Voices series.
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 5, 2011 -
26 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
The
original
version of "My Way" ("Comme d'Habitude", Frank Sinatra's version was a cover) was written by
Claude Francois, AKA
"CloClo". Somewhere between a French Wayne Newton and Elvis, he died when he was taking a bath, saw a lightbulb had gone out, and tried to replace it while standing in water, completing the circuit. Some of his hit songs include:
Belinda,
Belles Belles Belles (cover of
"Girls Girls Girls"),
Si J'avais un
Marteau (if I had a Hammer),
Sale
Bonhomme (French country, cover of Johnny Cash's "Dirty Dan"),
Le Disco est Francais
His scantily clad female backup dancers, called the
"Claudettes" or
Clodettes, were the inspiration for the Solid Gold dancers and had
their own short-lived solo spinoff career where they tried to cash in on the
kung-fu + disco
craze.
posted by destro
on Aug 1, 2010 -
27 comments
The Thriller Diaries: Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” remains the most popular music video of all time: a 14-minute horror spoof that changed the business. Behind the scenes it gave its star a temporary home with director John Landis, sparked a near romance with actress Ola Ray, and revealed how damaged the young pop idol already was.
posted by reenum
on Jun 24, 2010 -
33 comments
She's been called "the greatest posthumous success story in music history." But when she died of melanoma at age 33, few people outside of the Washington DC-area had heard of
Eva Marie Cassidy.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 17, 2010 -
62 comments
Music! - A 1968 documentary by the National Music Council of Great Britain, featuring folk singing, The Beatles, and even early electronic music produced by tape splicing.
Part 1,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4,
part 5.
posted by Artw
on Mar 7, 2010 -
8 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
