Sounds of America is a new monthly streaming audio program, a collaboration between the National Museum of American History and Smithsonian Global Sound. Up now are 3 episodes: African-American music in New Orleans, Women in American Music, and Freedom Songs of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
posted on Apr 2, 2008 - View this thread

John Rawls gives six reasons why baseball is the best of all games. Marianne Moore's "Baseball & Writing." John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."
posted on Mar 11, 2008 - View this thread

Who knew when Arnel Pineda, lead singer of a Journey cover band called "The Zoo," posted videos of his band on YouTube that he'd grab the attention of Journey itself and be invited to be its new lead singer? (via)
posted on Feb 22, 2008 - View this thread

Songerize [via]
posted on Feb 8, 2008 - View this thread

The 25 Greatest Duets Of All Time (with embedded YouTube videos of each) from retroCRUSH. Duets, by nature, are a corny type of song. Sure, there's a handful that we recognize here that are also some of best tunes ever recorded, but there's something inherently cheesy and fun about duets that make them a fun guilty pleasure for millions to enjoy.
posted on Jan 26, 2008 - View this thread

A good chuckle about surviving the hellidays: Dysfunctional Family Holidays, the music l an interactive karaoke with several songs l What exactly is a dysfunctional family? l What are the roles for the kids?
posted on Dec 25, 2007 - View this thread

Shel Silverstein, songwriter. "A Boy Named Sue," as performed by Johnny Cash; "One's on the Way," performed by Loretta Lynn; "The Unicorn Song" performed by the Irish Rovers. (All YouTube links)
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Claude François was one of France's most successful popstars, a complete song-and-dance act who remained at the top of the charts for almost ten years before his career was tragically cut short when he tried to change a lightbulb while in the bath (youtube ahead).
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

First she was a dancer but after an injury she had to sing to make a living. She still dances a little during her songs (a rare feat among flamenco cantaoras). I first heard about her when she made a whole record (cd) of Edith Piaf's songs in spanish. You can get a taste here. She talks about it here (spanish + french, excerpts). She sang les feuilles mortes too. But nothing equals seeing her, I think : so here she is with two covers from a recent documentary : a song by Edith Piaf, a song by Lola Flores. Btw, If you get into french songs in the flamenco idiom, try this.
posted on Oct 11, 2007 - View this thread

"I just turned on my little iMovie, and here I am!" This week, Hollywood Records announced a record deal with female vocalist and underground sensation Marié Digby. Over the past few months, she has over 2.3 million cumulative Youtube hits, and has become a veritable rags to riches story - a testament, if you will, to how the Internet is changing the world of entertainment. What the label failed to mention was that Digby had already been signed to Hollywood Records for almost two years, well before she became a hit. A case of manufactured networking, or simply a "major" misunderstanding?
posted on Sep 6, 2007 - View this thread

Ingmar Bergman once said that Roy Andersson "makes the best commercials in the world." The 64 year old Swedish director has also made a couple of striking feature films, including the 2000 Cannes Jury Prize winner Songs from the Second Floor (excerpt / reviews) and this year's still unreleased You, the Living (excerpt / review).
posted on Aug 8, 2007 - View this thread

Tommy Makem has passed. May a craic wake follow. Tommy Makem, he of the Clancy Brothers, and solo fame, has died of lung cancer. He will be missed. Raise a pint and sing a wee bit in his honor.
posted on Aug 2, 2007 - View this thread

Speaking of 'highly virulent earworms,' today's NY Times suggests that searching for this year's 'song of the summer' may lead to "one sad conclusion." Have today's hitmakers failed to live up to the jams of yesteryear? Others have offered their opinions...
posted on Jul 19, 2007 - View this thread

Brian Dewan, "The Vice Principal of Rock," sings a selection of campaign songs... because zither is the last word in rock this campaign season. Hearken! (previously)
posted on Jun 27, 2007 - View this thread

The 25 most exquisitely sad songs in the whole world. (via I Will Dare)
posted on May 9, 2007 - View this thread

Americas Favorite Architecture - The American Institute of Architecture lists its 150 most favorite buildings as ranked by its members. Zoom-able photos and building information herein. You can also rate your top five.
posted on May 3, 2007 - View this thread

The always-excellent (and MeFi fave) Jonathan Coulton, inspired by Alanis Morissette's cover of My Humps from a few weeks ago, has done a marvelously droll cover of You Oughta Know.
posted on Apr 19, 2007 - View this thread

It seems apropos today to post about Bollywood and its style of romance and love. Songs are often the equivalent of a bedroom scene, a fact I didn't believe until it was pointed out to me that there were numerous instances of extremely suggestive songs followed by pregnancy. Bollywood also uses songs to arouse patriotic fervour, a trait that master music director A.R. Rahman takes to new heights with his release of the classics Vande Mataram [Motherland, I salute thee] and Jana Gana Mana [India's national anthem]. But even before him, there were classics of public service advertising such as "Mile sur tera hamara..." a fuzzy video but inspiring nonetheless of the myriads of voices and languages spoken in India. Other loves that hindi cinema celebrates through its songs is that of a mother for a child, god, love across cultural boundaries and what is politely termed as "conjugal love".
posted on Feb 14, 2007 - View this thread

"John Smith, Youngest, of Crutherland, was given the honorary degree of LL.D in 1840. In 1842 he announced the bequest to the University [of Glasgow] of his runs of publications from learned societies, and his volumes of ephemeral items. These came to the library on Smith’s death in 1849." Some examples: Playbill, Theatre Royal, York Street. Broadsheet account of an attempted prison break. Radical Party election ballad. See also: Glasgow Broadside Ballads: cheap print and popular song culture in nineteenth-century Scotland and Glasgow Broadside Ballads: The Murray Collection
posted on Feb 3, 2007 - View this thread

Lines from Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic", modified to actually be ironic.
posted on Jan 13, 2007 - View this thread

What inoffensive songs do people find scary? A list asked for by a curious Jarvis Cocker, former frontman of the band Pulp.
My favorite entry:
"Laughing Gnome - Bowie. Scared the crap out of me as a kid. I remember getting my parents to check under the bed. My father, a bit of an evil electronics bastard put a speaker under my bed one night and played the song just as I was drifting off. He then ran in when I started screaming and pulled out a doll from under the bead and chopped its head off with a machete. God I need therapy."
posted on Oct 3, 2006 - View this thread

32 worst lyrics of all time
posted on Jul 21, 2006 - View this thread

Science sites of all kinds for kids. Archeology. Entomology. Natural Symphony. Baseball in Space. Philosophy. Process or Content. Science songs. Physics songs, relativity. String theory. Science and Art.
posted on Jun 26, 2006 - View this thread

Blender, meet science: The Pain, the Pain: Modelling Music Information Behavior and the Songs We Hate [link to 454Kb PDF]. The paper, presented at ISMIR 2005, offers "a grounded theory analysis of 395 user responses to the survey question 'What is the worst song ever?'"
posted on May 22, 2006 - View this thread

TV Theme Songs: The Dukes of Hazzard, The Love Boat, Taxi, Knight Rider, Air Wolf, The Prisoner, and many more. From TV Cream previously mentioned 1, 2, 3.
posted on May 15, 2006 - View this thread

The verses no one dares to sing these days ... Till selfish gain No longer stain The banner of the free!
posted on Apr 28, 2006 - View this thread

A few songs about comic strips. Here is Edward Meeker performing "Oh Min!" (mp3 link), a song about Sidney Smith's "The Gumps". Barney Google also had a song or two (mp3 links). Little Orphan Annie is probably the most famous (Real Audio), aside from Popeye.
posted on Apr 25, 2006 - View this thread

Song Tapper lets you to use your space bar as an instrument. Tap in a song rhythm and Song Tapper will identify it for you with its internety black magic.
posted on Jan 11, 2006 - View this thread

Dictionaraoke. Your favorite songs, as performed by the audio pronunciation samples from online dictionaries.
posted on Sep 8, 2005 - View this thread

St. James Infirmary, in a funereal, no lyrics, brass-band version underlies a persistent scrum of half-remembered songs about New Orleans rising in concert with the waters, lapping at the sandbags of my mind. Up front, Tom Waits (I Wish I Was in New Orleans) and Randy Newman (Lousiana 1927) are duking it out for time at the piano, elaborately filigreed chords overlapping and changing the dominant lyric at the moment of harmonic convergence, while in the background Arlo Guthrie (The City of New Orleans) warbles about a train ride. Professor Longhair and/or The Dixie Cups (Big Chief, Iko Iko) sort of amusedly fight to keep sliptime with the martial drums from Jimmy Driftwood's The Battle of New Orleans (caution: embedded quicktime) behind the whole toxic soup of sonic residue. I'm sure the stew will grow more dense over the next couple weeks. Got a New Orleans song to toss into the waters?
posted on Aug 30, 2005 - View this thread

BBC Radio 2 -- Sold On Song The website for this show on BBC Radio 2 is pretty awesome; it's got a list of pages on various classic songs in their library (also sortable by artist), which includes song clips and (where available) clips from covers of the songs, taken from the same place -- check out the various It Must Be Loves (originally by Madness Labi Siffre) -- my favorite will always be the Madness one, but the Lyn Paul version is actually pretty cool. There's also some weird and awful covers available for the picking. I've just been spending about an hour or two picking through random songs and noting on which ones are as good as the original or ones that just fall so very short. (They've also got lots of other content, like the songwriting guide, but the real fun is in the song pages, reading about these great songs and listening to other people do their own cuts on them. [All links go to text; all sound files are in RealAudio.]
posted on Jul 28, 2005 - View this thread

The Anti-Hit List , by John Sakamoto, continues to unearth music from the depths of the net and through rare releases. It can be found in the pages of the Toronto Star and is now available in convenient podcast form. Note: previous death and rebirth of the site.
posted on Jul 3, 2005 - View this thread

Immortalia: a website ‘dedicated to traditional bawdy songs, erotic toasts and other recitations.’ See, for example, the list of bawdy songbooks, variously in text and PDF formats, beginning with songs from a 1661 book of ‘Merry Drollery.’ Many songs are displayed alongside the appropriate sheet music, for example I Used To Work In Chicago and The Sexual Life of the Camel. There are numerous mp3s too, both samples and entire songs, many of which are field recordings by the site’s proprietor, John Mehlberg. Please note that the songs range from plain stupid to extremely offensive, that many pages have embedded audio, and that the site is confusingly-organised and may crash your browser. The site as a whole is NSFW.
posted on Jun 23, 2005 - View this thread

Buying Rare Race Records in the South. Music That Americans Loved 100 Years Ago. The Cheney Talking Machine. Just three among dozens of amazing articles about early recording machines and American popular music at the astonishingly detailed site of Tim Gracyk, author of Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895-1925. Scroll down for bios of forgotten stars, including Nora Bayes - who performed in the Follies of 1907, before Flo Ziegfeld's name became part of the title, George W. Johnson - "the most important African-American recording artist of the 1890s," and piano player Zez Confrey, whose sheet music for the 1921 hit "Kitten on the Keys" sold over a million copies and became "the third most-frequently recorded rag in history."
posted on May 17, 2005 - View this thread

The songs at the top of the world Unbelievable music from the land of the gods, Tibet - Haunting eerie and warming. I have no more words for this music.
posted on May 7, 2005 - View this thread

Got a title but no song? Like an Exploding Dog for music, Request-a-Song.com takes submitted titles and composes songs around them, with some surprisingly good results.
posted on May 3, 2005 - View this thread

Lets wade in the water, Coded slave songs.
posted on Apr 27, 2005 - View this thread

Fitness to Practice is a collection of songs written and performed by Amateur Transplants, two practicing doctors from the UK. The album consists of original songs as well as witty parodies of songs originally performed by among others Tom Lehrer and The Jam (mp3 links). The lyrics contain a lot of medical in-jokes, but the humour is broad enough to appeal to everyone.
posted on Mar 31, 2005 - View this thread

M M M My Sharona... M M M My real estate agent? Sharona Alperin was only 17 when she inspired the Knack's 1979 hit single "My Sharona." Now she sells real estate in Los Angeles...On the flip side of lyrical fame, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer inspired another set of lyrics in 1979 -- the Boomtown Rats' haunting song "I Don't Like Mondays" -- which chronicled Spencer's slaying of eight school children and a principal at an elementary school near her San Diego, CA-area home. It's not an urban legend: Spencer told a reporter who called her during the 6 1/2 -hour siege that she opened fire because, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." Spencer reminds us today that schoolyard shootings are not a new phenomenon. Now 42, Brenda is serving a 25-year sentence and is up for parole soon...
posted on Mar 22, 2005 - View this thread

Fake Jim Steinman song titles.
posted on Feb 20, 2005 - View this thread

While culling my clippings file for the big move, I came across Ragtime: No Longer a Novelty in Sepia, which led me to the The Rag-Time Ephemeralist, a labor of love by one Chris Ware , whose 'The Acme Novelty Library' and Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy In The World I had long admired. The Ragtime Ephemeralist's mention of Out of Sight - The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895---here's a review from Musical Traditions--and, its very own links page, as a consequence, led to this post about Ragtime, Cakewalks, Coon Songs and Vaudeville, with a slight nod to Barbershop Quartets. There's more, of course...
posted on Jan 21, 2005 - View this thread

I know we're all contemplating leftovers today, so I thought some food safety music would be appropriate. Dr. Carl Winter's website includes lyrics, video clips, and streaming audio of such songs as "A Case of Norwalk", "Don't Get Sicky Wit It", "I Sprayed It On The Grapevine", and "Beware La Vaca Loca."
posted on Nov 26, 2004 - View this thread

Song meanings is a site where you can read the lyrics to a song and then post your thoughts on what the song means.
posted on Nov 18, 2004 - View this thread

"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from Bob Dylan's new autobiography, Chronicles, with a brief interview, via Newsweek
posted on Sep 26, 2004 - View this thread

Kodomo no kuni - children's book illustrations and songs from 1920s Japan. I found the artist's index the best way to navigate. (via the always entertaining quiddity)
posted on Aug 21, 2004 - View this thread

The American Film Institute (a.k.a. "The Listmakers Who Just Won't Quit") have announced their long-awaited ground-breaking top 100 movie songs of all time.
posted on Jun 24, 2004 - View this thread

The story of "St. James Infirmary." You thought it was a piece of old New Orleans? Turns out St. James Hospital was in London (and treated lepers), and the song goes back at least to the 18th century (though it used to be sung to the tune of "Streets of Laredo"). Rob Walker's Letter From New Orleans #13 describes the results of his obsessive researches. If you have more info, he wants to hear from you! (Via Wordorigins, a site any word lover should know.)
posted on Jun 11, 2004 - View this thread

Yes, Here Are The Songs To Wear Pants To: He turns emails into music. You can send titles, lyrics, directions, and anything else that can be described in words and they may end up on this site as little songs
posted on Jun 10, 2004 - View this thread

The 50 Coolest Song Parts [RetroCrush] As always, bringing up our favorites... um... song parts... will be more constructive and fun than destroying the list.
posted on Jun 8, 2004 - View this thread

Blender Magazine lists the 50 worst songs of all time. Wait. Before you click the link know the the geniuses over at Blender only post songs 50 (Celline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On") through 41 (Color Me Badd's “I Wanna Sex You Up.” Yeah, I'm going to go buy a copy just for this article, aren't you? Fortunately, MSN spares us the torment of not knowing what the worst song of all time might be. Ready? Starship's "We Built This City." Now recognizing that it's the job of critics to make choices, and this is an impossible one, surely we can do better than that, no? [via danieldrezner.com]
posted on Apr 23, 2004 - View this thread