In occasione dell’uscita del nuovo album “Modern Times” dopo 5 anni di pausa, peraltro riempita da una miriade di concerti, Google onora Bob Dylan con questa pagina di video.
Category Archives: Pop
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
Because of this big mass of materials (about 55 billion pages), the search engine sometimes is unresponsive. Be patient.
In the meantime, listen to the Grateful Dead.
Beatles analizzati
In 1989 the American musicologist Alan W. Pollack started to analyze the songs of the Beatles. He published his first results on internet. In 1991 — after he had finished the work on 28 songs — he bravely decided to do the whole lot of them. About ten years later, in 2000 he completed the analysis of the official Beatles’ canon, consisting of 187 songs and 25 covers. Now the journal on media culture soundscapes.info have ordered this massive work in five categories. And, for your convenience, they have added an alphabetical, a canonical and a chronological index as well as a short introduction.
You can find all materials here.
The work is beautiful and very accurate. For each song Pollack analyze the structure, the style, form, melody, harmony and arrangement. A detailed section-by-section walkthrough follows. This is a very important resource for every people interested in popular music.
Nel 1989 il musicologo americano Alan W. Pollack ha iniziato la sua analisi delle canzoni dei Beatles, pubblicando i risultati in internet.
Nel 1991, dopo aver terminato le prime 28 canzoni, ha deciso, coraggiosamente, di continuare. 10 anni dopo, nel 2000, ha completato l’analisi dell’intero corpus ufficiale delle canzoni dei Beatles che consiste di 187 pezzi e 25 cover. Ora la rivista soundscapes.info ha riorganizzato il grande lavoro di Pollack e creato degli indici (alfabetico, cronologico e canonico). Il tutto è liberamente consultabile in rete qui.
Il lavoro è notevole. Per ogni canzone Pollack esamina la struttura generale del pezzo soffermandosi poi su stile, forma, melodia, armonia e arrangiamento. Segue poi una analisi dettagliata sezione per sezione. Una risorsa imperdibile per un cultore di popular music.
Dead Elvis
Yesterday, August 16, it was 29 year from Elvis Presley death. The Elvis fame don’t fall off. As dead, “The Pelvis” earns more than $30 millions each year from royalties on music, films and image. Here in Europe the majors are asking for a copyright extension to 95 years, like the “Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act” which preserved the Mickey Mouse copyright to Disney.
But the Elvis fame outsell even Mickey Mouse. There is a book called “Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession” which collects all the sights of Elvis after his death (no one see Mickey Mouse instead :-)).
In 1993 the composer Michael Daugherty wrote a piece whose title is again “Dead Elvis”. In the program notes, Daugherty says:
In Dead Elvis (1993), the bassoon soloist is an Elvis impersonator accompanied by a chamber ensemble. It is more than a coincidence that Dead Elvis is scored for the same instrumentation as Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat (1918), in which a soldier sells his violin, and his soul, to the devil for a magic book. I offer a new spin on this Faustian scenario: a rock star sells out to Hollywood, Colonel Parker, and Las Vegas for wealth and fame.
The style is a sort of post-modern collage that Boulez don’t like (see previous post) but in my opinion the music is pretty and fun.
I 50 album che hanno cambiato la musica?
To celebrate fifty years of its album chart, The Observer Review’s panel of critics argues for 50 albums that changed music.
IMHO this kind of charts is only a curiosity. It’s something to discuss on the beach when there is nothing else to do. Maybe younger people could find something “new” to listen to.
Of course the musical area is the popular music in the most general meaning. There is no experimental music, and not even the jazz is mentioned (but Miles Davis).
Best positions are:
- The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), the album with the Warhol’s banana on the cover.
- The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
- Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express (1977)
Strawberry Fields Forever
40 years ago, on Almeria shore (Andalusia, Spain) where he was on vacation, John Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields Forever. The song was inspired by a Liverpool’s orphanage (Strawberry Fields, closed from 2005) with a park where baby Lennon sometimes played.
Almeria does not forget and organize a celebration from september 19 to november 6, the six weeks of Lennon’s vacation (october 9 is also the Lennon’s birthday).
If you read spanish, this is the site.
Let me take you down
cause I’m going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever
Syd Barrett
Syd Barrett died of (it seems) a diabetes-related illness on July 7, 2006 at his home in Cambridgeshire at the age of 60.
Retired from public eye from the seventies, he was a living legend.
Music samples from Wikipedia (ogg format) and a video of Astronomy Domine (Pink Floyd, 1967) from YouTube
Per i fans dei Radiohead
L’attivissimo Joyello ha scoperto una curiosità sul loro quarto album (Kid-A) che vale pena di provare. La potete leggere QUI.
Se avete un qualsiasi software di elaborazione audio potete anche farvelo da soli.
Sì, lo che in questa occasione sembra che giochiamo a ping-pong, ma così è la vita.