Posts Tagged ‘Billboard’
“An office is a place where dreams come true”*…
If You Believe the Headlines, the Office Has Been Dying for Half a Century…
August 1969: “We can now provide each individual with a choice of … working at home, where he can carry out his duties for all his assignments through computer access.” (“You’ll Never Have to Go to Work Again,” Washington Post)
April 1974: “Homework. The word conjures up the overworked executive. But everybody’s doing it. Part time. Full time. Some time.” (“The Home Office: Nice Work If You Can Stand It,” New York Magazine)
May 1982: “One joy of the coming telecommuting age is that people will be able to choose to have virtually no government by congregating with like-minded neighbors.” (“Why Men Die,” The Economist)
April 1989: “We may be at the very end of the tremendous boom in office construction and office rents that was triggered when Napoleon III created the modern city’s prototype in 1860 Paris.” (“Information and the Future of the City,” Wall Street Journal)
July 1990: “Is it possible that the shining new skyscrapers towering proudly above American cities could become the next industrial wasteland, as outmoded as the rusty factories that were the symbols of American productivity a few decades ago?” (“Are Skyscrapers Becoming Obsolete in the Computer Age?” Oregonian)
November 1995: “A few companies have tried ‘hoteling,’ in which office workers are given a space temporarily, on an ‘as-needed’ basis.” (“A U.S. Irony: Demand for Tall Buildings Is in Short Supply,” Chicago Tribune)
February 1996: “Across the US, 500 million square feet of office space stand empty, much of it in skyscrapers built during the 1980s building boom. Some experts are now predicting that this oversupply might never be absorbed.” (“Death of the office?” Irish Times)
October 2001: “More people are asking to work from home, wanting to avoid high-rise offices and be closer to family.” (“Telecommuting From Terror,” San Francisco Chronicle)
September 2014: “On 30 June the business world changed forever. From that date the government gave employees across the UK the legal right to ask for flexible working. For business leaders, including the IT team, this may have been greeted with horror, with visions of desolate offices and a mass exodus of staff, with all kinds of weird-and-wonderful home-working tech requests flooding in.” (“Legal Right to Flexible Working Spells the End of the Office,” Legal Monitor Worldwide)
May 2020: “What will become of the office buildings themselves? There are already concerns that bacteria is building up in their plumbing systems, which were never designed to be left unused for this long, leading to risks like Legionnaires’ disease.” (“The End of the Office As We Know It,” New York Times)…
As we await the verdict on post-pandemic work, a look back at 150 years of cubicles, corner offices, all-nighters, and the holiday party: “Remember the Office?” (soft paywall)
* “Michael Scott,” The Office (Season 5 Episode 13: “Stress Relief”)
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As we contemplate recommencing commuting, we might recall that it was on this date in 1973 that The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (recorded in Abbey Road Studios) hit number one on the Billboard chart, beginning a record-breaking 741-week chart run (957 weeks in total… so far).
Side Two opened with the band’s first top 10 hit in the U.S., “Money.”
You get a good job with good pay and you’re okay
Money
“In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it”*…
Magazine publishing is a dark art. But the world of niche publishing—people who create magazines for necrophiliacs or donkey hobbyists, or for those of us who like to ride really small trains—features its own requirements…
See for yourself: “Brief Interviews With Very Small Publishers.”
* Maya Angelou
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As we turn the pages, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the first issue of The Record, Canada’s music industry magazine of record, was published. For two decades it provided the canonical sales charts for the Canadian music business both directly and as part of Billboard‘s “Hits of the World” section. It ceased print publication in 1999, surviving as a website for another three years before closing altogether in 2001.
The Record’s founder, David Farrell (left) announcing NewCanadianMusic.ca in 2012
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”
From our old friends at Polygraph, a stroll down memory lane… headphones advised.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
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As we trip the light fantastic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, in the wee hours, in a motel room in Clearwater, Florida, that Keith Richards awoke, grabbed his guitar, turned on a small portable tape recorded, laid down the signature riff of ”(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”… then slipped back into the arms of Morpheus.
“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.”
“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor”*…
Studio portrait (circa 1935), one of only three verified photographs of Robert Johnson
Eric Clapton once described Robert Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”. The recordings that Johnson made between 1936 and 1937, collected in two volumes entitled King of the Delta Blues Singers, not only mark the apogee of the blues form, they stand among the most influential recordings of all time…
And now, nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard…
* Bob Dylan
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As we make our deals with the Devil, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart– the “Music Popularity Chart”– based on record sales. A listing of the ten most popular records, it became a weekly feature in 1940. It fluctuated in size from ten to 30 records until 1955, when Billboard introduced its first Top 100 chart. The “Hot 100” chart, now recognized as the definitive singles chart in the US, was first published on August 4th, 1958.
And that’s a lot…
From the cornucopia that is Network Awesome:
Buckminster Fuller – Everything I Know
In 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave a series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These lectures span 42 hours and examine all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries.
During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization. The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering…
Network Awesome is featuring one part of the series starting each Wednesday, here (and in their archive). Or readers can turn to YouTube. In either case, the pieces are bite-sized… and well worth the watching.
As we endeavor to “think outside the dome,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1974– as Fuller was agreeing to do the lectures featured above– that Paul Anka hit #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 with “(You’re) Having My Baby.”
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