Posts Tagged ‘Grammy’
“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language”*…
Our language is constantly evolving. Colin Gorrie offers a nifty illustration of the development of English…
A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the languageis real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.
It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.
Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger)…
Read it and reap: “How far back in time can you understand English?” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.
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As we travel through time, we might note that not every new emergence becomes sedimented into the evolutionary path, as we recall that on this date in 1980 that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the first– and last– Grammy for Best Disco Recording. By the time that the Academy got around to it, disco was pretty much dead.
“I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor was the big winner that night. The other nominees were: Earth, Wind & Fire for “Boogie Wonderland,” Michael Jackson for “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” Donna Summer for “Bad Girls,” and Rod Stewart for “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (In January 2020, Gaynor won her second Grammy Award in her career for her gospel album Testimony.)
“We got the beat”*…
The drum machine is one of the most effective musical inventions of our time. It’s affordable, easy to use, and ruthless in its precision, able to do exactly what it’s been told for as long as required (so long as you’ve got an AC adaptor). Of course, not everybody warms to the drum machine’s big plastic buttons and bright LED screen…
Starting from the Italian Futurists, “A Brief History of the Drum Machine in Rock Music.”
* The Go-Gos
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As we lay in the loop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that NARAS stripped Milli Vanilli of the Grammy that they had won earlier that year. One of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s, their album debut album Girl You Know It’s True achieved international success and earned them the Grammy for Best New Artist. But when it was revealed that neither of the duo (Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus) had actually sung lead vocals on the albums songs, the award was withdrawn. The group recorded a comeback album, Back and in Attack, in 1998, but Rob Pilatus died before the album was released.
Milli Vanilli at the 1990 Grammys
A rose by any other name…
From Geotastic, “Vaguely Rude Place Names of the World.”
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As book our next vacations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” beat out Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” to win the first– and only– “Best Disco Recording” Grammy ever awarded.
Tripping the Light Fantastic…
Click here to watch full-screen (at least some of) the history of Western dance music unfold
Music tourism (visiting a city or town to see a gig or festival) is on the rise. But why stop at gigs and festivals? Why not visit the birthplace of your favourite genre and follow the actual journey various music genres have taken as one style developed into another.
To make it easier to trace the threads of music history, we’ve created an interactive map detailing the evolution of western dance music over the last 100 years. [It’s actually from the late 18th Century to the present…] The map shows the time and place where each of the music styles were born and which blend of genres influenced the next…
One can (and surely should) quibble with the map-makers’ bias to Afro-Carribean-based dance music (what about the Virginia reel, and its antecedents? Or Latin dance music?) But then, that’s fun of artifacts like this– the challenge to make them “better,” to make them one’s own…
Watch the interactive history unfold and read the full background at Thomson Travel’s “Evolution of Western Dance Music.”
And lest one doubt that music is in fact contagious, consider this evidence from the PRC:
As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that producer Frank Farian publicly admitted that the voices heard on the recordings of Milli Vanilli were not the actual voices of the duo (Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus). Shortly thereafter, the “Best New Artist” Grammy that the group had won earlier that year was recalled… In this age of wide-spread lip-syncing and Auto-Tune, it all seems so quaint…
… so you don’t have to…
Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on anime cancer demons, softcore Iraq War porn and racist ventriloquism, and this week, it’s the most unnecessary sequel since Caddyshack IV: Oblivion.
ACE VENTURA : PET DETECTIVE JR. (2009)
Starring: Existential dread.
If you’re anywhere near my age, then you probably remember when Ace Ventura: Pet Detective hit theaters, and how it led to 7th graders across the nation upgrading their playground Fire Marshall Bill impressions into full-fledged Ace Ventura riffs that were only slightly less funny than the end of Old Yeller by fall. Looking back, I can pinpoint the class (third period Social Studies) where I came to the conclusion that if I never heard another pre-teen drop an “alllllllll righty then,” it’d be too soon.
And then someone had to go and spend more money than I’ve ever seen to make that very thing happen.
Read the entire review here, then check out the Worst of Netflix Archive. It’s the handiwork of Chris Sims, one of whose other endeavors, Chris’ Invincible Super Blog is a treasure of sufficient worth to have become an “easter egg” in Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside.
As we cull our queues, we might bid a profane farewell to wise and witty George Carlin, the Grammy-winning comedian who is probably best remembered for his routine (originated on his third album) “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” When it was first broadcast on New York radio, a complaint led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban the broadcast as “indecent,” an order that was upheld by the Supreme Court and remains in effect today. Not coincidentally, Carlin was selected to host the first Saturday Night Live.
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