Posts Tagged ‘Louie Louie’
“Every history is a map”*…
How does one visualize history and chart time? Is it a line, moving forever outward in one direction? A Grecian temple, as Emma Willard envisioned, with Ionic columns representing centuries, receding from view toward a vanishing point at the world’s origin? Or could it be a corkscrew ascending upward, allowing us to look down from our present position into past events similar to our own?
For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid — or at least it was for the purposes of remembering it. The so-called “Polish System” originated in the 1820s and was later brought to public attention in the 1830s and 1840s by General Józef Bem, a military engineer with a penchant for mnemonics. As Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg catalogue in their Cartographies of Time, the nineteenth century brimmed with new methods and technologies for committing historical information to memory — and Jażwiński’s contribution (and its later adaptations) proved one of the most popular.
The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10×10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard…
More on this proto-modernist memory palace: “Visualizing History: The Polish System.”
* Jacob Bronowski
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As we picture the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the FBI Laboratory declared the lyrics of Louie Louie to be officially “unintelligible at any speed.”
In February 1964, an outraged parent wrote to Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the U.S., alleging that the lyrics of “Louie Louie” were obscene, suggesting that “The lyrics are so filthy that I can-not [sic] enclose them in this letter.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the complaint, and looked into the various rumors of “real lyrics” that were circulating among teenagers. In June 1965, the FBI laboratory obtained a copy of the Kingsmen recording and, after 31 months of investigation, concluded that it could not be interpreted– and therefore that the Bureau could not find that the recording was obscene.
In September 1965, an FBI agent interviewed one member of the Kingsmen, who denied that there was any obscenity in the song. The FBI never interviewed songwriter Richard Berry nor consulted the actual lyrics that were on file with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Snopes suggests that while some teenage mondegreens were indeed pretty filthy, the song itself was clean.
“A very merry Unbirthday to you!”*…
There’s been a good deal of understandable concern over online platforms and the dangers that they present to our health, both personal and civic. But occasionally it’s good to remind ourselves that there are services they provide that are genuinely crucial– e.g., Is Today Ted Danson’s Birthday?
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As we go to The Good Place, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the FBI exonerated “Louie Louie,” declaring that the lyrics of the 1963 recording by The Kingsmen– widely rumored to be “dirty”– were in fact simply indecipherable. After analyzing the disc at its intended 45 rpm and also at 33 1/3 and 78, and interviewing a member of the band, the FBI Laboratory declared the lyrics to be officially “unintelligible at any speed.”
In fact the song’s creator, Richard Berry, had released “Louie Louie” to mild regional success– and no lyrical controversy– a decade earlier. But the FBI’s verdict notwithstanding, a cloud hovered over the tune: in 2005, the superintendent of the Benton Harbor, Michigan school system refused to let the marching band at one of the schools play the song in a parade; she later relented.
from the FBI’s “Louie Louie” file
Me gotta go…
In 1963, a Portland high school band called the Kingsmen covered the song “Louie Louie,” originally recorded by Richard Berry eight years earlier. Their version has become a classic– though almost no one has any idea what the actual words are. (Hear it here.) As it happened, the band had a one-hour recording session in which to lay down both the A and B sides of their first record. To simulate a live performance, singer Jack Ely was forced to lean back and sing into a microphone suspended from the ceiling. “It was more yelling than singing,” Ely said, “’cause I was trying to be heard over all the instruments.” It didn’t help that he was wearing braces at the time of the performance, further aggravating his infamously slurred words. Still, the raw recording worked– it sold over 1 million copies, going gold.
It probably helped that Indiana Governor Matthew E. Welsh, assuming that obscurity meant obscenity, banned the song. Soon after, an angry parent wrote to then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, insisting that the lyrics were dirty. Kennedy put FBI on the case; but the crime lab concluded, after four months of investigation, that the the recording could not be interpreted, that it was “unintelligible at any speed.” The lyrics are in fact innocent; but the FBI missed something: at about 0:53 into the song– audibly, but not obviously– Lynn Easton, the band’s drummer, drops a drumstick… and drops the f-bomb. (Hear it here.)
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As we mind our manners, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that AC/DC earned their first Top 40 hit with “You Shook Me All Night Long.” The maiden voyage of Brian Johnson (who’d replaced the band’s original lead singer Bon Scott after Scott’s untimely the prior year), it was the lead single on Back in Black, an album that has sold over 20 million copies.
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Where everybody knows your name…
Some have fame thrust upon them…
Some just happen upon it along the way…
Artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley has mashed up Google Maps and the Open Street Map Project to create a search tool that will let one find all of the streets in the U.S. that share one’s name (first name, for now… as a bonus, one also gets places and things).
One can visit Steve’s Data Pointed to find one’s namesakes…
As we rethink our routes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the FBI exonerated “Louie Louie,” declaring that the lyrics of the 1963 recording by The Kingsmen– widely rumored to be “dirty”— were in fact simply indecipherable. After analyzing the disc at its intended 45 rpm and also at 33 1/3 and 78, and interviewing a member of the band, the FBI Laboratory declared the lyrics to be officially “unintelligible at any speed.”
In fact the song’s creator, Richard Berry, had released “Louie Louie” to mild regional success– and no lyrical controversy– a decade earlier. But the FBI’s verdict notwithstanding, a cloud hovered over the tune: in 2005, the superintendent of the Benton Harbor, Michigan school system refused to let the marching band at one of the schools play the song in a parade; she later relented.
from the FBI’s “Louie Louie” file (source)
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