Posts Tagged ‘Marvin Gaye’
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”*…
The end of the year approaches, and thoughts turn to retrospectives. In what has become a (Roughly) Daily tradition, today’s edition features a year-end recap from the estimable Tom Whitwell, who shares a full deck of fascinating things he learned in 2024. For example…
6. The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]
7. Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]
22. In 2022, 55% of Macy’s income came from credit cards rather than retail sales. That’s fairly normal for US department stores. [Pan Kwan Yuk]
29. You can buy 200 real human molars for $900. [B for Bones, via Lauren]
32. In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5. [Our World in Data, via Boyan Slat]
42. n the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Spider-Man: Homecoming), up almost 300% since the 1990s. [Daniel Parris]
46. Between the 1920s and 1950s, millions of ‘enemies of the people’ — often educated elites — were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union. Today, the areas around those camps are more prosperous and productive than similar areas. [Toews & Vézina]
Many more fascinating factoids at: “52 things I learned in 2024,” from @TomWhitwell.
Previous lists: 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023… and sprinkled throughout the December postings in (R)D over the years.
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As we forage, we might recall that on this date in 1968 Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was in the middle of its seven-week occupancy of the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.
A year earlier, Gladys Knight and the Pips had had a hit with the tune (#1 on the R&B chart; #2 on the Hot 100). Gaye’s version overtook its predecessor and became the biggest hit single on the Motown family of labels up to that point. The Gaye recording has since become an acclaimed soul classic. In 1998 the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “historical, artistic and significant” value.
“He’s like the ghost in the machine”*…
Sasha Kay on Clyde Stubblefield’s 20-second drum break that became one of the most sampled beats in music…
On November 20 1969, musical history was being made in a red-brick end-of-terrace in Cincinnati, Ohio. The sounds of cymbals and snares leaking out from under a garage roller door included a beat you’ve probably heard hundreds of times — perhaps without even knowing it.
At King Records’ low-key studio, drummer Clyde Stubblefield was improvising a 20-second breakbeat during a James Brown jam session which became known as “Funky Drummer”, a track that dramatically changed the course of music sampling and moulded the hip-hop genre which would be born a few years later.
Brown stresses Stubblefield’s genius in the song’s title and in various flamboyant asides stippled throughout the break — “Ain’t it funky” — but Mr Funky Drummer himself never received a penny from the track’s royalties. As was typical for the time, Stubblefield was on a work-for-hire contract, meaning his performance was legally attributed to Brown. Despite cooing “I wanna give the drummer some” over Stubblefield’s snares, Brown never gave Stubblefield a dime.
“Funky Drummer” fell short of the top 50 chart when it was released as a single in March 1970, but the record had a remarkable afterlife…
[Kay recounts the extraordinary life of the break as a sample in other musicians’ (especially Hip Hop artists’) works. See here for as complete a list as one’s likely to find– over 1,860 songs.]
… At the end of Stubblefield’s life, Prince paid around $80,000 of his medical bills — perhaps the singer’s personal reparation for mislaid royalties after sampling the beat in his “Gangster Glam” (1991).
Although “Funky Drummer” is a strong contender for the world’s most sampled beat, most wouldn’t recognise it in another tune, and much less know the drummer’s name. Stubblefield often said he was influenced by the sounds of factories and railways he grew up around — and no doubt many young instrumentalists have unknowingly been shaped by a music culture framed by his rhythm…
“Funky Drummer — pop history was made when James Brown hollered ‘Hit it!’,” from @FT.
For an appreciation of Stubblefield by Ahmir Thompson (AKA Questlove), see here.
* Questlove on Clyde Stubblefield
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As we beatify the beat, we might spare a thought for another undersung hero of percussion, Uriel Jones; he died on this date in 2009. The drummer in Motown‘s in-house studio band, the Funk Brothers, during the 1960s and early 1970s, he can be heard on dozens of recordings, including classics like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye, “Cloud Nine” by the Temptations, “The Tracks of my Tears” and “I Second That Emotion” by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, “For Once In My Life” by Stevie Wonder, and both versions of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell in 1967 and the 1970 remake by Diana Ross).
You are (how you say) what you eat…
Bert Vaux, now at Cambridge University, created The Dialect Survey while teaching at Harvard. Dr. Vaux and his colleagues asked scores of North Americans to pronounce several dozen common English words and phrases, recoded their pronunciations, and mapped the results– as for “pecan,” above. The full list is at The Dialect Survey; each example clicks through to a set of maps like this one.
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As we mind our p’s and q’s, we might spare a thought for an extraordinary enunciator, Tammi Terrell; she died, aged 24, on this date in 1970. Born Thomasina Winifred Montgomery, Terrell had begun performing at age 14, recording for Sceptre Records, then for James Brown’s Try Me label, before signing with Motown in 1965. After two years as a solo artist, Berry Gordy teamed her with Marvin Gaye. Their first release, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” was recorded by each separately, then mixed by Motown… and became a solid hit. Their follow-ups, “Your Precious Love” and “If I Could Build My Whole World Around You” also charted Top Ten.
Terrell reportedly had a tempestuous love life (including relationships with Brown and The Temptation’s David Ruffin); but her relationship with Gaye, while extraordinarily close, was platonic (friends and colleagues Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson characterized it as “sibling-like”). In October 1967, just six months after the release of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Terrell collapsed onstage during a performance at Hampton-Sydney College. Motown kept the incident quiet– and the duo on the road. Two-and-a-half years later, on this date in 1970, she died of complications from the malignant brain tumor that had caused her 1967 collapse. Following Terrell’s death, Gaye refrained from live performance for three years; his 1971 album What’s Going On– an introspective, mature masterpiece– was in part a reaction to her passing.
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