Posts Tagged ‘music’
“‘Scenius’ stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”*…
Zachary Hastings Hooper on Mark Wilkerson‘s Pub Rock, an appreciation of a now largely forgotten legacy…
The history of popular music is one of continual evolution, with one generation inspired by and then replaced by the next. Think the Beatles and Rolling Stones usurping their idols Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. In the U.K., conventional wisdom holds that the pretension and precision of early 1970s prog rock acts like Yes and Genesis were smashed by the intentional amateurism and outrage of later-decade punk rockers such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. This is perhaps best represented by the image of Johnny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt.
Pub Rock (Bloomsbury), a new book by Mark Wilkerson, biographer of Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman, shines some light on the overlooked genre of pub rock that catalyzed the shift from prog to punk. Wilkerson traces the genre’s birth in London pubs in the early seventies and its gestation of the world-shattering punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
I’m the audience for this book. As a teenager honing his musical tastes in the late eighties, I was introduced, by MTV and college radio, to the sounds of angry young men like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Graham Parker. Digging into their back catalogs, I discovered that Lowe especially was deeply intertwined with something called pub rock; his old band, Brinsley Schwarz, had been a major player in that scene. At the same time, I realized that Stiff Records—home to Lowe, Costello, and Parker, as well as the Damned and Madness—was run by two pub rock managers [see here]. In a sense, I’ve been waiting for this book for decades. And now that it’s here, I’m happy to dust off some old records while cueing up some new (to me) selections.
Wilkerson characterizes pub rock as “simply music that was played in pubs. A diverse mix was represented there: Roots rock, country, R&B, soul and rock’n’roll—both the good-time variety and the harder-edged stuff.” Unlike the sounds dominating airwaves and filling stadiums, pub rock was unadorned and earnest. It was neither glam nor grandiose.
While sonically similar to more mainstream rock and roll, pub rock had a slyly subversive allure. These seemingly square guys (yes, they are all guys) were about to birth punk. Every budding music snob tries to earn their bona fides with obscure knowledge. So learning that the dude behind “Cruel to Be Kind” had a previous professional life and that “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” was a cover gave me an undeserved sense of superiority.
Pub Rock is part of the 33 ⅓ Genre series of primers on musical subgenres. It hews to the imprint’s mission, offering a quick, accessible entry point to a genre with little or no knowledge required, just curiosity. Like any good synopsis of a genre or musical scene, it sends the reader off to their favorite streamer or record store in search of a new listen or three.
In the age of the algorithm, we’re accustomed to being told, “If you like X, you’ll like Y.” However, snapshots like Wilkerson’s go beyond the “what” to tell you why you should add Dr. Feelgood or Brinsley Schwarz to your playlist.
As the book’s title indicates, the scene grew around a series of pubs in London. Groups like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Band strongly influenced the nascent pub rock bands, but as Wilkerson notes, pub rock arose as big-name British acts were increasingly focused on selling out stadiums in America, and economic pressures were closing the venues that sustained the sixties scenes. Pubs, which had historically featured jazz acts, gave new bands opportunities to hone their skills and build followings. Wilkerson posits that intimate venues forced bands to up their game: proximity to Carlsberg-swilling audiences meant that you had to play your instruments and entertain the crowd without hiding behind light shows and heavy amplification.
The pub rock movement yielded a couple of minor hits, notably Ace’s “How Long,” now a staple of yacht rock radio. But many of its key figures became leaders in the punk and New Wave era. Ian Dury from Kilburn and the High Roads became the iconic leader of the Blockheads, while John Mellor from the 101ers became the even more iconic Joe Strummer of the Clash. Ace’s Paul Carrack had chart-topping success with both Squeeze and Mike + the Mechanics. The aforementioned Lowe went on to chart success as a solo artist, producer, and songwriter. Parker and Dave Edmunds enjoyed long careers. And pub rock’s DIY ethos—finding new places to play, hauling your own gear, building audiences from scratch—directly inspired the punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
It’s been said the Velvet Underground and the Ramones only sold a few copies of their debut albums but everyone who bought them started a band. It could be suggested that, similarly, everyone who encountered Eggs Over Easy or Brinsley Schwarz at the Tally Ho did the same. Artists as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Costello, Madness, and the Stranglers trace their roots to pub rock shows…
“Punk’s Pub Crawl,” from @ctrrelpol-washu.bsky.social.
For more, and videos of exemplary pub rock performances, see “Raising the bar: the chaotic story of pub rock.”
And for more listening suggestions, see “A beginner’s guide to pub rock in five essential albums.”
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 the one of the core pub rock bands, Dr. Feelgood, scored their only No.1 UK album when their live LP Stupidity went to the top of the charts– the first ever live album to go to No.1 in the UK chart in its first week of release.
Hear it here.
“Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft– and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.”*…
On the heels of Hardy Strictly Bluegrass [and here], Warren Hellman‘s gift to San Francisco, the most recent annual installment of which was last weekend, a lovely piece by David Alm on a more traditional event…
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited…
…
… An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.”
Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida.
Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord.
Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section…
Eminently worth reading in full.
In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out: “A Place Among the Fiddlers,” from @longreads.com.
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As we pick, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that George D. “Judge” Hay, the creator and producer of The Grand Ole Opry, invited Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys to audition for a spot on the prestigious radio broadcast. The audition was a success, and Monroe chose “Muleskinner Blues” for their debut. According to observers, when the curtain went up, the audience and Opry regulars alike (including stars such as Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon, and Pee Wee King) were awed by the furious tempo of the Blue Grass Boys. Band member Cleo Davis later observed that the audience “couldn’t think as fast as we played.”
Monroe quickly scored a recording contract, and switched personnel to establish the line-up that became famous, surrounding himself (on mandolin) with Lester Flatt (guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle), and Cedric Rainwater (bass). Together, they polished the traditional mountain music celebrated at Galax into a genre that took its name from their group. and Monroe is remembered as “the Father of Bluegrass.”
“Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people”*…
As we float awash in the debate over who/what is conscious (only humans? animals? plants? AI? everything?), we might take a moment to ponder the role of consciousness. For example, in science.
Harald A. Wiltsche argues that physicists, and scientists in general, attempt to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of the picture. Indeed, even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God’s eye view or view from nowhere.
A phenomenologist of science, Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them…
Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning…
[Wiltsche makes his point first with reference to spacetime physics, then to quantum mechanics. He concludes…]
… The question, then, is no longer whether physics and phenomenology should be united. As physics confronts its own conceptual foundations, the challenge is to bring into view the structures phenomenology has analyzed since its inception—and to explore how they can illuminate the meaning of objectivity in modern theory.
Eminently worth reading in full.
Physics cannot escape its roots in phenomenology: “Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics” (or archived version here) from @haraldwiltsche.bsky.social in @iai.tv.
Bonus question: if Wiltsche is right that consciousness is essential to advancing our understanding of reality, and consciousness is something that other things, living and “inanimate,” (do or can) possess, what does that mean for our quest to understand realit(ies)?… Or does a question like this simply (albeit implicitly) affirm anthropocentrism? How will we know?
See also: “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself“
* Edmund Husserl
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As we contemplate consciousness, we might note that it was on this date in 1977, at the High Wyncombe Town Hall in England, that the Bunch of Stiffs tour kicked off. It featured Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Wreckless Eric and The New Rockets, and Larry Wallis’ Psychedelic Rowdies– acts managed by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera before they formed the Stiff Records label, which released a live album of the festivities in February of 1978.
“Follow the money”*…
The Trump administration’s immigration policy has been a bonanza for the private prison sector– as Vanessa Romo reports, for two companies with ties to the administration in particular…
America’s two largest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, are reporting a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue over the spring as immigration detention closes in on record levels.
Those revenues announced Thursday do not include net proceeds of $1.6 billion made by CoreCivic after the recent sale of four of their facilities to the Department of Homeland Security. Patrick Swindle [!], CoreCivic’s President and CEO, told investors on an earnings call that that works out to an average rate of $307,000 per bed.
The earnings — from April through June of this year — come as the U.S. is holding almost 66,000 people in immigration detention, nearing record levels not seen since January, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center. Both companies say they’re also finding other revenue opportunities, like ankle monitors for Haitian immigrants who recently lost their protected immigration status.
Swindle said that CoreCivic’s total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million. CoreCivic exceeded expectations in a period that included the government shutdown, Swindle said. This was accomplished in part by lowering operating costs — meaning the business of detaining people is becoming cheaper — and because of more people being put in detention.
CoreCivic’s sales of detention centers to the government won’t be reflected until next quarter — but they are part of a larger strategy to meet President Trump’s goal of having 100,000 people in detention at once. CoreCivic made a deal to continue operating the detention centers and also hopes to build more. Meanwhile, GEO Group says they’re also in talks to do the same.
GEO Group CEO George Zoley said in his company’s earnings call also on Thursday that thanks to 2025 contracts, total revenues are up to $732.1 million — an increase of nearly $96 million or 15% — over the same period last year.
GEO Group’s government ties run deep. Former GEO Group executive David Venturella is the acting director of ICE. In a recent letter, he told lawmakers he has divested his GEO Group stock.
President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was also a paid consultant for GEO Group before joining the government, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for GEO Group before she was appointed.
President Trump also has financial stakes in the two companies, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. An analysis of Trump’s most recent financial disclosure by CREW last month found that the president’s brokers have made 29 trades of private prison stocks since he returned to office. According to the study, the first purchases were made on the 10th day of his second term. The total amount bought and sold was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars split between GEO Group and CoreCivic.
In Thursday’s call, GEO Group noted that their ankle monitoring sales are up. The electronic devices are part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program contract it has with ICE, along with smartwatches and the SmartLink phone app that help the government keep tabs on immigrants outside of detention, Zoley said.
Zoley also told investors that GPS-tracking ankle monitors in particular will likely keep climbing now that Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants has ended.
“Because of this new policy shift as to who will be subject to this immigration enforcement like … the Haitians, we could see a significant increase in the number of people in the ISAP program,” Zoley said, adding “most of them, we believe, would be placed under the ankle monitoring supervision.” He noted that “the app is far less expensive than the ankle monitors.”…
On those “sales of detention center to the government”: it appears the administration has retreated from overpaying for warehouses needy of retrofitting in area that don’t want them, opting instead to buy currently-operating facilities.
The misery market: “Private prisons announce $1.4 billion in revenue as immigration detentions climb,” from @npr.org.
* “Deep Throat” (subsequently identified as Mark Felt), William Goldman in the screenplay for All the President’s Men
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As we grapple with graft, we might recall that it was on this date in 1724 that Johann Sebastian Bach led the first performance of his Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, BWV 101, a chorale cantata based on “Vater unser im Himmelreich“ (Our Father in Heaven), a Lutheran hymn, a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer in German by Martin Luther.
See/hear it here.
“All is change”*…
The Wikipedia article on the Ship of Theseus has changed entirely since its inception.
A paradoxical thought experiment made meta: “The Same Boat,” from Greg Ross in his wonderful blog, Futility Closet.
* Euripedes, Heracles (and others, e.g., Marcus Aurelius, echoing Heraclitus)
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As we contemplate conundra, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the mix was completed on David Bowie’s “Changes,” which had been recorded nine days earlier at Trident Studios in London. Co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott, it featured Rick Wakeman on piano and the musicians who would later become known as the Spiders from Mars—Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey.
“Changes” is widely considered to be one of Bowie’s best songs and has appeared on many best-of lists. His biographers have suggested that the track is a manifesto of his entire career, predicting a constant change of musical styles: the first verse focuses on the compulsive nature of artistic reinvention and distancing oneself from the rock mainstream; the second verse concerns clashes between children and their parents, urging them to allow their children to be themselves as teenagers. Bowie frequently included the song in his live performances; it was the final song he performed on stage before his death in 2016.
See Bowie perform it here.
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