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Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:01a | A Vintage Grand Piano Gets Reengineered to Play 20 Different Instruments with a Push of Its Keys
The Ukrainian Band "Brunettes Shoot Blondes" took a broken, vintage grand piano and reengineered it, turning it into "a hybrid, containing 20 instruments." Now, when you press the keys, the "piano hammers beat a marimba, tambourine, cymbals or even castanets. There are also special mechanical devices that allow for the playing of cello, violins and organ." Watch it in action above... Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: 94-Year-Old Stroke Survivor Plays Jazz Piano for the First Time in Years A Vintage Grand Piano Gets Reengineered to Play 20 Different Instruments with a Push of Its Keys is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 9:00a | The Origins of the “Amen Break,” The Most Sampled Piece of Recorded Music Ever
You may not find the reference easily in a Google search. But hang around electronic musicians, DJs, or producers long enough, and you’ll probably hear someone talk about an “Amen song.” They don't mean gospel, not directly, but the famed “Amen break,” a six-second drum loop sampled from a 1969 soul instrumental recording of the gospel song “Amen, Brother” from the B-Side of a Grammy-winning record by Washington, DC-based group The Winstons. Played by drummer G.C. Coleman, who died in 1996, it has likely become “the most sampled piece of recorded music ever,” as the Great Big Story video above points out. We’ve previously featured the more extensive documentary history of the Amen break below by writer Nate Harrison. The Great Big Story video is not that, but rather a short, 4-minute tour through the sample’s origins by way of Bronx DJ Lou Flores, “Breakbeat Lou,” who included “Amen, Brother” on a compilation of songs made specifically for DJs. If you’ve never understood what’s so captivating about this beat, listen to Flores describe its sonic qualities. It's "probably one of the most organic, larger-than-life, big presence style of drums… there’s so many depths to this particular track,” he says, listing the specific effect of each piece of the drum kit.
There really is “nothing else like it." And, paradoxically, it exists everywhere, slowed down as the backbeat of early hip-hop, sped up to inhuman speeds in drum ‘n’ bass; appearing in some form or another in the repertoire of almost every contemporary artist, producer, and drummer. The Amen break has popped up in over 3,000 songs, from David Bowie to Slipknot to Skrillex to Public Enemy to N.W.A. to… well, it may be easier to name popular musicians of the last thirty years who haven’t been at least Amen-adjacent at some point in their lives. Like certain standards in jazz or movements from classical hits, everyone knows it, even if they don’t know they know it. What’s refreshing about the brief explainer is that, rather than try to cover this kind of musicological territory in a few minutes, it focuses on the break’s first popularizer, Flores, who was drawn out of his retirement from music because of the viral phenomenon of the Amen break. He's an affable guide to the most famous sample in history, happy that his corner of the Bronx contributed so much to the culture by helping turn sampled music into an original and inventive art form. Learn much more about the history of the Amen break in the documentary above and at our previous post here. Related Content: The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6-Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sampling Revolution All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music A Brief History of Sampling: From the Beatles to the Beastie Boys Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Origins of the “Amen Break,” The Most Sampled Piece of Recorded Music Ever is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 12:00p | Watch The Journey, the New Ridley Scott Short Film Teased During the Super Bowl
Established in 1933, Turkish Airlines celebrated its 85th anniversary last year with a higher profile than ever before. Born in 1937, Ridley Scott turned 81 last year and has shown no decline whatsoever in his enthusiasm for filmmaking. This year found those two institutions brought together by another, the Super Bowl, which offered the occasion to air a thirty-second teaser for The Journey, a six-minute film commissioned by Turkish Airlines and directed by Scott. (The same game also, Open Culture readers will have noticed, featured a Burger King commercial with Andy Warhol eating a Whopper.) The visually rich story of one woman pursuing another to and through Istanbul, the short marks the first commercial the Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator director has made in well over a decade. "I decided to go back and click into advertising," Scott says in the behind-the-scenes video below. "I love the chase and the speed of the job." And in this case the job was to show off the luxury of Turkish Airlines' first-class cabins and also the city of Istanbul itself, which Scott had never visited before. But on his first trip there, Istanbul impressed him with its harbor, its mosques, and surely many other of the elements of which The Journey makes use, including the airport. "The Istanbul airport was modern and efficient, European, and what first struck me is how foreign it did not feel," writes American reporter Suzy Hansen in Notes on a Foreign Country of her own first visit to Istanbul, drawing a stark contrast with "the decrepit airport in New York I had just left."
And Hansen had flown into Istanbul's old airport, not the new one opened just last year and designed as the largest in the world. Whether The Journey will bring more business to Turkish Airlines' flights into and out of it (the final shot finds our heroine en route to Bali) remains to be seen, especially since the Super Bowl teaser seemed to cause confusion about what was being sold. It nevertheless fits nicely into Scott's acclaimed body of advertising work. In its early period came a 1974 bread commercial voted England's favorite advertisement of all time; in its middle period, of course, came the 1984 Super Bowl spot that introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. Given the energy Scott's work in commercials and features still exudes, it feels somehow unsuitable to use the term "late period" at all. Related Content: Ridley Scott Demystifies the Art of Storyboarding (and How to Jumpstart Your Creative Project) See Ridley Scott’s 1973 Bread Commercial—Voted England’s Favorite Advertisement of All Time Ridley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Runner Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Watch The Journey, the New Ridley Scott Short Film Teased During the Super Bowl is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:40p | A Short History of Punk: From Late 50s Rockabilly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pistols
Seems there was a time when the dominant story of punk was the story of British punk. If you knew nothing else, you knew the name Sid Vicious, and that seemed to sum it up. Maybe it was only in the mid-nineties, around the time Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain released Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk that more people began to popularly understand the lineage of late sixties garage rock, the Velvet Underground, Detroit’s Iggy and the Stooges, and the early CBGB scene in the mid-seventies crowned by the sound of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads. Now even that story can seem oversimplified, sketched out in brief on the way to discussing the literary triumph of Patti Smith, cultural interventions of David Byrne, career highlights of punk power couple Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, or the many, always fascinating doings of Iggy Pop. The Ramones roared back into fashion twenty years ago, and the demise of CBGB in 2007 brought on waves of marketing nostalgia of almost Disney-like proportions. Most everyone who pays attention to pop culture now knows that late-seventies punk wasn’t a movement that arrived out of nowhere, bent on destroying the past, but a continuity and evolution of earlier forms.
But the Trash Theory video at the top reaches back even earlier than garage bands like the Monks and the Sonics—typically cited as some of the earliest common ancestors of punk and rock and roll. Punk was “rock and roll bored down to its bare bones,” says the narrator, and begins with a rockabilly artist who called himself The Phantom and tried to outdo Elvis in 1958 with the raucous single “Love Me.” The Phantom himself may not have embraced the label at all, but like Link Wray, he was still something of a proto-punk. Wray’s raunchy, gritty instrumental “Rumble,” also released in 1958, inspired huge numbers of guitarists and aspiring musicians, including young Iggy Pop, who cities it as a primary reason he joined a band.
From there, we’re on to “elemental” tracks like The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird,” The Sonic’s “Psycho,” The Monk’s “I Hate You,” and Love’s “7 and 7,” all clear progenitors of the sound. And the Mysterians, of garage classic “96 Tears,” were the first band to be described as punk by the mainstream press. The Kinks and The Who set templates in Britain while the Velvets perfected sleazy, experimental noise back in New York. The MC5 in Detroit helped bring us The Stooges. The Modern Lovers’ 1972 “Roadrunner” launched hundreds of bands.
The video is a convincing short history showing how punk arose naturally from trends in the late 50s and 60s that clearly pointed the way. Like every such history, especially one undertaken in the span of fifteen minutes, it leaves out some pretty heavyweight figures who should have a central place in the narrative. Irritated YouTube commenters have pointed out lapses like The New York Dolls (see them further up in 1973), without whom there would have been no Sex Pistols. (Proto-punk Detroit band Death does get a mention, though their influence is negligible since they went mostly unheard until 2009.)
Also needing inclusion as early punk pioneers are Television (check them out in ’78) and Richard Hell and the Voidoids (above in 1980’s Blank Generation). And these are just a few missing New York bands. Any devotee of this musical history will come up with a dozen or so more from both sides of the Atlantic who deserve mention in the early history of punk. And that’s why, I guess, that popular history keeps getting told and retold. As soon as it starts to get stale, it seems, there's always more to add. Related Content: The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016 Punking Out, a Short 1978 Documentary Records the Beginning of the Punk Scene at CBGB’s Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness A Short History of Punk: From Late 50s Rockabilly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pistols is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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