A who's who in the music industry lined up to testify as the hearings on the bill began in March I958.10 The first witness, Broadway librettist/lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, insisted that the public's taste in popular music had been "artificially stimulated" by BMI in …
Jan 03, 2022 · Not everyone consented to Wagner being shoved in their faces. Nazis reportedly fell asleep in theaters of Wagner operas. And Hitler could not contend with the public’s taste for popular music. But officially, the state sanctified Richard Wagner. His operas embodied the ideal of pure German music and became a locus around which nationalism ...
The most famous example of music censorship in the 00s had to be the list of 150 songs that Clear Channel sent to all its radio stations in the wake of 9/11. To be fair, the songs weren’t ...
Furthermore, Fripp argues, the music of the group was unpredictable (it progressed, rather than repeated itself) partly as a consequence of the group's shifting line-up over five decades: it ‘changed its direction and/or personnel whenever a particular musical approach had run its course’ (Fripp Reference Fripp 1997a, p. 43).
In Nazi Germany, music had political value. As with every aspect of German society, the state enacted tight measures to control what people could listen to. Music was hijacked by the propaganda apparatus. Goebbels recognized that Kunst und Kultur could be a powerful tool to cultivate Volksgemeinschaft, or community, and help unite a proud Germany.
The regime championed Richard Wagner as a powerful symbol of German culture. By returning to its roots, they claimed, Germany could restore their stature. And so Wagner became a fixture of important state events, from Hitler’s birthdays to the Nuremberg Rallies. Wagner Societies also sprung up across Germany.
By Kathryn Stranex BA (Honours) in English & Music Kathryn is a teacher-turned-writer living in the historic hub of Cape Town. She has a passion for teaching through storytelling, and gets a thrill when her three loves, Music, Literature and History all intersect. Currently she is a web writer of educational content.
In wake of 9/11. The most famous example of music censorship in the 00s had to be the list of 150 songs that Clear Channel sent to all its radio stations in the wake of 9/11. To be fair, the songs weren’t literally banned; the memo just suggested that DJs “might not want to play” the song.
Then along came the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), whose crusade for music censorship was in some ways the best thing to happen to musical freedom in the 80s. You might call the former First Lady Tipper Gore and her crew the definitive mix of noble intentions and utterly ham-fisted execution.
The Filthy Fifteen. The most pointed response to the PMRC would have to be a tie between Zappa’s “Porn Wars,” a dense collage of doctored tapes from the hearings, or Todd Rundgren’s “Jesse,” whose three verses gave strongly-worded kiss-offs to Jesse Helms, Tipper Gore, and the Pope.
Both convictions were overturned, and As Nasty As They Wanna Be sold two million copies, but for a time the censorship wars weren’t so funny anymore.
The most famously controversial songs of the late 70s weren’t even about sex . There wasn’t a single swear word in Sex Pistols ’ “God Save The Queen,” but the BBC was sufficiently outraged that they never even said the title of the record. The Pistols’ appropriation of the title phrase was at least as controversial as the song itself. Chain stores grudgingly sold the single, but if you walked into a chain like Boots, where the week’s top singles were displayed at the counter, you’d see a big blank where “God Save The Queen” was supposed to be listed. Nevertheless, the song topped the NME charts in 1977, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee; the official charts, however, ranked it at No.2, leading to accusations that the listings had been rigged. (Political content and a single naughty word had also gotten the previous “Anarchy In The UK” banned, but imagine the BBC’s frustration when the next single was “Pretty Vacant” and they couldn’t come up with a good reason to ban it.)
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg ’s ‘Je T’Aime…. Moi Non Plus’ proved too hot for America in 1969, but The Chakachas ‘Jungle Fever’ broke the taboo just a year later, as did “Pillow Talk” by Sylvia Robinson, the same woman who’d make history as the founder and owner of Sugar Hill Records.
From there it’s a short jump to Grace Jones ’ “Pull Up To The Bumper.”. By specifically referencing a sexual position – which it sure sounds like she’s doing – Jones pushed the music censorship limits about as far as they’d go in 1981.
The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the ‘new museology’.
Curation is no longer the preserve of the museum or the art gallery. The term is increasingly applied to other forms of creative exhibition, including popular music, where it may be applied to concerts and festivals, as well as to the compilation of anthologies of recorded music.
The notion of curation, with its roots in the Latin verb curare, carries in it both a sense of taking care (of oneself, of others or of things) and of taking charge (of a situation or business). Curation combines tending and superintending, looking after and exerting authority over.
My argument is concerned with the contemporary curation by musicians of historical recordings of their own performances. From the 1990s to the present we can identify an especially strong current of live recordings released by musicians.
Taken as a form of ‘exhibition’, The Complete Recordings exemplifies and complicates the arguments surrounding the curation of popular music as a form of historiography and as an act of recollecting/re-collecting.
Whether made in a studio or during live performance, any recording resembles some kind of performance or, as Gracyk puts it, ‘recordings are simultaneously documentations and stylized “semblances”’ (Gracyk Reference Gracyk and Dogantan-Dack 2008, p. 73).
While comparatively rare in rock music, recordings of improvised music have a particular significance in jazz, where they enable live performances to be preserved, studied and codified, processes that have enabled the historiography of jazz.
Bessie Smith poses for a portrait circa 1925. Singer Bessie Smith's recording career lasted only 10 years, but during that time she created a body of work that helped shape the sound of the 20th century. Her first single, "Downhearted Blues" — ...
That same year, Aretha Franklin served up a forthright enumeration of desire in "Dr. Feelgood," a soulful take on the blues form.
To hear Smith's genius and to begin to understand the power of the blues, we need to slow down and adjust to her tempo so we can appreciate the care and skill with which she makes her vocal choices. Working within the framework of the blues, she varies her inflection and phrasing to convey an idea or a feeling.
In that first hit record, "Downhearted Blues," you can still hear what won the hearts of her audiences. A lament about the problems associated with love relationships , Smith sings about "being crazy about a man" who mistreated her and broke her heart. It's a situation that most listeners (then and now) can relate to, but what sets the song apart is the attitude she assumes as she tells her story. In the opening lines she confronts the simple, terrible fact that "it's hard to love someone when that someone don't love you" and the pain that situation causes. But she also makes a commitment to avoiding this kind of agony in the future. "The next man I get," she sings in a subsequent stanza, "has got to promise to be mine, all mine." The song's final lines express a confidence that suggests she might succeed in doing so:
Through the rest of the 1920s, Bessie Smith became one of the earliest stars of recorded music and a leading figure of what came to be called classic blues (a genre dominated by African American women). She was the highest-paid African American artist working in music and the first African American superstar.
Once Jackson began recording in the 1940s, her voice was compared to Smith's, even though she only sang sacred music. In 1958, the release of Dinah Washington Sings Bessie Smith and LaVern Baker Sings Bessie Smith indicated a continued interest in the Empress of the Blues two decades after her death. Washington, one of the leading lights of vocal ...
Singer Bessie Smith's recording career lasted only 10 years, but during that time she created a body of work that helped shape the sound of the 20th century. Her first single, "Downhearted Blues" — written by two women, pianist Lovie Austin ...
The freedom songs and the Civil Rights Movement that birthed the songs and singing charged the national music culture. Popular music followed the concerns that were raised about justice, about getting along with each other, about challenging injustice. Black and White musicians of the day explored those issues in their music.
There were always performing artists who found ways to support the Movement's activities. One of the strongest was Harry Belafonte. His "Banana Boat" song in Parchman Penitentiary became a song about the Freedom Rides, "Calypso Freedom.".
A soloist is someone who can execute the entire song. A songleader is someone who starts the song, and if that performance is successful, it is successful not only because of the prowess of the leader but because people who are located within the sound of that voice join in to raise the song into life.
In Montgomery, Alabama — and this is early in the mass mobilization with the bus boycott — people would sing several hymns a lot. One is "Onward Christian Soldiers" — that song you would have heard mostly as a Sunday school song.
There is a story of the Freedom Rides, where Bernard LaFayette talks about singing in Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi, which is where they put the Freedom Riders, when they arrived in Jackson, Mississippi.
It's very easy, if you're not aware, to miss the value of that documentation. Freedom songs are documents created by a collective voice.
The fish's existence is so dominated by water that only when water is absent is the fish aware of its condition. So it is with people and mass media. The media so fully saturate our everyday lives that we are often unconscious of their presence, not to mention their influence.
The other dominant multichannel service is direct broadcast satellite (DBS). First available to the public in 1994, it has brought cable's subscriber growth to a standstill because, from the viewer's perspective, what is on a DBS-supplied screen differs little from what is on a cable-supplied screen.