Category: Music

London Bridge by Fergie is number one again this week on the Billboard Hot 100. It pushed aside Nelly Furtado and Timbaland’s “Promiscuous” last week after that song had a six week run at the top.

NewMexiKen finds many of the number ones fun, listenable songs. If I had 10-year-olds in the house I might be somewhat nervous about the lyrics, but whatever. “London Bridge” does nothing for me, however.

Except bring trivia to mind. London is the sixth city not in the U.S. to be in the title of a number one song. How many of the other five can you name?

Hint: The most recent is 26 years ago, the longest 50 years ago.

Hint Two: Three were instrumentals.

Hint Three: All five were number one for three or four weeks.

Source: Fred Bronson’s Chart Beat

God love the internets. A video of The Beatles Apple Rooftop Concert (1969), their last performance.

How much time do you have?

Stylus Magazine lists its 100 top music videos and has the video — and commentary, like this:

I’d always been puzzled to see “Addicted to Love” consistently included on Greatest Videos of All-Time lists. And yet here we are including it. And here I am writing about it. The video itself contains slightly more motion than a still picture—the sexless “sexy” mannequins scissor their legs and bop in place slightly, Palmer looks like he’s thinking about a latte or his doctor’s appointment, and the camera “work” consists of focusing in on small details of the non-event. Occasionally. “Hey, look her fingers are really touching those bass strings.” Yes, now if only the thing were plugged into the amp. At the time, people found this offensive. Today it’s just vapid and lacking in any kind of eroticism—but therein lies its greatness. Any time we’re indulging in character-destroying nostalgia for the era, all we need to do is see this video and we’ll quickly remember everything awful about the 80’s. Consider it thy medication and be cleansed.

Addicted to Love is number 96. Or like number 34:

There is no shortage of music videos filmed in black and white because the creators thought it was an easy way to seem cool or serious. There is a severe shortage of music videos filmed in black and white because the creators understood how it could underscore and enrich the minimalism in the music. From Busta Rhymes to Lil’ Jon, rap videos have often assaulted the eyes with 90 frames-per-minute of sugar-fried madness, a kitchen sink style that certainly has its charm. But it can look a little childish and silly compared to “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” a series of images so serene and smooth that it feels like drinking champagne while sitting on a velvet piano bench around a frozen swimming pool on the deck of a penthouse overlooking the city at midnight during winter.

And the antidote to Walk the Line (the film), number 2:

“You stay the hell away from me, you hear?” Even before American Recordings proved it beyond all doubt, JC’ was a man with two careers in parallel: one bringing the poignancy, the other novelty tunes like “One Piece at a Time,” and that one where he does an impression of a guy being hung. So how better to close his career than by dovetailing the two: a novelty cover version paired with a video featuring poignancy laid on so thick as to crush your heart through sheer persistence. Cash as Jesus, Cash as the pouting rebel, Cash the American, Cash as America personified, Cash the husband, Cash the man in black, Cash the guy who sold records in their droves, Cash the lonely, scared, dying old man. It’s hard to imagine there could have been a better way to close the piano lid on his career.

Stephen Holden suggests some wonderful “private music” for your summer iPod.

music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all,
     but you are the music
While the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”

Billie Holiday died on this date in 1959. She was 44.

Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since.

— American Masters

Indeed. Treat yourself.

Read more about Billie Holiday.

At The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about Mozart, the man and the music. He listened to it all — in order. Fans of Mozart (and if you’re not, shame on you) should read the whole article. I liked this little bit:

Ambitious parents who are currently playing the “Baby Mozart” video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.

In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—a hundred and eighty CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set has now been reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes.

And this:

In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity—‘The Tempest,’ ‘Hamlet,’ the two-part ‘Faust’—but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, ‘Don Giovanni.’”

In case you missed the pre-game show from the World Cup final — and if you watched on ABC you did — here’s what the rest of the world saw. How many musical traditions can you hear in Shakira and Wyclef Jean’s performance? (Shakira has a Lebanese father and Colombian mother. She grew up in Colombia. Wyclef Jean is Haitian via Brooklyn and New Jersey.)

From BBC News:

A print of the only photograph of Mozart’s widow, Constanze Weber, has been found in Germany.

The photograph was taken in 1840 in the Bavarian town of Altoetting when she was 78. She died two years later.

Click here to see the print. Constanze is on the front left.

She was 29 when Mozart died.

On this day in 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first rock and roll song and his first hit, “That’s All Right, Mama.” Elvis had wanted to be a crooner, and in his first recording sessions he only sang slow ballads. But then, in between takes, Elvis and the other musicians started fooling around and singing a blues tune called “That’s All Right.” Sam Phillips asked them to start over from the beginning and recorded the song. He then rushed the record to the biggest DJ in Memphis, and it became Elvis’s breakout hit.

The Writer’s Almanac

The “other musicians” were, of course, Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass.

Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup — nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies.” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded — it was “different,” it was itself.

They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes — “Simplify, simplify'” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the damn studio!” He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!” And yet that wasn’t it either — it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

NewMexiKen photo, 2006

Late in 2004 Rolling Stone released its list of the 500 Greatest Songs — “the greatest rock & roll songs of all time, chosen by a five-star jury of singers, musicians, producers, industry figures, critics and, of course, songwriters.”

While the 500 is far from satisfactory in many ways, being obsessive NewMexiKen began to see how many of the 500 I had, then how many more I could acquire. By last summer I reached 499 — all acquired through perfectly legal means I hasten to add. Most are directly from CD; others are from iTunes. The 500th song, the one I still need — “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll,” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (#484) isn’t available as a single track and, though I have done it before, I refuse to buy a whole CD for that one tune.

Now I have a new list. Well actually, an older list, but newly in my sights. It’s the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. This is the list put together in 1995 by the curators of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of what they considered the “most influential” songs. It’s actually a much more interesting list than the Rolling Stone 500, though of course there are many, many tunes that are on both lists. The 500 That Shaped has seven selections recorded in the 1920s and ten from the 1930s.

I’m closing on 400 with this newest, shall we say, obsessive-compulsive activity. As I look down the list to the songs I need to find, there’s one that stares back at me — “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll,” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.