Tag: music
Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises
by Chris on Jun.29, 2010, under literature, poetry
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
The Tempest 3.2.148-156
Ignoring the mainstream, spreading enthusiasm for difficult music and sustaining sonic subcultures
by Chris on Mar.29, 2010, under music
Ignoring the mainstream, spreading enthusiasm for difficult music and sustaining sonic subcultures: Colin Marshall talks to Chris Bohn, editor of The Wire
Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]
I was reading a slightly older profile of the magazine in the Telegraph. It had a quote from you saying that The Wire is best thought of as a magazine that does not cover certain types of music rather than a magazine that does cover certain types. So I’ll put the question to you: what does The Wire not cover?
The stuff you could consider heavily featured in the mainstream media. Obviously there’s some crossover with the mainstream media and the underground, noncommercial media, but generally we have no interest in covering stuff you just see on — if you go to a newsstand any see a range of magazines, be it music, culture, fashion, whatever, you see certain names cropping up over and over again. We just have absolutely no interest in being part of that interchangeability of faces, names, et cetera, et cetera. We’d rather focus on the music that interests us, and that most frequently is “non-mainstream” music, “underground” music, whatever that means.
That’s kind of a very slippery word, you might say, because “underground” in a political sense is a whole lot different from “underground” in a Western sense. In London or, I should imagine, where you come from, almost anything goes. You can do anything without consequences. But last November I was in Leipzig for a festival of underground culture from the German Democratic Republic period, the communist period in East Germany that obtained between ’48 and 1989 before the wall came down. Then, underground culture had a totally different meaning. It’s a salutary reminder to know that sometimes music is as serious as your life, and you can end up in jail for playing it. That’s not often he case here. Every so often I have to take one step back from the word “underground” and remind myself that it can be a far different thing to what perceive.
Continue reading here
Celebrating the Beatles: Goo Goo Goo Joob!
by Chris on Sep.09, 2009, under art, music
The Beatles are still with us, decades after they broke up, for many reasons: commercial, cultural, zeitgeist-y, etc…and let’s not forget aesthetically, for they represent a wonderful moment in popular song. They are there to be rediscovered by all of us, again and again. (CH)
September 9, 2009
Today is a big day for Beatles fans: the band’s entire catalog is being reissued in digitally remastered form, and the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” is also set for release. And what better day than 09/09/09, considering the band’s love of the number nine (enneaphilia?), from “The One After 909″ to “Revolution No. 9.” In honor of the latest wave of Beatles nostalgia, I’ve been mulling over a bit of nonsense from the fertile mind of John Lennon: the timeless chant heard in “I Am the Walrus,” “Goo goo goo joob.”
Originally released as the B-side of “Hello Goodbye” and as a track on the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967, “I Am the Walrus” has been an endless source of lyrical debate. And that’s just how Lennon wanted it: he reputedly constructed the song to be as confusing as possible, in order to keep the Beatle-ologists busy. The chorus of the song goes, “I am the eggman, They are the eggmen, I am the walrus, Goo goo goo joob.” The “walrus,” Lennon later confirmed, was an allusion to the Lewis Carroll verse, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” from the children’s classic Through the Looking-Glass. It’s believed that the “eggman” is a nod to the character of Humpty Dumpty in the same book. But what of “goo goo goo joob” (also transcribed as “goo goo ga joob” or “goo goo g’joob”)?
One widely circulated tidbit is that Lennon was inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake while writing the song. This would fit nicely with the Lewis Carroll homage, since Humpty Dumpty figures in Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece as well. (Finnegan’s fall from a ladder resonates with the fall of Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Man.) According to Beatles lore, “goo goo goo joob” are “the last words uttered by Humpty Dumpty before his fall.” This was a popular notion among the conspiracy theorists who were convinced that Paul McCartney had died in a mysterious accident and looked for clues to his demise in Beatles lyrics.
The only problem with the Joycean theory is that “goo goo goo joob” does not actually appear in Finnegans Wake. The closest approximation in Joyce is “googoo goosth,” which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. There’s also no evidence that Lennon was actually reading Finnegans Wake at the time, so the imprint of Joyce is not nearly as clear-cut as that of Lewis Carroll.
Around the same time as “I Am the Walrus,” a very similar nonsense refrain cropped up in another pop song, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” Songwriter Paul Simon penned the lyrics, “Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.” The song was released too late to have been an influence on Lennon: though a brief early version of “Mrs. Robinson” appeared in the movie The Graduate in late 1967, the full song with “coo coo ca-choo” didn’t show up until the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends in April 1968. So the influence could very well have flowed the other way, with Simon making a subtle gesture to the then-new Beatles song.
Both Lennon and Simon, I believe, were at least indirectly influenced by another pop-cultural source: the catchphrase of the 1930s cartoon bombshell Betty Boop, “boop-oop-a-doop.” It’s got the same metrical cadence as “goo goo goo joob” and “coo coo ca-choo,” and is similarly reminiscent of infantile babbling. The provenance of “boop-oop-a-doop” is itself the subject of much dispute. The singer Helen Kane claimed that she was the originator of the phrase, and in 1934 she sued Betty Boop’s creator Max Fleischer for $250,000 in damages. Kane was famous for using “boop-oop-a-doop” in such tunes as “I Wanna Be Loved By You” (famously covered by Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot), sung in her distinctively babyish voice.
Kane didn’t win her lawsuit, because during the trial it was revealed that she had based her “boop-oop-a-doop” on the stylings of an African-American entertainer named Baby Esther, popular at Harlem’s Cotton Club in the late 1920s. The New York Times reported that Baby Esther “had interpolated words like ‘boo-boo-boo’ and ‘doo-doo-doo’ in songs at a cabaret here in 1928 and that Miss Kane and her manager had heard her there.” A recording of Baby Esther’s act played in the courtroom was enough to doom Helen Kane’s claims to originality.
I haven’t been able to track down a recording of Baby Esther, so I don’t know if her “boo-boo-boo” and “doo-doo-doo” have the same syncopated spunk as the “boop-oop-a-doop” of Helen Kane and her cartoon alter ego Betty Boop. But we should not forget these pioneers in stylized baby talk who laid the groundwork for the inspired babble of “I Am the Walrus.”
(Enjoy some YouTube clips of Helen Kane, Betty Boop, and Marilyn Monroe for the full “boop-oop-a-doop” experience.)
Reblogged From:
Celebrating the Beatles: Goo Goo Goo Joob! : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus.
Dancing About Architecture
by Chris on Jul.02, 2009, under literature, music
I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.
At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or three years trying to produce something that could not be produced. I tried to put aside the line’s foundational snobbery (“My music is too ineffable for your inky art”), and then, reassuringly, it seemed like nothing more than a truism: words are words and music is music. And perfume is perfume; paintings are paintings; facial features are facial features. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?
Read more by Arthur Phillips at: The Believer – Dancing About Architecture.
