Advertisement for a record company, 1980

• Producer and Mad Decent label honcho Diplo on his pet genre, Brazilian baile funk: Australia has crazy-ass marsupials because it’s an island and they bred themselves into something weird. That’s kind of what happened with baile funk. Miami bass got trapped there and became this strange, hybrid Brazilian thing. But the thing about funk was there wasn’t an industry. For a while they were selling singles, but it was only in Rio. It was done on bootleg CDs. There was no giant hand helping to move it one way or another. It’s just how kids wanted it, as raw as possible. And that’s what’s so interesting about that scene. I’ve never seen it develop like that anywhere else while I’ve been traveling. [Pitchfork]

• Kelefa Sanneh’s latest is an enjoyable profile of Brad Paisley (subscription): Paisley fared better with the follow-up, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” in which a boy pays heartfelt tribute to his mother’s new husband. It built a chorus—“I hope I’m at least half the dad that he didn’t have to be“—that was designed to make remarried mothers cry. The song was a deft and novel articulation of family values, and it was Paisley’s first No. 1 hit. It was also profoundly square, with plaintive piano chords and cozy lyrics about a happy family “crowded ‘round the nursery window,” and the literal-minded music video looked a lot like a commercial for something (maybe a mortgage company, or powdered lemonade). [New Yorker]

• On the excellent blog Gemini Spacecraft, a piece on the origins of rockabillist Glen Glenn: [He] might have continued playing country & western music, instead of cutting some of the greatest sides from the rockabilly era, if not for one thing: Girls! “If you played country, girls might want your autograph,” Glenn has said. “If you did this kind of [rock’n‘roll] music, girls freaked out.”

Still from a Koratron television ad, 1960s

• Chris Sievey, the inventor of Frank Sidebottom and leader of The Freshies, died Monday of cancer. He was 54. Mark Radcliffe of BBC4: [Sievey was] one of the very few people I have ever met in my life who I would call a genius. He was so creative, so brimming full of ideas, and it wasn’t just his act, he lived his life as an elaborate extended act. It wasn’t just the gig that was always fun with Chris, it was the whole day. One time we were talking about travel games and he decided that a good idea would be travel snooker. The next gig we went to, which was in London, he’d brought one that he was developing with Velcro balls. We went from Timperley to London in a van with a snooker table in the middle of it, which meant there was barely any room to sit. [BBC]
• James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, interviewed by Joe Colly: So I just think it takes a couple decades to kind of clear your brain now. So it makes more sense to me that I could find my footing when I was 30 instead of when I was 19. It seems a little more clear. You know, novelists are older now. Things are happening later in people’s lives. They’re kind of living lives and then creating things about the lives they’ve lived. Rather than being an artiste at an early age and coming out with a ball of fire. That energy has been co-opted because you haven’t immunized yourself yet against media. It’s easier to get swept up things then take a couple of years to get over your, like, indie rock hangover. I’m scraping the fucking Quarterstick Records crust out of my eyes when I’m like, 27. You know, “Why am I playing in 5/7? How is that fun?” [Pitchfork]
• Trevor Cox on the instrument of choice at the 2010 World Cup: The vuvuzela is like a straightened trumpet and is played by blowing a raspberry into the mouthpiece. The player’s lips open and close about 235 times a second, sending puffs of air down the tube, which excite resonance of the air in the conical bore. A single vuvuzela played by a decent trumpeter is reminiscent of a hunting horn—but the sound is less pleasing when played by the average football fan, as the note is imperfect and fluctuates in frequency. It sounds more like an elephant trumpeting. This happens because the player does not keep the airflow and motion of the lips consistent. “But that din sounds nothing like a trumpet or an elephant.” When hundreds of the vuvuzelas are played together, you get the distinctive droning sound. People in the crowd are blowing the instrument at different times and with slightly varying frequencies. The sound waxes and wanes. The overall effect is rather like the sound of a swarm of insects. [New Scientist]

Still from a PANTONE promotional shoot, 2010

• Stephen Holden on Hoagy Carmichael: As affably easygoing as the early jazz that wound through his music like a lazy river: that would describe this season’s final program of the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series, devoted to Hoagy Carmichael, the proto-Midwest hipster. Carmichael, who has been described as the first singer-songwriter in a tradition that includes obvious descendants like James Taylor and Tom Waits, once described himself as sounding “like a shaggy dog looks.” He added, “I have Wabash fog and sycamore twigs in my throat.” [New York Times]
• Derek Walmsley covering the Montreal Mutek festival: I was blown away once again by Moritz von Oswald trio, whose set was simply one extended track, with Vladislav playing percussion at the side of the stage, Moritz (dressed absoultely immaculately in a suit, tie, with hankerchief poking out of his pocket) playing keyboard lines and dubbing Vladislav’s percussion parts on the fly, and Max Loderbauer working on the far side of the stage. Half way through, those Rhodes-like keyboard lines (stuck through dozens of echoes) sounded like mercury slithering around the floor. You could have taken and looped any four bars from the middle of the performance and it would have made an extraordinarily good 12”. Organic’s the wrong word… it ends up deliciously complex yet finely focused on the groove. Towards the end Mortitz elbowed some growling notes out of his keyboard John Lennon at Shea Stadium style, nudging Delay into even wilder drumming, and with that liberated gesture they concluded after fully 45 minutes. [The Wire]
• From Simon Reynolds’ profile of Ariel Pink: Depending on how you calculate, “Before Today” is Pink’s ninth album or his 24th. The Haunted Graffiti discography is a chaotic sprawl of ultra-limited-edition cassette, CD-R and vinyl releases, confused further by rereleases and reconfigurations of earlier material. But Pink insists that “Before Today” is “the first album” … “Before Today” strips away a lot of the echo-laden wooze that swathed Pink’s earlier music. What emerges, glistening and majestic like a yacht through fog, often sounds like chart material. The only catch is that these would be radio smashes in 1986, or 1978, or whichever year that a particular song refers to stylistically. You can’t imagine anything on the record making a dent on today’s radioscape. [Los Angeles Times]

Still from a television advertisement for AMF Sports Equipment, 1970s

• Martin Cizmar finds out what happened to all of the original NWA posse on LA Weekly.
• Andrew Nosnitsky of Cocaine Blunts unpacks crate-digging culture in the South with a short ditty on the occasion of a new mixtape by Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T.
• In Crawdaddy, sound engineer Dinky Dawson has a regular feature in which he recounts his life on the road with the Byrds, Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Steely Dan, and so on. The latest installment features a monkey, Doris Day, a shotgun, and “Kokomo.”
• One-liner from Camille Dodero of the Village Voice: “the fact that the baby chasing the dollar bill on the iconic symbol of ’90s ‘alternative’ culture now works for Shepard Fairey, who embodies the 21st-century commodification of underground culture, is, well, rich.“

Detail from BOMP magazine, 1976

• Over at eMusic, Michaelangelo Matos talks to Sharon Jones about the Oscars, Rikers Island, and soul music through the decades — “I know we’re going to gradually move up, ‘cause different people have different ideas. I know when I write something it’s going to be [hums hyperactive bass pattern], and that’s more of an ’80s feeling. I have no problem with it. I even tell people, I hope Daptone don’t go past the early ’80s. That’s as far as we go.”
• Los Angeles indie pop band Best Coast played Knitting Factory yesterday. Jon Caramanica reviewed the show for the Times — “Best Coast songs are narcotically hazy, with surf-rock churn, garage-rock distortion, and a sense of purpose derived from early-1990s alternative-rock acts like the Breeders.” And Ron Harvilla in the Voice’s Sound of the City blog: “when the rambling, wayward-voiced lo-fi-ness of it all gets to you (this is basically like SST bubblegum or something), there’s the spectacle of the singer herself, cheerfully fielding audience questions…”
• Pitchfork posted a pretty good video of the Dum Dum Girls playing “Catholicked” at South by Southwest.
• Aaaand a guide to girl-band movie clichés, by Marisa Meltzer, on Slate: “Without the support of a nuclear family, girls must turn to their record players for solidarity. This plot device is featured more heavily in movies about girl bands because the underlying message is that a normal teen with a solid home life wouldn’t need to turn to the decidedly nongirly hobby of music for salvation.”

Seven Seas, still from television advertisement. 1970s.

• Why you’ve never really heard the “Moonlight” sonata, Slate: “Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven’s time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam.” With audio examples.
• Every issue of Spin is now on Google Books.
• The New York Times reports that The T.A.M.I. Show, a 1964 concert film, will be released for the first time Tuesday. It features a famous James Brown performance that can count among its bootleggers Michael Jackson and Rick Rubin, as well as performances by Chuck Berry, The Barbarians, Smokey Robinson, and hosts Jan and Dean. The Times includes video excerpts featuring The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, and Lesley Gore.

McDonald's packaging (detail). 1980s.

• From the New York Times: a conversation about the new William Kentridge production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, between their classical music critic Anthony Tommasinimm, art critic Roberta Smith, and book critic Dwight Garner. Shostakovich’s 1928 opera is loosely based on the early nineteenth century Nikolai Gogol story of the same name; Kentridge, a South African artist known for his prints and animation, also has a major show at the Museum of Modern Art.
• Robert Christgau on the genius of Lil Wayne — “[he] ends each of the 22 lines with a two-syllable short-u rhyme: stunner, stomach, rubbers, woman, dungeon, fun-ya (?), Bunyan, construction, seduction, discussion, trust ya, fuck ya, fuck ya (yup, twice), busta, touch ya, Usher, Russia, flush ya, crusher, gusher, production, abduction. You may think these aren’t all rhymes, but Wayne disagrees, and puts their music where his mouf is … Always there’s the sense that this is word play — that Wayne has diddled the ‘street’ ‘reality’ of hip-hop convention until a convention is all it remains.” [Barnes & Noble Review]
• Steve Albini and Patti Smith remember Mark Linkous, the musician behind Sparklehorse, who commited suicide last Saturday.
• The transcript of an interview by Andrew Nosnitzsky (Cocaine Blunts) with Pimp C from August 2007, four months before the rapper overdosed on codeine: “Juicy J and DJ Paul came to my house, that’s when we recorded Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp and a couple other songs the same night, and we was having an ice storm. They got to my house and they got iced in, they had to stay. The mutherfucka Paul say, god damn Pimp, what the fuck is you doing, man, with this house like this? I said, man, I’m rap hustlin’, I haven’t touched a piece of dope in years. Nigga looked at Juicy and said, we gotta get a new house.”
• On Mere Duchess, a cultural context for H-Town’s 1993 single “Knockin’ Da Boots.”
• The February/March issue of Perfect Sound Forever includes an interview with Richard X. Heyman, a Trouser Press-esque overview of The Verlaines, an analysis of the black avant-garde (or lack thereof), feminism and the Vivian Girls, an appreciation of Pylon’s Randy Bewley by his bandmates, round-ups of the late careers of Peter Tosh, Robert Pollard, and Serge Gainsbourg, plus other offbeat stuff.
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Post Cereal, television advertisement (still). 1970s

• The Quietus turns in a lengthy editorial fighting for Lady Gaga as the successor of—not just Madge and Bowie—but Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Hm. They also seem to think her critical reception has been largely negative—which, well, I dunno?
• On Pitchfork, Tom Ewing gets tangled up in distinctions between art and commodity. (I think there is a failure to satisfactorially define what constitutes “art” in this column, and that gets the better of him in the end—but, as always, there are plenty of fine observations.)
• In the New York Times, Jon Caramanica covers a performance by Frankie Rose, who he calls “a sparkplug for all-female, lo-fi garage-rock.”
• An appraisal of the ambiguities in the music of Chopin on the occasion of the composer’s 200th birthday, by Anne Midgette in the Washington Post.
• Two from The Guardian: a review of Best Music Writing 2009 (which mentions David Remnick’s profile of jazz personality Phil Schaap, which I found delightful); and a review of The Music Instinct, by Philip Ball which attempts, with apparently limited success, to come to terms with the neuroscience of music.