Posted 9/14/2009 11:51:00 AM by barbara flaska

Daphne Carr answers the burning question: "Hey Kids, What time is it?"

("It's time for EMP")

2010 Pop Conference Call for Proposals

The Pop Machine: Music and Technology

Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Seattle, April 15-18, 2010

Popular music might be narrated as a story of sounds and the machines that make
them. From the talking drum and parlor room piano to the Gibson Les Paul, from
the Edison phonograph to Roland 808 beatbox and Antares Autotune software, how
have pop’s contraptions reflected, inflected, and mediated musical history?
What changes when we start with the technology that makes the ineffable
material, and its shaping of modes of production and consumption? As we close
out a decade of momentous change at all levels of popular music, this is a
salient moment for rethinking the continual dialogue in pop between the new and
the traditional. Note: this call is not aimed only at gearheads. What counts as
human is produced in and through the use of technologies. We need to hear the
voices that wrap flesh around the wiring.



Topics can cover any era or style of music and may include, but are not limited
to:

--Hardware: the effect of equipment on how we make, record, disseminate, and
fetishize music.

--Business: economies of scale(s), the demand for profit in changing
technological contexts.

--Identity: how youth culture, Afromodernism, and transgender/transsexual
personas, manufactured divas and real fem-bots, among other pop categories,
deploy technology.

--Technology in the 2000s: iPods, computer game music, music and war, digital
technology exhuming analog artifacts.

--Aesthetics: “perfect sound forever” to pixelation and lossy file formats;
Computer Love erotics; power chords from amplified blues to Guitar Hero.

--“The street finds its own use for things”: working class, global, racial,
and other subaltern appropriations of technology, from sound systems to rock
camps for girls.

--Bodies as technologies: the “natural” as a response to changing artifices;
the voice as a modifiable tool.

--Music writing and the technological formations it rests upon.

--Anxieties and doubts: folk revivalists, roots rockers, and other
tech-refuseniks.



The Pop Conference at EMP|SFM, now in its ninth year, joins academics, critics,
performers, and dedicated fans in a rare common discussion. The conference is
sponsored by the American Music Partnership of Seattle (Experience Music
Project, the University of Washington School of Music, and KEXP 90.3 FM),
through a grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. This year’s program
committee members are: writer and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda, Jasen Emmons
(EMP/SFM), musician Sean Nelson, Tavia Nyong’o (NYU), Lauren Onkey (Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times), Jody Rosen
(Slate), Barry Shank (Ohio State), Tyina Steptoe (University of Washington), and
Tim Taylor (UCLA).


Please send proposals of 250 words, with 50 word bio, to organizer Eric Weisbard
(University of Alabama) at Eric.Weisbard@.... Deadline for proposals is
Tuesday, December 15. Panel proposals, for either three presenters (90 minutes)
or four (105 minutes), should include overview language and 200 word individual
proposals, plus panelist bios. We welcome unorthodox proposals and proposals
aimed explicitly at a general interest audience. For more information, go to
http://www.empsfm.org/education/

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Posted 4/02/2009 06:39:00 PM by barbara flaska

Back when things were a bit more fun, in 1976 actually, I submitted a recipe to celebrate a new festival. By 1986, I was surprised to learn last night, that recipe had taken hold in a small universe (and was even the basis of an offering put onto the menu of a famous restaurant!)

The Courier, June 24, 1986

"The recipe for Garlic Ice Cream is by Barbara Flaska, has been published in both "The Garlic Times" and "The Book of Garlic", and has been adopted for use by Nucleus Nuance in Los Angeles as its official garlic dessert."


That was years ago that happened, and even as long ago as last night. Given how things are today, I find sometimes I still prefer to linger in places and times where things used to be more fun. The lucky diners at Nucleus Nuance, for instance, could culminate their fine repast if they so chose with a chilled dessert I was instrumental in designing. The Nucleus Nuance soon became a famous Hollywood eatery on Melrose, a classy natural foods joint that offered Evolution Burgers and fine jazz.

The restaurant was frequented by stars and performers famous to that era and maybe also by people I knew (Herbie Hancock, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell).

It's nice even going there now in my imagination, because I was never in attendance when it existed in fact, and I know from mere casual reading just now that other people still recall the place with special fondness and more than a twinge of nostalgic longing. The Nucleus Nuance was a gathering spot, where artists were discovered and signed on the spot by famous producers, where poets and musicians and artists and all kinds of interesting people assembled, and the place itself was celebrated in lyrics and paint by the artists who'd gathered around the tables. It's likely the Nucleus Nuance is about as close as I'll ever get to my ideal place Romany Marie's, but still, I'm glad I could bring dessert.

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Posted 2/03/2009 11:47:00 AM by barbara flaska

Want to write a song?

You're invited to be part of the "Home Sweet Home Project"

http://www.polarity1.com/homesweethomeproject/index.php

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Posted 12/29/2008 03:44:00 PM by barbara flaska

THE NEVER ENDING QUEST FOR THE BEST MUSIC WRITING CONTINUES ...

Hello lover of great music journalism,

I'm the series editor of the Best Music Writing series, an anthology
now in its tenth year of publishing the year's best writing on topics
music-related. I'm honored to be working with Greil Marcus for the
upcoming 2009 book, and hope you can help me make this the best book
in the series.

My job is tough. I am responsible for reading all the music
publications in the English language and selecting 100 pieces from
these publications for possible reprint in the volume. It helps a lot
to get suggestions from writers, editors, and music writing fans who
read every day.

So this email serves as a call for submissions for the book Best Music
Writing 2009. For the anthology I want to reprint brilliant features,
essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction,
fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, and journal
articles on musical and music culture-related topics. I mean the term
"music" broadly to include all genres, time periods, and performers
and "writing" to mean all work published in periodical form in the
calendar year 2008. I regret that I cannot consider books, book
chapters, liner notes, or transcripts of broadcast journalism.

Please send your own best work, work you've edited or overseen, great
work of your friends and colleagues, or work that you have admired in
passing throughout the year. You can send email links, hard copies of
articles, whole publications (please paper clip or post-it the pages
to read), or if need be, just email the series editor Daphne Carr with
the author name/article title/publication title/date.

If you are an editor, please limit the number of submissions to your
publication's best, most favored, most original and important works.
You can share my email with your writers too, so they can nominate
their own works.

Feel free to forward or repost this email, and to send mail multiple
times as you find more pieces that you find notable. Please send items
between now (December 29) and February 1, 2009. Please feel free to
forward this and repost it. Make sure the contact information is
contained:

Email to: musicwriting@gmail.com

BMW2009
603 West 115th Street #120
NY, NY 10025

Many thanks,
Daphne Carr

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Posted 11/22/2008 02:48:00 PM by barbara flaska

later first rough draft of memory: November 22

North Beach, San Francisco. The Committee was a comedy revue beloved by the local intelligentsia and tourist alike. But in November 1963, the time I am writing about, once or twice the doorman for reasons I will never fully comprehend let me and my singing partner in to watch the show for free. Bizarro improvisations, "zany" is the word for them (they'd improvise poems in crossover styles of "Kates" and "Yeets", and the audience was literate enough then to be in on the joke).

Another of the Committee's memorable regular skits of the time was about an execution. The convict was dragged in and buckled into an electric chair. The warden and the guards were adjusting the straps, and as the steel cap was being settled on the prisoner's head, the warden asked the prisoner if that was comfortable. At which the prisoner snorted out a derisive laugh and said, "Comfortable? You're about to kill me!" He then began cackling, spitting, and hurling hilarious abuse at his captors. The condemned man vented his all at last, believing he had nothing whatsoever left to lose. After a few minutes of this hysteric insult, the warden and his helpers glanced at each other, unbuckled the straps, pulled him from the chair, then beat and kicked him to death.

Back then I was a guitar picker in the smallest and most obscure of venues, and the City Lights Bookstore was my mailbox in the city, their bulletin board held my occasional pieces of incoming mail with a thumbtack. All of which might sound more poetic than it really was. Not of any kind of lost generation, but rather an in-between generation, I was too late for the beatniks and too early for the hippies. And to those who really might not suspect or know, should you care, there is no beach in North Beach.

Late November, I'd arrived at one of the small coffee houses for the scheduled gig guitar case in hand, floating on air, amazed and thankful to have a small paying j-o-b onstage in a slightly larger than the smallest and most obscure of venues. So amped up about this stroke of good fortune to have spent nearly the entire day in rehearsal and re-rehearsal. But arriving at the appointed time, the club was dark, the doors were locked; the little coffee house was shut up tight as a drum. As I stood disbelieving, I finally noticed a small framed portrait draped in black in the window. A photo of John F Kennedy had been clipped from a newspaper and placed into the small frame, and there was a candle burning next to it.

It was Eric Andersen folksinger happened by and told my singing partner and me that Kennedy had been shot and killed that day. That we didn't have the job that night though a financial hardship of profound proportion was scarcely noticed by either of us in view of the enormity of the news. The newsracks were all empty as we continued on, but one held a paper with a dark black headline. We went down the street to Mike's poolhall instead to share one cup of coffee and to get out of the chill. We read through all the newspapers littering the tables, and we sat there for what must have been hours. About that time, we noticed an energized person walking up to the front door, then back down the street obviously to talk to someone. He reappeared at the door and was identified to us by a man at a nearby table as Alan Ginsberg (sic). He was peering in through the windows, perhaps looking for a recognizable face. He decided to enter, and made his entrance by pushing quickly through the doors. He settled at a far table, back to the wall, his visage facing towards the people seated in the room, and within moments the floors squeaked with the sound of wooden chairs being dragged across linoleum. He was immediately surrounded by people who were pulling their chairs and scooting their tables to be closer to him.

Aldous Huxley (one of my personal heroes of that time) had also died that very day, but because of the ongoing news surrounding the President's assassination, Huxley's obituary was delayed nearly a week before even receiving space enough to be published in the local paper. That was doubly sad, but it seemed bigger and more metaphysically significant than that, like things were threatening to slip apace and descend quickly into an impending overall darkness.

Even being from real life, this would have been a pretty generic series of anecdotes, except for the name-dropping part. Drawn from real life, it doesn't make any kind of sense. Except that as you grow older, and experiences stack up, one thing reminds you of another and sometimes things intersect in strange ways.

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Posted 8/07/2008 08:03:00 AM by barbara flaska

By Ned Sublette

Smithsonian magazine, August 2008



I helped Bo Diddley find a drummer once.

It was in 1971. I was 19, reading underground comics one sleepy afternoon at Roach Ranch West, a spacious, hippie-stuff shop in Albuquerque, when a black man wearing a big black hat walked in and said: "I'm Bo Diddley."

It was, in the argot of the day, a cosmic moment. Could this really be Bo "47 miles of barbed wire" Diddley stepping out of the blue, announcing his presence in a remote desert city? Was I hallucinating?

No, it really was that founding father of rock 'n' roll. He had relocated his family from Southern California to Los Lunas, New Mexico, after being shaken up by a big earthquake, and he wanted to play a free show.

"Do you know any drummers?" he asked.

It happened that there was a drummer in the Roach Ranch at that very moment—Mike Fleming, who played with a local cover band called Lemon. I pointed him out. They spoke, and Bo Diddley said he'd be back later. Somebody called the local Top 40 station to announce the show.

Bo Diddley played that night to a packed-out back room at Roach Ranch West, with his wife and three daughters singing with him and Mike Fleming on drums. I sat on the floor in front of the improvised stage, close enough for him to sweat on me, studying him as he pulled a variety of sounds out of his cranked-up rhythm guitar to drive the audience wild. He wasn't doing an oldies show, he was doing funky new material. I shouted and shouted for "Who Do You Love." Which, finally, he played.

Ellas McDaniel, professionally known as Bo Diddley, died June 2 at the age of 79. He is remembered above all for his signature rhythm. Tell any drummer, in any bar band anywhere, to play a Bo Diddley beat, and he'll know what to do.

But Bo Diddley was so much more than a beat. He was a transforming figure. After him, music was different. His debut single, "Bo Diddley" (1955), announced that the whole game had changed. He showed how you could build a whole pop record around a rhythm and a rhyme. You didn't even need chord changes.

He put the beat front and center. To make that work, he chose the most compelling beat he could: the two-bar rhythm that Cubans know as clave. All the Chicago blues guys dipped into rumba blues, but this was another take on it. The Latin connection was so strong that Bo Diddley used maracas as a basic component of his sound. But sidekick Jerome Green didn't play maracas like a Cuban, and Bo Diddley didn't play that rhythm like a Cuban; he swung it, like an African-American who'd been playing on street corners in Chicago. And Bo Diddley's way of expressing that two-bar feel, known across a wide swath of Africa, was in turn a fountainhead for the development of rock 'n' roll, which would repeatedly cross Afro-Cuban and Af-rican-American rhythmic sensibilities.

Cover bands play the Bo Diddley beat formulaically. But in Bo Diddley's hands, the beat was alive. He did something different with it every time he recorded it. It's the difference between copying and creating.

He was born Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi, not far from the Louisiana border, on December 30, 1928. His teenage mother was unable to care for him, and he never knew his father, so the future Bo Diddley was adopted by his mother's cousin Gussie McDaniel, who gave him her last name and moved him to Chicago when he was about 7. There he was present at the creation of one of the great American musics: the electric Chicago blues.

The city was full of African-Americans looking for work and escaping the poverty, discrimination and lynchings of the Jim Crow South, and they constituted a strong local audience for music. More than a decade younger than Muddy Waters, and almost 20 years younger than Howlin' Wolf, Ellas McDaniel was a punk kid by comparison. "We used to be three dudes going down the street with a washtub, a little raggedy guitar and another cat with maracas," he told writer Neil Strauss in 2005. "Bo Diddley," his first record, went to No. 1 on the rhythm and blues chart without denting the pop chart. He appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on November 20, 1955—almost a year before Elvis Presley did. But Sullivan got mad at him for playing "Bo Diddley" instead of his one-chord cover version of "Sixteen Tons" (then the top recording in the nation, but by Tennessee Ernie Ford) and never had him back.

A generation of white kids first heard the Bo Diddley beat through cover songs and knockoffs, such as the Everly Brothers' 1957 hit "Bye Bye Love." Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" (1957), originally a B-side but his most-covered song over the years, was based on Bo Diddley's "Mona." The entire British Invasion generation felt Bo Diddley's impact. He played dates in the United Kingdom in 1963 with Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and, making their first tour, the Rolling Stones. Bo Diddley's material was a basic building block of the Stones' sound. In 1964, their version of "Not Fade Away," in a style that was more Diddley than Holly, became their first U.S. single.

Bo Diddley revolutionized the texture of pop music. He put the rhythm in the foreground, stripping away the rest, and customized the space with tremolo, distortion, echo and reverb, to say nothing of maracas. The way he chunked on the lower strings was a primary model for what was later known as rhythm guitar. He had lots of space to fill up with his guitar, because his records had no piano and no bass. Which also meant no harmonic complications.

Hanging on a single tone, never changing chords—the writer Robert Palmer called that the "deep blues," something that reached from Chicago back to the front-porch style of Missis- sippi and Louisiana. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters recorded one-chord songs before Bo Diddley did, but he made them central to his repertoire.

Both sides of Bo Diddley's first single were one-chord tunes. "I'm a Man," the B-side, cut at the same March 2, 1955, session as "Bo Diddley," was just as potent, with a marching, swinging, one-bar throb that hit a bluesy chord insistently every fourth beat. It was a rewrite of Muddy Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man," and Waters in turn reworked "I'm a Man" into one of his biggest hits, the one-chord "Mannish Boy," the stretched-out highlight of Martin Scorsese's concert film The Last Waltz.

The very name Bo Diddley implies a single chord, though he disclaimed having known the term "diddley bow" when he began using his stage name. The diddley bow, a single strand of wire nailed at both ends to a board, was a fundamental African musical instrument of the down-home American South. Bo Diddley played guitar as if it was a diddley bow with frets, barring up and down with his index finger—he did not play with a bottleneck—while chopping the rhythm with his right hand.

He was a key figure in the invention of psychedelic guitar. He found new ways to mess with the sound, making rhythm out of everything the pickups could detect. At first he couldn't afford an electric guitar; he used spare parts to electrify his acoustic one. He built his own tremolo device, creating a complex sound pattern when he played rhythm chords through it. "Down Home Special" (1956), with its railroad-chug guitar, echo, distorted vocal, rhythmic train whistle sound effect and wash of maracas, all in a minor-key blues, was ten years ahead of its time. The now-classic, much-abused Pete Townshend string scrape—running the edge of the guitar pick down the length of the wrapped wire of the low E string—was lifted from Bo Diddley's 1960 proto-garage classic "Road Runner."

The first instrument Bo Diddley played as a child was the violin—along with the banjo, a common African-American instrument in the 19th and early 20th centuries—and he may have been the first person to play a blues violin solo in a rock 'n' roll context. With echo, of course.

Bo Diddley was an inspired poet with a consistent voice. His lyrics sounded spontaneous and tossed off, but they were coherent. Whatever the improvised circumstances of a song's creation, it resonated with all kinds of meanings, evoking a mysterious reality lurking beneath daily life that reached back to Africa via Mississippi. If Bo Diddley was comical, he was a jester who'd seen something horrifying. In the first four lines of "Who Do You Love" (think of it as "Hoodoo You Love") he walks 47 miles of barbed wire, uses a cobra for a necktie and lives in a house made of rattlesnake hide.

The lyrics of "Bo Diddley" owed something to "Hambone," Red Saunders' 1952 Chicago-made rhythm novelty hit, which in turn referred to a popular lullaby: Hush little baby, don't say a word / Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird / And if that mockingbird don't sing / Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring. But Bo Diddley ditched the bird and went straight to the ring, creating one of the iconic verses of rock 'n' roll:

Bo Diddley buy baby diamond ring,

If that diamond ring don't shine,

He gonna take it to a private eye

By the third verse, he was singing about a hoodoo spell: Mojo come to my house, a black cat bone.

Bo Diddley had been the name of an old vaudeville comedian who was still kicking around on the chitlin circuit when Ellas McDaniel recorded "Bo Diddley." The song's lyrics originally referred to an "Uncle John." Bandmate Billy Boy Arnold claimed to have been the one who suggested replacing those words with the comedian's name. It was an on-the-spot decision, he said, and it was the producer and label owner Leonard Chess who put out the record "Bo Diddley" using Bo Diddley as the artist's name.

It was positively modernist: a song called "Bo Diddley" about the exploits of a character named Bo Diddley, by an artist named Bo Diddley, who played the Bo Diddley beat. No other first-generation rock 'n' roller started out by taking on a mystical persona and then singing about his adventures in the third person. By name-checking himself throughout the lyrics of his debut record, Bo Diddley established what we would now call his brand. Today this approach to marketing is routine for rappers, but Bo Diddley was there 30 years before. He was practically rapping anyway, with stream-of-consciousness rhyming over a rhythm loop.

At a time when black men were not allowed overt expressions of sexuality in mainstream popular music, Bo Diddley, like his Chicago colleagues, was unequivocally masculine. But that did not make him antifeminist: he was the first major rock 'n' roll performer—and one of the few ever—to hire a female lead guitarist, Lady Bo (Peggy Jones), in 1957, and he employed female musicians throughout his career.



"I'm a Man" was recorded the year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education. Anyone who hears that song as mere machismo misses a deeper reading of it. It was just 60 years before Ellas Bates was born that the 14th Amendment acknowledged as human beings people who had previously had the legal status of cattle, and who had been forbidden to learn to read and write: I'm a man / I spell M! A! N!



In case you didn't get what he was driving at, he spelled it out for you. His lyrics evoked a history that the white cover bands could never express: Africa, slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, peonage, discrimination.



The Yardbirds had a U.S. hit in 1966 with what was by the standards of British rock a very good version of "I'm a Man," but they changed the third verse, because they wouldn't even try to step up to the African-American legend alluded to in the original:



I'm goin' back down

To Kansas to

Bring back the second cousin,

Little John the Conqueroo



High John the Conqueror was a root that root doctors used. You might come back to Chicago from down South with some in your pocket. But in African-American lore, John the Conqueror was also an African king sold into slavery. Bo Diddley was claiming kinship to a king.



Bo Diddley made records for decades, improvising lyrics as he went along, creating a body of work that has yet to be appreciated in full. He had a long life, and a good life. He should have had a better one. He complained bitterly that he had been screwed on the money his songs generated. He had to keep working to pay the bills, still traveling around in his 70s.



He played for President and Mrs. Kennedy, as well as for the inauguration of George H. W. Bush. The day after Bo Diddley died, Senator Barack Obama clinched a major party's nomination for president. The general election won't be held until November, but in the meantime we can measure the distance African-Americans have traveled in the half-century since Bo Diddley made those records we still play.



Talk about your 47 miles of barbed wire.



Ned Sublette's most recent book is The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. He lives in New York City.

(via rockrap confidential)

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Posted 7/14/2008 10:52:00 PM by barbara flaska

steve rubio mentioned dale miller who made me think of

dave evans (and his sad pig dance). thinking of dave reminded me of

woody mann, who nudged me directly into rememberances of jo ann kelly, because they all shared a label i worked for when their records came out.

and i realized that i haven't listened to one of the best blues voices ever for a for a very long time, so i found this jo ann kelly tribute site a few days ago, and, really, just listen to this woman!


["It was hard to do "Walking Blues" for instance, but I was not born with a voice like Mavis Staples or Jo Ann Kelly." (Bonnie Raitt)]

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Posted 5/21/2008 02:48:00 PM by barbara flaska

Time for an art break

Check out Louis Armstrong's collages at Paris Review

(via rock confidential)

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Posted 4/04/2008 08:06:00 PM by barbara flaska

I missed reading "Considerable Sounds: The Music That Matters" when it first appeared on Duly Considered.

Here's the opener:

"Molecular Mysticism and The Music of the Spheres

The musician integrates into the social fabric, but is not of it. Art simply does not exist unassailed by social forces and the material world. One must turn inward in a process that is both personal and universal, emerging in the end outwardly via art. Music requires that it's performer be completely centered, concurrently maintaining a delicate balance between self and selfless. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. There are direct parallels between the story of the Zen Archer and the musician. One must know, exactly who and where one is in the cosmogony, have accumulated a vast array of cognitive content, and honed variety of techniques and resources. Yet the creation of art then requires abandonment of all of this to the moment. The finest musicians serve the music. The essential musician becomes the music."


DC Music Editor Benjamin New then goes on a wild solo, contemplating the zen of archery, easing into a sonic reference to "Music Matters", and creating a grand burning finale comprised of Frank Zappa, the Plastic People, Lou Reed, Vaclav Havel, and a NY show with Gary Lucas. I'd read Gary's account of that show when he first posted it and was happy to find this reference to help prove all that music is still living and breathing and echoing around in people's memories.

Considerable Sounds ... czech it out! And, gentle reader, please overlook a coupla typos in the interest of passion.

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Posted 4/04/2008 03:31:00 PM by barbara flaska

Hey, kids, what time is it?

It's time for EMP!


EMP's Pop Conference: A lot of talk about music

By Patrick MacDonald

Seattle Times music critic
Event preview

2008 Pop Conference: "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict and Change"
Thursday-April 13, Experience Music Project, Seattle Center; free (preregistration recommended: 206-770-2745 or e-mail to PopConference Registration@empsfm.org).

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as the old saw goes, then talking about music, at an academic level, can really be a stretch.

At Experience Music Project's annual Pop Conference, now in its seventh year, the presentations can go from fascinating and enlightening to pretentious and boring, as well as several levels in between. Sometimes you get the feeling that those who yammer endlessly about music don't really like it, don't seem to get pleasure or insight from it, but rather yearn to examine it, pull it apart, try to understand what others find in the musical experience.

Other times, you encounter a writer or scholar full of enthusiasm and ideas, one who makes listening to music richer because you understand and appreciate it better.

And the best thing about EMP's Pop Conference is that it's free. You can browse among the many offerings — some 40 sessions and panels, with more than 160 presenters reading their papers — and take 'em or leave 'em, never feeling that time or money has been wasted (and there's always the museum to explore for the general admission fee).

As with many contemporary academic pursuits, gender, politics and ethnicity are big at this year's conference. The theme is "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict and Change." That takes in a lot of territory. Several panels are connected to one of the museum's current exhibits, "American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music." Hip-hop is, of course, well-represented, including a performance by Blue Scholars. Several panels deal with music in time of war.

Last year's conference resulted in the book "Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music," published by Duke University Press. One fascinating aspect of the conference is that you learn how many scholars are out there in academia seriously studying pop music. (At the conference, I often hear Mick Jagger in my head, singing "It's only rock 'n' roll ... ").

For the latest information about the conference schedule, visit EMP online: www.empsfm.org/education.

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312 or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

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Posted 4/04/2008 03:15:00 PM by barbara flaska

Thanks to Dave Marsh and the fine folks at www.rockrap.com, got a movie for you today ... They want to know ...

Who owns what? What is the purpose of copyright? What is the purpose of music?

Good Copy Bad Copy is a 58 minute 2007 Danish film (in English) which explores, worldwide, how corporations, lawyers, artists, DJs, and fans are using or ignoring copyright. Filming was done in the U.S., Sweden, Nigeria, Brazil, England, and Russia. It's very well made and blasts out a wild ride of ideas and music.

Watch it at http://nofilmschool.com/2008/03/seen-good-copy-bad-copy/

The cast of characters who appear in one form or another include:

The Beatles
Jay-Z
Publishers
Lawyers
NWA
George Clinton
DJs
MPAA, IFPI
Producers
Danger Mouse
Dancers
U.S. Congress


In a world where 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day, do we need a new business model or a new model for society?

Let the music play.

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Posted 3/28/2008 09:56:00 AM by barbara flaska

Funny bunny stuff, an abstract presented in full at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) South-Central Chapter.

“Analyzing the Rutles: The Music and Identity of the Pre-Fab Four”
Christine Boone, University of Texas at Austin.

"On March 22, 1978, NBC aired a new made-for-TV “docudrama” about a fictional 1960s British Invasion band entitled The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. The Rutles is a phony documentary about the “pre-fab four:” Ron Nasty, Dirk McQuickly, Stig O’Hara, and Barry Wom. The movie is an obvious parody of the Beatles. Every still photograph shown and almost every bit of video footage has been modeled on an actual photograph or video clip of the Beatles.


"Eric Idle, the film’s creator, said that “the Beatles and the Rutles are so
intertwined, you can’t quite tell where the legend ends and the comedy takes over.”1 It is this particular comment that will be investigated through the course of this paper. The movie features a number of songs performed by the Rutles, but each Rutles song is not based on a single Beatles song. Composer Neil Innes does not simply take Beatles songs and replace the lyrics, in the style of the popular song parodies of Weird Al Yankovich. Using John Covach’s idea of stylistic competency, I will deconstruct the musical content of two of the Rutles’ songs and unearth a web of references that work together to create a parody of the Beatles’ style. These songs work in such a way that they can be (and in one famous instance, were) easily misidentified as actual Beatles songs, thereby helping to conflate the identities of the two groups."

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Posted 3/09/2008 01:31:00 PM by barbara flaska

Here it is, at last:

The Civics of Rock: Sixties Countercultural Music and the
Transformation of the Public Sphere

(by Michael Jacob Kramer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006)

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Posted 1/14/2008 01:39:00 PM by barbara flaska

Best Music Writing

(Got some? Send it to Daphne pronto!)

Hello there music writer,

I'm the editor of the Best Music Writing series, now going on its
eighth year of publishing the year's best writing on all topics music
related. I am pleased to report to you that for the 2008 edition of
the book I will be working with esteemed writer Nelson George. I look
forward to a fruitful spring of reading and consulting with him on
this project.

This year, as in every year, I am looking for brilliant features,
essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction,
fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, journal
articles and the like on music and music culture-related topics.

I ask you to please send your own best work, work you've edited or
published, great work of your friends and colleagues, and/or work that
you have admired in passing throughout the year. You can send me email
links, hard copies of articles, whole magazines (please
paperclip/post-it the pages to read), or if need be, just the
name/title/publication title/date and I will search the piece out
myself. Feel free to mail me multiple times as you find more pieces
that you love starting right….NOW! and ending by the first week in
February at the very latest.

Email to: musicwriting@gmail.com

Mail to:

Daphne Carr/BMW07
603 West 115th Street #120
New York, NY 10025

And finally, please feel free to post this or forward this email
widely to all of your contacts in the music writing and publishing
community. I look forward to a deluge of mail from all of you in the
very near future.

Feel free to email me with any questions.

Thanks for another great year of writing,
Daphne




--
from the desk of:

Daphne Carr
Best Music Writing Series Editor
http://funboring.com/bestmusicwriting/

603 West 115th St #120
NY, NY 10025
646-591-1166
musicwriting@gmail.com

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Posted 8/26/2007 07:13:00 PM by barbara flaska

If we can't be free, at least we can be cheap

It's August, and I saw the Tour de Frank, I saw the Tour de Frank (best show of the year -- no foolin' -- entire audience gave a standing ovation after each and every tune ... it's a gas, that show, and I felt like I'd encountered old friends).

In case you can't catch Dweezil and crew live and in person this time around, here's a great long article on the Man from Utopia, Frank Zappa for your reading, viewing, and listening pleasure.

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Posted 6/19/2007 03:10:00 PM by barbara flaska

Rock & Rap Confidential, the only publication ever recommended by Rage Against the Machine, is now available free of charge via email. To subscribe, just send the email address you wish to receive it at to: rockrap@aol.com.

RRC is the only publication that reviews and promotes every type of music.

RRC, the first to oppose Tipper Gore and the music censors, remains in the forefront in the fight for musical freedom of expression.

RRC is always giving answers to the question: Just exactly why do we need the music industry?

RRC regularly challenges Bono on his bullshit.

To find out more, check out www.rockrap.com (features include The Hidden History of Rock and Rap and Musicians and Health Care).

"This is what we need, more of this!"--Joe Strummer

"The best thing to hit my mailbox"--Cameron Crowe

To subscribe, just send the email address you wish to receive it at to: rockrap@aol.com.

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