Our ears perceive loudness in an environment by reflexively noting the dynamic range — the difference between the softest and loudest sounds (in this case, the environment is the recording itself, not the room you are playing it in). A blaring television commercial may make us turn down the volume of our sets, but its sonic peaks are no higher than the regular programming preceding it. The commercial just hits those peaks more often. A radio station playing classical music may be broadcasting a signal with the same maximum strength as one playing hip-hop, but the classical station broadcast will hit that peak perhaps once every few minutes, while the hip-hop station’s signal may peak several times per second. – The New York Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
Country Music, Politics, And The Problem When You Don’t Fit In
A few years ago there was an expectation that stars such as Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price might bring a new sound and sensibility to country music. Instead, they became their own subgenre and today are often classified as “Americana” artists, a subset of roots music aimed largely at liberals. – Washington Post
About Time: Landmark Deal Gives Actors Profit Sharing On Work They Help Develop
The deal, reached between Actors’ Equity, a union representing 51,000 performers and stage managers, and the Broadway League, a trade organization for producers, is a milestone, marking the first time that the industry’s financiers have tacitly agreed to acknowledge that performers are contributing ideas, not just labor, to shaping new musicals and plays. – The New York Times
How Today’s Journalism Looks Remarkably Like That Of Yesteryear
If you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly. A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents, or a partisan vehicle built around himself like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, or an occasional columnist gig at a less partisan outlet like Politico, or a popular podcast where he’d shoot the political breeze with other Sons of Liberty, à la Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America. “Journalism dying, you say?” Ben Franklin v 2.0 might say. “It’s absolutely blooming, as it was in my day.” – Wired
Joan Acocella: How New York City Ballet Was Brought Down To Earth (An Epic And Chilling Account)
“People trying to assess Peter Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.” – The New Yorker
Criminalizing Drill Rappers For Performing Their Work Is Dangerous
“As a letter signed this week by human rights organisations, lawyers, academics and musicians argues, criminalising artists in this way is both unjust and ineffective. It is unjust because it denies the basic freedoms of those who are attempting to creatively, if distastefully, expose their experiences of subsistent life in the bleakest urban pockets of British society. And it will be ineffective at achieving any reduction in violence because it simply does nothing to address its root causes.” – The Guardian
Netflix’s Sendup Of The Art World Is A Blast At Elites
Phil Kennicott: “This is a perfect film for the age of Donald Trump, a revenge fantasy perpetrated against elites, who are caricatured as venal, corrupt and beyond redemption. And despite a few attempts on the director’s part to distinguish authentic art from his parody of art as a vast con game, the film ends on a profoundly anti-art note.” – Washington Post
Pop Music Used To Be All About The Album. Now, That Model Has Been Blown Up
“While it does take longer for artists to get to their first album, once they are there, everything accelerates. Suddenly they reach a level that might have previously been reached by album two or three. Are they rising fast to then decline just as fast? Only time will tell.” – The Guardian
Actor Albert Finney, 82
Finney became the face of British cinema’s international explosion after being cast in the title role of Tom Jones, directed by The Entertainer’s Tony Richardson. Tom Jones, with its bawdy humour and rollicking atmosphere, was a sizeable hit in the US, and won four Oscars (including best picture); Finney received the first of his four best actor nominations, but lost to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. – The Guardian
Hollywood’s History Of Blackface
Most Americans today are so removed from the heyday of blackface, when an entertainer like Al Jolson could cement their iconic status with it, that, like the Confederate flag, it is embraced by some as a triumphant act of transgressive rebellion and/or willful ignorance, a thumb in the eye of the politically correct. – The Daily Beast