The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With the rise of hip-hop, covers were displaced by sampling and remixes, but then samples themselves became more concealed and layered, for reasons of both art and copyright. In the 2000s and earlier this decade, the practice migrated to YouTube, where concert clips or home videos of one-off covers, rearrangements, and parodies might show off the skills and wit of amateurs and pros alike but still seldom troubled the charts—unless they also made it to soundtracks or TV ads, where acoustic remakes of once-upon-a-time hits (either twee or glum or both) have become a staple.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why We Needed A New History Of The United States
Jill Lepore has surmised, is that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the period, and yet lost to us.” Lepore’s training as a historian, she’s said, tried to teach her that these things did not contain worthy explanations. In graduate school her interest in them “looked like a liability, and I took note.”
How Music Competitions Are Reinventing Themselves
Competitions, like the rest of the business, are redefining themselves. Rather than trying to produce the superstars of tomorrow, they’re increasingly focusing on the present: an end in themselves. Indeed, the line between the competition and other classical music organizations is increasingly blurred.
Even As Its Economy Was Melting Down, Greece Still Invested In The Arts. Why?
The principal belief is that supporting the arts and culture is not a luxury but an investment in human progress. It is the necessary scaffolding for building and sustaining civil society. It is the cornerstone for human growth and development.
We’re All About Feelings Now – How Literature Evolved Beyond Narratives
Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
Report: Broadway Theatre Audience Is Getting Younger
The 21st publication is just out and reports the lowest age attendance since 2000, a significant bit of hope for Broadway’s long-term health. During the 2017–2018 season, the average age of Broadway theater-goers was 40.6, the lowest since 2000. For a second year in a row, there was a record total number of kids and teens under 18 attending a Broadway show. At 2.1 million, it represents the highest total ever (it was 1.65 million the season prior). Additionally, since the 2010-2011 season, Hispanic/Latino attendance has grown by 61%, or 430,000 admissions (from 710,000 to 1.14 million).
What Happens When The Great Thinking Of The World Is Reduced To Being Expressed In Tweets?
So, what happens when people stop writing letters? Or when books become less central to society—a tangential diversion or eccentricity—less important than movies, which are less important than the premium cable channels, which are less important than Netflix and Amazon Prime, which are less important than video games, all of which together are less important than social media? What happens when our writers and thinkers express themselves through Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter instead of on the page?
New York Museums Rescind Use Of Saudi Money For Programs
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum said on Thursday that they would not use Saudi money for programs on Middle Eastern art that had originally been supported by groups tied to the Saudi government.
On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe
“Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own.”
Brahms: Rhythms That Fight (That’s The Secret)
Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak. You don’t have to be musically literate to know the bumpy feel of a cross-rhythm. Two-against-three can be a parent strolling hand in hand with a skipping child. Triplets on top of eighth notes are like a slow canter next to a trot: The two horses might move at the same speed, but you wouldn’t want them pulling a carriage together.