Drake suffered from depression and insomnia throughout his life, and these topics were often reflected in his lyrics. Upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old.
Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s but the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree caused his back catalogue to be reassessed. By the mid-1980s Drake was being credited as an influence by such artists as Robert Smith and Peter Buck. In 1985, The Dream Academy reached the UK and US charts with "Life in a Northern Town", a song written for and dedicated to Drake.[6] By the early 1990s, he had come to represent a certain type of 'doomed romantic' musician in the UK music press, and was frequently cited by artists including Kate Bush, Paul Weller and The Black Crowes.[7] The first biography in English of Drake appeared in 1997, and was followed in 1998 by the documentary film A Stranger Among Us. In 2000, Volkswagen featured the title track from Pink Moon in a television advertisement, and within a month Drake had sold more records than he had in the previous 30 years.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Nick Drake - Wikipedia
On Nick Drake:
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Built to Spill - Temporarily Blind
Love the throwaway moment at 1:29 when they play a "Big Country" style riff, just cuz.
Friday, January 21, 2011
"The spectacle of politics as a palliative cure for boredom" | blissblog
Politics as "another option in the array of passivities:"
you can consume "politics" (all the endless, impossibly intricate analysis, the parsing and discussion of the "optics") in this addictive, stim-buzz-snacking, distracted-drifting, more-more-gimme-more way that is nothing like actual politics as activity (which involves quite a lot of boredom, tedious graft, endless meetings, or, if it's activist, involves the physical endurance of protest)... and that conversely is extremely like the way one engages with music/popculture on the web (flitting and skimming, tldr, dl-ing-but-never-getting-round-to-listening, half a YouTube here, half a streamed track there). so "politics" does become just another option in the array of passivities, all the time-kills available to you in this wonderful webbed infosphere... only difference is that "keeping up" and "staying informed" seems vaguely more worthwhile and virtuous than obsessively downloading the latest djmix
at any rate, whether or not he meant spectacle as in "spectacular commodity society" and "the society of the ____", this fellow's thoughts made me think that:
a/ the Situationist critique of our civilisation in terms of boredom / isolation / "the poverty of everyday life" has never been more pertinent ... what with the internet, social networking, and other surrogates-for-true-fulfilment/community... digimodernism has created a whole new array of pseudo-activities, pseudo-participations.... digimodernism is Spectacle 2.0
b/ the Situationist critique is one of the best explanations for rock/pop/etc available ... as an explanation of why it came into existence in the first place, and of why it ultimately fails (ie. its rebellion against boredom/isolation/disenchantment is alway recuperated, turned into something that just reinforces boredom/isolation/disenchantment)
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Esquivel | HiLobrow
It's Esquivel's birthday:
Drop a needle onto any one of JUAN GARCÍA ESQUIVEL’s (1918-2002) legendary mid-twentieth-century recordings and listen in awe as the sound ping-pongs from speaker to speaker: pianos plink and glide, strings zigzag into space, and an unseen chorus croons soothing syllables, then bursts into an emphatic “pow!” Esquivel was a piano prodigy who had his own radio show in his native Mexico at the age of 12; he later honed his idiosyncratic chops backing up a comedian who might ask him to provide “music for a Frenchman walking in Russia.” That he succeeded wildly was underscored when his arrangement of “Sentimental Journey” was performed by an office suite in a delightfully surreal segment of an Ernie Kovacs special in 1961 [video below]. Though known today as the king of “space-age bachelor pad music,” Variety once noted that “Esquivel is to pop music what Aaron Copland is to serious music, or what John Coltrane is to jazz.”
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Design*Sponge » Blog Archive » she & him video premiere: don’t look back
How cool is it that She & Him's retro-futuristic video gets an online premiere on Design*Sponge? Pretty dang cool:
“Don’t Look Back” (off of their new album, Volume Two) is not only a wonderful song, but also a visual trip down mid-century memory lane with furniture, decor and references that I think so many of you will love and appreciate. Whether you’re in it for the classic furniture designs, the sounds or both, I hope you’ll enjoy this video debut. It’s so fantastic to get to celebrate the worlds of design and music colliding. Thanks to Lindsey, Zooey and M. Ward for sharing this video with us today. You can check out She & Him right here online. xo, grace
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Jon Savage on song: The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead is an anthem for our times | Music | guardian.co.uk
Yep,
[via somedizzywhore]
The Queen Is Dead is the Smiths' mature masterpiece. The playing is faultless: the rhythm section is both supple and relentless, while Johnny Marr's wah-wah guitar is constantly in motion, in total sympathy with the song's mood changes: rhythmic and viciously propulsive one minute, ambient the next. Morrissey's lyrics are pointed, witty and tricksy, with their implied rhymes: "castration" instead of "strings" to take just one example.
Best of all, they give a thorough portrait of how it feels to be an outsider, rooted in a precise physical and psychological place – "hemmed in like a boar between arches". When you hear the line "but the rain that flattens my hair" you can think of no other place than Manchester, and in many ways The Queen Is Dead represents the highpoint of Morrissey's lyric writing – when he was still informed by his city and its past.
This sense of rootedness is important. You intuitively sense that the musicians have experienced, indeed have deeply felt, what they are communicating. They know of what they speak. This sense transmits itself to the listener, who in turn finds a reflection of their own experience, and so the bond is forged. And that sense of connection remains: two and a half decades after I first heard it, The Queen Is Dead still rings proud and strong.
[via somedizzywhore]
Friday, November 19, 2010
Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Orange Juice: Coals to Newcastle
I don't know, maybe some legendary but unheard bands should stay that way. I'm no expert on Orange Juice, but I'm sympathetic to their influence. Unfortunately, there's no getting around the fact early tracks like this are sort-of, kind-of, lame:
First off, Edwyn Collins is Rick Astley-esque with the hair, the attitude, the shirt. There's no getting around that. It also doesn't help that this particular video comes from the school of aspirational silliness, which is to say, hey, we're playing music in the TARDIS, life ain't that bad. Things aren't so hard. We're young, you're old, and the world will be ours. Here goofy disregard for convention trumps angry attack.
So post-punk is or was anti-punk, and about as confrontational and non-comformist as retro-preppy Vampire Weekend singing songs for faux-preppy Tommy Hilfiger. In this case the band goofs around city streets, wears white trousers and Hawaiian shirts in the cold Scottish rain, and somehow manages to embody the very essence of preppy funsterism. Forced fun is usually no fun at all, and in this case the target of their fun, the "documentary" footage of drab UK life, looks amazing, and outshines all of the 80s-isms. Just look at those gray streets and those dark, serious citizens of collapsing empire. It oddly fascinates.
On the positive side, there's a nifty little guitar bit that underpins the whole track and which will eventually find its apotheosis in INXS's "Need You Tonight". If you don't like that, then there's no hope. And if nothing else the catchiness of the guitar bit hints at as-yet unrealized talent. There's more going on here than meets the eye.
As for Edwyn Collins, we'll always have 1994:
First off, Edwyn Collins is Rick Astley-esque with the hair, the attitude, the shirt. There's no getting around that. It also doesn't help that this particular video comes from the school of aspirational silliness, which is to say, hey, we're playing music in the TARDIS, life ain't that bad. Things aren't so hard. We're young, you're old, and the world will be ours. Here goofy disregard for convention trumps angry attack.
So post-punk is or was anti-punk, and about as confrontational and non-comformist as retro-preppy Vampire Weekend singing songs for faux-preppy Tommy Hilfiger. In this case the band goofs around city streets, wears white trousers and Hawaiian shirts in the cold Scottish rain, and somehow manages to embody the very essence of preppy funsterism. Forced fun is usually no fun at all, and in this case the target of their fun, the "documentary" footage of drab UK life, looks amazing, and outshines all of the 80s-isms. Just look at those gray streets and those dark, serious citizens of collapsing empire. It oddly fascinates.
On the positive side, there's a nifty little guitar bit that underpins the whole track and which will eventually find its apotheosis in INXS's "Need You Tonight". If you don't like that, then there's no hope. And if nothing else the catchiness of the guitar bit hints at as-yet unrealized talent. There's more going on here than meets the eye.
As for Edwyn Collins, we'll always have 1994:
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Suede: The Best of Suede
A good review of the under-appreciated Suede:
When Britpop first began to cohere as a concept and a potential mission statement, no band defined its vague, abstract ideas better than Suede. By the time Britpop became an actual going concern, Suede were simply grandfathered in; and when the whole thing spittered to its post-Oasis peak, Suede were considered washed up. But in 1993, they were the creators of the fastest-selling debut LP in UK history and had been anointed as saviors of British indie before their debut single, 'The Drowners', even hit the shops. This made them a natural for the British press to create ideas around, and so when Select argued for a return to wit, artifice, glamor, and British art school traditions, Suede were easy avatars for those hopes.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Belle & Sebastian's If You’re Feeling Sinister | Music | Better Late Than Never? | The A.V. Club
I disagree with almost everything in this assessment beginning with the opening premise:
Because beneath the fey surface there's an awful lot of pain, violence, and disappointment in the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister. And what the band offers is not answers but ambivalence - a comfort with contradiction, and ultimately the notion that most of life falls somewhere between "fail" and "kick ass."
Belle and Sebastian write songs about youth for adults, and for people who understand or have lived through that gap between youthful expectation and adult reality. The characters in their songs are constantly shifting from identity to identity, from innocence to experience and back again, and do so without falling into the cliched binaries of masculine/feminine, young/old, rebelliousness/conformity, sin/faith, strong/weak, gay/straight. Everyone, they say, is all of these things all of the time. As a band, they are communal and democratic, privileging no one member, and allowing the warts and occasionally weak singers to shine through. This, they seem to suggest, is an organizing principle for life.
Perhaps what's most subversive about their music (and this is true of Morrissey as well) is that the very idea of twee-ness is so threatening to your average unreformed and reactionary beta-male. And fearing that B and S will turn you into a pussy is the Calvin pissing on a Chevy sticker of music fandom. Whimsy is anarchy stripped of its fascist impulses. Preciousness is just emotional poverty made plentiful in song. If you can't rock to that, maybe you need to grow up.
It seems impossible to describe Scottish band Belle & Sebastian without using words like “precious” and “whimsical,” which are the two adjectives least likely to describe any of my favorite bands. That precious whimsy (or whimsical preciousness) is the cardigan-sweater-wearing heart of twee pop, the fey subgenre that typically grates on my nerves—and the one Belle & Sebastian came to epitomize beginning with 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister.The idea that B&S are less punk than Yo La Tengo, or somehow more fey and delicate than late 90s indie rock betrays a fatal chauvinism and a complete lack of imagination. And for a music culture that rejects "labels" and "genres", people seem awfully at ease with pigeon-holing Belle and Sebastian.
When the album came out, I was in my junior year of college and spending a lot of time at my school’s radio station, KCOU, which opened my musical horizons beyond the steady diet of punk on which I subsisted for years. I was a budding indie-rock snob—Yo La Tengo had blown my mind at a show in late ’95—so I was primed to greet Belle & Sebastian’s delicate songs with open arms. Yet I have little memory of If You’re Feeling Sinister’s release. It’s like remembering someone from a party years ago, but not recalling much about him other than you weren’t very impressed.
Because beneath the fey surface there's an awful lot of pain, violence, and disappointment in the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister. And what the band offers is not answers but ambivalence - a comfort with contradiction, and ultimately the notion that most of life falls somewhere between "fail" and "kick ass."
Belle and Sebastian write songs about youth for adults, and for people who understand or have lived through that gap between youthful expectation and adult reality. The characters in their songs are constantly shifting from identity to identity, from innocence to experience and back again, and do so without falling into the cliched binaries of masculine/feminine, young/old, rebelliousness/conformity, sin/faith, strong/weak, gay/straight. Everyone, they say, is all of these things all of the time. As a band, they are communal and democratic, privileging no one member, and allowing the warts and occasionally weak singers to shine through. This, they seem to suggest, is an organizing principle for life.
Perhaps what's most subversive about their music (and this is true of Morrissey as well) is that the very idea of twee-ness is so threatening to your average unreformed and reactionary beta-male. And fearing that B and S will turn you into a pussy is the Calvin pissing on a Chevy sticker of music fandom. Whimsy is anarchy stripped of its fascist impulses. Preciousness is just emotional poverty made plentiful in song. If you can't rock to that, maybe you need to grow up.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Friday, October 01, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Pitchfork: Forkcast: Prinzhorn Dance School: "Seed, Crop, Harvest"
Prinzhorn Dance School return with "Seed, Crop, Harvest". Less angular, less shouty, more lo-fi groove. The new track sounds like The xx or Joy Division.
This was from their 2007 debut:
And this:
This was from their 2007 debut:
And this:
Sunday, September 05, 2010
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