Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Joyce Hatto, unknown to even the most ardent classical music collectors until late in her life, released a string of incredible performances of great works, distributed by her husband’s mail-order CD business. But how was it possible for her to record difficult works at such a dizzying rate? And if wasn’t her playing, who was it?
A youth set to the shifting sounds of CCM, Christian Contemporary Music:
This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking Diet, “Wait, this is Christian?”
Conspiracy theories, utopian fantasies, and cult involvement surrounding the international standard of musical tuning.
An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.
From Stefani Joanne Germanotta to Lady Gaga: the self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose creation of the world’s biggest pop star.
Karaoke renditions of ‘My Way’ have led to murders in the Phillipines.
How Irv Teibel pioneered the capturing and repackaging of nature’s acoustics.
A profile of the singer-songwriter.
A profile of Prince as Diamonds and Pearls was released, based mostly off a brief phone call, all the access he’ll allow.
A profile of the D.O.C., the rapper’s rapper, who ghostwrote for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Kaskade is a 44-year-old devout Mormon father of three who has never touched a drink. He makes over $500,000 a night as an EDM performer.
A profile of Killer Mike, the self-described “gangsta rap suburban father” whose speech about Ferguson went viral last fall.
The rocky career and enduring appeal of country legend Charlie Rich, “the missing link between Elvis Presley and Ray Charles.”
A profile of the singer as he returns to the stage for the first time in a dozen years.
“When constant revisionism and re-invention is under way, what does it profit a biographer to drag the weary ‘facts’ before us?”
On Sam Cooke, theme parties, and the importance of McDonald’s-related jingles when street performing.
The lip-syncing app Musical.ly claims that it has signed up 50% of American teens.
The secret diary of Nina Simone.
The musician visits the Los Angeles of his youth and says goodbye to the past.
Nobody noticed Connie Converse when she was trying to get a record deal in New York in the 1950s. Nobody stopped her when she left her life in Michigan in 1974, never to be seen again. Today, her music is heard by tens of thousands.
The rise and fall of Lou Pearlman; blimp impresario, packager of boy bands like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, molester, fraudster, and ultimately fugitive from justice.
The director on Obama, the state of black cinema, the Knicks, the Nets, the tragedy of public education in America, gentrified New York and why he lives on the Upper East Side.
On Black nonchalance.
Gold and diamond grills. Stilettos you can’t walk in. Grandly arching fingernails, lovingly adorned. Such flouting of functionality is an obvious fuck-you to the days of scrutinized teeth at auctions and picking cotton on plantations.
"Los Angeles is a weird, complicated town for him. It's where all the record labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned. Won't sign. It's maybe the most interesting, improbable music-industry story going right now—a young, obviously gifted rapper, universally hailed as the heir to Kanye and leader of a new generation of Internet-savvy kids who think of Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur, now on his fourth year of refusing to sign with a label."
A history of the cell phone ringtone.
Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of “Goodies,” by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook. As ringtones become part of our environment, they could push pop music toward new levels of concision, repetition, and catchiness.
