The Pink/Ed Sheeran/Macklemore controversy

Ten years ago, getting kicked off a stadium tour in support of a star like Ed Sheeran would have been a career killer.  Voluntarily quitting such a tour would have been unthinkable.  Now it's not a career killer, it's a career maker.  The second act of Macklemore's career begins now.  With a precisely timed bit of political posturing, almost any washed up actor or musician can earn millions of dollars by cynically exploiting the suffering of the people they claim to be protecting, that's just the way things work these days.  Continued suffering equals more virtue signaling equals more money and fame for the podcasters, influencers, and wannabe activists.  It's a wonderful grift, it's easy to pull off, and it beats working for a living.

That's all I have to say about that zero talent POS Macklemore, he's a nobody and it's pathetic to see music critics who couldn't stand his music suddenly rally around him and excusing his obvious racism. 

What I really want to address is the widespread reaction to Pink's criticism of him.  The reaction to Pink's social media posts on this issue is part of a widespread problem within the music industry that never gets talked about -- the music industry is deeply, profoundly uncomfortable with the very idea of female Jewish artists.

Pink's comments boil down to just one simple thing: "I am a Jew, and this is my truth".  It shouldn't have been controversial.  People are entitled to their own truth and their own perceptions.  This has gone unquestioned by everyone on the left for years, particularly when the individual is a racial or cultural minority.  But when Pink "outed" herself as Jewish (I'm guessing that even many of her hardcore fans didn't know), the backlash was fierce.  Her stated experience, stated as part of a shared Jewish experience, was completely nullified.  This in part because the music industry (producers, A&R people, publicists, label owners, journalists...) have marginalized, downplayed, and actively covered up the Jewishness of female artists.  When Pink wrote what she did, her Jewishness was pushed into people's faces, they couldn't ignore it, and they had no idea how to handle it (in the sense that it was a "problem" that needed to be "handled" or "dealt with").  So they did the only thing they could do.  They criticized her.  Called her disgusting names.  Dismissed her feelings and experiences completely.  Pink broke the rules.  Simply existing as a proud female Jewish musician is outside the boundaries in which the industry normally operates.

This problem goes back decades.  The days of Barbra Streisand singing Jewish songs and being celebrated for her Jewishness are long past.  Whereas Jewishness for male artists is viewed as an asset -- a badge of coolness, particularly for New York based musicians for example -- such intellectual or cultural weight is never granted to female artists.  

At the height of her fame in the 80's, Susannah Hoffs' ethnicity was never discussed.  

Paula Abdul's heritage was completely obscured by the media.  Her work as a choreographer with the Laker Girls and the Jackson family led many to simply assume that she was African-American.  This assumption was never affirmed or denied.  Her ethnicity was left unspoken, and it's just as well, because no marketing executive possessed the knowledge or tact to market a Syrian Jewish singer to a largely pop/R&B American audience.  

Justine Frischmann was a key figure in 90's British music.  She was a fixture in the music press for years, both written about and photographed extensively.  I don't recall reading anything about her Jewish background in the press until she had left the music industry altogether.

Amy Winehouse might have been portrayed as a nice Jewish jazz singer at the start of her career, but by the time she became a major mainstream success, her heritage was a footnote.  The history of Jews in jazz music, her own family's musical history (her uncles were jazz musicians) and even the Jewish heritage of her long time producer and collaborator (Mick Ronson) could have made for an interesting framing device for her background and upbringing.  But instead, the narrative revolved around her substance abuses, public screw-ups, and her failed marriage. 

HAIM have never hid their Jewishness, but nearly every profile depicts them as sunny day California girls, the heirs to the FM radio cheer of Fleetwood Mac.  

And Pink?  Pigeonholed as a cookie cutter pop/R&B diva when she signed to Babyface's label, she later found her true voice on her second album "Missundaztood".  She is the most successful Jewish musician of the 21st century, with over 60 million albums sold and over a billion dollars drawn in concert.  Her 2023-4 tour is the highest grossing tour ever by a female artist not named Taylor Swift.  You'd think that with all that success, her heritage would be something to highlight, to celebrate, to inspire.  But Pink has never been portrayed that way.  Her Jewishness has been consistently ignored from the start of her career.  Until now, when it's become a cudgel to beat her over the head with.  

It doesn't matter one bit whether any of these women are religious, or secular, or Zionist, or not, or what have you.  At some point in their careers, journalists should have framed their Jewish upbringing in a context that illuminates who they are as artists.  But they didn't.  A marketing executive could have found a cute marketing angle.  They don't bother.  Female arists of other ethnicities get shown that respect.  Latin artists.  African Americans.  Dua Lipa.  But never Jewish female musicians.   

Music in Toronto

While driving in Toronto, I mostly flipped between Boom 97.3 (branded as 70's, 80's, and 90's hits) and CHFI ("Adult Hits").  Intuitively, these would seem like overlapping formats.  But "Adult Hits" includes the 00's and parts of the '10's, which forced me to conceptualize the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Bieber as "adult" hitmakers.  And in fact, the math checks out.  Britney's debut album was released 28 years ago, which is roughly the time between Bill Haley and the music I was hearing on the radio as a nine-year old.  Britney is very much part of the "oldies".  Teenage Bieber fans at the time of his debut are now college graduates in their late-20's/early-30's.  

One thing appeared to be constant across the radio dial -- repetition.  I drove around sparingly for two weeks and would somehow hear the same Bryan Adams songs over and over.  Glass Tiger (playing the CNE this year) and Gowan were also all over the format, which was a welcome refresher for me.  But still, with decades of music to draw from, how can this degree of repetition occur, Can-Con regulations or no Can-Con regulations?

Sonic Boom on Spadina feels more like a destination hangout than a music store these days.  The days of the cavernous warehouse on Bloor Street catering to hardcore crate diggers are long gone, it's hard to believe that this is still the same business under the same name.  Sonic Boom now carries vinyl (including a healthy rare and valuable vinyl section), CD's, turntables, books, music-related merch (pins, toys), and I doubt that their clientele has ever skewed so young.  It's the vibe you get when stepping into a place like Indigo, but for music instead of books.  People are there to stroll, browse, and chill, in addition to buying.  It's great to see, and I have never had this much fun shopping there.  

My biggest and most important music-related endeavor of the trip was cataloguing all my vinyl.  My discogs catalog began as a way to organize my classical music CD's.  I couldn't keep all the multiple recordings of the same works straight in my head.  Then I began to catalog all my CD's as well, partly to have an organized list, and partly because I found it to be fun and relaxing work in the evenings.  But the most valuable items in my collection are undoubtedly on vinyl.  I managed to catalog about 400 records -- nearly my entire collection.  About two-thirds of it is techno/electronic, mainly from the 90's and early 00's.  Gemini says I'm sitting on a "goldmine" -- an exaggeration, a typical AI asskiss -- but there are some valuable records in there.  Seven of them have a median price over 100 CAD in the Discogs marketplace.  My most valuable record overall is my 1991 pressing of "Loveless" that I first wrote about in a 2003 post.  All this cataloguing work is pushing me towards switching this blog to an exclusively YT format.  I still enjoy writing, but I could review rare and notable CD's and vinyl forever, and talk about what this music means to me.  There's no question that all this vinyl is far too interesting and valuable to be sitting in storage, and I'll have to come to a decision about it soon (sell, ship out, and/or show and tell).        

Boy George, "We Will Dance Again"

Let’s be real here.  This song is trash.  The fact that it was AI-generated helps explain why the backing track sounds like a parody of karaoke reggae .  The lyrics are clunky and awkward, to put it mildly.  There’s no obvious symbiotic connection between the music and lyrics – why is this a reggae song?  Couldn’t it have been house music, or acoustic pop, or any number of other genres while still broadcasting the same message?  There’s nothing about the lyrics that scream “cool reggae vibes” in the least.  The song comes across like something that was written and recorded in a day, in order to meet a deadline.  This won’t be blaring out of a car window or a club near you anytime soon.

And yet, it’s better than nothing, which is exactly what the music industry’s response to the Nova Festival massacre has been up until now.   Boy George is at least doing something.  He’s doing it for a cause he believes in, even if it costs him financially.  In the long term, he may even benefit.  Many loony left wing and right wing cranks have discovered that ditching a defensible political position and catering in Jew-hate to those who crave that sort of thing, is a financially lucrative career decision.  There’s a lot of money is Jew-hate right now.  There's also something to be gained by joining the other side.  Boy George may yet discover that after a career in the global pop sphere, he’d be better off focusing on more of a niche audience, the kind that will be receptive to the message of "We Will Dance Again". 

There’s really only one line in the song that matters: “But if you’re ever confused/I stand with the Jews”.  There’s nothing controversial about that.  His loyalty to his Jewish friends is commendable, he should be praised for it.  But the old line about being more Catholic than the Pope comes to mind.  Diaspora Jewish musicians can’t even defend their own.  Why does the responsibility fall on Boy George to do it?  This particular issue shouldn't be controversial in the least.  Hundreds were slaughtered at a music festival.  No matter your opinion on subsequent events, the event was horrific.  Kent State keeps an archive of music related to the 1970 shootings, which people still talk about decades later.  The shootings inspired dozens of recordings.  Boy George's song is the first Nova-inspired music by a major artist.  Why shouldn't there be more such songs?   

 

Brahms 1: Harnoncourt vs Toscanini

This is a study in contrasts. I could easily have picked another half-dozen conductors for this exercise and called them "polar opposites" in their approach to Brahms. Today, though, we're comparing two examples that I find particularly interesting: Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1951), a classic historical recording, and Harnoncourt with the Berlin Philharmonic (1997), a strikingly modern approach.

On paper, based on my usual tastes in conductors, Harnoncourt's approach shouldn't appeal to me, yet somehow it almost always does. His recordings are never my outright favourites of a particular work, but I appreciate them as an antidote to the countless same-same interpretations that dominate the catalogue. He favours relatively brisk tempos (although in this instance, his Brahms 1 runs for 47 minutes, well within the average range of performance times for the work), and he has a gift for making enormous orchestras sound like nimble chamber ensembles. Here he takes the Berlin Philharmonic—the embodiment of rich, luxuriant string tone during the Karajan era—and transforms them into a lean, hungry, almost scrappy orchestra. However, the playing is disciplined, sharp, energetic, and constantly alive.

Harnoncourt isn't the guy if you're looking for heart-on-sleeve, sweat-flying sentimentality.  But first, countless conductors aim for that sort of emotional excess and fail to get there.  Second, every now and then it's refreshing to have a change of pace and hear entirely different ideas applied to a familiar work. You can always count on Harnoncourt to try something different and to do it well.

Toscanini, by contrast, was one of the true giants of classical music, and this recording makes it immediately obvious why. It's breathless and exhilarating from start to finish. The momentum that sweeps you along for nearly the entire final movement, as the symphony reaches its triumphant conclusion, is virtually unmatched in recordings of this work.  If you want Brahms 1 as "Beethoven's Tenth", a performance that elevates it to sound like a monumental, epoch-defining symphony (which it undoubtedly is), then you can't do better than this performance. 

In rock music, there's the saying about how bands have their entire lives to write their debut album, but only a couple of years to write the follow-up. That's why debut albums by great bands are often their best work, and it also helps explain the infamous "sophomore slump." In classical music, there's no better example of this phenomenon than with Brahms.  He spent twenty years working on it in stages, and didn't finally perform it until he was in his forties.  He intended it to be a legacy-defining work, and keenly felt that it had to be a work to follow in the footsteps of Beethoven and other symphonic masters who had preceded Brahms.  Toscanini delivers the performance that makes good on that anticipation, his performance is a tour de force, and it comes across like a major event.

Def Leppard, "Live: In the Round, in Your Face"

It's no secret that AI-generated music has become one of the industry's biggest concerns—or greatest opportunities, depending on whom you ask—over the past few years.  Anecdotally, much of it is still easy to identify as artificial, and commentators such as Rick Beato have spoken about this at length. 

I think AI music presents a unique challenge because it's far sneakier than AI video. Videos are generally easier to spot: a video file contains vastly more information than an audio file, which means there are far more opportunities for the illusion to break down, far more work that needs to be done to fool the human brain.  Visual glitches and unnatural movements immediately attract attention.  AI music, on the other hand, is harder to pin down. Detecting it is often more instinctive than analytical—an "I'll know it when I hear it" feeling—whereas identifying AI video is, at least for now, based much more on specific visual evidence.

That brings me to this Def Leppard concert video, originally released in 1989, and one that I'd never seen before.  "Hysteria" was my favourite album for a solid year during the late 80's, and this video is simply breathtaking.  Watching it, I was fifteen again.  The sound is pristine, the band attacks every song with infectious energy, and there are several standout performances ("Animal" hit hard, and the semi-acoustic "Bringing On the Heartbreak" was an unexpected delight).  For anyone who loves the "Hysteria"-era, this video is a magical viewing experience.  But once the video was over, and I was done with tripping on this beautiful nostalgia, I went looking for confirmation of what I already knew.  Namely, what I had watched was not a genuine Def Leppard concert.

It isn't AI-generated, of course, or anything remotely like it. But the amount of overdubbing, post-production, and audio sweetening is impossible to ignore. It isn't merely enhancing the performance—it is the performance. What you're hearing is a beautifully choreographed and meticulously produced piece of musical theater, not Def Leppard live in any meaningful sense. The clues are everywhere. Joe Elliott's singing sounds remarkably strong throughout the songs, yet his speaking voice between some songs is noticeably hoarse.  The massed vocal harmonies are perfectly layered, clean, and undistorted in a way that only studio recordings tend to be, and bear little resemblance to the sound of a real arena concert.  The overall production is virtually indistinguishable from the album itself.   Rather than a polished soundboard recording, it feels like a studio recording synchronized to concert footage, with carefully applied arena-style reverb and crowd ambience to create the illusion of a live performance.

In this sense, the AI debate isn't entirely new. The debate is reshaped as the technology changes.  Sometimes the illusion gets in the way of a good performance, and sometimes it doesn't.  

*********************

(what follows is the response to my Gemini query regarding the production of this video)

The video you shared features Def Leppard's legendary 1988 Hysteria World Tour performance (historically captured in their concert film, Live: In the Round, in Your Face).

To answer your question directly: Yes, this recording contains a significant amount of studio post-production, overdubs, and audio enhancements.

Here is a breakdown of why it sounds so polished:

1. Extensive Studio Overdubbing

While the video footage is genuinely live from the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver and The Omni in Atlanta, the audio was heavily touched up in the studio before release. Def Leppard and their producer, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, were absolute perfectionists known for meticulous studio production. For the official release, a large portion of the lead vocals, massive backing vocal stacks, and guitar parts were re-recorded or heavily supplemented in the studio to fix mistakes and achieve that signature, wall-of-sound Hysteria texture.

2. Electronic Drums & Triggering

Following Rick Allen’s tragic accident, he returned to the band using a heavily customized, semi-electronic drum kit. On stage, his physical hits triggered pre-sampled and quantized acoustic and electronic drum sounds. While he was playing these parts live, the use of triggered samples inherently gives the live performance a highly consistent, perfect, "studio-like" precision.

3. Contrast with Raw Soundboard Bootlegs

If you listen to raw, unedited soundboard bootlegs or audience recordings from that exact same 1987–1988 tour, the difference is night and day. Live, Joe Elliott’s vocals were much more raw and strained under the grueling tour schedule, and the guitars were noticeably looser.

The official video release was intentionally engineered to sound like a flawless, high-energy extension of the studio album rather than a completely raw, documentary-style live capture.

Radio X's 25 Best Indie Albums of 1990

These days, most listicles are pseudo-spam, featuring dry, flaccid writing increasingly composed by AI-generated content farms.

But this particular list is really good!  The choices are rather narrow, covering mainly British indie rock from a single year (1990), but that happens to be the year that I spent more time listening to the radio than in any other year before or since (by far).  These bands were all over alternative radio in 1990, I was glued to Toronto's CFNY and not a day went by when I didn't hear a song by 5-10 of those bands.

I can group the albums on this list into categories:

1.  I listened to the albums religiously

Inspiral Carpets, Happy Mondays, Charlatans UK, The Cure.  Madchester was alive and well on my boombox throughout 1990.  Plus, you had the Cure discovering remix culture and becoming club staples for a year!  The Inspirals' "Life" is easily the best album in this group, and one of the most underrated albums from the late '80's-early '90's class of British indie rock pre-Britpop. The version I listened to was, naturally, the North American release that featured four tracks not on the UK/Europe edition.  Those extra tracks included the singles "Move" and "Commercial Rain" and boosted my impression of "Life" as a veritable "greatest hits" album masquerading as a debut album.    

2.  I didn't buy the album that year but these bands lived rent-free in my head because the singles were on the radio all the time.

The Beloved, Depeche Mode.  "Your Love Takes Me Higher" was a staple of Chris Sheppard's RPM nights, and I probably can't praise him enough.  More than anyone else, he was the DJ who turned me on to dance/club music.  That said, this is as good a place as any to note that Shep has been living off the grid for years, and even his close friends and family are unsure of his whereabouts.   

3.  I liked a select few singles and radio staples, but only bought the albums years later.

The La's, Ride, Cocteau Twins, Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, James.  

The Cocteau Twins are a major regret of mine, they were far too weird for me in 1990 but I have since elevated them to a godlike tier, at their best there was nobody better and it's a shame that I passed on seeing them live in the 90's.  By 1990, Jane's Addiction had become alternative rock royalty. You didn't have to like them, but you knew exactly who they were. Their music was impossible to escape, and whether or not you were a fan, you had to respect both their talent and at least a handful of their songs.  For me, Jane's Addiction always tried a little too hard to be provocative, their music was overly reliant on classic rock tropes, and I have never -- in almost any genre and any era -- taken much to LA bands.  And yet, I attended the first Lollapalooza and they pretty much blew me away and turned me into a fan (just in time for their breakup/extended hiatus). 

4.  I liked a select few singles and radio staples, but never did buy/hear the full album.

Breeders, Soup Dragons, Lightning Seeds, Sundays, Teenage Fanclub, PWEI.  Here I want to give a apecial mention to "Pure" by the Lightning Seeds, which was one of my favourite singles of the year, and is one of the best wistful/sad but ultimately uplifting pop songs you'll ever hear. The Soup Dragons' "I'm Free" was destined to be a one hit wonder but that one hit was wondrous during the few months that it was all over the radio. 

5.  Miscellaneous, was aware of their placement within the greater indie rock sphere but wouldn't have called myself a fan.  Going through them one by one: 

They Might Be Giants.  They annoyed me then, and they annoy me now.  

Carter USM.  Another annoying band but ultimately you had to kind of adore them because they were so committed to their style, a sort of hyper-British shouty electro punk.  By 1992 they were one of the biggest bands in Britain, but their peak was short lived and they were shunted aside once Britpop made its ascendance.  

The Mission.  Never cared much for them, or the Sisters of Mercy vs Mission feud.  The Sisters were immeasurably better, and I don't think there's any serious dispute about that these days.

The Fall.  My first memory of then-contemporary Elton John was "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues", because that was the song that was in the charts when I first started actively following the charts at age 9.  Thus, by sheer coincidence of timing, that's a signature Elton John song for me.  Similarly with The Fall, "Telephone Thing" was my first association with their music, leading to me to mistakenly believe that they were a quirky TMBG-like oddball band.  I'd learn what they were really about later on, and even see them play live twice.  To use another example, with the aforementioned Cocteau Twins, that first association was "Iceblink Luck". Every time I've heard it over the past thirty years, it has carried a special twinge of nostalgia, as though it has always been—and always will be—their signature song, even though it really isn't.  But at least that's still part of the Cocteau Twins' peak run.   

House of Love.  Great band that sounds better now than they did then.  

Nick Cave.  I didn't care much for Cave back in 1990, but as I've grown older I've come to appreciate his gruff intensity and deeply personal reflections on aging and mortality.

Pixies.  I recently wrote about my non-fandom of the Pixies.  I think I used to switch off the radio or change the channel when their music came on.  I didn't like Black Francis' voice and didn't connect to their music.  In my defense, "Velouria" was the radio hit in 1990, and I don't think it's aged well at all compared to most of their classic material. 

Eurovision 2026

The Eurovision final delivered the goods last night: strong performances, an unusually balanced jury vote that left the competition wide open heading into the televote, and a somewhat surprising but certainly deserving winner.   When all the numbers are tallied, I think the fears of disastrous viewership numbers due to this year's "controversies" will be  mostly unfounded.  Historically, Eurovision viewership peaked in 2016, when 42 countries took part. From 2023 to 2025, 37 countries competed and audience figures remained remarkably steady. This year, five countries that participated in 2025 chose to boycott, but several others returned, resulting in a net decline of just two countries, from 37 to 35.

Early reports indicate that viewership is down, but countries representing 80 million people sat out, so some drop is expected.  Among participating countries, Germany's numbers dipped slightly but remained strong.  Numbers in France and the UK took a significant hit, but both performed poorly in the final: the UK got zero points from the televote, and France were near the bottom.  I actually felt a 

bit bad for both. I have followed LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER's YT channel for years and he's an incredible talent, but is completely the wrong guy for this kind of competition.  He tried hard but the UK organizers knew they were throwing him to the wolves, and the UK public hated the song, so why should anyone else get invested in it?  I liked the French song but the public obviously didn't, and Eurovision is all about forging an instant connection with a finicky public.  To sum up, viewership appears to have declined most sharply in countries who competed with sub-standard songs.  People are less likely to watch if they don't like the song and they perceive that their broadcaster is simply phoning it in with a poor song and/or performer.  Among the countries that fielded competitive entries, I'm sure the viewership numbers will turn out just fine.  

As for the boycotting countries, in last year's Eurovision, Ireland and Slovenia failed to qualify for the final, while Spain and Iceland finished 24th and 25th. Iceland were crushed by the jury vote and earned zero points, possibly due to the plagiarism scandal regarding their blatant rip-off of an Israeli song.  The Netherlands had a respectable 12th place finish.  What can we learn from these results? It's much easier to stage a "boycott" when your songs and artists have badly underperformed, necessitating a one-year reset.  Pointing fingers at others and engaging in a largely performative "boycott" as a cover for those failures is a convenient face-saving excuse, nothing more.  

As for Israel supposedly manipulating the televoting, they finished third, so I guess they didn't manipulate hard enough.  More surprising was their 8th place finish in the jury votes (what, were those voted manipulated too??)  I have yet to see any evidence that Israel engages in campaigning that is any different than what many other countries are doing virtually every year.   And all of it pales in comparison to the palm greasing that goes on every year in the lead up to awards shows like the Oscars.  

Instead of asinine conspiracy theories, let's just focus on the more obvious and sensible explanation: a lot of people really liked "Michelle".  Heck, even the protesters in the audience were dancing during the semi-final! And the mathematics of what it takes to win hasn't changed since my post from last year.  We should be able to agree on one thing however: no amount of campaigning could possibly undermine the integrity of the competition than opening the voting for the final before the first song is performed.

Linking Philadelphia soul and the Philadelphia Orchestra

I am completely unqualified to write about this topic, let's get that out of the way now.  However, a potential connection between the Philly soul sound of the 70's and the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra from the same era feels significant, and it's not something that I can recall reading about in any standard music history accounts.   

The Philadelphia International Records label was founded by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff in 1971.  It was an alternative of sorts (not sure whether it was termed as such at the time) to the Muscle Shoals brand of gritty, blues-heavy soul.  The Philly sound was lush, smooth, with complex orchestration and rich string accompaniments.  Songs by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Lou Rawls, and Patti LaBelle became massive hits.  The O'Jays built an incredible discography, and for my money, stand out as one of the most underrated bands of all time.  One can draw a direct line between the Philly groups and the disco music that came to define the 70's.  

Somehow, all this great music went underappreciated by the industry at large.  Gamble and Huff won their first Grammy in the late 80's -- for Simply Red's cover of "If You Don't Know Me By Now".  Today, the Philly sound is rightly revered for the high quality of the music as well as the many innovations made by its creators.  

At the same time, the Philadelphia Orchestra had reached its peak under Eugene Ormandy, who served as its musical director from 1936-1980.  They made hundreds of recordings together during that time.  The orchestra's sound was wholly distinctive, due to its heavy, dramatic string sonority.  Ormandy was disliked by classical music critics, for reasons that look embarrassing through modern eyes.  He was a tremendous conductor in virtually all sub-fields of orchestral music.  Was the Philadelphia Orchestra's sound considered too kitschy, unworthy to be considered amongst the high art of other leading orchestras?  The likes of Karajan and Szell were steely traditionalists, proudly carrying the mantle of careful precision and skillful musicianship in the classical music world.  The industry marketed their recordings far more aggressively than they did for Ormandy's.  The whole "controversy" just feels silly now.  Many major orchestras of that era could reach a godlike tier on most nights, and Philadelphia was just as great as any of them.      

Philly soul and Philly classical were peaking in the same city at the same time, and their string heavy characteristics sounds were mirror images of each other.  This simply can't be a coincidence.  And yet I can't find any references to a specific connection between the two, or rock/soul criticism that makes the comparison.  

Thom Bell was the main orchestrator and arranger for Philadelphia international.  He gave a number of interviews throughout the years.  His RnR HOF page notes that he was influenced by Beethoven and Burt Bacharach.  He was classically trained and aspired to be a concert pianist.  By his own admission, classical music was his life growing up and he knew virtually nothing about pop music through his late teens.  Musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra played the string arrangements on the soul records he worked on.  It is inconceivable that he wasn't seeped in the sound of the Philadelphia orchestra by the time he began working with Gamble and Huff. However, I can't find any explicit statement by Huff, Gamble, or Bell about their classical influences.  They never claimed to be influenced by Ormandy and the wholly unique Philly classical sound.  

The closest thing I could find is Bell's "cheese steak" story.  According to him, it's not just that Philly has the best cheese steak sandwiches anywhere in America.  More than that, any mom and pop sandwich shop makes a better cheese steak than any restaurant in any city in American could hope to do.  Because the cheese steaks, according to Bell, are embedded in the Philadelphia culture in a way that no other city could duplicate.  And that's the origin of the Philly sound.  It's not taken from a specific time and place, passed linearly from artist A to B.  It was sewn into the fabric of the city.  One must look at the whole to appreciate the constituent parts.  And that whole obviously includes the Philadelphia Orchestra.  

Bruckner Symphony no. 6 DUEL -- Klemperer/New Philharmonia vs von Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker

I am extremely proud of my ranking of Sibelius Fifth Symphonies, but it was an exhausting post to write.  I had planned to turn it into a semi-regular series of posts -- next up was Bruckner's Seventh Symphony -- but right now, the investment feels too daunting.   So here's a more manageable alternative: a classical DUEL between two radically different interpretations of a work. 

As artists, Klemperer and Karajan are about as far apart as you can get, beyond their status as legends of the "standard German repertoire". Klemperer: steely tempos, stoic execution, and a transparent sonority in which every line is audible. Karajan: sweeping gestures, a flowing approach, and lush string textures that tend to swamp everything else.

Klemperer’s idiosyncrasies can sometimes tread close to the edge of a precipice -- in this instance, I'm referring to his tendency to take fast movements slowly (or at least slower than usual), and slow movements relatively briskly. The first movement unfolds at something close to a funeral-march pace, threatening to collapse under its own weight, yet somehow never doing so. He sustains a gritty, unyielding tension for nearly seventeen minutes—astonishingly, about two minutes longer than his account of the Adagio. And yet, the famously unsentimental Klemperer still finds a lyrical thread running through it all.

I’ve often found Bruckner’s adagios to be overlong (sacrilege, I know), but here Klemperer threads the needle, keeping things moving at a serene, unforced pace. Then, as is his wont, apparently because he couldn't help himself, he gives in to his contrary self and he stretches the scherzo past nine minutes, stripping it of the explosive urgency most conductors bring to Bruckner’s dance movements. It feels like a misfire—though not one that derails the symphony as a whole. After all, Bruckner did mark it “nicht schnell—langsam.” Perhaps Klemperer knew something that we (amateur listeners and professional conductors both) don't.

In the finale, he draws out the symphony’s more pastoral qualities, bringing the woodwinds to the fore. By the end, you could be forgiven for forgetting that you’re listening to Bruckner—until the final coda snaps you back into full, bracing Brucknerian reality.

Karajan, by contrast, launches the symphony full of FIRE, charging headlong into the opening, raging into the blinding light. This was, I believe, his only recording of the Sixth (and one he apparently never performed live), and in 1979 he had the Berlin Philharmonic under absolute control. The playing is disciplined, the strings are locked in to producing the sweeping, cascading sonorities he favored.

The adagio is slow indeed -- nineteen minutes, four slower than Klemperer -- but is beautifully paced.  In Karajan’s hands, it becomes perhaps Bruckner’s most “romantic” slow movement in the modern definition of the word: the love theme to an 80's movie about doomed, starcrossed lovers. The scherzo is nothing short of triumphant, easily surpassing Klemperer in terms of sheer excitement and drive.

But then, in the finale, Karajan does something unexpected: he slows things down, almost channeling Klemperer. Presumably he’s aiming for heightened drama, but without Klemperer’s transparency, all we hear are broad waves of sound, simply the volume rising and falling repeatedly.  Each time the orchestra fades out all too often, some of the piece's momentum vanishes, and it never really returns.  At first, I found the final coda to be needlessly overwhelming, with the brass too dominant, though I’ve now come to appreciate its impact.

Both interpretations are well worth hearing. But for me, Klemperer remains a kind of supergenius, operating on a wavelength the rest of us can only dimly perceive. Even when he’s not at his absolute best, I’ll take a mostly “on” Klemperer over just about anyone else in this repertoire.

90's nostalgia

I had a yen to hear Sonic Youth’s "Total Trash", which quickly spiraled into a YouTube-assembled playlist of late ’80s/early ’90s indie rock—Pixies, Blur, PJ Harvey, Galaxie 500, and more. What can you say, the algorithm knows what it’s doing. It starts with my search (Sonic Youth), pulls in the obvious contemporaries (Pixies), and then folds in the British acts it knows I like. It’s a formula that’s pretty much guaranteed to keep me listening.

It’s 2026, and I still haven’t heard a Pixies album, back to front, in my life. ’80s and ’90s American indie rock is a real blind spot in my listening—I grew up hearing about it, reading about it, but never really listened to it beyond the tracks that made it onto alternative radio. There are plenty of gaps in anyone’s musical life, of course, but this one stands out given my other listening habits.

So the algorithms keep assuming this was my thing, even though it never was. As a result, I’ve probably heard more Pixies songs in their post-reunion lifespan than I did during their original run. Still, I’ve heard enough to say what everyone already knows: this band was at least five years ahead of their time. Good thing they eventually put their differences aside and cash in, finally getting the chance to make the money their imitators enjoyed."

The mythology of the ’90s is now every bit as strong as the mythology of the ’60s once was. Bands get defined by that era, and it sticks with them no matter what they do afterward. Jefferson Airplane and The Kinks, for example, are forever labeled as ’60s bands, even though both were actually more commercially successful in the ’80s.

As for Kim Deal, the Pixies will always be her ultimate legacy, even though she had more commercial success outside of the Pixies, and was a bigger individual star when she led her own band.   This remains true even though she has spent much of her adult life trying to move beyond the Pixies. After falling out with Black Francis over creative and personal differences, she formed the Breeders and released Last Splash, which sold over a million copies and far outperformed anything the Pixies did commercially. She released music only sporadically after that, eventually rejoining the Pixies for their to tour the world many times over, before stepping away again when new recordings began.  Good for her for cashing in when the opportunity was there—she earned it. But the Pixies will always define her legacy, even if the "Cannonball" single remains her true commercial (MTV, sales) and creative peak.

Similarly, Gorillaz have somehow recorded as many albums as Blur (nine) and have sold at least ten times as many copies.  But Damon Albarn will always be the frontman of Blur first and foremost.  

Sonic Youth’s trajectory is wild, and becomes more fascinating and debatable with the passing years. "Daydream Nation": every track is a revelation, each one is an anthem for a generation. It’s even in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. Then "Goo": much in the spirit of "Daydream Nation", but filtered through major-label oversight. The "Kool Thing" single threw in everything but the kitchen sink in a bid for something resembling a commercial breakthrough. That track has everything -- wild noise freakouts, the Chuck D cameo, a singable chorus, an eye-catching video with Kim Gordon in leather, cats galore, and metric tons of sparkle and tinfoil. In some alternate, freakier universe, this is the album that breaks bigger than "Nevermind".

And then, just two years later, they’re putting out "100%" and "Sugar Kane", and they're sounding like an ordinary grunge-esque band—albeit one with stranger guitar tunings.

Various, "Tresor 4 -- Solid"

As I alluded to a few weeks ago, I could keep this blog going indefinitely by revisiting and reevaluating CD's from the 90's.

For instance, take the series of compilations released by Tresor.  I own numbers 2 through 8, with the exception of number 6.  It's safe to say that Tresor II and 3 are the most well-regarded, most influential, and probably were the biggest sellers of the series. They were released at the height of the Berlin-Detroit alliance (hence the name of II), where all roads in techno seemed to lead to those two cities.  The Berlin wall had come down just a few years earlier.  The club scene in Berlin was taking off, synergy between European and American techno artists was never higher.  

At the time, I listened to Tresor 3 more than any of the others.  I would have put Tresor II slightly below it, although any argument claiming it as the best of the series would be difficult to refute.  But each compilation went into heavy rotation on my stereo when they were released.  With the exception of Tresor 4.  I have no idea why.  In fact, I can't even remember where and when I bought it.  It was possibly years after the Tresor 2000 compilation, many years after it was originally released.  And I never particularly took to it.  Tresor 5, on the other hand?  At the time, I felt it symbolized muscular, slamming mid-90's techno at its best.  Tresor 2000?  Pounding, cavernous minimal techno long before it became synonymous with Berlin culture. 

But now?  Those compilations are a bit bland.  As part of a DJ set they would probably still slam, but as individual tracks on a 70-minute disc?  Too monotone, lacking in hooks (Tresor 2000 in particular).  What about Tresor 4, the one I would have designated as the runt of the litter.  Hearing it now, it's simply outstanding.  It's packed with classics ("Relish", "Der Klang der Familie", "Think Quick"), with more variations in mood and tempo than the average Tresor comp, which makes for more engaging home listening.  And the second disc!  I'd nearly forgotten that there was one.  The second disc is an excellent mix CD featuring many of the artists on the first disc.  It's sloppy in places, but the vision and momentum is there, it's safe to say that this disc never "loses the floor".  

Why did I ignore this compilation for so many years?  I really have no idea.  Maybe I felt it was unnecessary because I already had so many other records and discs by some of the artists (e.g. Maurizio, Vainqueur)?    

Bob Marley, "Legend"

I have been thinking a lot about a new format for this blog.  The correct choice seems to be taking the entire thing to a video format on YT or a social media platform.  Would this be in addition to, or instead of the written blog?  I'm not sure.  I feel that writing is more suitable for longer think-pieces and collated musings (which is what I tend to do) and shorter snippets where you can comment without necessarily having to say anything profound.  However, video is more immediate and relatable.  

Either way, I could churn out reviews and thoughts of catalog music indefinitely.  That's why I love the Pitchfork Sunday Review so much.  Long form pieces on classic albums with a modern reviewer's perspective.  Eric Harvey's piece on Bob Marley's "Legend" is outstanding -- the best of these PF reviews that I have come across.  It's an extensively researched piece, and I learned so much.  Harvey persuasively argues that "Legend" recast Marley's legacy as a photogenic, radio-friendly crossover star, rather than a militaristic rebel.  In turn, the album flipped the entire popular narrative of reggae music on its head.  In the 70's rock and punk bands would borrow (or steal) from reggae when they wanted to sound dangerous and threatening, in part as a reaction to anodyne FM soft rock.  After "Legend", reggae became the music of sunshine and good vibes for a newfound audience of middle class white listeners who bought the album in the millions.       

I don't believe there's a sensible counter-argument to this.  Marley released thirteen studio albums, and "Legend" doesn't come close to covering all the facets of his music.  David Robinson, the Island record executive who compiled the tracks on "Legend", admitted as much, namely, that they saw a mass marketing opportunity amongst an untapped white listenership.  Is it really such a problem though?  Harvey would say yes, seeing as "Legend" sanitizes Marley in a way that he certainly never would have chosen for himself if he were alive.  However, Greatest Hits compilations always target the casual fan, most of whom buy music sparingly and rarely delve deeply into an artist's catalogue.  More serious listeners can always use the GH compilation as a gateway into buying the individual albums, which was precisely Harvey's experience vis a vis "Legend".  Was Marley wronged moreso than hundreds of other artists whose music has been packaged and repackaged countless times?   Greatest hits collections come with loads of statistical anomalies.  Many of the top RIAA certified albums are compilations, and many of those were double albums (that count as two units).  I believe that "Legend" is the second biggest selling GH album of all time -- albums sold, not units sold -- behind only the Eagles juggernaut GH album.  To paraphase an old saying, 18 million Bob Marley fans can't be wrong.  "Legend" is still a steady seller, confirming its cross-generational appeal.    

My own experience in Jamaica as a foreigner is not meant to be taken as representative.  However, as a personal note, when I was in Jamaica in 1992 as part of a school program, the sellers in the market were only too happy to push any and all sorts of Marley merchandise onto us enthusiastic teenagers.  In Jamaica, a national hero like Marley is a once in a generation public figure, in a sense he belonged to everyone.  When it comes to profiting from his name, capitalism can't simply be split among racial lines.   

Beach House are still amazing

I will never catch up with contemporary music ever again, I am checked out on that front. I'm too far behind even with the music released by my all-time favourite acts, so there's zero chance of getting up to speed on recent releases in general.  Case in point, I intended to post a triple review of three new albums by three of my all-time favourite artists -- Moderat's "MORE D4TA", Spiritualized's "Everything Was Beautiful", and Beach House's "Once Twice Melody".  Each of them had produced at least one Album of the Year by my rankings.  Time passed, and I needed to add another album to the list -- "everything is alive" by Slowdive (their previous comeback record was my #2 of that year, and was in my top ten for the 2010's).  Time passed again.  That was in the summer of 2022.  I still haven't heard any of those albums in full.

Yet once in a while, I still fall down the rabbit hole like I have this week, playing Youtube videos from the "Once Twice Melody" tour on repeat.  When this album first came out, I thought I'd had it with Beach House.  They had more or less stopped evolving.  By "Teen Dream" they'd reached an inflection point, from then on, it wouldn't be enough to sound like star-crossed kids recording twee noodlings in their bedrooms, they needed to morph into a full-fledged, wall of sound-obsessed, immaculately produced band.  And with "Bloom", they did.  

Then they had a brief struggle with stylistic schizophrenia.  They stepped back into the shadows with (the still excellent) "Depression Cherry", and simultaneously recorded the more upbeat "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (a good idea on paper, but the songs weren't really there).  After struggling with the eternal question of whether to retreat further into moody dreampop or burst forth as a commercial indie pop juggernaut, the decision was made: we can do both.  This gave rise to "7", which stayed true to their trusted formulas but sonically, they sounded bolder and richer than ever before, their collaboration with Sonic Boom.  The apex had been reached, the only thing left was to officially become the dream pop AC/DC and milk the same signature style for decades to come.  To me, that seemed to be the marketing strategy behind "Once Twice Melody", so I figured this was the moment I could take a time out from this band.

In a sense, "Once Twice Melody" plays out as expected.  Beach House really only have one tempo -- one that they can slightly boost for the more radio-ready songs, or drag out for the slower ballads, but isn't every Beach House songs kind of a semi-ballad?  They have one instrumental palate -- guitar, keyboards, and drums, and the effects boxes and presets barely change.   Each song drifts along within roughly the same airy, hazy moodscape.  They have perfected the show closing epic with its breathtaking coda, every album has to have one now ("Irene", "Dive", "Over and Over").  

But despite all the signs that Beach House are content to churn out the same content from now until forever, I can still get completely lost in their music.  Victoria Legrand's voice isn't as bright and powerful as it once was, but everything they do on stage is still mesmerizing.  On any given day, their music is more life-affirming than anything else out there.  Everyone has their personal ranking, but "Once Twice Melody" more than holds its own with the best albums in their catalogue.  They have been in a godlike tier for well over a decade, and that's a rare thing.    

     

Israel Philharmonic presents "Little Tchaikovsky", cond. Lahav Shani

Every year, the Vienna Philharmonic presents a New Year's Day concert of light music based around Strauss-family waltzes and polkas.  These concerts are legendary and are broadcast worldwide, reaching a viewership around 50 million people annually.   

This was essentially an unadvertised concert that didn't appear on their published schedule, with tickets sold to under-35's at a discount price.  The presumed goal was to capture a younger audience and turn them into more regular concert goers, present a different side of classical music other than the stuffy reputation that it usually gets, and bring a special holiday-type atmosphere to the concert hall in a manner that's worked so well in Vienna and elsewhere.  The results were a slam dunk success.  

The Nutcracker ballet is already a holiday classic around the world, and Tchaikovsky ballets basically transcend classical music (even people who think they don't know about classical music will recognize many of the melodies), so the theme makes plenty of sense.  This was far and away the best performance I've seen from Lahav Shani.  He might fancy himself a late Romantic/20th century specialist, but he's incendiary with "lighter" music, not only as a conductor but as an educator/entertainer.  He spoke with the crowd between pieces, and invited audience members to watch part of the performance on stage to "fulfill a dream" (which turned into an unexpected deluge of upwards of 50 people).  He came across more cool and approachable than he could ever be while conducting Stravinsky or Bruckner.  In a cute moment during the extended pizzicato during the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, he simply took a break from conducting and grabbed seat in the audience.  It drew waves of laughter, but many conductors wouldn't be willing to take themselves down a peg and display such a sense of humour.

The programme was brilliantly sequenced, beginning with three selections from the Nutcracker ballet -- Waltz of the Flowers, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, and Dance of the Reed Flutes, each one delightful, each one recognizable to all.  This was followed by a selection from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, arranged for string orchestra, and a performance of the first movement of the Violin Concerto featuring soloist Michael Shaham, a young violinist making his debut with the orchestra.  The start was a bit rocky, but he pulled it together by the end.  Finally, following the aforementioned rush to the stage, the full orchestra performed the third and fourth movements of the Fourth Symphony.  The third movement was a lively delight, and the final movement was sufficiently fiery to get across the overall mood of the piece.  One unannounced encore later, and the concert was over in a trim 75 minutes (no intermission) and not a single person left without a smile on their face.      

Another year without a list

I used to obsess over my year-end lists, but now, I don't miss them in the least.  Non-listmaking friends and online acquaintances used to claim that lists were simply not their preferred method of judging the music they listened to.  I thought it was a giant cop-out.  If you love music, then you should stick your neck out for the stuff you've been championing all year long.  Well, I get it now.  Lists are really nothing more than a snapshot of where your head is at, a timely and in-time review of the year/decade as you saw it at the time.  In that sense, lists are essential.  But if you don't make those lists, then you can still document your thoughts in other ways.  On a blog, or on social media, and so on.  

Resident Advisor published a their best music of the past quarter-century.  My tastes are too outdated, so I didn't recognize most of the tracks on the tracks lists, even by the artists I'm familiar with.  It looked more like an artist representation list than a tracks list, with an outsized attempt to feature lesser-known tracks by well-known artists.  The albums list was more of my thing, perhaps the last major contemporary list that I'll truly be able to relate to.   I have still never heard the DJ Sprinkles album at #2 in full but I can't argue with its impact.  Burial's "Untrue" at #1 indeed felt inevitable.  

On the contemporary side, Philip Sherburne wrote about the top 30 electronic albums of 2025 for Pitchfork.  I haven't heard anything on it, but damn, Sherburne always makes everything seem so compelling.  There is truly not enough time to listen to all the music I love.  That Los Thuthanaka album really comes across as a must-hear.  

I have been deep into techno nostalgia -- the em:t discography, the Round One to Round Five compilation, the still mind-blowing In Order to Dance 5 compilation on R&S.   I could never write about contemporary music again, and churn out steady content based on reviews and recollections of old compilations, much like I did for the Spacemen 3 tribute CD.  On some days, I convince myself I should migrate to an all-nostalgia review format, possibly through video channels instead of through writing.  

Various, "A Tribute To Spacemen 3" (Rocket Girl)

I don't know why I have never written about this album before, seeing as it influenced my buying habits for years afterward.  If memory serves, this was my introduction to Bardo Pond and Low.  I had heard the names of both bands prior to this but had never heard their music.  I had never heard or heard of Flowchart or Transient Waves.  I spent considerable time tracking down nearly everything released by Flowchart, and Transient Waves' second, self-titled album is a long time favourite of mine, a psych-ambient masterpiece if there ever was one.  

Bowery Electric's "Things'll Never Be the Same" finds them hurtling headlong into their "Lushlife" phase, as the hazy "Beat"-like intro segues into the trip-hop influenced main section of the song.  The general idea is to create a shoegaze-like headspace without relying on a bank of guitars, and it succeeds.  As the opening track on the compilation, it sends a clear message -- this won't be a note for note pastiche of the source material.  

Asteroid #4's take on "Losing Touch With My Mind" transforms the original from a bludgeoning grind of guitars and feedback into a space-rock epic, full of windswept atmospherics and apathetic vocals that work perfectly in this context.  It wouldn't be right to say that these versions improve on the originals, rather, they've been updated and remodeled in a 90's post rock context.  That's exactly what you want from a tribute album -- fresh takes on older ideas.  Incidentally, Asteroid #4 are one of the few bands on this compilation whose albums I didn’t end up buying—mainly because I could never find them.

Mogwai's "Honey" is presented in the vein of their debut album, in particular, "Summer" is an accurate reference point with it's use of glockenspiel and quiet/loud contrasts.  I would have loved for them to take on a track that lends more to a maximalist approach, like "Walking With Jesus", but what we got is still fairly good.

Flowchart makes a lateral move with "Ode To Street Hassle", taking one of S3's weakest songs, tacking on a drum machine, and keeping more or less the same mood and feel.  It's one of the weaker tracks on the album, although I would still end up buying nearly everything Flowchart released and playing the daylights out of it.  Same for Accelera Deck's "I Believe It", although I never really connected to their version and never bought any more of their music. 

Arab Strap renders "Revolution" nearly unrecognizable by slowing the tempo and replacing the urgency of the lyrics by Aidan Moffat's incomprehensible mumbling.  Then they bring it all together in the end with a furious, wailing guitar outro and a jittery pseudo-dance beat fed through an amphetamine-laced drum machine.  But that's Arab Strap for you, it's all very much on brand.  

Shit gets taken to a new level on the next track, Bardo Pond's crushing version of "Call The Doctor".  Obscure trivia time: in 2002-3, noted pro wrestling asshole and trainee abuser Bill DeMott was getting a minor push in WWE.  His gimmick was that of a grumpy, veteran ass-kicking and he was using some kind of "doctor" nickname that I can't recall.  Well, somebody in the WWE's music department must have been looking for inspiration for a new theme song for DeMott, searched for "call the doctor" on file sharing services or wherever one would search for obscure music in 2002 pre-youtube, pre-streaming, stumbled across this Bardo Pond track, and figured what the hell, let's rip off this band that nobody's ever heard of.  That's the only explanation that makes sense, because these tracks couldn't be any more similar.  

Bardo Pond, "Call The Doctor"

Bill DeMott's theme, "No More Laughing"

Frontier's "Hey Man" is yet another space-rock masterpiece, quite similar to Asteroid #4 but even more into the outer reaches of the stratosphere.  The album makes another U-turn by following that with Low's "Lord, Can You Hear Me?", certainly the most Low-like S3 track and an excellent choice for them to cover.  

Amp’s "So Hot" is the most purely gorgeous track on the compilation, retaining all the lightness of the original while adding subtle, ethereal touches that make it feel almost folk-like and magical.  Amp were arguably the most underrated act in the Bristol post-rock scene, I never heard a bad note from them throughout their vast catalog.  And they're still active!

Piano Magic understood that "How Does It Feel" is, above all, about "feel"—the more you try to do with it, the worse it gets. So they let the track pulse and breathe and drift toward its understated conclusion. It’s exactly what the song needs, and it makes for a fine tribute to the original.

There's only one song from "Recurring" on this compilation, and it's Transient Waves' version of "Billy Whizz".  A bit of a tangent -- the Jason songs on "Recurring" all have horrible titles.  Thankfully he'd get much better in Spiritualized.  Transient Waves were a lovely band and this is an ambient rock lullaby, the perfect track to end the compilation with.  

This album was a huge influence on me, serving as a virtual "who's who" of Spacemen 3 disciples.  This is where the shoegaze-adjacent, psych-drenched post-rockers came to play and to carry on the Spacemen 3 tradition.  It blew my mind some twenty years ago and is still and powerful listen today.  Does anyone still remember it?  The recent shoegaze revival has more or less pushed this style of music into irrelevance. It now comes across as weak and wimpy, too self-absorbed—much like the criticisms leveled at the first wave of shoegazers, which was a major reason they fell out of favor by the mid-’90s.

One Shot with Ed Sheeran

Of course it’s an advertisement for his upcoming world tour, and yes, he surely got a boatload of money from Netflix for doing it. But set the cynicism aside—One Shot is ridiculously fun to watch: a fresh, challenging, and genuinely unique take on the “no camera cuts” concept. They brought in the team behind Adolescence to execute the vision and the logistics, and Sheeran absolutely delivers under what is, when you think about it, enormous pressure and uncertainty.

Even though he had multiple attempts (three full takes were filmed), so many things could have gone wrong. It takes a special performer to stay fully engaged, think fast on his feet, and not get flustered. Sure, plenty of moments were staged, but there are also interactions with the public that are clearly real and off-script. Then again, if you’re going to attempt something like this, who better than the musician who commands a stadium for two-plus hours solo night after night? The key word being “solo.”

The songs are great, the settings are wonderfully unconventional, Sheeran nails the persona (part affable megastar, part Pied Piper), the camerawork is exceptional, and I’m not sure anyone else of his generation could pull off this kind of “concert film”—although I’m sure some will try.

Milli Vanilli -- Grammy revenge

In 1991, Milli Vanilli became the first and still only act to be stripped of a Best New Artist Grammy.  Now, more than three decades later, Fab Morvan has been nominated for Best Audiobook and may finally get the last laugh by winning that elusive Grammy.  It would make for a fascinating acceptance speech if it makes TV (which it probably won't).  

Never mind the fact that Rob and Fab themselves took all of the punishment (everyone involved with making their record from their manager on down received zero flack) for doing the same crimes that several other top dance acts were guilty of (Technotronic, C&C Music Factory, Black Box, and many others used studio ringers).  The Grammys have never had an abundance of credibility when it comes to the Best New Artist award.  

Looking over the past few decades of winners and nominees, the first thing you notice is a distinct lack of, let's call them, the biggest selling, most successful, generation-spanning artists of all time.  The first Best New Artist award was given in 1960.  Since then (i.e. excluding artists such as Elvis Presley who got an earlier start), the reputedly biggest selling artists ever are Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elton John, Queen, Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Rihanna, Pink Floyd, Eminem, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and AC/DC.  Out of those fifteen acts, only two won the award (Beatles and Mariah Carey), and four others were nominated (Elton, Zep, Taylor, and Ed Sheeran).  And no, neither Destiny's Child or The Jackson 5 were nominated.  If the purpose of the award is to identify the next wave of blockbuster acts, then it has failed.

It took several years for the Grammys to figure out what this award was supposed to represent.  Nominations in the 60's were a veritable mish mash of jazz artists, folk groups, comedians (Bob Newhart won in 1961), singer/actors, blue-eyed soul acts, novelty acts and the occasional welcome surprise (Miriam Makeba nominated in 1961!).  From 1960-1965, I couldn't tell you a thing about half of the nominees.  Over the next fifteen years, most of the nominees were major hitmakers of their day, with legitimate claims to long-lasting stardom.  And almost every act was white.  Most years had one token black nominee, with the exception of 1975, which had two (Graham Central Station and Johnny Bristol).  But they had to expand the nomination group from five to six in order to do it.  Natalie Cole in 1976 was the only African-American winner of the award during that time period.  The next person of colour to win was Sade in 1986.  

After some thirty years of white/rock/blue-eyed soul/lounge singer dominance, 1990 was the most diverse group of nominees in the award's history to that point: Milli Vanilli, Neneh Cherry, Indigo Girls, Tone Loc, and Soul II Soul.  Part of the resentment toward Milli Vanilli was based on the perception that their popularity was more likely to be a fad, as opposed to the other four more serious, career-oriented artists.  It's almost as if people believed that justice was done when their award was revoked because they didn't deserve to win it anyway.  I like the other four artists very much, but their time in the upper reaches of the charts didn't last beyond 1995 or so.   In 1990, Milli Vanilli were unquestionably the hottest act of the bunch.  This can't be disputed -- they had five US top five hits from their debut album, including three #1's.  There have been far more indefensible choices since then:

1992.  As a direct reaction to the Milli Vanilli scandal, Marc Cohn won over Boys II Men, C+C Music Factory, Color Me Badd, and Seal.  Even at the time, it was widely known that C+C Music Factory (and many similar dance-oriented acts of the day) were lip synching as well and using ringers in the studio.  At least Marc Cohn was a friendly white act who could be trusted not to engage in that.  Or something.  No offense to Marc Cohn and his perfectly acceptable MOR hit "Walking In Memphis", but this was a horrible choice.  

2011.  Esperanza Spalding won over Justin Bieber, Drake, Florence and the Machine, and Mumford and Sons.  From 1997-2011, female artists and female-fronted acts won the Best New Artist award in twelve of the fifteen years.   Maybe it was a given that a female artist would win, given the voter's tendencies.  Male artists won for the next four years, but since 2016, only one male artist has gone home with the award.  A remarkable run of dominance for female acts.  But Spalding beat four acts that would rack up several dozen #1 songs and albums between them, and tour stadiums around the world multiple times over.  Strange. 

2014.  A travesty so unforgivable that they should lecture on it in university ethics classes.  Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, a flash in the pan rap act led by a demented anti-Semite, won the Best New Artist award over James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, Kacey Musgraves, and Ed Sheeran. This was indefensible at the time and looks about a billion times worse in the years since.  Any time a smiley white rapper scores a hit song out of nowhere, don't worry, Grammy comes running!  I'm feeling nauseous just writing about this.   

LFO, "Advance" (1996)

Hard to believe that this album is nearly 30 years old.  At the time, it felt wholly out of place.  Although released on Warp, "Advance" couldn't have been further removed from the "Artifical Intelligence" style of bedroom techno that had dominated the label in the previous few years.  It was too sobering and grounded for the rave scene, and not propulsive or hedonistic enough for the trance scene.  At least half of its tracks aren't suited for the clubs at all, and most DJ's would have been hard-pressed to meld even the more "conventional" kick drum heavy tracks like "Shut Down" and "Kombat Drinking".  Not coincidentally, those were the tracks that Gez Varley worked on.  Most of the album is an extended production reel for Mark Bell's future career as the knob twiddler for A-list electronic acts like Bjork and Depeche Mode. And those tracks still sound as if they were beamed in from an unexplored future world.  Nothing sounds like "Advance", even now.  

"Jason Vorhees" simmers with nervous energy due to its crashing percussive beats and mind-melting filters, but is layered over a serene ambient drifting background.  "Them" lays out a low-tempo squelching funk plastered over lost in the forest, horror movie sound effects.  I'm hard pressed to think of any near equivalent to either track.  DItto for "Tied Up", a sort of headbanger's techno-funk that ascends into a kind of electronic shoegaze paradise, full of breathy sounds and high pitched whistling and god knows what else (this was the single, by the way, and was remixed by Spiritualized into a nine-minute drone-fest).  "Shove Piggy Shove" is perhaps the lone throwback to LFO's bleepy roots, with a cavernous, speaker-rattling bass line to match.

But for me, the album centres around the title track and "Loch Ness".  The former is simply the most heart-stopping, dramatic, crystal shards of sound collapsing on one's head, fist-pumping mindfuck in 90's techno, bar none.  At 105 or so BPM, yet it's not danceable in the least in the context of a conventional techno set.  It starts out quietly with the whispered word "advance" and grows into a monumental cascade of droning and caterwauling.  The kick drum rains hammerfist blows into your chest, the bass causes the entire room to shake uncontrollably.  "Loch Ness" has an undeniable build of a different kind, tricking you into a false sense of security with its tranquil opening synth washes, before exploding into a chorus of electronic birdsong, yet another bass timbre to collapse one's chest, and accompanied by a militaristic snare drum workout.  There is no way to characterize any of this, it's a genre truly unto itself.

"Advance" is probably Mark Bell's masterpiece, the best advertisement for what  he could offer as a producer in the following years.  He was a talent that was truly taken from us too soon.  

BBC Music ranks the top 12 classical pieces that bridged the pop culture divide

 It's always nice to see a list that covers a subject that hasn't been overdone.  Other than Percy Grainger's "Country Gardens" -- the only piece on the list that I wasn't familiar with, it must be a Brit-centric thing -- each of these pieces has been featured, immortalized, and run full circle into parody.  These are truly famous pieces that have spanned oceans and crossed borders, and there's really not too much to argue about here.  One could argue for "Tubular Bells" if one wished to stretch the definitions into classical-adjacent forms, but even that's not a huge stretch considering the ELP version of "Fanfare for the Common Man" that is linked in the article.  There's also a good case for the Dr. Who theme if we branch into experimental music from post-WWII composers.  But if we just stick to tonal composers working with conventional instruments and ensembles, this is as good a list of the "most famous" classical works in pop culture over the past few decades. 

I grew up learning about classical music subliminally through Hanna-Barbara cartoons.  I was pleased to see that the connection to animated series hasn’t entirely disappeared—see the links to Bluey and SpongeBob SquarePants, two cartoons even my own kids enjoy.  Wagner and Strauss are indelibly tied to Apocalypse Now and 2001, respectively, to the point that mentioning the movie titles likely evokes those pieces of music more readily than any specific line or actor from the films