John Schaefer appears in the following:
Living in a Sampled World
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
We live in a sampled world. Our dominant music genre, hip hop, is built on samples of earlier songs, often quick bursts of percussion or catchy hooks from former pop hits. Our blockbuster movies take captured video elements – visual samples, essentially – and manipulate them through both space and ...
What's your favorite musical rivalry?
Thursday, October 02, 2008
One of the reasons we love sports is because it gives us something to argue about. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun growing up a Yankees fan in Queens if I hadn’t been growing up in a family of Mets fans. My brother Jerry and I would argue ...
In Song, the Eyes Have It
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Two visual artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, have created a project called Fleshmap as a visual representation of desire – an easily digested way of showing how humans approach one another’s bodies. The site has pages devoted to the sense of sight, or touch, and a page devoted ...
Banning Alcohol at Concerts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
So Van Morrison has banned booze at his UK concerts. The idea of banning alcohol at a concert makes about as much sense as banning beer at the ballpark. Look, no one wants to have to deal with drunken audience members – not the musicians, not the hall owners, and ...
Philip Glass: The Perennial Lighting Rod
Monday, September 29, 2008
The French have this great saying, entre chien et loup. Literally, “between a dog and a wolf,” but of course it’s much more poetic than that – it is used to describe that time of day when the light is fading ...
Who's on Top Today?
Friday, September 26, 2008
So Metallica is atop the Billboard 200 chart. Sort of reminds me of the 70s and 80s, when the Billboard album charts regularly featured rock bands. Now? Not so much. Aside from heavy metal (Metallica at #1, Slipknot at #12), there is almost no rock music atop the Billboard charts. ...
Can music motivate you at the gym?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The big thing in gyms now is apparently music. Various production houses, most notably Muzak, have created music services specifically with gyms and health clubs in mind. The idea is to use music to motivate the gym rats to step it up a notch, on the theory that music will ...
Another Look at Lenny
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
While writing his article about Bernstein in today’s Daily News, David Hinckley asked if we could talk a bit about Bernstein’s legacy in general, his connection to WNYC in particular, and even more specifically, about what I thought of him. I repeated, for the twentieth time this week, the strange ...
The '70s: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
While Dave Thompson’s book “I Hate New Music” may be an exercise in hyperbole and provocation, it does make a rather familiar point: many people feel that the music they grew up with is simply the best music ever made. It is almost painfully obvious to anyone who grew up ...
What Is Opera, Anyway?
Monday, September 22, 2008
Another season at the Met opens this week, and the somewhat traditional opener (Renee Fleming’s voice on display in three acts from three different operas) belies the fact that opera is actually opening up to more contemporary ideas. Peter Gelb at the Met and the incoming Gerard Mortier at the ...
The changing role of women in country music
Friday, September 19, 2008
As I mentioned on Wednesday’s blog, country music wasn’t really my thing, at least while growing up here in the city. But I was aware that some of the better known singers were women – Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and much later on people like Shania Twain. Since I didn’t ...
What I Missed: Hank Williams
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
I am a city boy – always have been. And so country music has long been my musical blind spot. Now, I have to say, in my own defense, that country music itself is at least partially responsible for my longtime ignorance: all that slick, overproduced Nashville stuff tends to ...
The New Metallica Album
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
When it comes to Metallica, there seem to be two kinds of people: those who believe the band broke new ground in thrash metal in the 1980s and then lost the thread in the 90s; and those who maybe had sort of heard of the band, but then fell in ...
The Art of the Cover Song
Monday, September 15, 2008
Cover songs can be tricky – on one hand, a cover of a song you like will often simply remind you of why you liked the original in the first place, and will often suffer by comparison. (There are exceptions – I liked “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but let’s ...
The Great Debate: Albums vs. Singles
Friday, September 12, 2008
So the story goes like this: Estelle releases her song “American Boy” on Atlantic Records. It does well on iTunes and becomes a top 10 single, and the folks at Atlantic Records, struggling to find their place in a changing music marketplace, decide this is great and heave a huge ...
Would you pursue a career in the music business?
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
So 20% of the people polled in the UK would give up their jobs for a chance to work in the music business… I wonder what they think “working in the music business” means? Sure, the bricklayer probably dreams of becoming a rich and famous pop singer, with a starlet ...