Today is September 21st, the subject of one of the most joyful recordings ever made, which comes with an all-time-great music video. The song in turn inspired my favorite work of fan art. pic.twitter.com/HR06yeUPFv — demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) September 22, 2016
Tag Archives: dance
Dancing to Michael Jackson with my kids
I have a longstanding musical relationship with Michael Jackson. There’s nothing remarkable about that; many people do. Like the rest of my age cohort, Michael entered my consciousness with Thriller in the early 1980s. Aside from a period in my teens and young adulthood, he has rarely been out of my ears since. The relationship …
In praise of the Reflex Re-Edit
The Reflex is a London-based French DJ and producer named Nicolas Laugier. He specializes in a particular kind of remix, the re-edit, in which you rework a song using only sounds found within the song itself. Some re-edits keep the original song more or less intact, and just give it a punchier mix, a more …
Ngoma aesthetics after apartheid
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Louise Meintjes (2017) Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press. Brian Larkin (2008) Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The image of Zulu men dancing, singing and drumming carries heavy symbolic weight. …
Groove challenges with the Groove Pizza
One of our key design principles at the NYU MusEDLab is not to confront beginners with a blank canvas. We want to introduce people to our tools by giving them specific, real-world music to play around with. That was the motivation behind creating presets for the aQWERTYon, and a similar impulse informs Ableton’s approach to their online music tutorials. …
Classical composers, Bowie and Björk
This post originally took the form of a couple of Twitter threads, which I’ve collected and edited here for easier reading. Greg Sandow asks two very interesting and provocative questions of classical music: When the Museum of Modern Art did its first retrospective of a seminal musical artist, no surprise it was Björk who reached past music …
Musical simple: Groove Is In The Heart
In college, I played in a cover band called Harsh Mouse (because the band members all lived in Marsh House.) One of the high points of our repertoire was this song.
Milo meets Beethoven
For his birthday, Milo got a book called Welcome to the Symphony by Carolyn Sloan. We finally got around to showing it to him recently, and now he’s totally obsessed. The book has buttons along the side which you can press to hear little audio samples. They include each orchestra instrument playing a short Beethoven …
The Great Cut-Time Shift
There has been a dramatic shift in American popular music’s grooves over the past sixty or so years. To understand it, you need to know what swing is. Here is a piece of music played without swing: Here is that same piece of music played with swing:
Syncopation
I have a whole lot of explanatory writing about rhythm in the pipeline, and thought it would be good to have a place to link the word “syncopation” to every time it arises. So here we go. Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony. A syncopated rhythm has accents on unexpected beats. In …