As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name. The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation …
Tag Archives: eighties
As The World Falls Down
As kids, my siblings and I watched Labyrinth about eight billion times. It has been super gratifying that my own children love the movie too. Together with their separate David Bowie fandom, that has put “As The World Falls Down” into heavy rotation lately. When I was a kid, I didn’t especially love this song, …
The Ghostbusters theme song
It’s Halloween, and that means that everyone is scrambling to find seasonal music beyond Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In the pharmacy this morning, I heard “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr, and remembered that it’s an absolute banger. This is one of a long list of songs that I loved as a kid, became embarrassed by as a …
I Wanna Dance With Somebody
I was looking for some new acapellas to remix, and was delighted to come across Whitney Houston’s vocal stem from “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” The 808-cowbell-laden production has undeniable charm, but the vocals by themselves are the real truth.
The longest sample chain
Music evolves the way life does: through change in the heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations. Most of the heritable characteristics of music are abstractions like rhythm patterns and chord progressions. However, you can also see heritability at work more obviously in the form of sampling. It’s especially illuminating when a song samples a …
An open letter to GQ about “We Built This City”
Dear Gentleman’s Quarterly, You recently published a story, An Oral History of “We Built This City,” the Worst Song of All Time.
Rhythmic simples
In the service of teaching theory using real music, I’ve been gathering musical simples: little phrases and loops that are small enough to be easily learned, and substantial enough to have expressive value. See some representative melodic simples, more melodic simples, and compound simples. This post showcases some representative rhythmic simples, more commonly known as …
My music education
I’m writing a chapter of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education. Here’s a section of what I wrote, about my own music learning experiences. Most of my music education has happened outside of the classroom. It has come about intentionally, through lessons and disciplined practice, and it has come about unintentionally, through …
Sucker MCs
Sasha Frere-Jones was recently asked by The Guardian to make a list of perfect songs. I don’t agree with all of his choices — Taylor Swift? — but I can definitely get behind his nomination of “Sucker MCs” by Run-DMC. This track was the B-side to Run-DMC’s first single in 1983, and was produced by …
Killen and Marotta
Participants in Play With Your Music were recently treated to an in-depth interview with two Peter Gabriel collaborators, engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta. Both are highly accomplished music pros with a staggering breadth of experience between them. You can watch the interview here: Kevin Killen engineered So and several subsequent Peter Gabriel albums. …