Showing posts with label #Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Music. Show all posts

Wednesday, 17 April 2024

MOTOWN

17 April 2024



"The Tears of a Clown"(Hank Cosby, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson)

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
Released September 1970

"Writing about a sad subject in a happy context and making it singable."


That is Motown! The Motown sound!!

Motown was a record company founded in 1959 by Berry Gordy in Detroit USA. Detroit is the capital of the American motorcar industry and "Motown" means "motor town". It was an all-black recording company - I'd be guessing if I said mostly the guys working in the factories, so it's mostly their music, at least at the beginning.

Motown was like a factory too, a factory that followed a simple repetitive process for producing music hits ... a music hits factory. Berry Gordy produced many many hit records. 

What was the secret, the secret of the Motown sound? To understand Motown we have to go back to Africa and tribal chanting, we have to go back to the slave trade and working the cotton fields, we have to move on to Christianity and Gospel music, and we have to see how technology was introduced to produce "Rhythm and Blues" (RnB) from Jazz and chant.

Motown is Soul Music made popular. Soul music started off in the 1950s and 60s from Gospel music.

Gospel is from the music sung by black slaves in the cotton fields originally, and in all-black churches. It's a kind of religious chant with African rythms, simple call-and-repeat to engage a congregation of worshippers. The congregation repeats what the vicar said. It is deeply consoling.

Motown is from church Gospel, but also from rhythm and blues. Rhythm and Blues is a black American music from the 40s that mixes Jazz with a kind of rocking beat from the piano. R&B lyrical themes - the ideas being sung about - very often summarise the African-American history and experience of pain from slavery, the denial of freedom and joy, as well as the triumphs and failures in the racism they suffered. It is about oppression, difficult and stressful relationships, hard times materially and financially, and of course their hopes and longings - "I had a dream last night...".

R&B infused into Gospel produced Motown, The Motown Sound. It spoke for the public but also to the public as it was background motivation to people involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

You gotta understand all that to appreciate the fundamental strains in American society dating all the way back to slavery when 13 million Africans made it alive in the slave boats to work in the plantations of the Deep South, and the Civil War that followed when the North tried to impose its idea of an equitable society, so-called.

What is The Motown Sound? I mean, how can you recognise it?

It's all about making the blend of Gospel and Rhythm and Blues - which are black musics - really appeal to a much broader white audience. In other words, it popularises this core black music with a view to more record sales. That was Berry Gordy, out to make money ... and who can blame him? A very clever and original guy.

Here are the main features of Motown - This is how you can recognise the genre:

- tambourines to accent the back beat

- electric bass-guitar (new at the time) for the main melody

- special chord structures - a chord is a collection of notes belonging together in a "key". A chord structure structure is the progression from one chord to the next. This progression sets the emotional tone of the music from happy to sad.

- a call-and-response singing style from  Gospel music, the church, from the cotton fields, from Africa.

- So, a simple and repeated progression of chords make the structure, but also sophisticated melodies, the tune that you hear, that first pulls you into the song...then there is the story being told, the lyrics.

- A four-beat drum pattern, nothing simpler - it is the toe-tapping rhythm of the music where certain notes in a chord get emphasised over others.

- Rich horns and strings, the famous "wall of sound" that gives a lush "whoooosh" organ-like reverberating feeling as the sound progresses (This is record-producer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, which was parallel to Tamla with a lot of cross influence between the two.)

- A trebly style ("treble" is higher notes, "bass" is lower deeper notes). This means mixing sounds electronically (new) in the studio (again, the Wall of Sound) to boost or rebalance the lighter more romantic, girl and boy holding hands, treble.

- A sound with special appeal to a motoring (this is Motown!) public (new) who listened on AM radio (AM is an early technical broadcast method to send sound to your radio).

- Pop (for "popular", ie big audiences) used techniques like sweet orchestral string sections trilling on your hear strings, power-blasting horn sections, carefully arranged background vocals. But nothing hard for ordinary folk to follow - no complicated arrangements, no elaborate, melismatic gliding vocal riffs (one vowel across many notes), and simple story lines rhat put words to our feelings. Motown was simple to follow and simple to understand, undemanding yet a really rich chocolately sound to bathe in - that is why we all love it!

Thursday, 1 December 2022

PINK FLOYD comfortably numb

1 December 2022
Comfortably numb

Try the live first

Feeling
https://youtu.be/rtzHgOuGKTc
https://youtu.be/nS7oZZLZQA8

Explanation
https://youtu.be/yj93v9j2A4A

Live
https://youtu.be/LTseTg48568
Reaction
I'd heard of and knew PF's top three songs (Comfortably Numb being number 3), but I was just a kid, a boy, not at all prepared for some of the feelings you get in this song.

Anyway...to put it another way...in the corner of your daily life is a little door that, like me as a boy, you probably hadn't noticed. Well, this video from The Charismatic Voice - and the previous from Polo - takes you to that tiny door and opens it for you. Wow, you look through, they show you this huge stunning technicolour universe of matching sounds and colours that blows you away.

Check it out:
https://youtu.be/nS7oZZLZQA8

Lyrics
[Intro]

[Verse 1: Roger Waters]
Hello? (Hello, hello, hello)
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
Come on (Come on, come on), now
I hear you're feeling down
Well, I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again
Relax (Relax, relax, relax)
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

[Pre-Chorus 1: David Gilmour]
There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying

When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons

Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am


[Chorus: David Gilmour]
I have become comfortably numb

[Guitar Solo 1]

[Chorus: David Gilmour]

[Intro]

[Verse 1: Roger Waters]
Hello? (Hello, hello, hello)
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
Come on (Come on, come on), now
I hear you're feeling down
Well, I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again
Relax (Relax, relax, relax)
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?
[Pre-Chorus 1: David Gilmour]
There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am

[Chorus: David Gilmour]
I have become comfortably numb

[Guitar Solo 1]

[Chorus: David Gilmour]
I have become comfortably numb

[Verse 2: Roger Waters]
Okay (Okay, okay, okay)
Just a little pinprick
There'll be no more
But you may feel a little sick
Can you stand up? (Stand up, stand up)
I do believe it's working, good
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on, it's time to go
[Pre-Chorus 2: David Gilmour]
There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look, but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone

[Chorus: David Gilmour]
I have become comfortably numb

[Guitar Solo 2]

Tuesday, 9 March 2021

ASPERGER'S

David Byrne. As an older adult, he realised he had Asperger's, stating that music was his way of communicating when he felt he couldn't do it face to face.

His father used his electrical engineering skills to modify a reel to reel so that his son David could make multi track recordings. 

What I know is that everywhere he went he picked up pieces and made things. You couldn't stop his mad creations from fragments of his reality. It is a special skill and an obsessive focus, unconcerned with other people. It's  more a difference than a disease. 
My best friend in Qatar was Asperger's. Very sharp. The sharpest knife in the drawer. But only one knife for one meat. I took him by the shoulder of his suit and directed him across the fast roads. A highly addictive: an alcoholic who didn't drink any more; a smoker who didn't smoke; 20 cups of coffee a day; 20 cans of coke.

WHAT IS ASPERGERS?

It's at the shallow end of autism. So troubles with interacting socially.



https://youtu.be/B0jMPI_pUec
https://youtu.be/O52jAYa4Pm8

JETHRO TULL

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kRzeRTRJOWwDPnF5kMuMBU4dLIUByQs14

https://youtu.be/hAt1b21S97k

And the most famous:

https://youtu.be/B0jMPI_pUec