Category: Pop Cult

Manipulating The Medium

Fun with unintended record speeds:

The day I bought Frank Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage Parts 2 & 3” I listened to the first three sides at 45 RPM before I realized I had it on the wrong speed. For forty minutes, I thought Zappa had gone crazy and released an entire two-record set in his patented Munchkin style (it could happen!) The guitar solos were amazing. Since that initial experience, I’ve never liked the album at 33 1/3.

Fruitcake Ahoy

Homosexual rock stars! Groupies! SEX! SATAN! Oh boy:

Rocker Frank Zappa (who discovered the awful truth December 4, 1993 the second he died) proudly boasted: “I’m the devil’s advocate. We have our own worshippers who are called ‘groupies.’ Girls will give their bodies to musicians as you would give a sacrifice to a god.” (Peters Brothers, What About Christian Rock, p. 17)

One Person One SUV

Speak Up has a great post about wartime propaganda posters — both real and parody.

SU war

Much of the conservation messages during the World Wars was brought about by actual need. Those wars devastated trade between western nations, and the need to conserve and to be as self-sufficient as possible was real. Times have changed, and it would take a truly global war to put the pinch on North America’s supply chains in a similar way. However, the parallels with the supply of fuel are obvious, and the lack of a major government-funded conservation movement, curious. Surely it is the most “patriotic” thing to do?

Tiny Music Makers

Music Thing has a great series of posts up on “tiny music makers”, the people responsible for the sound of your Mac/Windows OS starting up, the “Intel Inside” tune, and more.
Brian Eno who composed the Windows 95 tune:

The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’

X-Ray Sound

A different type of bootlegging: in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1950s underground night spots would play music pirated from the west. The only media they had were records etched into discarded X-ray film.

(…) enterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would “press” a record using a very unusual material for the purpose; discarded x-ray plates. This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press (…)

Further reading on underground music in the Soviet era.