Music | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Essential Albums of the 1980s

by Will

Noted Creed apologist Joe Carter has assembled a list of the 80s’ essential but-not-too-obvious albums. I missed out on the decade, but I’ll go ahead and nominate The Replacements’ back catalog, The Cure’s “Disintegration,” The Pogues’ “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash,” and maybe a Tom Waits album or two.

February 26, 2010 48 Comments

All the good band names are taken

by Will

Which probably explains why the new ones keep getting longer and longer. As far as ridiculously long musical monikers go, my favorites are “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” and the delightfully gothic-sounding “And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.”

February 17, 2010 11 Comments

Friday Night Jukebox

by Will

I’m a sucker for rhythmic minimalism:

New York Is Killing Me – Gil S…

February 12, 2010 1 Comment

Friday Night Jukebox

by Will

In a just world, this would have been a smash hit:

January 29, 2010 7 Comments

The Wu Tang/Beatles Mash-Up You’ve Been Waiting For

by Will

To quote Raekwon’s twitter feed, it’s “a ill mxtpe.”

January 27, 2010 Comments Off

The Top Ten Covers of All Time

by Will

A blizzard-induced Internet outage and various snow-related activities forced the cover selection committee (read: me) to delay its final decision over the weekend. Now, however, we’re back on track. Thanks to everyone for their excellent submissions – I ended up wading through nearly 100 songs to come up with the finalists (the master list is here).

Any list is bound to be pretty subjective, but I tried to reward innovative reinterpretations and fidelity to the intent (if not the form) of the original artist. I also steered clear of a few obvious choices, which is why Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” or Cash’s “Hurt” didn’t make the cut.

Full list after the jump:

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December 20, 2009 3 Comments

The Best Cover of All Time – The Stragglers

by Will

Due to an influx of late nominations and a prior social engagement, I’m going to hold off posting my top 20 covers until tomorrow afternoon. [Read more →]

December 18, 2009 1 Comment

The Best Cover of All Time – The Final Countdown

by Will

Well folks, it’s been a long and arduous journey, but I think we’ve done a half-decent job of rounding up some pretty good covers. The final list (complete with my top 10) will go up sometime Friday evening (Saturday afternoon?) – you have until then to submit your nominations. As always, sound off in comments or shoot me an email with any last-minute entries. A complete list of all previous submissions can be found here.

Scott, who kicked this thing off way back last week, submits three versions of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You In The End” from Wilco, Beck, and Matthew Good.

Trizzlor nominates Man Man’s excellent cover of Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

Pat nominates Youngblood Brass Band’s cover of “Human Nature” and The Red Hot Chili Peppers playing “Love Rollercoaster.”

Nick emails with The Byrds’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dinosaur Jr. playing The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and The Talking Heads’ version of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River.”

Alex votes for Cat Power’s “Sea of Love.”

Last but not least, I’m submitting Elliot Smith covering Big Star’s “Thirteen,” The Pogues’ singing “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” (with a tip of the hat to our comrades on the Front Porch) Jukebox the Ghost’s version of New Order’s “Temptation,” The English Beat covering “Tears of a Clown,” and my main man Otis Redding absolutely killing “Satisfaction” and “My Girl.”

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December 17, 2009 19 Comments

While you guys were talking about a certain politician…

by William Brafford

…I was messing around with the “in b flat” project. It’s sort of like playing with sound loops, except other people made them and put them on YouTube. Enjoy your ten-minute collaborative tune! [via my friend Tim]

November 18, 2009 Comments Off

How robots replaced amateur artists.

by William Brafford

James Matthew Wilson, an editor at Front Porch Republic, has posted the first four sections of an essay called “Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic,” and the fifth and final section is on its way. Though he’s posted excerpts for discussion at FPR, the full text is at First Principles (parts one, two, three, and four). If you’re interested in the fine arts and even a bit favorably disposed to the kind of conservatism that advocates “local and limited government founded on enduring cultural traditions, stable and self-sustaining communities, and, above all, the Christian intellectual legacy which informs all things by means of faith and reason,” it’s worth printing it all out and finding a quiet place to spend some time with the essay. By way of contrast, if you find that kind of conservatism to be a cover for all manner of nefarious schemes, you might want to do something else with your time. I suppose it’s enough to say that Wilson calls for conservatives to attend to the fine arts and also argues against theories of art that conceive of aestheticism without beauty. For the latter purpose, he draws on Jacques Maritain and, perhaps more surprisingly, Theodor Adorno. (The section on Maritain will be the final one, it will be published sometime in the next month.)

Though I’m very much an amateur when it comes to appreciation of any of the fine arts, I’ve spent some time dabbling in theological aesthetics and my Platonist side loves any project that aims for the unity of the transcendentals. I imagine a healthy artistic culture as one where the popular arts draw one’s gaze upwards, so to speak. Or, from the other direction, a healthy culture would have paths by which amateurs could approach high art: sort of an idealized version of Christendom. Our culture, I’m pretty sure, is not such a culture. Sometimes when I’m in a reflective mood I get rather stunned by the amount of repetition I’m willing to stomach in pop music: the same chord progressions, the same rhythms, the same song structures repeated again and again and again. And the same goes for the, well, artlessness of the motion pictures and television programs I so often watch. I don’t say it’s a bad thing that entertainment exists which is easy to absorb passively. What I lament is that the kinds of passive entertainments to which we expose ourselves so rarely even gesture at what is more sophisticated. Immersion in our culture’s popular entertainment rarely provides tools for understanding or approaching high art.

I want to say it doesn’t have to be this way, but I sometimes fear we’ve passed over a threshold, and the technology we structure our lives around has destroyed the conditions under which fine art and popular entertainment can be bonded together. Even as technology has empowered the amateur artist, it’s also done a great deal to render her irrelevant. For example, before the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s, if you wanted to hear music, you had to either get someone to perform it for you or learn to play it yourself. To put it simply, people must have needed more musicians, both amateur and professional, but cheap dissemination of recordings reduced this need, and thereby took away an incentive for becoming musically literate. These days, you can be a devoted music fan and still know nothing at all about how music works.

So I suppose what I’m getting at is that I’m all for a regenerated appreciation of the high arts, but it seems pretty clear to me that there’s no simple return to music or poetry or painting as it was in the past, since the forms that used to be popular arose from conditions which no longer exist.

This is something I’d like to explore in more detail, but I’m not exactly sure where to start. Further, I have no doubt that there are multiple texts I should read before opining any further, including some of what Wilson talks about in his essays. Any suggestions from the readers for books or articles on technology and the decline of art music?

(Apologies for the title. The best bloggers think of snappy quips, puns, or quotations for their post titles, but I couldn’t come up with anything like that. The choice was between weird and boring, so I chose weird. Feel free to suggest alternate titles in the comments.)

November 12, 2009 8 Comments