ASSAD ZAMAN as Sathnam Apple Tree Yard (2017) | 1.04
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ASSAD ZAMAN as Sathnam Apple Tree Yard (2017) | 1.04
Jack Hamilton from Ar Tonelico
"He's a guy! With guns!"
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It's Complicated
It’s literally impossible to imagine the music industry today without the influence of Black artists and Black culture. The history of American popular music and the history of Black American music are essentially inseparable — there isn’t a single genre of contemporary popular music that isn’t fundamentally rooted in Black musical traditions.
Jack Hamilton
Questlove’s directorial debut is a work of art—and time travel.
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The Story: The Unknowable Joni Mitchell
The Writer: Jack Hamilton
Finding the right opener to write about Chuck Berry is a daunting task: After all, among so much else, Berry crafted the greatest “lede” in the history of rock and roll. The furious flurry of twanging, snapping eighth notes that opens Berry’s 1956 hit “Roll Over Beethoven”—and which reappears even more iconically atop 1958’s “Johnny B. Goode”—is to early rock and roll what Louis Armstrong’s trumpet introduction on 1928’s “West End Blues” is to early jazz, a scorched-earth manifesto of craft and virtuosity, laying out the stakes of an audacious new art form. Any consideration of Chuck Berry starts there, with that burst of notes—I count 35 of them, whizzing by in a cool 6 seconds, although I’m on deadline and may have missed a few. Listen closely enough and you’ll hear an entire generation of young people, in the U.S., England, and elsewhere, informing their piano teachers that they’ve decided to switch to electric guitar.
“Who invented rock and roll?” is a truly unanswerable question, but Chuck Berry’s claim is as solid as any. Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” the 1951 song most frequently cited as the music’s Big Bang, predates Berry’s emergence by four years, and Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, and even Elvis Presley had all made records before Berry broke through with “Maybellene” in 1955, at the shockingly advanced age of 28. But Berry was the first to harness the new and unruly sounds into a sort of mission statement for a generation, and many generations after. Years before Berry Gordy Jr. festooned his fledgling Motown Records with the slogan “the Sound of Young America,” Chuck Berry had worked to make each word of that perfect phrase intelligible. Berry was rock and roll’s first great auteur, blessed with an effortless ability to render the specific into the universal, and vice versa. He wrote songs infused with play, humor, ennui, pain, rage, swagger, and sex. They spoke to a generation who assumed they were about them, which was always only partially true.
Berry possessed many geniuses as a songwriter, but the most consequential was his ability to write songs about being black in America that could double as allegories for being a teenager in America, an audacious bit of rhetorical alchemy that altered popular culture and reverberates to this day. Berry brought the blues into America’s high schools, and somehow did so without sacrificing any of the form’s lyricism, wit, and pathos, even while sometimes sacrificing specificity. According to Berry, the “country boy” of “Johnny B. Goode” was originally written as “colored boy”—Berry changed it to ensure the song got radio play. “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” written after Berry watched a Latino man in California being harassed by the cops as female companions pleaded his innocence, was originally “Brown Skinned Handsome Man.” And yet there was power in the ambiguity, with Berry’s talent and charisma filling in the blanks. Anyone who’s ever listened to “Johnny B. Goode” and assumed the protagonist is white has issues that are well outside Berry’s purview. [Read More]
Well what do you know, it looks like once upon a time Mom and Dad were cool. Does anyone know when this was taken?