A few links have stacked up, and I have a few posts lined up for the coming week, so might as well share them on a Sunday. Most of these are music-related, which seems ideal for a weekend.
Tennessee’s win over Alabama was spectacular.[1] The images of the orange-clad Volunteer fans taking over the field after the winning field goal sailed through the uprights will be one of the lasting images of this college football season. Alex Kirshner on why games like this are so great.
Validation in college football doesn’t reallycome from winning national titles. It can’t, or fans of 115 or so teams would have nothing to care about year after year. Instead, it comes from two things: beating the team you hate the most, and having the time of your life with your friends.
Tennessee Over Alabama Is Why God Invented College Football
A good piece about the anniversary of Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book album.
MACY GRAY (musician, released her own remake of “Talking Book” in 2012): The album is like “Goodfellas.” Every time you watch it, you see something different, you know? There’s all these little details, and you’ll hear it once and you listen to it again, or you’ll hear it in different speakers and something will pop out that you didn’t hear in your car.
Stevie Wonder’s ‘Talking Book’ at 50
Holy shit! The Verge’s Nilay Patel sets Elon Musk straight following his purchase of Twitter.
What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.
Revolver has been my favorite Beatles album since I really started listening to their music with fresh ears about 20 years ago. A new box set features remastered tracks along with demos, outtakes, and other audio mementos from the album’s recording. Here is the LA Times’ look at the updated release.
“…Bowie famously would change genres for each album. The Beatles seemed to do it within an album.”
The Beatles at their ‘peak’: A new box set sheds light on the making of ‘Revolver’
And this piece gets a little more into the technology behind the remixes, and some of the questions that arise because of it.
How Peter Jackson Broke Up the Beatles And used AI to make Revolver better than ever.
I’ve spent bits of this year reading a book that is heavy on music theory. I’m (finally) getting close to finishing it, so I’ll share more about it in an upcoming Reader’s Notebook post.
This article reminded me of that book, although taken to the next level. One commenter nailed how I felt after finished it: “I didn’t understand most of it, but I really liked reading it.”
For all the cultural baggage it carries, “Africa” is a truly innovative, masterfully crafted piece of music (which is saying something given that it’s not even the best song on the album!). Yet we so often see the song reduced to droll memes, or dismissed simply as a superficially dramatic (albeit catchy) pop tune. As famous as the song has become, it seems most people really don’t appreciate the brilliance of its musical architecture. But make no mistake: It is brilliant.
A Composer Breaks Down The Music Theory Behind Toto’s “Africa”
I love that there are still a few mysteries like this, relics from the Cold War era when technology wasn’t as advanced and it was much harder to identify strange signals in the ether.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues .
The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run
- Although some of the big-picture significance – for Tennessee at least – was rendered moot by their loss to Georgia this weekend. ↩