Median Annual Earnings in the US: Stagnant from 1974

Check out this graph. More here. Key quote: "the real median wage of women rose 36% from 1973 through 2015, while it fell 4% for men."

Sex Pistols swear on Bill Grundy's Thames Television show

The clip, courtesy Thames TV, includes these comments from Thames: "the infamous Sex Pistols interview that appeared on the 'Today' programme -- first transmitted 01/12/1976 -- John Lydon Aka Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones' four letter outbursts made front page headlines and national outrage. These outbursts propelled the band to stardom, making them household names." 

Here is the wikipedia description of the event:

Queen were due to go on the Today show of 1 December 1976 but cancelled their appearance at the last minute. They were replaced by the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, who appeared at short notice, with their entourage in tow. The show was broadcast live and uncensored on weekdays at 18:00, a time when spoken obscenities were forbidden.

The interview began with Grundy introducing the band but he then began to provoke his guests. As he introduced them, he said that "they are as drunk as I am!" Initially, he received mocking but relatively innocuous responses from Glen Matlock. However, Steve Jones, when asked by Grundy what the band had done with the £40,000 given to them by their record company, said: "We fuckin' spent it ain't we?" The obscenity was overlooked by Grundy at the time. Following this, Johnny Rotten, in response to a question about Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms, muttered the word "shit" under his breath. When challenged by Grundy, Lydon said that it was nothing but a "rude word" and asked Grundy to go on with the interview. Grundy insisted that Lydon repeat what he had said. When Lydon did so, Grundy mocked him.

Next, Grundy spoke to Siouxsie Sioux, who appeared as part of the band's entourage. She said, "I really wanted to meet you", to which Grundy responded by saying, "Let's meet after, shall we?" Interpreting this as a sexual comment, Steve Jones responded by calling the interviewer a "dirty sod" and a "dirty old man." Grundy further goaded Jones to "say something outrageous", a challenge that Jones met by calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy(!)" and Jones added "What a fucking rotter!" As the show ended and the credits rolled, Grundy mouthed, "Oh shit" as the band began dancing to the closing theme.

Although Today was only a regional programme for London, it became a national story due to coverage and comment by the tabloid press. As a result, Grundy was suspended for two weeks and Today was cancelled two months later. In a 2008 poll conducted by FremantleMedia, at this point Thames' parent company, the Today show interview was the most requested TV clip ever.

Psychedelic TV ads for...Alpha-Bits

Check out this post from Dangerous Minds on psychedelic TV adverts for Alpha-Bits, marketed to kids. Very trippy, very "educational."

One of the TV spots from 1972 starred The Jackson 5 (Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and yes, even Michael) at the height of their popularity; soaring high in the sky singing their own recorded funky version of the Alpha-Bits jingle. A lucky few collected the limited edition run of the cereal which featured a one-sided, five track flex-disc released in conjunction with Motown Records that had to be cut out from the back of the box. 

Girls in Popular Music

New book from Routledge, sounds terrific: Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity, Edited by Jacqueline Warwick and Allison Adrian

Contents:

Introduction Jacqueline Warwick and Allison Adrian  
Part I. Voice and Activism
1. I’m with the Band: Redefining Young Feminism Lucy O’Brien
2. Girl Activists Talk Beyoncé, Pussy Riot … Lyn Mikel Brown
3. To Them I am Just Some Girl Marion Leonard  
Part II. Voice and Singing
4. Valuing and Vilifying the New Girl Voice Diane Pecknold
5. Girls and Puberty: The Voice, it is a-Changin’ Barbara Caprilli  
Part III. Voice and Audience
6. The Curse of "O Mio Bambino Caro" Dana Gorzelany-Mostak
7. Nowhere to Run: Girl Group Transnationalism Gayle Wald  
Part IV. Voice, Body, Authenticity
8. Performing Pop Girlhood on the Disney Channel Morgan Blue
9. Girls Who Twerk on YouTube Kyra Gaunt
10. When Loud Means Real Sarah Dougher  
Part V. Voice and Narrative
11. Listen to the Mockingjay Robynn Stilwell
12. Struggling to Become Women Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods

And, the description:

This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl’s voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls’ online media culture. While girls’ voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old clichés of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl’s voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl’s voice throughout adolescence; girl’s participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl’s voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women’s and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls’ voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.

Resources: Labadie Collection of Political Posters, University of Michigan

A massive collection, including many anti-war posters, Black Panthers, and so on. You can search for Vietnam War posters by putting 'Vietnam' into the search engine, but this doesn't yield all the relevant results, unfortunately. Perhaps the pacificism category does. I just looked through the entire collection, which takes some time!

Glam tambourine: Brian Eno with Roxy Music, 1972

tweeted by Brian Eno on July 11, 2016

Archive of OZ, the London underground countercultural newspaper

every single issue of the influential psychedelic underground newspaper published in London between 1967 and 1973 after several years of an Australian version. here.

Psychedelic ads from the 60s and 70s: Woolworth's, Wrangler Jeans, Levis, Pontiac, etc.

Even...Campbell Soup. 

Many more examples here.

Reference: Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool.

Vietnam: photos from the "other side"

1973: A Viet Cong guerrilla stands guard in the Mekong Delta. "You could find women like her almost everywhere during the war," said the photographer. "She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who'd made great sacrifices for her country." (Image: Le Minh Truong/ANOTHER VIETNAM/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOKS)

"Many famous images of the war were taken by Western photographers and news agencies, working alongside American or South Vietnamese troops. 

But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong [sic] had hundreds of photographers of their own, who documented every facet of the war under the most dangerous conditions. 

Almost all were self-taught, and worked for the Vietnam News Agency, the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army or various newspapers. Many sent in their film anonymously or under a nom de guerre, viewing themselves as a humble part of a larger struggle...

One hundred eighty of these unseen photos and the stories of the courageous men who made them are collected in the book Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side."

More of these photos here.

Vivienne Westwood drives a tank to PM David Cameron's house to protest fracking

Still punk after all these years...one of the original punk provocateurs, Vivienne Westwood, co-owner of the London boutique Sex together with Malcolm McLaren, where the punk scene incubated...now a world famous designer...

September 9, 2015, the 74-year old, as part of a protest against fracking, drives a tank through David Cameron's constituency in Oxfordshire to his home in Chadlington.

Check out the vid here. More info here.

photo credit: PA

Marijuana, the beats, and Mezz Mezrow

Wonderful article in the LA Review of Books, by Loren Glass (May 7, 2015).

Some key quotes:

The Beats were the first generation of writers for whom cannabis was central, both to the experiences they recounted and to the prose style in which those experiences were rendered (and, insofar as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs frequently wrote while stoned, to their compositional methods as well). Furthermore, cannabis was central to the cross-cultural contacts, not only in Mexico but in the African-American community as well, that informed their countercultural sensibilities...

The central figure for both the culture and the circulation of cannabis in the United States prior to its countercultural apotheosis is the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, born Milton Mesirow in Chicago in 1899, who became the principal supplier of Mexican marijuana to Harlem in the 1930s...

Mezzrow, according to Wolfe [who collaborated with Mezzrow on his autobiography], “came to believe he had actually, physically, turned black,” and is both an underappreciated inaugural example of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” and a crucial antecedent to the Beat fascination with jazz and African-American culture more generally. Really the Blues, which went through numerous printings and was read by all the Beats, reveals how crucial marijuana use was to this well-known cross-cultural and, for the most part, homo-social complex...

Most significantly, though, Really the Blues illustrates a somewhat underappreciated claim in “The White Negro”: there Mailer calls marijuana the “wedding ring” in the interracial marriage whose “child was the language of Hip"...Mezzrow represents jive as emerging due to cannabis, which is why much of its vocabulary refers to the substance that at least partially enabled it.

Marijuana was also crucial to the music...

Marijuana also facilitated cultural exchange...

Mezzrow’s marijuana network was legal until 1937 when, after aggressive lobbying on the part of Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, making cannabis illegal across the United States. Soon after, in 1940, Mezzrow was arrested. In jail, he insisted on being housed with the African-American inmates, with whom he promptly formed an interracial band. Their jamming was enhanced by marijuana smuggled into the jail by Mexican-American WPA workers running a sewer pipe under the building...

...as Really the Blues amply documents, cannabis was crucial in establishing the social networks, cultural contacts, insider vocabularies, aesthetic styles, and compositional techniques that the Beats would introduce by way of the counterculture into the American mainstream. Cannabis was central to, as Mezzrow put it, “a whole new language.”

Riots at Newport Jazz Festival, caused by..."Gidget," "A Summer Place," and "Jazz on a Summer's Day"

These would appear to be the most anodyne of pop culture artifacts, the antithesis of what would cause a riot. I mean, Gidget?

A Summer Place?

Jazz on a Summer's Day? (A documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.)

An article in the Wall Street Journal called "Riot in Newport" (July 1, 2010), explains.

As for Jazz on a Summer's Day: 'Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, "Jazz on a Summer's Day" was released in late March 1960. The color documentary glamorized jazz and its hip audience, inadvertently creating the impression that seating was limitless and free.' It does look terminally cool, especially the footage of Anita O'Day (above). To me, that's the most memorable segment of the film.

As for the other two films: 'Also at movie houses that spring was "A Summer Place," starring Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee as teenage lovers rebelling against hypocritical parents. Percy Faith's yearning instrumental, "Theme From a Summer Place," was No. 1 on Billboard's pop-singles chart for a staggering nine weeks.

And then there was "Gidget." Released a year earlier, the film starred Sandra Dee and was the first in a series of popular teens-know-best beach films. While the Beach Boys' first hit song was still nearly two years off, "Gidget" instantly established the beach as a teenage proving ground.'

Don Letts' Documentary, "Punk Attitude"

According to Dangerous Minds: In this fine documentary directed by Don Letts (who knows a thing or two about punk rock) a bunch of aging punkers talk about the roots of the punk scene and their love of the music they make. There’s not much new here but it’s good to see Steve Jones, Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto, Siouxsie Sioux, Captain Sensible, Mick Jones Jones,David Johansen, Jello Biafra, Wayne Kramer, Thurston Moore, Legs McNeil and Tommy Ramone, among many others, wax poetic about the music explosion that was detonated in the mid-70s. It’s amazing how many survived. And deeply saddening that since this film was made in 2005 we’re down to zero original Ramones. 

“Punk is not mohawks and safety pins. It’s an attitude and a spirit, with a lineage and tradition.” Don Letts.

Brian Williams, Kool Herc, and the origins of hip-hop

FB

>

William S. Burroughs sells Nike Air Max CM, 1994

late 1960s psychedelic Pepsi ad

(see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool)

VW ad: "Mr. Jones and Mr. Krempler"

from Doyle Dane Bernbach

New York City's 1975 Fiscal Crisis: template for neoliberalism, and a precipitant of hip-hop

Initially, the crisis was portrayed as a local story, a reflection of New York and its “mongrel” population, liberal social policies, profligate spending, and powerful unions. But the means of its resolution became a template for the imposition of neoliberal policies around the world. Ruling elites took seriously the call to “think globally, act locally,” making a municipal finance problem into an event of world significance.

Read on, in Jacobin.

Brands and Bands and SXSW

David Carr, "A New Model for Music: Big Bands, Big Brands," on page one of the business page, New York Times, March 17, 2014.

Excerpts:

In Austin last week, the salty, cheesy wonder of Doritos was brought to you by the sweet, uplifting allure of Lady Gaga. Or was it the other way around?...

 
In a streamed world where music itself has very little value, selling out is far from looked down upon, it’s the goal...

The consumer wants all the music that he or she desires — on demand, at a cost of zero or close to it — and we now live in that perfect world.

It doesn’t feel perfect, though. At this year’s festival, historically a place of artistic idiosyncrasy, music labels were an afterthought and big brands owned the joint. Venues were decked out with a riot of corporate logos, and the conference’s legacy as a place where baby bands played their little hearts out to be discovered seemed quaint in a week in which Jay Z and Kanye West kicked it for Samsung, Coldplay headlined for Apple’s iTunes and Tyler, the Creator played a showcase for Pandora.

This new order evolved because when music moved into the cloud, not much of the revenue came with it. CD sales are a fraction of what they once were, and the micropayments from streaming services have yet to amount to anything meaningful...

Given that Bob Dylan, of all people, recently made a big-money commercial for Chrysler, none of this is surprising, but it still has implications. No one will miss the stranglehold the large music labels had on the industry, but having shoe and snack food companies decide what is worthy could strangle the new, unruly impulses that allow the music business to prosper...

For South by Southwest, Lady Gaga filmed something of an infomercial for Doritos, urging people to use the hashtag #boldstage and submit a video of themselves doing something “bold” to compete for access to her performance...

(You could say it was a new low, but last year, I saw Public Enemy, musical heroes of my youth, perform “Fight the Power” inside a mock Doritos vending machine.)

At her keynote address on Friday, Lady Gaga thanked Doritos and said plainly, “Without sponsorships, without all these people supporting us, we won’t have any more festivals because record labels don’t have any” money.

Carrie Brownstein, the star of “Portlandia” who played in the rock band Sleater-Kinney for years, was in town with her co-star Fred Armisen to speak on a panel. Like many, she marveled at the number of brands that wallpapered the festival.

“I almost felt like I was in festival-land and the bands were there as part of the theme park,” she said. “Still, it’s good there is a physical place where people gather to watch music because so much of it seems to come from nowhere at a cost of nothing”...

“The willingness of artists to partner with brands happened because revenues dried up from physical discs,” [Peter Gannon] said. “The labels are not going to get a lot of sympathy because they were not very good to artists. At least when a brand is involved, there is an understanding that we are borrowing the cachet that the artist has built and we try to make high-quality projects that give value to both the client and the artist. ”

Documentary: British Asian Sound Systems

Call it Bhangra managements: in a period stretching from the 90s to the early 00s, a musical and social phenomenon took place within the UK’s Asian community. A sound was developed that incorporated the pleasures, pains and politics of second and third generation Asian Brits. From the remixes of classic Bhangra tracks to the creation of drum & bass this period of time encapsulated a movement where cultural identities where announced all through the audible soundscapes of incredible music and the vital heart of youth nightlife. 

From Dazed magazine, via Shocklee Entertainment Universe. Here.