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The CHIRP Blog
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesFriday MP3 Shuffle: Happy Birthday Laurie Anderson Edition
Avant Garde extraordinaire Laurie Anderson’s career is Exhibit ‘A’ in the argument against artistic specialization. First coming to prominence in the ‘70s New York Experimental art and music scene, where she shared a physical and artistic community with folks such as frank Zappa, Alan Ginsburg, John Cage, and Andy Kauffman, Anderson’s work encompasses music, visual art, performance art, writing, film, and television. Along the way she’s even invented her own musical instruments, such as the Talking Stick and Tape Bow Violin.
Anderson's life is an inspiration to anyone who values creativity, and today’s her birthday! Wish her a happy one by pressing the “shuffle” button on your MP3 player and sharing the first 10 songs you hear:
Greg Kantowicz writesTop Five Hand-Clappy Songs
Songs with hand-claps are undeniably a guilty pleasure. When an artist sits down to craft a song, and looks at the vast options available to express himself, the hand-clap tempts as one of the most alluring low hanging fruit. By the age of six, most of us have already experienced its power, singing "If You're Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands" countless times.
With this forceful shared memory in the back pocket, many artists have chosen the path of least resistance and thrown the hand-clap into their song. Some have even harnessed its appeal in their band name. Shout out to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, coming to Lincoln Hall in July...
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesThe Week That Was and Will Be: What’s Happening at CHIRP Radio (6/1/15)
NEW MEDIA:
- Amanda Roscoe Mayo interviews Vetiver
- Person of Interest: Marc Hausser
- Top Five Musical Cameos From ‘The Adventures of Pete & Pete’
- Friday MP3 Shuffle: Happy, Brithday, Joy Division!
TOP OF THE CHIRP CHARTS:
1. Crocodiles - Boys (Zoo Music)
2. Hot Chip - Why Make Sense? (Domino)
3. Blur - The Magic Whip (Warner Bros)
Click here to see the full CHIRP list!
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesFriday MP3 Shuffle: The Birth of Joy Division
For today’s Friday MP3 Shuffle, instead of celebrating a person’s birth, we celebrate the birth of a band and one of the pivotal events in modern music history. On May 29, 1977, in support of The Buzzcocks, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Ian Curtis and Tony Tabac stepped on stage at the Electric Circus in Manchester under the name Warsaw. The band’s one performance got enough attention from the local press to set magical things in motion; The band would soon replace Tabac with Stephen Morris on drums, change their name to Joy Division, and go on to make music that continues to influence genres from Industrial to Dance to Shoegaze. It’s not often that a band gets to be at the forefront of a new music movement, tragically lose a member, then go on to be at the forefront of another music movement, but that’s exactly what Joy Division/New Order did when they helped put Post-Punk and Alternative Pop on the map. In this writer’s opinion, this day should be a world holiday, one celebrated by 24 hours of dancing with romantic-tragic vigor while drinking red wine and looking at modern video art.
Let us mark the occasion by taking your MP3 Player, pressing the “shuffle” button, and sharing the first 10 songs your hear:
Bobby Evers writesTop Five Musical Cameos From ‘The Adventures of Pete & Pete’
OK, so, this might not land as well with readers who were already adults in the mid- 1990s, or for anyone that was 14 or under during 9/11. But let me just fill you in:
The Adventures of Pete and Pete was a quirky, cool, live-action series on Nickelodeon that ran from 1993 to 1996. It was about two brothers, both named Pete, and their meditative observations about childhood in a small Midwestern postmodern America. While it had incredibly nuanced writing and bright, beautiful colors, most of what we talk about when we talk about Pete and Pete, is the music (compositions by Polaris and Stephin Merritt) and the obscure celebrity cameos, which rivaled Portlandia's use of them today.
This week's Top Five merges both of those. While its non-musical cameos could be a whole other list unto itself (Steve Buscemi?? Patti Hearst???), today we bring you: The Top Five Musical Cameos From The Adventures of Pete and Pete:
5. LL Cool J (from "Sick Day," season 2, ep. 10)
"In Spain it's called Dia infermo, in Hungary beteg nap. Around here... It's just known as... 'the sick day.'" Wherein little Pete plays hookie from school and learns a few memorable lessons about the world, his community, and himself as well. Like Bart Simpson before him, Little Pete is a bit of a hellion. As his principal, it is LL Cool J's job to announce, in a secret coded language to the other teachers that Pete is out, and they all rejoice.