Education

Watch The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys, a Free Film Documenting the Making of the 1980s Super Group

“It really had very little to do with combining a bunch of famous people,” says Tom Petty about the Traveling Wilburys. “It was a bunch of friends that just happened to be really good at making music.” One of the most modest supergroups of the 20th century, one that fate and chance threw together for a very brief period, the Traveling Wilburys made music that sits outside the usual histories of 1980s music, featuring five men in different states of their careers. Tom Petty was about to h...
Tags: Google, Music, London, College, George Harrison, America, Los Angeles, Bob Dylan, Mike Myers, Bob, Roy Orbison, George, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Harrison, Jim Keltner

The 69 Pages of Writing Advice Denis Johnson Collected from Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thompson, Werner Herzog & Many Others

The internet is full of inspirational quotations about writing, many of them from accomplished and respectable writers. But what need could such writers have of inspirational quotations themselves? Surely true literary art flows from its authors without need of encouraging words, demand though it may sustained periods of labor, frustration, and even suffering. These days, more than a few who seek to create such art spend time studying not just its past masterworks but its living masters. “Some ...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Writing, College, Stephen King, Bob Dylan, Jesus, Akira Kurosawa, Johnson, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Seoul, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Thompson

Paul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)

It takes a certain amount of hubris to write a song like “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—to write, that is, a secular hymn, a non-religious gospel hit for burned-out sixties’ folkies. Maybe only a tragic flaw could inspire a composer “coming off the back of four hit albums and two number one singles in four years” to soothe the disaffection of down-and-out Americans who could see the bottom from where they stood in 1969, a year notorious for its cultural disaffection and political gloom. Pa...
Tags: Google, Music, Nbc, College, Paul Simon, America, Bbc, Bob Dylan, Paul Mccartney, New Orleans, Cbs, Upper East Side, Martin Luther King, Dick Cavett, Central Park, Simon

The Magic of the Beach Boys’ Harmonies: Hear Isolated Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Other Pet Sounds Classics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um3MhkU0u7k Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian.                         —Bob Dylan on Brian Wilson The Beach Boys tarnished their reputation when they reformed in later years and tried to “reclaim their wholesomeness,” Dan Caffrey writes at Consequence of Sound, “only to find that it had all but disappeared.” But in the days when they sounded like the most wholesome thing on earth, they also had the distinct advantage of sounding serio...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Bob Dylan, Paul Mccartney, Brian Wilson, Smithsonian, Jesus, Brian, Bahamas, Wilson, The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, Al Jardine, Mike, Facebook Twitter

When Iggy Pop Published an Essay, “Caesar Lives,” in an Academic Journal about His Love for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpkADOTWSNg Purveyors of the shocking, primal idiocy of pure rock and roll can in many cases be some of the most intelligent people in pop. Or at least that’s the case with the king of shocking, primal idiocy, Iggy Pop. He has  ‘s “barbaric yawp” and delivered the John Peel Lecture for BBC Music, becoming “a visiting professor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks,” writes Rolling Stone and bringing an elder statesman’s perspective informed not only by ...
Tags: Google, Music, College, America, Bbc, Pop, Rome, Ireland, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, Hutchinson, Iggy Pop, Facebook Twitter, Roman Empire, Gibbon, Edward Gibbon

A bridge too far for the renaming game? | Brief letters

Teachers and coronavirus | Honours and Spike Milligan | Art quiz | World leaders | Severn BridgeWhat? No teachers interviewed or photographed at the chalkface in praise of their efforts to keep schools running (Heroes of 2020, 22-31 December)? Rising levels of coronavirus among pupils put all teachers at risk. There is limited use of PPE and masks are not used in class. My son is one of those unsung and exposed heroes, with a wife who suffers from asthma.Mary HillLudlow, Shropshire• The body tha...
Tags: Books, Fashion, Music, Politics, England, Education, Wales, Life and style, UK News, Culture, Infectious Diseases, Bob Dylan, Schools, Road transport, Honours system, Thomas Hardy

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover 8 Songs by Famous Jewish Artists for Hanukkah: Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys & More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8AAPoZVpmg Whatever you say to people this holiday season, whether it involves a “happy” or a “merry” or a nothing at all, maybe we can agree: winter holidays can brighten up a dark time of the year, even if they’re also fraught with family tension and other stresses. Maybe not everyone’s great at decorating or singing holiday songs, but we can all appreciate a job well done. Holiday lights shine like beacons on dark, cold winter nights… we swoon to the s...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Bob Dylan, Paul Mccartney, Dave Grohl, Drake, David Byrne, Grohl, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Greg Kurstin, Durham NC Follow, Kurstin, Dave Grohl Greg Kurstin, Bob Dylan Beastie Boys amp

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover 8 Songs by Famous Jewish Artists for Hanukkah: Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys, Velvet Underground & More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8AAPoZVpmg Whatever you say to people this holiday season, whether it involves a “happy” or a “merry” or a nothing at all, maybe we can agree: winter holidays can brighten up a dark time of the year, even if they’re also fraught with family tension and other stresses. Maybe not everyone’s great at decorating or singing holiday songs, but we can all appreciate a job well done. Holiday lights shine like beacons on dark, cold winter nights… we swoon to the s...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Bob Dylan, Paul Mccartney, Dave Grohl, Drake, David Byrne, Grohl, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Greg Kurstin, Durham NC Follow, Kurstin, Dave Grohl Greg Kurstin, Andrew Frisicano

Don’t Think Twice: A Poignant Film Documents How Bob Dylan & The Beatles Bring Joy to a Dementia Patient

It’s often said the sense of smell is most closely connected to long-term memory. The news offers little comfort to us forgetful people with a diminished sense of smell. But increasingly, neuroscientists are discovering how sound can also tap directly into our deepest memories. Patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia seem to come alive, becoming their old selves when they hear music they recognize, especially if they were musicians or dancers in a former life. “Sound is evolutionarily ancien...
Tags: Psychology, Health, Google, Music, College, Washington, Neuroscience, Bob Dylan, Npr, John, Dover, Northwestern University, Ac, Facebook Twitter, Jon, Tchaikovsky

Pop Songs with Narrative: Pretty Much Pop Discusses Tunes Ranging from Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” to “The Pina Colada Song” with Songwriter/Author Rod Picott

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_69_11-7-20.mp3 Plenty of songs purport to tell stories, and the narrative ballad of course has a long enough history that the two forms certainly aren’t alien. But how do our listening practices conditioned by pop music jibe with recognizing and understanding narrative? Singer/songwriter and short story author Rod Picott joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to talk about class...
Tags: Google, Music, Bruce Springsteen, Podcasts, College, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Jack, Leonard Cohen, Taco Bell, Mark, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Facebook Twitter, Johnny Cash, Diane, Tom Dixon

The History of Rock Mapped Out on the Circuit Board of a Guitar Amplifier: 1400 Musicians, Songwriters & Producers

There is no rock and roll without the blues, as we know, but the relationship between the two is not so straightforward as a one-to-one influence. Blues forms, scales, and melodies are interwoven and interlaced throughout rock in a complex way well represented by the complexity of a circuit board, such as one powering an early guitar amplifier that doubled as a blues harp amp. To understand the relationship, we must understand the blues as a multifaceted phenomenon; at various times in rock his...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Chicago, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Dorothy, Memphis, Facebook Twitter, Wolf Alice, Josh Jones, Bessie Smith, Durham NC Follow, Byrds, Circuit Board

William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations

The poet and painter William Blake toiled in obscurity, for the most part, and died in poverty. Twenty some years after his death, his rebellious spirit gained traction with the Pre-Raphaelites. By the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Blake was ripe to be venerated as a counter-cultural hero, for having flown in the face of convention, while championing gender and racial equality, nature, and free love. Reclining half-naked on a “a fabulous couch in Harlem,” poet Allen Ginsburg had a ...
Tags: Google, Art, London, College, Poetry, Bob Dylan, Animation, Museums, William Blake, Doubt, Eden, Harlem, Mary Wollstonecraft, Allen Ginsburg, Blake, Facebook Twitter

Watch Bob Dylan Perform “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” His Damning Song About the Murder of Medgar Evers, at the 1963 March on Washington

Trauma is repetition, and the United States seems to inflict and suffer from the same deep wounds, repeatedly, unable to stop, like one of the ancient Biblical curses of which Bob Dylan was so fond. The Dylan of the early 1960s adopted the voice of a prophet, in various registers, to tell stories of judgment and generational curses, symbolic and historical, that have beset the country from its beginnings. The verses of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, enact ...
Tags: Google, Music, Politics, John Lewis, College, Washington, History, United States, Bob Dylan, Dick Cavett, Sherman, Martin Luther King Jr, Jim Crow, South, Jesus Christ, Midwest

Milton Glaser’s Stylish Album Covers for Bob Dylan, The Band, Nina Simone, John Cage & Many More

Milton Glaser hardly needs an introduction. But if the name somehow doesn’t ring a bell, “Glaser’s many contributions to pop culture,” as Ayun Halliday writes in a previous post, certainly will. These include “the  I ?NY logo, the psychedelic portrait of a rainbow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ classic bullet logo.” All images that “confer undeniable authority.” Many children of the sixties know Glaser well for his album covers, such as the halo photo on the front of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, wi...
Tags: Google, Art, Music, Design, College, Bob Dylan, Hopkins, Ray, Townes Van Zandt, Marx, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Josh Jones, Peter Paul Mary, Glaser, Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser’s Stylish Album Covers for The Band, Nina Simone, John Cage & Many More

Milton Glaser hardly needs an introduction. But if the name somehow doesn’t ring a bell, “Glaser’s many contributions to pop culture,” as Ayun Halliday writes in a previous post, certainly will. These include “the  I ?NY logo, the psychedelic portrait of a rainbow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ classic bullet logo.” All images that “confer undeniable authority.” Many children of the sixties also know Glaser well for his album covers. Glaser designed the album art for The Band’s classic Music fro...
Tags: Google, Art, Music, Design, College, Bob Dylan, Pink, Hopkins, Ray, Townes Van Zandt, Marx, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Peter Paul Mary, Glaser, Milton Glaser

"Hey Siri, play music."

I said into my AirPods. So nonspecific! I was out and about and not in a good position to skip things, but I was also forcing myself to accept whatever it was that I had put into my iPhone music library. I have so many audiobooks, but they're in a different app, so it's only rarely that spoken word comes up when I'm playing the "Music" app randomly. I can tell Siri to skip a track, so it's not as though I'd need to dig the iPhone out of my bag and squint to read it in the sunlight. But I sometim...
Tags: Iphone, Audiobooks, Facebook, Real Estate, Technology, Education, Law, Poetry, Siri, Georgia, Looks, Bob Dylan, Judaism, Broadway, Army, Newark

The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965

The phrase “when Dylan went electric” once carried as much weight in pop culture history as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many a serious Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. The also seemed equally consequential. To understand the culture of the decade, we must understand the import of Dylan’s appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Berlin Wall, John Lennon, Pete Seeger, America, History, Britain, Bob Dylan, Normandy, Richard, Elvis, Ringo, Gould, Facebook Twitter

Milton Glaser (RIP) Explains Why We Must Overcome the Fear of Failure, Take Risks & Discover Our True Potential

Milton Glaser died last week at the age of 91, a long life that included decade upon decade as the best-known name in graphic design. Within the profession he became as well-known as several of his designs did in the wider world: the Bob Dylan poster, logos for companies like DC Comics, the Glaser Stencil font, and above all  I ? NY. Glaser may have become an icon, but he didn't become a brand — "one of my most despised words," he says in the interview clip above. He also acknowledges tha...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Design, College, Life, Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, Seoul, Samuel Beckett, Picasso, Saul Bass, Facebook Twitter, Glaser, Paulo Coelho, Milton Glaser, Colin Marshall

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immaculate Version of Her Song “Coyote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gordon Lightfoot (1975)

Joni Mitchell doesn’t like to do interviews, but once she starts to open up, she really opens up, not only about her own struggles but about her feelings towards her fellow artists. These are often decidedly negative. Maybe she took a cue from her personal hero, Miles Davis (who, it turned out secretly owned all her albums). Mitchell matched his level of caustic commentary in 2010 when she told the L.A. Times that Bob Dylan “is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and vo...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Court, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Bob, Times, Joni Mitchell, Mitchell, Jaco Pastorius, Martin Scorsese, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Shepard, Josh Jones

Remembering American Songwriting Legend John Prine (RIP): “A True Folk Singer in the Best Folk Tradition”

“A friend called our new world ‘a ghost ship,’” wrote Nick Cave in a recent installment of his Red Hand Files blog. “She has recently lost someone dear to her and recognizes acutely the premonitory feeling of a world about to be shattered.” The experience has become distressingly common. We have all begun to lose people dear, if not near, to us—artists taken by the disease before their time like Bill Withers, whose “Lean on Me” is now more poignant than ever. Whatever else we’re faced wi...
Tags: Google, Music, Bruce Springsteen, College, Kentucky, Bonnie Raitt, Chicago, Bob Dylan, Sam Smith, Bill Murray, John, Vietnam, Jfk, Nick Cave, Jesus Christ, Jason Isbell

Bob Dylan Releases a Cryptic 17-Minute Song about the JFK Assassination: Hear a “Murder Most Foul”

Like an Old Testament prophet with smartphone, Bob Dylan has appeared the midst of catastrophe to drop a new previously unreleased track, “Murder Most Foul,” on Twitter. Ostensibly a 17-minute song about JFK’s assassination, it’s “the first evidence of original songwriting that we’ve had in eight years from one of the most original songwriters of our era,” writes Kevin Dettmar, Professor of English at Pomona College, for The New Yorker. The move seems like a weird one—“’weird’ with its f...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Bob Dylan, Dallas, Npr, Jfk, Hamlet, Rolling Stone, Jack, Kennedy, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Lyndon Johnson, Andy Greene, Josh Jones

What’s the Function of Criticism? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #36 with Critic Noah Berlatsky

http://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_036_3-11-20.mp3 Do we need professional critics regulating our entertainment intake?  Noah has written for numerous publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC News, The Guardian, Slate, and Vox, and his work has come up for discussion in multiple past Pretty Much Pop episodes. He was invited to join hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt in spelling out the functions of criticism...
Tags: Google, Music, Film, College, Noah, Criticism, Atlantic, Bob Dylan, Literature, Vox, Mel Brooks, Hemingway, Mark, Facebook Twitter, Weiner, Ken Russell

How Patti Smith “Saved” Rock and Roll: A New Video Makes the Case

Rock and roll has always had its huge stars: from its earliest beginnings as a cultural phenomenon of interracial and sexual anxiety, to its turn as the soundtrack of free love, good drugs, and civil unrest. By the early 70s, however, Polyphonic argues above, the music of rebellion had “lost its way,” become the province of superrich superstars in private jets and French chateaus. As the 60s crashed and burned with the deaths of major figures like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morr...
Tags: Google, Music, New York, College, New York City, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Punk, Patti Smith, Smith, Iggy, Van Morrison, Ramones, Facebook Twitter, Gloria, Jim Morrison

“Mr. Tambourine Man” & Other Bob Dylan Classics, Sung Beautifully by Kids

New Zealander David Antony Clark grew up with the music of Bob Dylan, and, like many his age, felt sad that the youngun’s had no idea who that was. Instead of moaning, he decided to produce Kids Sing Bob Dylan, an 11-track CD of covers sung by the Starbugs, Clark’s children’s group. Before you flinch, check the YouTube clip above. These kids can actually sing, right? The harmonies are there...I mean possibly cleaned up a bit with technology, I can’t say for sure. Here’s “Fore...
Tags: Google, Music, College, China, Bob Dylan, K-12, New Zealand, Melbourne, Facebook Twitter, Puccini, Dylan, Jessie, KCRW, Ben Anderson, Wellington NZ, Ted Mills

Robert Johnson Finally Gets an Obituary in The New York Times 81 Years After His Death

Whether you see it as a good faith effort to correct past mistakes or a bid to distract from more recent fumbles—the New York Times' “Overlooked” obituary series has done its readers a service by recovering the bios of “remarkable people whose deaths… went unreported in The Times.” Most of the profiles are of people who were public figures at the time of their death. Some had achieved international recognition, like Alan Turing, and others were royalty, like Rani, queen of the kingdom of Jhansi...
Tags: Google, Music, Mississippi, College, New York City, Netflix, Bob Dylan, Arkansas, Tennessee, New York Times, Delta, Alan Turing, Johnson, Times, Jhansi, George Washington

Tangled Up in Blue: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” strikes a middle point between his more surreal lyrics of the ‘60s and his more straightforward love songs, and as Polyphonic’s recent video taking a deep dive into this “musical masterpiece” shows, that combination is why so many count it as one of his best songs. It is the opening track of Blood on the Tracks, the 1975 album that critics hailed as a return to form after four middling-at-best albums. (One of them, Self-Portrait, earned Dylan one of critic Gr...
Tags: Google, Music, Minnesota, College, New York City, Bob Dylan, Playboy, Joan Baez, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Greil Marcus, KCRW, Ted Mills, Bob Dylan Masterpiece, Sara Lowndes Dylan, Sara Lowndes

Freddie Mercury Reimagined as Comic Book Heroes

Pop culture thrives on superheroes, both fictional and real. This isn’t unique in human history. Read most any collection of ancient myth and literature and you’ll find the same. The demigods and chieftains beating their chests and talking trash in the Iliad, for example, remind me of macho professional wrestlers or characters in the Marvel and DC universes, cultural artifacts indebted in their various ways to classical legends. One thread runs through all of the epic tales of heroes and heroin...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Darth Vader, Prince, Billy, Bowie, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Durham NC Follow, Todd Alcott, Comics/Cartoons

Nick Cave Creates a List of His Top 10 Love Songs

This wall I built around youIs made out of stone-liesO little girl the truth would beAn axe in thee —Nick Cave, “Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree” Nick Cave has been many things in his long, fascinating career—lewd punk-country crooner for the assaultive Birthday Party, prophetic troubadour and Biblical balladeer, founder of the gritty, sleazy Grinderman, novelist and poet of the darker realms of human experience. He has been many things, but sentimental has rarely been one of the...
Tags: Google, Music, Australia, College, Glen Campbell, Brooklyn, Bob Dylan, Brazil, Elvis Presley, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Facebook Twitter, Dylan, Josh Jones

Natalie Portman Teaches a MasterClass in Acting

This week, MasterClass rolled out its latest course--Natalie Portman teaching a 20-lesson class on acting. The upstart educational venture writes: One of her generation’s most versatile performers, Academy Award-winning actor Natalie Portman has been captivating audiences for decades. Since her on-screen debut at age 12, she’s worked with some of cinema’s most celebrated directors and showcased her skills through unforgettable roles in Black Swan, Jackie, and the Star Wars franchise. Hav...
Tags: Google, Film, College, Robin Williams, Bob Dylan, Online Courses, Jamie Foxx, Natalie Portman, Jackie, Facebook Twitter, Portman, Natalie, Ray Charles Natalie Portman, Jackie Kennedy Cate Blanchett, Jodie Foster Samuel L Jackson

Hear a Six-Hour Mix of Hunter S. Thompson’s Favorite Music & the Songs Name-Checked in His Gonzo Journalism

Of all the musical moments in Hunter S. Thompson's formidable corpus of "gonzo journalism," which one comes most readily to mind? I would elect the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Thompson's alter-ego Raoul Duke finds his attorney "Dr. Gonzo" in the bathtub, "submerged in green water — the oily product of some Japanese bath salts he'd picked up in the hotel gift shop, along with a new AM/FM radio plugged into the electric razor socket. Top volume. Some gibberish by a thing called '...
Tags: Google, Music, London, College, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Carter, Literature, Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam, Haruki Murakami, Seoul, Keith Richards, Duke, Lennon, Thompson, Joy