Brad DeLong

"Jilted"

Mahna Mahna: Friday Music

Mahna Mahna

Friday Night Music: Tom Waits: "Hold On"

Friday Night Music: The Glorious Ninth

Black Friday Music

Bonnie Raitt: Since I Fell for You: Friday Night Music

Kashmir: Friday Night Music

Friday Music: Condemned as Degenerate by *Both* Theodore Adorno and Adolf Hitler!

You know who else besides Theodore Adorno thought that German jazz was a degenerate art form?

Friday Music: Beyonce: If I Were a Boy

Friday Music: Rilo Kiley: Silver Lining

Musica Sacra: February 16, 2013

Musica Sacra:

Musica Sacra reprises Giovanni Rovetta’s Messa à 4 voci, a work it first performed in a modern premiere in 2005. Rovetta was a leading composer in Venice in the mid-17th century, serving in the ducal chapel of St. Mark’s in Venice. The ensemble also will perform the Missa Dolorosa of Antonio Caldar

Friday Music: Fool in the Rain

Mardi Gras...

Friday Night Music: "That a Ghost Should Be So Practical..."

"Only If for a Night"

Friday Night Music: In Honor of Jeet "There's always a tension in pop music between serving the music & serving the Man" Heer

Sophie B. Hawkins: Damn! I Wish I Was Your Lover: Music to Deal with the Cold Outside Weblogging

Must-Read Weblog of the Month: Lawyers, Guns & Money

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

Friday Music: Bossa Nova Terror in the Desert "Iron Dome" Edition

Time for Some Art Completely Unrelated to the Current News Cycle...

Stockyard Oatmeal Stout by JosephBrau Brewing Is Not What I Thought!

1. It does not come from St. Joseph, Missouri.

2. It is not made in a brewery located where there used to be a stockyard.

3. It is not drunk by workers at a stockyard.

Instead, it is from San Jose, California.

Well, "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" were all written on the beach in Malibu. And both "Dixie" and "Swanee River" were written in Philadelphia…

Where did Walter Scott write, anyway?

Code Monkey

For the Weekend

For the Weekend: A Place Where It Is Relatively Cool in the Summer...

For the Weekend: Is It True That "Wichita Lineman" Was composed On The Beach At Malibu?

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

For the Weekend: July 27, 2012: Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, Free as in Ours Department

Brazil Conference Blogging

For the Weekend: July 20, 2012: Social Differentiation Department

For the Weekend: July 13, 2012: Just a Kiss Away Edition

For the Weekend: July 6, 2012: Much More Than They Can See Edition

For the Weekend: Misfunctioning GPS Edition

For the Weekend: "The Past Was Close Behind…"

For the Weekend: Kick-A** Michael Jackson Impersonators...

And Paul Krugman sends:

Gene Callahan Swings by My Website, and Says That Those Who Condemn Slavery Today Are the Real Moral Criminals

Remarkable:

Gene Callahan: La Bocca della Verità: The Slavers: When Brad DeLong posted a video of The Band playing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" on his blog, one commentator wrote that he hated seeing rockers defend "the slavers."

It was a stupid remark in that the song is about loss, not slavery, but it also struck me how trite his opinion was. Wow, you're against slavery, are you? That's a courageous moral stance you've adopted there!

But what would his stance have been had he been an upper-class white man in the American South in 1850? Given that you can read off every opinion this guy has from that one comment -- Abortion? A woman's right to choose! Someone is opposed to same-sex marriage? Homophobic! And so on. -- you can bet his views would have been absolutely conventional for the time, i.e., he would have been firmly for it.

My comment:

I would use the "strike" tag on your entire post if I were you.

Whenever you find yourself getting angry at people for opinions they do not hold and deeds they did not do--well, then there is something badly wrong, isn't there?

The crux of the Confederate experience is, as Ulysses S. Grant wrote, that they "fought so long and valiantly... suffered so much for a cause... [that was] one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse..." Any description of the Confederate experience that does not cover all five of those pieces is, I think, a lie...

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda...

Susie Madrak sends us to:

"I Don't Think We Should Blame All Our Problems on Tony...'

Great Song. Lousy Cause

The Band Plus the Staples Singers

In a Gadda Da Vida

Fool in the Rain

Sara Bareilles: "Many the Miles"

Sara Bareilles: "Many the Miles"

Now and Then We Like to Play One Guitar Together/And That's Convenient Because We Only Have the One/Tony Sold Our Other Instruments...

70 Years of Technological Progress in Making Fun of Dictatorial Regimes

Insane Serial Killers with Benefits?

That is not an appropriate closing credits song, guys…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTZ7iX4vTQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJS-wWqVAyk

Tim Harford: The Present of the Music Industry

Tim Harford:

There seems no objective justification for the idea that good music has simply dried up since file-sharing took off. “A digital vampire” – not the title of this season’s bestselling young adult novel, but an ageing rock star’s description of Apple’s online store, iTunes. In his recent John Peel lecture, the guitarist for The Who, Pete Townshend, railed against “the Aluminums” (Apple, I gather) and suggested changes to their business model that would be more supportive of musicians. He also wondered whether the modern, digitally distributed music industry could support the kind of careful listening and risk taking that the late DJ John Peel exemplified.

A reasonable response to Mr Townshend is that he could have picked more obvious targets – notably file-sharing sites and software, which facilitate outright piracy. (He did offer one sharp observation on the subject: “The word ‘sharing’ surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for?”) It is beyond doubt that the traditional music industry is dying: high street record shops are closing their doors or stocking alternative products, and music sales have fallen by about 40 per cent during the past decade. Digital music sales through retailers such as iTunes are manifestly failing to plug the gap from sales of physical CDs, but that is not the fault of the Aluminums.

Yet a more interesting question is how much this matters. According to Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota, three-quarters of pirated music would never have been purchased anyway. In such cases the consumer gains but the producer does not lose. Alas, for the major record labels – and, perhaps, for the artists too – the one-in-four acts of piracy that do reduce sales seem to be quite enough to corrode the industry’s business model….

Waldfogel manfully attempts to estimate the continued flow of high-quality new music…. Waldfogel… produces some intuitively sensible results: the late 1960s were the pinnacle of the past 50 years, while the 1980s were dark days indeed…. Certainly there seems no objective justification for the idea that good music has simply dried up since file-sharing took off.

Quite why this should be is a puzzle, but Waldfogel suspects it has something to do with the ease with which any band can produce and distribute music – a fact reflected in the growth of independent record labels. The money may be drying up, but the beat goes on.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: "Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus"

Wikipedia:

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus: "Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus" is a work for harp and string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composition is based on the folk tune "Dives and Lazarus", which is known by different titles according to region:

• "The Star of the County Down" (Ireland)
• "Gilderoy" (Scotland)
• "The Thresher"
• "Cold blows the wind"
• "The Murder of Maria Marten" (Norfolk)

Vaughan Williams composed the work on commission from the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. The first performance was at Carnegie Hall in June 1939, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. Boult also directed the first UK performance in November 1939 in Bristol.

The folk tune was also arranged by Vaughan Williams as a hymn tune "Kingsfold," appearing as "O Sing a Song of Bethlehem," in The English Hymnal as "I Heard the Voice of Jesus say," (no. 574 in the original 1906 edition), and as "If You Could Hie to Kolob" (no. 284) in the 1985 Latter-day Saint Hymnal.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Mahna Mahna:

Dusty Springfield: "I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore"

The Star of the County Down

Via Thers of Eschaton:

Sign of incipient senility? Sudden liking/craving for covers of Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" #worried

Prince: If I Was Your Girlfriend

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates: