Category: Music

Categories
Music

Queen’s Opening Acts

Queen, live in 1984

For no reasons other than I love the band and my stumbling across this list, here are the names of the bands who’ve opened for Queen:

  • After The Fire
  • Airrace
  • Al Stewart
  • The Alarm
  • Alvin Lee & Ten Years After
  • Ambach Circus
  • Andy Fairweather-Low
  • Angel Child (Änglabarn)
  • April Wine
  • Argent
  • The B-52s
  • The Bangles
  • Belouis Some
  • Big Country
  • Billy Squier
  • The Blasters
  • Bloodrock
  • Bob Seger & Silver Bullet Band
  • Bow Wow Wow
  • Brownsville Station
  • Bullitt
  • Cate Brothers
  • Cheap Trick
  • Chris Rea
  • Cold Chisel
  • The Commodores
  • Craaft
  • Dakota
  • Eduardo Dusek
  • Erasmo Carlos
  • The Exploited
  • Foghat
  • Fountainhead
  • Frankie Miller’s Full House
  • Fruupp
  • Full Frontal Nudity
  • Gary Moore
  • General Public
  • The Go-Go’s
  • Head East
  • Heart
  • Hustler
  • INXS
  • Iron Maiden
  • Joan Jett And The BlackHearts
  • Kansas
  • Kayak
  • Kid Abelha and Os Aboboras Selvagens
  • Kiki Dee
  • Lancelot
  • Level 42
  • Lucifer
  • Lulu Santos
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd
  • Mahagony Rush
  • Manfred Mann
  • Marillion
  • Molly Hatchet
  • Mr. Big
  • The Narcs
  • Ney Matogrosso
  • Nutz
  • The Outlaws
  • Pepeu Gomes and Baby Consuelo
  • Ray Burton Band
  • Red Baron
  • R.E.O. Speedwagon
  • Rory Gallagher
  • The Royal Dragoon Guards
  • Sea Level
  • Seger
  • Solution
  • Sport of Kings
  • Status Quo
  • Steve Hillage
  • Straight 8
  • Storm
  • Styx
  • Supercharge
  • Taste
  • Teardrop Explodes 
  • Thin Lizzy
  • Tombstone
  • Treat
  • Voyager
  • Whitesnake
  • Yesterday And Today
  • Zas
  • Zeno
  • ZiZi Labor
Categories
Music

The “Heavy Metal Band Names” Chart

If you’re looking for a name for your heavy metal band, you might find the chart below helpful:

Heavy Metal band name chart
Click the chart to see it at full size.
Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.

Categories
Music

“Before the Music Dies”: The Full Documentary

In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:

What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.

That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies,  a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”

A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.

You can also buy the video on DVD for US$14.99 or download it for as little as US$2.99 from the Before the Music Dies site.

Categories
Music

Vatican Forgives Lennon

Home Simpson shows Bart and Lisa the Be Sharps album "Bigger Than Jesus"

I think it’s rather sporting of them:

The Vatican’s newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a "boast" by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said.

The article, marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ The White Album, went on to praise the pop band.

"The fact remains that 38 years after breaking up, the songs of the Lennon-McCartney brand have shown an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time, becoming a source of inspiration for more than one generation of pop musicians," it said.

There’s still no word on whether or not Paul McCartney will be forgiven for a lot of his post-Wings stuff, especially the phoned-in Wonderful Christmastime. Some things are just too big.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Music

Happy 10th Anniversary, “Baby One More Time”!

Before November 3rd passes, I must make it known, that today, November 3rd, 2008, is the tenth anniversary of the release of Britney Spears’ single Baby One More Time. I wonder if Ms. Spears wishes she could take a time machine back to those more innocent days and re-do some of her life choices.

Here’s the video for the original:

Scene from the video for Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time"
Click the picture to see the video.

Here’s the version by Travis:

…and here I am, performing it at Hemingway’s at Jay Schneider’s birthday party:

Categories
Music

“Take on Me”, Literally

I love this: it’s the video for A-ha’s 1985 hit single, Take on Me, but with lyrics that match what happens in the song’s video to high-larious effect.

This isn’t the first time the video’s been parodied — Family Guy took a crack at it (click the picture below to see the animation):

Stills from the 'Take on Me' scene in Family Guy

And for nostalgia’s sake — I was seventeen and selling snow cones on Yonge Street the summer this song was a hit — here’s the original:

Categories
Music

“Musical Key to Unlocking Teenage Wasteland”

Mrs. Lovejoy: \"Won\'t somebody please think of the children?!\"

In Australian newspaper The Age, an article titled Musical Key to Unlocking Teenage Wasteland took the results of a study in the most recent Australasian Psychiatry journal and created a chart which seems designed to make parents paranoid about the music their teenagers listen to. I’ve reproduced the chart below:

Your Sounds: What Studies Say:
Pop Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.
Heavy Metal Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.
Dance Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.
Jazz / Rhythm and blues Introverted misfits, loners.
Rap Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

I must be severely screwed up, as my music collection has healthy doses of all the above!

Buried in the middle of the article is a statement by the author of the published study: “it’s important to point out that music doesn’t cause these behaviours. It’s more a case of teenagers who may have a mental illness or are involved in these antisocial behaviours being drawn to certain types of music.”

The remainder of the article is just the same sort of freak-out fuel for parents that’s been around since the dawn of rock and roll.

Recommended Reading

In this Southern Spotlight article, Professor Kevin Dettmar observes that rock and pop music have historically been attacked during moments of national crisis: “fears of communism and greater teen independence in the 1950s; anti-war movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s; concerns with lyrics and formation of the Parents Music Resource Center in the mid-1980s; or the emergence of rap and hip-hop music today.”

“If you look carefully at those moments, you’ll find that we are not dealing with the real issues,” he said. “We are displacing a lot of nervousness, insecurity or anxiety onto rock ‘n’ roll. It becomes a scapegoat for bigger issues and bigger problems.”