Skip to main content

Intimate Live Performances of Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Harvey & More: No Host, No Audience, Just Pure Live Music

It should be clear by now that rock and roll poses no danger to the status quo. Fair enough: It’s going on 70 years since Elvis and Chuck Berry freaked out parents of screaming teens, and 50 years since Iggy and the Stooges ripped up stages in Detroit and the denizens of CBGB made rock subversive again. That’s a long time for an edge to dull, and dull it has. Perhaps nowhere is this more in evidence than rock films like CBGB, which “somehow manages to make punk rock boring,” and Netflix’s The Dirt, a movie about Mötley Crüe that gives us as much insight into the band as a couple spins of “Dr. Feelgood,” argues critic Brian Tallerico.

Yes, we can chalk up bad rock films to lazy filmmaking and studio greed, but there’s also a general sense that the culture now understands rock only as a matter of gestures and anecdotes: the making of the music reduced to stylistic quirks and kitschy artifice.

This is in contrast, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich felt, to earlier media like the live performances on The Old Grey Whistle Test. (It’s certainly in contrast to John Peel’s raw sessions and films like Urgh! A Music War.) In making his From the Basement series, Godrich said, “I’m a sad fan trying to bring the magic back to music TV.”

Just as rock photography was reduced from “total access all the time” to well-kept marketing and PR (or so claimed the late, legendary Baron Wolman), rock performance has become overproduced spectacle in which it can be difficult to tell pre-recorded tracks from real playing. Add to this the loss of intimacy in live venues in the time of COVID, and we get even farther away from the music’s creation. Godrich and producer Dilly Gent conceived of From the Basement years before the pandemic, but it’s almost as if they anticipated a cultural crisis of our moment, the enforced separation from the making of live music.

Like the best Zoom concerts, From the Basement, produced between 2006 and 2009, eschews the trappings of host, audience, and studio lighting for an immediate experience of live creation. It’s a safe, sterile environment — missing are mosh pits, fans swarming the stage, and the sex, drugs, and violence of old. But to pretend that rock is dangerous in the 21st century is nothing more than pretense. There’s no need to turn the music into the edgy spectacle it isn’t anymore (and hasn’t been since “Creep” ruled the radio), Godrich and Gent’s concept suggests. In doing so, we miss what it is now.

Or as Thom Yorke — whose band got first dibs, playing “Videotape” and “Down is the New Up” in the debut episode — remarked, the show “was exciting because it came from the desire to cut out the crap that lies between the music and the viewer. To get plugged straight into the mains. No producer or director egos messing it up.” See From the Basement performances from Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes, and PJ Harvey above and many more archived at the From the Basement YouTube channel here.

Related Content: 

An Archive of 1,000 “Peel Sessions” Available Online: Hear David Bowie, Bob Marley, Elvis Costello & Others Play in the Studio of Legendary BBC DJ John Peel

Radiohead Will Stream Concerts Free Online Until the Pandemic Comes to an End

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Performs Songs from His New Soundtrack for the Horror Film, Suspiria

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Intimate Live Performances of Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Harvey & More: No Host, No Audience, Just Pure Live Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3rD3n1z
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more