Friday Miscellanea

Fraser Nelson at the Spectator explains why Joe Cocker was the only singer to ever improve a Beatles' song. He also has a list of singers who did a pretty good job with Beatles' songs--and ones who didn't.

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There is a new kind of censorship of the arts on the rise that this writer calls "cultural colonialism":

The logic of arts funding applications seems to have permeated cultural life. Art is no longer judged on its own terms. Instead it is an artist’s social responsibility, the pertinence of their work to the political and cultural concerns of the day, that matters. It’s what the novelist Howard Jacobson warned of in 2005, when, in the wake of 9/11, he was perturbed by the shallow art that was celebrated for, in some way, ‘dealing with’ the ‘war on terror’. ‘We are in a new dark age of the imagination’, he wrote. ‘Either we refuse the idea of art altogether… or we confer integrity on it from outside, allowing it to be art only by virtue of the pre-determined importance of the subject matter, or the acceptability of its attitudes. This is a species of censorship to which we have all acceded.’

In 2014, the philistinism Jacobson warned of has gone a step further. Not only is socially irresponsible work ‘bad’ - apparently it’s dangerous. Fuelled by a growing contempt for the audience – a refusal to believe in their ability to grapple with nuanced, subversive or even exploitative subject matter – these cultural colonialists have decided to weaponise culture. If all people are blank slates, if we are so easily programmed by the ‘messages’ we receive, then someone should at least make sure we are getting the right kind of messages, or so the logic goes.

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I've talked about autotune and lip syncing before on a couple of occasions, but this is a fairly thorough report on the practice:

Well, sure. I mean you can't expect people wearing those constricting costumes and leaping about all the time to be able to sing properly, can you?

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Bono had a really bad bike accident in Central Park in November. He is still recovering and wondering if he will ever play guitar again. Julian Bream had a very bad car accident once where he ran into a bridge embankment and broke his right arm. But he did recover fully and went back on tour none the worst for it. So don't give up hope! But this is why, when I was a professional guitarist, I avoided sports like skiing and cycling and car-racing and ping pong and arm wrestling and competitive soufflé baking.

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Tom Service over at the Guardian is still looking for his next project, but in the meantime he is putting up various kinds of clickbait in the form of the ever-popular list. This week's is "10 of the best: long works." Good idea, but I think he focused more on the "long" part than the "best" part. But go and judge for yourself. There are a couple of really good pieces there, a couple of really bad pieces and several your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine pieces. The ironic thing is that most of them are presented in brief excerpts so you will have to do a lot of digging if you do actually, you know, want to hear the whole piece. One thing is for sure, few of these really long pieces actually have the substance or material to justify their length. Instead, they are mostly perceptual tricks where merely holding a chord for a long time or making minute changes in timbre or rhythm causes your mind to imagine that profound things are happening. You get much the same kind of result with psychotropic drugs. Groovy, man!

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And lastly, our pseudoscientific study of the week finds that studying the violin can "ease mental illness in children." On the other hand, studying the accordion increases your chances of mental illness by 43.74%, so watch out for that!

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I am back from my vacation so regular blogging will resume tomorrow when I have recovered from my long journey back. In the meantime enjoy this singer, who does NOT use autotune. Jonas Kaufmann singing "Celeste Aida" from Verdi's eponymous opera: