#(...I remain not sold on jazz generally)

[gnattyplayssims]

Burnished Generation Gameplay Rules

Generation Challenges

First Decade - World War I

Second Decade - Prohobition

Marriage and Family

Single fathers and those with Mental Handicaps (via traits) are spared from being drafted

If all sons within the family die in the war then the surviving husband of the oldest daughter may inherit

If no eligible males AT ALL then the oldest daughter must remarry and her new husband will inherit

Second Decade - Daughters may inherit the next generation if no male has been found

Babies may now be bottle fed and a wet nurse is no longer necessary if mother dies.

Males can now take care of babies and toddlers in absence of capable female

Second Decade - Daughters are no longer required to start with Creative Trait and allowed to be heirs

Architecture and Design

Dry wall and painted walls are now allowed

Murphy beds, portable generators, soccer and phone use (talking only) are allowed

Jazz and Blues man now be listened to on the radio

Second Decade - Turn all bars, lounges or nightclubs into Restaurants

You may build a theater or a neighborhood pool (women must be fully clothed in shirt and shorts)

Second Decade - The following items are allowed: Talk Radio, Surrealism paintings, wind turbines, upright vacuum cleaners

Second Decade - Speakeasies can be added to restaurants or private lots but all moonshine must remain behind a locked door that can only be accessed by a specific club

Education and Hobbies

Hunting trip to Granite Falls allowed but only for males (Teens and Children must be in Scouting)

All drafted men must enter Military Career

Teens who do not have a C or higher must get sent to reform school (only the basics provided) or move in with grandparents

Women may not have a political career but may participate in activism and protests and vote on NAPS

Second Decade - Climging is allowed

Second Decade - Alcohol is prohibited in all respects. No personal bars, Globe bars, visiting bars, or juice/nectar-making of any kind. All visited lots must be adjusted accordingly

Career and Money-Making

All previous careers allowed

Paintings can now be sold by anyone even if not in Painting career

Fame can now be enabled

Part-Time Work: Men can be Fishermen, Lifeguard, manual Laborer. Women can be Babysitter, Lifeguard, Manuel Laborer. Teens/Elders may not have Part-Time Work

Children and Teens can join Scouting After-School Program

After the war men must be in military career for rest of decade

Widowed or divorced women are allowed to work Culinary(Chef), Entertainment(Musician), Gardening(Both), Painter, Writer (Second Decade - Freelancer(Writer), Criminal(Boss), Interior Decorator)

Men must complete appropriate degrees in order to work in following careers: Doctor, Education(Both), Engineer(Mechanical), Law(Both), Scientist

Second Decade - If in Criminal or Culinary career they may own or work at a speakeasy and brew their own nectar.

If there is a police bust pay $1000. Set fire to bar in multiple areas using cheats and only allow fire department to put it out

If busted 3x must be incarcerated for at least one sim week (approx 3.5 years). If busted 3 more times, must be incarcerated till end of Prohibiition.

Special Rolls

Fire burns through whichever neighborhood would be considered "Downtown" - Roll D6 - 1) Update 1 building, 2) Bulldoze one building, 3) Bulldoze one, update another, 4) Bulldoze two, 5) Bulldoze two, update one, 6) Bulldoze three buildings

Only roll for pregnant adults (not YA) and sick elders

WWI (1917-18) - Roll D6 for all males Teen-Adult: Odds = he falls in war, Evens = survive but must remain away from household for two years. Women can also be drafted (roll 1 on D20) as medics

Males returning from war must take a Trauma Trait - 1) Gloomy, 2) Hot-headed, 3) Clumsy, 4) Erratic, 5) Meloncholic 6) Mean(or Evil), 7) Lazy, 8) Non-Committal, 9) Squeamish, 10) Paranoid, 11) Cold-Blooded, 12) Impassive, 13) Insane, 14) Joyless, 15) Unstable,16) Avoidant, 17) Cruel, 18) Hostile, 19) Obsessive, 20) Repressed

Secret Drinking Club - Meets at least once a week (minimum of 4 times) - D20 - 1) Police bust.

Criminal or Culinary career/work at Speakeasy - D20 - 1 = Police Bust

Everyone who drinks - D20 1) Sim goes blind they are no longer able to work, travel or inherit estate. If they are single they will be unable to marry . If married, spouse may divorce them. 2-3) Sim gets serious alcohol poisoning (see next bullet point) 4-20) Safe from side effects

Alcohol Poisoning - 2D6 - Doubles = Death

[sinceileftyoublog]

The Vampires Interview: A Life Outside the Usual

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Consider Nightjar (Earshift Music) a sharing of the baton. While The Necks remain better than ever, another experimental Australian band has stepped up right beside them, both figuratively and in terms of a series of literal collaborations. The Vampires, who have been playing and releasing music for almost two decades, are an improvisational jazz quartet from Sydney whose songs dabble in reggae and dub rhythms and are generally inspired by music of the African diaspora. Though one wouldn’t mistake a Vampires jam for The Necks’ creeping minimalism, it’s clear listening to them side-by-side that they share the same open-minded creative spirit. From the time saxophonist and composer Jeremy Rose first witnessed The Necks’ marathon live performances, he became enraptured with the band. 

Finally, over the last half decade, the elder statesmen have taken The Vampires under their wing, in a relationship Rose described to me over Zoom a couple months ago as a mentorship. Necks bassist Lloyd Swanton produced The Vampires’ 2017 record The Vampires meet Lionel Loueke. Two years ago, he and Rose released a collaborative album as Vazesh, while Necks drummer Tony Buck contributed to a record by Vampires trumpetist and composer Nick Garbett and multi-instrumentalist Mike Majkowski. Now, with Nightjar, The Vampires’ 7th record, Necks keyboard legend Chris Abrahams has joined Rose, Garbett, bassist Noel Mason, and drummer Alex Masso on the band’s most textured record yet. On the appropriately titled opener “Game Changers”, as if to refer to the epoch-making nature of this fruitful collaboration, Abrahams instantly begins on keys alongside the steady rhythm section, before the two Vampires composers enter on horns; Rose’s main solo and Abrahams’ two-hand, classical style jaunt mesh with the gentleness of the band’s grooves. “Khan Shatyr”’s horn refrain actually quotes The Necks’ “The World at War” from their second album Next. Garbett’s “Ortigara” and its interlude combine the spirit of the two bands, a sort of reggae minimalism, a warped tropicalia with clacking percussion. And “Waves”, “High Plains”, and closer “Sun Gazers” are comparatively muted and mournful, a newfound emotional subtlety I haven’t gleaned from any previous Vampires songs.

Below, read my conversation with Rose, edited for length and clarity, about The Vampires’ process and inspirations, both live and recorded, and their relationship with The Necks.

Since I Left You: Did you grow up listening to The Necks?

Jeremy Rose: I encountered The Necks when I was at music school in my early 20′s. It wasn’t until I got to hear them live that I got to experience what their music was all about. I really believe their music has to be heard live to understand the full impact of what they’re trying to do. [laughs] And to experience the durational quality of their music. I clearly remember coming across one of their live shows. It was sold out. I had to somehow sneak in. I had to sit on the floor. I couldn’t see them--I didn’t have a good visual on them. But it had a profound impact on me. I’ve been following them ever since. Over the last few years, it’s been a great honor to be able to work with Chris. I have a separate project with Lloyd Swanton called Vazesh. It’s really been great. Lloyd Swanton also produced our fifth record, The Vampires meet Lionel Loueke. We’ve had a bit of an ongoing mentorship with the group. Our trumpeter, Nick [Garbett], has worked with [Necks drummer] Tony [Buck] in one of his own projects. They made a record in Berlin not too long ago.

SILY: It seems that The Vampires has continued on the influence of The Necks but also done some things uniquely. A track like “Khan Shatyr” has some reggae in it, like much of the band’s earlier material. How do you go about delving into other genres or styles while still retaining that hypnotic quality of repetition and grooves?

JR: The interesting thing about The Necks is that they’re defined more by their process rather than their stylistic boundaries. In fact, I know they talk about what they do as a kind of game. They try to bring other styles into what The Necks do and see if they can force it, if you will, into their way of playing, which is a slowly evolving improvised minimalism. “Khan Shatyr” opens with a quote from one of their tracks, “The World At War”, off their album Next. The Vampires’ music has drawn inspiration from the grooves of the African diaspora, and we’ve played in various reggae bands over the years, so that has a particular flavor. Though we’re not trying to sound like a reggae band, it has references to that music.

SILY: In your collaboration with Chris, did you find the process at all different depending on whether you or Nick composed the track?

JR: Rather than there being a difference between each of our compositions, I’ve found that our live performances are moving towards an expansive, longer durational style of play. Working with Chris has really led us into musical areas that are often different to what the composer’s original intention was. That’s the magic of improvised music, isn’t it? To discover something that wasn’t originally planned but is often just as interesting if not more so than the original composition.

SILY: Is “Khan Shatyr” named after the building of the same name?

JR: Yeah, it’s named after a Neofuturist tent in [Astana,] the capital of Kazakhstan. It’s designed by the renowned architect Norman Foster, who did “the gherkin” in London. I was really intrigued by the contrast of [the city] and this hypermodern interior complete with a cocktail bar.

SILY: What about the title track made you want to name the album after it?

JR: I don’t know if there was anything particularly deep and meaningful on that. I just kind of like the name “nightjar” and the connotation of a night bird. It’s kind of mysterious and has a life outside the usual day.

SILY: Have you been able to perform these tracks?

JR: We’ve been performing these tracks live with Chris for 2-3 years now. This project, like many others, has experienced a bit of delay in recording due to the pandemic. It was nice to give the project a bit of space and [time for] the ideas to develop and the concept to mature.

SILY: I imagine that they’ll take on new shapes as you play them.

JR: That’s the beauty of this music. The melodies and structures are loosely defined by our compositions, and we try to approach them in a way that they can be really opened up in live performance. Our live versions of these tunes are getting longer and longer. What can happen during that period is really left open to the groupthink on the day.

SILY: Much like The Necks, do The Vampires have a defined process for making music, where you try to apply that process to different styles, or do you let the styles in and see whether they mesh with the process?

JR: It’s not quite possible to be as wide, due to the nature of the music being fully improvised. It gives a set of other open parameters to being able to bring in any style, for that matter. Our music is half on the original composer to shape and define and the rest on the band to expand and workshop on those ideas. We try to be as open as possible during performance, and things can take different directions, particularly in the spaces between pieces, where we might have open sessions for people to take it in those directions.

SILY: Do you have a favorite song on here, or at least a favorite song to perform?

JR: I love playing “Khan Shatyr” because I love the way that track builds in momentum and expands on some of the ideas I’ve been talking about. The use of repetition and groove to create those immersive states that I so enjoy when I listen to The Necks.

SILY: Was there any song on Nightjar particularly challenging to nail down?

JR: No, I think for The Vampires, the main challenge is trying to get the grooves and the music to be settled before we record it. Often, we’ll try to jam, let the rhythm section play for a while, and really settle in to the groove before we hit record. That helps the music to feel more at ease and in the pocket.

SILY: Do you do the same thing when playing live, where the rhythm section starts out first?

JR: It depends what track we’re playing. Some start with the sax and trumpet, which is a feature of the group, too, open sections for the two frontline to explore cadenzas and the use of effects and space. It’s important to have a bit of a rest for the rhythm section every now and then. [laughs]

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art of the record?

JR: That is a painting by an old friend of mine, Mia Taninaka, whose artwork explores various symbiology. I really thought that artwork stood out and was particularly striking, so I thought it was a good match for our music. I think it’s one of her older images now. We were stoked we could use it.

SILY: Do you ever have a visual element to your live sets?

JR: We haven’t worked with A/V or a live artist before, but that’s a really great idea. [laughs] Some of my largest scale projects have worked with video artists in the past. It can be really fun and add another dimension to the music.

There are various issues to consider, [though]. [Are you going] to be inspired as you’re playing, to play off the A/V material, or are you just adding another dimension for the audience to experience the music? It can also be a challenge to navigate the balance between the visuals taking away focus from the music. You don’t want people to be watching a movie with a soundtrack. It needs to be more than that.

SILY: What else is next for The Vampires?

JR: We’re touring Australia later this year. We’ll consider what’s next after that. We never try to push anything with this group. We try to let it come naturally and see where the wind takes us.

SILY: Are you always sitting down and composing, or do you have to devote a set time period to do so?

JR: These days, I’m really busy in my life, so if I have a particular project I’m working on, I’ll make sure to set aside time. I try to allow space for creative play and to really improvise on my instrument, whether that’s the saxophone or piano. I predominantly compose on the piano. I try to allow my space without any predetermined objectives and see where that can take me. Often, that’s where you can come up with some of your most original ideas.

SILY: It seems like a microcosm of a band’s improvisational process.

JR: For sure.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that you’ve enjoyed?

JR: I’m reading Brad Mehldau’s book called [Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part 1 his first book.] It led to some great insight into the formation of his musical conception. It’s been an interesting exploration of him as an artist. Musically, I’m pretty occupied with getting through all my releases from my record label, Earshift Music, and I have a bunch of other projects I’m finishing off mixing and mastering. After getting through all that, sometimes, it’s good to have a bit of downtime. I’ve been loving and returning to shakuhachi music, the music of Riley Lee, who is my shakuhachi teacher. I’ve been intimately studying it for a few years now. It’s great for me to listen to his music; his control of breath and phrasing is quite staggering.

[reasoningdaily]

These 3 Black-Owned Record Labels Changed Music History

Black music is American music. 

We generally understand this fact to be true—after all, Black people are innovators of sound and music—creating genres, like jazz, blues and hip-hop, which have influenced culture in our nation and the world. And while we often celebrate the artistry and ingenuity of Black music (which is absolutely worthy of the praise), much less frequently do we discuss the muscle behind the music. The business of music. 

Historically, record labels have been instrumental in an artists’ success. To be frank, the labels are companies that sell their artists. At one point they were kingmakers. With the right amount of talent, labels could create celebrities overnight. The role of these companies has changed much as streaming is more and more prevalent. But, record labels still provide value to the artist and thus maintain their relevance in the industry. 

During a time when white record labels would sign few, if any, Black artists, Black musical empires (the first emerging in the 1920s) highlighted Black talent—they provided Black artists with a platform. Black record labels bolstered the careers of Black musicians, but there were certainly times when they took advantage of their artists, too. 

It’s Black Music Month, and ESSENCE we’re going to explore a handful of historic Black-owned record labels, the respective moguls behind them and their fate. Afterall, before there was Badboy or Roc-A-Fella Records, there was Swan Records. 

Black Swan Records

With its slogan stating, "The Only Records Using Exclusively Negro Voices and Musicians," Black Swan Records was the first Black-owned record label in the United States. 

Founded in 1921 by Harry H. Pace, a Black entrepreneur, attorney and activist; the founder’s story remains largely unknown. According to NPR, Pace’s mentor was W.E.B. DuBois, and upon graduation from college “Helped form the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and served as its first president.”

Pace and his business partner, W.C. Handy moved to New York City, launching a company that published sheet music by Black artists. It was called Pace & Handy Music Co. Years later Harry Pace would go on to launch Black Swan Records. The label’s first ‘breakout’ record was “Down Home Blues,” by Ethel Waters, released in 1921. Quite notably, Pace also produced the first recording of "Lift Every Voice and Sing,” in 1923. The founder wanted to use his label as an opportunity to defy what the world understood about Black music, recording Broadway tunes and classical composers, as well. 

Black Swan was only in existence for three years, but its story is still fascinating, nonetheless. 

Motown Records

Motown Records is one of the best-known and highly regarded Black record labels in the United States. 

Established by music mogul Berry Gordy in 1959 (Gordy first founded Tamla Records in January 1959, and would add the Motown label to his repertoire later that year), Motown Records is single handedly responsible for defining the sound of an era. If Black artists wanted to make it big during the 1960s and 1970s, then they had to go through Berry Gordy (though there was the rare exception to this rule, including Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone). And Berry put the artists to work– in the studio and on tour. When the artists weren’t recording, they were likely in a finishing school, led by Maxine Powell, owner of the Maxine Powell Finishing and Modeling School. Gordy wanted his artists to have “mass appeal” (read: he wanted them to be more refined) and his tactics worked, as reflected in his record sales.

Motown is the label responsible for iconic Black songs, like “My Girl” by the Temptations, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye and “I Want You Back” by the Jackson Five. Though Gordy sold Motown Records to the Music Corporation of America (MCA) in 1988 for $61 million, the label has forever changed the music industry. 

If you’re not familiar with the term, “Hitsville U.S.A.,” then you don’t truly know Black music. 

Sussex Records

Sussex Records was the brainchild of music executive Clarence Alexander Avant, who got his start in the industry managing artists. Founded in 1969 the record label was home to artists like Bill Withers, who sang the chart-topping hit, “Lean on Me.” Unfortunately, the company folded in 1975. Though Sussex records went under, Avant later launched one of the first Black-owned radio stations in the Los Angeles area (which also went under in the 1970s). The exec also founded Tabu Records in 1975, working with artists such as Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Notably, Avant was also the subject of a 2019 Netflix documentary called “The Black Godfather.”

[casesenergylife]

Johnnie taylor good love download

Taylor also recorded for west coast labels LA Records and Beverly Glen Records before signing with Malaco Records in 1984. Taylor was billed as "The Wailer, Johnnie Taylor". The station's format was mostly R&B and Soul oldies and their on-the-air personalities were often local R&B, Soul, blues, and jazz musicians. In the early 80s Johnnie Taylor was a DJ on KKDA, a radio station in the Dallas area, where he had made his home. At that point, sales generally started slipping away away. Taylor recorded several more successful albums and R&B single hits with Davis on Columbia, before Brad Shapiro took over production duties. "Disco Lady" was the first certified platinum single (two million copies sold) by the RIAA.

It spent four weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and six weeks at the top of the R&B chart.

After Stax folded in 1975, Taylor switched to Columbia Records, where he recorded his biggest success with Don Davis still in charge of production, "Disco Lady", in 1976. He appeared in the documentary film, Wattstax, which was released in 1973. Taylor, along with Isaac Hayes and The Staple Singers, was one of the label's flagship artists, who were credited for keeping the company afloat in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the death of its biggest star, Otis Redding, in an aviation accident. "I Believe in You (You Believe in Me)" also sold in excess of one million copies, and was awarded gold disc status by the R.I.A.A. 23 on the Hot 100 chart, "Cheaper to Keep Her" (Mack Rice) and record producer Don Davis's penned "I Believe in You (You Believe in Me)", which reached No. During his tenure at Stax, he became an R&B star, with over a dozen chart successes, such as "Jody's Got Your Girl and Gone", which reached No. In 1970, Taylor married Gerlean Rocket (and they remained married until his death). "Who's Making Love" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. His hits included "I Had a Dream", "I've Got to Love Somebody's Baby" (both written by the team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter) and most notably "Who's Making Love", which reached No. He recorded with the label's house band, which included Booker T. In 1966, Taylor moved to Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was dubbed "The Philosopher of Soul". Further singles were issued on both the SAR and Derby imprints, however, SAR Records quickly became defunct after Cooke's death late in 1964. A few years later, after Cooke had established his independent SAR Records, Taylor signed on as one of the label's first acts and recorded "Rome Wasn't Built In A Day" in 1962. Taylor then left the QC's in 1957 to replace Sam Cooke as lead vocalist for The Soul Stirrers. He started his career in the mid-50s as a member of gospel group The Highway QC's, as well as a brief stint with rhythm n blues group, The Five Echoes. Johnnie Taylor was born May 5th, 1937 in Crawfordsville, Arkansas and grew up in West Memphis, Arkansas, performing in gospel groups as a youngster.

[elainemorisi]

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[phroyd]

Charlie Watts, whose strong but unflashy drumming powered the Rolling Stones for over 50 years, died on Tuesday in London. He was 80.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by his publicist, Bernard Doherty. No other details were immediately provided.

The Rolling Stones announced earlier this month that Mr. Watts would not be a part of the band’s forthcoming “No Filter” tour of the United States after he had undergone an unspecified emergency medical procedure, which the band’s representatives said had been successful.

Reserved, dignified and dapper, Mr. Watts was never as flamboyant, either onstage or off, as most of his rock-star peers, let alone the Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger; he was content to be one of the finest rock drummers of his generation, playing with a jazz-inflected swing that made the band’s titanic success possible. As the Stones guitarist Keith Richards said in his 2010 autobiography, “Life,” “Charlie Watts has always been the bed that I lie on musically.”

While some rock drummers chased after volume and bombast, Mr. Watts defined his playing with subtlety, swing and a solid groove.“As much as Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’s snare sound is the Rolling Stones,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in an introduction to the 1991 edition of the drummer Max Weinberg’s book “The Big Beat.” “When Mick sings, ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it,’ Charlie’s in back showing you why!”Charles Robert Watts was born in London on June 2, 1941. His mother, the former Lillian Charlotte Eaves, was a homemaker; his father, Charles Richard Watts, was in the Royal Air Force and, after World War II, became a truck driver for British Railways.Charlie’s first instrument was a banjo, but, baffled by the fingerings required to play it, he removed the neck and converted its body into a snare drum. He discovered jazz when he was 12 and soon became a fan of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.By 1960, Mr. Watts had graduated from the Harrow School of Art and found work as a graphic artist for a London advertising agency. He wrote and illustrated “Ode to a Highflying Bird,” a children’s book about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (although it was not published until 1965). In the evenings, he played drums with a variety of groups.

Most of them were jazz combos, but he was also invited to join Alexis Korner’s raucous rhythm-and-blues collective, Blues Incorporated. Mr. Watts declined the invitation because he was leaving England to work as a graphic designer in Scandinavia, but he joined the group when he returned a few months later.

The newly formed Rolling Stones (then called the Rollin’ Stones) knew they needed a good drummer but could not afford Mr. Watts, who was already drawing a regular salary from his various gigs. “We starved ourselves to pay for him!” Mr. Richards wrote. “Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”In early 1963, when they could finally guarantee five pounds a week, Mr. Watts joined the band, completing the canonical lineup of Mr. Richards, Mr. Jagger, the guitarist Brian Jones, the bassist Bill Wyman and the pianist Ian Stewart. He moved in with his bandmates and immersed himself in Chicago blues records.In the wake of the Beatles’ success, the Rolling Stones quickly climbed from being an electric-blues specialty act to one of the biggest bands in the British Invasion of the 1960s. While Mr. Richards’s guitar riff defined the band’s most famous single, the 1965 chart-topper “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Mr. Watts’s drum pattern was just as essential. He was relentless on “Paint It Black” (No. 1 in 1966), supple on “Ruby Tuesday” (No. 1 in 1967) and the master of a funky cowbell groove on “Honky Tonk Women” (No. 1 in 1969).

Mr. Watts was ambivalent about the fame that he achieved as a member of the group that has often been called “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.” As he said in the 2003 book “According to the Rolling Stones”: “I loved playing with Keith and the band — I still do — but I wasn’t interested in being a pop idol sitting there with girls screaming. It’s not the world I come from. It’s not what I wanted to be, and I still think it’s silly.”

As the Stones rolled through the years, Mr. Watts drew on his graphic-arts background to contribute to the design of the band’s stage sets, merchandise and album covers — he even contributed a comic strip to the back cover of their 1967 album “Between the Buttons.” While the Stones cultivated bad-boy images and indulged a collective appetite for debauchery, Mr. Watts mostly eschewed the sex and drugs. He clandestinely married Shirley Anne Shepherd, an art-school student and sculptor, in 1964.

On tour, he would go back to his hotel room alone; every night, he sketched his lodgings. “I’ve drawn every bed I’ve slept in on tour since 1967,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996. “It’s a fantastic nonbook.”Similarly, while other members of the Stones battled for control of the band, Mr. Watts largely stayed out of the internal politics. As he told The Weekend Australian in 2014, “I’m usually mumbling in the background.”Mr. Jones, who considered himself the leader, was fired from the Stones in 1969 (and found dead in his swimming pool soon after). Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards spent decades at loggerheads, sometimes making albums without being in the studio at the same time. Mr. Watts was happy to work with either, or both.

“Never call me your drummer again,” he told Mr. Jagger, before grabbing him by the lapel and delivering a right hook. Mr. Richards said he narrowly saved Mr. Jagger from falling out a window into an Amsterdam canal.“It’s not something I’m proud of doing, and if I hadn’t been drinking I would never have done it,” Mr. Watts said in 2003. “The bottom line is, don’t annoy me.”At the time, Mr. Watts was in the early stages of a midlife crisis that manifested itself as a two-year bender. Just as the other Stones were settling into moderation in their 40s, he got hooked on amphetamines and heroin, nearly destroying his marriage. After passing out in a recording studio and breaking his ankle when he fell down a staircase, he quit, cold turkey.Mr. Watts and his wife had a daughter, Seraphina, in 1968 and, after spending some time in France as tax exiles, relocated to a farm in southwestern England. There they bred prizewinning Arabian horses, gradually expanding their stud farm to over 250 horses on 700 acres of land. Information on his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Doherty, the publicist, said Mr. Watts had “passed away peacefully” in the hospital “surrounded by his family.”

Eventually the Stones settled into a cycle of releasing an album every four years, followed by an extremely lucrative world tour. (They grossed over a half-billion dollars between 2005 and 2007 on their “Bigger Bang” tour.)But Mr. Watts’s true love remained jazz, and he would fill the time between those tours with jazz groups of various sizes — the Charlie Watts Quintet, the Charlie Watts Tentet, the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Soon enough, though, he would be back on the road with the Stones, playing in sold-out arenas and sketching beds in empty hotel rooms.He was not slowed down by old age, or by a bout with throat cancer in 2004. In 2016, the drummer Lars Ulrich of Metallica told Billboard that since he wanted to keep playing into his 70s, he looked to Mr. Watts as his role model. “The only road map is Charlie Watts,” he said.Through it all, Mr. Watts kept on keeping time on a simple four-piece drum kit, anchoring the spectacle of the Rolling Stones.“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996, adding that during arena rock shows, he imagined a more intimate setting. “I’ve always had this illusion of being in the Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me. It didn’t sound like that, but that was the illusion I had.”

Phroyd

[bopinion]

Book of the month / 2021 / 04 April

I love books. Even though I hardly read any. Because my library is more like a collection of tomes, coffee-table books, limited editions... in short: books in which not "only" the content counts, but also the editorial performance, the presentation, the curating of the topic - the book as a total work of art itself.

björk :archives. A retrospective

Klaus Biesenbach

Monograph / 2015 / Schirmer/Mosel Publishing House

Iceland, the land of geysers, the largest volcanic island on the planet. Home of the Icelandic pony with its exclusive gait of the tölt and the most active literary community in the world. Soccer mecca and most sparsely populated country in Europe. Icelandic names - for example the highest mountain Hvannadalshnúkur - are hardly pronounceable, although the alphabet does not even know many common letters such as C, W, Q and Z. There is a separate holiday for seafarers and a division of time into 3-hour periods starting at midnight. 16 German cities each have more inhabitants than all of Iceland, which has therefore its own dating app to prevent relatives who are biologically too close from mating. It's a fascinating country.

Given the size of the country, it's probably no wonder that Iceland's pop cultural influence internationally is rather limited. Despite the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Halldór Laxness, whose work I don't know, and the crime series The Valhalla Murderers, which I know thanks to Netflix. But wait - wasn't there something else? Yes, that's right, Iceland has a globally successful Gesamtkunstwerk named Björk. Her contributions to music, video, film, fashion and art have influenced a generation worldwide.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir, born in Reykjavík in 1965, has made a name for herself as a singer, music producer, composer, songwriter and actress with a broad interest in different types of music, including pop music, electronic music, trip-hop, alternative rock, jazz, folk music and classical music. To date, she has sold over 20 million albums worldwide. Certainly not only because of the seemingly endless variability of her compositions, but also because of her voice, which one can confidently call unmistakable. She causes goose bumps, whether you like her music or not.

Little Björk attended music school at the age of five and was taught singing, piano and flute, among other things, for ten years. One of the teachers sent a recording of her singing the song "I Love To Love" by Tina Charles to a radio station. The broadcast was heard and liked by an employee of the Icelandic record publisher Fálkinn and subsequently offered her a recording contract - when she was eleven years old. With the help of her stepfather, who played guitar, she recorded her first album. It contained various Icelandic children's songs and cover versions of popular titles, such as "Fool on the Hill" by the Beatles. The album became a great national success.

At 14, Björk formed the girl punk group Spit and Snot, the maximum contrast program to the children's songs. This was followed by the fusion jazz group Exodus, later Tappi Tíkarrass and Kukl (Icelandic for witchcraft), with whom she developed her signature vocal style. First foreign tours to England and West Berlin followed. Then in 1986 came the formation of the band Pukl, later renamed The Sugarcubes. The first single brought respectable success in England and USA, The Sugarcubes reached cult status. The first record deal with Elektra Records led to the album "Life's too good" in 1988, making them the first Icelandic band ever to become world famous.

The transformation into a total work of art began in 1992 at the latest with Björk's move to London. The first solo album, appropriately named "Debut," became the album of the year according to New Musical Express. Now even Madonna wanted to have a whole album written by Björk, but it remained with the title track "Bedtime Story", she remained true to herself and her love of experimentation. The New York based news magazine "Time" named her the "high priestess of art" and in 2015 put her on the list of the 100 most influential people on earth. She rounded off her visual extravaganza, that even her wardrobe was prominently featured in the major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag is an art book publisher in Munich founded in 1974 by Lothar Schirmer and the commercial artist Erik Mosel. Schirmer became friends with artists such as Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys at a young age and began collecting their works. By buying and reselling art prints and drawings, he earned the start-up capital for his publishing house. With his publishing debut, he ensured the rediscovery of August Sander, a visual artist of the Weimar Republic. There were various publishing collaborations with the MoMA, and in 2015 there was also the retrospective mentioned above. And of course, in keeping with the protagonist, the publication had to become a work of art itself.

"björk :archives" comes in an elegant slipcase containing six parts: four booklets, a paperback and a folded catalogue raisonné poster with the covers of all Björk albums. A closer look is worthwhile: first there is a thematic introduction by the editor and exhibition curator at the MoMA, Klaus Biesenbach. Then an illustrated essay by Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, which deals with Björk's creative dissolution of musical and aesthetic boundaries. Another by Nicola Dibben, professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield, on Björk's creativity and collaborations. And the collected e-mail correspondence similar to a pen pal relationship between Björk and American publicist, philosopher and literary scholar Timothy Morton.

The book itself, the centerpiece of the edition, is about Björk's seven major albums and the characters she created for them. Poetic texts by Icelandic author Sjón, with whom Björk has long collaborated, are joined by a veritable treasure trove of illustrations: Photos of live performances, stills from the music videos of masters like Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze, Björk in stunning costumes by designers like Hussein Chalayan or Alexander McQueen, and PR shots by star photographers like the duo Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin or provocateur Araki.

The design of the publication quotes music scores and comes from the renowned Parisian design studio M/M. It all adds up to an extraordinary visual masterpiece, a tribute to the magical world of Björk. And that at an hardly believable price of € 19.80. A reviewer on Amazon (no, you shouldn't shop there - support local businesses!) sums it up: "This is a collection of art, stories and references very well organized and assembled with care. The price does absolutely not represent how valuable this product is, I am positively surprised." Positively surprising - that could truly be Björk's mission statement.

Björk's music itself is so rich in pictorial statements that it doesn't really need any exuberantly creative videos to go with it. Therefore, according to Slant Magazine, her best video is her first, relatively simple one: "Big Time sensuality" from her "Debut" album purely shows her joy in music. Here's the link:

https://youtu.be/-wYmq2Vz5yM

[ambresong]

“All I’m asking is for a little respect when I come home “

Hello!

On todays post I'm going talk about “The Queen of the Soul“.

Aretha Franklin is an iconic singer in the Afro-American music community. She has sold over 80 million records and remains the best-selling female artist of all time. She sang gospel, soul-funk, blues and jazz and I decided to talk about her because I thinks is a great exemple of how to integrate Afro-American elements in contemporary music.

Aretha Franklin grew up in Memphis- Tennessee in the South of The United States. Memphis is the town with the most Afro-Americans. Indeed, 63,3 % of the population is Afro-American. Her father was a minister in the local church and she joined the church’s choir with her two sisters. That is how she beg&an to sing and it led to the release of her first album untitled “The Gospel Soul of Aretha Franklin“ at only fourteen years old. But she started to be noticed when she moved to New York City. And it is only in 1980 that Aretha became the first ever woman to join the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She released her first single in 1960 untitled “Today I Sing the Blues“.

“Respect“ is one of the most danceable and famous song she ever performed. It is a song which shows her feminist engagement but she didn’t wrote it. She changed it and turned a macho’s song to a feminist’s song: A true anthem to freedom. However, “Respect“ is not only an ode to femininity and freedom but Aretha Franklin also wanted to send a message to her audience and her people immediately grasped her confidence and the message behind her words. Indeed, in the lyrics she spelled the word respect “ All I’m asking is for a little respect when I come home “. Here she does to only refers to inequalities between men and women but also to segregation. Indeed, she was an activist long before the song. She even went on tour with Martin Luther King. The writer Gerri Hershey wrote in Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music : “In Black neighborhoods and white universities, her hits came like cannonballs, blowing holes in the stylized bouffant and chiffon Motown sound, a strong new voice with a range that hit the heavens and a center of gravity that was very close to Earth.”

“The Queen of the Soul“ shaped generations of music. She changed popular music forever and Jack Hamilton, a pop music critic sais I quote: “There is before Aretha Franklin and after“. She mixed gospel, jazz, blues, R and B and took on what we called Rock and Roll. She had the ability of embody the Afro-American musical traditions and represent them on stage.

Aretha Franklin influenced countless other artists such as Beyoncé and Rihanna by caring her passion and soul and legacy into her music.

[kingstylesdaily]

Why Harry Styles Just Scored His First No. 1 Song

Like any boy band alumnus, he first had to overcome radio’s bias against teen heartthrobs.

Late summer is a great time for sleeper hits: songs that have been hanging around the charts for months and finally hit their stride. Four years ago, in August 2016, Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” reached No. 1 after knocking around the charts since the prior winter, getting its final boost from a Sean Paul remix. In September 2018, Maroon 5’s year-old “Girls Like You” slipped into the top slot after wafting around the Top 10 for more than four months, with a Cardi B verse putting it over the edge. Last year around Labor Day, Lizzo finally topped the Hot 100 with “Truth Hurts,” a song that was two years old and had been rising gradually on the chart since the spring.

This year’s sleeper hit is “Watermelon Sugar,” a wisp of a song by boy bander–turned–self-styled rock star Harry Styles. With a name inspired by Richard Brautigan’s hippie-era, post-apocalyptic novella In Watermelon Sugar, Styles’ lackadaisical tune is not only a sleeper but a grower, the sort of hit that sneaks up on you—I wasn’t sure it even had a fully written chorus the first time I heard it, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Indeed, the whole nation took its time deciding that this quirky ditty would give the starriest, most eccentric member of One Direction his first-ever U.S. chart-topper.

“Watermelon Sugar” is the third single promoted from Styles’ second solo album Fine Line, which was released last December. That alone is remarkable, given the challenge in the digital age of generating chart interest in anything other than an album’s first couple of singles. Generally, in an era when all of an album’s songs are available to be consumed the day the album drops, you need a remix or a special guest of some kind to gin up chart action months after the song first hits streaming. “Sugar” has none of those. To be sure, there was some gimmickry fueling the song’s leap to the top, albeit of an old-fashioned kind: The song had its best week of sales ever thanks to an assortment of limited-edition vinyl and cassette singles that came bundled with a digital download. Those sales got “Sugar” the last mile on the charts, but Columbia Records wouldn’t have put the physical goods on sale if the song wasn’t already a radio smash—“Sugar” currently has the second-biggest U.S. airplay audience—and they knew they had an opening between current hits by Taylor Swift and a pair of lascivious female rappers I’ll almost certainly be writing about in this space next week. So, fair play to Team Harry: They took advantage of an open chart window, a tactic as old as the Hot 100 itself.

As “Sugar” leaps from No. 7 to No. 1 on the Hot 100 this week—essentially switching places with his ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift’s “Cardigan,” which falls to No. 8—Styles scores only the second-ever chart-topper by a member of One Direction. That includes all of the hits by 1D itself. In its five years of recording, from 2011 through 2015, the band never scored a Hot 100 No. 1. This despite topping the Billboard 200 album chart with its first four studio albums, the only group in history to launch a career with that haul. So … what was that other 1D-affiliated Hot 100–topper I mentioned? It was by ex-member Zayn Malik, the only member to break from the crew while it was still active. Zayn’s smoldering, Weeknd-esque boudoir jam “Pillowtalk” debuted at No. 1—and spent a solitary week there—in the winter of 2016, fueled by blockbuster streams and downloads ginned up by 1D superfans still mourning his departure the prior year and the group’s resulting, presumably permanent hiatus.

Explaining how the top-selling boy band of the 2010s could shift so many CDs and downloads but generate only two No. 1 singles means briefly recapping the fraught history of boy bands and the charts. Selling albums has never been hard for pinup pop groups, since the days of Meet the Beatles! and More of the Monkees. And in the ’70s and ’80s, such precision sing-and-dance troupes as the Jackson 5, the Osmonds, and New Edition managed to generate both gold albums and chart-conquering singles. In 1989, New Kids on the Block had the year’s second-biggest album and four of the year’s top singles, including a pair of No. 1s. But starting in the ’90s, as U.S. radio networks consolidated (fueled by the 1996 Telecommunications Act) and programmers more narrowly targeted specific demographics, radio stations shied away from maximalist teen-pop that appealed primarily to under-18 audiences. By the end of that decade, even as boy bands were enjoying a new wave of TRL-fueled popularity, radio became a chart handicap for them. The Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync had the top-selling albums of 1999 and 2000, respectively—the diamond-selling Millennium and No Strings Attached—but only scored a solitary Hot 100 topper between them, ’N Sync’s “It’s Gonna Be Me.” (Backstreet never hit No. 1: The deathless “I Want It That Way” peaked at No. 6.)

This radio bias against boy bands has persisted into the 21st century. And ever since the Hot 100 went digital about a decade and a half ago, teen-pop’s chart placements have been the result of a battle between rabid downloaders and radio gatekeepers—massive digital sales compensating for modest radio play. For example, radio was what kept the Jonas Brothers from scoring any chart-topping hits during their original wave of teen idoldom; their biggest hit of the ’00s, the No. 5 hit “Burnin’ Up,” sold 2 million downloads but only ranked 55th at U.S. radio. By the ’10s, the same fate befell one-man boy band Justin Bieber. In this long-running Slate series, I have chronicled the blow-by-blow between Justin Bieber and radio programmers that swung from Justin as hit-starved teen idol in the early ’10s to dominant young-adult chart-dominator in the late ’10s. In the early ’10s period, Bieber was a YouTube and iTunes demigod with not a single radio smash to his name. He could sell a half-million downloads of “Boyfriend” in a week and still fall short of the No. 1 spot, thanks (no thanks) to radio.

For One Direction, the chart patterns were the same. A Frankenstein’s monster that Simon Cowell famously threw together in 2010 on his televised competition The X Factor from five solo competitors—Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson—1D continually found its singles dragged down on the Hot 100 by radio, even as the band sold truckloads of albums. The pattern was set in fall 2012 when “Live While We’re Young” debuted with a staggering 341,000 downloads but could only get to No. 3 on the Hot 100, thanks to its 50th-ranked radio airplay. In the summer of 2013, the slyly Who-interpolating “Best Song Ever” became 1D’s highest-charting hit ever, debuting at No. 2 with record video views and near-record downloads, but at radio it never got past No. 53. “Story of My Life” (No. 6, 2014), “Drag Me Down” (No. 3, 2015)—no matter how many downloads sold or videos viewed, 1D could never top the Hot 100 so long as its radio spins remained limited.

The reason I’m running down all of this granular chart data is it reveals the hurdles both 1D and its post-breakup soloists had to overcome to top the Hot 100. Like Justin Bieber, they had to become credible radio fodder with adults as well as kids. With his early break from the group, Zayn was the first to pull this off. Though “Pillowtalk” debuted at No. 1 largely due to massive sales and streams, the carnal song did eventually become a No. 4–ranked airplay hit. Cleverly, Zayn had chosen a then-current EDM-inflected R&B mode and dropped his debut while the Weeknd was between albums. Other former 1D-ers have had their share of solid radio hits, including Liam Payne’s hip-hop–inflected “Strip That Down” featuring Quavo of Migos (No. 10 on the Hot 100, No. 4 on Radio Songs) and Niall Horan’s softly bopping pop jam “Slow Hands” (No. 11 Hot 100, No. 2 Radio Songs).

And Harry Styles? He decided to make things harder on himself. His 2017 debut album was chockablock with old-school classic rock. This would be like launching a career in 1964 with big-band jazz. While Styles’ fame ensured a big launch for his Bowie-esque single “Sign of the Times”—it opened, and peaked, at No. 4 on the Hot 100, fueled by strong downloads—radio showed only moderate interest. It eventually reached a modest No. 21 on the airplay chart. Later Harry singles like the twangy “Two Ghosts” and the thrashy “Kiwi” missed the Hot 100 and had little radio profile beyond a handful of pure-pop stations that were loyal to Styles from his 1D days. One admired Harry for following his artistic muse—more Joni Mitchell than Justin Bieber—but as a pop star, he arguably squandered his momentum coming out of One Direction.

What has made Fine Line, Styles’ sophomore album, such a clever left turn is he retained the rock flavor he naturally gravitates toward but converted it into mellow California-style surf-pop, and he let his production team—Tyler Johnson and Thomas “Kid Harpoon” Hull—fashion the songs into percolating radio jams. Each single has opened the door a bit wider: “Lights Up,” a No. 17 last October, is lightly strummed beach music with ethereal backing vocals. And “Adore You,” a No. 6 hit in April (for my money, still Styles’ best single), is thumping electropop. “Adore” in particular served as Styles’ entrée onto radio’s A-list—it reached No. 1 on mainstream Top 40 stations and No. 2 on Radio Songs by early summer.

With this beachhead established, Harry was finally free to let his freak flag fly with “Watermelon Sugar,” which is simultaneously his oddest single and his most infectious. The chorus consists of nothing more than the line “Watermelon sugar high” repeated a half-dozen or more times, with emphasis on the “HIGH.” (TikTok users have keyed into this idiosyncrasy, sharing videos in which the “high” gets its own video edit of the user playacting her best stoner face.) Last November, when Styles did double-duty hosting and singing on Saturday Night Live, “Sugar” was one of the songs he performed, and in that indoor setting, it came off as willfully quirky and seasonally incongruous; the song’s first verse line is “Tastes like strawberries on a summer evenin’.” Now, timed for 2020’s beach season—complete with a video filled with beautiful people on the shore, shot just before the pandemic and, according to a title card, “dedicated to touching”—it’s sitting atop the hit parade.

In short, Harry Styles finally has a profile on the radio and on the Hot 100 that matches his profile on magazine covers, and he achieved it on his own schedule and something like his own terms. Like John Lennon in the ’70s—the founder and nominal leader of the Beatles but the last former Fab to reach the toppermost of the poppermost as a solo artist—Styles just had to find his own way. As that onetime teen heartthrob sang, “Whatever gets you to the light, it’s all right.”

source: Slate

[96thdayofrage]

It was the mid-1980s, and African American rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and blues musician and activist Daryl Davis had just finished performing a set with his band in a bar in Frederick, Maryland.

As he left the stage, a White man—who would later reveal himself to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan—went up to Davis, put his hand around his shoulder and expressed his approval and admiration for his performance. “This is the first time I heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis,” he told Davis after they exchanged pleasantries. Surprised with the statement, Davis quickly replied, “Well, where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play that kind of style? . . . He learned it from the same place I did: Black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.” The White man was in disbelief and refused to accept Davis’ proposal.

Hearing about this incident on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast made me realise that I had been just as ignorant and oblivious as this man about the extent of the artistic contributions of Black people to American music. The moment also sparked within me many questions about my state of ignorance. Why did I not know about these artists? How much more did I not know? How much of the music I listened to was indeed Black?

As an Indian girl growing up in Kuwait in the 2000s, my exposure to American popular music came primarily through television channels like MTV Arabia (the Middle Eastern iteration of MTV) and MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center) as well as the radio station Radio Kuwait FM 99.7. Hit singles from a range of American artists, including Black artists, were in heavy rotation along with other shows. My favourite was an MTV show called ‘Rewind’ which played classic pop, R&B and hip hop hits from the previous decades. Songs were played in cars and at parties and hummed in classrooms by local as well as expatriate teens of various nationalities who, like myself, were unaware of the cultural and historical backstories of the music.

For example, I heard of Elvis Presley, dubbed the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” on television shows and news media due to his iconic status, but until recently, I had no idea that Presley was profoundly influenced by and “borrowed” from Black blues, gospel and rhythm ‘n’ blues artists of and before his time. He was influenced by radio performances of then local Black disc jockeys like B. B. King (who later came to be known as the “King of the Blues”) and Rufus Thomas (who also became a successful recording artist) and by performers at the Black nightclubs he visited during his teenage and young adult years.

Furthermore, I only recently learnt that many of Presley’s early recordings were covers of original songs by Black artists and that some of his biggest-selling songs like ‘Don't Be Cruel’ and ‘All Shook Up’ were penned by a Black musician by the name of Otis Blackwell. In fact, the first time I heard about it was last year in a YouTube video of a speech that Michael Jackson gave in 2002. While facts like this have now become somewhat common knowledge for most people in the West, my lack of awareness of Blackwell and others like him may be the residual effect of a time in the United States’ past when racial segregation permeated every aspect of life, including music and entertainment.

Dr Portia K. Maultsby is a renowned ethnomusicologist and professor emerita at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and the founder of the university’s Archives of African American Music and Culture. Maultsby took up the study of African American popular music traditions in the 1970s when there was no one looking into it as a valid area of research. She explains that segregation ensured that White Americans remained ignorant of Black musical traditions.

“Due to the segregated structure of the country for years and years, White Americans were kept away from the sounds of Black music,” Maultsby says.  During this time, many Black jazz, gospel, R&B and soul artists enjoyed popularity in and even toured different parts of Europe. However, within the United States, Black artists were relegated to the so-called category of ‘race music’, an umbrella term—later replaced by ‘rhythm ‘n’ blues’ in the 1940s—used to denote essentially all types of African American music made by Black people, for Black people. The songs were distributed by mostly White-owned record labels catering exclusively to Black audiences, which meant that the White population remained largely ignorant of the large volumes of work that was recorded by countless Black artists. Black artists also did not get paid as much as White artists or have as many resources, and segregation ensured that their performances were limited to smaller venues.

By the early 1950s, however, a number of independent radio stations (again, mostly White-owned) began popping up, including rhythm ‘n’ blues or “Negro” radio stations. Since it was not possible to segregate radio waves, Black music became accessible to everyone and White teenagers began taking an interest in it. Seeing this, the music industry recognised the potential of appropriating Black music and record companies started making sanitised covers of the music with White artists to distribute to White listeners. But as Maultsby explains, they did so while “keeping the original artists in the background, unexposed” and rhythm ‘n’ blues music, covered and performed by White artists, was now marketed to the mainstream White listener as ‘rock ‘n’ roll,’ a term coined by radio disc jockey Alan Freed.

Record companies and White artists wanted the Black sounds and styles that appealed to the White audience but they did not want the Black artist. American record producer and founder of Sun Records Sam Phillips had been looking for “a White man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel” when he found Elvis Presley. The Beatles got their start by covering various blues artists like Arthur Alexander and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry. Janis Joplin, who was dubbed the “Queen of Rock”, wanted to sound like a Black blues musician and was influenced by Lead Belly, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton. Pat Boone covered ‘Tutti Frutti’, an original song by musician, singer and songwriter Little Richard, and reached 12th place in the national charts of 1956—several places ahead of the original.

Covers like these were made by record companies much to the disapproval and discontentment of the artists. Little Richard, nicknamed “The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and whose style influenced big names like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Prince, told the Washington Post in 1984 that he felt as though he was “pushed into a rhythm ‘n’ blues corner” to keep him away from the White audience. He said that “they”—who he does not name—would try to replace him with White rockstars like Elvis Presley who performed his songs on television as soon as they were released. He believed that this was because “they” didn’t want him to become a hero to White kids.  

Little Richard’s statement reveals the racism and the lack of agency that Black artists suffered while under exploitative record labels. Exploitation happened to almost all artists in the music industry, but Black artists were particularly targetted as they would receive very little or nothing in royalties. Forbes reports that Specialty Records purchased ‘Tutti Frutti’ for a meagre 50 USD and gave him just 0.05 USD per record sold in royalties, while White artists received much higher rates—a discriminatory practice that was quite common in the industry. Richard, after he left the label in 1959, sued Specialty records for failing to pay him royalties.

Dr Birgitta Johnson is an associate professor of ethnomusicology in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina and teaches courses on African American sacred music, African music, hip hop, blues and world music. She explains that Black artists were not protected by copyright laws and would often have their music recorded and sold by record companies without proper contracts—in other words, their music would get stolen.

“Back in the day, there was no expectation that the Black artist could fight someone in court even though some of them did,” Johnson says. “If they didn’t have the copyright stolen from them, the record companies would own the music [instead of] the artists, and [the artists] wouldn’t know it because a lot of the time, they wouldn’t have the legal know-how to recognise what was happening in contracts. They wouldn’t get paid royalties . . . even though they were due royalties.”

While this exploitation of Black artists continued, in the late 1950s, after the development of smaller and more portable transistor radios, a wider audience of White teenagers began listening to Black radio stations. This new generation no longer had to depend on the family’s devices and gained more autonomy over what and who they listened to. “Young White people, who would become the hippies of the ‘60s, are the generation of people who started to press for their freedom . . . to [listen to] what they wanted to hear,” Johnson explains.

Listeners who heard the originals would call up the radio or go down to their local record store and ask for the originals, and record companies had to start supplying to demands to stay relevant in the market. “The covers made money but didn’t last long,” Johnson says, “because young White people no longer wanted the covers, the fake versions, the copies.”

The problem was that cover bands and artists tended to simply do whatever the producers asked them to do, which was usually to copy the original artist’s sound, style and moves, and more often than not, it made for bland and inauthentic renditions of the originals. The covers lacked the authenticity that Black artists conveyed in their performance and the young audience who had heard the authentic versions could see this. “They knew what the good music sounded like—it was almost like they understood... they may not have understood the racial dynamics of it, but they knew [the real thing from the fake],” Johnson says.

Moreover, artists who did covers were performing in styles that were foreign to them. “It was outside of their tradition; it was outside of their aesthetics; [and] they couldn’t bring the same excitement to it sometimes,” she explains. The music, performance and singing style had characteristic elements such as polyrhythms (layering of multiple rhythms), call-and-response, dance and improvisation—elements rooted in traditions that were brought to the United States by enslaved West and Central Africans between the 18th and 19th centuries. More importantly, the lyrics of songs by Black artists reflected the unique social customs, trends and living conditions of Black people, and these were not fully understood by people covering the songs. As a result, “[the covers] couldn’t compete with the real thing,” Johnson says.

Maultsby explains that due to the increasing popularity of the originals, record labels soon began recording more Black artists. However, she says, they watered down or “temper[ed] [their] heavy gospel-oriented sound” to make it more palatable for the White audience, and “one way they did [that] in the ‘50s and into the early ‘60s was to use pop production techniques” which meant a “background of strings and backup singers that sounded more White—concert-type singers—to soften the more raspier, emotional sound of the Black singer.”

By the 1980s, Black music gained exposure to an even wider international audience through television channels like MTV as well as broadcasts of live performances. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, collaborations between interracial duos were used as a mass-marketing strategy to increase the reach of Black artists and pop production continued to be used to “soften the Black sound.” Record companies also paired up White artists with Black producers to achieve that ever-popular Black sound.  

“Thus, more White artists embodying or imitating aspects of the Black style made it acceptable and soon . . . that Black sound began to define the American sound,” Maultsby explains. However, this imitation and dilution meant that people could never experience authentic Black music.

According to Maultsby, who helped pioneer the academic study of African American popular music, the way non-African Americans experience African American music, even in the United States, is from the perspective of an outsider, and this applies to the international audience as well.

“By and large, within African American communities, music is created as a part of everyday life . . . music is a part of our lived experience,” Maultsby explains. “When that music is then taken out of that context and placed in the music industry, it becomes a commodity for mass dissemination, and it takes on a different meaning and a different function.”

She explains that the live performances of legendary artists like Aretha Franklin or James Brown were very different from the studio-recorded performances because the records were “mediated so that [they] fit a certain format that [could] appeal to a broader audience.”

“Record labels didn’t like recording performances live because they felt the audience interaction would interfere with the performance,” she says. “But that audience interaction [was] very much a part of the way Black music is created and experienced.

The writing and coverage of Black music both in and outside of the United States also did a poor job of representing its true essence. As Maultsby explains, White journalists who covered Black music would write about it from a White perspective rather than a Black one.

“A lot of misconceptions early on had to do with the music being reported by White journalists who reported through the lens of White audiences,” Maultsby says. “When journalists wrote about Black music . . . in the US—and this carried on to Europe and the rest of the world [including] Asia [and the] Middle East—they wrote about it through their observation of performances in venues with predominantly White or all-White audience, or in general, non-Black audiences . . . they did not go into the Black community to see how the music was performed and experienced.”

Writing about Black music and culture from a Eurocentric or White point of view has resulted in early Black contributions to popular music being misrepresented as well as erased from the general consciousness. Black culture was appropriated, exploited and diluted and in the process, consumers were left with watered down, commodified versions of the art that did not represent the people that were at the heart of creating it, and its after-effects have carried over to the present-day, among non-Western consumers.

Black contributions to music are also rarely discussed in mainstream media, which is largely controlled by White executives.

“The influence of Black music in a lot of American music are things that only get discussed in classes or documentaries—sometimes award shows—but mostly in formal environments, unless you’re from that tradition,” says Johnson. “[Artists like] Steven Tyler . . . [have] said, ‘I grew up listening to the blues; I love the blues’ . . . but the people who promote him don’t really have any interest in [promoting that] narrative because it’s really about selling a personality when you think about how the music industry works.”

She explains that though most people are analytically aware that the United States is a diverse country, images that are promoted by American companies are very White-centric. What is sold to the rest of the world as “American” is usually centred around Whiteness, whether that’s through music, movies, television or other forms of entertainment.

“The outside world sees a very limited package and predominantly a White or Eurocentric image . . . people look at America and assume this is basically a White space even though we have all this diversity—we’ve always had this kind of diversity of culture,” remarks Johnson, who often does not get recognised as Black American when she travels internationally. “When I go to China, they don’t assume I’m American. When I go to Thailand, they don’t assume I’m American."

Even though a lot has changed for Black musicians and artists in the United States since its “race music” days, the impact of racism and Eurocentrism lingers on and affects the way Gen Z as well as millennials outside of the United States, like myself, understand pop music in the 21st century. Many tributes have been paid to pioneering and legendary Black artists in award shows, documentaries and biopics and their contributions have been studied academically by scholars like Maultsby and Johnson, but my awareness of Black music and culture as a non-American is not only limited by what’s been given to me in the media, but also by what’s been left out of the conversations around popular music. How do we change this?

As Maultsby expresses, it starts simply with acknowledgement—just like a symphony orchestra’s roots are acknowledged to be European no matter who performs it or how it is reinterpreted in different cultures, or how a sitar is recognised as an Indian musical instrument whether it’s played in a jazz performance or a symphony orchestra, we need to continue to learn and acknowledge the Black roots of the music even when it has a local interpretation or variation.

“We all know [the symphony orchestra] comes from Europe; there’s no question there; we don’t try to claim it as our own conception, but we do participate in that culture. That’s how we have to think about Black American culture,” she says.  

We need to recognise African American music for its role in shaping Western popular music, and understand what constitutes Black musical traditions and what differentiates it from the rest of the world, rather than generalise it as merely American music. And while music may have transcended cultural and racial boundaries, transcendence should not come at the price of obscuring and erasing the source.

“It’s fine as long as we keep in mind the source of that music,” Maultsby says. “We can say it transcends race—it just shows how influential Black has been internationally—but at the same time, we don’t need to erase the group that created the music and make Black people invisible in terms of their contributions. And that happens a lot.

“If we are not reminded that Black people are the ones that created the music you love, we question their contributions to society and to the world. We shouldn’t need to be reminded every day. It belongs in our consciousness.”

[fyeahhozier]

The Irishman is deeper and darker than he's maybe been given credit for... but the geniality and swoon factor remain high.

Variety: Hozier Proves He’s a Career Artist in Gratifying Greek Show

At Hozier’s sold-out show at L.A.’s Greek Friday night, one of the first things you couldn’t help noticing on stage —because it’s still an anomaly — was that his eight-piece lineup was half-male, half-female. Knowing his penchant for socially conscious songs, his decrial of “the anthems of rape culture” in his lyrics, and a general female-friendliness to his appeal, it’s easy to figure this gender parity is a conscious one and think: That is soooo Hozier. Which it is … and so effective, too, like just about every choice he’s made so far in his short, charmed career. On the most practical level, if you can bring in that much female harmony while also getting ace players in the bargain, why wouldn’t you? But it also makes for a good visual emblem of some of the other dual energies Hozier is playing with in his music: darkness and enlightenment; romantic hero and cad; raw blues dude and slick pop hero. He’s got a lot more going on than just being an earnest do-gooder. (Although he does do good, earnestly.)

During Friday’s hour-and-three-quarters set, Hozier focused largely on material from this year’s sophomore album, “Wasteland, Baby!,” which sounded good enough on record but almost uniformly improved in the live experience. Sometimes the upgrade came from making full use of the multi-instrumentalists on hand. The first album’s “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene” now had Hozier on guitar facing off against violinist Emily Kohavi, trading solos — and if it’s hard to hear an electric guitar/fiddle duel without automatically thinking “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” it was one of many welcome moments making use of the MVP skills of Kohavi, the newest addition to the band. Other times, the improvements on the album versions just had to do with Hozier allowing himself louder and gutsier guitar tones. He’s a bit like Prince, in that way — someone you’d happily listen to playing a very nasty-sounding six-string all night, although he has so many other stylistic fish to fry, which in this case means a still slightly greater emphasis on acoustic finger-picking.

For somebody who made his name on as forlorn but powerful an anthem as his 2014 breakout smash “Take Me to Church,” and who can milk that melodrama for all it’s worth, Hozier has a lot of other modes he can default to. He treads very lightly into the area of soul with songs like “Almost (Sweet Music),” the lyrics of which consist of either name-checking or alluding to some of the great jazz vocal classics of the 20th century, in an idiom that’s not so much jazzy itself as folk-R&B. You could almost cite it as the subtle kind of Memphis-swing thing Justin Timberlake should aspire to, if the tricky polyrhythm and oddly chopped up meters Hozier adds as wrinkles weren’t so un-replicable. Bringing up Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” as the night’s sole cover also established that early ‘70s era and sound as an influences he’d like to make perfectly clear. At the other extreme, this son of a blues musician can hard back to those roots so well, in noisy numbers like “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” and the brand new “Jack Boot Jump,” that he could give the Black Keys a run for their money.

“Jack Boot Jump,” which is scheduled to go on an EP of completely fresh material that Hozier said he plans to put out before Christmas, was possibly the highlight of the night, even though — or because — it stripped his excellent band down to just him and longtime drummer Rory Doyle. Having earlier played the current album’s “Nina Cried Power,” which is maybe more of a tribute to other historic protest songs than one of its own, Hozier gave a lengthy introduction to “Jack Boot” indicating that he’s aware of the traps that come with the territory. “I do have some reservations about the words ‘protest song’ and ‘protest music,’” he admitted. “But if you’re familiar with an artist called Woody Guthrie, he wrote the evergreen anthem ‘Tear the Fascists’ down. I was kind of looking into songs in that sort of tradition, that singing out, and I was worried that this is 2019; it’s a very unsubtle way to approach songwriting.” But, he added, “it was a funny few weeks, with 70 people shot in Hong Kong and arrests obviously in Moscow; Chile now at the moment also. And I was thinking, forget about subtle art — what is not subtle is this murder of protesters, and what is not subtle is the jack boot coming down in Orwell’s picture of the future: ‘If you want to imagine the future, imagine a jack boot stomping on a human face forever,’ that chilling quote from ‘1984.’ Anyway, I was just thinking, yeah, f— it, it’s not subtle, but let’s do it.” His electric guitar proceeded to be a machine that kills fascists, and also just slayed as maybe the most rock ‘n’ roll thing he’s written. (Evidence of the new song on the web is scant, or should be, anyway, since he begged the audience “in good faith” not to film it.)

If there’s a knock people have on Hozier, it tends to be the sincerity thing. He’s a nice guy who’s finishing first, which doesn’t necessarily help him become an indie-rock darling or Pitchfork favorite. (Predictably, “Wasteland, Baby!” got a 4.8 rating there — that’s out of 10, not 5.) At the Greek, there was an almost wholesome feeling that would’ve been an immediate turnoff to anyone who insists on having their rock rough, starting with his graciousness in repeatedly naming the band members and repeatedly thanking his opening act (Madison Ryann Ward, a fetchingly husky-voiced Oklahoman filling in on this part of the tour for a laryngitis-stricken Freya Ridings). That extended to a sense of uplift in many of the songs that doesn’t always match the themes of the material. But then, there was the impossible good cheer and attractiveness of the young players, to match Hozier’s own; this is a group where everyone looks as if they could be in Taylor Swift’s band or actually looks like Taylor Swift. The swoon factor in Hozier’s appeal is undeniably high, and it’s safe to say no one left Griffith Park less smitten.

But ladies (and gentlemen), do be aware that Hozier has some dark-side moments that can almost make Leonard Cohen look like Stephen Bishop. The only time he really overtly accentuated that in concert was in introducing and playing the new album’s “No Plan,” a love song that is also an amiable statement of atheism in which Hozier reminds his beloved that the universe is going to collapse upon itself someday. This may be rather like the gambit in which the ‘50s boy gets the girl to make out with him in a fallout shelter, but in any case, Hozier didn’t stint on the end-of-all-things aspect of it, even putting up on screen behind the band a statement from astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack pointing out humankind’s and the galaxy’s ultimate fate. (“Honestly I never really imagined I’d end up being name-checked in a song for talking about how the universe is eventually going to fade out and die so this is all very exciting for me,” Mack tweeted in replay earlier in the year.) Suffice it to say that with that soulful a vintage ‘70s groove and that fuzz-tastic a guitar line, many babies will be conceived to the tune of “No Plan,” whether it foresees generational lines ending in a godless black hole or not.

Other Hozier songs reveal darker gets more estimable the more you dig into it. With its bird talk, “Shrike” sounds sweet enough, till you realize that a shrike is a kind of bird that impales its prey on thorns, which does add a rather bloody metaphoric undertone to what sounds like a reasonably pacifist breakup song. “Dinner & Diatribes,” meanwhile, is just deeply horny, not thorny. The most brooding song of the set, “Talk,” has verses where Hozier sings in lofty, literary terms about the romantic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, only to reveal in the chorus that he’s talking to this woman in such high-minded terms because he just wants to charm her into the sack. As a piece of writing, it’s hilarious, establishing a devilish side of Hozier it’s good to hear. As a piece of performance, it’s just sexy.

But as enriching as it is to realize Hozier has a healthy sense of humor in his writing, bad-boy wit is never going to be what you’re going to come away from a Hozier album or show with. The main part of Friday’s concert ended, as expected, with “Take Me to Church,” his outraged take on abuse and homophobia in the scandalized Catholic church — which just happens to be easily taken as a lusty hymn to sexuality. Following that, the large band returned to a stage that had now been decked out in some kind of ivy, as Hozier talked about his love for the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney (whose last words he has tattooed on his arm) and, “since I’ve come this far,” went ahead and recited his poem “Mint,” sharing his hero’s affection for the plant and its “tenacity for life.”

Tenacity is likely to be a buzzword, too, for Hozier, given his leaps and gains as a writer-performer and seeming level head atop his tree-top shoulders. Taller still of voice, musical dexterity and good will — and still just 29 —  he’s somebody the swooners and even some cynics should feel good about settling in with for a very long Irish ride.

[canaryrecords]

The Metropolitan label was, like Nick Doneff’s Kaliphon label, an offshoot of Adjin Asllan’s Balkan label. It released some of the most niche releases of the Near Eastern immigrant community in the 1940s-50s, including the five discs made by Victoria Hazan in Ladino, nine discs in Armenian by Edward Bogosian (see the Canary album Everything is Fake), and about 26 discs in Turkish. Of the Turkish-language releases, the first eight were by Greek-speaking Balkan-roster mainstays Marko Melkon (including two sides sung by Victoria Hazan; see the Canary releases I Go Around Drinking Raki, No News From Tomorrow, and Don’t Let Me Be Lost To You B-Sides) and Virginia Magidou (see the Canary release I Was Born a Badass Chick) plus one additional disc - her only release - by one Sarah Behar (see the Canary album No News From Tomorrow).

The remaining 17 known Metropolitan discs in Turkish were credited to five performers who appear not to have recorded either before or after, all of whom have Turkish names - not Armenian, Greek, Jewish, or Albanian as all of the other artists on Balkan, Metropolitan, and Kaliphon were. Turks represented a small minority of those who emigrated from Ottoman territories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Frank Ahmed's Turks in America: The Ottoman Turk's Immigrant Experience (Columbia International, 1993) and subsequent research by his student Işil Acehan indicate that Turks tended not to immigrate through New York due to discrimination against Muslims. They generally opted instead to enter the U.S. through Providence, Rhode Island. Only single men were admitted, the vast majority of whom were rural villagers who settled in the Massachusetts towns of Peabody, Salem, and Lynn where they worked primarily in the leatherworks, the population peaking shortly before WWI at just over 2,000 individuals. Nearly all of them returned to Turkey by 1930.

We have no immigration details or press references for any of the individuals on the Metropolitan label recordings, and there is no ore from within the community of those who remember stories of the music of that time and place. With once exception, the violinist Yekta Akinci (b. 1905; d. 1980) who was the son of the musician Ahmet Mükerrem Akinci, we have not been able to trace biographical data for them. They were certainly not part of the immigrant population.

Accompanied by the core Balkan-label accompanists Marko Melkon, Nick Doneff, and Garbis Bakirgian, they recorded a total of 34 sides. My first guess was that they were immigrant musicians performing, for reasons I could not begin to explain, under Turkish pseudonyms. It was the researcher Harry Kezelian who proposed that that they were touring musicians.

Near Eastern musicians (Greek, Armenian, Lebanese, etc.) who toured the U.S. during the 1940s-50s were generally “name” players who had records out, not only in the homeland but also issued in the U.S. - Rosa Eskenazi, Sami el Chawwa, Giannis Papaiouannou, Udi Hrant, etc. The mystery of how and why these Turkish performers could have shown up without some extant biographical data might be explained by an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in November, 1951 titled “Turkey Today,” presented in cooperation by Turkey's Ministry of Information. The exhibition included Turkish handicrafts and photos as well as watercolor painting by Turkish children. A press release for the show’s opening states:

On Saturday November 17th at 3:00 PM, the Brooklyn Museum will present a program of Turkish Folk Music and Songs in connection with the exhibition. Admission to the public is free.

It is our speculation at present that these five Turkish musicians (or some of them) may have been sent by the Turkish Ministry of Information to play at this Brooklyn Museum exhibition opening. (Kezelian has pointed out that Turkey was admitted to NATO only three months later; the exhibit was likely part of a goodwill campaign to strengthen ties with the West under the third president Celâl Bayar’s administration.) Whether Melkon or Doneff attended the event and met the performers there or whether Adjin Asllan’s brother Selim knew them from Istanbul, where he had lived and made recordings for the Balkan label a couple years earlier, enters into the realm of fantasy. We don’t know.

The performances themselves are stylistically typical both of Turkey's urban nightclubs of the late 40s and early 50s as well as the "oriental" nightclubs around New York's 8th Avenue, Port Said and the Brittania in particular where Doneff and Melkon worked regularly. It is easy to imagine that Melkon and Doneff relished the opportunity to exchange tunes and jam with players from the current scene of Turkey’s metropolis and took advantage of the opportunity to play with musicians who had their fingers close to the pulse of modern Turkey. The only other two immigrant players on the session were Garbis Bakirgian (b. 1884; d. 1969), a classically trained native of Istanbul, and the pianist and bandleader T. Agabey who was himself a mysterious figure on the New York scene. Agabey’s discs for Doneff’s Kaliphon label sold well enough to indicate that he was a New Yorker with a following, and his style was a unique synthesis of Turkish popular melodies with the kind of small-group pop-jazz combo format that was ubiquitous around New York bars before the advent of commonplace jukeboxes sent low-paid, union-card-holding musicians searching for work as studio sidemen or with wedding bands.

We can say with certainty that the 17 discs made by this circle of Turks did not sell well. The Turkish-speaking immigrant population of the U.S., although accustomed to buying discs on the Balkan-Kaliphon-Metropolitan circle of labels through the 1940s, being largely Armenian and Greek, did not respond enthusiastically to buying discs by these unknown Turkish performers recorded in New York even with familiar names listed on the labels as their accompanists. It seems reasonable to suppose that each of the discs was given only a single pressing of 500 copies. Surviving copies turn up infrequently, and there is marginal interest in them when they do. In the history of Near Eastern music in the U.S., they are marginalia to a footnote.

The twelve sides presented here include all four by Caylani Instanbuli Anemde, one of two unaccompanied improvisations by violinist Yekta Akinci, three of the ten sides by Ali Fasih Tekin, four of fourteen by Zeki Arikan, and, unfortunately, none of the four by Vahit Artan. The remaining sides represent not only gaps for the discographies of the obscure primary performers but also missing pieces of the work of their accompanists who are among the most significant immigrant musicians of the middle of the 20th century in New York. We hope to add to the the collection over time.

[tracyshomesick]

25 things that were invented in NYC.

1. Toilet paper: In 1857, Joseph C. Gayetty began selling packs of “medicated paper for the water closet” out of his wholesale shop at 41 Ann St. The paper was made from pure Manila hemp and treated with aloe. Best (or worst)
of all, each sheet was watermarked with his name.

2. Chicken ’n’ waffles: After its 1938 opening, Wells Supper Club in Harlem was the last stop for jazz greats like Sammy Davis Jr., Gladys Knight and Nat King Cole. Catering to its night-owl talent, Wells created the perfect dish for acts who’d missed dinner but couldn’t wait till breakfast: leftover fried chicken on a sweet waffle.

3. Chewing gum, a New York invention, was first manufactured in 1870 by Thomas Adams in a warehouse on Front Street. Called ''Adams New York Gum No. 1,'' it was made from chicle, a form of sapodilla tree sap chewed in the Yucatan and Guatemala.

4. The Waldorf Salad: The Waldorf Astoria boasts two inventions on this list, the first of which is its classic salad, which combines lettuce, apple, celery and walnuts. It was first served in 1896.

5. Teddy Bears: In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot an injured black bear while on a hunt. Inspired by the story, Morris and Rose Michtom, candy-store owners from Brooklyn, sewed a plush bear and displayed it, calling it “teddy’s bear.” The toy was so popular, they gave up candy and opened a factory to make the cuddly critters.

6. The Tom Collins: In 1874, a hilarious joke swept through the city: A prankster would tell a friend, “I was at [insert local saloon], where Tom Collins was saying [insert insult] about you!” The offended party would rush off to defend his honor, but there was no Tom Collins. (Cool joke, bro.) Inspired by the prank, New York mixologist Jerry Thomas created the recipe in 1876.

7. Coal-fired pizza: Pizza was cooked with wood fires until Gennaro Lombardi introduced the tasty magic of coal. Legend has it he served the first coal-fired pie in 1905. Cooking pizza that way is technically illegal now, but the ovens of a few select haunts around the city were grandfathered in, including Lombardi’s, Totono’s and Patsy’s.

8. Scrabble: Out-of work architect and anagram lover Alfred Mosher Butts conceived this wordy board game in 1931 while living in Jackson Heights, Queens. The street sign on Butts’s corner in Queens now reads “35t1H4 a1V4e1n1u1e1” after the famed letter-scoring system.

9. Spaghetti primavera: When this faux Italian dish (fresh vegetables and Parmesan cream sauce on pasta) was served at Le Cirque in 1977, it was, according to The New York Times, “the most talked-about dish in Manhattan,” much to the chagrin of head chef Jean Vergnes. The classically trained Frenchie was so offended, his cooks had to prep the dish in a hallway—yet later he claimed its invention.

10. The remote control: Nikola Tesla conceived of a radio-controlled boat way back in 1898. The idea was so novel that nobody believed such technology could exist.

11. Sweet’n Low: Fort Greene entrepreneur Benjamin Eisenstadt teamed up with his chemist son, who found a way to create saccharin in powdered form (before it could only be a liquid or a pill). He named his pink-label brand after a Tennyson poem.

12. Eggs Benedict: Stockbroker and bon vivant Lemuel Benedict woke up one morning in 1894 with a raging hangover and booked it
to the Waldorf Astoria hotel, where he ordered a poached egg, crispy bacon, toast and hollandaise sauce. Legendary maître d’hôtel Oscar Tschirky was such a fan of the creation, he added it to the hotel’s menu.

13. The Bloody Mary:
 Fernand “Pete” Petiot imported his tomato-juice-and-vodka concoction from Paris to the St. Regis hotel’s King Cole Bar. Catering to the spicier local tastes, Petiot added Worcestershire sauce, lemon and
a dash of cayenne and black pepper.

14. Credit Cards: You have John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank to thank for those interest charges and late fees: In 1946, he created the charge-it program, which issued customers bank credit cards for use at local Brooklyn merchants. The shop owners would then deposit the sales slips at the bank, who would then bill cardholders.

15. Baked Alaska: In 1876, the pioneering pastry chefs
of lower-Manhattan restaurant Delmonico’s conceived of piping-hot sponge cake topped with crispy meringue and filled with ice cream, naming this miracle
of food science in honor of the country’s newest territory.

16. General Tso’s Chicken: While exiled in Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War, chef Peng Chang-Kuei created a spicy-and-sour chicken dish as an homage to a famous Hunanese general. When he jumped ship to New York in the 1970s and opened Peng’s, the dish became a huge hit— after he added sugar to the recipe.

17. Frozen Hot Chocolate:
 Stephen Bruce, the cofounder
of iconic East-Side restaurant Serendipity 3, kept the recipe of this decadent dessert a secret for 40 years. Bruce recently revealed that the famous frozen treat is 14 kinds of cocoa mixed with crushed ice and topped with whipped cream. (The types of cocoa still remain a mystery.)

18. Air conditioning: In 1902, Willis Carrier created his “apparatus for treating air” to keep the humidity from warping the paper at a printing plant on Grand St in Bushwick. Saving workers from the sweltering summer heat was just a fortunate side effect.

19. The Reuben Sandwich: Alright, this one’s contested, but many say Arnold Reuben, owner of Reuben’s Delicatessen, invented the meat-and-krout combo in 1914. Legend has it, the sandwich was created for a famished actress, who came in after a show, using the few ingredients left on the deli shelves.

20. Mr. Potato Head: When New Yorker and toy designer George Lerner first created plastic facial features to stick on real vegetables, toy companies worried that food wasting wouldn’t fly with a postwar public. But in 1952, Hasbro bought Lerner’s
 idea and made the first TV ad ever for children’s playthings, selling a million units that year.

21. Hot dogs: Coney Island baker Charles Feltman had the genius idea to serve hot sausages in a 
bun for a dime each. His frank fortune bought him a beachside empire of hotels and beer gardens, until former employee Nathan Handwerker opened Nathan’s Famous and sold his dogs for only a nickel.

22. ATMs: the first money-dispensing device was conceived in 1939 by Luther George Simjian, who convinced the City Bank of New York (today’s Citibank) to test his contraption for six months. The bank declined to use the machine after that, because “the only people using the machines were a small number of prostitutes and gamblers.”

23. Cronuts: Dominique Ansel labored for months to perfect his doughnut-fried, fluffy hybrid from heaven. The pastry, which debuted in May 2013, still inspires down-the- block lines each morning.

24. Children's Museums: The Brooklyn Children's Museum, located in Crown Heights, opened in 1899 and was the country’s first museum dedicated to the education of kids. It was also the first to introduce a “hands-on” policy for its exhibits.

25. Hip-hop. Enough said.

[mermaidsirennikita]

Why wasn't Charles allowed to marry Camilla back in the day? I know it was a long time ago, but it was still far past the time when royal marriage alliances were necessary for securing allies or expanding dynasties. I don't think Camilla was a commoner either (or was she?). Why couldn't Charles marry for love? Why exactly was Camilla so objectionable to the BRF?

I love talking about this bc it’s manifold.

The thing is that technically, had Charles married Camilla against the family’s wishes, it would’ve been a big scandal.  But nobody was STOPPING him.  I think that he could’ve married her had he wanted to, and risked being disinherited, to be sure.  But...  the thing is.  That I also don’t think that Elizabeth II would’ve had the balls to tell Charles that he wasn’t going to be king because he married the girl he wanted to marry.  Not after the immense scandal of what happened with David--I don’t believe that she would have disrupted the line of succession in that way, or pushed Charles to give up his claim (because, though David was pushed, he did CHOOSE to abdicate).

Charles just didn’t have the balls.  And arguably, perhaps Camilla wasn’t ready at that point to be queen; Parker-Bowles was still in the mix then, and some biographers have argued that Camilla and Charles didn’t get that serious until after she married Parker-Bowles... Though this is done, I think, to minimize the degree to which Charles KNEW he was doing a fucked up thing by marrying Diana.  I think he wanted to marry Camilla before she married Parker-Bowles, and I think he knew that he wasn’t going to give Camilla up when he married Diana.  I also think that it’s totally possible that Camilla wasn’t ready to marry him quite yet.  She’s a very offbeat woman, and I think canny enough to recognize the magnitude of being Charles’s wife.

And though Charles and Diana’s marriage didn’t secure an ally, it was very much still the last dynastic marriage within the family.  Diana hit a certain criteria--she hailed from an extremely prestigious bloodline that had served royalty for centuries, with connections to the Duke of Devonshire and even the Boleyns.  She was beautiful.  She was virginal.  It was believed that she could be taught.  So it was a marriage made PURELY to further a dynasty, because she was the emblem of the type of queen that dynasty wanted to produce its next generation and indeed its next king.  Though they were politically powerless, the Windsors viewed Charles’s marriage prospects through the lens of breeding and image.  Some have said that his cousin Amanda, granddaughter of his uncle Mountbatten, was proposed to by Charles for exactly this reason.

And the family was worried about the inappropriate love marriage because they did associate it with Wallis Simpson, who even after she was sequestered off to Paris made them look bad, due to Nazi ties, due to the way she and her husband talked shit--so while Elizabeth and Philip married for love, he was also... borderline unsuitable, to be sure, but suitable enough because he came from royalty and he was willing to fall in line, even if he grumbled.

Camilla was openly sexual.  People knew that she was someone slept with men, and this could not be tolerated by the regime, even if one of those men she slept with was Charles.  Her father was an army officer turned businessman, so she was not truly aristocratic, regardless of how much money her parents made.  She was considered, again, offbeat and kooky, so... yes, very much like Charles in that sense but also not what the Windsors wanted.  Because the thing is that whoever married Charles was supposed to prop him up, much like Philip propped Elizabeth up and the Queen Mum propped her husband up.  The Queen Mum was not glamorous, but she was well-bred and extremely charming, knowing exactly how to soothe her husband’s moods and support him on tour.  Philip was a bit rebellious at first and could put his foot in his mouth, but he was also considered this masculine ideal--handsome by the standards of the day, very macho in his naval pursuits, a gregarious and physical man who kind of jazzed up Elizabeth’s image, as she was a plain girl who lacked charisma.  Philip at her side gave her this legitimacy, this desirability, that she lacked naturally.  And it gave the impression of masculine support, which downplayed the issues she possessed as a woman in a position of power, if only a theoretical position.

This kind of suitability mattered deeply to the Windsors, and Philip and Uncle Mountbatten in particular were SO worried about the suitability of Charles’s bride.  Because Charles wasn’t this naturally handsome man.  He was sensitive, and he was awkward, and he seemed to not excel at any of the things Philip wanted him to excel at.  He was not this James Bond-ian figure that Philip tried to be, even as they sold him as one during his “action man” years.  The woman Charles was with needed to support and accent him--they set up him with glamorous, pedigreed socialites who’d be amazing arm candy, while what he wanted was a plain, considerably less refined woman who had something of an imperfect reputation.

That’s why Diana was considered perfect.  She was a 19 year old virgin, so no reputation to speak of.  She was beautiful, but was immediately seen as shy, so she could fade into the background when needed while also emphasizing this idea that Charles was a virile man who could attract the attention of a beautiful woman.  And her blood was extremely blue, to the degree that her father gave a little speech about how her marriage was essentially an extension of the Spencer family tradition of serving the royal family.

And while Camilla was objectionable as a wife, in theory she was not objectionable as a mistress.  Because everyone expected two things if Charles went back to her after his marriage: a) that he’d be satisfied to keep Camilla as a purely secondary side piece, tucked away and very much not his first priority and b) that Diana, the shy, beautiful arm candy, would put up with it.

They were profoundly wrong on both accounts.  Charles did see Camilla as the love of his love, and the more his marriage to Diana was imperfect the more he wanted to be with Camilla and resented that she wasn’t his wife; and Diana not only reacted to Camilla as the mistress, but reacted by raining down hellfire on that family.  Camilla COULD NOT be the mistress, which was a role the royals would have been fine with her taking, and I think many completely expected her to be an adequate, truly secret one.  And mind you, she was bad at being a mistress--talking to Diana way too much before the wedding, provoking her by showing up where she really shouldn’t have.

So basically, a lot of it came down to a misjudgment of Charles (as a man who’d be happy and unromantic enough to keep the woman he really loved as a side piece, while also being noble enough to treat his wife well and work to make her happy affair aside) and Diana (as a meek stand by your man type, who would be happy to have her children and decline to retaliate).  They believed that the scandal of Camilla, a totally unsuitable wife, would outweigh whatever Charles and Camilla could do to each other--especially after Camilla married and the alternative was Charles marrying a woman who’d divorced her husband for him.  They had no concept of how far Charles and Diana would go.  Because Elizabeth II, and Philip, and the Queen Mother, and Uncle Mountbatten, and everyone involved in that whole arrangement, fundamentally misunderstood how people act on emotion.  They also failed to understand how the times were moving on, and why Camilla would have likely been accepted by the punlic.  And ironically?  Now it remains somewhat tense as to whether or not she’ll ever be Queen Camilla, precisely because Charles was denied her originally.

[rogueclonesftw]

hello! i don't know anything about your OC's, but i saw your post. could you perhaps list all of them with a short summary? 🙏🏻💕

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sorry this took so long to answer. I moved house and it was A Lot. My OCs are legion so for the sake of everyone else’s dashes I’m putting this under a read more

These are just for the clone wars era I’m leaving the rebels out of it

Thanks for asking!! Feel free to ask about anyone if you want to know more.

fair warning this is long af

I’m splitting it into sections to make this easier

Heretics

Jedi

Bela Rant

Togruta Jedi Master and mother Master of four Padawans children. Not a favourite of the Council due to differences in interpretation of the Code. Had an ongoing feud with Qui Gon Jinn that lasted until he died. She died in the war ten years later and Col took over her command.

Alask Racor

Grumpy Twi’lek first Padawan of Bela, had two Padawans of his own but was killed by pirates before the second was knighted.

Reya Meraska

Alask’s first Padawan. A human from Jedha and compassion incarnate. Had an uneventful apprenticeship and grew up to be comparatively quiet compared to the rest.

Ben Edo

Reya’s first and so far only Padawan. The model of a perfect Jedi except for thinking their interpretation of the Code is bullshit. Would have made one hell of a politician if he could stand the Senate. From Dantooine.

Tol Koden

Alask’s second Padawan, a very polite Zabrak. Alask died when he was 17 and Jos took over his training. He and Ben are the same age and were raised basically together.

Jos Vel

Stubborn and opinionated Kiffar. Bela’s second Padawan. Had her own (equally stubborn and opinionated) Padawan and then took over Tol’s training when Alask died.

Harlan Konshi

Jos’s Padawan. Also a Kiffar. Would also make a fine politician because being raised by Jos taught him to argue. He’s a bit of a jackass but in a charming way. Like, he’s a prick but you still like him.

Azaana Tyl

Harlan’s sweet, quiet, shy Togruta Padawan. Jos laughed so hard when she heard about that. Harlan is trying to teach her self-confidence. The baby of the family.

Col Blackmoor

Bela’s third and most disastrous Padawan. The former Temple Problem Child (now Temple Problem Adult). Not that he spends much time in the Temple. Was so far out on the Outer Rim he didn’t find out there was a war on until he had to come back and take over Bela’s legion. The worst case of ADHD the Temple has ever seen.

Lena Sola

Col took her in after an incident with her former Master almost saw her kicked out of the Order. Col intervened. She’s still uncomfortable around most Jedi, but they’re working on it. Sweet kid. Kage.

Aden Jadus

Bela’s final Padawan, knighted just before Geonosis. Yes, she’s from Tatooine. No, that does not mean she knows Skywalker. Stop asking.

Not-Jedi

Vale

The oldest of the bunch, Reya’s Commander. Has enough Big Dad Energy to build a deck at 20 paces. Meat grills in his presence and the shinies all fear his disappointed frown.

Nill

Jos’s Commander. Deeply claustrophobic. A nice, likeable guy unless you piss him off. Caffeine demon.

Jax

Clone Commander and Col Wrangler in Chief, Col regards his Commander with barely disguised awe. He considers him his closest friend. For his part, Jax thinks similarly highly of Col. He likes to draw when he gets spare time (rarely). Grew up with Sonny and Cody. Very protective of Lena.

Crater

Professional Ray of Sunshine, the exact opposite of his twin. Crater and Crash grew up with Wolffe. Crater was assigned to Ben, and he likes his General, really, but the man never sleeps. It’s starting to stress him out.

Click

Professional Salt Mine assigned to the Galaxy’s Politest Jedi because apparently the GAR runs on irony. Makes Wolffe look like a ray of happy, happy sunshine.

Pip

The perpetual optimist to Aden’s incredible pessimist. Remains stubbornly cheerful by choice, because if he doesn’t laugh he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop crying.

Dexter

Professional Grouchy Bastard. Likes Harlan well enough but will absolutely tell him he’s full of shit. If Azaana likes you, Dexter will tolerate your existence. If you make Azaana sad they will never find your body. A training accident left him with scars and a deep growl in his voice that makes him sound angrier than he is.

Stitch

Col’s CMO and the only person Jax legitimately fears. Deeply wishes his siblings and General would get injured less and look after themselves more. Is willing to enforce this with sedatives.

Zip

The Right Hand of God (Stitch’s second in command). He who wields the big needles.

Layne

Cheerful but stressed Captain of a company of reckless idiots who really should know better but apparently don’t. He should be used to it. He grew up with Rex.

Trip and Tap

Two survivors of Krell reassigned to Col. Tap has a nervous habit of tapping his fingers. Trip can trip over thin air.

Jazz, Snap and Void

A trio. Jazz likes to wander off. Void likes to hide. Snap likes to complain they’re giving him grey hair from the stress of having them disappearing all the time.

Ray and Rico

The product of an embryo that split, Ray and Rico lived in fear of being culled as defects on Kamino. They’ve since left Kamino, but the fear hasn’t left them.

Lys

A tired medic who would like Dexter to drink something that isn’t caf please.

Tyke

The medic with the most agreeable Jedi (Tol). He barely has to bully him into seeking medical attention at all. Such a shame that his Commander seems determined to make up for it by being a complete bastard. If Click wants to get tackled in the hallway, that’s his lookout.

Rill

Has a particular interest in medical research. Or he would if he ever had the time. 

Corrie

The youngest CMO in the GAR. Just barely 18, only on the field for six months and never meant to be CMO at all. But she’s the only medic Pip’s got left after that clusterfuck, so they’re all doing their best. She might be young but she will absolutely yell at a commander you see if she doesn’t.

New Dawn Crew

Not-Clones

Mira Vin 

A female Kiffar former Jedi whose Master died on Geonosis. The Council were going to knight her and make her a General, so she told Windu to stick it up his ass and ran away to the Outer Rim to harass slavers and save “defective” clones.

Kell Vekarr

An Alderaanian former Jedi who was rescued from slavers as a child. Finally took the 20 remaining members of his command and ran when the rest were killed over Ando. Jaster’s boyfriend. Autistic.

Jaster Toran

True Mandalorian bounty hunter who was betrayed by a client and sold into slavery. Joined the crew upon his rescue four years later. Kell’s boyfriend. Autistic.

Riye Toran

Jaster’s older sister who joined the crew to look for him and then stuck around because she liked it there.

Volya’tar

Twi’lek former slave who freed herself and stole a ship. Pilot, mechanic and Mira’s best friend.

Pash Colton

Dyspraxic dyslexic Corellian with more brains than sense. An engineering genius who has wisdom as his dump stat. Also sometimes a smuggler.

Jaina Bell

Tiny and terrifying. Orphaned at a young age and grew up to be a smuggler, mechanic and pilot.

Ela

Nonbinary Lorrdian. Has a long horrendous Lorrdian name they never use. Joined the crew because slavers suck and anything that makes their lives difficult is a good thing. Stuck around for the people.

Black Company

Halcyon

An ARC Captain known for his green hair and endless patience. Considers Kell a close friend but calls him Commander regardless. Used to fight Rex a lot as a kid. Please let this man rest.

Bones

Halcyon’s batchmate and Black Company’s CMO. A cranky bugger, but that’s understandable considering what he deals with daily.

Pax

The peacemaker between his idiot brothers and everyone else for as long as they can remember. A chill guy, but even chill guys have limits.

Tracyn and Carud

Two of the Nightmare Children. Their names are fire and smoke and they cause a lot of both, raising Pax’s blood pressure and driving Bones into apoplectic rage.

Isa

Jaro’s long suffering sister. Usually has to track him down to make him go to sleep. Has a weekly commiseration session with Ari (alcohol optional but recommended).

Jaro

Named for the Mando’a word for reckless and boy howdy is it accurate. The ADHD doesn’t help.

Ari

Rio’s batchmate and she loves her brother dearly but she is so done with his shit.

Rio

The last of the original Nightmare Children, ADHD disaster and source of most of Bones’s workload.

Kee and Jam

Nonbinary comms officers who bicker very cheerfully. Usually with each other. Often at high volume through the halls of the ship.

Torin

Gay artist baby.

Kol

Gay artist bastard.

Charly

Honestly he’s just here for a laugh and his brothers respect him for it. You’ve got to find your joy where you can get it these days.

Dys

Takes great delight in moving Set’s things just a couple of centimetres. Just enough to annoy him. Will deck anyone else who tries the same thing.

Set

Also known as Corporal Square Corners. Everything has to be neat and tidy. He was a godsend before inspections. Now he’s just the reason people have somewhere to sit.

Slip

Known for giving his trainers the slip and disappearing into the bowels of Kamino when they were doing training exercises he didn’t like and then getting stuck and having to be retrieved by Chase.

Chase

More like chase-ing his brother through the halls of Kamino to keep him out of trouble. There’s a running joke that he should have ended up in search and rescue.

Bright

Was he named for his bright red hair or as an ironic comment on his general outlook on life? Who knows? Not him. A pessimist if there ever was one.

Impulse

Full name Have-You-Ever-Heard-Of-Impulse-Control and no, he hasn’t.

Cuyan Squad

Sonny

A naturally blond, autistic, Force-sensitive Commander who survived Kamino by the skin of his teeth. Grew up with Cody and Jax. Hyper efficient Can, will and has broken people’s faces for saying shit about the Coruscant Guard.

Zak

Force-sensitive Captain who despises soup and has incredible claustrophobia. Good with kids though. Autistic.

Ru

Force-sensitive autistic Lieutenant. Quieter than Zak, and fully supports his vendetta against soup. Has his own vendetta against food that stabs you in the mouth.

Bang

Force-sensitive bomb-tech. Partially deafened in an explosion which also gave him some pretty intense scarring. Gets nervous when he can’t see people behind him.

Bit

Force-sensitive techie with a penchant for weapons modification and data slicing. Gives the best hugs in the squad.

Tink

If it’s broken Tink can fix it. The resident ADHD Force-sensitive techie. Has a tendency to hyperfocus on projects to the exclusion of all else.

Flow

De facto squad medic because he’s the best at Force-healing of the lot of them. He does not appreciate this, this is not what he trained for, you’re voiding his warranty, vode please. Dyed his hair purple because he could.

Edge

Thrill seeker with electric blue hair and boundless energy. The ADHD doesn’t help with the fidgeting, but he likes to go fast so Force-augmented speed is pretty great.

Ry and Cas

True twins born from the same tube, they’re the Fred and George Weasley of clones. They’ve got the red hair and everything. Judicious use of the Force makes pranks far easier.

Other

Caj, Chess and Blade

The brothers in charge of the homebrew alcohol. The taste is a work in progress, but the last batch didn’t make anyone go blind.

Rictor and Sike

Survivors of Krell who deal with their trauma in very different ways. Rictor is terrified of authority in case they turn out like Krell. Sike figures if he survived that he can survive anything and mouths off constantly.

Kano and Oly

Batchmates who were reconditioned separately (for nightmares and injury, respectively) and reunited upon Kano’s rescue. Oly had been with the crew for months by then. They both cried.

Sitrep, Conn and Sig

Three more nonbinary comms officers. A cheerful bunch who like to argue. Usually with each other. The problems started when they started arguing with their General.

Aran, Orar and Tay

Three heavy gunners who fight TJ a lot because the little twerp is asking for it (literally). Tay is relentlessly cheerful, Aran the exact opposite, and you’re lucky to get three words out of Orar in a row.

Ani, Mirdir and Dajun

Techies and mechanics who prefer wires to people. Mirdir and Dajun have known each other since birth and bicker a lot. Ani mostly ignores them.

Dane

A captain who finally snapped and told his General where he could stick his suicidal orders.

Sprint

Full name Slow-Down-There’s-No-Need-To-Sprint, a six foot ball of energy and barely contained enthusiasm. Usually found hurtling around the place at ludicrous speeds.

Crash

An anxious, autistic pilot who has never crashed his ship. He has, however, crashed himself into doors, siblings, training sergeants.

Rainer

A really chill guy who got shipped off for being too violent after a misunderstanding about a sparring match. TJ’s favourite sparring partner.

TJ

Likes to fight, does not care if his opponent could physically snap him in half. Sometimes he just has to beat his brain into submission via getting the crap beaten out of his body. Usually succeeds in provoking the heavy gunners into fighting him.

Zero

TJ’s perpetually worried brother. Really wishes TJ would chill. Dyslexic and has a recurring leg injury that won’t heal. Gets bored easily.

Brook and Storm

A pair of total nerds who get so engrossed in arguing that they don’t realise they’re about to walk into a tree. Frequently wander off and have to be returned.

Jai, Tala, Teek, Niko and Galaar

Five ARCs who got sent back to Kamino for telling their General to go kriff himself. Jai is Force-sensitive. Galaar is just a prick with a terrible sense of humour.

[sneksue]

Official Post About Lifestyle Changes

The date is January 28, 2021. 

I have not had chickens for a while. It will be 2 years in August. I have been meaning to write something here about all of it, but I either have not had time, or the willpower to go through with it. I was in grieving. 

In June of 2019, I took a trip from my shared homestead in Mississippi to Colorado to do some long distance hiking. I left all of my animals in the care of my ex husband’s mother and her then boyfriend. 

I trusted them to at least do the bare minimum in my animal’s basic care. 

That didn’t happen. They failed night after night to close and lock the coop’s door. They wouldn’t change their water during the day and they did not collect eggs. 

When I had service on my phone during the hike, I checked in with them to find out that because they had not closed or locked the coop door at night, several birds were “missing”, with more missing every day. 

Instead of simply closing the door and providing a safe space for my dear, darling animals to sleep at night, they decided to buy a game camera to see what was happening to them at night. 

Their reasoning had absolutely zero logic, and I was pretty pissed.

They found that raccoons were simply just waltzing into the coops and grabbing birds. The raccoons would drag them away into the woods and feast. 

By the time our trip was almost over, all of my ducks were gone. There were only a few chickens left, and the guinea fowl were all intact due to roosting 50ft up in oak trees. My cat was also “missing”.

I was heartbroken, devastated. I had spent so much money, time, energy, and love to build this flock. I wanted to provide my “family” and myself with sustainable, renewable food in case of a natural disaster. No one seemed to value my efforts, or even care to see what my end goal was. 

On top of grieving for the loss of my feathered babies, my then husband’s younger brother decided to GO OFF on me during our drive back to Mississippi. He claimed I was selfish, psychotic, uncaring, and manipulative. He screamed at me while we were all stuck in the car. He called me a bitch, he called me a liar, he called me a leech. I was stunned in silence. I had been struggling with my mental health for years, and had contemplated suicide more times than I could count. So, it is no surprise that while we were driving 70mph on the interstate, I seriously contemplated opening the car door and leaping out into traffic. 

I turned to my husband, my partner, the love of my life, my support system, to back me up. Defend me. Tell his brother that he was wrong. My husband did nothing of the sort. He remained silent as the verbal barrage from his brother continued. 

Everything clicked for me then. My mother in law was a complete nutcase, she blamed me for all of my husband’s shortcomings. She viewed me as a failure for not being the perfect housewife. She only saw me as a burden on her son’s happiness. My husband maintained an emotional distance from me for several years. He refused to be intimate towards me. He never showed an interest in me, my thoughts, my feelings. He never stood up for me or was proud to show me off. He never commended my strengths and triumphs, he only pointed out what he viewed were my failures. My brother in law was more of a nutcase than his mother, physically abusing his dog and neglecting his cat, leeching off of his mother and getting handouts at every possible opportunity, spending his days smoking hundreds of dollars of marijuana, drinking booze, playing videogames. 

I had no social life, I wasn’t allowed to have a social life. 

I had no friends I could hang out with, all of my friends were online. 

No matter how much I did for these people and how much I excelled at everything I did, nothing was ever enough. I was never enough. 

No wonder I struggled with mental health, eh?

I came to this realization instantaneously, and demanded to be dropped off at my dad’s house in Westminster, CO. 

I had none of my personal belongings besides my hiking and camping stuff. I didn’t care, I just had to get away from these toxic monsters. 

My husband and I loosely decided that this would be a “break” for our relationship, and that he would go back to MS to work and save up to move here with me. I agreed and I began working and saving up myself. 

We both knew he was never going to come here. We were never going to be together again. 

We remained in close contact for a few months after the separation. But the contact and our conversations became fewer and less substantial. 

One night, as I was walking home from work, I called and told him that I thought we should break up. He admitted to me that he had removed his wedding ring over three weeks prior. I was understandably hurt by that, but I did understand. 

He also informed me that all of the birds were gone or dead except for a couple roosters. 

I was more devastated by the loss of my birds than the loss of my marriage. If that doesn’t tell you enough, I don’t know what does!! 

My cat never returned. 

I asked him if we could keep in contact, and he told me he did not want to talk to me or hear from me for several years. I was once again hurt by this, but with his own mental health issues, I again, understood. He did say he can see us being friends in the future, but now that its been some time, I don’t want to be friends with him. I want the best for him, but I can’t bring myself to expose my mentality to his toxicity and negativity. 

I asked again and again, over a period of months, for him to return my belongings. He kept putting it off. I told him I was going to drive down there myself and gather everything i could and dispose of the rest. 

He agreed, initially, then banned me from coming only after I requested the time off from work and had friends to accompany me on the journey, He promised he’d send all my stuff in several shipments after he sold my car. I told him he could keep the profit from the sale of my car and use it to send me my stuff. 

He ended up sending me ONE box of my stuff. And most of it wasn’t even mine. I was appalled and disgusted that he’d be so careless and inconsiderate. 

I sent him messages and requested SPECIFIC items after I received the first box. I got no reply, and no more packages to this day have been sent. 

He and his family stole my property, killed my pets, and broke my heart. 

Thieves, liars, and extremists, the lot of them. 

I grieve daily for the loss of my animals and the torture I was put through for nearly 6 years. 

All of that out of the way, let me move on to tell you what this blog will now feature. 

I have obviously had a change in lifestyle. I no longer live on homesteading land, I live in a roomy two bedroom apartment with my AMAZING fiance. 

My love of chickens, I discovered, was a love for reptiles in general. Cuz birds are reptiles and all that jazz. 

When I met my fiance, I was already blown away by his attitude, confidence, and view on life right off the bat! He inspired me, made me want to be better to myself. 

Meeting him felt weird, at first. It felt weird because I was waiting for this amazing person to... have a catch. There’s gotta be a red flag somewhere. And if there isn’t... he is probably a psychopath who will eventually turn on me and kill me. No one is that... good. 

So I thought to myself, “Welp, gotta find out. I’ll go to his house!”

He had a couple little snakes in his room which I demanded to play with. He happily got them out and I was like “THAT’S the catch? Nah, this just convinces me this guy is... my kind of guy.” 

I’ve had a love of snakes since early childhood. Not an interest of passion, but I truly loved interacting with and watching them. I’ve never had an innate fear of any insect, (exclude honeybee, because I didn’t know better at 6 years old), or animal. I love them all and everything they do to contribute. All they experience. 

I used to catch wild garter snakes and rat snakes in nets, pet them, show them to my mother occasionally to freak her out, and release them. Then watch them. 

There were a mating pair of Oteekee Corn Snakes in my HS yard. Every summer we’d see them, out and about hunting, hiding, climbing... growing. They were bright red and jet black with specks of yellow. I could tell these guys were pretty smart and maybe there was more to snakes than I really thought about ever. 

So, being sold on this amazing guy, we up and moved in together. Nice. My paycheck kept going up and up. I was saving a ton. I wanted a car and an apartment as soon as possible. 

I got bonus after bonus for working hard at my job and everyone hitting labor targets. 

We got a place. Nice. 

Both got steady jobs. Nice. 

There’s uh, a lot of room in this new place. Nice. 

Hey it’s my birthday and I can get myself a snake. I have more than enough for supplies and the animal itself. 

I browsed on morphmarket for what felt like ages.... 

I had no idea that there were.... so many complicated genetics with ball pythons. I was highly interested, because if you know me, you know I’m interested in genetics and selective breeding. 

I found there were THOUSANDS of genetic combinations, each with unique names. It was like alien code. The animals were beautiful but I had no idea what I was really looking at. 

One night while going to our local reptile store to get feeder rats, I was looking around at all the glass window babies, as I usually do. 

I made my way around the scorpions, tarantulas, cave scorpions, frogs, lizards, the store’s companion burmese python, and my eyes landed on a little... adorable puppy-eyed baby ball python. The signage stated that it was a Puma. Seemed simple enough. Easy name to remember. I looked into the glass at the lil noodle, and talked all baby talk and shit. The sweet little thing came right up to scope at me, then yawned. 

I called an employee over and said I’d like to handle this animal right here. The employee obliged and I fell in love. Sexed as male. Easy buy. 

I cried on the way home, It was amazing. I have one picture on here of him a few days after I got him. His name is Mallow, and he is bigger now, but still just as sweet. 

So yeah. It went from there. Now, including the boa and ball python that are my fiance’s, and Mallow, we have added 3 more to our family. We are done now, as these animals may live a loooooong time. And they require space and attention just like any other pet. They’re not expensive, and they’re low maintenance care is nearly brainless if you set it up right. They’re statistically and actually safer than dogs or cats, and are absolutely therapeutic and entertaining. 

This blog will from this day forward be dedicated to snake content, reptile content, and a lot more fun, actually good pictures. I will also share genetic related stuff I find relevant. 

Not having a shitty phone camera is pretty great, tbh. 

TLDR: No more homestead. Ex is evil (yeah yeah), New place new animal new me. SNAKES! SNAKES!!!! SNAAAAAAAAAKKKKKKKKEEEEESSSSS!

I know this post is just for me but whatever, if I make myself laugh. Cool. G’night.