“My Generation” is a song by the British rock group The Who, which became a hit and one of their most recognizable songs. The song was named the 11th greatest song by Rolling Stone on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 13th on VH1′s list of the 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll. It’s also part of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll and is inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “historical, artistic and significant” value. In 2009 it was named the 37th Greatest Hard Rock Song by VH1. The song, composed by Pete Townshend at the age of twenty in 1965, was written for rebellious British youths called Mods, and expressed their feeling that older people “just don’t get it”.
“Rumble” is an influential rock instrumental by Link Wray & His Ray Men. Originally released in 1958, “Rumble” utilized then-unexplored techniques like distortion and feedback. The song is one of very few instrumental single banned from the radio airwaves.” It is also described as the first song to use the power chord, the “major modus operandi of the modern rock guitarist”.
“Elektronik Türküler” (1974) was the first real long-play of Erkin Koray, besides of the self-titled album his old record company published without his knowledge one year earlier, which only was a collection of singles. In his words, this album had “a great sentimental worth” and he “created some of the things he wanted to give, but never had the chance to in his singles”. The album was made within a studio work of 150 hours, and was “the furthermost point one could go by bringing in electronic elements to our folk songs without loosing the beauty and ‘natural taste’”. “Cemalim” is an old folk song of the Cappadocian area which first was assembled by regional folk singer Refik Başaran. As to Koray, it “decribes the humiliate but manly feelings of Cemal” and is a blend of “a whining but ‘hard’ guitar coming from time to time to the foreground, and a firmly played but soft tuned Spanish guitar”.
If you like your pop music primitive and primeval – which would, on reflection, make it rock music – you’ll love the Minutes. A Dublin three-piece, what they do is so unreconstructed and unrefined they make Black Sabbath sound like the White Stripes. No, that doesn’t quite work. No, they sound like Black Sabbath doing the White Stripes. [Source]
A companion video for “Almost Gone” — a new song by legendary singer-songwriter Graham Nash and musician James Raymond (son of David Crosby) — is being released today in support of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. The free download is available on Nash’s website (www.grahamnash.com) and the Bradley Manning Support Network site www.bradleymanning.org.
The release is timed to Manning’s first judicial hearing scheduled for December 16th, following more than 17-months in custody, including a year in solitary confinement that Amnesty International has characterized as “harsh and punitive.”
Visually, the Almost Gone video is punctuated with bold graphics, disturbing images and harsh facts. Its release is scheduled to precede Manning’s pre-trial hearing on December 16, which is the day before his 24th birthday. The Bradley Manning Support Network has named the following day, December 17, its International Day of Solidarity (http://events.bradleymanning.org/). PFC Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who had been stationed near Baghdad, was arrested in May 2010 under suspicion of leaking classified information, including a video showing the killing of civilians, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Nash and Raymond composed the song “Almost Gone (The Ballad of Bradley Manning)” during this spring’s US tour of Crosby-Nash, and the new recording serves as the music bed for the video; it features an impassioned lead vocal by Nash, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted (Crosby, Stills & Nash, and The Hollies). “Bradley Manning is a hero to me,” he sings, acknowledging Manning’s role in making public videos and documents that shed light on such as issues as the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and bribes play in international diplomacy.
In July 1996, Tom Engelshoven of Dutch music magazine Oor described Jeffrey Lee Pierce as the missing link between the Eagles and Kurt Cobain. Four months after the Gun Club frontman had passed away, the article labeled him as the true victim of what Engelshoven interpreted as “the American disease.” Among the symptoms were a strong identification with violence and death and a clear notion of American society being imbued with it. Pierce’s lyrics testified of his awareness of America’s earliest history, a nation established at the barrel of a gun. Obsessed with an inevitable apocalyptic destiny, he took his lowlife background as an explanation for a feverish longing for decay. Sex, booze, and drugs all claimed their share in a self-destructive lifestyle, culminating in an early death at the age of 37. Wildweed was the first of two solo albums Pierce made in between his Gun Club albums. Following in the footsteps of remarkable statements like Miami and The Las Vegas Story, the material presented here isn’t all that different. The violence theme practically drips from the album cover, depicting Pierce with a dreamy look and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Standing amidst what could be the last true vestige of an unspoiled, rural America, it’s a fair bet that he’s ready to shoot anything even slightly disturbing — upon which he probably will utter one final howl before putting himself “to rest” as well. Plenty of those howls are scattered through Wildweed, which opens with a strong threesome of “Love and Desperation,” “Sex Killer,” and “Cleopatra Dreams On.” In more than one way, “Love and Desperation” is the twin to The Fire of Love’s “Sex Beat.” Apart from the infectious driving beat, one only has to compare the lyrics of the latter (“I, I know your reasons/And I, I know your goals/We can f*ck forever/But you will never get my soul”) to the former (“Somebody hurts you, so you hurt me/So I hurt somebody else, who I have never seen/Who hurts somebody else, why on down the road/Who hurts somebody else who goes on home/With you”) to conclude that Pierce’s world is one in which love takes a wrong turn most of the time. Halfway through the album things get a little awkward when, during the nursery rhyme of “Hey Juana,” Pierce starts name-checking a colleague (“Now Nick the Cave/He spent all his pay/On a bottle of gin/And a shark without a fin”). Luckily, “The Midnight Promise” makes a beautiful closing piece. Alas, the CD release of Wildweed adds some extra tracks that appeared on the Love and Desperation 12″ instead of the more intriguing experiments with spoken word from the 7″ bonus that came with the album or the free jazz of the title track of the Flamingo EP.
Mark Lanegan Band returns in February with Blues Funeral, the group’s first LP since 2004′s Bubblegum. Recorded with Alain Johannes in Hollywood, CA, the 12-track effort includes familiar faces like that of Josh Homme, Greg Dulli, and Jack Irons. Our first hymn from the wake is the aptly titled “The Gravedigger’s Song”, which actually sounds more like old school Queens of the Stone Age than the actual band has in years. [Source]
Random Hold went about recording their first album with Peter Hammill (Van Der Graaf Generator), and they wound up with two LPs’ worth of material. Polydor released a single for “Etceteraville” that failed to do well. The band embarked on a 13-date tour with XTC, and the five-song Avalanche EP appeared on the racks around this time, accompanied by another slew of lukewarm reviews. A couple months after the tour with XTC, the band headed out with the extremely supportive Peter Gabriel as the opening act on his U.K. tour. The tour coincided with the release of The View From Here, a full-length record culled from the sessions with Hammill. The reviews were more positive than not, but this proved to be of little help — Polydor dropped the band shortly after they returned from the tour. [Source]
A Black Box is an album by Peter Hammill, originally released on S-Type Records in August 1980. Hammill performed nearly all the instrumentation himself, including the drum parts, a task he had first undertaken on his previous album pH7. His ex-Van der Graaf Generator colleague David Jackson also made a guest appearance, along with David Ferguson of the new-wave band Random Hold, whose debut album Hammill had produced. Side 1 of the record featured a collection of songs, while side 2 was devoted to “Flight”, a lengthy multi-section song. This was the first time Hammill had included a lengthy song of this type on one of his solo albums. The short-lived S-Type label (the name was a pun on “stereo-type”), on which the album was originally released, was set up by Hammill and his then manager Gail Colson. Colson had formerly been a director at Hammill’s previous record company, Charisma Records, who had dropped him from their roster just prior to the recording of A Black Box. The S-Type label does not appear to have been a successful business project, and the album was later licensed to Virgin Records, who have since also acquired Hammill’s Charisma catalogue.
