Pasadena Pictures
a blog by my recent stuff
Zach Urbina
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Jessica Paré - New York Magazine by Zachary Scott, May 2012
Paré laughs easily and often, despite a case of extreme jet lag. Bali is fifteen hours...
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“MARLBORO” by:Dylan Silva on Flickr
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breadfast: the world’s coolest future toaster.
Tag Results
4 posts tagged music
Don’t Know Why I Love You
“ It is tempting to dismiss music as a purely cultural phenomenon and rock as an aberration of 20th-century culture. That is pretty much the explanation musicologists and cultural theorists have favoured as they dissect the arcane details of who-copied-what-from-whom, interpreting the history of popular music in a mumbo-jumbo of postmodern critique.
By contrast, an evolutionary biologist starts from the assumption that things don’t happen by themselves, especially things that dramatically increase your risk of dying, as rocking out certainly does. Anything as popular, exciting, sexy, deadly and - most of all - as difficult to do well, needs an explanation. But we need to ask the right questions.
Asking how making and listening to music affects the reproductive fitness of individual musicians and audience members can only tell us part of the story. We also need to consider other evolutionary processes that have operated on individuals and their genes that might predispose something as sexy and dangerous as rock to shake, rattle and revolutionise the modern world.
No sane person would argue that rock is not cultural: it is well known that rock arose in the 1950s out of existing musical traditions including rhythm and blues, folk, blues, jazz and country. It spread through learning and imitation, assisted by a special blend of social and economic circumstances that arose soon after World War II and the spread of technologies like commercial radio, record players and television. But even though rock is a quintessentially cultural phenomenon, it grew in the soil of our evolved biology. That is what makes it so utterly compelling, and why, a decade into the 21st century, it is still going so strong.” continue reading | Cosmos Magazine
[title: Mick Jagger][image: Iori Tomita]
Justin Kamerer aka Angryblue re-released two of his great Weapons of Mass Creation prints with cooking and art themes and added a new one: Music.
KCRW & DTLA Team Up To Prove Friends Are *Indeed* Eclectic |
Authenticity can’t be bought; you have to earn it. As KCRW’s Jason Bentley smiled down from an opera box at Downtown LA’s Orpheum Theater, the music lovers beneath him all knew that Saturday night’s Are Friends Eclectic? benefit show, was absolutely steeped in untainted authenticity.
Standout performances from Anna Calvi, Other Lives, White Denim, and Iron & Wine trailblazed a remarkable line-up that also included reggae legend Jimmy Cliff.
For followers of Internet culture, keeping up with the newest and edgiest Indie music remains relatively easy; however, for Los Angeles radio listeners it is cultural steward KCRW who brings those Indie gems to a wider audience. Are Friends Eclectic? provided a solid opportunity to sample these gems, as each band played three or four songs, before clearing the stage for the next act.
I caught up with Other Lives lead singer Jesse Tabish, who couldn’t stop praising KCRW for their support. “We’ve never been a band who’s gotten a lot of airplay,” confessed the Oklahoma native. “KCRW was literally the first national radio station to play our music.” If you’ve ever heard Other Lives’ Tamer Animals, you know full well the blatant criminality of this statement.
continue reading | Zachary Urbina | Los Angeles I’m Yours
[photos: Jeremiah Garcia]
