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Zunguzungu v. Clapton
Over at zunguzungu, there’s much talk about Eric Clapton, electrification, manipulation, authenticity and Robert Johnson:
From the Guardian:
Eric Clapton once described Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”…[but] nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.
I, like many people, only know of Robert Johnson through Eric Clapton; I know Cream’s Crossroads a lot better than Johnson’s, and like it more too. But I love the fact that the figure of origin, used to authenticate electric blues by so many white electric bluesmen like Clapton, cannot now be disentangled from studio gimmickry. Part of the Clapton thing was that he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric. Rock and Roll as the electrified blues is every hack music journalist’s favorite cliche. And now it turns out
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Winehouse takes on Talented Musicians
Amy Winehouse lost the job of performing the theme song to the new James Bond film due to her inability to stay clean–the gig eventually went to the team of White Stripes’ Jack White and Alicia Keys
But according to the Telegraph UK, Winehouse is threatening to release the version of the Bond theme in order to show the flim (SIC) producers that they have “made a big mistake.”
Said Winehouse, “I guess they are going for clean-cut and boring. When I do release mine – and I am tempted to do it on the same day – this would be the bigger hit…If they change their minds, I’m waiting.”
Yes… those other musicians are such commercial phonies. They’re not indie enough to do the theme for a James Bond movie. The tabloid junkie British soul singer in the cleopatra make-up is obviously the “authentic” one. She’s going to prove she’s legit by selling more records– the true measure of a successful artist.