Weekend Reads (November 9): Quincy Jones (RIP), “The Boys of Summer,” ’80s Typography, The Beatles
Recommended weekend reading material for November 9, 2024.
Quincy Jones died this week at the age of 91. The legendary producer was responsible for some of the biggest albums of all time (e.g., Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and worked with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Aretha Franklin.
Jones was at home in nearly every branch of popular music: During a career that spanned seven decades and included work as a trumpet player, composer, arranger, producer, conductor and scorer, his work touched on big-band jazz, bebop, gospel, blues, soul, funk, Quiet Storm R&B, disco, rock, and rap. He is best known for his involvement with Jackson, which brought an unparalleled level of musical dexterity to several of the most popular albums of all time and helped redefine what it meant to be a pop star.
But by the time Jones got to Jackson, he had already carved a path through jazz and early Sixties bubblegum pop and numerous film scores, studied with the famous classical composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, arranged records for Ray Charles and conducted Frank Sinatra’s band. Few musicians in history have enjoyed such a richly varied career and success in as many arenas. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2017, Jones presented his creative restlessness as part of a life-long commitment to learning as much about music as he possibly could. “You gotta hope you can make all the mistakes you can so you learn,” he said. “I made all the mistakes. All of ’em.”
Related: Tributes to Jones have been rolling in from LL Cool J, Michael Caine, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gloria Estefan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and more.
Also related: Ten songs that highlight Jones’ legacy and genius.
Toby Manning reflects on Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” — one of the most iconic ballads to emerge from the ’80s. The song turned 40 last month.
Given that “The Boys of Summer” concerns an older lover rendered obsolete by newer, shinier models, and that Henley had just turned 37, the song’s meta-levels are signalled from the off. So, its sonic landscape can be heard as a digitised analogue of the political landscape, where anxiety and loss are components, rather than contradictions, of 80s positivity and gloss (A-ha’s “Take on Me,” the same year, has a similar feel). Emerging from tinny alarm-clock radios, musclebound ghetto-blasters, or privatised Sony Walkman cassette-players, “The Boys of Summer”’s evocation of sunshine was so suffused with loss that it sounded spectral, otherworldly, uncanny. It still does.
A group of former Pitchfork editors has launched a new music publication that seeks to avoid the mistakes that Pitchfork — once the preeminent site for online music news and reviews — made. But they face a completely new media landscape.
Nearly a year later, five former Pitchfork journalists are getting the band back together to start a new online music publication, Hearing Things. The site… aims to capture the original independent spirit of Pitchfork while tuning out the stan armies that worship huge artists.
The founders of Hearing Things are tacking against major trends in both the music and publishing businesses. Magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, once dominant cultural tastemakers, have been pushed aside by recommendation algorithms on Spotify and TikTok. Digital advertising is migrating toward juggernauts like Amazon. The biggest artists monopolize the cultural conversation.
Hearing Things has published a number of interesting features since their launch, like this interview with Dawn Richard and a behind-the-scenes look at a popular benefit album for Hurricane Helene victims.
Design experts highlight some of the best typography to emerge from the ’80s.
As designers began to experiment with form and function, they leveraged digital advancements to create typefaces that were both visually striking and highly legible. As a result, typography during this era was more than just a means of communication. It became a cultural touchstone, influencing everything from advertising to the birth of personal computing.
Via TLDR Design.
More and more employers are using AI tools to process job applications, but those AI tools are overwhelmingly biased towards white males.
The UW researchers tested three open-source, large language models (LLMs) and found they favored resumes from white-associated names 85% of the time, and female-associated names 11% of the time. Over the 3 million job, race and gender combinations tested, Black men fared the worst with the models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.
Why do machines have such a outsized bias for picking white male job candidates? The answer is a digital take on the old adage “you are what you eat.”
The Beatles have been nominated for a Grammy, nearly 50 years after they broke up, for a song that was restored with AI.
Their final song, called “Now and Then,” was restored last year with the help of AI, and is now up for record of the year alongside the likes of Beyoncé, Charlie XCX, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift. It’s also been nominated for best rock performance, where it goes up against Green Day, Pearl Jam, and The Black Keys.
A lost story by Dracula author Bram Stoker has been discovered 134 years after it’s original publish date.
Brian Cleary stumbled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while browsing the archives of the National Library of Ireland.
Gibbet Hill was originally published in a Dublin newspaper in 1890 — when the Irishman started working on Dracula — but has been undocumented ever since.
Stoker biographer Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his development as an author and was a significant “station on his route to publishing Dracula.”
A man spent over $2 million dollars on a globe-spanning cloud computing network to find the world’s largest prime number.
On October 21, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a global community project dedicated to finding these incomprehensibly huge numbers, confirmed the 52nd Mersenne prime number is (drumroll, please) 2136279841-1. To translate, that’s equivalent to multiplying the number 2 together 136,279,841 times, then subtracting 1. The latest mathematical figure stretches to include 41,024,320 digits — a number so gargantuan that the .txt file housing it takes up 41.8Mb. For reference, .txt file for Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (587,287 words) is a paltry 3.4 Mb.
Via 1440.
Apple recently released an iOS feature that automatically reboots phones that haven’t been unlocked after a period of time. The feature, intended to improve phone security, has been cause for alarm for law enforcement officials.
On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.
Via Techmeme.
Finally, call it the end of an era: due in part to the increasing availability of WiFi as well as printing’s general downtrend, airlines are phasing out their in-flight magazines.
Carpenter emphasized the idea of the airline magazine reaching everyone possible. An in-flight magazine is “for you, it’s for your mother, and it’s for your daughter,” she said. “Everyone has to be able to read it. It crosses generations with its appeal. Most people are aware the audience is broad.” So: the opposite type of product, really, from the personalized digital content tooled and retooled by increasingly specific customer data. “It can’t be niche,” Carpenter continued. “It can’t make people feel separated from it. It’s not going to be political or religious. It’s going to be inspiring, positive. Airline magazines don’t write bad reviews. We don’t interview someone to make them feel dumb. It’s all about putting positivity out into the world.”
From the Blog
The Cure released their long-awaited fourteenth album, Songs of a Lost World, on November 1. And naturally, I reviewed it:
Whatever happens down the road, Songs of a Lost World possesses an undeniable sense of finality. If — heaven forbid! — it does prove to be their final album, then Robert Smith and the boys can rest easy knowing that they’ve met and exceeded their fans’ expectations, and gone out in a manner befitting the finest — and gloomiest — Cure tradition.
Related: To celebrate the release of Songs of a Lost World, The Cure performed an epic three-hour-long set that featured the new album in its entirety as well as a collection of Cure classics from throughout their storied history.
Also related: Before Songs of a Lost World came out, I revisited The Cure’s catalog and ranked all of their albums, from 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys to 2008’s 4:13 Dream.
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