Tom Jones and CSN&Y

[ed. An amazingly talented singer. Here, Tom schools the boys on one of their own songs (except for Stephen Stills, who gets insanely inspired). Great seeing the looks of amazement all around. Found this after watching a Rick Beato interview with Alison Krauss, another video that shouldn't be missed. An amazingly talented singer in her own right.]

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

[ed. ... around 3:50 - 8:20]

Lawman

Sylvie gonna bring a little water
Baby's gonna cry until he's fed
And the fire's gonna burn down to nothing
Poor folk gonna scrap for a piece of bread

And the preacher's gonna preach from the Bible
Devil's gonna laugh at what he said
Gambler gonna lay down his last gold dollar
Shadow's gonna creep from the farmer's shed

And the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead

Now the ground's gonna freeze when fall is over
Fever gonna burn in a big brass bed
The big iron gonna rust, everything's dust to dust
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead

Yeah the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead

Huw Montague Rendall & Elisabeth Boudreault

[ed. Singing "Pa-Pa-Pa-Papagena" (Mozart: Die Zauberflöte). I don't know who these folks are but they seem to be having a great time. From the comments:]

***

For those for whom context is scarce, this is "Pa-Pa-Pa-Papagena", coming at the end of the Magic Flute. Papageno has been finally reunited with his Papagena, and they are dreaming of the many children they will have together.

Papageno is a comic character, hence the wide-eyed singing here.

English translation here: https://www.opera-arias.com/mozart/die-zauberflote/pa-pa-pa-papageno/

Synopsis of The Magic Flute here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Flute

via:

Daryl Hall & Kenny Loggins

 

[ed. Fun jam.]

Turnpike Troubadours (feat. Sierra Hull)

[ed. For Jerry. Written by Robert Earl Keen.]

Frank Sinatra

 

Frank Zappa & The Mothers: Cheaper Than Cheep

[ed. Decades ahead of their time (1974). Not rock, jazz, or fusion - something else entirely. Frank was a true visionary (and all-around great musician/composer).]

Peter Keane

[ed. See also: Tylersville Road and an excellent Bob Dylan cover - I Want You.]

Frank Zappa: The MTV Interview

[ed. Man, I still miss the guy. I wish we had politicians this intelligent, direct and honest. Actually, not just politicians, everybody. Had a good laugh around 12:20, after he got done talking about John and Yoko stealing one of his songs.]

via:

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

Wayne Sumstine, “When The Ship Comes In”

Arlo Guthrie, "When The Ship Comes In"

Notes on Acquired Taste. Why Do We Make an Effort To Like Things?

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):

“…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis). 

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.

• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sontag by Edward Hausner / New York Times Co./Getty Images

[ed. See also: here and here.]

Dusty Springfield

[ed. Haven't thought about Dusty for a long time until hearing her again last night. See also: The Look of Love.]

WAR

[ed. Man, it's hot. Summer in full swing.]

Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam, Lollapalooza, Vancouver, 1992. Photo by Lance Mercer.

via:

via:

Jim Croce

[ed. A favorite.]

Rhiannon Giddens

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and also contributed to support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Congress.

In the years leading up to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham had earned a national reputation as a tense, violent and racially segregated city, in which even tentative racial integration in any form was met with violent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. described Birmingham as "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States."...

Black and white residents of Birmingham were segregated between different public amenities, such as water fountains, and places of public gathering such as movie theaters. The city had no black police officers or firefighters and most black residents could expect to find only menial employment in professions such as cooks and cleaners. Black residents did not just experience segregation in the context of leisure and employment, but also in the context of their freedom and well-being. Given the state's disenfranchisement of most black people since the turn of the century, by making voter registration essentially impossible, few of the city's black residents were registered to vote. Bombings at black homes and institutions were a regular occurrence, with at least 21 separate explosions recorded at black properties and churches in the eight years before 1963. However, none of these explosions had resulted in fatalities. These attacks earned the city the nickname "Bombingham" - Wikipedia

Todd Snider

[ed. See also: Ottoman Turks, American Male. Have a safe and happy 4th everyone.]

Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me

Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males

[...more]

Bob Dylan & Julian Lage

Bob Dylan has just recruited one of the world's greatest jazz guitarists – and no one quite knows what's going on (Guitar World)

[ed. He's always recruited the best. See other Julian Lage videos if you're not familiar with him (I'll post a few links later, or just do a search here). Not counting The Band, the Dead, and TP&The Heartbreakers, Larry Campbell was also a favorite.]

Ron Gallo

[ed. See also: Young Lady, You're Scaring Me.]