The Devil was David Bowie

“…Neil was adamant that the Devil was David Bowie. He just said, ‘He is. You must draw David Bowie. Find David Bowie, or I’ll send you David Bowie. Because if it isn’t David Bowie, you’re going to have to redo it until it is David Bowie.’ So I said, ‘Okay, it’s David Bowie.’…”

Kelley Jones
From Hanging out with the Dream King (a book consisting of interviews with Gaiman’s collaborators)

 

The title character from the cover of Lucifer #16, artist Christopher Moeller.

 

Gustave Doré, Depiction of Satan, the central character of John Milton’s Paradise Lost c. 1866

 

Lucifer Morningstar is a DC Comics character appearing primarily as a supporting character in the comic book series The Sandman and as the title character of a spin-off, both published under the Vertigo imprint.

Though various depictions of Lucifer – the Biblical fallen angel and Devil of the Abrahamic religions – have been presented by DC Comics in their run, this interpretation by Neil Gaiman debuted in The Sandman in 1989.

In the earlier related series The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman, Lucifer abandoned his lordship over Hell. While Lucifer had previously appeared in various stereotypical guises in earlier DC books, Gaiman’s version was premised on English poet and prose writer John Milton‘s Paradise Lost (at Gaiman’s request of the artist, Lucifer looks like David Bowie at the time).

A Kind of Chelsea Heterosexual Bonding

 

At the Chelsea Hotel, Robert Mapplethorpe claimed (in his version), he met Patti Smith, who appeared in his open doorway looking for someone else, not Robert, whom she had never met. “I woke up,” Robert said, “and there was Patti. We recognized each other’s souls instantly. We had matching bodies. I had never met her, but I knew her.”

“Robert at first was too poor to live at the Chelsea Hotel, so he lived down the street, but he hung out in the Chelsea, cruising its corridors, picking up on the art-sex-and-drugs cachet of the address, trying to meet people who knew people.” Robert at the time was twenty years old and had been hustling Manhattan for four years. He was six years away from meeting art historian John McKendry, curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who bought Robert his first serious camera. Robert worked the Chelsea Hotel and the galleries by day the way, in the later, more successful, period in the late seventies, he worked clubs like Max’s Kansas City, The Saint, and the Mine Shaft by night. Those early days, he once told me, were hard and dark. Sometimes, he was able to afford the tab on a small room at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. Sometimes, he retired to a dingy walk-up just down the street. In New York, one’s address is everything, and crashing the Chelsea, the notorious avant-garde enclave, gave Robert his first tangible sense of arrival.

 

 

The androgynous bodies took, according to Robert’s take, to a kind of Chelsea heterosexual bonding. They became a couple on the art-and-party circuit. They pooled their money to afford their nightly visits to Mickey Ruskin’s bistro at Park Avenue and Sixteenth Street, Max’s Kansas City, where sixties pop celebrated itself nightly. “I hated going there,” Robert said, “but I had to.”

 

 

At dawn, the young couple returned to the Chelsea. Robert supposedly had kicked a hole in the wall between his room and Patti’s. This instant suite was his first attempt at interior design. Robert needed Patti. He was alone. She was there. She nurtured him for several years. She was a writer and he was mad for the company of writers. She was a singer and he loved rock ‘n’ roll. The Chelsea Girls film had lasted three hours and fifteen minutes. Robert and Patti lasted longer. For a while, as a couple, they were chronologically correct, until they weren’t. Patti graduated to her own stardom, travels, and odalisques. One pop culture urban tale has Patti running off with playwright Sam Shepard, leaving Shepard’s writer/film actress wife, O-1an Jones (O-lan later became a theater legend, directing her experimental music and theater company, Overtone Industries). Another urban pop tale, told by porn star J. D. Slater, pairs Patti with the lead guitarist of MC-5, Fred Sonic Smith. Patti Smith herself can be the only one to tell the tales of her heart. Whatever her real private history, the true romance pop culture story is she never really left Robert, not for men, not for women, not for music, not for long, because she was more than his muse; she was his twin, his divine androgyne, and he was her photographer, the artist whose camera, with her, became positively Kirlian, capturing her spirit, her aura, her being.

His camera became their bond. “Patti is a genius.” Robert said that so often I began to understand that what he said about Patti he was projecting about himself as modestly as he could. His style was to reveal his personal self by indirection. (His professional self he revealed by edict.) Consequently, I never knew much about Patti, to whom I sometimes spoke on Robert’s phone calls from my home, because Robert used her as an emblem to talk about himself. When Edward Lucie-Smith met Robert and Patti, they were inmates at the Chelsea: spiritually, but not physically. “When I met him,” Edward said, “Robert was in one of his ‘broke’ phases, and the walk-up a few doors down the street was the place where he slept, if he ever did sleep, while he hung out at the Chelsea.” But Robert and Patti seemed avantly certifiable Chelsea Girls. Signs and omens were everywhere. Andy Warhol’s film was banned in Boston and Chicago. The “Chelsea Robert,” so enthralled by Warhol, was already on the trendy trajectory toward censorship.

 

Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera

Jack Fritscher

From Nightwatchman to Nightswimming

Michael Stipe photographed by Anton Corbijn, 1992

 

Photo by Jean-Marc Lubrano, 2004

 

Image from R.E.M.: HELLO (2008), by David Belisle

 

“Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

The photograph on the dashboard taken years ago,
turned around backwards so the windshield shows.
Every street light reveals a picture in reverse
Still it’s so much clearer

I forgot my shirt at the water’s edge
The moon is low tonight

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I’m not sure all these people understand
It’s not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
The recklessness in water
They cannot see me naked
These things they go away
Replaced by every day

Nightswimming,
remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit around the fairest sun?
The bright tide forever drawn
Could not describe nightswimming

You, I thought I knew you
You, I cannot judge
You, I thought you knew me
This one laughing quietly
Underneath my breath
Nightswimming

The photograph reflects
Every street light a reminder
Nightswimming
Deserves a quiet night
Deserves a quiet night”

 

Nightswimming is a song by the American alternative rock band R.E.M. It was released in 1993 as the fifth single from the group’s eighth album Automatic for the People (1992). Nightswimming is a ballad featuring singer Michael Stipe accompanied only by bassist Mike Mills on piano, a string arrangement by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and a prominent oboe by Deborah Workman in the latter part of the piece. Stipe sings about a group of friends who go skinny dipping at night, which draws from similar experiences in the band’s early days.

Bassist Mike Mills recalled he was playing a piano riff at John Keane‘s studio in the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia. While Mills almost discarded the melody, it attracted the interest of singer Michael Stipe. Mills said, “I never thought it would amount to much because it was just a circular thing that kept going round and round and round. But it inspired Michael.” While the song was not included on Out of Time, the demo recorded during those sessions was used for Automatic for the People, with a string arrangement by John Paul Jones added to the track. Mills has also claimed he recorded the piano part at Criteria Studios in Miami, on the same piano used by Derek and the Dominos on the recording of Layla.

The inspiration for the song has been debated by the band members. Stipe, in a 2001 Esquire article, clarified the true origin of the song. “A few years ago, I wanted to write a song about night watchmen, so I hired one to guard the R.E.M. offices in Athens. I bought him a uniform and a flashlight and everything. He turned out to be kind of crazy and called me up in the middle of the night to tell me dirty stories about the Kennedys. I wrote the song about him, but he was so paranoid he said he was going to sue me, so I changed the lyric from Night watchman to Nightswimming.”

Conversely in the past, Mills said, “It’s based on true events”, explaining that in the early 1980s R.E.M. and its circle of friends would go skinny dipping after the Athens clubs closed at night. “We’d go to parties, we’d go to the clubs and we’d go to the Ball Pump, and there would be any number of these same 50 people, so it was a very tight circle of friends.” Peter Buck holds a similar interpretation. However, Stipe has denied that that is the topic of the song; rather, Stipe says the song is about a “kind of an innocence that’s either kind of desperately clung onto or obviously lost.” Stipe said there are autobiographical elements to the song, but insists most of it is “made up.”

 

To listen to this song, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Without Exceptions

 
 

Everybody Hurts is a song by R.E.M., originally released on the band’s 1992 album Automatic for the People and was also released as a single in 1993.

Much of the song was written by drummer Bill Berry, although as R.E.M. shares songwriting credits among its members, it is unknown how much he actually wrote. Berry did not drum on the song—a Univox drum machine took his place—but he was responsible for the sampling of the drum pattern on the track. The string arrangement was written by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

Guitarist Peter Buck commented on the making of the track saying “Everybody Hurts is similar to Man on the Moon. Bill brought it in, and it was a one-minute long country-and-western song. It didn’t have a chorus or a bridge. It had the verse . . . it kind of went around and around, and he was strumming it. We went through about four different ideas and how to approach it and eventually came to that Stax, Otis Redding, Pain in My Heart kind of vibe. I’m not sure if Michael would have copped that reference, but to a lot of our fans it was a Staxxy-type thing. It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what, and then Bill ended up not playing on the original track. It was me and Mike and a drum machine. And then we all overdubbed.”

In the liner notes of the album In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988–2003, Buck writes that “the reason the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers”, and “I’ve never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the idea that high school is a portal to hell seems pretty realistic to me.” Incidentally, the song was used in the 1992 film of the same name that preceded the show.

In 2005, Buck told the BBC: “If you’re consciously writing for someone who hasn’t been to college, or is pretty young, it might be nice to be very direct. In that regard, it’s tended to work for people of a lot of ages.”

Everybody Hurts was included as a bonus track on Patti Smith‘s 2007 album Twelve.

 
 

Stills from 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

 
 

Michael Stipe in a still from  Everybody Hurts music video

 
 

In the video for the song, directed by Jake Scott and filmed along the double deck portions of I-10 near the I-35 Interchange in Downtown San Antonio, Texas, the band is stuck in a traffic jam. It shows the people in other cars and subtitles of their thoughts appear on screen. At the end, all the people leave their cars and walk instead; then they vanish. The video was heavily inspired by the traffic jam in the opening dream sequence of Fellini’s 8½.

Jake Scott is the son of director Ridley Scott, and nephew of the late Tony Scott and brother of directors Jordan Scott and Luke Scott.

The music video can be watched on The Genealogy of Style‘s Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

The Responsibility that Comes with His Freedom

“A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.”

Bob Dylan

Patti Smith’s Wall. Photo by Judy Linn, c.1969

Lennon and The Psychedelic Experience

Come Together, drawing by John Lennon

 
 

The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (commonly referred to as The Psychedelic Experience) is an instruction manual intended for use during sessions involving psychedelic drugs. The book is dedicated to Aldous Huxley and includes a short introductory citation from Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. Part of this text was used by The Beatles in the song Tomorrow Never Knows (1966).

 
 

Recording Give Peace a Chance. Left to right: Rosemary Leary (face not visible), Tommy Smothers (with back to camera), John Lennon, Timothy Leary, Yoko Ono, Judy Marcioni and Paul Williams

 
 

Timothy Leary once recruited Lennon to write a theme song for his California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan (which was interrupted by his prison sentence due to cannabis possession), inspiring Lennon to come up with Come Together (1969), based on Leary’s theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, recorded Give Peace a Chance (1969) during one of their bed-ins in Montreal, and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song.

The original last verse of the song refers to: “John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper, Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Hare Krishna”. In the performance of Give Peace a Chance included on the Live Peace in Toronto 1969 album, Lennon openly stated that he could not remember all of the words and improvised with the names of the band members sharing the stage with him and anything that came to mind: “John and Yoko, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Penny Lane, Roosevelt, Nixon, Tommy Jones and Tommy Cooper, and somebody.” The third verse contains a reference to masturbation, but Lennon changed this to “mastication” on the official lyric sheet. He later admitted this was a “cop out” but wanted to avoid unnecessary controversy.

To watch the music video, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Wanting to Be Big Stars

“The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict.”

Mark Twain
Corn Pone Opinions
1923

 
 

 
 

“Sha, la, la, la, la, la, la

Mmm

Uh huh

I was down at the New Amsterdam

Staring at this yellow-haired girl

Mr Jones strikes up a conversation

Sha, la, la, la, la, la, la

Mmm

Uh huh

With a black-haired flamenco dancer

You know, she dances while his father plays guitar

She’s suddenly beautiful

We all want something beautiful

Man, I wish I was beautiful

So come dance the silence down through the morning

Sha la, la, la, la, la, la, la

Yeah

Uh huh

Yeah

Cut up, Maria!

Show me some of that Spanish dancin’

Pass me a bottle, Mr Jones

Believe in me

Help me believe in anything

‘Cause I want to be someone who believes

Yeah

Mr Jones and me

Tell each other fairy tales

And we stare at the beautiful women

She’s looking at you

Ah, no, no, she’s looking at me

Smilin’ in the bright lights

Coming through in stereo

When everybody loves you

You can never be lonely

Well, I’m gonna paint my picture

Paint myself in blue and red and black and gray

All of the beautiful colors are very, very meaningful

Yeah, well, you know gray is my favorite color

I felt so symbolic yesterday

If I knew Picasso

I would buy myself a gray guitar and play

Mr Jones and me

Look into the future

Yeah, we stare at the beautiful women

She’s looking at you

I don’t think so

She’s looking at me

Standing in the spotlight

I bought myself a gray guitar

When everybody loves me

I will never be lonely

I will never be lonely

Said I’m never gonna be

Lonely

I wanna be a lion

Yeah, everybody wants to pass as cats

We all wanna be big, big stars

Yeah, but we got different reasons for that

Believe in me

‘Cause I don’t believe in anything

And I wanna be someone to believe, to believe, to believe

Yeah!

Mr Jones and me

Stumbling through the Barrio

Yeah, we stare at the beautiful women

She’s perfect for you

Man, there’s got to be somebody for me

I wanna be Bob Dylan

Mr Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky

When everybody love you

Oh! Son, that’s just about as funky as you can be

Mr Jones and me

Starin’ at the video

When I look at the television, I wanna see me

Staring right back at me

We all wanna be big stars

But we don’t know why, and we don’t know how

But when everybody loves me

I’m wanna be just about as happy as I can be

Mr Jones and me

We’re gonna be big stars”

 
 

Mr. Jones is a song by American alternative rock band Counting Crows. It was released in December 1993 as the lead single and third track from their debut album, August and Everything After (1993). It was the band’s first radio hit and one of their most popular singles.

 
 

The album cover depicts handwritten lyrics to a song called August and Everything After, but the band decided against featuring the song on the album of the same name; it was not until over a decade later that it was played as part of one of their live concerts.

 
 

The band’s debut album August and Everything After was produced by American musician, songwriter, and soundtrack and record producer T-Bone Burnett. Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett was a touring guitarist in Bob Dylan‘s band on the Rolling Thunder Revue. And he also produced the second album by The Wallflowers, Bringing Down the Horse, released in 1996. August and Everything After became the fastest-selling album since Nirvana‘s Nevermind.

According to Adam Duritz, the song title had a hand in the naming by Jonathan Pontell of Generation Jones, the group of people born between 1954 and 1965. “I feel honored that my song Mr. Jones was part of the inspiration for the name Generation Jones. The name Generation Jones has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a “keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness and the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving

The primary topic of the song itself is perhaps how two struggling musicians (Duritz and bassist Marty Jones of The Himalayans) “want to be big stars,” believing that “when everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.” Duritz would later recant these values, and in later concert appearances, Mr. Jones was played in a subdued acoustic style, if at all. On the live CD Across a Wire Duritz changes the lyrics “We all wanna be big, big stars, but we got different reasons for that” to “We all wanna be big, big stars, but then we get second thoughts about that,” and “when everybody loves you, sometimes that’s just about as funky as you can be” to “when everybody loves you, sometimes that’s just about as fucked up as you can be.”

Some believe the song is a veiled reference to the protagonist of Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, based on the lyric “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky.” According to Adam Duritz on VH1 Story Tellers “It’s really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a Flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain (David Serva), and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old Flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus.”

In a 2013 interview, Duritz explained that the song is named for his friend Marty Jones, but that is about Duritz himself. “I wrote a song about me, I just happened to be out with him that night,” Duritz said. The inspiration for the song came as Duritz and Jones were d runk at a bar after watching Jones’ father perform, when they saw Kenney Dale Johnson, longtime drummer for the musician Chris Isaak, sitting with three women. “It just seemed like, you know, we couldn’t even manage to talk to girls, … we were just thinking if we were rock stars, it’d be easier. I went home and wrote the song,” Duritz said. He sang the song in fun, enjoying the fantasy of making it big. However, he did not realize that just months later, in December 1993, MTV would begin playing the video for the song. It was an unexpected hit song, drawing massive radio play and launching the band into stardom.

 

To listen to this song and watch the music video, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style‘s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228

The Face of Contemporary Art

Kate, Sir Peter Blake, 2013

 

Model by Allen Jones, 2013. With a whiff of art nouveau, it pays homage to her love of a vintage frock

 

Body Armour , Allen Jones, 2013

‘Photography has replaced the artist’s eye in the depiction of reality. For most people Kate exists as a photograph. It is harder to draw somebody than to take their photograph. Painting Kate was a challenge in my world, but first I wanted to prove myself in her world — the world of professional photography.’

Allen Jones

 

Porcelain Kate on white background, Nick Knight, 2013.
Moss and Knight have collaborated often – but this is the photographer turning his muse into something 3D, a sculpture. Still, Moss is an angel here so reality is still a long way off

 

Kate Jacquard Tapestry by Chuck Close, 2007.
Close, a famously meticulous artist, turns Kate into a tapestry. All about a stripped back and natural Moss, this is a reprise – in thread – of Close’s 2003 daguerreotype portrait of her

 

A gold statue of supermodel Kate Moss entitled Siren by British artist Marc Quinn, circa 2008

 

Sphinx (Road to Enlightenment), Marc Quinn, 2007

 

Eyescape, Rankin, 2012

 

Naked Portrait, Lucian Freud, 2002

 

Kate, Gary Hume, 1996

 

One of the world’s best-known faces, Kate Moss has long been a favorite of Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, Juergen Teller and a legion of top fashion photographers. But her latest incarnation as a gleaming goddess provides new confirmation that she’s equally as popular with artists.

In fact, the world’s most enduring super-model has probably been portrayed more often than anyone in recent history, and an ever-growing body of art testifies to the true cultural icon she’s become.

The emergence of BritArt, which started to make its presence felt when Kate was already an international star, was certainly a major factor. Moss hung out with Damien Hirst, became pals with Tracey Emin, and at one point was said to be romantically involved with Jake Chapman. Painter Gary Hume famously portrayed Kate in 1996, and it wasn’t long before others followed suit.

In September 2003, W Magazine commissioned leading American art stars to produce their own take on Kate.

The Rainbow Games

The name “dachshund” is of German origin and literally means “badger dog”, from Dachs (“badger”) and Hund (“dog”). Although “dachshund” is a German word, in modern German they are more commonly known by the name Dackel or, among hunters, Teckel. Because of their long, narrow build, they are often nicknamed wiener dog or sausage dog.

Due to the association of the breed with Germany, as well as its popularity among dog keepers in Munich, the dachshund was chosen to be the first official mascot for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, with the name Waldi.

 
 

 
 

Waldi was created by German designer Otl Aicher, who amongst others was also responsible for designing the logo for German airline Lufthansa. The Dachshund was the first official Olympic mascot, as the 1968 Winter Olympics was the first to use an unofficial mascot, which was red ball on skis named “Schuss”. Waldi was designed to represent the attributes described as required for athletes — resistance, tenacity and agility.

Waldi was based on a real long-haired Dachshund named Cherie von Birkenhof, which Aicher used as a model. Although Waldi appeared variety of different color schemes, it is occasionally reported that the main scheme was designed to match the colors of the Olympic rings, ergo, blue, green yellow, orange and green. However, there were no black or red in the main scheme, which was a conscious decision on the part of Aicher to exclude those colors related to the National Socialist Party. The 1972 games were designed to be an optimistic “Rainbow Games”. Sadly, the sporting nature of the event was largely overshadowed by the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German police officer were killed. Five Black September terrorists died.

In 1966 Aicher was asked by the organisers of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich to become the Olympic Games’ lead designer. He was asked to create a design for the Olympics that complemented the architecture of the newly built stadium in Munich designed by Günther Behnisch. Aicher consulted with Masaru Katsumie, who had designed the previous 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games.

 
 

 
 

Basing his work in part on iconography for the ’64 Games, Aicher created a set of pictograms meant to provide a visual interpretation of the sport they featured so that athletes and visitors to the Olympic village and stadium could find their way around. He created pictograms using a series of grid systems and a specific bright colour palette that he chose for these Games. These designs were directly influential on the DOT pictograms, developed in 1974 by the United States Department of Transportation, which applied the same principles to standard public signage such as those for toilets and telephones; the DOT pictograms have in turn been used around the world.

 
 

 
 

Aicher used the typeface Univers for the Olympic designs. The design team produced 21 sports posters to advertise the sports at the games, using the official design colours and also including the logo and “München 1972”. The design team used a technique called “posterization” for the graphics on the posters, separating the tonal qualities from the images and using the official Munich colours for these games. This had to be produced manually as Photoshop did not exist at this time. The first of these posters that was created manually in this way was a poster of the Olympic stadium which became the official poster for these games.

Graphic Art for the Olympic Games 1972

 
 

The desire to reach the general public was also, to a large extent, the goal of the Olympic Games that took place in Munich in 1972. It was the first time that such an event was transmitted worldwide by television and, thereby, tragically also the first time a terrorist attack was viewed globally. For the first time the overall design, created by Otl Aicher, used predominantly images instead of text. Nearly 30 international artists were commissioned by the Olympic organizers and the Bruckmann-Verlag to create editions of prints especially for the Olympic Games. The goal was to unite art and sports.

These posters were displayed all around the city of Munich and around the Olympic sites. Posters were hung in twos alongside posters designed by famous artists chosen to represent this Olympics such as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Tom Wesselmann, Friedensriech Hundertwasser, Victor Vasarely, Serge Poliakoff, Allen Jones, and many others.

 
 

Pierre Soulages

 
 

Josef Albers

 
 

Eduardo Chillida

 
 

Serge Poliakoff

 
 

Friedensriech Hundertwasser

 
 

Oskar Kokoschka

 
 

Hans Hartung

 
 

Ronald Brooks Kitaj

 
 

Allen Jones

 
 

Charles Lapique

 
 

Tom Wesselmann

 
 

Victor Vasarely

Life in Photographs

Jimi, Central Park, New York, 1967

 
 

Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek, New York City, 1967

 
 

Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, New York, 1966

 
 

Paul and Michael, Sussex, 1981

 
 

Paul, Stella and James, Scotland, 1982

 
 

My Love, London, 1978

 
 

Self-portrait, Bathroom, London, date unknown

 
 

John Lennon In Colour, London, 1969

 
 

Johnny and Kate, London, 1995

 
 

Allen Ginsberg, Sussex, 1995

 
 

Intimate, personal, and without pretense is probably the best way to describe Linda McCartney’s style of photography. Having been a photographic enthusiast for years before that fateful Beatles album launch in 1967, she used her talent to capture images others could only dream of. An all-access pass to the world of rock ‘n’ roll over three decades allowed her to shoot the likes of Jim Morrison onstage, Allen Ginsberg over a drink and conversation, pre-Thriller Michael Jackson on a farm and Johnny Depp with Kate Moss hanging out on a porch in the midst of young love.

Attracted to Bebop

“I never know how to describe my work. It’s not always the same thing. It’s like asking Miles, ‘How does your horn sound?’”
Jean Michel Basquiat

 
 

Portrait of Miles Davis, date unknown

 
 

Discography II, 1983

 
 

What attracted Basquiat to bebop is the way it used repetition, reproduction, and improvisation to transform, or “artistically other”, the shape and meaning of somebody else’s originals, and to do so in the name of black protest against the restrictive social structures of American Racism. For LeRoi Jones, what most characterized bebop was its “antiassimilationist sound”, its rapid improvisations, its jagged time shifts, its wild solo flights, its embrace of melodic and rhythmic dissonance-its willfully harsh resistance to being swallowed up into the unisonance of American harmony. Bebop musicians understood the importance of communicating their racial difference from the American mainstream through their music.

While bebop was the music Basquiat inherited from the radical past, it was the radical present of hip-hop that he was born into. Basquiat was coming up as a painter and graffiti tagger on the streets and subways of New York City just as the music culture of hip-hop was being born on the very same streets and on the very same subways. In many ways Basquiat was hip-hop’s first galley artist, the first audiovisual hip-hopper to be legitimized, popularized, and substantively supported by the official New York art world.

The Last Massive Hit of the Disco Genre

Artwork by Scott Jones

 
 

Mouth to Mouth is the debut album by disco act Lipps Inc with Cynthia Johnson on lead vocals. Lipps Inc was formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was most known for the Double-Platinum-selling 1980 chart-topping hit Funkytown, which hit #1 in 28 different countries around the world. It consisted of a changing lineup of session musicians, including guitarist David Rivkin, guitarist Tom Riopelle and bassist Terry Grant. Steven Greenberg, the creator of the act, wrote and produced most of the group’s music.Lipps Inc.’s first release was a 1979 single, Rock It, on Greenberg’s own Flight imprint.

Funkytown, the second single from Mouth to Mouth, is often considered to be one of the last massive hits of the disco genre. This single held a unique record for reaching number one in 28 countries, more than any other single release until Madonna‘s Hung Up hit number one in 41 countries in 2005. Hung Up prominently features a sample of pop group ABBA‘s hit single Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight), for which Madonna personally sought permission from ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.

To watch the music video, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Musical Metamorphosis

The album’s cover art alludes to Franz Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis. Illustration by Linda Guymon. Artwork concept by Glenn Ross

 
 

Metamorphosis is the third compilation album of The Rolling Stones music released by former manager Allen Klein‘s ABKCO Records (who usurped control of the band’s Decca/London material in 1970) after the band’s departure from Decca and Klein. Released in 1975, Metamorphosis centres on outtakes and alternate versions of well-known songs recorded from 1964 to 1970.

In 1974, to give it an air of authority, Bill Wyman involved himself in compiling an album he entitled Black Box. However, Allen Klein wanted more Mick Jagger/Keith Richards songs in the project for monetary reasons, and Wyman’s version remained unreleased. Metamorphosis was issued in its place.

While the critical reaction was lukewarm (many felt some of the songs were best left unreleased), Metamorphosis still managed to reach No. 8 in the US, though it only made No. 45 in the UK. Two singles, Out of Time (featuring Jagger singing over the same backing track used for Chris Farlowe‘s 1966 version) and a cover of Stevie Wonder‘s I Don’t Know Why briefly made the singles charts.

Glamouflage at Glastonbury

On 2013 Mick Jagger called on the help of his long-term partner L’Wren Scott to create his glittering outfits for The Rolling Stones’ Glastonbury and Hyde Park performances. Ensembles include a big gorilla coat covered in hand-embroidered ostrich feathers, and a black jacket decorated with colourful butterfly motifs, a reference to the hundreds of cabbage white butterflies that were released at the band’s first Hyde Park concert in 1969 – in memory of guitarist Brian Jones who died two days before the show. For Glastonbury, the annual music festival in the Somerset countryside, which the Stones played for the first time in June, Scott and Jagger took a more pastoral turn.

 
 

Sketch for Mick Jagger by L’Wren Scott

 
 

Jagger performing in the oak-leaf-inspired jacket

 
 

“We started to think about the Glastonbury show and I said to her that [I wanted] something very English — an oak leaf. That’s where we started from in the Glastonbury show, nobody [in the audience] realized they were really oak leaves [on the jacket] — but I did,” said Jagger.

Even if Glastonbury’s crowd of thousands didn’t (or couldn’t) notice every detail on the jacket, the design meant a lot to Jagger. “Yes, it’s important. Most people just think it’s a bright green jacket, but if you look you can see. Glastonbury is an essentially English event,” he said.

Scott said she had originally wanted to do something around a leaf motif for Glastonbury. “So I did some tests of embroidery of leaves and I showed [Mick] a drawing with an embroidery or visual attached,” she said. “He loved the leaf idea, and I said it’s kind of like a ‘glamouflage.’

“We were joking about the glamouflage at Glastonbury, and he said ‘Well I want it to be oak leaf.’ So if you look at it closely you see the oak leaves — it’s quite cool,” said Scott of the sequin-embroidered jacket in emerald green, khaki and black. “It just felt very right for Glasto, to open the show with a very outdoorsy feel — and the crowd was incredible.”