This song is about rock star excess and the easy life it brings compared with real work. Mark Knopfler wrote it after overhearing delivery men in a New York department store complain about their jobs while watching MTV. He wrote the song in the store sitting at a kitchen display they had set up. Many of the lyrics were things they actually said.
Sting sings on this and helped write it. That's him at the beginning singing "I want my MTV." Sting did not want a songwriting credit, but his record company did because they would have earned royalties from it. They claimed it sounded very similar to a song Sting wrote for The Police: "Don't Stand So Close To Me."
The innovative video was one of the first to feature computer generated animation. The characters were supposed to have more detail, like buttons on their shirts, but they used up the budget and had to leave it as is. It won Best Video at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.
The video was directed by Steve Barron, who also directed the famous a-ha video for "Take On Me" and Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science."
This was the first video played on MTV Europe. The network went on the air August 1, 1987, 6 years after MTV in the US. In the US, this stayed at #1 for 3 weeks. It also won a Grammy in 1986 for best Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.
The 13th studio album by Prince and the New Power Generation, colloquially referred to as the Love Symbol or as O(+>. It was released as a double vinyl or single CD, on October 13, 1992.
Few artists have created a body of work as rich and varied as Prince. During the '80s, he emerged as one of the most singular talents of the rock & roll era, capable of seamlessly tying together pop, funk, folk, and rock. Not only did he release a series of groundbreaking albums; he toured frequently, produced albums and wrote songs for many other artists, and recorded hundreds of songs that still lie unreleased in his vaults. With each album he released, Prince has shown remarkable stylistic growth and musical diversity, constantly experimenting with different sounds, textures, and genres. Occasionally, his music can be maddeningly inconsistent because of this eclecticism, but his experiments frequently succeed; no other contemporary artist can blend so many diverse styles into a cohesive whole.
In a dispute with Warner Bros. in 1993, Prince decided to change his stage name to the album's eponymous symbol. He kept that name for several years until re-adopting the Prince moniker in 2000.
Prince's albums include among others 1999 (1983), Purple Rain (1984), Lovesexy (1988), Newpower Soul (1998) and 3121 (2006). He also starred in the 1984 feature film Purple Rain. Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. (All Music Guide, Wiki, Who2 Biographies).
As Prince doesen't like his videos being on line this post will be without any music sample.
Nevermind is the second studio album by Nirvana, released in1991.
The album cover shows a baby swimming toward a US dollar bill on a fishhook. According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births with Grohl. Cobain mentioned it to Geffen's art director Robert Fisher. Fisher found some stock footage of underwater births but they were too graphic for the record company.
Also, the stock house that controlled the photo of a swimming baby that they subsequently settled on wanted $7,500 a year for its use, so instead Fisher sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots resulted and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spencer Elden, the son of the photographer's friend Rick Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden's penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis, as they were afraid that it would offend people, but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."
The back cover of the album features a photograph of a rubber monkey in front of a collage created by Cobain. The collage features photos of raw beef from a supermarket advertisement, images from Dante's Inferno, and pictures of diseased vaginas from Cobain's collection of medical photos. Cobain noted, "If you look real close, there is a picture of Kiss in the back standing on a slab of beef."The album's liner notes contain no complete song lyrics; instead, the liner contains random song lyrics and unused lyrical fragments that Cobain arranged into a poem (Wiki).
This is "Come As You Are" from Unplugged MTV Concert:
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Even though "Brown Sugar" was recorded in December, 1969, The Stones did not release it until April, 1971 because of a legal dispute with their former manager, Allen Klein, over royalties. Recording technology had advanced by then, but they didn't re-record it because the original version was such a powerful take.
Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics. They were inspired by Claudia Lennear, one of Ike Turner's backup singers (Ikettes) who he had an affair with. They met when The Stones toured with Turner in 1969. Originally, Jagger wrote this as "Black Pussy." He decided that was a little too direct and changed it to "Brown Sugar."
Some say that the lyrics are about slaves from Africa who were sold in New Orleans and raped by their white masters. The subject matter is quite serious, but the way the song is structured, it comes off as a fun rocker about a white guy having sex with a black girl.
A year after this was first recorded, The Stones cut another version at Olympic Studios in London with Eric Clapton on guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards. It was considered for release as the single. The bootleg version which has Eric Clapton playing lead slide guitar was recorded at a birthday party for Keith Richards. It is widely considered to have been part of an informal audition by Clapton to become The Stones second guitarist. The bootleg version shows why Clapton likely did not get offered the job, or withdrew himself from consideration. While Clapton plays a million notes a minute, his lead has almost no interaction with the rest of the band. It is like a studio musician simply playing along with a CD that has already been recorded. In many interviews, Richards has spoken admiringly of his good friend Clapton's musicianship, but has always commented that the 2-guitar sound he and Ron Wood have developed is not Eric's cup of tea.
This was one of 4 songs The Stones had to agree not to play when they were allowed to perform in China. After getting approval to play in China for the first time in 2003, they canceled because of SARS, a respiratory illness that was going around the country. The other banned songs were "Honky Tonk Women," "Beast of Burden," and "Let's Spend the Night Together." (songfacts)
This is a version from "A Bigger Bang Tour" (2007), one of the greatest live tours in music history.
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This was System Of A Down's first single from their second album, and their breakout hit. The band feels they evolved a great deal between albums and did things on this that they wouldn't have thought of before. They named the album Toxicity in honor of Los Angeles, which they considered a "Toxic City." They grew up in a bad section and wanted people to know that it wasn't all glamorous.
Literally, Chop Suey is a Chinese stew made with meat or fish, plus bamboo sprouts, onions, rice and water chestnuts. They used it for the name of the song because it describes their musical style, with lots of stuff thrown together. The title is not in the lyrics.
The original name of the song is "Suicide," but they had to change the name to make it radio friendly. In the beginning of the song, you hear Serj say "we're rolling suicide." The title is a bit of a play on words - "Suey-cide."
This was climbing the charts when it was silenced by the events of September 11, 2001. Just about every radio station pulled this from their playlists in an effort to be as sensitive as possible after the tragedy. Even though the song had nothing to do with terrorism, it was considered much too aggressive. The line "I cry when angels deserve to die" was a little too heavy for most program directors. When things settled down, it returned to the airwaves pretty much where it left off, since there weren't many songs released in the weeks after 9/11.
The video was shot in the parking lot of a cheap hotel near where the band grew up in Los Angeles. Before the shoot, they posted a note on their website inviting fans to come down and participate. Since they were not well known, they thought they would get about 500, but instead 1500 fans showed up. The fans (mostly kids) were instructed to swarm the stage so they could help capture the energy of their live shows.
Many interprated this song to be about drug addiction, but it doesn't have the somber tone that many songs about addiction have. The band describes it as "a little quacky." The song was also interpreted to be about how society views death or about Christ.
In fact, Guitarist Daron Malakian stated: "The song is about how when people die, they will be regarded differently depending on the way they pass. Like, if I were to die from a drug overdose, everyone would say I deserved it because I abused drugs, hence the line 'Angels deserve to die.'"
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Reggae is defined as a Jamaican popular music and dance style. It originated in the mid-1960s as a music of the Jamaican poor, reflecting social discontent and the Rastafarian movement. Its instrumentation features an electric bass played at high volume as a lead instrument, around which an ensemble of organ, piano, drums, and lead and rhythm electric guitars plays short ostinato phrases with regular accents on the offbeats.
Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by regular beats on the off-beat, known as the skank. Reggae is normally slower than ska, and usually has accents on the first and third beat in each bar.
Reggae song lyrics deal with many subjects, including religion, love, sexuality, relationships, poverty, injustice and other social and political issues.
Although strongly influenced by both traditional African and Caribbean music, as well as by American rhythm and blues, reggae owes its direct origins to the progressive development of ska and rocksteady in 1960s Jamaica.
The 1972 film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, generated considerable interest and popularity for reggae music in the United States, and Eric Clapton's 1974 cover of the Bob Marley song "I Shot the Sheriff" helped bring reggae into the mainstream.
Bob Marley is recognised as the most representative singer of raggae genre. He evolved from ska and rocksteady to raggae to become a very influential singer of the '70 and '80. (Wiki)
This is "No Woman, No Cry".
Who's who and where
