It’s been raining white rappers on the internetz this week. Thanks to the return of Eminem and the release of lame-brained collegiate rapper Asher Roth’s debut album Asleep in the Bread Aisle some names that were long buried have been tossed around like a worn out Kangol. Young Black Teenagers, Buck 65, Ugly Duckling, Third Bass, Rodney Dangerfield, Snow, House of Pain, Dee Dee King….some good, some laughable, all white as Wonder Bread.

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Few onlookers could doubt the power of the media within politics when the two presidential candidates for 1908, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft, both agreed to record cylinders of their speeches for the Edison Talking Machine company. Bryan, Mr. “Cross of Gold” himself, could hardly be restrained from constantly speechifying, while Taft, the middle-brow heir apparent to a two-term president and heartily rustic Easterner (aka Teddy Roosevelt), was more circumspect about squaring off. Although neither specifically debated the other in their series of recordings, owners of phonograph parlors and arcades set up countless faux debates by airing them one after another. –>

For a period of about six years, during the early to mid 1970s, the cover art on LPs released on the budget Westminster Gold label (part of ABC/Paramount Records) had a kind of silliness not seen before or since. The covers, which featured photographs and photomontages by Christopher Whorf, could be outrageous, sexually suggestive, or just plain inscrutable, but they were definitely attention-getting, and unlike anything else likely to be seen on classical records. Uncle Dave Lewis remembers, “These album covers were all done by Christopher Whorf. Lalo Schifrin once told me that the record companies liked him ‘because he could produce an album cover for about the equivalent of about two dollars.’ Lalo detested Whorf’s concept for one of Schifrin’s albums, titled There’s a Whole Lalo Schifrin Goin’ On.” [The Schifrin album was released on Dot Records, not Westminster Gold.]

There are far too many gems among the covers to fit them into a single blog. They can be sorted into broad categories, and this introduction to an ongoing topical series of Westminster Gold covers offers some of Whorf’s wackiest work — his Just Plain Inscrutable covers.

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We’re certainly living in the age of crossover, with artists of almost every background venturing outside their own area of expertise to explore and sometimes try to create a common ground between two (or more) disparate musical traditions. This is a sampling of some of the more eccentric combinations that have turned up recently. With no value judgments about the artistic success of the outcomes, we humbly present this assortment of crossover pieces for your perusal.
 
 
1. Italian grand opera + traditional Aboriginal music + lite rock

Aboriginal digeridoo player and producer David Hudson has made a single-track CD-length version of Nessun Dorma, the popular tenor aria from Puccini’s faux-Chinese opera, Turandot, arranged for voice, digeridoo, and soft rock ensemble. With Australia, China and Europe represented, he’s got the northern hemisphere covered and the eastern half of the south — if he’d included a west African djembe, or Peruvian panpipes, he would have had a truly global combination.

David Hudson & Friends - Nessun Dorma:

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Attack of the One-Man Bands is exactly that, 58 different one-man bands spread over two discs of raw, crude and fascinatingly brilliant blasts of sonic madness, most of it so ragged and urgent that it makes vintage punk sound like Air Supply. So unhinged that it’s probably a serious health risk, this set delivers cut after cut of glorious bedlam with all the subtlety of an amplified jackhammer set loose in a glass house, and anyone sane should probably hate it, but like a child’s tantrum, it’s impossible to ignore, and like the child that throws that tantrum, it’s impossible not to love. Each of these one-man bands is currently active, and while most are decidedly lo-fi, even the ones who wandered into real studios seem to treat them like giant boom boxes, creating a clatter and din that shoves the needle into the red from note one. While a good deal of what is here is vicious punk rockabilly like Phillip Roebuck’s crude, spare and dangerously kinetic “Jackass Blues” or Pete Yorko & the One Man Music Band’s “Like Me” assault, some of it, like Royer’s One-Man Band’s version of the fiddle classic “Train on the Island” or 1Man Banjo’s deconstruction of “Mole in the Ground” (simply called “Mole” here), is seriously bent and skewed bluegrass mountain music. Train Wreck Washington’s banjo piece called “Walked All Night” sounds like an old wax cylinder field recording, and feels like it was recorded a hundred years ago. Uncle Butcher’s “No Judge No Trial” is as raw and frightening as a running chain saw thrown on a feather bed — chickens flying everywhere, as they say. Then there’s The Amazing Elephant Man’s primal “Can’t Go Outside,” which is literally a child’s frustrated rant given rhythm and electricity. Scary, unsettling, fascinating, delightful, vital, urgent and insistent, these 58 tracks are somehow — for all their abrasiveness — oddly comforting. Just like that one vigilant dog barking away relentlessly down the street late at night, it means someone is watching after all, and they ain’t gonna keep quiet about it, even if the rest of the world is trying its best to sleep.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its inductees and their respective presenters today for the big annual bash held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on March 10.

Here is this year’s list:

Songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff will be inducted by vocalist and songwriter Jerry Butler. The three collaborated plentifully, but most notably on the smash single “Only the Strong Survive.” That said, the honorees are arguably better known for the O’Jays’ smash “Love Train.”

• “Only the Strong Survive”
• “Love Train”

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During the frenzied and hyperbolic preamble to last Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, an electronically generated image of an HDTV screen — floating somewhere in a vague, CGI environment of power and importance — flashed images of great historical figures while a somber voice-over compared them to the players soon to take the field. Included among these images were the faces of Ludwig van Beethoven — the man who freed music from the shackles of classical form — and Louis Armstrong — who proved that popular music could be a platform for serious individual expression.

Beethoven and Armstrong and … Eli Manning?

Beethoven was so ahead of his musical time that it took most of his colleagues some 20-30 years to catch up with his ideas. In a sense, he did not do so by choice, as the patronage system for composers collapsed in the wake of the French Revolution, and Beethoven was forced to reinvent himself in order to keep bread on the table. Along the way, he figured that composers might as well make use of the full range of expressive possibilities available to them, since the landed gentry and imperial monarchs that expected classical form, and were used to it, were no longer footing the bills. Beethoven openly and bravely defied many avenues of support available to him for reasons of personal integrity, such as striking out the dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte from the manuscript of the “Eroica” Symphony, after deciding that the liberator of Europe was, in fact, a tyrant.

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When a little-known DJ named Danger Mouse mashed Jay Z’s a capella vocals from the Black Album with bits of the White Album to make his masterful Grey Album, no one could have guessed that it would lead to such success (or so many spinoffs.) This little artistic endeavor gave him enough notoriety to get gigs producing Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley, which ultimately won him a Grammy. It’s a good life lesson. With the right material and a good set of ears, your average Joe Shmoe who’s handy with the mouse can become a sought-after mega producer. If only you had a badass isolated vocal track to get started, that could be you, right? Gotcha covered, kiddo. Here’s a link to David Lee Roth’s raw vocal take from “Running with The Devil,” courtesy of Chunklet, and it’s a doozy.

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