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The Twenty-Seven Club September 26, 2005
Katrina Wilkins
Though I'm twenty-seven myself, I'd rather not join The 27 Club, mainly because you have to die to get in. You also have to be an at least quasi-famous musician. Since I'm neither dead nor musically inclined, and my twenty-eighth birthday is only a month a way, the chances of me joining are slim, but it's a pretty exclusive club: so far, only Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain have been admitted.
Music listeners probably began to note the phenomenon of rock stars dying at 27 after Janis Joplin's death on October 4, 1970, reportedly from a heroin overdose, though some fans site 'heart complications,' which, albeit technically accurate, seems an attempt to euphemize the situation. About two weeks earlier, on September 18, Jimi Hendrix had taken a large quantity of barbiturates and then asphyxiated on his own vomit--a more difficult situation to spin positively. Though the proximity of Hendrix's and Joplin's deaths likely prompted fans and the industry to take notice, these two musicians joined both Delta Blues great Robert Johnson, who died three days after a mysterious incident in a Mississippi bar on August 13, 1938, and Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who drowned in his home swimming pool on July 3, 1969. The death of Jim Morrison on July 3, 1971, exactly two years after Jones's death, sealed the deal, as it were. The message became clear: to make their marks, rock legends should die at 27.
Though the exact point that The 27 Club received its name remains unknown, it certainly had enough cultural salience by the early 1990s that Kurt Cobain was well aware of it. Cobain's friends recall him saying that he planned to join, and after he committed suicide on or about April 5, 1994, by injecting a considerable dose of heroin and then shooting himself, his wish came true. Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor, even stated afterward, 'Now he's gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club,' (quoted in 'The 27 Club,? BBC).
Thus book-ended by Johnson's and Cobain's deaths, fans began to notice other similarities beyond mere age: for example, almost all died of drug-related causes, and most were considered to be at the height of their careers; certainly all six lived excessively. The Astrolodge website even tracks the apparently astonishing similarities in their astrological charts. Though recording parallels between members may seem a simple form of solidifying these musicians as a group, it also sheds light on their popularity, both as individuals and as a phenomenon. While musical prowess may garner them initial attention, their excesses draw attention to their lives. Fans who focus solely on music will likely be disappointed merely because they won't produce any more music, but fans who are interested in the stars as people will see them as models, heroes, or lessons, and those fans will go on create the personal legend, as opposed to the musical legend, of a rocker.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then The 27 Club receives flattery in spades. For example, online encyclopedia Wikipedia's entry for 'Copycat Suicide' includes only two people commonly emulated in that manner, and Kurt Cobain is one of them (Japanese guitarist 'hide' is the other). Cobain, though, like most of the club members, was just as imitated in life. As Bomani Jones notes, 'Cobain made depression and introspection vogue in a way that no singer-songwriter had previously done.? Cobain turned angst into a life choice. On a different end of the same extreme, though most fans don't have the opportunity ape Morrison's sexual excesses, his drugs of choice, hallucinogens, are cheap and easy to procure, and many fans still attempt to replicate the Lizard King's experience. In Morrison's case, however, fans more often do this in order to see the world as he saw it than out of pure desire to be like him. Most 27-clubbers are still being mimicked today (with Robert Johnson as the primary exception), despite the fact that many have been dead for thirty-plus years, and that most of the copycats hadn't even been born when the rockers died (here, Cobain is the exception; still, many of his current listeners were young children at the time of his death). Fans may emulate stars for a variety of reasons, but the result is the same: the stars' lifestyles live on.
Thus, members of The 27 Club have earned their legends by living fast and dying young; their youth factors in equally with their ways of life. Their audiences want to know how this could happen to such talented musicians, and to understand how they achieved so much at such a young age. Also, considering suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth and teens age 10 to 19, teenagers identify with them through both the avenues of age and self-destruction; rockers who die early remain forever youthful and forever of the same ideas and opinions.
Which brings me back to my own interest in the situation. As I said at the beginning, I'm twenty-seven now, and I was sixteen when Kurt Cobain killed himself. Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely at all), I identified with Cobain more readily at sixteen than I do now, and that has nothing to do with remoteness in time. Rather, I am closed off from The 27 Club by possibility--I have made radically different life choices, and who I am at twenty-seven will never be anything like who Kurt Cobain was at twenty-seven. For a sixteen-year-old, the world is open and frightening, and I, at the time, was only just beginning to see how our choices shape us more than our fate. Today, I can look back at 27-clubbers' lives with pity, and perhaps some envy for their talent, but nothing more.
Sources:
"The 27 Club.?" Eleven Magazine, 26 Apr 2004. http://www.elevenmagazine.com/ special/nirvana_1.html 20 Sept 2005.
"The 27 Club?" BBC Radio 2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/documentaries/ nirvana_27.shtml 20 Sept 2005.
"Brian Jones." http://www.classicrockpage.com/rrheaven/jones.htm 21 Sept 2005.
"Club of 27?" Astrolodge. http://www.astrolodge.co.uk/astro/newsandevents/
autumn2004/club27/clubof27.html 21 Sept 2005.
"Copycat Suicide," Wikipedia. http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/ Copycat_suicide 21 Sept 2005. Jones, Bomani.
"Oh Please GAWD I Can't Handle the Success." Salon.com, October 23, 2002 http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2002/10/23/cobain/ 26 Sept 2005.
"Robert Johnson." http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-johnson 21 Sept 2005. 'Suicide.? KidsHealth.org http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/mental_health/ suicide.html
The Development of Cinematic Music in Video Games
Ryan Cornelius
As computer technology has improved over the decades, the quality of video gaming has improved in direct proportion. From games played on personal computers, capable of processing gigabytes of information in minutes, to television console games such as Playstation 2, electronic gaming has risen from its modest roots in the early 1970s to a multibillion dollar-a-year industry. Design studios invest millions of dollars during the production of a video game, a process that may take over a year. The video game industry is rapidly becoming the new Hollywood. In their desire to make bigger, better, more engrossing games, design studios take advantage of all the cinematic elements that would make up a Hollywood feature, music being one of these.
In the beginning, video games were nothing more than simple devices that connected to the television antenna input. Some were even so rudimentary as to require cellophane overlays be taped to the television screen. Because of these rough origins, games were limited to the sound quality of the television analog speakers. Game designers were also limited in designing analog sound over an electronic media. The first video game, Magnavox's Odyssey, could manage simple blips and buzzers to mimic the sound of a ball passing from one paddle to the next. There was no music playing in the background. With the development of 8-bit technology in the mid 1970s, game companies such as ATARI and Mattel Intelevision were able to produce basic music at certain points during the game, but as for an overall cinematic score, game players would have to wait until the invention of 16-bit technology in the early 1980s before they could enjoy constant music playing while they gamed, most notably would be the music to Super Mario Bros, by Nintendo.
Sadly, 8-bit technology did not provide a strong enough environment to produce complete scores that would play for as long as the players were engaged in gaming. The music would begin with the beginning of the game, and then fade out after a few minutes, leaving the players with just simple sound effects.
These particular models of television console games still relied on the analog quality of the television to carry sound to the gamer. As television stereo sound came into homes in the late 1970s, video game sound followed. As television viewers began installing home theater systems in the 1990s, video games took advantage of that too. With the inventions of 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit sound quality, the music in console games rose significantly, finally rivaling that of theater quality sound. In 1999, the Sony Corporation released news to the press that the then new Playstation 2, a 128-bit system, would incorporate DVD quality sound and animation with the old Playstation console, revolutionizing the way in which video games were designed (Thomas).
In the area of computer games, as the PC rose in prominence in the late 1980s, inroads to develop better quality sound necessitated the development of several different items of computer hardware. In 1987, Creative Technology developed the Creative Music System which was a 12- voice stereo music synthesizer card. The drawback to this device was that it required a software suite to operate it, and so was only used by the music industry (Thomas). In May 1993, Creative Technology developed the first "Sound Blaster 16," a 16-bit PCI card that computer owners could slot into the motherboard of their machines to bypass the computer's analog speaker (Thomas). The computer industry had designed a device capable of mimicking the tones of human speech. Finally, vocals in songs could be played over the computer without the voices sounding robotized.
Since then, computer gaming design companies have worked to meticulously design musical scores that compliment the game for which they are written-even going as far as to hire well-known composers such as John Williams and Danny Elfman. Sony invested over 166 million dollars on the development of the Playstation 2 console alone (Thomas). The quality of the music, today, is judged in numerous contests as games are compared against one another-some receiving awards and national acclaim.
It is impressive to see the effort spent on designing music for these games. In an industry that is still in its infancy, being only thirty or so years old, the video game industry has honestly done well for itself, making massive advances in technology and science. In the same vane, they have increased the quality of music and culture as well, providing a more entertaining, and fulfilling, experience for their customers. It will be intriguing to see just where they take it in the next millennium. Frankly, the sky is the limit.
Thomas, Donald A. Jr.. "The Whens of the Integrated Circuit." Thomas Solutions, Inc.
January, 24 2003. http://www.icwhen.com/book/index.shtml.
Chapter Six: Writer's Pick (Option Three)
Brad Isaacs
Reggaeton is "[L]atino party music" that is like no Latino party music that has come before it (Pull Up.. par. 2). Unlike salsa, merenge, or pop, reggaeton borrows heavily from the sound of 1980s American hip-hop and from the riddims of late 80s-early 90s Jamaican dancehall (Pull Up... par. 2). These riddims are the instrumental backing to dancehall-reggae songs, and are often composed of what Wayne Marshall-a music educator and musician who records under the name Wayne and Wax-refers to as the "boom-ch-boom- chick-boom-ch-boom-chick" beat that characterizes so much of the music that comes out of the Caribbean: mento, soca, son, calypso, etc. (We Use... par. 9) In reggaeton, bits of bomba, plena, and merenge, not to mention countless different snare sounds, flesh out the instrumental track over which the reggaetonero, who fills a similar role as the rapper or the Jamaican deejay, sings, raps, or toasts.
The history of reggaeton, like that of so many other genres of music, is a history of musical, national, and racial cross-pollination. I will begin looking at this history in Panama.
By the 1970s, Jamaican music had become popular in Panama, so much so that artists like El General, Nando Boom, and Black Apache began recording dancehall tracks, becoming the first generation of Panamanian/Latin deejays (Reggaeton par. 11). These early Latin deejays were, for the most part, not recording original songs, but rather re-recording versions of popular Jamaican dancehall tracks with the lyrics translated nearly word-for-word into Spanish-El General's "Pu Tun Tun" was a translation of Little Lenny's "Punaany Tegereg" (We use... par. 17).
In the early-to-mid 80s a similar re-working of a genre was taking place in Puerto Rico. American hip-hop had made it to Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican artists began putting their own signatures on the genre. In 1985 a 16 year-old Puerto Rican who recorded under the name Vico C released one of the first Spanish-language hip-hop records, and with that, reggaeton's two main influences were in place (Reggaeton par. 7).
The scenes in Panama and Puerto Rico developed quietly during the last half of the 80s, but as the 90s began, the music that was being created by the people in these scenes was changing. Panamanian artists were no longer happy doing vocals over riddims that had been imported from Jamaica, and because of that these artists began producing riddims that were unique the country and its culture(s) (Reggaeton par. 9). At the same time, Jamaican ragga-a style of dancehall characterized by its use of drum programming-was becoming popular in Puerto Rico (Reggaeton 9). As this music became more popular, Puerto Rican producers and rappers began experimenting with making their own kind of dancehall. Though some Puerto Rican musicians were wary of such experimentation-it was an imitation, dancehall was done by Jamaicans-they found themselves in the minority as their country became the center of activity for this genre that was finally going to get a name (Houghton 90).
Like the Panamanian artists, Puerto Rican artists began getting serious about original productions, and began making their own riddims in the mid-90s (Reggaeton par. 18). They called the music that was created using these riddims "under," short for "underground," but as "under" became more popular, and the Puerto Rican style became more popular than the Panamanian style, the name changed. At one point it was called melaza (molasses), but the name soon changed to Dem Bow (Reggaeton. pars. 5 and 6). "Dem Bow" was a riddim created by Jamaican producer Bobby "Digital" Dixion that was made popular when it was used on dancehall deejay Shabba Ranks's song "Dem Bow" in the early-90s (We Use... par 19). It was from this riddim that reggaeton got its aforementioned "boom-ch-boom-chick-boom- ch-boom-chick" beat, and it was the appropriation of this beat, and the way that subsequen t artists would manipulate it, that helped make reggaeton a genre of its own. The "Dem Bow" riddim "overlayed rather nicely with salsa and meringue," getting reggaeton artists that much closer to the "fusion of salsa piano vamps and toy-robot snares knocking on the afterbeat like disrupted clockwork" that makes reggaeton reggaeton and not just Spanish dancehall or Latin hip-hop (We Use... par. 19, Houghton 90).
By the mid-90s, reggaeton had both a name and a sound that would stick, and with that, it was time for the music to conquer the world, or at least many Caribbean and Latin American countries. As the year 2000 approached, reggaeton's pan-Latin appeal was making it more and more popular among Spanish speaking populations outside of the Caribbean and Latin-America (Reggaeton par. 8). Among other places, it had a foothold in urban centers of the U.S., where it found a ready audience of younger Latino listeners who had grown up listening to traditional Latin music and American hip-hop, and were ready for something that they could call their own.
The timing could not have been better. As reggaeton was gaining popularity in the U.S. on a small scale, the genre that helped to give it its sound, Jamaican dancehall, was all over music video channels and hip- hop/r & b radio stations. Artists and groups like No Doubt, Missy Elliot, and Lumidee were either collaborating with dancehall deejays, or using popular dancehall riddims as their backing tracks. This set the stage for Jamaican artists like Beenie Man, Sean Paul, and Elephant Man to make their own hit songs and albums.
As 2003 ended and 2004 began, the sound of dancehall was in people's ears and minds. In the summer of 2004 two Latino sisters performing under the name Nina Sky rode the dancehall sound to success by writing "Move ya Body," a song that they performed and recorded over the wildly popular "Coolie Dance" riddim. Their use of the dancehall sound helped make for a smooth transition into reggaeton. As the year ended the genre had made great strides. Producers like Noriega and Luny Tunes had gained reputations as reggaeton star-makers, and Cuban-American rapper Pitbull-whose mere presence helped to gain acceptance for many other Latino rappers and reggatoneros-was collaborating with a number of American rappers and producers.
As with reggae artists in 2003, 2005 has seen reggaeton artists like N.O.R.E., Daddy Yankee, and Pitbull have their songs become popular enough to make the move from specialty stations-106.7 KZZA out of Dallas is an example of this type of station-to mainstream hip-hop and r & b stations. That said, reggaeton is not, and may never be, as popular in the U.S. as rock and roll or hip-hop, but with reggaeton remixes of popular rap songs becoming mandatory if a rapper wants to appeal to a Latino audience, and the development of English-language reggaeton, it is clear that reggaeton is a genre unto itself, and that this genre's sound-a sound that does its part to represent the thoughts and feelings of a vibrant culture-will be heard.
Houghton, Edwin. "The Year Dancehall Ate the City." Fader. Aug. 2004: 88- 95.
"Pull Up Our Pants: Reggaeton Breakdown." Mudd Up!. 21 Dec. 2004. 16 Sept. 2005.
http://negrophonic.com/words/pivot/entry.php?id=14
"Reggaeton." Wikipedia . 16 Sept. 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggaeton
"We Use So Many Snares." wayne&wax. 4 Aug. 2005. 16 Sept. 2005.
http://wayneandwax.blogspot.com/2005/08/we-use-so-many-snares.html
