The Cover Song Makes A Comeback

The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With the rise of hip-hop, covers were displaced by sampling and remixes, but then samples themselves became more concealed and layered, for reasons of both art and copyright. In the 2000s and earlier this decade, the practice migrated to YouTube, where concert clips or home videos of one-off covers, rearrangements, and parodies might show off the skills and wit of amateurs and pros alike but still seldom troubled the charts—unless they also made it to soundtracks or TV ads, where acoustic remakes of once-upon-a-time hits (either twee or glum or both) have become a staple.

On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe

“Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own.”

5,000-Year-Old Musical Instrument Found Near Rome

“The ceramic shell at first appeared to be one of a kind. One hypothesis was that it might have been a cheese strainer. Then, similarities were found with two other objects, found near Naples, that had been convincingly identified as sound boxes for musical instruments.” One doctoral student determined that it was either a bowed lute or a lyre, and she made speculative reconstructions of each, using a copy of the ceramic shell and materials that were available circa 3,000 B.C. (includes sound clips)

Brahms: Rhythms That Fight (That’s The Secret)

Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak. You don’t have to be musically literate to know the bumpy feel of a cross-rhythm. Two-against-three can be a parent strolling hand in hand with a skipping child. Triplets on top of eighth notes are like a slow canter next to a trot: The two horses might move at the same speed, but you wouldn’t want them pulling a carriage together.