Word: joplin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...friends extol his essential goodness, but he's looking bored and distracted one minute, uncomfortable the next: it's hard for him to cede control of his own story. A black Little League teammate reminisces about the 11-year-old Bradley threatening to call the mayor of Joplin, Mo., if a local hotel didn't rent the black kid a room, and the 56-year-old Bradley chews his lip and looks at the floor. His second grade music teacher sings his praises, and he gazes into the distance, even forgetting to thank her as she goes by--until...
Like him or not, Newman the lyricist is a refreshing irritant. And Newman the composer is a sweet seducer. His music is a lush amalgam of Americana (Stephen Foster and Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, classic blues and '70s California pop); it gives symphonic heft to his cagey misanthropy, makes the tunes endlessly listen-to-able. The jauntiest tune in the new set, a sashaying march for Great Nations of Europe, accompanies a brilliantly bleak history of New World colonization, slaughter and disease ("Columbus sailed for India/ Found Salvador instead/He shook hands with some Indians and soon they...
Audacious musicians are the best. They've been all over the map with their talents and tastes, they've been a part of power-pop band The Semantics, they've toured with Shania Twain, Pat McGee, Amy Grant and Janis Joplin to get a foothold in the music industry, they've jammed with Ben Folds for fun. And then they retire to their living rooms in Alabama to craft their solo pilot over four meticulous years, which they subsequently drop off at the major labels with a rakish take-it-or-leave-it attitude until Giant Records snaps...
...fair, not even Gershwin's legendary ego was big enough to claim more than half the credit for this astonishing outburst of melody. No sooner had Scott Joplin introduced ragtime in the late 19th century than commercial writers were figuring ways to work its kicky, irresistible beat into their songs. By 1911 young Irving Berlin could confidently assert that Everybody's Doing It (Doing It, Doing It) Now--and not just Americans either. Dukes and lords and Russian Czars were doing it too, as Berlin noted elsewhere. And a few years later, ragtime became part of the sound track...
...cultures created new elites. Jewish-American composers like Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern invented the popular song and dominated the field for a swank half-century. And as they had borrowed from Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, so did they help bring black artists into the mainstream. Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker ran their astounding riffs on the backs of sturdy pop tunes by Jewish immigrants. This fruitful collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes--pop's twilight of multiracial synergy...