Word: musics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York) who has spent much of his spare time over the past two decades in Ireland. He is an unabashed Mayo chauvinist, and his lyric affection for the land and the people animates his characters. Even the Rev. Mr. Broome drops his scholarly tone to write how Irish music "would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets." Yet the author is too honest a historian to let sympathy alter circumstances. The first taste of revolution is a heady draft, but the dregs of doom...
...needle pressed against a metal cylinder wrapped in tin foil. The sound waves caused the needle to vibrate and to trace a wavy groove on the soft surface of the cylinder. This is kindergarten stuff, even allowing for the introduction of magnetic tape in the late 1940s. Most music now is recorded onto tape; when that tape is transferred to a master record, loss of quality inevitably occurs. Even if the master is excellent, acoustic impurities are picked up, the "surface noise" that frays the nerves of the audio freak like nails on slate...
...character of the wave form. These numbers are stored as binary "words." Then, when the recording is played, the computer translates these numbers back and the re-created sound waves cause the membranes of speakers to vibrate-possibly with joy. In any case, those vibrations from the numbers are music in spanking-clean form. There is no perceptible distortion, because the sound waves stored as numbers are not changed by the imperfections of magnetic tape or record surfaces...
Close your books, it's a pop quiz. Only one question, but tricky. Multiple choice. Graham Parker's music is 1) new wave, 2) old wave, 3) no wave, 4) punk rock, 5) pub rock, 6) none of these, 7) all of these...
...tunes range from the slyly salacious (Black Honey, Back Door Love) to the wittily defiant (Back to School Days) and the nakedly personal (You Can't Be Too Strong, which concerns an abortion). In all, not suitable for an easy listen or a fast dance. "I know my music makes people nervous, that it's not what the average person likes to hear," Parker muses. "It's got blues, soul, a lot of different things in it." What gives the songs much of their spirit and a good deal of their body English is frequent adrenal shocks...