This cartoon, created in 1957, spiced up the by then tired Elmer Fudd and Bugs routine of hunter vs. rabbit by incorporating high brow entertainment such as opera and ballet into the perfect comic atmosphere for Elmer and Bugs Bunny to interact in.

Be sure to read her entire post, where she explains the idea behind using "high brow" mechanisms like ballet and opera in cartoons, and its affects on Jones' need to compete with Disney cartoon artists in the 1950's.

This cartoon, created in 1957, spiced up the by then tired Elmer Fudd and Bugs routine of hunter vs. rabbit by incorporating high brow entertainment such as opera and ballet into the perfect comic atmosphere for Elmer and Bugs Bunny to interact in.

So there I was with confetti flying everywhere while the band played “Do You Realize?� and I couldn’t have been happier. Couples all around here hugging and kissing, someone proposed on stage; the enegry was unreal. I know watching the Flaming Lips is an experience unto itself but being on stage was something entirely else.

Despite some of her issues with the festival itself ("marketing disguised as music), Maria had good experiences watching Bob Mould, De La Soul and the Flaming Lips.

Another issue on Maria's mind came to pass thanks to Wayne Coyne's (Flaming Lips) soapbox rant about the Middle East:

The final encore was a cover Sabbath’s “War Pigs� and Coyne took it upon himself to get up on the soapbox. This is ultimately what drives me nuts about rock politics—it’s one thing to rant about the infinite sadness in the Middle East, but so extremely misguided on the other hand. Did he bother to pay attention to his surroundings? Any staff member in a position of power was white. The people cleaning up the mess of drunken frat dudes as we were exiting? Black. A year after the ineptitude of Katrina and nothing’s changed in our country, the divide keeps getting larger and larger— so why not use that time to encourage a crowd of 3,000 to be more proactive in their communities? Sigh. Sorry to be a Downer Debbie, but it’s been gnawing at my mind.

I'm not sure if agree that there are appropriate messages to deliver from a stage and inappropriate messages to deliver from a stage (they're all sort of inappropriate and condescending to me), but I can certainly sympathize with Maria's fatigue.

Head over to Her Jazz and read Maria's entire recap of the weekend here.

At one point she said that it was nice to know that she could have been a finalist on American Idol. “Not a winner, but at least a finalist!� Referring to Katherine McPhee who was runner up and sang Tunstall’s song, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree� Then she said, “She should have won shouldn’t she?� (with which I wholeheartedly agree though the crowd didn’t seem to). “She sang my song! She could have sung Simon and Garfunkel but she picked a new artist!�

Amy points out that she felt Tunstall's voice was even stronger and more lovely live, which is nice to hear since so often, a live show and a grueling tour can take its toll on a singer's pipes. Another highlight was the keyboard player, who did double duty on horns (and even played a garbage can lid).

Head over to Collected Sounds and read her entire review, it will make you itch to go see KT Tunstall.

What Parker didn't know, that is until she saw the video again and decided to research it, was that the song was written in response to actual events. Having been emotionally affected by the song when it was first released, Parker found herself even more attached and concerned, given the events at Columbine and her realization about the song's reverence for a troubled young boy who took his life in front of his classmates.

I hadn't seen this video for years, and then I watched it today and it just floored me. Especially after growing up with the Colombine shootings in 1999, this video in turn seemed somewhat eeriely prophetic and even more chilling than before. What I didn't know prior to today, was that "Jeremy" was actually inspired by real events. A boy named Jeremy Delle killed himself in 1991 in front of a classroom of 16 peers and his teacher.

Parker goes on to make what we all assume was Pearl Jam's point as well: as a community, we need to do more to recognize each other's alienation and work to break down the walls that keep children like Jeremy Delle from feeling trapped and hopeless.

The piece, "Jeremy: The Boy Behind the Song" does an excellent job of reminding us how music can motivate us for change, and how good music is always worth revisiting.

Read her entire article here.

Beautiful Pain is a music blog maintained by five women who all share a passion for music created and performed by other women. Their blog fuses mp3s, thorough artist profiles, album reviews and feature articles to comprise a really fantastic collection of information.

Recently, Sleepy wrote an artist feature for Neko Case, the Canadian singer/songwriter who recently released a new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

I first heard about Neko Case in the October 2004 issue of ChartAttack Magazine when there was a small mention of the CD release, Hard-Headed Woman: A Celebration Of Wanda Jackson, in which Neko performed Wanda Jackson's Brown Eyed Handsome Man. I haven't heard the song, unfortunately, so I can't tell you if it is good or not. But another page of the Oct '04 issue was an advertisement for Neko Case's album, The Tiger's Have Spoken. I wondered to myself if this was her debut album, and with a little research, I found that she had three previous recordings PLUS she is a member of the 'indie rock' group, The New Pornographers.

Sleepy goes on to give the reader a sense of Case's musical past and creative evolution through her solo albums. She focuses on the new album, elegantly describing its impact on her:

The lyrical wonder that echoed through my room, quenched my thirst for good country. I haven't liked country prior to listening to Case, but her version of alt country is to my tastes. I had been deprived of such excellence as I had soaked in the short album of The Tigers Have Spoken. Sorry for going off track, but I have been satisfied like a musical prostitute who can't get enough.

Read her entire feature here, and bookmark Beautiful Pain to stay up to date on women in music. They're profiling a wide variety of artists and genres, and doing a really fine job of it.

But that's not all Janet Timmons does. She's got an annual project that involves profiling all the bands playing at the Austin City Limits Festival, which includes hundreds of bands and performers.

She's already covered G Love and The Shins, as well as some other performers that you might not have heard of. She'll cover them all, too, including photos, mp3s, links to their homepages and MySpace accounts and more. It's a lot of work, but if you're going to ACL, it's definitely worth a look. If you're not going to ACL, stop by anyway and you'll probably leave with a new favorite band.

You can go straight to the ACL preview blog by going here, but it's easy to find from her main page as well. Have fun!

I'm starting getting nervous, although I haven't even sent out the invitations yet. Some people have been reading the blog and told me they'll be attending. I've been practicing the Tori Amos-songs I'm gonna play since the end of May (or longer). Last week I played them all through for the first time and - I'll have to cut the programme. Right now it's 18 songs lasting two hours. Afterwards I started playing one of my own songs.

What a great idea, I'm sad I'm not living in Germany anymore, because I'd definitely be there.

Opera's decline has been setting in since the 90's (perhaps earlier), but it's difficult to pinpoint why. As Cindy points out, it could be a strictly financial issue, considering economic woes and the 20/30-something's more reverent dedication to other sorts of funding outlets (community outreach, Red Cross post 9/11, etc.), but it might also be the case that (sadly), this age group just isn't interested in opera.

For curiosity's sake: Do you have an interest in opera? If not, what would make you more interested in opera? If so, do you regularly attend opera productions? If not, how come? Ticket prices? Production quality? Uninteresting or unfamiliar repertoire?

I've tried to answer this question for myself, and I'm having trouble. I don't dislike opera, but I don't go see it because of financial reasons, mostly. Additionally, it's difficult to decide what opera to try and discover when I don't have a base knowledge of what I really like. There are a few classics that I love and know relatively well (I know Lakme thanks to its appearance on several movie soundtracks, and I know Madame Butterfly well. I also really love anything Maria Callas ever sang, but that's for sentimental reasons), but most of those relationships are due to some external medium influencing me, or a sentimental attachment to a excerpt or singular movement that I've attached myself to. I have never truly appreciated an opera as a whole work, and I'm not sure why.

I can say that while I do consider myself a true music lover, my connections to opera and classical music typically rise out of my interests in other things. I discovered Schubert in college studying music history and theory, and I fell asleep to Vivaldi's Four Seasons as a child. Beethoven is a staple, and Chopin is also inescapable. Nietzsche introduced me to Wagner, but that was sort of political and based on my relationship with the philosophy, I didn't search out Wagner for the sounds, I searched it out to understand the thought behind it. Those kinds of musical majesties pervade our lives whether or not we choose to let them, but opera is harder to stumble upon, isn't it?

Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia introduced the world to Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier through Maria Callas' brilliant rendition of "La Mamma Morta", and several films have used Lamke's "Flower Duet", but again I can't help but notice that these relationships I have shaped with the help of some other motivator.

We don't hear opera in elevators, we don't have opera radio stations, we don't see operas like movies, even though we spend millions of dollars on Broadway every year. Is it really that inaccessible to us? In many ways, the opera is the closest thing we have to Greek tragedies or Shakespearean plays in this day and age: some relic of the past that can still move us because of its timeless theme. We love tragedies, we always will, so why don't we like to hear people sing their tragedies?

I wish I had a better understanding of opera and the maintainment of it as a whole, because I might be able to explain more of it then, but I just can't. People are strange, and as Cindy points out, it was only a couple years ago that everyone was nuts over a Jerry Springer opera, so I guess that might be my answer right there.

So while "Cielito Lindo" is hardly an immigrant protest song like "El Deportado," for me, its staggering, expressive melody, narrative of brown eyes and mountains, and lesson of singing in the face of sorrow, is inextricable with my beloved grandma and the attached realities of her (eventually naturalized) immigrant status-- working poverty, broken English, pride in her motherland and appreciation for her adopted country.

"Nuestro Himno", known for its sort of drama, also plays a role in Shepard's take on the current situation for Mexican-Americans, including the suggestion of a National Anthem in Spanish.

She points out that the last time she heard the National Anthem in English, she was at a basketball game, and it was followed up by "Whoomp! There It Is" while a floating blimp tried to sell me a lizard, car insurance and a $7 beer." This is what we're getting all sactimonious about? Or does the National Anthem not mean any less just because it's tossed around like Nerf? Besides all of that, is the National Anthem necessarily less relevant simply because our standards in terms of national pride have sort of slipped off in the last 20 years?

But, as Shepard suggests, the ultimate point isn't just what kind of anthems we have, the point is visibility for Mexican-Americans. She goes on:

Nelly Furtado, whose parents emigrated from Portugal to Canada before she was born, has a clause in her record contract that states she is allowed to sing at least two songs in Portuguese on every album. But her 2003 album Folklore was her most specific work about la cultura; it yielded "Forca"-- which was the official song for the European World Cup in 2004 and became Portugal's de facto anthem-- and the hip-hop influenced pop song "Fresh off the Boat" in both English and Portuguese. The latter is a song about the sweet relief of emigrating to a freer country, and while the lyrics are simple and impressionistic, the m.o. is clear: visibility.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. Take a few minutse and read Shepard's piece in whole over at Pitchfork.

Mallory O'Donnell is discussing a subject near and dear to my heart: the problem of music collecting in the digital age. For most of us nearing the end of our 20's or slipping quietly into our 30's, there are memories of vinyl collections, dusty crates and boxes of Maxells lingering around to remind us of the days when our experience was music actually involved some sort of physical interaction with it as a product.

These days, however, it's harder to manage our love for music. The younger generation does everything digitally, and the rest of us fight off urges to digitize our albums to perfect our iTunes playlists, all while Soulseeking to find the new things we want to try out. We've come to an impasse: we need to bridge the gap between the way we used to listen to music, and the way we have to do it now. We know we can't always rely on the radio to show us what we like, and MTV has long been obsolete when it comes to showcasing new, great music. We turn to the internet, as we do so often, to help us muddle through the rising tide of sounds.

We have to pick our battles, that's the main thing-and the selection of what to really pay attention to and what to blithely cast off into the night is a highly personal one, based on ephemeral criteria. For the overwhelmed listener or critic, one hour of time in which we scarcely pay attention is a cast-off, but for the artist we've taken all their hours and days and wadded them into a missile aimed straight at the rubbish bin. Unfair? Well, sure-but no more so than any other aspect of the process of natural selection in our media-crowded world. And it's only getting more and more jam-packed, day in, day out-just think, 300 years ago it was possible to have read every book ever written in English. Today, I doubt one could read so much as a list of all their titles. The same applies to music.

So how do we manage all of this? Do we give up and just stick to what we like? Or do we keep trying to discover new things to turn us on, get us excited, make us want to put in the effort necessary to truly enjoy our music community?

O'Donnell's persepctive is decidedly depressing for the music obsessive:

There are a million records to be heard and enjoyed, each one as deserving of your attention as any other. You will never get to hear 99% them.

Get over it.

Anna Bond recently interviewed crooner Jens Lekman for Dusted Magazine, delving into his relationship with label Secretly Canadian, the contents of his iPod, and his dream to be backed by a 100-child chorus.

Jens is a fantastic study, and Bond creates the moment with ease and grace, detailing everything from the soft imperfection of Lekman's accent to his heartfelt idolization of Jonathan Richman (Modern Lovers).

Most surprising (maybe) is the way Lekman searches for music on the web.

Songs are my favorite form, in whatever way they're released. I love the whole filesharing thing. I usually just type in a word that I like for a moment, the name of a city or something. I tried to do that for this tour, actually - I tried to find a song for every city that we were playing in, so I could play a song about the city in every city. But I couldn't find songs about every city.I like just typing in a word that I like, and just downloading anything that comes up.

Bond goes on to ask him about his relationship with female singer-songwriters, his band in Sweden (which is all women), and his reluctance to divulge politics blatantly (despite his dislike of metaphor). The entire interview is beautifully composed and interesting, even to the Lekman novice. You'll soon find yourself digging through Anna Bond's archives over at Dusted.

Amy Philips from Pitchfork reports:

"Thom Yorke's un-solo album, The Eraser, is due out July 11 on XL Recordings. (Pretty cool that Thom Yorke decided to put his album out on an indie label, huh?) It was produced by Radiohead bosom buddy Nigel Godrich..."

Head over to her post for more details and a rumored track list.

Paige Maguire also writes for Swoon.

"Crazy" is an interesting song, but ultimately devoid of that which it purports to be full of -- soul.

Real soul moves you, right? We're talking Irma Thomas, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder! Sure it's a great dance song and it's super catchy, but is it great soul? I'm not sure I think so either, Cindy.

Paige Maguire also writes at Swoon.

What exactly is the "normalization" process that turns novelty songs, which are explicitly comedic, into "straight" pop, which is generally tragic or epic? In the podcast, I touched on two explanations. One is that of maturation, demonstrated both by the transition from Spike Jones' childlike mouth noises and bangs to the restrained sexuality of Aaliyah and by the more literal growing-up we hear of the child's voice in Lil Markie -> Daniel Smith -> Jack White; kids are silly and weird in part because they like things that are silly, but also because they have not fully socialized and are a bit more willing to let their strangeness out to those close to them, and so as we normalize and become older and become more fit for public consumption, so does novelty become pop: it grows up, but it still retains that inherant, particular strangeness, which differentiates it from everything else and thus provides a hook.

Part One
Continuation

Parisian hip-hop group TTC have a fascination with American Southern beats that can be traced, in a sideways manner, to MC Teki Latex's trilingual education...

Mia Lily Clarke reviews a Gossip show in Chicago here.

The trio made it just in time, dragging bedraggled backpacks onto the stage and unpacking their gear at rapid speed. Guitarist Brace Paine, somewhat out of character, seemed disgruntled and tired during the brief line check and for most of the set, but new drummer Hannah Billie-- of excellent Seattle bands Shoplifting and Chromatics-- was on fine form throughout, and turns out to be a profoundly talented addition to the band.

Mallory O'Donnell discusses Bowie's "Rebel Rebel", and how it came to resonate with her in a way that other songs can't as a part of Stylus' Seconds column:

"Rebel Rebel" is always going to be one of those songs for me. Whenever I try to break it down into its component parts, it feels a little absurd. Bowie himself has called it "the funniest song. I can't conceive how I wrote that now."