Saturday, August 30, 2014

10 Things you didn’t know about George Clinton and P-Funk.


1.  George Clinton is so funky, he was actually born in an outhouse, in Kannapolis, North Carolina in 1941.

Says Clinton, “I was born in the funk. My mom started to birth me in the outhouse. She heard nature’s call, and it was nature calling about me. There I was, hanging on by the string. I didn’t come from the mother ship, I came from the mother’s shit.”

2.  He grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he started the doo-wop band The Parliaments in the 1950’s, at age 15. Named after Parliament cigarettes, they preformed for customers in the barbershops and salons where Clinton worked straightening hair.


3.  In the 1960’s, Clinton was a staff songwriter for Motown Records. He didn’t strike it big there but he did have one single, "I Wanna Testify," a hit single in 1967.

4.  George Clinton and his band dominated in the soulful and funky 1970’s, when they produced over 40 R&B hit singles, three songs that hit number one on the charts, and had three platinum albums.

5.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers, huge fans of Clinton’s funk, sought him out to produce their 1985 album, Freaky Stley, giving him a career revival as a producer and collaborator. He even wrote the lyrics for the hit title track, which originally was going to be an instrumental.

6.  Clinton and his various bands and network of funk performers finally received the accolades they deserved. In February 2002, Spin Magazine rated Parliament-Funkadelic number six on their list of the "50 Greatest Bands of All Time.”  In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Parliament-Funkadelic #56 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time."  In 1997, Clinton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with fifteen other members of Parliament-Funkadelic.

7.  Side by side with James Brown, George Clinton is one of the most sampled musicians ever. The song “Atomic Dog,” is perhaps the most sampled song in the history of hip hop.

8.  Clinton’s various bands over the decades have been called Parliament, Parliament-Funkadelics, P-Funk, the P-Funk All-Stars, the Funkadelics, and many more variations. This was partially so his huge network of funk singers and performers could work on projects and perform concurrently. But a bigger reason for the frequent name changes was that Clinton has oft been embroiled in legal trouble, royalty disputes, and copyright lawsuits around his work, spanning several record labels. In total, they achieved thirteen top ten hits in the American R&B music charts, including six number one hits.

9.  His music and role as an ambassador of Funk music allowed Clinton to cross over into movies and popular culture. He appeared in the films Graffiti Bridge (1990), House Party (1990), PCU (1994), Good Burger (1997), and The Breaks (1999) and had a cameo role in the season two premiere of “How I Met Your Mother,” in 2006. He’s also been the voice of animated characters and been immortalized in video games.

10.  The most notable other members of the Parliament umbrella are guitarist, producer, and solo artist, Bootsy Collins, and Gary Shider, before he succumbed to cancer in 2010. Shider was best known for appearing on stage and performing in nothing but a diaper, earning the moniker, “Diaper Man.”


Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Music and exercise - the brain's 'boogie down' phenomenon.

What music do you have on your workout playlist? Upbeat techno? Ear splitting rap music? Or is it head banging metal? No matter what you listen to while churning out miles on the treadmill, research shows that it’s more crucial to exercise than you may think.

In fact, music works in interesting ways to boost physical performance, giving you a better workout once armed with your iPod shuffle and earbuds.  Studies reveal that music actually serves as a distraction from the neurological signals of fatigue our brain emits during a workout, with our bodies are soon to follow. That distracting or conflicting positive signal from listen to music allows us to work through pain and fatigue, elevates our mood, increases our endurance, and actually promotes metabolic efficiency. It’s not just in your head – you can actually run farther and lift more and work out longer and harder with less perceived effort with music playing.

The body of research endorsing music’s role in exercise actually extends back to 1911, when American scientist Leonard Ayres found that professional cyclists actually pedaled faster when a band was playing than when it was silent.  

But the main body of research into music’s effect on exercise has come in the last twenty years.  A study in 2012 backed up Ayre’s century-old findings – that cyclists who listened to music used 7% less oxygen to muster the same performance as cyclists who rode without it. Costas Karageorghis, a researcher at the Brunel University of London and world-renowned authority on the psychology of exercise in music, concluded that same year that music during workouts was tantamount to, “A type of legal performance-enhancing drug.” Indeed, several current studies prove that listening to music increases electrical activity in certain regions of the brain that coordinate movement – the supplementary motor area, cerebellum, basal ganglia and ventral premotor cortex for you brainiacs keeping score at home.

Now that we’ve justified our purchase of unlimited music to aid our health and fitness journey, does it matter what kind of music you listen to? Absolutely. In fact, the rhythmic speed of your music also plays into an increase in athletic performance.  Interestingly enough, human beings most respond to a cadence of 2 hertz, or 120 beats per minute (BPM.)  When human beings clap in a group or tap their fingers on a table, they tend to settle in to that BPM naturally. They gather that 2 BPM is closest to the natural rhythm of the human heart at rest. When researchers tracked the BPM of all music from 1960 until present day, the majority of songs have 120 BPM.

So that is the baseline (no pun intended) of where music starts enhancing physical performance. Any slower than that and there probably won’t be a boost of mood, perception of exertion, endurance, or moto-neurons. As we get up to the 140 BPM range we probably hit the optimal range for music during a workout, though people on a treadmill tend to favor faster music, around 160 BPM. But for the rest of us lifting weights or performing other cardio, 145 BPM seems to be the ceiling for optimal performance – after that, there is little added benefit.  

There is a second phenomenon when it comes to music’s role in boosting exercise, something that white-coated scientists call “rhythm response.” Quite simply, that’s a person’s emotional connection to a song based on unique memories that triggers the human “neural crosstalk” response. Quite simply, certain music tells our brain to get down and dance, boogying like our pants were on fire!

 So turn up the music and have a kick ass workout!







  

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Breaking up is hard to do…unless their taste in music sucks.



You meet someone.  You go out on a first date and it goes swimmingly (unlike all of your other first dates.)  You really like them and think (gasp!) he or she could be the one!  But then, just when you’re picturing 50 years of domestic bliss with the white picket fence and 2.3 children, you see pick up their iPod and listen to their favorite playlist. 

It’s truly awful (by your standards) – Free Bird to your Drake, Britney Spears to your Zack Brown band, and Nickelback to your….well, that’s a bad example – no one likes Nickelback.  But the point is that their musical choices make your skin crawl.  So what happens next?  Do you dismiss it and continue with the great relationship?  I mean, it’s just music, right?  It can’t possibly have something to do with their personality, and you don’t want to be superficial…

Believe it or not, you may want to consider giving the person your dating their walking papers if you hate their music.  A new study by Heriot-Watt University shows that comparing top ten favorite songs is a fairly reliable way to predict the other person’s personality traits, and therefore relationship compatibility.   

This study gauged five different personality traits - openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.  (On a side note, I like my dating partners to be shockingly open to experience but very low on the emotional stability index.)

These super-smart scientist types found that some traits were both easier to predict and more accurate indicators of personality.  In fact, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly when looking at someone’s song and music choices.  However, the trait of conscientiousness wasn’t found to be correlated with a person’s musical taste.  

They went on to find that certain genres of music correspond in general with certain personality traits.  Here is their list:

Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease.

Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, and at ease.

Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introverts, and at ease.

Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing.

Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative, and gentle.

Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing.

Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle, and at ease.

Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle.

Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle.

Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing.

Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease.

Pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing, and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease.

Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease.

Nickelback fans are weirdly gentle, possess no self esteem, and most likely living in their mom’s basement and driving a windowless van with primer spots.

So what do you think - is this true of your top-10 playlist?  Are you going to sit down with your main squeeze and go song-for-song, hoping you’re not in tears and breaking up by the fifth song?  And remember: if they have any Nickelback on their list then it’s ok to dump them immediately because it’s not you – it’s them.  You’re welcome.


Sunday, August 17, 2014

Just how powerful is Google?

It’s common knowledge that Google is the world’s biggest search engine, but it’s still easy to underestimate just how powerful the Mountain View, Ca company is.  Google single handedly impacts just about every facet of life in America, including influencing media, technology, entertainment, commerce, and how we filter our reality.  And it’s not just internet searches – Google owns YouTube.com, the biggest video site in the world, as well as Android, the Google Chrome web browser, Blogger.com, Google Glasses, and Gmail email services, among many others.

We put together 15 facts that demonstrates just what that means.

1. Google holds a 65.6% market share of all U.S. Internet searches.  That’s about 45% higher than the second competitor, Bing.com.

2. Google accounts for 85.78% of worldwide search engine market share.

3. Google receives about 7.2 billion page views per day, or over 87.8 billion searches per month!  The next highest is 14.5 billion searches by China’s top search engine, Baidu. 

4. About 620 million people visit Google.com every day.

5. In 2013, Google brought in $59.83 billion in revenue.  Its total assets are listed at $110.92 billion.

6. Just through the first half of 2012, Google had already taken in more ad dollars than the entire U.S. print media collects every year.

7. Google originates most of its ad dollars from AdWords, and advertisers spent $38.6 billion with Google last year, up 73% from 2005. To put that in perspective, Facebook generated $6.4 billion in advertising that same year.

8. Google has an estimated $144 billion market value, which tops media giants Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, the iconic ad agency Publicis Groupe, and the New York Times…COMBINED!

9. Google has more than one million servers around the world as of 2007, managing 24 Petabytes of data.

10. It has 70 offices in 40 countries and employs well over 52,000 people.

11. Every day, Google uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes.

12. Google is listed as the #1 website in the world.

13. “Google” is now a verb in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary.

14. In 2013, Google ranked #5 for spending of all political lobbyists.


15. Google has purchased a 1 million square foot commercial space in London, England, which should be ready as a main office by 2016.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Ramblings from OutsideLands, Day 3.


Woods
Represented their new album with ripping guitar work and great keyboards.

Lucious
This Brooklyn band with two lead singers in matching outfits and blond wigs tore it down, going from chill and soulful melodies to heart-thumping war cries.  One of the highlights of the whole weekend.  

Paulo Nutini
I never would have guessed this singer is Scottish, not Brazilian.  He did a nice job bringing his brand of popular UK music to the main stage, and won plenty of new U.S. fans.

Flume
Fantastic DJ – one of the best of OutsideLands by far and had an endearing number of Jamaican musical sound bites in his set for a native Australian. 

Lykke Lee
Amazing show by this Swedish indie pop singer.  She really knew how to interact with and win over the San Francisco crowd.

The Flaming Lips
The stage set up was hilarious – like a disco mushroom trip.  I’ve loved the ‘Lips since the early 90’s but unfortunately live they were more fun and stage set gimmicks than quality sound.  

The Killers
After seeing them at the intimate Independent the previous night, it was interesting to see them rock outdoors in front of 30,000 people.  Their energy and stage presence translated well.

Tiesto
Probably the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen went bonkers to this Dutch DJ, though it was a little too frat kid-poppish for my taste.  I’ll stick with Flume from earlier in the day, though he must be doing something right! 

After hours:

We caught Kool and the Gang at the Independent, where all the doormen and bartenders met us with, “You’re back AGAIN?!”

A Sunday night crowd with their dancing shoes on was just what we needed to end the weekend, and their familiar rich sounds lead by the horn section was good for the soul. 

MC Hammer played a short set and to his credit, he wasn’t just a novelty, reliving his 1980’s success.  He looked good, dressed sharp, played new credible rap songs, and brought out younger musicians and rappers to get down with him.  He actually earned a lot of respect for continuing to make good music and not just show up and collect checks. 



Sunday, August 10, 2014

Notes from OutsideLands in San Francisco, Day 2.

“The next song came to me in a dream
I was living in Memphis
About 4am a pretty voice came to me
The most beautiful voice – much more pretty than mine
So I had to write it down…”

And so day two of OutsideLands started with those words by Valerie June in a foggy meadow right after noon.  Heads swaying to her voice from that dream as she strummed a gas can guitar, a unique and gifted soul from Memphis woke up the crowds and kicked off day two.

Saturday!  If we didn’t think it was possible, OutsideLand’s second day offered even more stellar music.  Dense fog and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds aside, everyone seemed to have a blast…and I managed to avoid the scary carnies that haunted my own dreams from the previous day.

The Kooks
Great band on the big stage – eclectic and they don’t follow any formula as they rock out.

Big Freedia
One of the most bizarre and awesome things I’ve ever witnessed – this New Orleans band put bounce on the scene years ago, influencing acts like Lil Wayne along the way.  Set up at a little stage in a grove in the woods, they energized the small crowd with their interesting take on music and food – “Booty, bignets and brunch.”  With a kitchen set and two New Orleans chefs making bignets right on stage, and Big Freedia and his gymnastic ass-tastic dancers going nuts to some deep-base southern bounce.  We didn’t want to stop dancing, but the good news was that we got to see them again later in the day, because Big Freedia played again in the afternoon on the big stage.

Tycho
Tight and unpredictable, with amazing percussions.

Haim
This sister trio (plus drummer) is one of LA’s best-kept secrets – that’s not so secret any more. 

Big Freedia
Booty shaking at its finest again, this time without the bignets.

Atmosphere
Like we mentioned yesterday, rap music doesn’t often translate well live, but Atmosphere absolutely represented and ripped it down – exuding contagious passion as he spit fire.

Tom Petty
The hardest working man in show business sounded perfect as the headliner on the big stage, showing why he’s an icon in the music world.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
After hearing half a dozen Petty songs we sprinted across the park to catch Macklemore and his DJ.  They didn’t disappoint, playing the hits we love and even bringing a female couple on stage for a marriage proposal before playing ‘Same Love.’ 

Afterhours:


We caught The Killers at the Independent, an ear-shattering fun show and a great way to end the night – and warm up for Sunday at OutsideLands, since they’re headlining at night.