Let’s discuss any and all music here. Got a new artist who’s rocking your boat that you want to talk about? Post a video! Found out about that unearthed Coltrane album that has the jazz freak in you losing your mind? Lay it out for us! Have a theory about what your favorite band might do for their next album? Let’s hear it! Anything and everything music-related goes here.
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ANNOUNCEMENT: For the duration of Black History Month, The Avocado’s very own Headphone Princess will be posting Black Sound and Image ’24. Every day this month, our resident clam-wrangler will be posting a different song by a Black artist that, to put it in her own words, “is a kind of active project where we are just as interested in how the music and images are situated as we are in the way in which they can be understood. If we just ‘look’ at these images, we’re not challenging ourselves to engage with them in a meaningful way. And if we just ‘listen’ to the song or the performance, we’re also not mobilizing what has become an important way to understand the Black experience. This attentiveness is done by ‘hearing’ an image, by taking in not just the singular performance, but thinking about its production, about its reception, about how it feels to bear witness to the confluence of sound and image, etc. In other words, experience is key! ”.
A new song (accompanied by a thoughtful write-up) will be posted in the comment section of the linked article every day around 6:00 PM CST. If it’s anything like the previous threads that Headphone Princess has posted, there is bound to be a treasure trove of great music to be heard, and almost certain to be something you’ll like, something you haven’t heard before, or even something that might change your life. So by all means, check it out!
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This week’s discussion prompt comes courtesy of The Avocado’s very own Nudeviking:
What are your favorite “fake” fade-outs (or endings) of songs?
“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers was released in November of 1964. At the time singer Bill Medley had his doubts that it would be a hit, as in addition to coming right in the middle of the British Invasion, at nearly four minutes it was considered “too long” (radio stations at the time rarely played tracks longer than three minutes long) and the producer refused to shorten it. However, after a suggestion from sound engineer Larry Levine, it was decided to print “3:05” on the label of the single (instead of the actual running time of 3:45) and the song was given a “false ending” which, in addition to making the recording sound more dramatic, also tricked radio DJs into thinking it was a shorter song. And the ruse clearly worked, as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart for two weeks in February of 1965, and also spent sixteen weeks in the Hot 100, which at that time was considered an unusually long chart run.
As always, any and all music-related posts are welcome. Have fun, and rock out with yr guac out!