Category: Video Vault

Video Vault Episode 78: Happy Birthday Mario!

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Today, everyone’s favorite video game plumber turns 30! Which is to say, blow off your Friday night plans and dust off your NES console because you now have a date with Super Mario Bros. Oh, and we have a present for you. 30 % OFF Andrew Schartmann’s 33 1/3 on Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros  soundtrack So don’t forget to pick up your copy ASAP! Not to brag, but the New Yorker seemed to like it. You can also read our Q&A with Andrew here, as well as Andrew’s posts on our blog…

Video Vault Episode 77: Ella Fitzgerald Sings “Summertime”

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Today is essentially the last day of summer for me, as it marks the end of my summer internship (I’ll be back part-time in the fall though, don’t you worry!). September is right around the corner and, with it, an insanely busy fall semester. I’m overwhelmed just thinking about it. But what better way to send off the summer than with Ella’s beautiful rendition of “Summertime”? Ella Fitzgerald is and always will be my go-to example of the closest a person can get to vocal perfection. Give her a classic…

Video Vault Episode 76: 33 1/3 Author Pete Astor (feat. How to Write About Music)!

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Today’s video vault is extra special for several reasons: The artist in this video is Pete Astor, author of our very own 33 1/3 book Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation. This video was premiered earlier this month on Overblown, and we can expect a full-length album in the near future! How to Write About Music made a cameo at 1:02! We are proud to be counted among Pete Astor’s favorite books (and we’re sure he’s not just biased because he published with us).     Check out his…

Video Vault Episode 75: A Kanye West/Jay-Z Parody

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Remember back in 2011 when you basically could not leave your house without hearing the ear-wormingly catchy backbeat of Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Niggas in Paris”? I would just like to remind everyone that this parody video also happened. Sorry, it’s stuck in your head forever again. As an aside, as much as I love this BUST approved video, how depressing is the ratio of male to female writers in this? Can we replace Eugenides with Octavia Butler? De Montaigne with de Beauvoir? Barthes with Mulvey? My suggested rewrite: Nerdy boy,…

Video Vault Episode 74: Hurricane Season by Trombone Shorty

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Hello again, everyone! It’s mid-July, the perfect time to start talking about hurricane season! This music comes from the wonderfully talented Trombone Shorty, everyone’s favorite pop/rock/jazz brass player. I’m sorry to say that he’s not playing trombone here, but trumpet is almost as good so we can live with it. I’m not really sure why, but this song never fails to make me happy. Maybe it’s the fact that the opening trumpet part sounds ridiculously silly to me, or the fact that I always try to sing along with the…

Video Vault Episode 73: Cayetana

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It may not be the most high-brow thing to admit, but I’ll always have a place in my heart for some good-old-fashioned indie-pop/”pop-punk”/whatever-they-call-it to lift the mood.* Which is how I found myself a few Saturdays ago at an all-ages free show amidst a sea of 16-year-olds in the sweltering heat of McCarren Park to see Philly-based band Cayetana. Seriously, it was unbearably hot. Pre-show, all we could do was miserably down bottles of water while the sound system, for some bizarre reason, blasted System of a Down’s Toxicity (yes, they played multiple songs…

Video Vault Episode 72: Genre-Hopping with Chris Thile

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Hello everyone! Allow me to introduce myself as the new intern at 33 1/3. I’ll be doing the occasional video vault post and maybe some other work around the blog. Rather than aligning myself in this first post with one musical camp or another, I’m keeping my stance ambiguous by invoking as many genres as I can in one video. “Another New World” is a song by Americana guitarist Josh Ritter, performed here on mandolin by Chris Thile, that is loosely inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” I’m also…

Video Vault Episode 67: Dead Kennedys Week – I Kill Children

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To celebrate the upcoming release of our 105th 33 1/3 on  Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, author and historian Michael Stewart Foley will discuss the archival research involved in writing about the San Francisco punk scene. Each day, he’ll be highlighting one amazing hidden source, and so, today, we bring you the fifth and final installment of Dead Kennedys week! For the last installment of Dead Kennedys week, check out this video of the DKs playing the Mabuhay Gardens in 1979, as they were refining the songs that eventually appeared…

Video Vault Episode 66: Get your Crayon

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Last weekend I found myself sitting in a room with a hundred music critics listening to an academic presentation about Missy Elliot. In fact, it was a panel of six academic presentations. There were arguments for the Afro-futurism of Missy Elliot as well as the importance of her influence on hip-hop since Under Construction. However, the final paper delivered on the panel was the most compelling. It linked Missy Elliot to the Korean Rapper, G Dragon, formerly of the K-Pop super group Big Bang. The parallels between this video and…