Compared to some other brands of similar price, the Skullcandy Ink’d 2.0 Wired Earbuds have deeper, fuller bass and superior detail/definition. They also fit and stay in your ears better than the Sonys did (I wear them when exercising). The flat cord still tangles sometimes, but not as often or severely as the round ones seem to. Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that if you break them, Skullcandy will give you a coupon for half of the MSRP value that can be used toward a purchase on their website.
There was a time in our innocent past when people trusted and preferred stories where the hero and villain were clearly defined, the simple math being that the good guy always did the right thing while the bad guy did what felt good no matter what or who got hurt. But after centuries of righteous humans killing and raping in the name of their gods, and the more recent revelations that every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints (sho’ nuff, Mick!) it became apparent that the traditional storytelling model was suspect (as well as fucking boring).
Right around the time Lucifer — er, Mick Jagger made that declaration, Hollywood and popular culture in general began to champion the idea of the antihero. Suddenly you had Warren Beatty raising holy hell as Clyde Barrow with chic, smokin’ Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker at his side. Audiences were now put in the position of rooting for the not-so-good guys, and Hollywood no longer made any pretense about not glorifying the sinners — just so long as the sinners were sexy. Hell, if Bonnie and Clyde had been purely fictional cinema creations and not real people, they might have even avoided being turned into bloody, bullet-riddled sacks of sexy flesh at the end!
Wholesome American heroism
The point is, with the rise of the likes of Cool Hand Luke, Butch and Sundance, Michael Corleone, and Ratso Rizzo, coupled with the moral uncertainties caused by the assassinations of the Sixties, the political and moral ambiguities of Vietnam, and the civic betrayals of Watergate, antiquated notions of noble heroism were no longer satisfactory for anyone above the age of 14.
Which brings us all the way to 2013 and the case of Walter White, a.k.a., Heisenberg, a.k.a. the most complex antihero character in the history of the big OR small screen, BIITCCHH!!! (sho’ nuff, Jesse!). Notice I did not say the best antihero. The reason for this is that Tony Soprano was, in many ways, the apex in the evolution of the antihero, and without him Walter White would arguably be a dead, un-ejaculated sperm in the dick that was the gleam in the eye of Vince Gilligan’s creative imagination. Still, Walt was a more complex animal.
So, without further ado, here are 6 reasons why:
6. UNLIKE TONY, WALT HAD NO ALPHA-MALE SOCIOPATH EXAMPLES FROM HIS CHILDHOOD
As any fan of The Sopranos is well aware, Tony didn’t exactly grow up in a Ward and June Cleaver-style household. Who in any recognizable realm of fucking reality has though, right? But allowing for the possibility that such ideal domesticity exists at all, the average family would fall somewhere on the spectrum between — and hopefully much closer to –the Cleavers, and the sublime mindfuckery that being raised by Johnny and Livia Soprano would involve.
Now there’s no question Tony blossomed in the ways of Johnny Soprano’s profession. He was born to it, the same way Sonny and Michael took after Vito Corleone (hey, one Fredo out of three ain’t bad, right?). When it comes to nature vs. nurture as it applies to the Heisenberg demon in Walter White, however, nature seems to have left nurture ass-raped, bruised and cowering a corner of the prison cell.
When Breaking Bad first introduces us to Walter White, he is the picture of whitebread Protestant suburban stability from an undoubtedly stable, whitebread Protestant background. He’s a high school chemistry teacher — an educated man of science who’s probably managed to make it through most of his adult life without getting so much as a speeding ticket, let alone engaging in such sordid activities as poisoning little kids with ricin or blowing half the faces off drug kingpins.
And yet, there we were, closing in on the inevitably horrifying end to his saga, marveling at the self-made monster that was Heisenberg. “From Mr. Chips to Scarface” indeed.
5. TONY WAS OUT FOR MONEY, POWER, AND ALL OF THE TRAPPINGS. WALT WAS ONLY OUT FOR POWER.
Tony Soprano craved money and power for the same transparent reasons we all do. Tony was a big man with big appetites for good food, nice clothes, and big boats. Tony loved pussy and Big Pussy, but he loved pussy more. Nonetheless, he killed them both. (I’m reminded of the pussy confusion in the dream sequence in Dr. Melfi’s office right before she gave him some pussy and right before he killed Big Pussy, but I digress).
Walt could care less for pussy. He probably never was much of a glutton in the food department either, even before his cancer diagnosis. I’d attribute his never being interested in using his money-derived power for pussy accumulation like Tony to loyalty to his sexy wife Skyler, but he doesn’t show much of an interest in her pussy either. No, with Heisenberg, it’s all about craving power for its own sake, to feed his formidable ego.
I mean, what’s he bought? Like two cars or something? He buried 80 MILLION DOLLARS for chrissakes!!! I know, I know, he had to keep a low profile to keep Hank’s snooping ass at bay, but that doesn’t fully explain his utter disregard for the boundless luxuries that have been available to him. As has become clearer and clearer over the seasons, power was really Walt’s/Heisenberg’s sole, twisted core motivation.
4. WHEN IT COMES TO BRUTALITY, WALT IS STRICTLY INTELLECTUAL
Walt Whitman. Walter Matthau. Walter Cronkite. Walter Mondale. Nobody with the name Walter has ever kicked serious fucking ass in the history of anything ever to the best of my knowledge.
And unless your name is Saul Goodman, nobody in the Breaking Bad universe — not Jesse, not Hank, not Mike, not Gus.. shit, not even Skyler or Walt Jr. has ever been physically intimidated by Walter White either. Surely he can fuck you up with some applied chemistry but that’s about it. Tony Soprano? Well, not to diminish his genuine street smarts and gift for subtle strategizing, but let’s face it… his main thing was being a master of physical intimidation (his mid-90’s mishaps with Chili Palmer notwithstanding).
Whereas Jesse put a beatdown on Walt on at least one or two occasions when the situation called for it, Chrissy Moltisanti would’ve had to wake up and go apologize for even having a dream that he kicked Tony’s ass!
3. TONY NEEDS DR. MELFI’S THERAPY TO HELP HIM BELIEVE HE’S A GOOD MAN, WHEREAS HEISENBERG’S SELF-DELUSION IS FUCKING IMPERVIOUS.
Let’s peel away all the romantic Mafia mystique and admit that Tony Soprano was a killer. He loved his wife and kids, sure. He was a Catholic. But being a killer was his defining characteristic. And despite Walt’s not having embraced his inner murderer until well into his middle age, he’s no less a killer. Who also loves his family and would kill for them. And does. But sometimes it’s not really for them at all. He just kills.
Old-timey notions of heroes and villains made the presumption that villains, for whatever reason, choose to do evil on purpose. The antihero notion sheds light on the reality that EVERYONE of us sees ourselves as the hero of our own story, no matter how much fucked up shit we do. You think Ted Bundy saw himself as anything other than a brilliant law student with a bright future career ahead of him who just happened to enjoy bludgeoning young women and making sweet sweet love to their rotting corpses in his spare time? Do you think Hitler saw himself as anything other than the Jew-exterminating savior of humanity? What the empathetic among us would call abominable on an average day, these guys would’ve called Thursday because abomination was a part of their scheduled routines.
But certain monsters require more outside affirmation of their inherent “goodness” than others. Another was to look at it is that Tony Soprano was a man becoming acquainted with his fear while Walter White has been steadily emerging from his.
2. WALTER WHITE IS UTTERLY HUMORLESS Both The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were heavy shows that employ a wicked dose of humor, black and otherwise. My favorite Sopranos episode on the strength of sheer comedy will always be “Pine Barrens” from season 3 when Paulie and Christopher get lost in the snowy woods while in pursuit of the escaped Russian Valerie. The exchanges, such as the one where, after losing Tony on the cell phone, Paulie tells Christopher that the man they’re after “killed 16 Czechoslovakians” (instead of Chechen rebels) and was “an interior decorator” (instead of an ex-commando who was with the interior ministry) were fucking priceless.
Tony, violent as he was, was often funniest at his most ill-tempered, but Jesse does most of the comedic heavy-lifting on this show. Heisenberg’s a serious serious man. So serious it’s not funny.
1. WALT’S EMPIRE IS ULTIMATELY ONLY A CONSTRUCT IN HIS MIND
On the surface, it would appear that Tony Soprano and Walter White have much in common, criminal kingpin-wise. They both have stacks of cash stashed away in various places. They both have people killed. They both have reputations that precede them (even if Walt was more widely known by a faceless alias until later). The crucial difference though is that where Tony actually had the loyalty and respect of a crew of fellow killers, Walt’s most consistent “crew” has consisted solely of Jesse Pinkman — and even he had to be repeatedly cajoled, manipulated, threatened and…. um… hugged to stay on Walt’s side.
Every agreement or alliance made between Walt and other criminal parties –from Krazy-8 to Tuco to Gus Fring to Mike Ehrmantraut — has resulted in every one of those parties ending up real fucking dead. Not that Walt had much of a choice in disposing of them, but the point is this: Were he equipped with the kind of GENUINE backup which Tony Soprano had, the only remaining enemy he’d have had to concern himself would’ve been Hank Schrader and the rest of the DEA.
Then he was betrayed once again. This time by so-politely-psychotic-it’s-creepy, “Opie, dead-eyed piece of shit” Todd Alquist and his Nazi Uncle Jack and crew, and got 70 million dollars and a dead brother-in-law poorer for it. It was the final confirmation that the empire Heisenberg lorded over was always just a fragile construct in his head. He had no loyal army to defend his fortress and family and riches. He had junkie Jesse. He had Saul and Saul’s fat black pickpocket. And in the end, he didn’t even have them.
His immense castle turned out to be made of New Mexican desert sand, prone to blow away with the first strong gust from a cosmic fart. His best and biggest ally thus far had proven to be sheer dumb luck, seeing as most anyone else in his vulnerable position would’ve been dead at least three seasons earlier. It’s a luck he and Jesse shared, but came nowhere near as close as Jesse to deserving.
Tony Soprano and his universe faded (or rather abruptly and fucking INFURIATINGLY cut to black) some years before Walter’s did the same. Two American antiheroes who reflected the tussling hero and villain within all of us.
Before being absorbed and assimilated into Babylonia, the Chaldeans were a people who existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BC in the far southeastern part of Mesopotamia. They originated a system of numerology which is unfamiliar to many modern practitioners of numerology.
Pythagoras, an Ionian Greek philosopher and mathematician, developed the more common and simplistic numerology system. The chart below represents the Pythagorean system of numerology where the letters are assigned numbers 1 thru 9 in alphabetical order, merely starting at 1 again until all 26 letters are assigned.
As you can see from the main chart at the top, the Chaldean numerology method deviates from the Pythagorean pattern beginning with F, which rather than 6 is attributed an 8 vibration. The Chaldean system also assigns no letters at all to the number 9 since 9 was considered by the Chaldeans to be sacred and therefore set apart from the remaining nine elemental numbers (0 thru 8) , although combinations of letters in words and names can still add up to a 9 vibration.
For those unfamiliar, in both systems the numeric vibration of words and names are derived by adding up the assigned values of each letter and then adding together the numbers in the result until a single number is reached. Take this example using the name Robert Mueller:
So, taking what we’ve learned by adding the value of letters in the Special Counsel’s name, we arrive at a vibration of 5 and a compound vibration of 32, the meanings of which I’ve illustrated below:
Now this of course gives us a great deal of insight into Robert Mueller, but the vibration of the numbers in his birth date would be needed to attain a complete picture. Mueller’s birthday is 08/07/1944 which adds up to a compound number of 24 and a single vibration of 6, which means Mueller is a 5 by his name and a 6 by his birth date.
Notice that his birth year, 1944, adds up to 18 (1+9+4+4) and further reduces to 9, which is the primary focus of this article. If you need proof that 9 holds special significance as the ancient Chaldeans believed, simply observe the fact that no other number can reflect the vibration of another number added to it the way 9 does. For example:
3 + 9 = 12, 1+2 = 3 again
8 + 9 = 17, 1+7 = 8 again
It works this way with every number added to 9, including of course 9 itself. The only number more mysterious and powerful is 0, which also has no letter assignment but which further has no word or name vibration assignment by itself at all. Nothing is a zero vibration, but zero plays an important role in compound number vibrations up to 50 (and of course multiplies the mathematical power of any number it follows, e.g. 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, etc.).
For a more in-depth look at Chaldean numerology, please check out my book Understanding Chaldean Numerologyavailable at Amazon on January 6, 2019.
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Back in 2010, Rolling Stone magazine published its 100 Greatest Singers of All Time list and I was enthralled. Being a more obsessive than average music fan and reckless bar karaoke enthusiast, the notion of prominent musicians and recording industry luminaries getting together to rank the vocal prowess of my singing idols was tantalizing.
Where other male peers in my teenage years were obsessing over pro and college sports statistics, I could always be counted on to know what musical artist had what number one single in what year, or which group had the most critically-acclaimed albums in their discography (the Beatles still top the Stones in my estimation, if only for the Fabs’ feat of having made their mark in the span of a mere six years).
What struck me most about Rolling Stones’ list was how the racial composition of their top 20 (and especially top 10 singers) contrasted so starkly with most of their other all-time-greatest list themes involving albums and singles. Whereas white artists dominated the top 10 of the album list (with Marvin Gaye being the sole, non-top-5 inclusion) the singers list top 10 was comprised almost entirely of black artists. Western popular music being so indebted to African-American musical art forms, this is somewhat understandable. And speaking of African-American musical art forms, it should go without saying that this list contains no rap artists.
10. James Brown
James Brown held many honorary titles ( “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business”, “Soul Brother Number One”) but he will undoubtedly be most remembered as the “Godfather of Soul”. That none of his many performing talents seemed to be overshadowed by his singing ability should in no way be taken to mean his singing was substandard. It was not. In the introduction to their list, Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Lethem emphasized:
“Contrary to anything you’ve heard, the ability to actually carry a tune is in no regard a disability in becoming a rock & roll singer…”
But this is in no way meant to imply that James Brown couldn’t carry a tune either. A soulful if unpolished balladeer, Brown was nonetheless most renowned for the guttural vocal ad-libs and soul-wrenching squeals employed on his super-tight band’s funk workouts: “Cold Sweat“, “I Got the Feelin'”, and all three parts of “Super Bad” among a stellar batch of others. Like all great singers, he let the music play him. His singing and dancing were the purest expression of his soul being simultaneously thrashed and soothed by it.
9. Stevie Wonder
UNSPECIFIED – JANUARY 01: Photo of Stevie WONDER (Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)
The marvel that is the voice of Stevland Hardaway Morris (aka Little Stevie Wonder, aka Stevie Wonder) is unparalleled in the history of popular music. As eminently capable of caressing the most pristine, sophisticated melodies (“You and I”, “Isn’t She Lovely”) as it is of attacking the fiercest of funk and r&b (“Superstition”, “Higher Ground”, “I Wish”), it’s one of the main reasons he was able — even though it was more a showcase of his prodigious instrumentality than his singing chops — to achieve his first number one at the age of 13 with the live single “Fingertips” (on which Marvin Gaye played drums).
In addition to his own formidable music, Stevie has lent his fire and focus as a singer to everyone from collaborators such as Paul McCartney on “What’s That You’re Doing” to Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick on the charity hit single “That’s What Friends Are For”. Always spirited and uplifting in his delivery, his special rendition of “Ribbon In The Sky” at the televised funeral of Whitney Houston in 2012 gave the late diva a classy sendoff.
8. Otis Redding
Tragically perishing at 26 just as his commercial crossover breakthrough to the Beatles-and-Motown-dominated pop market seemed imminent, Otis Redding left behind an indelible musical legacy. As a singer he summoned raw gospel and blues to serve the expressive heartbreak of songs like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “These Arms of Mine” and to drive home the urgency of tunes like “Mr. Pitiful” and “Tramp”.
After driving someone else to an ultimately unproductive Stax studio session, Redding himself ended up being signed by studio chief Jim Stewart upon hearing Redding’s performance of “These Arms of Mine”. Recalled Stewart, “Everybody was fixin’ to go home, but Joe Galkin (an Atlantic Records representative) insisted we give Otis a listen. There was something different about [the ballad]. He really poured his soul into it.”
His final masterpiece “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” came as a result of Redding being inspired by the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and trying create a similar sound (against the wishes of his label). While the music (co-written with Steve Cropper) was somewhat of a departure from the more traditional R&B of Redding’s prior work, his singing retained its gracefully pained and gritty resonance and carried the song’s emotional heart. The whistling at the end, meant to be redone with lyrics upon Redding’s return from a tour he wouldn’t survive, was itself a final taste of his gentle genius.
7. Bob Dylan
While some may find his tone and phrasing homely and be surprised to find Bob Dylan ranking so high on a list of greatest singers, there can be no question as to the breadth of his influence. Before Dylan, almost all popular recorded singing was expected to adhere to a certain set of rules. Singers strove to sound elegant and smooth. But Dylan emerged from the folk music scene, schooled on the vocal stylings of singers like Woody Guthrie and crackling vinyl blues apparitions like Robert Johnson howling like weary dogs in the lonely rural night. As Bono puts it in the Rolling Stone article:
“Almost no one sings like Elvis Presley anymore. Hundreds try to sing like Dylan. When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn’t understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.”
Meaning what you sing means a lot. In “Visions Of Johanna” Dylan means to sound haunted, and he does. In “Positively 4th Street” Dylan means to sound stinging, and he stings. In “All Along The Watchtower” he borrows and embodies the tone of cryptic Biblical revelation, inspiring an even greater storm from artistic admirer (and singing disciple) Jimi Hendrix in his electrified hijacking of the song.
Perhaps now, in the age of Auto-tuned singing, we’ve again reached a point where vocal perfection is disproportionately prized over vocal character. Surely the two virtues need not be mutually exclusive — they can and have co-existed in voices from Whitney Houston to Jeff Buckley. But what Dylan demonstrated — what he reminded with his wry whine and inimitable phrasing — was that beauty is often uncommon, unfussy, and unexpected, and he did it as much with his lyrics as with the way he sang and still sings them.
6. Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye was not Nat King Cole. And yet, early on in his career, it appears he wanted to be. His debut 1961 album The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye featured his versions of jazz standards like Rodger and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” and Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale”. He said he wanted to “sit on a stool and croon” rather than “shake my ass onstage”, believing that his voice should be the focus of his performances.
As things turned out, Gaye never became famous for his dancing, and his voice indeed was the thing that mattered most, but his tasteful jazz crooner aspirations were not to be, and his attempts to duplicate the successful jazz/adult contemporary ventures of artists like Ray Charles fizzled. Marvin Gaye’s destiny was loftier than becoming a Nat King Cole-imitator. Marvin Gaye’s destiny was to inspire future legions of Marvin Gaye- imitators.
This is not to say Gaye didn’t take any of his refined jazz sensibilities with him when he reluctantly surrendered to his genius as an R&B singer. Few before and even fewer since had his sense of controlled ache, where emotion pushed up against the lid of a boiling pot. He always sounded like he was barely holding something overwhelming down deep inside of him, and it’s unlikely that was an impression he would or could easily fake. He let bursts of carnal steam out at regular intervals to relieve some pressure, but any outright explosive loss of control usually didn’t come until the climax, as they did gloriously on tracks like “Distant Lover” and the still-astonishingly-scorching-after-45-years “Let’s Get It On“.
While he enjoyed moderate chart success in the 60’s, it was when Marvin Gaye’s expressions on record at Motown were allowed to become personal that his singing truly transcended R&B conventions. “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (a 7-week number one in 1968) may have solidified his pop stardom, but it was when he demanded and won the freedom to sing on matters beyond the traditionally-limited Motown scope that he became a vocal impressionist painter. “What’s Going On“, both the single and the 1971 album it helmed, fully unleashed Gaye’s passion and compassion on the world in a way that has yet to cease echoing in pop (and especially African-American) culture.
5. John Lennon
There are several reasons the Beatles became the most successful pop music act of all time, but let’s be clear up front that whether or not John Lennon‘s singing was one of them shouldn’t be up for debate. He’d probably have been one of the last people to agree however, as it is reputed he disliked the sound of his own voice and was constantly imploring producer George Martin to perform auditory cosmetic surgery on it.
But regardless of the fact that Lennon’s singing on timeless tracks like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” was filtered through electronic prisms, the human essence of his voice was never obscured. Slightly nasal but tunefully expressive, it married perfectly with Paul McCartney’s more rounded and sweet vocals on those occasions where one of their compositions called for them to sing together.
What really put Lennon’s voice over the top though (and over McCartney’s, who ranked at 11 on this particular list) was its peculiar combination of violence and vulnerable innocence. He could rage until his throat was raw, as he did on early tracks like the Motown cover “Money (That’s What I Want)” and later, to unhinged extremes, on post-Beatles solo tracks like “Well Well Well”; but could sound as guileless as a cooing child on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or the impossibly sad and lovely lament for his dead mother “Julia”.
McCartney, too, could rage hard (“I’m Down”, “Helter Skelter”) and soothe soft (“Yesterday”, “Blackbird”, “I Will”) but the deliberate distance he more often put between himself and the songs he wrote and sang contrasted sharply with Lennon’s tendency to bare his soul. “Dear Prudence” is a personal plea to a real person informed by a genuine yearning. “Martha My Dear” is about McCartney’s sheepdog.
It’s been said that “Imagine” (arguably Lennon’s most famous composition) hasn’t been covered by other artists as much as McCartney’s “Yesterday” for the sheer fact that Lennon’s own spiritual DNA is so entwined with the former song, and I think that applies to most of his songs — beginning with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, continuing through “Instant Karma”, all the way to the painfully bitter end at the time of his murder with “Beautiful Boy” and “Watching The Wheels”.
There will never be another John Lennon, so it’s a gift to the world that John Lennon was so stubbornly and honestly John Lennon while we had him.
4. Sam Cooke
UNSPECIFIED – JANUARY 01: Photo of Sam Cooke (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Sam Cooke started out as a gospel star, becoming the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers in 1950, although the group had been around in various member incarnations since five years before Cooke‘s 1931 birth. His debonair style and looks may have contributed as much as his voice to his ascension to the top of the gospel heap (and subsequent success in the secular pop market) but it’s hard to imagine any man in possession of his supernaturally soulful pipes not seducing the ears of the world whatever his personal appearance.
Cooke sang with an enchanting agility. He wrapped his voice around the words and phrases which made up his smart lyrics with a palpable joy whose luminescence in the gospel praising of “Jesus Gave Me Water” went undiminished in secular classics like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World”. And he had range beyond his impressive vocal one, unafraid to sing and put his magic stamp on anything from folk standard “If I Had A Hammer” to the 1927 musical number “The Best Things in Life Are Free” on the Live at the Copa album.
Cut short in his prime just like a dishearteningly amount of others on this list (Redding, Gaye, Lennon), Cooke still managed, also like those others, to forge a mighty musical legacy which reached a triumphant crescendo with the posthumously-released “A Change Is Gonna Come” — a song that managed to both fulfill his ambition to write something as socially-conscious as Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” and to serve as a final testament to his ability to make the secular sacred and the sacred secular.
3. Elvis Presley
Early in this list I quoted U2‘s Bono saying that almost no one tries to sing like Elvis anymore. What he didn’t bother to point out is that almost no one can or ever could. Brought up in a Depression-era Deep South steeped in decades of blues and gospel, Elvis Aaron Presley would come to symbolize the breaching of racial cultural barriers years before the political manifestation of racial desegregation in America finally came to pass.
Sun Records founder Sam Phillips was famously in search of a white face to put on the infectious power of R&B (or “race music” as music by black performers was labelled by the white establishment back then). Unlike flavorless posers like Pat Boone though, Elvis Presley arrived at his studio with a genuine feel and affection for blues and gospel music. If the way he sang made many listeners — both black and white — who first heard him on record assume he was a Negro, the way he involuntary shifted his hips and scandalized white America in his earliest television performances left little doubt he was rooted in the music.
Like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Presley had an affinity for the sophisticated crooning of Dean Martin and Nat King Cole as well as the down-home, folksy stuff, and he demonstrated this versatility on hits as varied as “Jailhouse Rock”, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, “It’s Now or Never”, and “Return to Sender”. He could do ballads as well as Sinatra or rival the wild, gritty spunk of Little Richard. Also like Cooke and Gaye he was blessed with natural good looks that only served to widen his cultural reach just as television was coming into more postwar homes and just as pop stars were branching off into cinema.
Still, after his looks and health went to shit and he died a sad and lonely death on his palace throne toilet, the King left behind a voice which had slayed millions of hearts and sparked a global cultural revolution, and which still lives on for as long as people appreciate great singing, whether they attempt to emulate its magnificence or not.
2. Ray Charles
“I Got a Woman“, released in 1954, is one of the earliest popular examples of what came widely to be known as the genre of soul music — predating other early contenders like James Brown’s “Please Please Please” in 1956 and Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” in 1962. Ray Charles wrote the song with his band’s trumpeter, Renald Richard, and built it along a gospel-frenetic pace with secular lyrics and a jazz-inspired rhythm and blues. In other words, soul.
Throwing gasoline on that potent fire was Charles‘ voice itself; a gruff and bluesy thing that sounded ancient and fresh all at once. It was ancient as the field hollers of his slave ancestors and fresh as the catalyst that would weave disparate African threads of blues, R&B, gospel, and jazz to help birth rock and roll, soul music, and all that those genres would give birth to in turn.
Does it mean anything that out of a list of the 100 greatest singers of all time, the only two blind artists made the top 10? If we accept the idea that being deprived of sight puts one in deeper touch with their sense of acoustics then it’s more than mere coincidence. Ray Charles for his part sang to defy a literal darkness the way many enveloped in darkness of some kind have sung the blues to cope. He sang “Georgia On My Mind” with a tenderness that soaks through and leaves any listener with a heart feeling his feelings whether they know anything about Georgia or not. Because it’s the feeling in his singing that conquered you, no matter what he was singing about.
1 Aretha Franklin
By this point some of you may have been asking, “Cool picks, but where are the females on this list?” Rest assured, women are well represented on the top 100 list as a whole, but any objections to their being nearly absent from the top 10 should at least partially be atoned for by the Queen of Soul‘s position at the pinnacle. That’s right, according to all the artists and industry execs, technicians, etc. who voted on this list, no man, woman, child, or beast made a more exquisite sound than the recently laid to rest Aretha Franklin.
Dropping like a bomb in the cultural riot that was late-1960s America, Franklin‘s immortal cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” bulldozed its way to the top of the charts and made her a musical force to be reckoned with. Like a majority of the other artists in the top 10 (and a great deal in the entire top 100) the force of nature that was her voice was schooled in a church gospel choir. She was a master of conveying and provoking strong emotional reactions whether she was soaring or singing gently and directly.
Her handling of Carole King‘s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” was pop drama packaged in a power seldom heard before or since — her legions of diva imitators sometimes come close to replicating her force and range, but her measured instinct for restraint and control escapes the vast majority of them.
Such an unparalleled force of nature was her voice that its gifts even extended to opera. On the night of the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, the late opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti had been scheduled to perform the aria “Nessun Dorma,” from Puccini’s “Turandot” but had to cancel due to illness 30 minutes into the live broadcast. Franklin, booked to appear in a Blues Brothers-themed number that same evening, agreed to step in for him and absolutely slayed it. She could sing anything.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Church Of Scientology surely has read or heard about its late founder L. Ron Hubbard’s whacked-out views on humanity and the pseudo-religion’s many movie and music star devotees. (A notable few include: Kirstie Alley, Beck, Chick Corea, Doug E. Fresh, Vivian Kubrick, Juliette Lewis, Elisabeth Moss, Michael Peña, Bijou Phillips, Giovanni Ribisi, and Greta Van Susteren).
What may be less widely known are the numerous references to the cult-like organization in literature, film, theater, and popular music by non, ex, and practicing Scientologists alike. Here are 10 of the most interesting.
This song from Frank Zappa’s concept album/rock opera Joe’s Garage uses terminology such as “L. Ron Hoover” and “Appliantology” in lampooning Scientology, with Zappa informing the primary character “Joe” that he “must go into the closet” to satisfy his suppressed appliance fetishism.
“How about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy
asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join
the master race. How’s that for a religion?”
– Frank Zappa, to a concert audience at the Rockpile, Toronto, May 1969
Various film critics made note of how the fictional organization “MindHead” in this Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy comedy vehicle bore a striking resemblance to the Church of Scientology. Martin plays a low-grade movie producer who cons currently-hot action star Kit Ramsey (Murphy) into being in his alien invasion movie without realizing it is not a real alien invasion. Considering the tenets of Scientology associated with belief in extraterrestrials, it was not a far stretch that Kit’s cult would have a similar theology.
Legendary Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs joined and left the Church of Scientology in the 1960’s. He subsequently wrote some of the earliest and most influential criticisms of the organization by a high-profile pop culture personality. This 1970 article from the Los Angeles Free Press was one of several he wrote on the subject, including 1971’s Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.
His review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman along with his other critical pieces eventually resulted in a battle of letters in Rolling Stone magazine between Burroughs and Scientology supporters.
This early millennium hit featured the first Scientologist regular characters on a prime-time TV show after one character (Kimber) convinced another (Matt) to join the Church, and it all started with this episode.
Show creator Ryan Murphy said he chose to explore Scientology out of his own curiosity. “You read so much in the press about certain famous people who are Scientologists, but the media pushes it aside as a joke. And clearly it’s not a joke for millions of people. I’m not for it. I’m not against it. I was just curious as to what it is, what they believe in, and how it changes life and how it destroys life.”
Writer Jarrow based the story of this musical on Hubbard’s writings and Church of Scientology literature. Original director Timbers developed the concept. The president of the Church of Scientology of New York sent a letter warning the producer about the Church’s history of litigation.
5 Battlefield Earth (2000 film)
So the film, starring and co-produced by Scientologist John Travolta, is widely considered to be one of the worst of all time. What’s more interesting though is how the 1982 Hubbard novel it’s based on was reported to have its sales fraudulently inflated by the Church and its members so that it would excel on the The New York Times Bestseller list. There were even reports of some bookstores receiving “recycled” copies with the store price tags still on them.
Lead singer and lyricist Maynard James Keenan had some gripes on this track from L.A. progressive rock band Tool’s 1996 album of the same name — dysfunctional insecure actresses, junkies with short memories, gun-toting hip gangster wannabes, and of most relevance to this list:
“Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and fuck all his clones”
Because a bitching diatribe against everything one might hate about L.A. would not be complete without a mention of the Church of Scientology.
Some time back before this in 1993 when the band was touring in support of its debut album Undertow, Tool was scheduled to play the Garden Pavilion in Hollywood. Unbeknownst to them it was owned by the Church of Scientology, and it was this fact which clashed with “the band’s ethics about how a person should not follow a belief system that constricts their development as a human being”. According to journalist Scott Schalin:
” In the center of this placid oasis stands the Celebrity Center, a glass
gazebo where, last May, Tool used the solemn surroundings as an ironic
forum for its own dynamic principles of finding inner strength. Between
songs, Keenan, staring first at the lush grounds paid for by devoted L.
Ron followers and then into the eyes of his own audience, bayed into the
mic like a sheep looking for his shepherd’s gate. ‘Baaaaa! Baaaaa!’ the
singer bleated. The subordinate call could be heard as far away as
Franklin Avenue, where the boulevard congregation bummed spare change.”
This song from Cohen’s Love And Hate LP primarily concerns a love triangle but
makes brief technical reference to the Scientology state of “Clear” in the lyrics:
Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?
before repeating the first three line of this verse at the close of the song.
Few listeners in 1971 (unless they’d read the Hubbard book Dianetics or were
practicing Scientologists themselves) probably knew what Cohen was talking
about.
Cohen himself remarked:
“I looked into a lot of things. Scientology was one of them. It did not last very long. But it is very interesting, as I continue my studies in these matters, to see how really good Scientology was from the point of view of their data, their information, their actual knowledge, their wisdom writings, so to speak. It wasn’t bad at all. It is scorned, and I don’t know what the organization is like today, but it seems to have all the political residue of any large and growing organization. Yes, I did look into that and other things. from the Communist Party to the Republican Party, from Scientology to delusions of myself as the High Priest rebuilding the Temple.”
This may well be the funniest example on the list as well as one of the more notorious. South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone took on the Church in an outrageous episode that managed to piss off Scientologists Tom Cruise (for implying he’s a closeted homosexual), Issac Hayes (whose tolerance for the show’s irreverence towards other religions vanished when his own became the target of ridicule), while breathing new life into an R. Kelly song which had already produced a series of zany music videos. Along with Cruise, other hilarious celebrity cartoon depictions included Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, and R. Kelly himself.
Not many would argue that of all the popular depictions of Hubbard and the Church of Scientology thus far, this film — written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams — has garnered the most critical praise for its sheer artistry. And deservedly so. The powerhouse performances by the late Oscar-winning actor Hoffman and Oscar-nominated actors Phoenix and Adams turn this thinly-veiled tale surrounding the origins of Scientology into absolutely transcendent cinema.
Hoffman portrays the Hubbard-inspired mentor to Phoenix’s disturbed disciple, and they play each off other brilliantly. Not enough praise can be heaped upon it. If you haven’t seen it already, please do.
Tom Cruise, after seeing an early cut of the movie, was (again) not pleased. Cruise and Anderson had of course worked together previously on the 1999 film Magnolia, and this early screening was presumably a courtesy Anderson extended to Cruise to avoid any possible rifts.
Cruise “had issues” with the flick according to TheWrap.com . One scene he reportedly had trouble with involved Freddie Sutton (Phoenix) listening to Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) pontificate about the religion he had created. Another character close to the founder turned to Sutton and says, “You know he’s making it up as he goes along.” Despite Cruise’s objection, Anderson didn’t take the line out.
Edawlatry 