The best holiday songs in one merry little playlist with David Bowie, Rock · Folk /Country · Jazz · Rap · Pop/R&B · Global · Electronic · Experimental freaks of outré sound still had a warm place in their hearts for this music. .. in pop, presiding with three-part harmonies, deconstructed R&B, and sharp.
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- Strange Fruit: the first great protest song
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Written by a Jewish communist called Abel Meeropol , Strange Fruit was not by any means the first protest song, but it was the first to shoulder an explicit political message into the arena of entertainment. Unlike the robust workers' anthems of the union movement, it did not stir the blood; it chilled it.
Up to this point, protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit proved they could be art. It is a song so good that dozens of singers have since tried to put their stamp on it, and Holiday's performance is so strong that none of them have come close to outclassing her — in , Time magazine named her first studio version the "song of the century". Although lynching was already on the decline by the time of Strange Fruit — the grotesque photograph of a double hanging which moved Meeropol to pick up his pen had been taken in Indiana in — it remained the most vivid symbol of American racism, a stand-in for all the more subtle forms of discrimination affecting the black population.
Strange Fruit: the first great protest song
Perhaps only the visceral horror that lynching inspired gave Meeropol the necessary conviction to write a song with no precedent, one that required a new songwriting vocabulary. Meeropol, who taught at a high school in the Bronx and churned out reams of topical songs, poems and plays under the gentle alias Lewis Allan, published a poem under the title Bitter Fruit in the union-run New York Teacher magazine in The later name change was inspired.
It puts the listener in the shoes of a curious observer spying the hanging shapes from afar and moving closer towards a sickening realisation. Meeropol worked out a tune and Strange Fruit quickly became a fixture at leftwing gatherings during , sung by his wife and various friends.
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In the crowd was one Robert Gordon, who had recently taken on a job at Cafe Society, directing the headlining show by Billie Holiday. The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: Opening the night before New Year's Eve , it owed much of its instant success to Holiday. In her 23 years, Holiday had already seen plenty, although her notoriously unreliable autobiography Lady Sings the Blues obscures as much as it reveals. Born in Philadelphia, she spent some time running errands in a Baltimore whorehouse, "just about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way", where she first discovered jazz.
After she accused a neighbour of attempting to rape her, the year-old Holiday, an incorrigible truant, was sent to a Catholic reform school until her mother secured her release. Moving with her mother to New York, she worked in another brothel, this time doing more than errands, and was jailed for solicitation. Upon her release she began singing in Harlem jazz clubs, where she caught the eye of producer John Hammond, who made her one of the swing era's hottest stars.
Meeropol played Josephson his song and asked if he could bring it to Holiday. The singer later insisted she fell in love with it right away.
Meeropol remembered it differently, believing that she performed it only as a favour to Josephson and Gordon: Arthur Herzog, one of Holiday's regular songwriters, claimed that arranger Danny Mendelsohn rewrote Meeropol's tune, which he uncharitably dubbed "something or other alleged to be music", which might have made the difference to Holiday. Either way, Holiday road-tested the song at a party in Harlem and received what would become a familiar response: Meeropol was there the night she debuted it at Cafe Society.
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Josephson, a natural showman, knew there was no point slipping Strange Fruit into the body of the set and pretending it was just another song. He drew up some rules: It was not, by any stretch, a song for every occasion. It infected the air in the room, cut conversation stone dead, left drinks untouched, cigarettes unlit. Customers either clapped till their hands were sore, or walked out in disgust. Created by Bad Robot, the US production company owned by JJ Abrams, it allows you to add action movie-style visuals to your videos — missile attacks, car smashes, avalanches, spider strikes — and its intuitive interface is easy to navigate.
Stop Motion Studio lets you take photos or import ones from your camera roll and string them together to create stop-motion masterpieces. A tripod or a makeshift one is pretty essential, and so is patience. The free app lets you add music and your own narration, while in-app purchases include green screen, paint tools and sound effects.
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On location shoots, Sun Seeker is the app that I use most frequently. You can tell exactly where the sun is going to be throughout the day — invaluable when blocking a scene or planning a shooting schedule. A good light meter can cost quid, and most have horrible little screens that look like 90s calculators. It can be configured to match any camera system. The priciest app, it is worth every penny.
DigiSlate is a class act. This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. It lets you trim, merge and share your videos, and some nifty additional features — transitions, adding music from your iTunes, recording voiceovers etc — cost 60p a pop.
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Blow up your cat! Created by Bad Robot, the US production company owned by JJ Abrams, it allows you to add action movie-style visuals to your videos — missile attacks, car smashes, avalanches, spider strikes — and its intuitive interface is easy to navigate.
12 Holiday Movies Black Folks (And Everyone Else!) Should Watch | Holidays | Celebrities | BET
Stop Motion Studio lets you take photos or import ones from your camera roll and string them together to create stop-motion masterpieces. A tripod or a makeshift one is pretty essential, and so is patience. The free app lets you add music and your own narration, while in-app purchases include green screen, paint tools and sound effects. On location shoots, Sun Seeker is the app that I use most frequently. You can tell exactly where the sun is going to be throughout the day — invaluable when blocking a scene or planning a shooting schedule.
A good light meter can cost quid, and most have horrible little screens that look like 90s calculators. It can be configured to match any camera system. The priciest app, it is worth every penny.