There’s the real king of rock and roll. | | | | Fats Domino performing on "American Bandstand," Dec. 13, 1959.
(ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | | “There’s the real king of rock and roll.”
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| | rantnrave:// Rock and roll came from everywhere and nowhere, from MISSISSIPPI, from MEMPHIS, from KANSAS CITY, from ST. LOUIS, from AFRICA, from APPALACHIA. But as with so much American music, if you really need to locate a wellspring, you might try walking to NEW ORLEANS, where, until the beginning of this week, ANTOINE "FATS" DOMINO and his producer and songwriting partner DAVE BARTHOLOMEW could both be found. One of my favorite social media posts from Wednesday: "Wow. I truly had NO idea #FatsDomino had been with us this entire time til now! I would have probably made an effort to see him perform." That's QUESTLOVE. See your heroes now. Domino would insist until the end, with good reason, that he was an R&B musician. But jazz, blues, R&B and New Orleans juju all flowed into his astounding run of 1950s and early '60s singles, from "THE FAT MAN" and "AIN'T THAT A SHAME" to "BLUEBERRY HILL" and "WHOLE LOTTA LOVING," and rock and roll flowed out of them. The seemingly wild abandon of those carefully, expertly played piano triplets. The woo-hooing vocals. The backbeats. The bling. There were some questionable musical choices in the 1960s, maybe his fault, maybe not, and though he wore his pioneer/elder statesman status proudly for the rest of his life, he gave few interviews and rarely traveled out of New Orleans for his last 30 years, which may explain why Questlove, and perhaps you, thought he was already gone before you heard this week's sad news. New Orleans adored him and he adored the city (home of the only cuisine he ever loved). He wouldn't even leave his house after HURRICANE KATRINA, later explaining that he was perfectly content while waiting around to be rescued because "I had my little wine and a couple of beers with me; I'm all right." Katrina destroyed most of his possessions. His last charting single had come in 1968. Fittingly, it was a cover of the BEATLES' "LADY MADONNA," a song they had written as a homage to him. From MISSISSIPPI RIVER to RIVER MERSEY and back. RIP to one of the architects... I love stories about origins and process. Like: Where did the saxophone come from? How are pianos made? Who was building drum machines in the 1930s? MusicSET: "Instrumental Inventions and Innovations, From MARTIN to MOOG and Beyond"... A beautiful "STAR-SPANGLED BANNER" courtesy BRAD PAISLEY, a FENDER TELECASTER and a Z WRECK amp... Could XXXTENTACION's controversial $6m deal with CAROLINE RECORDS already be history? X appears to have said this late Wednesday night... The late ROBERT GUILLAUME once recorded a disco 12-inch. Then again, who didn't? | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| The documentary traces how Fats Domino’s brand of New Orleans rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll, appealing to black and white audiences alike. | | |
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| Why did we love Domino so? | | |
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| For many years, Rucker has been the most prominent black country-music performer. But the genre has not always been the exclusive terrain of white people. | | |
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| T-Pain was important because he was ours. To this day I still get slightly weirded out by non-Florida T-Pain fans. It’s irrational, but he still feels like a secret just between us. | | |
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| SoundCloud has long been a pivotal medium for emerging musicians, but in the past year, it's suffered changes from which it cannot go back. Once artists realized that SoundCloud was in danger of failure, and that their dependence on the SoundCloud platform threatened their livelihoods, they stopped caring about it. | | |
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| On Guthrie, Robeson, Seeger, Lomax, Dylan, the Red Scare, the fall of labor, and what folk music had to do with it. | | |
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| The afternoon show thrived before phone screens were more enticing than television screens. Only four weeks into its reboot, the seams are visible, and frayed. | | |
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| We speak to rapper RM of BTS, the seven-member boy group whose ultra-dedicated fanbase have made them the most prominent South Korean act to break the west. | | |
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| It's tempting to treat Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend" as a genderscrambled version of Gladys Knight & The Pips' " If I Were Your Woman" or Janet Jackson's " If. " It's really not. | | |
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| (I wrote this a few weeks back, just before all the Weinstein stuff took off. The thoughts I'm having here kind of paled into insignificance at the time, but the sexual harassment discussion has been sustained with such incredible resonance, and the things I write below are still part of that conversation.) | | |
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| The singer doesn’t have to say a thing to loom over the culture. | | |
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| From Bauhaus to Jenny Hval, these tracks are to die for. | | |
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| The exec has invested $4 million in Riptide Music Group. | | |
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| The producer says Future and Young Thug recorded hundreds of songs for their version of 'Watch The Throne.' | | |
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| Maria Sledmere on the intricate, sensitive and strangely melancholic worlds we so readily inhabit. | | |
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| Peter Gelb, The Met Opera’s general manager, is on-call at all hours of the day, maintaining the opera’s history while revitalizing the art form for the future. | | |
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| Artificial intelligence and machine learning already permeate many aspects of your everyday life. Now they're creeping into music production, performance, and DJing, and making the formerly impossible possible. | | |
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| There may be no better arbiter of the end days than John Maus, who for the last six years has been missing from our cultural psyche. He's accredited for the task, at least, having spent that time completing a dissertation in "control societies" and earning a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii. | | |
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| This New York City-based singer, rapper, producer, and DJ has a knack for turning bass-heavy bangers into intimate affairs. | | |
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| At the door of his mansion in the gated community of Barkley Estates, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Fats Domino is dressed in black slacks, black patent-leather shoes, a purple dress shirt, a captain's hat and a gold chain that dangles a small gold airplane. (Originally published Dec. 13, 2007.) | | |
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