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Deeper Into Music Radio takes listeners on unpredictable musical journeys via a thoughtful, intelligent mix of free music. Deeper Into Music is Internet radio with a twist: surprising genre mixes loaded with tons of new discoveries. You're invited to join in with listeners around the world for a show that never ends.
When Deeper Into Music began streaming online more than ten years ago there were only a few hundred streaming radio stations online, Napster was still assisting file swappers, and few commercial radio stations in the U.S. bothered with streaming at all.
Today, there are [...]
So Sorry Uncle Albert – and Everyone Else
I am shocked that it’s been more than two months since I last wrote an update. I’m so sorry. And, apparently, so was Paul & Linda 40 years ago when their pastiche hit “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” was a huge AM radio hit here in [...]
Twenty-Nine Years Ago I Was On The Air And Playing…
I’ve kept neatly hidden away a series of notebooks which contain nearly all my WXYC airshifts between late 1982 and mid 1984. (I wish I had ones dating back to my start there in September 1980, but not so.) WXYC was in a transitional [...]
Amy White, Deeper Into Music Contributor, is an artist and a writer based in Carrboro, North Carolina. She writes about art for The Independent Weekly and works in her studio at a bend in the Haw River in Saxapahaw, NC. Amy also blogs about breakfast, coincidence, and funny stuff.
Deeper into Art Appreciation
Near the end of Cameron Crowe’s self-described love letter to rock and roll, Almost Famous, Elton John’s Mona Lisas and Madhatters plays as Patrick Fugit, serving as the fictional stand-in for the incredibly young Crowe the Rolling Stone writer, seeks out Kate Hudson as the charismatic yet tragic Penny Lane. As with most of the cuts on the spot-on soundtrack, Elton’s song anchors the sequence with emotional truth and pathos, culminating in the surprisingly affirming anthemic “I thank the lord for the people I have found…”
It was only today listening to Deeper Into Music, however, that I recognized the glaringly obvious art reference in Elton’s (or I suppose I should say Bernie’s) “Mona Lisas.” By setting it in the plural, the term hints at a Mona Lisa type, someone who is, perhaps, inscrutable, quiet, looking out at the world from a place of stillness, always with the slightest smile. It wasn’t until today, however, that I heard the song and thought of the literal image of the famous Da Vinci painting that lives permanently in the Louvre. I really only made the connection when, in a moment of divine DIM providence, the song that followed it also payed homage to art, Paul Cezanne by Five Chinese Brothers.
Mona Lisa
This goofy bit of Zydeco pop is a tribute to the great impressionist with lots of clever turns of phrase, incorporating rhyming structures that rely on badly mispronounced French, such as “His oover’s in the Loover.” Indeed, it was probably that very phrase that sparked the association to the actual Mona Lisa.
Leave it to DIM to have me bopping around to great music and free associating to famous paintings. You’ve gotta love a song that rhymes “MoMA” with “coma” and tweaks syllables at will: “The father of cu-BISM.” The song also has sly references to De Chirico, Modigliani and Picasso.
Now if DIM had only played Jonathan Richman’s classic Pablo Picasso, it would’ve been a (mad) hat trick. Someone make a request, quick.
Note: no Five Chinese Brothers on YouTube, but there’s this other version.
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