primary source -

2003 'rock and folk' article:

http://www.picturesofyou.us/03/03-08-rockandfolk-fr-1.htmhere's

everything, with his own words where he gave them:

ROBERT SMITH'S READING LIST: COMPLETE

1. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA — C.S. Lewis

His father read it to him at age four to send him to sleep. His own words: "I adored running away in those tales, it was my only reassuring moment — I was just discovering the incredible power of literature, the one of consolation and evasion."

2. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRANZ KAFKA — The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Castle, Letters to Felice

His teenage obsession. His own words: "For the first time, the narrator's voice was mine. I was the narrator. I was blending myself in his words."

3. THE STRANGER (L'ÉTRANGER) — Albert Camus

The book that produced the first single. Killing an Arab is a direct lyric engagement with the beach murder scene — Meursault, the sun, the trigger pulled in existential blankness. Smith studied French at Crawley College and encountered Camus there. His own words: "The theme of the absurd has always fascinated me."

4. NAUSEA (LA NAUSÉE) — Jean-Paul Sartre

His own words: "His description of the human condition stays unmatched, and I defy anyone to do better than Nausea."

Foundational existentialist text.

5. THE FLOWERS OF EVIL (LES FLEURS DU MAL) and selected poems — Charles Baudelaire

Several direct connections. How Beautiful You Are is based on Baudelaire's prose poem The Eyes of the Poor. Smith's own words: "Some poems, like Baudelaire's 'The Eyes of the Poor,' impressed me so much that I wanted to make a song of them. Their style already had a kind of musical rhythm. Singing 'How Beautiful You Are' is like going into an oral tradition."

6. CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES & TWO (OR THE BOOK OF TWINS AND DOUBLES) — Penelope Farmer

The source of the song Charlotte Sometimes — the story of a girl who wakes up in a boarding school forty years in the past, inhabiting another girl's body and life. Smith's own words: "I was obsessed by Charlotte Sometimes, this idea of temporal downfall, of duality, of personality trouble and the torture that follows."

7. THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY — Mervyn Peake

The source of The Drowning Man from Faith (1981). The character of Fuchsia — the wild, sensitive, doomed daughter of Lord Groan — haunted Smith deeply. His own words: "Fuchsia was my dream. This idea of infinite, of unreal, of dying innocence... At that time I was considering myself as her, as a victim." Plus the books probably inspired All Cats Are Grey too. Highly recommended. Among my favorite books of all time.

8. THE RAVEN AND SELECTED POEMS — Edgar Allan Poe

Named alongside Salinger and Rimbaud as teenage reading. His own words: "Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote 'The Raven', a masterpiece of modern poetry."

9. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE and selected stories — J.D. Salinger

Named twice in the interview. The story Bananafishbones is directly referenced in the Cure track of a similar name. Smith's admiration is partly for the work and partly for the life: "He's a character that I admire and that intrigues me also: isolating himself from the world, living as a recluse in a monastery, giving up writing and refusing any contact with the outside, it's fascinating."

10. PARADISE LOST — John Milton (1667)

The influence on Pornography (1982). His own words: "Pure poetry, fabulous, a must for an English grammar school pupil and very influencing on romantic writers. The style is strong, incredible. It strongly influenced Pornography. The idea of being a victim was still there, but it was becoming unbearable. I had decided to struggle in front of a world I hated. It was Devil against God. The fight was lost in advance."

11. ILLUMINATIONS and A SEASON IN HELL — Arthur Rimbaud

Named alongside Salinger and Poe as teenage reading. Rimbaud's project — the dérèglement de tous les sens, the systematic derangement of all the senses as a means of accessing transcendent vision — is the most direct precursor to Smith's image-chain technique (multiple songs use it, clearest example is probably 'Dropping through sky, through the glass of the roof
Through the roof of your mouth, through the mouth of your eye
Through the eye of the needle, it's easier for me
To get closer to heaven than ever feel whole again' from the title track of Disintegration. For another bit of music history, Patti Smith & Bob Dylan both like Rimbaud a lot. Highly recommend, along with his other works.

12. THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE — Thomas Nagel

Nagel is an American philosopher whose The View From Nowhere argues that objective and subjective perspectives on reality are both legitimate and irreducibly different — that you cannot fully step outside your own experience to see the world as it is in itself, but you also cannot reduce the world to your experience of it. The tension between these two perspectives is permanent.

Smith connects this to his obsession with twins: "Being able to go out of myself, leaving my body to observe me." The desire for an objective view of the self — to see yourself as you actually are rather than as you experience yourself — is the impossible desire. You are always inside your own perspective. You can imagine the view from nowhere but you can never occupy it.

I thought this kinda links to Disintegration: The album is narrating disintegration, but how, as the narrator themselves is disintegrating?The speaker on every track is trying to see themselves clearly and cannot.

ADDITIONALLY MENTIONED BUT NOT IN THE FORMAL LIST:

Jorge Luis Borges — Fictions: Smith mentions him with explicit humility — "It's quite frustrating to understand I would never reach their level, I would never touch the art of Jorge Luis Borges' words."

Nick Hornby — High Fidelity: "A classic for music maniacs. Brilliant, perfect, I have all the records mentioned in it!"

The Bible: He's taken it on tour in the past. "It's useful to hit the others, better than a phonebook." During the Faith tour he read passages each evening. He insists he never really read it properly but Nausea covers the same territory.

Bowie is one of my artists, and Low is genuinely one of the best albums I've ever heard — but it's overrated relative to how the critical consensus frames it, specifically on the "groundbreaking/visionary/pioneering" axis. That reputation conflates two different things — originality and influence — and the album is much stronger on the second than the first.

Side one is where the real invention happens, but it's invention-as-synthesis, not invention-from-nothing. None of the ingredients are new — krautrock pulse, art-rock fragmentation, synth texture, vocal-as-texture — but Bowie combines them into his own pop/lyrical form and his own voice, and that specific combination hadn't existed before. He has better individual pop songs on other records, but nothing else of his has this particular fractured, textural approach, which is what sets it apart. "Sound and Vision" is the clearest distillation of this — gorgeous, and it basically synthesizes the whole album in one track: the sonic statement plus the personal-recovery undercurrent.

Side two is gorgeous and contains some of the album's best songs (the closer especially), but compositionally it's nothing new. It's Bowie and Eno executing pre-existing vocabulary at a high level rather than inventing: Weeping Wall is Reich's phasing process applied almost directly, Art Decade was largely assembled by Eno on his own (echoing his own Another Green World/Discreet Music), and even Warszawa's central theme came from Eno building on a piano riff Visconti's kid was noodling, with Bowie adding a ten-minute vocal on top afterward — a vocal whose melody itself leans on a Polish folk choir recording. So the side that gets called most "visionary" is the one most thoroughly built from other people's already-existing material.

The vocal-over-texture idea on side two (Warszawa) isn't a separate innovation either — it's side one's actual move (voice treated as another instrumental texture) just carried over onto ambient material. So there's really only one site of invention on the record, and it's side one.

The influence is real and separate from all this. Joy Division literally named themselves after the Warszawa-adjacent material before becoming Joy Division; Robert Smith has named Low directly as the reference point for Seventeen Seconds; Siouxsie and the Banshees' early cold/minimal sound draws on the same Berlin-period well. But that influence runs on the compression/packaging achievement — Bowie and co. took avant-garde, krautrock, and minimalist vocabulary that already existed at full scale elsewhere and made it legible inside a mainstream rock record for the first time, which is why the next generation of guitar bands could actually use it. No doubt that it's a great album and achievement. But just quite different from saying this is revolutioanry or Bowie invented this. But that's just my take. You're welcome to share your thoughts below!

https://preview.redd.it/lsknc55wydbh1.jpg?width=450&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14ec38b2b59128120135b1c5dafd5eda4a4c6d7c

He was the “policeman” in Village People, the face on one of the most ubiquitous songs on earth, and for decades the law treated him like a hired voice rather than the writer. Victor Willis co‑wrote “Y.M.C.A.”, watched it become a stadium chant and a “gay anthem” attached to his costume more than his name, and then spent much of the last third of his life using a quiet clause in the 1976 Copyright Act to take his songs back.

With his death this week, I tried to write an obituary that treats the authorship fight as the central thread: how you get erased from your own work, what it costs to insist you didn’t, and what it means when a song outgrows you anyway. The piece is below — I’d love to hear what people think about (a) how we credit pop songs, and (b) whether calling “Y.M.C.A.” a gay anthem helps or flattens what the writer says he was actually writing about.

Victor Willis, 1951–2026

He died on the thirtieth of June, the day before his seventy-fifth birthday, and the obituaries did what obituaries always do with him: they put the costume on him first. The policeman. The helmet, the badge, the disco. They are not wrong to do it. He wore the costume for years, and the song he co‑wrote while wearing it became one of the most performed pieces of music ever recorded — played at ballparks and wedding receptions and presidential rallies, hummed on six continents by people who could not have told you who wrote it or what it was about. What the notices do not quite reach is the texture of the life underneath, which was not the story of a man in a costume singing a famous song. It was the story of a man who spent fifty years trying to be recognized as the author of his own work, and who, at the end, won — and found that winning looked almost nothing like what he had pictured.

He was born in Texas, in 1951, and grew up in San Francisco, in the Haight‑Ashbury neighborhood, singing in the Baptist church where his father served as minister. The voice was there early — Jacques Morali, the French producer who would eventually recruit him, called him “the young man with the big voice” — and it was formed on hymns, on the kind of music that is not about performance but about conviction, about making a congregation feel something rather than applaud it. He lived near a local Y and later described YMCA life in terms of basketball courts, swimming pools, inexpensive meals and temporary lodging — the kind of place where young men in combustible cities could work out, clean up, and figure out their next step. This is not a small detail. It is the whole origin of the most famous acronym in pop music, and it has less to do with bathhouses or double entendres than with a plainer thing: for him the Y was somewhere safe to be that wasn’t the street.

New York, in the early seventies, was hard. He studied acting and dance and moved east, joining the Negro Ensemble Company, founded on the principle that Black experience deserved a stage that took it seriously, as subject rather than spectacle. In 1976 he appeared in the original Broadway production of The Wiz. He was, by every account, exactly the kind of talent New York is full of and does very little with: trained, serious, in possession of a voice that could carry a room, waiting for the thing that would make it add up. Then Morali appeared, and the thing arrived, and it was not what he had been waiting for.

Morali’s pitch was simple and slightly deranged. He had dreamed — literally dreamed, as he told it — of a group called the Village People, and he needed Willis to front it, and the concept was already whole in his head: costumes drawn from the masculine archetypes of the Greenwich Village scene, a hard disco sound, music built for the clubs where Morali spent his nights. Willis was straight, was from the church, had trained in the theatrical tradition of the Black Arts movement — and Morali wanted him to put on a policeman’s uniform and sing disco. He said yes; he needed the work. And in the studio the voice met the material and something happened that neither man had planned for, which was that the songs came out good. Not camp, not novelty — structurally good, with hooks that did not apologize and lyrics that, in his mouth, opened wider than the world they were made for.

He has said more than once that when he wrote the lyrics to “Y.M.C.A.” he wrote from memory — from that remembered feeling of the YMCA as a place to play basketball, swim, eat, stay cheaply, and find other young men working out the same problem of where, exactly, they belonged. When he sang about hanging out with all the boys, he was remembering the way boys hang out in such places, and he took pride, as he later put it, in giving his songs a double meaning that could be heard straight or gay. The song was a piece of autobiography set to a bouncing disco cadence and released into a world that heard it as something else and never gave it back. It was embraced as a gay anthem almost immediately — a reading he did not resent, and one that the record around it invited; the first Village People album, as he would later say plainly, was about gay life, and his co‑writer Jacques Morali was gay, and some of the group were too. What he resisted was narrower and more stubborn: the claim that he had written it as an anthem, which he hadn’t, and which erased the boy who had found refuge at the Y. For nearly half a century he would spend a real portion of his energy explaining the difference — sometimes patiently, sometimes with the exhaustion of a man who has said the same true thing ten thousand times.

The copyright case is the central fact of the last third of his life, and on its surface it is not a romantic story. He had signed away his share of the songs for a percentage of the royalties — a standard arrangement, by which the people who owned the music got rich and the people who wrote it got a cut. He had co‑written “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man” and “In the Navy” and “Go West,” among others, and he was collecting a fraction of what they earned while the publishers and production companies took the rest. That had been the deal since the late 1970s. But Willis had understood something: under a provision of the 1976 Copyright Act, a songwriter could reclaim his own work thirty‑five years on, whatever the original contract said. He filed his notices of termination. The companies sued to stop him.

In 2012 a federal court ruled that he could terminate his publishing agreements, rejecting the argument that the work had been made for hire and recognizing him as an author with statutory termination rights — a landmark early victory under the provision, the kind of case other writers now cite when they talk about getting their songs back. He kept winning. In 2015 a jury struck Henri Belolo’s name from thirteen songs, including “Y.M.C.A.,” finding that the French producer who had been credited as a co‑author and drawn a share of the royalties for decades had no authorship in them at all. His earnings rose sharply, but what he wanted from the victory was not, principally, the money, and he said so more than once. What he wanted was authorship — the formal, legal, unassailable acknowledgment that he had made the thing, that his name attached to it in a way that could not be transferred or diluted or quietly rerouted through a foreign copyright organization.

There is something nearly theological in this, and it runs back to the church in San Francisco, to the tradition of testifying — of standing up before witnesses and saying this is what happened, I was there, I know. He came from a world that required that kind of insistence, because without it the record simply stands wrong, and the money keeps flowing in the wrong direction. His father’s whole professional function had been to assert, in public and on repeat, that certain things were true. The son spent decades asserting, in court, that he had written the songs. The venue changed. The discipline did not.

The wreckage of the middle years — the addiction, the arrests, the long estrangement from the group, the probation that sent him to the Betty Ford Center in 2007 — was the wreckage of a man pushed out of the room where his own work was being spent, and unable to find a way back in that did not require a legal team. For a stretch he was living in Newport, south Wales, with his wife Karen Huff‑Willis, a lawyer he had met in San Francisco, pursuing the case from a house there because that is where the marriage was and because he had learned that a courtroom is a courtroom anywhere. There is a whole comedy of displacement in the image — the man who co‑wrote “Y.M.C.A.” mounting a landmark American copyright battle from a semi‑detached in Newport — and a whole meditation on where a person washes up when the life has gone sideways from the plan. He credited the win to Karen. He said it simply, in the direct way he said everything in public: she had believed him, and the believing was what made it possible to go on.

The question of what the song means — whose it is, in the cultural sense — was never settled, and he knew it. What he objected to was the institutional flattening, the news organizations and commentators who filed “Y.M.C.A.” under “gay anthem” as though that were a fact rather than a reception. He was not trying to police the song so much as to insist that meaning has a source, and the source was a person, and the person had been somewhere specific and felt something specific, and the specificity deserved to survive. He was right. He was also, by the end, losing — not to any argument but to the accumulated weight of nearly fifty years of other people’s hearing, which had long since made the song larger and more plural than any single intention could hold. Songs do this. They leave the room where they were written and they acquire new rooms, and the writer stays behind in the original one, and the song does not come back to visit.

By the middle of the 2020s, when “Y.M.C.A.” was closing Donald Trump’s rallies and the Village People were performing around his second inauguration, Willis had lived through every phase of that spectacle. He had initially asked Trump to stop using the music. Later he defended the group’s decision to appear at pre‑inaugural events, and in interviews he talked about the song’s message of community and inclusion having outgrown any one political context or personal preference of his own. It was a strange, generous, faintly comic resolution — the author declining to litigate, for once, granting the song its own freedom of movement. He was in his seventies. The song had been making its own decisions for more than four decades. There is a point past which an author’s relationship to his work is one relationship among many — no longer authoritative, no longer primary, only continuous. He had spent his life insisting the song was his. It was his. It was also, by then, everyone’s, in the way that only a few songs ever become everyone’s, woven so far into public life that they stop feeling made at all. He co‑wrote it. He co‑wrote it in a studio, out of the memory of the Y as a refuge for boys with nowhere else to be, when he was young and the city was still manageable and there was still time to decide who he would be.

He died of a short and aggressive illness, on June 30, 2026, and the policeman’s helmet is somewhere, presumably, in storage. Before it and after it he was a Baptist preacher’s son from San Francisco with a voice trained on gospel and a gift for the lyric that opens wider than it looks. He co‑founded the Village People. He co‑wrote some of the most durable music of the twentieth century. He spent decades reclaiming the right to say so. He won.

True words from Mr Zimmerman

I have a great friend, 73 year old Earl Bigelow. I could go on for awhile but to sum it up Earl is an incredible human. He has lived a long life of adventure, had stories for days, and now owns a studio that has brought my entire community together. I have known him since a young age, he has guided me on my musical journey and has been somewhat of a second father to me.

Over the years I have been finding countless tapes, albums worth of beautiful, fully fledged recordings spanning from the mid 70s up until now. NONE of this music has seen much of an audience, and I believe it deserves too. Each song tells the story of his exciting life, his connection with the water that he lived on, and the farm fields he grew up in. His lyrics are poetic, and well written. The songs are very creative, with lots of parts, amazing guitar solos, and best of all his soulful voice. There is also a large amount of live recordings from his semi professional gigging days where the band is absolutely ripping.

He has told me he didn't take the steps that could have lead to fame, and I respect that. Either way I believe his music could move a lot of people, and be held to a high standard in the musical world.

I have made a Youtube channel where i'am carefully documenting a lot of these incredible songs most of which are pulled from old tape. There is a lot up now with playlists helping to organize the years, and there is MUCH more to come!

We live in an age where he can now see an audience, and his music can now be heard by the world. It would mean everything to me if all us music lovers go check him out, and I know it would mean so much to him!!

Thank you Reddit

Inspired by the steel drum music that surrounded him in Trinidad, Lester Sebastian Charles banged away on instruments he made out of old milk cans. At around age six, he picked up the ukulele and began singing in the school choir.

After moving to London with his family, teenage Les left school and started working as a tailor, playing piano in his spare time. One day he came up with a riff which led to the first song he ever wrote “Love Really Hurts Without You” which later became his first hit single, reaching #2 in the UK and #22 in the US in 1976.

His early singles were credited to Les Charles, but “Love” bore the name Billy Ocean (inspired by Ocean's 11, a Trinidad soccer team that had, in turn, taken its name from the 1960 Rat Pack heist movie).

Several of Billy’s follow-up singles were hits in Britain, but not in America. By 1980, he was a chart no-show.

In 1984, with a new label and fellow Trinidadian Keith Diamond on board as producer and co-writer, Ocean released the Michael Jackson-inspired “European Queen (No More Love On The Run).” It was a hit in Switzerland and West Germany, and nowhere else.

Apparently, “European” didn’t exactly conjure up the kind of fun-in-the-sun fantasy that most consumers wanted to buy into.

A label executive liked the song, but told Billy that the title didn’t work.

So, using the exact same track and vocal, with only the word “Caribbean” edited into the recording in place of “European,” a 12” single was released.

That one word change made all the difference.

In September 1984, “Caribbean Queen” hit #1 on the US Billboard Dance chart, and then in an edited 7” version reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts, and #6 in the UK. It was also a major hit in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

But wait…there’s more!

On the 12” there was yet another variation “African Queen” which was popular in parts of that continent.

“Caribbean Queen” capped off a great year for Ocean when it won him a Grammy for Best Male R&B Performance.

More importantly, it also made Billy Ocean a star.

He went on to place eight more singles in the US Top 20, including the #1s “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car.”

And, if you watch the official video closely, you can spot brief shots of a poster bearing the song title “African Queen” and then another with “European Queen,” which changes to “Caribbean Queen.”

Can you think of another song where a seemingly small change whether it was the title, a lyric, or even the marketing ended up completely changing its success?

HI,

I see most producers calling auto generated music as slop. I was wondering when sample based synths came along and a producer could generate any instrument be it guitars , Violin, flute , Trumpet or any instrument, by just "pushing buttons on a keyboard". Did the contemporary musicians who spent decades learning the nuances of playing each instrument react the same way as the producers are doing now ?

The same is true for Drummers, when drum machine came along you no longer needed the drummers. Of course Drum machine was "Not Human" was "Robotic" did not have "Soul" etc all the stuff we hear now about generated music.

I remember old time music composers used to employ so many people , one person for each instrument like for just a cowbell :) etc.

Just wondering , How everyone overcame the Criticism , please chime in.

I came across this short compilation/documentary built around some great archival footage from 1983, including parts of the Islington squat documentary, TV interviews, and live performances from bands like The Exploited, Chaos UK, Disorder, The Varukers, and G.B.H.

I thought people here might appreciate the old interviews and the way TV portrayed punks back then. Curious what those who were around the scene think about it.

I’ve got a question for the longtime Sarah McLachlan fans here.

I may be late to the party on this, but until recently I only knew the live version of “I Will Remember You.” I just discovered the original soundtrack version with the opening verse.

After listening to both versions back to back, it almost feels like two different songs because removing that first verse changes where the listener enters the story.

With the original opening verse, I naturally hear a specific relationship with a history. Without it, the song feels much more open-ended. Instead of wondering what happened to these two people, I find myself thinking about any relationship that’s about to change forever.

Does anyone know whether Sarah McLachlan, Dave Merenda, Pierre Marchand, or anyone else involved with the song has ever talked about why that first verse was dropped from the live arrangement? Was it simply a performance decision, or has anyone ever commented on how differently the song feels without it?

If there’s an interview, article, or concert story that sheds some light on it, I’d love to read it.

niche interest, I know , but those seem to be doing well lately and I have lots of knowledge as well as love for the franchise, and of course the wealth of additional internet information with a quick search

any ideas for topics or media to cover are welcome!

Also genuine constructive criticism is always welcome but be nice!!
I’ve done theatre before but my talking-to-a-camera experience is spotty