Complaints Choir: The World’s Mundane Grievances Set to Song

Rent is too damn high, the global musical.

One cold winter night in 2005, while strolling through Helsinki, Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen had an epiphany — what if they could transform the daily grievances people complain about en masse into a source of surprise and joy? In Finnish, there’s an actual word for those mass complaints — “Valituskuoro,” which translates roughly to “complaints choir.” So the duo set out capture the world’s everyday rants in actual choirs and Complaints Choir was born — a traveling record of the world’s grievances, crowdsourced from citizens and set to song.

We defined complaining as “dissatisfaction without action,” nevertheless behind most of the complaints there is an idea or a belief or a value that a person is committed to. Complaints have therefore inbuilt the potential of being a transformative power. The truth about the revolution in East Germany is, that it only happened because a critical mass of people was dissatisfied with and complained about everyday life issues.

There is another fundamental aspect to the culture of complaining. Why do people complain about things they have not the slightest influence upon, for example the weather? Here complaining is not at all about changing things, but rather to build a communal feeling: I am not alone with my little problems, we share the same burden – of an total in-acceptable climate for example.”

From Birmingham to Budapest, Helsinki to Hamburg, Jerusalem to Chicago, the choirs cover everything from the petty and mudane (job resentment, traffic, bureaucracy, the weather) to the amusingly specific and offbeat (neighbor holding Hungarian folk dance classes above bedroom, being ignored by friend’s cat, racist grandmother)

Got the itch for communal ranting? Here’s the DIY guide to orchestrating one in your city. (Did someone say Occupy Wall Street Choir?)

via Deafening Silence HT GMSV

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The Disciples: James Mollison’s Portraits of Music Subcultures

From Madonna to Marilyn Manson, or how to worship at the secular altar of pop culture.

From photographer James Mollison, whom you might remember from his poignant series on where children sleep, comes Disciples — a visual study of musical subcultures, reminiscent of the Exactitudes project. Between 2004 and 2007, Mollison travelled across Europe and the U.S. with a mobile photography studio, which he parked in front of music concerts, taking individual portraits of fans outside the respective band’s gig. He then composited the portraits into lineups of eight to ten fans, creating a single pseudo-panoramic image. Disciples gathers 62 of these fascinating images, featuring more than 500 individual portraits that capture the spirit and tribalism of comtemporary music culture, from death metal to Lady Gaga.

Madonna

The Cure

Bjork

Oasis

Kiss

Dolly Parton

50 Cent

Puff Daddy

Sex Pistols

Spice Girls

Jennifer Lopez

Casualties

George Michael

Rod Stewart

Manson

Missy Elliot

Morrisey

An entertaining study of pop culture and its subcultural micro-cults, Disciples offers a curious look at one of our era’s most pervasive secular religions and one of the last remaining social unifiers of our time.

via Quipsologies; images courtesy of James Mollison via Laboite Verte

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Bob Dylan & Other Icons Resurrect the Unfinished Lost Songs of Hank Williams

What Jack White has to do with dumpster-diving for music history.

Legendary singer-songwriter Hank Williams was only 29 when he died in the back of a car in 1953, yet in his short life he shaped the course of American music for decades to come. Some of the most celebrated rock’n'roll pioneers — including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins — got their start recording Williams songs. He has a posthumous special citation from the Pulitzer Prize, he’s been inducted into just about every American music hall of fame, and earlier this year he entered the loftiest of them all, the Recording Academy Grammy Hall of Fame.

In 2006, while handling a company dumpster, a janitor of Sony/ATV Music Publishing made a serendipitous discovery: In the dumpster were the unfinished lyrics found in Williams’s car the night he died. The lyrics eventually made their way to Bob Dylan in 2008, who set out to complete the songs for an affectionate album release celebrating Williams’s legacy. Three years in the making, the remarkable The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams is out this week and features a formidable roster of musicians performing Williams’s unfinished songs, including Jack White, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Alan Jackson, Sheryl Crow, and of course Dylan himself.

You can sample the goodness below and hear the entire Jack White track on Rolling Stone’s exclusive stream.

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