Madonna's Cultural Ascension With 'Like a Virgin', Mariah Carey's Perennial No. 1 Christmas Hit, Queen Latifah'smallThe groundbreaking "All Hail the Queen" and DaddyYankee's reggaeton blast with "Gasolina" are some of the defining sounds of the state's history and culture that will join the Library's class of 2023.National Register,Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today.
The 25 additions to the class of 2023 span over a century, from 1908 to 2012. They range from the earliest recordings of Mariachi music and the early sounds of the Blues to World War II radio journalism and iconic sounds of pop, country , rock, R&B, jazz, rap and classical music. It also features the first video game sounds to join the Super Mario Bros.
Carey, Jimmy Buffett, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (the Eurythmics), Graham Nash, Wynton Marsalis, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich joined the Library for interviews about their seminal works. You can see them in the video above and in longer interview segments on the Library's social media channels. The interviews will also be added to the Library archives.
"The National Recording Registry preserves our history through recorded sound and reflects our nation's diverse culture," said Hayden. “The National Library is proud to help ensure these recordings are preserved for future generations and we welcome input from the public on which songs, speeches, podcasts or audio recordings we should preserve next. We received over 1,100 public nominations this year for recordings to add to the registry.”
"Christmas" is Carey's first song to go NRR and she was excited by the news. She wrote the song in 1994 when she was just 22 years old, recalling her often turbulent childhood on Long Island and how she always wanted Christmas to be a wonderful family holiday. It rarely was, and he turned that desire into what is now a cultural touchstone.
“I tried to get in touch with my childhood self, my little girl self, and say, 'What were all the things I wanted as a kid?' he said. "I wanted it to be a love song because it's something people can relate to, but also a Christmas song that makes you feel happy."
After crafting lyrics and a melodic line, she brought a demo tape to her then-songwriting partner and producer Walter Afanasieff, and the pair collaborated to create the retro "wall of sound" production, as if it had been recorded in the 1990s. 1960. a success upon launch, it became a craft industry in its own right. It has been featured in films, Carey has written a children's book based on it, and shot three different music videos. It has reached No. 1 on the pop charts for the past four years, making Carey a pop culture icon as the Queen of Christmas.
"I'm really proud of the arrangements, the background vocal arrangements," she said, describing the sessions with her backing vocals as one of the best experiences of her recording career.
"'All I Want for Christmas...' is in its own category," he said, "and I'm so grateful for that."
The recordings selected for the NRR bring the number of titles on the register to 625, representing a small portion of the national library's vast collection of sound recordings of nearly 4 million items.
This year's selections feature the voices of women whose recordings helped define and redefine their gender. Madonna's hit album 'Like a Virgin' from 1984 would fuel her rise in the music business as she gained more control over her music and image. Of the nine songs originally on the album, four became top 10 hits. Queen Latifah is the first female rapper to enter the record with her debut album "All Hail the Queen" since 1989, when she was just 19 years old. Her album showed that rap can cross genres like reggae, hip-hop, house and jazz-while also opening up opportunities for other female rappers.
In the 1980s, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were in and out of British music groups for some time without much success. Flat broke up in 1982, Stewart borrowed enough money to buy some synthesizers and a prototype drum machine so basic it was housed in a wooden box.
One night in his studio - the loft of a frame factory in central London - he turned on the drums and strummed a few chords on the synthesizer. Lennox sat up as if he had touched an electrical wire. She went to her own synthesizer, played riffs against the beat of it, and soon blurted out a verse, a wry comment on her impoverished condition: "Sweet dreams are made of this."
"It's a mantra, almost like a Haiku poem, a coded message, a commentary on the human condition," Lennox said of the song. “You can use it as a happy birthday song or a celebration song… it can be anything. Looking back, I love how people identified with it."
With roots in Panama in the 1980s, reggaeton has been described as reggae, reggae en Español, dancehall, hip-hop and dembow. But it was Daddy Yankee's 2004 hit single "Gasolina" that sparked a major shift in reggaeton, with crossover appeal from Latin radio into the mainstream. The appeal of "Gasolina" was so great that it even prompted some radio stations to change the format from English to Spanish to capitalize on this revolution.
New Orleans jazz legend Wynton Marsalis explained that his album 'Black Codes (From the Underground)' - recorded in 1985 when he was just 23 years old - was hard jazz that confronted the lasting social effects of the Black Codes, the infamous Post-Civil. Martial law used by his home state of Louisiana and other southern states to keep black citizens in a state of violent oppression.
"Many 20th century civil rights cases were based on the Black Codes, laws that sought to politically cover up the achievements of the Civil War," he said in an interview. Part of the title “From the Underground” refers to black resistance to these laws: “No matter how defeated things seem, there is always an idea in the pursuit of freedom that is subversive of anti-democratic thinking. I was very aware of that (while recording)."
And finally, for everyone who's been near a beach in the past four decades, "Margaritaville."
It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1970's Jimmy Buffett was a little-known singer/songwriter who had a minor hit, "Come Monday."
But hanging out in Austin, Texas, with Jerry's friends Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson, he spent a long night on the town. The next afternoon, he had a delicious margarita at a bar. Moving on, he started scribbling a song on a cocktail napkin, finished it later while stuck in traffic on the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys, and played "Margaritaville" for the first time in a small bar in Key West that night, when he was "probably six hours".
People liked it and played it regularly during their live shows for a few years. When he finally recorded it in 1977, it was an instant Top 10 hit and has since become a pop culture staple. Buffett, a working-class kid from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, was appalled by the typical music contracts of the day that didn't allow songwriters to retain publishing rights to their work, so he was always attuned to making money from touring and sales. merchandise for fans as a more lucrative means of income.
Over time, his most successful venture grew into an incredible line of "Margaritaville"-themed businesses and products - now including best-selling books, a chain of popular restaurants, radio channels, a cruise line and communities with 55 years or more. Their tours are also still extremely popular.
The key to music's appeal in American culture, Buffett told the Library, was that people were looking for music that made them feel good and happy.
"You're lucky enough to at some point put your thumb on the pulse of something that people can relate to," he said. "It's amazing and lucky that this happens to you, and it happened with 'Margaritaville'."
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