American Music (Violent Femmes Song)
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American Music (Violent Femmes Song)
''Why Do Birds Sing?'' is the fifth studio album by Violent Femmes, released on April 30, 1991. It was the band's last album with original drummer Victor DeLorenzo, who left two years later to devote his time to acting, and was produced by Michael Beinhorn, best-known then for his work with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on ''Mother's Milk'' and '' The Uplift Mofo Party Plan''. The album featured the single "American Music," which rose to number 2 on ''Billboard''s Modern Rock chart during the week of May 18, 1991, and became a staple of the band's live shows. Track listing Personnel Violent Femmes * Gordon Gano – vocals, guitar * Brian Ritchie – bass, guitar, bouzouki, banjo, ukulele, mouth harp, didgeridoo, xylophone, glockenspiel, vocals * Victor DeLorenzo – drums, percussion, tranceaphone, vocals Additional musicians * Michael Beinhorn – Hammond organ on "American Music", Mellotron on "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" and "Used To Be", piano The piano is a s ...
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Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes are an American folk punk band from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The band consists of founding members Gordon Gano (guitar, lead vocals) and Brian Ritchie (bass, backing vocals), joined by multi-instrumentalist Blaise Garza (joined 2004), and drummer John Sparrow (joined 2005). Former members of the band include drummers Victor DeLorenzo (1980–1993, 2002–2013), Guy Hoffman (1993–2002), and Brian Viglione (2013–2016). Violent Femmes have released ten studio albums and 15 singles during the course of their career. The band found critical acclaim with the release of their self-titled debut album in early 1983. Featuring many of their best-known songs, including "Blister in the Sun", "Kiss Off", " Add It Up" and "Gone Daddy Gone", ''Violent Femmes'' became the band's biggest-selling album and was eventually certified platinum by the RIAA. After the release of their third album ''The Blind Leading the Naked'' (1986), the band's future was uncertain and they split ...
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Roy Hay (musician)
Roy Ernest Hay (born 12 August 1961) is an English singer, songwriter and musician. He is best known as the lead guitarist, keyboardist, and backing vocalist of the new wave band Culture Club. Hay, a trained pianist since the age of five, replaced founding member Johnny Suede in 1981. Some of Hay's musical influences were Stevie Wonder, The Isley Brothers and Led Zeppelin. Before his involvement with Culture Club, Hay was a hairdresser in his native Essex. It was during Culture Club's beginnings that Hay met Alison Green. The two married in 1982. According to the "Culture Club" episode the VH-1 series ''Behind the Music'', Hay assisted Boy George in giving up heroin. The singer suffered the painful withdrawal symptoms closely attended by Hay in his Essex home. Following Culture Club, Hay formed another band, called This Way Up, with singer Robinson Reid. In 1987, they released three singles: "Tell Me Why", "If I Can't Have You" and "Louise". An album, ''Feeling Good About I ...
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Drum Set
A drum kit (also called a drum set, trap set, or simply drums) is a collection of drums, cymbals, and other auxiliary percussion instruments set up to be played by one person. The player (drummer) typically holds a pair of matching drumsticks, one in each hand, and uses their feet to operate a foot-controlled hi-hat and bass drum pedal. A standard kit may contain: * A snare drum, mounted on a stand * A bass drum, played with a beater moved by a foot-operated pedal * One or more tom-toms, including rack toms and/or floor toms * One or more cymbals, including a ride cymbal and crash cymbal * Hi-hat cymbals, a pair of cymbals that can be manipulated by a foot-operated pedal The drum kit is a part of the standard rhythm section and is used in many types of popular and traditional music styles, ranging from rock and pop to blues and jazz. __TOC__ History Early development Before the development of the drum set, drums and cymbals used in military and orchestral music s ...
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Glockenspiel
The glockenspiel ( or , : bells and : set) or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the vibraphone. The glockenspiel is played by striking the bars with mallets, often made of a hard material such as metal or plastic. Its clear, high-pitched tone is often heard in orchestras, wind ensembles, marching bands, and in popular music. Terminology In German, a carillon is also called a , and in French, the glockenspiel is sometimes called a . It may also be called a () in French, although this term may sometimes be specifically reserved for the keyboard glockenspiel. In Italian, the term () is used. The glockenspiel is sometimes erroneously referred to as a xylophone. The Pixiphone, a type of toy glockenspiel, was one such instrument sold as a xylophone. Range The glockenspiel is limited to the upper register and usually covers about to 3 octa ...
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Xylophone
The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term ''xylophone'' may be used generally, to include all such instruments such as the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term ''xylophone'' refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be confused. A person who plays the xylophone is known as a ''xylophonist'' or simply a ''xylophone player''. The term is also popularly used to refer to ...
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Didgeridoo
The didgeridoo (; also spelt didjeridu, among other variants) is a wind instrument, played with vibrating lips to produce a continuous drone while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing. The didgeridoo was developed by Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia at least 1,000 years ago, and is now in use around the world, though still most strongly associated with Indigenous Australian music. In the Yolŋu languages of the indigenous people of northeast Arnhem Land the name for the instrument is the ''yiḏaki'', or more recently by some, ''mandapul''. In the Bininj Kunwok language of West Arnhem Land it is known as ''mako''. A didgeridoo is usually cylindrical or conical, and can measure anywhere from long. Most are around long. Generally, the longer the instrument, the lower its pitch or key. Flared instruments play a higher pitch than unflared instruments of the same length. History There are no reliable sources of the exact age of the didgeridoo. ...
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Jew's Harp
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The people of the Kingdom of Israel and the ethnic and religious group known as the Jewish people that descended from them have been subjected to a number of forced migrations in their history" and Hebrews of historical History of ancient Israel and Judah, Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, "Historically, the religious and ethnic dimensions of Jewish identity have been closely interwoven. In fact, so closely bound are they, that the traditional Jewish lexicon hardly distinguishes between the two concepts. Jewish religious practice, by definition, was observed exclusively by the Jewish people, and notions of Jewish peoplehood, nation, and community were suffused with faith in the Jewish God, ...
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Ukulele
The ukulele ( ; from haw, ukulele , approximately ), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings. The tone and volume of the instrument vary with size and construction. Ukuleles commonly come in four sizes: soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. History Developed in the 1880s, the ukulele is based on several small, guitar-like instruments of Portuguese origin, the ''machete'', '' cavaquinho'', ''timple'', and ''rajão'', introduced to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde. Three immigrants in particular, Madeiran cabinet makers Manuel Nunes, José do Espírito Santo, and Augusto Dias, are generally credited as the first ukulele makers. Two weeks after they disembarked from the SS ''Ravenscrag'' in late August 1879, the ''Hawaiian Gazette'' reported that "Madeira Islanders recently arrived here, have been delighting the ...
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Banjo
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans in the United States. The banjo is frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, and has also been used in some rock, pop and hip-hop. Several rock bands, such as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead, have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and the folk culture of rural whites before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century. Along with the fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay of American styles of music, such as bluegrass and old-time music. It is also very frequently used in Dixieland jazz, as well as in Caribbean genres like biguine, calypso and mento. Histo ...
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Bouzouki
The bouzouki (, also ; el, μπουζούκι ; alt. pl. ''bouzoukia'', from Greek ), also spelled buzuki or buzuci, is a musical instrument popular in Greece. It is a member of the long-necked lute family, with a round body with a flat top and a long neck with a fretted fingerboard. It has steel strings and is played with a plectrum producing a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. There are two main types of bouzouki: the ''trichordo'' (''three-course'') has three pairs of strings (known as courses) and the ''tetrachordo'' (''four-course'') has four pairs of strings. The instrument was brought to Greece in the early 1900s by Greek refugees from Anatolia, and quickly became the central instrument to the rebetiko genre and its music branches. It is now an important element of modern Laïko pop Greek music. Etymology The name ''bouzouki'' comes from the Turkish word , meaning "broken" or "modified", and comes from a particular re-entrant tuning ca ...
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Bass Guitar
The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length, and typically four to six strings or courses. Since the mid-1950s, the bass guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music. The four-string bass is usually tuned the same as the double bass, which corresponds to pitches one octave lower than the four lowest-pitched strings of a guitar (typically E, A, D, and G). It is played primarily with the fingers or thumb, or with a pick. To be heard at normal performance volumes, electric basses require external amplification. Terminology According to the ''New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', an "Electric bass guitar sa Guitar, usually with four heavy strings tuned E1'–A1'–D2–G2." It also defines ''bass'' as "Bass (iv). A contraction of Double bas ...
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Brian Ritchie
Brian Ritchie (born November 21, 1960) is the bass guitarist for the alternative rock band Violent Femmes. Ritchie was born and raised in the United States and is currently a dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia, with his full-time residence in Australia. In addition to his bass playing, Ritchie is proficient at the shakuhachi, a Music of Japan, Japanese bamboo flute. He acquired a Jun Shihan (shakuhachi teaching license) in March 2003 from James Nyoraku Schlefer, and his professional name is "Tairaku" ("big music" in Japanese language, Japanese). Ritchie has released three solo albums: in 1987, "The Blend," in 1989, "Sonic Temple & Court of Babylon" and "I See A Noise" in 1990. In 2007 Ritchie produced and toured with the Italian punk/folk band Zen Circus, The Zen Circus, which subsequently changed its name to The Zen Circus and Brian Ritchie. The first international album of the band, ''Villa Inferno'', was released in 2008 for the Italian record label Unhip Records. In 20 ...
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