VMP Magazine

Beginning in the 1940s and throughout the ‘60s, listening to American music in Soviet Russia was a defiant act of consumerism. The music itself—popular recordings from Lionel Richie, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and more—was banned, written off as subversive to the state, and the method of consumption was correspondingly sketchy. Stephen Coates, a British author and composer, grappled with the peculiarly fascinating black market for bootleg records in his 2010 hardcover book X-Ray Audio. Russian bootleggers pressed songs onto used x-ray film, a material with the unique properties required of a vinyl alternative: soft enough for grooves to be carved, firm enough for grooves to hold their shape.

The forbidden songs were pressed onto leftover images of bones—a hand here, a section of a tibia there—like incidental picture discs borne out of necessity. It’s a dramatic, alluring story about the hunger for music. And while it’s an extreme case, the story of Russian “bone records” offers up a weighty microcosm: people go to great lengths to listen to music they’re not supposed to.

When you start listening to jazz, if you’re completely unaware (if you’re like me), then you start with the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. It’s the standard that defined the standard, a master work, a relic of a style that has sadly — ironically — been relegated to the lifeless catacombs of shopping malls and elevators in many cases. It’s the music we listen to in-between things, while we’re waiting, without any real attention. And it’s a shame, because jazz, above all else, demands attention.

Pouring out through a voice as rich as fertile earth itself, the 12 songs on Nina Simone Sings the Blues feel like they weren’t created, but rather have always existed, incubating beneath layers of soil until Simone decided she’d harvest them to share with the world.

Maybe it’s hard to conceptualize the fruition of these songs because the blues—as a sound, as a genre, as a feeling—are absorbing; they embody complex histories and an encompassing emotional state that spans generations of human conditions. Maybe it’s difficult to imagine the creation of these songs because most of us have never known a world without this momentous 1967 album. Regardless, many of the songs have backstories as intriguing as the musical textures their recordings harbor.

Not so long ago, it felt like indie rock drove the discourse around music on the internet. Now, the Indie Rock Blog Hype Era is as gone as the Roman Empire. What happened?