#cannot unhear

What Pearl Jam sounds like to people who don't like Pearl Jam

Artificial Intelligence attempts to continue a 15sec clip of "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls in the style of Nine Inch Nails.

Cannot Unhear: R2-D2 in Italian

A closer look at how the King of Pop crafted his first big pop hit, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.'

Cannot Unhear: Star Wars "Cantina Theme" Played by a Pencil 

Trout Mask Replica, by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band was inducted into the Library of Congress' national recording registry in 2010 - nearly 40 years after it's release. The album has been widely cited by artists of all kinds as a shining point of creativity and original thought - it also is very very hard to listen to. It's the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. Its discordant rhythms and motifs sound made up on the spot by a child, but every sound and riff you hear on the album was arduously rehearsed over the course of a year by a group of young musicians who were remarkable in their own right. 

Over the past few years a general nostalgia for the 1980s has infiltrated music, film, & television. We deeply love those gated reverb drums of the '80s - you know that punchy percussive sound popularized by Phil Collins and Prince? In this episode of Vox’s Pop Earworm, they spoke with two Berklee College of Music professors, Susan Rogers and Prince Charles Alexander, to figure out just how that sound came to be, what makes it so damn punchy, and why it’s back.