Tag: #interesting

Today I discovered that the saxophone is banned by the Vatican, which is a delightfully random and utterly useless piece of knowledge. Strictly speaking, the saxophone was banned by Pope Pius X in 1903 (to avoid the temptation of churchgoers indulging in sexydancing, or something or other) and the ban has never formally been repealed. What might happen if you were to turn up in Vatican City with a saxophone I do not know.

The saxophone was also banned by the Nazis as a tool of ‘degenerate’ art due to its popularity with black jazz musicians (but mainly due to the Nazis being irredeemable walking piles of crap). Not to be outdone, Stalin also banned the saxophone due to its links with jazz, but in this instance it was because he viewed jazz as “the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture” (i.e. he hated all americans, not just the black ones … though I expect Hitler wasn’t too fond of americans either after they beat him).

Knowing all this gives me newfound respect for the sax.

If you’re a fan of science fiction movies then you’ve hopefully seen Contact. And, if you’ve seen Contact you’ll remember The Machine, which has one of the more striking designs seen in the film (unsurprising, since the film generally relies on existing real-life locations and technology to preserve its sense of realism).

Turns out The Machine was not an original design for Contact, but is based on an unused concept (by Steve Burg) for Terminator 2, in which we would have finally seen the time displacement machine that sends our heroes and villains back in time.

Once you note the way time travellers in the Terminator movies tend to arrive in spheres of lightning; and travellers in The Machine sit inside a spherical pod it all seems rather obvious …

Why waste a good design, eh?

Chaka Khan, arguably best known for her Prince-penned hit single I Feel For You (but who has a celebrated career spanning half a century) is the voice you can hear in the chorus of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love (arguably giving us a glimpse of how compelling this very whitest of MOR hits could potentially sound). Once you hear her, you can’t imagine how you never recognised her voice in the first place.

More interesting that that, however, is the fact that another iconic MOR hit—Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love—was originally intended to be a duet with Chaka Khan. It’s hard to imagine how Addicted To Love could be improved, mostly because it’s so indelibly etched in commercial music history, but I suspect we’ve been deprived of something even more remarkable here.

(I’ve picked up a lot of really interesting factoids reading through Tom Breihan’s very excellent Number Ones series, in which he has pledged to write a post on every single song that has reached number one on the Billboard chart. I highly recommend bookmarking it for a rainy day (or several.)