Intellect Plus
Music
820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 14.
- Qawwali, now a world music staple, began as Sufi worship with no instruments allowedQawwali was meant to carry listeners towards ecstatic remembrance of God, not to entertain them. Early Sufi authorities even banned musical instruments from the gatherings. Today …
- Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi started as Hans Zimmer's apprenticeBefore he wrote the Game of Thrones theme, Ramin Djawadi spent years supplying extra music for other composers' films, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Batman Begins, at Han…
- Merle Haggard watched Johnny Cash play San Quentin from the inmates' seatsIn 1960 Johnny Cash played a concert at San Quentin, and one inmate in the audience, prisoner A45200, came away knowing what he would do once he got out. His name was Merle Haggar…
- Noah Webster's great dictionary flopped, then two brothers bought itNoah Webster spent two decades on his American Dictionary, learning 26 languages to trace word origins. Published in 1828 when he was 70, it sold just 2,500 copies and left him in…
- Wu-Tang's contract let Method Man go solo first, and he made it countThe Wu-Tang Clan signed an unusual deal: every member could record solo albums for any label he liked. Method Man went first. His 1994 debut Tical entered the charts at number fou…
- Critics panned the Michael Jackson biopic, and it still made a billion dollarsMichael, the 2026 film about Michael Jackson's rise, drew mostly bad reviews. Critics liked the lead but called the story sanitised. Audiences ignored them. It earned 1.029 billio…
- Macklemore reached number one without a record labelIn 2012 a Seattle rapper and his producer friend put out a jokey song about bargain-hunting in secondhand shops. Thrift Shop climbed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, the first…
- Two brothers from Arran built the house that published Alice and NatureDaniel and Alexander Macmillan grew up on the Scottish island of Arran and opened a bookselling business in 1843. Within a few decades their firm had published Alice's Adventures …
- Maggie Smith won an Oscar for playing an actress who loses oneIn California Suite, Maggie Smith played a British star who goes to Hollywood for the Academy Awards and goes home empty-handed. The part won her the 1978 Oscar for Best Supportin…
- Marc Anthony said no to salsa before becoming its biggest sellerWhen a record boss offered Marc Anthony a salsa album, the young New York club singer turned him down. Then, riding in a taxi, he heard a Juan Gabriel ballad on the radio and chan…
- Martha Argerich feels lonely playing solo, so she mostly stoppedMartha Argerich is often called one of the greatest living pianists, yet since the 1980s she has rarely given solo recitals. She has said she feels lonely alone on stage. Instead …
- McCoy Tyner was John Coltrane's only pianist for five yearsFrom mid-1960 to December 1965, no other pianist played with John Coltrane. When McCoy Tyner couldn't make a gig, Coltrane simply went without. Their quartet recorded A Love Supre…
- Judy Garland's daughter won her first Tony at 19 and later an Oscar for CabaretLiza Minnelli first appeared on film at three, in the closing scene of one of her mother Judy Garland's musicals. By 19 she had won a Tony, and at 26 she took the Oscar for Sally …
- LL Cool J mixed his first demos on gear his jazz-playing grandfather bought himAt 16, James Todd Smith was making demo tapes in his grandparents' Queens house on turntables and a mixer his saxophonist grandfather had paid $2,000 for. He mailed them around Ne…
- Loretta Lynn won a wristwatch on TV, and a record label was bornA Canadian named Norm Burley watched a young coal miner's daughter win a wristwatch on a televised talent contest in Tacoma, Washington, and co-founded a record company on the str…
- Stokowski, the London-born maestro who ditched the baton and invented his own mystiqueLeopold Stokowski was born in Marylebone and trained at the Royal College of Music, yet he spoke with a mysterious foreign accent and sometimes claimed to have been born in Kraków…
- Lily Tomlin's snorting switchboard operator Ernestine made her a star and won a GrammyOne ringy dingy, two ringy dingy: Lily Tomlin's rude telephone operator Ernestine became a national catchphrase on Laugh-In. Tomlin went on to be the first solo woman to win the G…
- Lin-Manuel Miranda drafted his first Broadway hit as a college sophomoreLin-Manuel Miranda wrote the first version of In the Heights in 1999 for a student theatre group at Wesleyan, adding freestyle rap and salsa along the way. Nine years later it won…
- Linda Ronstadt sang rock, country, soul and mariachi, until illness took her voiceLinda Ronstadt moved between rock, folk, country, pop and soul, sang on more than 120 albums and won 11 Grammys. After 2000 she felt her voice slipping. By 2011 she had retired, a…
- Lionel Richie can't read music, yet wrote some of the biggest ballads ever soldLionel Richie once considered becoming an Episcopal priest, decided he wasn't cut out for it, and carried on with music despite never learning to read or write it. The result: Thr…
- At nine, Lisa Marie Presley became heir to Elvis; at 25, she inherited it allWhen Elvis died in 1977, his nine-year-old daughter shared his estate with her grandfather and great-grandmother. Within three years both had died, leaving Lisa Marie Presley as s…
- Leonard Cohen went back on tour in his seventies because his manager took his moneyIn 2005 Leonard Cohen discovered that his manager had siphoned off most of his savings and sold his publishing rights. At an age when most singers retire, he went back on the road…
- Leontyne Price broke opera's colour barrier on live television in 1955When NBC broadcast Puccini's Tosca in 1955, its star was a young soprano from segregated Mississippi, the first African American to lead a televised opera. At a time when Black si…
- Kiss got its name from a drummer's old band called LipsDriving around New York, Peter Criss mentioned he had once played in a group called Lips. Paul Stanley answered: what about Kiss? The band that followed painted its faces, breathe…
- Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar and Army Ranger before NashvilleBefore he wrote Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson had published prize-winning essays in The Atlantic, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, trained as an Army Ranger and…
- Britain's Labour Party began with a court case that outlawed most strikesIn 1901 a legal ruling known as Taff Vale made most strikes unlawful, and British unions decided they needed their own voice in Parliament. The committee they had formed a year ea…
- A secretary's misunderstanding sent a teenage Lauren Bacall to HollywoodHoward Hawks only asked his secretary to find out more about the model on a Harper's Bazaar cover. She misread the request and mailed the girl a ticket to Hollywood. Within a year…
- Napoleon admitted his Legion of Honour ran on baubles, and he was rightWhen critics sneered that his new decorations were trinkets, Napoleon replied that trinkets are exactly how you lead men: soldiers want glory, not arguments. His Legion of Honour,…
- Leipzig, the city of linden trees where Schiller wrote Ode to JoyBach worked here, Mendelssohn and Wagner too, and a boys' choir has sung in Leipzig since 1212. Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy in what is now a suburb. In 1989 the city added anoth…
- Hollywood filmed Lena Horne's songs so they could be cut out in the SouthMGM signed Lena Horne in 1942 but would not give her lead roles. Her numbers were shot as self-contained scenes, so theatres in cities that refused to show Black performers could …
- Karlovy Vary's legend begins with an emperor's sore leg and a hot springAccording to legend, Charles IV's hunting party stumbled on a hot spring in the Bohemian forest, and its water healed the emperor's injured leg. The spa that grew there took his n…
- Keith Jarrett walked onstage alone with no plan and sold millionsKeith Jarrett built a career on sitting down at a piano with almost no idea what he would play next. Those fully improvised solo concerts, above all the 1975 Koln Concert, made hi…
- Keith Moon joined the Who by wrecking a borrowed drum kitAt seventeen, dyed ginger and fortified by a few drinks, Keith Moon talked his way behind another drummer's kit at a Who gig, played one song and broke a pedal and two drum skins.…
- Keith Richards plays with five strings and the Stones follow himKeith Richards often pulls the lowest string off his guitar and tunes the remaining five like a banjo, the trick behind the chiming chords of Brown Sugar and Start Me Up. Bandmate…
- From a Houston housing project, Kenny Rogers sold over 100 million recordsKenny Rogers grew up in a federal housing project in Houston, where his father never earned more than about $75 a week and dinner was sometimes just peanut butter sandwiches. He w…
- Kevin MacLeod gave away 2,000 songs and ended up everywhereIf you have watched YouTube or scrolled TikTok, you have almost certainly heard Kevin MacLeod. The Wisconsin composer has released more than 2,000 pieces that anyone may use for f…
- King Crimson played in 7/8 just to avoid sounding popularLyricist Peter Sinfield summed up early King Crimson simply: if a song sounded at all popular, it was out. The London band piled on odd chords and odd time signatures, and still o…
- Justin Timberlake wrote a song for Michael Jackson, who turned it downAround 2001 Justin Timberlake wrote a ballad called Gone with Michael Jackson in mind. Jackson passed, so NSYNC recorded it instead, but before release Jackson phoned him. Timberl…
- Kanchipuram, the City of Thousand Temples, still lives mostly by weavingKanchipuram in Tamil Nadu is famous for towering temple gateways, halls with a thousand pillars and the silk saris that carry its name. It served as the Pallava capital for centur…
- Julia Stiles played three Shakespeare heroines before finishing collegeAround the turn of the millennium, a teenage Julia Stiles became the go-to actress for updated Shakespeare: Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You, Ophelia in a modern Hamlet, and the …
- Shakespeare squeezed weeks of Roman history into a single dayIn Julius Caesar, the assassination, the funeral speeches, the reading of the will and Octavius's arrival all happen on one day. In real life they spread from 15 March to May. Sha…
- An accidental click on YouTube turned Justin Bieber into a starIn 2007 Scooter Braun was hunting for videos of a different singer when he clicked on a 12-year-old from Stratford, Ontario, covering Ne-Yo's So Sick. He tracked down the boy's sc…
- Javier Bardem wanted to be a painter, not Spain's first acting Oscar winnerJavier Bardem spent four years studying painting in Madrid and took acting jobs only to pay for canvases. He decided he was a bad painter, stayed in front of the camera, and his t…
- Before Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page played on other bands' hitsLong before he founded Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was the guitarist producers phoned when a record needed insurance. He played as many as fifteen sessions a week, turning up on trac…
- Joan Baez almost changed her name before her first concertDesigning a poster for her first club show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a teenage Joan Baez weighed billing herself as Rachel Sandperl or Maria. She kept Baez, worried people woul…
- John Entwistle stood still while the Who smashed things around himBill Wyman called him the quietest man in private and the loudest on stage. While Pete Townshend and Keith Moon destroyed instruments, John Entwistle barely moved, yet he was the …
- John Travolta flies jumbo jets and parks them beside his houseJohn Travolta is rated to fly Boeing 707s and 747s, and his Florida home sits on an airfield with a taxiway running to the front door. Flying runs through his life as persistently…
- Johnny Depp became an actor by accident while chasing a record dealJohnny Depp dropped out of school at 16 to be a rock guitarist, and his principal told him to follow that dream. A few years later, broke in Los Angeles, a drinking buddy named Ni…
- Judi Dench auditioned for Cabaret from the wings, too scared to singOffered the part of Sally Bowles in 1968, Judi Dench assumed it was a joke: she had never done a musical and has a famously croaky voice. She auditioned hidden in the wings, leavi…
- Iggy Pop's name came from a failed band and a shaved-eyebrow lookalikeJames Osterberg grew up in a Michigan trailer park, where his parents surrendered the master bedroom because only it could hold his drum kit. Two nicknames later, one from a teena…
- Hitler's attack on Poland was postponed once, halted almost in mid-leapGerman troops were due to cross into Poland at 4:00 a.m. on 26 August 1939. Then Britain signed a fresh pact pledging to defend Polish independence, and Hitler hesitated, pushing …
- Isaac Hayes turned three-minute pop songs into twelve-minute soul sermonsIn 1969 a struggling Stax Records ordered 27 albums in a hurry. The biggest hit among them came from its in-house songwriter, who took Walk On By, a tidy Dionne Warwick single, an…
- At four, Jacqueline du Pré heard a cello on the radio and wanted oneA small girl in Oxford heard a cello on the radio, asked her mother for one of those, and began lessons with homemade illustrated pieces. By 20 she had recorded an Elgar concerto …
- The voice of Darth Vader barely spoke a word through childhoodAfter moving to his grandparents' Michigan farm at five, James Earl Jones developed a stutter so severe that he stopped talking, and stayed nearly mute until high school. An Engli…
- Janet Jackson's key earring came from cleaning Michael's animal cagesAt the 1983 American Music Awards, Janet Jackson wore a hoop earring with a key dangling from it. The key opened the cages of the exotic animals her brother Michael kept at the fa…
- H.E.R. hid her face to launch a career built on full disclosureGabriella Wilson was already a child performer, singing Aretha Franklin at the Apollo at ten, when she vanished behind a new name in 2016. H.E.R. stood for Having Everything Revea…
- Hypochondria began as a word for the belly below your ribsThe Greek hypokhondrios meant the soft region under the cartilage of the breastbone, and in Late Latin hypochondria simply meant the abdomen. Today the word names persistent, disa…
- Satie named his gentle Gymnopédies after an ancient Spartan dance of naked youthsErik Satie's Gymnopédies take their name from gymnopaedia, a yearly ancient Greek festival at which young men danced naked, or perhaps just unarmed. The three short piano pieces, …
- Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier shared one theatre ticket, swapping seats between actsAs broke young men in 1940s New York, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier would buy a single seat for a local play and take turns watching, trading places at each interval and fill…
- Henry Rollins was running an ice cream shop when Black Flag asked him to singIn 1981 Henry Garfield was assistant manager of a Häagen-Dazs in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. After he jumped on stage with Black Flag at a New York bar, the band auditioned him t…