YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Burns

lines on the record: 95
first: 2019-10-18
most recent: 2019-10-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, please do that. And join Passport, which means you'll be able to stream it for free for an awfully long time. And if you wanted to buy an old anachronistic DVD, then my children and my grandchildren get them free when they tote bags. You might be able to if you give enough, but my children and my grandchildren would still thank you.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So does he buffalo too? He's got more buffalo than anybody else. The internet people pay for, and they're in some field, in a park. It's lovely. Anyway, I would talk Kado for hours. This is great. I'm so excited. Everyone must watch country music. It's a beautiful. Thank you. I have to say, one we didn't talk about maybe another time was your Gettysburg address documentary.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing a history of the US and the Holocaust, which people always ask us about. We're doing the Great Society, LBJ's tragic attempt, and we're doing sort of a biography of the Buffalo. That is to say, it's a tale, a parable perhaps, of de-extinction. This was an animal that was sustainable food for millennia, and then all of a sudden in three generations, you couldn't find a breeding pair. But there were a handful of breeding pairs, and we brought it back from the brink of extinction. We got”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dark, dark, dark. And he's an illegitimate son, and he has an illegitimate son who Franklin raises and never really gives back to the father. I mean, it's just Franklin. So unbelievable. He's a package. And we're doing a separate biography. Country songs himself.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm working on seven films in various stages of undress. We've got Ernest Hemingway. We're doing Muhammad Ali, The Next War, if that sounds so horrible to say, is the American Revolution. I'm always interested in doing war because it brings out, obviously, the worst. But it also brings about the best. And this is a great story. George Washington Franklin. But we're also telling, if you're an African-American, what do you do? Where you got the most radical people are the Southern planters. They're using images of slavery to describe what King George is doing to them. Oh, yeah, but us. But all of their comfortable life has been possible by people. I don't pay.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, well, that's, I think, the gift of all of these elementals forms like the blues and rhythm and blues and some pop that hasn't been corrupted and country. And rock is that we're just saying, I love you, why don't you love me? I'm so happy that you love me. All the various permutations of what we want. And for me, the sad songs are the ones that have them.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We dissect both those songs, but No, that is a painful song Sunday morning coming down. Sunday morning coming down. I just recently had a baby and I was listening to it and I felt so sad for Johnny Catch. But I was listening to Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash heard it and he said”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We dissect both those songs, but it's so many things talking about relationships between human beings, physical, sexual relationships between, you know, hold your warm and tender body close to mine. I mean, these are stuff that wasn't being sung in country music or in pop because we don't know how to do it without euphemism. No, that is...”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he can write the silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky, and as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome I could cry. I mean, I mean, this is it, but then you have Jolene and you have, I will always love you. Chris Christopherson took the elemental poetry, the hillbilly Shakespeare, Hank Williams was, and added William Blake and Shakespeare to it and Frederico Fellini, as you see in the series, and makes songs of such complicating intimacy, not just me. Me and Bobby McGee, but Sunday morning coming down Sunday morning coming down.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I had to pick any. I forced it impossible to pick. Dolly and Hank Williams, I think, are, I just, I mean, this is a guy who can write I got a hot rod Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford and a $2 bill, and I know a place right over the hill, and hey, good looking. He's just the joy of new love.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because what'd you need is not just the beginning and the middle and the end. You need someone's going to lose a trail. You need somebody. something like that yeah exactly like that so I have two more questions one is do you have a favorite country music singer did you Dolly Parton is mine I think if I had to pick another”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just live in California. Well, what I would say is Richard Powers, the novelist, said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story. And if that's the truth, and I think the story that we're operating under right now and have for the last few years have been I can go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and get away with it. When that story changes, this will most definitely be a country song. Because what you need is not just the beginning and the middle and the end. Oh, someone's going to lose a trail. You need somebody. You need the last line to say Breaking Boulders and Sing Sing or something like that. Yeah, exactly.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no them. There's only us. And that's that idea of the alloy. Yeah, I was in Kentucky talking coal miners about digital stuff, which was I was arguing with them, but they're never going to be digital people. You know what I mean? And coal mining isn't coming back. We were having this argument. And someone was like, oh, we're the real Americans. I said, I'm a real American. I just live in California. It was really interesting. And then that was a moment. I remember thinking about that. It just occurred to me that Donald Trump is a country song, actually. Sooner or later, someone's going to lose a trailer.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, it's on every platform. It's free. And what we'll do is we'll keep adding things as films are made. But the whole backlist are evergreen. And that's something I left out. These themes are all evergreen. These themes are not going away. You can righteously be indignant about this moment that happened, but then that moment's passed. But if you're talking about the underlying themes of that moment and what it might be, say immigration or leadership or race or war or politics or all of these things, you have an ability to continue a conversation. And what I found out on the road promoting every film, and certainly country, which has had the most emotional response to it since my Civil War series back in 1990, is that we're all together. So if I work in this place between the US, all my films are about the US, but it's also about us. What I've understood is that there's no them.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the results of the 1980 Olympics before the broadcast on ABC? Because you have. Because there was a Canadian broadcasting group that had an international right and the game happened in the afternoon. And everybody said, shh, and we watched it in prime time. I can look that up in 30 seconds and find out the answer to that question, right? And we can find out all that stuff. But we've now seen...”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we're all about human beings are about convening. When I talked about the communion between strangers in dark rooms, which is the cinema experience, we're talking about convening marketplace is about convening. So we've created different now electronic marketplaces. We just have to make sure because we now have theaters in which you can scream fire and everyone gets away with it. It's against the law. Freedom of speech goes up to that point where you endanger others with the screaming fire. You cause a stampede when there's not a fire. And that's not what we're supposed to do. I think unfortunately we have a medium. It's impossible to get the genie back in the bottle. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube here. We just have to figure out how to regulate without destroying what are the important aspects of it. You want to find out why it is that you could watch the 1980s.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a film that came out in 2011, right after the Tea Party Ascension. And it was about prohibition And so you go prohibition, it's about flappers and gangsters. And you go, Yeah, but that's not the important part, it's that single issue of political campaign with unintended consequences”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That tells you it rhymes. I could take another film. What if I told you I'd been working on a film for many years about single right-wing, single-issue political campaigns that metastasized with horrible, unintended consequences about the demonization of recent immigrant groups to the United States, about smear campaigns during a presidential election style that the likes of which no one had seen unprecedented, and that a whole group of people felt that they'd lost control of their country and want to take it back.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Political party reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to affect that election. You would tell me I have been talking about the last two years. But all of those things were true in December of 2006 when I began work on the Vietnam War, and they were true when we locked the picture, meaning no more editorial work in December of 2015, a month before the Iowa caucus.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not the depression where prisoners do that. So you can have conversations and you can sometimes it's startling echoes. Let me give you a really good example. So two years ago, just think where you were late summer of 17, what had happened. We had a new administration in for about seven, eight months. I was out on the road promoting a film that I'd spent 10 years working on, 10 and a half years working on, about the Vietnam War. And I would say, what if I told you I had been working on a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration, about a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks, about a president sure the media was lying about him, making up stories, about asymmetrical warfare that confounded the mighty might of the U.S. military, about huge big document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilized the political conversation and the conventional wisdom and accusations that”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When that happens, I'll agree we're in a depression. So, all that permitted was whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, folks. The sky is not falling. This is really bad. It's a horrible, devastating financial crisis out of which many millions of people who feel dissatisfied and feel that their stories aren't being told and have aligned themselves with someone they think tells their story but has no idea what their story is That's another story for another time. Have not benefited, have not exited from that thing, as most everybody else has. And we're not mindful of it. It's been painful, but it's not the depression.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me do something that's a little, or the AIDS crisis, really good one. I'll give you an example that's a little bit benign so that we don't have to have a fight about it, not you and me, but just everybody in their heads about it. So when the meltdown happened at the end of the day. Who had a meltdown? Who had a meltdown? Let's guess. Let me guess. So when the financial meltdown happened at the end of 2008 and 2009, I had people come to me, even people in the financial services and said, Ken, Ken, this is like the depression, isn't it? And I said, in the depression, in many American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's also, and the implicit pessimism of human nature doesn't change, meaning you don't get better. You can individually make a difference, and stuff does happen, and dimes are moved just a little bit. It makes you optimistic. It makes you say, oh, you know what? We can get through this right now. Because remember when this and this? Not that this moment isn't unprecedented.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the ghosts and echoes of an inexpressibly wise past. And the historical context gives you the ability to look and see and understand with a slight bit of distance and maybe dispassion what's going on now. So it makes you strangely for all just the horrible hell of human experience and all of the bad things we've done.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you take from all the films that I've done without any sort of conscious sense of marketing or this sort of stuff. You take different themes constant. And then you've got a little mixtape of 40 minutes or an hour and five minutes or 25 minutes. So UNAM is about curating those mixtapes. So the evergreen nature of history and realizing that in the past, we've been able to make presentations about it. But if we interact with the present, if you have John Legend now doing a version of Ohio by Crosby Steele's Nathan Young, who licensed it to the very first time to us because everybody misuses it. But in our Vietnam series, we weren't going to misuse it. We were going to use it exactly where it should be. And then he comments on it. All of a sudden you're having a conversation between the past and the present or maybe the present and the past. And so Unim is a place to gather together and realize as much as you think this moment is new and it is completely new, it's informed by”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that tells you is that human nature doesn't change. And so that studying history is actually studying the present and the future. And it's the best teacher we have. So if you get into the repetition or you think you can make a, say you want to make a film about a contemporary moment and it's political, it's advocacy, whatever, which is fine, First Amendment, everybody gets to do that. They're really great documentaries that come out of that. But it's skywriting. It's gone after the first zephyr. But if you're dealing with these universal themes that we have about freedom, the tension between individual freedom, what I want, and collective freedom, what we need, that's been a thing. You're dealing with race, you're dealing with leadership, you're dealing with war, you're dealing with politics, you're dealing with gender, you're dealing with all sorts of themes that completely recur and reoccur all the time. Don't repeat. Those ideas repeat. So what if you could, the way you play disc jockey at home, make a mixtape of the theme, say take leadership, right? Or immigration.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not force. It makes sense. The advantages far outweigh the stuff, but I will swear by my delay. I think that was an important delay. It just didn't own us in the way I've seen friends get too involved not in content, but in sort of sizzle. And I just still want to be working at the end of episode 10 with the same fervor as I did the opening intro things fire death stuff for us. A big deal is to put a red line under something. Just leave it alone. Just tell a story. Story is... Okay, so we're there. So people say history repeats itself. It does not. Just tell me one thing that repeated itself. We're condemned to repeat what we don't remember. I understand why that's there, but it's not true. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I prefer the Old Testament Ecclesiastes, which says,”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because it's hard, and there are conveniences to it. I can't tell you. And now, I mean, I used to draw on a fade out. Now I can put a fade out on. I used to wait until this expensive process called optical printing to put your name on the lower third journalist.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically to digital everything. And I still take my camera around. I'm okay. I still miss the tactile. You know, painters wear smocks because they're working in a cellular process. Photographers who are still developing have gloves because it's a chemical process. Everybody else, it's electronic. You're so remove from the tactile stuff. I used to cut film. We used to pace scotch taping together, draw on the essential prices over.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artisanal is fine, it's handmade, it's not quaint. We're dealing with race, we're dealing with gender, we're dealing with really tough stuff. And it brings you to the idea that somehow the past is something simpler than the, and this will get to unum now, than it is.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody was by 2000 out of film and shooting digital until 2010 because I still wanted the tactile thing. When you've got unlimited amount of digital space to record stuff, there's a lassitude that enters into your work. And so I've always tried to be conservative about that, not a Luddite. And the same social media.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seduced by that. Keep shortcuts. Take shortcuts, or you have the tyranny of choice. You know, when I'm an editor analog, I go, wow, I just asked the editor something. It's either going to be two hours or two days. Now that two days takes two hours and that two hours takes two minutes. But then that gives you a range of a thousand things and then there's no there. And then what matters? And there still has to be a thing that matters. So I insist on keeping the form. These are handmade films still, even though it's ones and zeros and everybody's got a mouse and a keyboard, which I don't like. I want to be able to hold real one, episode one. And after you and I have dinner, I can say, hey, let me take you back and let me thread this up and show you what we're doing with Huey Long or the Civil War or baseball or jazz or whatever it is. Can't happen now. I have to turn on a machine that's worth millions of dollars and do 29 steps. And at that point, you're tired and you want to go home and you'll see it on your phone when it's out, right? I also didn't switch out of film.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's perfectly fine. I make it for the big screen of a big TV. I mean, I'm even a filmmaker, so I love going out to screenings where it's a whole wall and you're in a dark room with strangers, which I think that communion is super important that brings us together. So let me take the technology part of it, and then I'll move to UM. Is that okay? Yes, please. So my profession moved to digital editing around 1990. I moved after 2001. I just needed a decade of fury on the part of people from the outside. What you don't do then, you're still analog, and fury from the inside of people saying, look, I came here to be an intern. And for a while, it was sort of a badge of honor to learn this analog stuff. You asking me to learn this stuff is like I came here to learn how to drive a race car and you're telling me that I need to learn how to shoe a horse, right? But I needed to get to a place where I knew the tail wouldn't wag the dog because you get so...”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, to say, I watched your entire documentary on an iPad or an iPhone, which was, I did not watch it on television. I signed into PBS app and I watched it there and it was perfectly fine. No, it's perfectly fine.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so people have to lift their heads up and meet the others. And so you go to the school and you think, wow, what happened? What happened is they are not doing what any, if you and I walked outside today. Three quarters, if not 100% of everyone on this block would be looking down at their device. And so how is it that you participate in life? And so I've been very measured in my own acceptance of technology. I'm just as addicted to this as anyone, but I don't get too deep into all of that because I think it is such quicksand. And now we know from when you say order me a pizza, Vladimir is listening too. Right, right, right, right.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the death of his friend Keith Whitley, who dies of alcoholism, he sets it aside. Then his own brother dies a couple years later, so he picks it up again and he finishes it. And it's a beautiful song. It's requested whenever anyone passes. It's like Amazing Grace or Will the Circle be unbroken. And then he sings it at George Jones's funeral, and he can't throw it. He breaks down and cries, and Patty Loveless has to pick him up and carry him. I think there's a metaphor here about focused attention. Not a metaphor. It's just a fact, a truth of life. And so much of these technologies with service also don't serve us. My daughter goes to my number three girl. I have four, goes to a private school, just started, and they have a rule that you can't be on your phone as you travel between classes.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only my children, but I am captured by these devices that we hold in our hands, that you can go to a screening of a film in which a filmmaker has worked in my case in country music for eight and a half years and have a screening in there, a third of the audience are on their phones. Now you hope that they're tweeting something, but what even does that mean? Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is meaning. And meaning accrues in duration. The work that you're proudest of, the relationships you care the most about have benefited from your sustained attention. And attention is the singular focus. You don't write a great country song because you're inattentive. You write it because you've focused and done it. And that's the story of Hank Williams, whether you wrote it in 15 minutes or 15 days. That's where it is. Or Vince Gill writing, Go Rest High, one of these albums, one of these songs that you think have been around for hundreds of years. He writes a verse.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Obviously, so I'm a little bit out of my depth. We are historians. We stopped in the mid 90s at the height of Garth's popularity when Bill Monroe dies. Then our coda is to follow Johnny Cash to his death in 2003. So that's where it is. And we're aware of what's going on, but we feel uncomfortable commenting on it because we don't have, as history requires, the passage of time and therefore the perspective that allows us to triangulate with a little bit more certainty about what's good, what survives. I mean, I couldn't tell you right now who of the top 30 people should be in the pantheon. I can tell you in 30 years because we can allow stuff to happen. But I think the things that we see across the board in the fact that technology has opened up all of these things and yet is often the tale that wags the dog rather than the other way around, the way in which”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So when you look at modern country, I do want to tell you about the impact of the internet and music, the changes in music have had on it. You know, you talked about, you referred to little Naz and that song, and that was an interesting. It was ridiculous. To me, I was like, obviously song. Right. It's obviously a country song.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, no, I think in some ways what we've always wanted our country people to be are these tragic figures in the Pats decline and the Hank Williams in the Jimmy Rogers mode. And he is like Vince Gill, Doy Yokum, they understand the tragedy. They reflect it. But there's stuff going on. There's a joy of life.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his music and his story, the lyrics around the mic that someone said, when William started singing, a naked lady could go by behind in an African elephant and nobody would notice. And that's a testament. And so, you know, and Garth was doing a variation of that. He's so mesmerizing in the showmanship of it, in the way he sells the songs, whether it is that heartbreaking ballad or the bigth Arthur.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's amazing too. Actually, I like her better. Nobody's more country than Garth, and yet he brought in these stacks of amps and these fires and he's propelled through the air and a merry poppin's cable. And it's, and if you think about it, he's a combination of these beautiful heartache ballads. That's Hank Williams and these wonderful kind of drinking songs. That's Hank Williams. So, I mean, you've got somebody who fits in the tradition but has mastered the modern form of presentation. Hank Williams went up and he so wrapped himself”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I mean? It's an Well, you know, Jimmy Rogers is the first stupor. Superstar. But then it's a question of level. Nobody's been at the level of Garth. And he's growing up watching these kiss concerts and Queen and all of this sort of stuff. So he's into production, but he's his wife says in the film, he's as country as he is.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk a little bit in that way because I think if heavy orchestra is Garth Brooks, but he isn't really, you know what I mean? It's an interesting. He was sort of the first, I think, superstar. Would you?”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad demo. Let's just put it out so it'll die a quick death and then Willie will be more compliant to what we want him to perform. And of course it sells millions of copies and they gain a kind of control in saying no, we can make it the way we want. But this sort of tension is going on to this day. You can hear people knocking at the door of country music and saying, well, I guess I'm in Americana in roots now. I don't know how I got out of country, but countries only male and country's only this thing that sounds more like pop and it's got drum kits and it's heavily electrified and you can't hear or the stuff that really distinguishes itself is the stuff that has a nod to the old stuff, that has a toy to it, has an edge to it. And it may in fact have to do a lot with the life that people have been wrought up in. If you're in an upper middle class family, it's hard to speak about some of the things that have characterized country music through the decades. And so you're dealing with more nuance.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it has the sense of being stripped down and spare, but from the beginning there's been this tension between something that's kind of over orchestrated, if you will, and the pure sound, whatever that is. And I think in any art form, the artists in any generation don't want to stand still. They don't want to just play the old stuff. They want to go and push really the audience and the commerce side of it vote on that. We don't like the way you're going, or we do love the way you're going. This is something new. Early tensions, I mean, if you think about the outlaw movement and Willie Nelson and Whalen Jennings, that's rebelling from these over heavily orchestrated stuff and saying, look, just let me go into this studio with just two three instruments, my guys. Just let us record it playing. And the executives listen to redheaded stranger. And they go, this is a terrible demo.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really fascinating. When you're talking about, let's talk a little bit at the technologies of it because country music is really the least, you would imagine it's the least technological brand of music. Not a lot of electric, although increasing and different people do different things now. Talk a little bit about that impact, because it usually is just one of the instruments, the fiddle, the banjo, which comes from Africa.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For decades are not playing records. People are coming in and shouting at a microphone. Right, right. And that's the way you hear it. That's where the barn dances and the grandle opery and all the other things get their start. It's really fascinating.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He understood it, and right there, he's trying to make a buck. He's got a creative bone in his body. He does have one. But he knows, as in all things, that there's always a commercial element. The way you find out about something. He's taking two technologies, one completely new and the other been around for a few decades. The phonograph has been around for a few decades, and people have them. But this thing radio is just starting. And if you looked up in the dictionary, the word broadcasting in 1910, it would be a farmer walking along a furrow with a little bag of seeds and him strewing the seeds out broadcasting these seeds. You look at it 20 years later, and that's a secondary definition. It means from one point to many points, same idea, of reaching people through this new medium of radio. And this is what takes the recording plus the playing.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He breaks up with his band, The Geneva Ramblers, and then goes in alone, and they become the, you know, it's like lightning striking twice. It's considered. It's called the Big Bang. And this happened in the summer, August of 1927, and almost on successive sessions, I think it was the 1st of August that the Carter family was recorded, and then the fifth that Jimmy Rogers came in. And Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family just took off. And until the depression began to crimp sales, they were the hottest music in that field.”
2019-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ken Burns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT