Enlarge David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

Donald "Duck" Dunn onstage about 1990.

David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

Donald "Duck" Dunn onstage about 1990.

Donald "Duck" Dunn played bass with Booker T. and the MGs, who backed many of the hits Stax Records put out in the 1960s. He was 70 years old when he died Sunday in Tokyo. At the audio link, you can listen to a remembrance of Dunn's life and career that aired on All Things Considered.

For the third time in a month, the marquee at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music is eulogizing a fallen alumnus: On April 12, it read "R.I.P. Andrew Love." May 1, it marked the death of wah-wah guitarist Skip Pitts. Today, it pays tribute to Duck Dunn, the bassist who, as a member of Booker T. and the MGs, laid the foundation for so many of the hit records that put Stax on the map.

Although I've lived in Memphis since the mid-1980s, I came late to the MGs. I knew Dunn first from The Blues Brothers; despite the fact that I'd heard songs like "In the Midnight Hour" and "Try A Little Tenderness" thousands of times, I was a straggler to the party that is Memphis soul. Anchored by equal parts blues, country, gospel and jazz, Memphis soul music is more fatback than lean, typified as "gutbucket" in comparison with its sophisticated counterparts in Philly or Detroit. Dunn's finger-poppin' instrumental oeuvre — created with guitarist Steve Cropper, drummer Al Jackson Jr. and organist Booker T. Jones — led, in a roundabout way, to my career as a freelance music journalist.

Interviewing musicians made for an incredibly fun gig, but it was also nerve-racking to ask tough questions of my idols. Calling Dunn was easy — like talking to a neighbor who just happened to be a living link to the world beyond the microcosm of the Memphis soul scene, a compatriot of The Beatles and Neil Young. Dunn was a source I relied on. We'd talk fishing, then make an easy segue into the topic of the moment: Jerry Wexler, the revival of Stax Records, Otis' legacy, or the mysteries of Dylan. When it came to music history, Dunn was the uncomplicated, almost goofy man in the midst of the maelstrom, and he always offered an unfettered point of view.

"The Beatles came to the club we were playing in, the Bag O'Nails in London, and bowed to us," Dunn remembered with a chuckle when I quizzed him about the Stax-Volt Revue's triumphant 1967 European tour. "It made me feel like a million dollars, I guess. To tell you the truth, when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, the Dave Clark Five appeared the following week, and I turned to my wife and said, 'Now there's a good band.' She was going crazy over the Beatles, and I didn't want to like them."

Enlarge Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images

Talking Heads.

Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images

Talking Heads.

"In the summer of 1979, in New York City, a fifteen-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom heard a voice speaking to him over his radio. The voice said: 'Talking Heads have a new album. It's called Fear of Music.'"

So begins Jonathan Lethem's Fear of Music, a new, in-depth exploration of Talking Heads' third studio album and its transformative effect on the boy who grew up to be a MacArthur Award-winning novelist and essayist.

Fear of Music

by Jonathan Lethem

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Lethem's Fear of Music is part of the 33 1/3 series, a set of books each inspired by and dedicated to a single classic album. In his book, Lethem mixes track-by-track close readings with autobiography in an attempt to interpret one of his great teenage obsessions.

In 1979, Lethem, who describes himself as an "awkward white fifteen-year-old," was struggling to navigate the complex social terrain of his primarily black and Hispanic Brooklyn neighborhood. Bookish and arty, the child of a painter father and a political activist mother (who died when Lethem was 13), he took refuge in passions that later played a formative role in his writing career: science fiction, comics and music.

"In a lot of ways I can see in retrospect," Lethem says, Fear of Music "was a message in a bottle to me, to tell me that who I was, and how I felt, was gonna be okay, and might even be a little better than okay."

Fear of Music, produced by Brian Eno, marked a new stage of Talking Heads' growth from New York art-school punks into a nationally prominent, critically acclaimed pop band. The album rose to No. 21 on the Billboard 200 and gave rise to the hit single "Life During Wartime." Lethem, however, is more intrigued by "Memories Can't Wait," the track immediately following it at the close of the album's A-side.

"Memories Can't Wait" is a dark departure from the Talking Heads' typical sound, musically and lyrically. I spoke with Lethem about how the song surprised him, how he grew to understand it and how it shaped his youth and taste in music. (You can read Lethem's chapter on "Memories Can't Wait," from his entry in the 33 1/3 series on Fear of Music, here.) According to Lethem, it's a song that lifts the band's typical veil of ironic distance to expose the raw emotions underneath — anger, alienation and fear.

Rachel Smith: In the book, your description of "Memories Can't Wait" is really over the top visceral. You write, "This dreadnaught of a song wears an exoskeleton of reverb and sonic crud as it grinds grimly uphill, armored like a Doctor Doom or Robocop who has been smeared with tar and then rolled like a cheese log in gravel. It is as if 'Memories Can't Wait' rides on spiked treads, a vehicle bogged in mud at the depths of the record's second side, and determined to climb into view over the crushed bodies of the other tracks." It sounds almost monstrous.

Jonathan Lethem: Well, it's the most aggressive song on the record, in terms of real deep aggression, and it's also the most depressed song on the album, I think, the most really, really abject one. Both of those things are threatening to me, and in a way you might say that the tone of "Memories Can't Wait" was a problem for me, because it wasn't exactly what I was going to Talking Heads, or Fear of Music, to get. And in fact, I make a couple of jokes that I think are indicative in that chapter. I talk about The Exorcist, or Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." I had a really embarrassed resistance to things that came on as scary or doomy at that point in my life. Like the first time I heard The Doors, and the way Jim Morrison was storming around, that sort of doomy voice, I thought it was a joke. I didn't think anyone could sing like that and want to be taken seriously.

Enlarge Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Tom Gabel of Against Me!

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Tom Gabel of Against Me!

Late Tuesday night, Rolling Stone posted a news item that Tom Gabel of the punk band Against Me! plans to begin living as a woman. Gabel will soon undergo the transition, with hormones and electrolysis treatments. According to Rolling Stone, Gabel has "dealt privately with gender dysphoria for years." The full story, written by Josh Eells, hits newsstands on Friday.

As Matthew Perpetua, a Rolling Stone contributor, notes in a thoughtful piece about autobiography in pop music, Gabel has addressed gender identity issues in Against Me!'s music before, most explicitly in "The Ocean," the closing song on the 2007 album New Wave.

If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman
My mother once told me she would have named me Laura
I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her
One day I'd find an honest man to make my husband

And earlier this year, Gabel performed a new song, "Transgender Dysphoria Blues," with just an acoustic guitar, perhaps as a nod to Against Me!'s explosively vulnerable beginnings as a folk-punk band 15 years ago.

Gabel, who will take the name Laura Jane Grace, admits that the transition won't be easy.

"I'm going to have embarrassing moments, and that won't be fun," says Gabel. "But that's part of what talking to you is about — is hoping people will understand, and hoping they'll be fairly kind."

Enlarge Courtesy of AMC

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) tries to relax as The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" plays on the stereo at the end of the latest episode of Mad Men.

Courtesy of AMC

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) tries to relax as The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" plays on the stereo at the end of the latest episode of Mad Men.

Don Draper sure has a lot of power for a fictional character. At the end of this week's episode of Mad Men, Don dropped the needle on that copy of Revolver ("start with this," his wife Megan said as she pointed at Side B's final track) and the tape loop distortion of "Tomorrow Never Knows" started dripping through his hi-fi speakers. As Lennon sang, "You may see the meaning of within," the camera showed Don's wife and his co-workers, all caught in moments of uncertainty and transition. Don's own response to this hit of mind-expanding music? Disinterest. The episode closes in the silence that follows him lifting the needle mid-song.

My Twitter feed exploded. I'm a Mad Men fan, like every other person out there who digests Quality Television after supper on Sunday nights. But I'm here to take Don and his superego, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, down a notch. Yes, managing to license a Beatles track was a coup (an expensive one), but I think Weiner used the track in a way that just doesn't make sense.

Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images

Adam Yauch speaks at a press conference before the 1998 edition of the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C.

Early in my career, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to write for Grand Royal, also known as the Beastie Boys' magazine — and also the name of their record label. When I heard Adam Yauch had died on Friday, it felt natural to reach out to some of my old friends from the Grand Royal days — and their friends and their friends. So many of us got our start thanks to them. Here are a few of our memories of Adam:

Sunny Bak is a photographer who shot the centerfold photo for Licensed to Ill. A show of her work coincidentally opened this week at the Ivy Brown Gallery in New York City. She photographed the band in their earliest days and remembers them fondly:

"We were all just hanging around. We weren't trying to create iconic pictures, we were just shooting photos and capturing a moment in time but we really didn't know it at the time. It was an important time in our lives, but we didn't know it. I have pictures of Adam sitting on a skateboard eating a Subway sandwich. I had to buy the sandwiches because they didn't have any money! They hung out at my place all the time because I was shooting a lot of fashion in those days so there were a lot of models. And so there were a lot of Beastie Boys! I'd see them and Rick [Rubin] and Russell [Simmons] at the Palladium and Milk Bar and wherever and we'd hang out day and night. We all sort of grew up together and they blew up a lot faster and bigger than any of us would have ever guessed. And that was the whole joke of it. It was terrific and I'm just so sad ... but I'm also happy that he's not suffering anymore.

"I'm just amazed at the contribution that [Adam] made and the lives that he's touched in the world — how many generations of Beastie Boys fans there are going to be... I just can't believe it's the end of the Beastie Boys era. I think about Adam and what was so great about him ... all that fame and all that success, well, everyone went through their periods of stuff, but Adam had that touch with humanity and with worlds of peace.

Enlarge Janette Beckman

Adam Yauch (center), with Mike Diamond (right) and Adam Horovitz, in a photo from 1985, the year before the Beastie Boys' debut LP, Licensed to Ill, was released.

Janette Beckman

Adam Yauch (center), with Mike Diamond (right) and Adam Horovitz, in a photo from 1985, the year before the Beastie Boys' debut LP, Licensed to Ill, was released.

My first introduction to hip-hop came in 1987, when a junior high friend gave me a cassette tape with Run DMC's Raising Hell on one side and the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill on the other. I was 13 and completely pop-ignorant, so I had no idea that there were other groups making this same music, but even if I treated the albums like islands, I kept returning to that tape until it wore down to static.

Listening to the Beastie Boys for the next quarter century, I mostly thought of them as a group package rather than an assortment of distinct MCs. Their telltale style was a three-man, tag team weave, where each rapper — Adam "MCA" Yauch, Adam "Ad Rock" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond — often finished each other's sentences. To tell the Beasties apart, you needed to focus on their voices.

Horovitz had the most memorable, with an elastic, screechy whine. Diamond boasted the punchiest tone, all brass and bravado. In contrast was Yauch, who, unlike his compatriots with their pinched timbres, came in low and hoarse. That gave Yauch a certain gravitas, even in his early twenties, when the Beastie Boys were just becoming international stars. Perhaps its only apropos then that of the three, Yauch, who died on Friday at 47 after a nearly three-year battle with cancer, would exert the most outsized influence on the group, especially in helping turn a pack of so-called "frat rappers" into spokespeople for international human rights.

Like the rest of the Beastie Boys, Yauch was born into a middle class, Jewish, New York family, growing up in Brooklyn as the son of an architect and a public school administrator. Also like his partners, Yauch's first foray into music was not through hip-hop but punk rock, and he met Horovitz and Diamond when all three were members of bands in Manhattan's burgeoning "downtown" scene. Before they ever became known as a rap group, the Beastie Boys first made their name with two punk rock releases, Polly Wog Stew (1982) and Cooky Puss (1983).

Enlarge Rick Diamond/Getty Images

The Stooges Brass Band performs during the 2012 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

The Stooges Brass Band performs during the 2012 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

The annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is in full swing until Sunday. The event draws hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world — and also working musicians playing the festival.

Many of the performers don't have health insurance, so when they need a tuneup, they get care from the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic. It's one of a few health centers in the country that provide care exclusively to artists.

The clinic is really just two exam rooms and a couple of offices within Louisiana State University's medical school. But through grants and donations, and with the support of the larger hospital, the facility helps 2,400 New Orleans musicians with everything from the flu to slipped discs to, well, work-related injuries.

Charles Moore has been playing the bass for 43 years, but he hasn't played the upright in a long time until now.

"Now I got a blood blister from playing too hard," Moore says. "I play hard. And I got a big blood blister on my finger and it hurts!"

Moore, who is slated to perform this weekend at Jazz Fest, also has the flu. Musicians coming in before a gig isn't uncommon — a drummer will have gout in a toe and need an injection, for example. Clinic director Bethany Bultman says that while musicians might come in to address a blister, the clinic uses that opportunity to address diabetes prevention or exercise.

In other words, music is the opening that helps the clinic treat the whole patient.

"If their arthritis is becoming a barrier not to their wellness, but a barrier to them doing what they love to do, they will come in," Bultman says.

Dale Spalding, who sings and plays guitar, drums and harmonica, was more proactive than that: He made an appointment to talk about back pain before heading out on the road. But he says he still likes to think of his health holistically.

"Musicians play in pain all the time," Spalding says. "If you have a gig, you go to the gig. You do it. And most of his time, just playing the music cures you temporarily."

Enlarge Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

Adam Yauch (left) with the Beastie Boys in 1987. The gruff-voiced rapper known as MCA died Friday after a battle with cancer.

Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

Adam Yauch (left) with the Beastie Boys in 1987. The gruff-voiced rapper known as MCA died Friday after a battle with cancer.

Adam Yauch, the raspy-voiced rapper known as MCA of the Beastie Boys, died Friday in New York at the age of 47. Yauch was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 and had been largely out of the spotlight since.

Yauch and bandmates Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) are credited with helping push hip-hop into the mainstream. The Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month, but Yauch was not in attendance.

How Adam Yauch Grew Into His Voice

Founded as a punk act when Yauch was 17, the Beastie Boys began fusing elements of rap and rock on their 1986 debut album Licensed to Ill, released by the then-brand-new Def Jam Recordings. The album — created by an all-white trio that formed when rap was still made by and marketed toward black audiences — was the first hip-hop album to make it to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

According to Bill Adler, the Beasties' publicist at Def Jam records during the Licensed to Ill era, the album "defined ... American pop and international pop for the calendar year of 1987.

"They demonstrated that you did not have to be black to make a credible record," Adler told NPR's Sami Yenigun. (You can hear Yenigun's full report for All Things Considered by clicking the audio player on this page.)

On Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys created a cartoonish signature image: hard-partying neighborhood guys looking for a drink and a girl, and not much else (unless vandalism counted). In an interview with NPR in 2011, producer Rick Rubin, who worked with the band on the album, said, that's who the Beastie Boys were.

"[The group] had a punk rock-slash-pro-wrestling attitude of just ridiculous hip-hop boasting and aggression," he said.

But the group's early image incited a backlash and charges of misogyny.

In 1985, the group opened for Madonna on an arena tour. In a 2006 interview with WHYY's Fresh Air, Yauch told host Terri Gross that the pop singer's fans didn't like them much, but the image was a put on, at least at first.

"You know, it's almost like we started out goofing on it, and then sort of became it in a way," he said. In the same interview, the Beasties admitted they later changed sexist lyrics from the first album in later performances.

Licensed to Ill and other albums, including Paul's Boutique (1989) and Ill Communication (1994), are now hailed as classics for their adventurous production techniques, genre-mashing experiments and the cheeky — but more thoughtful — lyricism practiced by the three MCs. A lyric from Yauch on "Sure Shot," from Ill Communication, reflects the group's changes: "I want to say something that's long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through / To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends / I want to offer my love and respect to the end."

Yauch's career diversified as the band's image moved toward political awareness.

"As a younger man, he was very angry," Adler says. "As he went on, he got into spiritual pursuits [that] calmed him down and brought him peace."

Yauch co-founded the Milarepa Fund in 1994 and helped organize the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996 to advocate on behalf of Tibetan independence. The Beastie Boys also led him to filmmaking: Under the pseudonym Nathanial Hornblower, he began shooting some of the group's music videos before starting Oscilloscope Laboratories, a film production company. In 2008, he directed a full-length documentary about street basketball called Gunnin' for That #1 Spot.

Diamond and Horovitz appeared without Yauch on Morning Edition in 2011 to promote Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2, the Beasties' first proper album in seven years (the release of which was delayed during Yauch's battle with cancer). Speaking to NPR's Steve Inskeep, Diamond explained they were handling their friend's illness one day at a time.

"[We're] just holding on," he said. "He's obviously our lifelong best friend. You have to just sort of hope for the best."

Vanessa Heins/Courtesy of the artist

Released in December, Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" has been rising on the charts — it reaches no. 5 this week — and winning the hearts of fans on YouTube.

Giving in to the Top 40 hit of this awakening spring — Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" — is a lot like getting tickled. The song comes at you with a giggle, toppling forward with the aggressiveness of a child. "No!" you shout, but soon it's running its sparkly fingernails under your armpits and you're doubled over, laughing.

Monkey See

Covering '...Baby One More Time' One More Time

Every note vacillating between major and minor chords along the tonic; every slice of a string section that seems real but's just a synthesizer dream; every one of Jepsen's hopeful, tossed-off "maybes" and time-muddling lines about how "before you came into my life / I missed you so bad" — these details add up to make "Call Me Maybe" one of those pop songs that doesn't just describe or recall innocence, but aims to reproduce it, putting you smack inside that state of possibility. (The Village Voice critic Maura Johnston has written about how its instrumentation approximates the feeling of a crush; blogger Sydney offers a useful musical analysis.) The song's backstory only makes it better: "Call Me Maybe" is giving Jepsen herself a second chance, making her a teen queen at 26 with the help of mentorship by her spiritual sibling and fellow Canadian, Justin Bieber.

Key to the rise of "Call Me Maybe" is that Jepsen and her helpers play the song for laughs. The production itself, by Josh Ramsay of pop-punk band Marianas Trench, encourages a comic reading. Little percussive elements pile up over an already accelerated drum track, and that staccato string effect keeps punctuating the chorus to establish a slapstick mood — it's the sonic equivalent of a distracted lover walking into a wall. The lyric and Jepsen's delivery portray her in perpetual recovery from a startle. "This is crazy!" she blusters, finding equilibrium on the down note and in that breathless qualifier. She's the girl in the rom-com who's a little quirky and clumsy and doesn't seem like the hero's type, but who represents freedom and spontaneity and an open door to a new life. Call me maybe: I'll walk you into a different sunset.

The official video allows Jepsen to inhabit the screwball role today's ingénues often adopt as a corrective to the aggressive sexuality that more often defines them. Kesha's been here before; so has Pink and Katy Perry. Nicki Minaj perfected the stance in "Superbass," which you could call the "Call Me Maybe" of 2011. Invoking the comic styles of earlier troupers from Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe to Ann Margaret, today's self-styled supervixens gain not just perspective but a certain sweetness. (Guys do this too, from David Lee Roth in "Hot For Teacher" to Dave Grohl in "Learn To Fly.")

Enlarge Courtesy of The Fader

Images of Philip Glass from The Fader's Icon issue.

Courtesy of The Fader

Images of Philip Glass from The Fader's Icon issue.

As a general rule, if it's in The Fader, it's new. There's a good chance that you've never heard of many of the musicians who fill the magazine, which is based in New York and flaunts that city's bustling diversity and also its celebration of the cutting edge. But part of that celebration, every year, is the magazine's Icon issue, which takes a step back from the relentless forward motion to anoint an influential, already-celebrated figure. Past Fader Icons have included David Byrne, the singers Aaliyah and Nina Simone, reggae star Shabba Ranks and, last year, the rapper The Notorious B.I.G.

This year, the magazine will devote 34 of its glossy, full-color pages to the composer Philip Glass. Features, which you can read now online, include a timeline, an oral history of his career, a photo essay with images from performances of five Glass works around the globe in a month and interview with the composer himself as well as younger musicians who bear his influence.

I spoke with The Fader's editor-in-chief, Matthew Schnipper, about selecting Glass for the issue and why the composer, who celebrated his 75th birthday in January, isn't so different from the up-and-coming musicians on whom the magazine usually focuses.

Jacob Ganz: Philip Glass is better known than most of the musicians you cover. How did you decide to feature him in your Icon issue?

Matthew Schnipper: The idea behind the icon issue is sort of a pause. We're always trying, not even to catch up with what's happening now but to chase what's going to be happening soon. This idea of what will be the zeitgeist, trying to identify trends and see what sounds new.

I think the thing that someone has said to me, a writer I trust and really look up to, is, "If I hear something and I don't understand it, then I'm interested in it." That's the driving force in The Fader at all times. And once a year we say, "Who did this in such a huge way that we want to step back and celebrate it?"

We cover a lot of artists who are older, but often we're covering newer rappers, we're covering newer rock musiicans. Philip Glass is a career musician. He's a classical musician. But we said, "Look, if The Fader was around in 1971, we would have been writing about Einstein on the Beach. If The Fader was around when Music in 12 Parts came out, we would have written about it. This is music that actually doesn't sound that far away from Black Dice. It doesn't sound too far away from Clams Casino. The themes are pretty prevalent. And the way in which he looked at music, saying, "I want to play in art galleries. I want to play everywhere. I want to make everything, of all genres," is actually a really cool path for a bigger artist. He's a good example of what any of these young people that we're covering could become. He's a best-case scenario.