Weekly Discoveries

I kicked off last week's musical discoveries with some especially smooth and chill selections, including one wacky track just for Mom.

If you want to capture the fleeting nature of youth, and the longing for simpler days, look no further than Want It Back.

And check it out, Tupac made the list with Hold On, Be Strong. That there, is some powerful music.

There's a number of historical oddities on the list. First, consider the visual that runs behind Quantic's Time is the Enemy. That's a famous bit of footage filmed in San Fransisco in 1906 and titled A Trip Down Market Street. It's a remarkable snapshot in time of when the car and horse and buggy were figuratively (and probably literally) colliding. Here's one notable comment from the video:

1906... Incredible. Cars were roaming the streets. Large buildings were standing. Hitler was decades away from taking power. Baseball was the only major sport in the country. There was no television. No real movie theaters as we know them. The Titanic hadn't yet set sail. The Great Depression was still over 20 years away. World War I hadn't happened yet. Women did not have the right to vote. Slavery was abolished just over 40 years prior. The first plane was flown for only a few miles just three years before. The World Wide Web was 84 years away from being invented. There were 78 million people in the USA, compared to about 335 million now. The first cell phone was nearly 70 years from invention.

It is now 2016 (pretty soon 2017), yet in the grand scheme of time, 1906 was only a split second ago.

Cell phone video and easy publishing on YouTube may be trademarks of the amateur film maker, but the lack of these tools were hardly an impediment to those dedicated to the craft. Here's a film created in 1948 as a family lark: The Tramp's Revenge. Of course it was harder for videos to go viral back in the day.

And finally, consider Charlie Chaplin's, The Lion's Cage. Yes, this is a silent movie. But the lack of talking doesn't slow this little flick down one bit. It's 3 minutes and 25 seconds of hilarity. A must see, if you ask me.

The most powerful video of the bunch is probably Clean Bandit's, Symphony which tells the story of a devastating loss. It does this using characters that pretty much up-end most musical stereotypes, what with the African-American Gay couple, where one of them is a Classical Music Conductor. I'm not the only one who's impressed, as it's amassed 5.8 million views in just over 4 days.

This week's random hack: How to Make a Gas Mask. What can I say, I thought it was a clever build.

Watch all the clips here: