Serendipitous Curiosity

French Caribbean talking about business innovation, technology, basketball, Caribbean music & societal issues. Can't knock the hustle!

[Serendipitous Curiosity @DeevesRobison]

Listening to soca is a state of mind, a mindset, a deep love of life!

[Soca Leaks @SocaLeaks]

“You always listen to soca music” yeah it’s the only thing keeping me alive bro

[Spurs Culture @SpursCulture]

If Harper isn't starting next season, this organization isn't serious

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

VICTOR WEMBANYAMA NAMED THE WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS MVP

🔥🔥🔥

[San Antonio Spurs @spurs]

Won the West ✅

@FrostBank | #ad

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

VICTOR WEMBANYAMA IS SHOWING HIS EMOTIONS HEADED TO THE NBA FINALS.

[ESPN Insights @ESPNInsights]

Victor Wembanyama (22 years, 134 days) passes Lew Alcindor (22 years, 352 days) as the youngest player with 40 points and 20 rebounds in a playoff game😲

[TrashTalk @TrashTalk_fr]

Quelle TERRIBLE journée pour ceux qui pensent qu’on en fait trop avec Victor Wembanyama hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha holy flickidy fuck

[ESPN @espn]

WHAT DID WE JUST WITNESS?!? 👽

ALL-TIME LEGENDARY PERFORMANCE FROM WEMBY‼️

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

Victor Wembanyama striking a pose in front of the Spurs bench

This is amazing

[Shams Charania @ShamsCharania]

There will be no further discipline for Spurs star Victor Wembanyama after he was ejected for elbowing Naz Reid in Minnesota on Sunday night, sources tell ESPN. No suspension, no fine. Wembanyama will play in Game 5 against the Timberwolves on Tuesday night in San Antonio.

[J’Moul Francis 🇦🇬 @jmoulfrancis]

One of my all-time favourite soca songs, Fallin’ by Kes The Band🇹🇹, performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. S/o to Terri Lyons🇹🇹 and Teddyson John🇱🇨 doing background vocals 🔥 (major soca artistes in their own right).

Credit: @nprmusic @YouTube

[Serendipitous Curiosity @DeevesRobison]

Literally manifested and wrote his greatness into existence! Forever the GOAT

[Nekias (Nuh-KAI-us) Duncan @NekiasNBA]

i'm sorry???

[Last B 🦋 ✨ @Ony1nyechi]

The fairer his skin got cos of vitiligo, the “blacker” his songs got.

[The Media’s Most Wanted @TmmWanted]

The Nuggets were up by 9 in Game 5 vs OKC last year when they took Russ out for Christian Braun in the 4th. Russ never went back in and Denver lost by 7. Then they decided to not bring Russ back, gave Braun $125mil, and lost to the TWolves w/o Ant in the 1st round. Ooof

[ᴛʀɪʟʟ❦ @trilogyhurst]

this isn’t a group project.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 3. Three of the nine songs on Thriller were written by a man most fans of the album have never heard of. His name was Rod Temperton. He was British. Before he started writing music, he had worked in a frozen fish factory in northern England.

Rod had played in a 70s disco band called Heatwave. Quincy Jones heard one of his songs on the radio and tracked him down. By the time Thriller began, Quincy was going to Rod for everything. Rod wrote the title track. He wrote "Baby Be Mine." He wrote "The Lady in My Life."

The song "Thriller" was almost called something else. Rod's first version was titled "Starlight," with the chorus "Give me some starlight, starlight sun." Quincy said it was a great song but Starlight was not a strong enough album title.

Rod went to his hotel and wrote out two to three hundred new title options. He landed on "Midnight Man." Quincy said it was getting closer. The next morning Rod woke up and the word "Thriller" came to him out of nowhere. He picked it because he could already see the word at the top of the Billboard chart and on the merchandise.

Rod was so private that the music industry called him "The Invisible Man." He almost never gave interviews. He stayed out of photographs.

The other forgotten name on Thriller is Vincent Price. The horror movie actor whose voice you hear at the end of the title track. He was offered two payment options. A flat fee of twenty thousand dollars, or a percentage of the album's sales. He took the flat fee. Thriller went on to sell around 70 million copies.

A few years later, Johnny Carson asked Vincent on the Tonight Show if he knew how much money he had walked away from. Vincent looked into the camera and said, in his slow horror-movie voice: "How well I know."

John Landis, who directed the music video, said Vincent had called him in private, very upset. Vincent told him: "The kid made the most successful record of all time and I made less than a thousand dollars. Michael won't take my calls."

Eventually Michael sent him something. He had members of his team drive to Vincent's house with a gift. It was a large framed photograph of Michael Jackson, life-size, with a gold record and a platinum record attached, signed: "To Vincent Price: Thank you so much for your help with Thriller and in celebration of the 30 millionth album." Vincent took the photograph. Then he removed the gold record from the frame, auctioned it, and donated the money to a small art gallery at East Los Angeles College.

A fish factory worker wrote three of the nine songs on the biggest album ever made. The most famous voice on the most famous song was paid twenty thousand dollars total.

Nine tracks built by people most fans cannot name.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones listened to 800 songs to find 9. Then Quincy threw out 4 of those 9 and went back into the studio. Beat It, Human Nature, P.Y.T., and The Lady in My Life were emergency replacements for songs that were not good enough.

They spent four months just listening. Quincy and Rod Temperton sat in a Los Angeles studio in 1982, going through song after song after song from every songwriter they could pull a favor from. Most got cut after a few seconds. Of the 800, they only ended up recording around 30 with Michael actually singing. Of those 30, only 9 made the final list. And then Quincy listened to the finished album, decided 4 of his own picks were not strong enough, and pulled them. The four songs he replaced them with became some of the most famous in pop music history. The four he cut went on to become hits for other artists.

Recording those replacements almost broke the team. During the Beat It sessions, Quincy had three studios running at the same time. Eddie Van Halen was in one of them laying down his guitar solo for free. He had thought the call from Quincy was a prank his friends were pulling on him. Michael was in the next room, singing a vocal part through a cardboard tube. Engineers were mixing in the third studio. They worked five days and five nights with no sleep. At one point the speakers overloaded and caught fire. Quincy later told the BBC they had to carry engineers out of the studio on stretchers. Musicians too. Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player on the album, said there was a moment where everyone thought it was finished, that they had nothing left to give, and Quincy was still standing there saying "It is not there yet" while Michael, almost falling apart, kept asking what they were supposed to do now.

They finally finished mixing in early November. Then they sat down to play the master back, and the album sounded weak. They had crammed too much music onto a normal vinyl record, and the grooves had to be cut so narrow that the punch was gone. So they cut a verse from "The Lady in My Life," shortened the famous 29-second intro of "Billie Jean" that Quincy had been trying to drop the entire time, and remixed almost the whole album from scratch. One song a day. Eight straight days. The only track they left alone was "The Girl Is Mine" because it was already on the radio. The final mix wrapped on November 8, 1982. The album came out 21 days later.

The wolves you hear at the start of the song "Thriller" are Michael. The engineer set up tape recorders in a barn overnight to catch his own dog howling, and the dog never made a sound. So Michael did the howls in the booth himself. Some of the background vocals on the same track were sung in the studio's shower stall. Vincent Price did his entire spoken-word horror section in three takes, and the verses he was reading had been written by Rod Temperton in a taxi on the way to the studio that same morning. Michael never wrote his songs on paper. He recorded them on a small handheld tape recorder and then sang them back from memory in the studio.

The album ended up selling around 70 million copies. It won 8 Grammys, sat at number one for 37 weeks, and produced 7 Top 10 hits out of 9 songs. At its peak it was moving a million copies a week. But all of that came after the work was done. The work itself was 800 demos, 30 recordings, 4 last-minute saves, three studios running until the speakers caught fire, and a producer who refused to put out something he did not believe in even when it meant pulling his own album apart twice. Nine tracks because they could not find more that were good enough.

[GoldenKnight @GoldenKnightGFX]

LEBRON JAMES LITERALLY CREATED A TEAMMATE TO THROW AN OOP TO IN THE PLAYOFFS MAN STOP ALL THE DEBATES

[Evandro Carvalho 高文勇 @evandrocarvalho]

E aos poucos vamos adquirindo a consciência de algumas questões. A filosofia nasceu na Grécia Antiga? O direito internacional nasceu na Europa com a Paz de Vestfália em 1648? O pai da medicina seria o médico grego Hipócrates?

O mundo não nasceu na Europa. O conceito de Europa, sim.

Na nossa educação formal há um apagamento das contribuições históricas dos chineses, dos iranianos (persas), dos árabes, dos turquos, dos indianos, dos povos africanos antes da Europa, dos nossos povos originários.