“These are the sounds of America – our wide-ranging history and culture,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden explained, to The Washington Post. “The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation’s playlist.”
Each year America’s Library of Congress archives great works in all fields in order for them to be preserved forever. And that – of course – includes great works of music. And this year’s new entries have just been revealed. They include:
Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
Helen Reddy – I Am Woman
Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman
Mary J. Blige – My Life
Celine Dion – My Heart Will Go On
Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
Original Hamilton Broadway Cast – Hamilton: An American Musical
And [cough] Brian Eno’s Microsoft Windows reboot chime…?
Yes. Even the annoying noise that your old PC used to croak out is getting preserved forever.
What next? The 'Ding!' from Family Fortunes?
“The Library of Congress is proud and honoured to select these audio treasures worthy of preservation, including iconic music across a variety of genres, field recordings, sports history and even the sounds of our daily lives with technology.”
Microsoft, especially back then, weren’t exactly short of money, effectively owning 100% of the computer market, having ground the likes of Apple into the dirt with their cheaper, inferior DOS operating system, which ran on 100% of the world’s IBM (and compatible clone) PCs.
Thus when they finally revamped the thing, stealing Apple’s graphical user interface and mouse for Windows 95, they were willing to splash the big bucks to make sure that everyone paid for an upgrade. And given that the new operating system prominently featured a new ‘Start’ menu in its bottom left-hand corner the choice of The Rolling Stones Start Me Up for its ads was a bit of a no-brainer.
The ticket price? A snip at $3 million.
Notice that the ad stops before the line "You make a grown man cry"…
With the Stones bagged, next Microsoft needed something to announce to new users that something important had just happened to their PC. Something that would finally make use of its new speakers. Something that would let PC users know that now they were messing with real power… And who better to tell a story with sound than Brian Eno?
Thus Eno was commissioned to give Windows 95 ‘a voice’ and ‘personality’. There was only one catch. In order to fit inside the OS and the world’s weakling PCs it had to be less than three and 1/4 seconds long…
Or when Mario eats a mushroom?
Eno, of course, always up for a challenge, jumped at the opportunity. That and the cash they were offering: $35,000…
“The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas,” Eno explained to SFGate. “I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it."
“The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be three and 1/4 seconds long."
“I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
In fact, Eno actually failed to meet his brief. His Windows 95 start-up is actually six seconds long, but was deemed so brilliant that Microsoft let that slide. After all, they were getting an extra two and three-quarter seconds for free…
And Eno could spare the time. Even in its deal-breaking, bloated final form that works out at $5833 per second. Had he received the same generous rate for his flop Passengers album (with U2) that same year he’d have trousered $20.3million…
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