“Meeting Tina (Turner) made me feel like a little kid,” Beyoncé gushed, referring to the intimidating awe she’d felt toward her idol since she was a young girl.
The line comes from a behind-the-scenes film made about last year’s Grammy Awards show, which featured Beyoncé performing “Rollin'” with Tina Turner. The film screens eight times a day at the brand new Grammy Museum located within downtown’s new L.A. Live complex, and its chill-inducing culminating performance is only a small sample of the power of the museum’s interactive features.
The 30,000-square-foot museum is designed to be experienced from the top to the bottom, so each visit starts with an elevator trip to the fourth floor. The doors slide open to reveal a wide hallway, lined with several huge screens, each running a clip from a different Grammy performance.
Robert Santelli, the museum’s executive director, has worked in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and served as the artistic director for the Experience Music Project in Seattle. However, Santelli said this project is different because the Grammy Museum encompasses all types of music.
“How do you tell all these stories and tell them well? By and large, we use technology to do that,” Santelli said.
The pleasing aural collage extends throughout the fourth floor with countless listening stations and film-viewing nooks. One particularly interesting feature is the “Crossovers” exhibit, a long touch-screen table divided into ten stations with numerous pairs of headphones. The table offers almost 150 genres of music from polka to electronica; touch one and music starts to play, pictures appear and information about the genre’s origins and historical highlights pop up. Users can choose from a list of the genre”˜s “indicative recordings” to listen and learn about, or touch the “explore related genres” and enter a new portal. It’s just one example of the museum’s penchant for thoroughly modern interactive multimedia exhibits.
“People are now consuming music in such a way that they de-contextualize it,” said the museum’s chief curator Ken Viste, in reference to the instant availability of music spanning vast temporal and categorical ranges. “That’s wonderful in many ways, but an exhibit like “˜Crossovers’ puts back some of that context while still allowing exploratory freedom.”
“Culture Shock,” another exhibit, focuses on artists who have made bold cultural impacts in the last five decades, from Elvis’s envelope-pushing gyrations in the ’50s to 50 Cent’s confrontational rap lyrics in the ’00s. Each station is equipped with headphones and offers a selection of videos to choose from, including concert footage. Scattered throughout the fourth floor are four pods paying tribute to the American traditions of pop, folk, classical, sacred music and jazz. Each pod combines videos of interviews with influential figures, live performances, artifacts. A letter from Louis Armstrong to manager Joe Glaser from 1941 illustrates the jazz master’s warm and convivial character, while jewelry worn by Billie Holiday and Etta James recalls the iconic glamour of the era. There are also the re-assembled pieces of the Fender Strat smashed onstage by Kurt Cobain in 1992, a white Hugo Boss suit worn by Michael Jackson, Herbie Hancock’s handwritten acceptance speech for his 2008 Grammy for Album of the Year, and a floor-length sequin gown worn by Ella Fitzgerald.
The “Artist Connection” wall allows visitors to stand three inches from one of Jimi Hendrix’s right-handed Fender guitars that he restrung to play left-handed and a cello formerly owned by Yo Yo Ma, made of temperature-resistant carbon fiber. Also on display are Buddy Holly’s Gibson, Elvis’s Martin, and B.B. King’s Gibson, “Lucille.”
Stop at the Songwriters’ Mezzanine, and listen to legendary artists like Carole King, Isaac Hayes, Smokey Robinson and more, talking about their songwriting processes.
“There’s no method to my madness,” says rapper and actor Ludacris in the exhibit. The rapper also known as Chris Bridges also says he has to be alone to write a song and that his creative juices tend to flow when he’s driving on the open road. While the fourth floor is all about connecting museum visitors with icons old and new, the third floor focuses on the talents of some less recognizable faces. The “Record Men” wall is devoted to the people who make the music world go round ““ names like Clive Davis, Berry Gordon and Mo Austin. Other displays document the long journey of recording technology from phonograph to digital and introduce visitors to the great producers and sound engineers that use the power of that technology to create musical masterpieces.
The crowning glory of the museum’s interactive concept is the “In the Studio” exhibit. Eight booths use touch-screen navigation and videos to lead users through recording their own vocals, mixing the track and adding beats. The experience combines the thrill of the hands-on approach with the benefit of professional guidance. Each booth features instruction and commentary from different musicians, engineers and producers.
“You might be laying down a vocal with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and it’s like you’re in the studio with them,” Viste said.
The second floor celebrates the Grammy Awards themselves. Enshrined in a glass case is the marching band uniform worn by Kanye West during his performance of “Gold Digger” with Jamie Foxx at the 2006 Grammys and the black ruched dress worn by Amy Winehouse during her 2008 Grammy performance via satellite from London. The walls list the recipients of 50 years’ worth of awards, with special tributes paid to record-breakers like Aretha Franklin’s eight consecutive wins from 1968 to 1975.
Together, the museum’s floors celebrate 50 years of music history by combining cultural relics with interactive multimedia. And with features on everyone from B.B. King to Michael Jackson to Beyoncé, there’s something for everyone.