Other Artists
In a 1974 concert in Helsinki, Finland, a drunken audience member repeatedly disrupted a Frank Zappa performance by shouting a request for "Whipping Post." Zappa responded by playing a southern rock version of his song "Montana", subtitled "Whipping Floss". (This incident was eventually captured on his You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 2 live album, released in 1988.) In 1981, Zappa's band learned "Whipping Post" and added it to their repertoire, since the band's new singer and keyboard player Bobby Martin knew the song and sang the lead vocals on it. Zappa recorded a studio version of the song for the 1984 album Them or Us; a live recording of the song featuring Frank's son Dweezil Zappa on lead guitar was released in 1986 on the Does Humor Belong in Music? album and associated video.
Rock cult figure Genya Ravan produced the best-known recording by a female singer, with a screaming take on her 1974 album Goldie Zelkowitz, which was subsequently sampled in Jay-Z's "Oh My God" from his 2006 album Kingdom Come. Portions of the Jay-Z sample appeared as the soundtrack for feature advertisements for the 2013 film Gangster Squad.
The most-heard rendition of "Whipping Post" by any other artist came during Season 4 of top-rated television competition American Idol in 2005. Contestant Bo Bice gave a shot in the arm to Southern rock with an impassioned performance during the show's semi-finals round, pleasing Randy Jackson and the other show judges to no end and propelling Bice towards an eventual second-place finish. Since then other Idol contestants have tried their hand at the song as well, leading to it gaining renewed visibility.
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Famous quotes containing the word artists:
“In dealings with scholars and artists we are apt to miscalculate in opposite directions: behind a remarkable scholar we sometimes, and not infrequently, find a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist, fairly often—a very remarkable man.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)