Trapitals's Dan Runcie looks into the lockdown past and thinks about metaverse future in his latest post: "As exciting as the metaverse, NFTs, and web3 are, it heightens the desire for artists to be on every medium and platform possible. As entertainment becomes more and more fragmented, it takes more effort for artists to be everywhere, even the superstars... Two of the biggest opportunities for music in the metaverse are letting artists and fans create their own worlds, and getting more women artists and fans involved".

A great essay about life lessons from Fugazi: "The band that I believed knew more about how to live a better, more just, more punk life, were vegan, even on tour, eating veggie burgers out of their van in between shows across the country... Veganism involves questioning the dominant worldview, doing things for yourself, and sticking to principles. Being vegan means saying “fuck you” to a system even many meat eaters know is wrong — and that’s punk rock, even if there’s no crashing drums and searing guitar involved".

Music YouTuber Rick Beato made a list of the top 20 strangest guitar solos of all time, based on a few criteria - weird harmony, unusual sounds, and odd techniques. Included on the list are Nirvana, The Police, Rush, Judas Priest, Van Halen, Allan Holdsworth (very high on the list), and Jeff Beck at the top.

"The best punk movies are stories that tap into the spirit of the time through imagined characters and invented situations. A biopic can’t help treating its protagonists as exceptional figures—stars commanding the stage of History—in a way that undercuts the iconoclastic, 'no more heroes' spirit of punk" - the Simon Reynolds writes introducing his best punk movies list, which goes from "the first punk movie" 'Jubilee' to 'We Are the Best!' by Lukas Moodysson.

No physical medium required at the customer interface. A wide selection of songs available for instant listening. Music choices made by the user, not some corporation or station manager - a quite correct description of a streaming service. However, it's a business started in 1939 by Seattle inventor Ken Shyvers. Ted Gioia goes back in time.

A nice little blog post by Medium about movie titles inspired by songs. The top spot is taken by Inner Circle's 'Bad Boys' - a song "about teenage life and becoming semi-aggressive as you start growing up... it’s about troubled kids who have problems at home”. The song was picked up in 1995 by the 'Bad Boys' action comedy franchise, which stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as two Miami narcotics detectives.

“Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me... It felt great to me – that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people” - jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins tells the Guardian recalling his two years of playing on a New York bridge. Beginning in the summer of 1959, Rollins played the saxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours or more, for two years. This month is the 60th anniversary of his return to the recording studio where he made - 'The Bridge'.

An interesting point by Michelle Lhooq in her latest Rave New World post: "Clearly, we are entering the most absurd era of the pandemic, where ravers are actively trying to catch the virus, the scarcity of COVID testing is a joke, and the President himself is tweeting 'LMFAO IDK just Google it'. As the void closes in, the question lingers: is there any use resisting the nihilism of this moment? Or do you just cross the goddamn Rubicon, and jump into the gabber rave mosh pit?".

The New Yorker looks back to the career of pianist and composer Hasaan Ibn Ali and his new release 'Retrospect In Retirement Of Delay: The Solo Recordings' - which features him in privately recorded performances from 1962 to 1965. The recording "reveals his profundity, his overwhelming power, his mighty virtuosity. It does more than put him on the map of jazz history—it expands the map to include the vast expanse of his musical achievement".

"The curse of being a music hound is that you’ll never be able to hear everything; the blessing is that there’ll always be something new to discover" - Boston Globe writer points out in the article about musical discoveries from this year. It's actually all well-known names, but not for everybody, some had the luck of finding out excitement in something all else knew.

"Christmas songs vary hugely in genre – you’ve got everything from Songs-of-Praise-core to “Mad World” – and as you will see throughout this list, we are not afraid to challenge boundaries and perceptions. (One of the songs included, for example, doesn’t actually exist.) Not all Christmas songs mention Christmas, and not all Christmas songs are even “songs” as you may know them. Your mother screaming at you to get the dog out of the living room while there’s ham out, say, is just as much a Christmas ditty as “Silent Night” herself. You may not be able to play all our choices on your little Spotify, but they are all undoubtedly Christmas songs in that they contribute to the sounds and the mildly deranged mood of the season" - Vice kind of argues in favor of its list of 50 best Christmas songs. A mad list.

"If cascades of gorgeous-to-gritty tone, an effortless flow of sparkling, playful melody, harmonization and dazzling polyrhythmic syncopations make up your idea of six-string divinity, Dr. Nico surely belongs in your pantheon" - Guitar World writes introducing Nicolas Kasanda wa Mikalay, aka Dr Nico.

Medium presents top 11 glam rock song, with the No. 1 being 'Ballroom Blitz', the Sweet song based on a 1973 concert that got out of hand. Guitarist Andy Scott described how he and singer Brian Connolly were dragged off the stage in Glasgow, Scotland: “There was an absolute riot. All the fans were screaming and going crazy. A bunch of girls grabbed Brian and me by the ankles and dragged us off stage. They started lobbing off our hair with scissors they had been hiding in their handbags.To say we were terrified was an understatement. No one had ever seen a reaction like this and security didn’t stand a chance. Mike went away and wrote the lyrics to ‘Ballroom Blitz’".

Inspired by Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary 'Get Back', Rolling Stone has compiled a list of the 70 greatest music documentaries of all time: "the concert films, fly-on-the-wall tour chronicles, punk and hip-hop and jazz time capsules, and career assessments of everyone from Amy Winehouse to the Who that have set the standard and stood the test of time". The list finishes with 'U2: Rattle and Hum' and starts with Bob Dylan 1967 docu 'Don't Look Back', with plenty of good stuff in between.

Inspired by Brass Against's singer urinating on a fan's face, Consequence has assembled a list of the eight most shockingly gross concert moments. They go from Ozzy Osbourne biting off a bat's head, to Donita Sparks chucking her tampon into the audience, to Woodstock fans rolling in human feces. All for the sake of fun!

A short and funny post by Boing Boing with a selection of the finest and the worst of "please hold" music. So, the best - Tim Carleton's pleasant 'Opus 1', and the title of the worst goes to Vic Berger and his senseless/irritating recording.

Revolver asked an expert panel of heavy-metal and hardcore musicians — including members of Type O Negative, Revocation, Imperial Triumphant, and more — to pick out the heaviest riff. The musicians chose Black Sabbath, Slayer, Metallica, Pantera, Rage Against the Machine, Van Halen...

Mehdi Moussaïd, a research scientist in Berlin who studies crowd behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, came up with tips to survive a dangerous crowd situation:

Keep your eyes open for danger signs

Leave as soon as you sense the crowd getting too dense

Stay standing, and don't put a backpack on the ground

Lack of oxygen is the killer in crowds, so preserve space around your chest

Don't push. Move with the crowd

Avoid walls and solid objects

Learn to detect crowd density

If a crowd gets unsafe, look out for others

Tori Amos ran down the songs and albums that formed the contours of her life, at Pitchfork. Plenty of different music - Aphex Twin ("coming from a brain that thinks differently than the rest of us"), Radiohead ("It was this explosion that changed the terrain sonically"), Mary Hopkin ("the most beautiful, whimsical thing"), Adele ("like a meteor had crashed in through the atmosphere"), Tracy Chapman ("It woke me up and took me back to my 5-year-old self, who was creating from a pure place of intention of music being magic, as a place where we could walk into and feel many different things").

"With its signature groovy percussion, autotune-heavy vocals, and catchy hooks, Afrobeats is finding audiences far beyond Nigeria’s shores. Stars perform at global music festivals, and American musicians sampling their work have introduced African artists to an ever widening audience" - Quartz begins its introduction of Afrobeats. "Much of Afrobeats’ growing appeal is driven by Nigeria’s vast diaspora, but beyond that, social media, YouTube, and global streaming sites like Spotify are ensuring that it’s easier than ever to discover—and become a fan of—Nigerian music".

A lovely little article in the Guardian about Yugoslavian pop music in the 1980s when it got closest to the trends of the western world: "Yugoslavian musicians defied the limitations of technology to make superb electro-pop in an apparent socialist utopia... Yugoslavian disco, post-punk and electronic music thrived in the 1970s and 1980s – yet was mostly forgotten until recent efforts by hobby archivists and specialist record labels".

WordTips has a great feature - Singers Vocabularies. They counted the words used by 100 modern stars and the 100 greatest singers of all time and added up the number of unique words they used per 1,000 and used the formula for the feature. What they found is that the star with the biggest vocabulary overall is legend Patti Smith, who uses 217 unique words per 1,000 - she used 2,669 different words across a total word count of 12,291. The modern singer with the biggest vocabulary is Billie Eilish who uses 169 per 1,000. Legend Luther Vandross and modern star Trey Songz are tied with 66 for the smallest vocabulary. The song with the most unique words is Lou Reed’s 'The Murder Mystery', recorded by The Velvet Underground, with 639 words.

Music writer Ted Gioia tries to see into the future, here are some of his predictions:

Record labels will gradually lose both the ability and desire to develop new artists. They will focus increasingly on their old catalog and archival materials.

More new artists will get their big break from web platforms... So I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole new platform emerges during the next decade—an interface that makes it fun and exciting for music fans to hear new music.

Listeners will have favorite new songs, but not know (or care) about the name of the artist.

Musician incomes will continue to shrink, but some young musicians will still earn large sums of money by being influencers.

Dead musicians will start showing up everywhere—via holograms, biopics, deepfake vocals, and other technology-driven interfaces.

Get ready for A-Pop from Africa, I-Pop from India or Indonesia, and a whole host of competing sounds and styles from Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, etc.

Pitchfork is continuing to celebrate its 25th birthday, the latest b-day cake being a selection of favourite albums by some of Pitchfork's own favourite musicians. Some interesting choices: ANOHNI chose 'Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Power in the Blood' ("Buffy is one of the people I am relying on to help me understand how to move forward as an artist and as a human being"), Bun B chose Radiohead’s 'OK Computer' ("when life starts moving too fast, 'OK Computer' is still there to help slow it down for me"), Daniel Kessler from Interpol chose Aphex Twin’s 'Richard D. James Album' ("pushed music to where it had never ventured before"), Thundercat chose Slipknot’s 'Slipknot' ("awesomeness"), Timbaland chose OutKast’s 'SpeakerBoxxx/The Love Below' ("groundbreaking").

Ted Gioia looks back at the case of Peter Buffett, son of legendary investor Warren Buffett who had given his son some shares in Berkshire Hathaway, and at age 19 Peter wanted to raise money so he could prepare at leisure for a music career. To cover expenses, he sold his entire stock holdings for $123,000 - shares that would now be worth $275 million. “It was understood that I should expect nothing more” he later wrote in his memoir 'Life is What You Make It'.

To commemorate Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary, the music site has gathered 25 microgenres, great and small, that help illuminate music’s evolution over the past two and a half decades - since the start of Pitchfork. There's freak-folk, chillwave, lo-fi study beats, crabcore, shitgaze, night bus, and plenty other marvelous small ideas. Check 'em all out.

Song Exploder podcast shared a "very different and special episode of the show" - about John Lennon song 'God'. Song Exploder have never tried making a posthumous episode before, because hearing directly from the artist is at the heart of the show. However, with all the John Lennon interview archives, plus all the isolated tracks from the recordings, and the original demo, it turned out a legitimate, different and special episode of the show.

Late Tom Petty's quote that today's country music is nothing more than “bad rock with a fiddle” was the inspiration for Medium's blog entry of the best country rock songs. It includes some Rolling Stones, Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, and some context.

Pitchfork is celebrating its 25th birthday with a selection of 200 most important artists who have made the biggest impact across Pitchfork’s lifetime so far. The list features "The Icons" as well as "The Essentials", listed alphabetically, from Aaliyah to Wilco.

Level goes on an ambitious quest - tries to connect wordings of contemporary rappers with those of classic philosophers. One of the comparisons is between Kendrick Lamar and Plato, who both deal with issues of identity, reality and ideas:

“What money got to do with it / When I don’t know the full definition of a rap image? / I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it / Institutionalized, I keep runnin’ back for a visit” - Kendrick Lamar, 'Institutionalized'

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light” - Plato.