The former American president, and the current cool guy has shared his annual summer list featuring music "I’ve been listening to lately". There are some household names like Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, as well as some lesser-known like Jazmine Sullivan, Arooj Aftab, Sza, Michael Kiwanuka...
A fun little post by the Tone Glow blog about each of their writers anonymously “gifting” each other an album they like and then writing their thoughts on what they receive. None of the writers knew who would receive their album, and none knew who their gift was from. It's 23 albums of experimental-meets-fun music.
"The Songs in the Key of Death podcast looks at the historic true crimes that inspired a selection of murder ballads. It combines music, true crime, history, and edge-of-your-seat storytelling". The latest episode goes into the Lawson family murders. "On Christmas Day 1929, Charlie Lawson committed the chilling act of murdering his wife and children. What’s darker is the reason why, according to some true crime authors. But are they right, and what do we know today about the rare phenomenon of familicide?".
"Millions of listeners now subscribe to lo-fi hip-hop playlists to relax, study, chill, and sleep. Its popularity has spawned a DIY business opportunity. Companies like Lofi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) have carved out their own lane, launched their own record labels, built an independent brand of merch, products, playlists, and more" - Trapital says presenting Music Ally's piece about the chill-hop genre.
Music historian Katherine Schofield writes a short essay for the Grin, marrying her knowledge of Indian classical music and art, about how each swara or Indian note, seven in all, interrelate to cries of animals. Sur is a musical sound made up of swaras.
They rehearsed after school let out for the week on Friday nights, inspiring them to call the band On a Friday, but when they got signed, the label suggested they change their name. The band members all loved the obscure Talking Heads song, so the Radiohead were born. It gets worse on Rolling Stone's list of 25 worst band names - The Polka Tulk Blues Band is a lousy name for any band, let alone the one which will come up with heavy metal. Geezer Butler seeing crowd of people lined up to see the Boris Karloff film 'Black Sabbath' saved the day.
"When we talk about the sexism of murder ballads, 'Omie Wise' jumps to the forefront as one of the most prominent examples" - the Songs in the Key of Death podcast says announcing their latest episode, about the 19-century murder story. "Whether the true story involves a woman who was drowned because she became inconvenient or because she stood up to a no-good man, they both end the same way — with Naomi Wise dead, and many tales that got it wrong".
Vintage dealer and a dedicated metal fan Harry Cantwell has - using his sense of history, style, and a deep love for skulls - picked up his top 10 metal shirts of all time for GQ. One of the T-shirts is from a joint Venom/Metallica 1984 tour: “I chose this shirt as an example of [one] that really captures a place and time, to show how much history you can convey with a T-shirt. It’s just a really interesting convergence of metal history that encapsulates a small period of time that's really, really important: the passing of the torch British early ’80s British [bands] over to thrash".
Sun Ra liked "the new", whether it be instruments, words, genres - The New Yorker points out in a profile about the innovator. He gave instruments new names, like the “space-dimension mellophone", the “cosmic tone organ" and the “sunharp", whereas his band the Arkestra weren't musicians, they were "tone scientists". Sun Ra himself was an exploratory soul - “the impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change". This spring, the Chicago gallery and publisher Corbett vs. Dempsey reproduced a series of Sun Ra poetry booklets: 'Jazz by Sun Ra',' 'Jazz in Silhouette', and 'The Immeasurable Equation'.
YouTuber Rocked counts down 10 albums music critics have hated at first, only to get lauded later. It's exclusively rock albums, by AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, Queen, Radiohead and some other big rock bands.
An obvious question, for years now, which nobody has loudly set, to the very clever and way-too-serious Pitchfork writers (or, maybe, should its owner Conde Nast answer it?!). "Pitchfork is devoid of personality to a startling degree, especially in a pop culture magazine" music journalist and critic Wayne Robbins argues, defining Pitchfork texts "as post-humor assertions of importance regarding artists no one outside a young cohort of music nerds would find meaningful or important". What the P lacks, Robbins is certain, are expressions of personalities: "There isn't a single critic at this magazine that has a distinctive, look-forward-to-reading style or personality. And I bet you could make a substantial list with names of writers who are capable, but for some reason can't, or won't, let their freak flag fly".
The jazz music writer shared a passionate piece about how one wrong turn changed the destiny of a big jazz label Columbia Records was until one sad day in 1973 when they let go Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Keith Jarrett, and Bill Evans in what is now known as “Great Columbia Jazz Purge”. "With the right leadership, the label might have held on to a roster of the greatest musicians in jazz, with all the bragging rights that entails, and made money from their recordings for decades to come. The sad fact is: Columbia could still do this, if it understood jazz the way Manfred Eicher and a few other visionaries do".
A great read in the NPR about the 1971 Joni Mitchell album 'Blue', and women who helped make it, as well as about Miles Davis' 1959 album 'Kind Of Blue' and all the men who contributed to it. The bottom line of the article: "It's interesting to think about why people decide some works of art can change their lives".
“Jon Lucien’s 'Search For The Inner Self' is my own personal treasure that I will never give up. It’s from the early 70s, on Ampex Records... It’s a great record. Jon Lucien told my friend he only did the track because he needed some money at the time, but he struck gold. It’s got amazing string arrangement, great words. That title alone – 'Search For The Inner Self' – has got to be worth the money" - Paul Weller told The New Cue about a bit of gold he owns.
YouTube music theorist Rick Beato goes back into Brazilian guitarist Sérgio Mendes' 'Never Gonna Let You Go', the song he believes is "the most complex pop song of all time". Beato first tried to play it four decades ago and still doesn't know it by heart.
Almost a century before Lil Nas X caused a stir at parts of the country music community with his song 'Old Town Road', author 'Harold Hersey' wrote 'The Lavender Cowboy', a song about a cowboy with only two hairs on his chest that saves the girl and gets the honor of being buried in the prairie with cacti commemorating his passing. Country Queer explores the life story of that song.
"Anime in particular is extremely popular across Latin America, but it has a special significance in Mexico, with a history dating back nearly 60 years" - Bandcamp goes to explain the influence of anime on Mexican underground music. "In 1964, 'Astroboy' was the first Japanese animated series to be dubbed and broadcast in Mexico, becoming a fixture of network television and followed in subsequent years by 'Speed Racer' and 'Captain Tsubasa'... Large Japanese diasporas in Peru and Brazil were also quick to embrace anime, as rapidly growing syndication blocks paved the way for Latin America’s golden age of anime and manga in the ‘90s".
There's Madonna, Beyonce and Britney Spears on Rolling Stone's list of 30 sexiest videos of all times, yet the number 1 spot is being taken by Chris Isaac's 'Wicked Game' because "the smoldering passion exhibited by Isaak and Christensen had a vulnerability about it that still makes the video’s simple concept eye-popping decades later".
NFTs for music won’t really take off until (1) income streams are attached to the token, or (2) the owner’s name is commemorated (and displayed prominently) in a sufficiently elitist master-of-the-world manner - music writer Ted Gioia offers his opinions on NFTs, and raises some possibilities:
Music theorist Rick Beato discusses the overuse and impact of auto-tune in modern music, which he believes is being overused. He starts with famous Cher and Lenny Kravitz, to end with Maroon 5 and T-Pain. His argument is that auto-tune is making the vocalists sound like computers.
Consequence looks back into Philadelphia International Records, the staple of 1970s soul music and its house band (Mother Father Sister Brother), a cadre of more than thirty musicians who would record hits for PIR. Two of their biggest early hits were 'T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)' and 'Love Is The Message'. Consequence looks into the influence of those two songs, their creators and the band's second album.
Rave New World is investigating a new party trend in Los Angeles post-covid. They found: a tea party at a Persian garden paradise of cannabis plants and chickens; a public art park with punk-techno on picnic tables; an art rave at a Route66 biker bar; DJs playing cosmic disco in a hidden nook of trees.
American jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia explores the extraordinary life of Charles Kellogg. He started out as a nature singer - Kellogg first performed as a vaudeville performer imitating bird songs (listen to him on Bandcamp), his concerts for bears followed, but his most unusual feat was his ability to extinguish fire with music.
Nick Cave shared some advice about aging in his latest blog post, with plenty of charm and wit: "Entering your sixties brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick. What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old".
YouTube music theorist Adam Neely goes into "the long shadow of Western European aesthetics in the modern global musical ecosystem". Why? "Tik Tok has recently imploded over a young singer who sang harmony to Matt Maltese’s 'As the World Caves in'".
HM Magazine presents an oral history of the beginning of Christian metal music, featuring interviews with members of Guardian, Tourniquet, Holy Soldier, Whitecross, and Stryper.
New Directions in Music shared an interesting story about hoaxes in music. The first Klatuu album was widely rumored to be the work of The Beatles upon its release in 1977, which was how it got attention. After it was announced that the band were, in fact, a group of Canadian studio musicians, their subsequent albums missed both the sales and the charts. There's also the story of Ursula Bogner, a completely unknown woman who purportedly created electronic music from 1969-1988, all the while holding down a day job with a large German pharmaceutical company. Her music was compiled by German musician Jan Jelinek. It is now widely believed that Jelinek was actually the one who made the music and even got photographed as Mrs Bogner (he got dressed in women's clothing).
Al Jazeera looks into morna, a Cape Verdean musical practice believed to date back to the 18th century, that was initially performed by women who were brought into the archipelago from West Africa and forced into slavery. These improvised songs were used by “Cantadeiras” (women singers) to speak of day-to-day affairs – often taking on a satirical format. Over time, morna, also known as “música rainha” (“queen music”), underwent several changes to its melodic and rhythmic characteristics, becoming the slower, more mournful version heard today.
Medium wants us to read more, so they've made a list of the most popular songs inspired by books. There are: 'Pet Sematary' written by the Ramones (1989) after Stephen King himself asked the band to write a song for the 1989 film adaptation of his novel; 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' by Bruce Springsteen (1995) iwas nspired by John Steinbeck’s novel 'The Grapes of Wrath'; 'Shiver Me Timbers' by Tom Waits (1974) pulls from Herman Melville’s 'Moby Dick' and Jack London’s novel 'Martin Eden'; 'Ramble On' by Led Zeppelin (1969) is deep into 'Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'; 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane (1967) is Lewis Carroll’s 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass' set to music.
#ACFM podcast shared a podcast about the history of American folk music. It looks at the communism of Woody Guthrie and the singers of the Dust Bowl era, the Vietnam protest music of Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village scene, and the folk psychedelia of the Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan. The episode includes over 40 musical examples spanning a period of around 100 years.
