A few interesting thoughts by Public Enemy's Chuck D, via Guardian:

Hip-hop rerouted my life. I wanted to be an artist and I came out of university highly skilled, but hip-hop music bit me in 1979 and I immediately knew where I had to take my art and my politics and my attention

I prefer the term Black to African American. You can be Charlize Theron, who’s from South Africa, and be African American. Black covers the whole gamut. Black is all over the planet

Try to do as many positive things in life as you can... You’ve got to get up and do things

I have a terrible memory for lyrics. It’s caused problems for almost 40 years

Garrett Bradley's documentary 'Time' tells the story of Sibil Fox Richardson and her 20-year battle to bring home her husband Rob, who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for attempted robbery of a credit union. The docu is set to the music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Ethiopian nun and piano player, because, as Bradley says in Pitchfork interview, "it’s got this incredible blending of melodies that is reminiscent of New Orleans. There’s also a fluidity, repetition, and singularity in its range. There is quite a bit of nuance from one track to the next, but overall, you can float through the whole thing. I wanted the film to feel like a river, and not like a collage".

"There's two sides to what made me a rapper. One was how articulate and clever can I be with the lyric. And then the other side of it was, what am I doing in my real life that can relate to the music?" - south London rapper Che Lingo says presenting himself and his debut album 'The Worst Generation'. It was released last week on actor Idris Elba's label. BBC talked to the rapper - "one of the UK's most versatile MCs, equally at home on a hard-hitting grime track as on a sultry R&B jam"...

"The words to the song are your script. You have to bring the correct emotion to every word. You know, if you sing it pretty – a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty – it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that" - Joni Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in an interview about a release of a box set of her earliest recordings. She also talked about her musical identity - "For so long I rebelled against the term: 'I was never a folk singer'. I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened, and – it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings. And I had this realisation… I was a folk singer!".

"I think the world's always been shit but it's always been great as well. There's a definite balance to these things. I always like to remind people that if you were born just over 100 years ago, you probably would have been drafted into some glorified muddy chess game. Human beings just haven't learned what it actually means to be human beings. So it’s always been dark" - Napalm Death singer Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway said in the Quietus interview, talking about the band's latest album 'Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism'. Talking about the band's lyrics and sonics he said - "I do like the artistic contradiction between the very humane lyrics and the absolutely inhumane sonics. But there doesn't have to be a distinction between pushing ideas and trying to understand people, trying to connect with people".

“The beat box…was running fast, which means when you played the tape back, it came out slow. And that had an enormous amount to do with the sound of 'Nebraska'" - Bruce Springsteen said on his Apple Music radio series 'Letter to You Radio' talking to Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl about the beginning of their music careers, CoS reports. He explained - "'Nebraska' in its entirety is slowed down from its actual recording pitch. When I brought the pitch up to where it should actually be, it brightened a record up and took away a lot of its mysteriousness. So 'Nebraska' was this totally haphazard, happy accident that occurred over a few weeks with just whatever equipment we had laying around and the whole record cost us, including the price of the tape, it cost us about a thousand dollars to make”. Springsteen releases his new album 'Letter To You' this week.

Mixmag brings the story of Nazira, who went from being a molecular biologist working in an international company, to starting a DJ career in Kazakhstan, to the dismay of her family. She started the ZVUK ("sound") collective putting Kazakhstan's music scene on the world map and provided Kazakh artists with a unique opportunity to be heard outside their bedrooms. Nazira also kickstarted the Unsound Dislocation festival with international artists. In clubs, she managed to increase the average audience from 50 people by ten times and create a safe space for LGBTIQ people, for whom ZVUK is perhaps the only place where they can feel free.

English 1970s rock star Peter Frampton has written a memoir describing the "perfect storm of factors that turned the commercial peak of Frampton’s career into a case-study in rock stardom gone wrong", including details of "series of rip-offs, sketchy management deals and unfortunate choices" he made in his career. New book 'Do You Feel Like I Do?' also "highlights his many creative achievements, from his days as a guitar prodigy, to his time fronting the hit band the Herd, to his formation with Steve Marriott of one of the world’s first super groups, Humble Pie, to his promising early solo work". Guardian talked to him.

“I was surprised at how much I was writing, because I was in so much pain. I was not in the part of the pain where I was just reflecting on it” - Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker told The New Yorker about writing her solo album after breaking up with her husband, and (still) Big Thief member Buck Meek. She added - “I feel as if my psyche was putting as many things together as I could from my relationship, as many beautiful things as I could, to preserve it into eternity”.

"Still recovering from having gotten COVID at the end of February. I'm still dealing with the residual effects... Still coughing. There's still lung damage" - Tool's Maynard James Keenan told AZ Central about suffering from Covid-19. Hal also talked about wearing face-masks and freedom: "We wear seatbelts. We don't smoke in trains, planes or taxis anymore, or even restaurants. There's reasons for those things... Freedom is the ability to pursue your lifestyle, pursue what you want to do for your family, for your future, what education you want to get. And with that freedom comes a responsibility to look out for yourself, for your neighbor, for your family, for everybody".

Venom were the first truly important band when it came to extreme metal - the Quietus writes in a great article about how Venom got together and started what is now known as black metal. Band's frontman Cronos explains: “I love the idea of extreme metal. I just think you can't go too far... so long as it's just within the music y'know. The further the better, the more extreme the better, the more notorious, the more hardcore”. Band's 'Sons Of Satan: Rare & unreleased demos 79-84' is out now.

“We have made the best of it. We’ve really done what we should have done” Billie Eilish told Jimmy Fallon during their guest appearance on The Tonight Show about the pandemic. "We’ve made a lot of music. I don’t think we would have made it otherwise, if we hadn’t got this time. So as much as it’s been terrible to have this going on in the world, I think it has birthed some things. We have been really lucky with it”.

A lovely interview with Robert Plant in the Spin about his anthology (out today), how his music evolved through time. He shared advice for aspiring musicians: "Keep it light. Keep growing. Keep moving. Keep listening all the time. There’s some spectacular music out and about, and these influences will definitely affect what these kids of the new generations will do. They’ll look back at me and they’ll say, wow… he must have been a musician, too”. 'Nothing Takes the Place of You' is a new song on the anthology - listen below.

"Sometimes we had used twenty channels of really noisy shit... But the good thing with noise is, it just melds into itself... A lot of this kind of noise can go really far and sound good. Anyway, a lot of music today is trapped in noise: I think that is where the world is now" - Sam Karugu of Nigerian experimental metal band Duma told the Quietus about the process of producing their debut album, an electro-metal noise record. Explaining the strong physical imagery on the album Karugu said it - "concerns exposing your true self and asking, 'Who is that inner person you are hiding inside yourself?' We have the same lungs, stomachs, kidneys and blood types. We don’t care where you come from. There are just different ways of living and maybe different perceptions of the world, but we are essentially the same and that is what has been forgotten".

Cardi B spoke to SiriusXM about double standards faced by female rappers, compared to male counterparts - “Female rappers, y’all, they are always in mad pressure. If you don’t have a super crazy smash, it’s like oh, you flop, flop flop. The song could be like two-times platinum and it’s still flop, flop, flop. You’re always under pressure, and I feel like it’s not fair”, Elite Daily reports. Men, on the other hand - "I feel like there’s male artists who go two years without putting a fucking song out and they don’t go, ‘Oh, you’re irrelevant. It’s over for you’”.

An interesting interview with Janelle Monáe in the Guardian, covering a lot of subjects:

On her sexuality: For me, it is a journey, not a destination, as I gather more information about who I like

On growing up “as a Baptist kid in a very small, Republican state”: You feel, oh my goodness, I don’t know how I even have this conversation with my loved ones when all I’m hearing every Sunday is: if you are not heterosexual, you’re going to hell. And people using the Bible as a whip

On working on her artistic identity: I had time to say no to things that didn’t work for me. I had time to find myself, to prepare myself for some of the obstacles that would come my way, and to understand that my story’s not supposed to be everybody’s story

On systemic racism: My ancestors were forced to come to America and work for free, and the first institution of policing was the slave patrol, which was meant to hunt down and kill black people who had run away. So when we’re screaming, ‘Defund the police’, that’s what we are speaking to: we are reminding people that the police were not meant to protect and serve our community; they were meant to terrorise us. It’s a system built on traumatising black folks

"I think they probably always did look down. They always felt guilty about listening to certain things. I don't think it's us so much but definitely Limp Bizkit and shit like that. I think motherfuckers were embarrassed for that shit back then, too" - Chino Moreno of the Deftones said in a Vulture interview of the nu-metal scene the band was associated with for a while. He continued according to Loudwire - "you can't deny it. It's fucking stupidly good, some of it, but they knew back then that it was stupid. I mean, listen to the words. It's stupid. So it's not like in retrospect they're like, 'I can't believe I listened to that'. It's like, 'No, when you listened to it then, you knew it was dumb, but you liked it'. And that's okay. No one should be embarrassed by shit they like that's dumb".

Words of hope from Dayna Frank, the president-CEO of the famed First Avenue club in Minneapolis, in Variety: “After the Spanish flu of 1918-20, we had the roaring ‘20s, and that’s really what I foresee when we come out of this and it’s safe to do so. It’s just gonna be a celebration — hopefully a decade long, maybe just a few years. We just want to make sure the right people are still in business and able to make that celebration happen”.

Everyone from Massive Attack and Hot Chip to Animal Collective and Caribou has sung their praises, and now This Heat’s remastered catalogue is available to download and stream on various platforms. The band themselves described their music saying the people willing to listen to them were fuelled by “a desire to commit violence to accepted notions of music”. Guardian brings the story of the band, and talks to the surviving members.

“I am that person. The one that wasn’t supposed to make it out of Hell’s Kitchen, who was supposed to end up being a prostitute, a young mother at 16 years old, or addicted to drugs" - Alicia Keys says in a Guardian interview about her new album. "And what the fuck is a dream? A dream is a luxury, if you have to pay all these bills and put food on the table for your kids... All the songs I’ve ever written that have been considered empowering or uplifting, I’ve written them at my lowest point. Because I needed to remind myself: don’t forget that”.

"Reading history, literature, poetry, and economics is a pleasure and a necessity; learning how the world works and our relation to it, as banal as it sounds, is an essential component of the writing life" - music writer Alfred Soto shares a bit of advice to music journalists in MJI interview. He also believes blogging still helps, he keeps one - Humanizing the Vacuum.

Author Justin Quirk talked to The Word podcast about his latest book 'Nothin’ But A Good Time: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal' on the age of the big hair, big songs, and big fun. Quirk was a big fan, knows a lot, but however, says you can draw a link between Kiss and Trump. Informative and entertaining!!!

MusicAlly invited several experts to discuss the business and cultural differences between China and the rest of the world, in order to give insight to foreign artists trying to make it China, or to prepare artists for changes that come afterward in the rest of the world. Plenty of advice: artist branding must hit different touch-points; building a long-term, diversified approach across multiple businesses is essential; music fans quickly – and in the tens of millions – adopt new technologies, new methods of supporting artists or ways of consuming music; the audience seeks a different experience from artists.

Level talked to four women from different parts of American culture to discuss how hip-hop should change its attitude and behaviour toward women. "A lot of these C-suites and the music industry needs to be torn down and rebuilt with the younger people and people who are not complicit in decades of rape culture and abuse" - music producer Drew Dixon said. Journalist Clarissa Brooks is hopeful: "I do feel like things are getting better, though, because people are making art for themselves and their communities. People aren’t interested in celebrity in the same way". Author Danyel Smith put it simply: "Good people have to do good things and good work".

“I got a whole bunch of varieties on my playlist now. I used to listen to all rap, now I’ve got rock, old music, 80s. I’d hear songs but I had no idea who made it” - Fred Williams, of the reaction-video twins TwinsthenewTrend told Guardian about how his listening habits changed since he started posting videos with his brother reacting to songs after hearing them for the first time. Williams brothers were raised on Twista and Lil Wayne, so different genres were a surprise - “I guess I’ve been most surprised by rock, which I never listened to growing up. It’s good, and I thought rock was bad”. Fred appreciates it because “There’s no computer or autotune. They just focus on voices, beats and instruments. It’s just interesting how they can make a song like that”. But life hasn't changed a lot since the boys became popular (over 570,000 subscribers) - Fred is still working at his day job as a barber...

"I don’t listen to any of my records any more. I just don’t do it. I’m not one of these artists that sits there compiling stuff from all the vaults and stuff like that - and live recordings... I’m more interested in what’s coming next than what went by" Elton John said in an interview, Music News reports. So, what is it he's listening to right now? - "the new record by the Lemon Twigs, which is called 'Songs for the General Public'. There’s two guys and I’ve been a fan of theirs for a long time".

A funny little interview with Toni Braxton in the Guardian, about her religious upbringing, her being discovered at a gas station, and her regrets: "I regret not having more sex when I was younger. I should have drank more. I should have partied more. Smoked more, even. I think my religious upbringing stopped me doing a lot of things that I should have done. It’s not a good look at the age I am now. The way it works is you do that stuff in your 20s and 30s and then in your 40s you’ve earned enough to pay for the therapy".

Journalist Ken McNab goes into the nitty-gritty details of the last year of the Beatles in his book 'And in the End: The Last Days of the Beatles'. As it turns out it was - money, and the fifth Beatle. "The idea that they'd set up their own company called Apple and run it themselves, smacks of incredible naivete... They were not equipped and didn't have the skills to be business managers" - McNab tells in an All Music interview about the beginning of the end The other reason was manager Allen Klein, "the demon king... who created this terrible schism between Lennon and McCartney". The other Beatles didn't really like Yoko Ono - "McCartney had to deal with tiptoeing around this relationship with John and Yoko... Harrison walked out on the band (...) Much of the reason for that was because he couldn't stand Yoko being in the studio, and her presence stymied John's creativity and made him very passive when it came to group decisions". Finally, Lennon got into a row with McCartney when he found out the bassist has been buying Beatles' shares, ignoring the gentlemen's agreement that all the four members will keep equal parts. But, there's a lot of light in the book - "When you get to 'Abbey Road', it's amazing how they were able to put down the boxing gloves and reunite for one last album, their last letter to the world".

A hilarious interview with AC/DC's Angus Young in the Guitar World:

About the bars in Sydney where they played in the beginning: "Some of the places we played were worse than toilets, let me tell you"

How he got into rock'n'roll thanks to Chuck Berry: "It’s everything rolled into one: it’s blues, it’s rock and roll, and it’s got that hard edge to it. To me, that’s pure rock ’n’ roll. It’s not clean - it’s nasty"

The first time he wore school uniform on stage, in 1974: "That was the most frightened I’ve ever been on stage, but thank God, I had no time to think. I just went straight out there. The crowd’s first reaction to the shorts and stuff was like a bunch of fish at feeding time - all mouths open"

Groupies: "There’s nothing sexy about a schoolboy, is there?"

Australia: "Christianity was never a popular movement. It’s that convict background!"

Lyrics: "Most of our stuff is just about sex, as is most rock music. It’s pretty hard to write a song about your dog"

His onstage character: "Once you go into being The Schoolboy it’s pretty hard to come off it. I’m like two different people"

“We are the first country in Asia to legalise same sex marriage. We’ve been supporting the Hong Kong democracy movement and the cause of Tibet" - Freddy Lim of Taiwanese metal band Chthonic says in Guardian interview. He is also a member of the Taiwan parliament, where he pushes for young people and progressive ideas: "That younger generation have been born into independence, into a democratic country that they don’t want to sacrifice. With this generation making political decisions, it can make Taiwan more progressive, to care more about oppressed people and those who suffer with tough lives”. Recently, he started a new podcast with Emily Y Wu, Metalhead Politics where he mixes the two worlds.