"The original intention was to get your attention" - Chuck D said on Talib Kweli's weekly show People's Party about the public feud he had with Flavor Flav over Bernie Sanders. When Kweli noted that Flavor said he can't be fired, Chuck agreed - "He can't, he's a partner". To prove it, Chuck D announced their new album 'The Enemy Radio', made as a duo, and today they released the first single 'Food as a Machine Gun'.

"The USA will get through this in spite of the catastrophic shortcomings of the current administration. How? You. Your strength, compassion, smarts, cool, and tenacity will be what allows us to get control of this very real crisis" - Henry Rollins told Rolling Stone about the corona epidemic. While being alone, Rollins says he engages in "two kinds of listening. Protein and carbohydrate. Protein is records I’ve never heard before, where I have to lean in and focus. Carbohydrate is music that’s familiar to me. Right now, I’m in a 90/10 protein-carbohydrate ratio. New records by Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Coriky, Cold Beat, Wasted Shirt, Wolf Eyes, Crazy Doberman, Primo, and Lamps are all really good".

XL Recordings is one of the most successful independent record labels in the world - home to the Prodigy, Adele, Dizzee Rascal, Radiohead, White Stripes, etc. - and its founder Richard Russell, now 49, has written an autobiography, 'Liberation Through Hearing', that details how it happened. Alexis Petridis talked to Russell, who shared interesting insights and stories. About Prodigy's frontman Keith Flint: "Keith was untethered, so if you saw him onstage at a rave, you were seeing yourself, but a completely free version of it, no self-consciousness". He signed Dizzee Rascal after hearing his single 'I Luv U', then told him to hurry up making his debut album because he wanted to win the Mercury Prize. He signed the White Stripes,  M.I.A. and Radiohead, decided to track down Gil Scott-Herron, undeterred by the fact that the singer-songwriter was in prison. Adele in a different story - Russell insists her success is down to the label leaving her alone to do what she wanted: “Does anyone achieve that kind of thing because of anybody else?".

Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders has said that the band are often reluctant to play their older material because"it feels like we’re doing karaoke of our own songs”, NME reports. Helders says their older material feels "like a caricature. It doesn’t feel as genuine playing it anymore. I'd rather they [the fans] just have the memory of a version where we really meant it, rather than we’ll do this for you”.

"The lines that we draw on maps are not like a big hole and then there's something completely new after that. It's all one thing and it's difficult for me to understand music divided. I can't divide music" - flamenco innovator Raül Refree told the Quietus about 'Names of North End Women', his collaborative album with Sonic Youth's guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Both are fantastic guitarists, yet their first co-release displays almost zero guitars. Ranaldo explains - "I don't think we even thought about it much or realised it, until we had the group of songs going well, that this was not a rock record. It was something different. It dealt with landscape". Although it may seem so, it's not a minimalist or ambient music, it's just special and easy to listen to.

New York singer-songwriter Torres was playing in Berlin when travel ban from EU to USA was announced, which almost got her stuck. Eventually, she drove with her band to Amsterdam, flew to Moscow, and then to New York. The thing was she couldn't afford those expenses so she asked fans to donate money to help her and the band get back to the U.S. "The response was pretty overwhelming and immediate" - she told Pitchfork after they returned - "oh my God, people were so generous! I’m still trying to figure out what my plan is for thanking people because it’s the reason I made it home quickly and safely". So, the people are good, but she's afraid about the artists now - "musicians need to learn how to channel their energy so that they don’t lose their ability to keep making things. I guess that’s my fear, that artists will burn out because it just doesn’t feel possible anymore".

When the coronavirus started people "didn’t talk about it - in Chinese tradition, discussing bad things during the New Year is bad luck" - Liang Yi, singer of the Chinese band Stolen said in a Pitchfork interview. But when things got worse, they all had to stay indoors, and "given that we had nothing to do, we decided to all write songs and think about the next album". He lives in Chengdu and is allowed to go out now, but people in Wuhan still have to stay at home. Yi describes it as "a very good performance city because it has a lot of college students. People in Wuhan are like people in Sichuan in terms of their personalities: They are more open, not like people in Shanghai or other southern parts of China that are more reserved".

Sorry took four years to write their debut album '925', trying to distance themselves from their earlier singles that were "more rocky, and that’s not what we want to do”. '925' ended up sounding less as a genre-album, and more like their generation, with honest and vulnerable lyrics like “I want drugs and drugs and drugs and drugs, I want love”. As they told the Guardian, they are lazy, beholden to very little ambition - “We’re just making some music and seeing how it goes”.

Vulture talked to dozens of artists about what the mass-cancellation of tours will mean to them. Frazey Ford summed it up pretty well: "The U.S. tour isn’t a huge financial loss to us, but we have a big tour in Europe scheduled for May that will be a big loss, especially to my band members, who rely heavily on touring. It’s also a loss of joy. Times are so tenuous already that an evening of music can be healing and bonding".

“When you’re young you think old people are a bit stupid. But they’ve done everything we’ve done, plus everything the previous generations did, and the one before that. I think old people almost become Buddhists. They’re like: ‘It ain’t worth me saying shit so I’m going to just sit here and chill’” - Mike Skinner, aka The Streets told in a Guardian interview about his new release 'None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive', a mixtape full of guest spots from young stars. A few more interesting thoughts, like the one on a choice of career - "I’ve got so many incredible stories of people changing their lives with rap. And it’s a nice thing to see. Because nobody wants a life of crime. It’s very hard work. It’s much easier to be a musician than a drug dealer”.

The Guardian presents 'Guerrilla', the debut album by Angolan electronic artist Nazar as "a psychohistorical investigation", going from civil war in Angola to the rhythms of kuduro – a dense, explosive electronic music. Nazar calls the result “rough kuduro” – a caustic inversion of Angolan pride that packs the energy of kuduro down like gunpowder before blasting it apart, leaving distorted drums and pockmarks of dirt and noise, gun-cocks as percussion and whirring helicopter blades. Listen to the album 'Guerrilla' in full at Bandcamp.

“It’s more a social thing than it is people knowing how to make the song on the computer. I am friends with the most amazing musicians that can do pop, rap, punk and jazz. All I do is facilitate. I really am a janitor” - one of the most sought-after producers, Kenny Beats tells the NME about his approach to music production. Although rap is his first love, he has produced music for musicians from all over the genre-spectrum - Rico Nasty, Mac Miller, Clairo, Idles, Schoolboy Q, Ed Sheeran. His latest love are the Bristol punks - "I think they’re the most important band in the whole world. Even having been close with them and working on their music, I’m still equally obsessed. Every time they play me a new song, I fall in love with them again. Their song-writing, point of view, just everything about them is what’s missing right now with bands and punk energy. IDLES are checking a box for me that nobody else is checking for me”.

Nissim is an orthodox Jew who was born a Sunni Muslim in Seattle by parents who were both rappers and drug abusers. He first converted to Christianity, and then to Judaism, which for him as an African-American makes perfect sense, as he's told the Level - “There’s really not too many other people in the world that should be able to relate over struggles and discrimination and prejudice than Jewish people and Black people".

An amazing interview in the Quietus with Egyptian poet Abdullah Miniawy and German electronic band Carl Gari about their collaborative album 'The Act Of Falling From The 8th Floor', about personal fear and struggle to reach freedom. Miniawy had to leave Kairo, settling in France and the group now operates between Paris and Munich, recording in a remote house in Neunburg vorm Wald, a town nestled in the Bavarian forest. When they started, Carl Gari played minimalistic techno instrumentals, when Miniawy joined them they grew increasingly abstract, skirting the edges of deconstructed club sounds and into sections of pure ambience to prop up Miniawy’s dramatic readings. Amazing stuff...

Polish jazz musician Wacław Zimpel made the 'The Long Weekend' EP with British electronic producer James Holden, a rich jazz electronica album, with a trance quality, which is where both musicians come together. They interviewed each other for the Quietus, this is how they see their common ground: "I've got a million definitions for trance - but the first sign for me is when you start hearing inside the sound, or outside linear time - notes aren't just a note in a place in a sequence but exist in relation to all the previous and future versions of themselves" - Holden; "to me one of the ways of getting to this state of mind is via repetition of a pattern. After many repetitions I stop thinking about this and I become equally listener and player. Eventually I have the feeling that I am disappearing" - Zimpel.

"People think that history is finite, but it is something that needs to be explored constantly; it needs to be challenged and sometimes set alight, so we don’t continue to make the same mistakes... For there to be a change, there needs to be the end of what we want changed" - the great saxophone player Shabaka Hutchings told the Guardian ahead of the new album by Shabaka and His Ancestors 'We Are Sent Here by History (out March 13). But, he sees himself as an optimist - “I feel really positive about the future... Because there is always a fraught tension before things change – things really do have to get worse before they get better”.

"People may text me their song, but... the playlist submission tool is the only way we review music. Editorial decisions are based purely on the quality of the song and its fit in the playlist" - Spotify's co-Head of Music Strategy told Forbes about how to get to Spotify playlists. There are now 3,000 Spotify playlists, and a few metrics to determine whether a song is getting on any - "We'll look at the time people spend on the songs — it takes 30 seconds of listening for it to count as an official stream. We also look whether people are actively searching for the song or just hearing it from editorial tools. Then there’s the skip ratio". Generally, he says - "it's really hard to break as an artist but hopefully we created a world where everyone has a fair shot".

Saxophone player Alabaster DePlume changes the line-up of his band before every show to keep him on his toes - “It’s so we don’t have the time to be prepared. When you remove preparation people can’t hide, they have to be authentic and present" - as he's told the Quietus. He has released his new album 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', with no vocal tracks, obviously, because someone had told him - "I put your music on, and it was perfect, but then you started shouting something about a pig. Can’t it just be the nice bits?". The songs were recorded by DePlume and a one-off band consisting of Sarathy Korwar, Donna Thompson, James Howard, The Comet Is Coming’s Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers and Snapped Ankles’ Chestnutt. The Q describes the music as "gorgeous and soothing, intimate and direct".

An interesting interview with Halsey in the Guardian about how the media and the public present and view women - “It’s so much greater than me – it’s a social perception of women. So fuck it, I’m gonna tell them everything that happened. I am financially independent, I have my own team, I have every resource in the world to get out of [misogyny]. I still can’t. How hard must it be for women who don’t have these resources?”. But, things can be done - at the Women’s March in 2018, she delivered a poem about her experience of sexual harassment so compassionate, angry and confessional that - “people came up to me in the street. Men. A whole demographic who’d never approached me before. Art still works! You lose faith in it sometimes”.

"As the market becomes saturated with songs-as-content and A.I. being able to compose entire pieces without a human even touching it, I think our relationship to music will shift toward extracting it from digital spaces" - Pitchfork reviews editor Jeremy D. Larson says in an excellent Music Journalism Insider interview. He explains further on - "This trend makes me more drawn to artists who are more ambitious, ornate, technical, or jammy. A drummer who’s working, a particularly expressive guitar line, analog techno, live-band R&B, this spiritual jazz revival. It kind of reallocates the primacy of music creation back to the human, music as a feat, as proof of life".

When Eli Hewson started a band Inhaler his parents weren't that supportive - "I mean, they wanted me to go to college, you know, like all of our parents" - especially since his father, him being Bono from U2, knew from the inside how it works. "I think they just kind of saw that I loved it and that we were good. I think if we weren't good, they would have instantly told us to give it up and go to school. They've been supportive now, they really have” - Eli (20) told GQ. He admitted that growing up as Bono's son was "a strange spectacle", and now "experiencing a band through this way is very, very interesting for me. And it's a lot more fun”. About parents' influence on the band, bassist Robert Keating says - “I mean, I don't listen to my dad, let alone Eli's”.

"I thought it was the drugs and the alcohol that made it all work" - Ozzy Osbourne told about his recording career, as Rolling Stone reports. "But it's not true. All I was doing for years is self-medicating 'cause I didn't like the way I felt. But then this ['Ordinary Man'] is the first album I've co-wrote and recorded fucking completely sober". He says he likes having a clear head - - "Cause at least I can remember the fucking thing I did yesterday". In an earlier NME interview, he said he "now rates his greatest achievement as simply 'staying alive'".

"A hypnotic songwriter, guitarist, and producer with a glassy falsetto and an immense vocal range, he exposes unlikely connections between pop and experimental, with songs that are rooted in knotty emotions" - Pitchfork writes in a long read about Moses Sumney, who is releasing his double album 'græ' May 15. The title "acts as a one-word summary. His interpretation of greyness is not just the kind of cloudiness that sometimes marks his temperament, but the kind that rejects binaries, that asserts that life is not lived in blacks or whites but in the gloriously complex in-betweens"

"Fantasies are not real. There shouldn’t be any boundaries in that. What I’m interested in is the freedom of the imagination about sexuality and the fact that behind closed doors, when you’re not hurting anybody, you can imagine and do whatever you want"- Jehnny Beth of the Savages says about her debut solo album 'To Love Is to Live', out in May. She sees the stage similarly: “You can scare the shit out of yourself! But once you understand you’re absolutely safe, suddenly you can do anything – look at Iggy Pop. I see sex the same way – a wonderful way to test yourself. It is important because once you test yourself, you know yourself. You need that as a person and you need that as an artist”.

The producer's job is largely "getting the best out of an artist" by "making them feel special" - Stephen Street, the producer of records by The Smiths, Blur, The Cranberries, who is about to receive Music Producers Guild Awards, told the BBC about the essence of his job. He says how recording music is a lot about dealing with egos - "I have definitely been sent some slightly difficult people to work with", but sometimes "you do have to put your foot down but hopefully you're doing it in such a way that you're not making enemies... And there's other points where you just sit back and let them get on with it, because a good band will always sort out their natural balance".

Savages' frontwoman Jehnny Beth will release her solo debut 'To Love Is to Live' in May, and the project started on the night David Bowie died. She stayed up until morning listening to Bowie’s 'Blackstar', which "had a huge influence in terms of reminding me how an album can be a testament, an imprint of your vision of the world, and it will last longer than you will". It inspired her to work on the solo album “as if I was going to die”. It was produced by Flood (U2, New Order) and Nine Inch Nails’ Atticus Ross because she wanted to give the album an intriguing sonic dissonance.

“I consider this to be one of the most personal records we’ve ever made, even if the songs deal with ‘political’ subject matters. As I keep saying, political is personal” - Drive-by Truckers co-frontman Patterson Hood says about their new album 'The Unraveling'. The Ringer wrote a great review saying -"'The Unraveling' is riddled with real-life victims of our current moment. There is no clear path forward, but there is this left to fight for: Without resistance, whatever comes next may well be even worse", although - "It’s hard to know which side you’re on when you can’t even see the playing field".

“Geezer’s [Butler] a great, great lyricist. [And as a bassist], nobody can touch him. Bill [Ward], in his day, was a great drummer. Tony [Iommi], he’s always gonna be the greatest, no one can touch him" - Ozzy Osbourne spoke about his career on Rick Rubin’s Broken Record podcast. “People will say to me, ‘Why did you always sing on the side of the stage?’ I don’t fucking know. I don’t know", Osbourne said. "It’s just fear, I suppose. ‘Cause Tony, he’s one of the few people who could walk into this room right now and I would fucking feel intimidated. He intimidates the fuck out of me — and he knows it”.

Paramore's singer Hayley Williams is preparing to release her debut solo album this spring, quite different from music she made with her band. The subjects are more personal also, as she explains during the very revealing conversation with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe where she talks about depression - “My dog is the reason I’m alive, because he would’ve been waiting on me to get home, no matter what. You know how little sweet little puppies sit and they wait? I couldn’t think about it". Williams credits visualization therapy for helping her understand the power of protecting oneself during her dark times. The album 'Petals For Armor' comes from “the idea that being vulnerable is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up and trip in front of the world a million times?".

'New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-pop' by Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto investigates the burgeoning cultural movements from India (Bollywood movies), Turkey (dizi series), and South Korea (K-pop). Not that the author likes these much, it's just that she acknowledges its popularity and influence. A short, well-researched, and engaging book.