Guardian has another "bigger picture" article on social implications of a pop-culture trend. They write about estimated 1 million youngsters from South Korea and Japan competing in auditions for talent agencies, which will take on a select few as “trainees”. It's not just showing up at auditions, they train beforehand, paying thousands of dollars worth […]
“I’ve spent about seven years not writing anything for the band. I couldn’t write anything for the band. And then about a month or so ago, I wrote almost an album’s worth of material for the band... I had almost two weeks of those daily visitations and it was so nice. It makes you so […]
Madonna accepted the advocate for change award at the 2019 Glaad media awards, and gave an emotional speech about how seeing gays in Detroit in 1970s for the first time in life changed her life: “For the first time I saw men kissing men, girls dressed like boys, boys wearing hot pants, insane, incredible dancing […]
The centre of the song is The Weeknd, he got a helping hand from SZA, and Travis Scott, and it's taken from 'Game of Thrones' album. Anthony Mandler directed the visuals for 'Power Is Power', and it has 1,3 million views on YouTube. It's taken from the 'For The Throne (Music Inspired by the HBO […]
“It is not an inviting idea … and then, yes, there will be the notion of coming to Europe and the ease of travelling from one country to the next. That is part of what makes touring possible for lots of artists,” Kamasi Washington told the Guardian about what happens with UK exiting the European […]
A great read in the Guardian - part-biography, part-interview with the National, starting point being their Paris concert held on the very same evening the Notre-Dame burned. Multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Bryce Dessner, a Parisian now, was having second thoughts about playing (they did), and later concluded - “When so many institutions are crumbling, basic concepts of liberalism, […]
"City Pop" was a type of soft rock/AOR/funk that was tremendously popular in Japan in the age of disco and early new wave. 'Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976-1986' chronicles this musical positivity, with slick beats and gleaming grooves providing the perfect soundtrack - PopMatters presents the latest Light in the Attic […]
Japanese fashion company Toki Sen-I Co. has accused Kanye West, claiming his Yeezy brand owed them $624,000 for materials and work done on his exclusive sneaker line. They claim West “used his reputation and celebrity status” as a tool to deceive them into producing the fabric, which he then didn’t pay for. The firm also […]
Cricket Blue interweave the fantastical with very real questions of emotional and philosophical value, PopMatters says about Vermont folk band's full-length album, 'Serotinalia'. Their new song 'Psalm' builds through moments of quiet and fervor alike as the narrator's moral compass comes under self-interrogation. Listen to it here.
Metalachi are mariachi band from California, consisting of five siblings born in Mexico, and they are known for their covers of famous rock and metal songs. Loudwire made a list of 11 of their covers, including 'Sweet Child o' Mine' by Guns N' Roses, 'Raining Blood' by Slayer, 'Ace of Spades' by Motorhead...
At a ceremony on Saturday, Wu-Tang Clan were honored by having the Park Hill area of Staten Island officially renamed "The Wu-Tang Clan District". The rap stars, community leaders, special guests, were on hand for a renaming ceremony, as well as Councilwoman Debi Rose who said: “This is a great day where we have an […]
Measuring by the number of performances Melbourne is the most musical city in the world with well over 73,000 performances a year, according to the World Cities Culture Forum. It is followed by New York, with 36,192 performances, Paris with 31,375 and London with 22,828. Then again, Guardian says, maybe it doesn’t come down to […]
Stereogum takes on a serious issue of musician committing suicides: "We continue to lose music heroes to suicide and self-medication, with no real connection between age or genre — Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Avicii, Mac Miller, Lil Peep, Scott Hutchison, Keith Flint from the Prodigy, Kim Jong-hyun of K-pop group Shinee, Allman Bros. Band drummer […]
Brits in Hot Weather is PopMatters' guide to some of best new British music around at the moment, and in the latest edition of their segment they chose five songs - soulful house with a UK garage twist in the form of Quiet Man x Joy Anonymous, stuttering funk from Skinny Pelembe, downtempo synthpop from […]
Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan died last year, in the middle of making of band's new album, leaving all her taped vocals on a disc drive. 'In The End' is out now, and Consequence of Sound says it's a "lovely final statement, one that honors their shared legacy as unlikely alternative rock giants". The Skinny calls […]
Country singer Garth Brooks has called for more gender diversity in the genre, saying his wife, country singer Trisha Yearwood, "works a thousand times harder than me to get a tenth as much as I do out of this business", BBC reports. Female country singers have seen a decline in airplay over the past two […]
Mark E. Smith died in 2018, and the remaining members of The Fall - Dave Spurr, Keiron Melling and Pete Greenway, have continued where they left off with Imperial Wax, with new frontman Sam Curran. "We think about him [Smith] all the time but instead of being down about it it’s more positive, talking about […]
"Ghostly, experimental jazz that sets a new standard for music of its kind. A deeply tasteful and meditative recording" - PopMatters really likes debut album by Odum, out today. It's a new band consisting of Chicago underground masterminds Eric Block (Veloce) and Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Corrections House), and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley added drums […]
Tinder has launched a new feature Festival Mode, which allows users to add participating festivals to their Tinder profiles, and that allows them to view and match with other Tinder users who have marked themselves as attending. The Tinder Festival Mode will be in use for 12 festivals both in the U.S. and the U.K. […]
Pop songs are the most popular choice at British funerals, and traditional hymns have been completely squeezed out. Frank Sinatra’s 'My Way' is No. 1 at the funeral chart, Ed Sheeran’s 'Supermarket Flower' is a new entry to the list, and Monty Python's 'Always Look at the Bright Side of Life' closes the Top 10 […]
"You can hear a band pushing past their boundaries with striking results" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis says of his Album of the Week choice, Vampire Weekend's 'Father of the Bride'. "The lyrics occasionally suggest that the musical restlessness is meant to mirror the uncertainty of the world in 2019, but ultimately 'Father of the Bride' […]
A fan-made memorial was created at the site where Nipsey Hussle was gunned down in Los Angeles in front of his Marathon Clothing store, but location has become chaotic because of a high number of people attempting to make money off the grieving public, TMZ reports. There were people selling bootleg t-shirts with Nipsey's image, […]
The Harley in Sheffield, the Maze in Nottingham, the Victoria Inn in Derby, have been closed recently, or are about to close, and they are just examples of a big trend - in January 2018, industry body UK Music estimated that 35% of venues across the country had closed in the preceding decade. On top […]
Female artists are not just topping charts; they’re also challenging and expanding the limits of hip-hop - Consequence of Sounds writes, and picks out the 10 most crucial female rappers now: very much pop hip-hop Megan Thee Stallion, emo-rapper 070 Shake, blues musician turned rapper Lizzo, poetic rapper Noname, provocative Cupcakke, daughter of a rapper […]
"Electronic music can echo genuine emotional experiences - often by combining the organic and the synthetic. In the case of Model Man, their heartfelt, often profoundly beautiful electronic music, features the piano as its beating heart with all the arterial electronics and ventricular beats coursing from it" - PopMatters reviews new album by UK band. […]
The Quietus was in Malmö, Sweden to check out the fifth instalment of Intonal Festival - "The organisers have very little interest in commercial concerns, choosing instead to celebrate the weird, the underground and the experimental by showcasing artists who are challenging the ways music can be produced and experienced. And they do this in […]
On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death, art historian Martin Kemp has collaborated with early music singers I Fagiolini to create a tour and album centred on da Vinci's musicianship, Guardian reports. Da Vinci played a kind of fat violin called the lira da braccio, for which there were not even written scores, […]
Drake got 12 Billboard Music Awards yesterday, including the biggest prize of the night - the award for top artist - beating the likes of Cardi B, Ariana Grande, Post Malone and Travis Scott. Drake also won top male artist, top streaming songs artist, top rap artist and top Billboard 200 album for Scorpion as […]
Folk-rock quartet Big Thief have a new album 'U.F.O.F.' out on Friday, and it's Stereogum's pick for this week's Album of the Week. At the basis of the album stands "lead songwriter Adrianne Lenker now widely regarded as one of the most technically skilled and lyrically incisive musicians to emerge over the past five years. […]
Heavy metal topped all other genres in 2018 in increased streams and downloads in 2018 from the previous year, according to music distribution company TuneCore. Streams and downloads at Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, and more than 150 other music streaming and download services, that are home to 250,000 artists, totaled 199.3 billion in 2018, an […]
Covering the build-up to, and the aftermath of, the pop star’s accidental overdose in the summer of 2018, four-part series 'Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil' is harrowing and unflinchingly honest - Guardian writes in review on the new docu about the American pop-star. The G points out how "its central theme – that one individual shouldn’t bear the burden of other people’s expectations – is important". Lovato revealed deeply private information in the documentary, about how she was raped as a teenager, and sexually assaulted by her dealer. The docu airs on YouTube from 23 March.
“For artists, the protest song is an increasingly difficult proposition" - film director and musician Don Letts writes in Radio Times (via Guardian), adding - "in a world so woke you can’t make a joke, trying to navigate the minefield of fake news, conspiracy theories and information overload is made even trickier by the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation”. He also writes that he believes musicians are being “by default part of the business. In my day, getting into music felt like a rebellious, anti-establishment thing. Today, many see it as a way of becoming part of the establishment”.
Massive Attack‘s Robert Del Naja said he was “pretty livid” over the live music industry not meeting pledges to reduce its carbon footprint, Sky News reports. 3D highlighted Coldplay’s decision to stop touring until they could make it “environmentally friendly as possible”, adding, however, that “one band not touring doesn’t change a thing”. Del Naja also highlighted the possible “different solutions” for transportation like trains and buses. “Now is the time for action, no more pledges” - he told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee as part of its ongoing investigation into the future of UK music festivals.
The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers organized protests outside Spotify’s offices in 31 cities in the US and Canada, South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia on Monday, Clash Magazine reports. The peaceful demonstrations were meant to draw attention to the “Justice at Spotify” list of demands, which includes paying artists one cent per stream (Spotify currently pays some artists as little as $0.0038 per stream, which is among the lowest rates of any platform), plus transparent contracts, a more user-centric payment model, an end to payola, a switch to crediting all labor in recordings, and an end to legal battles against artists which serve to “further impoverish artists”.
“We’re approaching things by saying, ‘Let’s not even pretend that we’re trying to replace the live club experience’” - James Minor, who oversees SXSW Music, says to Texas Monthly about this year's edition of the famous festival. Instead of bringing 45-minute sets as part of an six-hour event at a club, each showcase will be a single hour of entertainment, because “people’s attention spans are a lot shorter online”, Minor says. There are no big-name headliners this year, he says, instead, this year’s festival will be focused on launching the careers of artists who’ve struggled with getting attention during the pandemic. “It’s supposed to be the coming-out party for what happens next in music" - Minor explains. Some of the bands who are going to perform are English new rock stars Black Country, New Road, country artists Jade Jackson and Aubrie Sellers who will perform together, Danish heavy metal heavyweights Iceage, Montreal shoegazers No Joy... SXSW 2021 is due March 16-21.
Google Arts & Culture has a very well laid-out microsite about the history of electronic music. It covers the technology used to make the music, the essential clubs, the studios, the musical innovators, and much more (although it is a microsite).
Oxford University Press has made several articles about music and technology available for free until the end of May. Articles explore "the impact of technology on the field of Music, including discussions on studies of musical instruments through CAD and 3D printing, and how the recording studio can be perceived as an instrument in its own right".
Thione Ballago Seck, from a family of “griot” singers, one of the West African country’s most famous musicians, alongside Youssou Ndour, Omar Pene, Ismael Lo and his own son, Wally Seck, has died at the age of 66 in Dakar on Sunday, al Jazeera reports. In the 1970s he sang in the Orchestre Baobab, known for playing a mix of Afro-Cuban salsa and traditional Senegalese music. In 1980 the singer and lyricist founded Raam Daam, which became one of the most popular purveyors of mblalax, a genre combining funk, reggae, dance music and local rhythms.
The music movie 'Sound of Metal' about a drummer who goes deaf is nominated for an Oscar in the best picture category, the Academy has revealed. The lead actor from that movie, British musician and actor Riz Ahmed, is nominated for his leading role in that movie. Chadwick Boseman, who died last year, is up against him in the same category for his performance in 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'. Also, Viola Davis is nominated in the Actress in a Leading Role category for her performance in 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom', as well as Andra Day for 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday'. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are nominated twice in the Original Score category, with 'Mank' and 'Soul' - Jon Batiste joins them in the latter. Also, in the same category, nominated are Terence Blanchard with 'Da 5 Bloods', Emile Mosseri with 'Minari', and 'News of the World' by James Newton Howard. In the Original song category nominated are: 'Fight For You' from 'Judas and the Black Messiah', 'Hear My Voice' from 'The Trial of the Chicago 7', 'Husavik' from 'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga', 'lo Sì (Seen)' from 'The Life Ahead (La Vita Davanti a Se)', and 'Speak Now'" from 'One Night in Miami…'.
"From start to finish, 'A Common Turn' takes you through Savage’s liberating highs, all whilst throwing you her turbulent lows – a raw and emotive album, to say the least" - the Quietus wrote about the debut album by English singer-songwriter Anna B Savage (30). Clash Music loves how intimate it is: "This is a gem of an album. Personal, honest and highly emotive, it tackles big questions; but most of all, it dares to be vulnerable".
