Forty years ago, Michael Jackson and George Harrison, gave an interview to BBC Radio 1, discussing that week's new releases well as the stories behind their own songs. A rare recording has been found and restored, and a low quality recording can be heard here. A restored version will be published on BBC. Jackson discusses […]
“I haven’t talked about this, and I’m still processing so much stuff that I haven’t talked about. I was lonely. I needed some time” - Justin Bieber opens up in a cover-interview for Vogue. And an interesting stand on religion: “But I don’t believe in all the religious elitism and pretentiousness, like people are better […]
Rapper 21 Savage is being held by US official due to an expired visa, which Jay-Z calls "an absolute travesty" and has hired a lawyer to help his fight against deportation. Atlanta-based rapper 21 Savage, a British citizen, has moved to America as a child, and now has three children who are US citizens. BBC...
Marvin Gaye planned to follow his 1971 blockbuster 'What’s Going On' with another socially conscious record titled 'You’re the Man', but, upon the release of its political-leaning titular single, Gaye scrapped the entire project, later contending that his political views ran in direct opposition to that of then-Motown CEO Berry Gordy. Motown is now releasing the lost […]
John Paul Jones, bassist and keyboardist of legendary Led Zeppelin, and Thurston Moore of noise rock icons Sonic Youth are set to perform together at a fundraising event on March 28th at the 100 Club in London. It’s a benefit concert to raise funds for community radio station Resonance FM. The duo will be joined by improvisational jazz […]
Guardian picks out 50 excellent new tracks from across the musical spectrum - r'n'b, rock'n'roll, punk, reggae, indie-rock...
Consequence of Sound: "All told, the 2019 Super Bowl Halftime Show was as much of a clusterfuck as one might expect: an overblown production with no real direction or actual sense of purpose. Maroon "coffee shop pop music" 5 proved once more why they are music’s equivalent to a Nilla Wafer, Travis Scott played 'Sicko […]
Johnny Longstaff was a 17-year-old boy from the north of England who “didn’t even know what sex was” and who “couldn’t find Spain on a map” but became determined to defy the wishes of his own government and fight for democracy in a foreign land - almost a hundred years after he was born folk […]
In "Does Rock 'N' Roll Kill Braincells?!", NME quizes an artist on their own career to see how much they can remember – and find out if the booze, loud music and/or tour sweeties has knocked the knowledge out of them. This week they talk do The Brian Jonestown Massacre maverick Anton Newcombe. NME...
A poll conducted on more than 1,000 British children aged seven to 17 about their music habits found that 97% of them had listened to music in the previous week – but 67% had also engaged in “some form of music-making activity”. It’s a huge rise from 39% in 2006. Music-making is present especially among […]
It's a collaboration with the Polish National Radio Simpony Orchestra, a rendition of Henryk Gorecki's 'Symphony No. 3'. Conducted by Krysztof Penderecki, it took place in 2014 at the National Opera Grand Theater in Warsaw. Audio and film from the performance is out March 29. Watch a trailer for the performance on YouTube, and check […]
Beyonce and JAY-Z have offered fans who adopt at least a partially vegan diet the chance to win gig tickets for life. A post on Beyonce's Instagram page urging fans to click on a link to the project's website and enter the competition. They can do so by pledging to give up meat on at […]
London police announced they had secured a sentence of nine months in prison for rappers Skengdo and AM, suspended for two years, for breaching a gang injunction issued in August last year. What did they do? Performed their song 'Attempted 1.0' at a London concert in early December. According to Index on Censorship the case […]
You want to have a major, upscale festival in the Exuma Cays? It wasn't just "on the boundaries of the impossible", as they advertised. It's impossible, I told them. It was clear they had no clue what they were doing. Worse: they had no idea where they were. With the right expectations, Fyre Festival could […]
Future's latest LP, 'The Wizrd', was sold in 126,000 copies in first-week sales in USA, landing the album in the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart. It's his sixth best-sales album - previously, the Atlanta rhymer's 'DS2', 'What A Time To Be Alive' (with Drake), 'Evol', 'FUTURE', and 'HNDRXX' topped the chart, in three and a half years. All Hip Hop...
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga sang ‘Shallow’, the hit song from the 'A Star Is Born' soundtrack, to an unsuspecting audience for Gaga’s 'Enigma' Residency show in Las Vegas. Watch it on Instagram. NME...
Acclaimed and prolific French composer Michel Legrand, who won Academy Awards for his work in The Thomas Crown Affair, Summer of '42 and Yentl, died Saturday in Paris. He was 86. He collaborated with giants of the industry -- Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne and Frank Sinatra. Variety...
Two agencies representing supermodels Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Emily Ratajkowski might soon be forced to reveal details about the payments they received from convicted fraudster Billy McFarland for the failed 2017 Fyre Festival. A subpoena is also expected for model and influencer Kendall Jenner as part of a broad effort to understand what happened to $11.3 million paid out by McFarland in the weeks and months leading […]
Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers have a new band together called Better Oblivion Community Center. Their self-titled album with 10 song is out now, and all of the album’s packaging is about a mysterious and satirical wellness retreat. They debuted their new single 'Dylan Thomas' on Colbert (here). Backing band members include Yeah Yeah Yeahs […]
Weezer surprise released a covers album 'The Teal Album' full of straightforward covers of pop hits, mainly from the ’80s, but there are a few outliers, such as TLC's 'No Scrubs' or Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid'. One of the tracks, 'Africa' — and possibly the entire album — is a direct response to the Twitter user @weezerafrica, a.k.a. […]
Nile Rodgers is offering 600 free tickets to furloughed workers and their families or friends for his upcoming concert at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland later this week on Jan. 26. KISS announced that they would be giving free meals to TSA employees at their Rock & Brews Restaurant. Numerous orchestras are handing out free tickets […]
Edwin Birdsong—an experimental jazz, funk, and disco keyboardist known for his work in the 1970s—has died. Edwin Birdsong’s 1979 song 'Cola Bottle Baby' was prominently sampled in Daft Punk 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger', as well as in Kanye West's 'Stronger'. Both De La Soul's 'Me Myself and I' and Gang Starr's 'Skills' sampled Birdsongs 'Rapper […]
Bassiani is one of the greatest nightclubs in the world. Find your way through a pitch-black maze of underground stairs and corridors, and you’ll arrive at a 21st-century techno mecca, and a potent symbol of political rupture in post-Soviet Georgia. In just a few years, Bassiani has become a catalyst for progressive politics in a […]
Glasgow has become a hotbed for punk protest in recent years, a strong sense of community spirit key to the rejuvenation of the scene. Well, thanks to the likes of Idles, punk’s got positive – NME picks up their favourite Glaswegian punks raising hell with a smile.
Broken Social Scene have a new EP, 'Let’s Try the After - Vol. 1', coming out February 15. They’ve shared its lead single 'All I Want' (hear it on YouTube). Pitchfork...
Lady Gaga is the second Oscar nominee, ever, to be nominated both for best song and in an acting category in the same year (Mary J. Blige was first). 'Shallow', her duet with Bradley Cooper is up for best song against 'All the Stars', Kendrick Lamar and SZA's contribution to the 'Black Panther' soundtrack, Diane Warren's 'I'll […]
Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, The Band’s Robbie Robertson, jazz vocal icon Mildred Bailey – are just a few of many Native Americans whose heritage was largely hidden, even as they shaped musical history. A new documentary 'Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World', tries to change that. Guardian...
A diverse array of artists honored the memory of Chris Cornell at the I Am The Highway tribute concert in Los Angeles last week. Members of Soundgarden, Audioslave, Temple Of The Dog, Foo Fighters, Metallica, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction, Melvins, Queens Of The Stone Age, Black Sabbath and others took park. Rolling Stone...
"With well over five million tracks released in the past 60-odd years of rock ‘n’ roll – and with rap and Britpop making ‘sampling’ from the past a legitimate artistic endeavour – it’s almost impossible to come up with something that has no similarity whatsoever to anything that’s gone before" - Mark Beaumont asks in […]
While on stage in Chicago, Erykah Badu told her fans she was “puttin’ up a prayer right now” for R. Kelly. The veteran singer also told of her hopes that, someday, Kelly sees “the light of day and comes forward". “But what if one of the people that was assaulted by R. Kelly grows up to be […]
Singer-songwriter Jim Ghedi shares his new album 'In the Furrows Of Common Place' with 'Beneath the Willow' as the stand-out track; Adrianne Lenker shares the new Big Thief song 'Simulation Swarm', played by her alone; Debbie Friday shares a dark electro-pop song 'Runnin''; José González is back with his first new song in six years, Spanish-sung 'El Invento'; female trio Horsegirl share their dreampop/shoegaze single 'Ballroom Dance Scene'.
The use of Splice, a highly rated app for mobile video editing, has boomed during the pandemic, as people stuck at home experimented with making their own tracks, Bloomberg reports. The company specializes in royalty-free samples, which allow people to use drum sounds or flutes from a large library for a monthly fee. The company has just raised an additional $55 million from investors, raising the value of the company at close to $500 million.
Spotify is expanding into over 80 new markets in more than 36 new languages – including key territories across Africa such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, Spotify reports. Together, these 80 markets house more than a billion people with nearly half of them already using the internet. The vast expansion over the coming days means that Spotify will be active in more than 173 markets.
Bruce Springsteen has teamed up with former American president Barack Obama for a new podcast series titled 'Renegades: Born in the USA', Reuters reports. The eight-episode series will cover a range of topics, including race, fatherhood, marriage, and the state of America. The first two episodes are available on Spotify.
Trapital believes there is great potential for Non-fungible tokens in hip-hop: "The late MF DOOM had just held an auction for augmented reality NFTs for his signature masks. Soulja Boy recently minted his own NFT. Hip-Hop Legends NFT is also selling several collectibles on its marketplace". An NFT is a unique and not interchangeable digital asset that relies on blockchain technology, which makes it easier to verify authenticity. Cherie Hu said in Water & Music on NFTs that hip-hop is ahead of most genres.
Daft Punk announced their split via an 8-minute video, so it's quite fitting to look back at their career through the lens of music videos. Pitchfork picks out their best videos, going from 1996's 'Da Funk' to 'Get Lucky' from 2013.
The Pudding has a great and fun interactive site Live Music Jukebox where it compares studio and live versions of popular songs. The idea is great, and the execution ever greater with technical details for every song. The collection is expansive with hundreds of artists and thousands of songs. Great stuff!
Parisian duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who gave us some of the most popular dance and pop songs ever made, have split, Pitchfork reports. Daft Punk broke the news with an 8-minute video titled 'Epilogue', excerpted from their 2006 film 'Electroma'.
Name3Songs podcast discusses the problem of sexual misconduct in alter music. Questions they pose: "Why sexual misconduct reoccurs at alarming rates in the music industry. What is the psychology behind this? How has this behavior been perpetrated across decades? How can this behavior be stopped and prevented? What is accountability and how do we apply it effectively?".
Writer Clover Hope released a new book 'The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop' which spans decades, and took her 2,5 years to write. In a Music Journalism Insider interview she explaines how she "wanted to write about what each of the women brought to hip-hop as a culture and rap as a genre... For Queen Latifah, I wanted to talk about her achieving longevity through film. For Eve, I decided to write about her bringing high fashion to hip-hop. For Cardi B, I wanted to write about her wielding the power of social media to star-making effect". Why 100? - "I wanted people to see the number and think about magnitude and impact".
