LA Times presents Jacob Collier, the British "strange-pop" artist with a jazz background. The 26-year-old of British and Chinese descent wasn't a household name until this week when he was nominated for the Grammy award for album of the year, alongside Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Post Malone and Coldplay. A nice boy...
The music video for System of a Down’s classic 'Chop Suey!' has surpassed 1 billion views on YouTube, making it the first metal song to hit that illustrious mark, Loudwire reports. 'Chop Suey!' joins the company of songs in the YouTube billion club that fall into the hard- or alter-rock category - Guns N’ Roses’ 'November Rain' and 'Sweet Child O’ Mine', Linkin Park’s 'In the End' and 'Numb', and Nirvana’s 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'...
Vinyl album sales in the US had their best week of the year last week with 55.5% increase to 943,000 copies sold, Billboard reports. That also marks the third-largest week for vinyl since 1991. The last time overall U.S. vinyl album sales were higher was in the week ending Dec. 26, 2019, when volume hit 1.24 million sold -- the largest week for vinyl album sales. Last week the record was set largely thanks to sale pricing and promotion at Walmart - the mega-store discounted all vinyl albums in-store to $15.
UK collective UKAEA is made of "superheroes" of UK experimental and alternative music, who are deeply influenced by immigration and sounding global. UKAEA have just released their debut album 'Energy is Forever', coming deeply from techno and industrial background, with Middle Eastern and African influences also prominent on the record. “I think ultimately the goal is to make music that sounds like it's from nowhere” - collective's leader Dan Jones told the Quietus. (Not overly) unusual music with a substance.
A bass guitar and effects pedal used by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, signed guitars from Liam Gallagher, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, handwritten lyrics from Florence Welch, Robbie Williams, and Ellie Goulding, a mixing desk from Craig David, and a signed synth from Chemical Brothers are all on sale at an online auction with the aim to help live events industry workers. Stagehand auction also includes memorabilia from Sam Smith, Jess Glynn and FKA Twigs, with more constantly being added, NME reports. Also benefiting the Stagehand initiative will be Prints for Music, a sale of more than 100 intimate photographs of stars including Grace Jones, Neil Young and Fela Kuti. Today, a £10,000 box set by Porcupine Tree' Steven Wilson, limited to a single copy, was sold at an auction, with proceeds from the one-off item going to Music Venue Trust, the charity lobbying for the UK’s grassroots venues under threat amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Famous New Jerseyans Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and former TV-host Jon Stewart have joined their home state #MaskUpNJ health campaign. Bruce and Jons encourage people to "wear a friggin' mask", with Springsteen saying he hopes it will help bring concerts back soon.
One Spotify user has made a playlist of all the songs David Lynch mentions during his weather reports. The charismatic director has reinstated these reports during the early days of the pandemic, via his David Lynch Theater YouTube channel, and he has been doing them since. His reports are mostly quite similar - hot and sunny most of the days - so it's his favorite songs that make for a difference. His music taste includes This Mortal Coil, Portishead, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Mazzy Star, Buddy Holly, his own music and more.
A$AP Rocky donated 120 meals to families at a homeless shelter in New York where he, his mother and sister spent some time nearly two decades ago. The rapper, real name Rakim Mayers, personally turned delivery man on Thanksgiving eve on Wednesday to distribute the food from one of his favourite eateries in New York, Amy Ruth's Restaurant in Harlem, according to People. The 32-year-old musician gifted the food to the Regent Family Residence - a homeless shelter that serves 83 families, including 111 children - where his mum, Renee Black, stayed after falling on hard times in the early 2000s.
PopMatters made a good and versatile list of the 10 best global music albums of the year (PM still calls it "world music", which is increasingly becoming a politically un-correct term). The chosen ones are Keleketla project with an album that "goes in a number of different and utterly revolutionary directions", ONIPA with "an entire continent's worth of styles" on 'We No Be Machine', Evritiki Zygia playing mountain folk music from Eastern Europe on 'Ormenion', and others.
Guardian goes into a quest to find the heaviest music ever made, measured "in terms of the intensity of the music itself, the atmosphere it generates and how quickly it liquefies your innards". There are a few equally deserving candidates - Motörhead, Swans, Black Sabbath, Merzbow, Sun O)))...
Rolling Stones guitarist said he has taken up gardening to keep him occupied during the lockdown, leading to a “more normal way of life” after years of living as one of rock’s most notorious hell-raisers - "which is un-normal”. He told Goldmine Magazine, according to Contact Music: “I spent the whole summer actually admiring the garden and also doing a bit of gardening myself – watering the veggies and the stuff... I saw the garden grow – really quite unbelievable".
Queen have shared an image of the time their original lineup met Maradona backstage in his home country. A March 8, 1981 performance at José Amalfitani Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina saw the band draw a crowd of 300,000 people. Among them was a 21-year-old Maradona, who Queen sought to meet. Freddie Mercury invites Maradona onstage during Queen's performance to the crowd's delight: "Right now, I'd like do introduce a friend of yours — and ours — tonight. I'm sure you all know him". "I want to thank Freddie and Queen for making me so happy," Maradona said, ahead of leading bassist John Deacon into 'Another One Bites the Dust'.
Tame Impala, Sampa The Great, Amy Shark and Archie Roach were among the big winners at the 2020 ARIA Awards, with Kevin Parker's psychedelic pop band taking home five awards including best group and album of the year for 'The Slow Rush'. Sampa The Great made history in 2019 when she became the first woman of color to win the ARIA for best hip-hop release, this year - she got it again. The singer and rapper also took out best female artist and best independent release for her debut full-length album 'The Return'.
"I feel like we exist at the behest of other people, but, yeah, I feel like I don't exist" - Phoebe Bridgers said about life in lockdown while talking to her new friend Bettye LaVette, who responded - "isn't it beautiful that we don't exist until the light come off and everybody applauds". Bridgers added - "I feel like my social life is built so heavily into music where I hire all my friends, I tour with my friends, so I don't even know how to exist at home". Listen to the funny conversation of the two ladies for the Talkhouse podcast.
"An exhaustive, highly informative, and impossible-to-put-down" - PopMatters says in a review of a book about the "strange, mysterious, obscure" album 'Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth' by the 1970s R&B and funk band 24-Carat Black. It chronicles the unfortunate fates of its many members and the delayed praise that it would eventually gain, as a sample-vault for many stars, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar.
Dua Saleh is in-between genres on 'Angel Rock', driven by strings; Lana Del Rey covered 'Summertime', this time George Gershwin's original; Gilles Peterson's Brownswood released electro-jazzy rap 'I Know You See Me' by Kassa Overall; singer-songwriter Postdata shared 'Twin Flames'; Fana Hues presents her great voice on 'Snakes x Elephants'; Dueling Experts deliver hip-hop old school NY-style on 'Revolve Around Sciences'; Kelly Rowland goes for and - gets a pop smash with 'Hitman'; Ash Koosha explores the “hallucination of a machine” on 'Hallucinato' (30 mins).
EDM producer i_o has passed away at the age of 30, after a short experimental pop solo career, and a pop highlight this year, EDM.com reports. Throughout his career, i_o explored new methods of music production and dissemination with an artistic philosophy rooted in the idea that "everything can be hacked". This year he released three EPs for mau5trap, the independent record label founded by deadmau5, and collaborated with Grimes on 'Violence' from her record 'Miss Anthropocene'.
Actor and director Alex Winter got lucky - he was the first author to get access to Frank Zappa's immense vault, and he made the first authorised documentary on Zappa based on the never-before-seen footage of the legendary rock polymath he found there. "The resulting film", Guardian says, "presents a nuanced and authoritative portrait of an artist who may have spoken prodigiously to the media during his lifetime about his music and politics but who remained oddly aloof as a person".
The current system of payment for music streaming is threatening the future of music in the UK - Elbow’s Guy Garvey said in front of the UK parliament committee on the first day of an inquiry into the impact of streaming on the music industry. Garvey, and musicians such as O’Brien of Radiohead, Tom Gray of Gomez, and Nadine Shah have put forward equitable remuneration, increased transparency and user-centric streaming models as ways in which the industry could be reformed and made fairer for artists.
Craig Brown has won the Baillie Gifford prize, top British award for nonfiction, for his book 'One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time', a mix of history, diaries, autobiography, fan letters, interviews, lists and charts, Daily Mail reports. BG judges say it is “a joyous, irreverent, insightful celebration of the Beatles, a highly original take on familiar territory... a profound book about success and failure which won the unanimous support of our judges. Craig Brown has reinvented the art of biography”.
For the first time since its inception in 2012, the nominees for best rock performance at this year's Grammys are all-female or female-fronted: Fiona Apple, Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, Brittany Howard, and Grace Potter. Women also dominated the best country album category - it is the first time it has had five albums helmed in whole or in part by women: Little Big Town, Ingrid Andress, Brandy Clark, Miranda Lambert, and Ashley McBryde, Variety reports. And yet another precedent - South Korean megastars BTS became the first K-pop act to receive a Grammy nomination. The boy band’s latest hit single, 'Dynamite', is competing in the best pop duo/group performance category, CNN reports.
Subversive Capital Acquisition company has acquired two California-based cannabis brands and named Jay-Z as the resulting holding company’s chief visionary officer, Marijuana Business Daily reports. Subversive Capital is acquiring the direct-to-consumer cannabis platform and brand Caliva as well as Left Coast Ventures, a cannabis and hemp producer, with investment from Roc Nation artists Rihanna, Yo Gotti, and Meek Mill. The deal makes Jay-Z the biggest music player in the California cannabis industry, worth $3 billion a year.
The Killers aren’t really hurt by not being nominated for Grammys (unlike The Weeknd who really took it to heart), they just make fun with it. Las Vegas boys let loose with a Trumpian tweet, in all caps, and all for laughs...
"Strange things happen every day, but in my life, few things have been as beautifully strange as the inherited repercussions—father to daughter, cotton field to city streets—of seeing, hearing, and being forever changed by the godmother of soul, Sister Rosetta Tharpe" - Rosanne 'The Daughter' Cash wrote in Oxford American about the iconic blues pioneer.
Illegal raves are now flourishing in the UK, with hundreds of events taking place over the last few weekends, Dazed reports from illegal British podiums. These raves started in rural Britain during the summer, and moved to urban areas when it became cold, into warehouses of companies closed due to Covid-19. VICE wrote there were three types of raves: established unlicensed parties, set up by an experienced crew and with safety measures in place; established free parties at which the community self-polices, including returning to clean up afterwards; ‘moneygrab’ parties advertised online with the aim of making money. The police are slapping them with £10,000 fines, while the locals from Welsh village of Banwen went viral for their laidback attitude, which saw them make cups of tea for the ravers.
Beyoncé scored nine nominations for the Grammys, including song and record of the year bids with 'Black Parade', as well as best R&B song and best R&B performance, CBS reports. Beyoncé's 'Black Is King' film that highlighted Black art, music, history and fashion is up for best music film while 'Brown Skin Girl', a song dedicated to dark- and brown-skinned women, is nominated for best music video. Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Roddy Ricch earned six nominations each. Check out the complete nominees list - here.
"The production is hazy and psychedelic and sounds sourced from crackling jazz records... Roc Marciano's verses are more subtle and tucked-away... masterful delivery and detailed lyricism" - Brooklyn Vegan likes New York rapper/producer's album a lot. Pitchfork says he's "putting his head down and continuing to churn out colorful wordplay over finely chopped loops".
China’s two biggest streaming platform operators, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music, are battling for the DIY artist market. According to Music Business Worldwide, Tencent Music had paid 590 million yuan (over $84m) to date to indie artists using its ‘Tencent Musician’ program, as well as offered services such as music publishing, marketing, copyright management and professional training. Tencent's biggest rival in China, NetEase Cloud Music was, in October 2020, home to music from over 200,000 Chinese independent musicians – representing 100% year-on-year growth in volume terms. In similar news, several streaming platforms under the umbrella of Tencent - QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo, as well as WeSing, a karaoke application - are offering micropayments from fans to artists, which make a big difference; top creators on WeSing pocket more than $7,000 per month in tips alone, Slate reports.
SoundCloud has achieved its first ever profitable quarter in Q3 this year, Music Business Worldwide reports. Also, SoundCloud posted €147.6 million in revenues in calendar 2019, up 37% year-over-year, which made for annual operating losses in 2019 narrowing significantly - down 28% to €23.8m from €32.9m in 2018. Some more good news - Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music currently have circa 70 million tracks on each of their platforms, SoundCloud now plays host to over 250 million tracks.
The Recording Academy has called a halt to its annual 'Grammy Nominees' CD series after 25 years of featuring artists nominated for the American Academy award. Fifteen volumes in the annual series made the top 10 on the Billboard 200, with two volumes - in 2013 and 2014 - climbing as high as No. 2. The main franchise sold 9,8 million copies, with sales dwindling in recent years, Billboard reports.
"I’ve seen women headlining heavy music festivals. Media coverage is better. There’s more visibility and influence." - Emma Ruth Rundle says in a Consequence interview about women in heavy music. "You have really incredible artists who have crashed down these walls. I was just featured in a guitar magazine, and Ani DiFranco was on the cover, and that magazine when I was a kid would have been full of half-dressed women. There was a huge shift in the past few years. Watching artists like Chelsea Wolfe pushing the boundaries of what heavy music is and owning it, I feel a respect and sense of place that I didn’t feel when I was in my 20s".
"The insurmountable rise of Lil Nas X, Billy Porter, and other artists represents a paradigm shift in the culture" - Rolling Stone writes in the introduction of its piece about the year of the Black queers. "Who could have fathomed that Black queer men would be at the top of the charts, in Congress, and on TV and movie screens? We’re living in a world where not only is the Black queer community being embraced, but those who show us hate are being disgraced".
One of Broadway’s most renowned and prolific songwriters, Stephen Sondheim has died aged 91, CNN reports. Sondheim is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics to legendary Broadway musicals 'West Side Story' and 'Gypsy'. Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics to a slew of musicals, and has over the course of his long career, won eight Tony awards, eight Grammys, and an Oscar.
Nell Smith, a 14-year-old girl from Leeds, and psychedelic heroes The Flaming Lips have unveiled their new album 'Where the Viaduct Looms', with nine Nick Cave covers. It all started three years ago when Smith became an instantly-recognizable regular at Flaming Lips shows thanks to her penchant for wearing a parrot costume, Consequence reports.
Nine in 10 UK musicians were earning less than £1,000 per month, and 22% were considering giving up music altogether, according to UK charity Help Musicians which made a survey among 929 musicians in August. One-third of musicians were still earning nothing after restrictions on live events were lifted this summer, according to Help Musicians, BBC reports.
The Weeknd's 'Blinding Lights' is the new No. 1 song on Billboard's Greatest Songs of all Time Hot 100 Chart. Billboard talked to The Weeknd and his collaborators to see how they made history. "There was nothing we had heard like that before from Abel" - Monte Lipman of Republic Records says. Yep, it was something different.
"Songs created Silicon Valley. Without music, it wouldn’t exist. In each key area of technology—semiconductors, storage, handheld devices, video displays, test equipment, etc.—funds to launch and grow the tech titans came from the entertainment industry, and especially the music business... No, you won’t hear that story told inside the fortresses of Google or Facebook or Apple. They battle with Hollywood studios and major labels nowadays, fighting over customers, copyrights, legislation, royalty payments, and many other matters" - music writer Ted Gioia points out in his great post.
Arguably the most intimate look at the inner workings of the Beatles you’re ever likely to get" - Stereogum reviews the new 3-part Beatles documentary. SG adds: "Although the setting is not all that visually striking, the cinematography is gorgeous — and thanks to Jackson’s CGI restoration of the 16mm footage, the reality of it all almost feels heightened at times, like you’re watching actors playing these characters in a hyper-detailed period piece".
Some Grammy firsts and records this year. Mickey Guyton is now the first Black artist ever nominated for Best Country Album, for her record 'Remember Her Name', Tennessean reports. Jay-Z has become the most nominated artist in Grammy history, after getting three 2022 nods, which brought him up to 83 total, The Variety reports. Paul McCartney is second with 81, and Quincy Jones drops to #3 with his 80 nominations. See all the Grammy nominees.
"On Royal, the new NFT marketplace, artists can share ownership of their music with fans by issuing NFTs as a limited digital asset. Those NFTs may eventually include invites to events, community access, VIP experiences, merch, and more" - Trapital's Dan Runcie looks into the new platform, and adds - "Royal’s best value-prop is the opportunity for artists to identify and serve their earliest fans".
