“Pop music tends to smuggle in a lot of contraband lyrically. Words that would cause outrage if spoken often get a pass or go unnoticed when sung" - Record producer Ian Brennan told Rolling Stone about racially violent songs. He pointed out 'Brown Sugar' by The Rolling Stones - "almost undoubtedly, the majority of their audience would claim to be ‘liberal’ and ‘not racist,’ but 60,000 people singing along to those words is not an entirely innocent act. That it is tolerated or dismissed is yet another smaller, but nonetheless meaningful example of systemic racism”. Brennan, who’s written several books about racism and inequity, says The Rolling Stones’ well-known track glorifies slavery, rape, torture and pedophilia.

Up to Sony's invention of Walkman, music was primarily a shared experience. "After the Walkman, music could be silence to all but the listener, cocooned within a personal soundscape, which spooled on analog cassette tape" - New Yorker writes on the 40th anniversary of the genius gadget being shared with the world - "The Walkman wasn’t the end of meeting people, but it paved the way for surviving an unthinkable era in which we would find ourselves unable to meet at all".

"[Henry] Rollins wore shorts and no shirt and slowly covered his torso with tattoos, including ones for his own band. Was it ego or pride? I loved it either way, because I had neither... I had a poster of its ['Damaged'] cover up on my bedroom wall, Rollins punching his reflection in the mirror, breaking it into a million pieces. He felt like garbage and hated himself too! Plus he had a lot of muscles. I could not have invented a more appropriate role model if I tried" - GQ's Matthew Schnipper wrote a heartwaring and earnest article about how he decided to name his son after Henry Rollins, hoping that hardcore icon will "make him tough in ways I can’t".

A beautiful article in the Sunday Long Read about alt-country musician Jim White, who was struggling with poverty and mental health, while also trying to build a career, and raise a daughter. SLR writes about how White bought a house, which turned out to be the foundation for his life, his career, and his relationship with his daughter - "Jim had learned to stand tall during his personal storms, drawing artistic inspiration from them. When he bought the Winterville house, he was in the midst of a protracted custody battle with Willow’s mother. The fight, fierce as a Category 5 hurricane, would shape his daughter’s upbringing and his identity as a parent. This struggle, and untold others to follow, would test the limits of the bond between father and child". A great read!

Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers wrote an honest and nice essay for the NPR about his band's name, inspired by Lady Antebellum's name change, and what a band's name means in general. A pleasant read; here's a snippet: "Our name was a drunken joke that was never intended to be in rotation and reckoned with two-and-a-half decades later, and I sincerely apologize for its stupidity and any negative stereotypes it has propagated. I'm not sure changing it now serves any higher purpose, but I'm certainly open to suggestions. In the meantime, you're welcome to just call us Lady DBT".

The third episode of Drillosophy - video blog where philosophy meets drill-rap - covers the topic of surveillance. Authors Ciaran and Reveal explain how English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon" design can be used to understand systems of control in modern society. They also dissect the lyrics of M1llionz and M Huncho to explore why some UK rappers cover their faces. This episode features drill artists S1, F2 Anti, and RoadWorks ambassador, Demetri Addison.

"I’m pretty sure it was the time I watched 'Schindler’s List' on Netflix that pushed me over the edge. If ever there was a movie where the credits were an integral part of the experience this was it. However, the second after Steven Spielberg’s name came up, the screen was shrunk to the size of a postage stamp and a massive advert appeared telling you to watch something else" - TV composer Daniel Pemberton writes in the Guardian, annoyed, by the cable-TV practice. "The end credit sequence is an unsexy but still important part of the film-going experience. It can be a key moment of contemplation, to assess, absorb and reflect on everything you have just experienced" - he argues.

Resident Advisory has a long read about a new scene emerging in Tokyo, with people coming from a musical background engaging in cultural, social, and political activism, with musical means - "this network of artists and activists have disparate backgrounds and are associated with widely different music styles. They are all committed to their own separate projects while organically overlapping and staying connected".

"Hip-hop has always spoken out on police brutality. But more businesses have partnered with hip-hop in recent years. Those companies have felt the pressure to contribute to the same culture that’s making them rich. It’s one of many factors that accelerated the shift in response to this crisis" - Trapital argues about the power hip-hop has come to possess now. The two main reasons why hip-hop became the dominant culture, Trapital says -empowerment and social media.

A great essay in Electronic Beats about electronic music as a platform to gain freedom: "Nightclubs bear a long legacy of being one of the very few spaces in society where Black and Brown people are able to freely express themselves, where they are able to, for a few short hours, reclaim the bodies that are systematically regulated, attenuated, and deliberately destroyed by the state... Freeform dancing, the process of trusting an innate, rhythmic impulse that shirks a set of codified behaviors, becomes a powerful gesture of resistance".

"If anyone’s ever made this hard land great in the past, it’s been Black Americans" freelance journalist Piotr Orlov writes in a great essay about Black music - "the first musical art-form original to the United States". It was born of "a desire to express oneself within a society that did not want to hear any of what you had to say. A society that, in many cases, did not regard you as fully human". Black culture, on the other hand, is characterized by - "creation of culture, the strength of moral character, the depth of communal compassion". Black blues and jazz, Orlov argues, is "the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years—paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music (hip-hop, house and techno and electro) which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century", but "we don’t get to have this music without the burden that preceded it".

"Wealth and class play vital roles here" - the Quietus says in its analysis of new EP by dance music quartet Housekeeping. The Q is quite annoyed by their "adoption of musical forms rooted in black, queer, and working-class struggles", because "it feels remiss to ignore the absolutely deranged levels of privilege to which all four of its members have access". So, biographies: "Three of them tend to elide or remove references to their surnames, perhaps hoping to draw some distinction between their musical personas and their other public appearances. The mononymous Jacobi is a regular on the society pages under his full surname of Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, usually in relation to his aristocratic connections, while for Sebastian Macdonald-Hall (whose family’s combined wealth of £842m places them at 168th in this year's Rich List), it’s his commercial real estate empire. Carl Waxberg appears positively relatable by comparison, having merely been a director at Citibank for 13 years before launching his own investment fund". The EP they made is "an utterly unremarkable slab of tech-house... a blur of mediocrity, notable only for its steadfast refusal to challenge even the tamest clichés of mainstream club music: tautly-mixed kick drums sit politely alongside shuffling percussion, filter-swept basslines and elegantly narcotised vocals".

A great read in Mel magazine about t.A.T.u., the Russian band from the early 2000s that featured lesbian identity and image. Lena Katina and Julia Volkova weren't then, and aren't now lesbians (both are married to men), but that project (guided by a psychologist) sparked a cultural shift in their anti-gay nation. Does it matter that t.A.T.u. were never the real deal? - Mel asks Russians from the LGBTQ milieu, whose lives were changed by the band.

A great and funny read in the Tablet magazine by David Yaffe, a professor of humanities about - Pete Townshend's nose. "Townshend’s nose is the heavyweight champion. It’s an English nose unlike most any other, turned up to eleven... When Daltrey first met Townshend, he described him as 'a nose on a stick'. Daltrey seemed like a bully. Townshend seemed like the kid getting bullied, until he would, one day, rise up and take it out on all those guitars... [Townshend] was old when he was young, too. He strode the world’s largest stages with a certain reluctance. The music was aggressive, but he was taciturn, and kind of awkward. Exceedingly neurotic, he questioned himself and his role as a rockstar throughout his whole career".

Jazz bassist and YouTube music scholar Adam Neely published a GREAT musicsplaining video about "the worst saxophone solo of all time", Vinny Mazzetta's alternative take on the Five Satins' 'The Jones Girl'. Nelly explains in great musical detail, in a 28-minute-long musical and cultural history of the one-note solo, why it is to bad.

Watch any K-pop music video and you’ll likely be met with loud hair colors, elaborate outfits, flawless skin, heavily made-up eyes and painted lips. To South Korean stars - or idols as they're called there - it’s not only the norm, it’s also specifically calibrated for audience appeal - Rafinery 29 writes in an analysis of young beautiful South Korean boy bands.

When you’re a passionate music fan in a pandemic, you look for consolation in the songs you love. As always, music is the shelter from the storm. But music is also the storm. The songs you love might promise you a safe refuge, a little peace of mind. But you already know the songs are going to mess you up, ravage your heart, remind you of faces you miss and loud times you’re not having and weird places you’d rather be. Living with music these days can be total agony. Living without it? Merely impossible - Rolling Stone's journalist writes in his essay about how he misses live music these days; and how he dreams live music - terrible live music - every night, and LOVES it.

Drillosophy is an original video-blog combining contemporary music culture, urban sociology and philosophy. In their first episode, they explore perception by applying Plato's Cave, an idea from ancient Ancient Greek philosophy, to UK drill music. It features Brixton drill duo Skengdo & AM, who talk about their lyrics. Watch the episode below.

"The most influential forerunners of punk on their respective sides of the Atlantic, these trailblazers established the tenets of glam that would serve as the foundations for future glam-punk" - PopMatters writes in an easy to read essay about the beginnings of glam-punk. "The transition of raw rock from garage to glam began in the mid-60s when Reed met Warhol... Striking pre-political poses that challenged the conventions of gender, sexuality, and class, Warhol's posse of eccentrics became an inspiration to the young Reed, who felt encouraged to ignore any pressures to compromise and to charge full-on with his decadent musings".

Guardian has an interesting essay about Sunn O))), especially about what did the American drone metal greats do to a change of perspective on metal music. "In an age where people crave spiritual meaning, psychological healing and escape from the hellscape of rolling news and the 'constant on' of social media in VR or expensive […]

"Just as the physicality of exercise takes one out of the mind, so does the bodily response to the thud, thud, thud of techno. The rattling of the ribcage; the beat of the music in your chest – as if you had the world’s most muscular, obnoxious heart. There’s no space for bad thoughts, doubt or […]

PopMatters has an interesting essay on goth punk beginnings, and how it still makes sense today: "While traditional goth punks tout the virtues of old school bands like the Banshees and Bauhaus, or of successors like the Horrors, Pale Waves, and Plastique Noir, younger goths are more likely to head to the dance floor where […]