A great long-read in the Mix Mag which explores the connection between the rising living costs and the downfall of clubbing. It also takes into account the societal, political, and behavioral factors, and sets forth some ideas as to how to deal with it. Finally, it tries to guess what this change will mean in the broader society.
Bandcamp's Brad Sanders wrote an essay about growing up in sports, replacing them with music, learning to love running, and, with a little help from the post-metal band Russian Circles, how the two tightly connect. "I log all my runs in the Strava app, and in the description field for each run, I always include what I listened to while I was out on the road. It’s a formal way to acknowledge what Russian Circles taught me years ago, that the music that feeds my soul and the movement that feeds my body can–and indeed must–peaceably coexist."
"[Nowadays] It feels like if you have a musical group it must be centered around the vocalist. If we measure the average percent of instrumental content per Billboard number hit between 1940 and 2021, we see demonstrable evidence for not just the decline of the instrumental superstar but the instrumentalist generally, with the sharpest declines beginning in the 1950s and the 1990s" - Chris Dalla Riva points out. He offers an explanation: "I believe it comes down to four factors: improved technology, the 1942 musicians’ strike, WWII, television, and hip-hop."
The Conversation offers a few pieces of advice "if you want to train your musical taste to extend beyond the old favourites of youth:
Dance music has got so hard and fast recently, Mixmag believes and tries to find clues as to whether it has really happened and - if so - why. “My whole take on the faster, harder side of things is that people turned 18 over the pandemic. They’d heard about techno, but they’d never experienced a club [and] they were listening to stuff in the house, coming from maybe hard dance, or hardcore or ravey happy hardcore stuff. Then they burst into a club and want to hear things at 100 miles per hour because they haven’t heard anything different" - Glasgow DJs and producer Quail shares his thoughts. Techno artist Sunil Sharpe thinks part of the reason is also down to a loss of clubs: “In ways the traditional nightclub environment used to regulate tempo but as the amount of clubs has thinned out over the last decade, it feels like the scene has moved more towards locations that capture the original spirit of rave culture when tempos were faster."
A great read in Vice about the "shady, high-paying private gig industry", which has almost all the biggest pop and rock stars on one side, and just about anybody who has enough money to pay them, on the other side. As Vice puts it, it comes down to this: "With unimaginable amounts of money at the disposal of central governments and lucrative corporations, stars with relatively clean PR images are being tempted to get a slice of the action"
"Many of us got to witness a second breakthrough moment for hip-hop during the recent 65th Grammy Awards. Questlove of the Roots along with LL Cool J put their heads together and curated an incredible tribute to acknowledge hip-hop’s upcoming 50th birthday... It was an incredible tribute that was preceded by Kendrick Lamar winning Hip-Hop Album of the Year and the grand finale being an 8-minute song that featured DJ Khalid, Jay-Z and Rick Ross" - journalist and professor Dave “Davey D” Cook is looking back at 50 years of hip-hop in the Pollstar. "The hip-hop takeover of the Grammys was a reminder that hip-hop is deeply woven in the fabric of modern-day music and it is perched to reach even greater heights".
"Reggaeton artists dominated the Spanish top 50 songs chart in 2021, edging out every English-language performer except for the Weeknd and Lil Nas X. The genre’s continuous rise in Spain has raised urgent questions about cultural ownership, colonialism, and race as a result of centuries-old social hierarchies between Europe and Latin America" - Pitchfork looks into the sensitive issue. "There is concern about Spanish artists profiting off the music of Afro-diasporic cultures once colonized by Spain, sometimes even eclipsing the visibility of those who founded the movement... Meanwhile, other industry executives and cultural commentators hail reggaeton’s takeover in Spain as a sign of globalization’s advantages."
“People want positive energy in their lives. Trance music offers just that” - Dutch curator, writer, and label owner Arjan Rietveld says to Pitchfork about the current revival of trance. Rietveld sees trance as a natural corrective to the omnipresent darkness of styles like techno and more experimental styles of club music, not to mention real-world woes like climate change and the pandemic, The P points out. Musicians at the crest of that new trance wave are TDJ, Young Marco, DJ Courtesy, among others.
"Tracks in dance music have not only gotten shorter, but significantly so - average track lengths appear to have dropped by at least a minute or two during the past decade, and that drop seems to have accelerated during the latter half of the 2010s" - First Floor points out. The reasons? "Streaming services provide not only seemingly infinite content, but also remove virtually all costs for engaging with that content. There’s literally zero consequence for quickly pressing the skip button and moving on to something else. For consumers, the benefits of this system are obvious, but it’s also given rise to a listening public with little patience and an urgent need to be entertained as quickly as possible, lest they move on to the next thing... At this point, the idea of laying back and 'getting lost in the music' seems almost quaint; most listeners, especially young ones, simply want their favorite songs to hurry up and deliver a dopamine hit as quickly as possible".
First Floor takes a closer look at the current hype around Latin sounds and rhythms within the wider electronic music world. It examines how these flare-ups of interest have historically been not only fleeting, but shallow, playing into stereotypes and misinformed notions of what constitutes “authentic” Latin culture while also doing little to concretely benefit artists and scenes located in Latin America.
Pitchfork tells the story of "slack key—a distinctly Hawaiian sound with complex patterns of rhythm, bass, and a leading melody all handled by one player on an acoustic guitar. It would become synonymous with the identity of the islands". The P also chooses nine releases through which "a story emerges of how a little-known indigenous folk music transformed into an empowering voice for the revitalization of an endangered culture".
"First, many artists could not tour this year due to a variety of factors, including inflation, high gas costs, supply-chain shortages, overbooked music venues, and poor mental health... Second, a much smaller number of artists this year... found that touring for the industry’s top one-percent is almost too viable, in that the shadowy corporations who run the live-music business... were able to gouge consumers for hundreds (if not thousands) of extra dollars above the original face value of tickets" - Uproxx looks back to "a weird and often bad year".
New Tedium writer Chris Dalla Riva looked at what has caused the disappearance of key change in pop music: "As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument".
Music writer Harmony Holiday was a part of Madlib's camp, and thought about what it was: "The entourage is its own worst enemy. It’s an endless funeral procession for the personalities that existed before of it, and the retribution that pursues it and evades it. It makes those men almost untraceable, intractable, easy to distract and extract from and run. I wanted to save this man from becoming the entourage’s pawn or mime, with the kind of feminine power that is mine, that makes men men. It turned me, for a time, into his pawn or mime, a thankless, timeless easy-to-abuse muse position. The entourage is a ruins".
In his latest post, music writer Ted Gioia presents a scientific basis for his alternative musicology—a holistic way of thinking about songs and their impact on individuals and societies. He makes the argument that too much of our world today is controlled by left-hemisphere-of-the-brain worldview — analytic and detail-oriented - and calls for the right hemisphere - controls creativity, intuition, and imagination - to take over. "The simplest way to tap into the right hemisphere is music… The connection between songs and the right hemisphere of our brains is so strong that stroke victims who have lost the language-making capacity of their left brain are sometimes still able to sing words they can no longer speak". A great intro to the theory.
A very interesting Complex essay: "The exploitation of Black rappers’ deaths is part of a larger societal truth as it pertains to modern day media and social media consumption. When digital natives are committed to documenting each and every moment, death simply falls in line with that as one of the more grander, more scandalous forms of activity. In a toxic environment prioritizing clicks, engagement, and reach, blogs and individuals fall in line, scrambling to be first—however disastrous that quest is. In the content economy, rap is discarded, as a lack of due diligence echoes on and a lack of care toward Black rappers—and presumption that these rappers are destined for death—lingers. (Artist relations specialist Karlie) Hustle concludes, 'Death as ‘online content’ is a cultural failure in an attention economy'”.
In 2018, hip-hop became the U.S. most popular genre of music. In 2022, hip-hop is still on top, and its revenues
are still growing, but after nearly a decade of market share growth, hip-hop’s share of total revenue has declined. Trapital’s first-ever culture report found three key drivers behind the trend:
1. Streaming’s continued growth
2. Early-mover advantages don’t last
3. The end of bundles and the limited vinyl supply
"Critiquing masculinity while maintaining his position within the enduring hierarchies that put those bad boys on top, he's the one you love to roll your eyes at. He's a dirtbag, baby, in a long line of antiheroes who interrogate the shapes of male privilege from the inside, even as they benefit from its persistence" - NPR's Ann Powers writes in a great text about Matt Healy, and his latest album with The 1975, 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language'. She questions the "dirtbag": "When it comes to creating alternatives to the patriarchal status quo, men actually have to surrender some privilege, not merely question the effect an elevated status has on their own souls. This can be a painful realization, a disappointment. But it also opens up new possibilities, pointing toward a life that might be less damaging to others, and less lonely".
WRTI shares a lovely text about "viral jazz" describing it as "aesthetic rather than a set of quantifiable viewer metrics". DOMi & JD Beck, and Louis Cole are two of the acts from the new movement, which The New York Times Magazine has described as "both radically sophisticated and full of jokes, a combination of qualities you find in both the 20th century's jazz greats and the 21st century's extremely online teenagers".
"An entire history of innovations in recorded music could be told through the lens of so-called musical mistakes. Do they even exist? At the level of intention, are errors ever actually errors?" - Piotr Orlov writes in a beautiful essay about 'Dilla Time', the new biography of legendary Detroit hip-hop producer James Dewitt Yancey, Jr. (aka J Dilla or Jay Dee) by journalist and NYU professor Dan Charnas. "What might the musical future look like when its supposed mistakes and proficiencies are based primarily on sets of data? ... Aren’t what previous generations’ power brokers dictated as errors turning out to be some pretty decent guides to a mindful development of th
Music writer Ted Gioia opens a question on the role of conductors with an interesting take on the double meanings referring to both music and traveling. "When we refer to the movement of a classical work or a favorite track on a playlist, or even to structural forms such as the fugue (etymologically linked to the verb to flee). Take for example, the ancient Greek word oimê, signifying song, which is connected to the similar word oimos, designating a road or path".
The Spectator introduces 'Industry', the British-made TV drama about young bankers: "More and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance. Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights".
Music writer Ted Gioia takes a critical look at today's music magazines which are (supposedly) leaning too much towards nostalgia: "Music writers serve as the conscience of the art form. They don’t simply reflect back to fans what they expect or want to hear. This is always important to remember but especially right now when the dominant platforms reward technocrats at the expense of musicians. Music media outlets have a responsibility to push back against these forces of marginalization and homogenization that not only hurt individual artists but weaken the en
"Listeners—especially young ones—are not concerned with what category each track falls under, but instead in how each track makes them feel. The abundance of homemade playlists coupled with the popularity of experimentation has made the fixation on traditional genres akin to insisting that the guy has to pay for dinner on a first date... Organizing music by mood finds promise in one simple fact: some people can’t tell you what genre a song falls under, but everyone can tell you how it makes them feel" - Tiffany Ng points out in her new essay about genre-less times.
h threats to our physical, psychological, and emotional well-being, and in order to feel safe and secure, we’ve had to get a bit more resourceful than usual. Enter dissociation, the response at the root of so much trauma" - Pitchfork introduces its longread about "dissociation culture", including "dissociation music". The author finds examples in songs by Mitski, Drakeo the Ruler, Black Midi, and many more.
Tablet Magazine published an interesting longread about Ariel Pink being cancelled after attending January 6 attempted coup d'état. "Rosenberg’s career is the story of how indie rock purged monsters that the culture had wrongly tolerated—or perhaps it’s the story of how even the most supposedly open sectors of the American creative scene abruptly slammed shut, losing any remaining patience for the complexities and cognitive dissonances that form the bulk of human existence. Both are really the same story, of how American culture got so stupid and so boring so quickly".
Ambient music has risen in popularity, Pitchfork is wondering what will this mean to artists and the genre itself: "There’s something perversely thrilling in the idea that listeners with little to no professed interest in experimental music might be served genuinely outré sounds under the auspices of self-care... But I have also wondered—when these playlists command so many listeners, and are so explicit in their presentation of the music as something to play while you’re doing something else—whether they might end up tipping the delicate balance of Eno’s famous dictate about ambient: away from the interesting and toward the ignorable".
ces by Pitchfork's Jeremy D. Larson: "As one of nearly half a billion people who pay a small fee to rent the vast majority of the history of recorded music—not to mention the 2 billion people per month who use YouTube for free—I have found that, after more than a decade under the influence, it has begun to reshape my relationship with music. I’m addicted to a relationship that I know is very bad for me. I know I am addicted to Spotify the same way I was addicted to nicotine or Twitter. It makes me happy, aggrieved, needlessly defensive". However - "the beauty of the algorithm of your mind is that it makes perfect sense to no one but yourself".
The Face asks whether Coachella is being transformed from a festival into a platform: "As hundreds of thousands influencers and festival-goers flocked to Indio, California for the festival over the past two weeks, an abundance of content surrounding everything except the music flooded the internet. The veil of manufacturing fun and doing things solely for the internet has lifted, begging the question: has Coachella transformed from music festival to content festival with music in the background? And what does that mean for festival style?".
