Input analyses Kanye West's career as it was mirrored in his fashion: "Kanye has curated his aesthetic universe to be one of the most recognizable in the music industry. His relationships with music and fashion have not only been symbiotic within his own life, but with the streetwear landscape around him. While the Yeezy label carves Kanye’s imprint within luxury fashion, he uses his merch as a creative playground, transforming each album into collectible garments. The lasting impact of Kanye’s merch has less to do with the artist himself, but more so with the creative ecosystem he creates around each project, and the aesthetic footprint it leaves behind". West's listening event for his still-unreleased album on August 5 proves the point - with 40,000 ticketed guests, it raked in $7 million from merch sales, breaking the record for highest-grossing U.S. tour.

"Some of 2021's most hyped albums are from Pop Smoke, DMX and now, Aaliyah. So what's the difference between honouring a legacy and cashing in?" - The Face asks in its new article, inspired by the latest Anderson .Paak tattoo. "Putting out new records that are often assembled from scraps to sit in their discographies is an act of legacy trampling. It is the capitalist pursuit of squeezing a person’s commercial potential for every last bit of juice. Yet it’s not impossible to put out unreleased recordings in a way that feels appropriate, egalitarian even" - The Face insists.

"The first songs to express personal emotions and individual aspirations appeared more than 3,000 years ago in Deir el-Medina, a village on the west bank of the Nile. By seeming coincidence this was also the location of the first successful labor protest in history, when artisans launched a sit-down strike that forced 'management' - Ramesses III in this instance - to increase grain rations. Is it just by chance that a major musical innovation and a historic expansion in human rights took place in the very same (and tiny) community?" - music writer Ted Gioia asks in his great article about the connection of art and activism.

At its best, moshing is a visceral and collective experience, a physical way to match the energy of the music you’re witnessing with the feeling it gives you. When done right (and safely), there is a willful exchange of bodily autonomy in the mosh pit — it’s a relinquishing of a certain amount of control of where your body goes and moves, a step into chaos, a pushing and pulling motion that mirrors the intensity of what’s happening on stage. At its best, there should be a feeling of respect in the pit; everyone is there for a similar reason: to enjoy live music in a visceral and cathartic way" - Consequence points out in an essay about the art of dancing in a punk show.

“It was like, ‘I can be comfortable and out and gay, or I can do country music, but I definitely can’t do both’” - one gay country artist told Rolling Stone about the dichotomy that now appears to be falling apart. There are several that have come out recently - Brooke Eden, T.J. Osborne, Lily Rose, Shelly Fairchild - without jeopardizing their careers.

"Most amps sound better at volumes loud enough to fray the edge of notes with the subtle distortion that is to electric guitars what makeup is to a drag queen of a certain age... We seem to love broken voices in general: vocal cords eroded by whiskey and screaming, the junked-out weakness of certain horn players, distortion which signifies surpassing the capabilities of a tube or a speaker—voices that distort, damage, but (at least in performance) don’t actually die" - guitarist Marc Ribot makes the case for loud music in the Literary Hub.

Pitchfork goes into the sensitive issue of music ownership: "The reality that behind every young, female pop star exists a team eager to exploit that stardom by any means necessary has not exactly been obscure throughout pop history. The shadow of the svengali producer and manager, long solidified in the work of men like Phil Spector, Porter Wagoner, and Kim Fowley, lingers in the edges of the modern industry... But 2021 feels like a breaking point for a public understanding of industry control that stretches far beyond singular producer-artist dynamics or bad contracts. As high-profile artists like Britney Spears and estates like Aaliyah’s battle for control and fight off their respective leeches, they illustrate the ways in which a musician can be dehumanized to function as a kind of corporation, one through which a staff of bad actors can rotate, or be sold off in parts to the highest bidder".

"The 29-year-old rapper really stepped in it, and continued to smear it all over the place, when on July 25th during the Rolling Loud Miami music festival he made some truly vile comments about gay men and people living with HIV... After his clusterfuck of faux-pologies, DaBaby’s left those in the queer community no choice but to demand dollars... We don’t need apologies. We’re tired of apologies. To be Black and queer in this country is to constantly have to apologize for your own presence, to constantly assert your own value, and to constantly watch others dismiss you entirely. An apology ain’t doing shit for anybody. Instead, speak the only language that carries weight in this country: cold hard cash" - Rolling Stone gets to the bottom line with DaBaby.

Vulture Craig Jenkins looks beyond DaBaby being dropped from Lollapalooza after some public homophobic comments: "The connectivity the internet allows made it so people who grew up siloed in their like-minded communities now have to hear from the people on the margins, and the people on the margins got smart and organized and are starting to creep into positions of power and greater visibility, and the blowback for this has been unsubtle and retrograde and base and disgusting. A lot of people want things to stay the way they used to be and seem unable to grasp that the way things were required marginalized people to suck it up and live as second-class citizens in a country clearly built for someone else. There’s no going back to sucking it up. Here’s the thing: This ends one of two ways. We all die hating each other, or we start acting like other people exist and are deserving of the same respect and consideration that we demand for ourselves".

Canada established a government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system in the late 1800s, with the goal of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease - nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students were reported, along with 3,200 documented deaths. Guardian presents Canadian rappers coming from the indigenous communities who are using their music as a tool of recovery for themselves and their communities.

"What do musicians who blend fact and fiction owe their real life subjects?" - NPR's Ann Powers writes exploring "self-referential musicians making waves in 2021 not only because so many notable current songs tread this ethically shaky ground between self and other, true and imagined, but because that's what songwriters who perform their own work have been doing for at least a half-century... What unites these artworks is a thrilling immediacy that comes at the risk of their makers' dignity and their close companions' right to anonymity". A clever text about the sensitive issue.

"Electric and acoustic guitar sounds have spread onto more hip-hop records, through an assortment of production techniques, including an increased employment of loops and loop makers, who create short melodies for producers to build beats around" - Vice points out the new trend in hip-hop production. "On the Polo G’s latest album, 'Hall of Fame', nearly half of the 20 songs include a guitar sound in the beat. On H.E.R.'s 'Find a Way' the R&B artist H.E.R. uses a crystalline electric guitar as a canvas for her voice. On J. Cole's 'Pride is the Devil', a simple and somber guitar riff carries the beat"...

New figures out of the US this week suggest that biggest hits are increasingly becoming smaller, Music Business Worldwide suggests, based on the latest streaming figures. The industry’s biggest streaming hit at the mid-year point of 2021 is significantly smaller than its biggest streaming hit at the mid-year point of 2020, of 2019, and of 2018. The biggest hit of H1 2021 in the US was Olivia Rodrigo’s 'drivers license', which attracted 460 million on-demand audio streams during the six months. In 2020 the biggest hit was Roddy Ricch’s 'The Box' with 728 million streams in the first half of the year, the prior year it was Lil Nas X’s 'Old Town Road' with 596 million streams, whereas in 2018 Drake’s 'God’s Plan' pulled in 655 million audio streams. This is all especially odd, of course, when you consider the massive growth in streaming’s popularity between 2017 and 2021. MBW offers a few explanations - it's a Covid-inspired anomaly, or maybe people are listening more to catalog music (older than year and a half).

"Morgan Wallen's 'Dangerous' is far and away the biggest album of 2021 in the US so far: It has netted 241,000 album sales and 2.3 billion audio streams, blowing out of the water any of the runner-ups" - Rolling Stone looks back at the numbers of the album stained by the racial slur scandal. What does that mean?: "Wallen is not a dysmorphic product of a toxic genre or niche fanbase growing like fungus in the armpit of some much healthier and more noble thing. He’s America. America loves him. Nobody wants to say it".

Black Music and Black Muses writer affirms the beauty of whistling; a great essay on the pretty little skill: "What superfluous love and mischief lurks in a sudden whistle? What calling into being of what playfulness and what hysteria travels on the thin wavering line between gasp and gust we call whistling, a form of telling ourselves secrets in public, a polite diversion from the blankness of it all... Why not let lips pressed together lightly and spiraling the air into witness be friendly? What malice is there in absent-minded desire? Why not objectify one another on a whim and improvise high-pitched windows into the atmosphere to say hello. Why do we feel entitled to the hyper-reverent silence of monasteries as we pass the living on sidewalks, in cities, full of synaptic impossibilities that only noise can heal or render as ease instead of shame?".

A fun little post by the Tone Glow blog about each of their writers anonymously “gifting” each other an album they like and then writing their thoughts on what they receive. None of the writers knew who would receive their album, and none knew who their gift was from. It's 23 albums of experimental-meets-fun music.

Jezebel analyses Starbucks' history in music, from its humble starts to the million-making business: "The Starbucks compilations were utterly suburban in feel. Neat, inoffensive, and modern in their convenience, they presented a skin-deep assessment of the genres they represented. They gestured toward what it was to be cultured while requiring none of the time or work it actually took to be so. They commodified the grit of the ’60s coffeehouse and encased it in plastic".

"Millions of listeners now subscribe to lo-fi hip-hop playlists to relax, study, chill, and sleep. Its popularity has spawned a DIY business opportunity. Companies like Lofi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) have carved out their own lane, launched their own record labels, built an independent brand of merch, products, playlists, and more" - Trapital says presenting Music Ally's piece about the chill-hop genre.

"The question of control has surrounded Britney Spears from the start of her career. How much was she being manipulated by the powerful men who stood to profit from her image? To what extent was her existence manufactured by the demands of the system around her?" - The New Yorker asks in a long-read after the disturbing testimony pop star gave at the Los Angeles court about her conservatorship. "Many of the most harrowing revelations in her testimony had been visible to anyone who cared to look closely. She told the court that she’d wanted to express them for a long time but had been afraid to do so in public - 'I thought people would make fun of me'”.

Streaming gives the artists an opportunity to break out from obscurity, but makes it exponentially more difficult to have a follow-up hit. That’s because like so many other viral hits, the song, not the artist, became the asset - Vox writer Charlie Harding says in an interesting essay about the artist and the album in the age of never-ending flow of music. “Streaming is a great way to make an artist faceless” - says Lucas Keller, the CEO of the entertainment management company Milk & Honey, who adds - “the song becomes bigger than the artist”. Emily Warren, who has written hits for Dua Lipa and the Chainsmokers among many others, said that she knows songwriters with hundreds of millions of streams and Grammy nominations who still drive Uber for a living. But she says that a songwriter with just two big radio hits is set up to retire.

Sun Ra liked "the new", whether it be instruments, words, genres - The New Yorker points out in a profile about the innovator. He gave instruments new names, like the “space-dimension mellophone", the “cosmic tone organ" and the “sunharp", whereas his band the Arkestra weren't musicians, they were "tone scientists". Sun Ra himself was an exploratory soul - “the impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change". This spring, the Chicago gallery and publisher Corbett vs. Dempsey reproduced a series of Sun Ra poetry booklets: 'Jazz by Sun Ra',' 'Jazz in Silhouette', and 'The Immeasurable Equation'.

An obvious question, for years now, which nobody has loudly set, to the very clever and way-too-serious Pitchfork writers (or, maybe, should its owner Conde Nast answer it?!). "Pitchfork is devoid of personality to a startling degree, especially in a pop culture magazine" music journalist and critic Wayne Robbins argues, defining Pitchfork texts "as post-humor assertions of importance regarding artists no one outside a young cohort of music nerds would find meaningful or important". What the P lacks, Robbins is certain, are expressions of personalities: "There isn't a single critic at this magazine that has a distinctive, look-forward-to-reading style or personality. And I bet you could make a substantial list with names of writers who are capable, but for some reason can't, or won't, let their freak flag fly".

A great read in the NPR about the 1971 Joni Mitchell album 'Blue', and women who helped make it, as well as about Miles Davis' 1959 album 'Kind Of Blue' and all the men who contributed to it. The bottom line of the article: "It's interesting to think about why people decide some works of art can change their lives".

Rolling Stone has a great long-read about the Chinese (indie-)rock scene, going back decades to Black Panther, Yu Quan, and He Yong. Today, it's Beijing that holds the country's highest-profile rock scene, with Southern cities Wuhan and Chengdu boasting fertile punk and post-punk scenes, due in part to their large university communities. RS emphasizes radical sincerity of Chinese rock, which Ricky Maymi, guitarist of the San Francisco group the Brian Jonestown Massacre, describes this way: “The musicians in the Chinese rock scene are finding a place to put ideas and feelings where otherwise, in their culture, they wouldn’t have a place. This music has real heart, devoid of any kind of irony. That gives it a built-in power, a magic that Western music hasn’t had for a long time".

The strategies of the Big Three record labels - Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and Sony Music Entertainment (SME) - dictate the future, even for companies outside of the major label system. They are investing billions of dollars to keep your attention for as long as possible. Their moves signal the best opportunities, and the areas getting slept on - Trapital's Dan Runcie goes behind the moves of the labels which hold 69% of the recorded music revenue.

"Anime in particular is extremely popular across Latin America, but it has a special significance in Mexico, with a history dating back nearly 60 years" - Bandcamp goes to explain the influence of anime on Mexican underground music. "In 1964, 'Astroboy' was the first Japanese animated series to be dubbed and broadcast in Mexico, becoming a fixture of network television and followed in subsequent years by 'Speed Racer' and 'Captain Tsubasa'... Large Japanese diasporas in Peru and Brazil were also quick to embrace anime, as rapidly growing syndication blocks paved the way for Latin America’s golden age of anime and manga in the ‘90s".

The Face looks into the revival of pop punk with artists such as Machine Gun Kelly, Meet Me @ The Altar, Pinkshift, Lil Uzi Vert, and others, yet this time around the ecology of the genre is different. The artists breaking through 15 years ago were almost exclusively straight, white and male. But the new wave of pop-punk artists coming from many sides of society are eager to make the scene a safe space.

NFTs for music won’t really take off until (1) income streams are attached to the token, or (2) the owner’s name is commemorated (and displayed prominently) in a sufficiently elitist master-of-the-world manner - music writer Ted Gioia offers his opinions on NFTs, and raises some possibilities:

1. A band could sell shares in its music, with potential for spinning off ownership of individual musicians as separate tokens
2. Artists could do mergers
3. Artists would be free to issue new shares
4. When artists run into career problems, they could turn to their powerful billionaire owners for help in resolving them
5. Fans would have endless opportunities for demonstrating their loyalty
6. Artists would face the complex financial trade-offs

Chicago drill was one of the most thriving rap scenes in the country, until local government and police tried to force it out of the city" - Complex writes introducing the controversial genre. BBC explores the rising popularity of drill music as well as rising debates over its links to violence.

A great text by the American jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia about how he worked as a fixer in the 1990s. He looks back into an episode from China where he had to find an "honest broker" - "true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need—a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever—they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks. And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently—you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings". A great read!