Charles Blow and Terence Blanchard's 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' opera opens the Metropolitan Opera season on Sept. 27. It will be the first operatic performance in the house since the pandemic shutdown 18 months ago, and the first opera by a Black musician presented at the Met in its 138 years. "I'm not the only one that was qualified throughout that history" - Blanchard told Bloomberg.
"We aim to build a sisterhood of young people by providing an inclusive, non-judgemental, safe space for musical and creative expression... We’re much more than a charity, or a music project: we’re a supportive community" - Young Women's Music Project presents itself. It helps young women learn about and perform music and all the issues around it, via gigs, workshops, talks, training and more. Via Music Journalism Insider.
There's a clear divide between the old industry and the new industry when it comes to gender and race issues, publicist dr. Lucy O'Brien says in Music Journalism Insider interview. "Power in the old industry was consolidated in a very male-dominated network across the major labels and in live music. It was a kind of power that put the onus on women to use their sexuality to increase sales, and in that sort of reductive environment women found it difficult to progress as artists" - O'Brien says about the "old industry", whereas "the new industry that has grown with the arrival of the internet is much more exciting and diverse, with women less reliant on major labels to get their music heard. Now all kinds of voices are coming through".
"Imagine that, being black and disabled. That's a double drama. It's like your voice is not heard in a double way" - Rick Velasquez of the rap duo 4 Wheel City told BBC about being a black person and being disabled in the USA. "It's like you're doing a double life sentence" - his partner Namel Norris says. However, they have received global acclaim and raised the prominence of Krip-Hop - a sub-genre of Hip-Hop which puts disabled matters front and centre and lets them express the "double drama" of being in two minority groups. Both have been disabled in accidents - Velasquez was shot by a stray bullet while he was coming back from school, and Norris was shot by his cousin who was playing with a gun.
"This past week alone, the hip-hop world loudly celebrated Black voices at the BET Awards, in popular interview podcasts, and during Monday night’s Verzuz battle. But the industry continues to be silent on its own transgressions: Those same platforms have also conspicuously amplified the voices of men accused of abusing Black women. In reflexively offering praise and visibility to such figures, hip-hop institutions implicitly condone their alleged behavior. This support reflects a pattern apparent across the music industry of protecting, and even uplifting, men facing serious allegations of assault against women - particularly against Black women" - The Atlantic brings out a serious issue.
COVID-19 is not a sexually transmitted disease, but it hampers all forms of human contact and is cruelly depriving. This is a moment for everyone, whatever their sexual orientation, to acknowledge how diminished life is when touch, closeness and affection is risky and unsafe, whether due to oppression or infection - Ludvig-van.com writes in a spot-on introduction of the article about the homosexuality of Leonard Bernstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
REDEF has set up a praiseworthy thread about the LGBTQIA community's influence on popular music - From jazz and blues to punk and disco to pop and techno, the past century of music is all but impossible to imagine without the influence, inspiration and point of view of LGBTQIA artists. Even when their lives were invisible, their music was loud and clear and everywhere.
Women's music was born, NPR argues, in May of 1969 when Maxine Feldman wrote a song 'Angry Atthis' about the very injustices and indignities that, one month later, would lead to the Stonewall Riots, the uprising credited with kickstarting the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Since then, there were plenty of women, singing about women - Linda Tillery, God-Des & She, Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman - in an effort to make the world fairer place.
