If you’re overly precious about something you’ll kill it. | | | | Miles Davis circa 1970.
(Express Newspapers/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | | “If you’re overly precious about something you’ll kill it.”
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| | rantnrave:// Twenty-plus years ago, when THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G., NAS and the WU-TANG CLAN ruled the boroughs of NEW YORK, when SUPER BOWL halftime meant PATTI LABELLE, DIANA ROSS or (I kid you not) the BLUES BROTHERS, and when people bought records at record stores, I got what I believe qualifies as my first job in the music industry, at MUZE. We supplied the kiosks where people at those record stores could find out which MILES DAVIS album(s) "FOOTPRINTS" was on and who played drums on it. The info was there because someone at Muze literally typed every name on every album into our system. Shoutout to all my amazing friends—musicians, writers, indie label founders, coders—who passed through those cubicles. We cracked a lot of CD booklets. We followed strict rules. Acoustic instruments before electric instruments. High strings before low strings. We argued details. We double-checked each other's work. We took mandatory one-hour lunches so the data could be backed up every day. And we wound up with more raw information about the people who make records, as far as I can tell, than any record company or anyone else in the biz had. But we didn't capture songwriter information at first, so we eventually embarked on an overtime project to double back and type into the system who wrote, like, every song ever. You can imagine how quixotic that enterprise was, and if you can't, trust me, it was worse than that. Frustrating, too. Reliable songwriting info doesn't grow on trees and it didn't grow on CD booklets either. Who was this L. JORDAN guy? How were we supposed to know he was the same as that other L. JORDAN? Or if this "NY STATE OF MIND" was the same as that "NY STATE OF MIND"? Why hadn't anyone put this info on the WORLD WIDE WEB yet? What was the World Wide Web? Would anyone *ever* put this on the WWW? I think about those days every time someone talks about collecting all these names in a connected database on the blockchain or in SPOTIFY or anywhere else, or when a service like Spotify actually goes ahead and tries to do it. The stakes are greater in the digital era, where reliable, cross-referenced songwriter data is crucial to the L. Jordans of the world getting properly paid. Various interested parties are trying to make it happen, or asking other interested parties to make it happen. Yet it still doesn't exist. Which is why it still seems like we can never be certain who wrote this FRANK OCEAN song or that IGGY AZALEA song. Do the people cutting the checks know? Do their labels? Do the artists? Is there a group of people from every corner of the business sitting in a dark underground room right now trying to make it happen? Is there a style guide? Is there a deadline?... Make your own SPOTIFY recommendation algorithm... This RHYE song... Everything that's wrong with TICKETMASTER's VERIFIED FAN ticketing, according to (oops, the article neglected to mention this) the executive director of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF TICKET BROKERS... Homeward bound: PAUL SIMON bids farewell to the road... RIP DJ TANGO. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| In Myanmar, a thriving punk scene has emerged in response to an authoritarian government. | | |
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| A strained "Star-Spangled Banner," a decaf flat white of a halftime show and, of course, the advertisements: Super Bowl LII's musical moments were legion, if often little else. | | |
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| The pop star has taken a beating from critics for the mawkish (but totally fine!) ’Man Of The Woods.’’ | | |
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| A letter to the Recording Academy’s board of trustees signed by six of the industry’s most powerful women calls the organization “woefully out of touch.” | | |
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| "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains" has a young heart, a bold attitude, and an enduring message of resistance. | | |
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| The move spotlights one of streaming’s biggest problems: how to identify and pay songwriters and producers. | | |
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| We went to the premiere of ‘Hello World’, the first album written and produced by Artificial Intelligence. | | |
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| After a government crackdown on hip-hop culture and tattoos on Chinese television, the music industry in China reacts with cautious optimism. | | |
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| News of ‘mind-blowing’ Prince music on the way isn’t the first time rumors of posthumous unheard songs have been teased from beyond the grave. | | |
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| Hold up, wait a minute … the Eagles were never finished once they adopted the jailed rapper’s communal anthem | | |
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| | | always crashing in the same car |
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| “I learned that I’m a powerful woman because I don’t have to say much to be heard.” | | |
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| In 1981, a band of six studio musicians from North Hollywood tried to record an album's worth of hits to save their flailing relationship with their label, Columbia Records. It worked: "Toto IV," released in April 1982, went triple-Platinum, generated the band's first top 10 hits on the Hot 100 since their 1977 debut, and helped Toto win a stunning six awards at the 1983 Grammys. | | |
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| The Beach Boys' " God Only Knows" is now considered one of the greatest recordings in rock history, but when it was released in 1966, it never climbed higher than No. 39 on Billboard's Hot 100. | | |
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| Up to now, a way to help those with misophonia--a sensitivity to sound--wasn’t available. Now researchers think they might have found a solution in cognitive behavioral therapy. | | |
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| The musical children of pop stars. | | |
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| Athens, Georgia, is famous for a few things: The Bulldogs, The National, and a musical legacy that has transformed the city from a sleepy college town to a cultural mecca. And this man is at the right place, at the right time. | | |
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| (Now that rock bands are out of style.) | | |
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| He’s one of the greatest MCs of all time. How'd he become such a monstrous talent? What are his favorite words? What makes Thought who he is? I dig into all of that and more. | | |
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| Part salesman, part evangelist, David Van Koevering did more than perhaps any other to spread the gospel of Moog synthesizers. | | |
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| The synth-pop singer talks to his friend and fellow DIY star about finding a place for himself and the authenticity of Bhad Bhabie. | | |
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| | | | | | | Written by W.C. Handy and Margaret Gregory in 1929. |
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| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
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