We weren’t aspiring to be like a rap group per se. We were chasing after Marvin [Gaye]; Stevie [Wonder]; Earth, Wind & Fire. We really wanted to have great musicality in our sound. | | | | A Tribe Called Quest's Pfife, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (from left) checking the low end, perhaps, in a New York studio, Sept. 10, 1991.
(Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | | “We weren’t aspiring to be like a rap group per se. We were chasing after Marvin [Gaye]; Stevie [Wonder]; Earth, Wind & Fire. We really wanted to have great musicality in our sound.”
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| | rantnrave:// There's a great anecdote in this WAX POETICS oral history of A TRIBE CALLED QUEST's 1990 debut, PEOPLE'S INSTINCTIVE TRAVELS AND THE PATHS OF RHYTHM, in which ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD describes crate-digging in New York's Greenwich Village with his bandmate Q-TIP and AFRIKA BABY BAM of the JUNGLE BROTHERS. "We’d go back and listen to the good finds and several bad ones and try to remember the players on the good ones and different producers who might have been linked to one artist or another," Muhammad recalls. "One record we’d find and say, 'Wow. That’s dope!' A player played a certain style on a record and then we’d go find another artist they worked with." A scene from the golden age of liner notes. Instinctive travels through real-world hyperlinks, in which you couldn't click on the name of a producer or bassist but you could look through some books and magazines, or ask around, or go back to the record store and find your way to other records with the same names on them. And then follow your personal paths of rhythm to other work by other people on those records. And so on, until you had the beginnings of a really good sample library, or maybe just a really good record collection. And earfuls of knowledge. I happened across that anecdote the same day SPOTIFY announced it's new songwriter pages—a space on the SPOTIFY FOR ARTISTS website, clickable to and from the Spotify app, in which the service is inviting songwriters like JUSTIN TRANTER and TEDDY GEIGER to showcase their complete works. In an ecosystem in which songwriters are paid poorly compared to their performing artist peers and in which credits and other liner-note information are still a long way from being usefully integrated, it's a welcome idea, with potential benefits to songwriters and users alike. For now, the feature, still in beta, comprises only a handful of pages for a handful of writers, and the presentation is awkward at best. The pages aren't actually in the Spotify app, and they aren't searchable. To find them, via either the desktop or mobile app, you have to navigate to individual song credits, which Spotify does a pretty good job of hiding, and click on a songwriter's name, which will take you out of the app and onto the Spotify for Artists site, where you can click on a songwriter's self-curated playlist or individual songs, which will immediately take you back to the app. If you were building a service from scratch, I'm pretty sure this isn't how you'd do it. And yet. On the other hand, this is, as far as I know, the first time a major streaming service has made its credits linkable, and the first genuinely new, non-algorithmic route for navigating the streaming world's endless forest of tracks that any such service has introduced in quite some time. There's still a chance to get it right for the benefit of the next Q-Tip... A couple days ago, LAURA SNAPES, the GUARDIAN's deputy music editor, got into a friendly TWITTER back-and-forth with the 1975's MATTY HEALY about gender representation at music festivals. The discussion was triggered by the READING & LEEDS FESTIVAL's lineup announcement (headliners: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, STORMZY, LIAM GALLAGHER; also featuring: lots of other men). Snapes took Rage, in particular, to task for presumably not demanding gender equality on the bill, and then challenged Healy to "add a condition to your rider that says you’ll only play festivals that commit to X% (ideally 50%!) acts that include women and non binary performers." With little hesitation, Healy said yes. "Take this as me signing a contract," he tweeted. And shortly after that: "I’m sure my agents are having kittens right now but times up man." Amazing. That's exactly how you do it. Men of rock, men of hip-hop, men of country, men of everything else: It's time to make sure your agents are having kittens, too. Tell them Matty sent you. Not me. That other Matty. I'm pretty sure his name will carry more weight... There's a GOFUNDME to help Malian musician BALLAKÉ SISSOKO replace the kora that he says TSA agents destroyed (the agency denies it messed with the valuable instrument)... And here's a story of a classical player's rare grand piano destroyed under very different circumstances. No foul play, but no less tragic... That time a Washington state trooper pulled over a recording studio for speeding... Rage Against the Machine may not care about gender equality at festivals, but the reunited band does care about ticket scalpers and counterfeiters... RIP VICTOR OLAIYA, PAUL ENGLISH and JAMES CARMICHAEL. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| “It’s amazing how a company most have never heard of can bring the U.S. music industry to its knees,” said one label exec struggling to get his artists’ records into stores. | | |
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| Is Spotify an audio company? And what is happening in the “rest of the world”? | | |
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| Beyonce Mass is an opportunity to make black women’s experiences the center of Christanity -- through Beyonce’s music. | | |
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| The Dallas rapper found fame with viral dance moves. Now he’s slicing and dicing music into post-song creations ripe for TikTok and Triller. | | |
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| Following criticism of Reading and Leeds festival for its heavily male lineup, frontman Matt Healy says ‘this is how male artists can be true allies.’ | | |
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| Take it from a Gen Xer: You might be slowing down some, but live rock music is still as vital as it ever was | | |
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| Carol Kaye started as a jazz solo guitarist, working the club scene of 1950s LA, when she was asked to work on some studio tracks for Sam Cooke. Though she loved the bebop jazz scene, Carol was a single mother with three kids and so to the studios she went, eventually switching to bass. | | |
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| Agency Space150's bot, trained on the rapper's actual music, has an odd obsession with food. | | |
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| Hulu’s "High Fidelity" reboot captures the end of elitist condescension and the rise of fervent eclecticism. | | |
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| Everyone's doing their best. | | |
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| Half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?” the band and their collaborators look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement. | | |
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| The guitarist of Rihanna’s favourite band muses on UFOs, grief and whether Billie Eilish is the biggest rockstar in 2020. | | |
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| A multimedia project by Vince Lawrence retraces four eras that shaped the city's sound, from 1955 to 1990. | | |
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| The best hip-hop songs -- but where are all the women rappers? | | |
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| Nue Agency Founder and CEO Jesse Kirshbaum talked about his company’s transition from talent to brand partnerships. | | |
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| The musician BFFs are bringing their movie about the making of a movie about musician BFFs to SXSW. | | |
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| Bill talks with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters to discuss his inspirations, timeless music, the concept of a band, touring in vans, kids’ relationship with music today, and much more. | | |
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| Medusa Sunbeach Festival, Arenal Sound, Viña Rock, Mad Cool and Primavera Sound were 2019’s top five festivals, attracting crowds between 220,000 and 315,000. | | |
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| Technology is one of the great drivers of musical change, and often one of its least understood. In this episode, we will explore the synthesizer, looking closely at the history of this ubiquitous (and often debated) piece of musical technology, and investigating how and why it was first used in a variety African musics. | | |
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| Holden Matthews was emulating Norwegian black metal musicians who burned down churches in the early 1990s, prosecutors say. | | |
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| | | | | | | From "The Low End Theory" (1991). |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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