If 10 men can write 23% of the top hits across seven years, so can 10 women. | | | | Back that sax up: The Sun Ra Arkestra's Danny Thompson in Amsterdam, April 15, 1984.
(Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “If 10 men can write 23% of the top hits across seven years, so can 10 women.”
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| | rantnrave:// You've probably received a steady drip of emails over the past few days from clubs, theaters, museums and any number of other places you patronize explaining what they're doing about the coronavirus. More cleaning and disinfecting than usual. Staff taking extra precautions. Likely canceling or postponing some events where traveling is involved; possibly canceling a lot of events. Most of us will make our own choices from there. Employees, from door people to sound people to cleaning people to bartenders, may not have much choice. Keep them in your thoughts, and in your plans. Give all those places, and all those employees, the benefit of the doubt. If an event is moved or canceled or, maybe most inconveniently of all, it actually takes place, accept the decision and go with the flow. Your inconvenience, my inconvenience, are not the biggest concern right now. Venues owe you cleanliness, honesty and every safety measure they can reasonably offer. They owe you nothing else. (I have mixed feelings about whether they owe you your money back at this exact moment. Airlines should refund your ticket price immediately, no questions asked. The punk club around the corner? Maybe give it a little leeway. SXSW and ULTRA? I confess I don't have a take on that. We're in uncharted territory. I mean, they probably do, eventually. But right now, I don't know, maybe not. Live music companies are taking a beating, along with everyone else, and some are fighting for their lives.) The NBA, meanwhile, has put its entire season on hiatus, after one basketball player tested positive for the virus. An extreme measure and quite possibly the right one. If the hiatus lasts for the rest of the season, it will cost every team in the league seven or eight home games, which, financially speaking, is the equivalent of a venue or promoter losing seven or eight arena concerts. Which is huge. Playoff teams could be giving up twice as many games. But when public health is at stake, what else should matter? If it has to be done, if it should be done, it *can* be done. Assume it will... Writing about anything else seems weird at the moment, but if our spirits could use one thing, it's art. We can share that whether we're quarantining ourselves or not, and we should. (HIPGNOSIS' MERCK MERCURIADIS on the market implications of this particular spiritual need: "Songs are one of the very few precious assets that have little or no correlation to the wider stock market. If you are having the time of your life you are celebrating with music; equally, if you are experiencing challenges, you are escaping with music. Great songs are always being consumed." I threw up a little in my mouth when I read that, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.) Right now, BRANDY CLARK's luxurious-sounding throwback country is hitting me hard, and not just because of the political resonance of the one with RANDY NEWMAN that starts "We're either all the way left or all the way right / The only time we meet in the middle is to fight / The rich get richer, the less get a little more broke." JHENÉ AIKO's deceptively silky R&B, too ("I'm triggered when I see your face / Triggered when I hear your name / Triggered, I am not OK"). This SONNY ROLLINS jam from 1966 (with JIMMY GARRISON and ELVIN JONES) has been playing on repeat for a few weeks here, lifting my soul every time. Consume that... And, yes, do some physical consuming, too, if you can... RIP BRYAN DILWORTH. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Covid-19 has upended both SXSW and Coachella, but more disruptions are on the way as the live music industry scrambles to change course. | | |
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| As festivals like Coachella and SXSW are canceled or postponed due to COVID-19, fans, artists, and organizers face complicated financial repercussions. | | |
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| The wave of South Korean pop culture around the world hasn’t happened by accident - it was a deliberate government plan. And it has even reached North Korea. | | |
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| Why the company's Cayman Islands setup should be closely scrutinized by music's biggest companies. | | |
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| If 10 men can write 23% of the top hits across seven years, so can 10 women. | | |
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| Pittsburgh's punishingly heavy lightning rods on new album 'Underneath.' | | |
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| Asking Marisa Dabice if there's anything she'd like to get off her chest is like tossing a full gas can into a volcano - a slow and deliberate explosion bright beneath the surface. | | |
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| BTS’s secret weapon, Billie Eilish’s merch machine, and more novel ways in which the music industry is reinventing itself. | | |
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| Even with the miraculous Second Coming of vinyl, the prospects for a successful reboot of the record-store drama " High Fidelity " seemed grim. Twenty years after the John Cusack film, nearly 25 after Nick Hornby's novel, the shrines to vinyl depicted in the book and movie are virtually extinct. | | |
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| William Gibson, 17, says he wanted to give the public more options than just singing Happy Birthday. | | |
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| Every era of British dance music has its myths and over-simplified narratives - hell, even little known local scenes have urban legends. | | |
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| Brawling with David Bowie, juvenile delinquency, dealing dope and two dead at Donington. | | |
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| Music manager Ebonie Ward shares how taking a risk helped her become the rep for Atlanta’s biggest artists, including Future, Gunna, Turbo, Wheezy & Freebandz. | | |
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| Dame Dash is an entrepreneur as done by a street brawler. He’s a hustler, he’s brilliant, he’s a bully, he’s a wild man. He’s Harlem through and through. With me he opens up about the worst thing that’s ever happened to him and how it helped him become a truly liberated person and what it’s like to deal with diabetes and what makes him really sad and his time with Aaliyah. | | |
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| Yes, it will be brutal to the performing-arts economy. It’s also necessary. | | |
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| The platform (be it Resonate, Spotify, YouTube, etc.) is not where I think the power ultimately lies within the current record industry. Rather, it rests, as it always has, in the labor of musicians. | | |
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| Rap’s young stars connect with their audience on a deep emotional level -- so it’s especially devastating when they die, as those fans explain. | | |
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| Both Megan Thee Stallion and Carl Crawford would have benefited from increased transparency that the industry needs. | | |
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| Legendary songwriter Burt Bacharach just signed a new publishing deal. | | |
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| Jerry Del Colliano gets the physical media experience again. | | |
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