I often picture releasing an album as trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake—find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away. | | | | Kacey Musgraves at Stagecoach, Indio, Calif., April 28, 2017.
(Christopher Polk/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I often picture releasing an album as trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake—find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away.”
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| | rantnrave:// Make America clickbait again. The better of the two KANYE songs released over the weekend, musically speaking, is the one where he raps about poopy di scoop, scoop diddy whoop and (my favorite) poop di scoopty scoopty whoop. The poopty verse is preceded by a verse that boasts, "This next verse, this next verse though, these bars," and is enunciated so crisply that internet lyric sites will never have to argue about how "scoopty" is spelled. For both of those reasons, the poop talk is genuinely funny, at least by the standards of a sixth grader with preternatural production skills and good comic timing. The other Kanye song, which the RINGER's LINDSAY ZOLADZ accurately crowns this year's "ACCIDENTAL RACIST" ("if the fact of his racism wasn’t an accident at all, but rather dangerously intentional"), recaps a week's worth of Kanye's own tweets while attempting to answer a week's worth of TWITTER comments. Last week, to be specific. It was released Friday night; the earliest it plausibly could been recorded was Thursday. Two thumbs up for that; I eagerly await the Monday afternoon and Tuesday night remixes. But the most notable thing about "YE VS. THE PEOPLE" is that it's framed as a debate between Ye and T.I. ("starring as the people," according the song's parenthesized subtitle), and by any reasonable debate metric, T.I. trounces him. The protagonist loses his own debate. He starts by saying, "Ever since TRUMP won, it proved that I could be president," which is adorably narcissistic and kind of like me saying, "Ever since BUFFALO WILD WINGS became popular, it proved that I could be a chef." He then offers various platitudes about brokering peace, spreading love and flipping political scripts. T.I., fulfilling the role of the people admirably, starts his rebuttal with "Where you tryna go with this?," continues with "You wore a dusty-a** hat to represent the same views as white supremacy, man, we expect better from you," and by the end Kanye isn't even trying to answer him anymore. Instead the star decides to "cut the beat off and let the people talk." As if the people haven't already spoken... P.S. I'm dying to know if T.I. wrote his part himself or if Kanye scripted it for him. I'm not sure which answer would be worse... The best political song released last week is WILLIE NELSON's nonpartisan "ME AND YOU," about friendship between the last two sane people standing in an insane world. It's followed, on Nelson's new album, LAST MAN STANDING, by "SOMETHING YOU GET THROUGH," a Great American Songbook-worthy ballad about surviving loss. An astonishing album from a singer-songwriter who turned 85 on Sunday... Does someone need to build a wall around Nashville to keep pop stars from New York and other immigrants out? With BEBE REXHA and FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE's "MEANT TO BE" becoming the latest in a string of pop/country collaborations to top the country airplay chart, the answer in some quarters is, um, yes. In what other genres are insiders so overtly hostile to contributions from perceived outsiders? (Wait, don't answer that. It might be all of them)... GEORGE CLINTON bows out... ABBA bows in... RIP TED "THE GODFATHER" DEVOUX of BOO-YAA T.R.I.B.E. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | NPR Music |
| Kanye West premieres new songs, "Lift Yourself" and "Ye Vs. The People," following his week of Twitter trolling and political power trips. | | |
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 | Trapital |
| The Dollar & A Dream Tour turned J. Cole's day-ones into lifelong customers. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| The ambient artist’s work is titanic and quiet, eerie and soothing, ghostly and alive. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Instrumental founder Conrad Withey on the potent combination of man and machine (learning) in music. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| As he reaches his 85th year, Nelson is writing, touring and smoking more than ever. His band and family members weigh in on what drives the Red Headed Stranger. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| A new smartphone app brings Irv Teibel’s recordings capturing the crisp call of birds, the foamy wash of the sea, and crickets at dusk to a modern audience. | | |
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 | XXL |
| He encourages love and positivity while practicing the words he preaches. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| Have you noticed the silence? I realize the other guy releasing an album 6/1 has been drowning out everybody else anyway, but the contrast is instructive: Whereas Kanye West is doing everything he can to rankle and entrance the masses, his fellow media-savvy cult of personality Josh Tillman hasn't made a peep. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| At record labels, catalogue and frontline used to be church and state - rarely mixing. But streaming is blurring the lines, and Tom Mullen’s role as VP of catalogue marketing for Atlantic Records is a further expansion of this trend. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Country newcomers this year were easier to spot than ever. Once relegated to the shadow of commercial powerhouses at Stagecoach, an innovative new performance space put a spotlight on a contemporary country class. | | |
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 | KCRW |
| The boys in New Edition were basketball fans from Boston - Celtics country. So what happened when they hung out with the L.A. Lakers in a music video during the height of the 1980s Celtics/Lakers rivalry? | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| In one of his first post-jail interviews, the rapper discusses the effect his ordeal had on his family and how to change an unjust system. | | |
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 | Dae Bogan Music |
| I just spent the last hour giving a copyright law and music publishing crash course to a Principal Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office who’s tasked with determining the economic impact of the revised Music Modernization Act. | | |
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 | The Trichordist |
| It appears that through the use of proxies and two-faced lobbying DiMA is trying to abrogate the entire compromise by stripping out the Pre-1972 and producer/mixer protections. | | |
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 | Vox |
| "Before the MGM brass flew in, Kubrick said, ‘Get this much money and buy all the classical music you can find downtown.’" | | |
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 | The Undefeated |
| He’s a man of faith, plays the organ and the keytar — and creates huge hits with stars like Gucci Mane, Nicki Minaj and the Migos. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| One relic from the heyday of boy bands that I’m not interested in seeing again: the repression of members’ sexuality in pursuit of fame. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| "I Like It" is an inarguable hit, but its sample invokes a history of the industry exoticizing songs sung in Spanish. Burger King is involved somehow. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| ‘No one gets entangled without consequences,’ QBA once rapped. | | |
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 | Dancing Astronaut |
| DA's editors and alums sit down to reflect on Avicii's incredible career, and also share the impact he had on their own lives. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "A Grid of Points," out now on Kranky. |
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