As a 100% black owned company that employs minorities and immigrants we are hereby at your service... We will continue to monitor and demand that all corporations and individuals in the LVRN network that benefit from our culture and music speak up. | | | | Nina Simone in London circa 1966.
(David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “As a 100% black owned company that employs minorities and immigrants we are hereby at your service... We will continue to monitor and demand that all corporations and individuals in the LVRN network that benefit from our culture and music speak up.”
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| | rantnrave:// My soundtrack this weekend was the music of Black women from BESSIE SMITH and BILLIE HOLIDAY to SISTER ROSETTA THARPE and NINA SIMONE to BEYONCÉ and LEIKELI47. A century's worth of shared roots, shared pain, shared notes, shared stories, shared transcendence, shared protest. I'd like to say their music lifted me through this awful moment in America, but I'd be lying. I'm not lifted. But theirs were the voices I needed to hear, reminders of where this country has been and what this country is, reminders of the art that has connected us, moved us, taught us, soothed us, provoked us and, often, lifted us. I'm a privileged recipient of all of that, a cultural beneficiary of an experience I've never lived. Black music, my friend PIOTR ORLOV writes in a must-read essay on Black protest and Black culture, was "the first musical art-form original to the United States," and it was born of "a desire to express oneself within a society that did not want to hear any of what you had to say. A society that, in many cases, did not regard you as fully human." The irony is almost deafening, and it's hard to see what's happening in Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere without hearing its roar. Black blues and jazz, Orlov notes, is "the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years—paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music (hip-hop, house and techno and electro) which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century." And, because all of that is rooted in the Black American experience—this is the important part—"we don’t get to have this music without the burden that preceded it." Bessie Smith bore that burden. Nina Simone bore that burden. Beyoncé still does. Their music confers a responsibility on their listeners. Read this. Please... Under the banner BLACK OUT TUESDAY, the US music industry is largely shutting down for 24 hours in memory of GEORGE FLOYD and in solidarity with those protesting his death. All the major labels are participating in a day of industry silence along with indie labels, publishers, distributors and more. INTERSCOPE announced that it's also blacking out its entire release schedule for this Friday, and UNIVERSAL MUSIC chairman LUCIAN GRAINGE told his staff he's creating a task force "to accelerate our efforts in areas such as inclusion and social justice" and to use "the power of our astonishingly vast catalog to effect change." MusicREDEF will be going silent, too. There will no Tuesday newsletter. We'll return on Wednesday. #TheShowMustBePaused... RIP CHARLIE MONTTANA, BOB KULICK and GABRIEL BACQUIER. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Blues and jazz are the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years - paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century. And the Black experience is the DNA of these musics - meaning that we don't get to have this music without the burden that preceded it. | | |
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| As the far right makes headlines with its perversion of "boogaloo," there's renewed opportunity to learn about the word's real history. The word's racist cooptation by the far-right has a strange irony: boogaloo was developed by and for black and brown communities. | | |
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| The collective fury over the death of George Floyd, who was suffocated by a Minnesota police officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest in Minneapolis, has prompted the music industry to take a united stand on Tuesday, June 2. | | |
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| Artists from Minneapolis and St. Paul talk about the history of racism that led up to George Floyd’s killing by police and the protests that have followed. | | |
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| 46-year-old unarmed George Floyd who was killed by Minneapolis police earlier this week once rapped with DJ Screw’s legendary Houston crew. | | |
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| Jesse Bernard weighs up the future. | | |
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| Natty Kasambala interviews the women who work at No Signal about growth, inclusivity and the freedom of being able to revel in their blackness at work. | | |
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| I had to go to Minneapolis. I needed to be right there on 38th Street and Chicago where George Floyd 's life was tragically stolen from him. I needed to see the people in that community - how much love they had for their community and their people and how much pain this has caused. | | |
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| "Society gives you privilege just for being white," Eilish wrote, praising Black Lives Matter's leadership in protests over George Floyd's death. | | |
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| While some rappers have actually hit the streets in protest, including Mysonne, J. Cole, Nick Cannon, Lil Yachty, Lil Tjay and more, others have been helping out from home. | | |
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| "On the Record," the new HBO Max documentary about sexual assault allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons is a powerful - and complicated - look at what’s at stake for black women who come forward with claims of sexual abuse. | | |
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| The K-pop industry says it’s opening its doors to include more diversity. But at an NYC training center full of non-Korean hopefuls, dreams of stardom keep colliding with reality. | | |
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| Last week was evidence of a slow and peculiar shift in the relationship between fans and the musicians they love over the last decade. | | |
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| Free at last: Christian rapper, entrepreneur and label CEO Lacrae moves from the comforts of Columbia to Reach Records with his new album and single. | | |
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| As a new government taskforce meets to suggest ways to rescue the UK's cultural scene following the impact of the coronavirus lockdown, a number of figures from the live music industry have spoken out to demand more clarity and support in order to survive. | | |
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| It’s in no one’s interest for a billion-pound industry to fail - which is why the new culture taskforce hits all the wrong notes. | | |
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| Sorting through the rubble of music venues damaged in rioting and looting late Thursday night into early Friday morning, the Hexagon Bar in south Minneapolis was gutted by fire, and the Turf Club in St. Paul was looted and flooded by sprinkler damage. The Hook & Ladder Theatre — where George Floyd and Derek Chauvin may have met — appears to be structurally intact. | | |
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| "The High Note" points out a lack of older women represented on the charts, but it’s forgetting a couple divas. | | |
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| | | | | | | "They pick and choose what's equal / Who's good and who's evil / And this is the devil's world but the Lord is coming for his people." |
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