If you have the urge to vomit while you’re playing a show, you should not swallow the vomit. You should let the vomit out into a bucket. | | | | One of those things is the last ever urban contemporary Grammy Award. Lizzo at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.
(Amanda Edwards/Getty Images) | | | | | | “If you have the urge to vomit while you’re playing a show, you should not swallow the vomit. You should let the vomit out into a bucket.”
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| | rantnrave:// Part 1 of 2: Peculiar timing has always been one the RECORDING ACADEMY's stocks in trade, whether that means waiting till 1989 to recognize the existence of heavy metal (you know how that went) or 2008 to make room for reggaeton (ditto); or waiting till the last year of TUPAC SHAKUR's life to nominate him for anything (ditto) or three albums into an acclaimed career to post CHANCE THE RAPPER for Best New Artist (he won!); or, and this is not a typo, 1981 to give an award to JOHN COLTRANE. So it was strangely on brand that on Wednesday, the day REMEZCLA abandoned the terms "urbano" and "música urbana," which are "inextricably linked to a history of exclusion and segregation within the music industry," the Academy officially announced it would do no such thing. Yes, I read the same headlines you did, and more on the GRAMMY AWARDS, R&B and "Urban" below, but in the same announcement that renamed a long-problematic R&B category, the Academy let it be known it would be shuffling its Latin categories around so that the urban descriptor would be removed from one category and added to another. The Academy noted it has been working on the changes since March, before the police killing of GEORGE FLOYD led to nationwide protests led to a national conversation about race led to the music industry coming to terms with the problematic nature of describing Black music as urban. "At the time that this category amendment proposal was put forth earlier in the year, use of the word urban when classifying certain genres in Latin music was widely accepted," a spokeswoman said. "However, we understand that in the current climate, sentiment might be changing." Which begs one question: Why make any announcement on Wednesday? Why not get the trustees back on a ZOOM call, smooth out the newfound kinks and do the announcement next week? Why act like it's still March and the axis of culture hasn't shifted? Why the rush to assure the Academy's marquee show will be a step behind the pop world for at least another year? The nomination window opens soon but it doesn't close until the end of summer; surely it's not too late to literally change a single word, is it? Literally changing two words is how the Academy is dealing with Grammy's problematic Best Urban Contemporary Album category. That one's been rechristened Best Progressive R&B Album, which addresses the nomenclature issue while neglecting to acknowledge a bonkers over-compartmentalizing of genres. There are now awards for R&B, Traditional R&B and Progressive R&B, and I'm quite sure not even LIZZO, who was nominated in all three disciplines this year (she's the owner of the last-ever Urban Contemporary Grammy) while being bizarrely overlooked for Best Pop Album, could explain why. The Academy is defining prog R&B as R&B that "may include samples and elements of hip-hop, rap, dance, and electronic music [and] production elements found in pop, euro-pop, country, rock, folk, and alternative," which sounds, to me, like the most literal description of mainstream R&B (and pop) you could come up with in 2020. Is it too late to appoint MARIE KONDO to the Academy board to do a little tidying up? VULTURE's GARY SUAREZ has an insightful essay on the changes, with an emphasis on the Academy's Latin problem, and NPR MUSIC's ANASTASIA TSIOULCAS does a great job tying together the major issues and attempted solutions. But, as Tsioulcas notes, these aren't the biggest changes the Academy announced. In my Part 2 on Friday: The nominating committees, and how badly does the Academy want to erase the memory of DEBORAH DUGAN?... (As for the tweaks to the Best New Artist category, which has never not needed a tweak but which the Academy has been doing a better job with in recent years, my official comment is, um, OK, I guess, sort of?)... The Academy continues to do lots and lots of good, too, sometimes tens of millions of dollars' worth... The Academy's first chief diversity and inclusion officer, VALEISHA BUTTERFIELD JONES, is on a panel today with T.I. and COLUMBIA RECORDS' AZIM RASHID at the free (with registration) online version of the ASCAP EXPERIENCE. They'll be talking about "Preserving the Legacy of Black Music and Pushing the Culture Forward"... Awkward genre changes elsewhere: BILLBOARD's Hot Rock Songs chart is now the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. POWFU and BEABADOOBEE's earwormy "DEATH BED (COFFEE FOR YOUR HEAD)," which lives to the right of that ampersand, is the new configuration's first #1... RECORD MART, which has been peddling Latin, jazz and other music inside the Times Square subway station in New York since 1961 (with an eight-year hiatus around the turn of the century), has shuttered for good, a victim of the pandemic... Followup to Wednesday's rantnrave: MIXCLOUD has broad licenses for playing music in video livestreams... RIP PAUL CHAPMAN and JAMES HAND. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Regardless of genre or language, if we’re going to do away with the term urban, we actually have to do away with it. | | |
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| As people march against police brutality, music makes the movement more accessible. | | |
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| With coronavirus having upended music's economic model, independent acts face an uncertain future. | | |
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| Most western music is built on the same 12 notes. Sometimes the arrangement of those notes sounds similar, which raises the question: Theft or Inspiration? We listen to some famous copyright disputes and try to decode them. | | |
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| The keyboardist has spent the last four years gigging with Guns N’ Roses, but it’s just the first part of her quest to become ‘the female Trent Reznor.’ | | |
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| George Floyd, whose death sparked nationwide protests, was a rapper in Houston earlier in his life. NPR's David Greene speaks with Floyd's former collaborators about his musical past. | | |
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| The late rapper’s booming track is amplifying the voices of Black kids in his native Brooklyn and beyond. | | |
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| To say that interim Recording Academy president/CEO Harvey Mason jr. has had a challenging first few months on the job is an understatement of epic proportions. In January, just days after taking the role on a temporary basis after former president/CEO Deborah Dugan's controversial ouster, he steered the Recording Academy through the most tumultuous Grammy Awards in its history. | | |
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| Major labels, led by Republic Records, are moving to ditch the label “urban.” It’s a step that the music industry has been repeating for almost 80 years. | | |
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| The circumstances surrounding Marian Anderson's Met Opera debut are less talked about than the fact of her historic performance. | | |
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| In this Midem 2020 Digital Edition Keynote, Kobalt founder Willard Ahdritz looks at the radical but not altogether negative effects the pandemic will have on musicians and the music industry. | | |
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| The industry's reigning queen of good vibes and good deeds has an album coming out just in time. "We're only as good as our ability to connect with each other," our July cover star says. "Everything else is irrelevant." | | |
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| This story begins with an article by author and activist Cory Doctorow on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. | | |
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| An Interview with Met Opera Bassist Leigh Mesh. | | |
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| “Ultrasonic,” Stuart Hyatt’s eighth recording as Field Works, turns their high-frequency sounds into haunting music. | | |
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| These are terms that are inextricably linked to a history of exclusion and segregation within the music industry. | | |
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| Last Tuesday, June 2, many major music companies - spanning from record labels to streaming services as well as musicians themselves - participated in the Blackout Tuesday movement by stopping everyday operations to show their solidarity with those protesting racial injustice. | | |
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| Whether giving a window into the beat-based genre percolating at block parties in the Bronx or the "Saturday Night Fever" sweeping the country, the Harlem-born reporter's articles show a prescient fixation on the role of the DJ/producer in the realm of popular music. | | |
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| The tragic death of another innocent black man in America has opened up so many old wounds that I have kept hidden for YEARS. Wounds that I would have covered up forever out of fear that no one cared or would want to hear my voice which is how I’ve always been made to feel. | | |
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| The rap legend, super-producer and fashion mogul talks creativity, inspiration and community with Kanye West. | | |
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| | | | | | | From "Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?," due Aug. 14 on Cooking Vinyl. |
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