I’m blonde and I play guitar. I think people assume I might not have much to say or know that much about music. | | | | Night at the opera: Freddie Mercury at Madison Square Garden, 1977.
(Waring Abbott/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I’m blonde and I play guitar. I think people assume I might not have much to say or know that much about music.”
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| | rantnrave:// "I have struggled for a long time, both being public and not public about my mental health issues or my mental illness"... "I have been there, written 'the note', had the plan, the stockpile of meds, how to disperse my property among my family. I was ready to go"... "some days i'm certain i won't ever be ok and some days are a little bit lighter, but ALL days i have to connect with someone"... "suicide has been an at-many-times daily part of my psychic reality, even still. It follows me around"... Those are the voices of pop and rock stars in the wake of the deaths of ANTHONY BOURDAIN and KATE SPADE. It's been a horrible few days in a not-so-great year. It's good that people are talking, that they feel free to talk. It's a discussion we've long needed to have, that we'll always need to have. HAYLEY WILLIAMS is ready to have it. DARRYL MCDANIELS, too. We can be thankful for that. It's helpful for all of us, whatever our health, to hear. It's important, it's crucial, to listen. Music, like all arts, affords creators a unique chance to express their sadness, their anxieties, their fears, their pain, in everything they do. It also affords them the chance to hide all of that in their work. We can't ever know what a composer or musician is feeling just from listening to a song. We can only know how it makes us feel. We listen to ourselves at the same time we're listening to others. Do depression and other mental illnesses make for better art? Or are great artists simply better at documenting darkness than everybody else is? Or, perhaps, do we hear in songs what we need to hear in songs? I do know this: Sadness can make for great art. And so can happiness. I'm rambling today, sorry. Talk hard. But also talk soft. And listen. Always... And please don't tell people when to be sad. Or when not to be sad... The NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION LIFELINE can be reached 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255... At the APOLLO (!), U2 sends one out to Anthony Bourdain... SIRIUSXM settles out of court with SOUNDEXCHANGE for $150 million... The 1975 puts its money where its pride is... SUPERORGANISM is a little goofy and a lot awesome and this is another great live session... Wow, JORJA SMITH's band. Live at the TINY DESK... We know what KANYE thinks of WYOMING. But what does Wyoming think of him?... RIP NEAL BOYD. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Michael Schmitt’s rap song was crude, but was it a crime? "They painted me as a school shooter, and that's terrifying," said the 18-year-old, who’s been on house arrest since March. | | |
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| The idea of hybridizing the famed Northern California record shop with a pot shop came to Amoeba's co-founders Marc Weinstein and Dave Prinz in 2012 when they noticed a decline in sales at their first of three locations. | | |
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| Head of the Village Vanguard, the oldest and most respected jazz club in New York, Lorraine Gordon's affinity for jazz was unprecedented. | | |
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| When I discovered Fela, I found an artist who made socially conscious music with the absolute best bass lines and was straight up jamming. Fela was the music that I didn’t even know I was waiting my entire life to find. | | |
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| Grooveshark had big plans to take on the streaming market by becoming "the YouTube of audio," but ended up being sued into oblivion by the major labels. | | |
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| New Zealand’s Matthew Young is the latest in a increasing number of musicians opening up about mental health. And making brilliant tracks in the process. | | |
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| The "Hereditary" composer and Arcade Fire collaborator walks us through crafting the Toni Collette film's unnerving soundtrack. | | |
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| Marine Le Pen is among the backers of a campaign to prevent the musician Médine from appearing at the venue, the site of a terrorist attack in 2015. | | |
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| For more than half a century, the album has been the business foundation for the music industry. Increasingly, that era seems to be nearing an end. | | |
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| Caleb Byerly works with indigenous communities to rediscover-and rebuild-their people's lost instruments. | | |
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| How do local music ecosystems affect the economic and cultural health of a city? Portia went to Upstream Music Fest to discuss with leaders from the regional music hubs of Seattle (Kate Becker), Portland (David O.G. ONE Jackson), and Vancouver BC (Alex Grigg). | | |
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| The drummer’s work in avant-jazz is quickly eclipsing his main gig. | | |
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| How can independent labels make the most of disruptive new technologies, from blockchain and AI to virtual and augmented reality? A session at the Midem conference last week explored the issue. | | |
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| The manager, producer and Twisted Sister guitarist shares a dose of reality about the music business with Music Biz Weekly podcast hosts Michael Brandvold and Jay Gilbert. | | |
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| his Björk-endorsed singer’s baroque, queer, devastating R&B is the brazenly tender music the world needs right now | | |
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| Laura Parnes’s film follows a community of NYC musicians and artists staying the course in an era of Trump and tragedy. | | |
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| The story of one of the most influential records in Southern rap history doesn’t start in Miami, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans or even Atlanta. It starts in the front seat of a Jeep parked on a side street in the heart of a notorious hip-hop hotbed: Hollis, Queens. | | |
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| The genre pulled from hip-hop, rap, house, and R&B, and was played at mid-tempo with a characteristically fierce kick drum. | | |
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| Journey back to a time when dinos made you feel things. | | |
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| Meet Michael Greenfield, a musician who began tuning, repairing, restoring, and making guitars in the 70s and since then has become a seasoned luthier of bespoke guitars. His workshop is based in Montreal, where we visited over a period of 5 months, filming as he and his apprentice, Julien, transformed slices of spruce, ebony, mahogany, and other tree species into glistening guitars. | | |
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