I went to the Grand Ole Opry. Backstage, there's two black people: Chuck Berry and Darius Rucker. I want to be on that wall and I want to have my costumes behind the glass case for, in 50 years, another little black girl goes back there and says, 'Wow, if she did that, I could do it.' | | | | Josephine Baker at the Olympia, Paris, July 6, 1960.
(Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I went to the Grand Ole Opry. Backstage, there's two black people: Chuck Berry and Darius Rucker. I want to be on that wall and I want to have my costumes behind the glass case for, in 50 years, another little black girl goes back there and says, 'Wow, if she did that, I could do it.'”
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| | rantnrave:// "Let's not lose focus." So sayeth JASE HARLEY, the New Jersey rapper whose 2016 "AMERICAN PHARAOH" bears enough of a resemblance to CHILDISH GAMBINO's 2018 "THIS IS AMERICA" to have turned all of REDDIT, INSTAGRAM and TWITTER into plagiarism investigators over the past two days. I'd like to think he's speaking for all of us. Seriously, let's not lose focus. Let's maintain our senses of proportion and context. Let's save our outrage for truly outrageous things. Let's spend a little more time listening to what artists like Jase Harley and Childish Gambino are trying to say and a little less time listening to random Redditors transcribe the manner in which they say it... For the record, they're both trap songs with triplet flows addressing the black experience in America. They both have something to say. The vocal inflections overlap. They *feel* similar. Like, I suspect, most of America, I was familiar with only one of them until Sunday. Was DONALD GLOVER familiar with Jase Harley's song before then? Did he nick a piece of it, either consciously or subconsciously? Is it possible that two black men in America have similar feelings about the state of their union and similar impulses on how to express it? Do all pop songs, to some extent, either consciously or subconsciously nick pieces of other pop songs? Should we spend our time policing that? Or accepting it? Even celebrating it? My favorite response to these questions, all of which have been asked plenty of times in the past 36 hours, has come from Harley, who thinks he probably did inspire Glover, and who wouldn't mind a shoutout, and who says it's "all good tho.. he’s a great artist, dope I could’ve had some influence on the record." And then in another Instagram post, as if to make sure he wasn't being misunderstood: "I feel extremely humbled to be recognized and labeled as one or the original inspirations for one of the most important pieces of music and visual art of our time. I appreciate all the love and support! But PLEASE DON’T let this controversy dilute the message me and @childishgambino are trying to convey." That's where the focus belongs. And if a little extra light has been shined on Jase Harley, even better. I'm all for credit where credit is due, and as far as karma is concerned, Harley has already received it... Also, props to him for spelling "American Pharaoh" correctly. As opposed to, you know... XXXTENTACION is the first artist with a posthumous #1 single in the US since the NOTORIOUS B.I.G. in 1997. Title of the new #1 song in America: "SAD"... VIJAY IYER, CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT and KENDRICK LAMAR among winners of DOWNBEAT critics poll... Lamar, QUESTLOVE, CHUCK D and WENDY & LISA among musicians invited into ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS & SCIENCES... For sale: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's hand-written "BORN TO RUN" lyrics. ELVIS PRESLEY's private jet. It's not out of the question that the 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of ruled notebook paper will go for more than the 1962 LOCKHEED JETSTAR... RIP DAN INGRAM. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| If you’ve been following music-tech news this year, the recent influx of investment and M&A activity in the Indian music streaming market might have caught your eye. | | |
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| Three days in Wyoming as the hip-hop firebrand tends to his scars. | | |
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| Basketball and hip-hop have always shared powerful links, but each industry contends with complicated legacies. | | |
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| Artist manager Sophia Chang—who, as a Korean-Canadian woman, was an anomaly within an anomaly in the male-dominated world of ’90s hip-hop—advocated fiercely for the Wu-Tang Clan and other artists behind the scenes, helping to shape the very foundation upon which hip-hop’s golden era is built. | | |
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| I sought out XXXTentacion fans expecting to meet reactionaries and trolls mired in bad faith. Instead I found young people seeking an outlet for their own pain and ignoring the rest. | | |
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| Buying a ticket to a show doesn't give you a free pass to act however you want, everyone else be damned. | | |
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| At MusicBiz in Nashville in May 2018, Songtrust’s Joe Conyers III shared his thoughts and experiences about international and domestic songwriter royalty, rights, markets, and metadata issues. For more than 150,000 songwriters and more than 20,000 music publishers, Songtrust has been collecting songwriters’ royalties, creating systems that were ready for streaming’s global growth path. | | |
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| The O.G. saxophonist made his name in jazz, but he’s bigger than genre. | | |
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| It feel significant that Kacey Musgraves, a “country singer,” is opening for Harry Styles, a “pop star” on an extensive tour of “the United States” this summer. And it looks like a trend, too. | | |
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| Watch the New York rap icon perform "Paid In Full" and "Know The Ledge," as well as a new song for Marvel's Luke Cage, at the Tiny Desk. | | |
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| Branding a song in three seconds is a subtle art. | | |
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| Soft-spoken engineer Jeremy Bridge has invented speaker technology that delivers high-quality sound to festival-goers while limiting its bleed into surrounding areas. | | |
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| It’s based on facial recognition technology. Ticketing is broken, can anybody fix it? Will anybody fix it? That’s what Nathan Hubbard has set out to do, the man who used to run Ticketmaster, he’s raised double digit millions and… | | |
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| Most writing on The B-52s foregrounds their identities–queer, southern–and leaves the music in the background. That strategy is both a common way to dismiss the artistic contributions of musicians from marginalized groups and a huge misrepresentation of how such musicians negotiate their identities and the political, economic, and aesthetic systems that push them to the margins. | | |
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| After decades of mainstream banishment, artists like Kamasi Washington are ushering in a saxophone renaissance. | | |
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| "We need to observe and encourage change as record labels". Discover how the digital can be a source of evolution in the music industry, according to Rachel Stoewer. | | |
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| The nu-metal band introduced new ways of expressing male sadness and rage into the mainstream—an evolution that continues today. | | |
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| While clinicians continue to encounter obstacles in reaching urban youth and identifying signs of mental illness, there is someone who manages to connect with them in every at-bat. Insert Lil Uzi Vert. | | |
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| As you listen to this music, remember that John F. Kennedy was in the White House, the Beatles weren't here yet and wouldn't arrive for 10 months, civil-rights protests were just heating up and only a handful of Americans could find Vietnam on a map. Coltrane was that far ahead of his time. | | |
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| After wild years of all-night partying, Florence Welch has found a calmer way to live. She talks to Eva Wiseman about the "magic energy" that drives her and how she’s finally learning to make sense of herself. | | |
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| | | | | | | "That’s just life for me / Living while black in the land of the free." |
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| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
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