I was in the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Ave. in Manhattan. I was reading the scripture about where God called the angels together and made an announcement that he was going to create this human—the human being. He gathered the angels together and they said, 'We don’t know nothin’, but we just celebrate you, God—we celebrate and praise you.' And I thought, wow, that’s big! We're talking about the origin of human beings...I’m going to write a song about that. | | | | Kool and the Gang's Ronald "Khalis" Bell at a taping of "ABC in Concert," Dec. 27, 1974.
(Walt Disney Television/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I was in the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Ave. in Manhattan. I was reading the scripture about where God called the angels together and made an announcement that he was going to create this human—the human being. He gathered the angels together and they said, 'We don’t know nothin’, but we just celebrate you, God—we celebrate and praise you.' And I thought, wow, that’s big! We're talking about the origin of human beings...I’m going to write a song about that.”
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| | rantnrave:// I was thinking about the ACADEMY AWARDS' new diversity/inclusion standards (which, if I'm reading the room correctly, some of you think is a great idea and some of you don't) and wondering if there might be a GRAMMY equivalent. Thought #1: Diversity and inclusion should be encouraged and rewarded. Engineering and production jobs and cello playing and mastering jobs and coffee-making and management jobs should be open to everybody, and if that requires outside intervention, there should be outside intervention. But, thought #2: Diversity and inclusion generally require that there be teams and departments and/or themes and narratives, none of which are needed to make, say, a pop album. The album may be just you and your brother composing, performing, producing and mixing. It may not have a narrative. You might get your own coffee. You might not even have a brother. It could be just you, your laptop, your rhyming dictionary and your BANDCAMP account. You may or may not have a record company behind you, and while you probably, if you're on the Grammy Awards' radar, have management and promotion and other such support, you are by no means required to, and you may not have much need for interns and production assistants either. How does an academy create hiring standards for an art form that may or may not involve any hiring? Thought #3: If you can't force the potential nominees to diversify, maybe you can do something about the nominators. And the RECORDING ACADEMY, to its credit, is in fact taking action on that side of things. The Academy's ongoing (and, admittedly, awkward) effort to diversify its own house has included promises to make its nominating committees and its overall voting membership more inclusive. As women, people of color and other traditionally excluded groups gain a louder voice in the process, one hopes the nominees and winners on future Grammy nights will increasingly look—and actually be—diverse and inclusive. And more representative of the music being celebrated. The Academy could push change at the Grammys even faster by instituting ranked-choice voting, which its own diversity task force said it should do but the Academy, with no explanation, rejected last year. It also could speed up its membership drive. Just under half the membership invitations sent out this year went to women and 21 percent went to African Americans, which, mathematically speaking, is no way to shake up your membership with any kind of quickness. *Most* of the invitations should be going to underrepresented groups. Which shouldn't be hard in pop music. And yet. Thought #4: Instead of instituting rules on a project-by-project basis, could the Academy simply tell labels they can't submit *anything* for Grammy consideration if the label itself doesn't meet certain diversity goals?.... Speaking of exclusion, what's the industry doing about this blow to touring artists trying to get to the US from other countries?... FACEBOOK LIVE is about to get a little (a lot?) more music-unfriendly... A good year for guitars and performance rights orgs. A good week for vinyl... His older brother, ROBERT "KOOL" BELL, is the one the band was named after, so you'd be forgiven if you thought RONALD "KHALIS" BELL was the lesser of the two brothers at the heart of KOOL & THE GANG, just the tenor saxophone player or something. In reality, not unlike AC/DC's MALCOLM YOUNG, Khalis was the creative one hiding in the shadows, the driving force behind some of the biggest pop hits of the '70s and '80s as a songwriter, arranger, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He was modest about his accomplishments—"a lot of the songs, I may have spearheaded ’em, but it’s really, with a ‘K,’ the kollective genius of a band called Kool & the Gang," he said when the brothers and two bandmates were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame—but not unaware of his phenomenal range, which spanned jazz, funk, R&B, pop and even hints of gospel over the decades. As one does when one grows up with one's father's MILES DAVIS records, but also with Davis himself (he was friends with the Bells' boxer dad), and gets one's start shuttling between playing Greenwich Village bars and the APOLLO in the late 1960s. A musical life well-lived. RIP. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Some high-profile DJs have been criticised for playing big, crowded legal shows — dubbed ‘Plague Raves’ — in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis. Some have started playing socially-distanced events as a baby-steps route back to something approaching normality, while others are staying put at home until coronavirus passes. It's a minefield to navigate. | | |
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| The song of the summer had roots running through the history of Black American pop -- or, rather, American pop, period. | | |
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| If you download the video-sharing app TikTok right now and scroll the "For You" page, it likely won't be long before you stumble upon teen-agers hip-thrusting and chest-popping to the sounds of Jersey club. | | |
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| The Dept. of Homeland Security announced the changes last week, which will take effect in early October. | | |
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| Sony is eager to cash in on a booming audio business that could siphon away listeners -- and advertisers -- from radio and streaming services. | | |
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| In the absence of live music, touring musicians have taken to Zoom to share their knowledge and craft with a flood of new students. Imperfect as it may be, this exchange has become a financial and creative lifeline. | | |
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| Today’s episode of Questlove Supreme is long overdue. Robert Glasper, multiple award winner, genius pianist and producer maintains his prominent position of changing how we think jazz should sound as well as how it should play in the sandbox with soul and hip hop music. | | |
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| Post and Lucas remember a febrile time for alternative-rock -- and what came after. | | |
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| How Motion Agency helps major and indie labels to get media attention for artists in multiple international territories. | | |
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| The funk band, newly inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, talked Miles Davis, David Lee Roth, the Berlin Wall, and whether black men should shout “Yahoo!” | | |
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| A&R is one of the most misunderstood roles in the music industry, so we talked to A&Rs at majors, independent labels, and publishers to clear up the confusion. | | |
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| If there are two things that don't go together, it's quarantining and queues. Yet beleaguered independent music retailers are offering positive reports on Record Store Day 2020... or, rather, the first of three monthly "Record Store Day Drops" that are belatedly substituting for the major RSD that was to have gone down in April. | | |
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| Palmer's "Color Me Country" focuses on the Black, Indigenous, and Latinx histories of country music. | | |
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| A new documentary, "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President," examines the former POTUS' relationships with icons such as Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Gregg Allman. | | |
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| Paul Saltzman was 24 when he studied with the Beatles under the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India. His new film, “Meeting The Beatles In India,” chronicles the eye-opening experience. | | |
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| Number One The obsession with sitting on top of the singles chart. Words: Sowmya Krishnamurthy Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of XXL Magazine, on stands now. Billboard debuted its first chart of song sales on July 27, 1940. | | |
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| It's a Thursday afternoon in December, and on the big screen at the Sony scoring stage, swords are flashing, arrows are flying and soldiers in ancient Chinese garb are spinning in midair. | | |
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| In China, the music industry works differently. Music fans quickly -- and in the tens of millions -- adopt new techs and new methods of supporting artists. | | |
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| Their episode of Two Friends is a gift to music nerds everywhere. | | |
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| The beloved producer's last project, created before his death in April from COVID-19, is a tribute to the songwriting of T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan. | | |
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| | | | | | | "Tables 'bout to turn." From the voter suppression documentary "All In: The Fight for Democracy." |
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