The words are just as important as the music. There'd be no music without the words. | | | | | Bob Dylan at Massey Hall, Toronto, April 18, 1980. (Jean-Luc Ourlin) | | | | |  | “The words are just as important as the music. There'd be no music without the words.”
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| | rantnrave:// Things we've spent more than a half century debating: Should BOB DYLAN have gone electric? Should he go back to singing "message" songs? What is a message song? Can he sing? Is he a poet? Is he Jewish? Is he serious? Is he a thief? What's that song he's playing right now, right in front of us? For what reason? How? And now the NOBEL PRIZE people have gone and given him their literature award and, well, it turns out we've already been debating that one for several years, even though the announcement just came on Thursday. Here's the pro and the con, as argued across THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE ATLANTIC in 2013. And here's a song to listen to you while you ponder such questions as: Does a guy who writes short bursts of words that are meant to be sung with rock-band accompaniment deserve the same prize that SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH won last year and that PHILIP ROTH has never won? Can music be literature? Would the words work without the music? Does it matter? Do words mean anything at all until they are seen and/or read and/or heard and/or set to a 12-bar blues? Is it fair to judge that 12-bar blues against a 1,200-page novel? Does either deserve any prize at all besides the sublime prize of simply having been birthed? Is the Nobel committee holding a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it? We submit to that temptation with our REDEF MusicSET BOB DYLAN, NOBEL LAUREATE... Dylan inheritors everywhere you look: MARGO PRICE chatting up MARC MARON... Price and several other country/folk artists celebrating their own kind of old, weird AMERICA in the impromptu and wonderful LUCK MANSION sessions... REGINA SPEKTOR on performing-while-parenting and the NEW YORK anti-folk scene... MELISSA ETHERIDGE interviewed by friend-of-REDEF COURTNEY E. SMITH about her MEMPHIS ROCK AND SOUL project... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from JOJO, GUCCI MANE, KINGS OF LEON, JAMIE LIDELL, MOBY & THE VOID PACIFIC CHOIR, WEYES BLOOD, THE GAME, CONOR OBERST, TANYA TAGAQ, BENOÎT PIOULARD, THE ORB and AMERICAN FOOTBALL. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | i started out on burgundy |
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 | Pitchfork |
| From poking fun at Kanye West, to curating playlists, to singing with Willie Nelson, to hosting the recent South by South Lawn festival at the White House, President Obama has taken advantage of his musical know-how in unprecedented ways. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Trump supporter Betsy McCaughey’s ridiculous comments against black music and Beyoncé are shared by conservatives and liberals alike. | | |
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 | REDEF |
| Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Which has raised an age-old question: Is he a poet? Or is the Nobel committee holding a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it? | | |
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 | Vice |
| The FBI has always had a hard-on for gangsta rap music, specifically the creative forces behind the genre's most iconic and provocative hits. We used the Freedom of Information Act to find out more about the bureau's file on the Wu-Tang Clan. | | |
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 | Literary Hub |
| A hip-hop icon talks about his island youth. (Excerpted from "Nonstop Metropolis," by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.) | | |
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 | WTF with Marc Maron |
| Singer-songwriter Margo Price entered the garage on a wave of acclaim and notoriety that is rare for an artist with only one album. But Margo's country music bona fides are not in doubt. | | |
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 | Thump |
| We use Manchester's ever-changing Northern Quarter to explore the growing importance of the non-traditional in UK club culture. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| This weekend, a new kind of music festival will draw thousands of rock fans out to the Coachella Valley, hoping to re-create the mind-expanding possibilities that a weekend-long concert might have had in the ’60s. | | |
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 | MTV News |
| Molly Lambert on how pop punk never really dies in California. | | |
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 | Men's Journal |
| “For me, when I put it on, I don’t feel like I have a guitar on. It’s such an integral part of me.” | | |
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| | | but soon hit the harder stuff |
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 | VAN Magazine |
| What’s behind the obsession with children who compose? | | |
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| Thump |
| Alex Paterson on the most notable objects-from his stuffed sheep Flossie to the group's logo-that have defined The Orb through the years. | | |
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 | Music Industry Blog |
| Amazon’s announcement of its AYCE streaming service Amazon Music Unlimited should not come as a surprise to anyone whose been keeping even half an eye on the digital music market. Amazon are the sleeping giant / dark horse (select your preferred descriptive cliché) of digital music. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The latest mashed-together album brings delicate indie and chart-topping R&B together but what’s the secret to making the perfect Franken-mixtape? | | |
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 | The Conversation |
| Plenty of people listen to sad music to make themselves feel better. But new research shows that for people with depression, it can do the opposite -- triggering a cycle of negative thoughts. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| It's been four years since her last LP, but the Moscow-born, NYC-based singer's been anything but idle. | | |
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 | Lenny |
| An interview with Melissa Etheridge about her new album of classics, "Memphis Rock and Soul." | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Brian and Michael D’Addario’s retro look has raised eyebrows, but they share a commitment to raiding the past that goes way beyond dressing like the Bay City Rollers. | | |
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 | Spotify Insights |
| We at Spotify love music. We love data, too. Because our data is about music and how over 100 million real people listen to it, it’s actually quite human. As our own Matt Ogle said of the popular Discover Weekly feature, "Man vs. machine is no longer a useful distinction in terms of how we… | | |
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 | Vox |
| Rappers have mentioned Grey Poupon in songs almost every single year since 1992. | | |
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 | via YouTube |
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| © Copyright 2016, The REDEF Group |
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