There just has to be something in the music that knocks at the door, that challenges the gatekeepers. | | | | Beyoncé at Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 in Johannesburg, Dec. 2, 2018.
(Kevin Mazur/Getty Images) | | | | | | “There just has to be something in the music that knocks at the door, that challenges the gatekeepers.”
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| | rantnrave:// Ranking any year's best songs and albums in late November or early December, or anytime before you've put the Christmas roast in the oven, is like certifying the results of an election at 5 pm when the polls are still open. Or maybe it's more like calling an election six months earlier, before all the candidates have joined the race. PASTE, for example, declared the music year over on Nov. 26, and since these things take time to curate, argue about and produce, let's conservatively estimate the site was actually celebrating New Year's Eve somewhere around November 1. If I'm not mistaken, the most recent albums on Paste's 50-song countdown, topped by LUCY DACUS' HISTORIAN, are ROSANNE CASH's Nov. 2 release and ROBYN 's Oct. 26 offering. The chance that anyone had heard, say, MARIAH CAREY's fantastic CAUTION or ANDERSON .PAAK's OXNARD is close to nil; the chance that anyone had heard, say, the still-to-come 2018 albums by OFFSET or BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN is even niller. What's the rush? Slow down, everybody. You might also argue that ranking a year's best songs and albums at any point is a little silly because a) you haven't even heard all of these albums, which represent a tiny fraction of the music released in 2018, and you probably never will, and b) you're probably going to change your mind in two months anyway. On the other hand, if I didn't think curating things into lists was ever a good idea, I'd be in a different line of work. One reads these things not in search of metrics but in search of perspectives and reminders and gentle nudges into corners of the music universe that one may have left unexplored in the past 10 or 11 or 12 months. The best ones are a public service. And since people have started posting theirs, I've started curating them. I normally continue doing so until the middle of the winter when the VILLAGE VOICE PAZZ & JOP POLL goes online and finishes the discussion. But the Voice and Pazz & Jop are no more (RIP, for reals), so hopefully we'll all just sort of know when 2018 has ended. MusicSET: "Best Music of 2018: The Year in Lists"... For some reason, this first edition of the list is metal-heavy, as if the world's metal writers decided in a secret cabal that they should go first. (Can someone please confirm that for me?) A lot of them are banging their heads in agreement on this doom-metal album, speaking of learning to slow down... Along with a lot of other writers, I rushed on Friday to declare that JAY-Z had delivered a knockdown punch to KANYE WEST on MEEK MILL's "WHAT'S FREE," which, as Jay himself pointed out in a rare tweet, was an unfair—and flat-out wrong—assessment. It's literally a verse about solidarity. Apologies... I saw this post about the worst literary sentences written about sex in 2018 and then I heard EMINEM's new viral 11-minute freestyle and wondered if maybe they had missed a few. The man's skills are still very much intact. But... GARY SUAREZ asked music writers to post their best story of 2018, and they complied. Lots of good reads... RIP NINA BEILINA, PAUL TROUBLE ANDERSON, GARY HAISMAN and MARVIN THOMPSON. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| The ability to connect the most disparate of dots has helped Shorter become one of the finest composers in the history of American jazz — one of the many reasons he received the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night. | | |
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| From the Ying Yang Twins' "Whisper Song" in the early aughts to Cardi B's love of ASMR, rap and the ASMR community are more intertwined than ever. | | |
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| The vast majority of high-profile musical VR applications released to date have not truly taken advantage of VR's unique capabilities as a technological medium. | | |
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| Variety spoke with a number of the song’s collaborators to find out what went into the single that cemented him as a star. | | |
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| Rickey Washington has told the story more times than he can count. He was a young college student, almost completely ignorant of the history and culture of West Africa, the first time he went to Ghana on a school-building mission in 1975. | | |
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| The pitch is simple: release four tracks by four artists every two months. | | |
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| The streaming service hopes to leverage the Philadelphia rapper's comeback and convert his fans into loyal subscribers. | | |
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| The alt-country band Pinegrove is touring for the first time in a year after its singer issued a mysteriously vague apology concerning an allegation of “sexual coercion.” | | |
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| I pretty much couldn’t care less about Rick Ross’ verse or Meek’s for that matter, even after repeated listens. I’m waiting for Jay each time. And he doesn’t disappoint. In fact, let’s just go line-by-line, mmkay? | | |
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| What the avalanche of new music means - from overwhelmed listeners to algorithms that seek out unsigned talent for labels. | | |
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| The Kennedy Center Honors stepped out of its comfort zone Sunday night, conferring recognition for the first time on a living, breathing work of art, along with four seasoned — and also living and breathing — American artists. And the change felt both fresh and a little fraught. | | |
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| It's been just over one year since the death of Lil Peep (born Gustav Åhr). His first posthumous album, the new "Come Over When You're Sober Part 2," is the first of three projects that will carry Peep's legacy onward. | | |
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| Also, Johnette Napolitano and Matthew Sweet talk Latinx art and songs about monsters. | | |
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| What if we are witnessing the death, or suffocation, of a society that values careful listening, serendipity and, like a jazz ensemble, the dedication to finding common ground? | | |
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| Many of the best Christmas songs originate with Jewish songwriters. So when you consider the great number of Christmas albums by artists ranging from Barry Manilow to Bob Dylan to Kenny G, it's not that strange that gentiles crafted some of the best Hanukkah songs: | | |
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| A group of independent live-music clubs in Chicago has joined together to ask the city to slow its planned Lincoln Yards development and the proposed new Live Nation concert halls there. | | |
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| Florida Georgia Line's Tyler Hubbard has thrown his support behind the End Gun Violence Together campaign launched by Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes -- and he wants his colleagues in country music to join him. | | |
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| How a teenage Britney Spears made a generational hit. | | |
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| Noel Gallagher famously sang that listeners of Oasis should not put their life in the hands of a rock’n’roll band. I fundamentally disagree. Everything good in my life has been recommended to me by my musical heroes. My moral compass has been set almost entirely by pop stars. | | |
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| | | | | Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings |
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