You’ll have a song and think, ‘This feels like a track six. I don’t know why; it just does.’ | | | | Singer David Johansen, bassist Tony Garnier and guitarist James Blood Ulmer at the Jazz Standard, New York, Jan. 3, 2008. The club announced this week it has closed for good.
(Hiroyuki Ito/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | | “You’ll have a song and think, ‘This feels like a track six. I don’t know why; it just does.’”
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| | rantnrave:// There are still four weeks to go in this year to end all years, but for music accounting purposes you can, apparently, consider 2020 done. Judging by the flood of best-of-2020 lists that have poured out like aerosols and droplets in the past two days, we'll be viewing the music of 2020 specifically through the goggle- and shield-covered lens of 2020. How could we not? FIONA APPLE's FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS (#1 in STEREOGUM), released in mid-April, "felt like a blessed cosmic gift from someone who had already figured this stuck-at-home s*** out." SAULT's UNTITLED (BLACK IS) (#1 per NPR MUSIC), which dropped on Juneteenth, "was intentionally made to uplift Black people during a calamitous period... and to unsettle anyone who's against their liberation." CHARLI XCX's HOW I'M FEELING NOW (#6 from the NEW YORK TIMES' LINDSAY ZOLADZ) features "timely allusions to stir-crazy anxiety and video chatting, but these circumstances have also made Charli extra attuned to her emotions, lending the depth of genuine introspection to many of these songs." And as for a certain watery summer single (#2 says the GUARDIAN), "The Republicans got it all wrong: the real transgressive delight of WAP was how Cardi and Megan revelled in bodily fluids during a year of (admittedly justified) paranoia about the minutiae of droplet transmission." As I pore through these annual exercises in imposing scientific order on an artform better suited to abstract and emotional order, I find myself taking that lens for granted—I co-sign all the albums and singles referenced above, and they all very much do speak to the moment in which they were born, sometimes directly, sometimes a little less so—but I also find myself appreciating the understanding that music can, and does, exist outside any given timeline, too. DELPHINE DORA's L'INATTINGIBLE, one of the QUIETUS' favorite French albums of 2020, is a "dreamlike environment where birdsong, rippling piano, chimes, strings, organ and wavering voices mingle and coalesce into beautiful, fleeting forms." Sometimes, oftentimes, that's more than enough. MusicSET: "Best Music of 2020: The Year in Lists"... ELLIE GOULDING has a few things to say about how the music industry itself recognizes music's best. She doesn't mention the word "GRAMMY" in her MEDIUM essay "The Start of a Conversation...," but she wants to know when "factors such as industry relationships, internal politics, and magazine covers started being rewarded before the music itself" and why "People are being awarded—in the form of both nominations and category wins — for reasons that are hard to decipher." If I may gently check Goulding on her impression of how this works in fields other than music, I'm not sure I'd agree that, say, actors, directors and screenwriters are always "identified and praised for their notable bodies of work, not because their notable bodies or working relationships." For whatever that's worth... The first snippet of TAYLOR SWIFTs rerecording of her BIG MACHINE catalog has arrived via this amusing MATCH ad, for which Swift licensed the bridge and final chorus of her 2008 hit "LOVE STORY." And in case you or SCOOTER BRAUN or SHAMROCK CAPITOL were wondering how she plans to go about this project, be advised that it's damn near a note-by-note replica of the original. And it sounds good. Not that you thought she was, but she does not appear to be kidding around. The ad itself may throw a little shade on the matter... New York's JAZZ STANDARD is closing, a victim of the pandemic... RIP STEVEN TYSON. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Twenty twenty wap wap wap. Weird and problematic. Wintry and pandemicy. Wishing away politicians. Weeknd and Pop Smoke. Watermelon (sugar) and ppcocaine. Our annual running list of top 10s, top 40s, top 50s and top whatevers from around the music universe. | | |
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| Variety’s Grammy-nominated Hitmaker of the Year goes deep on the music industry, the great pause and finding his own muses. | | |
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| My question to you, the music industry, is — and I ask this humbly to open a discussion — what constitutes the worthiness of an award? This is not rhetorical; I would love to know an answer. | | |
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| The streaming giant offers artists a lower rate in exchange for a bump in its recommendation algorithm. | | |
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| Twitch offered some "astounding admissions" in a recent blog post to users about music use on the service. David Israelite of the National Music Publishers' Association outlines at least four of them. | | |
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| The last Bee Gee looks back at his wide-ranging catalog of hits, and ahead to an album of duets that spotlights his first love, country music. | | |
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| While the pandemic has hit locals hard, the pause in summer season has also given time for a reset and for the White Isle to regenerate. Anu Shukla travels to Ibiza to investigate. | | |
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| Whether its Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen breaking streaming records, small artists like Priscilla Block and Andrew Jannakos scoring surprise #1 songs and getting record deals, or influencers coming together to form The 615 House, it's clear that TikTok is having a profound effect on the country music industry. | | |
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| something old, something new |
| Buncha thoughts on discovery, my experience with streaming services, and why people use apps for music discovery instead of sifting through every random blog's end of year list. | | |
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| Expanding the classical canon brings us incredible music and extraordinary stories, not least that of Ethel Smyth, whose compositions and pioneering energy filled England in the interwar years. | | |
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| Nearly ninety days since the demand and no companies within the record industry appears to have publicly addressed the demands set forth by the women. | | |
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| Multi-instrumentalist airs hopes and frustrations on his solo debut. | | |
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| Whether mobilizing voters, raising up women artists or praising the power of “WAP,” her unapologetic voice resonated far and wide when the world needed it most. | | |
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| The CEO of B2B music tech company Tuned Global, Con Raso, offers a global eye on the future growth opportunities for the recorded music industry. | | |
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| "Wuddaji," the new album by Theo Parrish, seems hard to dance to until you get out of your chair and do it. Rhythms clot. Melodies congeal. But the tempos remain steady and insistent, and if you're willing to surrender yourself to the funky propulsion of it all, you'll soon be activating zones of musculature you never knew you had, using your body to cut fresh paths through space and time. | | |
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| Razorcake has been a beacon on the Los Angeles punk underground for twenty years; not just serving as sextant for local scene sailors, but also as a metaphorical cultural lighthouse marking the musical mecca popularly known as Los Angeles on the map for those who are not as geographically close. | | |
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| A new release documents the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in a Toronto attic—when Joni lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent. | | |
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| An all-encompassing interview with the Led Zeppelin icon on his evolution as a guitarist, writing rock's greatest albums and the gear behind them. | | |
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| Lou Harrison’s delectable Suite for Violin With American Gamelan fuses Indonesian percussion, Renaissance Italian dances and 1970s hippie spirit. | | |
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| Pop’s mothers have told of guilt, loneliness and record-label prejudice - so do men face the same problems? Wayne Coyne, Ghetts, Thurston Moore and others respond. | | |
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| | | | | | | From Treble's #1 metal album of 2020, the dazzling "May Our Chambers Be Full," out now on Sacred Bones. |
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