Why we are turning to darkly funny music during the coronavirus. --- Throughout history, music has been an integral part of how people cope with epidemics. Sometimes, we put them in familiar musical contexts to make them less scary (less “novel,” you could say). While the rest of the world called the 1918 outbreak “the Spanish Flu,” at home in Spain it was often described as “the Naples Soldier” after a song from a popular opera; one of the librettists claimed it was because the tune was just “as catchy” as the disease. […] The themes underpinning many of their songs—passion, intensity, body heat—reminds me that art gets much of its meaning from confronting the ephemerality of existence. We want things deeply and quickly because life is, indeed, short. And musicians know that; they usually only get a few minutes per song. Who better to guide us in how to squeeze as much out of life as possible?

Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t? --- The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard, but it’s necessary. The world will keep spinning and culture must move with it, even if we are staid and static in our homes, even if the economy grinds to a halt, even if there are no shows, no release parties, and even artists sink even further into the precarity that defines a career as a musician. The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world, but this invisible exchange powers the vanguard of art, even in times of historic inertia.

Before Billie Eilish performed the Beatles' "Yesterday," during the Academy Awards "In Memoriam" segment last month, she walked the red carpet in a look that's become something of a signature for her: custom oversized Chanel tracksuit, a chunky, gold cuban link chain, long black acrylics. --- The internet has provided, for white youth who've spent a large part of their adolescence on it, a front seat to the creation and distribution of Black cultural products — Black music, slang and dances. But as those cultural products move across the internet, they get farther and farther away from their original context and meaning and often become collapsed under the simplistic label of "youth culture." This isn't as democratizing as it seems. Apps like TikTok and its spiritual predecessor Vine not only encourage the performance of Black culture by non-Black teens, but incentivize it with real money to be made. It used to just be financially viable for pop stars to perform Blackness. Now, it presents an opportunity to non-Black teens everywhere.

As we enter a new decade, the ways in which we define electronic music styles are rapidly changing. Chal Ravens explores the etymological evolution of “UK club music” and speaks to some of its key players: about how regional roots are growing into digital ecosystems, and powering new conversations about globalisation in club culture. --- It’s more about the mood, ultimately: vibrant, kinetic, unpredictable. In fact, club is probably best understood as a style of DJing rather than production, a sound invented in real time. The element of surprise is highly valued, along with quirky edits, bizarre blends, and a fearless approach to clashing musical keys. You might hear a spinback or three. It’s music to stay on top of rather than music to get lost in. […] Why aren’t these UK club DJs appearing on European festival lineups? “If I knew I’d be playing more festivals,” says Finn, who wonders if there’s a basic mismatch in attitudes and expectations. “There’s not much room for humour in dance music. It all feels like it has to be quite serious,” he says. […] In the process of absorbing and reframing various black genres, the term “club” obscures the roots of its own diversity. That shouldn’t write off its utility as a catch-all term; how else might we capture the contemporary intermingling of dozens of related global scenes? But intersecting factors of race and class are always at work in the creation and adoption of new styles. […] There’s an absurd feedback loop at play in which promoters excuse pedestrian bookings by citing commercial imperatives, which does audiences a disservice by suggesting that they’re too bigoted or unimaginative to branch out from house and techno. But insofar as club music is thriving in small clubs and basement parties in the UK, the next challenge will be to establish the current generation as an internationally recognised creative powerhouse.

He’s been DJing for more than two decades, so we talked about a lot besides that. --- I ask him simply: is this why you do it? He snaps out of his stasis, looking at me indignantly. "I just love it. I genuinely love the music I play. I love looking at people's faces when they lose it." He stops. "I've spent the past 35 years seeing how collective euphoria works. It's people coming to escape; to lose themselves and lose the stresses. For two hours, four days – they become part of this bigger thing. This sexy mess. There's a level where you can totally freak somebody out. It's the equivalent of making them cum. It's half-voyeurism, half-vampire; my secret of eternal youth. Not drinking the blood of the young – absorbing their sweat! I genuinely love it."

The story of a record-store snob struggles to fit an era defined by shared enthusiasm. --- The easiest way to update the satire would have been to change its milieu, making it about video gamers, for instance, or hardcore comics and superhero fans—or YouTubers, for damn sure. It’s all too evident there are toxic preference patterns to be skewered in those realms, set for processing through High Fidelity’s patented epiphany-and-redemption filters. But since it sticks to music, the show has to reckon with the fact that music fandom isn’t what it was 25 years ago. […] A general trend toward aesthetic eclecticism was already being noted by sociologists who study cultural taste before Hornby’s book came out. Surveys of previous generations found that people tended to share both their preferences and vehement distastes with other members of their social classes and backgrounds. Their tastes tended to follow, along class lines, the old model of “high art,” “middlebrow,” and “low culture.” But by the 1990s, elite cultural consumers were sampling widely across categories and creating more bespoke taste profiles—somebody might be an equal aficionado, for instance, of Asian art films, graphic novels, and WWE wrestling. Even in the original High Fidelity, the Championship Vinyl boys are well aware it would be lame to confine themselves too much to any single genre. While specialists still argue over how to read the data, it seems likely to me that the internet’s democratization of distribution has made this omnivore eclecticism the popular default (Exhibit A: “Old Town Road”), and it encompasses eras as well as styles. Through the “universal jukebox” of streaming, it’s as easy to give yourself an instant education on classic late-1960s Brazilian Tropicália—the new High Fidelity features a conversation about an Os Mutantes box set—as it is to inhale Young Thug’s whole discography in an afternoon. […] But from a lowercase-marxist perspective, it strikes me—and I realize this is a stretch—that being a cultural magpie, more noncommittal and contingent about which ever-changing suites of tastes might suit your moods and situations, roughly parallels the kind of flexibility and adaptability that’s demanded by today’s gig-and-hustle economy. We need to be able to change jobs, switch loyalties, move cities, update skill sets and personal images, to suit the ever-disruptable, often geographically and even physically disembodied labor marketplace. Being too strongly wedded to an identity becomes a liability. […] She wants to use music not to assert superiority and distance but to forge human connections—ultimately, despite her ragged insecurities, about being a music-maker herself. This might be where the new High Fidelity picks up the thematic thread from the original, in its radically different context, suggesting that it matters less what the characters’ particular tastes are than the ways they cultivate and care for them, along with one another. It isn’t what you like. It’s how you like it.

Boucher has recently seemed at a loss to regain control over her career, and naive about her role in its dissolution. But Miss Anthropocene reveals an astute understanding – evidently well honed – of humanity’s worst impulses and how to appeal to them. […] Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is a beautiful and emotionally complex album: Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction, and an unlikely optimistic gesture that still believes art can be a powerful force for social good. It also finally finds Boucher reconciled to her relationship with the public. On Miss Anthropocene, she is a mirror, inviting us to examine the source of our bad faith.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. went to the Dweller Festival and asked the question, can one celebrate Black underground artists and audiences in a gentrified genre? --- And it must be clearly understood: dance music, in all of its various forms, was born in Blackness, patterning itself after the communities, spaces and shared skills that were built in hopes of finding a specific kind of respite, and an alternate future. Techno in particular has been a music riddled with misconceptions and distorted histories, whose global popularity has unfortunately scrubbed away its origins in Black American culture. Fundamentally, techno is a rhythm and soul-based music developed in 1980s Detroit, using Motown studio production techniques, jazz and funk. Though largely adjacent to house music, techno is distinctly from Detroit, whereas house was rooted in Chicago; and both share their technologically progressive, DJ-based DNA with hip-hop, forming the holy trinity of Black dance-floor Utopias of the late 20th century.

Musical treats from the entire world for over a century. Pick a country anywhere on the map. Pick a decade from 1900 to now.

Today, The Fat Of the Land is easy to swallow, even if mix of party-on and patriarchy leaves a strange taste in the mouth. As usual, Kim Deal knows the score. “Firestarter” was, after all, built on women’s work: that charmed and pissed-off “Hey!” throughout belonged to Anne Dudley, one of the virtuosos behind Art of Noise; the song’s raucous guitar line belonged to Deal, whose Breeders track “S.O.S.” birthed it. “Since I own, like, a quarter of [”Firestarter”]…I root for them since they used a song of mine,” she told the A.V. Club in 2009. “It’s like I’m in the biology club and they’re in the football team, you know?” With The Fat Of the Land, they packed the stadiums.

A new song, a capital S Song that persists through your life, is magic. It’s not so much like having a new dish or drink and more analogous to discovering a new color or flavor. My sight feels altered permanently, things are recontextualized.

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed. But in his Wire piece, Simon refers to the shock he experienced when he first heard records constructed entirely out of samples. I vividly recall the first time I went into studio and heard vocal samples played through a mixing desk; I really do remember saying, 'It's like hearing ghosts...'

In Vampire Weekend’s 2008 debut, I recognized the African soukous and rumba that had been my father’s calling.

Typically appearing in works that employ a score with non-original elements, these are brief segments of recognizable songs—like classical music that doesn't involve paying royalties—as themes for various types of scenes or activities. Some of these occur often enough to seem standardized, and in some cases they are the only reason people know the songs these days at all. Many of these have become verbal shorthand for particular nationalities or ethnicities, and thus may border on stereotypes.

The nine-note tune made famous in Carl Douglas' 1974 song has served as a stereotype of Asian music since the 19th century.

It’s fairly easy, and indeed tempting, to write M.I.A. off as a faux-radical who relies on the borrowed aesthetics of revolution to sell records. But that superficial reading belies her truest political work: her commitment to self and the exploration of identity in a world and industry that is more comfortable with easily digestible predetermined narratives, particularly when it comes to racialized people.

this isnt just about Kimmel and Kanye it's about who gets to be a creative genius in America and who we'd rather see as a clown

Love is a dog from hell, as it's said, and real emotion is ugly and uncomfortable, and it’s why some people giggle when they see a man keening or screaming or crying -- but Drake knows that all this has to be tempered and digestible to be disseminated and reach as many people as possible.

There's something taunting and mean about the soul samples on Yeezus; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.

Author Devon Powers on how Village Voice writers Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau helped create rock journalism, and the evolving role of music critics.

Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

In an exclusive in ELLE's May issue, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon talks candidly about her next chapter, and what really happened between her and Thurston Moore.

But as much as he was teaching me about movies, Roger Ebert was also showing me how to write-- I became a student of clean and concise sentences that emphasized clarity and the right balance of humor, thoughtfulness, and accessibility, as well as how to shape my raw impressions into well-rounded opinions that cohered on the page into narratives. The idea that the most interesting part of a movie happens after you see it-- during the post-mortems you have with others and with yourself in your own head-- was something that carried over easily to the songs and albums I was discovering at the time.

The endearingly bookish singer talks about the nature of performance and love as well as his recent Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material.

Without some sort of personal framework for approaching music, and expectations for what you think music should and shouldn’t be doing, there wouldn’t be much point in engaging it. And as pop and indie and hip-hop and R&B and metal all currently share a pretty close-knit territory, defining what you stand for might be the best preparation for the looming fallout from those who too often let us know what they are against.

The early history of MTV, with parallels to modern technology movements.

YouTube crushing everything does seem like a concern. I love novelty songs, I ride hard for novelty songs—but if, suddenly, all our big hits are goofy YouTube-incubated one-offs, the novelty song will cease to be novel.

81 years later, Lomax’s quandary is a different issue. Rap Genius aims for a comprehensive archive of rap meanings, while redefining the idea of “genius” altogether. The intelligence of a single person is replaced by a self-correcting form of knowledge derived from the crowd, which often leads to populist rhetoric that papers over very real power differentials and well-established hierarchies. The site’s investors invest their venture with bold religious significance, but practically speaking, perhaps the real genius is in transsubstantiation, via a technological capacity to turn pleasurable activities into value-producing labor. It’s the same logic that fuels Wikipedia and Google search results: a free market of anonymous contributors is a vastly better information aggregator and processor than an individual human brain, and a killer app is all that’s needed to derive stable meaning from the messiness of culture.

Everyone's relationship to music has changed because of the Internet, and in a way that invalidates year-in-review summaries: We rank and file music all year long on our blogs and web magazines, in the list-drenched advertorial press, and even on our iPods. If everyone's a critic, do we still need a critics' poll?