Lucy Dacus: Woodstock, a Utopia? Not for Every Generation (NYT)
But an anniversary is a call to action — to remember, and celebrate if possible. Remembrance is one of the most powerful tools we have. Revisiting the past, intentionally, allows us to excavate more of the truth each time we look back. Without this effort, our memories will be gradually, carelessly buried under the debris of our lives, the sharpness of our good intentions dulled under the weight of time passed.
Whatever Woodstock was, I can’t speak to. What it is today feels like a husk of a dream. And yet we are still drawn in by the lore, like we know the vision has yet to be fully realized, like the story isn’t over.
Korede Akinsete: Call Us by Our Name: Stop Using "Afrobeats" (Okay Africa)
These replacement names have yet to stick and even more troubling, the ever-present "afro-" prefix still follows the tradition of portraying Africa in monolithic terms. A much simpler and respectful solution, is to refer to what is currently known as Afrobeats as pop music from a specific country (i.e. Ghanaian Pop Music) and to other established musical styles by their local names—"highlife," "fuji," "gqom," "bongo flava" and so forth, equipping new listeners with the right vocabulary to experience the varying cultures.
In the rat race for crossover success, Africa's biggest pop stars and their backers have been preoccupied with creating a palatable brand for US and UK consumers while losing sight of the long game—retaining ownership of culture. For African pop music to command the level of respect that is reflective of its influence, artists must divorce themselves from the idea that crossing over to Western markets is the highest privilege.
"Afrobeats" centers western audiences in the very language used to describe the soundtrack to the lives of university kids partying on the beaches of Accra and the Lagos workers who set out at 5am to beat traffic. This is simply unfair. African art and by extension Black art should be allowed to exist without the constant burden of performance under a Western gaze.
Hanif Abdurraqib: From Vanilla Ice to Macklemore: understanding the white rapper's burden (The Guardian)
I stopped fucking with Eminem when he couldn’t stop making rape jokes in his rhymes as he approached 40 years old. There is a time when all of us have to re-evaluate the distance we actually have from dangerous moments. Eminem has a distance that never runs out. A distance that only grows wider. And there are those who would call him edgy for not realising this, while ignoring those who realise that their proximity to danger is a lot slimmer, and yet they’ve still found a way to stay alive. No one finds this funny.
[...]
What Macklemore didn’t embrace was the thing that Eminem embraced before him: if you are in a system that will propel you to the top off of the backs of black artists who might be better than you are, no one black is going to be interested in your guilt. It has played out in every genre since the inception of genre, or since the first song was pulled by white hands from wherever a black person sang it into the air. No one knows what to make of the guilt.
[...]
Macklemore did what I would have hoped he would have done, even if he did it painfully and with a tone of self-congratulation. What no other white rapper was able to do before him. He stopped just apologising for what he imagined as undeserved fame and instead weaponised it, losing fans in the process. The major function of privilege is that it allows us who hold it in masses to sacrifice something for the greater good of pulling up someone else. Macklemore, whether intentionally or not, decided to use his privilege to cannibalise whiteness, tearing at his own mythology in the process. When I saw him last year at a festival, he performed White Privilege II to a captivated white audience. Halfway through the song, he left the stage entirely empty, walking off and making room for two black poets and a black drummer to read poems about police violence and gentrification. It was a stunning image, an artist holding the mouth of his audience open and forcing the slick red spoonful of medicine down their throats.
Sophie Haigney: Meet the man behind the music at Logan Airport (The Boston Globe)
What’s played over the speakers at Logan originates in a room in a yellow house in North Providence.
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This question of how to please everyone is something that many large public spaces — and small private spaces — deal with on a daily basis. This desire to please the largest crowd — or not to offend — drove the popularity of “elevator music.” On some level, this challenge continues to drive companies like Spotify to create better and better algorithms. And it drives Dalzell to continually add and delete, listen and select.
‘Nobody Here but Us Chickens!’ by Louis Jordan (Wikipedia)
A number-one on the Billboard R&B chart from 1946.
Apparently, this phrase originated in the early 1900s as a racist joke about a slave stealing chickens. An excerpt here from ‘Everybody’s Magazine’ from 1908:
A Southerner, hearing a great commotion in his chicken-house one dark night, took his revolver and went to investigate.
“Who’s there?” he sternly demanded, open the door.
No answer.
“Who’s there? Answer, or I’ll shoot!”
A trembling voice from the farthest corner: “’Deed, sah, dey ain’t nobody hyah ’ceptin’ us chickens.”
So, yeah: pretty racist and awful!
In a radio show excerpt that I listened to (https://www.waywordradio.org/us-chickens/), the hosts suggest that by the time it had been turned into a hit song in 1946, it had lost all of that context. I think that’s an awfully convenient assertion for two white people to make over a hundred years later!
Andy Beta: Yvonne Turner Helped Invent House Music—So Why Does No One Know Her Name? (Pitchfork)
Evan Turner was actually Yvonne Turner, who had a prolific, if abridged, career as a producer, mixer, and remixer. Being erroneously credited was just the beginning: On subsequent pressings of “Music Is the Answer,” her name was left off altogether. These kinds of mistakes and misprints make piecing together Turner's discography especially tricky. She was often relegated to the small print on a record, bumped to associate or co-producer status, marked as mixer instead of remixer. In dance music, it's assumed that the singer is secondary to the producer in the creative process, but the inverse is true for Turner. Many male vocalists she worked with—be it Abrams, Willie Colón, or Arnold Jarvis—got credit for the music.
Do you like to put songs in the proper order? So do we! That's why we've built these tools that help you create and organize your playlists.
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Organize Your Music — Organize your Spotify music by any of a wide range of musical attributes including genre, mood, decade of release and more.
The Playlist Miner — The Playlist Miner aggregates the top tracks from the most popular public playlists on Spotify that match your search criteria. Looking for the best workout tracks? Enter the term workout and we'll find the tracks that have appeared most frequently in workout playlists
Sort Your Music — Sort your Spotify playlists by any of a wide range of musical attributes such as tempo, loudness, energy, danceability, popularity and more.
The Set Listener — Create a Spotify playlist for your favorite artist's most recent show.
The Unfollower — Quickly unfollow Spotify playlists.
Roadtrip Mixtape — Create a mixtape of local artists for your roadtrip.
Boil the Frog — Create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style to another.
Acrostify — Create a Spotify playlist with a secret message hidden as an acrostic.
‘Old Town Road’: See How Memes and Controversy Took Lil Nas X to No. 1 (NY Times)
In the latest “Diary of a Song” episode, Lil Nas X is joined by the producer YoungKio — who didn’t even know he was a part of “Old Town Road” until he heard it in a video meme — and Billy Ray Cyrus, who lent the song another layer of novelty and outlaw credibility. The video also features cameos by the influencers @nicemichael and @elitelife_kd, who were crucial to the track’s early rise.
Maria Bustillos: The 1% Nightmare Class Politics of Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” (Popula)
I mean this reaction to poverty is not even mocking, or laughing. The have-nots hate the haves just for being themselves, glorious, glossy and rich; thus the haves needn’t, and won’t, even acknowledge that the have-nots exist, those gap-toothed ignorant peasants in their gross marabou-free clothes. They need to shut up, control themselves. Calm down.
Natalie Angier: New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ (NYT)
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.
Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
Full list of changes to the officially released Leak 04-13 (Reddit)
Through listening to the album and all of the posts everyone has been making here, I put together a comprehensive list of all the differences between the original leak and the new version. Please let me know if I missed something!
All songs are less compressed and have a much better mix.
Art/music can be disruptive technologies. Art doesn’t just come from reorganization of cultural forms. It is radical when it perturbs dominant cultural modes & shakes people out of their ordinary experience. It has the power to connect us to mysteries of imagination and being.
Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 2,923 genres by Spotify as of 2019-04-16. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
Clones of the Queen is the selected artist for 'Hawaiian Indie.' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Crysknife007 specializes in extended ambient space and spaceship sounds. He also enjoys working with other scifi soundscapes.
Fans of ambient starship noise from TV and movies, look no further than this Bandcamp, which also includes loops of ambient noise from the Starfox video game, a submarine, fans and air conditioners, and ‘Every Super Mario Brothers Sound Effect At Once.’
The Boston Typewriter Orchestra: Termination Without Prejudice, Volume 1
Music performed entirely on typewriters.
A collective endeavor which engages in rhythmic typewriter manipulation combined with elements of performance, comedy and satire. BTO aims to entertain the masses while providing an outlet for the creative urges of its members.
Amy Phillips: Why Are Women Underrepresented in Music? Look to the Ryan Adams Story (Pitchfork)
How many lives have been ruined by coercive men and their protectors? How many women stopped working in music because of them? And how much great music did we lose in turn?
Hazel Cills: Spotify's New Mute Feature Is a Patronizing Misstep (Jezebel)
There’s no easy institutional answer as to what to do with the music of men like R. Kelly, or XXXTentacion, or any other alleged abuser on a streaming platform like Spotify. While allowing users to answer that question on their own might seem like a great solution at first glance, it’s ultimately a lazy, patronizing copout for Spotify, one which allows the streaming giant to avoid answering for their role in promoting these artists.
WhoSampled for some reason decided to get rid of the list of samples used by The Field, so I'm taking matters into my own hands. The way I'm ordering this is by album and then by the song or songs sampled on the tracks in the album. Any additions or criticisms are welcome, so long as you can back it up with the times in the song where the samples are.
A look at how Spencer Krug portrays the Minotaur in the Moonface album ‘This One’s For the Dancer.’
The Athenian children are victims, but so too is the Minotaur. This is far more representative of many real conflicts than the standard good vs. evil narrative – insulated potentates have orchestrated a scenario in which there are no winners, only victims, in the attempt to keep the political machine grinding on.
Robin James: Toned down for what? How 'chill' turned toxic
Like its ancestor cool, chill does double duty as a prestige marker. On the one hand, in the post-#MeToo era, chill masculinity seems infinitely preferable to so-called “toxic masculinity”, which is predatory and self-destructive. But even though Sheeran’s tame romanticism may feel less toxic than the slightly skeevy masculinity of bro-step, chill is less a step towards equality and more an update on gender and race stereotypes.
Jesse Dorris: The Prodigy — The Fat of the Land (Pitchfork)
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.