Without music, life is a journey through a desert. | | | | Dr. Dre, Director Allen Hughes and Jimmy Iovine. 'The Defiant Ones'
(HBO) | | | | | | “Without music, life is a journey through a desert.”
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| | rantnrave:// About 12 years ago I got a call from TIM WESTERGREN the founder of music service PANDORA. I was CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER at MTV NETWORKS. Tim would travel the country to meet with dedicated listeners to make sure their voices and input were heard and influenced the product they loved. He asked me to come speak at one those meetings at NYU. I was a fan then and still am. His vision and the service he founded changed music discovery forever. All these years later, It's an honor to join the board of Pandora and I look forward to helping the team continue to focus on core product values, the love of music, the artists, and the fan... I was once tasked with building a music subscription service for MTV. But before I began I thought maybe we should meet with STEVE JOBS to pitch him the idea of MTV and ITUNES working together. The MTV execs didn't know him so they turned to JIMMY IOVINE to broker the discussion. The resulting meeting is one of the funniest moments in my career and also one of the most memorable. I got to meet two of my heroes at once. Jimmy and Steve. I wanted to be in the music business since I was a young kid. I interned for CHARLES KOPPELMAN, MARTY BANDIER and JODY GERSON. I read liner notes and trade magazines instead of comics. Jimmy was an idol. A name I'd never meet. U2. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. TOM PETTY. INTERSCOPE RECORDS. And on and on. That day with Jobs, Jimmy told us some stories on the plane. He walked around with his check from the Tom Petty record for weeks before cashing it. Early stories of confidence issues. Hearing this from such a successful guy not only humanized him but made me feel I could achieve those things even if I was scared. On JULY 9th, HBO will debut a fantastic 4-part documentary on Jimmy and his longtime partner DR. DRE. THE DEFIANT ONES. I'm almost finished watching and I love it. Yes, it's glowing. As JOE WALSH once said: “You know, there’s a philosopher who says, 'As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t.'" So there is always a little revisionist history in these types of docs. Sometimes not even knowingly. But who cares? There are so many great stories on their rise and challenges in their own words and those they've worked with. No real spoilers here. But something stood out to me. As I get older, in many situations I've become more tentative. Full of doubt and fear. Too much thinking. In my 20s and 30s, fear and insecurity drove me. But it never slowed me down. I acted fearlessly. Weaknesses are often strengths. Dre and Iovine were driven from some of the same things. Maybe emanating from childhood issues they never totally got over, but they did control it. At Iovine's USC COMMENCEMENT speech he says: "I know about fear. I was once fired from two jobs within 90 days. I felt as if the sidewalk was collapsing behind me, but that insecure feeling always kept me moving forward. Rather than stop me in my tracks like a headwind, I began to learn how to make those same insecurities, the tailwinds, to propel me forward." He covers this in the doc and in his recent HOWARD STERN interview. Tailwinds instead of headwinds. I can't stop thinking about that analogy. It will help me get through this period. The two guys fit together perfectly. As EMINEM says: "Jimmy Iovine is the levitator. Dre is the innovator." From NWA to solo stuff to collabs and his production work, Dre has played in my house for over 20 years. My first AOL screen name was CHRONIC94. A Dre solo nod. It's a story of success, fear, insecurity, ambition, talent, hard work, luck, tenacity, serving the artist, entrepreneurship, dreams, opportunity and more. Directed by ALLEN HUGHES. I really loved it. This is a film for everyone. It inspires... Congrats to MGM CEO GARY BARBER on his inclusion on HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S Most Powerful People in Entertainment list... The first one to ask for a raise is usually the first one that slides down the dinosaur exactly at quitting time. Ironic... The biggest issue facing the online music industry is the missing full catalog of DEF LEPPARD. New generations need to know... Happy Birthday to CASEY WASSERMAN, JOE GREEN, NADA STIRRATT, ANDREW ANKER, ANAND CHANDRASEKARAN, MICHELLE BREEZE JOHNSON, DAVID NATHAN, and BOB SHERMAN. Belated to JASON KRIKORIAN, DANNY PASSMAN, JOSEPH ROBINSON, and MATT YOUNG. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| The University of Chicago Press Journals |
| Our smartphones enable--and encourage--constant connection to information, entertainment, and each other. They put the world at our fingertips, and rarely leave our sides. Although these devices have immense potential to improve welfare, their persistent presence may come at a cognitive cost. | | |
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| Why are so many privileged people feeling so sick? Luckily, there’s no shortage of cures. | | |
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| Who should decide what is hate speech in an online global community? | | |
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| In the ever-evolving scatter of content making its way to the small screen, many players are continuing to emerge - but there may be no one better poised to push reinvention forward than Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg. | | |
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| Just wait. Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either. | | |
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| What happens when China's e-commerce giants, like Alibaba, go offline? | | |
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| It is difficult to overstate the importance of headlines. A good headline can entice and engage your audience to click, to read, and to share your content. In many cases headlines are the thing that is shared rather than the article. So you knew that. But do you know what makes an engaging headline? | | |
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| Disinterested reporting is overrated. | | |
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| We now have the whole world in our hands, but how did we get here? | | |
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| NA: Not available * Figure takes into account the $215 million annual payout ESPN has committed to the "contract" bowls - the Rose, Sugar and Orange - in addition to the playoff package. ** Total shared deal with Fox is worth a combined $600 million. | | |
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| The writer, director, and producer talks to Alec Baldwin about growing up Coppola, tracking down Bill Murray, and understanding the vulnerability of stars. | | |
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| What Google searches for porn tell us about ourselves. | | |
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| The legendary consumer advocate describes his decades-long perspective on what brought the Democratic Party to its current state of collapse. | | |
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| It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google -- and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. | | |
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| Climbers, cyclists, runners, and all kinds of other athletes-both men and women-are starting to speak out about disordered eating in their communities. | | |
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| One of the best essays written last year was Elad Gil’s End of Cycle? -- referencing our most recent 2007-2017 run on mobile and web software, and the implications for investing, startups, and entrepreneurs. Although he doesn’t directly talk about it, the end of a tech cycle has major implications for launching new products, growing existing product categories, because of a simple thing. | | |
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| Feminist speaker hits back at trolls and haters. | | |
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| A search for the source of Southern hip-hop’s magic will always lead you to three men from Atlanta - Ray Murray, Sleepy Brown, and Rico Wade - known to the world as Organized Noize. | | |
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| The godfather of Philadelphia startups is not an investor or a founder. He's a lawyer that believed in the entrepreneurial community before it became commonplace. He's Steve Goodman. | | |
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| It all began with a newfangled bank machine in Enfield. | | |
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| From DIY drum pads to robot vocals. | | |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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