I asked Jay-Z, I asked Mary J. Blige, I asked Lil Kim, Erykah Badu, Dave Chappelle. Most people just don't want to touch it. Ahmir ['Questlove' Thompson] was like, 'I would do anything for you but I can't do this.' It's not because they support him, it's because it's so messy and muddy. It's that turning away that has allowed this to go on. | | | | Rufus' Tony Maiden and Chaka Khan in Amstelveen, Netherlands, in 1976.
(Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I asked Jay-Z, I asked Mary J. Blige, I asked Lil Kim, Erykah Badu, Dave Chappelle. Most people just don't want to touch it. Ahmir ['Questlove' Thompson] was like, 'I would do anything for you but I can't do this.' It's not because they support him, it's because it's so messy and muddy. It's that turning away that has allowed this to go on.”
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| | rantnrave:// I was working at MTV when R. KELLY's "TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET" came out. It's the last R. Kelly music I paid attention to. The world didn't know Kelly then the way the world knows Kelly know, but it knew more than enough. His marriage to 15-year-old AALIYAH, which was shocking and which didn't slow down his career even a little, was already old news. The infamous videotape that got him indicted on multiple counts of child pornography (he was eventually acquitted) was current news. It was a thing that horrified decent people; but decent people laughed about it, too. "Trapped in the Closet" got plenty of play inside the MTV building. It was bonkers, it was entertaining, it was clearly the work of an unmoored and still quite talented artist, and it was a video you sort of laughed at and sort of laughed with. It's easy to say the world was a different place then. But it wasn't so different that a grown man sleeping with, and urinating on, an underaged girl was even remotely funny. Watching R. Kelly continue his career, even as it was going off the rails, from inside a building in the middle of an industry that treated this man as a pop idol, was an act of enablement, plain and simple. I'm talking about me. I'm not going to try to speak for my friends who also watched, or any of the millions of others. It's something we all have to process for ourselves, and I don't pretend to know what anyone else was thinking, or thinks now. I remembered that moment as I watched the first two parts of LIFETIME's thoughtful, thorough and heart-wrenching SURVIVING R. KELLY Thursday night, and as I read about executive producer DREAM HAMPTON's frustrations trying to book musicians to appear in the series (see quote of the day, above). QUESTLOVE, one of the stars hampton called out by name, responded Thursday, tweeting that Kelly is "trash" and he supports the documentary "10000000 percent" but he didn't want to be filmed talking about Kelly's talent. hampton pushed back, saying that's not what she wanted Questlove to talk about, and he deleted his tweet. I think of Questlove as one of the smartest and most self-aware musicians anywhere. We enable in ways both big and small, in public and in private, intentionally and unintentionally. We enable lots of unworthy people—pop stars, hip-hop stars, indie rockers, legends, wannabes—for a zillion reasons known and unknown. There is a long history in this, as "Surviving R. Kelly" took time to explore in its first hour. We have to be better. We have to work at being better. Every day. "Surviving R. Kelly" continues at 9pm ET/PT today and tomorrow on Lifetime. Praise be JOHN LEGEND... Random notes from BUZZANGLE's 2018 Year-End Report: Subscription streaming is trouncing ad-supported streaming as a source of music consumption, and the difference is widening. Caveat to that: That section of the BuzzAngle report ignores "video streams," i.e. YOUTUBE. Room, meet elephant. "Deep catalog," which BuzzAngle defines as anything over three years old, is responsible for half of all music consumption, and that figure is remarkably consistent across different types of consumption, from buying albums and CDs to buying individual songs to streaming them. Vinyl and cassettes are the only musical formats whose sales are trending up; everything else, sales-wise, looks like the current stock market. Forty-one percent of those vinyl sales are rock albums. Hip-hop dominates consumption overall, responsible for a quarter of all songs bought and streamed in 2018. I'm sure there's a reason why anyone is still tracking "album consumption," defined here as "Album Sales + (Song Sales/10) + (OnDemand Audio Streams/1500) + (On-Demand Video Streams/1500)," but I have no idea why. That equation is almost entirely an accounting of *song* consumption. The numbers overall are rosy heading into 2019. But, speaking of caveats, there's that whole current stock market thing. Just sayin'... It's FRIDAY, and who's releasing albums for your consumption on the first Friday of the new year? DERMOT KENNEDY, BALSAM RANGE, JOHN GARCIA and SLAVES OF THE SHADOW ROOM, that's who. And new singles from D'ANGELO, FUTURE, LUNA and THEON CROSS/MOSES BOYD/NUBYA GARCIA. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Texas Monthly |
| The unlikely rise (and rise, and rise) of the most powerful man in country music. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| The Lifetime docuseries, premiering Jan. 3, features interviews with survivors, friends, and family, who all shed light on the superstar’s systemic abuse of (mostly) black girls. | | |
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 | Shadow and Act |
| When an unnamed Chicago-area man threatened to shoot up a New York City screening of the explosive docuseries "Surviving R. Kelly" last month, filmmaker dream hampton, an executive producer on the series, was not surprised. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Examining the multiple failings that plague the rock n’ roll song about rock n’ roll. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Viral cartoon rap memes are breaking new artists and increasing streaming revenue for labels. Here's how "SpongeBob" is changing the business of rap. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| Like we always do at this time! The day that Coachella unveils its poster is one of the great holidays in pop music. Even if you've never been to the festival, and even if you have no plans of ever going, it's fascinating. This poster, more than any other, reveals the pop-music pecking order and spells out what might be facing us in the year ahead. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| After reports last year of rampant sexual harassment on its grounds - a story in Teen Vogue found more than 50 accounts of sexual misconduct over the three day weekend - the Goldenvoice-produced festival has added an anti-harassment policy. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| The newly-passed Music Modernization Act calls for the creation of a music licensing collective -- and the competition is heating up over who should sit on the collective’s board. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Pusha discusses his first Grammy nomination, what separates ‘Daytona’ from his previous solo work and competing against Mac Miller. | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| The love that Prince is referring to in "I Would Die 4 U' must be compared to spiritual and religious ideology because as he sings in his lyrics, it’s not romantic, not familiar or platonic, but rather divine. | | |
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 | Esquire |
| For 2019, we need forgiveness for what we did in 1996. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| Who decides what we hear on hold? Who writes it? And why doesn’t classical music work? | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Swift was an early adopter of the faux-intimacy afforded by social media, and she has mastered, if not pioneered, its weird, chummy cadences-even when performing a stadium show. | | |
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 | NewMusicBox |
| It all started with a conversation. What could we possibly do as teachers and as artists to make things better? We wanted to do something more profound, more long-lasting and impactful. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Hip-hop, streaming subscriptions, vinyl and Ariana Grande shared in the good news. Rock, and digital sales of any sort, not so much. | | |
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 | Dazed Digital |
| While the show’s joyful aesthetic has endured in the cultural memory, the potency of its political convictions has faded with time. | | |
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| Complex |
| The morning DJ you love to hate shares his vision for the future of radio and his plans to further the Apple empire. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| “I realize now how young and immature we were and how hopeless we were at coming to grips with Syd’s breakdown,” drummer says. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Rubberband OG, who raps about the poverty and violence that have shaped him, comes face to face with America's deep-seated racism and history of lynching at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in his hometown of Montgomery, Ala. | | |
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 | Afropop Worldwide |
| In the early 1980s Jumbo was a prominent figure in London's cosmopolitan music culture. He presented concerts by South African émigrés such as Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza and Julian Bahula, and by Thomas Mapfumo on his first visit from Zimbabwe. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | For my New York friends. But not for Andrew Cuomo. |
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