When our ability to speak is not restrained by a 28-page contract and legal threats, we will expose what happens when you 'step up' at the Recording Academy, a public nonprofit. | | | | It takes two at NARAS and the Grammy Awards: two pianos, two factions, two lawsuits, two investigations.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images) | | | | | | “When our ability to speak is not restrained by a 28-page contract and legal threats, we will expose what happens when you 'step up' at the Recording Academy, a public nonprofit.”
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| | rantnrave:// Sooooo... GRAMMY week. Not exactly how LIZZO or BILLIE EILISH pictured it, one imagines. There's one detail that's been nagging at me about the RECORDING ACADEMY telling its first female CEO to step aside as soon as she stepped up—to use the unfortunate language of her predecessor—and started dismantling the very barriers to progress that had gotten her predecessor into language trouble in the first place. The timing. That's what nags at me. The Academy's executive committee was aware two months ago, we've been told, of complaints that CEO DEBORAH DUGAN was fostering an "abusive work environment." And one month ago, the board received a letter from a lawyer for a single staff member who upped the description to "toxic and intolerable" and "abusive and bullying." Workplace bullying and abusiveness in any form is wrong and shouldn't be tolerated. I'm not here to defend it. It's also widespread across pretty much every industry, music included. There are rarely consequences for the abuser. There should be. But if the abuse in this case was as toxic and extraordinary as we're being asked to believe, why was it OK for Dugan to still be running the show two months later? If the bullying was so bad that you'd be willing to fire your own CEO, or at least put her on leave, a week before the GRAMMY AWARDS—the Recording Academy's SUPER BOWL—how could you have let her keep doing her thing for the two months prior? What's the exact allegation here? How bad are we talking? And if it wasn't so bad that you couldn't let it go for a couple months while you looked into the complaints, then why act now? What's going on? What's the message? What's the fear? That it will be harder to discredit her after she oversees her first successful Grammy broadcast? That's actually been suggested, and it sounds like a conspiracy theory, at least until you start thinking about it. As for everything else we've been forced to think about for the past few days, it's safe to say most of us don’t have all the facts. There's a lot to sort out, and we'll be sorting it out over the coming days and weeks. (Board chair and interim CEO HARVEY MASON JR.—who for what it's worth co-produced this track by one of the most famously snubbed women in Grammy history—expressed concern Monday that all this sorting out could take attention away from the artists whom the Grammys are designed to celebrate. But that one's on Mason's own board for acting exactly 10 days before the ceremony. What did they think would happen?) Were there conflicts of interest and financial management high up in the org, and did Dugan step up into a puddle by trying to rein it all in? Were the Academy's millions of dollars in outside legal expenses exorbitant? Did Dugan go up against an old guard of old white men and lose? Will the Academy ever welcome the sweeping reforms its own task force on diversity and inclusion recommended? Did Dugan try to do too much too soon without acclimating to the existing culture? Was she too much of an outsider? "If she was a dude who was coming in, would it be characterized differently?" Will any women, or anyone at all, say anything when the Grammys are broadcast Sunday? MusicSET: "Grammy Wars: New CEO Steps Up, Recording Academy Asks Her to Step Down"... Is it weird/eerie that the former assistant who's contemplating suing Dugan for workplace abuse has retained a HARVEY WEINSTEIN lawyer while Dugan has retained a lawyer for one of Weinstein's accusers, or is that just to be expected in the small world that is the entertainment industry?... OPRAH WINFREY says she absolutely did not pull out of executive producing a documentary about RUSSELL SIMMONS' accusers because he pressured her to do so, but rather she decided independently to pull out after he did exactly that. The doc, ON THE RECORD, will premiere this month at SUNDANCE but is no longer headed to APPLE TV PLUS... SPOTIFY is in talks to buy the RINGER, per the WALL STREET JOURNAL... RIP the great Nashville songwriter DAVID OLNEY, who on Saturday night "was playing a song when he paused, said 'I’m sorry' and put his chin to his chest. He never dropped his guitar or fell off his stool. It was as easy and gentle as he was"... RIP also tenor saxophone great JIMMY HEATH; New Orleans singer/songwriter ROBERT PARKER, and PETER LARKIN, who co-designed P-FUNK's Mothership.
| | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Was the Recording Academy's first female CEO a reformer or a bully? Did she try to change too much too soon? Or did the Academy want to be changed at all? | | |
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| Music discovery is more difficult than ever with infinite choices, little curation, and a lack of supportive community. Robert Dean explores the need for a resource like classic MTV in the modern era. | | |
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| Headliners should play for well over an hour — but it all depends on audience expectations. | | |
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| California’s new online privacy law, combined with a cocktail of similar laws in the EU, India and elsewhere , could drag the high-flying music industry down to earth. | | |
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| A Variety writer's quip about how playing two women on the radio back-to-back broke all the rules led to a media tempest, once Kacey Musgraves and Kelsea Ballerini joined the fray. | | |
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| How TikTok-and a squeaky noise-made Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” the biggest song in America. | | |
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| The weekly Apple Music playlist will grant exposure to emerging and independent artists. | | |
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| After the rapper’s sudden death in 2018, the producer did his best to “get out of the way” of recordings that represented a bracing left turn for a still-evolving artist. | | |
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| The singer who once sang backup for Massive Attack, Iggy Azalea and The Chemical Brothers, is front-and-center at the Tiny Desk. | | |
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| We set up in an abandoned restaurant on the edge of the Tigris river to record a classical trio called Awtar Nergal. I asked the band what life was like living under ISIS. The violin player said he had buried his instrument under his garden after one of his neighbors tipped off ISIS that he was a musician. | | |
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| Music festivals going green in Asia face a tricky task: shedding their long-simmering stigmas as carnivals of trashy tourism and bringing mainstream awareness of sustainability to a region that needs it the most. | | |
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| At the Connect conference in New York, Carter suggested major labels have missed a trick by not pulling their content off existing streaming services and building their own platforms; said the music industry may follow the NBA in becoming an artist-driven world of short contracts and label-hopping; and predicted private-equity firms might buy out the rights of stars like Drake. | | |
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| Nearly 20 years ago, the genre-defining artist found the Black power in Puerto Rican identity. | | |
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| Steve Gorman played drums in the Black Crowes from 1987 to 2001. Then again from 2005 to 2014. | | |
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| Spotify's main rivals don't need to make a profit on streaming. So, how does a pure-play compete? | | |
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| Microsoft's musical partnership with Björk generates choral music based on weather patterns and birds. It's very calming, and I want it at home. | | |
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| I look at every piece of recorded music in this way: "This is one way that the music could have been captured and presented." | | |
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| From lunching with Dee Dee Ramone to shooting up with Alice Cooper's guitarist, the journalist and co-founder of "PUNK" magazine reflects on the movement he named. | | |
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| The halls’ omissions are striking. I do not think they accurately correlate to the successes of women in music, though that’s a hard thing to quantify. What they do represent are the gendered tastes of the mostly male nominating and voting bodies that make these decisions. They are today’s version of the Shriners or Masons: bro’ societies devoted to self-perpetuation. They are patriarchies. | | |
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| He was the first African American to win a Pulitzer for music, yet he died largely unknown. How the music world is starting to right that wrong. | | |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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