Every couple of months he’d come by and be like, 'Oh, check out my new album.' A new album every few months. He was just super-prolific and he’d always give me that boost. I’d look at my s*** like, 'What am I doing? OK, I need to make some more s***.' | | | | Denzel Curry's at the Boston Calling Music Festival, May 25, 2019.
(Nathan Klima/Boston Globe/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Every couple of months he’d come by and be like, 'Oh, check out my new album.' A new album every few months. He was just super-prolific and he’d always give me that boost. I’d look at my s*** like, 'What am I doing? OK, I need to make some more s***.'”
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| | rantnrave:// I'm just old enough to have seen LEON REDBONE on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in 1976, just young enough to not have had a clue what I was seeing or hearing. He was the musical guest twice during the show's first season, a fact that, in retrospect, may have seemed almost as strange then as it seems now. But it was a new show. Strange was part of the idea. He looked like what I imagined the 1920s looked like, sounded like what I imagined the 1910s sounded like and sang an IRVING BERLIN song when he wanted to bring things a little more up to date. He was studiously droll. I assumed he was 60 years old or something. I mean, he had to be. I wasn't, and if 1976 TVs had fast-forward buttons, I would have used one. He was, in fact, in his mid-20s. About the same age as JUSTIN BIEBER and MILEY CYRUS are now. Younger than three of the four members of ABBA were then. He didn't hit 60 until 2009, and he was only 69 when he died Thursday. The official announcement of his death, from his family, said he was 127. I'd like to believe both of those numbers are right. In a way, they are. All performers are playing characters; he inhabited his with more commitment and more depth than most. Much, much more. He was born in Cyprus to an Armenian family during a time of political unrest and violence. The family eventually made its way to Toronto. Redbone, whose name wasn't Redbone (or Leon), never talked about this in public. He told people he was born in Louisiana and made up a fake birth name, which also wasn't Leon or Redbone. He invented his own roots—early 20th century American blues, jazz, ragtime, pop country, etc.—and became a lifelong scholar of the music and the musicians who made it. That part was real. Or maybe all of it was real. He "become the character he created," his daughter ASHLEY said earlier this year. "PLEASE DON'T TALK ABOUT ME WHEN I'M GONE," said a favorite song of his, written in 1930 by SAM H. STEPT and SIDNEY CLARE, but Redbone didn't want you to talk about him when he was here either. He just wanted you to hear the music, and maybe to rediscover your real roots through the ones he made up for himself. And to hear the mysterious truths that live at the heart of even the most fanciful stories. And to laugh and smile along the way. RIP... Farewell also to PARK BLVD RECORDS in Oakland, Calif., which in less than four years of existence became a mecca for hip-hop vinyl and cassette collectors (it will continue to live online), and to the call letters WPLJ, beloved by New York classic rockers of a certain age... GREY WORM makes music, and he loves BILLY JOEL... It's FRIDAY and that means ROCKETMAN, the biopic of the guy who plays piano who isn't Billy Joel, is opening in in the US, and KANYE WEST is the guest on the new episode of DAVID LETTERMAN's NETFLIX thing, and there's new music from DENZEL CURRY, SKEPTA, THOMAS RHETT, MILEY CYRUS, SINKANE, DAMON LOCKS, LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY, DARKTHRONE, KIRK FRANKLIN, JUAN WAUTERS, CAMILA MEZA, SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE WITH PATTI SMITH, SARAH DAVACHI, J. ROBBINS, CHRISHAN & OG PARKER, DOG BLOOD, SACRED PAWS, PSYCHEDELIC PORN CRUMPETS, FUJIYA & MIYAGI, JUAN LUIS GUERRA, COL3TRANE, DUFF MCKAGAN, IAN NOE, KISHI BASHI, MATSTUDIO, FRANK IERO & THE FUTURE VIOLENTS, JR JR, FLOR DE TOLOACHE and PIP BLOM... RIP TONY GLOVER.
| | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| With streaming poised to infuse billions of dollars into the music business, artists are once again hoping to get their fair share. | | |
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| The unsexy in-store music streaming sector is posed for multibillion-dollar growth — and big-tech companies want in. | | |
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| The National Trust for Historic Preservation on Thursday named the streets where Patsy Cline recorded "Crazy" and Dolly Parton laid down "I Will Always Love You" to its 2019 "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" list. | | |
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| Leon Redbone’s first guitar, or at least the first one anyone seems to remember seeing after he emerged on the Toronto folk scene in the late 1960s, was a Harmony Sovereign, transformed according to his vision. He painted the headstock to cover up the brand name and drew a meticulous pattern around the edges of the soundboard that, from the audience, resembled inlay. | | |
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| With the release of 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters,' the composer Akira Ifukube's legacy continues. | | |
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| Apple Musics global publishing head, Elena Segal, on the industry, those CRB appeals, and her career to date. | | |
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| “This one’s long,” says 36 year-old Steven Ellison of "Flamagra," his sixth album as Flying Lotus. “It’s an hour and some change, so I don’t expect people to actually listen to this all the way. I expect people to jump in and jump out, which is fine.” That’s a striking-ass calm admission for an artist promoting an album as big and good, as sprawling and weird as "Flamagra." | | |
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| The Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist has entered his solo-experimentation phase, but he remains the leftist hero who inspired a generation of activists. | | |
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| On Friday, May 31, 95.5 WPLJ-FM - one of the most transformative radio stations in the New York market in the last four decades -- will fade to black after 48 years on the air when it switches over to a contemporary Christian music station called KLOVE following the frequency's sale by Cumulus Media. | | |
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| Streaming has literally changed the world -- it's bringing music and the businesses around it to previously under-optimized territories, and the results are already in full effect. Latin America has become a streaming powerhouse, China and India are well on their way, and the major labels are moving aggressively into Africa, the Middle East and the rest of Asia. | | |
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| The St. John Coltrane Church has endured everything from multiple relocations to a $7.5 million lawsuit from Alice Coltrane. Still, the church stands today. | | |
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| Deep cut from 1989’s ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ summed up what Nicks called a “magical time” in her career. | | |
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| Eamonn Forde takes a look at why labels and publishers are trying to negotiate better deals with the platform, and why exposure alone is not sufficient currency. | | |
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| In her U.S. debut as Don Giovanni, Lucia Lucas became the first known trans person to sing a principal role on an American opera stage. | | |
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| Jazz pianist Billy Tipton has been celebrated by some as a trans pioneer - but his story resists an easy telling. | | |
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| The rising Chicago rapper tells MTV News about her come-up and what her new album 'Eat My P**** Again' means. | | |
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| The latest release in a long-standing relationship between the great dub astronaut and On-U Sound founder Adrian Sherwood, Rainford is Lee “Scratch” Perry’s most sophisticated, personal and politically prescient album in years. David Katz met them both to hear about its creation. | | |
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| Naira Marley and Zlatan’s cheeky political song “Am I a Yahoo Boy” prompted immediate action from the government. | | |
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| Across decades in music, Gary Stewart became an influential curator, admired taste-maker and beloved friend to many. That wasn't enough to save his life. | | |
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| We crash their reunion tour to find out. | | |
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| Once his songs of loneliness and shyness made him a hero to misfits and outsiders. Yet now he is voicing his support for a far-right party. | | |
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| | | | | | | From "Zuu," out today on Loma Vista. |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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