Up to this point, music was primarily a shared experience: families huddling around furniture-sized Philcos; teens blasting tunes from automobiles or sock-hopping to transistor radios; the bar-room juke; break-dancers popping and locking to the sonic backdrop of a boom box. After the Walkman, music could be silence to all but the listener, cocooned within a personal soundscape. The effect was shocking even to its creators. | | | | Jessie Ware at Electric Picnic, Dublin, Ireland, Sept. 2, 2018.
(Kieran Frost/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Up to this point, music was primarily a shared experience: families huddling around furniture-sized Philcos; teens blasting tunes from automobiles or sock-hopping to transistor radios; the bar-room juke; break-dancers popping and locking to the sonic backdrop of a boom box. After the Walkman, music could be silence to all but the listener, cocooned within a personal soundscape. The effect was shocking even to its creators.”
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| | rantnrave:// Thinking more about the two controversial, poorly social-distanced country shows Saturday night in Tennessee and Idaho (the latter was part of a multi-day festival, from which at least two headliners dropped out), it struck me that there was virtually no coverage of either event in the mainstream press before they happened. They were described after-the-fact as two of the first attempts to stage large-scale (or at least medium-scale) traditional concerts in the US in three months—maybe literally the first two—which makes it especially odd that they could be booked, promoted and ticketed almost completely out of view of so many people. A much smaller club show a month earlier in Arkansas by indie country-rocker TRAVIS MCCREADY attracted intense national coverage for several days by the likes of the NEW YORK TIMES and ROLLING STONE along with the attention of Arkansas officials and the eyes and ears of a good chunk of the live music industry. Saturday's shows were bigger outdoor events by one current and one former major-label artist, both with gold records on their walls, and unless you follow CHASE RICE or CHRIS JANSON on INSTAGRAM it's unlikely you had any idea they were happening. Are we headed toward a new version of the American culture war where are there two different live-music Americas, one in which concerts with live audiences exist and one in which they don't? And in which the two sides don't acknowledge each other's existence, if they're even aware of each other? I don't believe we're there, but in a country where wearing masks and going to bars are divisive political issues, it isn't hard to see how concerts, too, could become a left/right divide. I pray they don't, because music should be a connector, not a separator. A bridge, not a gulf. A universal truth. Chase Rice returned to Instagram Monday to talk about the east Tennessee show at which he played for an audience just shy of 1,000 people who, based on his own earlier postings, ignored basic social distancing conventions. "I understand there’s a lot of varying opinions, a lot of different opinions on COVID-19, how it works with live music crowds, and what all that looks like," he said. Which is true, strictly speaking, in the unregulated court of public opinion, but not really true in the world of mainstream medicine. In the latter world, things are more cut and dry: Wear masks. Socially distance. Period. But Rice then told his fans that "your safety is a huge, huge priority" and said his next show, Friday in Ashland, Ky., will be a drive-in concert, a safer genre of show that the other live-music America is generally comfortable with. "Please go by the rules," he said. "The safer we are now, the quicker that we get to get to actual normal live shows, which I know we all want." I'm reasonably certain there isn't a music fan in America or anywhere else who wouldn't agree with that. May the cars and trucks roll in for that one. And may everyone who wasn't aware of this particular corner of live music before, be aware now... Twenty years ago today, PEARL JAM was onstage at the ROSKILDE FESTIVAL in Denmark, where a very different kind of overcrowding led to the tragic deaths of nine fans. "Nothing has been the same since," the band posted on Instagram early this morning along with a video of nine candles and a live clip of the song "LOVE BOAT CAPTAIN" referencing nine lost friends "I'm getting to know"... MTV's VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS will happen Aug. 30 in Brooklyn, with satellite performances in all five New York City boroughs and either "limited or no audience"... Save STEREOGUM... MIXMAG puts print magazine on "pause"... RIP BENNY MARDONES, a one-hit wonder who had top-20 pop hits in 1980 and 1989 with the same song; YOUNG CURT, who had no hits but was an influential figure in the Bay Area's hip-hop scene; JOHNNY MANDEL, who scored both the film and TV versions of M*A*S*H and wrote the music for their shared theme song; Muscle Shoals session guitarist PETE CARR, and free-jazz trumpeter JACQUES COURSIL. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| The gadget that taught the world to socially distance. | | |
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| With concerts on hold, it’s abundantly clear that most musicians can’t live off streaming income alone. How could the system be fixed? | | |
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| It is tempting to envision Chinese media firms as the local equivalent of a familiar Western brand. That mindset imagines Weibo as the Chinese Twitter, iQIYI as the Chinese Netflix, and WeChat as a Middle Kingdom version of WhatsApp. | | |
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| The Bailey sisters on why they didn’t switch up overnight -- the world just caught up to their speed. | | |
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| Filter bubbles are real. Particularly in the social media era, we are all trapped inside a likeminded feedback loop of our own making. I think we all recognize this on an intuitive level, but sometimes a reminder that you inhabit a bespoke cultural silo will come along and smack you in the face. | | |
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| The nation isn’t in a celebratory mood. But the BET Awards struck a delicate balance between honoring black artists and reckoning with current events. | | |
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| With their showrooms closed this spring, instrument dealers around the country report surprise at the robust numbers. | | |
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| How can it be possible that we're only halfway through the year? Here are 25 albums from 2020's first six months that are worth holding onto for the next six, and beyond. | | |
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| The country singer took to social media to speak to the controversy over playing a no-social-distancing gig over the weekend. | | |
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| Mosh pit tragedy at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival on June 30, 2000. | | |
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| As more live events take place on screens, creators and producers will need new ways to license and protect copyrighted material, writes an intellectual property attorney. | | |
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| It's June 19, and Chuck D is heading to a radio interview in Los Angeles. He has a lot to say, and he's just getting started. Earlier in the day, Public Enemy dropped "State of the Union (STFU)" their first single in three years. | | |
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| There’s virtually no context Jah Wobble hasn’t explored with dub bass. | | |
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| As we arrive at the mid-point of each year, Pollstar takes a look at the first six months of global live entertainment and, on the strength of our world-renowned box-office data, provides a snapshot of the current state of the concert industry. | | |
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| Major artists are turning to brand partnerships in droves for new revenue streams. Since COVID hit, deal-making has been “heightened on steroids,” says one agency exec. | | |
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| These DJs, organizers, scholars, and more are working to re-center house and techno's Black, queer legacy. We asked them to reflect on their movement and what's in store for the future. | | |
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| Ripped to Shreds frontman Andrew Lee addresses the work that needs to be done in fighting dangerous stereotypes against Asians and Asian-Americans in underground metal. | | |
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| Redeye, the indie distributor based in Hillsborough, N.C., found itself the object of stark public criticism on social media by past employees of color, after proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter on its Facebook page. | | |
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| Around 1920, someone decided that they needed some tunes for their horseless carriage. Ninety years later, we're still listening to the radio in the car. | | |
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| "Into the Night," the melodramatic mid-tempo ballad that's quickly scaling Top 40 playlists at stations from Phoenix to Baltimore, has become wildly popular with listeners, despite the invisibility of its singer, Benny Mardones. And it's unlikely many have had any luck finding it on an album cover in the local record store—unless they've checked through the oldies cutout bins. | | |
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| | | | | | | A gorgeous last-dance-at-the-disco throwback. From "What's Your Pleasure?," out now on PMR/Friends Keep Secrets/Interscope. |
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