I didn’t miss [touring]. I’ve always wanted to perform from my bed at home. I never wanted to do the packing and going through the car and luggage and the hotel and, 'What’s the password? What’s the internet?' You get tired after years and years of doing it, you know? | | | | Which yoga pose is this? Blues guitar great T-Bone Walker circa 1950.
(Gilles Petard/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I didn’t miss [touring]. I’ve always wanted to perform from my bed at home. I never wanted to do the packing and going through the car and luggage and the hotel and, 'What’s the password? What’s the internet?' You get tired after years and years of doing it, you know?”
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| | rantnrave:// ERYKAH BADU starts her dinner with dessert, at least that's what she did while the NEW YORK TIMES was interviewing her via video recently, it was a "homemade lemon-lime-agave Popsicle," and I now love Erykah Badu a little more than I used to, and I already loved her more than I love run-on sentences. Badu is one of thousands and thousands of musicians trying to figure out how to perform live in a world where the concept of live performance has been canceled, and she's been more creative and ambitious than most, which is why the Times was talking to her for a great series of pieces about the art, business and aesthetics of livestreaming. There's been lots of discussion lately about the future of live music, but as it becomes clearer and clearer, at least in the US, that that future is a long way off, at least some attention has been turning to the strange present of live music. How to stage "absolutely not a rave." How to keep us apart. The logistics and distribution of social media music battles. The research benefits of fluorescent hand sanitizer at German concerts. Why TWITCH might be a better partner than a record company or concert promoter. The technology of quarantine jamming. And, in Badu's case, the specifics of how, for example, you can hire a truck to increase the digital bandwidth of your house ("All the neighbors had high-speed internet for a couple of weeks"), and how you might reimagine a live performance as "a two- to three-hour live music video." I'm fascinated, too, by the news buried deep within this piece that the forward-thinking ticketing startup DICE will eventually let you and your friends have a private chatroom where you can watch livestreams together and talk over the music to your heart's delight without ever being in danger of spilling beer on each other. Which sounds almost as tempting as a lemon-live-agave Popsicle... A day after awkwardly trying to rebrand itself out of a sexual assault scandal that has enveloped the label, its record store and nine of its bands, BURGER RECORDS announced Tuesday that it's going out of business. Co-founder SEAN BOHRMAN told PITCHFORK the label has already asked its distributor to remove its entire catalog from streaming platforms; the label's artists, who own their masters ("I hate dealing with lawyers so we never signed contracts with bands"), will be free to re-upload them if they want... The NEW YORKER's ALEX ROSS interviewing JOHN WILLIAMS is a fantastic music geek film geek read. Williams on film-music scholar FRANK LEHMAN's cataloging of more than 60 leitmotifs in the nine STAR WARS movies: "Oh, wow. How exhausting"... RIP pioneering concert promoter MITCH SLATER and Cardiacs frontman TIM SMITH. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| UK garage's schism in the early 2000s forced a generation to adapt, but the scene is bubbling with fresh optimism. Gabriel Szatan spends a year inside the UKG community to find out if the momentum can last. | | |
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| At the age of eighty-eight, the self-effacing composer reflects on his extraordinary career. | | |
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| With no return date for shows in sight, fans and artists are adapting to a new way of experiencing music together. Whether it’ll keep everyone satisfied -- and paid -- is still unclear. | | |
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| Being an independent artist or label was already unpredictable, but things got even more difficult in 2020. Here's how indies are evolving and coping. | | |
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| No one could have predicted what 2020 has thrown our way, but moving forward we have little excuse to not think about tomorrow today. | | |
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| Music journalist Maria Sherman discusses why she wrote 'Larger Than Life,' her exhaustive guide to an enduring cultural phenomenon. | | |
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| The musician has used TikTok to revamp his career, but he’s also perpetuating many of the app’s long-standing issues. | | |
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| Logic doesn't like the internet -- specifically social media: the masses who send hateful messages about him, the unmoderated horde of people who feel empowered to say "go kill yourself" to someone they deem big enough to be faceless. | | |
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| With traditional live-music gatherings prohibited because of COVID-19, drive-in concerts have emerged as a safe, socially distant, better-than-nothing alternative. | | |
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| Though Black musicians played a large role in creating country music, an almost unanimous assumption remains that the genre appeals to whites only. | | |
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| The artist on the two-party system, Black liberation theology, and learning from his mistakes. | | |
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| Two years ago, Sil Lai Abrams named Russell Simmons as her rapist. She’s still fighting to be heard. | | |
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| The 2020 edition, of course, faces considerable challenges when it comes to a human audience, but the tenth anniversary show will go on, albeit virtually. | | |
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| Besides being musicians, Zoë Keating and David Lowery have been two of the most prominent voices for artists’ rights in the streaming era. | | |
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| Award-winning music artist, Mr. Eazi is launching a new funding venture for music artists in Africa based on equity models used for startups. | | |
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| It wasn’t gunshots that caused widespread panic. According to the group’s inner circle, police set off fireworks to sow chaos. | | |
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| The author speaks to Dorian Lynskey about his new novel, "Utopia Avenue," which features one of the most persuasive fictional depictions of the music industry. | | |
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| The Oscar-winning actor reflects on his guitar heroes, Zen koans, and finding harmony on the film set. | | |
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| We’ve been waiting for The MLC to show us how the best of breed solves the global rights database problem. Hopefully the smart people will solve that problem before the January 1 deadline when the MMA’s blanket license comes into effect. We’ve been told many times that HFA and ConsenSys were the elites and the smart people who would lead songwriters to the promised land. | | |
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| The Moment with Brian Koppelman |
| Brandy Clark, brilliant songwriter and singer, on sticking it out in Nashville. | | |
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| | | | | | | "Killed my children one, two, three, yes they did..." Title song from the Portland native's 1967 debut album. |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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