I have rather grown to like blaring norteño music as accompaniment to meals, as well as Bollywood scores, cumbias, vintage punk rock, Veracruz harp music and the inevitable oeuvre of David Byrne, as well as the less offensive varieties of house, although the Gipsy Kings still interfere with my digestion. | | | | Screaming life: Julien Baker at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, July 20, 2018.
(Michael Hickey/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I have rather grown to like blaring norteño music as accompaniment to meals, as well as Bollywood scores, cumbias, vintage punk rock, Veracruz harp music and the inevitable oeuvre of David Byrne, as well as the less offensive varieties of house, although the Gipsy Kings still interfere with my digestion.”
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| | rantnrave:// Sometimes you have to dig through plastic crates in musty basements to find strange and wonderful sounds that no one else is paying attention to. Sometimes you just have to listen to the radio. Two equally valid paths to delicious sonic surprises. Two equally valid routes to the distinct taste of something like, say, NATE DOGG. "It has become easy to forget about Nate Dogg," a certain Los Angeles critic wrote upon the rapper/singer's death in 2011. "Identifying the dozens of songs he enhanced is the rap enthusiast's equivalent of a jazzbo's listing KID ORY solos on LOUIS ARMSTRONG sides—but his crooning was as vital to the early '90s as BIGGIE's lisp or COBAIN's howl, a sound affixed to America's pop consciousness like a natty prison tattoo." That's great music writing. And great music listening. Knowledgeable, empathetic and, above all, aware. The critic was JONATHAN GOLD, who at the time was already much better known as America's greatest food writer. But before he became a full-time chronicler of southern California's taco trucks, pupuserías and soup dumpling houses, Gold had been a music writer and editor with a singular taste for cratedigging under everybody else's noses. LA punk. Gangsta rap. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and W.A.S.P. None of it—literally none of it—taken as seriously in its time as it is today. He took it seriously. He lived in LA and it was part of the culture around him. It wasn't just about music for him. He wanted to understand people and cultures and share their stories. He wanted to travel through their sonic spaces. He wasn't interested in MICHELIN-starred bands. He was interested in the locally grounded bands who populated the villages scattered across his native Southland. His reporting on N.W.A for LA WEEKLY, whose music section he edited for most of the 1980s, was groundbreaking. He was fired from that job, he later wrote, when Weekly editor KIT RACHLIS "realized that my opinion of sainted folkies RICHARD and LINDA THOMPSON was pretty much the same as his opinion of QUIET RIOT." His musical expertise was wide and deep, and he didn't write in the rarefied, insider language of other rock critics. "He had an appreciation for the people who liked the band he was writing about, which is not the norm for writing about popular music, said CRAIG MARKS, who edited him at SPIN. "He wasn’t a snob about it.” Also, Marks told the LA TIMES on Sunday, he actually wanted to write about Stone Temple Pilots. (Also also, he had a band.) Gold approached food the same way he approached music and won a Pulitzer Prize in the process. It wasn't that his writing obliterated the line between haute cuisine and taco trucks; it's more that he refused to believe any such line existed. He was a cultural cratedigger in the most generous sense of the term, and the cultural melting pot of Los Angeles was his crate. "Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews," his friend and editor PETER MEEHAN said. "He wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too.” And he never stopped writing about music. While eating last year at VESPERTINE in Culver City, where dinner for two runs upward of $1,000, he informed us that he felt like he was on Jupiter and "I kept humming Sun Ra's 'Space Is the Place'' to myself as I ate." As you probably would, too. RIP... Space was literally the space for this KRAFTWERK sideman Friday night... You apparently can't walk in and film at the COLOSSEUM as easily as you can walk in and film at the LOUVRE... Off-TRGT. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Though best known for his work as a food critic, Jonathan Gold was just as thoughtful, and edgy, in his early days as a music writer. | | |
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| Raphaelle Standell-Preston, singer and guitarist in Braids, explains why she challenged TC Electronic and Steel Panther on their guitar effects preset “Pussy Melter.” | | |
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| Young independent artists are writing the city’s present, and future, into their music. | | |
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| How did the genre transform from working class catharsis to an corporate marketing campaign for a certain version of the American dream? | | |
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| Musicians are raising the question of what the makers of Fortnite owe to the artists who inspire them. The discussion is part of a legacy of concerns about how black artists’ work is appropriated by mainstream—whiter—culture. | | |
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| As "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" opens in theaters, we talked with Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus about how the band stays relevant--and lucrative--after all these years. | | |
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| Billboard tallies the highest-paid musicians of the last year. | | |
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| High-end audio may be mostly an old man’s game, but there's a new breed of entrepreneurs making great products. | | |
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| August ’88: Eazy E props his Air Jordans up on a desk, stares at the ceiling, and leaves the room whenever the beeper on his belt goes off, which is often. He answers most of the reporter’s questions with a noncommittal mmmmm; he could as well be talking to a parole officer as a writer from the slicks. | | |
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| To get to Dr. Dre’s house, you speed west from Hollywood, out over the hills at the west end of the San Fernando Valley into a dusty scrubland where the old Tom Mix films used to be shot. Like any West Valley homeowner, when Dre gets home, he parks his car, hangs up his jacket and settles back with a glass of nicely chilled white zinfandel, lounging in a patio chair by the pool. | | |
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| It's been 50 years since he wrote "Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud," a song that is still necessary. | | |
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| We met up with the members of EXP Edition to find out why they’re trying to become the genre’s next breakout stars. | | |
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| Before cracking the Top 10 with “Meant to Be,” the singer wrote an Eminem smash and sang for a Pete Wentz side project. Now she’s coming into her own with her first LP. | | |
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| Just by walking into these places you became a part of the ecclesiastical grit of rock music in New York. | | |
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| Despite being over a decade old, podcasting is still a new frontier for music licensing. As podcasts gain millions of listeners and big budgets, it's more important than ever for artists to understand their rights when approached about music use. | | |
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| The 1975’s singer used to hide behind irony and hard drugs -- but dismayed with social media and modern relationships, he says he’s ready to bare his soul. | | |
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| No matter how many times I hear the term "modern drummer," I can't help but imagine a player that has a smaller setup which includes a Roland SPD-SX. This product is part of a family of instruments known as drum sampling pads. | | |
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| “I’m trying to evoke the same feeling that you would get from listening to a old record.” | | |
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| Ebba Chitambo, 66, made music during Zimbabwe's fight for independence. Now, he's giving advice to a new generation of musicians about writing political music. | | |
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| From Lizzo to SOPHIE, here are the artists pushing boundaries and claiming space in music. | | |
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| | | | | Emma Kirkby & David Thomas |
| | Composed by John Dowland. Cited by Jonathan Gold as a favorite recording. |
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| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
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