Every other Christmas song is like a fantasy. You know, 'Santa Claus is coming to town.' That’s a fantasy. My story is what really happened in real life, about real people, and what it was like as a kid growing up. | | | | Christmas in 30 Rock: Chance the Rapper and Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels on "Saturday Night Live," Dec. 17, 2016.
(Caroline De Quesada/NBCUniversal/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Every other Christmas song is like a fantasy. You know, 'Santa Claus is coming to town.' That’s a fantasy. My story is what really happened in real life, about real people, and what it was like as a kid growing up.”
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| | rantnrave:// Near the end of a year in which the idea of genre continued to collapse and/or shift on its axis, I find myself in a New York performance space on a Thursday evening watching a hip-hop band play a straight-up jazz show, or maybe it's a band that's been inaccurately filed in the hip-hop section play what I'm inaccurately describing as straight-up jazz. Or maybe it's both. STANDING ON THE CORNER, wrote the NEW YORKER's BRIANA YOUNGER in January—which seems so many verses and choruses ago—"makes the kind of music that sounds like genres rising up in rebellion." SOTC's shows are as different from each other, I'm told, as the show I'm experiencing at THE KITCHEN is different from either of the revolving-door New York collective's two albums. There's a trumpet, a saxophone and a bass clarinet. There's a cello and an upright bass. There's a conductor (bandleader GIO ESCOBAR) who sometimes adds electronic waves and squiggles, which are the only obvious signs on this particular night of hip-hop DNA, unless you choose to think, as you take this all in, of the energies of jazz and hip-hop that have been coursing through each other for the past several years (or decades), and actually how could you not think of that? There are pieces of a couple drum kits suspended on wires, asymmetrically, from the ceiling. For one song, there are two stilt walkers dancing through the crowd. The effect is pointedly theatrical and aesthetically arresting. The performance is billed as "The Ghosts of the Night Flock: A Standing on the Corner Art Ensemble Holiday Performance Extravaganza," and I'm hearing improvised meditations on "SILENT NIGHT," "THE FIRST NOEL" and maybe another Christmas Carol or two as waves of purposeful themes and variations ebb and flow through this small chamber ensemble. There are silences, there is joy and there's plenty of room for contemplation in between. This may be the best show I've seen in 2019 (which is why you should never make year-end lists before the year has actually ended, the several hundred people who did all these notwithstanding). There's reason to believe none of this will ever be repeated. There's reason to believe I'll want to see Escobar and his crew follow other roads as often as time and space allow in 2020, a year that seems so close and so many more genres away. It can't come soon enough... The state of New York has granted $3.75 million toward the building of the UNIVERSAL HIP HOP MUSEUM in the Bronx... PUBLIC ENEMY, JOHN PRINE, SISTER ROSETTA THARPE, IGGY POP, ROBERTA FLACK, ISAAC HAYES and CHICAGO will receive GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Awards... YO LA TENGO, which began its annual eight-night run of Hanukkah shows at New York's BOWERY BALLROOM Sunday night, picks holiday classics you might now know (but should)... Bonus quote of the day, from MATISYAHU: "The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music"... RIP ABBEY SIMON... This is the last regular edition of MusicREDEF in 2019, but look out for a series of special editions over the holiday break: artists of the year (Dec. 27), in memoriam 2019 (Dec. 30) and the decade in review (Dec. 31). We'll continue to share stories via our Twitter feed in the meantime, and we'll return to our daily routine on Monday, Jan. 6. Wishing you a happy holiday season filled with music and joy. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Roy C's 1973 funk track about Nixon didn't get much traction till the hip-hop crowd got a hold of it, and now it's everywhere. | | |
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| The #MeToo movement inspired some deeper thinking about whether some iconic artists might need to drop off the roster for weddings, bar mitzvahs, proms and corporate events. That led to hand-wringing for some, hard choices for others and lots of conversation about whether some formerly slam-dunk dancefloor classics should be retired. | | |
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| For a few weeks every winter, popular music tumbles into a time warp. The reason? Nostalgia. | | |
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| One important impact appears to be on vocals. | | |
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| The way people listen to music has changed. Bang & Olufsen hasn’t caught up. | | |
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| How Limewire, the “Hampster Dance,” Minecraft and a NSFW Yoda video explain 2019’s most adventurous band. | | |
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| Michael Wrycraft is in a conundrum. Asa music aficionado, the Juno Award-winning graphic design artist who has designed album covers for everyone ranging from Bruce Cockburn to Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, loves to attend concerts. However, Wrycraft lost his legs in 2017 due to diabetes and now uses a wheelchair. | | |
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| The Spanish star Rosalía has made the harrowing music of Andalusia into a global phenomenon. | | |
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| Our pick of the year’s finest albums brings American dreaming, teenage dynamism, heartbreak, barbed rap, impetuous indie and beautiful soundscapes. | | |
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| With apologies to some of these authors for tardiness (there are a couple of late 2018 titles in here) — and to Liz Phair, Hanif Abdurraqib and others whose books I’ve heard are great but have not read yet — here are The Best Music Books of 2019 That I Managed to Procure and Actually Finish Reading… | | |
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| The wannabe rapper is currently facing more than 20 years in prison for allegedly stealing money to make music and buy fake fans. Did he dream too big, or not big enough? | | |
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| While Tumblr’s influence on music has evolved a great deal over the years, thanks partially to the growth of competing platforms like Instagram and Twitter, it still has a relevant use in online music culture, especially when looking for upcoming trends. | | |
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| 2019 tempered many of our positive, idealistic forecasts about digital innovation in music with a healthy dose of realism. | | |
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| And what male allies’ own songs tend to miss. | | |
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| In 2019, the American singer has helped change the balance of power between creators and the music industry | | |
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| A look back at the harrowing year of music journalism in print, digital or otherwise. | | |
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| Journalist Amit Gurbaxani offers his first impressions on Resso, the new music-streaming app that TikTok's parent company Bytedance is testing in India and Indonesia. | | |
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| It has been a banner year for Black music. We’ve seen genres like hip-hop and dancehall continue to flourish and mutate while others like jazz and R&B have been revitalized by boundary-pushing new blood. Africa has risen. | | |
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| MUSIC x GREEN is a directory to create more visibility for organisations and initiatives that make the music industry greener, less impactful on the climate and ecology, and more sustainable overall. | | |
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| Kanye West had himself a decade. While he started out on a musical tear that had car speakers and arenas rocking, he ended it as a Donald Trump, MAGA-hat wearing, gospel-ish artist. The one consistency is that when he started out 2010, he thought he was God’s gift to the planet-and he pretty much ended the decade that way, too. | | |
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| | | | | | | From the compilation "Hanukkah+," out now on Verve Forecast. |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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