Music is what we cry to. It's what we march to. It's what we rock to. It's what we make love to. It's our shared global language. | | | | King Princess at the Fox Theater, Oakland, Calif, Jan. 21, 2020.
(Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Music is what we cry to. It's what we march to. It's what we rock to. It's what we make love to. It's our shared global language.”
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| | rantnrave:// So do they go ahead and give out the GRAMMY AWARDS on Sunday as if this were any old week in any old year? Does host ALICIA KEYS talk about the power of music and the magic of the moment as if there weren't a galactic shadow hanging over the moment? Do LIZZO and BILLIE EILISH thank their families and collaborators and agents and managers and then run to the press room and pray for questions about how their next albums are coming along? Does ARIANA GRANDE shut up and sing? Does TAYLOR SWIFT have thoughts about the boys' club in charge of the evening clattering around her brain? Do some artists linger in their seats wondering about the provenance of their nominations? Will the theme of the night be "Truth Hurts"? "If You See Something, Say Something"? "Enjoy the Silence"? Will the bars be adequately stocked? Would it be better to not go through with this exercise at all? I'm not the first to suggest this, but what if they just canceled the 2020 Grammys, like they canceled the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature? What if they replaced the awards with a three-hour show of nothing but performances, lots and lots of them by women, a tribute to the power of music unsullied by the need for winners and losers? (Or how about Lizzo singing "TRUTH HURTS" for three hours straight?) How about an extended, three-hour performance of JOHN CAGE's "4:33," giving the industry and TV viewers a chance to spend that time listening to the sound of the room, which no doubt will be restless and loud? How about a three-hour televised jam session, everyone (rappers, pop stars, jazz musicians, blues guitarists, classical maestros) playing together instead of competing with one another? Or three hours of clips of great performances from Grammys past? Artists, of course, wait all year, sometimes all their lives, for this moment, and canceling the Grammys would cancel—temporarily anyway—a lot of dreams. Labels wait all year for the business the Grammys can bring them (but is the Grammy bump overrated?). But maybe this isn't a year for dreams and streams. Maybe it's a year for a reset. For self-examination. For facing the music. MusicSET: "Grammy Wars: New CEO Steps Up, Recording Academy Asks Her to Step Down"... Alicia Keys is the best host of any televised awards show right now, by far, and if anyone can pilot this particular show through this particular moment, it's she. Everyone at NARAS and in the recorded music business should send her flowers this weekend... Embattled Grammy boss DEOBRAH DUGAN will appear on ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA this morning. This story is not going to disappear between now and Sunday. It's going to get louder... The RINGER's BILL SIMMONS, who co-created ESPN's documentary series 30 FOR 30, is developing a music doc series with HBO. "We don’t want to make music docs that just cover the beginning, middle and end of someone’s career," Simmons says. "We think there’s a different way to do these"... AMAZON MUSIC says it has 55 million users worldwide... JUICE WRLD died from an accidental overdose... RIP CLAUDIO RODITI, BARRY TUCKWELL and MARK YEARY. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Variety |
| How did things between this agent of change and the Grammy brass that selected and elected her unravel so quickly and so bitterly? Variety sources and her formal complaint provide a rough timeline of events. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| The story of Milli Vanilli became so notorious that "Behind The Music" was practically created just to tell it. | | |
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 | Refinery29 |
| In 2003, Natalie Maines criticized President George W. Bush to a London crowd. The Dixie Chicks paid for it for nearly two decades. | | |
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 | Texas Monthly |
| The incredible true story of two brothers raised on the hardscrabble country music of rural West Texas who dropped out, tuned in, found God, and helped launch the seventies soft-rock revolution. | | |
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 | Twenty Thousand Hertz |
| 4'33" | | by Dallas Taylor, Kyle Gann, Nahre Sol... |
| John Cage was a respected composer when, in 1952, he created his “silent piece”, 4’33’’ - a piece that would have the music world scratching their heads. This episode asks whether 4’33’’ is really “silent”, and we explore the history of a piece musicians still talk about today - and speak to the man who campaigned to get it to the top the British charts in 2010. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| She has become a new kind of pop superstar, full of relentless positivity. But it took a long time and a lot of heartache. | | |
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 | The Associated Press |
| What started as a joke about an unwritten rule among country radio stations not to play two female artists in a row prompted outrage, but also pledges to give women equal airtime. | | |
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 | Midia Research |
| Neatly ahead of Spotify's Q4 earnings, Amazon has taken the rare step of announcing subscriber metrics for Amazon Music (inclusive of Prime Music and Music Unlimited). Amazon Music closed 2019 with 55 million 'customers' across free and paid. | | |
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 | New York Magazine |
| A lot has shifted, but venture-capital aspirations and royalty rates remain as lofty as ever. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| From the band’s first EP to "Kid A" blips that now resemble Instagram videos. | | |
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| Variety |
| The first Christmas back after leaving home can be an anxiety-provoking experience, as countless college students would attest. What was it like for Montero Lamar Hill, the 20-year-old who reinvented himself as Lil Nas X, to return to Atlanta after spending the previous year building to six Grammy nominations and charting the biggest song, well, ever? | | |
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 | Vulture |
| How country music outlaw Tanya Tucker might win her first Grammy nearly 50 years after her first nomination. | | |
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 | The New York Observer |
| “He thrust every elf / Far back on the shelf!” | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| RA staff look back on the definitive albums of the 2010s. | | |
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| Pitchfork |
| Rupa’s "Disco Jazz" is nearly 40 years old and more relevant than ever. | | |
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 | Engadget |
| The company says this is because the technical capabilities of those devices has essentially been maxed out due to limitations on memory and processing power -- a reasonable argument, considering some of these products are more than a decade old. After May, these devices will continue working as they did before, but any new features Sonos offers won't work. | | |
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 | Why Is This Interesting? |
| On music, taxonomies, and the shift to a more ontological approach to categorization. | | |
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 | The Vinyl Factory |
| The Vinyl Factory and Luaka Bop present a new documentary revealing the untold stories of private press gospel groups in the USA. | | |
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 | DownBeat |
| Musicians often wind up in a sort of tug of war, trying to balance their past while still producing modern work. Meredith Monk, 77, is amid that struggle. The vocalist and contemporary classical composer is, as she said during a recent conversation with DownBeat, working more than ever these days. | | |
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 | Talkhouse |
| And 236 songs later, our writer nearly drowns. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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