It was always hard for the little guy to get records made. Now it’s going to be that much harder. | | | | Kraftwerk phone home. At the Keio Plaza Hotel, Tokyo, September 1981.
(Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It was always hard for the little guy to get records made. Now it’s going to be that much harder.”
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| | rantnrave:// So GRAMMY week is over; what now? Glaringly absent from all the talk in the past two weeks about the RECORDING ACADEMY, DEBORAH DUGAN, the diversity of the recorded music business and the integrity of the Grammy Awards was any sense of the Academy's side of the story. There were a couple leaked (more or less) memos, a handful of denials and, over the weekend, a promise to address a few specific gender agenda items that sounded eerily similar to what the Academy had already said it was going to do. Dugan, the Academy's suspended CEO, meanwhile, was on TV, in the press and in lawyer's offices making a compelling case that the Academy she was hired to reform had no interest in doing any such thing. The perception was that she was blowing up the house from inside and doing a pretty good job of it (with some help from DIDDY and from the Academy's diversity and inclusion task force). The Academy itself, of course, had an awards show to run and thousands and thousands of thousands of guests in town. It had business to attend to. Even so, the show's near-silence on the scandal "was deafening," in VULTURE's words. The show "got away with saying nothing," according to PITCHFORK. Actually, host ALICIA KEYS did have something to say, as noted in Monday's MusicREDEF, but she spoke in code. The death of KOBE BRYANT made the show that much more solemn and sober than it was already going to be, and provided even more business to attend to. Most of the artists at the STAPLES CENTER laid low, too. Vulture's EVE BARLOW notes that artists and presenters did their best to avoid the media room, and TYLER, THE CREATOR, who did have something to say, told the journalists in the room, "Y'all look bored as f***." Interim Academy CEO HARVEY MASON JR. declined the customary on-air state-of-the-Grammys speech and skipped the press room, too. But the Grammys are in the rear window now and 2020 is ahead. Time is near, it would seem, for the Academy to clear the rather heavy air still hanging over Los Angeles, to tell a new story... Grammy producer KEN EHRLICH's message to LIZZO and other people who aren't BILLIE EILISH: "It should be on my forehead: Nobody remembers who won the Grammy"... Part one of director MICHAEL D. RATNER's YOUTUBE documentary JUSTIN BIEBER: SEASONS is live on YOUTUBE. Several more parts are available on YOUTUBE PREMIUM... Teen Grammy reggae winner KOFFEE at the TINY DESK... Why do we hate the music we hate?... RIP REED MULLIN and BOB SHANE. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| This L.A. business pressed discs immortalizing Black Flag, 2Pac and N.W.A. -- and ordinary people too. | | |
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 | InsideHook |
| The last generation to know life before the internet hasn't fully switched over to streaming. | | |
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 | Slate |
| On being heard, but not seen, in our rapidly gentrifying cities. | | |
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 | Tidal |
| Stormzy is taking over one continent at a time. Recently the South London rapper released his sophomore album 'Heavy Is The Head.' In February, he's set to embark on his year long international tour. While in New York, Big Michael speaks on his latest album, Glastonbury performance, Bansky, Beyonce, rap beef, and more. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| How do you move on? This is the defining question on "High Road," Kesha Rose Sebert's fourth album and second since the public drama that redefined her life and career. In 2014, Kesha sued her producer and label head Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald for a wide range of alleged abuses including sexual assault and battery. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| The awards have been too white, too male and too old for too long. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| “If this is an indication of the industry dying, I’m with it.” | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| Carnival World Music Group’s Wyclef Jean will sign songwriters and producers in Africa, the Caribbean, and other developing regions. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| The music is more than a personality trait. | | |
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| The Washington Post |
| No, it isn’t dead, and its purveyors aren’t all hopped up on drugs. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Grammys week 2020 will forever be connected with the passing of Kobe Bryant. Here's our report, featuring Coldplay's Chris Martin, TDE's Punch, D Smoke, & more. | | |
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 | Paper |
| 3,000 metalheads drinking piña coladas and moshing to Cattle Decapitation. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| If co-founder Olly Barnes’ infectious optimism is correct, Voisey is a phenomenon-in-waiting: an app that has the potential to shake up how songs are made. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Global digital distributor and label services company Ditto Music is to launch a new blockchain solution that, it says, will generate higher earnings for artists and creators. | | |
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 | Playboy |
| The Atlanta stalwarts talk everything from GI Joe to GG Allin--and their new album, 'Sing in a World That's Falling Apart.' | | |
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 | The Alternative |
| Guest contributor, Joel Funk, discusses the message of struggle and acceptance of his sexuality that he was able to gain through the music of New Jersey folk punk band The Front Bottoms. | | |
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 | Lawyer Drummer |
| Technically, most tribute acts are in violation of the rights belonging to the original act, to some degree. However, current legislation fails to adequately address the issue, and as such, a grey area has been created that has been left to the courts to decide. | | |
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 | American Songwriter |
| In the summer 2008, I got a message from my old pal Paul Zollo. He said his friend, Seattle journalist Clay Eals, had written not just a biography of the late great folk-rock icon and Chicago native, Steve Goodman, but he'd in fact written the definitive and only biography the man who wrote "City of New Orleans" and many other songs. | | |
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 | The Independent |
| The former boyband star’s first solo album, ‘Walls’, has taken four years to make, a period in which he has lost his mum and his sister. He talks to Fiona Sturges about grief, getting arrested and why he’s sure 1D will reform | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| The show arrived with a peculiar kind of duality-immense sorrow juxtaposed against the hard-earned wins of artists hoping to leave the kind of mark that Bryant did. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "Silver Tongue," out Friday on Merge. (Video NSFW.) |
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