The thing about being an artist, is that no one needs you to be an artist. If you just stop working, that would be the end, no one’s going to tell you to keep going. | | | | | Pink flying above the Grammy Awards, Jan. 31, 2010. (Lester Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “The thing about being an artist, is that no one needs you to be an artist. If you just stop working, that would be the end, no one’s going to tell you to keep going.”
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| | rantnrave:// While traditional Monday morning quarterbacks tried to deconstruct how the PATRIOTS did that thing to the FALCONS, pop music's MMQs spent their day on a more existential question: What exactly did LADY GAGA do during those 12 minutes of airtime the NFL gave her? Where KATY PERRY in 2015 was fun, surfacy and left sharky, and BEYONCÉ in 2016 was provocative, deep and partly inspired by the Black Panthers, LADY GAGA's slick, flawless performance was a 2017 pop Rorschach test. Are you looking for political messages? Are you looking for an escape? Are you expecting speeches? Do you what to know if everyone's lip-syncing? There were plenty of pro-Gaga voices like TEEN VOGUE's PHILLIP PICARDI, who wrote that simply "performing a song that's so blatantly gay in front of an audience that includes MIKE PENCE ... is absolutely political," and plenty of others like THE RINGER's ROB HARVILLA who mourned a "missed opportunity" to send a clear, non-coded message. Gaga's embrace of a non-white crowd member was, for Harvilla, "a little too coy from someone whose whole gig is launching the very notion of coy into the sun." PITCHFORK labeled it the Choose-Your-Own-Political-Subtext Halftime Show, with writer JUDY BERMAN noting that HILLARY CLINTON, IVANKA TRUMP and MARCO RUBIO all expressed their approval. Berman suggested liberals loved the LGBT-friendly lyrics of "BORN THIS WAY" while conservatives "appreciated her many invocations of God." My favorite analyses took into account that pop stars' political gestures under TRUMP are likely to differ in both substance and style from political gestures under OBAMA. The US has moved from an artist-empowering administration with a "high pop-cultural IQ" to one with "hostility toward Hollywood and the musical establishment," wrote NPR MUSIC's ANN POWERS. "In such an environment, popular artists tend to tone down their messages, make them vague and, as Gaga did, disguise them within the fireworks of spectacular performances." Or maybe Lady Gaga really did need an escape. "It’s exhausting," wrote Harvilla, "to think that every major cultural event for the next four years will be viewed through the same prism—you can make the argument that playing this straight was the craziest move of them all"... Also, it wasn't entirely live and she didn't actually jump from the roof of NRG STADIUM... Also also, any mass-media performance that openly values inclusiveness and otherness is a win, and I thought Gaga delivered that with grace... Next up on the will-they-or-won't-they cultural agenda: the GRAMMYS. A source tells ROLLING STONE that producers are scrutinizing scripts for Sunday's show extra closely and "going out of their way to not inadvertently shoot the first bullet" at President Trump. And RECORDING ACADEMY president NEAL PORTNOW reportedly is still working on his GRAMMYS speech, well past his usual deadline. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | NPR |
| "Waiting 4 it," one Lady Gaga fan wrote on her Facebook wall before the Super Bowl halftime show last night. "Gaga, say some s***." The multiplatinum pop rabble-rouser's reputation as an advocate for LGBTQ rights, feminism and general freakery left her with a certain burden of proof as she took on America's biggest annual slice of family entertainment. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| CBS executives "going out of their way to not inadvertently shoot the first bullet" at Trump administration | | |
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 | Motherboard |
| The specter of zero-rating looms over Sprint now owning one-third of Jay-Z's streaming music service. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| In 2013’s Last Night of the Proms, Marin Alsop hailed progress towards inclusivity in classical music. But that progress is painfully slow, as some shocking statistics reveal. This is an issue that we all need to keep talking about. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| What happens before “The Envelope, please”? Committees debate internally over the legitimacy of nominations. | | |
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 | CBS News |
| His sound is hard to classify, floating somewhere between R&B and hip-hop, and even that doesn’t quite describe it. His music is unique -- and so is his name: Anderson .Paak. Simple enough, except he puts a dot in the middle. | | |
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 | Slate |
| Journeyman musician Franz Nicolay had done the big-band thing. He wanted to go solo. And he wanted to see Ulaanbaatar. | | |
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 | Thump |
| We went to Philadelphia to spend a day with the industrial-noise rapper and producer giving voice to this generation's battle cry. | | |
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 | Fact Magazine |
| As Mute releases two deluxe box sets of highlights from Richard H. Kirk's vast solo catalogue, he tells Daniel Dylan Wray why he never looks back. | | |
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 | Soundfly |
| While each verse in the track features some seriously individual stylings, Busta's verse, the song's closer, stands out from the rest as deeply influential. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| When artists like Kirk Hammett, Slipknot's Corey Taylor, and Otep Shamaya speak out against fascism, it's an agent for change and a wake-up call to apolitical metalheads. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Strong influence on dance music culture from the Middle Eastern country | | |
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 | DNAinfo New York |
| Fans lament "sad, sad day" for Chicago's music scene as locks are changed on venue doors. | | |
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 | Loud And Quiet |
| Listen to episode 18 of the Loud And Quiet interview podcast Midnight Chats, with Ryan Adams discussing cats, music and a pretend label that became real. | | |
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| NPR |
| Killer Mike and El-P continue to out-muse each other in a supergroup that somehow seems to get better, louder, and more pertinent since their start in 2013. | | |
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 | i-D Magazine |
| In the second of our Global Street Style documentaries, i-D crosses the border into Scotland to meet the young people carving out Glasgow's underground scene. | | |
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 | DJBooth |
| Afrobeats is primed to take over pop music, and Mr Eazi is primed to take over Afrobeats. | | |
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| Noisey |
| The Sonic Youth guitarist sat down with the Mayhem founder to discuss Venom, punk rock, and Necrobutcher's new book 'The Death Archives.' | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| Jes Skolnik sits down with Throbbing Gristle musician, poet, and performance/visual artist Genesis P-Orridge at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to discuss music, politics, gender, and more. | | |
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 | The Fader |
| His new album "Fresh Air" is a soft-yet-groovy dispatch from a dedicated homebody. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "Not Even Happiness" (Ba Da Bing! Records). |
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