My family didn’t have much money. I wanted DJ equipment like the other kids, but I couldn’t get it. So I just started playing the beat with my mouth. | | | | Fat Boys' Darren Robinson, aka Buff Love, aka the Human Beatbox, at the Aragon Ballroom, Chicago, January 1985.
(Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “My family didn’t have much money. I wanted DJ equipment like the other kids, but I couldn’t get it. So I just started playing the beat with my mouth.”
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| | rantnrave:// A short list of entities that may or may not be concerned about SPOTIFY's full-on pivot into podcasting: radio ("people still spend over two hours a day listening to radio — and we want to bring that radio listening to Spotify," DANIEL EK wrote Wednesday morning); record companies (Ek's blog post was pointedly titled "Audio-First" as opposed to, say, "Music-First," and there's reasonably clear subtext there); podcast fans (the podcast industry's "biggest acquisition to date by quite a large margin" might signal "an end to the Wild West era of podcasting"). But if there was one constant in the first-day coverage of Spotify's acquisition of podcasting studio GIMLET MEDIA (for a reported $230 million) and DIY podcast toolkit ANCHOR, it's that everyone thinks it makes all kinds of sense. It's a move toward diversification, obviously. It's a move toward a userbase that, according to Ek, already spends twice as much time on Spotify as non-podcast users do, and listens to more music to boot. It's a move toward original content/programming. It's a move toward control not only of the music we hear, but everything we hear. A small step, perhaps, away from the music business, even if that continues to be the company's core for a long while to come, and toward the "ear" business. This is the key passage from Ek's blog: "Video is about a trillion dollar market. And the music and radio industry is worth around a hundred billion dollars. I always come back to the same question: Are our eyes really worth 10 times more than our ears?" A new era dawns. Are you listening?... Spotify on Wednesday also reported its first quarterly profit, while cautioning that might not happen again for a little while... MARSHMELLO's DJ set inside FORTNITE last weekend might be part of the dawning of yet another new era. MATTHEW BALL peeks inside the virtual monolith in a REDEF ORIGINAL: "Fortnite Is the Future, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think." (And here's a detail from that performance that would be a fantastic feature at any real-world show: "EPIC GAMES... disabled the ability for players to use their weapons, allowing for players to watch the gig without risk of disrupting their game")... 21 SAVAGE gets some high-powered counsel... AOC's musical moments (so far)... KACEY MUSGRAVES and CHILDISH GAMBINO top the 2018 PAZZ & JOP poll, and with that we close the book on "Best Music of 2018: The Year in Lists"... A personal note: I'm white, I was alive in the '80s, I enjoyed the music of MICHAEL JACKSON and KURTIS BLOW, and I never once thought to put shoe polish or brown makeup on my face as a way of expressing that enjoyment. This is because, among other reasons, It.Wasn't.OK.To.Do.That.Even.In.The.80s. So yes, let's judge people by the standards of the times in which they live, but let's also try to remember what those standards were... RIP ROY IMBER and GEORGE KLEIN. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The New York Times |
| Detained by the government and mocked on social media, the Atlanta rapper is facing an uncertain future. | | |
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 | Complex |
| We spoke with the lawyer brought in by Jay-Z and Roc Nation to assist 21 Savage about the next steps for the case, and the implications of his detainment in the larger scope of U.S. immigration policy and practices. | | |
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 | TechCrunch |
| The acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor show a service that thinks podcasts are big business. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| We asked artists, managers, booking agents, label executives, and more to weigh in on the Grammys’ relevancy. | | |
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 | Slate |
| Run-D.M.C., fake Aerosmith, and a teenage riot: the making of the “Walk This Way” video. (Excerpted from "Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever" by Geoff Edgers.) | | |
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 | Variety |
| On a recent Saturday night on the Vegas Strip, Celine Dion was giving her version of a flight attendant’s you-have-many-choices speech. “We all know that you do have a lot of options in Las Vegas to see a lot of amazing shows,” she told an audience at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, where she has performed nearly 1,200 times over the past 16 years. | | |
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 | GQ |
| The beloved genre-bending Animal Collective member is starting anew with "Buoys," his fourth album. Here's what he’s learned from Atlanta trap, making it in the Spotify era, and accidentally revealing too much of himself. | | |
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 | n+1 |
| Around 2014, I began to talk to friends about Joni and was disappointed-surprised-by how little they knew. These were people who listened to music. I had a conversation about her with a highly accomplished ex-student in New York, a writer who had musical training, who thought I was talking about Janis Joplin. | | |
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| Complex |
| The backstory to Kanye West's latest legal drama is dotted with movie stars, grunge icons, and Rita Ora. | | |
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 | The New Statesman |
| Sometimes you have to snarl a bit to take charge. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| A misplaced Grammy nomination meets classic blaxploitation as hip-hop's rising star recalls the watershed period in her journey to self-discovery. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Recorded music in China has undergone an unprecedented amount of globalization and transformation over the past decade -- and one company has been at the forefront of some of the sector’s most defining success stories. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| English is no longer the lingua franca of pop music, and its alpha stars -- Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga -- are an endangered species. | | |
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 | Village Voice |
| Kacey Musgraves, Janelle Monáe, and the Year of the Woman…again. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The durable R&B-turned-movie star built her legend on the pursuit of enlightenment. It’s taken her to hostile territory. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| Jay Z has spent literally decades treating Memphis Bleek the way Donald Trump treats basically everybody. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Criminalising artists such as Skengdo and AM doesn’t help, says youth worker Ciaran Thapar. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| She says she was beaten often during their seven-year romance, which ended with his arrest on gang-related charges. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| Mercury Rev had a pretty good 2018, mostly because they had a great 1998. Though the band hadn't released any music in a couple of years, in 2018 they became the beneficiaries of a free promotional campaign, thanks to the 20-year nostalgia cycle that inevitably spawns think pieces and retrospective listicles. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| "If I have a couple who wants me to play R. Kelly, I explain why I prefer not to support him by playing his music, but if it's their wedding and they want it, I will reluctantly play the song," | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | A human beatbox showcase from Fat Boys' 1984 debut album. They were discovered performing this song at a talent contest at Radio City Music Hall. |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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