Martin Luther King was speaking about love, and so were we. There had been many black stars before us whose shoulders we stood on—Sammy Davis Jr., Sydney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, to name just a very few who couldn’t even stay in the same hotels they appeared in. But our timing was so right on to 'Dare to Dream.' | | | | I hear a symphony: The Supremes in Detroit, 1965.
(Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Martin Luther King was speaking about love, and so were we. There had been many black stars before us whose shoulders we stood on—Sammy Davis Jr., Sydney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, to name just a very few who couldn’t even stay in the same hotels they appeared in. But our timing was so right on to 'Dare to Dream.'”
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| | rantnrave:// With apologies to my favorite political talk show, KCRW's LEFT, RIGHT & CENTER, from which I'm shamelessly sampling this, here are my tweets of the week past... #1: "APPLE understands they’re in the artist business," IRVING AZOFF tweeted Thursday. "Clearly, GOOGLE, PANDORA, SPOTIFY and AMAZON don’t." That was Azoff's, and pretty much the entire songwriter/publisher community's, response to the latter four companies filing a court challenge to the US COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD's January decision to raise songwriters' streaming royalty rates by 44 percent. Compared to artists and labels, songwriters and publishers are significantly underpaid in the streaming economy, and the increase, while a big one, still leaves them well behind. But it also cuts into the streaming services' narrow profit margins, which makes the court challenge perhaps inevitable even while it adds a discordant note to the recent harmony between the streaming companies and the rest of the music biz. The NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION joined Azoff in praising Apple, while directing its anger at Spotify and Amazon. NMPA president DAVID ISRAELITE gave Google and Pandora a pass, saying they "didn't want to appeal and are only doing so to protect their interests because Spotify and Amazon decided to appeal." With the music business booming and with the streaming services providing nearly all the dynamite for that boom, there are plenty of voices out there suggesting labels and publishers are biting the hand that feeds them when they call out the likes of Spotify. But the counter argument, which is as old as the phrase "music business," is that music creators are simply asking for what they believe is theirs... #2: "Music is still mostly a force for good," wrote NPR MUSIC's ANN POWERS after ROBYN fans, on their way home from her MADISON SQUARE GARDEN show Friday night, turned PENN STATION into a midnight version of the lunch scene from FAME. Never forget that. Music has power that no industry, no government, no critic and no bad men can ever diminish, no matter how hard they might try. Music, like knowledge, is good... #3: "Ew why do we normalize gun violence in our music so much?," asked QUEER EYE star JONATHAN VAN NESS, in a probably well-intentioned but definitely clumsy attempt to complain about the pervasiveness of guns in pop songs. Clumsy because he proceeded to single out—and misquote—a metaphoric usage by exactly one artist, a black female rapper, as if hip-hop in general and NICKI MINAJ in particular is responsible for a century-plus's worth of gunplay in pop culture. Worse, he did this on International Women's Day. I'm not into guns either. But before you bring your fight to Nicki Minaj, you might want to start with, say, the BEATLES, or NIRVANA, or IMAGINE DRAGONS. Which is to say, if you want to fight the power, you have to start with the actual power. You might also want to learn how metaphors work... RIP JACQUES LOUSSIER, JEANIE PATTERSON, PETER HURFORD and GERRY STICKELLS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| He could have been his generation’s Kurt Cobain, but he overdosed just after his 21st birthday. Inside his life, music and chaotic final days. | | |
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| His contentious conversation with Gayle King this week brought back memories of when he stormed off the HuffPost Live set. | | |
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| While top nightlife players have been known to never reveal their numbers, there is a general consensus Calvin Harris and the masked DJ are now Vegas' highest paid DJs. | | |
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| It took more than an Oscar to put the "A Star Is Born" song over the edge. | | |
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| Despite all the big-name artists, speakers and sponsors expected at this year’s South by Southwest Music Festival (March 8-17), along with subsequent grousing and think-pieces debating the impact of the Austin event, artist discovery still remains at the heart and soul of every SXSW. | | |
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| Izzy Reidy (Izzy True) on how SXSW has come to represent a kind of external validation for working musicians. | | |
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| Singer Linda Ronstadt tapped her ancestral roots in the small Sonoran town of Banamichi, Mexico, to bring a group of young American students of Mexican music and dance to meet and interact with peers south of the border. | | |
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| An author recalls the pianist at the center of “Green Book” as erudite, salty and not a little opinionated. | | |
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| Ye's lawsuit against EMI Music Publishing is understandable, but his pattern of business decisions may lead to similar challenges down the road. | | |
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| A new documentary at SXSW attempt to get to the bottom of who, exactly, let the dogs out in the first place. The answer is more complicated than you could imagine. | | |
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| As the power of the album wanes on streaming services, sequencing matters more than ever. | | |
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| A new generation of pop stars are arriving as fully realized versions of themselves. Instead of dressing up, they’re strategically pushing costume to a less high-concept place. The accessibility factor of their brands -- and they all have pre-established brands --is what’s radical. | | |
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| There's a mannequin head sporting a baseball cap at the microphone where Maren Morris's mug should be, positioned front and center in her first full-blown stage setup. Her new lighting rigs, platforms, and video screens currently occupy a cavernous former warehouse in an industrial area on the northeast side of Nashville, her home base since she departed Texas half a dozen years ago. | | |
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| She thought she was just writing poems. Her classmates at Young Chicago Authors heard a great rapper in the making-and the rest of the city’s scene is starting to agree. | | |
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| In an era when a growing number of artists are eschewing corporate music contracts in favor of maintaining more control over their careers, educational tools for artists are the new table stakes for staying competitive as a music company. | | |
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| Cinthie is a globetrotting DJ, label boss, record store owner and former free party starter | | |
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| The two singles from the legendary musician’s first solo album were mirror images of each other: one reflecting empowerment, and the other total despair. | | |
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| The songwriter community is up in arms right now… and understandably so. | | |
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| The detailed secrets behind the American's sound. | | |
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| Suzi Quatro discusses her five-decade career, new album "No Control" and her influence on women in rock. | | |
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| | | | | | | Their first post-Diana Ross single, an underrated girl-group gem. |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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