Man. To be In hip hop culture & live past the age of 50 is a fight to the finish for real. | | | | Suddenly there came a tapping: Kaki King performing at SXSW, March 2003.
(Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Man. To be In hip hop culture & live past the age of 50 is a fight to the finish for real.”
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| | rantnrave:// This is the song SEAN COMBS—fresh from being fired from UPTOWN RECORDS—played to CLIVE DAVIS to persuade Davis to give him a distribution deal for the fledgling BAD BOY RECORDS. It was the first single Bad Boy released, arriving a month before NOTORIOUS B.I.G.'s "JUICY." It was slow and weird and postmodern and obsessed with the JETSONS and BRUCE JENNER. It was a top 10 pop single and a GRAMMY nominee. It was the sound, or at least *a* sound, of the summer of 1994. This is the amazing remix that opens with Puff Daddy, two soda bottles and Biggie. "Killed the 90s with 1 song and 1 remix," M.I.A. tweeted Tuesday. And if you never heard anything by CRAIG MACK after that, you wouldn't be alone. Bad Boy promoted its first two artists jointly, as B.I.G. Mack, but Biggie became the big star in every way, and Mack never escaped that towering shadow. He disappeared into the mix. But indelible singles like "FLAVA IN YA EAR" never disappear. Mack was working on a comeback album with childhood friend ERICK SERMON when he died Monday. RIP... Hip-hop today is also mourning producer and DELICIOUS VINYL label founder MATT DIKE, who brought us TONE-LOC and YOUNG MC and was one of the production geniuses behind the BEASTIE BOYS' PAUL'S BOUTIQUE. A master of the crossover, in other words. He was raised a Jehovah's Witness, seduced into rock and roll by MOTT THE HOOPLE in the 1970s, and to say he lived a life would be a massive understatement. My favorite random factoid from his obituary on Delicious Vinyl's website: "In the late ‘70s... Matt DJed a party for the first time, repeatedly playing JOE JACKSON’s "GOT THE TIME" at the request of a then-unknown teenage artist named JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT. I love so many things about that sentence I don't even know where to start. RIP... The new best use of subscription music services ever... Episode two of JEFF MILLS' radio series "The Outer Limits" can be heard here at 10 am ET today... One more RIP: 17-year-old DRAYLEN MASON, one of the victims of this week's bombings in AUSTIN, TEXAS. He was a high-school senior and the principal double bassist in both the AUSTIN YOUTH ORCHESTRA and AUSTIN SOUNDWAVES. He had been accepted to the BUTLER SCHOOL OF MUSIC at the UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS. Today's newsletter is dedicated to him, the 17 students gunned down at MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS HIGH SCHOOL and all the students who will walk out of school for 17 minutes this morning in their memory. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Billboard |
| When country songwriter Shane McAnally left ASCAP to join Global Music Rights, he expected he would continue to earn the "premium payments" he'd been getting on his hits as long as ASCAP was still collecting money for them from its radio licensees. But his next check from ASCAP was $1 million short of what he'd been anticipating. | | |
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 | BuzzFeed |
| For Jerhonda Pace, who last summer accused musician R. Kelly of abusing her when she was a minor, watching #MeToo take down powerful men has been bittersweet. “What about R. Kelly’s victims? What about us? Nothing happened for us.” | | |
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 | Chartmetric |
| Will music playlists be more content-based or context-based? | | |
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 | Complex |
| He was there at the beginning of Bad Boy, and a whole lot more. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Though he was deliberately not a household name, the music that the producer and DJ Matt Dike created, sampled and spun helped define underground Los Angeles in the 1980s. | | |
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 | British GQ |
| Anna Conrad, who went to cover the event, talks to the bands, the gig goers and the people involved to find out how it went so wrong | | |
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 | Getintothis |
| With the success of the vinyl record revival, it is no surprise that other audio formats, previously deemed as expired, are being looked at again. The search for a lost format that harks back to presumably simpler times, now leads most trendsetters to the humble cassette tape. | | |
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 | BBC |
| Arwa Haider moved to Saudi Arabia when she was 13. She recalls what it was like to be a teenage pop fan in a place where music was frowned on. | | |
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 | A Nation of Billions |
| We aren’t invisible, we matter, we have a voice, we are here, we don’t have to hide or be in… | | |
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 | Reasons to Be Cheerful |
| A collaboration between David Byrne and the Detroit School of Arts. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| “The Uncensored Playlist” pairs journalists with local musicians in China, Egypt, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam to turn the news into songs | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| More than any other American war, Vietnam had a soundtrack, and you listened to it whether you were marching in the jungle or in the streets. Music was our lifeline, a link to our existence “back in the world,” connecting us with the things that enabled us, as the Impressions urged us, to “keep on pushing.” | | |
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 | IBWM |
| Bob Marley was renowned for pursuing music with ferocious intensity, not with a material pay-off in mind, but solely to produce art to the standard of excellence it deserved. Few realise that he lived with such ascetic devotion to his craft, and even fewer realise that music was not his only love. Soccer was equally important. | | |
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| Complex |
| The dicey discourse flooding your social media timelines has been in the making for decades, if not longer. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| The debate about whether Mars, a non-black artist, actively appropriates black culture is beyond tired—and misses the larger point about institutional racism in music. | | |
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 | austin360 |
| For some reason, I was very excited to go to an 8-hour, overnight concert. I think it was the bed that sealed it. | | |
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 | The Quietus |
| Quietus contributors select forty of the finest genre compilation albums ever, from Venezuelan prog to Japanese club-pop via Iraqi folk, classic hip hop and more. | | |
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 | Daily Dot |
| Amazon's international singing competition is a ready-made hit. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The fate of Mr. Levine at the Metropolitan Opera may be an opportunity to consider the vast, almost mystical power granted to conductors. | | |
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 | Future Fossil Music |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Wanda Jackson with Rosie Flores and Lee Rocker |
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