It was different back then. You either got it or you don’t; no in-betweens. Aretha had it. Gladys had it. The Temps had it. The Four Tops had it. There was no playin’. Now there’s a lot of studio stuff goin’ on, no real live acts. You see them and think, ‘What the hell is this? That ain’t the record I bought!’ Back then, you saw Aretha, and you got the record and more. | | | | Whitney Houston circa 1988.
(David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It was different back then. You either got it or you don’t; no in-betweens. Aretha had it. Gladys had it. The Temps had it. The Four Tops had it. There was no playin’. Now there’s a lot of studio stuff goin’ on, no real live acts. You see them and think, ‘What the hell is this? That ain’t the record I bought!’ Back then, you saw Aretha, and you got the record and more.”
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| | rantnrave:// You don't need me to tell you how horribly messed up the universe has been this week. It's in the news, pick a day, pick a country, pray for it to end or get better soon. On days/weeks/years like this, we come to music sometimes to escape, sometimes to reflect and react, sometimes to amplify, and sometimes to drown in sounds and colors and feelings that remind us who we are and who, at our best, we can be. A group that calls itself THE COMET IS COMING and advertises itself as the "soundtrack to an imagined apocalypse" might not be the first place you'd normally want to go to at a moment when an apocalypse doesn't sound quite so imaginary, but allow me to suggest that, this week, you do. This is apocalypse as renewal, apocalypse as a mind-bending omen that spring may eventually arrive. The saxophone/synth/percussion trio, which is nominally a jazz group but also glides through techno, psychedelic rock, maybe hip-hop and maybe the ocean, tends to organize itself around propulsive, sometimes menacing, earthbound grooves which are offset by space-is-the-place sax excursions. Except sometimes when it almost does the reverse. The sax (and bass clarinet) is played by SHABAKA HUTCHINGS, one of the key cogs of the exploding London jazz scene (his other bands are SONS OF KEMET and SHABAKA & THE ANCESTORS); the rhythm section is DAN LEAVERS and MAX HALLETT, who played together for years as SOCCER96 before they met Hutchings. Their second full-length, TRUST IN THE LIFEFORCE OF THE DEEP MYSTERY, is out today on IMPULSE!, and I'm telling you all this because the album ends with "THE UNIVERSE WAKES UP," which for a good part of its five minutes features Hutchings wandering, melodically, over Leavers' organ and Hallett's light electronic percussion, and it's the most beautiful solo I've heard on record in 2019, and it's simultaneously escape and reflection and amplification and man at his best. And then Hallett switches to drums and starts pushing Hutchings forward, and he accepts the challenge, and I actually screamed for a moment last night, and I remembered why I do this. It's the Ides of March, but spring will be here soon... T BONE BURNETT has the apocalypse on his mind, too. The digital apocalypse. His keynote speech Wednesday night at SXSW was a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the evils of FACEBOOK, GOOGLE and the rest of Big Internet, which he painted as basically the enemy of music, musicians, art, artists and everyone and everything else in the room. But there was hope there, too. "The goal of art is to create conscience," Burnett said. "You are up to the task"... APPLE responds to SPOTIFY (is T Bone Burnett available to moderate this debate?)... WARNER BROS. RECORDS exits the ski lodge... The RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS will livestream their concerts at the pyramids all over that evil internet, starting at 3 pm ET today... KACEY MUSGRAVES, CHRIS MARTIN, ALICIA KEYS, GARTH BROOKS and TAYLOR SWIFT provide moments at the IHEARTRADIO MUSIC AWARDS... It's FRIDAY and in addition to the Comet Is Coming, that means new music from BETTY WHO, VIJAY IYER & CRAIG TABORN, CINEMATIC ORCHESTRA, KAREN O & DANGER MOUSE, LAUREN JENKINS, ZACARI, DEXTER STORY, LIL GOTIT, MATMOS, SNARKY PUPPY, CHIEF KEEF & ZAYTOVEN, BLAQK AUDIO, CHAI, STEPHEN MALKMUS, ABUL MOGARD, BENJAMIN FRANCIS LEFTWICH, TURNING JEWELS INTO WATER, ULYSSES OWENS JR., NOISEM, TODD SNIDER, TOM RUSSELL, UB40, VANISH, BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE, PAPOOZ, CULROSS CLOSE and MEITEI... RIP GREG TOPPER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The Arizona Republic |
| Rascal Flatts restaurants failed nationwide. Did a Mafia soldier pull the strings? | | |
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 | Esquire |
| The '80s introduced the world to a new creature, the middle-aged rock star, and with it a whole new style of music. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Artists are using humour to fight back against monotony in music and beyond. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| "The story of the Hurricane," as Bob Dylan once sang, has been told before. It is the tale of Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the famous middleweight boxer who was convicted and reprieved-twice-of a 1966 triple murder at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. | | |
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 | CNN |
| Several high-profile K-Pop stars have been named as being members of an online group chat that shared sexually explicit videos of women filmed without their knowledge or consent, South Korean police confirmed. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A year ago, he had a few songs up on SoundCloud; now his song “Thotiana” is a Top 10 hit. But Blueface knows music is only part of the job. | | |
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 | CityLab |
| Flashband starts with speed-dating for musicians, and ends with a packed venue and a lineup of brand-new bands. | | |
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 | Variety |
| The iHeartRadio Music Awards show is many people's favorite awards show of the year, by virtue of lasting only two hours. If it's not music's biggest night, it's music's shortest, which counts for a lot. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| As music data analytics services proliferate -- giving everyone access to the same information -- some believe A&R will revert back to being a field based on gut feeling. | | |
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 | Highsnobiety |
| Black women appear to have taken the lead with shifting the narrative around cowboy culture. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| To an uncritical audience, FGL is all about the music. But with the release of their fourth studio album, the band reveals how they’ve taken their consistent, sometimes controversial sound, and built it into a kingdom. | | |
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 | gal-dem |
| We flew out to Texas following the release of Solange’s "When I Get Home" to explore her hometown and learn about the project directly from the source. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| How a 1980 cult movie about South London sound systems finally got a U.S. release almost 30 years later - and why you need to see it. | | |
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 | Daily Dot |
| At SXSW, Dorothy Carvello shares stories that will disturb you. | | |
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| Highsnobiety |
| On the latest episode of our Conversations podcast, Shanghai-based DJ and radio host Wes Chen breaks down how Chinese hip-hop and trap broke out globally. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| On licking my wounds and buying the overpriced Wicca Phase sweatshirt. | | |
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 | The Independent |
| Ahead of the 'World of Hans Zimmer' UK tour, "The Lion King" and "Inception" composer speaks to Roisin O'Connor about the daunting task of curating his new show, and why he thinks pop artists should throw away the rulebook. | | |
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 | Bandcamp Daily |
| An offshoot of the Emotional Response label, Emotional Rescue specializes in LPs only diggers would know. | | |
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| Billboard |
| After a trouble-filled sound check and a few glitches with the lights at the beginning of his set, Jordan Cook thinks he might have finally isolated the problem with his gear -- the soldout LA venue where he’s working his new album is probably, almost certainly, haunted by ghosts. | | |
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 | New Republic |
| Why his fall from grace implicates all of us. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | She has your credit card receipt, along with a classic turn-of-the-century dance remix. |
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