[T]here's nothing new in a British rocker coming here, attempting to absorb the black experience, and making money off the resulting music. Rarely is the attempt so blatant as to name an actual neighborhood. |
| | | | | PJ lets DC shake. (Seamus Murphy) | | | | | |  | “[T]here's nothing new in a British rocker coming here, attempting to absorb the black experience, and making money off the resulting music. Rarely is the attempt so blatant as to name an actual neighborhood.”
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| rantnrave:// The best rock criticism I read this weekend was in the comments section of WASHINGTON POST reporter PAUL SCHWARTZMAN's account of chauffeuring PJ HARVEY around one of WASHINGTON's roughest neighborhoods. SCHWARTZMAN, who didn't know who his passenger was at the time, discovered two years later that she had turned his descriptions of the streets and buildings they saw in their day trip through WARD 7 -- much of it seemingly verbatim -- into a two-minute single about urban decay called "THE COMMUNITY OF HOPE." The song is a little ironic, a little hopeful, a little touristy, a little unsettling. "PJ HARVEY asking SEAMUS MURPHY to ask PAUL SCHWARTZMAN to give her a windshield tour of the roughest neighborhoods in DC," wrote one commenter, "would be like LIL WAYNE asking EUGENE ROBINSON to recommend a reporter from EBONY to give him a tour of the trailer parks in WEST VIRGINIA." "Wow," wrote another, "when asked to give a tour of the 'dark side' of DC, you didn't go to GEORGETOWN, FOGGY BOTTOM, K STREET, and the CAPITOL BLDG.??" And on and on, and often equally on the mark. Which doesn't mean "THE COMMUNITY OF HOPE" is a bad song, just an unsettling one, and it will tell you less about the DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA's rougher neighborhoods than it will tell you about PJ HARVEY and perhaps yourself, which is how songs generally work, even journalistic ones. I like it. And as a fan of process, I like the fourth-wall break in the video where a church choir works out the harmonies to the song's repeated coda -- "They're gonna put a WALMART here" -- as much as I like SCHWARTZMAN's attempt to work out how his guided tour turned into her song. Politicians and community organizers in WARD 7 do not like the song so much. WASHINGTONIAN magazine's ANDREW BEAUJON does not like that they don't like it... RIP STEVE YOUNG and TOM SPANIC. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The Washington Post |
| This all started with a war photographer named Seamus Murphy, who found me through a mutual friend. Would I be willing, Seamus asked by email, to lead a tour of Washington's roughest neighborhoods for him and a woman he described as a "musician/poet"? A few days later, Seamus and the woman climbed into my beat-up Mazda. | | |
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 | Fact Magazine |
| Life and music in 1980s Soviet Azerbaijan through the eyes of a record shop owner. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| The music industry has a data problem and it's finally ready to tackle it head on. As frustration grows and lawsuits pile up, the issue has become the most-debated topic in Austin's Convention Center. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| When thunder and lightning threatened the country outlaw’s festival, the stacked lineup rolled with the rain-soaked punches. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| >From the moment of Queen's inception, they proudly stated that no one played synthesizers on their albums. They would post small declarations on the back of their album sleeves and on the liner notes to 1974's Sheer Heart Attack that said "No Synthesizer" to further their commitment to the unsynthesized. | | |
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 | Medium |
| Natural workflows can power a faster, smarter music industry. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| The hit song by Twenty One Pilots tackles a generation's insecurities. | | |
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 | MTV News |
| Matt Healy's lyrics are crowded with warmed-over male fantasies of the ideal bad girl. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| The New York Times pop-music critics lay out a new vision for how to cover the season’s live events. | | |
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| The Washington Post |
| The first thing resembling music at Saturday's Donald Trump rally comes from the crowd waiting outside of Cleveland's I-X Center, barking their man's name in vicious staccato. The sound rips clear across the parking lot, where six cops on horseback patrol the blacktop, expecting the worst. | | |
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 | The Spectator |
| I dropped out of university to pursue a career as a rave promoter. Raves now aren’t worth promoting. | | |
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 | Thump |
| Bloc Festival founder George Hull has a problem with the current clubbing generation's penchant for things like inclusivity, responsibility, and even schoolwork. | | |
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| Medium |
| Customized music may soon be the new normal. | | |
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 | Chicago Tribune |
| Can there be a such a thing as too much music? The South by Southwest Music Conference, which concluded Sunday, gave pause to even the thousands of industry insiders who attended. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| Storytelling is the art of not simply conceiving the story, but also communicating that story in the most effective, most evocative ways possible through myriad mediums, from conversational dialogue to smartphone apps. | | |
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 | Digital Trends |
| "My ears are a curse, and a blessing. I hear everything." It's something that happens once every four years, and when it finally hits, it's usually quite spectacular. No, no, no - I'm not talking about the Presidential campaign or the Olympics; I'm talking about getting a new album from forward-thinking dance/electronic icon Santigold. | | |
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| Fact Magazine |
| Twelve months on, "To Pimp a Butterfly" is still powerful in its confrontation of issues currently fizzling through American political discourse. It feels like a lightning rod at a time when America is at its most polarized since its citizens’ antithetical ideologies led to an actual war. | | |
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 | SXSW |
| Tony Visconti has built a truly prolific career over the last 40-plus years, having produced hit songs "(Bang A Gong) Get It On" by T. Rex, "Your Wildest Dreams" by the Moody Blues, and David Bowie masterpieces like "Young Americans," "Heroes," and "The Man Who Sold the World." | | |
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| Noisey |
| SOPHIE and Charli XCX's live performance together at SXSW was what a pop concert should feel like: pure, ravelike ecstasy. | | |
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 | Chicago Magazine |
| Chicago musicians share horror stories of losing their instruments--and in some cases, much more. | | |
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 | via YouTube |
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