To me, singing like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett was more of a divine path than anything the hippies got up to in the Sixties. I wanted to be a totally serious torch singer, someone who is dedicated to their craft; I didn’t want to stand in front of thousands of young girls, nor did I want to pretend I came from Mars. All I wanted to do was sing my songs. | | | | Scott Walker circa 1967.
(RB/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “To me, singing like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett was more of a divine path than anything the hippies got up to in the Sixties. I wanted to be a totally serious torch singer, someone who is dedicated to their craft; I didn’t want to stand in front of thousands of young girls, nor did I want to pretend I came from Mars. All I wanted to do was sing my songs.”
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| | rantnrave:// SCOTT WALKER, an American expat who lived most of his adult life in Europe, was introduced to the world in the 1960s as a brooding singer of dark and sweeping orchestral pop songs. They turned him, briefly, into a teen idol, a job that was of no interest to him. He exited this week, 50-plus years later, as an aloof and deeply private singer of weird, foreboding art songs that required an intense commitment to truly love, or even like. It was a strange and beautiful career. Except for his unmistakable baritone, there's little in the WALKER BROTHERS' "MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF" (1965) and Walker's "SDSS1416+13B (ZERCON, A FLAGPOLE SITTER)" (2012) to suggest the two songs were made by the same person, or even by two people who knew each other. But they're both exemplary, richly detailed recordings, and the path Walker followed to get from one to the other was clear and logical, even if it never quite seemed like he was making it easy on himself along the way. His initial run of solo records after leaving the Walker Brothers, all now cult classics, remade him as an iconoclastic cabaret singer, sometimes morbidly bleak, sometimes darkly funny. It was the sound of a precocious and smart teen idol who went to art school and discovered foreign films. By the time he made it to the gorgeous and little-heard SCOTT 4, any hope of a conventional pop career was gone, which was presumably more of an issue for his record company than for him. In the late '70s, with the reunited Walker Brothers and getting ever smarter, he was exploring soundscapes not unlike those his disciples DAVID BOWIE and BRIAN ENO were creating in Berlin; in the '80s, solo again, he was sort of flirting with new wave. It was clear by now that while he was paying attention to pop, his inner map was powered entirely by his own muse, and his muse was leading him steadily outward. "I was always more interested in following a pure path than most people," he once said. There were some pockets of productive time lost to alcohol, but in the mid '90s he re-emerged with the remarkable TILT, which is a dark orchestral pop record dragged and twisted through a field of operatic recitatives, industrial percussion and stretches of empty space. If "Scott 4" took you three listens to get, "Tilt" might have taken you 15, but if you were lucky, you got it. And he kept going, spiraling ever outward while following not only his own muse but also his own pace, which for a while meant one album per decade. But he never missed a decade, and he never let his muse down. Is there another pop-rock-ish artist who hit genuine career peaks in each of six straight decades, 1960s through 2010s, or any six decades? Is there an equivalent career anywhere in the vicinity of pop? Is it even possible? RIP... STEPHEN KIJAK's 2006 doc SCOTT WALKER: 30 CENTURY MAN, shot while Walker was recording the 2006 album DRIFT, is a great snapshot of an artist on the edge of the edge. And it includes a memorable scene of him directing a player in the most musical way to punch a slab of raw meat... Can you inflate record sales as easily as you can deflate a football? Let's call it inflate-gate: SONY MUSIC and the MICHAEL JACKSON estate are skeptical of recently adjusted sales numbers that have allowed the EAGLES' THEIR GREATEST HITS to once again surpass Jackson's THRILLER as the all-time top-selling album in the US. The reason for the skepticism: The Eagles album got nine new platinum certifications in one day, from newly discovered sales stretching back over a period of 12 years. (TOM BRADY wears number 12 and has played in nine Super Bowls. Just sayin'.) Sony believes the Eagles sold only 2.3 million copies of the album over those 12 years. WMG got the new Eagles numbers by, among other things, reviewing years of data in underground vaults. Which sounds like something the Patriots would do. Again, just sayin'... CHERIE HU separates fact from fiction and signal from noise in the deal between AI music company ENDEL and WARNER MUSIC... RIP TECH 9. (But not TECH N9NE.) | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| This deal is less important than you think in some ways, and more important than you think in others. | | |
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| Spotify recently launched in India, but that path was long and complicated. We take the experience of Spotify and use it as a lens to look at why breaking into India is so difficult. | | |
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| Core FM listeners skew older. But children might be eroding that base by introducing mom and dad to Spotify. | | |
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| Scott Walker spent most of his career on the margins, certainly on the edges of the pop world and seemingly on the verges of the real one too. He had honed torture, existential angst to such a degree that his haunting, desperate records could alter the mood of a room as surely as a power cut. | | |
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| Scott Walker, a.k.a. Noel Scott Engel, may be pop music’s most frustratingly elusive icon-the Thomas Pynchon of the ’60s singer-songwriter generation-whose marked absence from public conversation for nearly a decade at a time serves only to reignite fiery devotion and speculation among fans and critics when the latest record descends. | | |
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| Songtrust's Molly Neuman discusses the state of the publishing sector, direct deals and gender parity in music. | | |
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| Hello from Silicon Valley! As the vote on the Copyright Directive approaches, we wanted to thank Europeans, especially young members of the Pirate Parties, for defanging the left in order to make us rich. We sometimes joke about all of these kids who want to keep the internet free and open, even though what they’re supporting always turns out to help our closed, monopolistic platforms. | | |
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| As the “yeehaw agenda” takes hold online, two prominent women of color question the significance of the beloved American hero in their music. | | |
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| Decades into their careers, rock 'n' roll journeymen from seminal bands like Guided By Voices and Pavement are discovering the subversive joys of making electronic music. | | |
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| Questlove talks about how he got involved with D’Angelo’s Voodoo record, the evolution of his drumming style, how he approaches DJ’ing, and tells the best Obama story ever. Part 1 of 2. | | |
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| | | if they laugh then f*** 'em all |
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| The "Frozen" anthem is a song tailor-made for the streaming age. | | |
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| How hip-hop has become the language of politics for Senegal's youth. | | |
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| On Sunday night, "American Idol"--the singing competition television series that aired from 2002 to 2016 on Fox and was revived in 2018 by ABC--tied its series-worst viewing numbers in the 18 to 49 age demographic. If that’s not damning enough, the show’s series-low was set just six days prior, according to "The Hollywood Reporter." | | |
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| With artists and executives facing their first full-year IRS bills since the latest tax overhaul took effect, the role of financial advisers is more essential than ever. | | |
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| Over 10 years, this open-minded music festival in Knoxville, Tenn., has never spelled out its aesthetic guidelines, and by now it doesn’t have to. | | |
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| Despite suffering from two catastrophic haemorrhages in 2005, the post-punk pioneer is back making music as good as anything he produced before. He talks to writer Jeremy Allen about his road to recovery, Twitter, and the perils of wetting yourself in front of supermodels. | | |
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| The music industry has long felt disappointed by artists who want to halt their careers. Perhaps, says Peter Robinson, we should listen to them more often. | | |
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| In the Netflix biopic " The Dirt," Pete Davidson of "Saturday Night Live" fame portrays A&R exec Tom Zutaut, the man who signed Motley Crue to Elektra and Guns N' Roses to Geffen, while veteran character actor David Costabile ("The Wire," "Billions") is manager Doc McGhee. | | |
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| Esteemed music producer and Prince collaborator Susan Rogers discusses her pioneering work as a music engineer/producer, her research in the field of music cognition and psychoacoustics, Prince vs. Michael Jackson, hitting it big with Barenaked Ladies, and much more. | | |
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| Including: Is it actually a church? | | |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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