I really admire Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen—how they have such a breadth of material throughout the years, into old age. They seemed to follow their own thread of curiosity and creativity, even through some weird phases when people were like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing.’ But the foundation is so strong that you follow them anyway. | | | | Blues, period: Mr. Sipp at New Orleans Jazz Fest, April 27, 2019.
(Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I really admire Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen—how they have such a breadth of material throughout the years, into old age. They seemed to follow their own thread of curiosity and creativity, even through some weird phases when people were like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing.’ But the foundation is so strong that you follow them anyway.”
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| | rantnrave:// As a general rule, I ignore artist feuds, internet spats and other such trivialities that have little to do with music and which, I'd like to think, would disappear into the ether if people like me, you and everybody else deprived them of the oxygen of our attention. There's music to hear, stories to amplify, business to learn. Even when the cause is righteous, I'm happy to let the back-and-forth play out elsewhere. Which is to say, on most days, LAUREN MAYBERRY of CHVRCHES, whom I admire, is free to call out her one-time collaborator MARSHMELLO for working with CHRIS BROWN and TYGA, and Chris Brown is free to respond, and I am free to go on with my life, and you with yours. But this isn't most days. When Brown publicly responds by suggesting that Mayberry and her band are "the type of people I wish walked in front of a speeding bus full of mental patients," and when internet trolls amplify Brown's rage by sending abusive messages like this (trigger warning; it's vile) to Mayberry, and when Mayberry reports that her band now needs police protection at its shows and "I am not staying in my own home when we finish tour because the threats we have received have reached such a scale," then the rest of us no longer have the privilege of silence. Nor should we want that privilege. This is the time for better angels everywhere to speak out. This is the time for Chris Brown and Tyga (whose own response to Mayberry's callout was far more reasonable) to speak out. This is the time for their handlers and their labels to speak out. This is the time to rally around a female musician who's being openly abused and to make clear to music fans everywhere that this is wrong. And disappointing. And, to quote Chvrches' original Instagram, "not something we can or will stand behind"... As another general rule, I tend to be suspicious of websites put together by some of the most powerful associations in the music industry that can't think of more than six "notable musicians" that ever came from Washington D.C., or more than eight from Massachusetts (one of which is "AEROSMITH" and one of which is "JOE PERRY"), or any from California born after 1972. But for all its slapdashness, the 50 STATES OF MUSIC site, intended to draw attention to the $143 billion impact the music biz has on the US economy, paints a fascinating picture of the musical electoral map. There are only 49 people receiving SOUNDEXCHANGE royalties in WIZ KHALIFA's native North Dakota (he left when he was a toddler), and only 640 songwriters there registered with ASCAP or BMI. Young musicians: Consider moving to Fargo. The numbers are similar in Wyoming, birthplace of one of the two AVETT BROTHERS. By contrast, Tennessee (TAYLOR SWIFT, MILEY CYRUS, DOLLY PARTON) boasts 55,066 registered songwriters and 8,559 SoundExchange beneficiaries, not to mention nearly 62,000 jobs and $4.9 billion worth of GDP. Tennessee also boasts CRAIG MORGAN, who topped the country chart once, in 2004, and is apparently one of the state's 15 most notable musicians... Speaking of statistics, these are the top 12 U.S. indie labels by revenue, according to BILLBOARD. DISNEY is #3. See if you can guess #1 and #2 (who I thought was #1) before you click... PELOTON strikes back... RIP DAVE SAMUELS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Pacific Standard |
| Young artists are finding creative ways to carve a space in Portland's lively-if fractious and often ignored-hip-hop scene. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| What if the major music companies teamed with Merlin -- the body that represents the recorded interests of the largest independent labels worldwide -- and raised the capital to buy Spotify? | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Arctic Monkeys’ old haunt in Sheffield becomes latest casualty of spiralling costs that threaten to reshape UK’s music landscape. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| On the precipice of a breakthrough, the Brooklyn band reflects on growing up and gaining a following without abandoning what got them to this moment. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| "The Battle of Winterfell" was won thanks in no small part to Ramin Djawadi’s score. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| At the Met’s Grand Finals Concert, our chief music critic spoke to a judge about what makes a performance memorable. | | |
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 | XXL |
| XXL reflects on the hip-hop legacy of legendary film director John Singleton. | | |
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 | Poughkeepsie Journal |
| Despite the legacy of Woodstock that began in 1969, putting on a Woodstock festival has never been smooth. | | |
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 | Aquarium Drunkard |
| There's a single word that Deadheads and music journalists alike often use to describe "Terrapin Station," Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's title song of the Grateful Dead's 1977 album and live showstopper every year thereafter: epic. | | |
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 | VICE |
| The rapper went from courting controversy to leading a quasi-Christian church. But whose soul is he trying to save? | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| In an excerpt from his new collection "Book Reports," rock critic Robert Christgau goes toe-to-toe with Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer and the late great Lester Bangs. | | |
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 | Refinery29 |
| Refinery29 talked to K-pop group NCT 127 ahead of their first solo U.S. tour about being thankful for their fans, their moms, and their differences. | | |
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 | VIBE Magazine |
| The worlds of hip-hop and videogames have always been intertwined, but their relationship is moving forward in the world of esports. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| A new doc ‘Plucked,’ premiering at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, chronicles the theft of a $6 million Stradivarius violin that was rumored to have been touched by the Devil. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| When Tiffanie DeBartolo first discovered the music of Jeff Buckley in 1999, two years after his death, she was distraught by the fact that he was gone before she ever knew about him. | | |
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 | Hypebot |
| While the rise of streaming is, in many ways, responsible for the music industry's salvation, the vast majority of content streamed on platforms like Spotify generally tends to lean towards the pop/hip hop spectrum. As Thomas Steffens here explains could be bad news for more niche music genres like classical and jazz. | | |
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 | Highsnobiety |
| In this cover story from Highsnobiety Magazine Issue 18, rap legend Danny Brown reveals the details behind his hugely anticipated new album. | | |
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 | Mercury News |
| The prosecution on Tuesday morning laid out for the first before jurors its case against two men charged in the deadly Ghost Ship fire, taking a packed courtroom on a tour of the cluttered warehouse from its origins to Dec. 2, 2016, when 36 partygoers perished inside. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| The Icelandic musician’s fresh approach to Bach has won him rave reviews and a record of the year award. Why is he now mixing the baroque composer with electronic music? | | |
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 | Medium |
| In 1979, the French cultural critic Catherine Clément published Opera, or the Undoing of Women, a disturbing exploration of just how much of the standard opera repertory is built on female suppression, subjugation and death. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "U.F.O.F.," out Friday on 4AD. |
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