To make something beautiful is revolutionary. | | | | Bob Marley & the Wailers arriving at the Birmingham Odeon, Birmingham, England, July 19, 1975.
(Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “To make something beautiful is revolutionary.”
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| | rantnrave:// There are eight CHARLES MANSON albums on SPOTIFY. APPLE MUSIC, too. Most of them, I believe, recorded behind bars. My knowledge of Manson's music oeuvre is limited, but I do know at least one of them pre-dates his residency in the federal prison system and includes a couple lo-fi underground rock classics, if you're into that sort of thing. I admit I bought a copy on CD myself a couple decades back. Haven't listened to it in almost as long and don't know where the disc is at the moment, probably in storage, but I'm a Spotify subscriber so I guess I'm good. Here's a link to the hit on YOUTUBE. You're welcome. It has 1.4 million views. My YouTube autoplayed CHILDISH GAMBINO's "SATURDAY" next; make of that what you will, universe. DAVID TURNER, whose weekly newsletter, PENNY FRACTIONS, has become a favorite of mine, ties together several strands of the Spotify "Hateful Conduct" discussion in this week's issue and it's a great, skeptical read on the music service as "Judge, Jury, and Gatekeeper." Key line: "Spotify now dons a moral cop badge over music, when the company might’ve wanted to remember every good deed doesn’t need a press release." To be clear, it is *not* hypocritical for Spotify to make Manson albums available while banning R. KELLY from its own playlists and promotions. It isn't putting Manson on playlists either, as far as I can tell, and it hasn't removed Kelly's music from the system. It is, however, of interest. Also of interest is this hip-hop-specific take on a number of other men who a service with a hateful conduct policy may want to be thinking about. This is a discussion that absolutely should be happening—in music, in film, in media, in business, in government—and it's a discussion where communication, collaboration and lots and lots of deliberation will be helpful. In my humble opinion. MusicSET: "The Playlist Police"... YOUTUBE MUSIC will soft-launch next Tuesday as the newest major entrant in the subscription music space, and the company is promising it will be highly personalized, "audio-biased" (as opposed to video-), and receptive to your search for "that hipster song with the whistling"... YouTube also has started adding songwriting, musician and other credits under the "Show More" section of official uploads. Which is awesome, and a little messy in a way that makes clear how difficult it remains to do credits justice in a service with tens of millions of songs. For starters, the output is only as good as the input. And somebody input WALTER AFANASIEFF and MARIAH CAREY as the composers of AVICII's "LEVELS," which, um, no. And LEONARD COHEN appears as the writer of the Charlie Manson I link to above, which, um, hahaha. A for effort, though, and let's assume it's going to get better... The LAUREL vs. YANNY slider tool you've been breathlessly waiting for since at least Tuesday... Someone in the FBI likes the ROLLING STONES... JANELLE MONÁE is here to erase your Spotify playlists... KHRUANGBIN at the TINY DESK... RIP LARA SAINT PAUL.
| | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Longreads |
| It has already, time and time again. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Fame almost ate this 26-year-old pop singer and songwriter alive. Now he’s made one of the year’s best pop albums, “Voicenotes.” | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| His ideas about journalism - relentlessly shadowing subjects, telling a story through novelistic dialogue - became the hallmark of writing about music. | | |
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 | The Common Reader |
| Starbucks uses for its in-stores soundtrack music celebrating individual tenacity and collective rebellion, but that supposed renegade spirit takes on a different context when the soundtrack is bebop jazz, and two African-American customers are arrested for failing to place their order in due time. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Rappers have been in movies in ever-increasing numbers since the beginnings of the genre. Is there something about being an MC that translates to the silver screen? Ludacris, Common, Xzibit, Krondon and other rappers-turned-actors chime in on the profitable trend. | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| Sleepless nights, kick drums and cheap sunglasses. Matt Unicomb travels to Hamburg to meet one of dance music's most intriguing artists. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Review Of Books |
| There is one issue of representation that no one seems to be talking about: The missing Black musicians in the orchestra that recorded the score that embodies the fictional African country of Wakanda. | | |
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 | Motherboard |
| Lessons from the music industry’s initial consumer-hostile reaction to the Napster saga. Going from $16 CDs to unlimited streaming is really hard. | | |
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 | BBC Radio 1Xtra |
| How young Christians are using rap & drill music to lure gang members away from streets & towards God. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| One of the first things I thought about when I heard that Glenn Branca had died from throat cancer at the age of 69 earlier this week, is the sound that the electric guitar makes when feeding back uncontrollably - and about what the person cradling that screaming guitar may be liable to do next. | | |
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 | Detroit Metro Times |
| In appealing to die-hard Zep-heads, Greta Van Fleet have successfully seduced a generation too young to have experienced the band's foundational source material firsthand. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| Why the Music Modernization Act matters. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The stage version of “Jagged Little Pill” sets a story steeped in hot-button issues like opiate addition and gender identity to the singer’s raw 1995 album. | | |
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 | Under the Radar |
| This is the first interview she has done for her new record, she says, and she is still working out exactly what she wants to say about it. In her own way, Barnett is a difficult artist to interview. Though she's disarmingly polite and engaging in conversation, she's also unfailingly humble, seemingly uninterested in self-promotion and even less in self-mythology | | |
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 | Talkhouse |
| Listening to "Space Gun" is like discovering a classic that you somehow missed out on when it first hit. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| The streaming giant's new policy on artists who engage in 'hateful conduct' is a half-measure, but it demonstrates the power the company now wields - and the challenge it now faces. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| With rap albums getting longer, young rap stars are learning to fight listener fatigue. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Nearly a decade into the K-Pop wave that heralded a shiny new future for South Korean pop culture, where's the genre going now? NCT 127, one of the most popular new boy bands, offers some clues. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The myth that deafness impedes appreciation of music is gradually being debunked - and new technology is helping. But marginalised deaf fans say attitudes are still a huge problem. | | |
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 | i-D Magazine |
| Muqata'a includes the iPhone-recorded city sounds of Palestine in his avant garde productions. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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