I’m still going to listen to satanic metal, and I still love Deicide and bands like that. As far as for my personal life and my experience of what I went through, I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to. | | | | Polo G at the Northsbest Festival, Seattle, April 27, 2019.
(Jim Bennett/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I’m still going to listen to satanic metal, and I still love Deicide and bands like that. As far as for my personal life and my experience of what I went through, I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to.”
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| | rantnrave:// So JOE ROGAN, who had kept his wildly popular and somewhat controversial podcast off SPOTIFY because the service doesn't pay enough, is now going exclusively with Spotify for a price upward of 100 million bucks, which apparently is exactly enough. There's going to be blowback from the music community, which also, interestingly, doesn't think Spotify pays enough. For. Example. You could drive TAYLOR SWIFT's entire touring operation through the optics of this one. But what will be the actual effect on Spotify's music constituency of a deal that continues the service's wallet-busting push into podcasting? On one hand, it all but guarantees that Spotify users, going forward, will spend a smaller percentage of their time listening to music, which presumably benefits Spotify at the expense of artists and labels. Podcast profit margins are definitely better. On the other hand, it no doubt helps Spotify retain, and probably gain, subscribers, which benefits the music constituency. On hand number three, Spotify stock got a nice boost from the deal and two of the three major labels are significant stockholders. So there's that, too. There's a lot to chew on here, there are plenty of unknowns, and we're going to stick a pin in this one and come back to it in the days ahead. And, no doubt, in the years ahead, too... One more subject for discussion: Along with most of its competitors, Spotify has generally avoided exclusive music content in recent years. So what does it mean that the company's making a ginormous exclusive splash in podcasts, another medium that has generally avoided exclusive distribution?... Three thoughts on SHIRLEY HALPERIN and MICHAEL SCHNEIDER's deeply reported piece on troubles at Los Angeles' once-mighty alt-rock station KROQ: 1) Classic alt-rock is an inherently awkward format, and KROQ has needed a shakeup for longer than I've been in LA. I've been here nine years. 2) The firing of morning staple KEVIN RYDER, necessary or not, was handled badly. How you treat your staff matters, up to and including how you let them go. 3) POST MALONE and BILLIE EILISH absolutely belong on rock radio in 2020. Bonus 4) The detail in the article about the issue of whether to ID the station as "K-rock" or "K-R-O-Q" gave me all sorts of PAUL GIAMATTI feels... Is this the worst saxophone solo of all time (it starts at 0:55), and if so, why? There's no one I'd rather hear answer that question than jazz bassist and YouTube music scholar ADAM NEELY, who doesn't disagree with the notion that VINNY MAZZETTA's out-of-tune and possibly out-of-breath one-note solo on an unused alternate take of the FIVE SATINS' "THE JONES GIRL," which the internet dug up in recent years just to make fun of it, isn't very good. He can tell you, in great musical detail, why not. But before he's done, Neely will also have given you a 28-minute-long musical and cultural history of the one-note solo, from jazz tenor saxophonist ILLINOIS JACQUET through early R&B star BIG JAY MCNEELY, classical composer GYÖRGY LIGETI and rocker NEIL YOUNG, and he'll have explained how Mazzetta's repeated bleats of a not-quite-D-flat fit in. There'll even be a surprise happy ending in which you find out what else Mazzetta did that fateful day in 1956. A masterclass, and the best musicsplaining video I've seen in a long time... RIP WILLIE K. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| The iconic Los Angeles station is on life support — and it has nothing to do with coronavirus. | | |
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| Bluegrass' history is strewn with women and Black and queer artists who weren't credited for their contributions to the genre. | | |
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| Here are the bands and artists who got it right the very first time. | | |
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| It's easy to make fun of something, but hard to come to grips with why exactly we do that. | | |
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| An IMDB for music, crossed with LinkedIn: That's basically the elevator pitch for Jaxsta, a Sydney, Australia-based tech company that aims to be the go-to source for music credits, serving both the curiosity of fans and the needs of musicians and industry professionals. | | |
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| Musicians, researchers, and psychologists examine the phenomenon. | | |
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| So, in case you haven’t kept up with Jay-Z’s latest legal battle, we’ll recap it for you. | | |
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| The leaders of the psych-rock group helped Berman make his first album in a decade. After his suicide, they tried to get lost in finishing their own LP, “Strange to Explain.” | | |
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| Singer Travis McCready performed to a crowd in masks in the country’s first concert of the social-distancing era. | | |
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| In a “Live Free or Die” corner of the nation, music fans were happy just to get out of the house and dance by their cars. | | |
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| Andrew Watt is one of pop music's hottest hired guns. The 29-year-old has written and produced for megastars including Post Malone, Cardi B, Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. His calling card is blending of-the-moment pop with a rock aesthetic. | | |
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| The way a song is created today is drastically different than the early ’90s when thousands of songwriters flocked to Nashville where they could make a decent living by simply getting an album cut. | | |
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| Can “mmm whatcha say” escape “The O.C.” and become something timeless? | | |
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| Some of the greatest song lyrics and some of the best ideas ever were inspired or borne by desperate situations spurred by a concrete need for change. | | |
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| The Philadelphia Inquirer |
| Since the pandemic shut down the live music industry, Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie has been livestreaming his Tough Cookies show from his house in South Philly. "This is not a stop-gap measure," he says. "This is the future.” | | |
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| As his old solo work hits streaming, the rapper talks about what it means to be independent, how it feels to stumble into profound timeliness, and Run the Jewels’ new, more "aggressive" music. | | |
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| When YouTube allowed music labels to "remaster" their original uploads, different videos had very different approaches. Some are in crystal-clear 4K; others are very definitely not. Here's why some of them look terrible. | | |
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| A Journal of Musical Things |
| A few days ago, Google announced it would be rolling out a new, simple way for users of its Play Music offering to transfer files over to YouTube Music, the culmination of a nearly two-year effort to streamline its music service. Those who haven't been paying attention might have been caught off guard with this announcement. | | |
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| Attacking Spotify is all the rage right now, but there's another company that also deserves our collective ire. | | |
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| Archie Shepp reminisces about auditioning for Lee Morgan, John Coltrane’s dislike of socks, and a Wild West-style confrontation with Miles Davis. | | |
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| | | | | | | You can have Michael Jordan. This one's for Scottie Pippen. From "The Goat," out now on Columbia. |
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