It's funny when people make fun of my career trajectory as if i wasn't the one who actively sabotaged it, i make art not marketing content. | | | | Might as well jump: Halsey at the Governors Ball, New York, June 2, 2018.
(Steven Ferdman/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It's funny when people make fun of my career trajectory as if i wasn't the one who actively sabotaged it, i make art not marketing content.”
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| | rantnrave:// It's inevitable, perhaps, that a sloppily rolled out policy on art and morals will be sloppily walked back. Three weeks after announcing that R. KELLY and XXXTENTACION would be banished from playlists and other promotions under a policy on "hateful conduct," SPOTIFY on Friday repealed the policy and immediately put one of the two back on playlists, including the influential RAP CAVIAR. Under pressure from artists and labels, some of whom threatened to pull content from the service, Spotify essentially told the world it's now officially good with XXXTentacion but not good with R. Kelly. Can someone please explain how that's better? Or what that even means? In a blog post explaining its thinking, Spotify said a lot of smart things. "We don't aim to play judge and jury." "Our playlist editors ... focus on what music will positively resonate with their listeners. That can vary greatly from culture to culture, and playlist to playlist." Yes and yes. But the company *is* still playing judge and jury; it just changed one of its verdicts on appeal. And while values and interpretations and the resonance of specific pieces of art do vary from culture to culture, I'm not aware of any culture—or at least any culture that you or I or Spotify should care about—in which domestic violence or sexual abuse is OK. That's not a thing that varies among enlightened cultures. (And allow me to use this space to remind the playlist editors at YOUTUBE MUSIC that there are still three BRAND NEW songs on their "True Teenage Romance" playlist. If there's positive resonance there, I really don't want to know about it.) There's no question that Spotify's policy on hateful conduct ("hate speech" still remains an absolute no-no, the service says) was poorly thought through and rolled out. The fact that everyone it initially applied to was a black hip-hop artist made things worse. "Oops, sorry, we're going to try again" may have been the only appropriate response. I'm not sure this is quite that though... The target length of a musical release has ballooned from 3 minutes to 40-ish minutes to 80-ish minutes to infinity-ish minutes as we've transitioned over the decades from 45rpm singles to 33rpm albums to CDs to streaming. As a reaction against endless, editor-free album-making and a vote for artistic immediacy, I'm in KANYE WEST's corner on the mysterious power of the seven-track album, which has been the format of choice for the two most notable albums released in the past two weeks, with more to come (at seven-day intervals, naturally)... Here are the early takes on the seven tracks of YE, which may turn out to be hip-hop's SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (which a lot of people loved, btw): "Curiously safe-sounding." "Part suicide note, part ransom note" (that's NPR MUSIC's RODNEY CARMICHAEL; at the same link, his colleague ANN POWERS compares the album to the BEACH BOYS' SMILE and BIG STAR's THIRD, which I'm not sure is a different argument). "He's like J.R. SMITH at the end of regulation in Game 1 ... We’re all LEBRON." "What’s most challenging about it may not be interpreting what he’s saying more than coming to terms with it"... YE has sparked some good, healthy discussion on bipolar disorder... This would've been my favorite line on the album if he had ended it where I end it, which he doesn't: "Time is extremely valuable and I prefer to waste it"... TUMA BASA joins YOUTUBE... MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO wants NEIL PORTNOW's job... CHRISSY TEIGEN queries the BACKSTREET BOYS... RIP EDDY CLEARWATER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Vulture |
| Yo! MTV Raps helped mainstream hip-hop, and was appointment viewing if you wanted to keep up with what was going on with the genre - but what kind of influence does it have today? Hosts Doctor Dre and Ed Lover talk about the origins of the show. | | |
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 | The Tennessean |
| Decades ago, Lower Broadway was blighted and crime-ridden. Today, bar owners are raking in millions on Bud Light and George Strait covers. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| The one area where Pandora might be outpacing Spotify: advertising and marketing tech. | | |
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 | Salon |
| Before he wrote songs with the Grateful Dead, Barlow was my housemate over the very weird winter of 1969. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Kanye West's newly-released ye is already 2018's most polarizing album. Two of NPR Music's critics sat down to try and make sense of West's motivations and musical accomplishments. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Black musicians were once boxed in by the mainstream. But the success of grime has helped diverse, diasporic tracks to hit the charts. | | |
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 | Refinery29 |
| Shirley Manson, Meshell Ndegeocello, and exec Jennifer Justice react to the news that the man who told women to "step up" will step down in 2019. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Perry Ritter decided as a young man that he would never play the sax professionally. But he was good at fixing them. | | |
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 | Complex |
| The rapid pace of rap battles today is a function of a society used to all on-demand-everything, and there’s no going back. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| The Replacements never had a hit, but their shambolic rock-n-roll has inspired legions of books - including a new one by their roadie. | | |
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 | Vox |
| Some indoor cycling classes have nine times the recommended noise exposure dose for an entire day. | | |
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| Billboard |
| A MusiCares fundraiser is the center of the latest storm cloud to envelop The Recording Academy, and an email exchange raises new questions about why academy president/CEO Neil Portnow selected Radio City as the fundraiser venue. | | |
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 | NPR |
| Bomba has always been a way for those who play and dance it to forget the troubles. It was true for the island's African slaves who first started dancing it centuries ago. It was true after Hurricane Maria, too. | | |
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 | Pigeons & Planes |
| Poot McFarlin's band Lectric Fence played Kanye's afterparty at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| On the chaos and calm of his latest perplexing spectacle. | | |
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 | Medium |
| We're living in a digital world and therefore information and music travels faster than ever before. It's never been easier to release your music and let people from all over the world listen to it. Borders seem to vanish as music can be discovered fairly easy by playlists and social/online media. | | |
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 | Music Tech Solutions |
| I don’t see a catalog buy in Apple’s future. They don’t need the money or the headache. But I could see a world in which Apple leveraged their creative staff and audio recording toolshed to attract developing writers. | | |
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| Complex |
| Complex caught up with Juice WRLD to talk his recent success, what it’s like to get label attention without a plan, and getting Lil Uzi Vert in the studio for a remix of “Lucid Dreams.” | | |
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 | DJ Tech Tools |
| Self-care is more critical than ever for everyone in dance music. The EDM bubble has punctured. Business is down, but so what? New destinations are on the horizon. | | |
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 | The Trichordist |
| Sen Ron Wyden seems to have issues with pre-1972 performers (music workers) and the American Federation of Musicians and whether digital services (the bosses) have to pay them at all. And yes you read that right. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Black Thought x 9th Wonder & the Soul Council |
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