We want to meet this moment. | | | | Arca at the Sónar Festival, Barcelona, July 18, 2019. "KiCk i" is out today on XL Recordings.
(David Zorrakino/Europa Press/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “We want to meet this moment.”
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| | rantnrave:// There appear to be people who think the band now known as the CHICKS caved in to public pressure in tossing the other half of the name, which the long-running Texas trio originally named for a LITTLE FEAT song went ahead and did Thursday morning without bothering to officially announce it. They just changed the URL of their website and their social media handles (shoutout whoever quickly scooped up at least one of their old ones, assuming that wasn't them, too) and released a single under the new, shortened name. "We want to meet the moment," the homepage of the website now says. There was in fact public pressure, but the Chicks aren't a band that has ever shown much interest in doing what they're told. "March, march to my own drum / Hey hey, I'm an army of one," goes the chorus of the new single, a stripped-down, roots-rocky (or at least as roots-rocky as you can be over a programmed beat) protest song that in two verses covers a convention's worth of left wing causes. Marching to their own drum in the past famously got them banished from country radio; it also allowed them to successfully come back a couple years later, without radio's help, with a single that basically told their detractors to shove it. They changed their name this week not because someone in New York or Los Angeles or Austin told them they have to (it's equally likely someone in Dallas or Tallahassee begged them not to), but because they thought it was the right thing to do and because they wanted to. Defiant Chicks would've worked, too... Question: Can country artists still say they've been "Dixie Chicked"?... The Chicks also changed managers, but not to any of those tracked in this informative interactive report, courtesy ROSTR, that charts the world's biggest music management companies based on such metrics as roster size, SPOTIFY and YOUTUBE reach and a variety of other data points. CORAN CAPSHAW's RED LIGHT MANAGEMENT has the most clients, by far, of any company tracked here (more than four times as many as MAVERICK, which has the second biggest roster) while Maverick, SCOOTER BRAUN's SB PROJECTS and the Latin-focused WALTER KOLM ENTERTAINMENT are the Spotify and YouTube champs... MARC GEIGER is stepping down as global head of music at WME... CASH MUSIC, a long-running nonprofit that provides crucial tools to indie artists, is shutting down in July... NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL has a CBGB Caucus... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from KHRUANGBIN, ARCA, HAIM, G-EAZY, IDK, 6LACK, JESSIE WARE, THROTTLE ELEVATOR MUSIC (feat. KAMASI WASHINGTON), HUM (actually dropped earlier this week, breaking a small corner of the internet), TENILLE TOWNES, CORB LUND, GREY DAZE (new recordings by CHESTER BENNINGTON's pre-LINKIN PARK band using his original vocals), CEELO GREEN, YUNGEEN ACE, NATANAEL CANO, BUJU BANTON (dancehall star's first album in 10 years), NADINE SHAH, PARK HYE JIN, LOUIS THE CHILD, BELL WITCH & AERIAL RUIN (from the linked review: "[It] won't be for everyone. In fact, it's practically not for anyone at all"), POTTERY, RAY LAMONTAGNE, BECCA MANCARI, DERRICK HODGE, BOBBY WATSON, MACEO PARKER, BRIAN MCKNIGHT (his last album of original songs, he says), MAX B, AUGUST ALSINA, BANKROL HAYDEN, DEAD TONGUES, JAMES KRIVCHENIA (second solo album by BIG THIEF drummer), COUNTRY WESTERNS, WILL HOGE, BAD MOVES, GORDI, DIRTY PROJECTORS, MOE. and ART FEYNMAN... RIP MADY MESPLÉ. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | | | | | Hypnotizing. From "Mordechai," out today on Dead Oceans. |
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