This morning I tried an experiment. As I arrived at our office parking lot, I stopped to ask a number of our staff members how they listened to music on their commute. While the answers varied, often by age bracket, one thing was consistent: The 20-somethings barely knew where the FM button was. | | | | Tennessee whiskey: Troy Gentry at Fan Fair, Nashville, June 7, 2003.
(Rusty Russell/Getty Images) | | | | | | “This morning I tried an experiment. As I arrived at our office parking lot, I stopped to ask a number of our staff members how they listened to music on their commute. While the answers varied, often by age bracket, one thing was consistent: The 20-somethings barely knew where the FM button was.”
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| | rantnrave:// Justice can be weird. Wait, make that justice *may* be weird. Which is a shade different. Or maybe not. News flash: A federal judge in NEW YORK has stripped the first verse of "WE SHALL OVERCOME" of its copyright—I had no idea copyrights could be granted on a per-verse basis, but that shall be a different subject for a different day—on the grounds the writer who changed the lyrical hook of an old spiritual from "we will overcome" to "we shall overcome" had made a trivial substitution that "lacks originality" and was therefore not entitled to a new copyright. Like many people, I have concerns about the use and abuse of copyright. But this is about something else. This is about the art of songwriting. Try rewriting KENDRICK LAMAR's "sit down, be humble" as "sit down, be modest" and see how far you get in the 2017 pop zeitgeist. Or try changing ED SHEERAN's "I'm in love with the shape of you" to "I'm in love with the frame of you" and good luck with that. Words matter. Every single word. "We shall" and "we will" do not sound the same in a song, do not carry the same power, do not mean the same thing. We don't need a judge for that. We have history for that. Whether editing "will" to "shall" in one of the 20th century's great civil right anthems is deserving of more than a half-century of copyright, I'm not here to say. But call that edit trivial and I shall complain, loudly, that you are missing the very essence of the song you are judging. And you are misunderstanding how music works... Hugs to NASHVILLE, which lost two members of the GRAND OLE OPRY Friday. DON WILLIAMS was one of the last of the great urbane honky-tonk balladeers, if that's even a thing, and if you can make a hit out of a song that goes, "those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me/Hank and Tennessee," then I say it's a thing. His classicist crooner spirit will live on in the voices of inheritors like CHRIS STAPLETON and ALAN JACKSON... TROY GENTRY, killed in a helicopter crash en route to a gig in NEW JERSEY, was the smooth, higher-voiced half of MONTGOMERY-GENTRY, whose hits came a quarter-century later. They may have been more well versed in SKYNYRD and SPRINGSTEEN than either of those two Williams boys, and they may have been more likely to rock a honky-tonk than croon to it, but that's the passage of time for you, and they were equally fierce protectors of their Southern roots. Their "SHE COULDN'T CHANGE ME" is the happy-ending sequel to Williams' plaintive "IF HOLLYWOOD DON'T NEED YOU," a reminder that home is most often where country's heart is. RIP... A TRIBE CALLED QUEST's headlining set Saturday night at ENGLAND's BESTIVAL was "our last show ... ever," Q-TIP told the festival crowd while paying his respects to the late PHIFE DAWG. ATCQ's final song? "WE THE PEOPLE..." Respect. MusicSET: "Last Waltzes: Artists Say Goodbye"... What's your favorite music movie? Asking for a friend... KELIS' milkshake recipe... More hugs: to BROADWAY, which lost songwriter MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, best known for the deliciously satirical BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON... RIP also SEAN DELEAR, ANTHONY "BUBBLES" TORRES and, his deeds here on earth notwithstanding, RICK STEVENS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | should we talk about the weather? |
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| Before creating Verrit, the politico was a downtown club kid rubbing elbows with Danny Tenaglia and David Morales. | | |
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| The anti-fascist movement draws on punk’s political awareness and network for activism - and right now may be its most crucial moment. | | |
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| Listen carefully, and you'll learn a lot about life in the fields. | | |
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| On U2's current tour, each show is a feat of engineering, construction, and precision–and there can be no mistakes. The cornerstone of the production is the world's largest mobile video screen. Popular Mechanics had exclusive access to the band's stadium shows in New Jersey. | | |
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| The new Mighty, an $86 ultra-small music player, syncs with your Spotify playlists and plays them offline. Can it replace the increasingly obsolete iPod? | | |
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| As of Friday, Taylor Swift's buzzy video for "Look What You Made Me Do" had generated a staggering 270 million views. That's been happy news for Swift fans, and also for advertisers like Dodge, Flex Dry and the new Tom Cruise movie "American Made," each of what had their video ads running prior to the video on Vevo's YouTube channel. | | |
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| The controversial practice still shaping modern dancefloors. | | |
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| Jack Johnson is known as the world's mellowest pop star. A surfer raised on the North Shore of Hawaii, his acoustic strumming has been the default soundtrack to good-times beach living for more than 15 years. But these days, something's up with Jack Johnson. | | |
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| His recent years were marked with loss and struggle. | | |
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| I love Cardi B. I love everything about her. I love that she is aggressively real. I love that she is aggressively beautiful. I love that she is aggressively Cardi. | | |
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| | | should we talk about the government? |
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| Credit card records show Fyre Festival’s founder ran a concert ticket buying scheme that blended the finances of his two companies. | | |
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| The untold story of a Sri Lankan rebel who mixed music, danger, and politics as both a catalyst in the ’80s Bay Area punk scene and the originator of one of rap’s most notorious publications. | | |
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| Sonos, granddaddy of the connected home audio marketplace, is now 15 years old. Sonos was a pioneer that was so far ahead of its time, it inadvertently found itself as one of the key early drivers of streaming subscriptions. | | |
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| The music producer came to New York for the sleaze and the flea circus. He stayed to make the mixtapes of a city’s imagination. | | |
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| Yeezy and a whole generation meet real life and wonder ‘what it all really mean?‘ | | |
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| Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino sits with LionTree CEO Aryeh Bourkoff to discuss his company’s amazing growth - serving over 80 millions fans. They delve into the live business and discuss the new “Verified Fan” program powering shows for Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, among others. | | |
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| Mr. Williams, whose admirers included Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton, was best known for ballads extolling the virtues of romantic commitment. | | |
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| A conversation with one of music’s most idiosyncratic and most notorious artists about celebrity, creativity and controversy. | | |
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| This was always going to be so much more than just a concert. | | |
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| Neil Young’s years in Malibu were marked by existential despair, drugs, and some of the darkest albums of his career. | | |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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