Somewhere along the way to a great rock record you need some controversy. If one were to remove all of my extracurricular activities from the history of Interpol’s early days, I can say without hyperbole that we’d be remembering the band differently—perhaps a little less passionately. | | | | The get down: Bo Diddley at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, 1970.
(Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Somewhere along the way to a great rock record you need some controversy. If one were to remove all of my extracurricular activities from the history of Interpol’s early days, I can say without hyperbole that we’d be remembering the band differently—perhaps a little less passionately.”
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| | rantnrave:// I suspect the people who would dismiss the MIDLAND album because country bands shouldn't have connections to CALVIN KLEIN ads and BRUNO MARS videos and should be more sincere about their come-up are the same people who would dismiss the new DEMI LOVATO album because it took 29 writers and 15 producers to craft its 12 songs and how can you possibly hear an artist's authentic heart when a crew the size of an American football team is standing between you and her? But what makes an actor and underwear model from TUCSON any less suited to sing breezy honky-tonk drinking songs than someone who grew up on a farm in OKLAHOMA? And what if those 29 writers and 15 producers are the instruments Lovato is using to tell her story and express what's in her heart, just as someone else may use 29 keyboards or 15 amps? I love Lovato's album unreservedly, and I like the Midland album quite a bit. The latter is more early EAGLES than early DWIGHT YOAKAM, and if there's anything "inauthentic" about it, it's that country music in 2017 doesn't particularly sound like either the Eagles *or* Yoakam. MIDLAND's close harmonies and steel-guitar yacht-rock details are rigorously retro, consciously counter to what either country music or pop music currently is. But country music tends to like challenges to its own state of the art (see: CHRIS STAPLETON and MARGO PRICE), and if a drinking song that boasts "they call it a problem, I call it a solution" doesn't cross every border wall country music has ever tried to erect, I don't know what will. On her sixth album, Lovato explores under the sheets of sexual obsession in ways both conventionally lustful and unconventionally creepy, fueled by a dizzyingly catchy array of R&B and pop beats. She holds that array together with a soulful, confident voice that can open a big, brash soul ballad by cooing "I see the future without you" in a way that leaves all sorts of room for regret but none for doubt. If you can't hear authenticity in that, I don't know where to tell you to look... I like to think small sometimes. Reading this BEN SISARIO profile of TUNESMAP, a company that aims to put songs in context by displaying photos, news clippings and other relevant material on your APPLE TV while the songs are playing on your SONOS, I asked myself why can't someone just show me who programmed the drums on this JAX JONES song while I'm listening to it, on the same app on the same device that I'm listening to it on? (Spoiler: Jones does her own programming)... MILES DAVIS and DEEP PURPLE preserved in DNA... RIP CEDELL DAVIS and REGGIE LAVONG... Best wishes to JERRY JEFF WALKER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Fast Company |
| Led by Beyoncé’s former digital guru, Instagram wants to help artists make the most of its music-obsessed users. | | |
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 | The Sewanee Review |
| A fact that has gone unnoticed is that in the decades just before people started to talk about singing “the blues” or “a blues,” Americans were talking extensively about “blue music” and “blue songs.” It began in the 1870s, which is to say it began just after the Civil War, as freed slaves fanned out through the country by the tens of thousands. | | |
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 | n+1 |
| "Turn on the Bright Lights," now experiencing a well-deserved fifteen-year anniversary celebration, is an album that could definitely while away a wistful witching hour or two. I don’t mean this to sound like bragging: though I was one of its composers, I now feel more like a confused participant, or a survivor of PTSD. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| The former Disney star has battled personal demons throughout her entire career. And while nobody was looking, she suddenly became one of the great torch singers in contemporary pop. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| The singer and the hit maker were entangled for three decades. He wanted chart-topping songs. But what did she want? | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| We can't be silent in the face of racism anymore. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| As the movement has spread to include coaches and NFL staff, the performers charged with belting out the patriotic song themselves are split over whether to kneel along with them. | | |
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 | Atlas Obscura |
| The art of the "cover-up" once led an obscure Marvin Gaye record to be misidentified for decades. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The Trump resistance has become sing-a-long-able, thanks to a 30-something man from Queens and his YouTube channel. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| The founder of the Playboy Jazz Festival, Hugh Hefner was long an advocate for "the music of his youth." But has the Los Angeles institution been a force for good in the world of jazz? | | |
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 | Noisey |
| The song plunges its hands into the messy dynamic between artists and their admirers, teaching us about ourselves along the way. | | |
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 | Slate |
| The story of how the recording industry made you shell out $18 for one good song in the ’90s. | | |
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| Billboard |
| "I'm a businessman first and a musician second," says Pandora's new, guitar-playing CEO Roger Lynch, "but I'm excited to apply what I've learned to a category I'm passionate about." | | |
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 | Medium |
| “Shape of You” is 110% not “Night Fever, and that’s a problem. | | |
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 | Pigeons & Planes |
| When 19-year-old singer Clairo started sharing her music, she had no idea how far it would spread. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| TunesMap, which offers a feed of videos, photographs and links to related material when songs are streamed, will make its debut as an Apple TV app in November. | | |
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| Noisey |
| "Wow, a bunch of people that have really cool haircuts, wear eyeliner and wear all black? These are my people. They facilitated that acceptance." | | |
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 | A.V. Club |
| Eddie Vedder loves the Cubs. Since his days as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, he's been a devotee, so it makes sense that playing on the Cubs' home turf, Wrigley Field, would be a big deal to him and to the band he fronts, Pearl Jam. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Americans are dying. Towns and economies are being destroyed. Yet the epidemic can be stopped. It's solvable. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| In an extract from his new biography, rock writer Anthony DeCurtis reflects on the icon he knew personally and delves into the making of his 1973 solo album Berlin and his encounter with Czech president – and fan – Václav Havel. | | |
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