I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was. | | | | Sam Hunt performs at Route 91 Harvest in Las Vegas Saturday night, 24 hours before a mass shooting.
(Mindy Small/FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was.”
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| | rantnrave:// RIP TOM PETTY. A special edition of MusicREDEF, in honor of one of my favorite classic rockers, who died late Monday night, will be sent out later this morning... Rock fans in PARIS. Bachata fans in ORLANDO. Pop fans in MANCHESTER. Country fans in LAS VEGAS. Terrorists don't discriminate. It's hard to discriminate when you're setting off a bomb or spraying bullets randomly into a crowd. It's hard to discriminate when you hate everybody. But while I send my thoughts, prayers and wishes for serious gun control laws to everyone directly affected by the latest terrorist assault on music fans—the kind of gun control that would make it at least a little harder for a 64-year-old man to stash more than 20 rifles, including assault rifles, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his Vegas hotel room—I will ask, for the fourth time in two years, why music? Why have so many of the worst terrorist attacks in the West in recent years targeted music fans? What is it about people celebrating their love of beats, rhymes and life with a community of fellow music lovers that some men (it's almost always men) find so hateful? Or threatening? What does music represent to terrorists? What do JASON ALDEAN, ARIANA GRANDE, the EAGLES OF DEATH METAL and young gay clubgoers dancing to Latin music have in common in their eyes? How do we fight back, besides continuing to make and perform music? We do know, at the very least, we have to keep doing that. With our communities. With other communities. With our beats. With other beats. In harmony. In unison. But also, let's reduce the population of guns, shall we?... Does country music have a specific role to play after the massacre at the ROUTE 91 HARVEST festival? There are longstanding ties between several country performers and the NRA, and the WASHINGTON POST's CHRIS RICHARDS wonders what would happen if NASHVILLE's best "decided to link arms" in the opposite direction. One musician who was in Las Vegas has already had a change of heart. SHANNON WATTS, founder of MOMS DEMAND ACTION FOR GUN SENSE IN AMERICA, notes that gun control can be a "polarizing discussion" for the core country demo but says "all entertainers, artists and celebrities have a role to play." This is also an opportunity for the rest of the pop music audience to stand, unconditionally, with country singers and their fans. Jason Aldean, who was onstage when the shooting broke out Sunday, became a country star by singing about a lifestyle often dismissed, or misunderstood, by pop singers. The NEW YORKER's AMANDA PETRUSICH zeroes in on his great 2016 single "THEY DON'T KNOW," about "those folks (who) ain't lived in our lives," and suggests now would be a good time for those folks to reach out to his fans, "stand with them... and make their voices even louder"... Here's how else you can help... RIP TOM PALEY, DJ STEF, DONALD MITCHELL, MICK CLARK and all those who died in Las Vegas. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Vanity Fair |
| The subject of "The Soundtrack of Our Lives" gets candid about what it means to have a golden ear. | | |
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 | Lapham’s Quarterly |
| How ISIS is hastening the end of the Yezidis’ ancient oral tradition. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| The latest attack at a musical event is horrifying but will not change our need to connect through the songs we love. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| It’s time for Nashville to start talking about gun control. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Bataclan, the Pulse nightclub, Manchester - and now Vegas. The past two years have seen horrific acts of mass violence at music events, and each one has been different from the other. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| A technical catastrophe that struggled with the tonal whiplash between the Vegas shooting and its premiere celebration, the new ‘TRL’ didn’t even bother to play music videos. | | |
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 | Pigeons & Planes |
| Experts weigh in with essential advice for anyone interested in the music industry. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| The singer, songwriter, and producer has quietly soundtracked Black America for the last 30 years. | | |
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 | Song Exploder |
| Ella breaks down her song “Sober.” You’ll hear how it started, with the original demos she made with her co-producer Jack Antonoff, and how the song changed over the course of working on it for months and months. | | |
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 | TIME |
| The UK's first station dedicated to popular music launched 50 years ago | | |
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 | Medium |
| You can’t hide from yourself, because everywhere you go, there you are. | | |
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 | 1A |
| Women in hip-hop? We're calling for a comeback. | | |
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 | JSTOR Daily |
| Modern pianos are the product of a 600-year evolution-from Hermann Poll's 1397 clavicembalum, to clavichords, harpsichords, and the modern grand piano. | | |
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 | Nowness |
| Enter the mosh pit of the country's modern punk movement. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Before it became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, the Route 91 Harvest festival was one of a handful of concert blowouts aiming to burnish the Las Vegas Strip’s reputation as a live-music destination. | | |
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 | Nelson George |
| This is the first in an on going series of short video interviews with major musicians about either music they made or were influenced by. The focus is gong to be funk, hip hop, R&B, soul, rock, disco and other African-American created musical styles. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| MC Swat rapped against Gaddafi and railed against extremists -- until the polarisation of the Libya conflict persuaded him it was too dangerous to stay. | | |
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 | DownBeat |
| Producer Nico Segal is best known as the architect behind 2015's pop masterpiece Surf, by The Social Experiment, a genre-smashing hip-hop collective that brought together titans of the scene like Chance the Rapper, Big Sean, Kyle, B.o.B and Busta Rhymes. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Paramore captures the moment between rapture and its comedown. Watch the band rearrange songs from its sparkling pop album "After Laughter." | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| What we need most of all isn’t mourning, but action to lower the toll of guns in America. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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