You don’t expect a rightwing Republican to follow a leftwing reggae socialist band from Birmingham. But we used to sing about really heavy stuff and wrap it up in frothy, happy tunes, so a lot of people got into us who had no idea what we were singing about. Maybe he just loves reggae... and didn’t listen to our lyrics. | | | | Lips, sink. Louis Armstrong in an undated photo.
(Dominique Berretty/Gamma-Rapho) | | | | |  | “You don’t expect a rightwing Republican to follow a leftwing reggae socialist band from Birmingham. But we used to sing about really heavy stuff and wrap it up in frothy, happy tunes, so a lot of people got into us who had no idea what we were singing about. Maybe he just loves reggae... and didn’t listen to our lyrics.”
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| | rantnrave:// News broke overnight of the death of GEOFF EMERICK, who was 19 when he became the BEATLES' primary recording engineer and who did this his first day on the job and who was recording SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND seven months later. His work reverberates across a ridiculously wide swath of pop music a half-century later. RIP, and I'll have more to say tomorrow... It's easy to understand why musicians might be interested in uploading content to PORNHUB, which averaged 81 million visitors a day in 2017. That's the equivalent of SPOTIFY's entire paid subscription base showing up every day. But I'm a little less clear why those 81 million visitors would be interested in that musical content. You don't go to MTV.com looking for dinner recipes, do you? A quick (very quick, mom) investigation suggests I'm not off base here. The first two TIM WESTWOOD Crib Sessions I searched for on the site turned up one featuring the drill act 1011, which had received 3,389 views, and another featuring BSIDE, which had a whopping 433 views. Divide those numbers by 81 million and you get basically nothing. But the videos are there for a reason, having been uploaded to Pornhub after a crackdown in the UK forced YOUTUBE to delete drill videos en masse. They were in need of a home and Pornhub provided it. That's good internetting. (And I confess I don't know the particular provenance of the exact clips I found. Maybe there's been some deleting and re-uploading. Take those view counts with a few grains of salt. But considering what else comes up when you search for "drill"—let's just say there's some tough competition for eyeballs.) The guys in the drill videos are fully clothed, but Pornhub also hosts music videos where that's not the case, and those, per my very quick research, have done better. In an essay on Pornhub's "Major Music Industry Moves," HIGH SNOBIETY's JAKE HALL notes the site also has funded full-on adult films directed by rappers BROOKE CANDY and YOUNG M.A., which are LGBTQ-friendly and appear to be doing numbers befitting Pornhub's enormous audience. The site has flirted for several years with the idea of being an actual record label, though it has little to show for that effort. But as NME's EL HUNT notes, Pornbhub is offering a platform that traditional subscription music services aren't equipped to match and that YOUTUBE doesn't want to match: "The appeal held for alternative musicians happy to subvert with their art and exploit the opportunities offered by less mainstream outlets is understandable." Pornhub may also be a little more lax than its mainstream competitors with things like unofficial mixes. Musicians have been hearing for years that they need to branch out, explore new and unusual opportunities, create their own spaces, etc. The question for now, I suppose, is this: Do Pornhub's users want to branch out and explore those spaces, too?... Important UB40 followups: ALI CAMPBELL says Democrats and Republicans alike have always been welcome at his band's gigs, "so long as they leave their politics at the door." And VULTURE tracked down constitutional law professor and former Supreme Court clerk GREGORY MAGARIAN, who was at the same UB40 concert BRETT KAVANAUGH was at in 1985, and who wrote an angry letter to the YALE DAILY NEWS after its critic trashed the show... Former JAWBOX guitarist BILL BARBOT went to high school with Kavanaugh, and he's one of the authors of an anti-Kavanaugh petition that's been signed by 96 GEORGETOWN PREP alumni so far... TENCENT formally files for its IPO and SONY MUSIC and WARNER MUSIC have already bought in... RAFFI resists... The world's highest-grossing arenas, per BILLBOARD... APPLE MUSIC signs an exclusive deal with MINISTRY OF SOUND—not for albums or tracks, but for playlists... RIP PEGGY SUE GERRON. Yes, that Peggy Sue. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| How a quartet of different movies released in the last month -- and one hitting theaters this Friday (Oct.5) -- are contributing to the Era of Peak Music Doc. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| The K-pop boy band are a worldwide music phenomenon-and their concerts help explain why. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| A new bill signed into California state law on Monday (Oct. 1) will require several publicly-traded music companies, including Pandora and Live Nation, to add more women to their boards -- or else face hefty fines. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Geoff Emerick was the point man as George Martin and the Beatles worked to create new sounds in the studio, doing everything from moving microphones to rewiring building electronics to manipulating tapes. | | |
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 | Highsnobiety |
| Hip-hop culture has had the biggest influence on street culture, informing plenty of the style trends and clothing brands that rose to prominence. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| A year after Petty’s death, author Warren Zanes shares a tale of loss, memory, and the search for the perfect cup of coffee. | | |
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 | MTV UK |
| "As long as music can be an outlet and a form of therapy to those that create it, then it will always be a positive." | | |
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 | The Verge |
| Public Knowledge’s Meredith Rose on The Vergecast. | | |
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| Vulture |
| The big revelation of the documentary titled "MAYA / MATANGI / MIA," which hit U.S. theaters last weekend, is how it vindicates the singer at its heart. At "The Guardian," Laura Snapes draws a connection between Christine Blasey Ford and Maya Arulpragasam -- nom de guerre, M.I.A. | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| Ericka Blount Danois talks to the superstar rocker about his inspiration and motivation, his star-studded career, and his new album, "Raise Vibration." | | |
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 | NME |
| Lindsay Bishop has conducted an eight-year, on-the-ground study into the communities surrounding heavy music. | | |
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 | The Times |
| I am standing side of stage at the Boston Garden arena - I've just watched U2's Experience + Innocence show, a performance that covers the folly of the former and the optimistic power of the latter. It is both personal and political. | | |
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| The Ringer |
| A weak single. A weird ‘SNL’ performance. A new album with little momentum. The old Kanye was a rebellious virtuoso. The new Kanye is a hack. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Twelve years later, Antonio Delgado is receiving recognition for his brief career as a rap artist. All it took was for him to run for Congress. | | |
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 | Music Tech Solutions |
| Not only do subscription retail rates need to increase, but it’s also time for a major change in the way artist’s streaming royalties are calculated from what is essentially a market share approach to one that is more fair. | | |
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 | Aquarium Drunkard |
| By now, jazz has been back in the mainstream of music criticism and popular thought for so long, it seems impossible to imagine it was ever endangered. Though to hear Nate Chinen tell it, jazz was never in danger -- we just weren't paying attention. | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| Stephen Titmus spends some time with a DJ who's a master of his craft. | | |
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 | Dazed Digital |
| After a controversial festival season, in which male artists with a history of sexism still dominated line-ups, we need to talk about what we can do better. | | |
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| Highsnobiety |
| From Kanye West's recent collaboration on the first-ever Pornhub Awards to its record label beginnings in 2014: a brief history of Pornhub and music. | | |
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| Vulture |
| The board thought Gerard Mortier would save the company. Its promises to him doomed it. (Excerpted from "Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America," by Heidi Waleson.) | | |
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