If I had the ability to go back in time, I wouldn’t go warn Oppenheimer about the bomb or swat a butterfly just to see what happens, I would return to eight or nine years ago and prevent myself from ever updating iTunes. | | | | Janelle Monáe at the Roundhouse, London, Sept. 11, 2018.
(Neil Lupin/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “If I had the ability to go back in time, I wouldn’t go warn Oppenheimer about the bomb or swat a butterfly just to see what happens, I would return to eight or nine years ago and prevent myself from ever updating iTunes.”
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| | rantnrave:// Standing outside the STONE PONY in Asbury Park, N.J., as I did many, many times when I was in my 20s, you wouldn't know it was anything more than a rundown corner bar across the street from the Atlantic Ocean, one that had surely seen better days. You still might not know after you stepped inside and took in its black walls and awkward layout and perhaps caught a whiff of the cover band onstage. "I think the only thing that was exceptional about it was that it was unexceptional," its most famous denizen tells NICK CORASANITI, who has pieced together a lengthy oral history of the Pony for the NEW YORK TIMES. Its most famous denizen, of course, is the guy who basically put the Pony, the city of Asbury Park and the state of New Jersey on the map, and the cover bands that he, you or I may be talking about at any given moment featured some of the most ridiculously talented musicians who ever walked into a dark bar, played for four hours and walked out with 15 dollars in their pockets. They were schooled in traditional live-music virtues and could play 16 or 32 bars of pretty much anything, on the spot, without breaking a sweat. Bandleader points at you, you step up. Some eventually made it big, some found regular day jobs, some are still at it. There are clubs perhaps not exactly like it but sort of like it in decent-sized towns across America today, some with guitarists and drummers, some with DJs, some with rappers, some almost as talented as those cover bands, some not quite as much. The skills are nice to have, for sure, and the black walls are assumed but not all that important. It was the people inside—the regulars, the tourists, the bartenders, the players, the guy who seemed to live in the DJ booth (hi, LEE), all of them brought together by music and dreams and hungry rock and roll hearts—who made the Pony the Pony. The club, which is, improbably, still there, is just an old building. It's the people and the music inside that made it a temple. "There was the first foolish person that said, 'I think I’m going to open a business in Asbury Park, and right now it’s a train wreck,'" says the GASLIGHT ANTHEM's BRIAN FALLON. "It’s like, if we can do it with this town, like you can take and make something out of nothing." Which is as good a description of rock, and pop, and hip-hop, and everything else as I've heard in a long time... Did you ever think you could feel nostalgic for that free software you used to use to play your low-resolution MP3s through your tiny computer speakers? As WINAMP prepares to rise from the digital dead, we look back on what went right—and what went wrong—with the great turn-of-the-century media players. And we look around to see what's left. MusicSET: "Winamp, iTunes and the Golden Age of Digital Music Players"... SPOTIFY, which absolutely, definitely doesn't want to be a record company, now also absolutely, definitely doesn't want to be a distributor either... Does the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME need an alphabetization committee?... RIP OLI HERBERT and ANDY GOESSLING. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Sears may be bankrupt, but thanks to the retail giant we're all singing the blues. | | |
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| 75 million listeners heard Lovelytheband’s “Broken” last week. | | |
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| How the iconic rock club - where Bruce Springsteen found a home and others got their start - weathered the tumultuous history of one of New Jersey’s most storied shore towns. | | |
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| As Winamp prepares to rise from the digital dead, we look back on what went right—and what went wrong—with the great turn-of-the-century media players. And we look around to see what's left. | | |
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| Ahead of a major festival devoted to issues around copyright, Larisa Mann explores the relationship that Jamaican soundsystem culture has to the concept of musical ownership. | | |
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| Innovating pricing and content approaches are leading to massive revenues for Epic Games title. | | |
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| Spotify has taken a minority stake in DistroKid. In itself, it may be a slightly left field but relatively insignificant move, except that it is in fact one small but important step on a much bigger journey. | | |
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| The subject of an extensive new reissue from Analog Africa, Dur Dur Band were one of the few privately run bands causing a stir on Mogadishu’s vibrant ’80s dancefloors. Lost for a generation, this is the story of Dur Dur Band’s mission to globalise Somali music. | | |
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| With a boost from Carbon Fiber labelhead Farruko, the Afro-Honduran rapper stands poised to smash the genre's color barrier. | | |
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| The Beastie Boys made a masterpiece. And then they were foiled by Donny Osmond. (Excerpted from “Beastie Boys Book,” by Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz.) | | |
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| The trap door allows for a quick entrance but there’s no promise of a long stay. | | |
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| "Why Vinyl Matters" is a book that gathers together testimonials from across the music world to explain the joy of vinyl records. Here's Lars Ulrich's contribution. | | |
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| Success is difficult to measure in indie music in 2018. But by any metric, Holter is one of the most acclaimed and exciting composers of her generation. How she got here wasn’t promised. But on her new album, she’s soaring. | | |
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| Americana power couple on their new albums, how they first met, and why they won’t stay silent in the Trump era. | | |
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| Before it was announced that SiriusXM was buying Pandora, the long standing music streaming service made their own rather eye-raising purchase. The company bought top digital audio advertiser AdsWizz. I could say that the purchase went under the radar but truthfully nearly everything Pandora does fails to make the same dent as Apple Music or Spotify. | | |
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| The way programmers represent 80s modern rock to alternative radio listeners in 2018 misrepresents 80s modern rock radio, which was comparatively diverse in terms of gender, race, and genre. An omnivorous and diverse format has been turned into a litany of “forefathers.” | | |
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| Last August, the Killers front man Brandon Flowers had something to say about the state of capital-R rock music in 2018. "There hasn't been anybody good enough," Flowers commented to me. "If there were some kids out there right now playing [Interpol's] 'Obstacle 1' tonight, I would hear about it ...but there isn't." | | |
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| From First Access to Full Stop, Pulse to Paradigm, the biz's up and comers march to their own Big Beat. | | |
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| The damned thing caught me again this week. This time, I was watching a video of an old acquaintance’s funeral. He was something of a biker — we’d ridden together occasionally in Texas and he hailed from Alabama. | | |
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| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
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