[I told Michael] you could shave on that intro But he said, 'That's the jelly, that's what makes me want to dance.' When Michael Jackson tells you that's what makes him want to dance, well, the rest of us just have to shut up. | | | | Miguel at Afropunk Atlanta, Oct. 14, 2017. His album "War & Leisure" is out today on RCA.
(Paras Griffin/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “[I told Michael] you could shave on that intro But he said, 'That's the jelly, that's what makes me want to dance.' When Michael Jackson tells you that's what makes him want to dance, well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”
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| | rantnrave:// Screenwriter JENNY LUMET's open letter to RUSSELL SIMMONS, in which she says the DEF JAM co-founder raped her in the early 1990s, is one of the most powerful, terrifying accounts I've read of sexual assault in the entertainment business. It's deeply detailed and deeply personal, written in the second person and addressing her alleged assaulter by his first name. She describes how she tried to fight him off and then how she decided to stop fighting: "I made the trade in my mind. I thought, 'Just keep him calm, and you'll get home.'" And: "I desperately wanted to keep the situation from escalating. I wanted you to feel that I was not going to be difficult." The personal form of address is devastating. It's a documentary account. Simmons stepped down from all of his businesses shortly after Lumet's letter was published in the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Thursday morning, which was the right and only thing to do. He also said that, while he has been "thoughtless and sensitive in some of my relationships," his "memory of that evening" is "very different" from hers, which seems to have become the default response for every man who's half-apologized for sexual assault in the past two eye-opening months. I can't think of a worse way to apologize. Your different interpretation of the evening in question is the entire problem in a nutshell. You're denying the very thing you're apologizing for, telling the victim "I'm sorry but you're wrong." Your "very different" memories probably began the first time she said "no" more than 20 years ago. If you still see it differently, what are you actually trying to say? What are you processing and how are you processing it? Russell Simmons has done mountains of good, important work in his life, as a music mogul, fashion executive and philanthropist. It put him in a position of incredible power, which, based on this story, he no longer deserves... Also claiming a "different memory" of past events is playwright ISRAEL HOROVITZ, who stands accused by nine women. His son is the BEASTIE BOYS' AD-ROCK, who told the NEW YORK TIMES, "I believe the allegations against my father are true, and I stand behind the women that made them." That's a man doing mountains of good, important work right here right now... Meanwhile, JIM DEROGATIS takes to the NEW YORKER to ask why "the music industry seems unconcerned about the charges against [R.] KELLY," even as men like CHARLIE ROSE, MATT LAUER and KEVIN SPACEY have lost their jobs. If the entertainment business is truly coming to grips with its problematic past, that seems like a question that should be asked, repeatedly, until someone steps up and tries to answer it... BILLBOARD, which held its WOMEN IN MUSIC ceremony Thursday night in LA, catches up with CATHY FAVARO-MAIMONE, one of the rare women to make it into the upper echelons of the music biz in the 1940s and '50s, and finds, unsurprisingly, "It was all guys, and doors did not open." Different issue, same roots... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from MIGUEL, CHRIS STAPLETON, NEIL YOUNG & PROMISE OF THE REAL, U2, GLASSJAW, THE FACELESS, ROY WOOD$, Z-RO, CINDY WILSON, DANIELLE BRADBERY, FRANC GRAMS, CHIEF KEEF, ANDY GRAMMER and VAN MORRISON... And TAYLOR SWIFT's REPUTATION hits your local streaming service... RIP MAGÍN DÍAZ. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | NPR |
| New international regulations on rosewood have reverberated through the music industry, costing tens of millions in lost sales and extra administrative costs. | | |
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 | The Omnivore |
| How an increasingly bawdy American vernacular is liberalizing what is considered appropriate content for radio. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Maybe it was a sign when the speakers in the studio burst into flames. It was late October 1982, and a full battalion of musicians and technicians were working around the clock at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, putting the finishing touches on Michael Jackson's highly anticipated follow-up to 1979's "Off the Wall," which had established him as a solo superstar. | | |
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 | Hollywood Reporter |
| The screenwriter of 'Rachel Getting Married' and 'The Mummy' (and the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet) details a terrifying encounter with the legendary music producer, who says he is stepping down from his businesses in the wake of the new claims. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| From making records to protecting rights, negotiating contracts to discovering talent, the female executives included on Billboard’s 2017 Women in Music list represent the best of today’s dealmakers, influencers and tastemakers. | | |
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 | The Quietus |
| JR Moores looks back on the Australian psych lords’ annus mirabilis and proposes and few theories on how they proved so productive. | | |
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 | CDM Create Digital Music |
| Before it reverted to Internet age-blandness, American kids’ TV enjoyed a golden age of music, scored by oddball indie composers and legends alike. And, wow, it could even teach you about synthesis. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| The best way to judge a boy band's potency is the intensity of the screaming throng that accompanies its every move. That was true in the 1960s, when the mop-top-era Beatles incited widespread hysteria, and it was true again at the turn of the millennium, when Backstreet Boys and NSYNC became the faces of a similarly boisterous and pervasive movement. | | |
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 | Very Smart Brothas |
| Jay performed for roughly two hours. And I could have danced and rapped along for two more hours, easy. Obviously this is not news to anybody, but that man’s catalog is STACKED. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| ach day brings news of men who have abused their positions of wealth, fame, and power to engage in sexual harassment and assault. Yet, as the list of perpetrators grows ever longer, the name of the Chicago singer, songwriter, and producer R. Kelly is conspicuously absent from those belatedly paying a price for their actions. And it’s worth asking why. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Over the course of a 15-year career, Maroon 5, the million-selling pop act, have released just one single featuring a rapper or R&B singer. So it was surprising when, in the lead-up to their recently released album "Red Pill Blues," they put out four such singles in a row. | | |
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 | Cocaine & Rhinestones |
| The Louvin Brothers are widely regarded as the most influential harmony duo to ever cut a country song. The way Charlie and Ira could sing together is downright otherworldly. There’s even a special term we had to invent for family (it’s always/only family) who can sing this way: blood harmony. That being said, it’s possible we’ve never heard what they could really do. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| “These things still needs to be built with the rightsholders in mind, and creators in mind… You can’t just pay everybody in cryptocurrencies! We’re not in 2030, 2050 yet. There’s a real pragmatic part of what we do and how we work with labels.” | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| By building up tracks through the manipulation of programming code -- and pairing them with visuals also made on the fly -- algorave producers are among the underground's most dextrous and daring work. Iman Amrani heads to Sheffield to meet those at the heart of the scene. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| We had a sprawling, open-ended conversation with the Grammy winner and oft-heralded "savior of country music" about misconceptions, the media, feminism, punk, and the end of the world. Here's what he had to say. | | |
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| Noisey |
| Sure, it was just a reality TV show, but Simon Cowell's fingerprints are now smudged all over the pop world as a result. | | |
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| Hollywood Reporter |
| A magistrate judge potentially deals a blow to some 10,000 radio stations fighting licensing demands over songs by Adele, Jay-Z, and U2, among other superstars. | | |
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| Billboard |
| Nashville's top female managers talk to Billboard about the tipping points for their artists’ careers and setting boundaries with talent as well as sexual harassment and the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. | | |
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 | Oxford American |
| Searching for the old jawbone. | | |
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 | The Cipher |
| He was down with Wu-Tang before there was a Wu-Tang. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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