Young girls loving music, whatever kind of music, are truth. I believe in them and nothing can annihilate their truth. | | | | Happy Xmas (Reading Is Not Over): John and Yoko in London, July 15, 1971.
(Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Young girls loving music, whatever kind of music, are truth. I believe in them and nothing can annihilate their truth.”
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| | rantnrave:// Over the past year, I've shared some 5,000 stories in this newsletter. I've read tens of thousands more along the way, looking not for news or reviews or lists of the world's greatest record stores (though I welcomed all of that, too), but looking, simply and sometimes selfishly, for well-told tales. Stories I wanted to read for no other reason than that I wanted to read them. Tales of strange trips. Obsessively deep explorations of songs, genres, canons. Peeks into weird corners of the business I never knew existed. The things artists have to do. The things they don't do (but wait, now he does). The issues we faced then. The issues we face now. The issues we'll face tomorrow. Things that work. Things that don't work. And, duh, music. Pop music. Not pop music. Below are 20 of my favorite music stories of 2017, re-shared as my humble gift to you for this holiday season. Kick back, dig in and thank you, as always, for reading. Happy Xmas. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Vulture |
| The most influential playlist in music is Spotify’s RapCaviar, which turns mixtape rappers into megastars. And it’s all curated by one man. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| You've probably been surprised to hear a remarkable song you've never heard pop out of nowhere sometime recently - you're not alone. But as the terms of excavation shift, what are we losing? | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Bryson Morris is a rapping 14-year-old. His team thinks he’s the next teen pop superstar. Are they delusional, or about to change the game? | | |
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 | Village Voice |
| At first Lia thought it was a scam. Do you want to learn how to sing properly? Do you want to take the next step into the entertainment industry? What are you going to do today? Do what you love! | | |
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 | MTV News |
| The search for a black self in the American west. | | |
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 | 99% Invisible |
| "Time" is the first episode of Ways of Hearing. This story looks at the way digital audio -- in music recording, and in radio and television broadcast -- employs a different sense of time than we use in our offline life, a time that is more regular and yet less communal. | | |
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| NPR Music |
| This list, of the greatest albums made by women between 1964 and the present, is an intervention, a remedy, a correction of the historical record. It rethinks popular music to put women at the center. | | |
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 | Medium |
| Kesha — the persona, if not the person — has always been gonzo, in both lower- and uppercase: too much, too intense, too weird, too much of a freak, talking in a private language that only other freaks (or chickens) can understand, unconcerned with whether the next stunt she’s going to perform is going to kill her or make her immortal. | | |
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 | The Baffler |
| Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry. | | |
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 | Pigeons & Planes |
| Oral sex has long been a controversial subject in dancehall, and a new hit single has the topic back in the spotlight. | | |
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 | Motherboard |
| The most infamous ticket scalper of all time used bots to buy millions of tickets. Now he wants to stop them. | | |
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 | BuzzFeed |
| As the R&B legend tours the country this summer, parents have told police that R. Kelly is running an abusive "cult" that's tearing families apart. Three former members of Kelly’s inner circle told BuzzFeed News similar stories. | | |
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 | Hazlitt |
| Both holy and wholly her own, Amy Grant was the soundtrack to my rebellion. When my church rejected her, what I heard was, “You can’t be a believer and a woman who wants more.” | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| By the time the night's final act took the main stage, the fast friends had settled into a spot about 20 yards from the right side of the stage, nestled between a few cuddly married couples and a rambunctious bachelorette party. Then the first shots were fired. | | |
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| The Ringer |
| The rise of two depressive, suicide-threatening rappers and the return of one of the genre’s veteran bands raises questions about emo’s legacy and long-lasting appeal. | | |
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 | Spotify |
| Chris Lighty was a giant in hip-hop. He managed Foxy Brown, Fat Joe, Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J, 50 Cent-anyone who was anyone worked with Lighty. But in 2012 he was found dead at his home in the Bronx, a death that left the music world reeling. | | |
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| MTV News |
| How Miami Bass, ocean waves, and pirate radio shaped the film. | | |
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 | GQ |
| T La Rock was one of the pioneers of hip-hop, an old-school legend sampled by Public Enemy and Nas. But after a brutal attack put him in a nursing home, he had to fight to recover his identity, starting with the fact that he’d ever been a rapper at all. | | |
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 | The Bitter Southerner |
| Three years ago, in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri, protests, Drive-By Truckers cofounder Patterson Hood wrote a song called “What It Means.” Ever since, the song has pulled him and his band into conversations they never thought they’d have. Hood tells us about the life and times of an American band on the cusp of a perilous night. | | |
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 | VSB |
| A question about rap's most consistent and most consistently perplexing artist. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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