If you play 'In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins on December 31st at 11:56:40 the drum break will play right as the clock strikes midnight. Start off your new year right. | | | | #Resist #2017: Q-Tip leading A Tribe Called Quest at the Grammy Awards, Feb. 12, 2017.
(Christopher Polk/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If you play 'In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins on December 31st at 11:56:40 the drum break will play right as the clock strikes midnight. Start off your new year right.”
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| | rantnrave:// LORDE help us. In the spirit of the holiday season, and as a tiny pop-music rebuke to a year marked not so much by division (people have been divided since people have existed) as by a complete breakdown of civility across that division, may I offer a shoutout to pretty much everybody with stakes on either side of the Lorde v. ISRAEL affair? Not counting the usual internet trolls on both sides, basically everyone has comported themselves with respect and dignity and even some humor since Lorde announced over the holiday break that she would not be coming to the Promised Land next year. A week ago, two activists, one Palestinian and one Jewish, wrote an open letter on the SPINOFF, a NEW ZEALAND site, asking the pop singer to "take a few minutes and hear us out" and consider canceling her June 5 TEL AVIV show in accord with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. A day later, the Spinoff published another open letter calling the BDS movement intransigent and isolationist and asking Lorde to pursue "dialogue, not exclusion." God bless actual, open discussion. Lorde, who had responded to the first open letter on TWITTER, announced on Sunday she was canceling. She said she had done research and sought outside advice before booking the gig, and continued doing so afterward and had changed her mind even though "it’s been a dream of mine to visit this beautiful part of the world for many years." Then WORLD WAR III started. No, wait, it didn't. The show's Israeli promoter apologized to local fans—and to Lorde, "who doesn't deserve all the s*** she's had to put up with over the past week." Grace. Look it up in the dictionary. Some people noted the incongruence of the fact that Lorde's 2018 tour will still take her to RUSSIA, not exactly a human-rights paradise. Not unfair. Israel's culture minister, MIRI REGEV, politely asked her to reconsider her reconsideration, and the country's ambassador to NEW ZEALAND, ITZHAK GERBERG, invited Lorde to meet with him, while sharing some harsh—but not undiplomatic—words about BDS. Lorde didn't get defensive, at least not publicly, and she didn't call anyone any names. Maybe she'll change her mind again and join the likes of RADIOHEAD, NICK CAVE and every other act mentioned here that has proudly played Israel. Maybe, like ROGER WATERS, RAG N' BONE MAN, LAURYN HILL and others, she won't. She's 21, she's an artist, she gets to make her own decisions, and this one, no matter which side you stand on, is nothing if not complicated. I loved this tweet from the JERUSALEM POST's AMY SPIRO: "I definitely think what @Lorde needs is more people to tag her in their hot takes." Noted. I will not tag her in mine... Some of my favorite pop music writers, including JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD, ANN POWERS and JEWLY HIGHT go back and forth on issues from border-crossing music to bro country to artists writing love songs for their babies in the wonderful rolling editorial thread "The Music Club, 2017"... Cutbacks at yet another alt-weekly; please stop it 2017. A good thread on some of the great work ATLANTA's CREATIVE LOAFING has done covering ATL hip-hop, courtesy @MINAANNLEE... The COMBAT JACK SHOW remembers COMBAT JACK... RIP trombonist ROSWELL RUDD, MTV UNPLUGGED co-founder JIM BURNS, MAROON 5 manager JORDAN FELDSTEIN, CASABLANCA RECORDS co-founder LARRY HARRIS, FLATT & SCRUGGS mandolinist CURLY SECKLER, and poet and MISSION OF BURMA collaborator HOLLY ANDERSON. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | what are you doing new year's eve |
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 | Mother Jones |
| How I learned to fiddle my way through America's deeply troubling history. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| As streaming continues to remake the music industry, artists and record labels schemed and scrambled, remixed and bundled to get their songs into fans’ ears. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| U2's frontman on the state of his band, the state of the world and what he learned from almost dying. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, Feist, Chance the Rapper, Kings of Leon and Arcade Fire confronted the media in various ways. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| While both the recorded and live music industries have struggled for so many years to get people to pay for music, India’s potential is clearly huge – arguably as huge as its neighbour China. | | |
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 | Hit Songs Deconstructed |
| What do 2017 mega-hits "Shape Of You," "Closer," "Look What You Made Me Do," "Feel It Still" and "Body Like A Back Road" have in common? They all interpolated a vocal or instrumental melody from a proven hit. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| In 2017, Spotify and Apple Music prized curation above all else.That may have not been a great thing for listeners and the music industry at large. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| April gave us Fyre Festival, the perfect story of comeuppance - and the perfect metaphor. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| Is it Kanye? Coldplay? Could it be... Keane? | | |
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 | NPR |
| "MTV Unplugged" was a 90s pop culture staple. Jim Burns co-created the series and was the show's executive producer during its original run. Burns died on Tuesday at 65. | | |
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 | Om Malik |
| Over past few months, I have become strangely obsessed with reconnecting to music, listening, curating and most importantly experiencing it, much like I used to about a decade ago. In the years that intervened, like many, I too succumbed to the charms of streaming music.... | | |
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 | 500ish Words |
| When we can listen to literally anything, what do we choose, why, and who - or what - decides? | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| The rapper's attempts to troll Donald Trump come at the end of a year of political pop, some of it as clunky as his. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| NPR Music's year-end interview series concludes with an analog baby turned digital savant, who says that how we experience music today has become a political, emotional and existential decision. | | |
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 | SPIN |
| Thrash wasn't initially a genre: it was what a band did. And in the '80s it swarmed across the globe like a plague of locusts, from the Bay Area to Germany and beyond. Practically overnight, a new generation of shredders emerged who punched through the social and stylistic barriers dividing heavy metal from hardcore punk. | | |
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 | Afropop Worldwide |
| Underneath the streets of New York City, there is a thriving music scene. Amidst the noise of passing trains, we meet Papa Fara, a Cameroonian xylophonist and singer, who plays for tips and captures the love of strangers with his quick, warm smile. But behind the smile and beautiful melodies, something is troubling Papa Fara. There’s a reason he’d rather be underground. | | |
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 | The Jerusalem Post |
| Lorde’s cancellation has created a lot of noise - more so than the dozens of acts who show up every year. | | |
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 | Paper |
| The non-traditional rapper on his vices, Halsey and that infamous Britney Spears kiss. | | |
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| Noisey |
| With an anonymous owner who refers to himself only as “The Entity,” this DIY venue in Pereira has become the epicenter of the country’s most vanguardist electronic movement. | | |
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 | The Bitter Southerner |
| How a producer, studio owner, and music-business teacher learned the magic isn’t just in following dreams - but in mastering the tools that bring them to life. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Otis Redding and Carla Thomas |
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