No one's gonna ever really know me. You know what I mean? That's okay. The people that have the best chance of knowing me, that would like to, would just be by listening to my music. Even friends that I've lost touch with, if they ask how I've been, I'm like, 'That's the best way to know how I'm doing.' | | | | Aretha Franklin at the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1994.
(Leon Morris/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “No one's gonna ever really know me. You know what I mean? That's okay. The people that have the best chance of knowing me, that would like to, would just be by listening to my music. Even friends that I've lost touch with, if they ask how I've been, I'm like, 'That's the best way to know how I'm doing.'”
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| | rantnrave:// It seems fitting, in another year enveloped by darkness, that 2018's two preeminent cultural events may have been funerals: in Washington, a politician; in Detroit, a musician. Reminders, both, that we are living for something bigger than ourselves and always reaching for something higher. In the music and the memory and the transcendent voice of ARETHA FRANKLIN, we reached for, and maybe touched, love, desire, pain, our better angels, actual angels, God. This was true for believers and nonbelievers alike. There was consensus on this. There was a consensus of grace. This then, is for Aretha, and for all that we have lost... This final newsletter of the year is also for those who died way too young—for MAC MILLER, for AVICII, for the troubled and troubling XXXTENTACION, for SCOTT HUTCHISON, for ANGELICA COB-BAEHLER—and for those who fought for a better world, and those who bent space and time, and for all the songs they left behind... The 28 stories below chronicle the year's most notable passings. Here's our much longer, alphabetical list of 2018's music-related deaths... For a wider collection of obituaries and remembrances across culture, media, politics and more: MediaSET: "Spirits in the Dark: In Memoriam 2018"... MusicREDEF will be back in your inbox on Thursday, Jan. 3. Wishing you a peaceful new year. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | NPR Music |
| Her music has been sung at marches and political rallies, heard in churches and on chain restaurant jukeboxes. Everything popular music can be is there in the songs of Aretha Franklin. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Honesty was Miller’s default. He stumbled and learned in public, even as the intensity of the public glare increased his pain. His eyebrows seemed curved in perpetual, boyish inquiry. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| His music defined EDM, the powerful phenomenon that hit the United States (and then the rest of the world) hard at the turn of this decade and switched a generation of teenagers on to dance music. | | |
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 | Africa is a Country |
| Hugh Masekela was one of the last great jazz men of the twentieth century. Both his life and music were shaped by transatlantic political and cultural currents that ebbed their way through the slums of Johannesburg and the jazz dives of Harlem. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| An ode to one of Motown’s psychedelic soul stars. | | |
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 | Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches |
| There was always that question of when he, that seemingly eternal, towering, incomparably enriching presence, both in the larger culture and in my sound-obsessed brain/heart, might no longer be there. And the answer to that is, really, never, because he seems as alive to me now as he ever did. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| He was a pioneer of so much that is still relevant, from gender-neutral pronouns in rock love songs to early synth-pop. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Remembering The Cranberries’ lead singer Dolores O’Riordan and the searing power of “Zombie.” | | |
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 | The A.V. Club |
| He was the mad Mancunian genius behind The Fall, one of the most prolific, mercurial, confounding, and enduring bands of the post-punk age. | | |
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 | The Sacramento Bee |
| Russ Solomon was the founder and guiding force behind Tower Records, the chain that revolutionized music retailing until it was swamped by iPods, big-box stores and other dramatic changes in the industry. | | |
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 | Longreads |
| The influential singer’s voice cut across genres and decades, and it will continue to. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Best known for his film scores, Jóhannsson’s earlier electronic and classical work confronted existential horror. | | |
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 | Passion of the Weiss |
| A brief look at the sad and brutal life of XXXTentacion. | | |
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 | Under the Radar |
| There is no timeline, no deadline, for grief, especially when death is involved. You stare into the abyss, searching for answers, for reasons, for some sort of sense to emerge from the infinite blackness, but nothing comes except tears. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| He and Buck Owens were hosts of a long-running prime-time TV variety show that helped bring country music into mainstream American pop culture. | | |
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 | Chicago Tribune |
| Even in a city teeming with blues guitar masters, Otis Rush towered above. His guitar tone — corrosive, piercing, etched in darkness and anguish — shaped the sound of Chicago blues, and resonated around the world. | | |
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| NPR Music |
| Emerging from the soup of groovy San Francisco, The Residents went on to outweird them all. Last week, one of the group's co-founders and its central composer died at 73 - but not anonymously. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| One of the first things I thought about when I heard that Glenn Branca had died from throat cancer at the age of 69 earlier this week, is the sound that the electric guitar makes when feeding back uncontrollably - and about what the person cradling that screaming guitar may be liable to do next. | | |
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| The New Yorker |
| Called one of the enduring “faces of France” by Emmanuel Macron at his state funeral earlier this month, the crooner was a self-consciously global pop star who invented personas with astonishing empathy. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| Fountain was one of the last living connections to gospel’s Golden Age. | | |
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 | NPR |
| Gospel singers look back at the legacy of choirmaster Edwin Hawkins, who passed away on Monday, Jan. 15. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| The Grammy-winning trumpeter was paradoxical in the way that so many of jazz’s most important figures have been. Which is to say, the contradictions about him as a musician and a person only broadened his power, influence and allure. | | |
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 | The Spinoff |
| The thing that I connected with most was the relationship Dimebag and his brother Vinnie had. On stage they were beautiful. Two awkward but boisterous guys who turned into children when they were in front of an audience. They hugged each other and kissed each other on the cheek – when they posed with fans it was often in huge bear hugs. | | |
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 | The Independent |
| From anti-establishment punk beginnings to winning France's prestigious Victoires de la Musique, he remained a passionate, outspoken rebel till the end. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| In the 1970s, Mr. Lucas worked with Miles Davis. In the 1980s, he produced Madonna’s first album and wrote her hit song “Borderline.” | | |
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 | Afropop Worldwide |
| Randy Weston, more than any contemporary jazz artist, understood, honored and explored the roots of American music in Africa. He lived there, traveled there often, and spoke of his connections to his African ancestors in every interview during his 92 years. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| The crucial collaborator in the Beatles’ glory years helped them find endless new ways to change the way music sounded. | | |
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 | RealClearLife |
| Angelica Cob-Baehler spent her life making dreams come true. What a beautiful and weighty résumé to take to heaven. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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