He needed an entire entourage to help him function—enablers, drug dealers, hookers, groupies, hangers-on, bodyguards, and yes, his secretary. I became his unofficial cleaner. By the end of the night, his clothes were usually encrusted with cocaine or vomit or both, and he needed a good wiping down. | | | | Van McCann of Catfish and the Bottlemen at Lollapalooza, Chicago, Aug. 4, 2018.
(Timothy Hiatt/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "He needed an entire entourage to help him function—enablers, drug dealers, hookers, groupies, hangers-on, bodyguards, and yes, his secretary. I became his unofficial cleaner. By the end of the night, his clothes were usually encrusted with cocaine or vomit or both, and he needed a good wiping down."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// It's complicated. It's always complicated. The twist on today's quote of the day, which comes from DOROTHY CARVELLO's upcoming memoir, ANYTHING FOR A HIT: AN A&R WOMAN'S STORY OF SURVIVING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, is that she loved working for AHMET ERTEGUN at ATLANTIC RECORDS. She loved working there despite the time he signed some important financial papers for her while in a studio control room getting a blow job, and despite the fact that his body resembled "a shriveled egg." She loved working there despite the executives who constantly groped her or asked her for sex, and despite the time two execs pulled down her skirt on a company elevator. The atmosphere was demeaning, abusive and, somehow, also fun for a former Catholic school girl. "Ahmet was free," she writes. "His life was the exact opposite of mine, and I got paid to live some of the wildest parts with him." That, in short, is the crazy, romantic, complicated part of the record biz. Dorothy Carvello wanted to be part of it. But, also, it wasn't *that* complicated. Here's the uncomplicated part: There were very few women in positions of power at Atlantic. Very few opportunities for women who might have wanted such a position. And when she finally complained about the way she was treated, she says, she was fired. Because the people who were in power, presumably, wanted those wild, crazy times to last forever, and they didn't want to hear about the rest... The next story in this week's BILLBOARD, after the magazine's excerpt from Carvello's book, is a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the HOT 100 chart, including an attempt to calculate the biggest singles of the past six decades in raw numerical terms, as if there were a musical equivalent of baseball's WAR statistic. There isn't, and there's no universe in which CHUBBY CHECKER's "THE TWIST," Billboard's all-time #1, is the most important single of the past 60 years, or even of the year it came out. There's also no world in which "UPTOWN FUNK," "PARTY ROCK ANTHEM" and "SHAPE OF YOU," the three most recent entries in the top 10, would tell the story of music in the 2010s. But they're all great songs and I love this chart, which, like the weekly Hot 100, attempts to tell us what people are actually listening to at any given time, whether on jukeboxes, the radio or SPOTIFY and YOUTUBE. It's an imperfect, subjective chart, dependent on which jukeboxes, which radio stations and which corners of Spotify and YouTube the magazine chooses to measure. But if there's a more democratic representation of the melting pot of commercial pop, I've never seen it. If there's a radio station that plays more women, more rock, more R&B, more hip-hop, more country, more pop, all at the same time, I've never seen that either... The last guitar has gone silent on the WARPED TOUR, which ended its 24-year run Sunday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Members of NEW FOUND GLORY, YELLOWCARD, SENSES FAIL and more look back on one of the most enduring rejoinders to the notion that rock is dead (as well as one of the strongest affirmations that rock is really, really hard work)... What are your songs worth—in the literal, economic sense? ROYALTY EXCHANGE aims to answer that question for you with its new KNOW YOUR WORTH app, which the company is pitching as ZILLOW for royalties. An instant valuation of your catalog of music and lyrics... Speaking of worth: UNIVERSAL and SONY, combined, are making $550,000 in streaming royalties per hour... Your weekly reminder: R. KELLY is still signed to RCA RECORDS... RIP RICK "ZOMBIE BOY" GENEST, ELLEN LOO and C STRUGGS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | |  | Billboard | | In an excerpt from her memoir "Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman's Story of Surviving the Music Industry," the author recalls her harrowing experience working for Atlantic Records in a pre-#MeToo record industry. | | | |  | Affidavit | | While outrage culture has its merits, nuance has evaporated. So often it involves reducing someone to their mistakes, their greatest hits collection of f***-ups. | | | |  | Noisey | | Four days in Jamaica chasing down Popcaan, the dancehall superstar eyeing a global takeover. | | | |  | Pitchfork | | The nation's largest online racial justice organization shares with Pitchfork its talks with Kelly's notably quiet label. | | | |  | Fast Company | | The explosive growth of their AI voice assistants has Google, Apple, and Amazon racing to put your entire smartphone in an earpiece. | | | |  | Pando | | Sonos' strength lies in the managers guiding it -- but don't discount the possibility it could become the next TiVo. | | | |  | The Ringer | | The Compton MC isn't the biggest rapper in the world. But at any given moment on his new album, "Stay Dangerous," he sounds like the best. | | | |  | The New York Times | | Britain's classical music scene relies heavily on freedoms that come from European Union membership. How will it cope outside the bloc? | | | |  | The Daily Beast | | Wandering the cold halls of his home/office/recording studio, you wonder why his estate handlers seem bent on erasing every trace of his lubricous—yet often spiritual—presence. | | | |  | Motherboard | | The video creation platform loved by teens is getting a rebrand. Here are a few of its best moments. | | | |  | Narratively | | Hazel Scott was a piano prodigy who wowed the worlds of music, TV and film. But when she stood up for her rights, the establishment took her down. | | | |  | The Undefeated | | Trakgirl is a Washington, D.C., producer who's been making beats for 13 years. But until May, she'd never been part of a recording session that was 100 percent female, from the songwriter to the vocalist to the engineer to the producer. | | | | | The New York Times | | The new wave band, whose music is being celebrated in a Broadway musical, provided a blueprint for girl-powered groups. But the Go-Go's weren't always taken seriously. | | | |  | NPR | | Today's common drum kit is just 100 years old, even though drums have been around for millenia. It fell out of favor with the advent of drum machines and sampling. For many, there's no substitute. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | When acts like Hoodcelebrityy break through here, they're overcoming major structural obstacles to their success. | | | |  | Perfect Sound Forever | | Modest little receivers seemed to sound much better than the bland-looking bell-and-whistle collections that pass for receivers these days. And turntables were cheap, and good. They were made of wood, not plastic, and they lasted forever. And speakers... well, they were big and loud and they really pissed off your parents. Yep, those were the days. | | | |  | Vulture | | Imagine that you're a young composer and one day you realize that you don't much care for notes. Actually, you're also kind of disappointed in instruments, pitch, melody, and rhythm. | | | |  | SSENSE | | Thom Bettridge talks to the San Francisco-based DJ about music as an object, tech-bros in disguise, and how he landed his gig at Apple. | | | |  | NPR Music | | The historic Latin record label has been sold to Concord Music. Sig Sigworth, president of Concord Music's Craft Recordings, talks about preserving Fania's legacy. | | | |  | The Believer | | "Nardis" and the curious history of a jazz obsession. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group | | |
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