A music festival should be a celebration of good music. A business venture is the very last thing it should be, even though it won't survive unless it is one. | | | | Ife Ogunjobi of Ezra Collective performing at Latitude 30 in Austin, Texas, during SXSW, March 12, 2019.
(Travis P Ball/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "A music festival should be a celebration of good music. A business venture is the very last thing it should be, even though it won't survive unless it is one."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// Put this on your horse and ride it: LIL NAS X's "OLD TOWN ROAD" is the #1 song in the U.S. From TIKTOK to the top of the pops. Exiled by country, embraced by *the* country. So many words have been ranted, spewed and tweeted in the past two weeks about the homemade cowboy ditty with the trap beat and Autotuned vocals—about what it is, what it isn't, where it belongs, where it doesn't belong, what country means, what hip-hop means, what the very idea of genre means—and all along pop fans have been answering all those questions in the only way that makes sense, which is to just keep playing it. They had another option, of course, which was to not play it. But for all its goofiness and off-the-cuffness, "Old Town Road" is a good pop song, both with and without its new new achy breaky guest verse. It has emotion, a point of view and it's incredibly sticky. And it seems to have drawn a mysterious energy from all the discussion and controversy, feeding off the very nerves it keeps hitting. It's arguably more of a country song now than it was two or three weeks ago, because how songs are received matters as much as how they are presented, and every time it hits a nerve it gains a little more twang. Which may be an argument both for and against how BILLBOARD and the country establishment initially treated it in those long ago days of March. But which is definitely an argument for reconsideration on everybody's part. If any of this matters anymore. "Lil Nas X has won this showdown," the RINGER's LINDSAY ZOLADZ writes. "'Old Town Road' has transcended the genre charts altogether and become a bona fide pop smash." MUSICSET: "Are You Sure Florida Georgia Line Done It This Way?"... The "Old Town Road" discussion has raised important questions about the historic framing of genres, particularly as it relates to African Americans and country. In this valuable TWITTER thread, NPR MUSIC's ANN POWERS unpacks and fact-checks of that discussion while explaining why it's important that we get this stuff right. Genres can be blurry sometimes. But they contain cultural history, and they matter... And here's one great, pithy tweet about genre from DAMON KRUKOWSKI, responding to FLEETWOOD MAC withdrawing from the same cursed headlining slot at the NEW ORLEANS JAZZ FEST that the ROLLING STONES had backed out of days earlier, both for health reasons. "Maybe try a jazz musician?," Krukowski asks. (Alas, the fest went with WIDESPREAD PANIC. Whose members hopefully are taking their vitamins)... Who was the first artist born this century to have a #1 album in the US? (Hint: It happened this week)... The NY TIMES' CARYN GANZ made me literally LOL, and cry a bit too, with this ROBYN ticketing tweet... Credit where credit is due: CARL CHERY, head of urban music at SPOTIFY, was behind hip-hop's week of silence for NIPSEY HUSSLE, which I had mentioned in Monday's newsletter. Curating with his heart. Tickets go on sale at 10 am PT today for the Thursday morning memorial service for Hussle at the STAPLES CENTER. California residents only. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | | | | | it's the same old tune, fiddle and guitar | |  | REDEF | | What do genres mean in 2019 and who gets to police them? Are they separated by walls or by open borders? And what happens when a rapper like Lil Nas X tries to ride through with a horse, a banjo and a trap beat? | | | |  | Slate | | Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee. | | | |  | Kerrang! | | We take a tour of Alternative Tentacles HQ to find out the secrets of running a punk-rock institution. | | | |  | Bloomberg | | The three biggest record labels are demanding more money for songs played on TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, setting up a showdown with the hugely popular video apps, people with knowledge of the matter said. | | | |  | Eternalflameemoji | | The term barges in, with huge capital letters and starts talking for me. Moulding my representation as a girl, before I get the chance to represent myself as a musician. | | | |  | The Conversation | | Greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production in the vinyl era is not a patch on the equivalent from running giant servers today. | | | |  | GQ | | She's penned hits for Ariana Grande and Janelle Monáe; now she's writing them for herself. | | | |  | Los Angeles Times | | In addition to being a rapper, Nipsey Hussle, who was shot to death in South L.A., was an Eritrean American. His father fled to the U.S. in the 1970s. Hussle visited the African country as a teen and the experience changed him, prompting his move away from gang culture toward community activism. | | | |  | Vulture | | "I don't really understand how any musician can afford to stay in one place," indie veteran singer-songwriter Cass McCombs told me during an interview for Vulture earlier this year. "We don't make enough money to afford an apartment. I know pretty much half of the musicians in existence have a side job of some sort." | | | |  | Internet Archive | | A wide-ranging collection of 490,000 mp3 files from MySpace.com, accomplished using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. | | | | | | | rhinestone suits and new shiny cars | |  | The Bitter Southerner | | North Carolina's Music Maker Relief Foundation, founded 25 years ago, doesn't just document the folk music of the South. It ensures that the people who made the music do not have to live in poverty. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | B.J. Novak and the writers and producers responsible for "Threat Level Midnight" lay out what it's like to be a surprise sample on a Number One album. | | | |  | Hollywood Reporter | | Recording session archival material was remixed at Abbey Road Studios for parts of the 'Deuces Are Wild' show at the Park MGM Hotel's Park Theater. | | | |  | Music Biz 101 | | As iHeart Media plans for a $100 million IPO, we look into the future of the company, and radio, and see how the paradigm can be shifted back to the future. | | | |  | Fast Company | | The Uncensored Playlist took the work of journalists whose work was censored or blocked, turned them into songs, and uploaded them to streaming services-where they became hits. It's one of the winners of Fast Company's 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards | | | |  | The Daily Beast | | The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind '12 Years a Slave' talks to Marlow Stern about his "Soundtrack of America," why 'Widows' was overlooked, and collaborating with Kanye West. | | | |  | CBS This Morning | | ACM Award-winner for Female Artist of the Year on the effect being happy has on her songwriting. | | | |  | TechCrunch | | Spotify is launching new analytics tools to help artists and their teams better understand how well their ads are working. The company today says it's rolling out new streaming conversion metrics that will show how Spotify listeners reacted to a particular ad campaign -- whether they clicked through to listen, saved the music or added it to a playlist, for example. | | | |  | Mixmag | | The scratch master takes on the sync button debate. | | | |  | Texas Monthly | | Over two days at a ranch in Stephenville, artists share lyrics, melodies, and whiskey as they establish their place in Texas music. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | Rock and roll from London, 2019. From "Miss Universe," out now on ATO Records. | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |
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