I feel like being black and being gay has held me back from certain levels in the music industry, because not everybody wants to work with a gay artist. They may say, 'Oh, what are the people gonna say, what are the fans gonna say?'... But I'm patient. I just keep on making noise, and they see me. | | | | Borinquen in the USA: Jennifer Lopez at the Super Bowl, Miami Gardens, Fla., Feb. 2, 2020.
(Elsa/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "I feel like being black and being gay has held me back from certain levels in the music industry, because not everybody wants to work with a gay artist. They may say, 'Oh, what are the people gonna say, what are the fans gonna say?'... But I'm patient. I just keep on making noise, and they see me."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// On Friday, I watched TAYLOR SWIFT, in the very good NETFLIX documentary MISS AMERICANA, wrestle with the decision of whether to break her career-long political silence and publicly support the Democrat in Tennessee's U.S. Senate race, while two older men on her support team did their best to stop her. Your career, they said. Your safety, they warned. As if a 28-year-old woman who had navigated one of the 21st century's most successful pop music careers, and who's a huge DIXIE CHICKS fan to boot, hadn't thought of those things. In the next scene, I watched Swift sit on a couch with two women (her mother and her publicist), the men nowhere in sight, as she hit "share" on the INSTAGRAM post that landed her in the middle of the 2018 midterms, into a thousand cable-news headlines and, soon afterward, into the head of the president. Her candidate didn't win but Swift, we learn, won something else in that moment: her freedom. Which, it isn't hard to believe, is what scared those two men most of all. Two days later, during halftime of the SUPER BOWL, I watched JENNIFER LOPEZ unveil a cape she was wearing to reveal a Puerto Rican flag while her 11-year-old daughter, EMME MARIBEL MUÑIZ, sang a chorus of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's "BORN IN THE USA" and several other children sang from inside cages. The other side of the cape was an American flag. This multilayered protest may have been the most pointed political statement ever made in a half-century-plus of Super Bowl halftime shows, an annual TV spectacle broadcast to 100-million-plus people on behalf of a sports league that's done its best to steer clear of difficult political conversations. And it was done without missing a step of the Latin dance celebration that Lopez and SHAKIRA were brought in by the NFL to deliver. One wonders what the men in the room at *those* meetings said. Or if the men in the room ever quite understood "Born in the USA" in the first place, as so many people did not. Did anyone ask J.Lo to shut up and sing? I like to think someone did, and that she answered by inserting that particular moment into her song "LET'S GET LOUD," which is as good an anthem for pop right now as I can think of: Let's get loud and sing. Kansas City—you know, the one in Missouri—won the football game. Pop won the weekend... There were no rock bands that sounded like GANG OF FOUR before Gang of Four, and a few thousand that did their best to sound exactly like them afterward, but none came all that close because none had a bass player who could do much more than stiffly imitate DAVE ALLEN's deconstructed funk basslines or a guitarist who could honor the trebly abrasion of ANDY GILL's bombed-out amplifier-factory guitar parts while also actually playing them. Gill's guitar sound, which involved rejecting both tube amps and distortion pedals, was one of the great battle cries—battle shrieks really—of the original punk-rock era. What he doesn't get enough credit for is the rhythm guitar mastery with which he deployed that sound, turning scrapes, feedback and what sounded like shards of broken glass into perfect minimalist R&B photonegatives. He was a kind of antimatter JIMMY NOLEN. And like Nolen's boss, JAMES BROWN, he was a musical prime minister who brooked no dissent. "[Singer] Jon [King] and I liked to say that Gang of Four were like a committee and we were all involved," he told LOUDER SOUND. "All bollocks. Me and Jon were running the show. We invented it, but we pretended it was all four of us." So now you know. RIP... Missing from SPOTIFY and all other streaming services: Most of Gang of Four's pre-1983 catalog. Capital, it fails us now, so to speak... LIL WAYNE, unmasked... RIP also HAROLD BEANE, IVAN KRÁL, FRANZ MAZURA and JOSH PAPPE... Best wishes to BLACKALICIOUS' GIFT OF GAB. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | | | | | capital (it fails us now) | |  | Billboard | | For those old enough to be music fans and attending concerts in the mid-1990s, Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster will forever be inextricably linked -- but the once-enemies are now close allies. | | | |  | TechCrunch | | Lip-syncing app Dubsmash was on the brink of death. After a brief moment of virality in 2015 alongside Vine (R.I.P), Dubsmash was bleeding users faster than it could recruit them. The app let you choose an audio track like a rap song or movie quote and shoot a video of you pretending to say the words. But there was nowhere in the app to post the videos. | | | |  | The New Statesman | | You don't go to Madonna for vulnerability: she is all about self-determination, pleasure and defiance. | | | |  | The Washington Post | | Alongside Shakira, she sent a powerful message with her presence alone. | | | | | Billboard | | He scorned using distortion pedals and his "lead" interjections were shrieking chords or runs of aggravation along his high strings, all outbursts kept as brief as possible. "Once the sound has sort of made its point," he said, "it doesn't necessarily need repeating." | | | |  | 8Sided Blog | | As more and larger artists continue utilizing 21st-century tools to seize their rights, the meaning of 'independent' only gets blurrier. | | | |  | Resident Advisor | | Chal Ravens reflects on how electronic music festivals evolved over the last decade. | | | |  | American Songwriter | | When Chicago blues singer Toronzo Cannon signed with Alligator Records in 2015, label owner Bruce Iglauer told his new artist, "People remember songs, not solos." This was contrarian advice in a field that fetishizes guitar flash, but Cannon took it to heart. | | | |  | Stereogum | | Within the music industry, New Year's Day does not matter. It's a writeoff. The entire music business - labels, publicists, writers like me -- has the day off. Most of us spend the day lolling around in a hungover stupor. Nobody really releases music until a couple of weeks into January. Things grind to a halt. But for people outside the music industry, New Year's Day can matter. | | | |  | Chartmetric | | From Alt-Pop rappers to Indie-Folk singers, reaching a destination of digital success can involve many different routes. For A&R teams - and artists themselves - a comprehensive roadmap can be the difference between getting lost and getting discovered. | | | |  | The Guardian | | Twenty years after her debut album, the singer talks about refusing to be pigeonholed, her fallout with Pharrell, and why she has moved to a remote farm. | | | |  | AIGA Eye on Design | | And a theory about who really designed it. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | People who laughed at him for his HD music obsession should learn from his Neil Young Archives project. | | | |  | Gizmodo | | Why would anyone want a Walkman in the streaming age? That's the question I asked myself when I first fiddled with the small Sony NW-A105. One month later, I've learned enough about the music player to answer that question and many more. | | | |  | Vox | | Bach's G major prelude has captivated cellists and music lovers for years. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein deconstructs it. Bach's six cello suites are considered a rite of passage for cellists. They're masterpieces of classical music, and the prelude in G major -- the first movement of the suites -- is perhaps the best example of Bach's power as a composer. | | | |  | Slate | | Parodists and stand-ups were big record sellers at rock's birth, and comedy helped spawn rap … and the career of one accordion-playing weirdo. | | | |  | Music Business Worldwide | | Zach Katz and Shara Senderoff discuss their startup-surveying, Scooter Braun-backed venture. | | | | | The Guardian | | Overdoses or violent crime have claimed Mac Miller, Juice WRLD and Nipsey Hussle. 'It's not a fairytale lifestyle,' admits an insider - but should the business do more to protect its stars? | | | |  | Medium | | No-one tells you how to be in a band beyond the lift-off period when you can trade newness for attention and you've no reason to believe it might not always be like this. | | | |  | Kreative Kontrol | | Andy Gill is a legendary musician, songwriter, and producer who lives in the United Kingdom. Towards the end of the 1970s, Gill co-founded the remarkable post-punk band Gang of Four whose jagged, dance-able, politically outspoken songs influenced one million musicians. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | RIP lead guitarist Harold Beane. | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group | | |
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