I really feel like the person I am today would not exist without all the failure I went through. And all the success I ever had never taught me one damn thing. | | | | We Got the Ambitious Beats: Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go's in Rockford, Ill., Oct. 1, 1981.
(Paul Natkin/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "I really feel like the person I am today would not exist without all the failure I went through. And all the success I ever had never taught me one damn thing."
| - | Jane Wiedlin, Go-Go's guitarist, in the documentary "The Go-Go's" | | | | | | | rantnrave:// GO-GO's singer BELINDA CARLISLE on the nasty gossip about her band (five women, managed by a woman) in the LA punk community 40 years ago: "We had sold out. We weren't a punk band. We were ambitious." It never, ever, ever changes... Another thing that struck me watching ALISON ELLWOOD's documentary THE GO-GO's (now playing on SHOWTIME): One of the primary factors behind the band's breakup was songwriting royalties, which greatly rewarded the group's three primary songwriters while leaving the other two (Carlisle and drummer GINA SCHOCK) out in the financial cold. Schock is the one who pushed the rest of the band to rehearse seven days a week in the early days and who came up with the beat for "WE GOT THE BEAT." But as thousands of drummers, keyboardists and even lead singers have learned, those long hours in a rehearsal studio or basement—developing and perfecting the songs that will make a band's songwriters at least a little wealthier than everyone else—are generally uncompensated, and the beat is among the many elements that often go unrewarded in songwriting credits. Those credits, which are most bands' most valuable assets, are almost always subjective, guided as much by economics and politics as by anything else. Bands can choose to treat the creation of words and chords as executive-level work and everything else—including the creation of keyboard hooks and drumbeats—as manual labor, or they can even it out simply by divvying up the publishing differently. At the very least, everyone making music today, from hip-hop producers to dance-music programmers to rock drummers, is more aware of these economic consequences than the typical musician was 40 years ago. And many are in a position to act on that information. Whenever someone complains about how pop songs used to have one or two credited writers but now they always seem so have five or six or more, I wonder if they stop and think about why that might be, and how the economics of music might figure in to something as simple as whose names show up in that box on the top right of a song's WIKIPEDIA page... Speaking of songwriting: We Redefers love hearing the stories behind the stories: How BUCKWILD spent hours searching for the perfect drum sound for the NOTORIOUS B.I.G. How PHOEBE BRIDGERS came to accept that not all songs have to be ballads. How CHRIS CORNELL stopped writing songs for SOUNDGARDEN fans and started writing them for himself. These, and more firsthand accounts, in MusicSET: "Behind the Song, Vol. 13"... FACEBOOK goes into the music video business... TIKTOK, oy. But it looks like the tech company behind the ZUNE is in position to save TikTok from the whims of the man who destroyed the USFL. But what if those whims aren't wrong?... FOLKLORE had the third-best sales week of any album in the US in the past four years, behind two other albums by guess who... RIP BILL MACK, LEON FLEISHER, STEVE HOLLAND, JIM DELEHANT and ALAN PARKER, the great British director whose films included FAME, THE COMMITMENTS, PINK FLOYD: THE WALL and EVITA. "One of the few directors to truly understand musicals on screen," wrote ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | | | |  | Trapital | | Artists waste tons of money when they cancel tours they had no chance of selling out. The impact will be worse when the pandemic is over. | | | |  | Variety | | Facebook is unleashing hundreds of thousands of music videos in the U.S. starting this weekend - a direct challenge to YouTube, which has had a virtual lock on the internet music-video space for years. | | | |  | Vulture | | "The Go-Go's," debuting on Showtime, is a rollicking portrait of a seminal band, and an acute examination of female ambition. | | | |  | REDEF | | Chris Cornell stops writing songs for Soundgarden fans and starts writing songs for himself. Buckwild searches for the perfect drum sound for the Notorious B.I.G. Phoebe Bridgers accepts that not all songs have to be ballads. And more firsthand accounts of how songs become songs. | | | |  | Esquire | | The 52-year-old, who went viral with an angry tweet aimed at Trump supporters, talks Skid Row, wine rage, and the death of rock 'n' roll. | | | |  | The Guardian | | In Barnsley, the phone rang and a voice said, 'It's Tupac. You sent me a copy of your fly-a** magazine.' | | | |  | Music Business Worldwide | | Why a quieter release slate at UMG - temporarily -- might end up pleasing Tencent and its consortium. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | Disco Lines' unofficial remix of Swift's 2008 single "Love Story" has torched through TikTok, soundtracking over a million videos in just a week. | | | |  | radio.com | | We asked two music lovers who recently attended Brad Paisley's drive-in concerts about their experience. | | | |  | 8Sided Blog | | Even though an artist's 'middle class' was always precarious, there's very little chance now to make it work. | | | | | Vulture | | A close read of nine formative images tell a complicated story about the artist's politics. | | | |  | Slate | | How Yacht Rock, a genre invented in the '00s, gave a name to the smooth West Coast music of the '70s and '80s. | | | | | Variety | | More than 700 members of the U.K. music community, including artists, managers, executives at record companies, agencies, the live music industry, in addition to creatives like songwriters and producers, have come together to sign a letter pledging to combat division and hate. | | | |  | The Washington Post | | We've never put our hand out for help before, but we've also never had our business taken from us either. | | | |  | VICE | | Rather than capitalize on a now-popular sound, the "My Truck" singer is in it for the long haul, an artist who seems to disrupt stereotypes just by existing. | | | |  | Perfect Sound Forever | | As a music fan, it's always exciting to make the artistic acquaintance of a new artist whose work had previously evaded your attention. So it is for this reporter to have recently discovered the music of Utah-based singer/songwriter Justin Utley. | | | | | The Guardian | | There's still no definitive evidence about the dangers of singing in spreading coronavirus, and so performers wait with bated breath. | | | |  | The Daily Beast | | Rockers is an absolutely wild movie with a backstory that's much, much wilder. | | | |  | Page Six | | Jamie Spears is sick and tired of how #FreeBritney - an increasingly vocal online movement claiming his daughter Britney Spears is a prisoner in a gilded cage - is painting him as a villain. | | | |  | The Nelson George Mixtape | | Masterminded by Neil Bogart, this label was full of MTV acts before MTV existed -- KISS, Donna Summer, Parliament and the Village People. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | From "Couldn't Wait to Tell You," out now on In Real Life. | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group | | |
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