| My idea was to play with James Brown to earn enough money to be able to play jazz. It worked! | | | | |  | Pee Wee Ellis at Ronnie Scott's in London, July 1993.
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | "My idea was to play with James Brown to earn enough money to be able to play jazz. It worked!" | | | | Oops!... They Did It Again
The power of a TV documentary. They're spilling out like pop singles in the case of BRITNEY SPEARS and her controversial conservatorship, with the NEW YORK TIMES and FX having dropped the surprise "CONTROLLING BRITNEY SPEARS" on Friday (a followup to "FRAMING BRITNEY SPEARS," which came out just eight months earlier), and NETFLIX planning to release ERIN LEE CARR's two-and-a-half-years-in-the-making "BRITNEY VS. SPEARS" on Tuesday, a day before a hearing on the entangled issues of removing her father as her conservator and simply ending the conservatorship altogether. It's all entangled, really. The most explosive new source in "Controlling Britney Spears"—an ex-employee of a security firm who claims the firm bugged Britney's phone and her bedroom—quit his job and came forward as a result of seeing "Framing Britney Spears." That earlier documentary affected the upcoming Netflix doc, too. Carr, who says the focus of her feature-length piece is "less on how [Spears] was culturally treated but more the consequences of [the conversatorship]," says the first doc's focus on the media nevertheless made her rethink her approach and ask Netflix for more time to finish her project.
Documentaries and other media coverage will always color how the public perceives a controversy, but especially in a case like this where nearly all the battles among Britney, her father/conservator and a Los Angeles court have taken place behind closed doors. The title "Framing Britney Spears" was seemingly meant as a double entendre about the media, but it also works as a double entendre about itself. As the first major televised piece on the conservatorship, it could be accused (or praised) of setting up the media as one of the major villains in the story while also using the power of television to tell us exactly which lens we should be viewing the story through. And maybe which lens all future media should look through, too.
The first of at least two major criminal trials of R. KELLY is in the hands of a New York jury, which heard the two sides' final arguments Friday morning. Kelly's defense team told the jurors that LIFETIME's Kelly doc, SURVIVING R. KELLY, did some framing of its own, basically giving the women who testified against Kelly a road map to follow. "A lot of people watched 'Surviving R. Kelly,'" defense lawyer DEVERAUX CANNICK said, "and unfortunately, a lot of people are now surviving off R. Kelly." Tortured rhetoric aside, it may have been the only halfway reasonable argument Kelly's side had to offer—they also tried comparing the singer to MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., MIKE PENCE and HUGH HEFNER—and I guess we'll see soon enough if there's anything to it. Does America hate the media even more than it hates R. Kelly? Was there any other way to frame the story of a man accused of what multiple women, on the record, under oath, have accused R. Kelly of? And how's this for framing, courtesy NICOLE BLANK BECKER, a former sex crimes prosecutor who watched "Surviving R. Kelly" in horror two years ago and is now the only woman on Kelly's defense team: "What I'm most proud of is my ability to use my knowledge to get justice for my clients. And listen, 'justice' doesn't always mean 'get cases dismissed.' It may mean my client has got to at some point pay the price for [their] actions." That price may present itself soon enough.
Etc Etc Etc
Royalties calculator... DAVID BYRNE's AMERICAN UTOPIA, which has just reopened on Broadway, was given a special TONY AWARD Sunday night, as was FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME, an improv hip-hop group co-founded by LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA... Canada's POLARIS MUSIC PRIZE will be awarded tonight... The psychology of extreme rhythms... Congrats to our friend (and fellow curator) JESSE KIRSHBAUM, who's the new chief marketing officer of livestreaming company DREAMSTAGE.
Rest in Peace
PEE WEE ELLIS, the jazz and R&B saxophonist best known as James Brown's bandleader, arranger and songwriting collaborator in the 1960s. Among the songs he wrote with Brown were "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" and "Cold Sweat"... Jazz bassist GEORGE MRAZ, who accompanied Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Cyrus Chestnut and many others... Status Quo bassist ALAN LANCASTER... Salsa singer, percussionist and bandleader ROBERTO ROENA... UK booking agent STEVE STRANGE: "A giant of the music industry and the cornerstone for so many bands' and artists' careers, including ours," Coldplay tweeted.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | |  | | DJ Mag |
| | Pressing issues: is this the end of the vinyl revival? | | by Will Pritchard | | Manufacturing delays and rising costs are straining small, independent vinyl labels. Paired with environmental concerns and a reassessment of what physical releases can entail, the wax bubble appears to be bursting. Is this the end of the vinyl revival? | |  | | Los Angeles Times |
| | 'I never talk about "Nevermind"!': Courtney Love on the Nirvana album that changed everything | | by Charles R. Cross | | Courtney Love talks with Kurt Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross about the still-resonant depths of her late husband's breakthrough 1991 album, 'Nevermind.' | |  | | Vulture |
| | Tom DeLonge Was Never Crazy | | by Brady Gerber | | "I have this side that's very focused on kind of New Age concepts, physics, and esoteric studies. I also have this other side of me. This kind of eternal youth that doesn't ever really want to grow up. Sometimes they fight with each other." | |  | | The New York Times |
| | The Surveillance Apparatus That Surrounded Britney Spears | | by Liz Day and Samantha Stark | | An account by a former employee of the security team hired by Ms. Spears's father created the most detailed portrait yet of the singer's life under 13 years of conservatorship. | |  | | INSIDER |
| | Nicole Blank Becker was a longtime sex crimes prosecutor. Now she's the lone woman defending R. Kelly. | | by Michelle Mark | | 'Justice' doesn't always mean 'get cases dismissed.' It may mean my client has got to at some point pay the price for [their] actions." | |  | | Slate |
| | Japanese Breakfast Thinks This Is the Best Song She's Ever Written | | by Allegra Frank | | It's not on her new album. It's on her score for the new game Sable. | |  | | The Guardian |
| | 'I'm angry, I'm raging': how Raye took on her record label – and won | | by Michael Cragg | | After Polydor refused to release her album, the rising pop star spoke out. Now, newly independent, she's ready for a fresh start. | |  | | Billboard |
| | Bill Making Recording Costs Tax-Deductible Added to Congress Budget Package | | by Chris Eggertsen | | The bipartisan Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act is getting another chance. After failing to pass as part of the last two pandemic relief packages, the bill has been added to the current draft of the Build Back Better Act, the $3.5 million budget reconciliation package currently making its way through Congress. | |  | | Level |
| | How Kendrick Lamar Became His Generation's Marvin Gaye | | by Miles Marshall Lewis | | The two music legends mastered concept albums centered on freedom, equality, and Blackness. (Excerpted from "Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar," by Miles Marshall Lewis.) | |  | | Black Music and Black Muses |
| | In Praise of John Coltrane's Smile | | by Harmony Holiday | | If smiles are open parentheticals John Coltrane's is where I'd like to travel-a borderless crescent slivering with ecstatic grief and troubled abandon. There is truth in the way his lips part, the truth of reluctance and the truth of martyrs. The truth of ardor and the truth of ennui. | | |  | | NPR |
| | They Found It! The Long-Lost Album By Zambia's President: 'We Shall Fight HIV/AIDS' | | by Aaron Cohen | | Kenneth Kaunda spoke out about HIV when African leaders would not even acknowledge its existence. He sang about it, too, in a 2005 album that made a splash, then vanished. And so a search began. | | | | The New York Times |
| | A Music Obsession That's Adventurous and Soothing | | by Marcus J. Moore | | 'The trick to crate digging is to simply go at it: Dive into the sections, flip through the jackets and trust your gut.' | |  | | The Tennessean |
| | 12 Black artists shaping country music's future | | by Matthew Leimkuehler and Dave Paulson | | These 12 talents cover all corners of the musical map, but they've all been drawn to Nashville, embracing the traditions of country music while shaping its future. | |  | | 4Columns |
| | Fire Music | | by Geeta Dayal | | Coltrane, Coleman, Dolphy's death: a documentary charts the 1960s' free jazz movement. | |  | | The Washington Post |
| | Pee Wee Ellis, who helped put the funk in James Brown's music, dies at 80 | | by Matt Schudel | | Pee Wee Ellis, a saxophonist who was the musical director for soul star James Brown in the late 1960s and is considered an architect of funk music for his groundbreaking songwriting and arrangements on such songs as "Cold Sweat" and "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud," has died at age 80. | |  | | Music Ally |
| | An independent artist's view on NFTs: providing fans with a stake in their future success | | by Vérité | | NFTs have been the vehicle for my experimentation this year. As an independent artist, embracing the technological innovations and the inevitable cultural shifts they cement are the key to building sustainable projects that last a career, not just a song. | |  | | The Ringer |
| | The Biggest Album Release Dates in Modern Music History, Ranked | | by Justin Sayles | | September 24, 1991, is often called the biggest release day in history. We came up with a formula to see whether that was the case. | |  | | Culture Notes of an Honest Broker |
| | How to Deal with Criticism: 10 Tips for Musicians (and Everyone Else) | | by Ted Gioia | | A recent incident with Rickie Lee Jones has spurred me to consider the critic's craft, both from the giving and receiving end. As someone who has experienced both, here are my guidelines for dealing with criticism. | | | | Vulture |
| | Cozying Up to Coldplay Hits at the Apollo Is Only Half As Surreal As It Sounds | | by Craig Jenkins | | The performance was as loose and intimate as it gets for an arena juggernaut. | | | |  | | | Music of the day | | "Glider" | | Japanese Breakfast | | From the soundtrack to the video game Sable, out now on Dead Oceans/Sony Music Masterworks. |  | | YouTube |
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From the soundtrack to the video game Sable, out now on Dead Oceans/Sony Music Masterworks. | | | | | Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in
everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" | | |  | | | Jason Hirschhorn | | CEO & Chief Curator | | |  |
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