| People think I just make up words, but everything means something. | | | | |  | Drakeo the Ruler at Rolling Loud, San Bernardino, Calif., Dec. 12, 2021.
(Scott Dudelson/Getty Images) | | | | | "People think I just make up words, but everything means something." | | | | The Truth Hurts
The best rapper in Los Angeles, pretty much by acclamation, had released five albums and mixtapes in the past 12 months, possibly to make up for lost time after spending the previous three years in jail, a year of that in solitary confinement, on charges of which he was almost entirely acquitted. He managed to sneak out another two during his time in jail, including the astonishing THANK YOU FOR USING GTL, a high-concept album recorded over the phone lines of GTL, the controversial company that dominates the American prison phone market. He was released after pleading guilty to a relatively minor charge that required him to admit being a member of a gang. He continued to insist he wasn't in fact a gang member: "Everyone gangbangs in LA rap; it's just a part of this s***. I'm the only one who doesn't." He was 28. He toyed with rhythm and he improvised language (OK, he made up words, lots of them) like jazz saxophonists improvise melodies. His flow was "a deliberate mudwalk, subterranean pockets drilled into the beat, scraping against the rhythm like a jazz drummer's brush," in the words of his journalist friend JEFF WEISS, who chronicled his career over the course of several years for his own site, Passion of the Weiss, and several other publications. His vocal presence could be soft and mumbly but he wasn't humble. He knew he was the greatest. He was blessed with 13 months of extremely productive, cathartic, freedom until Saturday night, when he was stabbed backstage at the ONCE UPON A TIME IN LA concert at BANC OF CALIFORNIA STADIUM, where he was supposed to perform on a bill with SNOOP DOGG, ICE CUBE, 50 CENT, AL GREEN and GEORGE CLINTON.
Darrell Caldwell, better known as DRAKEO THE RULER, became, by my count, the 26th or 27th hip-hop artist murdered in the US this year. The others were all shot to death. Initial reports about Drakeo's murder said he was stabbed during a backstage fight. The Los Angeles Times on Sunday quoted a source who said he had had been "attacked by a group of people." Police are searching for the killer and "still trying to figure things out," an LAPD spokesman told the newspaper.
LA and the hip-hop world are no doubt trying to figure things out, too. Something bigger in their case. They're in tears. The world is broken and not enough people know. DRAKEO THE RULER might have been trying to let everybody know on all those albums. RIP.
Drakeo was part of a long tradition of rappers who bent the English language to their needs, and in that sense you could draw a line across nearly 40 years from him to KANGOL KID, the UTFO rapper who died a day earlier from colon cancer. Kangol Kid's voice was the first you heard on UTFO's 1984 single "ROXANNE, ROXANNE," the song that kicked off the Roxanne wars, prompting legendary answer songs from ROXANNE SHANTE and the REAL ROXANNE. Like Drakeo, Kangol Kid consciously used coded language. His had a name: Z-rap. "I would say, 'Dizoctor Izice. Yizo hizo bizoy wizon't youza kizoy mesover herezere?'—that's just saying, 'Yo, homeboy, why don't you come over here?' and what I did is make a rap out of that language." In later years, Kangol Kid, who was born Shaun Shiller Fequiere, produced other artists (including baseball's DARRYL STRAWBERRY) and wrote a hip-hop advice column. And watched his influence trickle down through the generations.
Etc Etc Etc
"People were going to get very, very angry at us regardless of what we did," LCD SOUNDSYSTEM tweeted Friday evening, announcing that it planned to go ahead with that night's show at New York's BROOKLYN STEEL despite Covid-19 spreading like wildfire around the city and despite noticing that its own audience had largely ignored mask requirements at the same club the night before. Friday was show #17 in a monthlong 20-show run at the Williamsburg club and the band was correct. There was a lot of anger, including from some musician peers. And it turned out to be the end of the run. With cancellations spreading like wildfire, too—even the ROCKETTES canceled the rest of their Christmas—LCD Soundsystem returned to Twitter Sunday to scrap the final three shows in the run. "You all have spoken," the band wrote, "but so has the new info, the hospital capacity, and those of us in the band, crew and venue"... It's end-of-the-year charitable giving time and, if you have the means, you can still donate to the NATIONAL INDEPENDENT VENUE ASSOCIATION. Just saying... ELDRIDGE INDUSTRIES, the private investment firm that helped finance the publishing piece of SONY's $500 million-ish purchase of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's catalog, is a recent entrant in music's intellectual property gold rush. Its one other significant music holding is the masters and publishing of the first five albums by Springsteen collaborators the KILLERS. It also owns a piece of P-MRC, the parent company of ROLLING STONE, BILLBOARD, VARIETY and the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, as Billboard itself notes... What if you moved the snares a 32nd note triplet this way and the synths a 64th note that way? Pop music!
Rest in Peace
CARLOS MARÍN, Spanish singer who was the baritone voice in Il Divo... EVE BABITZ, journalist, novelist and visual artist who chronicled Los Angeles culture from the inside in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. She also designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield... MATT WOLFE, former drummer for West Virginia metal band Byzantine.
| | | |  | | The Ringer |
| | RETRO READ: The Ruler's Back: Drakeo the Ruler Is Finally Free—and Ready to Talk | | by Jeff Weiss | | Days after being released from three years in prison, the South L.A. rapper discussed his case, how prosecutors weaponized his lyrics against him, and his plans for his music. | |  | | The Washington Post |
| | Drakeo the Ruler wanted us to listen close. His death brings a disorienting silence. | | by Chris Richards | | He was a dazzling stylist, but his rapping always had a riveting sense of proximity — a sotto voce intimacy that allowed you to feel the precise distance between his mouth and your ear. | |  | | The New Yorker |
| | How Jonny Greenwood Wrote the Year's Best Film Score | | by Alex Ross | | Once a lanky youth barely visible behind a mop of black hair, the Radiohead guitarist is now a seasoned fifty-year-old who, in recent weeks, has cemented his status as a leading film composer with three projects: Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza," Pablo Larraín's "Spencer," and—Oscar voters, this is your cue—Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog." | |  | | The New York Times |
| | What Shouldn't Change About Classical Music | | by Anthony Tommasini | | Our chief classical music critic bids farewell with some thoughts about what should be preserved in the field he's covered for decade. | |  | | Billboard |
| | How Do You Tell the Story of Live Music? 'Rock Concert' Author on Tackling the Superstar Subject | | by Dave Brooks | | Marc Myers' oral history tells the story of the individuals who helped launched the modern live music industry. | |  | | 5 Magazine |
| | My Life in Analog Hell | | by Ed Martinez | | I built the studio of my dreams during the pandemic, and then I couldn't write a note. | |  | | UPROXX |
| | The Weather Station And The New Grief | | by Grayson Haver Currin | | The Weather Station's 'Ignorance' offers a sophisticated map of climate change's complicated emotional terrain. | |  | | Slate |
| | The Soundtrack to the Great Languishing That Was 2021 | | by Carl Wilson | | On a miserable year and the music that represented it best. | |  | | Atlas Obscura |
| | How Louis Armstrong Shaped the Sound of Ghana | | by Laura Kiniry | | You can still hear echoes of the trumpeter's 1956 visit in Accra's clubs today. | |  | | Water & Music |
| | Analyzing fan sentiment of music NFT drops | | With the goal of developing a more objective, big-picture understanding of the state of fan sentiment around music NFTs, we developed a timeline mapping fans' reactions to hundreds of music NFT drops on Twitter between October 2020 and November 2021. | | | | | The New York Times |
| | A $550 Million Springsteen Deal? It's Glory Days for Catalog Sales. | | by Ben Sisario | | Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices. Here's why. | | | | The Ringer |
| | Family Untied: Kendrick Lamar and TDE Ruled the 2010s. What Comes After Their Split? | | by Julian Kimble | | The Compton MC and his label were among the most popular and influential entities in music of the past decade. But their relationship is coming to an end. So what now? | |  | | VAN Magazine |
| | Meet the Pianist Revolutionizing Classical Music | | by Sharon Su | | The radical artistry of Key Playerson. | |  | | Complete Music Update |
| | Independent publishers say that re-slicing the digital pie is the 'defining issue' of the moment | | by Chris Cooke | | The International Music Publishers Forum has launched a report reviewing the independent music publishing sector in 2020, with the study's key conclusion being that the good old digital pie needs to be re-sliced to the song's advantage. | |  | | VICE |
| | The 50 Greatest Christmas Songs of All Time | | by Lauren O'Neill, Hatti Rex, Nana Baah... | | A special festive package containing classic bangers, hymns, abstract concepts and a bassline remix of Mariah Carey. | |  | | Jezebel |
| | Excuse Me, But 'You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch' Crosses the Line | | by Megan Reynolds | | Leave this green bachelor in peace for just one moment. | | | | Billboard |
| | Country Music Pledged To Change, Here's Where the Scene Now Stands | | by Melinda Newman | | Like much of the nation, following 2020's Black Lives Matter protests, the country music community reckoned with its racially divisive past and current lack of inclusion. Then in February, the spotlight turned its glare on Nashville after a video of budding country superstar Morgan Wallen using a racial slur emerged. | |  | | GQ |
| | Gerard Way Knows That People Miss Guitar Music | | by Eileen Cartter | | Fender has tapped the My Chemical Romance bandleader to help release a new guitar pulled from Kurt Cobain's sketches. | |  | | Okayplayer |
| | The 7 Best Leonard 'Hub' Hubbard Bass Lines For The Roots | | by Elijah C. Watson | | A highlighting of the best bass lines Leonard "Hub" Hubbard came up with during his time with The Roots amid his passing. | |  | | Black Music and Black Muses |
| | Bloods | | by Harmony Holiday | | Where Ganja & Hess meets Kendrick Lamar meets my father: It's the blood for me. | |  | | Analog Planet |
| | Horace Tapscott, Tom Albach and the Story of Nimbus West Records | | by Joseph W. Washek | | If you're a musician and you're not a major pop/rock star or you don't own your own label, the money you make comes with strings attached. To some, they may be invisible-"Hey, that's what you do to sell records. Right?" To Horace Tapscott, the strings were all too visible and entangling. He wasn't going to be a puppet dancing for the record companies and the system of which they were part. | | | |  | | | Music of the day | | "Out the Slums" | | Drakeo the Ruler feat. 03 Greedo | | From "Cold Devil" (2017). |  | | YouTube |
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From "Cold Devil" (2017). | | | | | 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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