| My entire family and I thought, 'Eh, it's never going to actually come out.' It has been pretty insane and surreal since. | | | | |  | Julien Baker at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, July 20, 2018. "Little Oblivions" is out today on Matador.
(Michael Hickey/Getty Images) | | | | | "My entire family and I thought, 'Eh, it's never going to actually come out.' It has been pretty insane and surreal since." | | | | Too Soon?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, in a country that was tired of wearing life-saving masks about a day and a half after people started wearing them a year ago, that people would just as quickly tire of having to pretend they were outraged by a popular singer yelling the N-word in public on a drunken Nashville night. DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS spotted two cracks in the wall around MORGAN WALLEN this week: SPOTIFY, which had stopped promoting Wallen on its playlists, has quietly re-added his single "SOMEBODY'S PROBLEM" to its popular COUNTRY COFFEEHOUSE playlist, where—you can't make this stuff up—you can now hear Wallen crooning about a woman who's "somebody's problem, and somebody's problem's about to be mine." And Knoxville radio station WMYL has broken ranks with its peers by putting Wallen back on the air after an online poll of its listeners—and whoever else jumps on online polls—overwhelming supported the singer. The poll went up three days after Wallen's was banned at almost every country radio station in the US. It hasn't been much of a punishment, as punishments go. You can still buy Wallen's music and you can still stream it on demand at Spotify and everywhere else. And people are doing that. He's now had the #1 album in the country for six weeks running. (Does that mean album buyers and downloaders are OK with that word? Does it mean they're not OK with so-called cancel culture? Or does it mostly mean, as the Atlantic's SPENCER KORNHABER suggests in this smart piece, that people will run out to buy and play music by anyone who's in the news for pretty much any reason, whether it be Morgan Wallen or R. KELLY or MICHAEL JACKSON or TEKASHI 6IX9INE?) Wallen can't tour, but neither can anyone else. He expressed contrition in a raw YOUTUBE video in which he asked fans not to defend him. "The time of my return," he said, "is solely upon me and the work I've put in." It seemed a sincere apology. But it's been all of three weeks since he was caught. These things take time. They *should* take time. Wallen hasn't had time to process all he needs to process. The country music community hasn't had time. There are important discussions going on in public, and hopefully many more discussions going on behind closed doors. The issues go way beyond Morgan Wallen. Taking him off the radio for a while doesn't solve them and reinstating him doesn't mean everything's better now. But it sends a signal that everything's OK. And everything is not OK.
Filmbillies
Two Billies, one documentary, one feature: THE WORLD'S A LITTLE BLURRY, which drops today on Apple TV+, charts BILLIE EILISH's rise to pop stardom in very real time. Documentarian R.J. CUTLER began shooting it in 2018, when she was recording her first album. Cutler on Eilish's parents: "You see them living in denial. You just see them hoping that she's never gonna grow up. Not because they don't want Billie Eilish to grow up, but because parents don't want their children to grow up. It's the most human thing in the world"... THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY, out today on Hulu, is LEE DANIELS' biopic focusing on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' relentless pursuit of the jazz singer, who it considered a threat to national security because—you can't make this stuff up—she wouldn't stop singing "STRANGE FRUIT." "These stories were not told," says ANDRA DAY, who plays Holiday. "They were intended to never be told."
It's Friday
And that means new music from rock singer/songwriter JULIEN BAKER, who plays all the instruments on her "unruly, complex, and gorgeous" third album... Composer, producer and JAZZ IS DEAD label founder ADRIAN YOUNGE, seeing out Black History Month with AMERICAN NEGRO... Grown-up YOUTUBE pop star MADISON BEER... Electro/hip-hop explorer JIMMY EDGAR... Memphis rapper DUKE DEUCE... WILLIE NELSON paying tribute to FRANK SINATRA... Hyperpop veteran DANNY L HARLE... Chicago blues singer and slide guitarist JOANNA CONNOR... And albums from CLOUD NOTHINGS, YOUNG BUCK, DENZEL CURRY & KENNY BEATS (remixes), BLANCK MASS, JEFF MILLS (released earlier this week), DJ SURGELES, MOUSE ON MARS, SMERZ, NERVOUS DATER, NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS (released Thursday), ARCHITECTS, CURREN$Y, SHORDIE SHORDIE & MURDA BEATZ, PAYROLL GIOVANNI & CARDO, CASEY VEGGIES, JOE CHAMBERS, THUMBSCREW (MARY HALVORSON + MICHAEL FORMANEK + TOMAS FUJIWARA), BEN MONDER, SAM GENDEL, MENAHAN STREET BAND, DAX PIERSON, BRIJEAN, CALIBRE, WESLEY SCHULTZ (LUMINEERS singer's solo debut), DALE WATSON (instrumentals), SEAN DELLA CROCE, SARA PETITE, BONES OWENS, ALLY VENABLE, ALICE COOPER, KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD, the MELVINS, LOST HORIZONS, SYDNEY SPRAGUE, GLITTERER, PLAGUE WEAVER, MOONSPELL, EPICA, EVERGREY, DREAMWELL, NIGHTSHIFT, NOFX, KARIMA WALKER, LUCY SPRAGGAN, KUMI TAKAHARA and MAXIMO PARK.
Also: The UNDEFEATED/ESPN's BLACK HISTORY ALWAYS: MUSIC FOR THE MOVEMENT VOL. 2 featuring BRENT FAIYAZ, TINASHE, FREDDIE GIBBS and others... A deluxe version of FREDDIE GIBBS & MADLIB's PIÑATA with 83 tracks... PJ HARVEY's STORIES FROM THE CITY STORIES FROM THE SEA demos... A fourth volume of STEREOLAB's SWITCHED ON comp series... And a 1990 NEIL YOUNG live album.
Rest in Peace
LOUIS CLARK, who bridged the pop, rock and classical worlds as an orchestrator for ELO and creator of HOOKED ON CLASSICS... Rock guitarist DAVE PHILIPS, who played with FRANK BLACK, JACK LOGAN, TOMMY STINSON and GUIDED BY VOICES.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | |  | | The Atlantic |
| | Why a Disgraced Musician Is Dominating the Charts | | by Spencer Kornhaber | | After saying a racial slur and being exiled from radio, Morgan Wallen has become only more popular. What's going on? | | | rave:// This is amazing. Everything is biased, even your sequencer, and this is a fix for that | | |  | | Pitchfork |
| | Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts With Its Software | | by Tom Faber | | With the release of two free programs that encourage experimentation with global tuning systems, the musician and researcher Khyam Allami is challenging the Western biases of music production software. | |  | | GQ |
| | Bobby Shmurda's First Day Out of Prison | | by Frazier Tharpe | | The Brooklyn rapper, fresh out of prison on parole, partied with childhood friends and rap superstars, and talked to GQ about what he learned inside and where his career goes next. | |  | | The Daily Beast |
| | Andra Day Abused Herself to Become Billie Holiday. Why She Felt It Was Worth It | | by Kevin Fallon | | The "Rise Up" singer is nominated for a Golden Globe for playing the jazz great. She lost 40 pounds, took up drinking and smoking, and immersed herself in darkness to pull it off. | |  | | SPIN |
| | The Blurry World of Billie Eilish | | by Mike Hilleary | | A new documentary by R.J. Cutler shows the inner workings of the mega popstar and her family. | | | rave:// Thinking about different tapes, made in a different basement | | |  | | Jezebel |
| | Shifting the Center of American Music from Bob Dylan to Beyoncé Knowles | | by Daphne A. Brooks | | There are those who say that the lore of the modern rock and roll archive starts here, deep in the rustic outer country of upstate New York, in a house affectionately nicknamed Big Pink because of its gaudy, pastel siding. (Excerpted from "Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound.") | |  | | Billboard |
| | Daft Punk Breakup Leaves Millions on the Table, But Royalties Are Still Rolling In | | by Ed Christman and Dave Brooks | | Daft Punk's catalog brought in $6.4 million in revenue annually over the last four years, according to Billboard estimates, with half of that amount coming from the U.S. and the other half internationally. | |  | | Engadget |
| | I let an AI analyze my Spotify to find unsigned bands I might like | | by Daniel Cooper | | Andrson uses AI to find songs that sound similar to your choices. | |  | | KQED |
| | On a Positive Note, Pandemic Piano Sales Are Booming | | by Andrew Gilbert | | Bay Area piano shops say they're selling out of inventory as more families invest in pianos to inspire creativity and improve quality time. | |  | | UPROXX |
| | Julien Baker Tells Us How She Made Her Best Album, 'Little Oblivions' | | by Steven Hyden | | "Are you my therapist?" Julien Baker asked me toward the end of our interview last month. We had just spent nearly an hour talking about addiction, religion, the cult of personality around indie-rock singer-songwriters, and the best album of her career, "Little Oblivions." | | |  | | Spotify |
| | Black Girl Songbook: Ciara, First Lady of Crunk & B | | by Danyel Smith and Shanti Das | | This week on 'Black Girl Songbook,' Danyel Smith praises the south's finest: Ciara. She redefines Ciara through her extensive talents rather than her relationships, and brings in music executive Shanti Das to break down the pivotal moment that put Atlanta's signature sound on the map. | |  | | The New York Times |
| | 50 Years Later, Gamble and Huff's Philly Sound Stirs the Soul | | by Alan Light | | The songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Black-owned label Philadelphia International Records turned a city's aesthetic into a movement that reverberated around the world. | | | | | Pitchfork |
| | How Latin American Electronic Artists Are Using Field Recordings to Reconnect With Nature | | by Emily Hart | | In the face of a severe climate crisis, musicians from Argentina to Mexico are increasingly weaving the sounds of birds, streams, and forests into their work. | |  | | Ludwig van Toronto |
| | Let's Take A Moment To Appreciate The Under-Rated Recorder | | by Anya Wassenberg | | The humble recorder has an illustrious history in Western music, including a golden era and a recent rebirth. | |  | | Pollstar |
| | Q's With UMG's Arron Saxe On Preserving Legacies And Creating Value For Estates | | by Deborah Speer | | "Managing an estate is to protect, first and foremost, the integrity of the art." | |  | | British GQ |
| | How George Harrison staged one of the most influential concerts in music history | | by Graeme Thomson | | What began as a rock star's heartfelt response to a humanitarian disaster went on to become one of the most influential concerts in music history. | |  | | The Guardian |
| | New Cue the music: former Q editors join newsletter publishing boom | | by Laura Snapes | | After the Bauer Media music title's pandemic-triggered demise last July, Q's former staff are launching a weekly direct-to-inbox publication. | | | rant:// Et tube, record companies? | | |  | | TorrentFreak |
| | Record Labels Blame YouTube For a Lot of Things But Continue to Upload Music | | by Ernesto Van der Sar | | If YouTube is such a problem, why use it? | |  | | Audiofemme |
| | Photographer Sherry Rayn Barnett Shot Music History As It Happened | | by Mandy Brownholtz | | For "Eye of the Music," photographer Sherry Rayn Barnett combed her vast archive of live shots and portraits of legendary musicians, from Nina Simone to Cyndi Lauper. | |  | | MTV News |
| | An Oral History Of The A*Teens, The ABBA Cover Band That Defined Y2K Pop | | by Brennan Carley | | They went global with 'Teen Spirit,' toured with Britney Spears, and then... silence. 20 years later, the Swedish foursome explain what really happened. | | | | | | A very different Billie Holiday movie, from 1972. | | | 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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