| If you look at the bulk of the pre-Beatles rock artists... I would say 90 percent of them must have re-recorded their hits at some point or another in the last half century. You could just go down the list and check them off. Little Richard did it, Chuck Berry did it. | | | | |  | Taylor Swift on the "Fearless" (original version) tour, Sydney, Australia, March 12, 2009.
(Sergio Dionisio/Getty Images) | | | | | "If you look at the bulk of the pre-Beatles rock artists... I would say 90 percent of them must have re-recorded their hits at some point or another in the last half century. You could just go down the list and check them off. Little Richard did it, Chuck Berry did it." | | | | Taylor's Version...
...is a damn good, meticulous even, recording that sounds a hell of a lot like SHAMROCK CAPITAL's version, which Taylor herself made 13 years ago, but not so much so that an audio engineer or audiophile or attentive fan couldn't tell them apart. Taylor and her musicians are humans, not digital strings of ones and zeros. It's a manual copy. A self-forgery. "A deft and exacting recreation." "A stunning resemblance." An excursion "into the territory of contemporary art, as she appropriates her own work, turning her persona into a copy of the persona it was thirteen years ago." A good art project and a good record.
Why is it bothering some people so damn much?
The number of people who continue to whine about their belief that TAYLOR SWIFT is a poor little artist whining because things didn't go her way when her old label, BIG MACHINE, was sold (and sold again), is as depressing as it as funny. Taylor didn't whine. She registered and explained her objection and did something about it, culminating (or, more accurately, beginning) with last week's release of FEARLESS (TAYLOR'S VERSION), the first of what she promises will be a series of faithful re-recordings of all her Big Machine albums. (Or will one be enough?) She's been clear about why she's doing this. She wants to control her own masters and she doesn't want one particular music manager/mogul, SCOOTER BRAUN, owning or benefiting from them, and if that means she has to make a new set of masters, that's what she's going to do. And she's going to have fun doing it.
The actual whining is coming from (what appears to be be) grown men who are somehow aggrieved by this.
It isn't fair, they say. People are actually, I swear to God, saying this isn't fair. Big bad Taylor Swift, a 31-year-old singer-songwriter, is somehow taking advantage, simultaneously, of a very large independent record company, a music mogul who makes deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars and an investment fund that's ready to step in when the mogul decides he wants to cash out those hundreds of millions.
LOL.
She signed a contract, they say! She should have known what was in it, and what the implications were, before she signed it.
By all accounts, she did. She fulfilled the contract. She hasn't, as far as we know, done anything it doesn't allow her to do. For some reason, no one ever whines about how the label should have known what was in its own contract, which apparently gives Taylor Swift the right to do exactly what Taylor Swift is doing today. If the label's exclusive right to exploit and profit from songs like "LOVE STORY" and "YOU BELONG WITH ME" with no competition for 10 or 15 wasn't enough of a payoff for the financial risk it was taking, shouldn't the label have said something 10 or 15 years ago? (Inasmuch as the label sold for nine figures, those 10 or 15 years seem to have been sufficient, though maybe I'm being insufficiently profit-minded. I'm sure I'd make a terrible label owner.)
(Another parenthetical aside. A short list of singer-songwriters who've famously gone to war against labels and managers, with the explicit goal of breaking contracts they had signed, and who were lionized as heroes by the exact sort of people, possibly the exact actual people, who think Taylor Swift is a whiny little girl: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. TOM PETTY. In Petty's case, his chief complaint was that the label he originally signed to had been sold and he didn't want to be sold with it. How dare he.)
What is Taylor Swift even thinking, they want to know. Artists should look forward, not backward!
She wrote, recorded and released two new albums in 2020 and both were commercial and critical blockbusters. What did you do during the pandemic?
There's a long history, as ANNIE ZALESKI writes, of artists re-recording their work, from live versions to new and different studio versions to new and identical studio versions, and there's a long list of legitimate reasons why. "To have something that is so identified with you actually belong to somebody else," GLORIA GAYNOR, who remade her own "I WILL SURVIVE," tells Zaleski. "Imagine you went out to a party, and everybody was admiring the dress that you had on, but it belonged to your sister."
Or, if you can, imagine it was a cardigan.
Touch Me I'm Etc Etc Etc
MUDHONEY easily beat out SIR DIGS-A-LOT in an online vote to become the official name of the machine that will spend 14 months boring a tunnel between Seattle's Ballard and Wallingford neighborhoods... The guitar PHOEBE BRIDGERS got criticized for smashing on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in February because she, like Taylor Swift, is not a man, sold for $101,500 Sunday in an auction benefiting GLAAD... Making music out of spiderwebs... The GRATEFUL DEAD's Wall of Sound—in a Connecticut basement (paywall)... Among the top winners at the GUILD OF MUSIC SUPERVISORS AWARDS were TOM MACDOUGALL, who oversaw the music for PIXAR's SOUL, as well as MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM's DAWN SUTTER MADELL and PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN's SUSAN JACOBS. There's no equivalent ACADEMY AWARD, and music supervisors are barred from even being members of the MOTION PICTURE ACADEMY's music branch, which includes composers, songwriters and music editors. The guild has been lobbying to open that membership door... JANET JACKSON's 2004 Super Bowl stylist tells Page Six her infamous wardrobe malfunction was JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE's idea. Timberlake, who wasn't punished for ripping open Jackson's blouse on national TV (because he, unlike Janet, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers, is a man), was trying to one-up the MADONNA–BRITNEY–XTINA makeout session that stole the headlines at the previous year's MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS, stylist WAYNE SCOT LUKAS claims.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | |  | | Stratechery |
| | Non-Fungible Taylor Swift | | by Ben Thompson | | When it comes to a world of abundance the power that matters is demand, and demand is driven by fans of Taylor Swift, not lawyers for Big Machine or Scooter Braun or anyone else. | |  | | NPR |
| | The Rhymes And Reasons Behind Re-Recording Your Own Classics | | by Annie Zaleski | | Taylor Swift is far from the first to revisit her old catalog for reasons of business as much as art - but even if it's often a managerial decision, the process can't help but be heartfelt. | |  | | GQ |
| | Hip-Hop Loves Cash App, and That Might Be Why Jack Dorsey Bought Tidal | | by Grant Rindner | | The alternative to Venmo has become ubiquitous in rap lyrics. How did that happen? | |  | | The Guardian |
| | Greta Van Fleet on critics: 'They're pissed off that we're doing something' | | by Jim Farber | | The Grammy award-winning rock band have received commercial success yet critics haven't been quite as receptive - can their new album change that? | |  | | POLITICO |
| | How Lil Nas X Flipped Conservatives' Culture-War Playbook | | by Derek Robertson | | Never mind "owning the libs." The meme rapper pushed one button and the right did his publicity for him. | |  | | Music Tech Solutions |
| | What the MLC Can Learn from Orphan Works | | by Chris Castle | | "Reasonably diligent search" guidelines for orphan works shine a light on what is expected of streaming services hiding behind the MMA safe harbor giveaway. | |  | | Music Business Worldwide |
| | How to fix streaming without wrecking music | | by Paul Pacifico | | Different solutions across multiple services that speak to different artists and fans in different ways and for different reasons might well be the most effective way forward. | |  | | Bandcamp Daily |
| | A Guide to the Extensive Musical Legacy of Mills College | | by Marc Masters | | It's hard to imagine what American experimental music over the past 100 years would sound like without Mills College. | |  | | VICE |
| | 'I Hated the Song for Years': The Story of Vanessa Carlton's 'A Thousand Miles' | | by Jaime Silano | | Carlton spoke with Vice about writing the iconic hit, and the importance of releasing her new music on her own terms. | |  | | British GQ |
| | Why are literary writers still so addicted to Bob Dylan? | | by Sam Leith | | Four new biographies on the legendary artist are set to arrive ahead of Bob Dylan's 80th birthday on the 24th of May. | | | | | GQ |
| | DMX Turned Agony and Atomic Energy Into One of Rap's Most Titanic Legacies | | by Jeff Weiss | | He was both the last great, raw '90s rapper, and a harbinger of the harmonic pop sensibilities that would dominate the next generation. | |  | | KQED |
| | For a Young Girl in the Bay Area, DMX Made Sense of Life's Emotional Complexities | | by Nijla Mu'min | | DMX's vulnerability showed my generation a new way of understanding the world we would soon enter. | |  | | The New York Times |
| | In Rina Sawayama, Elton John Found a Collaborator and a Friend | | by Jon Caramanica | | The rising star and established icon who've discovered they have a lot in common. | |  | | Variety |
| | Independent Venues Left in the Lurch as SBA Website Remains Broken | | by Jem Aswad | | Venues, which have been hanging by a thread waiting for relief, have to find a way to hang on even longer. | |  | | Billboard |
| | AEG Hosting Summer Concerts in Wyoming With Fewer Pandemic Restrictions | | by Dylan Owens | | About 110 miles north of Red Rocks, a Cheyenne space will pad out AEG's booking options in the Rocky Mountain region, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to restrict indoor show capacities. | |  | | Sound and Design |
| | Reverse Engineering EDM's Mix Profile | | by Michael 'Myk Eff' Filimowicz | | While my own music does not usually adhere to mix norms — since I come from an experimental and electroacoustic music background where more rules are usually broken than followed — proverbially one is supposed to at least know the rules before allowing oneself to break them. This article outlines the 'rules' of spectral intensity structures in contemporary EDM mixing practices. | |  | | The New Yorker |
| | The Sonic Extremes of the MaerzMusik Festival | | by Alex Ross | | This year, the happily chaotic Berlin event was streamed online. | |  | | The Independent |
| | What Yoko Ono really thought about John Lennon leaving The Beatles for Plastic Ono Band | | by Craig McLean | | As a box set celebrating the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album is released, Craig McLean talks to bassist Klaus Voormann and The Beatles' press assistant Richard DiLello, and recalls his meeting with Yoko Ono in 2009, when she spoke about her reaction to one of the most important moments in pop history | | | | The New York Times |
| | They're Sacred Spaces for Spain's Flamenco Scene. Many Won't Survive Covid | | by Raphael Minder | | The intimate venues known as tablaos have mostly remained shuttered even as pandemic restrictions ease. That puts at risk a formative element of many flamenco performers' careers. | |  | | NPR Music |
| | Still 'Fearless': Re-Recording The Past On Taylor's Version | | by Lyndsey McKenna and LaTesha Harris | | On the re-recorded "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," Taylor Swift -- and her fans -- reconnect with the past; we asked writers and musicians to share how they hear these songs now. | | | | | 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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