| Do not sing for the murderers of my beloved Jamal. Please speak out and condemn his killer, Mohammed bin Salman. Your voice will be heard by millions. | | | | |  | Janet Jackson during her Rhythm Nation tour, August 1990.
(Paul Warner/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | | "Do not sing for the murderers of my beloved Jamal. Please speak out and condemn his killer, Mohammed bin Salman. Your voice will be heard by millions." | | | | You Oughta Know
I watched two new documentaries about women in the music business over the weekend and I come to you today to report the completely not shocking news that people told both women they needed to lose weight.
I mean, we oughta have known.
The press around HBO's JAGGED has largely focused on two things. One is ALANIS MORISSETTE's revelation of the horrifying abuse she suffered when she was a teenager trying to find her footing in the music industry. And not just from the male producer who forced her onto a diet in which he was counting her slices of cheese, leading to a "massive eating disorder journey." She hints at the worst of it early in the documentary: "Almost every single person that I would work with, there would be some turning point where the camera would go Dutch angle. And I would just wait for it. Like, this won't happen in the first week for this one, but it will happen." She never names names, but later, after director ALISON KLAYMAN has told the story of the creation of her album JAGGED LITTLE PILL and her rise to superstardom, the doc returns to that earlier conversation, presumably having asked Morissette to explain a little more clearly for the people in the back. "It took me years in therapy," she says. "I would always say, you know, I was consenting. And then I'd be reminded, like, 'Hey, you were 15. You're not consenting at 15.' Now I'm like, 'Oh yeah, they're all pedophiles. It's all statutory rape.'"
The latter segment, in which she goes on to say she tried to tell what happened to a few people and was uniformly ignored ("It would usually be a stand-up, walk-out-of-the-room moment"), is dropped rather abruptly into the middle of a documentary that Morissette, who cooperated with the production, has since disowned. That's the other thing the press has focused on. Without elaborating, the singer accused the filmmakers of having a "salacious agenda," of "implications and facts that are simply not true" and of producing a film that was "not the story I agreed to tell." It goes without saying that documentary subjects won't always like the films made about them, and the filmmakers, not the subjects, almost always have the final say. But there's an awful irony (we'll be coming back to that word in a bit) in the idea of filmmakers allegedly not having listened to the subject of a documentary which is largely about the subject's struggles to get anyone to listen to her.
At its best, "Jagged" sets out to make the case for Morissette as a capital-I Important artist and "Jagged Little Pill," which she had to fight to get made and then worked overtime for two years to make sure it was heard, as a groundbreaking rock album. The fact that she's a woman colors every aspect of the story. The same alternative-rock radio station in Los Angeles that jumped on the album's first single openly admitted it couldn't (or, rather, wouldn't) play two songs by women in a row. While she was empowering an enormous audience of young women with her music, her male backing musicians were scoping out that same audience for potential groupies. The documentary's mini-stories of the album's first three singles are smart and insightful, and go a long way toward making you understand how and why they work and what so many critics and naysayers, overwhelmingly male, missed the first time around. Klayman gets you to raise your eyebrows, along with Morissette, at everyone who demanded to know who "YOU OUGHTA KNOW" was about rather than hearing and understanding what "You Oughta Know" was trying to say. And then there's writer/critic HANIF ABDURRAQIB on "Ironic": "She's great with imagery. While people were arguing over the linguistic use of 'irony,' I think they missed out on the imagery." The message, over and over, is that people could look at Alanis Morissette without seeing her, and listen to her without ever really hearing her.
The first, but not last, people to tell JANET JACKSON she was fat were her famous brothers, who gave her the nickname "Donk," short for "Donkey." Men can be so casually cruel. The New York Times/FX/Hulu doc MALFUNCTION: THE DRESSING DOWN OF JANET JACKSON traces Jackson's basic backstory as musician and actor, and how she overcame her body image issues (to awe-inspiring effect), on its way to repeating the story of an infamous Super Bowl halftime performance that's been told many times before. There's nothing particularly new in this documentary, and since neither Jackson, the Black woman whose top was ripped open, exposing her right breast to the sports television universe for roughly one half of one second, or JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, the white man who did the ripping, agreed to be interviewed, you'll quickly realize that none of the remaining mysteries (like how exactly did this happen?) is going to be solved here. But the simple act of putting the story back on TV, where it started, gives it a visceral punch you might have missed before. And you might notice that punch land, repeatedly, on Timberlake, who's shown salivating over Jackson in clips from earlier in their career and laughing off the blouse-ripping incident in interviews conducted shortly after it happened but before, apparently, anyone told him it was no laughing matter.
And yet there may be no interview more problematic than a current one with SALLI FRATTINI, the MTV exec overseeing the halftime show, who chastises Jackson for running away from the stadium immediately after a man ripped open her blouse on live television, and then describes how Timberlake, by contrast, stuck around but refused to accept any blame or responsibility. "I was told you guys knew," he tells Frattini. "He manned up," she tells us.
Huh?
Moments later, the doc gives us New York Times writer JENNA WORTHAM, who says, "What so painful about that moment is everything Janet had been working for and towards, building up to in this career, was just taken away, in that moment, by this white man." Over the next decade, the man's career flourished, as both musician and actor, while the woman was all but formally exiled from mainstream entertainment channels. "Malfunction" dutifully lays out the details of this, and notes how it took until 2021, 17 years later, for the man to formally apologize (to both Janet and to BRITNEY SPEARS, his ex-girlfriend and the subject of the last New York Times/FX/Hulu documentary, which seemingly prompted the apology).
That, and not that half-second in 2004, is what all of this is really about. "When we talk about racism, and we talk about sexism," Wortham says, "the fallout from the Super Bowl incident is what we're talking about. That's what it looks like." And maybe that, come to think of it, is what it really means to man up.
Shuffle This
Apparently at ADELE's request, SPOTIFY has, depending whose version you read, either stopped making "shuffle" the default setting when users hit "play" on an album, or just made it harder to shuffle an album than it used to be. In 13 years of playing albums on the service, I've never encountered that default setting. But I have friends who have. And in either case, "Anything for you," Spotify said to Adele, and here, per DAMON KRUKOWSKI, are some other things the latter might ask for if the former really means that.
Rest in Peace
Multi-instrumentalist BILLY HINSCHE, who was one third of the '60s pop group Dino, Desi and Billy and spent 20 years recording and touring with the Beach Boys; he also toured with Brian Wilson... Turbonegro singer HANK VON HELVETE, also known as Hank von Hell... KEITH ALLISON, who played bass for Paul Revere & the Raiders for seven years and had a long career on his own as a songwriter, session guitarist and actor... Longtime William Morris music agent JAY JACOBS.
| | | |  | | Above The API |
| | Streaming's Endgame (Part One) | | by Dave Edwards | | In the summer of 1997, Karlheinz Brandenburg, a gifted German mathematician and electrical engineer, made his way to a meeting in Washington, D.C. that – although few realized it at the time – would arguably change the music business more than any other in history. | |  | | NPR Music |
| | The jazz dalliance on Adele's '30' runs deeper than a sampled groove | | by Nate Chinen | | From the harmonic intrigue of "My Little Love" to a track sampling the late pianist Erroll Garner, Adele's latest album is filled with subtle connections to jazz. | |  | | The Washington Post |
| | Please, Justin Bieber, don't perform for the regime that killed my fiance | | by Hatice Cengiz | | An open letter from Jamal Khashoggi's fiancé to the pop star, who's scheduled to perform in Jeddah on Dec. 5. | |  | | Salon |
| | The injustice done to Janet Jackson isn't only in the past – new film "Malfunction" also falls short | | by Melanie McFarland | | Hate to disappoint, but NYT documentary "Malfunction" won't gain #JusticeForJanet like the series did for Britney. | |  | | Jezebel |
| | Alanis Morissette Documentary 'Jagged' Is a Hardly a Thrill | | by Rich Juzwiak | | Morissette has denounced Alison Klayman's doc about her breakthrough album...but why? | |  | | 4Columns |
| | Look Sharp! Revisiting the Graphics of the New Wave Era | | by Simon Reynolds | | Reversing into the future. | |  | | Complex |
| | The Drill Rap Episode of 'Law & Order' Is Full of Stereotypes and Propaganda | | by Andre Gee | | Last week, NBC aired an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit titled "Nightmares in Drill City," a drill rap-based episode that's as sensational as the title suggests. The episode synopsis states, "[Assistant District Attorney] Carisi asks the SVU for help with a murder investigation when one of the witnesses shows signs of abuse." | |  | | 5 Magazine |
| | 808 State, From the Beginning | | by Bruce Tantum | | Bruce Tantum's groundbreaking interview with Graham Massey and the late Andrew Barker on the history of 808 State. | |  | | Passion of the Weiss |
| | A True King of Memphis: Remembering Young Dolph | | by Will Hagle | | Dolph's music was grandiose and self-mythologizing. It helped him become what he viewed himself as: a story bigger than himself. | |  | | The Commercial Appeal |
| | What South Memphis 'neighborhood hero' Young Dolph means to Hamilton High's legacy | | by Laura Testino | | Before returning as 'good luck charm' Young Dolph, a role model for students, he walked Hamilton High's halls as Adolph Thornton, teachers remember. | | |  | | Slate |
| | Could Taylor Swift Have Written "F— the Patriarchy" a Decade Ago? | | by Ben Zimmer | | A history lesson behind the now-infamous keychain. | | | | The Washington Post |
| | Adele asked Spotify not to shuffle her carefully-curated album by default. The streaming service listened. | | by Jennifer Hassan | | Adele carefully curated the order of songs on her latest album "30,″ calling the 12 tracks her "ride or die throughout the most turbulent period of my life." But Spotify's default setting - to shuffle album tracks in random order - apparently threatened to disrupt the flow of her musical narrative. | |  | | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| | Peter Jackson's great dread: how to take a sad song and make it better? | | by Michael Dwyer | | The famous filmmaker worried it was a poison chalice. But his journey into the vault for "Get Back" shines a revealing new light on the Beatles' darkest days. | |  | | protocol |
| | Supply chain pain: Sonos can't make enough speakers | | by Janko Roettgers | | Company executives think the situation will improve, but Black Friday deals might be hard to find this year. | |  | | The New Yorker |
| | Davóne Tines Is Changing What It Means to Be a Classical Singer | | by Alex Ross | | The bass-baritone's daring recitals feel almost like compositions in themselves. | | | | The Washington Post |
| | Blues, jazz, electronica. It all flows through Ben LaMar Gay | | by Andy Beta | | Ben LaMar Gay's musical loves range far and wide. Steeped in the blues of his hometown of Chicago and an integral figure in his local jazz community, the cornetist and composer embraces a wide range of music, sounding it all through his horn across his vibrant, mercurial songs. | | | | Salon |
| | I was in a cult. Britney was in a conservatorship. Our situations are crazy similar | | by Tamara MC | | Secretly behind closed doors, we'd both been held hostage, our personhood and civil liberties stolen. | |  | | Washingtonian |
| | Inside the Making of the Britney Spears Musical | | by Rosa Cartagena | | After a year of seismic developments in the pop star's real-life soap opera, a Broadway show set to her music--with a rise-up tale about a posse of princesses who become feminists--is set to debut. | |  | | Idea Generation |
| | Alchemist On Turning Beats Into A Business, Cutting Out The Music Industry | | by Noah Callahan-Bever and The Alchemist | | Alchemist got his start as the teenaged sidekick to Cypress Hill and the Soul Assassins. Though his rap group, The Whooliganz, would be dumped by their label before they could even release their first album, Al did not let the setback stop him. In fact, by the time he dropped out of NYU the MC-turned-beat-maker already had a catalog with a couple classics, and more on the way. | |  | | Do the M@th |
| | 'What do you give someone to introduce them modern jazz?' | | by Ethan Iverson | | There's a lot of great jazz from all sorts of angles, but this is the center of the mosaic. A peak of American music, 1958-1967. | | | | | 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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