| If we have to, we can invoke holy tradition; the preacher goes 'Huh!,' James Brown goes 'Unnhh!,' George Clinton goes 'Ho!,' Bob Marley goes 'Oh-oh-wo-oh-oh,' and the DJs scratch their ecstatic ejaculations. | | | | |  | Robbie Shakespeare at Glastonbury, June 18, 1982.
(David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | "If we have to, we can invoke holy tradition; the preacher goes 'Huh!,' James Brown goes 'Unnhh!,' George Clinton goes 'Ho!,' Bob Marley goes 'Oh-oh-wo-oh-oh,' and the DJs scratch their ecstatic ejaculations." | | | | Crossing Over the Pass
Hi. Nice to see you again. I've been out for the past week mourning—but also celebrating, reminiscing about and learning a little more about—my father, LEO KARAS, who died last week. He lived a long, full, complete life. He was a giant of a father, which I grew to understand over the years and decades, and a giant in the glass industry, which took a little longer for me to fully grasp. Till last week, to be exact. I wasn't the one who followed him into the family business, and I had the luxury of not having to think about him in that capacity. He was just my dad who liked to burn his toast. My brother, JOEY (and his son, BEN), had the opposite luxury of knowing that side of him inside and out. Along with our sisters, I like to think we've helped each other fill in the picture and complete our own stories over the last several days. And I'm quite sure we're going to keep telling them, and expanding on them, in the days, months and years ahead.
Today's rantnrave was going to be about dad and the music in his life—about his love, for example, of the music of Jewish prayer and ALLAN SHERMAN and how he saw both the BEATLES and FRANK SINATRA, neither of whom he cared all that much for, and didn't hear a note either time on account of all the young women screaming. But then the awful last couple of days happened: the death of GREG TATE, a giant of cultural criticism and cross-cultural thinking and a guiding spirit for so many people in this business, on Tuesday (take the day off and read all of this), followed by ROBBIE SHAKESPEARE, quite literally the foundation for a quarter century plus of reggae, dub and dance pop on Wednesday (take the rest of the year off and start listening). Giants in their industry in ways that are simultaneously obvious and that will take all of us many more years to fully grasp.
So instead today I'm going to write about "ARIRANG," the unofficial national folk song of both South and North Korea. A song of murky origins (some say it dates back 600 years, some say only to the 19th century, no one can say for sure what the word arirang means) and hundreds of unique versions. A song of separation that's sometimes sung with anger, sometimes in yearning, sometimes in sadness. A song of both resistance and pride, sung in moments of national sorrow and national joy. An example of how a piece of music can simultaneously mean so many things to so many listeners, or even the same listener. An example of how mourning and celebrating are never far apart, whether you're thinking of a lost love, your father, an inspirational writer and thinker, or every bass line you remember from the 1980s.
"Arirang" has a plaintive melody that's easy to sing and remember, and it traveled widely outside of Korea in the hearts of soldiers returning home from military service there in the mid-20th century. One of those soldiers was my dad, who served during peacetime and had plenty of time, apparently, to learn the melody and proper pronunciation of the most popular version, alternately known as "Seoul Arirang," "Bonjo Arirang" or simply "Arirang." As far as I know, he never learned what the words meant but he spent the rest of his life singing it, with passion and intention, and with extra emphasis on the last syllables of each line, for pretty much anyone who crossed his path. I'd like to think still singing it today with renewed energy and pestering every Korean musician in heaven about whether his pronunciation is correct. And that he understands the words viscerally if not literally. He always sang it as if he did. I can hardly begin to tell you how many pop songs I hear the same way. Thank you dad.
Here's a more or less traditional rendering of "Seoul Arirang," which is close to the one I grew up with. Here's one of the ways "Arirang" was rendered during the 2018 Winter Olympics and a jazz-pop version by YOUN SUN NAH. There are K-pop versions galore, for example by BTS and A.C.E., and I imagine dad pestering every member of those groups, too, 70 or 80 years from now. I sing it today, for him.
And for all these souls, also lost in the past week: Experimental American composer ALVIN LUCIER... Honky-tonk singer and longtime Grand Ole Opry member STONEWALL JACKSON... Bebop pianist BARRY HARRIS... Up-and-coming Milwaukee rapper BIG WAN, at least the 22nd hip-hop artist murdered with a gun in the US in 2021... Led Zeppelin road manager RICHARD COLE... KAL RUDMAN, founder of radio industry tip sheet FMQB... JACKIE AVANT, philanthropist wife of influential producer and executive Clarence Avant, the Godfather of Black Music. She was murdered at her house in Beverly Hills... DENIS O'BRIEN, who managed George Harrison and co-founded, with Harrison, HandMade Films... Steel guitarist NEIL FLANZ, best known for his association with Gram Parsons... British rock singer and session musician JOHN MILES... Warner Bros. promotion exec BARNEY KILPATRICK... World-renowned trumpet collector (and performer) FRANZ STREITWIESER... Experimental musician and performance artist LOUISE WOODCOCK... Metal keyboardist and two-time "America's Got Talent" contestant JAY JAY PHILLIPS.
| | | |  | | The New York Times |
| | The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate | | by Jon Caramanica | | For four decades, he set the critical standard for elegantly intricate assessments of music, art, literature and more, writing dynamically about the resilience and paradoxes of Black creativity and life. | |  | | Los Angeles Review Of Books |
| | RETRO READ: Fly as Hell: An Interview with Greg Tate | | by Leah Mirakhor | | Leah Mirakhor interviews author, musician, and cultural critic Greg Tate. | |  | | Resident Advisor |
| | Dancing My Way Through Grief | | by Katie Thomas | | How the return of clubbing helped writer Katie Thomas process the loss of her mother—and honour her on the dance floor. | |  | | REDEF |
| | REDEF MusicSET: Best Music of 2021: The Year in Lists | | by Matty Karas | | Where to start in this long, dark, disquieting year? Grab your driver's license and come along for the ride. Our annual running list of top 10s, top 40s, top 50s and top whatevers from around the music universe. | |  | | NPR Music |
| | When Making Music Breaks Your Body | | by Grayson Haver Currin | | An arthritis diagnosis means the latest album by the Bay Area band The Dodos is likely its last. It is a striking reminder of the oft-overlooked physical strains of music careers. | |  | | Tarzan Economics |
| | Malbeconomics: Taking stock of the twentieth anniversary of the 9.99 price point | | by Will Page | | The two-decades old 9.99 price point is the missing note for the ongoing chorus of debate about how much music is worth and what it should cost. | |  | | Rolling Stone |
| | Robbie Shakespeare, Reggae Bass Legend, Dead at 68 | | by David Browne | | Alongside his Riddim Twins counterpart Sly Dunbar, the bassist played with everyone from Black Uhuru to Bob Dylan across more than four decades. | |  | | Red Bull Music Academy |
| | RETRO READ: Sly & Robbie Red Bull Music Academy Lecture | | by Benji B | | In this lecture at the 2008 Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona, Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare share of the secrets behind their relentless hit-making machine. | |  | | Music Industry Blog |
| | Audiomack and the coming monetization / remuneration tipping point | | by Mark Mulligan | | The remuneration problem is getting worse, not better, due to the simple arithmetic of the royalty pot growing more slowly than artists. The solution? Models that let artists build fanbases and remuneration, not audiences and monetization. | |  | | Dada Drummer Almanach |
| | The Problem with Live Music | | by Damon Krukowski | | The immediate, obvious part of the problem is COVID. But there's another, more longstanding problem with live music – its increasing reliance on larger and larger shows, and dominance by a very short list of corporations who produce nearly all of them. | | |  | | Slate |
| | Here's What Happened to 'Get Back's' Non-Beatle Characters | | by Meredith Moran | | One was shot by the police. One started a cocktail podcast. | | | | REDEF |
| | REDEF Music ORIGINAL: Upsetters, Ruff Ryders and the Backbeat of Rock and Roll: Music Deaths 2021 | | by Matty Karas | | Dub shaman Lee 'Scratch' Perry, fin de siècle rap king DMX, Rolling Stone heartbeat Charlie Watts, jazz fusion giant Chick Corea and salsa pioneer Johnny Pacheco were among the music figures we lost in 2021. | |  | | Input |
| | Did a former 'NYT' reporter exploit musicians for his personal gain? | | by Chris Stokel-Walker | | A YouTube video accuses Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina of fleecing artists. Urbina says his project is "being woefully distorted." | |  | | The Public Domain Review |
| | All Sound Recordings Prior to 1923 Will Enter the US Public Domain in 2022 | | Thanks to the Music Modernization Act passed by US Congress in 2018, all sound recordings prior to 1923 will have their copyrights expire in the US on January 1st. | |  | | DJ Mag |
| | Can UNESCO help safeguard techno culture? | | by Martin Guttridge-Hewitt | | A new initiative, started by the founder of Love Parade, aims to have Berlin's techno scene recognised as a cultural practice, supported and preserved by UNESCO. DJ Mag speaks to those behind it and others to learn the significance and possible outcomes of giving techno world heritage status. | | | | Slate |
| | Why the Year's Most Popular Song Never Went to No. 1 | | by Chris Molanphy | | The DaBaby controversy offered an accidental experiment in what so-called cancellation would do to a very popular song—Dua Lipa's "Levitating." | |  | | NBC News |
| | Morgan Wallen's country music redemption arc is a sad sign of the times | | by Elena Sheppard | | The Wallen controversy gave country music a real, obvious chance to grow. Instead, it allowed the status quo to triumph again. | |  | | Billboard |
| | Out and Proud In 1991: Former Billboard Dance Editor Reflects on Pushback, Rifts & Representation | | by Larry Flick | | Back when queer industry professionals stayed closeted as a rule, Larry Flick shares the story of fighting to keep his perspective on the pages of Billboard. | |  | | Music Business Worldwide |
| | Kobalt is shorn, reborn… and still full of scorn (for those who keep money from songwriters) | | by Tim Ingham | | Willard Ahdritz and Laurent Hubert explain Kobalt's sell-offs, and why they're coming for collection society wastage. | | | | Music Business Worldwide |
| | For a fund with over $1bn to spend on music rights, Tempo is rather quiet. It likes things that way | | by Tim Ingham | | Tempo CEO Josh Empson explains his Providence-owned fund's strategy in the music business. | | | | The New York Times |
| | The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles | | by Amanda Hess | | In Peter Jackson's "The Beatles: Get Back," Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers. | |  | | CDM Create Digital Music |
| | The Prince symbol has been salvaged from a 1992 floppy disk | | by Peter Kirn | | Prince was way ahead of non-fungible tokens - with a symbol that was intended to make life a pain-in-the-a** for the record label. (Non-f***able totem?) And now Anil Dash and Limor Fried/Adafruit have brought back that image from a floppy. | |  | | Variety |
| | Ross Golan's 'And the Writer Is' Podcast Marks 150th Show With Clear-Eyed View on Songwriters' Challenges, Diversity | | by Lily Moayeri | | At first he thought he was creating a niche product for the elite songwriter community, but as Ross Golan approaches his weekly-ish podcast's 150th episode, his interviews with guests ranging from Benny Blanco and Finneas to Julia Michaels, Bebe Rexha and Daniel Lanois have racked up millions of downloads. | |  | | The Believer |
| | An Interview with Black Thought | | by John Morrison | | "In this moment, as a creative, my process is to leave it all on the page, on the stage, and on the table, because none of this s*** is promised, man." | | | | Featuring Sly & Robbie, 1981. | | | | | 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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