| I want more artists to get into the blues, free jazz, and gospel music. Those genres—not only is it Black American classical music, but it’s also a liberation technology. |
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Lil Nas X at the MTV Video Music Awards, Sept. 12, 2021. "Montero," his debut album, is out today on Columbia.
(Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
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“I want more artists to get into the blues, free jazz, and gospel music. Those genres—not only is it Black American classical music, but it’s also a liberation technology.”
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Genius + Sold = ???
From the moment it launched 12 years ago as RAP GENIUS, the annotated lyrics site that came to be known as simply GENIUS has done its best to attract detractors. A troll-ish team of founders. Cultural appropriation on a corporate scale. A years-long refusal to pay songwriters and publishers for the songs the business was built on. Annotations like this.
All of which makes it easy to overlook that Genius, which has been acquired by media holding company MEDIALAB in what was basically an $80 million fire sale, is far and away the best lyrics site on the internet (or anywhere else). Genius invented the idea of a lyrics site that wouldn't drown your computer or phone in popup ads and bad code. It invented the idea of a lyrics site you could trust *and* that you weren't afraid to click on. Think back, if you can, to trying to look for song lyrics on the internet in 2006. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't always possible.
With ambitions to annotate the world far beyond hip-hop lyrics, Genius made some weird, and expensive, decisions over the years. But it continued investing in its core product, too, from expanding to the wider pop music universe to building an editorial team that knew how to tell stories about music creation and enhance the crowd-sourced content that was the site's bread and butter. Artists, songwriters and producers started hanging around the site to talk about, and annotate, their own work.
Annotations like this don't grow on trees. They grow on editorial rolodexes. But continuing a trend that's been spiraling upward in recent years throughout music media, Genius' new owner made it clear where its priorities were, and weren't. "The company will not make cuts to the teams handling sales, product or engineering," a source told Bloomberg's SARAH MCBRIDE, who broke the news of the sale. It wasn't hard to figure out where the cuts *would* come. And they did.
(Also: Ugh.)
It's too soon to know what will happen from here, but sales, product, engineering and a media holding company can only take a site devoted to music and its creation so far. Someone needs to listen to the music, and understand the creators, and put all that context in, um, context. For now, Genius looks and acts exactly like you would expect Genius to look and act, which is to say, it doesn't look like all the other lyrics sites. We'll revisit in a few months and see if we need to annotate *this* story.
This One Is for the Champions
You can admit it. You thought—you knew—LIL NAS X was a one-hit wonder. Everything about that hit, as fantastic a pop song as it was, suggested a career arc not all that different from that guy he recruited for the remix. But here we are more than two years later, and he's just releasing, today, his debut album, and that hit isn't on it, and it wouldn't make all that much sense if it was. The two major hits that followed are here, as are DOJA CAT and MEGAN THEE STALLION and ELTON JOHN, all of whom have as much to gain from working with him as he does from working with them. The pop sensibility is very much still there, as is the loud and proud personality that's carried him further than the pop sensibility alone ever could have. He knows what he's doing, and he knows that he knows what he's doing. "Never forget me and everything I've done," goes the album's last song. You won't, and I think you know that now.
One day, kids, someone will give you a script. You don't have to follow it if you don't want to.
It's Friday
And besides Lil Nas X, that means new music from poet and experimental musician extraordinaire MOOR MOTHER, who opens up and lightens up her sound on BLACK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AIR. "At first I was calling it my 'sell-out album' as a joke," she tells Pitchfork. "But in reality, I wanted to make it more accessible, and to get to ears that don’t really know me or have been afraid of me.” You really, really should not be afraid... Nashville singer-songwriter ADIA VICTORIA moves "between romanticizing the South and interrogating it" (to quote Hanif Abdurraqib) on her third album, SOUTHERN GOTHIC, with the help of Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Kyshona and producer T Bone Burnett... BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX is the album underground Arizona hip-hop group INJURY RESERVE was working on when founding member Jordan Groggs died suddenly in 2020. It's "a strange and startling listen," says Stereogum, filled with "so many blurts and blasts and growls and wails, most of them assembled in counterintuitive ways, that you might not even notice at first that there’s still a rap album happening within the chaos"... Country singer CARLY PEARCE's 29: WRITTEN IN STONE is a greatly expanded version of the mini-album, 29, that she released early this year—it's now doubled in length—chronicling a dark year that included a divorce and the death of her producer, busbee... LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM's self-titled seventh solo album is the one he was working on when he was fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018—an event whose details he and his ex-bandmate and partner Stevie Nicks do not, to say the least, agree on.
Plus: New music from CHARLEY CROCKETT, NCT 127, RAY BLK, WORDSMITH, BIG BOI & SLEEPY BROWN, KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH & EMILE MOSSERI, JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ, RP BOO, H3000, LILHUDDY, NATE SMITH, HELEN SUNG, CYNTHIA ERIVO, ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, SEVYN STREETER, KYLE DION, MELISSA ETHERIDGE, ROD GATOR, JAMESON RODGERS, SCOTTY MCCREERY, HERB ALPERT, BILLY IDOL, CARCASS, EDGE OF PARADISE, THRICE, MONO, YVETTE, DEAD SARA, METRONOMY (released earlier this week), JOS SMOLDERS & JIM O'ROURKE, WESLEY STACE (aka John Wesley Harding), TOMMY CASTRO, the FELICE BROTHERS, DAUGHTRY, NOAH KAHAN, CORY HENRY, E.VAX (of Ratatat), ALEXIS TAYLOR (of Hot Chip), MOZZY, CURREN$Y & KINO BEATS, TION WAYNE, BAD BAD HATS, MINI TREES, LIZZIE LOVELESS, ALEXA ROSE, CANDLEBOX, ROUNDABOUT MAGIC (and the Tanzanian hip-hop comp SOUNDS OF PAMOJA, from Nyege Nyege Tapes.
Rest in Peace
British jazz and pop composer/arranger/singer BARBARA MOORE... Opera singer CARMEN BALTHROP... Jazz and R&B percussionist LEONARD "DOC" GIBBS... Season 2 "X Factor" contestant FREDDIE COMBS... Hollywood musicals star JANE POWELL.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| funny how you said it was the end |
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GQ |
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| How Wizkid Became the King of Afropop |
| by Edwin "Stats" Houghton |
| He’s the guy Drake and Beyoncé call up whenever they need a continent-spanning smash hit-and now, Lagos’s own Wizkid is taking over speakers everywhere with the sounds of home. |
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The Verge |
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| Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far |
| by Nilay Patel and Charlie Harding |
| Who gets credit doesn’t always line up with what you hear. |
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Bloomberg |
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| Former Startup Darling Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80 Million |
| by Sarah McBride |
| The sale price is less than the total funding raised. |
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Nieman Journalism Lab |
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| True Genius: How to go from 'the future of journalism' to a fire sale in a few short years |
| by Joshua Benton |
| Genius (née Rap Genius) wanted to "annotate the world" and give your content a giant comment section you can't control. Now it can't pay back its investors. |
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Byta |
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| Digital Blues: The Day-to-Day Challenges of Music Sharing -- Part I -- Metadata |
| by Shawn Reynaldo |
| Metadata isn't exactly the sexiest topic, but its capacity to foul things up is practically immeasurable, particularly in a world where the day-to-day business of music has become almost entirely digital. |
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Rolling Stone |
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| Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time |
| by Jonathan Bernstein, Jon Blistein, David Browne... |
| For the first time in 17 years, we’ve completely remade our list of the best songs ever. More than 250 artists, writers, and industry figures helped us choose a brand-new list full of historic favorites, world-changing anthems, and new classics. |
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FLOOD Magazine |
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| Moor Mother on Reaching New Listeners with 'Black Encyclopedia of the Air' |
| by Teresa Xie |
| Camae Awae discusses working with artistic limitations, the relationship between poetry and music, and the direction she took with her latest solo LP. |
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Billboard |
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| Karol G Fought Her Way to the Top of the Reggaetón World. What’s Next? |
| by Griselda Flores |
| Karol G hustled her way to the top of the male-dominated world of reggaetón. Now she says she wants to build a business empire. |
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NPR Music |
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| A Month Into R. Kelly's Trial, Here's What It's Been Like In The Courtroom |
| by Anastasia Tsioulcas |
| Four weeks into testimony in the R&B superstar's New York federal trial, it's often been hard to hear testimony from the women and men he allegedly abused. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| Would AWAL really have thrived had it not been sold to Sony Music? |
| by Tim Ingham |
| MBW crunches the numbers on AWAL, and asks if the UK competition watchdog is looking in the right direction. |
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The Daily Beast |
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| Kenny G Has Always Been In On the Joke. Now He’s Ready for the Praise |
| by Kevin Fallon |
| How could a musician so phenomenally successful be so hated? As he tells The Daily Beast: “If you’re being made fun of, it’s flattering because it means you’re being noticed.” |
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NPR Music |
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| Hell Is A Teenage Girl: Olivia Rodrigo, 'Jennifer's Body' And The Joy Of Rage |
| by Chasity Hale |
| Rodrigo's spiky "good 4 u" isn't just a breakup song: It inserts her into a tradition of art, including one particularly beloved cult horror film, about the right of teenage girls to get angry. |
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VAN Magazine |
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| 'The Perfect Voice in the Wrong Body' |
| by Elisabeth Hahn |
| On body shaming in opera. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| Gaming’s freemium model is making billions. For the music industry, it offers valuable lessons. |
| by Dave Roberts |
| What the music industry can learn from the video games sector about the long-term power and potential of free content. |
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Billboard |
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| On the Run From the Taliban, Musicians in Afghanistan Face Uncertain Future |
| by Steve Knopper |
| The Taliban's anti-democracy regime, which regained control over Afghanistan last month, has already had a devastating impact on local music. |
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DJ Mag |
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| The true story of how India partied through Covid-19 |
| by Dhruva Balram |
| Few countries have been as devastated by Covid-19 as India. While European DJs have been criticised for playing there, what's been missed is that the Indian dance music industry has largely continued to operate throughout the pandemic, with events often booked, run and played by Indians. |
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Hypebeast |
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| For RZA, Creating Hulu's 'Wu-Tang: An American Saga' Is a Labor of Love |
| by Sophie Caraan |
| The de facto leader of the legendary hip-hop group speaks about the show's return after two years. |
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Slate |
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| Why Alanis Morissette Is Disowning the New Documentary About Her |
| by Sam Adams |
| "Jagged's" director is one of the singer's biggest fans, but the feeling is not mutual. |
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VICE |
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| I Love Divorce Albums, Probably Because I’m Divorced |
| by Alex Zaragoza |
| Kacey Musgraves' 'Star-Crossed' is the latest in a long line of records depicting the end of a marriage, a genre and experience I know well. |
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Texas Monthly |
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| Houston’s Legendary SugarHill Recording Studios Turns Eighty |
| by Michael Hardy |
| The oldest studio in Texas has recorded everyone from Lightnin’ Hopkins and George Jones to Beyoncé and Travis Scott-and it’s still making hits. |
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| Music of the day |
| "Shekere" |
| Moor Mother (feat. Lojii & Saydah Ruz) |
| From "Black Encyclopedia of the Air." |
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YouTube |
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From "Black Encyclopedia of the Air."
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| Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech |
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“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?’” |
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| Jason Hirschhorn |
| CEO & Chief Curator |
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