| We are going to be larger than Warner Music by the end of this decade. |
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Future at a benefit for Haiti at the Oasis in Miami, Sept. 3, 2021.
(John Parra/Getty Images)
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“We are going to be larger than Warner Music by the end of this decade.”
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On Collecting Well
The one book that's always within arm's reach when I'm writing, even if I choose to ignore its advice, which I'm probably doing with these commas, is the late WILLIAM ZINSSER's ON WRITING WELL. It's a guide, an inspiration and, most important, comfort. There used to always be 10 or 20 CDs within reach, too, when CDs were how I listened to music. They were there for similar reasons. The specific titles would change from time to time along with my obsessions, but the pile would always be at the ready, to inspire, to distract, to overwhelm, to comfort. This wonderful ANDREW HOBBS photo of AMY WINEHOUSE's floor, from NAOMI PARRY and CATRIONA GOURLAY's book BEYOND BLACK, is a perfect portrait of the lovingly disheveled inner sanctum of a proper collection. Whether you need a fix of THELONIOUS MONK, RAY CHARLES, DONNY HATHAWAY or the SUPREMES, it's there, waiting. It will still be there tomorrow. You know exactly what that room sounds like, don't you?
If there's one feature I want more than anything from a subscription music service, it's a digital equivalent of that floor: my pile of my current obsessions on my floor or my desk, exactly where I left them, whether it was this morning, last night or a year ago. Not a cold list of titles on a sidebar, and not a neatly arranged screen of album cover thumbnails on a page I have to click three times to find, but something that feels, in a tangible way, like my actual stuff. Is that too much to ask? Is it one more example of me foolishly resisting the internet? Or is the internet foolishly resisting me?
In his essay on "The digital death of collecting," KYLE CHAYKA goes significantly deeper on the disconnect between collecting music in real life and trying to collect music in the cloud, and how the way we collect and organize music affects how we hear it, and how SPOTIFY and other services, with their ever-changing interfaces, actively pull us away from the piles of music we want to collect and listen to and toward the piles of music they want us to collect and listen to. It's a frightening, fantastic, resonant read about design and dissonance and algorithms and agency and playlists and passivity and about how "the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness." And how with every auto-update of the software, that Thelonious Monk CD gets a little further away.
Etc Etc Etc
With 10 nods, including Album of the Year for his wonderful MIS MANOS, CAMILO leads the pack of nominees for the LATIN GRAMMYS, which will be handed out Nov. 18 in Las Vegas. But a year after the Latin Grammy nominators finally gave reggaetón its due in the top categories, the popular genre finds itself back on the margins, and J BALVIN, despite his own nomination for Song of the Year, isn't having it. "The Grammys don't value us," he tweeted (in Spanish). "But they need us"... Measuring the combined music rosters of CAA and ICM by SPOTIFY monthly listeners... Music critic and poet HANIF ABDURRAQIB and choreographer JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR are among this year's recipients of MACARTHUR "Genius" grants... KANYE WEST has edited CHRIS BROWN and KAYCYY out of songs on DONDA, which, you may recall, was released a month ago. I kind of admire Kanye's ongoing high-concept art project of releasing music today and mixing it tomorrow, but in a streaming universe it leaves fans in the awful position of not knowing if their favorite song today will exist tomorrow. Remixing a track is one thing; disappearing the original mix is something else altogether.
Rest in Peace
Jazz's master of the Hammond organ, DR. LONNIE SMITH... R&B singer/songwriter ANDREA MARTIN, who wrote hits for En Vogue, Monica, SWV and others... Memphis radio pioneer CHRISTINE COOPER SPINDEL, who, despite racist pressure, turned WDIA into a powerhouse of blues music and other Black programming in the 1940s and '50s, with on-air talent that included B.B. King and Rufus Thomas... Influential Los Angeles radio DJ SAM RIDDLE, who helped shape the sound of Top 40 radio and later went on to produce TV's "Star Search"... 1950s country and pop singer SUE THOMPSON... Minneapolis jazz critic PAMELA ESPELAND, a longtime fixture on the Minnesota arts scene.
Programming Note
I'll be off for the next couple days. MARCUS K. DOWLING, a great Washington, D.C. and Nashville music writer whose stories you may have read here and who's taken a few spins at curating MusicREDEF in the past, will be back to curate Thursday's and Friday's newsletters. I'll be back Monday.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Kyle Chayka Industries |
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| The digital death of collecting |
| by Kyle Chayka |
| How platforms mess with our tastes. |
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The Cut |
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| She Warned Us About R. Kelly. No One Believed Her. |
| by Angelina Chapin |
| Sparkle has been waiting 20 years for this verdict. |
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| rave:// Never mind all those stories about "Nevermind"; read this instead |
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Dada Drummer Almanach |
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| Zeitgeist: The Sound of 1991 |
| by Damon Krukowski |
| There was grunge. But also classical, jazz, Qawwali and a world of live and improvised music newly captured for reproduction on CD. |
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Pitchfork |
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| James Murphy Ousted DFA Records Co-Founder Jonathan Galkin Last Year. What Happened? |
| by Evan Minsker |
| Murphy responds to Galkin’s recent claim that he was literally locked out of the label he helped run for nearly 20 years, offering his account of last year’s behind-the-scenes shakeup. |
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Forbes |
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| Music’s Other IPO: How A Scrappy Indie Record Company Turned An Army Of Nobodies Into $2 Billion |
| by Ariel Shapiro |
| Denis Ladegaillerie cofounded Believe in 2005, when technology had the music industry in a death grip that sent global sales of recorded music from a peak of more than $24 billion in 1999 to a bottom of $14 billion in 2014. He kept the faith through it all, including in 2017, when he turned down Sony Music's offer to buy the company for $440 million. |
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NPR |
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| What New Netflix And Hulu Documentaries Reveal About Britney Spears' Conservatorship |
| by Eric Deggans |
| Netflix's "Britney vs Spears" and Hulu's "Controlling Britney Spears" - released right before an important hearing on the singer's conservatorship - piece together how Spears lost control of her life. |
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The New York Times |
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| How Lip-Syncing Got Real |
| by Amanda Hess |
| Not long ago, lip-syncing was the domain of subversive drag queens, or pop stars that the media saw as talentless. Now it’s how scrappy amateurs get famous. |
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Bandcamp Daily |
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| Alien Weaponry: Māori Tradition Meets Thrash Metal |
| by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni |
| The New Zealand trio has carved a singular path in the global metal scene by putting their Māori heritage front and center. |
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Billboard |
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| Artists Are Selling ‘Signed’ Digital Album Downloads -- What Does That Even Mean? |
| by Steve Knopper |
| Taylor Swift and Doja Cat are among artists releasing digitally signed albums, which are basically an old-school album download whose cover contains a signature on the virtual cover. |
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The New Yorker |
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| A Song for Preventing Overthinking in a New Relationship |
| by Sheldon Pearce |
| Esperanza Spalding’s “Songwrights Apothecary Lab” imagines music with very specific healing properties. |
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Okayplayer |
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| The Making of Stevie Wonder’s Magnum Opus ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ |
| by Chris Williams |
| On September 28, 1976, Stevie Wonder's masterpiece "Songs in the Key of Life" was released. We spoke with members of Wonderlove and legendary engineer Gary Adante (Olazabal) about how this timeless album was made. |
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Mixmag |
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| Arabs Do It Better: the party championing Arabic music in the Holy Land |
| by Alice Austin |
| Alice Austin meets David Pearl and Marwan Hawash, the party-starters flying the flag for Arabic culture in Jaffa and Berlin. |
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The Washington Post |
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| With debut of ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ at the Met, a watershed moment for American opera |
| by Michael Andor Brodeur |
| The Terence Blanchard-Kasi Lemmon production is the first opera by a Black composer in the Metropolitan Opera’s 138-year history. |
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The New York Times |
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| After R. Kelly’s Conviction, Can the Music Industry Change? |
| by Ben Sisario and Joe Coscarelli |
| The R&B musician’s guilty verdicts met a muted response in the music business that made him a star, and survivors and activists say the field has a responsibility to do more. |
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XXL |
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| Lil Nas X Opens Up About His Battle for Respect in Hip-Hop |
| by Kris Ex |
| Lil Nas X is a revolutionary forcing hip-hop to face the culture’s long-term issues with homophobia. |
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Hollywood Reporter |
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| Judge Rejects Donald Trump Bid to Escape Song Copyright Lawsuit |
| by Eriq Gardner |
| The ex-president attempted a "fair use" defense to a lawsuit brought by Eddy Grant over use of "Electric Avenue." At least for the moment, it hasn't worked. |
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NPR |
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| How An Author And Illustrator Adapted Nina Simone's Complicated Life Story For Kids |
| by Audie Cornish, Jonaki Mehta and Ashley Brown |
| NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with author Traci Todd and illustrator Christian Robinson about their new children's book 'NINA: A Story of Nina Simone,' and adapting a complicated figure's story for kids. |
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Tablet Magazine |
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| A Conversation With Donald Fagen |
| by Paul Grimstad |
| Talking Nabokov and Judaism with the Steely Dan co-founder, whose first live album comes out today. |
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DJ Mag |
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| Meet the UK rap and drill engineers shaping the sound into a chart-topping phenomenon |
| by Robert Kazandjian |
| As UK rap and drill now dominates airwaves and streaming platforms, engineers have been crucial in refining the sound. Quality control has become even more important. "A few years ago, the sound was more lo-fi, it was quite rough," Sean D explains. "The 808s didn't have a lot of bottom on them." |
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The Bitter Southerner |
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| What Is Folklore Today? |
| by April Ledbetter and Lance Ledbetter |
| Are memes a kind of folklore? The founding directors of Dust to Digital talk with two leading folklorists about the past, present and future of their work. |
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The Commercial Appeal |
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| WDIA programming pioneer, Memphis gardening expert Christine Cooper Spindel dead at 97 |
| by Bob Mehr |
| Christine Cooper Spindel, a radio executive who helped transform Memphis station WDIA into a beacon of Black programming in 1940s and 1950s, has died. |
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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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