| I was determined to write a collection of songs that never referenced the pandemic... But I still ended up with an album about that very specific time. |
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Keyon Harrold at the JazzMI festival, Milan, Italy, Oct. 26, 2021.
(Sergione Infuso/Corbis/Getty Images)
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“I was determined to write a collection of songs that never referenced the pandemic... But I still ended up with an album about that very specific time.”
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Grammys A Go-Go
One thing we can be 98 percent* sure of when the nominees for the 2022 GRAMMY AWARDS are announced today: The WEEKND will not be among them, and this time it will be his choice, not the RECORDING ACADEMY's. Beyond that, you predict what the Grammys are going to do in any given year at your own peril. The noms, which the Academy will begin rolling out at noon ET, will be the first since Grammy nominators shockingly snubbed the Weeknd's blockbuster 2020 album AFTER HOURS a year ago, causing the Weeknd to boycott the Grammys forever (forever has already lasted a year, which is long as these kinds of forevers go), and seemingly providing the final straw that prompted the Academy give its nominating process a serious makeover. That included disbanding* the secretive nominating committees that had been installed as a corrective for previous Grammy embarrassments (or bungles, if you will, as in jungles), which leaves us to wonder if an overcorrective has been properly corrected this time, or if it really was an overcorrective in the first place, and what will become of future JACOB COLLIERs, BLACK PUMAS and D SMOKEs, to take three random names that no one expected to see at the top of the 2021 ballot until they just kind of showed up there. Answers to come soon.
In the meantime, speculation. One insider told Variety a while back to expect "more Taylor Swifts and fewer Jacob Colliers... People like to be on the winning side, so I think dark horses are really going to fall off—which is bad for more outsider artists like BRANDI CARLILE or H.E.R." And which could be good, Billboard's PAUL GREIN guesses, for commercial pop staples like BTS' "BUTTER" or ED SHEERAN's "BAD HABITS," which are no longer subject to the "snooty" filters of anonymous industry insiders. (The committees were also, according to former Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan, corrupt.) Another possible beneficiary: live versions of songs that otherwise wouldn't be eligible, such as, say, EUROVISION and TIKTOK rock darlings MÅNESKIN, whose glammy cover of the FOUR SEASONS' "BEGGIN'" was the subject of a mini-feature that totally coincidentally was posted on the Grammy.com website Monday night and on its Twitter feed early Tuesday morning. The studio recording was released too early for the Grammy eligibility window but a live version, which has been making the network TV rounds this week, and which is kind of great, is right on time. The committees might have turned up their collective noses at an entry like that, but the nominating and voting masses may not care. But, again, nothing is ever certain, except possibly OLIVIA RODRIGO and LIL NAS X, who virtually every prognosticator of note has penciled in for multiple top nominations. Don't let them down, voters of musical America.
In the meantime, HBO has nominated the Weeknd for a scripted miniseries, the BRIT AWARDS have followed the Grammys' example of a decade ago and eliminated all gendered categories, and the Washington Post happily notes that another rule change has given go-go music the best chance it's ever had to break through at the Grammys.
*Asterisk 1: Though the Weeknd followed through on his threat to not submit any of his work for Grammy consideration, apparently KANYE WEST submitted the Weeknd-featuring song "HURRICANE," which means a Weeknd nomination is still feasible, through no fault of his own.
*Asterisk 2: While the most notorious secret committees, which filtered nominees in the biggest four categories, have been disbanded, other secret committees remain downballot, where the genre-based Grammys are decided.
Rest in Peace
British prog-rocker DAVID LONGDON, lead singer of the band Big Big Train.
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| riding high when i was king |
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Real Life |
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| Yesterday Once More: Algorithms Are Changing How We Experience Nostalgia |
| by Grafton Tanner |
| To help users make sense of massive volumes of content, streaming services rely on recommendation algorithms, which depend in turn on breaking both content and consumers down into component variables. This process manifests as a new kind of nostalgia — a continuous repacking of past pleasure in new permutations rather than an impossible desire to return to a "better" time and place. |
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NPR Music |
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| When Finishing an Album Means Talking With Ghosts |
| by Piotr Orlov |
| Joan Wasser recorded the collaboration of a lifetime. Then disaster struck. |
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The Washington Post |
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| Grammy night is coming -- and go-go music finally has a shot |
| by Chris Richards |
| How's this for an awards show magic trick? Questlove plays E.U.'s " Da Butt" while DJing at the Oscars back in March, then Glenn Close rises from her seat to shake hers, and presto, the Recording Academy decides that it will finally recognize go-go music at its 64th annual Grammy Awards in January. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| Why the ’80/20 rule’ will be crucial to Hipgnosis’ mission to buy billions of dollars of music catalogs in 2022 and beyond |
| by Tim Ingham |
| Hipgnosis has over $2.5 billion of deals in the pipeline. The question of who’s going to pay for them requires a complex but important answer. |
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Fast Company |
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| More than Joe Rogan: Inside Spotify’s audio revolution |
| by Nicole Laporte |
| With 3.2 million podcasts on its platform and more monthly active users than Apple, Spotify is the new heavy in podcasting. It’s just getting started. |
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The Ringer |
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| The Complete History of the Kings and Queens of New York Rap |
| by Paul Thompson |
| We’re tracing the lineage of the crown of hip-hop’s mecca. |
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Stereogum |
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| Has Anyone Released An Original Christmas Standard Since 'All I Want For Christmas Is You'? |
| by Chris DeVille |
| I’m not talking about a fresh recording of a pre-existing song, which rules out oft-circulated covers by key Christmas Industrial Complex players like Michael Bublé, Pentatonix, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I’m talking about an original song so unmistakably popular that we’ve collectively absorbed it into the unofficial Christmas canon. |
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Trapital |
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| Tidal Makes a Big Bet on Independent Artists |
| by Dan Runcie |
| This is the start of Tidal’s plan to build an artist-centric platform, primarily for independent artists. It wants to give artists resources through Cash App Studios, help them release music through Tidal, and give their fans more ways to reward them. That’s the Square-Twitter-creator flywheel in motion. |
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Complex |
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| WondaGurl's Quiet Revolution |
| by Del Cowie |
| It feels like WondaGurl has been around for a very long time but the reality is that the producer born Ebony Oshunrinde is still only 24 years old. After all, she was only 16 when her name rang out internationally for snagging a production credit on Jay-Z's 2013 album "Magna Carta Holy Grail." |
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Audiofemme |
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| Flying Nun Founder Roger Shepherd On Forty Years of The New Zealand Label’s Highs and Lows |
| by Cat Woods |
| Audiofemme skips across the Tasman Sea for this week’s Playing Melbourne, to celebrate forty years of iconic New Zealand label Flying Nun Records. |
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| i played it hard and fast |
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The Independent |
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| He was the champion: Raising the curtain on Freddie Mercury’s devastating final act |
| by Mark Beaumont |
| As their new BBC film zooms in on the Queen frontman’s death amid the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties and Nineties, the film-makers speak to Mark Beaumont about how they captured how the megastar and his band dealt with his secret unfolding tragedy in the public eye. |
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Pollstar |
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| Megadeth, Lamb of God & Trivium's 'Metal Tour Of The Year' Lives Up To The Name, Melts Faces |
| by Ryan Borba |
| Just getting to the tour was an accomplishment, having been derailed from its original 2020 opening like virtually every other tour, festival or mass gathering. |
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Consequence |
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| Beyond the Boys’ Club: Emma Ruth Rundle |
| by Anne Erickson |
| The singer-songwriter talks about her new album and her experience as a woman in heavy music. |
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Billboard |
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| How Entertainment Law Firm Boyarski Fritz Rode Music’s Tech Boom To Success |
| by Bill Donahue |
| Founders Jason Boyarski and David Fritz talk about their first decade in business — and steering deals for the Prince estate, Joan Jett and Marc Anthony. |
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The Independent |
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| Lone superstar state: How Texas became America’s last great musical mecca |
| by Alli Patton |
| Why is Texas such a hotbed of musical innovation? And what, if anything, binds all those artists together? Alli Patton buckles up to find out. |
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Pitchfork |
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| Pitchfork's 11 Best Music Books of 2021 |
| by Rawiya Kameir, Jazz Monroe, Michelle Kim... |
| From a devastating memoir by Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner to a rigorous study of Black feminist sound to a spirited defense of ska. |
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The New York Times |
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| The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’ |
| by Joshua Barone |
| For several years, the composer Matthew Aucoin corresponded with Sarah Ruhl about how to adapt her play into the Met Opera’s latest premiere. |
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The Guardian |
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| ‘I just can’t believe it exists’: Peter Jackson takes us into the Beatles vault locked up for 52 years |
| by Andy Welch |
| Ahead of his epic series "Get Back," the director reveals the secrets of 60 hours of intimate, unseen footage of the Fab Four -- and why it turns everything we know about their final days upside down. |
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Cocaine & Rhinestones |
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| Loved It Away: Tammy Wynette, On Her Own |
| by Tyler Mahan Coe |
| CR026/PH12: Following her breakup with George Jones, many people had many questions for Tammy Wynette. Well, they had questions for George, too, but he was a little harder to get in touch with, trying to drink himself onto a separate plane of reality from his conscious mind and all. So the questions went to Tammy. And she had answers. Then more answers. And more… And more. |
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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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