| Making music is like making love, it's not good unless it's honest and spontaneous. |
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| Vangelis circa 1970. |
| (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“Making music is like making love, it's not good unless it's honest and spontaneous.”
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- Vangelis, 1943 – 2022
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| rantnrave:// |
Live (Nation) Aid
You will be shocked, shocked to find that one of the biggest companies in the music biz got millions of dollars in Covid relief funding intended for independent venues. A good, straightforward, slightly disturbing piece of investigative journalism from the Washington Post, and some helpful context from the Future of Music Coalition (which is why the qualifier "slightly" made it into this sentence). According to the Post's YEGANEH TORBATI and TONY ROMM, whose story is part of a series on "The Covid Money Trail," LIVE NATION lobbied Congress to be included in 2020's Shuttered Venues Operators Grant program, but Congress, which wanted to provide relief to small, independent businesses and their employees and not to public companies and their shareholders, explicitly said no. And then subsidiaries of Live Nation applied for and got $19 million in relief funding anyway. It's a good story on seemingly wasteful government spending, though as the FUTURE OF MUSIC COALITION later pointed out, it wasn't *that* much waste, representing a tiny percentage of the available funds in a program that never ran out of money. And most of it still ended up, it appears, in the coffers of live music venues struggling through a pandemic. Far from a terrible result from an emergency program aimed at easing a fast-moving crisis. A good result even.
But there's still something unseemly to all of this, and executives from some of the Live Music venues themselves make clear why that it is even as they defend taking that money. JOEL PLANT, CEO of Wisconsin's FRANK PRODUCTIONS, which received $10 million, tells the Post that Live Nation has only a minority stake in the particular entity that applied for the benefits even though Live Nation has a majority stake in Frank itself. "We are eligible," he says. But he also says the company has "mechanisms with Live Nation to lend us money that we did not access during Covid," which begs the question of why not access that money and leave taxpayers' money to the clubs and theaters that don't have that access? The NATIONAL INDEPENDENT VENUE ASSOCIATION, which was instrumental in getting the grant program through Congress, represents "small business people that don’t have access to Wall Street financial instruments," executive director REV. MOOSE told the Post.
Another Live Nation subsidiary, GELLMAN MANAGEMENT, which got $407,000, said the money helped it keep staff on its payroll, and "none of these funds were allocated for personal gain of management, nor [for] Live Nation," which is hopefully true but which is asking for quite a bit of faith on the public's part.
The grant program had hiccups at the start, but ended up providing billions of dollars in relief to clubs that badly needed it (and many of which are still struggling today). "Let’s work to hold Live Nation accountable," the Future of Music Coalition tweeted, "but let’s also be clear: the #saveourstages investment was overall a massive success." It can be hard, in the current political environment, to do both of those things at the same time, but it's crucial. We need to be able to fix the mistakes without killing the bigger thing we were trying to fix in the first place.
Rest in Peace
Three angles on the immense talents and influence of EVANGELOS ODYSSEAS PAPATHANASSIOU, the Greek émigré synth pioneer and film score innovator better known as VANGELIS, who died last week in Paris. His anachronistic synth-plus-piano score for 1981's "Chariots of Fire" was his cinematic and pop breakthrough—and best-known work—but his music a year later for Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," which is as essential to the film's dystopian vision as the cinematography and script, will be remembered by many of us as his masterpiece. Writing for Vulture in 2017, Piotr Orlov argued that the "Blade Runner" score is "as much a part of the 20th-century electronic canon as various Philip Glass and Steve Reich pieces," influencing, in various ways, "young British electronic composers... Detroit’s techno rebels... [and] armies of experimental producers." In the Stranger, Charles Mudede offers a personal essay about how Vangelis' earlier work on the Carl Sagan TV series "Cosmos" helped connect him with a new kind of religion at a time when he was spiritually adrift. "The transference of my religion from the church to the stars," he writes, "would not have been possible without Vangelis's transportive 'Heaven and Hell.'" (Mudede attributes Vangelis' death to Covid-19, which, it should be noted, was reported in some European outlets but hasn't been officially confirmed.) Before all of that, Vangelis was a successful prog-rocker, and Rock & Roll Globe's Jim Allen traces prog's long arc through his life's work. He was, Allen writes, "an unlikely rock star."
In the past week we've also lost singer, songwriter and painter BOB NEUWIRTH, who was instrumental in the careers of Janis Joplin and especially Bob Dylan. “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth," Dylan wrote in "Chronicles: Volume One." Some people over the years have suggested Dylan immortalized Neuwirth himself by borrowing his raconteur persona... Blind Boys of Alabama singer BOBBY MOORE JR.... '80s soul and funk singer/songwriter/keyboardist BERNARD WRIGHT ("Who Do You Love"), who was sampled by Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J and played with Miles Davis... ROSMARIE TRAPP, formerly known as Rosmarie von Trapp, one of the last surviving members of the Trapp Family Singers, whose story was told in "The Sound of Music"... Longtime promo exec KEVIN SUTTER... NORMAN DOLPH, a Columbia Records staffer who engineered several songs that wound up on the Velvet Underground's debut album, but failed to get his label to sign the band. He also co-wrote Reunion's 1974 pop hit "Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)"... ALEXANDER TORADZE, a classical pianist and Soviet defector renowned for his performances of Russian composers.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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The Washington Post |
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| Live Nation subsidiaries got millions in aid meant for indie venues |
| By Yeganeh Torbati and Tony Romm |
| Congress wrote a pandemic relief law that excluded Live Nation and companies like it. But the Small Business Administration gave nearly $19 million to Live Nation subsidiaries or companies in which it has a significant investment. |
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NPR Music |
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| Can Matt Pike face the music? |
| By Grayson Haver Currin |
| Matt Pike overcame long odds to find success in metal bands Sleep and High on Fire. But his deepening obsession with conspiracy theories has created a dissonant riff. |
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The New York Times |
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| How Gossip Is Remaking Online Hip-Hop Media |
| By Jon Caramanica, Jerry Barrow, Andre Gee... |
| Actual music can seem like an afterthought as digital coverage of the genre has tilted toward tabloidism. Are there other paths forward? |
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The Ringer |
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| Porridge Radio and the Redemptive Power of Cringe |
| By Justin Sayles |
| "What I’m trying to do is just acknowledge the painful things, or the shameful things, and talk about it." Two years after breaking out in the middle of a pandemic, Dana Margolin and her band have a new album and a new sense of comfort. |
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Zogblog |
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| Spotify Isn’t Netflix--For Better Or Worse |
| By Zack O'Malley Greenburg |
| Shares of both streaming giants have tumbled in the past month following negative Netflix news. Wall Street doesn’t seem to get that they're different. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “Heaven and Hell: 3rd Movement” |
| Vangelis |
| From his 1975 album "Heaven and Hell." Five years later, it became the theme of Carl Sagan's PBS series "Cosmos." |
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| Music | Media |
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Suggest a link  |
| “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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