| We just got bored waiting for Oasis to re-form. |
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| Happy 4/20 from Wiz Khalifa, partaking in the Dazed and Blazed Tour in Austin, Texas, Aug. 25, 2018. |
| (Rick Kern/WireImage/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
A(I)ddendum*
In Tuesday’s newsletter, I pledged to resist “a future where DRAKE licenses his voice, and gets royalties or the rights to songs from anyone who uses it.” I want a future, I wrote, where artists are free to use AI but AI is not free to use them.
But I also want a future, I might have added, that recognizes that controversial Drake channeler/copier GHOSTWRITER and others working in the same milieu are artists, too, potentially no different than, say, DANGER MOUSE, FRANK OCEAN, LED ZEPPELIN, GEORGE LUCAS or so many others who came before, repurposing, revising, reconsidering and recreating voices of their past, some figuratively, some literally, some transparently, some less so. Art and influence are sometimes wound tightly together at the start. Serious creative movements sometimes begin as jokes, or as offenses to acceptable tastes. This is going to be complicated. Even if you could stop the technology, which you can’t, you can’t stop pop, which ghostwriter’s “HEART ON MY SLEEVE,” whatever else you want to call it, most definitely is.
“There is more opportunity in exploring this technology than trying to shut it down,” musician and technologist HOLLY HERNDON tells the New York Times. “As an artist I am interested in what it means for someone to be me, with my permission, and maybe even be better at being me in different ways. The creative possibilities there are fascinating and will change art forever.”
The emphasis, she and others are suggesting, should be less on regulation and restriction and more on proper compensation. “We just have to figure out the terms and tech,” Herndon says. (And maybe also solve for who specifically those terms are benefiting, DAMON KRUKOWSKI writes in an essay that gives this debate yet another twist.)
Some might say we need to consider, as part of all this, how future ghostwriters themselves get paid. Because they, too, will be creating. And their work, too, will be downloaded, studied, remixed, reimagined and copied by future successors, human and robot alike.
(*There are probably more addenda to come.)
Dot Dot Dot
FRANK OCEAN pulls out of COACHELLA weekend two, after performing weekend one’s most scrutinized, debated, scientifically researched, post-mortemed set, the only one that warranted an insider account by two podcasting ex hockey players. BLINK-182 reportedly will step up to fill in Sunday’s headlining slot, all the stories about this being the first Coachella with no white headliners notwithstanding... “Music is music regardless of its age,” says CEO HARTWIG MASUCH of BMG, which believes it’s the first big music company to merge its new-release and catalog divisions. The quote is undeniably true. The news will be a little more interesting if another company whose product line isn’t quite so catalog-heavy decides to follow suit... Cassettes aren’t exactly flying off the shelves in England—total sales were less than 200,000 nationwide in 2022—but the number has gone up every year for the past decade, according to the BRITISH PHONOGRAPHIC INDUSTRY. “It’s something at a lower level than vinyl, but it is happening,” a BPI spokesperson says... HARRY STYLES, KID HARPOON, CLEO SOL and INFLO are the top nominees for the IVOR NOVELLO AWARDS, which honor songwriting in Britain and Ireland. The ceremony will be held May 18 in London... ADAM NEELY has some tips for musicians trying to fly with their instruments, including the underrated hide-it-behind-your-back-when-checking-in maneuver. He also has some well-earned frustration with “a bizarre legal purgatory where the law and airline policies do not reflect what’s going on in the cabin.”
Rest in Peace
K-pop singer MOONBIN, best known as one-fifth of the boy band Astro... IVAN “MAMÃO” CONTI, drummer for the Brazilian jazz-funk group Azymuth... Guitarist OTIS REDDING III, soul music heir who co-founded and co-led the family band the Reddings in the 1980s.
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| - Matty Karas, curator |
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ELLE |
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| 'Nobody Can Take Your Power': Megan Thee Stallion in Her Own Words |
| By Megan Thee Stallion and Evette Dionne |
| Megan Thee Stallion faced vitriol from gossip blogs, strangers, and even peers after coming forward about her shooting by Tory Lanez in July 2020. For the first and only time since her assailant’s guilty verdict, she discusses moving past what happened. |
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The Blog Era |
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| The Blog Era Ep. 1: The Ballad of Joe Budden |
| By Eric Rosenthal, Jeff Rosenthal and ItsTheReal |
| At the turn of the century, a high school dropout named Joe Budden put in the work and earned his place at Def Jam as the next big thing. But his downfall as a major label artist would run concurrent with an industry out of touch and fast on the decline. What so many didn't see was that out from that rubble would come the blogs. |
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Tidal |
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| Newark Vibe: How Jersey Club Won |
| By Kristin Corry |
| Today, Jersey club music is a global sensation -- thriving on TikTok, utilized by Drake and Lil Uzi Vert and resonating throughout the Hot 100. But its deep roots are defined by hard-earned regional innovation. |
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Twenty Thousand Hertz |
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| The Spatial Race |
| By Dallas Taylor, Andrew Anderson, Simon Blumlein... |
| In the 1960s, stereo sound revolutionized the music industry. But a pioneering engineer named Alan Blumlein had actually invented stereo a full three decades earlier. Due to tragic events in World War II, his innovations were forgotten for decades. |
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The New Yorker |
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| Kara Jackson’s Plaintive, Playful Folk Songs |
| By Hanif Abdurraqib |
| On her début LP, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?” the poet and singer-songwriter makes music that is spare yet expansive and able to surprise. |
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interdependence.fm |
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| Latent space exploration with Damien Roach aka patten |
| By Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Damien Roach |
| We caught up with Damien Roach, aka patten, aka 555-5555, to discuss the need for new language to navigate the abstract implications of machine learning for our understanding of art, and the limitations of the modernist approach. We also discussed his beautiful new record "Mirage FM" created in part with Riffusion, a text-to-audio model. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “James Joint/James Joint II” |
| Rihanna/James Fauntleroy |
| Two puffs of this mini Rihanna masterpiece, which she wrote with Fauntleroy and Shea Taylor. Happy 4/20 to those who celebrate. |
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| Music | Media |
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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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