| As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us. |
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| In the before times, when money grew on artist's clothes: Santigold in Long Beach, Calif., Sept. 29, 2018. |
| (Scott Dudelson/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us.”
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- Santigold
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| rantnrave:// |
Breaking
Apologies for the late send today. Server issues. A reminder that our platforms our unstable things that sometimes cough, sputter and break. Or maybe they just need a day off.
This long, thoughtful note from SANTIGOLD, announcing the cancellation of her “Holified” tour, which was scheduled to begin in two weeks in Atlanta, crystallizes what’s been on a lot of people’s minds—and vans and tour buses—in music’s allegedly post-pandemic landscape. A landscape of too many tours and not enough venues or crew or even fans. Skyrocketing prices for seemingly everything. People still getting sick. “All of that,” Santigold wrote, “on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.”
To wit:
The Guardian’s LAURA SNAPES on artists from JUSTIN BIEBER and SHAWN MENDES to WET LEG and DISCLOSURE having a hard time making it work mentally, and having the courage to say so: "This week, Arlo Parks became the latest, cancelling a run of US shows and explaining how the relentless grind of the past 18 months had left her ‘exhausted and dangerously low.’”
Billboard’s STEVE KNOPPER on the still very present risk of Covid-19: “It’s terrifying going into a tour,” Cigarettes After Sex manager ED HARRIS tells him. There’s the virus itself and there’s the economic damage it can leave behind, especially in a landscape where insurance coverage for Covid cancellations is hard to find. (Also not always available: Insurance coverage for hurricanes and other storms.) If you’re RINGO STARR’s ALL-STARR BAND and two of your guitarists test positive, at least there’s room backstage and in the hotel to isolate. If you’re Cigarettes After Sex, maybe not.
LUMINEERS tour manager SARA FULL on the roadie shortage: "It’s more work and more pressure and less rest time for all of our touring crews. Doing a stretch as long as we did, by the end of it you could just see that people were a little weary of dealing with labor issues every day."
AROOJ AFTAB on the math: “Touring has been amazing. We headlined a ton, had massive turnouts and have proven ourselves in all the markets. Yet still, running 10s of thousands in debt from the tour and I’m being told that it’s ‘normal’. Why is this normal. This should not be normalized.”
Aftab is continuing with her tour. Santigold is not. The personal math will differ from artist to artist, tour to tour, human to human.
“I want to tell you that for me it has taken a toll - through anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, vertigo, chronic pain, and missing crucial time with my children,” Santigold wrote. “It feels like I’ve been hanging on, trying to make it to the ever-distant finish line, but my vehicle’s been falling apart the whole time... And here I am thinking, ‘Should I just hold the doors up and run?’ And my little heart that has been working way beyond its limits, my whole body in fact and my soul too, are screaming at me ‘NO muthaf****a! Pull.The F***. Over!’”
Rest in Peace
Watching JOE BUSSARD listen to one of his 15,000 78 RPM records “is a spiritually rousing experience,” Amanda Petrusich wrote in “Do Not Sell at Any Price,” her 2014 book about the 78 collector underground. “He often appears incapable of physically restraining himself, as if the melody were a call to arms, an incitement it would be immoral if not impossible to ignore: he had to move.” This is as beautiful a description of a record collector as I’ve read because it cuts to the very core: If you’re not deeply moved by the music embedded on the discs you’ve amassed (on floor-to-ceiling shelves, arranged in an order no one but you will ever be able to discern), if you’re not in fact called by them, why are you doing this? And if you are, how can you not? You could, and should, apply this to almost any endeavor in the music business. Bussard, one of the world’s foremost collectors of early 20th century American music, died Monday, age 86, leaving behind those records and a legacy of musical preservation. He loved playing his shellac discs for fellow enthusiasts. He played them on radio shows he hosted, and helped reissue some of his rarest sides on CD. He started his own 78 label, Fonotone, after everyone else had stopped, to produce new recordings of old-time music, including the first-ever recordings of guitarist John Fahey. He kept looking for more. His collection, Joe Heim wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year, “is his life’s work. It is his life.”
Also: SUE MINGUS, who spent the last 40 years of her life zealously protecting, promoting and expanding the legacy of her late husband, Charles Mingus... Los Angeles rapper KEE RICHES, at least the 22nd rapper murdered in the US in 2022. Inspired by the Nipsey Hussle, the 23-year-old was known for giving back to his community... RICHIE GALLO, a longtime sales exec for A&M, Universal and Rhino.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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The Quietus |
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| Into The Pre-Gap: Forty Years Of The CD |
| By Daryl Worthington |
| 40 years since the first album was released on CD, Daryl Worthington pays tribute to the unique experimental potential of the format, explores how it changed the parameters of the album itself, and wonders why it’s still not thought of as fondly as cassettes and LPs. |
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Streaming Machinery |
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| Notes on Roon |
| By G.C. Stein |
| Roon is more than a great software: in a way, it feel it is what the future of iTunes “should” had been. |
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The New Yorker |
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| Solomun, the D.J. Who Keeps Ibiza Dancing |
| By Ed Caesar |
| He leads a manic, exhausting life-but when he’s guiding clubbers through one of his marathon sets it feels like time has been suspended. |
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Vulture |
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| Life, Death, and Titus Andronicus |
| By Craig Jenkins |
| Frontman Patrick Stickles used his band’s new album to process loss. Now he just needs to get their van fixed. |
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Sonos |
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| Bird Songs for Breezy (Honoring Jaimie Branch), Part 2 |
| By Dada Strain and Piotr Orlov |
| The final episode of Dada Strain Radio’s first season honors the memory of the late trumpeter/composer/improviser Jaimie “Breezy” Branch with music by Branch and memories from family and friends, including Kate Branch, Angel Bat David, Lester St. Louis and others. |
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| steady breaking me on down |
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No Depression |
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| Jake Blount on Traditional Music’s Built-In Science Fiction |
| By Jake Blount |
| To be immersed in a folk tradition like old-time stringband music — one that uses archival life-support technologies to forestall birth, death, and the onward march of time — is to dwell a few short steps from the realm of science fiction. To be Black in the tradition necessitates traversing that gap. |
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Dazed Digital |
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| Sky Ferreira is ready for her rebirth |
| By Dominique Sisley |
| Sky Ferreira’s fantasy lens has kept us wonky since 2013 and now, nearly a decade on, her long-awaited new album, Masochism, is nearly here. So what’s in the stars, Sky? |
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Pollstar |
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| The Labor Shortage and Its Impact on Live |
| By J.R. Lind |
| Unemployment in the United States is at near-historic lows. The July jobless rate of 3.5% was the lowest in a half-century. The number crept up slightly in August, but 3.7% is still historically low and meets the general standard of what economists consider maximum employment. The devil, as ever, is in the details. |
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interdependence.fm |
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| Post-Individualism, Metalabels and Web 3 with Yancey Strickler |
| By Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Yancey Stickler |
| A joy to welcome Yancey Stickler to discuss his idea of Post-Individualism and his new project Metalabel. We also get into his prior work founding Kickstarter, its parallels to web 3, and new proposals to fund artistic scenes. |
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Norah Jones Is Playing Along: |
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| Norah Jones Is Playing Along: Jeff Tweedy |
| By Norah Jones and Jeff Tweedy |
| Norah joins Jeff in the studio to chat and play duo versions of 5 of her favorites songs of his, including ‘Jesus, Etc.,’ ‘Muzzle of Bees’ and ‘Sunken Treasure’. They dive into how he’s made music a family pastime and writing the perfect set list. |
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Pitchfork |
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| Pitchfork's 250 Best Songs of the 1990s |
| By Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Andy Cush, Judy Berman... |
| The tracks that defined the ’90s, including Björk, Biggie, Mariah, Bikini Kill, Aaliyah, 2Pac, and many, many more. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “Shlut” |
| Shygirl |
| From "Nymph," out Friday on Because Music. |
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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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