| Now as part of the initiation ceremony I get to find out about the secret handshake... there is one, right? |
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| Workin' it: Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Missy Elliott at the Palladium, Los Angeles, October 2003. |
| (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
The Rubberband Starts to Jam
MISSY ELLIOTT! The SPINNERS!! GEORGE MICHAEL!!! KOOL HERC!!!! CHAKA CHAKA CHAKA CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN!!!!!
There are eight other new plaques being prepared for the ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME, including one for a woman who’s never played a concert in the U.S. and one for a man who celebrated his 90th birthday this past weekend with his billionth and billionth-and-first US concerts, and a handful of plaques *not* being prepared that make me want to cancel a few hundred of my fellow voters, as is the case every year. But if you had put those exact five boldface names on your ballot (which you couldn’t since two of them weren’t actually on it) and mailed it to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, you could walk away from the post office knowing you’d just voted for one of the most entertaining and worthy classes in Rock Hall history.
SUPA DUPA FLY. “I’LL BE AROUND.” FAITH. The BACK TO SCHOOL JAM. “SWEET THING.” For all the Hall’s well-chronicled mistakes, oversights and WTFs over the years, that sounds like a concert/party/institution I’d want to fly the flag for. Put all that in a room in your museum and I’ll spend my entire weekend there. Bring on (bring back?) the free-for-all induction night all-star jam, no TV cameras please. Get ur freak on.
But what I really want to use this space for today is to defend one of the weirdest and most indefensible choices the Hall has ever made—reserving one of its precious few awards for “Musical Excellence” for a man who’s never played or written a note of music you’ve ever heard but who did write the words “Marconi plays the mamba” and “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids... And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.” The Hall has an abysmal record of recognizing women for musical excellence, and while it’s been working to fix its gender issues in other areas, it keeps coming up weirdly short on this one. Including Chaka Khan this year, the Hall has recognized two women, ever, for that. It still has never recognized CAROL KAYE, DIONNE WARWICK or SHEILA E for their virtuosity, but it has now recognized the man who wrote the words to “CROCODILE ROCK.”
But here’s the thing about BERNIE TAUPIN—those strange and awkward words, some of which sound like he’s writing in an unfamiliar language, tend to sound amazing coming out of ELTON JOHN’s mouth, and Elton John is almost pathologically incapable of writing a good song without them (seriously, check out John’s non-Taupin oeuvre one day when you’re bored). Which means, ironically, that one of rock’s most notoriously awful lyricists is also one of its... “best” would be a strange word to use here... but let’s just say Missy Elliott and future Hall of Famers OUTKAST have nothing on Bernie Taupin when it comes to “weird” and Elton John wouldn’t have come anywhere near the pop charts, never mind the Rock Hall of Fame, without him. And every once in a while he comes up with something genuinely beautiful like “Oh it's ten below zero / And we’re about / To abandon / Our plans for the day.” He was a terrible choice this year and if they need someone to write his plaque, I’ll volunteer in a heartbeat.
Shoutout also SHERYL CROW, AL KOOPER, LINK WRAY, DON CORNELIUS... And RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, who, like Chaka Khan and the Spinners, had been nominated numerous times by the Hall’s nominating committee and rejected numerous times by its 1,200-ish voters. The voters finally said yes to Rage and the Spinners and one of the small insider committees that chooses the specialty honors added Khan to the mix (“We monitor the performers vote and we do watch to see if there’s anything we need to balance,” Hall chair JOHN SYKES told Billboard Wednesday in one of the clearest explanations the Hall has ever made of this part of the process.) Next year, please: The SHANGRI-LAS.
The inductions happen Nov. 3 at BARCLAYS CENTER in Brooklyn.
Etc Etc Etc
BYTEDANCE kills the free version of RESSO, its streaming service for India, Indonesia and Brazil, three of the world’s six biggest countries by population. Forcing users to subscribe “is likely to alienate a significant number of listeners” in those countries, Bloomberg reports, but appears to be part of a wider tech trend toward reducing free services and emphasizing profitability. Will more music services follow?... Judge to jury which began deliberating Wednesday afternoon in the ED SHEERAN / “LET’S GET IT ON” plagiarism case: “Independent creation is a complete defense, no matter how similar that song is"... San Francisco’s public library is partnering with AMOEBA on a BAY BEATS, a music streaming platform for local Bay Area artists, following in the footsteps of libraries in New Orleans, Nashbille and elsewhere.
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| - Matty Karas, curator |
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| copywritten so don't copy me |
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The Ringer |
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| The Speed Bump |
| By Julianna Ress |
| Those chipmunk-pitched edits are more than just a viral craze. They’re a new path to success for a lot of musicians. Here’s how sped-up songs are changing the industry--and what they say about remix culture and art. |
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The Believer |
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| Lost Ones |
| By Ross Scarano |
| Memories of rare music can persist for many years. |
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| i ain't braggin' cause i'm the one |
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Zogblog |
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| An Elegant Solution To Music's A.I. Conundrum |
| By Zack O'Malley Greenburg |
| Compensating artists when machines "cover" their voices could be as simple as the system for paying songwriters when their work gets covered. Just ask Grimes. |
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The Washington Post |
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| A terrible decision on AI-made images hurts creators |
| By Edward Lee |
| Edward Lee is a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of " Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment ." Who owns the copyright to images generated using artificial intelligence? In a recent decision, the U.S. |
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Longreads |
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| Cocooning |
| By Samuel Ernest |
| In the dorm, friends were playing the new record of a local band, "Too Bright" by Perfume Genius, and I couldn’t tell if I liked it. The songs were tender and fierce, sometimes one or the other, but often both at once, the singer’s voice trembling like someone who has ever only whispered learning to shout... |
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Populism |
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| Keep running up that hill: Rock Hall 2023 |
| By Evelyn McDonnell |
| When I edit students' papers, I always try to give them positive notes first. Then I hit them with what they did wrong. In that spirit, let's talk about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2023, announced today. |
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| what we're into |
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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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