I thought it would make a great T-shirt. Like, really good merch. Including the grammatical mistakes—I wanna leave those in there.

Out and proud hip-hop artist Le1f tells us what he thinks of World Star Hip Hop’s recent grammatically-challenged headline, “This Is What Happens When Rappers Start Admitting Their Gay? Hip-Hop Artist Le1f—Wut.”

I’m a musician and I just rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head. FYI, you can both cut an album and release a book of sheet music for that album. This is how I learned to play all of Tori Amos’ catalog when I was twelve. This is a thing that is already done. They probably already HAVE done this for prior Beck records, minus the fancy art that, I’m sure, gives them an excuse to drive up the price. If you’re only doing half of that thing, all you’re doing is encouraging people to do something they can — and do — already do, and removing your half of the equation. Ya lazy. Get out.

I Know You Will Be Happy Here 

A musician’s take on the whole Beck releasing 20 songs in sheet music form.

(Source: nprmusic)

nwkarchivist:

Happy 69th, Mick Jagger!

The Lucifer of rock, the paradigm of the rock superstar as Pied Piper, tribal medicine man, unholy roller, the Dionysus of the rebellious young millions who in the 60’s made rock music the official language of their unfocused but unmistakable disaffection from tradition.

Newsweek January 4, 1971

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tRdBsnX4N4

andrewromano:

He heard voices, did drugs and fell apart. Can the Beach Boys’ reunion help put Brian Wilson back together again?

To answer that question, I spent weeks observing rehearsals, interviewing the band, attending concerts, and listening to the forthcoming album. My feature story appears in this week’s Newsweek. Here’s how it begins: 

Brian Wilson, the lumbering savant who wrote, produced and sang an outlandish number of immortal pop songs back in the 1960s with his band, the Beach Boys, is swiveling in a chair, belly out, arms dangling, next to his faux-grand piano at the cavernous Burbank, Calif. studio where he and the rest of the group’s surviving members are rehearsing for their much-ballyhooed 50th Anniversary reunion tour, which is set to start in three days. At 24, Wilson shelved what would have been his most avant-garde album, Smile, and retreated for decades into a dusky haze of drug abuse and mental illness; now, 45 years later, he has reemerged, stable but still somewhat screwy, to give the whole sun-and-surf thing a final go.

Before that can happen, though, the reconstituted Beach Boys must learn how to sing “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the first new A-side that Wilson has written for the band since 1980. They are not entirely happy about this. Earlier, I heard keyboardist Bruce Johnston, who replaced Wilson on the road in 1965, talking to the group’s tour manager about an upcoming satellite-radio gig. “Just so you know,” the manager said, “Sirius wants you to perform ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ tomorrow night.”

“Oh really?” Johnston responded. “And how are we going to do that when we don’t know it?”

And so the band has gathered, once again, around Wilson’s piano. I’d like to imagine that this is how it was when they first accustomed their vocal cords to, say, “California Girls.” Except it’s not, exactly: back then, in 1965, Wilson was the maestro, conducting each singer as his falsetto floated skyward and his fingers pecked out the accompaniment. Now he stares at a teleprompter and sings when he’s told to sing, ceding his bench to one member of the 10-man backing band that will buffer the Beach Boys in concert and looking on while another orchestrates the harmonies and handles the loftier notes. At first, the blend is rough: Wilson strains to hit the high point of the hook; frontman Mike Love and guitarist Al Jardine miss their cues. But after eight or nine passes the stray voices begin to mesh. They begin to sound like the Beach Boys. Close your eyes, shutting out Wilson’s swoosh of silver hair and Love’s four golden rings, and 1965 isn’t such a stretch.

Or it isn’t until someone’s iPhone rings. Jardine’s. He turns away from the piano and presses the device to his ear. “I’m going to have to call you back, because—wait, what?” He hangs up, shaking his head. “Dick Clark just passed away,” he says. The room begins to murmur; the makeup lady covers her mouth with her hand.

Over the next few minutes, I watch as each Beach Boy absorbs the news. Love makes light of it, pretending to strangle Jardine behind his back. “You’re next, Al,” he purrs. Johnston, a former A&R man at Columbia, pitches Clark’s death as an angle for my story. “It’s kind of ironic to have our television hero in music pass away while we’re doing this next big move,” he explains

And then there’s Wilson—always the conduit, the live wire, the pulsing limbic system of the Beach Boys. As his biographer David Leaf once put it, “Brian Wilson’s special magic in the early and mid-1960s was that he was at one with his audience … Brian had a teenage heart, until it was broken.” At first, Wilson says nothing. Then I overhear him talking to Jardine.

“We’re 70 fucking years old,” he says. “You’ll be 70 in September. I’ll be 70 in June. I’m worried about being 70.”

“It’s still a few months off,” Jardine says.

“That’s true,” Wilson mutters. He pauses for a few seconds, looking away from his bandmate. “I want to know how did we get here?” he finally says. “How did we ever fucking get here? That’s what I want to know.”

Read the rest here. 

Photo: Brian in his Bel Air home studio, circa 1970-71.

Got your #longread for the week.

Japan’s biggest pop star isn’t even a real person—she’s a hologram.

This is ‘Tiger Girls,’ Myanmar’s first all-girl band which sings songs about freedom in a country in the midst of a political and cultural shift. They can’t play in clubs (lest the ‘Tiger Girls’ be dubbed prostitutes) so theirs is a world of radio stations and private events. Their plan? “To push the limits of the country’s censorship board,” Heidi Mitchell writes on the Beast, ”which regulates virtually everything: costumes, lyrics, dance moves, videos, album titles.” These girls are badass! Team Tiger Girls right here.

Packs of bikini-clad sprites rub shoulders with shirtless bros rocking armbands. There’s an abundance of neon and a handful of enterprising ravers hawking glow-sticks for two dollars a pop out of backpacks. A drag queen in a silver latex bodysuit on stilts lumbers through the crowd, while a lithe, attractive brunette grinds on the lap of her buff, wheelchair-bound boyfriend. Celebrities like Paris Hilton and an incognito Selena Gomez mingle in the elevated VIP area by the main stage. Between the campground setting and the creative rave attire, it’s like Coachella on ecstasy.

We sent Marlow Stern to Florida for Miami Music Week and the Ultra Music Festival, and he had a pretty good time.

nwkarchivist:

When he leaned into the microphone, ripped off his black leather jacket and blasted, “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run,” the Jersey teeny-boppers went wild. After four foot-stomping encores they were ready to crown Bruce Springsteen the great white hope of rock ‘n’ roll.

Newsweek October 27, 1975

The Boss Is Back With A New Album. Here’s What Critics Are Saying.

Bruuuuuucce! 

In Search of Skrillex: A short documentary that investigates one musician’s very human struggle to bring electronic music into the mainstream. Director, Jacob Septimus.