Pitchfork

In the swinging 60s, Caribbean immigrants and born-and-bred Londoners came together to create a new pop-rock sound.

Pitchfork looks at the life and work of the late musician Mark Linkous.

A look at why a growing tide of musicians are moving their shows away from sweaty clubs and into cozy living rooms, and the cottage industry that has sprung up around the production of so-called house shows.

Sales of vinyl records have skyrocketed, but its comeback has come with many growing pains.

In its heyday, Billboard’s R&B chart credibly reflected the tastes of the genre’s core fans, paving the way for artists like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Richie, Prince, and Whitney Houston. But now, a new digital methodology has rendered the tally a shell of its former self, replete with dubious racial and cultural consequences.

Over on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, however, those millions in digital sales had no impact. Billboard still wasn’t factoring iTunes and its ilk into its black music chart in the late 00s; only physical singles sales still counted. To say the least, this was a rather surreal chart policy for the time. If the new millennium had been tough on brick-and-mortar music chains—shuttering the nation’s Tower Records, Coconuts, and Strawberries franchises—it was downright brutal on the smaller shops that reported to Billboard’s R&B charts, which were disappearing just as quickly. And anyway, so few physical singles were being released in the 00s that whatever black-owned-and-oriented music stores remained didn’t have much to report to the chart.

Ten years after the singer-songwriter’s death, friends and bandmates tell the story of his life and career:

“I had a copy of the finished cassette on me all the time and I was listening to it all the time. I had a lot of friends at Sub Pop and Matador and Cavity Search and all these record labels, and I was hanging out with them because I was promoting [Heatmiser], and I needed these labels to put their bands on tour with my band, but I didn’t burst into Cavity Search Records like, ‘You have to play this! It’s the best thing you’ve ever heard and you need to release it right now.’ I was probably just like, ‘I’ve got this solo cassette by Elliott.’ ‘What? Elliott does solo stuff?’ I put it on and their jaws dropped. They released it without changing a thing. That’s Roman Candle.”

How did the 1970s and Los Angeles end up creating such idiosyncratic singer-songwriters as Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks?

“The first thing you should know about Harry Nilsson is that he won a Grammy for covering a schmaltzy Badfinger ballad called ‘Without You’ in 1971. The second thing you should know is that I once read an interview with Nilsson where he claimed to have recorded ‘Without You’ after having taken what he described as ‘a little mescaline.’ The third thing is that ‘Without You’ is on an album called Nilsson Schmilsson, a title basically designed to make fun of Nilsson’s name, and that the cover of Nilsson Schmilsson is a picture of Harry Nilsson, unshaven, wearing a bathrobe.”

?uestlove might not rap, but he’s still one of hip-hop’s best storytellers, and he had plenty of yarns when we spoke with him recently about all of the above– including the time Puffy screamed on him for an hour and how he bonded with Jay-Z over their mutual love of “The Simpsons”. One of these days, ?uestlove will write a memoir, and it will be incredible. Consider the following a preview.