Search Results for: Music

Southern Music’s Racial Double Standard

We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun.

Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the man with the gun in his hand.

Think for a second about the history of Southern music. Our Appalachian musical heritage has a long and grand tradition of what the academics call “murder ballads” and what the musicians just call “killin’ songs.” The archetype, perhaps, is “Knoxville Girl,” in which the protagonist beats a girl with a stick “until the ground around her within her blood did flow,” then drags her by her hair into the river to drown.

Southerners have written and still sing hundreds of ballads about killings. We sing them at festivals and around campfires. Academic musicologists study them as cultural artifacts. Though they are dark indeed, no one finds them too objectionable. Johnny Cash “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” and we’re not scared. We just love Johnny more.

But when the gun in the song is in the hand of a black man, things get weird. The song becomes less cultural artifact and more an object of fear. We reflexively object. We worry about what the children will hear.

You think we have a little double-standard problem here? Yeah, me too.

Chuck Reece writing in the Bitter Southerner about the rapper Killer Mike.

Read the story here

Photo: Mads Danquah, Flickr

Our Music, Our Lives: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s reading list from Emily includes stories about Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer, Jenny Lewis, Mykki Blanco, and more.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 24, 2014

Our Music, Our Lives: A Reading List

Turn the music up and tune into these five articles.

1. “The Soundtrack to My Late Blooming Sexual Awakening: A Round Table.” (Rachel Vorona Cote, Kirsten Schofield, Sarah Seltzer, and Lindsay King-Miller, The Hairpin, August 2014)

What maelstrom of musicians is this?! These four authors elaborate on everyone from Usher to Fiona Apple as they reminisce about their teenage dreams.

Read more…

Taylor Swift Is a Music Business Genius: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

A brief guide to the music business, according to Taylor Swift: Featuring the Wall Street Journal, Planet Money and The New Yorker.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 7, 2014

Taylor Swift Is a Music Business Genius: A Reading List

Taylor Swift has done it again, this time getting Apple to change its streaming deal with artists. Here’s a collection of stories on how the pop star runs the music industry. 

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1. The Future of Music Is a Love Story (Taylor Swift, Wall Street Journal)

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift says the future of music will be saved by this—the ability of a star to make millions of real friendships:

There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people’s lives forever. The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.

However, some artists will be like finding “the one.” We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.

2. The Secret Genius of Taylor Swift (Zoe Chace, Planet Money, 2012)

It’s not just the emotional bonds that will matter—it’s also the ability to thrive in a fragmented world where streaming overtakes individual album sales. Planet Money reported in 2012 that Swift and her team still know the best ways to move albums:

As Paul Resnikoff, editor and founder of Digital Music News points out, she has chosen from the toolbox only the outlets that would give her the most money for every album sold: Outlets that pushed a full album purchase.

The first week her album came out, you could only get it in a few key places: iTunes, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Target. You could order a Papa Johns pizza and receive the CD — at the sticker price of around 14 bucks.

But the tools Swift didn’t use are as important than the ones she did. By refusing to release her singles on Spotify, or any other streaming site, she pushed her fans to buy the album. Spotify pays the artist pennies on the dollar. Taylor Swift skipped it.

3. You Belong With Me (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 2011)

As the New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe noted in 2011, there were early signs that Swift had a keen business sense:

Early on, Swift assumed that she would follow her parents into business. “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be,” she recalled, during an online Q. & A. with fans. “We’d be at, like, the first day of school and they’re, like, ‘So what do you guys want to be when you grow up?’ And everybody’s, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ Or, like, ‘I want to be a ballerina!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna be a financial adviser!’ ” But she eventually had a country-music epiphany, inspired by listening to nineties crossover hits—Faith Hill, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. The melodies were good, but she especially liked the storytelling. “It was just such a given—I want to do that!” she said.

4. Taylor Swift Is the Music Industry (Devin Leonard, Bloomberg Businessweek)

After selling 1.29 million copies of her new album 1989, then pulling her music from the streaming service Spotify, Devin Leonard goes to Nashville to meet Scott Borchetta, founder of Swift’s label Big Machine Records, to understand the economics of being a label in 2014:

For that reason, Borchetta and Swift chose to initially withhold 1989 from Spotify. They did the same thing with Red in its early weeks. “We’re not against anybody, but we’re not responsible for new business models,” Borchetta says. “If they work, fantastic, but it can’t be at the detriment of our own business. That’s what Spotify is.”

Photo: evarinaldiphotography, Flickr

The Business of Merchandising Pop Music

Brian Epstein was the manager of a family-owned business called North End Music Stores in Liverpool, England. He began hearing a lot about a new group called The Beatles, who were playing at the Cavern Club. So he went to hear them, and one day, proposed a management contract.

The four lads, which included drummer Pete Best at the time, eventually agreed, and a five-year deal was signed in 1962. With that, Epstein created a company called NEMS to manage The Beatles. As the band became popular in England, NEMS began to be overwhelmed with product licensing offers.

But once the band hit America, NEMS became besieged with merchandising requests, so Epstein reluctantly set up a subsidiary called Seltaeb to deal with the offers. Seltaeb was Beatles spelled backwards.

As Epstein saw it, the merchandising was just a PR abstraction at best, so he asked a friend to take the management of Seltaeb off his hands. That friend, Nicky Byrne, suggested a 90/10 split, which, by the way, was 90% for Byrne, 10% for The Beatles.

Epstein agreed immediately, thinking that 10% of incidental merchandising was better than nothing. And in the stroke of the pen, lost untold millions for The Beatles.

CBC Radio’s Under the Influence podcast, on the marketing of rock ‘n’ roll. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: moonierocks, Flickr

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Fan Letters to a Troubled Country Music Star

Longreads Pick

Joe Hagan stumbles onto old fan mail sent to 1970s country-R&B star Charlie Rich. The fans share their most intimate secrets with a musician who had his own troubled life:

I felt drawn to Charlie Rich. For me, he was part of the landscape of family road trips in the late 1970s, lonely days driving with my parents in a VW van through the muggy Southeast in summer, across Louisiana and Alabama, up to the Carolinas and Virginia, as my father, a Coast Guard officer, moved me and my sisters from one military station to another. In memory, the sun sets in a Polaroid-orange glow over an Interstate horizon as the opening piano rolls of “Behind Closed Doors” come through the radio. Years later, Charlie Rich’s voice seemed to plumb some blue depth in me, a subterranean loneliness. But he was long dead by then and, unlike Tara, I was in thrall to a forgotten singer, left to chase a ghost: Charlie Rich, the tragic soul man whose legacy was largely forgotten after his brief period of fame. He was a major American artist whose life had traced the history of rock & roll, r&b, and soul; the definitive missing link between Elvis Presley and Ray Charles.

Author: Joe Hagan
Source: Oxford American
Published: Jan 8, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,114 words)

The Producers: A Reading List on Musical Masterminds

From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love.

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1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012)

In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a singer from Muskogee, Oklahoma and a two-man team of Norwegian producers. Meet Ester Dean and Stargate, pop’s unknown puppeteers.

2. “Disco Architect: 12 x 12 with Brass Construction’s Randy Muller,” by Andrew Mason (Wax Poetics, Fall 2004)

The true story of how one 18-year-old, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, became the unsung godfather of 1970s disco.

3. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee,” by Kembrew McLeod (Stay Free! Magazine, 2002)

Public Enemy burst onto the 1980s hip-hop scene with a sound unlike anything the world had ever heard. Their groundbreaking beats were supplied by The Bomb Squad, a two-man team who turned sampling into a complex, noisy and compelling new art form that changed hip-hop forever.

4. “Philippe Zdar: The French Touch,” by Amber Bravo (The Fader, June 2012)

Is Philippe Zdar the best producer you’ve never heard of? From Parisian disco and Phoenix’s “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” to records from Cat Power, Beastie Boys and Cassius, you’ve probably felt his influence, even if you didn’t know his name.

5. “Arthur Baker: From Planet Rock To Star Maker,” by Richard Buskin (Sound on Sound, June 1997)

How Arthur Baker, a failed disco DJ from Boston, made his musical mark on the 1980s—from hip-hop (Afrika Bambaata’s “Planet Rock”) and dance (New Order’s “Confusion”), to pop (New Edition’s “Candy Girl”) and rock.

6. “Rick Rubin: The Intuitionist,” by Will Welch (The Fader, 2004)

From Kanye’s “Yeezus” and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” to Johnny Cash’s cover of NIN’s “Hurt”, Rick Rubin has been the music world’s (mad)man behind the curtain.

Marketing Portland’s Music to the Masses

Longreads Pick

A profile of the music supervisors in Portland, Ore. who are getting local musicians exposure and money by licensing their music for films and advertisements:

“By profession, Matarazzo is known as a ‘music supervisor.’ Marketing companies, brands, and filmmakers hire her to find that perfect song—such as an electronic track by the artist Dabrye that sonically propelled a Motorola commercial in which a sleek room fractures and folds up into a Moto Razr phone. When she can’t find the right song, she hires someone to write it, to order. The string quartet she commissioned from the young composer Nicholas Wright for Nike’s ‘Find Your Greatness’ London Olympics spot, showing everyday athletes around the world, won the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ award in June for best original music. Often, the tracks she discovers come from Portland’s fertile independent music scenes. She’s placed the swinging rock of Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside in ads for Target and J. Crew, casting the band’s songs farther than any radio play has. Given the otherwise dismal state of the music industry, any of those phone calls Matarazzo relentlessly places or receives could change the life of a starving songwriter or a scruffy band.

“This power has helped Matarazzo and a few local colleagues make Portland a fulcrum for a major shift in how the music business works, especially for the kind of independent, edgy, underground artists the city prides itself on breeding.”

Published: Jul 23, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,445 words)

My Top 5 #Longreads on the Business of Film, Music and Books

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Mark Armstrong (that’s not him above) is the founder of Longreads, and editorial director for Pocket.

This past week’s Steven Soderbergh speech on “The State of the Cinema” isn’t as big a downer for film lovers as these choice quotes might have you believe:

“Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained—except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it.”

Or:

“When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong.”

Soderbergh does offer some encouraging news about the amount of independent films being distributed:

“In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films…”

The downside, of course, is that it’s harder to get them seen:

“…and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.”

For further reading, the Soderbergh speech reminded me of a few other excellent #longreads about the business of art:

1. “Letter to Emily White at All Songs Considered” (David Lowery, June 2012)

Lowery, the founder of bands including Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, paints a bleak picture of the state of the music industry, particularly when it comes to professional studio musicians.

2. “The Business of Literature” (Richard Nash, VQR, Spring 2013)

Nash offers historical context for those worried about the future of books: “Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is.”

3. “Some Thoughts on Our Business” (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Letters of Note, 1991)

Katzenberg’s memo to colleagues at Disney, which in addition to having allegedly inspired the memo in Jerry Maguire, also addresses the blockbuster mentality.

4. “I’m for Sale” (Genevieve Smith, Elle, April 2013)

Smith searches for a balance between creative fulfillment and financial security. 

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

(Photo by Thore Siebrands, via Wikimedia Commons)