Search Results for: music

The Rise and Fall of the Last TV Channel That Cared About Music

Longreads Pick

A requiem for the International Music Feed, a short-lived TV channel that had the distinction of being the last American music video network to play music videos 24/7.

Author: Lisa Mrock
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Sep 15, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,113 words)

The Harsh Realities of Being a Woman in the Music Industry

On Monday, Jessica Hopper (music writer, culture critic, author of the recent and wonderfully titled The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic) asked her Twitter followers a simple question:

“Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t “count”?”

Needless to say, more than a few people responded. After a short period of writing back encouraging, personal responses, Hopper started retweeting the stories en masse.

Over the past 48 hours, Hopper’s timeline has filled with hundreds of individual stories; specific events, conversations, and aggressions, relayed in 140 characters or less. If you were hanging around the internet yesterday—or at least certain corners of the internet—you probably heard people talking about what was going on, and urging you to head over to Hopper’s page for a look.

A Twitter user named Laupina put together a Storify of Hopper’s timeline from the period in question. It’s a brutal, intimate, moving, difficult to read, and also inspiring testament to what it’s like to a be woman in the music world.

And what’s it like to be a woman in the music world? You will be mercilessly hit on, sexually harassed, endlessly accused of being the girlfriend/sister/mom, treated like an imposter, made to justify your presence, possibly threatened with violence, and constantly on the lookout for whatever fresh hell (and/or groper in the mosh pit) might be coming your way next. And that’s just the very short version.

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What is Sista Grrrl’s Riot? Punk Music, Collaboration and Revolution

Photo: Kate Milford. Punk musician Tamar-kali Brown, founder of Sista Grrrl Riots, performs at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in 2010.

Vice’s new vertical, Broadly, is off to a strong start with reporting like Gaby Bess’ “Alternatives to Alternatives: the Black Grrrls Riot Ignored.” Tamar-kali Brown, Maya Glick, Simi Stone, and Honeychild Coleman founded Sista Grrrl Riots, an alternative safe space for black women punks to rock out and revolutionize. The founders continue to support each other and other women making music to this day.

On their first flyer:

“It was a lipstick heart with our silhouettes in it, like Charlie’s Angels, and we had weapons. I brought my father’s machetes and BB guns for our shoot.” But unlike the flyer’s silhouetted BB guns and machetes would suggest, the riot’s real ammunitions were electric violins, bass guitars, and the raging voices of women who were lifelong punk outsiders. On this momentous night at Brownies, a now-defunct rock club on Avenue A, these four women had found their place, playing to a packed crowd who could finally see versions of themselves onstage.

If you bore passing witness to this night, you might have casually referred to Brown, Glick, Stone, and Coleman as Riot Grrrls, if you didn’t know any better. They were girls. They were angry. They were tired of playing shitty gigs and taking a backseat to the boys. But these women would scoff at the thought of designating themselves “Riot Grrrls,” or just plain correct you. “You had Riot Grrrl,” Brown explained, “and this was a Sista Grrrl’s Riot.”

Their dedication to visibility and representation, in addition to sisterhood and killer musicianship, should not be underestimated:

The Riot Grrrl box may have been decidedly off-limits in the eyes of Brown and other black women who couldn’t see themselves in the movement, but as [Rhonda] Davis points out, these women shirked boxes, created their own wave, and reclaimed rock for black women. After all, rock music is black music. While the Sista Grrrls didn’t see themselves in Riot Grrrl or in the men they had been playing with in bands, they saw themselves in each other. “I got what Riot Grrrl was about. I didn’t think it was exclusive, but it didn’t feel inclusive to me,” said Brown. “I didn’t see myself or my story, and so that’s why Sista Grrrl came about later on–out of other women of color that I knew who were punk rock and navigated that scene and had similar feelings about it. Sista Grrrl was my response to Riot Grrrl because it just felt super white.”

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Hunting for Prince’s Secret Vault of Unreleased Music

Vice: Is there anything, just a taste, that you’d be able to share?

Mobeen Azhar: Yeah—OK, I want to know how to put this diplomatically—let me put it like this: One big theme which comes across no matter whom you speak to, in terms of people who have dealt with Prince—everyone respects him hugely, but if I had to sum up their experience in one word, that word would be control. And he has constructed this world in which, thankfully for him at least, he is in control of everything. He is one of the freest artists, you could say, in the world. He has a record contract only when he wants one. And unlike everyone else who is trying to make it in the music business, he will have record contracts that have special terms on them, distribution deals, where he can decide what he delivers, he can decide what’s on the record—he has his own studio for god’s sake—it’s not like he’s hiring studio time or the record company’s paying for anything.

Something else that’s snappier and isn’t mentioned in the documentary is, without mentioning any names, I know on good authority that one thing that’s in the vault and unlikely to ever come out is a collaboration with Madonna that Prince has toyed with releasing and was going to release it at one point but he hasn’t. So that’s quite a big deal, and also there’s a collaboration with—do you know who Meshell Ndegeocello is?

Vice Editor James Yeh speaking with journalist and Prince fanatic Mobeen Azhar, about his new BBC radio documentary, Hunting for Prince’s Vault.

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What’s Behind the Surging Popularity of Music Festivals?

Photo by Anax44, Flickr

In its growth, Governors Ball is benefitting from and contributing to the festival explosion of the past decade, a trend that a new Eventbrite study (on the “Top 2014 Music Festival Trends and Insights”) claims has resulted in one in every five millennials attending at least one festival per year.

Though big, multi-day productions have thrived longer in Europe and South America — think Glastonbury, Primavera, and Rock in Rio —  than in the United States, festivals’ worldwide presence continues to expand, with locally based boutique shows like the Bon Iver-booked Eaux Claires and the biannual, two-stage Boston Calling sprouting up yearly. As the names and figures involved suggest, live music itself has become a vitally lucrative industry in the past decade: Corporate sponsorship of music (including festivals) ballooned to over $1.3 billion last year alone, and with live show attendance numbers now in the hundreds of thousands annually — Austin City Limits draws the biggest crowd with just under 200,000 patrons in 2013 — the festival boom hasn’t even come close to peaking.

Liz Nistico of the brat-pop duo HOLYCHILD, who’ll make their Governors Ball debut this June, believes festivals have exponentially sprouted in popularity over the past five years because they force people with (at least tangentially) shared interests to interact…Like Nistico suggests, when all the world’s music — sans a few big name holdouts — is available via Spotify just a few clicks away, its easy to forego interacting with other people when it comes to soundtracking our day-to-day lives.  Governors Ball is one in a trend of large-scale events with diverse lineups — which reflect the varied, blurred tastes and genres that’ve emerged in the wake of the web-driven democratization of music — pulling people in, making them more likely to dive into a mud pit in the middle of the day. 

Brennan Carley writing for Spin about the trio behind the Governors Ball Music Festival, and their plans to bring a country festival to New York City.

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Romantic Love: The Dominant Subject Matter of Western Popular Music

[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as the dominant subject matter of Western popular music.

This tendency became overwhelming in 20th-century America. Both in the freestanding commercial pop songs of Tin Pan Alley and in musical-comedy lyrics, love is the near-universal theme. One can almost count on the fingers of both hands the number of standard ballads written between 1920 and 1960 that are not about romantic love, whether failed or successful. Even among such chronically disillusioned lyricists as Lorenz Hart, it is the singer’s desirable but unattainable ideal: This funny world/Makes fun of the things that you strive for/This funny world/Can laugh at the dreams you’re alive for. What is more, most of these perennially popular songs presuppose marriage as the natural consequence of love, sometimes implicitly but just as often explicitly, as in Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”: He’ll build a little home,/Just meant for two,/From which I’ll never roam,/Who would, would you?

Terry Teachout writing in Commentary about love songs, and music historian Ted Gioia’s new book Love Songs: The Hidden History.

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How Listening to Music and Fighting with Susan Sontag Helped Me Cope with Chemo

Longreads Pick

An essay about dealing with stage IV cancer and developing coping techniques.

Source: The Stranger
Published: Jan 21, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,152 words)

A History of Stealing Music From Record Club Memberships

There was nothing like the elation of getting that first shipment of records for essentially nothing — but that ecstasy was quickly offset by the anxiety of finding out that you owed $34.74 for those Sir Mix-A-Lot and Crash Test Dummies discs you never asked for. Now you were on the hook: either you could fulfill your obligation, or start ducking collection agencies.

Unless, of course, you could find a way to cheat the system. For a large contingent of the record-club membership, scheming a way to get more free records — usually through fake accounts and multiple addresses — was the ultimate caper. Everyone had a friend of a friend who had supposedly done it: signing up using a false name, or having the records sent to a conspirator’s address. After all, in the pre-supercomputer age, it wasn’t hard to stay one step ahead of Columbia House’s detectives.

The patron saint of the records-club schemers would probably be Joseph Parvin. In 2000, the 60-year-old was prosecuted for having received, between 1993 and 1998, nearly 27,000 CDs, using over 2000 fake accounts and 16 P.O. boxes. All told, he bilked Columbia House (and rival BMG) out of $425,000 of product, selling them at flea markets. For anyone who was paying attention when his arrest made headlines at the time, it was kind of like finding out that Paul Bunyan is real — someone actually was able to cheat the system the way everyone dreams of.

– Stealing music didn’t originate with the internet. In the era of subscription vinyl, Columbia House records club ruled—until the recording artists revolted and the medium evolved. Read Daniel Brockman & Jason W. Smith’s take at The Phoenix.

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What Happened to All the Music Blogs?

Longreads Pick

“The list of music publications that have either folded entirely or gone online-only in the past decade is long and storied: SPIN, Blender, Paste, Vibe, Venus, Urb (some, like Magnet and Relix, went out of business and were revived). Online, with a few notable exceptions, music coverage vacillates between celebrity gossip, slideshows, and endlessly recycled discussion of the same few (extremely popular) acts.”

Published: Dec 1, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,023 words)

The Old Music Industry: ‘A System Specifically Engineered to Waste the Band’s Money’

Shellac, with Albini. Photo by goro_memo

During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.

Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.

International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.

Music producer and Shellac frontman Steve Albini’s reminder about what the “good old days” of the music industry were really like for artists.

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