A recurring weekly feature where we bring you the best music articles from around the web.
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Excerpt: Jagger by Marc Spitz (New York Times): Picture this: it is 1964. You are a former student of the prestigious London School of Economics and you will one day be knighted for your services to the empire. But instead of writing economic policies for the government of the day, you are instead standing in the wings of the stage at the T.A.M.I. show, the biggest ever rock and roll television show to that point. You are watching James Brown get encore after encore from a crowd that simply can’t get enough of his outrageous, incredible stage moves, the kind that Janelle Monae shamelessly steals today. You are the lead singer in the band that has to follow him.
Welcome to the world of Mick Jagger in 1964. The Rolling Stones haven’t yet written ‘Satisfaction’, Keith Richards is still a mild mannered, polite young man, and here they are, given the unenviable task of following James Brown. In an excerpt from his upcoming biography of Jagger, Spitz (who IMHO wrote the best Beatles biography to date) explains how they pulled it off. And how this set them up to became the second biggest British band in the U.S. after the Beatles.
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Everything Louder Than Everything Else – Dynamic Range Mastering In 2011 by Nick Southall (The Quietus): Kanye’s
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the top of the heap last year, feted by critics from around the world. But in mid-2011, nobody’s listening to the album anymore; it’s worn out its welcome (according to Southall). Southall thinks that one of the main reasons for this is that it is such a loud, compressed album, without any dynamic range – after a very short while (according to Southall) it gets tiring to listen to. And part of why modern chart pop might sound so bad to you is because the sheer non-stop assault of the sound – the Black Eyed Peas, for example, make very loud music indeed, and this loudness reduces any subtlety in their sound.
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We’re No. 1: Garth Brooks’ Ropin’ The Wind by Steven Hyden (The A.V. Club): Country star Garth Brooks was really big in the 1990s. Way bigger than Nirvana. So big that when his album as his alter ego Chris Gaines only sold a couple of million albums, it was deemed a failure (a level of sales that today would be seen as Bieberesque). Hyden argues that Brooks’ massive success was because he wasn't very cool. He wasn’t Nirvana or Dr Dre. He was for people confused by Nirvana or Dr. Dre, who weren’t cool enough, or angry enough, or knowledgeable enough, to get what that was all about. But they did know what they liked. And despite the fact there isn’t a 20th anniversary edition coming out, 1991’s
Ropin’ The Wind is probably just as influential as
Nevermind - for better or for worse. It has pretty much been the blueprint for mainstream country music ever since.
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Pitbull: ‘I Would Be Hypocritical To Perform There’ by Alex Macpherson (The Guardian): Pitbull’s music scans as sleazy and cliché-ridden to me, with its lyrics revolving around The Club and objectifying women. But clearly a large section of Australia disagrees with my taste, as he’s been involved in six top 10 singles in the last 12 months here. Macpherson suggests that there’s more to Pitbull than meets the eye; he’s a product of party-mad Miami, who knows how clubs work inside and out, and is of the opinion that it’s women in clubs who are his biggest fans -- fans who
want that objectification (and he claims to be as surprised and confused as anyone else about this). He’s also surprisingly outspoken about politics; as a Cuban refugee in Florida, he refuses to go to Cuba until Castro is finally turfed out, and is angry at the U.S. Republican Party for its anti-immigration policies.
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Dear Katy Perry by Rob Delaney (Viceland Today): Katy Perry’s ‘Last Friday Night’ has lyrics that (
as Katherine St. Asaph identified) come across as an inane focus-group version of what partying is meant to be like. And Vice magazine, let’s face it, probably knows more about mindless hedonism than Katy Perry’s songwriters. And so Vice writer Rob Delaney creates comedy out of the song’s lyrics, replying to each line to point out its absurdity. For example, the line ‘then we had a ménage a trois’ gets the response ‘that’s French for ‘increased your odds of contracting an STD by 500%’.’
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How To Be A Vampire by Nitsuh Abebe (Pitchfork): In the wake of the book
Retromania by Simon Reynolds and the 20th anniversary of
Nevermind, there’s been a lot of talk amongst critics about nostalgia and what’s missing in music at the moment. Abebe here thinks that one thing that is missing is people who like to shamelessly jump on bandwagons; when the recent microgenre of ‘chillwave’ happened, there was much more pooh-poohing of the genre than actual ‘chillwave is awesome’ enthusiasm. He argues that perhaps it’s a lot more fun to get on a bandwagon than cynical music snobs realise.
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Jay-Z And Alan Lomax by Ethan Hein (www.ethanhein.com): Here’s a strange thing – the estate of folk song collector Alan Lomax gets royalties every time they play ‘Takeover’ by Jay-Z on the radio. And why? Because Lomax recorded a song called ‘Rosie’ sung a capella by some black prisoners working at a farm. Lomax (dodgily) got the copyright to this (probably quite old) folk song and, through a maze of influence, covers, and samples, now owns a certain piece of Jay-Z’s pie. That this is the case shows that there are some very weird things that have been happening in the world of copyright for some time.
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5.4: Pitchfork, 1995-Present by Richard Beck (N+1): For better or worse, Pitchfork’s music reviews are influential – bands like the Arcade Fire would probably not be as big without them. In this lengthy review of Pitchfork (of which only the first section is available to the public), Richard Beck goes for the jugular.
Amanda Dobbins at Vulture excerpts the juiciest bits – “faced with readers who wanted to know how to be fans in the internet age, Pitchfork’s writers became the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption”. In the end Beck’s criticisms are all a bit exaggerated and out-of-date – Pitchfork hasn’t had the same influence since the rise of blogs, really. But if you’re the kind of person who disses Pitchfork to your friends but secretly reads it – as a surprising amount of people seem to be!
(It's the old "I don't listen to Triple J 'cause it sucks" argument. How do you know then? - Ed.) - there’s lots of material here to think about.
Tim Byron