In what is the best news I've gotten in a while, the business trip I had that would have kept me from CRJ's show at Hammerstein in July looks like it's off. I am excite.
Wait, does liking rock music, or having liked aughts-era indie rock, make one not woke, now? I found those aspects of this article weird. It's not like hip-hop/R&B weren't HUGE in 2009, or that it wasn't possible to be into both turntables and guitars as far back as Run DMC's "King of Rock." I just have a really hard time with the notion that being into a particular kind of music is an act of identity politics.
It was sooooo close, with me, on A Brief Inquiry. Like, "Give Yourself a Try" is built around this great riff...and then it just doesn't go anywhere. "TooTimeTooTimeTooTime" is so fun, but stays on the same level for its entire running time. Even "Love It If We Made It" chugs along without much of a dynamic shift. I still *like* those songs, and the record, overall, but I feel like it was missing just that little bit of intra-song diversity to really make it hit home. Just my $0.02, of course.
This was so great...except for Jon Batiste. The man has more musical ability in his little finger than I'll ever have, but that was some ass accordion. My guess is that it's not an instrument he's spent a bunch of time with.
I watched some of the BLACKPINK stream from Coachella, and I can't, for the life of me, figure out what the big deal is. This is not old-man-yells-at-cloud territory - I'm a poptimist, and no mistake. But their show...meh. Their dance repertoire pretty much amounts to *checks notes* walking, and nothing about the songs really made them stand out to me at all. I don't get it.
Oh, absolutely. There are so many rabbit holes to go down - I've gotten new stuff I've loved served up in Discover Weekly, and for everyone one of those songs, I get at least a few more through creating a radio station for that song, the artist, the album it came from...
I mean, I get what he's saying - I would bet that, statistically, most Spotify users don't tend to use it primarily as a discovery engine (assuming there was a way to quantify that). A lot of my friends just use it to listen to stuff they already like - it's all there! - and maybe only occasionally get into something new when an album they're playing runs out and the algorithm kicks out something different.
But it's all in how you approach it. If you want it to be, Spotify can be the best crate-digging tool around.
Ugh, noooooo. I was going to be out of town for the NYC shows, so my wife and I got tickets to Philly...and a non-refundable AirBnB. Now, we'll (hopefully, assuming no conflicts) be taking a trip to Philadelphia for no reason and eating the cost of the room. Blergh.
This sucks. Turn down the reverb on the mics, y'all - Halsey actually has a good voice and doesn't need it to be washed like that. I'm not so sure about Yungblud. But, ugh, turning this into a dirge rather than a hymn just really hurts, in my opinion.
Nah, it's not that. I actually don't mind the *type* of stuff she does, and could rattle off a bunch of tunes in the genre that I genuinely dig. I'm just at sea as to why, out of all those folks, she's the one that's blowing up so hugely ATM.
I just really, really don't get the Maggie Rogers phenomenon. I mean, she's got a good voice, but I'm not sure what it is that separates her from the hordes of other folks out there currently performing songs that, back in the day would have been played on acoustic guitars and mid-range keyboards in coffee shops but which, in this day and age, are just put through the electronic pop production car wash. I mean, I read she sampled the sound of a spoon clinking on a glass jar for her record...and we're supposed to take that as special, in some way?
I dunno. I'm not as down on her as I may sound - I saw her at Governors Ball last year, and she was...fine. She can sing well enough. But I'm just flummoxed as to why she's skyrocketing to Awesometown in the current musical world we live in, when so many other folks are doing the exact same thing.
Man, I don't know. I love RTJ and generally enjoy Killer Mike, but watching this show has kind of dinged my opinion of him. Like, the episode in which he explores the idea of rebranding the Crips...I absolutely, totally get the point about the Hell's Angels being able to merchandise, and such, and how ridiculous that is. Yes. But, throughout the episode, Mike really lays into the idea that, despite what we've all heard, the Crips are just like a fraternity or brotherhood, and that their whole purpose is to help the community. Meanwhile, if anyone - whether it's in the focus group he convenes or elsewhere - dares to bring up the very real issue of gang violence, he absolutely railroads them as if the entire thing is a media creation and anyone who believes it is a moron. and/or racist. It's like, sure, there's a discussion to be had about there being an unexplored positive aspect of an organization like the Crips, but to act as if any mention of violence around them is totally and completely beyond the pale - especially when one of the very members of the group that Mike has on the show talks about friends of his having been shot and killed - strikes me as disingenuous.
Number of 2018 artists with "Lil" in their name: 7
Number of 2019 artists with "Lil" in their name: 13
It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues. Some enterprising soul should start LilFest, featuring only artists with "Lil" in their name.
Uhhhh...but I'm pretty sure that's not Carla Azar playing in the backing band on this particular performance. Carla uses a traditional grip on her non-leading hand, and this drummer does not...and also doesn't look like Carla Azar.
Anyway. My original point stands.
As someone with more than one loved one who's a survivor of domestic and/or sexual abuse, Kanye can fuck right off after the verse he dropped on XXXtentacion's record shitting all over victims who come forward. He's scum.
Production-wise, yeah, it sounds awesome...and it would also be logistically impossible for any festival to pull off, let alone completely financially infeasible. Think about how big that thing would have to be to fit the amount of people you're talking about into it. You're talking about asking a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars event to completely upheave itself for *one* artist in a way that would have disrupted every other artist on the lineup, not to mention things like traffic flow and other mechanical details. And, on top of that, giving the festival only four months' notice to execute something that disruptive when these things are planned for at least a year is completely unreasonable.
It's egomania in the extreme, especially since, as the article points out, Beyonce *just last year* did something incredible with Coachella's main stage setup as it is.
In short: Fuck Kanye.
It's weird how festivals generally have a great first couple of names before nose-diving, whereas this lineup features two crap headliners in the first two slots (I know some folks are into Travis, but he played just an hour in a headlining slot at GovBall last year, and is...well, just not for me) before rocketing off to awesometown. If nothing else, everything from Tame Impala on down puts Governors Ball to shame. I honestly think it's the best East Coast lineup for the year so far, and it's not even close.
Been going to GovBall the past 6 years. This is an underwhelming lineup, for my tastes, especially compared to the last few years. There's not a single booking there that feels special, the way, say, Yeah Yeah Yeahs did last year, or Tool and Childish Gambino in 2017. Also, last year was such a great example of parallel track booking - as dead as rock supposedly is, I was able to put together a pretty rock-heavy schedule of sets for the weekend. Take out Saturday, and this is pretty much an R&B and hip-hop festival with a couple of rock acts thrown in, for some reason.
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