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The poet Maya Angelou has died. She was one of Americaâs great writers, and will be sorely missed.
Here's something I just discovered: Angelou had a brief music career. She released an album in 1957, called Miss Calypso. Wikipedia says:
After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced calypso music. Up to that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at The Purple Onion she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou", a "distinctive name" that set her apart and captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances. During 1954 and 1955 Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages. In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996. She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.
I just listened to âRun Joe,â and I'm pleasantly surprised. Angelou has a silky voice, and she's backed by super solid musicians. Check it out for yourself below.
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Every Free Music Article You Should Read From The New Yorker's Unlocked Archives
by Alex Kapelman || @alexkapelman
On Wednesday, the editorial staff of The New Yorker announced a âsummer free-for-allâ â theyâre granting online access to all of their articles going back to 2007. (At least until September, when they unleash their subscription model.) Many, many roundups were done to mark this occasion â so many that The Awl even did a roundup of roundups.Â
Well, I got caught up in the spirit, since The New Yorker is amazing and everything is free. I went through every article roundup compiled by The Awl  and pulled all the music pieces I could find. (If I missed one, let me know.) Of course, putting together this post took me way longer than I ever could have possibly imagined, but if just one person gets to spend four hours of their life reading a New Yorker music article because of me, itâs worth it.
Without further ado, hereâs every music article in The Awlâs roundup of New Yorker roundups, in no order whatsoever. Enjoy, after the jump.
Every Free Music Article You Should Read From The New Yorkerâs Unlocked Archives:
"Delta Nights" by Bill Buford, June 5, 2000. A singerâs love affair with loss.
"Clara" by Robert BolaĂąo, August 4, 2008. A short fiction love story, where object of the narratorâs love is a young woman studying music.
"The Apostate" by Lawrence Wright, August 19, 2009. Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. (An incident of musical chairs featuring David Miscavige figures prominently in the story.)
"Cheap Words" by George Packer, February 17, 2014. Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? (Some discussion of how music is a big part of Amazonâs model.)
"Parallel Play" by Tim Page, August 20, 2007. A lifetime of restless isolation explained. (âThe authorâs first and most powerful obsession was music.â)
"The Mask of Doom" by Ta-Nehesi Coates, September 21, 2009. A nonconformist rapperâs second act.
"The Fun Stuff" by James Wood, November 29, 2010. My life as Keith Moon.
Living-Room Leopards by Ariel Levy, May 6, 2013. A new group of breeders want to undomesticate the cat. (One profiled breeder is a Swiss-born former musician.)
"The Story of a Suicide" by Ian Parker, February 6, 2012. Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy. (Tyler Clementi studied music at Rutgers.)
"Master of Play" by Nick Paumgarten, December 20, 2010. The many worlds of a video-game artist. (Shigeru Miyamoto also has written video game music, including helping with Donkey Kong.)
"Symbol of All We Possess" by Lillian Ross, October 22, 1949. âBess Myerson, (1945) went to Columbia and studied music, married, had a baby, and is now running a music school and modelling, too.â
"Some Notes on Attunement" by an unlisted author, but listener Andrea pointed out that it's Zadie Smith, December 17, 2012. A voyage around Joni Mitchell.
And every article in this music roundup:Â 15 Essential Music Longreads from The New Yorker (Buzzfeed)
Thatâs what I could find. Comment here or tweet at us if thereâs another unlocked article you really love thatâs not listed here and weâll post it here.
The New Yorker released a ton of their archives for free this past week. (I compiled a list marking the best music pieces here.) The first article I jumped on was "The Mask of Doom", about Daniel Dumile, aka rapper and producer MF Doom. Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to spend a little bit of time with Dumile, and looks into his childishness, work process, and the modern state of hip hop (or at least how it looked in 2009).
The podcasting site Uplayed Zero reviewed us today, and gave us a 9/10! That puts us in distinguished company with shows like 99% Invisible, Radiolab, and Planet Money. Great club to be in. Check out the full review on Unplayed Zero's site.
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Sunday Brunch Read: A Heavy Metal Alloy, Fused With Youth
by Alex Kapelman || @alexkapelman
Carrie Battan writes in The New York Times about Unlocking the Truth, who she calls "a boy band that rocks beyond it's years. Here's the opening paragraph, which hooked me immediately:
Unlocking the Truth, a trio of black middle-schoolers from Brooklyn who received extensive coverage from the news media recently after signing a lucrative record deal, is a boy band, but only in the most literal sense of the term.
And then there's this amazing section:
Mr. Brickhouse and Mr. Dawkins, who met in church as toddlers, have been playing music in the Brickhousesâ Flatbush basement since elementary school, largely learning their instruments on their own. (Mr. Atkins, who lives in Crown Heights, joined the group a couple of years ago).
Two of the boysâ mothers, who were supervising their sons at P.S. 282âs playground, said their interest in metal was initially cause for concern. âI thought, if they would play anything, it would be R&B and pop,â said Tabatha Dawkins, who works in finance. âAnd when I heard their music, I thought, âOh my God, Iâve got to get him back to church.â â
When Words Fail: Alternative R&B, Racial Codes, and the Power of Language
by Ellen Mayer || @EllenRebeccaM
How to Dress Well is one of several artists categorized as Alternative R&B. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
Music is a universe. Itâs huge and itâs constantly shifting.Â
Not only that, the experience of music is highly contextual, personal, and sensuous. Consider, then, the daunting task of music writers: To reconcile this huge musical universe with the limited words we have in our lexicon.
Language shifts and expands â but nowhere near quickly enough to encompass musicâs constant spasms of growth and change. As a result, the existing language for discussing music often feels insufficient. Iâm talking, of course, about musical genres. Â
Few words exemplify the twisted disconnect between language and music so aptly as Alternative R&B.â R&B stands for rhythm and blues, a genre invented in the 1950s to replace ârace musicâ as the term for music made by and for African Americans.
At the time, there was no material musical difference between rock and roll and R&B. The distinction was almost purely racial, not musical. Music executives established these terms as marketing categories, used to segment (and segregate) musical audiences. Nevertheless, music writers and listeners quickly accepted the distinction between these two genres as both a musical and racial fact, and we now consider black rock artists a novelty despite overwhelming historical evidence that black people invented the form.
On the other hand, contemporary R&B is not quite so segregated. Music writers regularly use the term to describe music by white artists from Justin Timberlake to How to Dress Well, a solo project from the singer-songwriter Tom Krell.
How to Dress Wellâs third album, What Is This Heart, came out in June, but music writers have remarked upon Krellâs R&B influence since his debut in 2011. Often in the next sentence, they would categorize the musician alongside a handful of other artists (Frank Ocean, Miguel, The Weeknd) in an exciting new musical movement. Alternative R&B is the broadest and most malleable name for this new sub-genre, though other writers opted for click-bait names like R&Bummer or, most notoriously, PBR&B.
I hate this term. PBR&B reduces music to its ancillary function as a social signifier. It also reduces music writing to mere lifestyle branding. Itâs just a little more succinct than simply writing, âthis music is for hipsters.â Â Or, as Jozen Cummings wrote in the Awl, âItâs a nice way of saying it's R&B that white people like.â
Though itâs less blatantly brand oriented, Alternative R&B similarly implies the âhipsterâ lifestyle and, by extension, a white audience.
When we use these euphemistic genre lables we are talking around the continued racial implications of the R&B moniker. At the same time, we cease to talk about the music itself.
In March, Pigeons and Planes published a list of the 10 best Alternative R&B songs âout right now.â Of course the list included the first single off How to Dress Wellâs new album. It also included Miguel, FKA twigs, Kelela, and Janelle Monae.
The trouble is that these artists have very little in common.
How to Dress Wellâs ghostly falsetto bears no resemblance to Miguelâs warmer, lustier vocals. In turn, Miguelâs straightforward pop structure has zero affinity with the otherworldly music of FKA twigs.
Krell has discussed his frustration with the R&B label in many recent interviews, and Ocean rejects the genre entirely, believing that writers only use the term to describe his music because heâs black. Even Eric Harvey, the music critic who coined PBR&B, is quite critical of the genre. He tweeted the term as a joke and regrets its subsequent adoption in the music blog lexicon. (Harvey does a really nice job of summarizing both the flaws and the etymology of his franken-genre from the 1950s to present-day in this article for Pitchfork.)
So why do so many thoughtful music critics continue to use such absurdly inadequate umbrella terms as Alternative R&B?
Writers like Eric Harvey know the genreâs racial history and they also must know that they are lumping together an incredibly diverse range of artists. Harvey notes in his article that few genres actually stand up to scrutiny but, he explains, âThey make large amounts of music easier to talk about (and, by extension, sell).â
When it comes to music writing, Iâm not sure thatâs necessarily a good thing. Our job is to write about music, not around it. All of these thoughtful music critics should know better than to use genre labels as a kind of shorthand and expect â or hope â that the readers are in on the code.
What if readers donât know better?
To be clear, Iâm not suggesting that the average blog-reader is stupid. Rather, Iâm pointing out that words are more powerful than we sometimes let on.
The words we choose have a power of suggestion that can shape how we collectively experience music. As Frank Ocean pointed out in an interview with the Quietus, the term R&B can misdirect his listeners:
I've never read a lyrics sheet, from Marvin Gaye to Usher, that looks anything like the lyrics on âNovacaneâ or the storytelling on there, and that's because I didn't take that kind of storytelling from R&B. I took it from hip-hop. If you listen to that record and you don't at least give a little bit of the props to hip hop and what came from that, then you're limiting it. And that's why I always say that about the genre thing, because that's what it does. When you say 'it's that', you listen to it in certain way. And you might not necessarily miss it, but it's just inaccurate, and you'll miss a couple of things, contextually.
Ocean is totally right. Though these inadequate words might make music easier to talk about, ultimately they also make it harder to understand. Â When we let these words become our shorthand, we stop saying what we mean. If we do that long enough, we might eventually stop knowing what we mean. We might start believing in Alternative R&Bâs fabricated affinities because theyâre simply convenient. And in doing, so we might shave away all the things that make an artist challenging and strange.
In this internet age, the music writerâs role has evolved into a curatorial position â helping listeners siphon through and make sense of the incredible overflow of music content. Often, writers do so by constantly coining sub-genres as new hybrid musical styles emerge (shoegaze, chillwave, etc).
The result is a kind of linguistic inflation.
Sub-genres are now so plentiful they are almost meaningless and often absurd. Iâm not suggesting that any serious music writer must do away with genre labels entirely. Iâm not sure thatâs even possible. But considering how powerful and potentially harmful they might be, genres certainly should be handled with care, used sparingly, and with clear acknowledgment of their limits and their histories.
I'd also like to suggest an alternative approach to music writing, a craft that can be creative and vital in its own right.
Genres ultimately purport to aggregate artists that are alike. As writer-curators, our job is more exciting â and ultimately more helpful in the massive sea of new music â if we highlight musical unlikeness rather than likeness.
In 2010, when How to Dress Well released his first album, he wasnât exciting because he sounded like Miguel or The Weeknd. He was exciting because he drew melodic influence from artists like Shai and Bobby Brown and then made something totally unfamiliar and unlike anyone else.
When we surrender to this unlikeness in music, we find ourselves in uncharted territories of sound, to which words have not yet been assigned. This is the point at which music is its most challenging. Itâs also where the writer has the greatest chance to shake off limitations of language and make meaning in new ways.
Weâre stuck with the words we have, but we can, like the very best musicians, create something new and bright and enlightening with old material.
Ellen Mayer is living the intern life at Chicago Public Radio. In her spare time she listens to lots of good music and thinks hard about its sociopolitical implications. Then sometimes she writes her thoughts down for websites like Pitch. Catch her on Twitter for #millenial musings and loads of hip-hop retweets @EllenRebeccaM.
Sunday Brunch Read: Viral Rapper Stitches: Some Truth, Many Questions
by Alex Kapelman // @alexkapelman
Today's Sunday Brunch Read chronicles Stitches, the rapper whose "Brick in Yo Face" music video has made him "one of the top five most-watched artists in Miami," according a source in the Miami New Times article.Â
The rise of Stitches provides a blueprint for modern-day hip-hop myth-making. Almost overnight, Katsabanis went from being a suburban Kendall kid known as "Lil Phill" to a bona fide gangsta rapper. Though there's scant evidence to prove his claims of being a cocaine kingpin since he hit puberty, he created a viral reality that fed on the Magic City's reputation for drugs and violence, which began with Scarface's Tony Montana and continued through Rick Ross.
Sunday Brunch Read: All Roads Lead to Willie Nelson
by Alex Kapelman // @alexkapelman
Rolling Stone has a massive profile of Willie Nelson this week. It goes in depth â they call it their "definitive profile" of the music and cultural legend â about his life, career, and, of course, marijuana.
"Weed is good for you," [Nelson] says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel â there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Sunday Brunch Read: Ace Frehley Gives Us a Ride Around His Old Bronx Stomping Grounds
by Alex Kapelman // @alexkapelman
In this Sunday brunch read, KISS's Ace Frehley hits the town with the Village Voice:
Pulling up to his old apartment house on Marion Avenue near 201st Street, Frehley, even behind the sunglasses and cracking-wise demeanor, is clearly moved. From the sidewalk, he points up to the second floor. "I used to put my amp in that window," he recalls, as we sneak into the six-story brick building for a look-see when two kids emerge.
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Sunday Brunch Read: The Nation That Janet Jackson Built
by Ellen Mayer // @EllenRebeccaM
This month marks the 25th anniversary of Janet Jacksonâs Rhythm Nation 1814. The album was hugely popular in its time, setting the record for most Top 10 singles within a single album (and breaking her brother Michaelâs previous record). But, like much of Jacksonâs career, the album seems to have faded out of cultural consciousness.
Rhythm Nation was a transformative work that arrived at a transformative moment. Released in 1989 â the year of Spike Leeâs Do the Right Thing, protests at Tiananmen Square, and the fall of the Berlin Wall â its sounds, visuals, and messaging spoke to a generation in transition, at once empowered and restless. The Reagan Era was over. But the cultural anxiety about what was next was palpable.
Writing for the Atlantic, Joe Vogel reminds us what made Rhythm Nation so good, and why we should care. Read the whole thing here.
Sunday Brunch Read: Do DJs Have A Future On SoundCloud?
by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM
SoundCloud used to be the wild wild west of music distribution: Untamed with plenty of territory for any adventurous music maker to stake a claim. Most importantly, it was lawless. DJs and producers could sample or share copyrighted material at will. This free-for-all has been a defining principle of the new electronic music landscape. But now it looks like the wild west has been tamed. SoundCloud just inked a deal with the major labels, and the major labels want to enforce copyright law. This week The Fader digs into what this shift will mean for pioneering music labels â like Joe Kayâs Soulection--who have relied on SoundCloud for distribution. Â
We were using Soulection to constantly promote not just our artists but people that we thought should be put on," Joe Kay explains. "Between putting out a DIY release through Bandcamp and SoundCloud, then with the radio show, that was all we needed to be heard." Soulection eschewed album deals with flagship artists like Sango and Carmack for fluid single agreements and publishing splits. "We aren't a traditional label," he said. "We've been able to build this with no advance money, no finances.
Most things about Shamirâs career seem a little accidental. The 19-year-old singer comes from Las Vegas where, it seems, nothing authentic grows. There is no local music scene. The cityâs culture is stifled by the looming presence of casinos. But this oddball songwriter emerged, through a series of happy accidents, and arrived in New York City with a high scratchy voice and a musical sound that was just as accidentally âof the moment.â Â In an interview for Wondering Sound, Shamir explains how he stumbled into house music:
Dance music to me was EDM, it was the shit that they played at the hotel pools in Vegas. I was just trying to make my own alternative to that â I was trying to make something very pop, very danceable, very alternative, while still very minimal. Little did I know at the time that it was house music! I thought I had made this interesting, minimal dance sound!
Hey y'all. Season 3 is coming very soon, but in the meantime, please subscribe on iTunes, sign up for updates, or listen to all of our episodes below.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to our #crushtape. It's totally awesome and we'll be listening to it all day. We got tons more suggestions on social media than we could use so if you want to see the full list of songs, you can listen to this amazing Spotify playlist. The track list is below. Happy Crush Day! Love, Pitch.
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While we work on amazing new stories for you, we'll be reissuing some of our favorite episodes. This is our premiere from February 2014, and it tracks the strange history of the "Clearmountain Pause" from an off-the-cuff comment to a friend to a Pulitzer Prize winning novel.
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amandla
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