#ellenmayer

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

This year the 68-year-old country music singer Dolly Parton played Glastonbury, the biggest music festival in the UK. Her booking might seem incongruous; the festival’s headliners included Skrillex and Arcade Fire. But these young male superstars had nothing on Dolly. She drew an estimated crowd of 180,000, the largest in Glastonbury’s history. Clearly there’s something about Dolly that keeps old fans coming back and new fans rolling in. Tom Lamont investigates that something in this profile for The Guardian.  But when he talks to Dolly herself, he gets a pre-packaged answer for almost every question. Like this one:

I’ve been around a long time, long enough for people to realise that there’s more to me than the big hair and the phoney stuff. The magic with me is that I look completely false when I’m completely real.

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

Most things about Shamir’s 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 city’s 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 “of the moment.”  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 — 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!

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

Basically everything about hip-hop’s first pop success is a little bit strange and, many believe, inauthentic. “Rapper’s Delight” didn’t come from one of the original hip-hop crews who honed their craft throwing dance parties in the Bronx. It was recorded by Sugar Hill Gang, a New Jersey-based rap trio that was assembled by producer Sylvia Robinson, much in the way execs assembled boy bands in the early ‘90s. And it’s an open secret that Big Bank Hank copied his lyrics for “Rappers Delight” from the hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz. In an essay for Cuepoint, Caz writes about making peace with Hank’s legacy. Even though the song probably seemed cutting edge to pop audiences at the time, Caz explains that “Rapper’s Delight” was outdated compared to the rest of hip-hop:

And it was so damn long I almost fell asleep. It was like 15 minutes long! And they were doing that “disco style” of rhyming, emulating the early disco DJs like Hollywood and Lovebug—all of them trying to sound like radio DJs, that same cadence. It was the style that we in hip-hop all had before we eventually found our own voice. I used that disco voice myself when I was younger and coming up in hip-hop. But I had found my voice by then, so by the time “Rappers Delight” came out, I was like, that’s corny.

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 — like Joe Kay’s Soulection--who have relied on SoundCloud for distribution.  

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.

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

Kathleen Hannah is now so historicized for her role in the Riot Grrl movement that she sometimes feels like a museum piece. Mykki Blanco is a genderqueer rapper whom critics routinely lump in with other gay rappers as though “gay” were a musical genre. This week, The Fader published a conversation between the two musicians. They talk about being boxed in by critics, their collaboration on Blanco’s new album, and what it means to be a political artist in 2014. For Blanco, being political doesn’t necessarily mean being militant:

Now for me it's more about pushing my music. No one is still making music like this! Everyone can Auto-Tune their voice a thousand times on the radio, we can have as many female pop stars that wanna imitate Beyoncé and Gaga and Katy Perry and whoever else, but when a unique voice comes along—like Twigs, or an Arca, or a year and a half ago when it was me—it's always gonna stand out. You don't have to be political anymore by screaming, you can be political by the sheer show of your success.

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

Portishead is notoriously averse to press. The band’s three members don’t give interviews — not even to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut album, Dummy. That fact did not deter DJ Pizzo from compiling an oral history of the album for Medium’s Cuepoint. Through interviews with the group’s session drummer, DJ, and former manager, Pizzo weaves together the story of Portishead’s formation, their unorthodox production process, and their distinct sound. Drummer Clive Deamer describes the way Portishead’s Geoff Barrow used live drum sessions to put a new spin on hip-hop break-beats:

At that time, most everybody had rinsed out the vinyl breakbeats that everybody had. So Geoff was being a bit of a drummer then, but he used me to play things he couldn’t play himself. So he’d play me a bit of vinyl and say, Listen to this, can you play that, but change the hi-hat to this? Or leave that bit out? Or make it more this. He described how he wanted it different. And then we’d go into great detail, perfecting the mic, the sound, the tuning of the sound, the dampening of the drums, until he got what he wanted.

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

Music critics churn out album reviews every week. In the hands of good writers, reviews may be eloquent and informative. But they’re rarely inspiring, and certainly not fun. Jon Caramanica’s New York Times review of Taylor Swift’s 1989 is a sparkling exception. You can tell he had a blast writing it, and it’s a blast to read. Out this Monday, 1989 represents Swift’s total plunge out of country and into pop. As Caramanica tracks Swift’s personal and musical growth spurts, he also illuminates the rest of the pop music landscape, marveling at the singer’s savvy ability to retain her outsider persona even as she dominates the Billboard charts. 1989 may exist in this pop music world, but Taylor Swift is never of it, and perhaps that’s the secret to her success.  

Ms. Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now”; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight. On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.

by ELLEN MAYER // @ELLENREBECCAM

One of the most buzzed about films on the festival circuit this year was a music movie — sort of. Whiplash is about the the abusive relationship between a demanding bandleader and his student, a talented drummer named Andrew. The film’s director, Damian Chazelle, says he actually thinks of Whiplash as a sports movie — at least in terms of narrative format. Still, the film draws on Chazelle’s own experiences as a drummer, and considers what it takes to harness musical genius. In an interview for The Dissolve, Chazelle talks about music teachers, how practice shouldn’t be enjoyable, and the idea that art could kill you:

Especially toward the end, I definitely wanted to film Andrew in a way that looks like he’s this close to literally having a heart attack and keeling over. I wanted people to worry not just for his sanity, but for his physical well-being. There’s a physical side to this instrument, and a brutality that’s not just emotional, but corporeal.