Celebrities Listening to Music on Headphones: French actress Maria Schneider, Nov. 30, 1970.
(Dove/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Celebrities Listening to Music on Headphones: French actress Maria Schneider, Nov. 30, 1970.
(Dove/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
MUSICREDEF PICKS
Grime's Fashionable Rebirth, Boy Bands Are Back, Dangerous Words, Behind the Song, Amanda Palmer...
Matty Karas, curator May 24, 2018
QUOTABLES!
quote of the day
When I first started writing rhymes, I wasn't trying to write hit records. I was a shy Catholic school kid, just writing to express myself. As soon as a company said, 'Yo D, we need a hit record,' my thought pattern completely changed. I felt the only way I could get rid of the pressure was to drink.
music
rant n' rave
rantnrave://

Lots of talk about words this week. KENDRICK LAMAR invites a white fan to rap "M.A.A.D CITY" onstage with him, and then he (gently) and his audience (not so gently) and a good chunk of TWITTER (do you have to ask?) turn on her when she repeatedly raps a certain word that white people, as a rule, should not ever say, under any circumstance. Is it weird that a rapper can say a word and a fan can buy it, stream it, memorize it but not sing along with it? Yes, it's a little weird. But hello, America. What's a lot weird, and a lot ugly, is the history behind that word, the weight it carries, the hatred it conveys. The black rapper who uses it is drawing on that history and grappling with it. The white fan who hears it owes it to the culture to respect all of that and to not repeat the slur. Is that so hard to do? Is it asking too much? It's 2018. This isn't new information. And it isn't complicated. But a secondary question has been raised. Was it unfair of Lamar to invite a young white fan, who probably has never stood on a stage in front of an audience like that, to join him on that exact song and expect her to know exactly what to do in that moment, and to know how not to be awkward? Valid question. (And while we're here: Should we be talking about the fact that the next song Lamar played uses a five-letter slur for women in its title?) RITA ORA, meanwhile, was pressured into sort of apologizing for her own song because of a couple loaded words and phrases that turned her all-star update on "I KISSED A GIRL" into a cultural offense. She'll think twice before she tries singing about red wine or her open-mindedness again. Or before she tries telling the world that a party song about her own experience could be an anthem for a community of women of which she isn't a part. Because that's where she really went wrong. "GIRLS" is a kinda catchy pop song that could have been a harmless album track (if album tracks exist anymore; do they?). But as a single with a purported mission, it was a fast fail. Context matters... It can take a village to produce a great song. "THE MIDDLE" required one sample of a medieval axe, three waves of producers and 14 would-be singers. "DON'T STOP BELIEVIN'" drew on years of memories of the sights and smells of rock clubs up and down SUNSET BOULEVARD. I'll never get sick of first-hand accounts of the very real process behind the fairy-dust magic that is pop. MusicSet: "Behind the Song, Vol. 7"... Trumpet debt forgiven... RIP GLENN SNODDY.

Matty Karas, curator

May 24, 2018