43 posts tagged with music by chavenet.
Displaying 1 through 43 of 43.
Like oases of humanity amid streaming’s algorithmic desert
These playlists preserve a slight human touch, representing user “folksonomies,” or organic, user-generated systems of classifying content compared to boring corporate categories like “mid-20s white woman who likes pop-rock.” They set the scene, address the listener, and offer a seductive promise—that however you ended up listening, whether by direct search or through an automated recommendation, this group of songs is bespoke and meant just for you (or the mushroom-gathering woodland sprite of your dreams). from What Wildly Specific POV Playlists Tell Us About How We Listen Today [Hearing Things]
A small, strange corner of the music business
Though uncertainty around royalties abounds, the ringtone itself remains alive and well. While that life has not been nurtured by the world’s most prominent music companies, it’s been adopted by a slew of app developers and freelance producers. [Sherwood]
Weep, Shudder, Die
I had one cultural advantage. I owned a 1955 Ford Fairlane, which I had bought for $100. Gas was twenty cents a gallon. Jim and I drove all over Southern California, which is admittedly something teenage boys don’t mind doing, to attend free concerts and performances. It was the age of high print-culture, each Sunday the Los Angeles Times listed every forthcoming concert in Southern California. Any concert within a hundred-mile radius was fair game. from Cruising for Classical Music in LA by Dana Gioia via Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker
The Wish for Kings
King Of America is the sound of Elvis Costello growing up. It’s full of melody. The lyrics are more direct but remain clever, witty and literate. His singing is superb, possibly the best of his career. He is emotionally invested in these songs. Dropping the smart-alex sneer helps them carry more weight. As time goes by, the musicianship suits the ear more, little details revealing themselves. When the likes of T-Bone Burnett, Jim Keltner, Mitchell Froom and members of Elvis Presley’s TCB band are involved, the result is bound to ooze class. It is an album of inner turmoil, presented in best bib and tucker. It was a lot to digest in 1986, and quickly superseded by its caustic follow-up the same year, Blood & Chocolate. It was easy to move on, but, if you kept coming back, you would find a lot to cherish in King Of America. [more inside]
Nobody on the internet could move on
All media becomes lost without intervention. It only stays at our fingertips if it’s archived, often by librarians and historians, but also amateurs. Preservation is connected to curiosity, a deeply human emotion found in everything from Marco Polo traversing the globe to Lostwavers trawling through old radio archives. Lost media movements are a beautiful testament to humanity’s love for details, chasing the unknown, and writing the history of things once deemed throwaways. from Needles in Haystacks: The Lostwave Story [more inside]
With an infinite pool of songs to track, the data looks way different
The truth is that it’s likely a confusing combination of all three. Sabrina Carpenter is very popular. Shaboozey wrote the party song of the summer. Everyone knows what “Brat” green looks like. But there’s no magic formula or brilliant gimmick to make something popular. Just ask Billie Eilish. from What was the song of the summer? Nobody knows [Garbage Day on Sherwood]
Like really? Five years? Why not just thug it out the full decade?
From rap getting brasher and noisier, to online scenes blossoming during quarantine, to entire subcultures of music being shot to the moon and stripped for parts by TikTok, music as we know it fundamentally shifted this half-decade. from The 100 Best Songs of the 2020s So Far [Pitchfork] [more inside]
Not quite an album. More than a single.
An Ideal for Living by Corey duBrowa (Hozac Books) is the first book devoted to a music packaging format that has gone virtually unknown to some in the U.S. Yet from early jazz and rock through the punk, new wave, post-punk, alternative/indie rock eras, and ultimately up to the present, the extended play, or EP (usually four or sometimes six tracks), has been a staple of the record industry. from The Little-Known Legacy of the EP [Daily Heller] [more inside]
This whole world is out there just trying to score
Occasionally, people make music, and then wildly different people cover that music with wildly different sounds and results. I like when this happens. I especially like when it happens without changing the pronouns of the original piece. “Look into his angel eyes…” hits differently when it comes from a sparsely accompanied, gravelly male voice, instead of, ah, ABBA. from Genderswap.fm by Eva Decker [more inside]
Just who in the hell is Ray Suzuki?
From a certain angle, the review feels less like a piece of music criticism and more like a Dada-ist joke on what music criticism even is. Or at the very least like a shitpost that was prophetic in its use of the visual, flippant language people would soon be employing en masse to post about art online. Squint, and it’s a masterpiece … of some kind. But it goes down in the stats sheet as an actual review—and in that sense, it wasn’t really fair to Jet. from The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written” [The Ringer]
Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
Unwanted Sound
Implicit in the art of noise is a promise of resistance. For millennia, music has been a medium of control; noise, it follows, is a liberation. from What is Noise? by Alex Ross [The New Yorker; ungated]
Ritual is part of my nature. I would call all of my pieces “rituals"
We hear from Budapest that the eminent composer Peter Eötvös died today. He was 80 and had endured a long illness. After an apprenticeship with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eötvös emerged in the 1980s as a leading voice in late and post-modernism. Four of his operas were internationally premiered – Three Sisters at Lyon, Love and Other Demons at Glyndebourne, The Tragedy of the Devil at Munich and Sleepless (2021) in Berlin. His final opera Valuska, was premiered in Budapest on 2 December last year.
The idea that it was mostly white guys was totally true
I don’t think it has anything to do with the audience for this stuff. I don’t think it has anything to do with the buzziness or the culture surrounding the site itself. I think it is just these money people coming in and making bad decisions. If they’re going to lay off people in Boeing and cut safety protocols or whatever, they’ll do it to anyone. from The Oral History of Pitchfork [Slate]
I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved
I preferred these sensory and sensual phantasms to the everyday reality of school life, and I knew that fact was so shameful it needed to be hidden. Back then I couldn’t put my disability into words, but I felt it keenly. My habits were not just escapist pastimes. They were abnormal passions. I was a mutant, a monster of sensibility, a changeling with a freakish vulnerability to beauty. Years later I found a name for my debilitation—I was an aesthete. from The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir by Dana Gioia in The Hudson Review
The Eternal Jukebox
This web app lets you search a song on Spotify and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. [more inside]
Your Favorite Thing Sucks
What intrigues me about musical anhedonia, and the 5 percent of the human population who supposedly suffer from it, is the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that 5 percent is an underestimate. I strongly suspect there are a lot more than four hundred million people out there who would rather opt out. from Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters, an excerpt from Listen by Michel Faber
Another Time at Bandcamp
Et In Arcadia Ego
The urban fog that has trailed shibboleths of progress to the Pacific Rim hovers over a reflection in once-clear water that looks final in its murkiness: finding the barbarisms of modernity exacerbated and multiplied on the outer cusp of the American continent, settled under the false assurance of beginning anew, we can no longer dispute that the monsters are us. It is through [Lana] Del Rey, a moody transplant with a made-up name, that this lineage finds its most opportune and poignant expression. A damsel in distress inured to the fatalism of our time, her songbook is a secular Revelation for the coming fall, illusions of redemption having all but burned out. from California Gothic [The Baffler; ungated]
“A Guy in an Ashcan Sending Messages”
Forty years on from the magnificent album sequence that began with Swordfishtrombones, collaborators and fans including Jim Jarmusch and Thom Yorke discuss Waits’s journey from bar-room balladeer to conductor of the ultimate junkyard orchestra from ‘All these bulletproof songs, one after another’: remembering Tom Waits’s extraordinary mid-career trilogy [Grauniad; ungated] [more inside]
The Songwriters Remain the Same
Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence ... How often has a top 5 hit been written only by women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.
A Perfectly Trippy Ambience
But like a dream, the Mellotron’s time was fleeting. Just as it proliferated in psych-rock, what we know as the modern synthesizer was coming into its own ... As the rest of the world turned to burgeoning digital technology in all other facets of life, the clunky, temperamental Mellotron soon became dated. It popped up every now and then on singles, but the last Mellotrons—due to a copyright dispute, sold under a new name—rolled off the factory floor in 1986. from Tape Heads [more inside]
The Empty Bigness
The producer is at bottom an allegorical figure. “Jack Antonoff” refers as much to a set of historical processes as it does to a bespectacled guy making beats in his Brooklyn apartment. Call it Antonoffication: the process of the dispersion of the aesthetics of indie rock out from a distinct subcultural enclave and into a general ether that suffuses and unites the major genres of today’s Top 40 pop music. Which is to say, the complex process of cultural mediation through which all pop music today has become a little bit indie rock. from Dream of Antonoffication by Mitch Therieau [The Drift; ungated] [more inside]
It’s Good to be King. It’s Just More Magical to be Prince
Chills Set
This 715-song playlist is scientifically verified to give you the chills, thanks to “frisson” [Big Think] [Spotify playlist] [more inside]
Lusitano's Moment Has Come
"The Western classical music canon is notoriously white and male – so you might assume that a black Renaissance composer would be a figure of significant interest, much-performed and studied. In fact, the story of the first known published black composer – Vicente Lusitano – is only now being heard, alongside a revival of interest in his long-neglected choral music." from The great 16th-Century black composer erased from history [BBC] [more inside]
Fabulously Unscrupulous
How did it come to this? In the 1980s, a vibrant opposition to mass culture thrived. Punk formed a whole DIY ethos, a collective way of life outside of mainstream structures. At any rate, that was the promise. Michael Friedrich looks at Jim Ruland's new book on the legendary punk label in The Unraveling of SST Records [The New Republic; punk rock no-paywall version] [more inside]
Neil, Joni & ... James
Neil Young Demands Spotify Remove His Music Over ‘False Information About Vaccines’ ... Joni Mitchell Plans to Follow Neil Young Off Spotify, Citing ‘Lies’ ... James Blunt jokes he will release new music on Spotify in Rogan protest [more inside]
Gonna Get a Fly Girl, Get Some Spank and Drive Off in a Def OJ
It’s a Long Way Down
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest this process may disproportionately affect women and people of colour. Songwriter Coco Morier, who has written for Britney Spears and Demi Lovato, says she’s seen plenty of young female artists “lectured and berated” by the male studio teams they are collaborating with, and who are “deemed a creation of the label and the producers behind them, instead of them being signed on their talent and allowed to have their creative vision.” from The Pop Stars Kept in Limbo by Major Labels
Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
When we first did the RS 500 in 2003, people were talking about the “death of the album.” The album —and especially the album release — is more relevant than ever. Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. But that was part of what made rebooting the RS 500 fascinating and fun; 86 of the albums on the list are from this century, and 154 are new additions that weren’t on the 2003 or 2012 versions. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better. [Rolling Stone]
Some Indie Record That’s Much Cooler Than Mine
It’s got a metal cover, a song ft. Bon Iver, a song about the people who used to live in her house, an uncanny resemblance, a secret bonus song, an isolation manifesto, a cardigan for Natalia Bryant, 8 deluxe vinyl editions and 8 deluxe CD editions, huge initial sales, and rave reviews. It’s folklore [Spotify link, but there are others], the [surprise] new album from Taylor Swift.
Your Favorite Song Sucks and No One Even Remembers It
When records are not replayed, they become fleeting fads in the eyes of history. In the case of “Wild Wild West,” the only people who understood its importance were those who were there in 1999, at peak Will Smith. But, some songs will survive—the ones most recognized by Gen Z. Defining the ’90s Music Canon, Part II of "How Music is Remembered" from The Pudding. [more inside]
“Let us first trace the meaning of the words delirium and exhaustion.”
“Everybody was sort of left-footed,” Hall says. “We were all like, Whoa, what are we doing? Everybody had to figure out how to relate to each other. So everybody started to act like they were in the eighth-grade chorus. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever experienced. All these superstars, whatever you want to call them, we all turned into junior-high kids in chorus, and Quincy became Mr. Jones. That’s how it shook out. Laughing like kids.” 'We Are the World': Inside Pop Music's Most Famous All-Nighter [SL Esquire]
Now everybody—
The great novelist Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) is also a sometimes thoughtful, sometimes irreverent lyricst. Sprinkled throughout all of his novels are many tunes that surprise the reader. The NYC band Visit recorded fourteen of them and Philadelphia-based composer Peter Price put together some interstitial material. Released on 8 May 2020—the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II but also Pynchon’s 83rd birthday—the album ... adds to the growing list of music inspired by the American writer. “Now everybody—” Visit Interprets Songs by Thomas Pynchon [more inside]
Texts and Shrugs and Rock and Roll
Quartz analyzed the data, and this is a trend with legs. In the last week of December 2018, just eight of the 200 songs on Spotify’s top 200 streaming songs were either all uppercase or all lowercase. In 2019, more than 30 songs in a typical week have non-standard capitalization. The rise of all-lowercase and all-uppercase song titles [Quartz] [more inside]
Every Tweet is Like Sunday
Large Maps
It may not have set the charts alight when it was first released in 2003, but it’s entirely possible that Maps by New York art-punk outfit Yeah Yeah Yeahs has been the single most influential song of the 21st century so far. How? Let’s look…
He was not originally a rapper by trade
Big Bank Hank, one-third of the Sugarhill Gang, the unlikely ambassadors who took hip-hop out of Bronx parks and onto the pop charts, died on Tuesday in Englewood, N.J. He was 58. [more inside]
Really Blue
In 1981, the South Bank Show followed Elvis Costello to Nashville for the making of his latest album.
The result: "The Making Of Almost Blue" [more inside]
Tickling the Master's Creatures
Thomas Pynchon is one of the great unheard lyricists. His award-winning novel, Gravity's Rainbow, is full of song lyrics. Depending on how you count, there are around 100 in the book. Over the course of a year, the Thomas Pynchon Fake Book managed to set twenty-eight of them to music. [more inside]
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