Highlights from February’s new music releases include Britti, Brittany Howard, Ducks Ltd., Caroline Polachek, St. Paul (yes, of St. Paul & The Broken Bones, with his first solo single), Modern English, and SZA. [Spotify]
“This lunar art museum spans millennia, reaching all the way back to a Sumerian cuneiform fragment of musical notation up to modern-day beats by Timbaland. The digitized lunar archive includes material from 20th century icons Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Sly & the Family Stone, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin, The Who and many more, as well as photos of everything from Woodstock to album art (naturally, a photo of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is included) in a glass, nickel and NanoFiche structure built to last millions of, if not a billion, years.” [Billboard]
“‘We’re on our way out,’ he told the 3,000 people in the crowd, joking that their next album would be a hip-hop record. ‘Grunge is dead. Nirvana’s over.’” [The Independent]
“Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’ And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.’” [The Guardian]
“It's helped that Jarsoz's musical family — both in the literal and figurative sense — has expanded over the years. Just last year she married a fellow musician, bassist Jeff Picker (Nickel Creek), which is great because not only do they collaborate, but having someone who truly understands the plight of a musician's life is certainly a comfort.” [Inlander]
“Three months before Johnny passed he had asked me to sing at his wife June’s funeral, where I saw this larger-than-life man become diminished by the loss of this woman he loved so passionately. Then he called me to say: ‘I’m not done yet. I’m going to record your song.’” [The Guardian]
I usually don’t post Tiny Desk concerts since most people have already seen them (if they’re interested in the artists), but I bet you didn’t see Butcher Brown’s…. [NPR/Live For Music]
“Black artistry is woven into the fabric of country music. It belongs to everyone,” writes Rhiannon Giddens in this op-ed (relevant to my book.) [The Guardian]
Film/TV
The only Snoop I want to hear about: “I’m Black, gay, got a criminal background,” Pearson said. “Every strike that’s against Black people, I got them.” [NYT]
Books
“The small press had received a manuscript submission that seemed unusual compared to the hundreds of others they sort through each week. Although the manuscript was remarkably tidy in terms of compliance with grammar and style, the author’s word choices were odd in places, almost but not quite appropriate for their context. Much of the characters’ dialogue lacked emotion.” You can probably tell where this is going, but read on… [Writer Unboxed]
Agree with this (and his comments about Bukowski and Bret Easton Ellis), although the movie American Fiction is still very good otherwise: “There is absolutely no chance any major publisher accepts and distributes a novel like My Pafology/Fuck in 2024. The white liberals at the Big Five conglomerates have moved on from such stories. It is increasingly rare to find literary fiction that depicts working class life, let alone a work that satirizes it or traffics in garish tropes. The Push era is long gone. …Novels like Yellowface and The Other Black Girl are set, quite literally, in publishing houses, and not on the streets of Harlem, Chinatown, or Compton. American Fiction might bemoan the trauma narrative, but trauma narratives are not vanishing from Penguin or Random House anytime soon.” [Ross Barkan]