Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Monday, March 30, 2026
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Flea
[ed. Quite an evolution from his Chili Pepper days. See also: a live performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon.]
Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda
“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.
[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Michael Hurley
I'll walk with you, 'til the morning slows me down
I'll walk with you 'til it's over my friend
And if it proves that in the end I can't be found
Keep on rollin' and I'll find you 'round the bend
June, June, sweet June, and July
Juniper berries and rye
There go the flowers to the sky
[ed. For my lovely grandaughter, June. My little juniper berry.]
Friday, March 20, 2026
A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared.
For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I.
The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.
“I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January.
The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.
In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.
The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.
“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.
The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]
For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.
“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]
Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.
Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.
One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.
The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?
by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]
The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.
The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.
In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.
The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.
“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.
The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]
For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.
“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]
Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.
Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.
One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.
The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?
by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Murder Music
One hundred and nine million albums sold.
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
What if I told you it was none of the above? And what if I told you these stunning achievements were all accomplished by the time the artist was 25? And what if it was all achieved without a single legacy media feature piece, cover story, late night TV appearance or mainstream artist co-sign? What if I told you the artist was confusingly named YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a.k.a NBA YoungBoy, a.k.a YoungBoy, a.k.a YB, a.k.a Top? You’re most likely pretty befuddled right now. Chances are you’ve never even heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. And if you have, maybe from that younger cousin who spends his every waking moment buried in the YouTube app or your one weird friend who keeps up with niche youth culture well past the age they should be doing so. Even if you have heard of NBA YoungBoy, chances are you have absolutely no idea just how legitimately, massively popular this kid truly is.
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Score
What does Alice Coltrane sound like, for those who only know the name? Heavenly harp, like a thousand silver coins on a spiral staircase. Groovy bass lines, shuffley snares and sax – from Pharoah Sanders – that seems to push upward and outward, in search of something. This, at least, is the 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda, named after the Hindu word for “absolute state of being”. It was a rare moment of critical acclaim in Coltrane’s lifetime from the male jazz critics of Downbeat magazine.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
When thinking about the Coltranes, it is important to know that it wasn’t just music, and it certainly wasn’t just jazz. Eastern spirituality swept many rockstars and jazzers away at the end of the 1960s; even the Beach Boys’ gigs were given over to meditation sessions after their dalliance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For certain kinds of artists – generally, the brainy ones – combining music and spirituality was the peak of existence. It is a mysterious idea for anyone who can’t play, and doesn’t pray, but it’s essentially the opposite of chasing fame and good reviews.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
by Kate Mossman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Chuck Stewart /@Alicecoltraneofficial
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
Monday, March 16, 2026
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Suno: The AI Music Race is Over
Video: Rick Beato
For someone as profoundly unmusical as me, AI music generators are quite magical. I can barely sing a note, but in a few seconds I can make an entire track in any genre on any topic I want – like this soul song about Sky camera operator Phil Hooper. You can dismiss this as pure silliness for an audience of about five, but to me that’s the point! Thanks to AI, I get a little bit of musical joy that otherwise is completely out of reach.
Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost, and in this case the cost is a tsunami of musical spam. The stats on AI music are mind-boggling. In 2015, the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs. Today, 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to Deezer (aka French Spotify) *every single day* - that’s 21m a year, and this thing is just getting going.
The real problem isn’t the tracks, however, but the behaviour around them, because AI music is being used to try and steal from streamers (and by extension every legitimate musician on the site). Deezer estimate that 85% of listens to AI music are fraudulent – that is, made by bots set to stream the songs over and over in order to siphon royalties from the common pool.
Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost, and in this case the cost is a tsunami of musical spam. The stats on AI music are mind-boggling. In 2015, the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs. Today, 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to Deezer (aka French Spotify) *every single day* - that’s 21m a year, and this thing is just getting going.
The real problem isn’t the tracks, however, but the behaviour around them, because AI music is being used to try and steal from streamers (and by extension every legitimate musician on the site). Deezer estimate that 85% of listens to AI music are fraudulent – that is, made by bots set to stream the songs over and over in order to siphon royalties from the common pool.
[ed. Do check out the soul song example mentioned above (with this accompanying video). Pretty scary... and sad.]
Friday, March 6, 2026
Thursday, March 5, 2026
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
The Irsay Collection/Auction
Kurt Cobain’s famed Fender is part of $1 billion collection going to auction
In the summer of 1991, Nirvana filmed the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a Culver City sound stage. Kurt Cobain strummed the grunge anthem’s iconic four-chord opening riff on a 1969 Fender Mustang, Lake Placid Blue with a signature racing stripe.
Nearly 35 years later, the six-string relic hung on a gallery wall at Christie’s in Beverly Hills as part of a display of late billionaire businessman Jim Irsay’s world-renowned guitar collection, which heads to auction at Christie’s, New York, beginning Tuesday. Each piece in the Beverly Hills gallery, illuminated by an arched spotlight and flanked by a label chronicling its history, carried the aura of a Renaissance painting.
Irsay’s billion-dollar guitar arsenal, crowned “The Greatest Guitar Collection on Earth” by Guitar World magazine, is the focal point of the Christie’s auction, which has split approximately 400 objects — about half of which are guitars — into four segments: the “Hall of Fame” group of anchor items, the “Icons of Pop Culture” class of miscellaneous memorabilia, the “Icons of Music” mixed batch of electric and acoustic guitars and an online segment that compiles the remainder of Irsay’s collection. The online sale, featuring various autographed items, smaller instruments and historical documents, features the items at the lowest price points.
A portion of auction proceeds will be donated to charities that Irsay supported during his lifetime.
Cobain’s Fender was only one of the music history treasures nestled in Christie’s gallery. A few paces away, Jerry Garcia’s “Budman” amplifier, once part of the Grateful Dead’s three-story high “Wall of Sound,” perched atop a podium. Just past it lay the Beatles logo drum head (estimated between $1 million and $2 million) used for the band’s debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which garnered a historic 73 million viewers and catalyzed the British Invasion. Pencil lines were still visible beneath the logo’s signature “drop T.” [ed. Also includes Eric Clapton's Martin acoustic guitar used on 'Unplugged'].
It is exceptionally rare for even one such artifact to go to market, let alone a billion-dollar group of them at once, Walker said. But a public sale enabling many to participate and demonstrate the “true market value” of these objects is what Irsay would have wanted, she added.
Dropping tens of millions of dollars on pop culture memorabilia may seem an odd hobby for an NFL general manager, yet Irsay viewed collecting much like he viewed leading the Indianapolis Colts.
Irsay, the youngest NFL general manager in history, said in a 2014 Colts Media interview that watching and emulating the legendary NFL owners who came before him “really taught me to be a steward.”
“Ownership is a great responsibility. You can’t buy respect,” he said. “Respect only comes from you being a steward.”
The first major acquisition in Irsay’s collection came in 2001, with his $2.4-million purchase of the original 120-foot scroll for Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road.” He loved the book and wanted to preserve it, Walker said. But he also frequently lent it out, just like he regularly toured his guitar collection beginning 20 years later.
“He said publicly, ‘I’m not the owner of these things. I’m just that current custodian looking after them for future generations,’ ” Walker said. “And I think that’s what true collectors always say.”
At its L.A. highlight exhibition, Irsay’s collection held an air of synchronicity. Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for “Hey Jude” hung just a few steps from a promotional poster — the only one in existence — for the 1959 concert Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were en route to perform when their plane crashed. The tragedy spurred Don McLean to write “American Pie,” about “the day the music died.”
Holly was McCartney’s “great inspiration,” Christie’s specialist Zita Gibson said. “So everything connects.”
Later, the Beatles’ 1966 song “Paperback Writer” played over the speakers near-parallel to the guitars the song was written on. [...]
Another fan-favorite is the “Wilson” volleyball from 2000’s “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks, estimated between $60,000 and $80,000, Gibson said.
Historically, such objects were often preserved by accident. But as the memorabilia market has ballooned over the last decade or so, Gibson said, “a lot of artists are much more careful about making sure that things don’t get into the wrong hands. After rehearsals, they tidy up after themselves.”
Nearly 35 years later, the six-string relic hung on a gallery wall at Christie’s in Beverly Hills as part of a display of late billionaire businessman Jim Irsay’s world-renowned guitar collection, which heads to auction at Christie’s, New York, beginning Tuesday. Each piece in the Beverly Hills gallery, illuminated by an arched spotlight and flanked by a label chronicling its history, carried the aura of a Renaissance painting.
A portion of auction proceeds will be donated to charities that Irsay supported during his lifetime.
Cobain’s Fender was only one of the music history treasures nestled in Christie’s gallery. A few paces away, Jerry Garcia’s “Budman” amplifier, once part of the Grateful Dead’s three-story high “Wall of Sound,” perched atop a podium. Just past it lay the Beatles logo drum head (estimated between $1 million and $2 million) used for the band’s debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which garnered a historic 73 million viewers and catalyzed the British Invasion. Pencil lines were still visible beneath the logo’s signature “drop T.” [ed. Also includes Eric Clapton's Martin acoustic guitar used on 'Unplugged'].
It is exceptionally rare for even one such artifact to go to market, let alone a billion-dollar group of them at once, Walker said. But a public sale enabling many to participate and demonstrate the “true market value” of these objects is what Irsay would have wanted, she added.
Dropping tens of millions of dollars on pop culture memorabilia may seem an odd hobby for an NFL general manager, yet Irsay viewed collecting much like he viewed leading the Indianapolis Colts.
Irsay, the youngest NFL general manager in history, said in a 2014 Colts Media interview that watching and emulating the legendary NFL owners who came before him “really taught me to be a steward.”
“Ownership is a great responsibility. You can’t buy respect,” he said. “Respect only comes from you being a steward.”
The first major acquisition in Irsay’s collection came in 2001, with his $2.4-million purchase of the original 120-foot scroll for Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road.” He loved the book and wanted to preserve it, Walker said. But he also frequently lent it out, just like he regularly toured his guitar collection beginning 20 years later.
“He said publicly, ‘I’m not the owner of these things. I’m just that current custodian looking after them for future generations,’ ” Walker said. “And I think that’s what true collectors always say.”
At its L.A. highlight exhibition, Irsay’s collection held an air of synchronicity. Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for “Hey Jude” hung just a few steps from a promotional poster — the only one in existence — for the 1959 concert Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were en route to perform when their plane crashed. The tragedy spurred Don McLean to write “American Pie,” about “the day the music died.”
Holly was McCartney’s “great inspiration,” Christie’s specialist Zita Gibson said. “So everything connects.”
Later, the Beatles’ 1966 song “Paperback Writer” played over the speakers near-parallel to the guitars the song was written on. [...]
Another fan-favorite is the “Wilson” volleyball from 2000’s “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks, estimated between $60,000 and $80,000, Gibson said.
Historically, such objects were often preserved by accident. But as the memorabilia market has ballooned over the last decade or so, Gibson said, “a lot of artists are much more careful about making sure that things don’t get into the wrong hands. After rehearsals, they tidy up after themselves.”
by Malia Mendez, Los Angeles Times/Seattle Times | Read more:
Image:Cover Images/ZUMA Press/TNS
[ed. Mentioned this in a previous post but still can't believe what's here.]
[ed. Mentioned this in a previous post but still can't believe what's here.]
Sunday, March 1, 2026
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer
Image: James Provost
[ed. Everything was new and primitive back then. Jimi pushed these new tools to their limits.]
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Tom Bukovac And Guthrie Trapp
Nashville Cats
Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will
[ed. Two of the best. Also really love this recording of a song with Nashville session players and Bukovac handling guitar duties.]
Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will
~ John Sebastian
Friday, February 20, 2026
Sunday, February 15, 2026
The Jim Irsay Collection: Auction
C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvannia, 1939
Friday, February 13, 2026
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