Rhiannon Giddens

Todd Snider

[ed. See also: Ottoman Turks, American Male. Have a safe and happy 4th everyone.]

Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me

Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males

[...more]

Bob Dylan & Julian Lage

Bob Dylan has just recruited one of the world's greatest jazz guitarists – and no one quite knows what's going on (Guitar World)

[ed. He's always recruited the best. See other Julian Lage videos if you're not familiar with him (I'll post a few links later, or just do a search here). Not counting The Band, the Dead, and TP&The Heartbreakers, Larry Campbell was also a favorite.]

Ron Gallo

[ed. See also: Young Lady, You're Scaring Me.]

Tension Instrument Concert Hall designed by Lihan Jin.
via:

[ed. See more:]

Wes Montgomery

Wes Montgomery Live in '65 - Here's That Rainy Day

Wes Montgomery (Guitar); Arthur Harper (Bass); Harold Mabern (Piano); and Jimmy Lovelace (Drums).

Gene Kelly & Donald O'Connor

From Turner Classic Movies: 

"For many critics and fans, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (’52) is simply the finest musical ever made. And they may be right. Everyone was at the top of their game on this film from the choreographers to the co-directors to the actors to the songwriters. The film epitomizes everything that made the musical genre such an exciting form of entertainment during the heyday of the studio era. The film tells the story of Don Lockwood, a silent-screen swashbuckler who finds love while trying to adjust to the coming of sound. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN drew as much from past popular culture as it did from contemporary references and attitudes. Most of the songs were drawn from past musicals except for "Moses Supposes," which was an original composition written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green."

[ed. Yeah... it's a dumb song. All the more amazing that they could make something this great out of it. See also: Critically acclaimed art is also popular (Thing of Things).]

Authenticity in Music

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today. [...]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music. [...]

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often us to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Rob Verhorst/Redferns via

Walter Becker

Jerry Jeff Walker

[ed. Father's Day, 2026.]

Mick Jagger

It’s easier for guitarists to be mysterious. They don’t have to open their mouths, pontificate in rhyming couplets or risk ridicule in the attempt to make us keep looking at them. Perhaps that explains why Keith Richards continues to receive a smoother critical ride than Mick Jagger. Neither have enjoyed great success as solo artists. Keith can’t sing, his occasional attempts to write lyrics are rubbish and his Wingless Angels reggae experiment failed to yield a single memorable song. Mick hasn’t fared much better, but I retain some fondness for 1993’s Wandering Spirit – an album I probably would have never heard were I not asked to write about it by then Melody Maker review editor Andrew Mueller. To my surprise, Mick's third solo album exceeded my expectations. Rick Rubin was manning the console and it must have been nice for Mick to have Rick encouraging to leave his comfort zone – unlike Keef, who appears not to have listened to any new music since 1973. Don’t get me wrong – Wandering Spirit is no masterpiece, but the band is cooking and, right at the top, we get what might have been Mick’s last ever falsetto funk turn with Sweet Thing. Occasionally I play it “out” or drop it into my Soho Radio show without pre-announcing it. You don’t need to know who it is until you realise you need it in your life. As for the Melody Maker review, my prevailing memory of that experience is handing the floppy disc containing my work to Andrew Mueller and, approximately three minutes later, hearing Andrew loudly announce to the entire office that I had given Mick’s effort a positive critical notice, thus encouraging all my jaded seniors to rain derision upon me. Like Mick, I had also risked ridicule by opening my mouth. In that moment, I had never felt closer to him.  ~ Pete Paphides on Sweet Thing

[ed. Never heard this one before.]

Don’t Even Try to Play This Album in the Background

At times, the defining mood of the 2020s seems to be disassociation. The culture of these years will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays, conspiracy theories that were preferable to the truth, and droning podcasts about all of the above. Feeling is out; vibing is in.

But the case against this line of thinking is simple: Olivia Rodrigo.

In early 2021, the then–Disney star’s single “Drivers License” pierced the pandemic-weary zeitgeist like a geyser in a desert. The song’s soppy piano and screamed choruses served to interrupt the flow of any playlist by triggering the listener’s sympathy and, perhaps, alarm (Is she okay? Am I okay?). Her albums Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) flaunted clever wit and theater-kid poise with adventuresome work from the rock producer Dan Nigro—but the real asset was her ferocity. As she hopped between punk crunchiness and bedroom-pop intimacy, every trembling lyric was backed by palpable, well, guts.

Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, makes that earlier work sound like kids’ stuff. That’s not to dismiss what she did before—she was bottling a particularly teenage form of spite, hot and thin like boiling water. Now that she’s all of 23 years old, the emotional brew is thicker and even messier. The album narrates what she has called her first “adult” relationship, and it was initially meant to be entirely made up of love songs. Then she and her guy broke up, and the work got darker. The result is a wild listening experience—so intense it verges on sickening.

She’s in unstable territory from the first moments of the lead track, “Drop Dead.” A synth riff evokes the wistfulness of a John Hughes movie, but it’s rhythmically shifty, like she’s about to bolt. Rodrigo sings about a first date in a slithering, secretive tone of voice—then starts stabbing one note over and over for the chorus. The effect is unnervingly happy. One imagines the narrator of the Proclaimers’ most maniacal hit undertaking their 500-mile journey with a double dose of Vyvanse.

Quite soon, Rodrigo is fully crashing out. “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane,” she sings on the stunning “Stupid Song,” which sets the honeymoon phase to pulsing piano and galloping drums. The track apes the softly anthemic approach of U2, Coldplay, and the National—until all of that elegant uplift topples like an overly ambitious wedding cake. [...]

The starkly self-incriminating nature of those lyrics marks a nice evolution in the contemporary canon of heartbreak pop. Rodrigo came up under the influence of Taylor Swift, who taught a generation of singers how to write post-breakup disses lightly dashed with antiheroic confessions. But now Rodrigo is pulling at a thread underlying the modern crisis of young romance: the way that dating has become bound up with goal-seeking and social performance. The album opens with her stalking the perfect guy on her phone; midway through the track list, she has the relationship she dreamed of yet is still unable to feel secure. The villain isn’t only her man—it’s also “all the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind,” as she sings in “The Cure.”

As she explores these tensions, Rodrigo portrays herself as straining against the confines of her art form: She wants her man “more than any stupid song could ever say,” and she warns that “it’s too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” But really, she’s quite adept at getting her point across, combining vivid anecdotes (a cry on the curb at LAX), fascinating inflections (full-abandon yodels, facetious sultriness), and highbrow crudity (“They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, ‘Fuck it, whatever!’”). 

by Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube

[ed. She's smart and talented and is going to have a great career.]

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy. [...]

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

by Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigitte Rose, Bandmade |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/YouTube 

[ed. Works for some, not for others. Which, I guess is the point. The algorithm is selecting for a certain type of musician - not necessarily the best. That YouTube email really says everything you need to know about their business model, doesn't it?]

Wasteland Hop

[ed. My friend's husband plays guitar in this very cool band. She met him in Alaska way back in 2011 when the band was touring there, fell in love, moved to Colorado, and now they've been married for 11 years with two small boys. Serendipity. 

As it turns out, the band was in Alaska again in 2024. So nice to see so many familiar places again:

How to Find YouTube Success With Music Theory

[ed. As Ted Gioia writes:

"I’d never seen Rick Beato’s breakout video before—where he tests his young son’s musical ear. But he included highlights in his latest YouTube upload, and it is worth watching, especially if you know anything about music theory.

People need to see this if they think there are no objective standards in music, and everything is just opinion and personal preference.

The reality is that you can actually measure a person’s musical aptitude, and those who have this demonstrable gift possess a huge advantage in making music. Some people are so creative that they can thrive despite this gap, but the gap exists nonetheless."

[ed. Beato is of course, ten years later, one of YouTube's most successful personalities in the category of 'all things Music'.] 

Roy Buchanan

[ed. See also: Pete's Blue, and just about everything else by this former telecaster master. Another great one to check out would be Danny Gatton.]

Bettye Lavette

Los Lobos

[ed. The first rock concert I took my son to years and years ago was Los Lobos, performing as part of the Anchorage Concert Association's annual program schedule. He loved it, especially Cesar Rosas doing some mean slide guitar work with a beer bottle. But, after a while I noticed people began leaving, and after intermission nearly a third if not more of the auditorium seats were empty. Can you believe it? Apparently it was just a little too much for the refined sensibilities of some seasonal ticket holders.]

Jazz Haze

 

Late Night Trip-Hop // Hypnotic Slow Jazz Vibes // Shadow Play

[ed. Not gonna lie, this isn't half bad. Somewhat repetitive and not particularly memorable, but still not what one would normally associate with the term AI slop (and perfectly fine for falling asleep to). See also: I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood (NYT):]

***

Once I went indoor skydiving with Melissa McCarthy. Once I smoked a cigarette with Gwyneth Paltrow in her living room. I once slept on a tour bus through Alabama a few feet away from Billy Bob Thornton after he decided, briefly, that he was done with Hollywood and wanted only to sing with his band. I sat in a room with Nicki Minaj in Brooklyn once, ostensibly to interview her, but instead watched as she fell in and out of sleep for the duration of our time together. Once I walked the entirety of Hampstead Heath with Tom Hiddleston. Once I shot hoops with Ben Simmons as we waited out the tense weekend before the N.B.A. draft.

And then the world changed drastically, and I went to London to interview a … computer? a robot? named Tilly Norwood, whom her creator calls the world’s first A.I. actress.

What that looked like was me sitting at the Groucho Club on a green couch, across from a laptop, as if I were talking to someone on Zoom. Sitting next to me was Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, 40, the chief executive of Particle 6, a production company that creates media content, sometimes using A.I. The three of us chatted amiably, as if this were not insane. When we ordered lunch, we didn’t order for Tilly, as computers don’t eat, and Tilly is just a computer. That is the most important thing to remember: Tilly is just a computer.

***

[ed. Tilly explains herself in: Take the Lead. Kind of reminds me of the movie Barbie.]

The Taming of the Stooge

"I would characterize it sort of like a powerful interest group within a political party at this point. It used to be the entire political party."
—Iggy Pop explains his current relationship with his penis.

[ed. I forgot I'd posted this (like so many other things). I need to get back into the archives more. Peaches cracks me up: see also - here and here.]