How Stevie Celebrates a Birthday Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. On...
The Spreadsheet of Prince Recordings Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going...
How Prince won the Super Bowl On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the most-viewed musical...
Dule Rockerrr Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend...
Prince & The Revolution: The COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund Livestream Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch the most definitive record of Prince and the Revolution at their commercial peak, on one of the biggest musical tours ever mounted to that point. It's to raise funds for the COVID-19 Solidarity...
Questlove's Prince Tribute There could be no more fitting remembrance of Prince than Questlove going deep into his catalog and spinning some of Prince's greatest works into a multi-hour DJ set. Unless Quest did that five nights in a row. Which he did! It was an absolutely...
The Sound Of Your Voice Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt more at home in this format, blogging, as that's where I'd found my voice. Well, that might...
After the Rhythm Nation With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her...
Every Single Video Prince Ever Made Prince was an astoundingly prolific artist, releasing nearly 40 albums under his own name(s), and thousands of songs for himself and others. His concerts were legendary, spellbinding from arenas to intimate clubs, flooring audiences around the...
It's like Shazam — for your face! Today's most fun new Glitch app is Record Player, which lets you upload a photo, then uses Google Cloud's Vision API to recognize the image and play it on Spotify. It works really well, but the real fun starts when you upload a selfie or a picture of...
Have the Hip Hop BBQ I keep having to explain a principle I arrived at a few years ago when I realized the modern conservative movement is grounded almost entirely in a contrived sense of grievance, predicated on a false victimhood of its supporters. (That’s not to say...
4th Day of November... I struggled for a long time when the nice folks at the Heat Rocks podcast asked me which Prince album I’d want to talk about on their show. Oliver Wang and Morgan Rhodes run an amazing podcast, where every episode is a deep-dive into a classic...
Dig, If U Will... I was delighted to get to talk to Ben Greenman for an episode of “Dig If You Will The Podcast,” his series in honor of his book “Dig If You Will The Picture”. We go deep into Prince’s influence on transforming the music industry, and if you like it,...
It's time to discover Prince With the recent availability of nearly all of Prince’s catalog on the most popular streaming services, it’s a great time to (re?)discover the breadth of Prince’s incredible body of work. The full scale of Prince’s music is probably too much for any...
Coloring Books Red Book, Yellow Book, Green Book Stay within the lines. The Red Book There’s a specification that Phillips published in 1981, for optical digital encoding of audio. They teamed up with Sony to create the standard, and by the following year hardware...
Set Adrift: Beneath the Surface of P.M. Dawn Today, P.M. Dawn exists as a faded memory for most music fans, if they’re remembered at all. But Attrell Cordes made songs like nothing that came before. Beautiful, sweeping melodies paired with lyrics of regret, remorse, heartache and profound loss....
Prince's Own Liner Notes On His Greatest Hits When Prince’s first greatest hits collection was released, Prince made private comments as a guide for the liner notes. Later briefly posted on his website thedawn.com in 1996, Prince’s comments have been lost for the last 20 years, but now provide a...
Goodbye, Prince I’ve been struggling to find words to express how I feel in the week since Prince died. He’s obviously the artist that’s had the most impact on my life, and was in many ways the lens through which I processed the rest of pop culture and artistic...
A little less rocking with you... After talking to a friend about how Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” is so romantic if you just focus on the strings, bass and vocals, I was inspired to mix down the tracks to feature just those elements. anildash · A little less rocking with...
It is miraculous. Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I just can’t let it go. For a few months, I’ve heard this nagging sound in the back of my mind, asking me to revisit Amadeus, one of my favorite films ever. Because who among us hasn’t heard Jeremih intone,...
I Know Times Are Changing 0:00 — 0:10 In the summer of 1983, Wendy Melvoin was just 19 years old. She’d flown halfway across the country from Los Angeles for her first professional gig as a guitar player, joining her girlfriend Lisa Coleman in the band where Lisa had been...
My Favorite Floppy of All Time After at least 15 years of debating whether I should spend money on this, I recently took the plunge and acquired one of my most-desired Prince collectibles. Added to my collection: 3.5" floppy given to press when Prince changed his name....
Prince on New Girl [11:05pm] Well, that’s a wrap. It’s hard for me to say how that ranked as a New Girl episode, but it seemed the narrative of the show may have been subordinated to getting Prince some good lines. That being said, the little man certainly acquitted...
Heaven, Hell, Marvin, Prince and the Party Every great career in rhythm and blues leads only to heaven or hell. The path to hell is obvious: From Sam Cooke gunned down to James Brown leading a multi-state police chase to Sly Stone strung out on crack and living in a van to Whitney Houston’s...
A Golden Era of Prince Scholarship Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such as Michael Jackson, his influences like James Brown, or even contemporary hip hop acts from Biggie...
A Decade After Aaliyah Ten years ago, my friend Andre had been experimenting with an instant messenger bot that sent out news headlines; Up late on a Saturday night I got a message that stopped me cold: A link to MetaFilter with the simple headline Singer Aaliyah Killed in...
Video Computer System A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I’d reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite. Behold, “Video...
A Red Flag Before The White Flag Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean that’s a bizarre business model in any arena. But particularly in the cultural arena, the idea...
Alan Leeds and Who Writes the Web One of the most frequent questions I get when I talk to people who are unfamiliar with social media on the web is, “Who writes all these blogs or Wikipedia? Who has the time?” The answer, at least in this case, is me. People who are skeptical about...
Remembering Bobby Byrd Alan Leeds, one of my heroes and our greatest record of the living history of funk music, offers a warm remembrance of Bobby Byrd after Byrd’s passing last week. Well worth a read, especially to understand that every great sidekick had the potential...
Timbaland, Nine Years On Speaking of Timberlake, that brings us inevitably to Timbaland. After the fawning over Rick Rubin in the New York Times, it’s amazing that there hasn’t been a similarly high-profile profile of the best producer working in pop music today. Until then,...
JT's LoveShow We just finished watching HBO’s broadcast of Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex tour, which I (unsurprisingly) quite enjoyed. It seems like he’s done a good bit since his last tour to incorporate his strong live band and his rapidly improving chops on...
Robert Kelly, Genius I wish I didn’t have such a proclivity for hyperbole, so I could find the right words to express how excited I am about the teaser trailer for R. Kelly’s new chapters of the Trapped in the Closet saga. Witness, courtesy of Stereogum, a preview of...
I've Just Got To Let You Know Lionel Richie’s “Hello” is, of course, the most moving and emotional music video of all time.* In the more than two decades since its release, it’s also become a touchstone for inept sculptors worldwide. Especially in Iraq. Thus, it’s imperative that...
Video of the Year My early pick for video of the year? Zach Galifianakis‘ take on Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”. Absolute genius, and even features a cameo by Bonnie “Prince” Billy More on the video’s origin at The...
They Reminisce, They Reminisce Over at HipHopMusic.com, which Jay Smooth has relaunched as a group blog, Brandon Soderberg offers When They Reminisce Over Mixtapes. The same industry that makes millions from “Now That’s What I Call Cherry-Picking Hit Singles! Vol 42” tries to...
Why do all record industry execs sound like thugs? As much as we like to blame the RIAA for all the evils of the recording industry, leave it to my boy Prince to bring out the best in the execs over in the U.K. And mind you, these are music retailers, not even the people who, despite their...
Michael Jackson For Sale Sadly, MichaelJacksonForSale.com does not actually let you purchase the King of Pop for your very own. However, it does have lots of interesting memorabilia, and it accepts PayPal, which isn’t real money and so it’s basically like you can get any of...
Justin Timberlake: Jelly and Jams Details offers a lengthy and fairly credible interview with Justin Timberlake: Timberlake is not a kiss-ass. Selling more than 13 million records has earned him a lot of rope, and he knows that. He relishes battles with his label, Jive, about...
A Temple in Vegas Sasha Frere-Jones bears witness to Prince’s ageless funk in this week’s New Yorker. As much as I admire Prince’s gifts, it’s Sasha’s job I...
The original Rhapsody in Blue So, we talked about Gershwin’s work in inspiring the Rhythm Changes, but his signature work is, of course, Rhapsody in Blue. One of my favorite recent finds is the original recording of Rhapsody in Blue, as preserved by the Internet Archive. From the...
The Amen Break Nate Harrison’s 2004 documentary Can I Get an Amen? on the “Amen Break”, uncovers the story behind one of the seminal breaks of the electronica/jungle/drum-n-bass scenes. Though I’d argue that James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” break is even more...
Them Changes Rip, Mix, and Burn? It’s not new. Contrafact is what they called sampling before there was sampling. You take the chords from a song that the whole band knows, and play your new song on top of it. Familiar but new, and you don’t have to pay...
My Library Is Dead My iTunes library, of about 12,000 songs consisting of 60GB of data, got corrupted today. The MP3 files themselves are okay, but all of the metadata is blown away — playlists, play counts, ratings, and all my little tweaks to song and album...
Prince's Pretty Patent Sure, everybody’s linking to Ironic Sans’ (admittedly entertaining) Celebrity Patents, since Waxy pointed them out, but did you know Prince actually has a real patent? Patent D349127 is for a portable electronic keyboard musical instrument. But...
Rethinking the Symphony Earlier this year, the New York Philharmonic started distributing some recordings of their works through the iTunes music store. On its own, that’s not a particularly revolutionary achievement; These days, it seems downright obvious. But what’s...
Frank Zappa on Crossfire A little more than two decades ago, popular music was under fire by Tipper Gore’s PMRC, the Parents’ Music Resource Center. Tipper was aghast at popular music’s coarsening of the public discourse, especially because a young Karenna Gore had played...
They Wrote The Manual For a long time, I’ve been enamored of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. There’s a lot of reasons, from their music to their various art projects and media hacks. But the one that’s struck me as most compelling lately is The Manual. I’d guess the advice...
Justin, Just Links My reign as most verbose Justin Timberlake fanboy on the Internet is not yet complete. Thus, some links to augment the review of “SexyBack”. The Observer has a lengthy review/interview on the eve of the publicity tour for...
Culture Jamming, or Jam & Lewis It’s no great revelation that popular music has largely shifted to a producer-centric culture, and though this is true not just in hip hop or house music, as discussed earlier, those were certainly two of the biggest influences. If you want to talk...
People Really Wanna Talk About Star One of those interesting side-effects of having lots of old blog posts around is that sometimes they come back to life. With Star being fired last week, there’s been a whole bunch of new visitors and commenters to my old post which states, correctly,...
MTV for Americans, and Niharika Desai I’d be remiss if I didn’t pass along the NYTimes story on MTV Desi from last week. There’s a lot of different reactions this prompts from me, but perhaps the most important one to MTV is summed up in the story: The three target audiences for the new...
Everybody Loves Me! I have received the following comments on posts from my Pop Life blog. Though they’re ostensibly aimed at the celebrities I discuss on the blog, I prefer to think they’re aimed at me. Hey Baby!! I love you sooo much.I love your music, your style,...
Music, Music Everywhere With the news that Toyota is launching a record label, I guess we can officially say that the music industry has gone completely random. Though most people want to attribute it to Wal-Mart’s dominance of the distribution of physical recordings (as...
How the web should be Michal Levy reminds us what we love about the web. With Giant Steps, Levy took Coltrane’s masterwork and set it to Flash in a beautiful interpretation. Nothing literal, just a stunning representation of what the music made her see. Go take a look at...
Poor Jermajesty It seems that Jermajesty Jackson‘s parents are splitting up. An unfortunate and surprising turn of...
separate and unequal Gina lists the 1,049 federal rights that depend on marital status. Civil unions are not enough, and will never be enough, despite the fact that they’re harder to enter into than marriage...
The Laziest of Webs Okay, there are services that handle eBay for me if I’m too lazy to sell my junk. Which I am. But what I need is a service which will handle Free After Rebate products for me. I’d trust them to be my purchasing proxy, perhaps with one of those...
International Lip Synching I finally got around to seeing Finding Nemo this weekend. It’s pretty good, not great, but I suppose I’d appreciate it a lot more if I were a parent. In summary, the story is not as good as Monsters, Inc. but the animation, as one might expect, is...
Life Can Be So Nice I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person in Nice, France, who is walking around looking for locations that were used to film scenes for "Under the Cherry...
Five Years Later I have an older, kind of broken-down laptop that I wanted to do some research and testing on, so I installed a fresh install of a new operating system on it. Having a slow processor, I chose an operating system with relatively low system...
JT and AD in NYC I am really, truly, inordinately excited about the fact that I’m going to see Justin Timberlake perform this week, especially since it’s not the crappy arena tour with Aguilera, but one of the live club gigs he does with a real band. If this sort of...
toolbar Yeah, I got rid of the little toolbar that used to be next to the sidebar. Nobody uses it anyway, and most of the links there are on my page of other stuff...
Get rid of these discs It’s funny because it’s true! This list of One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately only includes 3 or 4 that I have. Overall, they are so, so right on. But you’ll pry "Fear of Black Planet" out of my cold, dead...
Remember a few months ago Remember a few months ago everyone was gaga over Golden Shower’s "Video Computer System"? Well, now you can see how it was made. And in case you missed it the first time I’ll mirror the video locally right...
hugh downs Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a TV watcher, but one of my consistent faves since childhood has been 20/20. This, despite my great contempt for Barbara Walters. The reason? Hugh Downs. A class act, he’s been in broadcasting for 60...
Arto signs with Righteous Babe Dammit, I just can’t stop starting trends. I half-jokingly put up my "FadMaker" section on the sidebar when Ani signs Arto Lindsay to her label. As part of my ongoing "Circular Reference ’99" tour, flip through my CD collection to...
bad dad goes to the market Went to the grocery store the other day. (Did I mention I love grocery stores?) The fellow in front of me in the express aisle had three items: A 6-pack of 12-ounce Bud Light Longnecks. Bag of pork rinds frozen White Castle burgers. And a 4-pack of...
secondhand record economics The harsh realities of the capitalist free market. Or, "Art vs. Commerce, Chapter LXXXII". Despite my fondness for independent record stores, (or should I say CD stores?) their penchant for buying and selling used discs results in some...
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus Just one of those great "Only on the Web" sites is the Visual Thesaurus from a company called ThinkMap. I’m not much of a fan of Java applets, but this one’s worth the download time, it’s a great brainstorming tool. And one of my classic...
Prince lifts intro bars? Separated at birth? The opening bars of Stevie Wonder’s "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" features vocals being handed off from a male vocal to a female and finally to Stevie himself. Prince’s "1999" features the same technique,...
Prince aftershow Actually, it’s technically very early on 21st July, 3:45a to be exact. That bastard Prince made us wait 5 hours until he showed up. In my opinion, of course, it was worth it. Others who were present tended to disagree… Also present onstage at Life...