US singer-songwriter Greyson Chance, who is in recovery from anorexia, says his eating issues stem back to feeling a lack of control over some of his relationships and his career. "I could control where that scale went," he says, describing the machine around him: "Ten to 20 people at the label saying, 'This is where we think you should go'; and you have management, an agent, business managers. Musicians feel as if they are in a world where they don't have a lot of control and they're searching for things that they can control. That's what it was for me."
Body positivity and intuitive eating have gained traction in recent years, but the music industry, and culture at large, can still feel unwelcoming to anyone in the public eye who doesn't fit a tightly defined "ideal" image – and praise is still heaped on those who do. This is an issue Nashville artist Kalie Shorr has reckoned with. After struggling with anorexia in her teens, an executive at her former publishing company praised her for the way she looked while putting down a fellow female artist for having a different body shape. "He was not just comparing me to another girl, but comparing me to a junior in high school, a child, and calling out her body."
An experienced music publicist who has worked in record labels adds: "There aren't many fat people in record labels, so you've got a lot of unconscious bias from the staff. If they have an artist who was what would be considered a non-standard size, and might be a little bit bigger, they'd be like, 'Oh God, we can't get any clothes for them.'"
Shorr remembers being influenced by Swift's thin frame as a teenager. "It was so hard to not compare myself to this person who I just adored and read all her interviews, bought all her magazines, and knew every word to all of her songs."
There are signs of change. The publicist says the success of artists such as Adele and Rag'n'Bone Man made labels realise they could market artists who didn't have to look as if they were models. (Despite Adele's recent weight loss, they express hope that her "legacy means that everything has shifted for good".) JoJo agrees: "There are so many examples of women and men doing incredibly well in mainstream pop music that have all different types of body shape. Within the past 10 years, there has been a shift for the better. If you feel great about yourself, that's what people are going to be drawn to and resonate with."
Many things are taking place:
The Musicological Zest of "Switched On Pop" | The New Yorker
The secret chord in "Switched On Pop" is that the hosts know what they are talking about. Sloan is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California, specializing in pop and jazz. Harding is a songwriter. Friends from college, they had the idea for the podcast during a road trip along the California coast. When Carly Rae Jepsen 's "Call Me Maybe" came on the stereo, Sloan told Harding about how he'd used the song to teach some students the rudiments of music theory. After losing themselves in an analysis of the song—or an "overanalysis," as they like to say—they decided to record their conversations.
A typical "Switched On Pop" episode pairs a contemporary hit with a musical topic—modal scales, descending bass lines, modulations, and so on. The strategy that Sloan used when he taught harmony by way of "Call Me Maybe" remains in play. Because the songs are so familiar to much of the audience, the hosts can wallow in technical lingo without fear of losing people. A sly bait and switch is at work: the conversation often wanders far from the song in question, ranging across pop-music history or delving into the classical past. For me, the switch operated in the opposite direction. For the sake of listening to Sloan and Harding musicologically jabber away, I received an education in the mysteries of the modern Top Forty.
In the third installment, the guys confront the posthumous cult of Beethoven, the ossification of the canon, and issues of élitism and racism in classical music. In September, a stray tweet about this episode riled up right-wingers on social media, who warned that podcasters were threatening to "cancel" Beethoven. If those self-appointed defenders of Western civilization had listened to the entire series, they would have found that the hosts were simply arguing for Beethoven to be played alongside newer music. I had my own reservations about Sloan and Harding's narrative. It's never clear what role the Fifth itself plays in the undeniable syndrome of classical élitism, and when they merrily catalogue pop-culture riffs on the symphony's opening gesture—Walter Murphy's disco track "A Fifth of Beethoven" and the like—they testify to Beethoven's uncannily wide reach.
What struck me most about "The 5th" is that it adopts a mode of sociological critique not often found on "Switched On Pop." The show tends to be formalist and apolitical: melodies are melodies, chords are chords, patterns recur across the centuries. There is, however, no such thing as "pure music," as Beethoven's afterlife makes clear. The issue surfaces in a fascinating way when Sloan and Harding address Kanye West 's recent ventures in gospel music. They begin by explaining that they've been tuning out West of late, making brief mention of his " maga -embracing" side. Midway through the episode, they reach the provisional conclusion that West's gospel music merits attention, insofar as it's "deconstructing conventions and norms." Then they bring on a gospel authority, the critic Naima Cochrane, who supplies a much harsher assessment. West is dabbling in gospel, Cochrane says, at the same time that he's supporting Trump and describing slavery as a choice: "He's saying things that are very anti-Black, even in a space that is modelled after call-and-response traditions and musical narrative traditions that go back to slavery." Sloan and Harding, in a commendable exercise in self-critique, allow themselves to be led away from their initial praise for West's gospel incursions.
An irony attendant on contemporary pop is that the discourse around it recycles many of the grandiose formulas that have long beset classical music. Reviews of Taylor Swift's 2020 album " folklore " routinely used the words "genius" and "masterpiece." Sloan and Harding have called Swift "Beethovian." Such genuflections may seem less problematic in pop than they do in classical music, where the grim weight of European history looms behind the idolization of Beethoven and Wagner. Yet American culture has its own engulfing shadows: white supremacy has shaped popular song from the minstrelsy days onward, and celebrity power mirrors the radical inequality of the winner-takes-all marketplace. I'd love to see an intelligent podcast like "Switched On Pop" push past the façade of triumphal innocence. The deepest kind of music appreciation takes music not as a divinely gifted art but as an agonizingly human one. ♦
Women fell back in race for inclusion in 2020 pop charts | Music | The Guardian
The music industry continues to marginalise women, according to the latest instalment of a landmark US survey on representation in pop.
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"It is International Women's Day everywhere, except for women in music, where women's voices remain muted," said Dr Stacy L Smith, who led the survey. "While women of colour comprised almost half of all women artists in the nine years examined, there is more work needed to reach inclusion in this business."
The number of women working among the 449 songwriters responsible for the most popular songs in the US in 2020 had also dropped to 12.9% from 14.4% in 2019. On last year's year-end Hot 100 chart, 65% of songs did not feature any women songwriters – the highest level of exclusion since the survey began in 2012.
Women also remained woefully underrepresented as producers in 2020, making up just 2% of the 198 production credits on hit songs – compared with 5% a year prior, which was a high in the survey's history.
The USC Annenberg team looked further at the issue of colour in regard to producing. Picking a representative sample of 600 songs between 2012 and 2020, of 23 individual women credited as producers just seven were women of colour, resulting in an overall ratio of one woman of colour to every 180 male producers.
The report noted some positive progress. Overall, the representation of artists of colour of all genders has increased year-on-year since 2016, representing 59% of artists behind the most popular songs in the US last year.
Smith said: "While it may seem easier to work with prior collaborators, the process of discovering new partners and opening up the potential for innovation is the path toward greater inclusion."
The top male songwriter, Swedish producer Max Martin, had 44 songwriting credits. The top woman, Minaj, had 19. Fewer than 1% of those 900 songs had only women writers; 30.6% featured one woman writer and 57.3% had none.
The Inclusion Initiative report also surveyed Grammy nominations from 2013 to 2021 in the five major categories. The representation of women had increased fairly steadily year-on year, rising to a high of 28.1% in this year's ceremony, which takes place in Los Angeles this Sunday.
Your Beermonger: The Intersection of Beer and Music Pop Culture | ARLnow.com
It’s coming to my attention that I have a problem with pop culture, namely that I cannot stop referencing it in my everyday conversations. It hasn’t gotten quite to Abed from “Community” levels of bad yet, but I might be on my way.
I find myself particularly immersed in music pop culture, and a lot of my timeframe for those references is the ’80s and ’90s. The impetus for me realizing this was becoming a problem was when I was having a perfectly normal conversation with a coworker this week, and a little light goes off in my head. Next thing I know, I’m searching YouTube for a commercial Nirvana did with Bobcat Goldthwait .
Luckily for me, this ’80s and ’90s pop culture knowledge does leave me primed to understand where a lot of these beers are getting their names these days…
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Poring over a beer list these days can sometimes be pretty intimidating. Occasionally you’re presented with a beer that is straightforward and clear about what it is. Take, for example, Hardywood Pils. You’ve got the name of the brewery, the style of beer — and that’s it. Then you’ve probably got your fair share of puns, a few ten-cent words and the ever increasingly more popular short paragraph. But the ones that jump out at me are those names that drop a quarter into the jukebox of my mind.
Just this week we got in a new West Coast IPA from Brooklyn’s Interboro called Left of the Dial , and when I see the can, I can hear in my head the strum of The Replacements. DuClaw just released an orange and vanilla infused IPA called It Was All A Dream-sicle , and there is absolutely no way I can read that without following up with Word Up magazine.
The alternative rock and hip hop of the ’90s I grew up on definitely seems to overlap with brewers, marketers and others involved in the naming process of these beers. You see some folks that might skew a little older — I see you, Bluejacket with your Mexican Radio and Love Cats — and of course the more “of the moment” names as well. You also see someone like Atlas swelling with hometown pride with their Dance of Days Pale Ale, which pairs well with house shows according to the can!
To celebrate a few of the musically inclined beers we have in stock right now, I’ve put together a little Beermonger’s Playlist on Spotify . Feel free to have a listen.
Check out this next:
Hungary pop music reform opens new front in culture war
A Hungarian government plan to reinvigorate the local pop music scene and promote Hungarian culture at the same time has sparked concerns about political influence and censorship.
Details of the 62-million-euro plan revealed Tuesday include funding for training and talent spotting, grants for content creation and marketing, and infrastructure like studios and performance venues.
"It's about producing quality Hungarian pop and rock, and identity-building," said the project's frontman Szilard Demeter, 44, appointed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government as a cultural commissioner in 2019.
"Music can express what is different in Hungarians' character, vision, and historical experience," Demeter told AFP after a draft of the plan was published last year.
"Perhaps that's not always understandable when looked at by western Europeans, but that's why it can be exciting and exotic," he said.
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Government critics however fret that the music plan opens a new front in an escalating culture war.
The self-styled "illiberal" nationalist premier Orban, 57, in power since 2010, declared in 2018 that "big changes" were coming for Hungary's cultural and academic scenes, seen in pro-government circles as hotbeds of liberalism.
Since then, the government has tightened control over theatres and universities while an anti-LGBT campaign has been launched.
A university founded by the liberal US billionaire George Soros, a bete noire of Orban, said it was forced from Budapest into exile in Vienna.
Daft Punk's 'Discovery': How It Changed Pop | Billboard
Testimony from Skrillex, Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Alison Wonderland and more Daft Punk acolytes guides Billboard's analysis of the many ways their 2001 sophomore album changed the course of popular music over the 20 years since.
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Instead, they sporadically released game-changing music and spent the rest of their time in the shadows. Each of their four studio albums was a Rosetta Stone tossed into the primordial soup, rippling outward, sending aftershock after aftershock through popular music and culture. Just like the ancient Wonders of the World, you can pick out building blocks that existed prior to the alien (or, in Daft Punk's case, robot) visitations -- brick-cutting technology, a disco sample, rudimentary pulley systems, the clear influence of Chicago house music -- but even experts sputter to explain how any earthly being engineered the final product.
Despite four distinctive, groundbreaking eras, no Daft Punk release reinvented the wheel quite like 2001's Discovery , released worldwide 20 years ago today (March 12). On their second album, the duo emerged from their more traditional house/techno background and created something that was as poppy as it was reverent of dance music, as retro as it was futuristic. Several of its singles were global hits, particularly lead cut "One More Time" -- but initial reviews were mixed, some critics balking at the album's unabashed earnestness. Today, in the wake of two decades of electronic music's infiltration of the mainstream, you'd be hard-pressed to find another 21st Century dance album as globally successful, beloved, and influential. Discovery established a unique, definitive "Daft Punk sound" that inspired a generation but never quite returned in the duo's ensuing releases, which continued to expand outward and swallow up new worlds.
Even before last month's breakup announcement, you didn't have to flip over many rocks to find Discovery praise from musicians whose work has defined the 21st Century. But to get a better sense of the album's divination of modern trends, Billboard did flip over several of those rocks. With contributions from 16 artists and industry insiders, here are 10 ways that Daft Punk's most inconceivable world wonder predicted pop music's future.
If you read the early reviews -- especially in the U.S. -- you'd never guess Discovery was destined to be a cornerstone of the electronic music canon. Among complaints about perceived irony and gimmickry, critics attacked the album's "cheesiness," especially its flirtations with soft rock sounds of the '70s and '80s, achieved both by using archaic instruments like the Wurlitzer keyboard and LinnDrum drum machine, and by sampling pointedly unhip artists like Barry Manilow and George Duke.
"Daft Punk's speciality is rehabilitating ideas long consigned to the dustbin of history," wrote The Guardian's Alexis Petridis. A.V. Club's Joshua Klein thought that many of the album's songs sounded "so resolutely retro that they often [fell] prey to the pitfalls that felled disco -- namely, banal hedonism at the expense of emotional resonance." Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber, in a now-infamous 6.4 review, dubbed the music the unwanted "Frankenbaby" of prog and disco, writing, "This beast, however grotesque, is relatively harmless."
Electronic artists Porter Robinson and Madeon were both pre-teens at the time of Discovery 's release, and though too young to remember the negative press firsthand, look back on it with bemused derision. "The critical reviews of Discovery are the best shorthand reference I have to why music criticism isn't really worth getting worked up about," says Robinson. "Let me put it like this: Every negative review of Discovery has aged about a million times worse than the album."
Discovery was, in part, conceived as an homage to "the naiveté and the non-pretentiousness of childhood," says Madeon, which he believes is the reason for the album's "anti-snobbiness." "This is not an excuse to be corny, it's just an excuse to be authentic and true to emotion."
For younger listeners like Robinson and Madeon, Discovery 's sonic archaeology also served the purpose of, well, musical discovery. "When I first listened to Discovery , I didn't know about Supertramp or Electric Light Orchestra," says Madeon. "To me that was the 'Daft Punk keyboard.' And then through them, I started listening to that older stuff, and then I started using that Wurlitzer keyboard, and I'm sure there's some people that weren't that familiar with Discovery [who] heard my album first. To them that was my keyboard, and for me it's Daft Punk's keyboard, and for Daft Punk it's Supertramp's keyboard, and maybe for Supertramp it's somebody else's keyboard."
How Eighties pop stars saved Tina Turner from musical purgatory
At first, Turner focused on surviving each day. She was penniless and in debt, chased for lost earnings by all the venues with cancelled Ike & Tina Turner Revue shows. She moved from one friend's house to another, earning her keep with a cleaning job. "Better to be someone else's maid than Ike Turner's wife, was my attitude," she said in her 1986 autobiography I, Tina.
But Ike had underestimated his wife again. The family slept on the floor until Turner rented some furniture, using food stamps to get by. Shockingly, even her own name didn't belong to her, as Ike had changed it from Anna Mae Bullock when she first started performing with him and promptly trademarked it. Indeed, when the former couple eventually faced each other in court in 1978, it was the one thing Turner asked for in their divorce. Ike got the house, the money and the royalties to their songs. Turner finally owned her name.
"To keep it is to reclaim it, reshape it, refine it," Katori Hall, writer of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical , says in the documentary. "Also a kind of f___ you to Ike. You gave me this name, but watch what I build with it."
By 1978, it was all Turner had left. The US music industry had turned its back on her, uninterested in a 39-year-old black woman whose glory days were assumed to be over. Two solo albums flopped and she found herself playing cabaret shows in Vegas while audiences ate dinner as she sang. To keep money coming in, she would appear on any TV programme that would have her, including The Brady Bunch Hour and game show Hollywood Squares, where host Peter Marshall asked her gleefully, "Tina, where's Ike?".
She hoped it would be the last time she would need to talk about it, that the music industry would finally realise she was now ready to perform on her own. Yet still Turner's music was ignored. Her new, tougher rock sound left radio stations bemused and the press were more interested than ever in her headline-grabbing association with Ike.
Only the British rock aristocracy were still prepared to listen to Turner's extraordinary, emotive voice. David Bowie skipped his own album celebrations to go see her perform at a club in New York. Rod Stewart and The Rolling Stones invited her to support them on tour.
As a direct result, Capitol finally offered Turner a longed-for record deal and her manager, Roger Davies, realised she had to go to London to stand any real chance of moving her career forward. There, Turner was introduced to Heaven 17's Martyn Ware and producer Greg Walsh, who suggested the singer record a version of one their favourite tracks, Al Green's Let's Stay Together.
"The way I explained it to her was that she needed to embed herself into the public perception as being one of the great soul singers of all time," Ware told music website SuperDeluxeEdition. "She kind of turned her back on it quite a lot because she wanted to be a rock singer, essentially. She didn't make any bones about it. You can't alter the fact that you are born with this God-given talent. I said, 'I think it's a good idea to do a reinterpretation of a soul record in a new way'."
It was quickly followed by the album Private Dancer, recorded at London's Abbey Road studios with a distinctly British input. It featured covers of Help by The Beatles and 1984 by David Bowie, while Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler wrote the album's title track. The rest of Dire Straits played the music on the song.
Zara Larsson on growing up, the perfection of pop music, and new album <em>Poster
"I'm really happy I found the courage to just say how I feel about things," says the 23-year-old Swedish pop star.
When Zara Larsson wrote the title track for her third album Poster Girl (out March 5) with hitmaking duo Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels, she turned to one of her favorite proclivities for inspiration. "It's just a fun song about weed," explains the 23-year-old pop singer. "They were like, f--k! You smoke so much!' I was like, 'Let's write a song about it!'"
The album also sees Larsson weaving themes of unrequited devotion and sobering flits of romantic toxicity into near scientifically engineered pop songs. With contributors including Max Martin, Marshmello and Young Thug, Poster Girl brands Larsson as a pop singer with range, one indebted to the perfection that pop music demands while infusing it with the specific honesty that it often curtails. It may not be the Swedish performer's ticket to Stateside dominance, but it has the foundation — something she's confident won't be lost in translation.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've been working on Poster Girl for years. What sort of emotional state did this start from for you?
"Never Forget You" was the first song you ever wrote. How do you think you've grown since then as a writer, and how does this record convey that growth?
Poster Girl is far less of a group effort than So Good . You worked a lot with Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels. What drew you to them in particular?
The title Poster Girl is taken from a song on the record. What made you feel like that track could serve as the banner for the album?
I thought it was a really cool title. When you hear it, you're like, hm, what does it mean? Is she the poster girl? You know, it's actually not that deep. Funny enough, the song is literally about weed and I'm like, "Hey, I love you, weed. I don't say this to a lot of people but I love to smoke and I love you so I'm going to write a song about you." You could also hear it as a love song. And when you hear "poster girl," I felt it represented the album title. I feel it presented me as two types of people I am every day. I don't walk around super glammed up all the time. I'm very normal. I honestly look like a bag of s--t most of the time. I don't care. The other part of me is obsessed with flawlessness and my performance has to be perfection and I want glitter and glamour and fluff and the lights. Both are equal parts of me.
Pop music is seeing a disco resurgence right now — particularly with Kylie Minogue and Dua Lipa — and there's an ABBA-adjacent tone to Poster Girl . What is it about that sound that draws you to it?
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KD, Kyrie, Harden, Blake Griffin, and now Aldridge teaming up to try to take down a 36 year old LeBron James in his… https://t.co/io5hTrkJjr CouRageJD (from Instagram.com/CouRageJD) Sat Mar 27 22:33:38 +0000 2021
Them Hogs applying so much pressure!! Woo Pig 🐗 @razorbackmbb SonnyWeems13 Sun Mar 28 01:35:36 +0000 2021
There's so much pressure on women to be the 'correct' kind of woman. Funny (but not too funny), pretty (but not t… https://t.co/tnkaa2hBde RebeccaRideal (from Chester, England) Sun Mar 28 16:29:09 +0000 2021
Now I'm under so much pressure on what to eat. Mochievous (from Washington DC | Lagos ) Sun Mar 28 13:41:27 +0000 2021
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