My kids and I were listening to some modern music lately when my 13-year-old sprinted to her phone to try to skip to the next song.
I asked her what she was doing as she stopped playing “Without You” by The Kid LAROI . She said she wanted to skip the song because she knew the song had swear words in it, and she wanted to “protect” me from it. She didn’t want me to hear the F-bomb in terms of “(expletive) all of your reasons, I lost my (expletive), you know I didn’t mean it.”
But before I start telling kids in the neighborhood to stay off my lawn, it’s helpful to think about the songs of my own youth. I’ve always enjoyed the rock dating back to the 1960s through the 1990s, and there are some less-than-pristineimages.
We’d found a station playing some of what I would’ve claimed were good songs when the 1994 song “New Age Girl” by Deadeye Dick started playing. I cringed as I heard the lyrics I once fawned over, “She don’t eat meat but she sure likes the bone.” I don’t really believe Brittney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” was about boxing, either.
Perhaps you like your classic rock a decade earlier. Perhaps Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” seems like a classic, back from when music was good. Yeah, it was filthy too: “I’m hot, sticky sweet, from my head to my feet.” And if you don’t know what ZZ Top’s “Pearl Necklace” is about, you’re better off not knowing.
The 1970s weren’t any better. There was a lot of stuff out there about youngsters losing their virginity or interest in underage girls, including Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.”
I remember my 13-year-old once misunderstood the lyrics of Andy Grammer's “Honey I’m Good,” as she misunderstood which vice it featured. She was convinced it was about having one more beer, not about cheating on a loved one at home.
Sure, I wish the music of today wasn’t so loaded with innuendo and swearing. Still, we need to be a little more honest with the music of our past that it wasn’t so virtuous either.
That having been said, I’ll stick with the Christian contemporary music I’ve enjoyed lately before I willingly choose the modern pop of Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey” or “Astronaut in the Ocean” by Masked Wolf . That’s a decision that won’t require me to, as Masked Wolf asks, “put that (expletive) in slow motion.”
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A documentary about the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, helmed by a prominent Hollywood veteran, is bound for the big screen.
Olivia Rodrigo's 'Sour' is a delightfully messy debut - The Chronicle
That's the opening line of Olivia Rodrigo's debut album "Sour." It's almost inaudible, hidden behind the production, but the little offhand comment pretty much sums up the entire album. In "Sour," Rodrigo has poured every single ounce of her breakup blues and anger into an album that is as beautiful as it is chaotic. Leave it to a teenager to create a case study in teenage heartbreak that feels like the real thing, all the melodrama, bitterness — and yes, messiness — included.
That lyric above? You can find it in "Brutal," the album's opener. Rodrigo is talking about the song's thrashing guitar rift, lifted straight from the 90s, that rockets Rodrigo along as she bestows us with line after line of pure, unironic generational woes. What other artist in the music industry is going to throw "Who am I if not exploited" and "And I'm not cool, and I'm not smart / And I can't even parallel park" in the same song? The song is incredibly messy, but that's the point – the messy sound and messy lyrics make for a slick introduction to a purposely messy album about a messy breakup.
Using diverse, incohesive tracklists for breakup albums is not a new idea — Rodrigo's idol and biggest influence, Taylor Swift, did it on her own breakup album in 2012 with "Red." There, Swift used pop, country, electronic and rock to encompass the full spectrum of emotions following a heartbreak. On "Sour," Rodrigo instead emulates the bedroom pop of the 2010s, early-to-mid-aughts pop punk, and 1990s alt-rock to effectively do the same thing. While she didn't invent the concept, what makes "Sour" so impressive is that it's Rodrigo's debut album – it took Swift four tries for one of her albums to showcase the same versatility Rodrigo shows in her first eleven songs.
Take "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U," Rodrigo's two number-one Billboard Hot 100 hits. The former is aesthetic, ethereal and magnetic, a monument to Lorde and her continued stranglehold on pop music. The latter is explosive and furious, providing proof that the 20-year cycle is making punk mainstream again. The pair couldn't be more different in their sounds or their emotions, yet here they are, one artist's two biggest hits, separated on the tracklist by two songs on a single album.
If "Sour" is all over the place, then that begs the question: what keeps the album from spiralling out of control in the hands of a teenager making her first album? Well, if "Sour" isn't cohesive and doesn't even try to balance itself emotionally, then it has to be Rodrigo's laser-focused songwriting that efficiently obliterates the album's antagonist, some dude not worth naming, for all the pain and anguish he caused her. Either she's dragging him for moving on in only two weeks ("Traitor"), being an impossibly unoriginal boyfriend ("Deja Vu") or treating her cruelly and unpredictably ("1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back"). Even when he isn't the focus of the song, like in bookends "Brutal" and "Hope Ur Ok," he's always lurking in the background, an ever-present threat to Rodrigo's potential happiness.
Rodrigo's songwriting and sound on "Sour" is impressive in and of itself. She has nearly mastered the heartbreak song at the ripe age of 18, and yet her biggest potential lies in her eye (and ear!) for detail, both inside and out of her songwriting. Rodrigo goes above and beyond to fill the album with small, little moments that give the album a real sense of personality. For example, look at the titles for "Good 4 U" and "Enough For You," right next to each other on the tracklist. Rodrigo gives the 2000s-inspired song the abbreviation treatment, as if pointing a neon arrow towards its Y2K inspiration. In contrast, using the "proper" spelling in the title of acoustic ballad "Enough For You" feels like a statement on the song's emotional gravitas. It is impossibly easy to smack the same stylistic choices on every title, but a track-by-track analysis demonstrates the intelligence and meticulous thoughtfulness with which Rodrigo curated the project.
Those little details also provide glimmers of humor in the midst of an otherwise very bitter album – buried in the production of "1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back" is an interpolation of "New Year's Day," one of Taylor Swift's most romantic songs from one of her most romantic albums. It isn't an accident that Rodrigo combined the sweet and the sour – she could probably recite Swift's entire discography from memory, and there are plenty of other choices that could've worked. It's funny, just a little ironic and it allows Rodrigo's biggest fans to feel like they're included in an inside joke with her.
If there's one thing that "Sour" proves, it's that Olivia Rodrigo is here to stay. So many one-hit-wonders fail trying to copy their initial success, and while I would gladly stream an entire album of just the bridge from "Drivers License," there is nothing more satisfying than an artist taking risks that pay off. As long as she isn't parallel parking, there probably isn't anything that Rodrigo can do wrong.
Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee Album Review | Pitchfork
Michelle Zauner embraces the spotlight and goes for the brass ring on her third album, a stylish and eclectic record that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities.
Pop legend Tom Jones answers our 11 Questions
Currently, the hard-working octogenarian is a judge on the U.K. version of The Voice . He's also just released a new album, Surrounded By Time, with creative renditions of well-known songs like Noel Harrison's "Windmills Of Your Mind" and Bob Dy lan's "One More Cup Of Coffee." Sometimes the tracks even seem to be veering into 4AD territory, but as Jones explains the experimentation to The A.V. Club , "I wanted... to experiment in sound, even though a lot of the songs had been done before. They were going to sound different and the arrangements were going to be very, very important."
Surrounded By Time entered the U.K. album charts at No. 1, making Jones the oldest man to claim a No. 1 album on the Official Albums Chart, and the oldest artist ever to do so with an album of new material. Naturally, he's planning a tour: "I haven't come out of retirement or anything. I'm doing shows. The only thing that stopped me was this lockdown situation… So we're going to start with Great Britain, do a lot of British shows, from the middle of July up until about October. And then, Europe and America, of course, comes after that."
Tom Jones: Well, I come from South Wales, you see, which is part of Great Britain. We used to go to the seaside. There's a place called Barry Island, and even though it wasn't all that far away, we went on the train. And then you'd see the fairground as you were coming into the station. There was a thing called the scenic railway, which is like the Big Dipper. So I always used to get very excited when I would see that, because you could see it from a long way away.
Those were the most exciting trips that we used to go on as kids, because I was born during the Second World War. So you couldn't really go to the seaside in the early years. But then again, I was 5 years old when the war ended. So after that, it was very exciting because you could go to the beach. That's the first thing I remember would be going to Barry Island and the fairground especially. I used to love that Big Dipper. After being in a blackout and coming out of the war, it was a big, big deal. Just to go to the seaside was a big deal.
TJ: No, no. [Laughs.] Because I was singing since I was a kid, I sang in school. I sang in chapel. I started singing in pubs when I was a teenager. So I was getting myself ready to get a hit record and to get on the television. It was all what I expected. So there was nothing, really.
TJ: Not new ones. I sort of listened to a lot of albums and things that I had accumulated over the years that I hadn't gotten a chance to get to yet. So I was catching up on some reading books that I have on my shelf, thinking, "Well, I'll get to that one day." I had more time to to do things like that. So it was sort of catching up on things really.
TJ: Well, it all depends where I am. When I'm on the road, which takes me all over the world, I like to sample local food. Because I love food, maybe a little too much, but I do love it. So if I'm in Japan, of course, sushi is a big deal, but I eat sushi anyway. If I'm in Germany I'll eat German food, and France of course. Of course! So I like to sample, but if I haven't been to a city before, I'll find out which represents wherever I am the best—not just a tourist place, somewhere, but I do what I can to find out what the local people eat. I like to do that.
AVC: You've met so many famous people, was there anyone who really intimidated you or that you were scared to meet?
TJ: I don't know. I always like to read facts, anyway. I'm not big into fiction. If I read books, I have more interest in things that really, really happened. So I've never really thought about belonging to a fictional family.
A cry for help from a reformed music snob (Part 2 of 2) - National | Globalnews.ca
Last week in this space, I spent about 1,100 words whingeing about how so much of today’s music isn’t very good . This concerns me because it shows that I’m backsliding into music snobbery, something that I’ve been trying to leave behind.
And because obtaining music in this manner was expensive, you were very careful about what you purchased. You bought only what you could afford.
Then along came the internet, first with Napster and illegal file-sharing, then with 99-cent songs on iTunes, then all-you-can-eat streaming services. The price of accessing music dropped to zero while the number of instantly available songs increased to tens of millions. Music on plastic became quaint at best, and at worst, obsolete.
And that’s not all that’s changed. Every single aspect of music composition, performance, production, distribution, sale, and consumption is different. The old ways are dead, dead, dead, and today’s youth — and remember that music culture is always driven by young people — have their own way of doing things.
The best beatmakers — composers who specialize in creating rhythm tracks — can make tens of thousands of dollars a month. Chances are you’ve never heard of The Lab Cook, but he’s supplied beats for Jaden Smith, A$AP Ferg, Rich the Kid, and more.
I’ve met more than a few young bands who buy beats and then sing their own lyrics over top. That’s exactly how Lil Nas X scored with Old Town Road . He paid less than $40 for a set of beats from a Dutch producer named YounKio (who, er, adopted things from a Nine Inch Nails track) and ended up with a song that stayed at number one for 19 weeks.
Yes, we’ve heard this one before. In the Apple TV+ series 1971 , someone is heard complaining that “there’s only so much you can do with the traditional rock’n’roll setup.” We heard it, too, at the end of the ’70s/beginning of the ’80s when synthesizers came into play. Today, though, somehow feels different.
Ruth B took a similar route to fame. After suddenly blowing up on Vine, she was signed to a record deal. Her second-ever show was in front of 10,000 people at an iHeartRadio music festival.
These are the heroes of today’s young musicians, not some person with a guitar slung around their neck. Touring in a van? Bouncing from band to band until you fight the right bunch of fellows? Please. That’s so 2010. They haven’t paid their dues in the same way as musicians of the past because they don’t have to . Think that’s shaped the course of music?
Katy Perry Meet And Greet & VIP Tickets: Where To Find Packages
If you ever find yourself in a crowd at a Katy Perry tour , you’ll be mesmerized and amazed. The production value is beyond the charts, her vocals are always amazing, and she knows how to make her audience have a wholesome and great time. You won’t face one moment which you will consider dull. Every moment will be a magical experience, and you’ll surely get to hear all her present hits as well as some old classic hits. You're sure to have an amazing time whether you're attending alone or even with friends or family. If you have people you know who adore her, you can also always inform them about the upcoming Katy Perry meet and greet.
Among her many achievements, by far, her most recognizable achievement is tying a record with the late Michael Jackson. She had five singles hit the number one position in Billboard from one album. All these songs are beloved by many, and even though they are songs of the early 2010s, tons of people are still crazy over these songs. Her songs like “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dreams,” “E.T.,” “Firework,” and Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) are some of her best works. You might get to hear these songs if you’re able to get into one of her tours or concerts. Be first in line for Katy Perry presale tickets when she announces a tour.
Getting a hold of Katy Perry meet and greet tickets is the perfect way to see her in person. There are tons of Katy Perry fans who are very eager to see her. Well, if you're one of them, you might have the chance to meet her if you have these tickets with you. If you know that Katy Perry is coming to a venue near you, you better look up for meet and greet tickets. If you get these tickets, then you are definitely in a fun time and wonderful surprises. You can take photos, ask for signatures, and even just talk with her.
Are you looking for VIP access to a Katy Perry concert? If so, you'll need to get yourself the Katy Perry VIP tickets. You can look for these tickets from the ticket section if you want to find the best possible tickets for yourself. You can pick venues and dates that best suit you. VIP tickets allow you to get access to amenities and benefits that most people don't normally get. Just remember that VIP tickets are available for select venues and so you'll need to check for their availability. Since Katy Perry is very famous, tickets sell out insanely fast. So, whenever the chance pops up, grab it!
As a teenager, you must have heard amazing Katy Perry songs, and now you want to meet her. Thankfully, that’s not impossible at all. There are tons of great, safe, and legitimate ways to meet this pop star. Are you wondering how to meet Katy Perry? Just look out for her concert and tour announcements. She’s always on the road traveling and performing her famous songs. So whenever you hear news about her upcoming tour, just look out for her schedule, and you’ll be able to find concert tickets without any problem. You can select a venue or a city that’s close to you to make it more convenient for you.
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