“It’s so easy, a baby could learn to play it in fifteen minutes”
Frank Black on music streaming: “There’s an opportunity for my music to be heard and potentially paid for? Great, do it.”
The Daily Beast: What do you think about streaming services from a financial aspect?
The Pixies’ Frank Black: I can’t worry about that. It’s like, how many things can I fucking worry about, you know? I’ve got a lawyer, I’ve got an agent, I’ve got a publisher. They can worry about that stuff. I don’t have time to fucking take a stance on everything. There’s an opportunity for my music to be heard and potentially paid for? Great, do it. Is it the best that I can be paid? Is it the worst that I can be paid? I don’t know. I don’t really have a lot of options. All you can do is play your cards, and hopefully it all works out. Right now all I can really focus on is making music and trying to make sure whatever is owed to me from a financial point of view is collected by those agents who are authorized to collect it for me.
The Daily Beast: But don’t bands make exponentially less money than they used to?
Black: I can get all involved and take a stance and develop an opinion, but at the end of the day, I’ve got too much to do. I’ve got five kids. I just want to fucking play music and make art. I’m not criticizing other people who have highly developed opinions about all this, but I just don’t have time for it. I don’t have any interest in it. I just want to play music, and fortunately I’ve got my t-shirt money, I’ve got my concert ticket money, I’ve got my commercial usage money.
It’s no different than when I started out. Technology changes and formats change, but it’s basically you generate creative content, you try to get it heard, you try to get it paid for, you try to collect what is due to you, and, you know, file for your taxes (laughs). What else can I do?
Via The Daily Beast
Prince’s next album “HITNRUN” will be a TIDAL exclusive, released September 7th
Prince says:
“After one meeting, it was obvious that Jay Z and the team he has assembled at TIDAL recognize and applaud the effort that real musicians put in2 their craft 2 achieve the very best they can at this pivotal time in the music industry. Secondly, TIDAL have honored Us with a non-restrictive arrangement that once again allows Us to continue making art in the fashion We’ve grown accustomed 2 and We’re Extremely grateful 4 their generous support. And lastly, in the tech-savvy, real-time world We all live in 2day, everything is faster. From its conception and that one & only meeting, HITNRUN took about 90 days 2 prepare its release. If that’s what freedom feels like, HITNRUN is what it sounds like.”
Anwen Crawford On Why The World Needs Female Rock Critics
“The problem for women is that our role in popular music was codified long ago. And it was codified, in part, by the early music press. In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments—the Rolling Stones vs. Muddy Waters, Motown vs. Stax, Bob Dylan vs. the world—was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony.
Perhaps fiction and memoir, more than criticism, provide space for female writers to dissect all that is maddening and wonderful about popular music: the spectacle, the chicanery, the beautiful lies it tells us. But there is plenty of need for female music critics yet. “Take it easy, babe,” Mick Jagger sang in “Under My Thumb,” still as glistering a slice of unrepentant misogyny as ever it was, unredeemed by time or by the million screaming girls who wriggled beneath Jagger’s commands. In a 1971 essay, Ellen Willis argued that Jagger’s “crude exhibitions of virility” were less sexist than the “condescending” pose of a bohemian like Cat Stevens; insofar as rock, she wrote, “pitted teenage girls’ inchoate energies against all their conscious and unconscious frustrations, it spoke implicitly for female liberation.” I don’t entirely agree with Willis’s defense of the Stones, but I do recognize the difficult trade-off she describes, between the freedom that rock can feel like, for a woman, and the subjugation that it might celebrate. It’s between these boundaries that the female critic works, hoping to clear a path.”
– Anwen Crawford, “The World Needs Female Rock Critics”
Duran Duran On Why They Think They’re Still So Influential
Every generation gets into Duran Duran. What do you think it is that makes this band still so influential?
Nick Rhodes: I think the approach we took has certainly become more popular with a lot of artists now. But we took it from everything we’d heard and seen and put it together. We liked Chic and Sister Sledge, and we liked David Bowie. We liked the Sex Pistols and Kraftwerk. Along the line we got into James Brown and electronic music and house music. It all goes into the mix, and that’s the way music’s always developed.
The world keeps catching up to where Duran Duran started.
Simon Le Bon: We’re still here. And we’ll wait forever if we have to.
Via Rolling Stone
What is ‘vocal fry,’ and why is this a new thing? Oh, it’s not?
You sound like a Kardashian or many actresses these days? Speech therapists “vocal fry” the call is low, throaty-up of young women are gaining importance. “Sunday Morning” Faith Salie contribute girls should be encouraged to find their voices, however, say that there should be creaky uncomfortable.
Watch A Breakup Happen In Real Time In Harrison’s Amazing “How Can It Be” Video
Oh, Harrison, we feel your pain…
Harrison – How Can It Be (feat. Maddee) from Last Gang Records on Vimeo.
You can pick up Harrison’s EP, ‘Colors’ on Last Gang / Jet Jam.
