Ned's Atomic Link Bin

Writer's note: Greetings! My name’s Ned Raggett, occasional music writer for a variety of spots. The Cream approached me to talk a bit about interesting music news, think pieces, longreads and more from the previous week. And some actual music too, strangely enough. You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator. Welcome to the column, and hope you enjoy!

I didn’t even mention Steve Bannon’s rap musical above, but you’ll see more on that soon enough. Welcome back to a fully armed and operational Link Bin, as it were. Other features include more memories of Jonathan Demme’s work, the start of Jason Molina’s career and what happens when you’re trying to entertain a bunch of schoolkids in Georgia (the country) with broken equipment. I’m still getting over the Bannon thing, though.

A New Guest at Your House Show: The Middleman

For KQED Arts, Emma Silvers looked at the growing impact of Sofar Sounds in the live performance field, helping coordinate house shows for emerging artists in a variety of fields — but not without criticism for its model.

Sofar Sounds, named for ‘Songs From a Room,’ is a for-profit company that hosts live music performances in 340 cities worldwide. Founded in London in 2009 by three friends who were sick of the loud, disrespectful audiences at bars and rock clubs — this origin story is recounted before every show — Sofar now has a full-time staff of at least 50, investors like Virgin’s Richard Branson, and a team of unpaid volunteer ‘ambassadors’ in every Sofar city. The company has grown quickly over the past eight years, largely by marketing itself as a grassroots movement for and by like-minded music lovers. Its motto is ‘Bringing the magic back to live music.’

But a contingent of local artists say there’s one increasingly unavoidable sour note: performers at Sofar shows don’t get paid. A first-time Sofar musician is instead compensated with a ‘high-quality’ video of his or her four-song set; after that, a performer is considered a Sofar ‘alum’ and offered a $50 stipend (depending on a room’s capacity, as low as three percent of the door) for an unfilmed gig. At all shows, musicians have the chance to sell merchandise, promote upcoming appearances, and make fans and social media followers out of a captive, attentive and, increasingly, upper-middle-class audience.
In other words: it’s great exposure.

How Jason Molina Charmed Will Oldham and First Got Signed

Excerpted in The Pitch, Erin Osmon’s forthcoming book on Molina, the founder of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. who passed in 2013 after a lengthy struggle with alcoholism and its impact, contained plenty of anecdotes featuring the young Molina exercising both his talent and his cut-up sense of humor.

Molina’s penchant for storytelling cranked up to ten in the company of his housemates and their extended friend group. One of the most beloved Molina tall tales involved his high school prom photo with then girlfriend Shannon Dickson. His roommates Jeff Panall and Tom Colley found it in a box in their living room shortly after Molina moved in. ‘He was in a tux and his hair was all done up,’ Panall recalled. ‘So of course we put it up on the wall.’ When Molina returned home and received the de facto razzing about the pubescent relic, he responded soberly that it was difficult for him to look at the photograph because his date had died in a terrible car wreck soon after that night. Guilt ridden, Panall and Colley left the photo on the wall but eased up on the teasing. That is, until Shannon Dickson showed up on their front porch. ‘Our housemate was home one day, and someone knocked on the door,’ Colley explained. ‘It was the woman from the picture.’ Dickson was very much alive and living just twenty minutes away in Lorain.

How Oakland’s Experimental Music Scene Became Queerer, Browner, and More Femme

Nastia Voynovskaya’s profile of a number of scene members for a Bandcamp feature helps give some deserved shine to a variety of artists starting to make increasing names in the field both locally and beyond — and how they did so by working against entrenched assumptions and more.

That’s why even though Basu is only a few years older than some other artists in the experimental music scene, many regard her as a foremother who paved the way for younger artists such as Spellling, Kohinoorgasm, and Earthbound. ‘I think it has a lot to do with resistance also, to be honest,’ she says. ‘I think a lot of stuff shifted at the end of 2014, when all the Mike Brown stuff was happening and all of a sudden, that was a point that people were suddenly realizing what police violence is and what white supremacy actually is.’

And that shift is becoming apparent in the ways that younger artists describe their experiences in the scene. Josephine Shetty, a.k.a. Kohinoorgasm, also attributes some of these shifts to social media, which has allowed diverse artists to gain exposure, even if promoters are overlooking them for shows. ‘When someone with privilege takes up space in the physical world, that is a spot lost for someone else. But on the internet, there’s infinite space,’ she explains. ‘If someone books a show full of white dudes, that’s a show where black and brown women didn’t get to play. I feel that the internet has created space for people, and I feel that really recently people have felt more comfortable taking up that space.’

Donald Glover’s Funk Album Proves that He’s Going to Be a Great Lando Calrissian

It’s a great headline. And Evan Narcisse sells the io9 feature’s premise pretty nicely: If it seems a stretch on first blush, then why am I imagining Glover’s Lando walking down a corridor to the strains of the Brothers Johnson as I type? But it’s about much more than that.

What does all of this have to do with Star Wars? Listening to Awaken, My Love! made me realize that Glover could do the same thing—mimic, recontextualize and personalize—with the role of Lando Calrissian. When actors take on roles that have been originated by others, they can choose to study what came before or not. Either choice is valid. But, with Awaken’s mojo in my ears, now I feel like there’s no way Glover couldn’t have met with Billy Dee Williams months ago. His process, at least as I envision it, demands a visit to the reservoir of cool whence Lando sprang. People’s expectations will likely be that Glover will work in some Billy Dee into his version of Lando but he’s also got to make the role his own. His approach to 1970s psychedelic funk—which was on the airwaves of black radio stations when Star Wars was coming out—presents a strong case that he can do exactly that.

It’s equally important to note the strain of Afrofuturism in the core metaphor of ‘Zombies.’ If you’re going to play Lando Calrissian, getting into an Afrofuturist mindset—which imagines how black people live in speculative fiction—feels like a valuable mental exercise. Remember, Lando’s a guy on the fringes of an oppressive power structure—someone who gets by however he can, even if those methods induce some self-loathing.

I Guess I’m Already There: Jonathan Demme Understood How Music and Film Worked Together

Further adding to the memoriams for Demme, in Spin Alfred Soto put together how well he worked with music beyond his famed documentaries and music videos, a thread that ran through his work.

When Lulu (Griffith) kidnaps him for a cruise through small town America, Demme’s film doesn’t treat the yokels’ cuisine, clothes, or habits with the contempt of a Manhattanite. His curiosity is Olympian, like one of the gods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who accedes to human frailties and lusts because they’re kinda cool. Meanwhile, Tak Fujimoto’s camera grabs any exciting music it hears: a car blowing past Lulu and Charlie and blasting New Order’s ‘Temptation’; a combo of young black men in a garage breakdancing and trading vocal lines; the Feelies, who look like they wandered off the audition for the house band in Blue Velvet, playing Bowie at that high school reunion; and, finally, Sister Carol in the closing credits, facing the camera to sing—to live—’Wild Thing.’

The female husbands: boyband of girls win hearts in China

Whatever the exact story is behind Acrush, I kinda want to know more about it. Reporting from Hong Kong, Benjamin Haas wrote for The Guardian with a handy overview of what’s going on and why.

The manager has prohibited members of Acrush from discussing their sexual orientation, and he said there was a sizeable contingent of ‘anti-fans’ who trolled the band over their looks.

But the quintet have precedents, both in Chinese culture and in pop forerunners who adopted similar styles over a decade ago.
‘There’s a long history of cross-gender performance in China, male playing female roles and vice-versa, in traditional Chinese theatre,’ said Lucetta Kam, a professor of gender studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. ‘Feminist issues are getting more and more politically sensitive under the current political regime, but as long as they don’t mention any gender issues and remain entertainment-oriented, it’s all OK.’

Steve Bannon’s rap musical has been found, and it is some unhinged nonsense

Clayton Purdom’s AV Club report on this — this thing provides a handy accompaniment to the NowThis reading of the script, embedded in the story. One wonders what the guy is working on now, shall we say.

The cast fares well against Bannon’s garbled Shakespearean dialog, intoning lines like, ‘South Central is the belly; you, niggas, its mutinous member’ with aplomb. At one point, actress Nyima Funk says, ‘Bitch, please! It becomes a man. Breasts nursing look no lovelier than when a forehead spits forth blood,’ then, breaking character, adds, ‘Sorry, this is the first time I’ve ever said anything like this. We should talk like this more often.’ It ends with a bunch of ‘gangsters’ bearing Coriolanus’ body into hell.

It’s total nonsense, with characters named Baby Gangsta and Stink Eye and one character described in the script with this flourish: ‘Abandon hope all ye who fuck with her.’ For all its incomprehensibility, it’s delighted by itself, exuding the unmistakeable scent of a writer high on their own supply, eager to share their polished and sparkling insecurities and delusions with the world because they’re convinced that they’re universal profundities. In that sense, it’s not far off from the low-budget one-man classics of trash cinema like The Room, Birdemic, or Fateful Findings, only this time shot through with the sort of racist, dick-obsessed eschatology that has seized our government. The Trump administration is uniquely capable of creating such works, it seems.

Jazz Flutist Nicole Mitchell’s New Concept Album Asks, “What is Progress?”

Back at Bandcamp, Seth Colter Walls’s interview with flautist/composer Mitchell is a brief but captivating exploration of her conceptual approach and work — when you’re drawing on Octavia Butler and Anthony Braxton, as far as I’m concerned you’re well on the right track.

You heard a sense of democracy and shifting between configurations within the music, and between the musicians. That aspect of Mandorla is definitely influenced by Braxton’s work, because I think he models that better than almost anyone. In terms of having a large group where people make decisions: they’re working with all of his material, but then they have agency, and they can cooperate in different configurations within the larger group. Or then we can all play together.

That was really inspiring to see, how he uses his musical group as a platform for exploring how we can develop human interaction in different ways. Not just this bandleader telling you what to do. I was definitely inspired by that aspect of his work. But…his music is very intricately composed. This piece is a little bit looser.

Q&A: Palehound's Ellen Kempner On Loss, Love, And Her New Album ‘A Place I'll Always Go’

At Stereogum, James Rettig’s interview with Kempner is a good state-of-the-artist piece for 2017 in all its complexities, with Kempner touching on everything from personal upheaval to the economics of the current working musician, and having to consider how to go forward.

I still have a day job… I work at a book warehouse, which is great. Honestly, it’s good for me to do stuff with my days because when I’m not on tour, what else am I gonna do? It’s great to have a day job. I don’t really know, honestly, with music. I’m at kind of a crux right now where it could go either way. I would obviously love to do music full-time. That’s definitely the goal. I want to be able to sustain my life through music. It’s a dream come true to even tour to a different city and have people that I don’t know who know my music. That’s still so crazy for me.

The Love and Terror of Nick Cave

Chris Heath’s profile of Cave for GQ, with the storied musician openly dealing with the lengthening impact of his son Arthur’s accidental death two years ago, is a marvel of considered analysis and feeling, from both the writer and his subject.

“He didn't know what to expect from this tour, back to Australia, the country of his birth. He wondered whether things would be different, and how these new songs would sit next to older ones, many of those more directly forceful and visceral. And it has been different, in a way that seems to have slightly taken him aback. ‘You know, the audience has been hugely helpful,’ he says. ‘And I find it difficult to articulate this to them, onstage, but, and maybe don't put this in, I would just want to thank them for this. Because for me it's, like, this is not the way it should be. I've always felt as a performer a sort of combativeness. You know, the finger would come out and I would be here I am and this is fucking it and stand there and take it. And it was a very one-way kind of experience for me.… I come from a different school of frontmen. Full-on attack. It's an attack on your audience of some sort. It's just the way it's always been.’ That has changed. ‘Even though the finger comes out, it doesn't feel like that in the same ways it used to feel. It feels much more that there's something coming back.… Something different has been happening with the audience—a kind of dynamic, emotional exchange—that is quite beautiful. There's just some kind of communal feeling. Maybe this is what it's like to be in Coldplay or something.’”

Tonstartssbandht on learning to do things yourself

Gary Canino’s interview with the brothers in said band for the Creative Independent features some good anecdotes, but nothing may beat what happened when they visited a friend who was a teacher in the country of Georgia and they were invited to play for some students — and found themselves caught out without working instruments.

First the kids performed for us, and did 20 or 30 minutes of insanely beautiful national songs and a national dance, with so much enthusiasm and pride and love. Then it was like, ‘Now it’s your turn.’ We were in this one room schoolhouse in a really small village with kids from the ages of five all the way to 18. We were just like, “We don’t know what the fuck to do. None of these instruments work.” There was a language barrier. ‘Sorry, is there anything else we can play?’ We ended up doing, I think, two songs. It was mostly just singing a capella and holding the C chord on the piano because as long as you didn’t move up and down the keys it sounded okay.

It was a beautiful moment, but it was probably the most embarrassed I’ve ever been performing because I felt like I was blushing. I was just like, ‘This is ridiculous.’ I just felt out of my comfort zone, but it was totally fine. Even the kids, you can tell, were like, ‘What the fuck is going on?” What are these goons doing? After we did all that really sick dancing?’ We were just like, ‘Hey, we’re the reason everyone’s here. We’re going to sing a capella and it’s going to suck.’

The Reports Of The Record Industry's Rebirth Are Greatly Exaggerated

Finally, with a specific UK perspective but with implications well beyond it, Eamonn Forde wrote for The Quietus about the optimism being reported in some corners about said industry by said industry, and just how mirage-like it is.

Last year was The Great Harvesting for some of our best pop stars and the industry benefitted from a lot of catalogue sales off the back of celebrity deaths, as always managing to turn a tragedy into a triumph. Prince was the ninth biggest selling artist of the year while David Bowie was the second biggest. Blackstar was part of that, but the bulk of sales were his classic 1970s and 1980s albums as well as greatest hits. On top of this, his triple-disc Cracked Actor album (recorded in, ummm, 1974) was the biggest-selling vinyl set at the recent Record Store Day. So here lies a cruel incongruity for the record business: if it is banking on its biggest stars dying each year to pull it out of a sales hole, the music industry's twist on Logan's Run is only going to go so far until there's nothing left. A thinning crop awaits.

The bigger question is this: who, exactly, is this the early stirrings of a new golden age for? The labels and music publishers? Sure. The top 1% of acts that dominate in CD sales (Adele), streams (Drake) or both (Ed Sheeran)? Of course. But what does it all mean for those way down the pecking order and unlikely to be placed at the top of Spotify's hugely powerful playlists like Hot Hits and New Music Friday?

And on that note: