Ned's Atomic Link Bin: Kim Kardashian: Punk Inspiration, Iranian Rave Busts, When ZZ Top Were the Zombies and More

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!

Last week had a number of pieces which stirred up passions in various corners of the Net — such as the one about how supposedly Mike Love deserves more credit for the Beach Boys than Brian Wilson because he’s a nice guy. (And have I mentioned De La Soul yet?) But whether it was protests about the economics of the UK driving out both club and band scenes, a celebration of The Monkees as a prime example of '60s studio musicianship or the Chinese indie-rock scene being driven to the margins, there was as much to be discussed as ever.

Prince's 'Afromestizaje'

Tyina Steptoe’s celebration of Prince for All Music Books looked at how he grew up in a context of Latina/o performers at many levels throughout popular music in the '70s, paying particular attention to his long-running work with Sheila E.

Nevertheless, when Sheila E. introduced herself to Prince after his show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California, she was startled to realize he already knew who she was. As she recalled, “I’d already released my first record with Pops and had performed on multiple records for other artists, in addition to being on national tours and television shows. It dawned on me then — I didn’t need to be nervous. I suppose I was a ‘somebody’ before he was.”

Geeta Dayal’s feature for RBMA on Bell Labs as both technological experimentation zone and unexpected musical pioneering venue is part elegy to a lost period, part celebration of wide achievement.

[Max] Mathews was a visionary who saw the potential in those early computers to create new sounds. “We knew at the beginning that the computer could make any sound the human ear could hear, and any timbre,” Mathews told me. “That was not true of traditional instruments. The violin is certainly beautiful, but it will always sound like a violin. That can be very good, and it’s also limited. And the computer is not limited.

Lauren Laverne’s heartfelt piece on her blog at the Pool considered the famed UK history of clubs and clubbing, arguing that the combination of economic and political pressures at play are dealing a series of hard blows.

Why does this matter? To be completely frank, the economic case for a thriving club scene is not what moves me. I want our cities to remain culturally vibrant and diverse. I want young people now to experience the culture and community that I did. Being part of an alternative culture makes you see the world in a different way. It broadens your mind. The children of wealthy people have easy access to that kind of thing - travel, books, art, theatre trips… For kids growing up where I did, Saturday night was sacred because it was their equivalent. Like a sacrament, going out was surrounded by rituals - from planning your outfit to procuring the booze. It was a chance to escape the world, transcend your own particular circumstances - to live differently, in your imagination.

In my case sneaking into the Newcastle Riverside (now - guess what? - luxury flats) underage changed my life. I formed a band, moved to London and ended up with a career in broadcasting. I’m not the only one. The people I knew then went on to their own adventures that began in the pursuit of a good time. As musicians, writers, artists and academics or just human beings with a wider perspective. I had no expectation that going to clubs would change my life. I just wanted to have fun. Speaking of which, fun isn’t a very fashionable concept to champion but whatever happened to having a good time? There should be places to have fun in our cities. I don’t want the recreational life of the country to be confined to the outskirts of towns, or just to pop up at the weekend in the countryside.

Kim Kardashian West Is Punk as Fuck Kim Kelly’s Noisey piece, in reaction to comments about the other Kim K being photographed in a black leather jacket with a patch from the obscure Japanese hardcore band Disclose on it, cast a wry eye on the reaction to it, wondering if priorities weren’t a little misplaced.

Passing judgement on fashion—deciding who does and does not deserve the right to wear a band’s logo—is a childish waste of time and energy that could be spent on infinite better activities. Yes, it’s annoying to see it happen; it irritates me too, but it really shouldn’t. You want to be pissed off at people you don’t know? Be pissed off at the politicians who poisoned Flint, or the police officers murdering unarmed black people in cold blood, or the capitalist billionaire class strangling the people and working us to death while they jet off to Fiji. Direct your energy somewhere useful—that’s what punk is really about, isn’t it?

Scene contributor Jewly Hight’s interview with country musician Cam for NPR delves into the genre’s dude-heavy approach of late and how she has happily and pointedly twisted expectations and built-in biases along the way.

Right now being a girl in country music, there's a lot of talking about it. And man, I'm not trying to make any statement at all, really. I'm trying to make music that makes a statement, you know? That's what I'm trying to do. But with that responsibility of being someone that now has extra attention [comes] being a role model. And that is very important and I take that very seriously. ... I want the girls that are watching this, and the girls that are about to make country music, about to get signed, about to get on the radio, I want them to [see], "I will be one of those role models for you. I will show you that I'm gonna take it as far as I can, and then you're gonna stand on my shoulders, just like I stand on the shoulders of the people before me." It was really important to embrace that part of it.

Trunkworthy’s anonymous piece on the supposed Prefab Four, back with a well-received new album Good Times! and a long in the works Blu-ray box set of their TV show and film work, makes a strong case for celebrating the band by shifting them to another context aside from the one they’ve found themselves in from the start.

Ironically, the crass, production-line mentality of Motown’s hit machine is the key to its glory. Berry Gordy assembled the best writers, producers and musicians and then put them all through a quality-control regimen with infinitely higher standards than the Cadillac factories he was emulating. He literally sent his artists to charm school, where they were taught how to dance, dress, shake hands and conduct TV interviews in a way that would avoid giving folks any sense that that the raging turmoil that defined the mid-to-late ’60s had any impact on the lives of the singers behind their favorite songs. This not only produced some of the best music of the 20th century, but it allowed Motown to take it mainstream via prime-time TV. Everybody wins.

Now don’t take a word of what’s been written above as a cynical dismissal of Motown, its music or its methods: We’re unabashed, b-side-level fans of what they did and how they did it, even as we celebrate artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder for breaking free and dragging Motown in to the eye of the storm the label consciously provided shelter from. But we think it speaks to a larger point about dismantling these tired, old ideas about credibility and authenticity and the need to stop conflating them with quality. Because when we listen to The Monkees, we undeniably hear quality. As we do with Motown, we hear a confluence of the era’s best songwriters (Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, David Gates and, of course, Boyce & Hart) and musicians (the Wrecking Crew) backing four accomplished singers who had the talent and charisma to take these songs to the masses.

The Strange Is Gone From San Francisco Steven Edelstone’s Spin piece isn’t the first to have addressed the increasingly unsettled music scene in SF — much less the first to look at the financial upheaval via vastly increasing rents driving the change. But in its variety of voices quoted — not always in agreement with each other — it’s a vivid portrait of a community’s instability.

And, yes, there is new talent coming out of the Bay Area, including surf-rock band Hot Flash Heat Wave, math-rock/jazz experimentalists Feed Me Jack,chillwave quartet Air Surgeon, and Afrosoul artists Bells Atlas. But the overall number of acts seems to be down significantly, making it harder to fill a venue, according to Ramona Downey, booker and owner of Bottom of the Hill, a legendary 250-capacity venue in Potrero Hill. Other artists, like rappers Nef the Pharaoh and IAMSU!, R&B singer Kehlani, and tech-house DJ J.Phlip, are all up-and-coming local stars in their respective genres, but all venues, regardless of the genres they book, are feeling the sting of having fewer musicians in the area. Michael O’Connor, owner of multiple venues like the Independent and Brick and Mortar, says, “The bane of my existence right now is finding support acts to be on a bill — it’s like pulling teeth. There are so few bands, so they’re being way more selective.”

Nate Patrin’s overview of the groundbreaking band’s work for the Vinyl Factory isn’t just a fan’s appreciation, but a series of solid cases for the group’s place in 20th century musical history — an analysis that goes beyond axioms to making solid cases.

As a racially and gender-integrated band with an indelible ensemble strength to back up a charismatic and talented idea man, there wasn’t really anything quite like Sly & the Family Stone. Having two white members helped play up the band’s multicultural angle, but chops-wise they might as well have been Junior Walker (sax player Jerry Martini) and Clyde Stubblefield (drummer Gregg Errico). The other half of the horn section was a woman, Cynthia Robinson, who would be a titan from her outro to ‘I Want to Take You Higher’ alone. Bassist Larry Graham singlehandedly (or singlethumbedly) popularized the slapping style of playing, giving the band the legendary bottom-end that put them right next to James Brown (and arguably ahead of him) in the annals of funk’s creation. And the Stone siblings – fuzz-flinging guitarist Freddie, co-lead-singer/keyboardist Rose, and singer/songwriter/mastermind Sly – were the literal familial unit that invited every listener to their reunion.

In the Quietus, Angus Batey looked back at the abbreviated recording history of Son of Bazerk, whose Bazerk, Bazerk, Bazerk album from 1991 remains a high creative point of that hip-hop era, though it became in the end a glorious one-off rather than the start of something huge.

If hip hop's sample-based methodology is, as has been argued by some of those who've analysed it as a postmodernist art, defined by breaks and ruptures, then 'Change The Style' is arguably the perfect example of the form. There is no pretence made at smooth transitions: instead of a hook that fits with the verse, SOB and the Bomb Squad snatch all the music of the verse away and replace it with a huge lump of Yellowman's 1983 dancehall reggae track, 'Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt'. There's no continuity - of tempo, key, lyrical theme. And after a few seconds, we're back into verse two, the same music as the first verse, before smashing into a doo-wop hook the next time around. For the finale, the changed style flips us into punk, via a Bad Brains sample. It's less a single than a high-speed multi-genre pile-up on the musical motorway: sonic carnage, aural confusion, a record made by people who knew what the rules were, but were going out of their way to not just break them but leave them looking hopelessly outdated and no longer fit for purpose.

Is the Era of Free Streaming Music Coming to an End? Marc Hogan’s in-depth piece for Pitchfork looked at recent industry moves and trends in both music and tech to wonder if the current ad-supported model of ‘free’ listening is reaching an endgame.

Glimmers of what this realignment could mean for artists and listeners are already becoming evident. People who make music may eventually start to see their payouts from free streaming rise as services spread and advertisers follow—though it’s hard to see how those amounts will ever compare with the sales of old. People who listen to music, meanwhile, may want to get used to not being able to hear every major new release (legally) without paying for the privilege.

The problem, as Tim Westergren, founder and CEO of web-radio giant Pandora, tells me, is locating the right middle ground, where there’s enough free music to encourage paid subscriptions but not enough to condition audiences to stop paying altogether. “We’re heading into a period of reckoning, where the industry is going to make some decisions about what really makes sense,” he says. “It can’t go on as it is.”

Rhodri Marsden wrote for the New Statesman about the increasingly precarious situation UK acts find themselves in as money and options for full-time musical work dwindle, rooted in larger societal and government changes.

For more than 15 years after the punk revolution of 1976, British musicians found their artistic efforts partly funded by the benefits system – not particularly generous but lax enough to allow recording and touring to proceed with minimal interference from the government.

Around 1992, however, this became much more tricky as restart programmes for the long-term unemployed were more vigorously implemented. Middle England no doubt rejoiced at the curbing of our feckless behaviour. “My local council got a private company to run a scheme where you had to go in every day and be humiliated – being taught how to shake hands,” recalls Tim Chipping. Some of the Keatons [Marsden’s band at the time] got jobs and others continued signing on, but inequality is destabilising; internationally famous bands might battle in court over their share of the spoils of success but part-time bands implode over arguments over petrol money and whether cigarettes should be a band expense or not.

Simon Price, longtime Manics fan and interviewer over the years, did so once with an extensive conversation with James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire for the Quietus, focusing on the 20th anniversary of their smash UK success Everything Must Go.

There used to be a nightclub in Newport called Rudy's,” says James, “which was a soul club, and me and my girlfriend of the time used to go down there. And they'd play lots of quite obscure Tamla Motown. And Northern Soul, which I'm not such a gigantic fan of. But they'd play stuff like 'The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game' by Marvin Gaye, or 'I Can't Get Back The Love I Feel For You' by Syreeta Wright, really select, choice stuff from Motown. And I was always a massive Motown freak. My mum had lots of Motown in the house. I just loved the strings and the arrangements. It was the same with ELO: I'm on record that they were my first musical love. I presented Jeff Lynne with a Lifetime Achievement award at the Q Awards about 12 years ago. So, that love of strings in music was always there, for me. And my mum was a bit of a Sinatra fan, and 'Summer Wind' is one of my favourite songs: the strings on that were just transcendent. And yeah, 'Born To Run' as well. Because that record took ages, and Springsteen was obsessed with creating a soundscape, he really was. And I wanted that, for Everything Must Go.

They’re Not There: The True Story Of The Fake Zombies, Rock’s Strangest Con Daniel Ralston’s Buzzfeed piece on the happily unscrupulous creation and booking of not one but two fake bands in America in the late '60s to pretend to be the very British Zombies is the kind of history story that is a sheer treat to read. Not least due to the ZZ Top connection.

Frank Beard and Dusty Hill declined to be interviewed for this story, but Hill did respond to fact-checking questions by email via his manager — the first time either ZZ Top member has ever publicly acknowledged involvement in the Zombies scheme. Like Ramsey, however, Hill said he couldn’t recall how the band got started: “It was the ’60s, man.” Ramsey believes they were connected with Delta Promotions through someone Meador met on tour with the Gentlemen in Florida. The players were told that the operation was perfectly legal, according to Ramsey.

“As far as the Zombies, I was told they didn’t exist,” he recalls. “That they were only a studio sound. I was just excited and flattered. I’d only been playing for a few years and the other guys were pro-level at that point. I didn’t look at it as anything more than a chance to have some fun, hang out with some cool guys, learn some songs, go somewhere outside of this Hillbillyville, and earn a little money.”

Jonathan Kaiman’s piece for the Los Angeles Times, referring to the Chinese president in the headline, discusses how his various directives have resulted in a distressing impact on the city’s small but remarkably talented and vibrant musical community in question.

“I think especially the past two or three years, we can feel it — there is pressure,” said a Beijing-based musician who requested anonymity so that she could speak freely without fear of reprisals. “We talk secretly, saying that when Xi is no longer in his position, maybe things will get a little bit better. But now, we feel the censorship is getting more and more serious, year by year. We always try to encourage ourselves, saying it will get better one or two months in the future, but it just keeps getting worse.”

Punishable by Lash: We Talk to the Brave Pioneer of Iran’s Rave Scene In a sadly equivalent piece, Chandler Shortlidge speaks with Siamak Amidi for Pulse about the latter’s work in setting up and promoting underground dance events in the early 2000s — and some of the grim results, including lashing after a court sentence.

Looking back, Amidi’s attitude about the situation is shockingly accepting. He says that while lashes may sound harsh now, that’s not how he and his friends saw it at the time. They’d grown up with the dangers and understood them fully, and didn’t let fear get in the way of doing what they wanted. “What else can you do? You're gonna have to live your life the way you want it, or else you're gonna have to do whatever they say, and this is not an option.”

Phillip Mlynar’s profile for RMBA of the 1990s/2000s-running NYC record store, specializing in hip-hop across the board and building up a fierce fanbase, already seems like a bit of distant history just six years after the store’s closure.

Store founder Joseph Abajian: “The independent stuff was there, so when people came down to the store you’d right away see what they’re buying – Nas, Method Man, Redman – and as a store owner I wanted to promote everything I had, so I’d hear about the independents and get them from the one-stops. I’d listen to them and think, “This is a good record but nobody’s playing it.” The only place they were played was Stretch and Bob and a couple of independent shows, so we’d play the independents in the store. “It wasn’t a case of people coming looking for independents, but more us pushing them: “Hey, I know you like Redman and Nas and Beatnuts, but check out this record from Company Flow, this group that’s just got this record out called ‘Eight Steps to Perfection.’” “Ah, man, that’s bangin’.” Next week, “You got any more of that independent stuff?” Bam!

Rich Smith’s report in The Stranger about the Taking Back Tuesday club night’s appearance in Seattle also served as his own reflection on his musical youth — as well as sparking yet another series of disagreements about what emo exactly is/was to start with.

It's been nearly 20 years since I listened to Through Being Cool on repeat, and, according to some weird immutable law of the music and fashion industries, we're at the beginning of the emo nostalgia wave. Emo Nite offers former sad kids the opportunity to get pitted on that wave, a chance to acknowledge and reflect on and so affirm a shared musical reality. But in that act of cultural affirmation, I am denied my individual relationship to and experience with that music, which is what made it feel so special in the first place. I mean, Say Anything are emo, but they weren't fucking emo, right?

The ‘Fantastic’ Origin Story of J Dilla & Slum Village Drawing on his essay from a forthcoming box set Martin Caballero wrote for Cuepoint on the legendary producer and the act that brought him initial fame, interviewing surviving member T3 and going over the group’s history.

The period that immediately followed was full of stops and starts for SV. On the one hand, Dilla’s star was rising fast. Joseph “Amp” Fiddler was an established musician in Conant Gardens, who had schooled Dilla on how to sample on the MPC-60 as a youngster. Fiddler was also a part of George Clinton’s band for the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, during which he shared a tour bus with A Tribe Called Quest. While on the road, he played a tape of Dilla’s beats for Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammed, urging them to check out his young protege. They listened and were convinced. Soon after, the pair signed Dilla as a member of their production collective The Ummah and he made the most of his chance. Before SV had released a single project, their producer had racked up prominent credits on acclaimed albums by De La Soul, The Pharcyde, and Tribe themselves.

Meanwhile, T3 and Baatin continued to develop on their own. “There was a spot downtown called Saint Andrews that we used to go to on Fridays. If we came up with a record, we would give them the CD and they’d play it live to see how the crowd reacted. That’s how we built our audience base. We would try to have something new every week.”

Finally, the death of Ali at age 74 following decades of struggle with Parkinson’s syndrome provoked a worldwide outpouring of grief for someone who was one of the most public figures in the world during the previous century. Among the many encomiums were celebrations of his place as one of hip-hop’s earliest inspirations, with Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s piece for MTV being a standout.

It is, ultimately, about how the mouth can earn respect. How to name your rivals before they can name you, how black people have survived fights, how rappers have survived battles, how Ali survived in a country that wanted him submissive, silent, and fighting — fighting either another man in a ring or a war in another country. The fight, and knowing that there are no ways to escape it coming toward you, either by chosen profession or by birth, creates an urgency in the voice. Everything has to be heard, and has to echo long enough to be carried down to the generation after your own. I hear Ali’s cadence in the siren-like voice of Chuck D and the steady sneer of Ice Cube. I hear Ali’s tongue-in-cheek but still powerful rhymes in Chance and MF Doom. I hear Ali’s fearlessness and never-ending boastfulness sitting on the tongues of any rapper who has ever named him or herself the greatest alive and truly believed it because they had to in order to survive one more single, one more album, one more round. I picture Nas in 2001, fighting through making Stillmatic after two lackluster albums, knowing he had to make his way back to the top of the mountain. Lil Wayne from 2006 to 2008, telling us that he was the greatest rapper alive for so long that many of us had no choice but to believe it. These were small battles that Ali showed us all how to win.

Last week in general was a bit ... fraught. So this came to mind: