Ned's Atomic Link Bin: Music Metadata, Hank Jr.'s Awkward Legacy, Farewells to Phife Dawg 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 provided many stories, ranging from a thoughtful appreciation of the music of an often thoughtless singer, Hank Williams Jr., a continuing vivisection of HBO's Vinyl when it comes to vague accuracy and two separate pieces on New Order or members thereof. But sadly it was a number of passings which defined much of the week, most notably that of A Tribe Called Quest member Phife Dawg.

Behind the music on “Vinyl”: This is why David Bowie cover bands are so rare

As part of her continuing coverage of the TV show, Caryn Rose wrote for Salon about a recent episode featuring David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars attempting “Suffragette City.” Much like the show itself, it didn’t go so well.

The other problem will be that Noah Bean, who plays Bowie, has zero English accent. He does manage to approximate some of Bowie’s physical demeanor both in performance (although, again, Bowie was just so much more lithe, even in platform shoes, probably due to his training as a mime), in his spoken intonation (despite the lack of accent), and in his interaction with Andrea Zito (Annie Parisse). But he looks more like David Cassidy than he does David Bowie, and that just ruins the initial performance shot and shadows the rest of the scene.

Hazel Cills wrote for MTV on the peripatetic actor-and-everything-else’s latest, Smiths-inspired venture and found it rather wanting.

Let Me Get What I Want doesn’t sound much like The Smiths, unless you count the muted echoes of that band that it shares with a thousand other post-1985 indie acts. Where Morrissey used his distinctive, fluttering baritone to disrupt even a lyric as simple as “I’m so sorry,” Franco and O’Keefe meekly sing-talk their way through their minimalist lyrics, their meek voices clouded by synths. This is a snail’s-pace shoegaze slog, a distant cousin of dreary, long-winded ’90s bands like Slowdive and Ride. But even those bands had peaks and valleys. Let Me Get What I Want, instead, goes all-in on plodding ambience that sounds like it comes straight from a canned GarageBand preset, with most songs tediously stretching on for at least five minutes (and sometimes more).

Melissa Locker spoke with Gilbert for the Pitch, introducing the latter’s reflective thoughts on the dynamic outlined in the title. Frank, thoughtful and passionate in equal measure, it’s the story of an artist determined to find her creative balance on her own terms, and who did just that.

I remember my daughter, Matilda, starting school when she was about five, and we were due to go in the studio for a long stretch to finish ‘Get Ready’ and it was like, ‘Oh god.’ I remember Hooky [former bassist Peter Hook] saying to me, ‘Well, if you’re there, you’re there and if you’re not, you’re not.” It was very cutthroat. I’d like to think that wouldn’t happen anymore, but we didn’t think about those things then. When you had children, those were decisions that you made and not the rest of the band. I think at some point you just become an argumentative woman [to your bandmates]. If you say what you think, that’s wrong. You just get put down a lot. Hooky saying that I didn’t do anything in the early days is not true.

Rashod Ollison’s report in the Virginian-Pilot provides an update on this project, originally funded in 2010 and now up and running in a partnership between the College of William & Mary and the Internet Archive.

Compared with Billboard, its main competitor, Cash Box’s coverage of pop culture was much more to the ground, so to speak. Its music charts in the early days relied primarily on jukebox retailers reporting what people listened to while hanging out in bars, clubs and soda fountains. Such data gave a true taste of what the average Joe or Ernestine was digging on during the years of World War II and Jim Crow.

Cash Box also published regional charts starting in 1950. What made it onto the “Hot 100” in Billboard, based mostly on sales and airplay, wasn’t always reflected on the charts in Cash Box. Pioneers of country, rock and R&B, especially acts of color, frequently made the cover. And given Cash Box’s limited budget in the early days, the shots were seldom glamorous, capturing candid often hammy moments.

How 'Eddie the Eagle' Made an Imaginary Eighties Pop Soundtrack Keith Harris wrote for Rolling Stone on the recent movie about late '80s Olympic ski jumper Eddie Edwards — more well known for his earnest enthusiasm than skill — and the soundtrack effort coordinated by Take That veteran Gary Barlow and movie producer Matthew Vaughn, aiming to bring together performers famed for their 80s work to create new music that suited the time and place.

Barlow: “There's a real, specific style of singing from that decade that those singers have never lost: It's a very manly sound. I actually worked out by the end of the project that it's not really the drum machines or the synthesizers that give us that fluffy feeling. It's actually the voices. When Tony Hadley sings, I'm just transformed into a teenager. When I hear Holly Johnson's first line in "Ascension," I'm back to being 13 years old. We spent all this time messing around with technology, when it actually it wasn't until we got the singers in that we really captured the moment.”

In Motherboard, Vijith Assar wrote about how streaming services and cloud service providers are working with metadata — the tagging of songs and artists with certain characteristics, identifiers, tags and the like — and how it might not serve the listener so much as those entities themselves.

Music libraries transitioning to online services is a perfectly natural evolution. Similar changes have already happened to movies with Netflix, and even to messaging before that through webmail services like Gmail. But with audio files, the shift to the cloud has already undermined a huge trove of data that had previously existed offline, embedded in the files. It's no longer just about attributes of the songs: The word "metadata" requires the presence of another entity to which the data at hand refers, and increasingly, it now points toward the listener instead of toward whatever they're listening to. Maybe this was inevitable, since the songs themselves don't have any autonomous purchasing power.

As the local D.C. reaction to Harvey’s latest song and video continued to play out, Clark’s piece in the Washington City Paper on it and on Harvey struck a tone that was more often heard from his fellow musicians in the city than from the institutions she referenced and considered — that there has to be space for reinterpretation, and the creative impulse.

It’s not a jubilant song. This much we know. But is it kind? This is less clear. There is a (deliberate?) blankness to the song. I think what we want is a sense that A) she has insight to share and B) her heart also goes out to these people. We want to know that PJ Harvey isn’t just being dark with no compassion or revelation. Because that would be mean. And we don’t want to think of her as mean. Many of my friends take issue with the notion that PJ Harvey came to D.C., took a cursory tour of the struggling areas, and then flew home to base songs on those observations. This seems like a shallow, dismissive way for an artist to take on the deep and complex problem of urban poverty. My friends feel that PJ Harvey should have done deeper research, maybe gotten to know people, learned their stories. This is a fair criticism, I suppose. But is it necessary for an artist to have intimacy with/authority about a thing to write about it?

David Cantwell’s New Yorker piece on Williams Jr. makes the argument that, for all the heavy expectations and assumptions placed on him due to his father’s long shadow as well as his increasingly overwhelming image as a vociferous, crude right-wing stereotype, he needs to be treated and seen as a massively important artist in his own right, now across several generations of listeners.

“Family Tradition” merged sounds that Williams had been playing with for years—Southern rock, old-school pop and rock and roll, A.O.R. and R. & B., honky tonk, the blues. But it didn’t exactly sound, let alone feel, like any of those. Bocephus spoke and even shouted at times more than he sang, and the song’s backing vocals were a raucous concert sing-along. The record was dominated by a simple but way-up-in-the-mix drumbeat. The lead guitars snapped and snarled but the record’s pedal-steel guitar solo mimicked the sound of his dad’s old records. In another signature move, the lyrics mentioned his dad almost incessantly while remaining all about Bocephus. The record let him cuss out everyone who’d ever damned him for not making music like his father’s or who’d condemned him because his drinking and other self-destructive tendencies were exactly like his father’s. The effect for Williams, as for country music, was traditional in the most vital sense. “Family Tradition” works overtime to remain connected to the people and sounds of the past even as it inevitably breaks with that past in favor of new sounds.

The State of D.C. Hardcore Ron Knox wrote for NPR on a newly revitalized scene in the nation’s capital, which has, practically by default, long been defined by the bands that emerged at the start of the '80s. But 35 years on, there’s room for a fully new crew of acts from a tightly knit group of performers, following their own impulses in the field.

Those efforts have produced incredible results for the young scene and have placed sometimes welcome distance between this new wave of bands and the towering names that haunted D.C. venues 30 years before. Donegan says he does his best to represent that legendary scene in the wider world of hardcore punk — he thinks the historic New York and Boston scenes get more attention than D.C., without reason. But most members of the current scene tire of answering questions about Minor Threat and Government Issue. In the unique bends of punk space-time, those bands are ancient history — the Paleozoic Era of punk. There are risks with such concentrated band membership, of course. If one or two of the core group were to move away for whatever reason, the scene, or at least multiple bands now central to it, would struggle to continue. "If it happens, it happens," Donegan says. "We'll keep pressing on."

On his personal blog, Alfred Soto wrote about seeing the band’s final US date for their current tour, taking stock of how the band have kept on through changes and shifts and yet not only retained a core but also a further audience, still uniquely themselves.

They performed the first half of Music Complete — when was the last time the Stones payed more than superficial interest in new product? — and a sprinkling of crowd pleasers like “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith,” with Sumner compensating for atrocious dancing with economical, pungent leads. Whipping out a melodica for the yearning solo in “Your Silent Face” provoked as loud a roar. The evening’s surprise was a “Waiting For the Sirens Call” re-imagined as a sustained series of improvisations in electronic and acoustic rhythm, with Sumner picking at the hook in the last minute; in other words the band unearthed the song’s kinship with “Temptation.” For ninety minutes the quintet created the impression that they believed in the vastness and complexity of their catalog, that “Academic” can sit beside “Regret” without the scrapes and grinds of audience accommodation. They could’ve ended the set with “Blue Monday”; they ended instead with “Superheated,” a Music Complete duet with trust-me-it-works Brandon Flowers, with Sumner singing from the top of his range without strain.

Dorian Lynskey’s Guardian profile of Bristol’s Derek Serpell-Morris, more widely known by his DJ name and for the fact that he was a 50-year stalwart of reggae music, DJing well into his 70s, was a portrait of a true original. A seemingly stereotypical older very English gentleman with a bit of the eccentric about him, loving his pubs, his music and his community, and who was beloved by his community in turn as well as reggae fans across the world, his story ended sadly after his disappearance months ago, the resultant widespread publicity and search for him led by his sister’s granddaughter Jenny Griffiths, and the recent discovery what proved to be his remains after a still-unknown cause of death.

Derek switched from vinyl to MiniDisc (“He backed the wrong horse there,” says Larkin) but still introduced each record in Jamaican patois, which he had learned in a Bristol barber shop. “I found the contrast of this bespectacled old Englishman in his cardigans and fancy waistcoats throwing down some serious Jamaican slanguage quite endearing,” says Letts. “I don’t know anyone who had a problem with it.” Older Jamaican artists loved him. When Derek introduced himself to Toots Hibbert of ska veterans Toots and the Maytals, Hibbert replied: “You don’t have to tell me who you are. You’re the white man who talks the people’s talk and plays the people’s music.”

Musicians Remember the Late Michael Sheppard, L.A.'s Champion of the Weird Los Angeles remembered a local fixture in his own right — similarly a little off the beaten path, and with his own passion for music just as strong — after the passing of Sheppard in his sleep at 59. David Cotner’s story for the LA Weekly featured any number of musicians from the art/punk/underground wing of things speaking warmly of Sheppard and what he was able to bring to the area, from Throbbing Gristle bookings to Sun Ra live recording releases to much more besides.

In a music-industry town, Sheppard was the opposite of the slick "record man." He existed proudly outside of whatever was currently considered mainstream, hip or cool. To look at him, he seemed constitutionally uncool — and yet, like a pulsar, he rotated to unveil a kind of coolness you could never have imagined. He embraced the outré, the outsider, the offbeat. The weird was not to be feared. The twinkle in his eye was more like a cackle, but if you saw it when he talked to you, you knew you were on to something.

From Wednesday forward, though, the most important story for many was the passing of Phife Dawg, formally Malik Taylor, one of the core members of A Tribe Called Quest. The combination of the group’s still revered status and Taylor’s tragically early passing at 45 due to long-standing health issues meant the news was met with shock and widely felt grief perhaps only comparable to this year to Bowie’s passing. One of the earliest responses came from Powell, who also revealed he’d recently completed a set of liner notes for a forthcoming ATCQ collection later this year.

I love this group, the members of this group, their journey, even their ups and downs and inner turmoil. If you came of age with Tribe like I did they feel like family, our family. Last time I got to see the four of them was Fall 2015 here in New York City, at an autograph signing. It was packed inside and out, including with a lot of millennials too young to have seen the group live at its peak, but super-fans nonetheless. The fans were every race, every culture, every identity, which speaks to how far-reaching the group's music was, and is. I remember eyeballing him that day, thinking about Phife's health, a long battle for him, including diabetes and a kidney transplant he got from his wife. I really do not know what else to say, except it becomes harder and harder to see members of your generation die, one by one. It becomes harder to see people of your generation not make it to 40 or 50. But he left us an incredible legacy.

Phife Dawg ‘Was Always 10 Years Ahead’ The many posts and tributes across social media and beyond from Phife Dawg’s fellow MCs, producers and musicians swiftly built up, including from Chuck D. In an interview with Zach Schonfeld for Newsweek, he elaborated further on Phife’s role and skills, including his famed sports obsessions.

Phife was "the closest thing to a sports commentator that there ever was in hip-hop," Chuck D says. "He was a big sports fan, big Knicks fan. I tried to explain to ESPN, I said, 'If you're trying to get into the beginning of hip-hop and mixing it with sports, you want to hook up with this guy. This guy knows more sports than many of your sportscasters.'"

Talib Kweli Reflects on Phife Dawg's Legacy: 'He Embodies the Very Best of Us' If Chuck D was a predecessor, then Kweli was one of the many to follow in ATCQ’s footsteps. In an essay for Billboard, he spoke with pride and passion about Phife’s particular legacy as part of the group and the larger Native Tongues scene he emerged in.

Midnight Marauders may be the album responsible for getting more people into hip-hop than any album before and after it. It’s a flawless piece of work, and the reputation that Phife began to build on Low End Theory was expanded on greatly while recording Midnight Marauders. On the solo cut "8 Million Stories," Phife painted an eloquent picture of himself as the homie from around the way. With lyrics like “everybody knows I go to Georgia often” and “to top it off, Starks got ejected,” Phife let us into his life in a very personal way. Very early, Phife let us know that he was getting sick of NY and that sports was beginning to interest him more than hip-hop. When I first heard Phife rap “when’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?” on “Oh My God,” I winced. It was so brutally and beautifully honest of a lyric, it made my body react.

Phife Dawg: In Memory of the Five Foot Assassin At MTV, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib proferred his own celebration of Phife through a lens that the MC happily owned and made his own — being the shortest member of ATCQ, not to mention the one aiming for as much humor as he could find and bring to bear.

I first loved Phife because he was short. I come from a family of short people and still find myself rooting for the shortest person in the room, even if that person is myself. Phife was not only short — he owned it. He made it dangerous. He was branded the Five Foot Assassin, and he ran with it. Even on the early Tribe records, you could hear the formula: Q-Tip, the careful and deliberate MC, teaching as he rhymed. Phife, the wise-cracking antithesis, the shit-talking homie from the corner of every hood in America, finally making good on his punch lines. The short kid with a mouth big enough to make him larger than life. Rap bravado in the late ’80s and early ’90s was most frequently done best by men like LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, and Rakim — men who were supremely skilled, attractive, and covered in gold. Phife’s brand of bravado met many of us where we were at. No person where I come from could come righteously into a gold rope chain. There were no sex symbols, leaning shirtless on expensive cars. There was, of course, a park. A few lackluster rhymes kicked in a circle before the session turned into who could crack the best jokes, who could deliver a punch line that would make a person collapse with laughter. Phife was the hero of this space. Busta Rhymes was there for the energy, Wu-Tang was there for the technical brilliance, Mobb Deep was there for the danger, and in the midst of it all, Phife was there: rapping to us, but also for us, in a way that seemed like it was so touchable. Something that we could also fit inside our mouths. The lines that pulled us to the edge of our seats at their opening and blew you backward at their closing. The lines that made us pause for a small moment before the grand payoff of understanding. Phife says “The mad man Malik makes MCs run for Milk of Magnesia” and there is a small silence, then a chorus of gasps.

And the video for the week? Well, to choose just one. Could he kick it? Yes he can and yes he did.