There should be no shame in major music outfits taking money through the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, to keep their road crew and support staff financially stable, despite it being characterized as the cash grab of millionaires by some, aided by certain embellished and misleading headlines in the media.
Tre Cool of Green Day has pretty much joined Willie Nelson’s Family Band. Alright, that’s probably a little presumptuous and hyperbolic, but there is definitely something cool going on here, and now it’s happened a couple of times. It started when Willie Nelson played a show in San Francisco.
In the 90’s, aggressive, angry, angst-filled music was the pop music of the day—Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, and Chris Cornell and Soundgarden. And it wasn’t just limited to what was referred to at the time as “grunge music.” In the 90’s, Marilyn Manson was a pop star.
Ted Cruz says he became a country music fan after 9/11, while the digital editor of ‘Ebony’ responded with “Nothing says ‘Let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music,” forcing MSNBC to have to publicly distance from the comments. Meanwhile a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton released a pro-Hillary country song. Here’s how country listeners will be targeted like never before in the upcoming election.
In typical Austin fashion, the festival and live feed started 12 minutes late. Though iHeartRadio was touting the experience as a “festival”, the outdoor, multi-day and multi-stage discovery of new music that usually accompanies the music festival experience was swapped for a very structured environment centered around the most familiar names in the format…
Phil Everly, one-half of the highly influential Everly Brothers, passed away earlier today (1-3-14) in Burbank, CA from complications due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “We are absolutely heartbroken,” his wife Patti Everly told The Los Angeles Times. “He fought long and hard.” Phil Everly was 74. The duo was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.
When you first heard that Billie Joe Armstrong of the arena punk band Green Day and darling little lounge singer Norah Jones were teaming up to make an Everly Brothers tribute album of all things, you wondered if this was some drunken dare taken way too far. At the same time, there was something about the idea that seemed just insane enough to make some strange bit of sense.
2013 very well may go down as the year when referencing marijuana and other drugs in your songs is no longer cool as much as it is conformist—a lyrical hook, a well-recognized buzz word made for marketing an artist or song just as much as anything else. There has ceased to be either the generational gap, or the exclusivity of drug references in music to make them “cool.”
With the death of local record stores, and even the smaller national chain music stores, Wal-Mart has now taken the spot as the big dog atop the music selling food chain. Problem is, Wal-Mart refuses to sell any album with what they consider “offensive” lyrics, so artists are forced to ether produce “clean” versions of […]
So a couple of times when I’ve posted a roasting of a some pop country blowhard, I’ll get someone to send me a message similar to this: Hey Dumbass, (or whatever) So you talk shit about pop country, but you admit you never listen to it. So how would you know if it sucks or […]