After she became the most awarded woman in Grammys history this week, we attempt to whittle down the best of her wildly varied and brilliant catalogue
As far removed as you can get from the innovations of the Beyoncé album or Lemonade, The Closer I Get to You is a slick cover of a 1977 Roberta Flack-Donny Hathaway duet, with Luther Vandross filling the Hathaway role. It’s lovely: a great song, beautifully sung, with Beyoncé admirably uncowed by the presence of a soul titan.
Continue reading...Maroon 5’s Adam Levine was scoffed at for suggesting there ‘aren’t any bands any more’ – but if you look at the numbers, he’s right. Wolf Alice, Maximo Park and industry insiders ask why
“The moment that we started a band was the best thing that ever happened,” sings Matty Healy on the 1975’s recent single Guys. The song is an ardent love letter to the band, and to the romance of bands in general: the camaraderie, the solidarity, the joyous fusion of creativity and friendship. It’s an old sentiment but an increasingly rare one.
“It’s funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out [in 2002] there were still other bands,” the band’s frontman Adam Levine told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe this month. “I feel like there aren’t any bands any more … I feel like they’re a dying breed.” Levine was quick to clarify that he meant bands “in the pop limelight” but the internet doesn’t really do clarification, so his remarks sparked bemusement and outrage among the literal-minded, from aggrieved veterans such as Garbage (“What are we Adam Levine? CATS?!?!?”) to fans of newcomers such as Fontaines DC and Big Thief.
Continue reading...While questions rightly remain over its shadowy nominations process, Grammy voters should be praised for honouring a large number of women and people of colour
The Grammys always attract a degree of controversy. This year, there was singer Teyana Taylor protesting that “all I see is dick” in the all-male nominations for best R&B album, and a slightly peculiar statement from Justin Bieber, asking to be considered an R&B artist rather than a pop singer. More headlines were grabbed by the Weeknd, understandably shocked that his double-platinum album After Hours, and its accompanying single Blinding Lights – a song so omnipresent that it recently celebrated an entire year in the US Top 10 – didn’t receive a single nomination: he subsequently announced he would stop his label submitting his music in future. The latter’s complaint revolved around a lack of transparency in the voting process: the presence of nomination committees that retain executive power over who makes the shortlists and who hold the ability to add artists who have received no nominations in many of the Grammys’ categories.
The argument about transparency isn’t going to go away – if your voting process involves a shadowy and apparently unanswerable cabal who exert control over the nominations, you should probably expect people to look askance at it – but, the absence of the Weeknd aside, the actual winners in the Grammys’ big categories brooked little argument.
Continue reading...The rapper’s arrest shows Spain has a problem with freedom of ideology. But people shouldn’t be scared to write songs that stand up to power
The arrest of Pablo Hasél this month, a Spanish rapper – like me – who is accused of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his lyrics, didn’t surprise me. When I was 18, I wrote a song about the Spanish king, the police arrested me and I was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. The day they came to take me to prison, I fled to Belgium and have been here ever since, despite the best efforts of Spain to have me extradited. It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges.
Related: Angry words: rapper's jailing exposes Spain's free speech faultlines
Continue reading...Free speech protests have continued since the jailing of musician Pablo Hasél last week for exalting terrorism in his lyrics
Continue reading...The reality TV and rap superstar couple known as Kimye are parting ways after almost seven years of marriage, following reports a split was ‘imminent’
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are getting a divorce after almost seven years of marriage.
The reality TV superstar, 40, filed for divorce from the rapper, 43, on Friday in Los Angeles, court sources confirmed to the AP, and is seeking joint legal and physical custody of their four children, daughters North, seven years old, and Chicago, two, and sons Saint, five, and Psalm, 19 months.
Continue reading...Rubber bullets fired at crowds in Madrid day after Pablo Hasél was detained on charges of glorifying terrorism
Police fired teargas, rubber bullets, and sound bombs at thousands of protesters in Madrid, the day after a rapper was arrested on charges of glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his songs.
Protests in the capital’s central Plaza de Sol square were initially peaceful, with people clapping their hands in unison and chanting “No more police violence” and “Freedom for Pablo Hasél”, the rapper detained in the Catalan city of Lleida on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Protesters clashed with police in several Spanish cities on Tuesday night after Pablo Rivadulla, known as Pablo Hasél, was arrested to serve a prison sentence for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty and the police in his lyrics and on social media. Hasél had barricaded himself in Lleida University to highlight 'a hugely serious attack' on freedom, and his arrest has fuelled debate about freedom of speech in Spain and the country’s so-called 'gag law'
Continue reading...Brexit rule changes that make it tricky to tour the EU will hold back UK artists from a fast-growing market
Limiting UK artists from working and touring in the EU post-Brexit will destroy the development of British music, say European industry experts, amid thriving competition from German rap, Spanish pop and more.
British artists now face the need for visas, work permits and equipment carnets when working in the EU, with emerging acts most likely to feel the impact of this costly and time-consuming admin. Over the last month, the UK and the EU have blamed each other for the inability to strike a deal to help the creative industries.
Continue reading...With multi-platinum No 1 albums including topics such as suicide and the psychology of paedophiles, the Congolese-Belgian MC has carved his own lane with total determination
‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”
This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.
Continue reading...Pop’s mothers have told of guilt, loneliness and record-label prejudice – so do men face the same problems? Wayne Coyne, Tom Fletcher, Ghetts, Thurston Moore and others respond
This summer, two of the world’s biggest pop stars became parents for the first time. Katy Perry told an interviewer that after becoming pregnant, “a lot of people have asked me: are you going to go away?” Presumably, though, nobody has enquired if new dad Ed Sheeran will be exiting the music industry with immediate effect. Perhaps they should.
In recent years, female artists such as Perry – but rarely their male counterparts – have been speaking with increasing candour about the anxiety, guilt, unrealistic expectations and logistical nightmares involved in balancing parenthood and pop stardom. Paloma Faith said the toil of touring with a young baby made her ill, and that her record company assumed her sales would divebomb because “people wouldn’t find a mother as appealing”. In 2018, Cardi B cancelled a tour due to begin six weeks after the birth of her daughter, saying she had “underestimated this whole mommy thing”.
Continue reading...With easy flow, hard barbs and a magnetic persona, the rapper casts herself as the successor to hip-hop’s old-school heroes
On YouTube, you can still see one of Megan Thee Stallion’s early appearances at a 2016 rap cypher in Houston. It’s a very telling performance. Twenty-one years old and still an unknown student (“Support the artists,” pleads the accompanying text, “this is only the beginning of their journey”) she’s vastly outnumbered by male counterparts who don’t seem to be taking her terribly seriously. It could be that they’re laughing and high-fiving while she performs because they’re incredulous at her skills, but it doesn’t really look that way. Yet she seems impossibly confident and self-possessed, ending her performance with the salacious, tongue-out taunt of “ahhh” that has since become her trademark. It isn’t just the benefit of hindsight that makes her seem the artist most likely to.
Continue reading...The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?
Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.
Continue reading...Rapper temporarily banned from Twitter and dropped by management firm after tirade
Police are investigating after the grime artist Wiley posted a tirade of antisemitic comments on Twitter and Instagram.
The musician has been dropped by his management company and temporarily banned from posting on Twitter after a series of social media posts were made on accounts belonging to him on Friday and Saturday.
Continue reading...Wakaliwood’s Isaac Nabwana swapped directing shootouts to parody music videos to support rural projects hit by Covid-19
The helicopter and the bling are made of cardboard and the dollar bills carefully drawn on paper by local children. But the people are very real and the music is totally authentic.
A new video from Ugandan film director Isaac Nabwana is a move away from his previous output – movies heavy on blood and gore and ultra-low on budgets – which is gaining him an international cult following. And he says the pandemic’s impact in pushing film online, with the trend towards all-digital film festivals, has helped.
Continue reading...Officer Joseph Mensah was found to have acted in self-defence in two of the shootings, with another currently under review
Jay-Z’s social justice initiative Team Roc has called for a Wisconsin police officer to be fired and prosecuted, after he shot and killed three people while on duty.
Joseph Mensah, of Milwaukee suburb Wauwatosa, killed Alvin Cole, Antonio Gonzales and Jay Anderson in three separate incidents between 2015 and 2020. He is under review for the most recent killing, of Cole, but the earlier two were deemed self-defence and he did not face charges.
Continue reading...This new track sees Kanye at his very best, corralling his anger with masterful focus into an apocalyptic vision of America
America, divided along racial and political lines and led by its own Herod, faces an invisible plague and a public reckoning against its history of violence. It’s against this Biblical backdrop that Kanye West imagines the next apocalyptic event, in one of his most focused and arresting tracks for years.
Wash Us in the Blood sees the rapper call for a blood rain to deliver black America from evil. We’re at the point, perhaps, where normal water won’t wash; an emergency where we need something stronger. That sense of alarm is amplified by the two-note siren motif, a flattened-out version of the feedback sound on The Life of Pablo’s Feedback or Yeezus’s Send It Up, another of his warnings that puts the listener on alert. It gets your blood up.
Continue reading...While the genre is hugely popular in the country and sells in vast numbers, the French music industry and politicians have tried to downplay its success
Dave’s Mercury prize-winning debut album, Psychodrama, was the biggest-selling British rap album in the UK in 2019, certified gold for selling more than 100,000 units. Those numbers wouldn’t even have landed him in the top 10 biggest rap albums in France last year, where artists from greater Paris sell more rap albums than acts from any other city. But, while Dave won album of the year at this year’s Brit awards, and gave a nationally televised performance decrying the prime minister as racist, at last month’s Victoires de la Musique – France’s equivalent of the Brits – none of France’s black or Arab rappers were nominated in an album, artist or song category.
Days after the ceremony, French music industry body SNEP, which is responsible for collating the charts, distributing royalty payments and more, declared rap music an “overexposed phenomenon” in their 2019 market report. It argued that “fan support for urban music must not eclipse the performances of other musical genres” – an explicit call for less promotion and celebration of the most successful French popular music movement of all time.
Continue reading...He’s been attacked by pastors and jailed by the authorities. But the outspoken rapper will not be silenced. He talks about his cult-like following – and the weird rules ‘Marlians’ live by
Depending on who you talk to, Naira Marley is either the scourge of the next generation of Nigerians or their saviour. But whoever’s talking, the pop star – arguably the most controversial in Africa – is spoken about in near-mythological tones, which makes his amiability very arresting when we meet in London a few weeks before lockdown.
He arrives flanked by an entourage, photoshoot-ready in a reflective puffer, and oscillates between class clown and deep thought. To some, the 25-year-old’s meteoric rise over the past two years has been sudden: selling out Brixton Academy in three minutes; accruing three million Instagram followers, tens of millions of streams, and a cult-like fandom. But the signs of stardom have always been there.
Continue reading...The actor, comedian and musician Donald Glover has made the first truly outstanding album of the decade, offsetting cultural examinations with moments of sweet levity
In hindsight, music has always been Donald Glover’s true calling. Before the sitcoms, the Star Wars movie, the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, and the well-worn gifs of the performer walking horrified into a burning room with a stack of pizza boxes, you could find him on YouTube as a member of Derrick Comedy. The group’s greatest sketch, B-Boy Stance, saw Glover play an ageing hip-hop pioneer who had his arms surgically attached to his back, ensuring he was forever pulling the iconic pose – it riffs on the distance between the New York acolytes who witnessed the birth of hip-hop and those who came to the music after it was commodified. Glover’s understanding of American culture shines with diamond clarity; Atlanta, his comedy-drama that goes deep into the city’s rap scene, is the evolution of those ideas.
Glover’s early forays into rap were corny and forgettable. The Childish Gambino project felt like the side hustle of a talented kid eager to test every limit of his creativity – that the moniker was taken from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator seemed to reflect how low it fell on his list of priorities. In 2016, the funk record Awaken, My Love! was an artistic breakthrough. Then came 2017’s vicious This Is America and a video that encapsulates the racial prejudice, police brutality and vicious gun lust freezing the soul of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The clip became a pop cultural juggernaut, anointing Glover as spokesman for the Black Lives Matter generation.
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