Tina Turner, the American-born singer who left a farming community and an abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, has died at the age of 83.

She died peacefully on Wednesday after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.

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The official Twitter account for the late David Bowie has posted a lengthy tribute and some images of the two icons together.

Actress Viola Davis praised Tina Turner as the “first symbol of excellence” in a tribute.

“Iconic. Beautiful. A survivor. Brilliance,” she wrote on Instagram.

“Our first symbol of excellence and unbridled ownership of sexuality!! You were my childhood.

“Oh man!!! God is getting an angel today!!! Rest well Ms. Tina Turner. We will bask in your legacy!!!”

Turner began her career in the 1950s, during the early years of rock and roll and evolved into an MTV phenomenon.

In the video for her chart-topping song, What’s Love Got to Do with It, in which she called love a “second-hand emotion”, Turner epitomised 1980s style as she strutted through New York City streets with her spiky blond hair, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini-skirt, and stiletto heels.

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With her taste for musical experimentation and bluntly worded ballads, Turner gelled perfectly with a 1980s pop landscape in which music fans valued electronically produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.

Nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s.

The decade saw her land a dozen songs on the Top 40, including, Typical Male, The Best, Private Dancer, and, Better Be Good to Me. Her 1988 show in Rio de Janeiro drew 180,000 people, which remains one of the largest concert audiences for any single performer.

By then, Turner had been free from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for a decade.

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L’article Tina Turner: tributes to legendary singer flood in after her death aged 83.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Saad Lamjarred, a star Moroccan singer, has been found guilty of raping a young woman in France and sentenced to six years in prison.

Lamjarred, 37, showed no reaction after the verdict was announced by a court in Paris on Friday, French media reported. He was immediately detained.

During a short trial, he denied raping the woman in a Paris hotel in 2016.

Lamjarred is famous in the Arab music world. His hit LM3ALLEM has been viewed more than one billion times on YouTube.

When Lamjarred was arrested in 2016, the king of Morocco – who has awarded Lamjarred the country’s highest national honour – intervened to cover the singer’s legal fees.

Many of the singer’s fans alleged at the time that he was the victim of a “plot” by neighbouring Algeria, which has strained relations with Morocco.

And the first song he released after his arrest, which he dedicated to the king, showed just how popular he remained, gaining over 140m views.

It was not immediately clear if he planned to appeal against the verdict.

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Just over 30 years ago, band The La’s released their sole LP – a masterpiece that shaped guitar music. But its brilliant frontman has been elusive ever since, writes Shaun Curran.

Lee Mavers is the frontman, songwriter, and creative force of The La’s, a British band from the northern city of Liverpool. The La’s only made one album, enjoyed just one hit single and haven’t released a note of new music since 1990. Yet the band’s legacy and place in rock history supersedes their slim output. That single, There She Goes, remains as perfect a slice of guitar pop as anything since their Liverpool forebears The Beatles and is the crown jewel in a treasured canon that has become a touchstone for generations of bands. The La’s helped to usher in the 90s Britpop era in British guitar music, led by the likes of Oasis and Blur – Noel Gallagher once declared that “Oasis want to finish what The La’s started” – while their influence has stretched beyond that to bands from The Libertines to Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines DC.

“It’s like The Velvet Underground,” says former La’s guitarist Barry Sutton. “Maybe not everyone knows about The La’s, but everyone who did went out and formed a band or was touched by [the music] in a really deep way”. 

It says everything about the scale of Mavers’ talent that his reputation as a genius is based on such little recorded material. But his beautifully succinct songs, covered by artists ranging from Robbie Williams to Pearl Jam, have placed him in the lineage of classic songwriters, winning a devoted following and the admiration of music legends. In 1991, Eric Clapton told Rolling Stone that “the only thing I’ve really liked (recently) is a guy called Lee Mavers… he’s got a stance and a style that I think is tremendous”, while in 2013 The Smiths’ former guitarist Johnny Marr told Q magazine that Mavers “is as good as everyone thinks he is”.

Yet Mavers is now considered by many to be one of pop’s great “lost” figures. Over the last three decades, he has steadfastly refused to release any of the songs he’s written. Since 1991, Mavers has played just 20 official concerts, the last of which was nearly 10 years ago. His public appearances are so scarce that for some journalists, tracking him down became a holy grail: Matthew Macefield wrote an entire book, 2003’s A Secret Liverpool: In Search of The La’s, dedicated to his four-year quest to get an audience with Mavers, which he eventually did at his Liverpool home.

His enigmatic nature is one reason why, with rock music currently lacking truly maverick figures, Mavers still holds the imagination of not just fans, but the press and industry at large: despite years of inactivity, his status is such that as recently as 2015, he was rumoured to be working on music with Liam Gallagher.

Recently celebrating its 30th anniversary, the La’s self-titled debut is a cult album in the truest sense. It only reached number 30 in the charts and sold relatively few copies on release. Influenced by The Beatles, The Who, Love and Pink Floyd, its acoustic rhythms, 1960s sensibility and pure melodicism were at odds with the era’s prevailing scenes of Madchester, grunge and shoegaze. But it is precisely that ageless quality that has weathered so well. Songs like Timeless Melody and the epic Looking Glass display a rare gift for songwriting that continues to endure.

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Irish rapper-singer-poet Denise Chaila started turning heads from the outset. After featuring on Limerick trio Rusangano Family’s album Let the Dead Bury the Dead, she released a two-track EP in 2019. Copper Bullet and Duel Citizenship were both a breath of fresh air, the former wryly goading listeners (“Don’t talk about ‘female rap’ like I’m an extra in the scene”), while the latter used spoken word to ruminate on identity, borders and how Chaila is perceived as a Zambian-born, Limerick-based black woman.

Since then, she has been rising: 2020 saw her become the highest ranking Irish woman in the country’s charts. Her sublime first mixtape, Go Bravely, was bolstered by astonishing television performances, and collaborations with some of Ireland’s other most exciting acts, such as Sorcha Richardson. With deft, immersive production, Chaila’s slick delivery shines through, her voice exuding confidence amid rap brags and references to mythology, mental health and being “the black James Bond”.

Last month, Go Bravely was nominated for Ireland’s Choice Music prize, both for best album and best song (a track called Chaila, which rolls its eyes at people who won’t learn how to pronounce her name, with sing-song vocals over sweet, angular guitar).

With more singles in the pipeline, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Chaila this year. The recent video for standout track Anseo finds her and Dublin-based rapper Jafaris in chainmail, marking Chaila out as the stuff of legend.

By Tara Joshi – theguardian.com

L’article Music. One to Watch: Denise Chaila.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

The venerable cover CD, beloved of music magazine buyers for a generation, has been challenged by Brexit after Mojo was forced to postpone distribution of its next issue because of a delay in delivery.

In an email to subscribers on Friday, Mojo said that while the magazine itself was printed, “the CDs which are produced in the EU, are not yet in the UK”. It is understood that the issue was caused by hold-ups in the process caused by new trade rules.

Mojo, which apologised to readers and said they would be given early access to the digital edition of the magazine, is the victim of the latest logistical hiccups to strike business since the Brexit transition period ended.

German freight giant DB Schenker paused UK deliveries on Thursday, blaming increased paperwork, while companies including Fortnum and Mason have reported problems delivering to customers in the EU and Northern Ireland.

Marks & Spencer said it was concerned that a third of the products in its Irish food halls, including Percy Pigs, would now be subject to import tariffs. Meanwhile, international delivery giant DPD also said it was “pausing” road service from the UK into Europe last week.

Mojo’s problem represents another challenge to the economics of the cover-mounted CD. Once a prized staple of music and technology magazines and even deemed a threat to the music industry when they appeared in weekend newspapers, they are now largely anachronistic as most people access entertainment online and fewer have CD players.

The heritage music magazine is not the only publication to fall foul of Brexit-related issues. Electronic Sound magazine also said it had been forced to delay its next issue, editor Push told the Guardian, saying that a problem with the free vinyl sent to subscribers was “the result of issues with changing to a UK supplier”.

Oliver Condy, editor of BBC Music Magazine, said he had feared the same issue with cover CDs and he had been “planning for this for months and months”.

“We sent materials to the [CD] presses a couple of months early,” he said. “We haven’t seen the results yet, but we’ve got our fingers crossed it will be fine.”

Bauer, Mojo magazine’s publisher, declined to comment, saying it was “still a live situation”.

By Archie Bland – theguardian.com

L’article Brexit delays Mojo magazine as cover CDs remain stranded in EU est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

I first heard Now & Then performed in a living room by a piano on a hot evening in the summer of 2019 when the world was open and life seemed plenty. Even in comparably liberated times, as the LA-grown singer-songwriter Lily Kershaw tugged her fist at her chest, clinging to fading memories and singing about the grief of an unfair tryst, her voice and her melodies were at once comforting and foreboding. “Remember the rooftop parties, remember the friends …” she sang, ruminating on past gatherings while in the presence of a new scene; a reminder that moments are precious and fleeting. In 2020, Kershaw released the song as a guitar-based duet with the Canadian emo rocker Goody Grace, and its acoustic melancholy inherited a deeper sorrow amid the intense isolation of a pandemic in which a story about unrequited love felt more cruel and unnecessary. Yet the way Kershaw validates past love with such a rich and bodied melody ensures that her precious time was never wasted. Eve Barlow

Grace Potter ft Marcus King, Jackson Browne and Lucius – Eachother

Given, well, everything this year, my appetite for content that even remotely referenced quarantine was basically zero (no thank you, Love in the Time of Corona). But Grace Potter’s Eachother, written five days into lockdown and released in mid-May, is one of the few pandemic songs to transcend the limitations of rapid-response art, and the only one that made me want to lean into the ache of isolation rather than escape or muscle through it. Led by Potter’s singed alto, a prismatic ensemble including the blues-rock singer and guitarist Marcus King, the rock legend Jackson Browne and the country-pop quartet Lucius pulls the last syllable of each chorus line into a cascade of uncertainty that still looks skywards. “I don’t know where we’re going / but when the going gets tough,” they sing – a temporary resolution, both balm and bruise, melded from voices isolated at home like the rest of us. “We’ve got each other, and for now that’s enough.” The shock of early quarantine has passed, but at least for me, the hymnal, humbled Eachother will outlast this cursed year. Adrian Horton

Hayley Williams – Dead Horse (Hot Chip Remix)

The most lizard-brained response I ever have to a song I like is: good, but it’d be much better sped up a bit. Imagine my delight when British national treasures Hot Chip dialled up the temperature on a standout from the Paramore icon Hayley Williams’ excellent solo debut, Petals for Armor. Her lilting funk-reggae meander through the infidelities that bookended her first marriage becomes a tachycardic shimmy in hypersaturated shades of UKG and happy hardcore. It’s lurid, diamond-hard and tooth-achingly addictive. Laura Snapes

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The sight of a person bopping around behind decks while virtual hearts and comments stream past on the screen has become pretty well known. The vast majority of DJs, ranging from professional to those who play part-time and other enthusiasts, have had to be creative and online sets streamed through social media have been a lifeline for DJs and dance music lovers alike.

This mass move has led to a series of interesting developments in DJing and nightlife that are likely to have a lasting impact post-COVID.

A collaborative club

In your average club there is the private space of the DJ booth and the public spaces of the dancefloor and bar. Digital streaming is changing this idea of space.

DJs are decorating their studio and practice spaces – which are often within their homes – in ways which represent them, the music they play, and the venues they played at pre-pandemic. DJs including Mikey D.O.N – who plays a range of dance-focused genres from reggae and hip hop to acid house – hangs the Jamaican flag over his decks, which references his Caribbean heritage and nods to the sound system culture in which he grew up.

Rope lighting, posters of previous gigs, and record sleeves adorn many other DJs’ backgrounds – and what once may have felt like a private and shrine-like space has been opened up to the public. This is almost a voyeuristic view into another part of the DJ’s world.

These streams are also reimagining events. Audience participation through a live text-based chat stream, coupled with interaction by the DJ on the microphone, fosters an experience which is at once individual and collective.

In this new online “club”, playlists are often abandoned as chat streams richly debate songs or tracks – provoked by the sounds currently spinning. This might prompt the DJ to go off-playlist to root through their collection to find and play a hotly debated track. DJs name-drop, rewind, and feed in other sounds – engaging with specific comments in the chat thread. This exchange is more than making a request – it’s a collaborative creative act whereby DJ and audience work together to shape the experience.

That audience is also widened and more diverse. In a club you are limited by space, but online the audience can be limitless. For instance, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Will Smith’s original music partner, has just short of 17K followers on the streaming platform Twitch and an average of 900 live viewers. Once that stream is uploaded and available to be replayed it has the potential to reach more people. One stream reached almost 7,000 listeners in a day.

Streaming also has the potential of engaging communities that tend to be excluded from the physical experience. This includes those who live in remote areas, those who face access issues due to disabilities and others who favour sober spaces.

Copyright issues

As with any new frontier, there have been challenges. On November 11, after receiving thousands of copyright infringement notifications from rights holders, Twitch announced: “if you play recorded music on your stream, you need to stop doing that”. This has huge implications for DJs as streaming is one of a very few viable options available to them while venues remain closed. Some venues, however, are hosting streamed DJ sets and virtual club nights in a bid to retain their clientele.

Mixcloud offers an option to stream recorded music for a £9 per month subscription, and Mixlr has a similar service for £9.99 per month. For the average club DJ, this can be financially unsustainable, especially as no direct revenue is gained by streaming unless DJs enlist paying subscribers or earn tips.

While streaming isn’t without its problems, clubbing in person is a long way off and this new online world is offering nightlife practitioners the chance to re-imagine what the club post-COVID will look like.

One aspect of clubbing in particular that should be readdressed is that of access. How can events be more inclusive of those people that they are now reaching through streaming? It may be that clubs, venue management and DJs will need to work more closely together to bring a physical 360-degree experience spawned from the streaming era.

Events may diversify spatial and sonic experiences by blending real and digital spaces, performers and audiences. There could even offer a personal rewind option where clubbers might revisit physical events to experience them digitally later. Whatever it may be, the progression of digital technology will inevitably play a more central role in the future spaces of clubland.

By theconversation.com

L’article Clubbing at home: how live streaming made DJ sets more inclusive est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

While Bruce Springsteen was performing Springsteen on Broadway, the stage iteration of his 2016 memoir, his former teenage bandmate, George Theiss, was dying of cancer. Well before the E Street Band, there were the Castiles, an incubator where Springsteen first played guitar, then sang, from 1965 to 1968.

As the end neared, Springsteen held a vigil at the North Carolina bedside of his former musical sparring partner. When Theiss died, Springsteen became the only surviving Castile, a realisation that spawned a new song, The Last Man Standing.

Thanks to a guitar unexpectedly given to him by “an Italian kid” at the theatre stage door, more songs began to pour out of Springsteen: songs about being in a band, about absent friends and snake oil salesmen. He told Roy Bittan, the E Street Band’s keys player, about the new tunes over lunch. Bittan advised Springsteen to leave the compositions as sketches, ushering in an album in which this storied band could build the songs from the ground up.

The result is Letter to You, a distillation of the elixir of E Street: a thumping, sentimental, full-court press of unabashed vigour, designed to frappé stadiums. It is full of Springsteen bingo: trains, rivers, the edges of towns and women called Janey; a number of things are on fire.

It was all recorded live, except for the odd overdub; it took four days and one to listen back. Three songs are old – one, the excellent If I Was the Priest, so vintage that Springsteen played it at his 1972 audition for Columbia’s A&R John Hammond. Another, Janey Needs a Shooter nearly made it on to several Springsteen 70s albums. The bootleg version found him doing his best Dylan impression. This update turns a nuanced portrait of a love hexagon into a mid-paced thumper, sacrificing the song’s sexual intimacy for a piano- and harmonica-laced singalong.

On one level, Letter to You is utterly the wrong album for right now. With no prospect of mass live entertainment returning soon, the E Street Band will have to sit on their hands instead of touring. Old-fashioned and nostalgic, this dose of retro 80s wish-fulfilment finds first world white guys with guitars spreading communion, certainties, endorphins and tinnitus. That’s not where young people’s music is now.

Inside this feelgood bubble, there are only brief nods to US politics. This album’s release on the eve of a pivotal election is no coincidence, however. Recently, just before Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia soundtracked an anti-Trump ad by author Don Wilmslow.

It’s cheesier than a Monterey Jack… but exactly the album some people could use right now

In truth, Letter to You is cheesier than a Monterey Jack, shameless in its embrace of cliche. As well as burning trains and “faded pictures in an old scrapbook”, there is a “house of a thousand guitars”, an after-party where the music never ends and friends are reunited; agnostic bar band heaven.

The record starts with Springsteen alone, picking his guitar as a “big black train” comes “down the track”; rueful in the face of death. “One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone,” he breathes, as the various members of the band assemble like light-footed superheroes – the muted piano of Bittan, the subdued thrum of drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Garry Tallent.

The album ends remembering the departed, dangling the prospect that they live on in our dreams – high-fructose corn syrup the E Street Band muscle into a dignified elegiac toast. In between, there’s another train, this one burning, and a song about love, The Power of Prayer, whose belief in “a pair of hearts” going all-in is a whisker off self-parody.

Conversely, then, Letter to You is exactly the album some people could use right now, a sledgehammer of succour and uplift, a heroic E Street pile-on of the kind fans and guitarist Steve Van Zandt have been lobbying for, for years. It might not be the dernier cri, but from the Killers via War on Drugs, to Lana Del Rey and, previously, Celtic punks the Gaslight Anthem and the Hold Steady, Springsteen’s stock has steadily risen among much younger musicians. Rainmaker rips into Trump, but with a superb allegory about “unloading buckshot into low clouds” during a drought.

Giving people what they want is a slippery alleyway for an artist to sidle down, but Springsteen, the author of myriad solo landmarks, latterday tonal experiments and a film, could never be accused of picking low fruit. Here, the sound of master craftsmen leaking into each other’s amps provides a generous helping of the hoarse, overdriven Springsteen live experience – like a verboten lungful of other people’s warm CO2.

The powerful title track distils the essence of Springsteen messaging down the ages. House of a Thousand Guitars is a killer composition where “the bitter and the bored wake in search of the lost chord”, laced with knowing sadness that no such place exists outside a Springsteen gig. It’s an album about dead comrades whose stated ambition is to “leave no one alive”, a vision of American goodness in sharp relief to the bleak unravelling of the last several years.

By Kitty Empire – theguardian.com

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Since emerging earlier this year with his self-produced debut single, the skittering, jazz-flecked Imaginary Friends, 23-year-old rapper-singer Wesley Joseph has written, directed and scored his own short film, Pandomony, as well as directing the video for his undulating second single, Martyrs.

While he delegated the animated visuals for July’s glitchy Ghostin’ to Pixar’s former technical director Najeeb Tarazi, the video’s fusion of the hyperreal and the mundane marries purposefully with the intention of his music. “When you look back at life, the romanticised memories are… more poignant than the reality,” he told TheFace. “But music allows you to relive those moments as over-exaggerated, melodramatic soundbites. And I want to provide those soundbites.”

Born in Birmingham and raised in Walsall, where he was a member of the OG Horse collective alongside Jorja Smith, Joseph moved to London in 2016 to study film. He also started making beats on his laptop, converting his bedroom into a makeshift studio. That ad hoc, DIY ethos permeates everything he does, with the lyrics to Ghostin’ written quickly on the bus home from a session with the song’s producer, electronic pioneer Joy Orbison. He’s also working closely with Jai Paul associate Lexxx, who mixed his appropriately titled new single Thrilla. A heady fusion of bass-rupturing beats, warm organ and Joseph’s playful, André 3000-esque rapid-fire flow, it ends with a question: “Why don’t you call me?”. They probably assumed you’d be too busy, to be honest.

Thrilla is released on 16 Oct

By Michael Cragg – theguardian.com

L’article Music. One to watch: Wesley Joseph.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Few guitarists are treated with as much reverence as Jimi Hendrix. But myths about his talent do him a disservice, argues Greg Kot.

Fifty years ago today, one of the most important and influential musicians of the 21st Century, Jimi Hendrix, died. All Is by My Side, the John Ridley-directed, loosely biographical movie about Jimi Hendrix’s early life, claims to tell the story of the guitarist and musical shape-shifter as he was on the cusp of becoming an international star. The film focuses on the 1966-67 years, when Hendrix came to London and was ‘discovered’ by Britain’s rock royalty, including Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

This article was originally published in September 2014.

Amid the endless retellings of this tale, there is a sense that Hendrix was a Halley’s Comet of rock guitar, a once-in-a-lifetime game-changer who arrived fully formed in London, long before his ground-breaking 1967 debut album, Are You Experienced? To hear the history books tell it, that album’s arrival was akin to tectonic plates shifting, the earth moving beneath a culture’s feet. We are told that there’s guitar before Hendrix, and there’s guitar after Hendrix. Few rock instrumentalists get treated so reverently, and fewer still created their own aura and era so definitively for all time. It didn’t hurt that Hendrix died in 1970, only three years after his arrival as a seemingly instant rock star.

All this from a man who spoke softly and did not appear to be outwardly driven by what the music business had to offer. Yet on Voodoo Chile, one of his most esteemed tracks, Hendrix channels some of the high-testosterone mythmaking of one of his idols, Muddy Waters, when he declares, “Well the night I was born/Lord I swear the moon turned a fire red.”

Hendrix was less an instant sensation than a student who, through intensive training and innate talent, transcended his many teachers

I’m pretty sure the moon didn’t turn a fire red on 27 November 1942, and it’s certain Hendrix knew his mythical powers weren’t created by cosmic events but by not-so-mythical virtues such as intense listening, astute taste and heavy road work. Call it a combination of blood, sweat and brains, but Hendrix was less an instant sensation than a student who, through intensive training and innate talent, transcended his many teachers. All those who buy into the Halley’s Comet myth do Hendrix and his work ethic a disservice.

‘A little science fiction’

Like The Beatles before him, who were hailed as rock ‘n’ roll saviours, Hendrix thought of himself as more of a skilful synthesist of what had come before than a whole new entity. He always said he was channelling the blues into his own thing with “a little science fiction”. In interviews, he was generous about name-checking his inspirations, and they were numerous.

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