November Liner Notes

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]B[/dropcap]oston Mayor Marty Walsh is on a roll. Full disclosure: I know nothing of his politics or his political decisions, but I do know that he (or his interns) have really trotted out their support for female-driven rock lately. He declared (on Twitter—School House Rock needs to update their song about passing bills to include social media) that October 10 will hereafter be known in the City of Boston as Patti Smith day, “I urge my fellow Bostonians to join me in celebrating her enormous artistic contribution to the world,” Walsh said. Walsh’s office also recognized April 9 as Riot Grrl Day in honor of Kathleen Hanna and general badass girl rock-dom.

Smith also recently released her newest memoir, “M-Train,” which follows her highly successful and well-received memoir “Kids” by a few years. While at Dominican University promoting “M-Train” last month, Smith received a huge surprise from an audience member. Noreen Bender, a decades-long fan of Smith, approached her after the show and returned some items stolen from Smith back in the late ’70s. The items, including the shirt that Smith wore on a 1978 issue of Rolling Stone, were stolen by a then U-Haul employee and divided up amongst Bender and her friends.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my god, these are her clothes and they still have sweat on them,’” Bender said in the Chicago Tribune. She went on to say how great it felt to make her hero happy. She avoided mentioning how it felt to make her hero sad in the first place.

Jay-Z is being sued for the alleged illegal use of a sample from a 1950s Egyptian love ballad in his 1999 song “Big Pimpin,” which the estate of the Egytpian artist Baligh Hamdy claims is a breach of the artist’s “moral rights.” The lawsuit has been ongoing for four years, but Jay-Z has just recently testified, discussing his massive influence of the realm of music and entrepreneurship (though strangely forgetting to mention that he owns Tidal, the music streaming service he’s been giving most of his attention to lately). Jay-Z claims that he had no knowledge that a sample was being used and that the beat was delivered to him by producer Timbaland, who allegedly paid $100,000 to settle out of court with the record company who held the rights to the song. There are still likely to be several months before a verdict.

Speaking somewhat about streaming music, services like Spotify and Apple Music have been making headlines recently as artists support or (more often) descry them. Taylor Swift was able to convince Apple Music to change some of their policies and able to avoid being included in Spotify altogether. The leaders of Apple and Spotify have been getting into dust-ups about their competition for market dominance on social media.

Joanna Newsom, harp virtuoso and powerful lyricist, has also been critical of Spotify, saying that it is, “the banana of the music industry.” If this is out of context or difficult to understand, it’s okay. It still makes a great headline. Really let it soak into your mind before I explain it to you. Okay? Good. She said it’s the banana because it gives off a distinct fume of repugnance, “You can just smell that something’s wrong with it,” she said. She referred to steaming services as a “villainous cabal of major labels” and said that “the business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists.”

Newsom also gave interviews recently voicing her disapproval for the way that many (usually male) critics have written about her through a “lens of sexism.” They’ve “infantilized” her, using coded language when discussing her music in comparison to her male contemporaries. Devendra Banhart, she offers as an example, is seen as “eccentric” or “psychedelic” where “for [Newsom] they’d use “fairytales” and “unicorns.”

Kayne West had an interesting week last month. He performed at the Democratic National Convention and was given some campaign advice from President Obama himself. “Do you really think this country’s going to elect a black guy from the South Side of Chicago with a funny name to be President of the United States?” Obama joked. After that, he flew to Los Angeles to audition for the final season of American Idol. The world is truly a strange place.