Ariana Grande’s masterful 2018 album Sweetener includes a single called “R.E.M.” Mike Mills, bassist for the legendary alt-rock band R.E.M., found this amusing. His laughter became slightly more anxious and perturbed when Grande made R.E.M. the name of her cosmetics and fragrance line. And when that company released a product line in a box designed to look like a cassette tape, Mills decided it was time to respond.
Metal had to set its “Days Without a Nazi Festival” counter back to zero after the ignominious Metal Threat Fest brought sketchball acts like Graveland, Inquisition, Grand Belial’s Key, and Arghoslent to the Chicago suburbs earlier this month. It was an amusing circus to behold from afar, at least.
Orville Peck might be preparing for his EGOT. Earlier this year he played the Emcee in Cabaret on Broadway, and he’s starring in the Kitao Sakurai-directed Street Fighter with 50 Cent, Jason Momoa, and Noah Centineo. Today, he’s pivoted back to music with the announcement of a new EP Appaloosa, out in two weeks via Warner. The mysterious country crooner also shared the lead single “Drift Away.”
Did you know that the Wall Street Journal holds an annual awards show? It does. The newspaper’s Innovator Awards have been happening since 2012. Per the newspaper itself, this particular awards gala “encapsulates everything readers have come to expect from the award-winning magazine: a gathering of ambitious, forward-looking minds whose originality has led to meaningful change and offers inspiration to others.” This year’s award show went down Wednesday night at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, and it recognized innovators like Hailey Bieber, Spike Lee, Ben Stiller, George Lucas, and Billie Eilish. As she accepted her all-important Innovator Award, Eilish had some words for the billionaires in the room.
Right now, the consistently great R&B experimentalist Dijon is out on tour, and he performed his staggering new album Baby in full at the opening date in San Diego. On Wednesday, Dijon played the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, and some friends came out to assist. Dijon is a prolific collaborator, but Justins Bieber and Vernon did not make their way to the stage last night. Instead, Dijon sang a couple of tracks with his old buddy Mk.gee.
Yesterday, Billboard deputy editor and Stereogum buddy Andrew Unterberger published a piece with some confusing implications: On last week’s Billboard Hot 100, there were no rap songs in the top 40. The same holds true for this week’s chart. It has been a very, very long since since we saw a Billboard top 40 with zero rap songs — 35 years, in fact. The last time that happened was the week of Feb. 2, 1990, when Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” was sitting at #41, on its way to peaking at #9. This was the early crossover era, seven months before Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap song ever to top the Hot 100. Up until very recently, rap has been a dominant force on the pop charts. But for the past two weeks, it’s been nowhere near the top. That’s weird. What does it mean?
Gary Numan’s sophomore album Telekon just turned 45, and to mark the occasion, it’s getting the reissue treatment. Over the next couple of months Beggars Banquet will release three different editions: a sustainably pressed vinyl, a double-LP deluxe expanded edition, and a standard double-LP edition. The deluxe edition will feature four bonus tracks, and one of those, “Like A B-Film,” is out today.
Here’s your actually-freaky Halloween soundtrack. Lankum, Dublin’s masters of doom-laden experimental folk music, have covered 2-tone kings the Specials’ 1981 spooky ska classic “Ghost Town.” Lankum originally recorded the cover for Oona Doherty’s dance show Specky Clark this year. Now, just in time for All Hallow’s Eve, it gets a music video by director Leonn Ward, filmed in County Wicklow. It basically sounds like the trailerized version of “Ghost Town,” but good.
The pretty bad but fun-to-watch new biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in theaters now, and it mostly seems pretty factually faithful to Springsteen’s experience recording the album Nebraska. But any work of biography is at least partly a work of fiction, and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere seemingly includes at least one glaring lie about Springsteen’s choice in condiments. In the movie, Springsteen says that he likes mustard. In real life, Springsteen hates mustard.
What should we call this person? He has many names, and we don’t know the real one. We’re talking about the anonymous South Korean musician who releases gorgeous, idiosyncratic shoegaze under the name Parannoul. This prolific artist has only played live a handful of times, and he won’t be doing that anymore. Instead, he continues to craft cohesive, transportive records on his own, and it feels weird to keep calling him “Parannoul” when he’s releasing a lot of his music under different names.