By Laura Sydell – NPR

It has been almost 10 years since Napster helped launch a revolution that turned the music industry on its head, allowing file-sharing fans to swap music on the Web. Record labels have blamed this phenomenon for a steep drop in CD sales.

Consider this: In early 2000, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached was on top of the Billboard album charts, selling nearly 2.5 million CDs in its first week. Now the bar has been lowered. Last year, it took only 1 million CDs for Lil’ Wayne to reach the top of the charts. [Read More]

By Will Glovinksy – The Villager

*In the hotbed microcosm that is Washington Square Park, it is rare that something changes with little fanfare. But that is what appears to have happened with skateboarders in the park. 

“There has been a significant decrease in skateboarder activity,” Gil Horowitz, leader of the Coalition for a Better Washington Square Park, declared. 

Horowitz, who can see the park from his apartment windows, wants to protect both the new granite benches — appealing targets for trick skaters — and senior-citizen parkgoers, who have complained about aggressive skateboarders who, they say, dart through crowds. Horowitz once described skaters as his group’s number-two concern after drug dealers, but now they seem to have made themselves scarce, at least while the sun shines. [Read More]

By Heidi Patalano – Metro

In mainstream culture, Bob Marley has long been credited as the progenitor of reggae, but before we can even ask, the Jamaican genre’s true father corrects the misconception.

“I’m the inventor of the word reggae,” boasts Frederick Hibbert, better known as Toots, the leader of Toots and the Maytals.

Calling from Kingston, Jamaica, his patois so thick it requires several relistens to the recording of our conversation, he says, “Bob Marley was older than me, but he didn’t create the word reggae.” [Read More]

By Mog

When an artist is on a major label, it can seem like they have to go walkin’ in artistic no-mans-land sometimes, especially when you read reports that the new album you’ve been hearing about and clamoring for is getting shelved. This is what happened in 1999 to Q-Tip’s record Kamaal The Abstract , the intended follow-up to his first solo outing, Amplified. And like most shelved albums, it leaked out there and became one of the famous lost albums. But recently, someone decided it was the time for the album to see the light of day and it is being released on September 15. You should hear it, just to see what all the fuss is about. The album leans more to the jazz/funk end of the spectrum with an almost spoken word vibe. That vibe feels like musical poetry (in that it tries to push you) and just like poetry, its not for everyone. [Read More]

By Fact Magazine

01: DJ MILO / VA

THE WILD BUNCH – STORY OF A SOUNDSYSTEM

(STRUT, 2002)

OK, so this isn’t strictly a Massive Attack album, but if you want to get any real sense of the social and musical context that gave rise to that band, you need to pay it some mind. The Wild Bunch was basically a Bristol soundsystem that came to prominence in the late 80s, tearing up parties in St Pauls and beyond with their infectious, immediate and quietly radical fusion of reggae, hip-hop and soul: a fusion that Massive Attack would take to the next level a few years down the line.

The core members of Wild Bunch were Miles Johnson (AKA DJ Milo, compiler of this 2002 retrospective), Claude Williams (Willy Wee), Nellee Hooper and Grant “Daddy G’ Marshall, soon joined by Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles and Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja. Very much pre-acid house, the parties the Wild Bunch played at and hosted were massively important to Bristol’s creative flowering and laid the foundations for the sound and aesthetic that would later be termed hip-hop. Though ecstasy and other drugs infiltrated the scene, it remained predominantly weed and booze-driven; accordingly, the wide range of music espoused by the soundsystem was united by its dub DNA: from the rolling, bass-heavy house of Mr Fingers’ ‘Can You Feel It’  to the electro-rap chop-up of Man Parrish’s ‘Hip Hop Be Bop’. [Read More]

By Ben Ratliff – NY Times

The crowd thinned out before the last band at Brooklyn Bowl on Thursday night. This made no sense, by normal gig logic, because of course the best band — Cymbals Eat Guitars — came last.

But this wasn’t a normal gig. It was a five-band show of new indie rock sponsored by Insound, the Brooklyn music distributor and online retailer of vinyl albums, T-shirts and other cool things, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. And it happened at Williamsburg’s newest rock palace: novel and g-g-gorgeous, a place built to satisfy your desires for grass-fed beef and tipsy recreation. If you can stand any more leisure, there’s live music there too. [Read More]

By Anahad O’Connor – NY Times

DJ AM, a high-profile disc jockey who was as famous for his much-chronicled relationships as he was for his creative scratching and mixing on the celebrity club circuit, was found dead on Friday evening in his apartment in Manhattan, the police said.
The police said his body was found in his seventh-floor apartment in SoHo about 5:30 p.m. after friends had tried unsuccessfully to reach him for days. The chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police did not suspect foul play. [Read More]

by Greg Sandoval – CNet News

Over the years, Michael Robertson, the man who founded pioneering digital music service MP3.com, has never hesitated to make a prediction about the sector’s future.

“It’s not a business,” Robertson has told me often in the past about ad-supported music sites. Frankly, in the past, I didn’t pay much attention. I do now.

The man who has fought more high-profile battles with the record industry than anybody in technology, and whose experience in digital music is nearly unmatched, has never appeared more prescient. He told me two years ago that ad-supported music sites would perish. The licensing fees required them to pay a penny, or some fraction of that, each time a service streamed a song to a user’s computer, and that was too high to sustain a business. And now just look at the sector. It’s a mess. [Read More]

By David Cotner – The Village Voice

After 20 years of being and becoming an institution, Warp Records is nearly impossible to sum up in one weekend of shows or one box set, no matter how extravagant. And yet the label—alternately christened Weird and Radical Projects or We Are Reasonable People—thus observes its two-decade anniversary in September, weathering changes in fickle music fashion and surviving the 2001 death of co-founder Rob Mitchell. Justifiably, they’re celebrating with both a multi-night, multi-venue, multi-media birthday party (much of it free, all of it aurally cataclysmic) and, for those who prefer objects to experiences, the Warp20 collection, whose size and breadth rival both Arthur C. Clarke‘s lunar monolith and Ace Hardware‘s common doorstop. [Read More]

By Elizabeth Dwoskin – The Village Voice

Mark Farese is a man with two feet and 1,400 pairs of sneakers. In his New Jersey basement, plastic shoeboxes line the floor in rows and stack up in six-foot-high walls. The boxes, custom-made for him in Japan, bear his nickname: “The Mayor.”

There’s a similar consistency inside the boxes. Almost every one contains a variation on the same product: Nike’s Air Force 1, the basketball shoe that the company introduced in 1982. [Read More]

By Vibe

  (New York NY) – InterMedia Partners, in partnership with its portfolio company Uptown Media Group along withBlackrock Digital today announced the purchase of the assets of Vibe and Vibe.com, the preeminent brands for hip-hop & R&B lifestyle and culture.  Founded in 1993 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, Vibe has been an iconic brand for 16 years, responsible for setting trends among hip hop and mainstream culture. InterMedia is buying Vibe on the heels of the recent June shuttering of the magazine. [Read More]

By Bonnie Rosenstock – Chelsea Now

Urban Art. Street Art. Mural Art. Aerosol Art. Spray Art. Guerilla Art. Tag Art.  Call graffiti what you will — but there’s no denying it’s a big part of life in NYC (whether we realize it or not). That sentiment was expounded by painter/photographer Shell Sheddy.
Sheddy, who prefers to be called “an art activist,” is the curator of “GRAF: Reading the Writing on the Wall; images of the L.E.S. 1968 to present,” an overview of this contentious art form (currently showing at the Tompkins Square Park Library Gallery). [Read More]