Music Bloggers Hack Record Industry by Launching Indie Labels

A great article is up in Wired Magazine about how "tastemaker" music blogs, just like Blood Is One, are creating indie labels of their own and bringing new music to the forefront:

For Tom Krell, his latest record is extremely meaningful. Krell, who records as How to Dress Well, created the EP as a tribute to a friend who died last year. It’s an orchestral reimagining of music Krell previously released, inspired by the kindred spirit he lost.

As a collection of music, How to Dress Well’s Just Once is a tragically magnificent remembrance. It’s intimate. And that intimacy makes the way the record is being released meaningful as well.

“It’s a memorial record, something very close to my heart,” Krell said to Wired.com. “I needed a label that would allow me to do it exactly my way — have it be something grand, yet intimate and not something overly commercial.”

Krell’s heartfelt EP is being released by small label Love Letters Ink, which is run by San Francisco music video blog Yours Truly. Just Once is a very small release — only 1,000 10-inch vinyl copies of the record are going up for sale — and each $14 EP will ship with a copy of a handwritten letter from Krell.

In addition to the vinyl and letter, fans get a password to view behind-the-scenes footage of the EP’s recording done in the easy-going style for which Yours Truly is known. ($1 of each sale goes to mental health organization MindFreedom, and digital versions of the record were made available through Bandcamp for $4 Tuesday.)

“Some labels put their heart into it, but at the end of the day, their goal is to sell records,” Krell said. “But with Love Letters Ink, they seemed to have a different approach. We want to sell the record, of course. But it felt like they weren’t concerned in the first place about releasing a marketable product as much as releasing a piece of art — something that they were proud of.”

It’s not a common way to release a record, but putting out an album through a popular indie music blog is a pretty smart way to hack the traditional record industry business model. Yours Truly is just the latest indie music blog to launch a label, serving up lovingly crafted offerings and using the kind of promotional savvy that traditional record companies can’t seem to muster.

Community Destruction - The Hip Hop Version

Masculinity and the fact of maleness are a regular part of this website, as has been evidenced by earlier posts. In hip-hop is a genre that specifically speaks to adolescent boys (and sometimes older) and sends penetrating messages to them. The messages are often contradictory and have changed considerably as the genre has evolved (from Nas' "Got Yourself A Gun" to Kanye West adorning himself in women's clothing, the genre has come a long way).

Let's go for some real talk - with just about every predominant rapper has been some sort of history with weapons or violence. This doesn't just go for Tupac and Biggie, who were murdered at the height of their fame, but also for Eminem (whose case history is storied), Nas and Jay-Z (both involved in stabbings and weapons possession cases), Dr. Dre and others.

Is this representative of the problems of criminality in the black community, which has epic rates of incarceration that surpass any other group, including itself in prior periods of American history? Probably. I don't need to remind readers, however, that America is a chaotic, violent place, with crime happening at rates other countries couldn't hope to compete with. The rampages at places like Columbine and Virginia Tech are great illustrations of this.

It's not merely the morally degraded getting in on this game. Brother Ali, one of the greatest conscious rappers, a devout Muslim and devoted parents, has openly bragged about keeping a snub-nosed .38 while taking care of children. Eminem's tough talk seems to spawn not just from personal anger from his being bullied for a great deal of his life (along with family issues involving his mother and absent father) but also from his protection of his daughter Hailie and his two other, adopted daughters. These aren't bad guys but instead good people who decided that taking a tough pose was simply necessary to dissuade predators from touching their children or messing with them.

Deep within this issue may be the community bonds of our society. The institutions that typically build community are, if not completely wrecked, severely hurt in this country. Churches have become anonymous megachurches instead of intimate communal gatherings, public institutions are better inclined towards career advancement than building relationships and old public institutions like local candy shops, theaters, groceries have been taken apart and replaced with Wal-Mart, Target, RedBox, iTunes and all sorts of equally disengaging community substitutes.

Of course, I am writing as someone diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, so my vision may be skewed, but I have noticed community and social disconnect among people that are supposed to have way better social skills than me. They also get into fights and don't seem to have relationships so much as extended one night stands. It's a hyper atomized society that America is living right now and it's about as healthy as a hole in the head. No matter what cases your favorite rapper catches, the worst points of hip-hop are more representative of bad trends in American society, rather than an illustration of some rogue element of society that we can all feel righteous over.

Booker T. Jones - Representing Memphis

One half of this song is the renowned Sharon Jones of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. The album comes out in May.



The guys at Prefix Mag have an assessment:

Booker T. Jones' second career (or third) as Anti-signed soul-indie collaborator continues with his new album, The Road from Memphis, an album that features Jim James, Lou Reed, the Roots, Matt Berninger from the National and Sharon Jones. Those latter two feature in "Representing Memphis," the new single from the project. Berninger and Jones duet here, with Jones dominating, obviously. It's not like Berninger is going to out-soul anyone, but his voice here is a good complement to Jones. Listen at Pitchfork.

Redlight King - Old Man

The Kid Rock/Yelawolf model of country hip-hop seems to rolling along. I just got sent a demo of a guy called Redlight King and really liked this single - "Old Man:"

Hip-Hop As Social Commentary

Have you been visiting the Blood Is One Twitter page? No? Well, you should!

Will Pierce is the cofounder of Blood Is One. He isn't as prolific of a writer as I am but actually says some really brilliant stuff almost regularly. On the Twitter page he wrote:

The question of how much rappers should provide an example is the only mainstream debate about ethics in art the last 30 years.

Hiphop provides the only satisfactory compromise between naturalism and romanticism in contemporary art.

No other artform but hiphop has successfully decried the situation of a cultural underclass while trumpeting success beyond it.

That's in abstract- substance, means is another matter. It at least engages the listener to the thump and challenges them with a message.

Modern art does not invite question, fears it; hiphop is cultural dialogue. It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder.

Where would country music be if it had a sinuous system of self-criticism of hiphop? The social dialogue collapsed, biting became the form.

Hip-hop has been good and bad. All music genres have big problems and the biggest one that I have noticed for rap is that, in escaping the hood, rappers and DJs often bring the hood with them. For a long time, hip-hop was dominated by entourages of rapper's friends from back in the day who they've brought along in order to spread the wealth. Think Outsidaz, Ruff Ryderz, D12 and G-Unit. That doesn't happen that much anymore. Now record labels are filled with business ventures.

Despite becoming more and more business inclined, however, hip-hop manages to "keep it real" in a way that the lubricated genre of country, which Will mentions, rarely does. Rappers frequently start and own their own labels. Raekwon has been releasing his last few albums independently, directly to his consumers, while Eminem has owned his own Sirius satellite radio station and 50 Cent has used his fame to launch an acting career. This doesn't happen so much with rock musicians, who often are total messes and sneer at the business ropes that get tied around them when they ignore them. When trying to grab for money, rock musicians like the guys at Metallica often do so in reaction, using the courts to give them all sorts of copyright money while guys in hip-hop use piracy and bootleg music to their own benefit. Country music, meanwhile, with a few exceptions, has totally sold itself to corporate radio, with the only hope of breaking the hold being the rise of alt country guys like Jamey Johnson through iTunes and the internet.

As Will Pierce said, "Modern art does not invite question, fears it; hiphop is cultural dialogue. It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder." Hip-hop puts right up front alot of stuff that we prefer not to recognize. While educators talk theories about socially constructed gender roles, hip-hop shows us what happens in real life to young men when dad leaves home and mom drops her kids off with grandma so she can work all day. It shows us - through the tales of former drug dealers 50 Cent and Jay-Z or Yelawolf, who hails from methodone lab hotspot Alabama - what the drug war has done to African American, poor white and Hispanic communities.

In one song called "I'm Paranoid," 50 Cent declares, "We thought the dope and the coke would help us escape poverty. When that didn't work, we resorted to armed robbery." In a duet with Wu-Tang veteran Raekwon, Yelawolf called "I Wish," rhymed of life in the south, "Confederate flags I see 'em, On pick up trucks with the windows down, Why's he playing Beanie Sigel? Because his daddy was a dope man. Lynyrd Skynyrd never sang about slinging keys of coke, man." Even when it thinks it's apolitical or even ignorant, hip-hop packs more social commentary than your average indie rock or country band will in their entire career.

In fact, when you think about it in retrospect, the fact that academia wasn't pouring over rap lyrics and relating them to modern society shows academia might not be that clued into American societal dynamics.

Country Music + Rap = Secret Soulmates Part One

To anyone who is a connoisseur of both rap and country music, the similarities of rap and country should be no surprise. Both unapologetically portray worlds that hum below the mainstream of American society (but nevertheless make the force felt): one being the largely African American and Hispanic lower to middle class and the other America's rural and largely blue collar whites. Both are flat out honest in their music, one will show you the rough, money, sex and power pursuing world of the inner city and the other will show you the same in the country.

Both communities are conservative, God fearing and honest. Due to racial, cultural and geographical differences, the two communities don't cross over much. I mentioned this to a girl I dated years back (who was black, incidentally) and she said that, as much as they hate each other, they cross over in sporting events like Oakland Raiders games or professional wrestling events.

I'm not the first to recognize this similarity. Just about every white rapper has tapped in to the cultural similarities. Kid Rock merged rap with blue collar flag waving in order to deem himself an "American Bad Ass." Everlast took up the blues and helped make Fenders and Casios friends. Brother Ali echoes Everlast's gospel style in his songs, complete with guitar use. Eminem, in his more sentimental moods, frequently samples Ozzy Osbourne, Queen and Aerosmith, stalwarts of any suburban rock station. Meanwhile, Mos Def and Pharoahe Monch have brought gospel and blues beautifully into their work and Kid Cudi has sang acoustic ballads.

Yelawolf, an up and coming Alabama rapper of mixed white and Cherokee ancestry, showed working class unity in his video "Kickin." The song is not his best work (though it is good) but shows a great panorama of skateboarders, rednecks, police, Atlanta rappers and even a guy in a sombrero with none of it being awkward:

Now that's really multiculturalism.

Let's do a little compare and contrast. Here's Lightning Hopkins sing about that tried and true scenario: you make a good home for a woman, then they up and leave.

Now let's turn around and look at Mos Def, singing about a pretty ghetto gangsta woman:

Next comes Yelawolf, once again, with his song "Break the Chain," which samples Fleetwood Mac. The chorus, "Alabama dirt road, Dixie flags fly," is sung flawlessly over synthesizers, drums and chopped up Fleetwood Mac samples in one of the best steps at connecting the worlds of country and classic rock to the, at first glance, far different world of rap.



The similarities between the two genres, from gun loving to blues over women and a general embrace of masculinity, are so strong that this "Secret Soulmates" column will have to be a regular feature of the blog. I can already think of more than a few songs and artists that would work well in the next rendezvous.