Music Industry

DJ Khaled hosted the BET Hip Hop Awards, which were recorded September 17, 2016, and aired on that network Tuesday night. He remarked the show would be about “real lyricists, talking about real issues.” As you might guess, the real issues were all about the election and Black Lives Matter narrative.

Think old media are biased? New media is vying to be worse. Spotify, the streaming music service with 100 million active users, is rolling out an election issues video series targeting millennials through a partnership with Mic. And from the start it is leaning left. The Clarify video series will address a number of subjects like student debt, gun control, the economy and civil rights, according…

President Obama, demi-god of cool. The New York Times Gardiner Harris hailed Obama’s musical taste in his Monday “White House Letter,” “The President’s Revealing Disclosure, in Rhythm and Prose.” Yep, it’s more of that tough Times coverage of the president, as Harris got way too excited over the president's  “Musical taste that includes surf rock, soul and the blues.” But when it came to…

The Hillary Clinton propaganda machine has been hard at work leading up to her presumptive presidential nomination. Entertainment media have been littered with a multitude of TV shows, movies, children’s books, and even songs inspired by the Democratic candidate.

Did you realize Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” could be “weaponized” to instigate violence and that Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” was “authoritarian hold music” similar to Adolf Hitler? If not, then you just aren’t listening, man. Washington Post music critic Chris Richards made the front page of the Style section with “And the Bland Played On.” The original online headline to the post was kookier: “…

Washington City Paper reports with cheerleading that the pop-punk band PWR BTTM (don’t google power bottom) is using its “unmistakable charisma and candor” (captured in part by NPR promotion)  to impose on concert venues a “gender-neutral” restroom policy. Last month, the ABC/Univision-owned website Fusion celebrated the emphasis on "trans-friendly" bathrooms.

The best-known of the three declared presidential candidates for 2020 (not kidding) appears to be off to a good start as a leftist politician in love with deficit spending. According to a celebrity income estimate maintained by Forbes Magazine, rapper Kanye West has earned well over $200 million during the past 12 years. Saturday evening, he tweeted that he is carrying "$53 million in personal…

Macklemore is the stage name of a white rapper from Seattle named Ben Haggerty. He and his publicists are currently trying to convince the hip-hop press and the music media to notice the greatness of his new nine-minute song “White Privilege II.” He raps: “White supremacy isn't just a white dude in Idaho. White supremacy protects the privilege I hold. White supremacy is the soil, the foundation…

Given all the feminist hype for HBO star Lena Dunham, what she recently said about music is making her sound more like vintage Tipper Gore than a modern-day Gloria Steinem. Dunham was speaking at Variety’s Power of Women 2015 lunch when she made the following comments attacking music (most notably hip-hop and rap), which she says, “celebrates the exploiters and hides the exploited.”

Which was the bigger insult to Hillary: that she might have committed hanky-panky with the handling of her email, or that she's a huge Barry Manilow fan? On today's With All Due Respect, Mark Halperin mocked Hillary's decision to delete thousands of supposedly personal emails: "was she running out of server space because she was, like, downloading every Barry Manilow song?" John Heilemann was…

Over the years, the hip music critics have easily mocked the Grammy Awards for rewarding kitschy music. See: Milli Vanilli, Best New Artist. Oops. But that doesn’t mean Kanye West gets to declare himself the new dean of the rock critics like Robert Christgau. Kanye threatened to storm on stage and take the Album of the Year award away from Beck and give it to Beyonce. Washington Post music…

Leftist rock critic Greil Marcus claims that ever since Obama was elected, there’s been a widespread racist “loathing…that seeks out its targets.” He even claimed "I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama."

Imagine a movie that 1) sympathetically portrays Occupy Wall Street and 2) features songs by “Weird Al” Yankovic. If you think 1) and 2) seem incongruous, you might get an argument from writer Lynn Stuart Parramore. In a piece that ran Wednesday on Salon and originally appeared on AlterNet, Parramore claimed that Yankovic’s recent chart-topping album, Mandatory Fun, contains a “deeply moral…

Would right-wingers like a larger presence in mainstream news and entertainment media, or would they rather grumble about the MSM’s liberal bias while patronizing conservative media outlets? To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, it’s clear that the second is correct. Waldman’s peg for his Wednesday post was a National Review piece by editor and publisher Adam Bellow on the need for a…