By Jabari Evans/The Conversation

Before he was arrested in December 2011, Chief Keef was a 16-year-old budding rap star. He’d released a song, “Bang,” which had more than 400,000 views on YouTube, along with a mixtape that he’d recorded in a friend’s bedroom. He also had a dedicated Twitter following among Chicago high school students.
The track displayed a rawness unlike anything else that was released at the time, and you couldn’t stroll down the streets of Chicago’s South Side without hearing “Bang’s” lyrics pulsing from the stereos of cars rolling by:

Choppers gettin’ let off
Now, they don’t want no war
30 clips and them .45’s, gotta go back to the sto’
And that Kush gettin’ smoked, gotta go back to the sto’
Cock back ’cause there’s trouble, my mans gon’ blow

Yet he was almost completely unknown outside of Chicago. His Facebook profile had less than 2,000 followers, he claimed his occupation was “smokin’ dope” and he still lived with his grandmother.

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Posted on December 11, 2021

By Emina Cerimovic/Human Rights Watch

“I have an IUD in my body right now that won’t let me have a baby and my conservators won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out,” pop star Britney Spears told a court last spring.
Fans, influencers, activists and members of the public rallied in support of Spears, loudly condemning the pop star’s treatment under the 13-year abusive guardianship, which granted her father legal authority to make decisions about her career, finances, and even her own body.
Spears is not alone. While the exact figures are not known, it is estimated millions of people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities are deprived of legal capacity and placed under some form of guardianship. Just like Spears, this had led to a range of abuses, including forced medical treatment, forced contraception and coerced termination of pregnancies, involuntary confinement, forced living arrangements, and limited freedom of movement.

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Posted on November 20, 2021

By Arwa Yousssef/Human Rights Watch

In three weeks, Saudi Arabia will host the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah, and a slew of global superstars – including Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, A$AP Rocky, and David Guetta are scheduled to perform on the weekend after the first checkered flag falls on December 4.
On the surface, the festivities are meant to show race attendees an amazing time. But a look beneath the hood makes clear the Saudi government’s intent is to use these celebrities to whitewash its abysmal human rights record.

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Posted on November 17, 2021

Compare and Contrast

Madonna: Once married to Guy Ritchie.
Moderna: Once made some guy rich.
*
Madonna: Celebrated by postmodern theorists.
Moderna: Celebrated by viral epidemiologists.
*
Madonna: Good in small doses.
Moderna: Good in small doses.

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Posted on October 23, 2021

By Fender Musical Instruments

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC) released the results of a study, “Fender’s New Guitar Player Landscape Analysis,” commissioned alongside YouGov®, which revealed that an incredible 7% of the U.S. population ages 13-64 (approx. 16 million people) started to learn guitar in the last two years, with 62% citing COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns as a major motivator.
Anticipating the growing need for individual, healthy and positive hobbies during a time of isolation, in April of 2020 Fender offered three complimentary months of Fender Play®, their complete online learning app for guitar, bass and ukulele. This resulted in one million new signups, amidst soaring guitar sales. To continue to best support this growing community, Fender partnered with YouGov® to commission a 10,000-person survey with the goal of identifying and understanding this new community’s needs.

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Posted on October 11, 2021

By Chris Berdik/The Hechinger Report

Music education advocates have been fighting back against school budget cuts by claiming that that learning music makes kids better at learning other things.
Numerous studies have found that students who play an instrument tend to do better in school across a wide range of subjects, but not everyone agrees that music instruction is the reason they do better. It’s not clear whether music training sharpens the learning mind or if smarter and self-motivated kids are more likely to start (and stick with) music training in the first place – the classic causation versus correlation conundrum.
In a September 2021 book Of Sound Mind (MIT Press), Northwestern auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus makes the case that budding musicians enjoy real brain gains that help them achieve beyond the school orchestra.
The book covers a broad sweep of Kraus’s decades-long investigation into the hearing brain at her Brainvolts lab at Northwestern University, including two longitudinal studies of students in real world music classes who showed improved language and reading skills that tracked with changes in their brain functioning compared to control group students.

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Posted on September 13, 2021

By Tim Willette and Steve Rhodes

In the spirit of this meme genre . . .

. . . we added a letter to make bands better. Or worse.

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Posted on September 5, 2021

By Tim Willette

I’m travelin’ down the road
I’m flirtin’ with disaster
“Lead singer Danny Joe Brown died on March 10, 2005 at his home in Davie, Florida. He was 53. The cause was kidney failure.”
I’ve got the pedal to the floor,
My life is running faster
“Bass guitarist Riff West died on November 19, 2014, at age 64, after a lengthy illness caused by severe injuries suffered in a car accident.”
I’m out of money, I’m out of hope,
It looks like self destruction

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Posted on July 14, 2021

Waitin’ For The Thaw Out

“With Illinois on track to further loosen COVID-19 restrictions . . . and moving toward a full reopening [Friday], Gov. JB Pritzker [last month] announced a new tourism campaign seeking to lure visitors back to the Land of Lincoln this summer,” CBS2 Chicago (and others) have reported.
“The $6 million ‘Time For Me To Drive‘ ad campaign, featuring the hit song ‘Time For Me To Fly’ by Champaign rock band REO Speedwagon, invites people to visit downtown Chicago, dozens of state parks and historic sites, winery tours in southern Illinois, and more.”
Yeah, we’ve got some better ideas for how the state could have rejiggered some REO songs.

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Posted on June 10, 2021

By Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren/The Conversation

Musicians are often concerned about environmental problems, but entangled in them through the materials used in their instruments. The guitar industry, which uses rare woods from old-growth trees, has been a canary in the coal mine – struggling with scandals over illegal logging, resource scarcity and new environmental regulations related to trade in endangered species of trees.
We spent six years on the road tracing guitar-making across five continents, looking at the timber used – known in the industry as tonewoods for their acoustic qualities – and the industry’s environmental dilemmas. Our goal was to start with the finished guitar and trace it to its origin places, people and plants.
We first visited guitar factories in Australia, the United States, Japan and China. There we observed materials and manufacturing techniques. From factories, we visited the sawmills that supply them. And then we journeyed further, to forests, witnessing the trees from which guitars are made.

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Posted on June 1, 2021