By Lincoln Smith/The Hechinger Report

Nothing truly prepares you for the realities of teaching in an underserved community.
Racial disparities in public education are an essential issue for every teacher to understand – but especially for white educators who teach children of color. While most pre-service teaching programs do not equip you to meet these challenges, each school I have taught in has provided me with experiences that have shaped me and the way I’ve worked as a music teacher in urban schools.
After spending 10 years as a contract musician stringing together gigs, teaching private music lessons and performing odd jobs, I stepped into a part-time music teaching position in an urban charter school. My first day as a music teacher was harrowing. I found 12 playable guitars in my classroom – and 14 students who were resistant to me. After several chaotic classes, I wondered, What was I doing wrong? Why won’t they listen to me?

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Posted on December 11, 2019

A ‘Supernova’ Who Was Just Getting Started

“Juice WRLD, one of a crop of sweet-voiced singing rappers who emerged from the streaming platform SoundCloud in recent years, died on Sunday, the authorities said. He was 21,” the New York Times reports.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois confirmed the death in a statement.
Identifying the artist by his real name, it said Jarad A. Higgins, of Homewood, Ill., had been pronounced dead at 3:14 a.m. at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill. The cause of death was not available and an autopsy was to be done, the office said.
The rapper’s sharp, catchy songs – which were often freestyled in only a few takes – combined the melodic hip-hop instincts of Lil Yachty, Post Malone and XXXTentacion with the heavy-hearted angst and nasal hooks of emo and pop-punk bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco.
“I’ve always been different,” he told the New York Times last year. “I used to try to hide it a little bit, but now I have a platform for being different.”

*
Jessi Roti wrote for the Tribune in June 2018 that “no artist has had such seeming overnight success quite like Juice Wrld – the 19-year-old Calumet Park native who signed a reported $3 million deal with Interscope in March after his 2017 EP Juice Wrld 999 started racking up millions of streams on SoundCloud, thanks to singles ‘Lucid Dreams’ (currently No. 6 on Billboard’s ‘Hot 100’) and ‘All Girls Are the Same’ (first featured on the three-song Nothings Different EP, amassing 48.3 million plays).”

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Posted on December 9, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

This Lurlean Hunter song, “My Home Town Chicago,” was posted on YouTube over the weekend, presumably on the occasion of her birthday on Saturday . . .

. . . and that sent me on a journey to learn more about Hunter, who died in 1983 at the age of 63.
Let’s take a look at what I found.

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Posted on December 3, 2019

By Aeon

“For two decades following the Second World War, music in the Soviet Union was tightly restricted by the Communist Party. Bans on Western genres such as boogie-woogie, jazz and, later, rock ‘n’ roll, as well as other styles deemed threatening to the political order, extended not only to public radio waves, but to private listening too.
“This prohibition, and the subsequent demand it created, gave rise to a black market of banned records carved into used X-ray film – contraband items colloquially known as ‘ribs’ and ‘bone music’ that would later become emblems of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion.
“This short documentary from the UK independent music and arts enterprise the Vinyl Factory traces the grooves of X-ray records, using primary sources to retell how these crackling, bendable bootlegs came to be sold on Soviet streets thanks to their risk-taking, music-loving makers and dealers.”

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Posted on November 29, 2019

By Bloodshot Records

Here’s a chronological look back at our releases of the last 12 months.
VANDOLIERS – Forever

Released: February 22, 2019
Vandoliers are the next wave of Texas music. The six-piece Dallas-Fort Worth group channels all that makes this vast state unique: tradition, modernity, audacity, grit, and – of course – size. Forever puts it all together for an enthralling ride down a fresh Lone Star highway.

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Posted on November 20, 2019

‘War In Chicago Will Never End’

On Vlad:

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Posted on November 19, 2019

‘A new musical inspired by Chicago’s own young punks . . . with music and lyrics by Jason Narducy and book by playwright Brett Neveu.

Chicago-based guitarist Jason Narducy started a punk rock band in Evanston in 1982. “I was 11 years old and it felt incredible to write original songs and play them with my friends. We all had our own issues at home but we found love and support in our little group. We were Verböten.”

Premiering with The House Theatre of Chicago in January at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago.

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Posted on November 14, 2019

By FOOLYT

A lot of this shit is the actual facts, man.

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Posted on November 8, 2019

By Aeon

Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.
– Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records
The U.S. gospel blues musician and evangelist Blind Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space.

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Posted on November 4, 2019

By Katharine Trendacosta and Samantha Hamilton/Electronic Freedom Foundation

Nickelback never asked to become a meme. And yet, after the Internet decided it hated the Canadian alternative rock band due to the lead singer’s unique voice, users have shared their image millions of times. But their record label decided to draw a line at President Trump tweeting a meme putting the Biden-Ukraine controversy into a Nickelback music video. We may tend not to think of memes as political speech, but they can be. And when someone expresses a political message via meme, using copyright law to silence their speech when it is very clearly fair use is an abuse of copyright.

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Posted on November 1, 2019