Gerard Way has teased some “heavy” music that may see a release in 2019:
2018 was a dark year full of black magic in my opinion, so it got me thinking about witches again. I was inspired to buy this mask because I had just written a song called I Am The Hag, which I haven’t finished yet. It’s kind of heavy. Maybe I’ll release it in 2019.
21 Savage has the number one album in the country:
The set was released on Dec. 21 via Slaughter Gang/Epic Records and launches with 131,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Dec. 27, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 18,000 were in traditional album sales, as the bulk of the album was driven by streaming activity.
Abhimanyu Ghoshal, writing at TNW:
What was particularly interesting back then was the wide range of ingenious methods people used to share tunes. Back in the day, people went beyond simply hosting music on public-facing websites, and instead, found ways to send and receive tracks directly with other internet users. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and take a look at some of the ways people grew their music collections in the late 90s and early 2000s.
As we usher in 2019, some of our community members are starting the year by doing a “wellness challenge.” I always think it’s cool when the community does little projects like this. If anyone is interested in learning more, and trying to get a little healthier with others, all the information is in this thread.
A post office in Renton, Washington has been named after Jimi Hendrix:
Last week a bill was signed into law re-christening the Renton Highlands Post Office the James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix Post Office in the legendary guitarist’s honor. The bill, which passed unanimously, was sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, and supported by both of Washington’s U.S. senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell.
Max Read, writing for New York Magazine:
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
Wonderful.
Kodak Black has the number one album in the country this week:
The set, which was released on Dec. 14 via Dollaz N Dealz/Atlantic Records, earned 89,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Dec. 20, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 5,000 were in traditional album sales — as the bulk of the album’s units were driven by streaming activity.
House of Heroes have announced a reunion show in Columbus, Ohio:
On Dec. 28, they’ll play “The End Is Not the End,” their breakthrough album, from front to back, which has charted in the top 20 of Billboard Christian albums.
“There was a lot of labor to get it done and released,” Skipper said.
Skipper said the band plans to put out an EP with three new songs and two re-imagined, previously released songs, but don’t regularly plan to tour after the Columbus show.
I found this tweet thread from Daniel Pemberton, the composer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, about how they put together some of the music for the film, utterly fascinating:
So – here is how we ‘scratched the orchestra’ for #Spiderverse. We’d go record and mix all the live players – then get it transferred to ‘vinyl’ – then spend ages putting the notes back in the mix bar by bar […]
This scene here (nicknamed ‘bongo train tug’) we worked on for ages, trying to get every scratch and musical move to mirror the action and movement in the animation and on screen.. No one had really done anything like this before so we were working out how to do it as we went.
Alex Robert Ross, writing for Noisey, about the band’s holiday song “Yule Shoot Your Eye Out:”
Wentz says that they didn’t overthink the lyrics, that it was “mostly just a goofy song that we took and burned on a cd and gift wrapped in holiday paper and gave out to kids at the show.” […] “Maybe that was a bit overdramatic,” he says now. “I don’t think it was awful. I think monotonous would be a better word. I think when you are a punk rock kid in the suburbs, the holidays represent the biggest version of the monoculture. How could you not take a shot at it?”
Both Beyoncé and SZA had unreleased songs leaked on Spotify and Apple Music over the past few days:
Under the name Queen Carter, the albums “Have Your Way” and “Back Up, Rewind” appeared on Spotify and Apple Music, featuring demos, previously released songs and unreleased tracks by Beyonce. Hours later, they were removed.
And:
Nine unreleased SZA tracks were leaked on Spotify today. The songs, two of which feature Kendrick Lamar, were listed as an album called Comethru under the moniker Sister Solana. SZA has since responded to the leak on Instagram: “These are random scratches from 2015. Def not new new! But… creative? And scary?” Comethru was later removed from Spotify, but the Sister Solana artist page remains on the platform.
Alan Day of Four Year Strong talked with Alternative Press about starting a Christmas tree farm:
“It fell in our laps a couple of years ago, because a friend of a friend was selling their grandparents’ farm,” Day explains. “It was a lot of land, so we went to check it out not really expecting to go for it, but we did. We planted our first batch of trees last spring, and we’ll plant more in the new year. We’re not selling our own trees yet—we won’t be for another four or five years, because they take that long to grow—so we’re still selling retail. But we’re building a life around this thing, for some reason, and at its peak, we’re hoping the farm will have up to 10,000 trees.”
If you thought 2018 was tough for you, imagine being a staffer in Facebook’s public relations department. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began the year by pledging to fix the company’s problems, but instead 2018 turned into 12 months of mea culpas, self-inflicted scandals, and screwups.
Madison Bloom, writing at Pitchfork:
Jackie Fuchs—who was the bassist for the Runways from 1975 to 1977 under the name Jackie Fox—is the current reigning “Jeopardy!” champion. As of last night, she’s on a four-win streak. Fuchs made her first appearance on Friday, December 14, but it wasn’t until her third appearance, on Tuesday night, when Alex Trebek finally acknowledged her tenure in the band. Fuchs won for the fourth time by correctly answering a question about the poet Dylan Thomas.
Ben Koller, the drummer of Converge, suffered a freak elbow accident. A GoFundMe has been set up to help pay for medical costs:
His injury required immediate surgery with an extended recovery period before he’s able to start physical therapy, and ultimately a long road before he is able to be behind the kit again. The accruing medical bills – as well as the impending loss of steady income through touring, writing and recording – is a massive hit to him, his wife, and their children.