'Push'

It's Rob Thomas and Matchbox Twenty:

Did Anyone Check on 'Miserable' Ben Affleck After the Grammy Awards? (VIDEO)

At LAT, "Ben Affleck attended the 65th Grammy Awards arguably for the sake of Twitter, which could not get enough of the Oscar winner’s “I’d rather be anywhere else” reaction shots during Sunday’s telecast":

The “Gone Girl” star accompanied his wife, actor-singer Jennifer Lopez, to the ceremony and, due to the power couple’s prime seating inside Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, were seen throughout the night reacting to performances, speeches and quips. But Affleck — no stranger to memes of exasperation — appeared disengaged in the background of host Trevor Noah’s frequent roaming monologues and bored or “miserable” during performances throughout the night, much to the delight of social media.

“Someone please check on Ben Affleck #GRAMMYs,” tweeted the Chicks in the Office account.

For the record, we did check on Affleck and a representative for him and representatives for Lopez did not immediately respond Monday to The Times’ requests for comment.

Meanwhile, images and videos of the subdued “Argo” star-director lighted up the social-media platform, especially a clip of a tense moment between him and Lopez that piqued the interest of amateur lip readers searching for trouble in paradise. Affleck and Lopez wed last year.

“When the publicist checks Twitter tells your wife to make you smile for the camera. Oh Ben Affleck,” wrote a user who tweeted the clip.

“Ben Affleck worrying if P Diddy was going to perform in 50 Years of Hip Hop ….” added another, referring to Lopez’s ex’s possible involvement in one of the evening’s standout performance collaborations.

Spliff Star, left, and Busta Rhymes perform onstage during the 65th Grammy Awards. MUSIC

Beyoncé, Harry Styles, hip-hop history and everything else that went down at the Grammys Feb. 5, 2023

And although music legend Stevie Wonder’s and Chris Stapleton’s joint performance got the “Argo” star to his feet, Affleck half-heartedly nodded along to the Motown tribute.

“Ben Affleck would rather be anywhere else than front row at the #Grammys2023 watching Stevie Wonder crush Higher Ground,” tweeted Daily Beast writer Matt Wilstein.

“Ben Affleck wants to go home Jen. Everyone in this video looks like they are vibing to a different song,” tweeted another user.

“Ben Affleck is every introvert everywhere. You can see his batteries draining in real time. Man is already at 23% #GRAMMYs #SaveBen,” wrote another.

“Ben Affleck is the 8-year-old dragged to a wedding, wants to go home and play video games,” tweeted NFL veteran Matt Leinart.

“Ben Affleck giving off big ‘Only sober guy at a wedding where you know nobody other than your wife’ vibes,” wrote another...

Grammys Go With Devil Worship In Primetime

At Instapundit, "I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC."

And from Liz Wheeler:

Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.

pic.twitter.com/p1rqEwVeSW

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 6, 2023

'Into You Like a Train'

The Psychedelic Furs, live from 1981:

Roxy Music Live at the Inglewood Forum September 28th (VIDEO)

I saw them play in Pasadena in 1979. Turns out they're back on tour, playing the Inglewood (Kia) Forum Wednesday night. 

Amazing.

At the Los Angles Times, "50 years ago, Roxy Music invented rock’s future. Now they’re taking a well-deserved bow":

Phil Manzanera, the 71-year-old guitarist for art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, is leaning into a computer camera backdropped by a nondescript hotel room. The band has assembled in Toronto, where they’re rehearsing for their first U.S. tour in two decades, and Manzanera is relearning their repertoire after a long spell away from it. “I haven’t really played those songs for 10 years,” he says with a trace of concern. “And so it’s all like coming back fresh.”

Roxy Music has come together for the first time since a run of shows across the U.K. and Australia in 2011. (The band will perform at the Kia Forum on Sept. 28.) They are venturing back to the States in celebration of being a band for 50 years, with large breaths and pauses and solo adventures peppered throughout.

“We were never going to be the Beatles, like a bunch of brothers,” Manzanera says. “Luckily we’ve come together as this unit, which you could call a band, but it is not as straightforward as that. Now it’s about the joy of rediscovering those songs and playing them live. If we don’t play them, who’s going to?”

Roxy’s permanence in music culture — they were inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 2019 — belies the decades in which the band’s cachet, mainly among musical adventurers and high-cheekboned jet-setters, far outstripped its popularity.

In the fall of 1970, Bryan Ferry had lost a job teaching ceramics at an all-girls school near London, in part due to his holding frequent record-listening sessions during school hours. Having floundered a bit after finishing art school a couple years prior, Ferry put an ad in the paper, looking for bandmates to collaborate with him and an old art-school classmate, bassist Graham Simpson. Saxophonist Andy Mackay replied to the ad, bringing along his university pal Brian Eno, who could work a synthesizer and owned a tape machine. The original iteration of the group was rounded out by guitarist Roger Bunn and drummer Dexter Lloyd. In search of a name that signified “faded glamour,” Ferry chose Roxy Music.

By 1972, Manzanera had come on as the group’s guitarist, Paul Thompson had replaced Lloyd as the drummer, and Roxy Music was off and running, releasing five albums between 1972 and 1975 alone, all of them critically acclaimed while finding modest commercial success. (In the U.S., their highest-charting hit was the taut and funky “Love Is the Drug,” which reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.) Their albums gained praise for their inventiveness, the band being credited with pioneering a new wave of art rock, wherein the visuals and onstage stylings were just as meticulously thought out as the lush production and incisive lyrical wit of the songs.

Ferry, now 76, acts as the band’s emotional conductor, of sorts. His voice is malleable — sometimes a distinctive and melodic drone, something one might hear in a smoky jazz lounge, sometimes soaring to beautiful highs. But his writing is what most commonly stands out. Ferry is one of the great architects of the love song, a lyricist who approaches the concept of love from all angles: the inception of romance, the tentative and uncertain bridges between affection and even greater affection, longing and heartbreak and bracing for the inevitability of loss. For all of the artistic flair surrounding Roxy Music, at the core, under the care of Ferry, they were a band in constant pursuit of considerations of love.

But there was also artistic flair. Their album covers were striking and sometimes controversial (the cover art for 1974’s “Country Life,” featuring two scantily clad models, was censored in the U.S. upon its release,) and the music itself was undeniable. By 1982’s “Avalon,” the band’s consistent members were Ferry, Mackay, Thompson and Manzanera (those four are now on tour; Eno is not participating.) They took a hiatus after 1982, despite “Avalon” being the group’s most commercially successful record.

There has been a renewed interest and excitement in Roxy Music in their time away. “Avalon’s” swelling “More Than This” was memorably karaoke’d by Bill Murray in the Sofia Coppola film “Lost in Translation.” The sinister “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” from 1973’s “For Your Pleasure,” gained renewed interest after being featured in a pivotal scene in the show “Mindhunter.” The group’s consistent presence in the cultural atmosphere has a lot to do with the fact that they were, very much, ahead of their time, in terms of vision and influence. But it is also attributed to the fact that, despite not releasing an album in 40 years, their songs still sound fresh. Manzanera’s logic on this is simple.

“We always recorded on analog tape, and actually played together in a studio,” he says. “That sound seems to have quite a long life span. You listen to all the great songs that are still so popular from the ’70s, and they were beautifully constructed; they sound as if they could have been recorded yesterday.”

Not only their influence on music, but also on performance, on how bands present themselves and use the stage as a canvas, it has all endured. That influence spans decades, from peers like David Bowie in their early ’70s heydays to new wave founders like Devo, Talking Heads and Blondie. By the time they had stepped away, acts from the Cars to Pulp to TV on the Radio were charging through a new rock landscape with the style, affect and sound once pioneered by Roxy Music.

Both Manzanera and Ferry, with whom I spoke in early August from his home in London, are not explicitly focused on the band’s legacy, saying that it isn’t something they think about until someone mentions it to them. But there is the reality of time, and what time affords a band of people who have created over a long enough stretch of it. There are also, very literally, monuments to this kind of introspection, even if it is unnamed by the band members.

This year, Ferry has released a book of his lyrics, spanning both Roxy and all of his solo albums. It is a massive but joyful book to traverse, as Ferry’s lyricism comes across on the page like reading small, delightful short stories. Stories of love, or the anguish of love. Songs that unravel intimacy, sometimes finding the unraveling unsatisfying, but knowing it must be tended to. There’s an ever-present longing in the songs, but also a space where one is bracing for the impact of giving themselves over. “Preparing oneself for the worst,” Ferry says, shrugging and smiling. Forward-facing as ever, Ferry does admit that organizing the book itself, and sitting with the wide range of lyrics he’d penned over the years, did provide him with small regrets and sentimentalities.

“As you get older, life becomes more complicated and writing time becomes, I guess, precious and limited. Some of the songs, when I was compiling the lyric book, I thought, oh, I wish I’d had another week to spend on that. Or I wish I’d edited that out. But maybe it’s just as well that there was an immediacy about them. Being up against the wall time-wise can be a good thing for artists. For writers.”

Whether they feel like tangible attempts at solidifying and firmly upholding legacy, both the book and the tour gaze fondly upon the past greatnesses of the group and its most central figure. The Roxy tour setlist is a tight 20 tracks that spans just about two hours of performance. Anchored by their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” the majority of tunes bounce through Roxy’s sprint of stunning ’70s albums.

“It was all such a rush of time,” Ferry says about that era. “We found this derelict house in Notting Hill and it was quite picturesque, freezing cold, just trying to get this program of work assembled. When we went into the studio, we did that really fast and then it all started to accelerate. That’s when it started getting really hard and I learned to write very quickly, but it was really exciting because I suddenly felt, wow, we have an audience.”

That audience extended to the States, and across generations. Roxy Music became notorious for their romanticism, the flourish in their performances, the eccentricities of future superstar producer Eno pushed up against the brilliantly calculated charisma of Ferry. Their performances, even now, unlock an elsewhere, a place to escape to that seems, to the eye of a spectator, to be fabulous. The only party you’d ever want to be at...

Still more.

 

'Touch Me'

The best live version you'll find. My goodness.

The Doors:

'Hello It's Me

It's Todd Rundgren:

'Brand New Cadillac'

"I said, 'Jesus Christ, where'd you get that Cadillac?!!'"

The Clash: 

'Superstar'

I so love her. I miss her more than any rock star who's passed in my lifetime.

The Carpenters:

Joni Mitchell Reclaims Her Voice at Newport (VIDEO)

Amazing.

At the New York Times, "The singer-songwriter’s surprise return to the stage at the folk festival she first played in 1967 was an act of bravery, joy and reinterpretation":

This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. https://t.co/Y99xQDC4Ep

— Jodi Kantor (@jodikantor) July 25, 2022

This summer, quite unexpectedly, two of music’s brightest stars haven’t been fresh young upstarts, but a pair of semi-reclusive female elders whose brilliance is being reaffirmed by a new generation of fans.

The 63-year-old pop legend Kate Bush’s 1985 anthem “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” is a legitimate contender for Song of the Summer — it currently sits at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, nestled between recent smashes from Harry Styles and Jack Harlow — thanks to its prominent use in the hit Netflix series “Stranger Things.” And on Sunday night, Joni Mitchell, 78, stunned attendees of the Newport Folk Festival (and the countless people who have since watched viral cellphone videos of the event) when she performed in public for the first time since her 2015 brain aneurysm, playing her first full-length live set since 2000.

Acting as an ecstatic master of ceremonies, the 41-year-old musician Brandi Carlile asked the crowd to welcome her friend Mitchell “back to the Newport stage for the first time since 1969” — which was 12 years before Carlile was born.

“Joni hasn’t always felt the appreciation that exists amongst humanity for her,” Carlile said in a CBS News interview, explaining her idea for a performance that would mimic the laid-back “Joni Jams” that Mitchell has for the past few years been hosting with peers and younger musicians in her Los Angeles living room. “But I wanted her to feel that.”

Carlile has done plenty to help her friend and idol feel that love, and to assert Mitchell’s rightful place in the canon. “We didn’t live in the time of Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Beethoven,” Carlile said during one of the several recent concerts she’s given in which she’s performed Mitchell’s 1971 album “Blue” in its entirety. “But we live in the time of Joni Mitchell.”

Especially since surviving that near-fatal aneurysm in 2015, Mitchell’s work has been enjoying a widespread critical reappraisal. (“Having a brush with death kind of softens people towards me,” she told CBS News with a chuckle.) In the past year, she has received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors and was named the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person of the Year, as well as begun an ongoing project called the Joni Mitchell Archives, which will see her releasing rich collections of previously unheard music.

Even though these recent accolades have brought Mitchell back into the public eye, the performance videos from Newport have had a rare and profound power. In some sense, they are simply reminders of the euphoric potential of live music, an experience that was all but silenced for many months during the pandemic.

Beyond that, though, the past two-plus years of seemingly unending illness, sacrifice and loss have left so many people hungry for stories of resilience, hard-won strength and new beginnings. After the aneurysm, just as she did when she contracted polio at age 9, Mitchell had to teach herself to walk again. This time, though, she also had to rediscover her singing voice and relearn how to play the guitar — which she did, triumphantly, onstage at Newport during an instrumental performance of “Just Like This Train,” from her 1974 album “Court and Spark.”

Before Mitchell picked up her guitar, Carlile prepped the audience, announcing, “She’s doing something very, very brave right now for you guys,” adding, “This is a trust fall, and she picked the right people to do this with.” Carlile was talking to the Newport crowd, but she might as well have been saying it to the other musicians onstage — including herself. Even when she was singing lead, tackling these complex songs with a soulful ease, Carlile’s gaze was attentively fixed on Mitchell, ready to catch her in case she stumbled but more often just letting Mitchell guide the way.

There was an intergenerational tenderness to the performance, the way that some of the younger musicians (Marcus Mumford, Blake Mills, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of Lucius) appeared to be in palpable awe of what was happening even as they kept time and in tune. The whole thing had a loose, communal spirit about it, too, reminiscent of the coffeehouses in which Mitchell got her start performing folk songs in the mid-1960s. The spotlight was shared (the singer and guitarist Celisse Henderson had a particular star turn when she sang lead on “Help Me”) but, as Mitchell sat regally in her high-backed, gilded chair positioned in the center of the stage, it was always apparent who was the one holding court.

When Mitchell first came out onstage, she seemed a tad overwhelmed, clinging to her cane and backing up Carlile, who took the lead on a breezy, celebratory “Carey.” But over the course of that song, a visible change came over Mitchell. Her shoulders loosened. She began to shimmy. And all at once she seemed to regain her voice — her voice, sonorous and light, seeming to dance over those balletic melodies at a jazzy tempo all her own. She eventually relaxed enough to sing lead on several numbers, including a sumptuous version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” that allowed her to luxuriate in her velvety lower register.

The highlight of the set, though, was “Both Sides Now,” a song that a 23-year-old Mitchell wrote in 1967, the same year she played Newport for the first time. Back then, some critics scoffed at the lyrics’ presumptive wisdom: What could a 23-year-old girl possibly know about both sides of life? But over the years, the song has revealed itself to contain fathomless depths that have only been audible in later interpretations...

Keep reading.

 

'Shine'

From Collective Soul:

'Build Me Up Buttercup'

The Foundations:

'Slow motion riders fly the colors of the day...'

Chicago, "Saturday in the Park." 

'Fly Away'

It's Lenny Kravitz.

'Personality Crisis'

The New York Dolls. 

'Rebel Rebel'

I miss him so much, David Bowie.

'Dog Days Are Over'

It's Florence + the Machine.

'Paranoid'

Black Sabbath. So classic.  

How Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot Escaped Russia (VIDEO)

I don't listen to this band. Not particularly to my tastes, though your mileage may vary.

I like their rebellious politics though. Frankly, what other politics could they have in Putin's Russia?

There new music video is here, "Hate Fuck." 

At the New York Times, "Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends":

After more than a decade of activism, Maria Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier to evade the police — and a widening crackdown by President Vladimir Putin.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Maria V. Alyokhina first came to the attention of the Russian authorities — and the world — when her punk band and performance art group Pussy Riot staged a protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

For that act of rebellion in 2012, she was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” She remained determined to fight Mr. Putin’s system of repression, even after being jailed six more times since last summer, each stint for 15 days, always on trumped-up charges aimed at stifling her political activism.

But in April, as Mr. Putin cracked down harder to snuff out any criticism of his war in Ukraine, the authorities announced that her effective house arrest would be converted to 21 days in a penal colony. She decided it was time to leave Russia — at least temporarily — and disguised herself as a food courier to evade the Moscow police who had been staking out the friend’s apartment where she was staying. She left her cellphone behind as a decoy and to avoid being tracked.

A friend drove her to the border with Belarus, and it took her a week to cross into Lithuania. In a studio apartment in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she agreed to an interview to describe a dissident’s harrowing escape from Mr. Putin’s Russia.

“I was happy that I made it, because it was an unpredictable and big” kiss-off to the Russian authorities, Ms. Alyokhina said, using a less polite term. “I still don’t understand completely what I’ve done,” she admitted, dressed in black except for a fanny pack with a rainbow belt.

Ms. Alyokhina, 33, has spent her entire adult life fighting for her country to respect its own Constitution and the most basic human rights, like freedom of expression. After being freed early from prison in December 2013, she and another member of Pussy Riot founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet focused on crime and punishment in Russia.

She also wrote a memoir, “Riot Days,” and traveled internationally performing a show based on the book. Though her dream was to tour with it in Russia, only three venues agreed to host the show, and all faced repercussions.

Ms. Alyokhina was committed to remaining in Russia despite regular surveillance and pressure from the authorities. But now she has joined the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled since the invasion of Ukraine.

Alyokhina, whose friends call her Masha, had bitten her nails down to stubs, and she puffed almost unceasingly on a vape or on Marlboro Lights. She made the journey in black, three-inch platform boots without laces — a nod to her many stints in jail, where shoelaces are confiscated.

In prison, she and others instead threaded moist towelettes through the eyelets of their shoes to keep them on. As a statement, she and other members of Pussy Riot will wear them while they perform during a tour, starting on May 12 in Berlin, to raise money for Ukraine.

When it first began more than a decade ago, Pussy Riot seemed as much publicity stunt as political activism. But if their protest in the Moscow cathedral — where they sang a “Punk Prayer” ridiculing the symbiosis that had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin — seemed overwrought at the time, today it appears prescient.

The church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, recently blessed Russian troops going to Ukraine, and the European Union put his name on a proposed list of people to be sanctioned.

Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.

Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”

During the interview she was surrounded by other members of the group, now a collective with about a dozen members. Most of them had also recently fled Russia, including her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein.

Ms. Shtein had chosen to leave Russia a month before, also evading restrictions on her movement by sneaking out in a delivery-service uniform. Her decision came after someone posted a sign on the door of the apartment she shared with Ms. Alyokhina accusing them of being traitors...

Keep reading.

 

'The Way'

Here's Fastball: