Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
NME magazine. Photo: Unknown
Sink or swim for NME as long-running music weekly goes free from September – by Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian
“There are few magazines with a legacy to rival NME’s. The magazine championed rock’n’roll when Elvis was shocking the establishment, introduced the world to the Smiths and Joy Division and in 1979 put all-female punk group the Slits on the cover, stripped off and covered with mud. But after a decade-long decline in sales, the title, which has been published weekly since 1952, is to become a free magazine, a move described by one industry expert as “the last throw of the dice”.”
Campbell Live From Apia – How Did JC Fit In on Sky? – by Duncan Greive, The Spinoff
“When something annoys you or I, we’re mostly powerless to do anything about it. Don’t like the Port’s location? A couple of angry tweets should do it. Think we should be able to congestion charge to fund the CRL? Have a fight with your parents. Not Campbell. He’d agitate and cajole until he got his way – with government, with business. Even with the NZRU, probably the most insular and intimidating monolith in New Zealand society. So the timing of All Blacks-to-Apia couldn’t have been more poignant, coming a matter of weeks after the programme which, truly alone, created this genuinely historic occasion was shut down for good. And shut down for precisely this kind of work.”
Spotify and Apple Music Should Let Us Tip Musicians We Love – by Eric Steur, Wired
“Imagine a button on your favorite band’s Spotify or Apple Music profile that allowed you to send them a buck while you’re listening to their song. The services already have your credit card info; more critically, their platforms already enable musicians to set up verified profiles. Apple Music’s Connect feature even offers artists the ability to directly interact with fans. By taking an extra step and allowing musicians to link their profiles to digital payment accounts, and by employing some UI magic, the streaming services could make tipping artists a seamless, nearly trivial process.”
The Problematic Conversation From, About & Around Pebbles Hooper – by Leah Damn, Being A House
“It’s a hard concept for the privileged to understand why the things they say should have anything to do with race when they almost never mention skin colour or ethnicity. Unbeknownst to them, opinions like that of Hooper’s have everything to do with race, because when you make generalisations and baseless conclusions about issues like child abuse, social welfare, unemployment and crime, unfortunately these issues cannot be separated from the reality of who are most represented in those categories. And it isn’t the Pebbles Hooper’s of the world.”
The Endless Fall of Suge Knight – by Matt Diehl, Rolling Stone
“This could finally be the end of the road for the record-label head who, a generation ago, helped bring the West Coast gangsta rap of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur to the mainstream, pushing aside the pop rap of artists such as MC Hammer and Tone-Loc and putting low-riders and gang signs into heavy rotation on MTV. In the process, Knight established himself as a legendary music-biz tough guy. His exploits — some mythic, some real — during the heyday of Death Row Records have become part of hip-hop lore: In the early Nineties, he allegedly shook down Vanilla Ice into handing over publishing profits, walking the rapper out to a hotel-room balcony to show him how far his fall would be. ("I needed to wear a diaper that day," Ice said later.)”
Make it Reign: How an Atlanta Strip Club Runs the Music Industry – by Devin Friedman, GQ
“Atlanta gets referred to frequently as Black Hollywood. It is, like Los Angeles and New York, a city in which no small number of celebrities feel it is important to maintain a presence. You're as likely to find Kanye in Atlanta as anywhere else; Kevin Hart celebrated his engagement at Magic City; Rick Ross just bought the old Evander Holyfield twelve-bedroom mansion down in Fayetteville. Atlanta is, especially, the de facto center of the hip-hop industry, and it is Magic City—and the small number of strip clubs like it—that operates as the underground linchpin of that industry. If hip-hop were Silicon Valley, Magic City would be the place venture capitalists would loiter, looking for talent.”
Heartbreak houses – by Greg Bruce, Metro
“I was full of anger and regret. Two years earlier we had been on the verge of buying when we had quit, beaten and broken, heavily pregnant with both our first child and the fear of several lifetimes of debt. Every day since then, every single day, the Herald had run a story saying “Auckland property prices reach new high” and by the time we recommenced our search, it was clear that our inability to overcommit ourselves financially to a house we didn’t really like in an area we weren’t especially enamoured of had cost us around $150,000 in forgone capital gain.”