woensdag 27 november 2019

The Amazon Music Boycott Is Growing

The Amazon Music Boycott Is Growing

jeff-bezos
CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images
On Tuesday, November 26, JPEGMAFIA became the latest musician to withdraw from the lineup of Intersect, a new Las Vegas music festival funded and presented by Amazon Web Services. Representatives of the celebrated art-rapper did not provide a reason for his decision to SPIN, but it comes against the backdrop of a rising tide of protest by independent musicians against Amazon for the tech behemoth’s contracts with Palantir, a data-mining company that provides software for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In October, prompted by the announcement of Intersect, more than 1,000 musicians signed a pledge not to participate in Amazon-sponsored events or exclusive Amazon partnerships until the company terminates its relationship with Palantir, among other demands. Organizers of the campaign, dubbed No Music for ICE, escalated their tactics this week, with a call for participating musicians to also remove their catalogs from Amazon Music Unlimited, the company’s music streaming service. Acclaimed indie bands Deerhoof, Downtown Boys, Speedy Ortiz, and Told Slant are among those who have already directed distributors to pull their albums from the platform. Signees of the initial boycott of Amazon events include Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Vivian Girls, Ted Leo, and Car Seat Headrest.
“It is time to say NO to ICE and the tech companies that power it, like Amazon,” the organizers wrote in an open letter on Sunday. “A mass, collective takedown is an escalation, another step in musicians acting in solidarity with the numerous groups across the country protesting to shut down ICE and end family separations, deportations, and other horrors.”
Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, hosts a whopping portion of the internet on its servers, including Netflix, Lyft, and AirBnB. AWS’s client list also includes Palantir, a largely secretive company co-founded by the notorious billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, which develops the case management software that ICE uses to target immigrants, including parents of unaccompanied minors, for criminal prosecution. In 2018, ICE held a daily average of 44,631 people in detention, the highest number in the agency’s 16-year history.
Chicago-based dance music producer and DJ The Black Madonna was the first artist to withdraw from Intersect after the lineup was unveiled. She credited her decision to Amazon’s indirect ties with ICE, and alleged that she had not been informed that Intersect was Amazon-affiliated when she signed on to perform, a claim Amazon representatives have denied. Representatives for seven artists still on the Intersect bill declined to comment on their involvement, or whether they had been informed of Amazon’s involvement.
Organizers told SPIN that No Music for ICE was inspired by similar campaigns by tech workers and immigrant rights organizations, and also by online discourse about Intersect after the lineup was announced. “It seemed to me a bit wrong that so much of the attention was going on artists, you know, calling them out, rather than going towards why it is that musicians shouldn’t want to work with Amazon, and how many of us don’t, and sort of formally voicing that,” Speedy Ortiz guitarist and bandleader Sadie Dupuis, an organizer of the campaign, told SPIN.
Employees at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have organized petitions in the past year demanding that their companies reject existing and prospective contracts with both ICE itself and third party firms like Palantir that develop the agency’s software. The Seattle software company Chef announced in September that it would not renew an ICE contract after employees protested. And in a precedent for the artist-organizers of No Music for ICE, two major independent comics festivals, Bethesda’s Small Press Expo and the Toronto Comics Art Festival, dropped the Amazon-owned comics distribution platform ComiXology as a sponsor after nearly 200 artists and industry workers published an open letter criticizing Amazon’s relationship with Palantir. (Both festivals declined to comment.)
Kate M., a tech organizer and musician who helped organize No Music for ICE (and declined to share her last name), said that artists in the streaming era share common ground with tech workers. “It’s important to realize that, as musicians, if we are taking paychecks from Amazon, we are tech workers too, and have the power to withhold our labor and affect Amazon’s bottom line,” she told SPIN. “This seems like a logical moment for us to start building our movement.”
The open letter includes step-by-step instructions for removing music from Amazon. It also acknowledges the cost of taking a stand, claiming that, for major rock acts, the platform accounts for around four percent of an album’s first-week streams. It’s a relatively small share compared to the dominance of Apple and Spotify in the music market, but not immaterial. Still, this dynamic makes it easier for a musician to withhold work from Amazon than it might be for, say, a cartoonist. “Not every author can afford to extract themselves from Amazon completely,” Michael DeForge, an artist who helped organize the cartoonist campaign, told SPIN.
Three labels—Philadelphia’s Get Better, London’s Damnably, and Barcelona’s Sidefunk—said they have issued takedowns to Amazon for their entire roster. Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
If you would like to share any interesting information, email me at tosten.burks@spin.com.
Tosten Burks
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maandag 25 november 2019

Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan, a Rock ’n’ Roll Mystery That Remains Stubbornly Unsolved

In 1975, the psych-folk musician vanished in Santa Rosa, N.M. A new reissue of his self-titled album only deepens the puzzle of his life and career.
Credit...Yosuke Kitazawa, via Jim Sullivan Estate
  • Jim Sullivan was the kind of California character who seemed to have stepped straight out of a Pynchon or DeLillo novel — a 6-foot-2 singer and songwriter known as Sully with a magnetic personality and a handlebar mustache. His dramatic psych-folk songs were spacious, cinematic and edged with mystic, lonesome brooding. His social circle included actors and Hollywood hangers-on, and he’d had brushes with fame, including an uncredited part in “Easy Rider” with his friend Dennis Hopper.
    On his 1969 debut album, “U.F.O.,” he sang of beckoning highways, of aliens, of an Arizona ghost town, of a man who looked “so natural” in death it was clearly his time to go. Six years later, the 35-year-old Sullivan disappeared in Santa Rosa, N.M. On the front seat of his recovered gray VW bug were his ID, his beloved 12-string Guild guitar, and a box of his two albums, “U.F.O.” and the 1972 LP “Jim Sullivan.”
    Sullivan, a country-blues troubadour with an enigmatic story, has been compared to Nick Drake, Richie Havens and Gram Parsons. Questions about his vanishing still plague the small town where he was seen last, as well as his family and a small group of loyal enthusiasts. Last month, the record label Light in the Attic reissued his self-titled album, along with a new collection of previously unreleased demos, titled “If Evening Were Dawn,” that deepen Sullivan’s eerie, essential strangeness.
    Image
    Credit...via Jim Sullivan Estate
    In 1975, Santa Rosa was a town dependent on tourists and used to strangers. Before Interstate 40 arrived in the late ’60s, people pulled off Route 66 to rest at its neon-lit motels and swim in Blue Hole, an artesian well. “We called them drifters,” the retired newspaper reporter Davy Delgado said in a recent interview. The Communicator, the newspaper where he was last employed, had a circulation of about 2,000 in a city of about 2,800. “This isn’t a town where you can steal a piece of bubble gum without everyone knowing about it,” he added.
    But no one seems to know what became of Jim Sullivan.
    Delgado insisted the investigation was thorough: “There was no arroyo left unturned,” he said, “and no trace of him found.”
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    Another local disagreed. “I always thought there was something strange about how that went down, why they didn’t investigate it more,” said Donald Sena, who now lives in Mount Vernon, Texas. His father, Pete, who died in 1993, worked on a ranch near where Sullivan’s car was discovered abandoned, and is recorded in The Santa Rosa News as possibly the last person to have spoken with Sullivan, asking him if he needed a ride.
    “We thought he was some cowboy,” said Sena, who’d seen Sullivan’s car earlier that week from his school bus. “He had a handlebar mustache just like a cattle hand we knew.”
    BORN IN NEBRASKA in 1939, Sullivan was the seventh son in a working-class family that moved to San Diego during World War II. He was the quarterback of the high school football team, played in a band called the Survivors and married the homecoming queen. Once he got deep into the guitar, that was it.
    “Let me put it diplomatically,” said his son, Chris Sullivan, 58 and an English professor in San Diego. “The idea that he might have to be a square and go work for someone else was probably as repulsive to him as cutting off his hand.” Jim’s wife, Barbara Sullivan, was the family’s breadwinner, working as a secretary at Capitol Records after the family moved to Los Angeles. Sullivan played gigs at nights, spending his days songwriting and listening to records by Karen Dalton, John Prine and the folk singer John Stewart.
    Image
    Credit...via Jim Sullivan Estate
    Barbara’s boss, John Rankin, tried unsuccessfully to get executives at the label to notice Sullivan’s music. “They weren’t interested at the time and I didn’t have any great position there,” Rankin said recently from his home in Alaska. “But I believed in Jim.”
    Others did too: Al Dobbs, an actor turned cue-card holder for “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” heard Sullivan at a Malibu nightspot called the Raft and was determined to help him make a record. “I think a lot of us were searching, trying to find what we could put in our minds,” Dobbs said. “I’m not sure Jim was searching. I think Jim was trying to get what he had inside of him out.”
    Dobbs raised money from friends and co-founded a tiny label, Monnie. Jimmy Bond, Earl Palmer and Don Randi from the famed studio band the Wrecking Crew were recruited to back Sullivan up.
    “U.F.O.” was released in 1969, the year of the moon landing, “Abbey Road” and Woodstock. Dobbs and his cohorts didn’t have money to promote it. “We used to joke about the number of copies it sold,” he said.
    Image

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    maandag 4 november 2019

    Bruce Hornsby

    Bruce Hornsby staat op 11 november in onze Grote Zaal. De naam van de Amerikaanse zanger/toetsenist zal wel voor altijd verbonden blijven aan The Way It Is, zijn grote hit uit de eighties die nog dagelijks op de radio is te horen. Maar Hornsby is inmiddels vele albums en een hele carrière verder. Zo maakte hij bluegrass, klassiek, jazz en speelde van 1990 t/m 1992 bij de legendarische hippieband The Grateful Dead. Dit jaar verscheen zijn 21e (!) album Absolute Zero, waarop hij zich laat inspireren door zijn favoriete auteurs Don DeLillo en David Foster Wallace en samenwerkt met Bon Iver en The Staves. Een muzikale alleskunner!
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    Moby Grape

    EASY ED’S BROADSIDE: Moby Grape Is Still Afloat

    Easy Ed Posted On October 11, 2019


    Moby Grape / Sony Legacy Records
    If you’ve followed my articles and columns at No Depression through the past ten-plus years, you likely know that I have a special place in my heart for Moby Grape. When an argument breaks out about the genesis of Americana music, among those of us who argue about such things, after we shout out The Dillards, Youngbloods, Lovin’ Spoonful, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Flying Burrito Brothers, the two 1970 Grateful Dead albums, Townes, Gram, and whomever else I’ve just failed to mention, it’s usually me who brings up Skip Spence, Bob Mosley, Jerry Miller, Don Stevenson, and Peter Lewis.
    There has been so much written about this band and its legacy that there’s probably no need to rehash their quick rise and fall, mental health problems, the lawsuit that lasted for over 30 years, or the many times they’ve reunited and reconstituted. You’re either are old enough to know the story or young enough to know how to search for it.


    Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of the group was their ability to pull together multiple elements of American roots music, including blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, introspective folk, and country. With three guitarists standing out front and five vocalists and songwriters, they presented themselves as a solid and cohesive band both onstage and in the studio. Their discography is filled with early Americana nuggets, and the last studio album of original material, Legendary Grape, is now 30 years old.
    While Skip Spence was probably best known for his short time with Jefferson Airplane, his struggles with schizophrenia, and his critically acclaimed solo album, Oar, his career had already ended when he passed on from lung cancer in 1999. And now, 52 years after their self-titled debut was released, Moby Grape’s surviving members are still active in making music as they approach their mid- to late-70s.
    This past summer Peter Lewis released The Road to Zion, his third solo recording in over five decades. His backstory before the Grape is probably the most interesting: He was the son of the famous actress Loretta Young, was raised in Los Angeles, is the cousin of master musician and Jackson Browne collaborator David Lindsey, and was an Air Force veteran who worked as a pilot until he caught the Byrds opening for the Stones and decided to form a band.
    Many of Lewis’ songs in the Grape’s catalog featured fingerstyle guitar and leaned toward country and folk, and The Road to Zion offers up similar fare. Some of the songs sound as if they could have been outtakes of Moby Grape ’69 or Truly Fine Citizen.


    Drummer and vocalist Don Stevenson came out of the Pacific Northwest with guitarist Jerry Miller in a band called The Frantics. Through the decades he’s continued to drop in and out of the various incarnations of the band, but his main gig was as a highly successful salesman for a resort timeshare. Several years ago he moved to Toronto to be closer to his grandchildren, and he began a second life as a subway busker. As a participant in the Toronto Transit Commission’s Subway Musicians Program, he’s one of 75 musicians who fan out to stations throughout the city. Here’s a feature story on him from a few years ago.


    Miller — often confused with the other Jerry Miller who has played with Eilen Jewell’s band — is based in Tacoma, Washington, and has never stopped performing and touring. Miller is one of the finest “white boy” blues guitarists of the 1960s, often throwing in jazz chording and country twang to enhance his distinctive sound. He’s participated in every version of the Grape, including the one from a couple of years ago with Skip Spence’s son Omar sitting in for dad and playing at SXSW.


    Bass player and soulful singer Bob Mosley has been a bit harder for me to get a recent update on. He quit the band in 1969, joined the Marines, and was discharged after several months for medical reasons. He and Spence rejoined the other three in 1971 for 20 Granite Creek and played a few gigs together. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s Mosley played off and on with the Grape, was in a band called Fine Wine, and for a short time in 1977 he played in The Ducks with Neil Young.
    In 1991 the band called it quits (again), and Mosley’s deteriorating emotional state due to paranoid schizophrenia eventually left him homeless and living on the streets of San Diego. Peter Lewis is credited with finding him in 1999 and moving him up to Santa Cruz to get treatment and begin playing again. He rejoined a new version of the Grape and did weekly gigs for years with veteran country artist Larry Hosford, and later with Dale Ockerman of the Doobie Brothers. He continued to write songs; his last release was an album titled True Blue in 2005.
    To add a footnote, Lewis’ daughter Arwen released a mostly acoustic tribute to the Grape in 2015 that is worth tracking down. Closing out this column, here’s Mosley playing with members of Buddy Holly’s Crickets and Elvis’ backup band.


    Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com.  I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard  and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com
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