Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
Adele's album 30 was among 2021's chart-toppers, according to a new, year-end report by MRC Data.
Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
News flash: we've had a lot more time to consume music during the pandemic. While many in-person concerts were canceled or postponed, our devices allowed us to stream our favorite tunes, dance in TikTok videos and, with a click, buy music we can hold in our hands.
According to MRC Data's 2021 U.S. Year-End Report, the big winners of 2021 were Morgan Wallen, Adele, world music, old favorites and vinyl. The annual report is presented in collaboration with Billboard.
Wallen's bad-boy behavior likely helped sales of his release, Dangerous: The Double Album. The album was the top seller across genres, with 3.2 million units sold. In February, 2021 Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur. About four months earlier, Saturday Night Livecanceled his debut appearance when he was caught violating the show's COVID protocols. But in 2021 they invited him back. As Stephen Thompson of NPR Music put it, "Wallen has long had a 'repeatedly arrested outside Kid Rock's bar' vibe to him, although to be fair, he's only been arrested outside Kid Rock's bar once."
UK pop star Adele charmed millions of fans around the world with 30. In its first week, the singer's fourth studio album sold 839,000 copies, making it the highest album sales debut in four years. In separate record-breaking news, Adele made music history in 2021 when she became the first female artist to have an album spend 10 consecutive years on the Billboard Top 200. That album, 21, was released a decade ago.
Other noteworthy points from the MRC Data report:
- World music "saw a 17.4% rise* in total consumption year-over-year in 2021." According to MRC Data, "global genres like K-pop and Afro-Pop reached larger than ever audiences in the U.S. courtesy of blockbuster hits like BTS' 'Butter' and Wizkid's 'Essence,' respectively."
- Vinyl albums surpassed CDs for the first time since 1991, the year MRC Data started measuring music sales. But don't get your hopes up for selling that old phonograph: Digital music sales dwarf LPs by a long shot.
This year's MRC Data report also includes some predictions. P-MRC CEO Rob Jonas writes that, in addition to recapping the year's most-consumed songs and albums, "we also zoomed out to showcase 10 big-picture trends that we think will continue to have a major impact on the ever-changing landscape of music consumption in the coming year." Among those trends:
- Streaming isn't just for Gen Z: "...millennial music listeners outpace them in a few notable territories — including the U.K. and Latin America. Among boomers, Mexico has the highest concentration of weekly music streamers, with 75%. Japan, where physical CD sales are still popular, has the lowest with 34%."
- A new love for old favorites from the catalog: "Audio on-demand streaming reached a new single-year high of 988.1 billion streams in 2021, which included a notable decline in yearly audio streams of Current music (which decreased 19.4%). For the first time since MRC Data began measuring streaming data, music fans spent more time with Catalog (which was up 29.4% this year).
- Music and video game synergies will continue: "After artists like Travis Scott, J Balvin and Lil Nas X kicked off a virtual concert craze in 2020 with platforms Fortnite and Roblox, music and gaming integrations continued to pick up steam in 2021 and helped drive consumption of the artists' catalogs."
Earl Simmons, better known as the rapper DMX, died Friday at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, N.Y., according to a statement from his family. He had been on life support for the past few days following a heart attack. He was 50.
"Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end. He loved his family with all of his heart and we cherish the times we spent with him," the statement said. "Earl's music inspired countless fans across the world and his iconic legacy will live on forever. We appreciate all of the love and support during this incredibly difficult time."
DMX had a signature rasp to his voice. He delivered his lines with a desperate aggression that propelled his debut album, It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, to multiplatinum-level sales. He followed it up with a string of chart-topping albums that included songs such as "Party Up (Up In Here)." His rise in music also gave way to acting in movies such as Belly, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave.
DMX was born Earl Simmons in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1970. He told the podcast People's Party With Talib Kweli that as a child he suffered from asthma that would keep him awake at night. In his 2003 autobiography, E.A.R.L: The Autobiography of DMX, he wrote he was abused and neglected by his young mother. He ended up living in a children's home. When he was 14, he told Kweli a mentor of his tricked him into smoking crack. He struggled with drug addiction for the rest of his life.
YouTube
On It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, DMX reflected on his past: the robberies he committed and violence he enacted. It also introduced the world to his love of dogs, repeatedly using dog imagery and sometimes literally barking ad-libs. Later in his autobiography he would write about being a teenager and caring for stray dogs, tending to them as a way of coping with his troubled home life.
Shortly after his debut, he began acting in movies. In 1998 he and Nas co-starred in the crime movie Belly, where DMX played a young criminal on the rise. But as DMX's fame grew, so did his addictions. When he appeared on the reality TV showIyanla: Fix My Life, he said that whatever problems he had with drugs before, "it was nothing like it was when I got money." He was also arrested multiple times over drug possession, animal cruelty and tax fraud.
DMX was a devout Christian, and he would end his live sets with a prayer. In a 2019 interview with GQ, he talked about being so overwhelmed after shows that he would need a private moment of his own to pray. "I just take a minute for myself and just, I thank Him, I praise Him. And I'm like, 'Thank you, thank you.' I'm like, 'Who am I to deserve this?' We all bleed the same blood."
July 12, 2019
João Gilberto: His Brazilian Music Sparked An Aesthetic Revolution
Kacey Musgraves won four awards for best country solo performance, best country album, best country song and album of the year.CreditCreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At a ceremony dominated by female performers and presenters, Kacey Musgraves won album of the year and Cardi B became the first woman to win best rap album as a solo artist.
If the forces of commerce haven’t completely secularized Christmas, Mariah Carey seems ready to finish the job. I, at least, can imagine a Nativity scenario in which the wise men reach Bethlehem and find Ms. Carey’s face glowing in the manger. Right now her 21-year-old Yuletide jam “All I Want for Christmas Is You” stands atop Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart, where it’s been, on and off (but mostly on), since the chart appeared in 2011.
No matter what is happening in her career — the tribulations, the tours, the headline-grabbing performance mishaps — “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2019.
There are, of course, plenty of die-hard fans for whom Ms. Carey is not merely an end-of-year highlight but a singer-songwriter for all seasons. Ms. Carey’s devoted followers take her artistry very seriously. Sometimes they demand others do, too — it was the fan-organized hashtag #JusticeForGlitter that, in November, briefly catapulted the soundtrack to the notorious 2001 flop “Glitter” to No. 1 on the iTunes Top Albums chart a mere 17 years late.
It’s easy to rhapsodize about Ms. Carey’s most recognizable musical trait, that honey-coated voice, capable of contours that previously did not seem humanly possible. She is noted for her five-octave vocal range, power, melismatic style, and signature use of the whistle register. She rose to fame in 1990 after signing to Columbia Records and releasing her eponymous debut album, which topped the US Billboard 200 for 11 consecutive weeks. Soon after, Carey became the first and only artist to have their first five singles reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, from "Vision of Love" to "Emotions".
After a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to the top of music charts with The Emancipation of Mimi (2005). It became the world's second best-selling album of 2005 and produced "We Belong Together". With the release of "Touch My Body" (2008), Carey gained her 18th number-one single in the United States, more than any other solo artist.
In July 2001, it was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown.She had left messages on her website that complained of being overworked,[109] and her three-year relationship with the singer Luis Miguel ended. On July 26, she was suddenly hospitalized, citing "extreme exhaustion" and a "physical and emotional breakdown.
Love is the subject of the majority of Carey's lyrics, although she has written about themes such as racism, social alienation, death, world hunger, and spirituality. She has said that much of her work is partly autobiographical, but Time magazine wrote: "If only Mariah Carey's music had the drama of her life. Her songs are often sugary and artificial—NutraSweet soul. But her life has passion and conflict."He commented that as her albums progressed, so too her songwriting and music blossomed into more mature and meaningful material.
Several critics have described her as a Coloratura soprano. The singer claims that she has nodules in her vocal cords since childhood, due to which she can sing in a higher register than others. However, tiredness and sleep deprivation can affect her vocals due to the nodules, and Carey explained that she went through a lot of practice to maintain a balance during singing.
Jon Pareles of The New York Times described Carey's lower register as a "rich, husky alto" that extends to "dog-whistle high notes." Carey was heavily influenced by Minnie Riperton, and began experimenting with the whistle register due to her original practice of the range.[296] Additionally, towards the late 1990s, Carey began incorporating breathy vocals into her material.[322] Tim Levell from the BBC News described her vocals as "sultry close-to-the-mic breathiness,"[322]while USA Today's Elysa Gardner wrote "it's impossible to deny the impact her vocal style, a florid blend of breathy riffing and resonant belting, has had on today's young pop and R&B stars."[323]
Hero
Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker adds her timbre possesses various colors, saying, "Carey's sound changes with nearly every line, mutating from a steely tone to a vibrating growl and then to a humid, breathy coo. Her wide vocal range allows Carey to take melodies from alto bottom notes to coloratura soprano upper register."[65]Carey also possesses a "whisper register." In an interview with the singer, Ron Givens of Entertainment Weekly described it this way, "first, a rippling, soulful ooh comes rolling effortlessly from her throat: alto. Then, after a quick breath, she goes for the stratosphere, with a sound that nearly changes the barometric pressure in the room. In one brief swoop, she seems to squeal and roar at the same time."[324]
"For better or worse, Mariah Carey's five-octave range and melismatic style have influenced a generation of pop singers."[325] According to Rolling Stone, "Her mastery of melisma, the fluttering strings of notes that decorate songs like "Vision of Love", inspired the entire American Idol vocal school, for better or worse, and virtually every other female R&B singer since the Nineties."[326] New York Magazine's editor Roger Deckker said that in regarding Carey as an influential artist in music, he commented that "Whitney Houston may have introduced melisma (the vocally acrobatic style of lending a word an extra syllable or twenty) to the charts, but it was Mariah—with her jaw-dropping range—who made it into America's default sound." Jody Rosen of Slate wrote of Carey's influence in modern music, calling her the most influential vocal stylist of the last two decades, the person who made rococo melismatic singing.[327] Rosen further exemplified Carey's influence by drawing parallel with American Idol, which to her, "often played out as a clash of melisma-mad Mariah wannabes. According to Stevie Wonder: "When people talk about the great influential singers, they talk about Aretha, Whitney and Mariah. That's a testament to her talent. Her range is that amazing.
Ms. Carey on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.CreditJeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
Few other divas of virtuosic voice and glamorous affect have been so involved in the writing of their own music — a point that Ms. Carey has made many times herself since releasing her self-titled debut in 1990. She has been credited for writing or co-writing every original song she has sung, which together represent an idiosyncratic contemporary R&B catalog. Her vast body of work covers virtually every thinkable micro-facet of love’s trajectory, from preliminary crushes to euphoric beginnings to sexual bliss to the despondency of finality. And then there is her consistent theme of the importance of prevailing — the songs about making it through the rain, of learning that a hero lies in you.
“The artist is living the lyric,” said Mr. Fletcher, referencing the aspects of Ms. Carey’s biography — her biracial identity, fraught upbringing, high-profile couplings and splits, and unhappy marriage to Tommy Mottola.
Her spare and subdued 15th full-length studio album, “Caution,” received some of the most ecstatic raves of her career upon its November release. But her newfound status as a critic’s darling hasn’t translated into record sales — “Caution” yielded no hits on the Billboard Hot 100. In the album’s third week on the Billboard 200, it was down to No. 163.
Often, it seems Ms. Carey’s flubs are more scrutinized in the press than her music. Two narratives about her have dominated coverage in recent years. One is that she’s losing her voice, or has lost it, or is hiding the loss of it. The other is that she’s a hot mess.
For instance, the opening night of “The Butterfly Returns” lasted for almost two hours and spanned 25 years of material. Over her live band, the singer’s voice fluttered like her butterfly mascot. She growled with a tenacity that would put her Jack Russell terrier to shame.
But only a few seconds of the show were reported in the press, and those were gaffes. One occurred when a box she was sitting on tipped over and she reached down to steady herself with the hand she was using to hold her microphone. The music continued uninterrupted, betraying Ms. Carey’s momentary lip-syncing.
Stories that seek to define Ms. Carey by her mistakes, not her gifts, harken back to those about her winded, strained live performance at the 2014 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting (“Remember when Mariah Carey could sing? Most millennials probably can’t,” began Deadspin’s post, which netted almost 4 million clicks), or her sound issues-plagued nonperformance in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2016, or her virtually inert choreography onstage to her hit “Honey” in 2017.
The singer’s vocals have undeniably changed in recent years. Witnessing her miss notes can feel like watching the road give out from Wile E. Coyote as he chases the Roadrunner off a cliff. She has largely attributed whatever difficulties she has performing to her vocal folds in addition to the amount of rest she gets. Said Justin Stoney, the founder and president of the school New York Vocal Coaching. “What it appears to be is she is trying to still sing as though she were 23 years old.”
Ms. Carey also said she had just experienced the “hardest couple of years” she’d gone through. She has weathered a broken-off engagement to the billionaire James Packer, a little-watched, widely mocked reality show on E!, and the end of a close relationship with her manager, Stella Bulochnikov. After working together for nearly three years, Ms. Carey fired Ms. Bulochnikov in the fall of 2017. Ms. Bulochnikov, in turn, filed a lawsuit in April 2018 that listed sexual harassment among its allegations.
Ms. Carey performing during the winter holidays at New York's Beacon Theater in 2016.CreditJeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
During Carey's career, her vocal and musical style, along with her level of success, has been compared to Whitney Houston, who she has also cited as an influence,[297]and Celine Dion. Carey and her peers, according to Garry Mulholland, are "the princesses of wails [...] virtuoso vocalists who blend chart-oriented pop with mature MORtorch song."[298] Author and writer Lucy O'Brien attributed the comeback of Barbra Streisand's "old-fashioned showgirl" to Carey and Dion, and described them and Houston as "groomed, airbrushed and overblown to perfection."[298] Carey's musical transition and use of more revealing clothing during the late 1990s were, in part, initiated to distance herself from this image, and she subsequently said that most of her early work was "schmaltzy MOR."[298]
“In today’s world, it’s kind of cool to hate on Mariah Carey,” said Sam Alvarez, an 18-year-old student in the U.K. who has uploaded to YouTube more than 1,600 thematically organized clip compilations of Ms. Carey in concert and interviews since 2014. “I hope with my videos that a lot of people can be introduced to how much of a great artist she is.”In a review of her Greatest Hits album, Devon Powers of PopMatters writes that "She has influenced countless female vocalists after her. At 32, she is already a living legend—even if she never sings another note."[362] While reviewing a concert of Carey in Sydney, Elise Vout of MTV Australia wrote that "it's not amazing choreography or high production value you're going to see, it's the larger than life personality, unique voice, and legend that is Mariah Carey."[363]
Ms. Carey in Glasgow in 2016.CreditRoss Gilmore/Redferns, via Getty Images
• 
