David Letterman (whose team is doing a wonderful job of presenting and narrating his formidable archives) recently posted an amusing anecdote about Prince's fi...

Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a nega...

Back in 2021, my friend Jesse Thorn interviewed two of my creative heroes, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, for an absolutely indispensible episode of Bullseye . Th...

Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice ma...

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his caree...

On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not...

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi di...

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch the most definitive record of Prince and the Revolution at their commercial peak, on one of the bigges...

There could be no more fitting remembrance of Prince than Questlove going deep into his catalog and spinning some of Prince's greatest works into a multi-hour...

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt mo...

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular c...

Prince was an astoundingly prolific artist, releasing nearly 40 albums under his own name(s), and thousands of songs for himself and others. His concerts were...

Today's most fun new Glitch app is Record Player, which lets you upload a photo, then uses Google Cloud's Vision API to recognize the image and play it on Sp...

I keep having to explain a principle I arrived at a few years ago when I realized the modern conservative movement is grounded almost entirely in a contrived s...

I struggled for a long time when the nice folks at the Heat Rocks podcast asked me which Prince album I’d want to talk about on their show. Oliver Wang and M...

I was delighted to get to talk to Ben Greenman for an episode of “Dig If You Will The Podcast,” his series in honor of his book “Dig If You Will The Picture”....

With the recent availability of nearly all of Prince’s catalog on the most popular streaming services, it’s a great time to (re?)discover the breadth of Prince...

Red Book, Yellow Book, Green Book Stay within the lines. The Red Book There’s a specification that Phillips published in 1981 , for optical digital en...

Today, P.M. Dawn exists as a faded memory for most music fans, if they’re remembered at all. But Attrell Cordes made songs like nothing that came before. Beaut...

When Prince’s first greatest hits collection was released, Prince made private comments as a guide for the liner notes. Later briefly posted on his website the...

I’ve been struggling to find words to express how I feel in the week since Prince died. He’s obviously the artist that’s had the most impact on my life, and wa...

After talking to a friend about how Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” is so romantic if you just focus on the strings, bass and vocals, I was inspired to mix d...

Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I just can’t let it go. For a few months, I’ve heard this nagging sound in the back of my mind, asking me to revisit Am...

0:00 — 0:10 In the summer of 1983, Wendy Melvoin was just 19 years old. She’d flown halfway across the country from Los Angeles for her first professional gi...

After at least 15 years of debating whether I should spend money on this, I recently took the plunge and acquired one of my most-desired Prince collectibles....

[11:05pm] Well, that’s a wrap. It’s hard for me to say how that ranked as a New Girl episode, but it seemed the narrative of the show may have been subordina...

Every great career in rhythm and blues leads only to heaven or hell. The path to hell is obvious: From Sam Cooke gunned down to James Brown leading a multi-sta...

Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such as Micha...

Ten years ago, my friend Andre had been experimenting with an instant messenger bot that sent out news headlines; Up late on a Saturday night I got a message...

Everyone claims to be at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell: And yet, this venue has no mayor! THE BLOGOSPHERE IS FACT-CHECKING YOUR ASS, Das Racist!...

Though he was arguably the most popular solo artist of all time, one of the great joys of being a serious Michael Jackson fan is that some of his best work is...

This was probably the one clip of Michael Jackson I wish everybody had seen....

Jay Smooth, “ Please stop calling everyone and their mother ‘The First Rapper’ “: U-Roy may be one of rap’s predecessors, and among the influences that lai...

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I’d reach way back into the archives (anybody still...

I’m a fan of The-Dream , the producer-turned-singer who was born Terius Nash and is responsible for pop gems ranging from Rihanna’s “Umbrella” to Mariah’s “To...

My friend Nick is good at answering the questions I didn’t even know I wanted to ask. For example, how many electrons per song on an iPod ? At approximate...

Thanks to a nice reminder from Ginevra , and a motivational post by Ta-Nehisi Coates , I got around to gathering up some videos I've been meaning to share....

Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean tha...

We saw Mary J. Blige. It was like a 2-hour motivation speech interrupted by some fantastic ass-shaking songs. I laughed, I cried, I want to see it again....

One of the most frequent questions I get when I talk to people who are unfamiliar with social media on the web is, “Who writes all these blogs or Wikipedia? Wh...

Spin Magazine’s piece covering the rise and fall, and perhaps second rise of D’Angelo has been lingering in my mind for weeks. As you might expect, I was a f...

I’ve been a fan of The KLF since I was a teenager, and just last week was reminded of one of their most amazing stunts. This is just the first of a five-part v...

Dedicated readers will recall me obsessing over and over-analyzing Auto-Tune in pop music earlier this year. It is, then, my pleasure to report that, than...

As I had guessed, I’ve already had someone threaten to unsubscribe from my blog due to the publication of this week’s Snoop Dogg research. But I’ve had twice...

Beginning with our exploration of Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction”, we wandered into the history of vocoders, talkboxes, and the most nefarious of voice manipu...

One of the things that makes Snoop’s “Sensual Seduction” video so compelling is his outstanding use of vocal effects. Let’s take a closer look, shall we? I...

Now that his single Sensual Seduction (a.k.a. Sexual Eruption) is in the Top 10, it’s official: Snoop Dogg can see the future. First, let’s pause to watch the...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine . Put simply, Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that’s i...

Many of my nerd friends are all excited about Portal , Valve’s brilliant reworking of Narbacular Drop . I’ve only played about five minutes of the game...

The Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is almost over, and that means you only have a few days to help support the Notes fo...

Put these in your browser, and shake well. Facebook apps are not a long tail . So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since th...

I’ve gotten a lot of really good questions (and some fantastically generous donations!) about the Donors Choose blogger challenge I wrote about yesterday , bu...

Ranjit has made his robots play Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” , and in the comments reveals that apparently he can just throw any MIDI file at them and have it r...

Alan Leeds, one of my heroes and our greatest record of the living history of funk music, offers a warm remembrance of Bobby Byrd after Byrd’s passing last w...

Speaking of Timberlake, that brings us inevitably to Timbaland. After the fawning over Rick Rubin in the New York Times, it’s amazing that there hasn’t been...

We just finished watching HBO’s broadcast of Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex tour , which I (unsurprisingly) quite enjoyed. It seems like he’s done a good...

I’d intended to post a correction to this NY Times story’s recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermitt...

In the New Yorker, Bruce Wagner tries to live my life : The performance began at two in the morning and took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hote...

In the New York Times, Jon Pareles gets it exactly right : Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s...

Over at HipHopMusic.com, which Jay Smooth has relaunched as a group blog, Brandon Soderberg offers When They Reminisce Over Mixtapes . The same industry that...

As much as we like to blame the RIAA for all the evils of the recording industry, leave it to my man Prince to bring out the best in the execs over in the U.K....

This one’s sublime: “ What’s your favorite kitchen sound? ” This one’s the truth, finally. The most eloquent dismissal of User Generated Discontent (or in...

Sadly, MichaelJacksonForSale.com does not actually let you purchase the King of Pop for your very own. However, it does have lots of interesting memorabili...

Details offers a lengthy and fairly credible interview with Justin Timberlake : Timberlake is not a kiss-ass. Selling more than 13 million records has e...

Sasha Frere-Jones bears witness to Prince’s ageless funk in this week’s New Yorker. As much as I admire Prince’s gifts, it’s Sasha’s job I want....

So, we talked about Gershwin’s work in inspiring the Rhythm Changes , but his signature work is, of course, Rhapsody in Blue. One of my favorite recent finds...

Nate Harrison’s 2004 documentary Can I Get an Amen? on the “Amen Break”, uncovers the story behind one of the seminal breaks of the electronica/jungle/drum...

Always trust the guys at The Smoking Gun to ferret out the good stuff. “ Thanks CBS for turning my son GAY. ” This, of course, is the substance of one of the...

Do you want links? Because I’ll give you some damn links, I’m not afraid of you! I’m not afraid of NOBODY! Reyhan Harmanci on the third wave of academic s...

Rip, Mix, and Burn? It’s not new. Contrafact is what they called sampling before there was sampling. You take the chords from a song that the whole band know...

Most everybody who knows me well knows that I’ve been a fan of Prince for pretty much my entire life. So when casual fans or non-fans hear that Prince is playi...

My iTunes library, of about 12,000 songs consisting of 60GB of data, got corrupted today. The MP3 files themselves are okay, but all of the metadata is blown a...

Sure, everybody’s linking to Ironic Sans’ (admittedly entertaining) Celebrity Patents , since Waxy pointed them out, but did you know Prince actually has a...

To those of us who grew up after his artistic heyday, James Brown is some combination of legend, influence, icon, and inevitably, caricature. So on the day we...

Microsoft has just launched the Zune , which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild s...

Earlier this year, the New York Philharmonic started distributing some recordings of their works through the iTunes music store. On its own, that’s not a par...

A little more than two decades ago, popular music was under fire by Tipper Gore’s PMRC, the Parents’ Music Resource Center . Tipper was aghast at popular musi...

This is the first post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is the N...

For a long time, I’ve been enamored of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. There’s a lot of reasons, from their music to their various art projects and media hacks....

My reign as most verbose Justin Timberlake fanboy on the Internet is not yet complete. Thus, some links to augment the review of “SexyBack” . The Observe...

Four years is a long time in pop music, but that’s how long it’s been since Justin Timberlake’s “Like I Love You” heralded his launch as a solo singer and...

It’s no great revelation that popular music has largely shifted to a producer-centric culture, and though this is true not just in hip hop or house music, as...

One of those interesting side-effects of having lots of old blog posts around is that sometimes they come back to life. With Star being fired last week, ther...

It’s like they chose the onstage talent at this event just to appeal to me ! ![Rock Your BillG.jpg]https://cdn.glitch.global/71e5579f-aba0-499a-b200-01549a2a...

I’d be remiss if I didn’t pass along the NYTimes story on MTV Desi from last week. There’s a lot of different reactions this prompts from me, but perhaps the...

I have received the following comments on posts from my Pop Life blog. Though they’re ostensibly aimed at the celebrities I discuss on the blog, I prefer to...

With the news that Toyota is launching a record label , I guess we can officially say that the music industry has gone completely random. Though most people...

Michal Levy reminds us what we love about the web. With Giant Steps , Levy took Coltrane’s masterwork and set it to Flash in a beautiful interpretation. Nothi...

It seems that Jermajesty Jackson ‘s parents are splitting up . An unfortunate and surprising turn of events....

When "The W" came out, I got to see all 9 members of the Wu-Tang Clan on stage at one time. Even that night , I knew we’d never see them all togethe...

Gina lists the 1,049 federal rights that depend on marital status . Civil unions are not enough, and will never be enough, despite the fact that they’re harde...

Dan Woods has a poignant lament about the end of life for his application (and labor of love) Watson. The circumstance is unfortunate, but it would be totall...

About 250 years ago, Josiah Wedwood invented the concept of the celebrity endorsement . A scant two and a half centuries later, his clever marketing strategy...

Okay, there are services that handle eBay for me if I’m too lazy to sell my junk. Which I am. But what I need is a service which will handle Free After Reba...

So, Prince is playing the Fillmore in San Francisco this weekend, two shows, and I need tickets. His online music club is supposed to hook us fans up, but I mi...

I finally got around to seeing Finding Nemo this weekend. It’s pretty good, not great, but I suppose I’d appreciate it a lot more if I were a parent. In summ...

I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person in Nice, France, who is walking around looking for locations that were used to film scenes for " Under the...

I’ve been following Russell Simmons’ political ambitions for over a year now, and it seems like his self-promotion campaign has kicked into high gear in the...

I have an older, kind of broken-down laptop that I wanted to do some research and testing on, so I installed a fresh install of a new operating system on it. H...

The basic details: Justin took to the stage at 1:30am after the end of the VMAs, where he won 2 moonmen. Performance lasted one and a half hours, and onstage g...

I am really, truly, inordinately excited about the fact that I’m going to see Justin Timberlake perform this week, especially since it’s not the crappy arena t...

It’s been about 10 years, where’s the Best of Method Man collection? You could fill a strong 2-disc set or one bangin’ solid CD of tunes with Meth’s tracks, ev...

My cousin in California sent me the following email, but I haven’t kept up enough with our local hip hop stations enough to know if we’ve had the same trend on...

Yeah, I got rid of the little toolbar that used to be next to the sidebar. Nobody uses it anyway, and most of the links there are on my page of other stuff n...

Another in my occasional series of great emails sent to our customer service address at work: From: [Name Redacted] Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 2...

I wasn’t going to write about it, but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it, so maybe writing it out will get it out of my head… I’m surprised just how affect...

If web services are considered the API to an Internet operating system, what would be the device drivers? What’s analogous to the layer that abstracts the phys...

Understand this: I am an unapologetic Michael Jackson apologist. I was that guy, the one still holding on to hope. Michael Jackson has had a third child, app...

Understand this: I am an unapologetic Michael Jackson apologist. I was that guy, the one still holding on to hope. Michael Jackson has had a third child, app...

Andre kindly pointed out this weblog of Quake news from Blue’s News circa July 1996. I’ve always wondered why Stephen Heaslip deliberately gets written out...

And all good things, they say, never last …...

I thought everyone had read this, but then I mentioned it to a few people, and they hadn’t seen it. Do yourself a favor and read Clay Shirky’s thoughts on the...

It’s funny because it’s true ! This list of One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately only includes 3 or 4 that I have. Overall,...

I just got back from a two and a half hour show where Prince led a band consisting of, at various times, George Clinton, Maceo Parker, Larry Graham, ?uestlove...

Four words: James Brown , Saturday night....

I saw Maceo Parker last night, and he was funky as all get out. Granted, he wasn’t as ass-kicking as the first time I saw him, but that may have been due at...

Anil Dash :whooo! andretorrez : yeah? Anil Dash :whooo! Anil Dash :It takes two to make a thing go right… andretorrez : yeah Anil Dash :It takes two to m...

Remember a few months ago everyone was gaga over Golden Shower’s "Video Computer System" ? Well, now you can see how it was made . And in case yo...

I saw Wu-Tang Clan last night, and it was predictably entertaining, even though I’m not a huge fan. But the reason I think it will turn out to be quite memorab...

Liquid Audio : See also Sand, Head in the ....

Another downside to the Tulip Bubble mentality saturating the industry is the "Why are they making all the money, I should have thought of that!" r...

Dammit, I just can’t stop starting trends . I half-jokingly put up my "FadMaker" section on the sidebar when Ani signs Arto Lindsay to her label....

Went to the grocery store the other day. (Did I mention I love grocery stores ?) The fellow in front of me in the express aisle had three items: A 6-pack of...

Everything that rises must converge. If pressed to recite a short list of some of my favorite pop musicians, that list would undoubtedly include Prince , A...

The harsh realities of the capitalist free market . Or, "Art vs. Commerce, Chapter LXXXII". Despite my fondness for independent record stores, (or s...

Just one of those great "Only on the Web" sites is the Visual Thesaurus from a company called ThinkMap . I’m not much of a fan of Java applets...

Separated at birth? The opening bars of Stevie Wonder’s "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" features vocals being handed off from a male vocal to a f...

Today and yesterday I have used the Metropolitan Transit Authority ‘s trains to go to work. I have been a big believer in public transportation , as long as...

Actually, it’s technically very early on 21st July, 3:45a to be exact. That bastard Prince made us wait 5 hours until he showed up. In my opinion, of cours...