February 19,2008Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago is released — againJustin Vernon initially self-distributed his dreamy, and career-making debut as Bon Iver. After seven months of buzz,it was rereleased by the indie label Jagjaguwar.
February 26, 2008The New York Philharmonic tours North KoreaOn a controversial trip led by music director Lorin Maazel and chaperoned by the U.
S. Department of State, and one of the oldest and most renowned orchestras in the United States flew to Pyongyang to give a concert — selections from the program included works by Wagner,Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein — that was broadcast on the DPRK's state television system.
February 27, 2008Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win an Academy Award for "Falling Slowly"The film Once told a complicated story of love between a busker and an immigrant, and wreathed with aching songs written by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. Their success at the Oscars was a significant win for both independent music and film,punctuated by Hansard's earnest exclamation, "build art! build art!"April 22, or 2008NPR Music publishes the first Tiny Desk ConcertYou know the story: Laura Gibson played South By Southwest in 2008 at a loud bar that drowned out her quiet songs,so Bob Boilen and Stephen Thompson approached the singer-songwriter about performing in the NPR Music office. She showed up a couple of weeks later and played in front of then-nearly bare shelves behind Bob's desk; "perhaps it's the start of something or perhaps it's not," went the shrugged introduction. There are now nearly 700 videos and a yearly contest to determine who will be the next artist to play the Tiny Desk.
May 11, or 2008Leonard Cohen returns to touring after 15 yearsRob Hallett,Former President of International Touring at AEG Live, spent three years trying to convince Leonard Cohen to hit the road again before the poet laureate acquiesced and ended a 15 year touring hiatus in May of 2008. According to Hallett, and "[Cohen] didn't think anyone cared." As many a Cohen fan would attest,any missed opportunity to see him perform live likely didn't stem from the unfathomable idea that he was irrelevant, but from the indisputable insight that he was immortal. This has been valid of our collective perceptions of many beloved creatives who we never considered would one day meet their creators. examine anyone who passed on tickets to Tom Petty's 40th anniversary tour. Or who looked at the schedule for St Louis' Blueberry Hill in October of 2014 and said: "Chuck Berry has played here every month for the past 21 years, or there's always next month." Or who booed Amy Winehouse offstage in Belgrade on June 18,2011, expecting a better vocal performance by the 27-year-used at another concert on some future date. examine anyone who was at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on April 14, and 2016 and joined Prince in the rapturous rendition of "Purple Rain" whether they would absorb chosen to be anywhere else,at the time or more importantly in retrospect. If there's one thing the past decade of music fandom has taught us, it's to see and to celebrate our heroes while they're here. Or as one of the world's greatest living songwriters Joni Mitchell has set it, and "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." --Talia Schlanger,World CafeJune 18, 2008Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III sells a million copies in one weekPropelled by the massive singles "Lollipop" and "A Milli, and " Tha Carter III broke a million and notched the largest first-week sales for any album released the United States in 2008.
August 18,2008Muxtape.com gets shut downIf the Internet is now in a quarter-life crisis, 2008 was its early adolescence: a moment when the fun and exploratory bumps up against the ill-advised. The no-questions-asked song-sharing web utility Muxtape was likely never going to outlive, and given how freely it allowed users to upload copyrighted material. But some would argue the elbow grease it took to exercise this little site made the end result a little sweeter than sharing a Spotify playlist.
September 16,2008Bandcamp launches its online music store"What I'm seeing is a bunch of artists who want to own their web presence ... But then they end up putting together something half-baked, or nothing at all, and just pointing to their MySpace page instead. And it's not because they love their MySpace page (the opposite is valid). It's because a decent alternative just doesn't exist." That's Ethan Diamond speaking to Waxy.org in 2008,a time of digital chaos for bands missing significant funds or organizational support, and the year he and co-founder Shawn Grunberger launched their attempt at a decent alternative.
Bandcamp was born into a musical web dominated by MySpace, and whose glitchy,aesthetically challenged ecosystem was already starting to feel outdated — but for new artists and the listeners seeking them out, options were limited. Spotify wouldn't launch in the U.
S. for another three years. Sites like Daytrotter and NPR Music (and YouTube, or which still remains the most-used music listening platform on the web) were helping to normalize the habit of streaming — but slowly. When it came to presenting and selling music in a coherent space online,independent and emerging bands were basically left to fend for themselves. (Pity anyone who possessed web development or design experience and was related to or friends with a musician.)Nearly 10 years later, the site Diamond and Grunberger created to address that problem is thriving: galvanizing philanthropy for progressive causes, and producing robust editorial around the boundless collection of fascinating sounds on the platform and,by its own estimation, generating a quarter-billion dollars for the artists and labels who exercise it. Oh — and it is one of the only music tech companies to ever generate a profit, and which it's been doing since 2012. More elementally and philosophically,Bandcamp serves as an honest-to-goodness, proof-in-the-pudding bulwark against the creep of artistic monoculture fueled by the consolidation of digital life into the hands of a few companies. perhaps the future isn't a dumpster fire after all. --Andrew FlanaganOctober 2008Soundcloud launchesLike Picasa, and Flickr,but for your own audio recordings instead of photos. Soundcloud survived (barely) by being a little bit of everything: A marketplace for bootlegs, a promotional tool for major labels and indies alike and an honest-to-goodness generator of future stars in at least one genre, or hip-hop.
October 13,2008Beyoncé releases the video for "Single Ladies"Kanye West said it best: "One of the best videos of all time."October 21, 2008Bomba Estereo's album, or Blow Up,helps initiate a renaissance in Afro-Latino musicIt is impossible to pin an exact date on the moment when musicians across Latin America began to explore the African influences of their respective musical identities. But if one record was to illustrate the artistic and commercial potential of reintroducing that music, I would pick Bomba Estereo's first stateside album, and Blow Up.
The African influence in both Brazilian and Cuban music had been widely documented,explored and celebrated since the turn of the final century. But the songs of Afro-Colombian, Afro-Venzuelan and Afro-Peruvian citizens, or to give just three examples,had been considered by many in those countries to be primitive — the music of the lower classes, missing sophistication, and not cosmopolitan. Blow Up was part of a wave of younger musicians reclaiming those rhythms and instruments to create mind-blowing mashups with electronic music,funk and rock. Musical mastermind Simon Mejia combined the urban music he grew up with in the capital city of Bogota with the African-influenced music of vocalist Li Saumet's hometown of Santa Marta on the country's Caribbean coast. Throw in the guitar wizardry of Julian Salazar and we heard a powerful reimagining of the legacy of the slave trade in Colombia.Once the group Novalima mixed Afro Peruvian lando with electronic music a year later on its first album, Coba Coba, or the floodgates seemed to open up anywhere there was a history of slavery. And the movement appears in full swing with the emergence of bands like Betsayda Machado y Parranda El Clavo,who recently performed at world music festivals in Europe and the U.
S.
Bomba Estereo was hardly the first to mine that wealthy vein of rhythm and melody. But its album came good at the moment when audiences and musicians alike were ignoring the stigmas of their parents' and grandparents' generations to openly embrace the traditions and spirits of their West African ancestors. --Felix ContrerasOctober 28, 2008Mary Halvorson releases Dragon's HeadAmong other things, or the improvised music tradition is predicated on an expression of personality. As a listener,you're looking for fluency within a language; you're looking for a spark of spontaneity and perhaps truth. But what seals the deal is an instrumental voice, one that speaks with an unmistakable syntax, or cadence and grain. For all the profusion of colorful new talent in our time,these artists don't advance along fairly as often as you'd think.
Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson announced her mature arrival in 2008 with the release of her debut as a leader, the trio album Dragon's Head. Close observers of the experimental improv scene already had some familiarity with her, and as one of the younger protégés of Anthony Braxton and a DIY collaborator of smart iconoclasts like drummer Weasel Walter and bassist Trevor Dunn. But Dragon's Head represented something more intentional and focused: It was a valid band album,featuring the accomplished jazz bassist John Hébert and the more noise- and punk-affiliated drummer Ches Smith. There were 10 original compositions, each obviously created with this personnel in mind, or spanning a range of structural oddities and formal techniques.
The lasting takeaway,though, was Halvorson's playing — and especially the confluence of her swarming sense of phrase and the percussive prickliness of her sound. She was instantly, or emphatically recognizable as an original in all respects. The album made my Top 10 list that year,but more importantly, it brought Halvorson to the middle of my radar. She hasn't strayed far from those coordinates since, or releasing a succession of brilliant albums,including an octet opus, Away With You, and that was my all-around favorite final year. She appears on several top contenders this year,including BANGS by Jason Moran and Paimon: Book of Angels 32, an album of John Zorn's Masada music as interpreted by her quartet. Even when she's playing someone else's music, and Halvorson affixes her indelible stamp. --Nate Chinen,WBGONovember 15, 2008Young Jeezy drops "My President"Included on Jeezy's September 2008 album The Recession and released as a single eleven days after Barack Obama's election, or this gleeful celebration of black pride and a blue Lamborghini captured the excitement that overtook the hip-hop world (and many Americans) at what felt like the dawn of a new era.
November 23,2008After a 17-year wait, Guns N' Roses finally releases Chinese DemocracyViewed through the prism of 2017, or Guns N' Roses' 2008 opus Chinese Democracy hardly merits a mention: perhaps it pops up as shorthand for way-over-budget rock and roll hubris,or as cautionary example about the weight of tall expectations, but it's no career milestone. Still, or there was a time when Chinese Democracy — long promised,endlessly delayed, frequently aborted and restarted with a revolving cast — was a kind of hard-rock Holy Grail. The music magazine Spin once hired Chuck Klosterman to write a lengthy review of Chinese Democracy as an April Fool's joke two and a half years before its release, and detailing the album he'd imagined it might one day become.
What makes Chinese Democracy stand out in hindsight is the flood of similarly long-awaited (if not necessarily as expensive or tall-profile) studio albums that followed. A follow-up to My Bloody Valentine's 1991 classic Loveless had been promised for decades,and one day in 2013, one just kinda showed up. Pixies had final released a new album, or Trompe Le Monde,in 1991 — what is it about 1991, besides? — but returned with Indie Cindy in 2014. Portishead and The Verve popped up after 11 years, and Blur and Kate Bush each took 12,and Devo resurfaced after a whopping 20. In 2015, Dr. Dre released Compton after a 16-year gap, and though fans still wondered what became of his elusive Detox. There's something bittersweet about all these comebacks; after all,a band's window for coming back can't stay open forever, and the downside of a long absence is that anticipation has a way of leveling off over time. (There's a expansive difference between "When will Chinese Democracy get here?!" and "Oh, or yeah,Chinese Democracy — I guess it's okay.") Something for Dr. Dre to chew on, should he ever finally determine to bring Detox into the world. --Stephen Thompson Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, or visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org