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    V&A Museum To Open David Bowie Archive

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    The London museum will house more than 80,000 items from the star’s music career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts. It will open in 2025.Over a 55-year career, David Bowie redefined the essence of cool by embracing an outsider status. Now, Ziggy Stardust and all of the musician’s other personas will have a permanent home.The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will house more than 80,000 items from Bowie’s career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts, the museum announced on Thursday. The center, which will be at a new outpost of the museum called the V&A East Storehouse at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the Stratford section of London, will open in 2025.“With David’s life’s work becoming part of the U.K.’s national collections, he takes his rightful place amongst many other cultural icons and artistic geniuses,” Bowie’s estate said in a statement. “David’s work can be shared with the public in ways that haven’t been possible before, and we’re so pleased to be working closely with the V&A to continue to commemorate David’s enduring cultural influence.”Bowie died in 2016, two days after his 69th birthday.In a statement, the museum said that the acquisition and the creation of the center had been made possible by a combined donation of 10 million pounds (about $12 million) from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group, adding that the donation would support “the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.” Warner Music bought Bowie’s entire songwriting catalog last year.Beyond 70,000 images of Bowie taken by the likes of Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton, the collection includes letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, other photography, film, music videos, set designs, instruments, album artwork, awards, and of course, fashion.Many of those will be familiar to fans: Bowie’s ensembles worn as his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust; Kansai Yamamoto’s costumes for the “Aladdin Sane” tour in 1973; the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and the British designer Alexander McQueen for the 1997 “Earthling” album cover.Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique. The artist looked to William S. Burroughs, the postmodern author, as inspiration to cut up written text and rearrange it into lyrics.Cut-up lyrics for “Blackout” from “Heroes,” recorded in 1977 by David Bowie.The David Bowie ArchiveIn 1997, Bowie told The Times that he worked with that method “about 40 percent of the time,” which, in that year, meant using a Macintosh computer.“I feed into it the fodder, and it spews out reams of paper with these arbitrary combinations of words and phrases,” he said.Bowie’s personal writing and “intimate notebooks from every year of Bowie’s life and career” and “unrealized projects” will also be on display, many of which have never been made available to the public, the museum said.The permanent collection comes 10 years after the museum created “David Bowie Is,” a vast survey that traced the beginnings of David Jones, a saxophone and blues player growing up in London, as he became David Bowie, a transcendent figure in music, art and fashion. The traveling exhibit made its final stop in 2018 in New York, the city Bowie called home at the end of his life.“I believe everyone will agree with me when I say that when I look back at the last 60 years of post-Beatles music, that if only one artist could be in the V&A it should be David Bowie,” Nile Rodgers, a longtime collaborator, said in a statement. “He didn’t just make art. He was art!” More

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      Spotify Removes Neil Young's Music After Complaints About Joe Rogan

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      Neil Young wasn’t bluffing.Spotify said on Wednesday that it had begun removing the singer’s music from the streaming service, two days after he briefly posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan, the star podcast host who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.Young’s challenge to Spotify has become a high-profile, if unexpected, flash point in the battle over misinformation and free speech online. It also raised questions about the power of performing artists to control where their work is heard.In a statement posted to his website on Wednesday, Young called Spotify “the home of life threatening Covid misinformation.” He added: “Lies being sold for money.”His criticism of Rogan — a comedian and actor who has become Spotify’s most popular podcast host, sometimes speaking at great length with controversial figures — came after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31. That episode, featuring Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert, promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines,” according to the group’s public letter, which was issued on Jan. 10.Spotify said in a statement on Wednesday: “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.”“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify,” the service added, “but hope to welcome him back soon.”Young’s most popular songs, like “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Old Man,” have been radio staples for decades, and have attracted hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. In his statement on Wednesday, Young said that Spotify represented 60 percent of the streams of his music around the world.Young’s music was expected to be fully removed from Spotify within hours. The news that the service was removing his songs was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.In his original letter, which Young addressed to his label, Warner Records, and his manager, he said: “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform. I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform.”He added: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”That letter was removed from Young’s website soon after it was posted, though it drew wide news media attention.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      A Race ‘Report Card’ Measures Whether the Music Industry Changed

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      The Black Music Action Coalition issued a 37-page report examining if powerful companies followed through on diversity commitments made last summer.A new “report card” on race in the music business takes many of the industry’s most powerful companies to task, urging them to follow through on diversity commitments made last summer amid nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd.The 37-page “Music Industry Action Report Card,” by the Black Music Action Coalition, was issued over the weekend to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday. The group took its hardest look at the three major record companies, which announced large financial donations last year — Sony and Warner Music each pledged $100 million, and Universal $25 million — and doled out middling-to-poor grades to them.Only a portion of those donation pledges has been paid out so far, and in its report the coalition — a group of artist managers, lawyers and others in the business that was formed a year ago — pressed the companies to hire more people of color in top executive jobs.The report graded the labels in four categories, including their initial commitments and subsequent follow-through, and the companies mostly got B’s and C’s. None earned an A, and one, Warner, even got a D in the category of representation at the executive level.Last week, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released a detailed report of its own, noting that, among 4,060 executives at 119 music companies of various kinds, 7.5 percent were Black. (At record companies, that number was 14.4 percent.)“Our hope is that the MIA Report Card, especially coming on the heels of the Annenberg study, will spur more conversations and efforts towards, in some cases, disruptive change,” Naima Cochrane, a journalist and former label executive who was the author of the Black Music Action Coalition’s study, wrote.Most companies named in the report, including each of the three major record conglomerates, declined to comment about it. But some within the industry privately complained that the study was inconsistent or incomplete.A total of 18 companies were examined in the report. While record labels were given letter grades, other types of companies, like streaming services, talent agencies and concert promoters, were rated on whether their efforts were “satisfactory.” Whole areas of the business, including radio and artist management, were not addressed. The coalition said the study would be expanded in coming years.“Our data is only as good as the record industry’s willingness to cooperate in providing information,” Binta Niambi Brown, the coalition’s co-chairman, said in a statement.Pandora, the internet radio giant that is owned by SiriusXM, was one of the few whose efforts were deemed “unsatisfactory,” although scant reasons were given for that rating. “Because Pandora has traded on its familiarity with Black and Latinx listeners and their impact on culture,” the report said, “we expected a more significant commitment from them.”In response, Nicole Hughey, the head of diversity and inclusion at SiriusXM, said the company has given money to organizations and pursued specific campaigns against racism in the audio business.“We support BMAC’s mission, but were disappointed and surprised by the Unsatisfactory rating given to Pandora in their recent report card, given our strong passion and commitment to fighting racism and promoting racial equality,” Ms. Hughey said in a statement.“There is always more work to be done, within our company and across the music industry,” she added, “and we will continue that work tirelessly.” More