Jay-Z Halted A Lawsuit By Pointing Out the Lack of Black Arbitrators – Rolling Stone

Jay-Z won a court battle on Wednesday in a lawsuit against his company Roc Nation, on somewhat unusual grounds: The rapper-entrepreneur argued that the lack of African-American arbitrators presiding over the case left him susceptible to unconscious racial bias. The suit has to do with Jay-Z’s Rocawear clothing brand, which he sold in 2007 to…

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Ninja Sex Party is the quintessential YouTube band — except it transcends the Internet – The Washington Post

Imagine if Peter Parker had never become Spider-Man. Instead, he kept getting bullied, yet still had the compulsion to dress in spandex. And he started a band. He would probably sound a lot like Ninja Sex Party. The comedy songwriting pair of Daniel Avidan and Brian Wecht have created the quintessential Internet Band: Their music, first…

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The Problem with Muzak

“Anything you want. Anyone you want. Anywhere you want. Anyway! Anyway!” —Priests, “Pink White House” (2017) Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table,…

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What does the end of the world sound like? Listen to this. | The Outline

In June, while the earth was experiencing a record-breakingly hot summer, a scientific paper was published in Nature Geoscience suggesting the planet’s long-term temperature rise could be double what was previously predicted by climate models. Drawing on the collaborative efforts of 17 international scientists, the same bleak study argued that the effects of climate change,…

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Forty years ago, ‘Rock Lobster’ launched the career of the B-52s — and revived John Lennon’s – The Washington Post

The members of the rock/new wave group the B-52s in front of a staircase. (Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) By 1978, with the Beatles eight years in his rearview mirror, John Lennon had stopped making music — and found himself vacationing apart from his wife and muse, Yoko Ono. That same year, a group of eclectic…

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Billboard’s charts used to be our barometer for music success. Are they meaningless in the streaming age? – The Washington Post

Clockwise from top left, Drake, Kanye West, Prince and Michael Jackson. (Washington Post illustration; Getty Images; iStock) Drake and Kanye West — two reigning kings of pop music — both flooded the American consciousness with music this summer in strikingly different manners. West released a series of seven-track albums, including one bearing his name and…

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