BTS and the rest

 

If you haven’t been following the musical news lately, it’s OK: there are so many things to focus on these days that it’s downright head-spinning. So we’ll help you out and share a few of the headlines that shape the current (musical) conservation:

 

The best is clearly yet to come

BTS released the video for their new single today. The song is called “Yet to Come” and serves as the lead single for their brand new and first ever anthology album, Proof. Like everything the band does, it seems, that track is looking to become a smash hit of insane proportions. We’ll just give you an idea: the video, which again was introduced today, is already nearing 40 millions views at the time of writing. As a matter of comparison, the (excellent) singles released last months from and around Kendrick Lamar’s remarkable latest album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, “N95” and “The Heart Part 5”, have yet to reach that number…

 

The Islander speaks

Chris Blackwell, the (now) 85-year old founder of Island Records, is releasing his first ever memoir, telling the storied life of an incredible music man. Blackwell is an interesting character in many ways: contrary to the Berry Gordys, Richard Bransons or Jimmy Iovines of this world, he was always a discreet player on the field, no matter how crucial his contribution was to the game. For one thing, he was instrumental in making Bob Marley a global superstar. Having grown up in Jamaica, he effectively became the missing piece between reggae and the rest of the musical world, and we all thank him for that. That is not his only success story, though: U2, Grace Jones and Steve Winwood also owe the man parts, if not all of their respective careers… Respect!

 

Will there Bee a comeback?

Few things are more secret in this world than Beyoncé‘s rollout schedule — save from the Coca-Cola recipe, if that. All we know is that the generation-defining superstar hasn’t released a new album since 2016’s phenomenal Lemonade (nice alliteration, right?). Sure enough, we were lucky enough to hear the diva on 2018’s collaborative Everything Is Love or 2019’s Lion King soundtrack (followed by the Black Is King visual treat), but the world is anxiously waiting for that next full-length solo project. A few days ago, all Beyoncé profile pictures vanished from social media. Is that the sign we’ve all been waiting for?

 

David Lynch’s voice is gone

Julee Cruise, who famously sang on the song “Falling” which ended up being one of the most celebrated TV song themes of all times (to David Lynch‘s seminal Twin Peaks show, lest we forget), has sadly passed away. Lynch and his faithful composing partner Angelo Badalementi made far more than that with Cruise: over the course of many years, albums, soundtracks and songs, the fates of these highly talented individuals became inextricably intertwined, to the point of defining a cultural era, that of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and its seemingly lost innocence… RIP.

 

White NFT Stripes?

In case you’ve been living under a rock and (also) failed to note that blockchain in general and NFT’s in particular have been on a downward spiral as of late, after arguably witnessing an incredibly fast rise to the top before that, you should know that the crisis touches the biggest names in the industry. Last year, The White Stripes announced a new NFT project based on a visualiser for a “Seven Nation Army” remix. While that description may seem a little convoluted, it turns out that Jack White himself agrees and now prefers to distance himself from the project. In other words, it may have just been that the current crash is nothing but a rather inflated bubble exploding…