For more than three decades, legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic made uncompromising, challenging work, including 1977's "Breathing In/Breathing Out" Z — in which two people breathe into one another's mouths until all that's left is carbon dioxide and they pass out — and 2010's "The Artist Is Present," a MoMA hit that found her sitting silently for 736 hours, across from museum-goers who could also take turns sitting with her. "The Artist Is Present" raised Abramovic's profile significantly, especially after Lady Gaga made an appearance at the show. So, what did she do? She got absorbed by Gaga's goofy-ass Artpop/artRAVE debacle, which was promoted in part with images of a nude Gaga practicing "The Abramovic Method." And don't forget Jay Z getting the cosign on the "Picasso Baby" performance, where Abramovic found Jay rapping that Magna Carta Holy Grail track over and over again at New York's Pace Gallery and staring museum-goers down. Here's to cashing-out for some celeb cred late in life!
The beyond burly Queens rapper's persona hinges on his loveable dirtbag attitude. But even by those ostensibly low standards, 2013 was a year of obnoxious, just plain cruel, and worst of all, just not that funny, controversy-grabbing stunts and dickhead declarations. There was the icky cover for Saab Stories, which featured two women in a bathroom arching their backs and a lot of toilet paper, with Bronson lording over them. And at a concert in Toronto, he picked up a woman from the crowd and groped her. Though she seemed complicit in the stunt, Bronson's petulant Twitter responses to critiques were particularly obnoxious and unnecessary: "FUCK U STUPID PIECES OF SHIT WIT UR INTERNET BULLSHIT AND UR FAKE FEMINIST TRASH JUST CUZ U DONT LIKE SOMEONE."
This year found Justin Bieber sprinting from bonehead move to bonehead move. He wore a lot of incredibly douchey clothes, knocked over a photographer with his car, hopped on the twerk zeitgeist on Lil Twist's Miley-assisted "Twerk," spit on a grown-ass man, showed up for a concert two hours late, and beefed with his neighbors. But the one-two punch of um, pissing in a restaurant kitchen and then noticing a Bill Clinton photo on the wall and declaring, "Fuck Bill Clinton," and heading on over to the Anne Frank house and signing the guestbook with "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber," really sealed the deal on Biebs' problematic 2013.
So there is the "reunited" Black Flag, which consists of the group's 1979 lineup of Greg Ginn, Ron Reyes, Gregory Moore, and Dave Klein. Then there is FLAG, which features Keith Morris along with original members Dez Cadena, Chuck Dukowski, and Bill Stevenson, as well as Descendents guitarist Stephen Egerton. (For once, Henry Rollins showed some restraint and chose not to be involved in either of these nostalgia trips.) But that didn't stop Ginn from suing Rollins along Morris' FLAG for using Black Flag's iconic logo and using a similar name that is "likely to cause confusion, mistake, or deception among consumers." Why Rollins was even named, who knows. Fortunately, Ginn lost the injunction, though that couldn't stop Black Flag from putting out the wretched album What The...
After getting into an altercation with Frank Ocean over a parking spot earlier in the year (and allegedly lobbing homophobic slurs at the singer), Brown continued to troll Ocean, who by all accounts seems like a reasonable guy. In an interview with Power 106 in March, Brown suggested that Ocean used Brown damn near jumping him to garner "sympathy" at the Grammys. Meanwhile, in a quasi-beef with Drake after a nightclub altercation, he added a verse to Young Jeezy's "R.I.P." that contained this not-even-middle-school-level homophobic punchline: "Dearly departed, I bought a plane I departed / And if you started from the bottom, go on and come out the closet." On top of that, there's the pile-up of community service for the community service duties he shirked after his 2009 assault on Rihanna. Not to mention a Washington, DC arrest in October for assault. A stint in anger management led to a freak out in anger management, which led to even more anger management. This fuckin' guy.
In April, Jay-Z and Beyonce celebrated their fifth anniversary in Havana, Cuba. But see, U.S. Citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba for the purposes of "tourism" due to the 1962 embargo, which meant Jay and Beyonce applied for and received a "cultural exchange" license. Because of our nutty political climate, the couple were labeled Communists by some right-wing nutjobs and President Obama was challenged because, after all, he's friends with the couple, so there was obviously some shenanigans involved or something. The non-controversy expanded to a legendary governmental SMH when Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee proposed and passed a bill that further limited funds used by the Department of Treasury to approve travel to Cuba. In short, the bill, had it existed before, would not have allowed Jay Z and Beyonce to go. A lunkheaded and vindictive waste of resources by the Republicans, under the guise of preventing the wasting of resources.
Do we even have to explain why the forever twerkin', thinkpiece-generatin', perpetually trollin' pop star is on here???Related: The Year in Miley Cyrus
James Brooks, formerly of Elite Gymnastics, who also made a name for himself this year as a thorough and thoughtful Tumblr-er as deadgirlfriends, started a new project under the name Dead Girlfriends this year. And DG released an EP called Stop Pretending. The immediate stand-out was "On Fraternity," a noise-encrusted singer-songwriter track that, presumably, addressed a woman's daily fear of rape and sexual harassment: "The way they're all watching for your guard to drop / At the end of the night / Now, that's why." The song was praised at first and then everybody had a "waitafuckingminute" moment and properly challenged it as a empathetic albeit condescending slab of mansplanation. Brooks, known for spewing on Tumblr, immediately got on the defensive, explaining that the song was gender-neutral (he would also change his project's name from Dead Girlfriends to Default Genders) and from there, pretty much wouldn't shut up about his song about women (that wasn't really about women) and the women who were upset that he would write the song. Way to be an ally, bro!
A commercial from Goldie Blox, "a toy company on a mission to inspire the next generation of female engineers," snuck onto the Internet thanks to clever advertising paired with an empowering message: It took the Beastie Boys' notoriously sexist song "Girls," and added young girls singing response lyrics ("You think you know what we want ... pink and pretty ... just like the '50s"). The corrective commercial quickly came under scrutiny though, when the company preemptively sued the Beastie Boys over the parody and then claimed in an open letter in the New York Times that the Beasties had sued them. They hadn't. Though the rap legends had suggested it was copyright infringement, in a tender letter to the company they mentioned that the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys had a "no advertising" clause in his will. Whether Goldie Blox made a parody or not, really shouldn't matter. Contriving a viral moment (their CEO has made other controversy-baiting spoofs before) with a riff on a song from a man whose will explicitly asked that his music not be used in commercials is just plain gross.
Selling his tepid album Magna Carta Holy Grail to Samsung Galaxy and then turning that sell-out move into end-all-be-all of selloout moves into a "#newrules" tagline, and then complaining about the fact that they didn't count as proper record sales was pretty weak. As was placing Rick Rubin, who had just helmed Kanye West's Yeezus, in the Magna Carta teaser suggesting he had something to do with the album when he didn't. Oh yeah, that whole stepping on Kanye's pop-rap radical zeitgeist by announcing a record just days after Yeezus was announced was worse than that time Kanye did a song with Coldplay and then Jay did a song with Coldplay. There was also the whole racial profiling Barney's controversy, which Jay responded to with a public letter on his Life and Times website that wisely reminded everyone that his involvement with Barney's hinges on charity and that abandoning his clothing line partnership with the fancy department store would just deprive the children. But it also compared Jay's refusal to assume anything about Barney's alleged racial profiling to racial profiling itself: "I am against discrimination of any kind, but if I make snap judgements, no matter who it's towards, aren't I committing the same sin as someone who profiles?" Also, he asked us all to stop putting a hyphen in his name...and we all listened!?
The 16 year-old New Zealander had one of the best and most bizarre singles of the year with "Royals" – sorta kinda 2013's "Somebody That I Used To Know" – though it's success was also marred by some problematic sloganeering about wealth that leaned a little too hard on negating hip-hop signifiers like "diamonds," "Cristal," and "gold teeth." (The last one in particular is a give away because gold teeth aren't exactly a sign of wealth). Alongside Macklemore's "Thrift Shop," 2013 was a year in which middle-class white musicians criticized black musicians for wanting to buy things, and that's odd. More recently, Lorde doubled down on the subtext of "Royals." In Interview magazine, she said this: "Around the middle of last year I started listening to a lot of rap, like Nicki Minaj and Drake, as well as pop singers like Lana Del Rey. They all sing about such opulence, stuff that just didn't relate to me — or anyone that I knew. I began thinking, 'How are we listening to this? It's completely irrelevant.'" Oh brother, 16 year-old kid or not, how you do even begin to unpack that? If Lorde only hears "opulence" in the deeply emotive music of Drake and the empowering hip-hop of Nicki Minaj, that's a problem with Lorde, not those three-dimensional, incredibly expressive artists.
California rapper Nipsey Hussle lived up to the "hustle" part of his name this year when he released his mixtape, Crenshaw, at the retail price of 100 bucks and limited the number of copies to 1000 – just for his diehard fans. Nipsey, a talented and perpetually underrated MC, set up a pop-up shop pimping the record (a flyer read, "The world's first $100 album. Be a part of history!") and buttressed the P.R. gimmick with talk of "revolution" and cutting out the music biz middle men. Supposedly, Jay-Z purchased 100 copies. Now, that's a good business model: Charge way too much for your record and hope you can get a half-hearted benefactor like Jigga to throw you some dough!
Oh, ya know, just a legendary rapper and a well-meaning good ol' boy cooking up a rap-country crossover track that sets out to solve the whole problem of racial animus and Confederate flag-waving intimidation in just a few pop-friendly minutes. This thing is a clueless albeit well-intentioned mess through and through, but what really derails the song's message is how far L.L. Cool J bends backwards to concede to Paisley (see: the lyric "R.I.P. Robert E. Lee"), who croons the half-hearted, on-the-defensive acknowledgements of institutionalized racism: "The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south"..... "Our generation didn't start this nation / And we're still paying for the mistakes." A masterful example of missing the point.
Leave it up to Number One Coke-Rap Phony Rick Ross to do away with the already pretty awful low-key issues of consent swirling around so much in-the-club rap and R&B these days, and just get right to the point. On Rocko's street hit, "U.O.E.N.O," he rapped: "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that she ain't even know it." Those lines, which describe, in no uncertain terms, drugging a woman and then sleeping with her, put Ross at the center of a conversation about rap lyrics and rape. A Change.Org petition appeared that demanded Ross "publicly apologize for glorifying drugging/raping a woman." The National Organization of Women and Ultraviolet protested at a Reebook store in Manhattan. When Ross was asked about his "U.O.E.N.O." lyrics on the New Orleans radio station Q 93.3, he offered a condescending and clueless half-apology. "I want to make sure this is clear," Ross said, really selling it. "Woman is the most precious gift to man." He called the controversy over the lines a "misunderstanding" and "misinterpretation," adding, "the term rape wasn't used." A few days later, he sent out a couple of tweets that confirmed his cluelessness: "I don't condone rape. Apologies for the #lyric interpreted as rape. #BOSS"; "Apologies to my many business partners who would never promote violence against women. @ReebokClassics @ultraviolet" Ross' refusal to categorize what he raps about as "rape" is symptomatic of the majority of the country's ignorance and shows that the guy just doesn't get it.
For continuing to imprison female punk group Pussy Riot, as well as the country's anti-gay laws which criminalize homosexuality and make it illegal to even discuss it therefore, engaging in, ""propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships."
The alt-folk icon took the stage in March at Yoshi's in San Francisco and commented on California's Proposition 8, which invalidated, momentarily, the legality of gay marriage: "When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back," she said. The next day, Shocked claimed she was simply voicing the view of the homophobic Christians. A rambling interview with SPIN and later, CNN, tried to suggest it was some audience challenge about "truth" and "reality." She has since come out in favor of gay marriage and good for her, but she took the most hateful and round-about way to get that message out there, for sure.
After arriving as some kind of saving grace for the dying, money-less music industry, Spotify finally came out with it and revealed how much they pay by way of a Spotify Artists website. That number? Somewhere between 0.6. cents and 0.84 cents per stream. That money is to be divided by labels, managers, and the like by the way. The service then had the stones to say that looking at pay-outs was a "highly flawed" way to understand what they can provide for musicians. The flaw here is in Spotify, which has presented itself as something that can resurrect the industry and get musicians paid in an era when revenue streams are limited, but can only really assist musicians popular enough that they don't necessarily need Spotify checks to survive.
He had one of the biggest songs of the year with the arguably predatory "Blurred Lines" and spent the rest of the year smarmily hamming it up and telling anyone who would listen how the song was "feminist" and the video was mocking exploitative videos and blah blah blah. Meanwhile, he seemed to somehow avoid any responsibility for the controversial Miley Cyrus performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, telling Oprah that the performance was "on [Miley]."
The Liechtensteinian producer and self-proclaimed "entertainment mogul" received a 2013 Best Dance Recording Grammy nomination for "I Can't Live Without You," despite being a largely unknown. Walser's song is truly cynical: A sub-Avicci "Levels" facsimile with crude female vocals, a dude singing that sounds like the guy from Smashmouth Auto-Tuned atop a typical trance beat and jacks from producer Zedd's "Spectrum." If you Google "Al Walser," you will find articles asking who this guy even is. How did this happen? Is it possible to network your way to a Grammy nomination? Apparently. Also, he arrived at the Grammys in an astronaut suit and planted a flag with his name on it on the red carpet. If you want a good laugh, go to his official website and gasp at the Geocities-level design and font choices.
Okay, so Pharrell Williams' lifestyle brand, "i am OTHER," was challenged by the Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.Am via a legal claim challenging Williams' use of "I am." Yep. That's right, Will.i.Am attempted to claim ownership of "I am." Even by that cheeseball's standards, that's pretty bad.