Music industry

Sabrina Carpenter mainstreams cutesy violence towards women

With a deliberateness that did not escape critics and onlookers, the Carpenter-fed algorithm had suddenly decided to choke us on her sweet and frothy song "Espresso" in such a relentless fashion that we soon ended up drinking it down, begging for more. “Move it up, down, left, right, oh, switch it up like Nintendo,” I and plenty of other people too old for her dire Gen Z, Taylor Swiftian fare, found ourselves singing it anyway, day and night, on its release last year. “Say you can't sleep, baby, I know. That's that me espresso.” Sleep was certainly not improved by the earworm of the song.In fact, I thought at first that Carpenter was a bot because the songs are such calculated, algorithmic pop, from top to bottom.

Sabrina Carpenter

Bernie Taupin is more than just ‘Elton John’s lyricist’

It takes only a couple of hours by train from the southern reaches of rural Lincolnshire to central London. But for seventeen-year-old Bernie Taupin, leaving home in June 1967 to try his luck in the big city, the journey might as well have been to a distant planet, such was the gulf between his life as a casual farm-laborer and his ambitions to become an internationally acclaimed songwriter like his heroes Hank Snow or Merle Haggard.

taupin

Did the music industry enable R. Kelly?

From our UK edition

As Harvey Weinstein was to film, so Robert ‘R.’ Kelly has been to the music industry. An energetic and profligate figure who enjoyed enormous commercial and artistic success in his heyday, Kelly’s downfall, with his convictions on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, is now total. It looks likely he will be given a life sentence for his crimes, and few, other than his most devoted admirers, will be mourning his entry into the penal system.  Yet Kelly’s fate, while richly deserved, is not the end of the story. Instead, questions have to be asked of those who were around him while he behaved egregiously behind the scenes.