MUSIC NERD Midsummer Roundup

Subjects covered: The Olympics, the presidential race, Childish Gambino, and Timothée Chalamet

Bob Dylan

In a lengthy interview on the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, director James Mangold talks in great detail about how “A Complete Unknown,” his new film about Bob Dylan’s early days in New York City starring Timothée Chalamet, aims not to be a biopic that simply charts pivotal moments.

“I don’t want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that makes you go ‘Ah now I get him,’ Mangold told interviewer Brian Hiatt. “[My film] is certainly following Bob, but I’m much more interested in the wake that this person has left on others.” Mangold also directed “Walk the Line,” a film about Johnny Cash that received five Oscar nominations.

Kamala Harris

That 2023 video clip of Vice President Kamala Harris stopping by Home Rule Records in Washington, D.C. to snag copies of Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers vinyl has been circulating again, followed by the “Kamala Holding Vinyls” meme, where you can insert your own favorite album into her hands.

When she hosted a party at her house last year celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip hop, Harris said hip-hop is “the ultimate American art form” that “shapes every aspect of America’s popular culture. Hip-hop culture is American culture.” Common, Jeezy, MC Lyte and Roxanne Shante were among the artists invited to perform.

Also: It’s not easy picking music for the campaign trail, and politicians usually get it wrong.

Childish Gambino

Donald Glover is retiring Childish Gambino, his musical alter ego, and his eyes explode in a new video to promote his latest album.

“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done.’ “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore,” he told The New York Times. “When I put my son on my shoulders, I feel deep joy. That’s real. No one on their deathbed is going to look back and say, ‘Thank God I avoided being cringe.’”

The Olympics

What do Olympic athletes at the summer Paris games listen to when they need to get fired up? Twenty-four-year-old discus thrower Veronica Fraley listens to Afrobeat, and track & field athlete Gabby Thomas likes “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish, and skateboarder Nyjah Huston listens to Pop Smoke when he’s really trying to be in the moment.

NBC hired Snoop Dogg — who was earned 16 Grammy nominations as an artist and a few more as a producer — for an expanded role on its broadcasts of the Summer Games in Paris to help revive its record-low viewership.

Spotify

In 2020, Spotify launched “discovery mode,” a controversial new feature that allows artists to forgo a portion of their royalties in order to receive a boost in algorithm-led zones of the app, like the autoplay queue, radio, and mixes.

Spotify claims that, on average, artists see +50% in saves, +44% in user playlist adds, and +37% in follows during the first month, but it’s unclear whether musicians are actually making more money.

Live music vs recorded music

Neuroscientists based at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo studied the brain responses of people listening to music and determined that listening to recorded music “will never feel as good as being at a concert.”

Half of the participants listened to music through earphones in an MRI scanner, while a pianist played live outside the room. The other half listened to pre-recorded versions of the same songs. The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback, and were instructed to adapt their playing in response.

It didn’t matter whether the music was happy or sad: listening to the pianist play in real time generated more brain activity, and listeners tracked acoustic features like tempo and pitch more closely when it was played live.

Roy Hargrove

The 2022 documentary “Hargrove,” about the trumpeter from Dallas, this week became available on PBS. The film documents aspects of the life of jazz great Hargrove, who was just 49 when he died in 2018 of complications from kidney disease, after years of battling drug addiction.

As Questlove states in the film, the trumpeter was able to navigate the musical worlds of big band jazz, small group jazz, funk, fusion, and hip hop. Surviving family members issued a statement saying the trumpeter never saw or approved the final movie, and filmmakers were denied the rights to use any of Hargrove’s compositions in the film.

A MUSIC NERD Midsummer 2024 playlist, featuring music mentioned and linked to above, is here: