"I cant tell you why other people write, but I
write in order to keep from going insane.
my head, I expect'd turn inside out if my hands
were t leave me."

"Here's why we need to always trust Kanye, forever. Back in January, awake and energetic and feeling chatty one cold winter's evening, Mr. West got on Twitter and rattled off a vision for a bold new venture called DONDA. The nuts and bolts was that Kanye was putting together a multidisciplinary design firm, named after his late mother, that "will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce there dreams and ideas... To dream of, create, advertise and produce products driven equally by emotional want and utilitarian need.. To marry our wants and needs." And oh how we laughed and laughed. Well, guess what, jerks -- the joke's on us."

"AS: During this record, we went back to the verse in "Mr. Tambourine Man", which is a song I was obsessed with when I was 15: "To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free." We were in the van, coming back from a show, halfway through writing the album, and I remember hearing that verse. We both wanted that feeling to be encapsulated in our record.

"VL: You want the words to create feelings, and also these intense visuals. As a person who writes lyrics, it's not always about literal heartbreak, but rather the negative space and the feelings around it. How do you describe a feeling without saying "this is the feeling"? How do you take something completely natural, that will eventually transfer to the listener, but not just settle for that instant feeling of "you hurt me," and go to an imaginary landscape instead? It's the most intense task.

"And I'm sorry, but musicians are not chefs. You don't like music because of the way it tastes, where [artists] never want to disappoint a paying customer. Music is about your feelings. Stop pleasing people. You please yourself, and if people like it, great. Beach House is our life. Someone asked us, "What are your hobbies?" And there are small things, but this is every day of our lives.

"AS: Beach House was my life before our first album came out. It was weird, because people would always ask, "Why are you doing that all the time?" But now people don't think I'm weird because I play organs all day."

"There seems to be an understanding, band-wide, that simplicity and a low-key way can still allow for mystery and deep complexity. This has caused some confusion in the critical response. Long and positive articles were written about the “half-hearted try,” and how the band’s most expressive gesture was “the shrug.” But, in speaking with these guys, one gets the sense, right away, that they mean what they say, that they aren’t going to get too worked up about it and that any so-called “pose” is really much closer to a “stance.” Or, even, very plainly, just a way of being."

"Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits grew their hair long, snubbed Nashville, and brought the hippies and rednecks together. Country music has never been the same."

"Intense, emotional, and frequently out of control, the hip-hop superstar Kanye West allowed his antics to turn him into a national joke and to earn him the criticism of two American presidents. Would a massive concert tour with his friend and rival Jay-Z offer the troubled rapper a taste of redemption—or disaster?"

"...orchestral conductors conduct WAY ahead of the beat the musicians are actually playing. This helps the musicians respond in real time to the conductor's instructions. From the audience's perspective, therefore, it can be nearly impossible to see the connection between what the conductor is doing and what you're hearing from the musicians-they're probably substantially out of sync."

In an austere Zen monastery up on Mount Baldy, the once sybaritic, sex-obsessed poet has finally found his soul-mate.

"This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. The second way was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn't stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that "vomitific" writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realised that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn't insist on making sense. He would later say that Like A Rolling Stone was his first "completely free song... the one that opened it up for me".

"In retrospect, we can see that the composition allowed Dylan to fully express, for the first time, the diversity of his influences – Arthur Rimbaud, Fellini, Bertolt Brecht and Robert Johnson. There's some Delta blues and "La Bamba", but also plenty of Beat poetry, Ledbetter, and the Beatles. What Dylan did was find the strange thread connecting those disparate voices. During those frantic first minutes of writing, his right hemisphere found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of influences, drawing them together into a catchy song. He didn't yet know what he was doing – the ghost was still in control – but he felt the excitement of an insight, the subliminal thrill of something new. ("I don't think a song like Rolling Stone could have been done any other way," Dylan insisted. "You can't sit down and write that consciously... What are you gonna do, chart it out?")"

White said he hated the limitations society imposed when it came to relationships. “I’ve always felt it’s ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You’re my friend, you’re my wife, you’re my girlfriend, you’re my co-worker,” he said. “This is your box, and you’re not allowed to stray outside of it.” I told him it sounded as if monogamy might not be for him, and he laughed. “You think?” he said. “I gave that up a long time ago. Those rules don’t apply anymore.”

""Oldie" probably doesn't need to be ten and a half minutes long. Any of the following could've made the song "tighter": speeding up the 36 BPM/36 Chambers lurch of the backing track, having Earl Sweatshirt's momentous comeback verse as the closer, cutting out Jasper Dolphin entirely. But that's missing the point: OFWGKTA was a rap crew before they were a "Loiter Squad", so "Oldie" accomplishes what "Window" and even "Sandwitches" couldn't before. It's their definitive for-the-love posse cut, somewhere between "Protect Ya Neck" and "Make ‘Em Say Ugh" in terms of form and function. In such close quarters, their competitive camaraderie manages to accomplish what two years of outside criticism couldn't, and everyone involved from Domo Genesis to Hodgy Beats and, yes, even Jasper Dolphin sound legitimately inspired to steal the track, even if Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt end up doing so anyway. Like much of The OF Tape Vol. 2, "Oldie" was made for both the diehards and Odd Future's own amusement. If Goblin or anything else they did in 2011 made you jump ship, though, it's the willingness to push each other here, rather than simply push buttons, that might remind you what was so exciting about these guys in the first place."

"The Godfather of Soul invented funk, befriended presidents and laid the foundations of rap. And he did it by defying the laws of space and time. Inside the private world of the baddest man who ever lived."

"Prior to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a minor footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the time its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the band’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles."

"In a yellow building somewhere in Düsseldorf, the reclusive, bicycle-obsessed creators of electronica are back at work - and not accepting visitors. Alexis Petridis goes anyway"

"Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside your heart and head at all times."

"On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself."

Revisiting the people and places significant to the notorious BIG

Don’t be frightened, says the Icelandic singer turned professor of science and musicology. Even that gravity harp won’t kill you.

"
As is often the case with a hit rap song, lots of people have been putting remix verses over the beat Chauncey "Hit-Boy" Hollis made for Jay-Z and Kanye West's smash "Ni**as In Paris." Everyone from T.I. to Chris Brown to Young Jeezy to Busta Rhymes to Aziz Ansari to a now-famous guy on the subway have taken the tune and making something new. This, though, is the best by far. Yasiin Bey, the rapper formerly known as Mos Def, flips the original's flaunting of wealth into a trenchant commentary on poverty."

YOU’VE GOT TO DIG IT TO DIG IT, YOU DIG?

It was A$AP Rocky‘s first time in Atlanta and he was shown crazy love by DJ Drama as he stopped by the Hot 107.9 for an interview. The Harlem native and Complex February/March cover boy was asked about everything from his influences to working with ScHoolboy Q and what it was like to meet Rakim.

Die Antwoord.

Each member of A$AP has a full-fledged personality and purpose within the group. Sure, a lot of them rap, as you know and expect, but you'll also find managers, stylists, producers, designers, and more role players branching out from the same collective.

Mayer realized that pouring creativity into smaller, less important, promotional outlets like twitter not only distracted him from focusing on more critical endeavors like his career, it also narrowed his mental capacity for music and writing intelligent songs.