The week in music: Willie Nelson's weed, sad boyband fans and more
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Version 0 of 1. Slipknot’s Mick Thompson is due to appear in court this month You may have missed a story on 12 March about Mick Thompson, in which the Slipknot guitarist is alleged to have got into a knife fight with his brother, with both men ending up in hospital. Well, it’s now been reported that the siblings face charges for disorderly conduct by fighting. The court date’s set for 30 March – we can only hope they’ll have made up by then, if they haven’t already. Zayn Malik left One Direction … The best-looking and most vocally gifted member of One Direction left the boyband on Wednesday. In the wake of the Guardian publishing about 82 stories on the line-up change, there isn’t much more to add on this subject. … and boyband fans lost their collective cool on social media OK, there’s one last thing to add: Malik’s departure inspired an incredible torrent of both rage and heart-wrenching pain from One Direction fans on Twitter, Vine and Instagram. We all saw that one coming, but it’s been fascinating to see how boyband grief has developed in the so-called digital age. In short: Malik’s mentions have been in tatters for days. There's a tinie-tiny-itsy-bitsy-tinsy-winsy part of me that says Zayn is going to be back very soon and it will be the happiest day for us Apple are due to launch a music-streaming service In September 2014, it looked as though Apple might scrap their Beats Music subscription service altogether, but the tech giant’s plans to rival Spotify with a music-streaming app are now back on track. Jimmy Iovine and Nine Inch Nails’s Trent Reznor are both set to be involved in the process, and a New York Times article confirmed that DJ and producer Zane Lowe’s new role at Apple will involve revamping iTunes Radio. Apple’s world-domination plan continues. Rihanna used an app to share teaser snippets of a song The track, entitled Bitch Better Have My Money, debuted in 10-second clips on an app that people use to make silly lip-syncing videos. Since then, the song has been officially released on iTunes so that the rest of us, who don’t understand the purpose of an app for dubbed selfie videos, can hear it. Kendrick Lamar tops both the UK and US album charts After breaking a Spotify record last week for the most streams in a day, the Compton rapper’s second album, To Pimp a Butterfly, shot to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. In both cases, it was Lamar’s first time at the top of the album charts – the Official albums chart top 100 in the UK and Billboard 200 in the US. Willie Nelson plans to launch a marijuana brand The country legend is keen on the idea of launching a brand of weed called Willie’s Reserve, and possibly selling it in standalone shops in the US – in states where marijuana has been legalised, of course. Go on, Willie. The world needs this. Lil’ Chris died at 24 On Tuesday it was announced that singer Chris Hardman, known as Lil’ Chris, had died aged 24. Famed for his turn in Gene Simmons’s Rock School reality-TV show, Hardman went on to release a solo single in 2006 and was most recently working on a stage production in Leeds. At the time of writing, the cause of his death was unknown. Jackie Trent died at 74 The Staffordshire-born singer-songwriter, who wrote the Neighbours theme tune and wrote songs for Frank Sinatra and Petula Clark, died on Saturday after a long illness. With her ex-husband, Tony Hatch, Trent wrote hundreds of songs for a variety of US and British performers, from Des O’Connor to Nancy Wilson. Radiohead and Lauryn Hill are preserved in the Library of Congress Each year, the US Library of Congress adds 25 recordings deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to its collection. In 2015, Radiohead’s OK Computer, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and a score of other works joined the archive. Fun fact: every public tweet sent in the US is also logged in the Library of Congress – remember that the next time you’re Stateside and want to subtweet your boss. |