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Mum, can I grow up to be a style icon? - Financial Times

Posted: 27 Sep 2019 02:00 PM PDT

You are a good parent. You want the best for your child. You put their name down for a top school while they were still in utero. To seal the winning-in-life deal, you send your five-year-old to etiquette classes to learn the value of good manners and eye contact. After all, those places at an Ivy League university, Oxford or Cambridge don't just arrive by accident.

You've even built a small nest egg to get them on their way — a junior Isa investment account in the UK or a US 529 plan, perhaps?

Then, the US college admissions scandal broke. And you realised that, actually, you've been slacking on the parenting front. You may have thought your child would get ahead with raw talent, hard work and a small army of highly sought-after Mandarin-speaking, violin-playing, mathematics-geek tutors. Well, more fool you. A coterie of ambitious wealthier parents were buying better test scores and university places — risking prison in the process.

And then there is Beyoncé. Queen Bey is locked in a legal tussle to trademark her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Recent court documents filed on the pop star's behalf labelled the seven-year-old a "cultural icon" and "mini style icon".

With that, Beyoncé — who once sang "we're smart enough to make these millions, strong enough to bear the children, then get back to business" — has smacked down the parenting gauntlet.

No doubt Queen Bey has one eye on a future Blue Ivy Carter children's clothing line or a foie-gras-weaning food range. But by making her firstborn a brand, she has also understood the future of work: personal marketing and capitalising on being human.

Brand Me, is hardly new. As far back as 1997, management writer Tom Peters argued: "We are CEOs of our own companies, Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You." Social media has ramped this up. The likes of LinkedIn has us all dabbling in personal marketing — something Beyoncé knows a thing or two about. (Instagram: 134m followers, and 15.4m on Twitter.)

Such branding has not only been for adults, either. Blue Ivy Carter faces stiff competition from the legion of kid influencers, or "kidfluencers" out there. Taytum and Oakley Fisher, three-year-old identical twins, have more than 3m Instagram and YouTube followers. As the New York Times pointed out, the twins' sibling Halston Blake had an Instagram account before she was even born.

Such influencers highlight the other future-of-work trend: the importance of being a person. No doubt Beyoncé has read the headlines: 'The age of automation is here!', 'Robotgeddon!', 'Robots are stealing our jobs!'. Like other parents, she has fretted about how to prepare her offspring for a future workforce that is being colonised by machines.

If the Future of Work Industrial Complex (the many books devoted to the topic, the multiple conferences, the thought leadership articles!) has one message, it's that we must be more human. In other words, empathy, social skills and creativity will give us the edge over our robot competitors. (Although, if the machines of the future really are that smart, they will be kicking back in a robot spa, putting their little metal legs up and necking a can of WD40, not elbowing Trevor from accounts out of his office cubicle.)

So, in the new machine age, Blue Ivy will only have one goal: to exist, to be herself. Which at least saves her from the fate of other kids of famous people (the Beckhams, say, or the Trumps) — frantically trying to find a role in life. She is her own raison d'être.

Such parenting strategies present new challenges. Not least of which is when do you break the news to your offspring that they are cultural icons. Do you sit them down to tell them, or is it just one of those things they just grow up knowing?

The good news is that Beyoncé has raised the parenting bar so high, the rest of us may as well give up.

emma.jacobs@ft.com

Why Kourtney Kardashian Thinks It's 'Great' Kids See Her in 'Working Mode' - Us Weekly

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 06:14 AM PDT

Mom guilt no more! Kourtney Kardashian thinks it benefits her kids, Mason, Penelope and Reign, to see her running her lifestyle website Poosh.

"It's interesting because I used to, as a working mom, really try to separate work from my mom time," the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star, 40, told E! News on Tuesday, September 24. "I recently thought it's a great thing for my kids to be able to see me in working mode. Even at our Poosh event, I had Penelope come. She really wanted to spend the day with me and I thought, 'You know what? Let her see her mom in action.'"

The reality star added that she wants to empower "women to be able to follow what their passions are" through her work. "Know that everything comes in your own timing," the Los Angeles native said. "Poosh has been really fulfilling for me."

Kourtney Kardashian Thinks Its Great for Kids to See Her in Working Mode
Kourtney Kardashian. Matt Baron/Shutterstock

Kardashian launched her site in April and targets four main categories — health and wellness, life and style, home and entertainment, and the Kardashian family.

Later that same month, the E! personality spoke to her ex Scott Disick about their coparenting relationship in a YouTube video for the site. "I'm so proud of the place we're at as parents to our children now and all the work we've put into getting here," she captioned an Instagram upload promoting the interview.

The former couple have reached a "good place" without the help of attorneys, she revealed, adding, "We just did it on our own and came up with our own schedule."

The Flip It Like Disick star, 36, said that he feels "very lucky" for the mature way they've raised Mason, 9, Penelope, 6, and Reign, 4, after their 2015 split.

"The biggest challenge was just trying to figure out how we separate our relationship as friends and parents and still be on the same page, and what's, I guess, appropriate and what's not and when to be able to talk to each other," the New York native explained. "In the beginning, you set good [boundaries] and we learned from that and we've gotten to a good place."

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This is what happened when our song was sampled by Jay-Z - MusicRadar

Posted: 27 Sep 2019 04:02 AM PDT

When I think of a sample, I think of how effectively Kanye West uses Ray Charles (and Jamie Foxx) for his 2005 banger, Gold Digger. Or Fatboy Slim's repurposing of Camille Yarbrough's vocals for the dancefloor classic Praise You. But I had never considered what actually has to happen for these pieces of art to materialise. 

For a lot of musicians - especially those who work in the soul/RnB genres - the idea of being "sampled by Jay-Z" is something of a pipedream. It is the kind of thing you might think would lead to fame, wealth and kudos, since those are the qualities associated with such hip-hop royalty. My friend Shawn Lee jokingly alludes to this in the intro to his 2018 Soul Surfers album, opening it with the line: "Jay Z! Sample this!"

Ultimately though, for many, the process remains shrouded in mystery. In my case, this changed in March 2017, when Jay Brown (CEO of Roc Nation) called me up, personally, to ask if Jay-Z could sample one of my band's songs for an upcoming release. The result, 4:44, was the title track of the album, and something Hova has since described as "one of the best songs [he's] ever written".

The background

Hannah Williams and the Affirmations are a Bristol-based soul band. We were formed in 2014 from the ashes of Hannah's previous band, The Tastemakers, and are signed to Milan-based label, Record Kicks. We are very much a group of friends who play music together, as well as musicians who play professionally outside of this project.

In 2015, we recorded our debut album, Late Nights and Heartbreak. We worked with supreme groovesmith, Malcolm Catto, known for his work with DJ Shadow, Mulatu Astatke and Orlando Julius. Most songs were written by our MD James Graham, with a couple of exceptions - one of which went on to be the title track, Late Nights and Heartbreak. This was written by a friend of James's, Kanan Keeney.

The album was finally released in November 2016, and, to our immense relief, was met with acclaim from reviewers and peers alike. This allowed us to expand on the small-but-dedicated fanbase Hannah had accumulated with her previous band. I was the main point of contact for the band during this time as we had no management, and I was keen to help drive the project forward.

The call

By the time 2017 rolled around, we were in the midst of a nicely-building tour and seemed to be going from strength to strength with each gig. The pace felt very natural.

On 1 March, we travelled to Paris for a show. After a wonderful night, we drove back to Bristol with some haste, as the bass player and I had a jazz gig in a local pub that we had to make it back for. I finished the pub gig and arrived home just after midnight. Upon checking my phone I saw that I had received an email from Roc Nation [Jay-Z's record company], requesting my mobile number for a chat. Without thinking much of it, I replied and went to bed. 

The next day I received a phone call from an LA number. Jay Brown very politely introduced himself and explained that they were working on an upcoming Jay-Z album and would like to use a sample of our song, Late Nights and Heartbreak. I said this sounded good and that I would put him in touch with our lawyers and label.

I was never told exactly how Jay-Z and producer NO ID stumbled across our little indie release, but as far as I'm aware they were crate digging. The story goes that NO ID had been trying to coerce Jay into writing something that would be a response to Beyonce's Lemonade, in which she opened up publicly about his infidelities.

NO ID then found our song and made the beat, sent it to Jay and let him ponder it. Jay then woke up at 4:44am with the lyrics written in his head and went straight into the studio to record it. See this NY Times Article for info.

If there was one point of advice to any budding musicians reading this, who might get sampled, it would be: make sure you get a lawyer. This sounds obvious but it is vital. Artist, label and songwriter should all have their own representative.

Doing the deal

Of course, we were all eager to hear the song, but as a negotiation tactic, Rocnation would only acquiesce to play it through the phone, to the legal representatives. Upon hearing it, our label boss and the lawyers were in a position to negotiate a deal that reflected the heavy usage of our song.

What generally happens is that the lawyers on all sides will butt heads, mediated by a clearance/licensing company, until a deal is reached. This process can take some time. In our case, this process took around three months.

As the summer began to creep in, the negotiations started taking shape. Excitement was growing, but we still hadn't been able to hear the song. There had been mysterious 4:44 billboards sprouting up in major cities all over the world, and we weren't allowed to say anything. Eventually, a deal was reached and 30 June was publicly announced as the release date.

Hannah Williams and the Affirmations

Hannah Williams and the Affirmations.

(Image credit: Press)

We were excited by the prospect of it being a "huge sample" - as our label boss put it - but at this point we still hadn't heard, or even been told the name of the song. A few days before the release, we got the final documents through, and it became apparent that it was the title track. 

With excitement at fever pitch, we arrived at release day. In order to listen to the track we actually had to download and install Tidal, just like everyone else. I also distinctly remember watching a YouTube Video of two excited Jay-Z fans streaming the whole album and reacting to each track.

Upon hearing the track for the first time, I was shocked at how faithful it was to our original song. It had retained the vintage analogue feel, the structure, and all of the band's parts. To me, it has this punk attitude of "keep the feel, put a backbeat behind it and let's go!" Not to mention the lyrical content: Jay appeared to be openly admitting to cheating on Beyonce and repenting! It was a surreal situation.

What changed?

Across the world, the reaction to the track was overwhelmingly positive. For many it was the standout track of the album because of the subject matter: one half of the world's most famous power couple, apologising to the other. It was played absolutely everywhere.

This massive exposure led to an enormous boom in popularity for the band. The first thing that happened was press. We were featured by NYTimes, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Complex, Genius and many others. With all this press on our side, suddenly this little Bristol band had managers and booking agents asking to work with us.

This was interesting. Some of the people that approach you in these types of situations are clearly just after the money and some slice of the publishing. I found it very easy to weed them out from those genuinely interested in the future of the project.

As we all know, the music industry has its fair share of snakes. As a general rule: if someone gets into name-dropping very early on, it's quite likely they are a dishonest person. Don't be afraid to ask someone what they are looking to gain from a business relationship with you. Anyone who has experience will expect this question, and it shows foresight on your part to get these things settled from the off.

The most important thing for me was to visualise this sample as a springboard; the beginning of a journey.

Eventually we settled on a good team and begun the next phase: a new tour. Making sure to capitalise on our new-found success, we played many bucket list shows and begun building roots in new territories. 2018/19 saw us play many exciting shows, but personal highlights for me were The Blue Note Tokyo, Montreal Jazz Festival, Central Park Summerstage and North Sea Jazz. 

The most important thing for me was to visualise this sample as a springboard; the beginning of a journey. It is very easy to get comfortable when things are going well, but just as soon as the hype has begun, it has died down.

For a small Bristol band like us, being sampled by one of the biggest rap artists in the world threw us into the spotlight overnight. It meant we had to up our game in all respects. It meant hard work. We wrote, we played, we fought, we collaborated and we definitely cried. But we are now a stronger unit than ever before. We came back from a two-year tour with a new arsenal of contacts and a much larger profile at our disposal. So, of course, we headed into the studio.

50 Foot Woman was recorded with Shawn Lee, at ATA Studios in February, and will be released October 18th. You can preorder the album and hear the first single here.

Did Beyoncé just surprise-drop the best live album of all time? - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 19 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT

If you were there — or if you just watched it on YouTube — then you know that Beyoncé's performance at the 2018 Coachella festival may have been the greatest concert of our time.

A loving and deeply thought-through re-creation of a halftime show at a historically black college, Beychella (as it quickly became known) blew minds with the scale and audacity of its vision, and with the mastery of its execution.

Now, between the two weekends of this year's festival, the singer has revisited her epic accomplishment in a Netflix documentary and an accompanying live album, both titled "Homecoming."

If Beychella was the best concert of the last decade or two, does it follow that "Homecoming" is one of the greatest live albums ever? Our experts debate its claim to music history.

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MIKAEL WOOD: One of the many ways of looking at "Homecoming," which contains 40(!) tracks and appeared without warning early Wednesday on the major streaming services, is as a reaffirmation of that musty, vinyl-era artifact, the live album.

Live records once were big business. They offered artists the chance to show off what they could do outside a carefully controlled recording studio.

Think of "Live at Leeds," which restored the Who's explosive reputation following the theatrical "Tommy." Or "Aretha Live at Fillmore West," with Franklin's radical reimagining of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Or "Cheap Trick at Budokan" or James Brown's "Live at the Apollo" or even "Frampton Comes Alive!"

These days, of course, artists don't need to make an album to preserve their concert work; that's what Instagram and YouTube are for.

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But as always, Beyoncé's ambitions outstrip those of her peers. So here's her attempt to break into the live-album canon — indeed, perhaps to dominate it.

la-et-ms-homecoming-review

A scene from "Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé."

(Parkwood Entertainment / Netflix)

SONAIYA KELLEY: Let me preface this by saying that, while I am a fan of Beyoncé, I'm not a diehard member of the Beyhive by any means. That being said, yes, "Homecoming" is one of the greatest live albums ever. If nothing else, the intention behind her performance makes it so.

During the opening two songs, her band plays melodies from '90s Southern rappers C-Murder and Juvenile that are instantly recognizable to black listeners. There are also a few chords from the Emerald City scene in the Motown classic "The Wiz" that feel like a knowing wink. After years of maintaining a pop-star remove from political and social issues, Beyoncé now unapologetically embraces her blackness and takes every opportunity to celebrate the culture that has always championed her.

It can't be overemphasized just how revolutionary it was for her to transform Coachella — a predominantly white festival —into an HBCU halftime show, to "swap out a flower crown" to bring "our culture" (as she says in the Netflix documentary). Beyoncé's star wattage exceeds almost any other musical artist from the last decade, and still it took until 2018 for Coachella to book her as its first black female headliner.

RANDALL ROBERTS: This is certainly one of the biggest live albums ever released, both in terms of onstage participation and thematic breadth. Across the record, Beyoncé and her band riff on work by Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, Parliament-Funkadelic, Led Zeppelin, second-line New Orleans brass bands and heavy-hitting drumlines. Listening to it at full volume this morning was an overwhelming experience. So much action. So many cues and rhythms, so much narrative momentum. Its melodic and rhythmic quotes need footnotes to fully absorb, and her voice resonates with history.

Still, calling it the best live album of all time may be a stretch. Is this "better" than "Nina Simone at Newport," Fela Kuti and the Africa 70's "Live," "Parliament Live" or "James Brown Live at the Apollo"? What about Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace" or the Staple Singers' "Freedom Highway"?

Hell if I know, but it ranks way, way up there.

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Amazing Grace - 69th Berlin Film Festival, Germany - 30 Oct 2017

Aretha Franklin recorded her "Amazing Grace" album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles.

(Amazing Grace Movie LLC)

MAKEDA EASTER: I agree with Sonaiya: Beyoncé's "Homecoming" at Coachella was a revolutionary act. Performing such a black show in such a white space was a way to say to so many people, "I see you," even if most people in the audience didn't quite get it.

As someone from Houston, whose family is from Mississippi, I did get it. "Homecoming" is a way of saying my family's culture has value.

While I didn't attend an HBCU, both of my parents did. I grew up going to HBCU football games. I remember waiting in anticipation for the halftime show. To watch the drum major strut out and the band play soulful versions of my favorite songs. To see the beautiful black dancers in the stadium bleachers absolutely kill it. My cousin was a Jackson State University Prancing J-Sette (the innovators of the style of dancing seen at Beyoncé's Coachella performance), which is still a source of pride for my family. "Homecoming" takes me back to that place. It makes me proud to be black. It makes me proud to be black and from the South.

This album is a piece of black history.

KELLEY: One of the songs that stands out the most to me is the bonus studio cover of Frankie Beverly & Maze's "Before I Let Go." That '80s classic is absolutely treasured in the black community, providing the soundtrack for many of our fondest memories of celebration and togetherness. It's the perfect addition to the album, and a timely reminder of Beychella's message of black excellence.

la-et-ms-homecoming-review

A scene from "Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé."

(Parkwood Entertainment / Netflix)

WOOD: "Homecoming" is also the rare live album whose audience has likely already consumed — live, via YouTube or now on Netflix — the concert in question.

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What it offers, in other words, is the pleasure of experiencing the show again — of being reminded of the shock and awe, but also of being able to savor the countless details that flew by you in real time.

Listening now, I'm amazed at the intricacy of the marching-band arrangements in "Sorry" and "Party" and the lushness of the vocal harmonies in "Say My Name"; indeed, the singing throughout is shockingly precise, given how much was happening around Beyoncé onstage.

ROBERTS: As the most successful and popular musician of her generation, the mere mention of Beyonce's name prompts an avalanche of images and expectations. Unfortunately, her musicality is rarely at the front of the conversation. The genius of issuing "Homecoming" as a recording is that it strips away all the eye candy — the choreography, the fashion, the visual syncs — until what's left is sound.

Cranking in your car, say, the transition from "I Been On" to "Drunk in Love" or the foot-stomping intro to "Party," is an invitation to hear her as a consummate bandleader and musical scholar.

EASTER: I'm glad that Randall used the word "genius" to describe "Homecoming." There are people who believe (and years ago I was one of them) that Beyoncé was a performer fabricated by a team of handlers, with little creative input into her own persona and product. That's just not true.

There have been discussions about this before, but the word "genius" is so rarely used to describe women. Oxford defines genius as "exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability." So yeah, it's fair to say that Beyoncé, and this work, is genius. I hope "Homecoming" cements that. And I hope we can start considering more women geniuses.

Beyoncé Leads YouTube To Record-Setting 41 Million Viewers On Coachella Streams - Tubefilter

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 12:00 AM PDT

For the past eight years, YouTube has offered up live streams from the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which brings the top names in music to the California desert. This year, that broadcasting deal delivered particularly strong returns for the world's top video site. Thanks in large part to a lauded, historic performance by Beyoncé, YouTube's Coachella streams amassed 41 million unique viewers during the festival's opening weekend.

That viewership represents the highest-ever total for a music festival live stream, according to data shared by YouTube. The video site's Coachella audience grew by 75% over the previous year.

While Beyoncé's set wasn't the only one to draw a lot of eyeballs, it certainly led the way. At peak viewership, 458,000 unique accounts accessed YouTube's broadcast of the Saturday night set, which featured guest appearances from Jay-Z, Destiny's Child, and a full marching band, among others. That digital audience was the largest-ever for a single Coachella stream, YouTube said.

Fans who attended Beyoncé's performance have also reached millions of viewers on YouTube. This clip, which shows the set's bombastic introduction, has picked up six million views in just three days:

This isn't the first time the partnership between YouTube and Beyoncé has proved lucrative for both parties. Back in 2013, Queen Bey selected the video site for the surprise release of her self-titled visual album. In the first two days after that album became available, Beyoncé's official channel received approximately 25 million total views.

Elsewhere, other social media platforms had good reason for their own cele-Bey-tions. According to data from analytics firm Talkwalker, the superstar's set resulted in 2.8 million social media mentions.

Beyonce and JAY-Z Enjoy Date Night at Game 3 of NBA Finals -- Find Out Why Twitter Is Going Wild - Entertainment Tonight

Posted: 05 Jun 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Beyonce and JAY-Z Enjoy Date Night at Game 3 of NBA Finals -- Find Out Why Twitter Is Going Wild | Entertainment Tonight