“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer,” it read.

Bowie’s death was confirmed by his son, Duncan Jones, who tweeted, “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all.”

The singer released his latest album, Blackstar, on his birthday on Friday. The New York Times described the album as “typically enigmatic and exploratory.”

In a career that spanned decades and incorporated various personas, including Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Bowie was known for his innovative and wide-ranging musical styles and his highly theatrical stage presentation.

John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, highlighted Bowie’s influence on rock in the 1970s, singling out the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust for the “Ziggy Stardust” persona that Bowie adopted.

Covach adds:

“Jim Morrison had flirted with the persona of the Lizard King already in the late 1960s, and the donning of a persona in UK pop singing could be traced back at least to Screaming Lord Sutch in the early to mid 1960s. Like Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel at about the same time, Bowie’s performances became theatrical in ways that focused on the persona, and these shows took rock performance to new production levels, with greater emphasis on staging and costumes.

“Bowie’s creative and performing persona would change from album to album and from tour to tour, permitting him to transform his music in ways that fans might not have embraced in other artists (Madonna would adopt a similar strategy beginning in the 1980s).”

The New York Times reports:

“Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theater: something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leaped into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified.

“He also pushed the limits of ‘Fashion’ and ‘Fame,’ writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown.”

Bowie’s popularity hit another peak in the ’80s with the release of Let’s Dance. Hit singles from that album included the title track as well as “Modern Love” and “China Girl.”

In addition to his musical career, Bowie was an actor, appearing in films including The Man Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth.

Bowie is survived by two children and his wife, the model Iman.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Blurred Lines” topped the charts in 2013. At the time, there was much speculation about the similarities between Gaye’s classic and the new song. Nonetheless, it was wildly successful.

According to court evidence, Thicke and Williams earned more than $5 million from the song’s success. Rapper Clifford “T.I.” Harris Jr., who raps on the song, made more than $700,000. Harris was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The map was created by Paul Lamere, who seems to have been caught by surprise by the popularity it gained after he posted it this week. And while he admits in the comments section of that post that there might be ways to improve his map, he certainly started an animated conversation with it.

“Yesterday I spent 45 minutes making a map to accompany a blog post, today I spend all day answering questions about it,” he tweeted. He later added, “Any second now I expect I’ll be getting a call from Seventeen Magazine for a photoshoot.”

The map caused a stir as people shared it on Facebook and Twitter. In discussing how their home state did, many also talked about the relief or disbelief the map inspired in them.

Those who were frustrated – “R.E.M.’s not from Maine!” “I’m from South Carolina and I’ve never heard of Hillsong Unlimited!” – might not have realized that despite appearances, the map depicts artists that distinguish states and regions from one another. That is to say, it doesn’t list your state’s most popular musical act; it lists the act that sets your state apart from all the others.

That point was lost on some folks, who were pushed down a confusing path by headlines that promised to reveal “Your State’s Favorite Music” or something along those lines.

Lamere is the director of developer platform at The Echo Nest, a tech company that works with streaming music services such as Rhapsody, SiriusXM, iHeartradio, and Rdio.

The findings “are based on the real listening behavior of a quarter million actual online music listeners,” says Marni Greenberg, the communications director for The Echo Nest. The map reflects the choices of listeners who have zip codes associated with their accounts.

And they emphatically do not reflect the popularity of artists in states. Instead, the data aims to reveal the differences in preference among states and regions.

Here are the five states whose assigned musical act was comparatively unloved by the rest of America:

• Alaska: Ginger Kwan (No. 33 vs. No. 12,062, for a gap of 12,029)
• Hawaii: J Boog (No. 40 vs. No. 4,703 for a gap of 4,663)
• Louisiana: Kevin Gates (No. 15 vs. No. 1,359 for a gap of 1,344)
• Wyoming: Dirty Heads (No. 48 vs. No. 1,334 for a gap of 1,286)
• South Dakota: Hinder (No. 42 vs. No. 1,154 for a gap of 1,112

One thing that might have helped to confuse some folks is that for some states, the map reflects what you might expect. George Strait represented Texas, for instance, while Bruce Springsteen’s name was on New Jersey and Phish was in Vermont. But in other cases, names seemed out of place.

Among the findings, the artist with the smallest gap between their appeal in a state and nationally was Sufjan Stevens, who (as you might expect) was big in Illinois, at No. 38. But he’s also doing well nationally, coming in at No. 68 for a gap, or “delta,” of only 30 spots.

As Lamere points out, he used several rules to populate the map. For starters, the acts must have music available on the streaming services whose data he consulted. He restricted the list of candidates to the top 50 artists in the target state.

And there could be no repeats. If two or more states all listen to the same artist, the one with the largest population got the name, while the others slid down to their second – or possibly far lower – choice.

For example, we can look at Washington, D.C., which doesn’t seem to be on Lamere’s map but is in an app that allows comparisons between states, regions, or the nation as a whole. With that in mind, we’re told people in D.C. would be more likely to listen to Phosphorescent, because the artist is ranked No. 44 in the district and No. 189 in the U.S.

And in an interesting twist on the metrics, Lamere’s tool lets us look at things from the other side of the prism, as well. The biggest gap between what’s popular nationally and what’s hot in D.C. exists in the person of Luke Bryan, we’re told. He’s at No. 48 in the U.S. but only at No. 647 in the district – a gap of 599 spots. Chris Brown and R. Kelly are next in line, with gaps of 121 and 99, respectively.

We should note that in our tinkering with the music app we’re using the default setting of 200 spots for “depth.” If you change that — dipping into a deeper well of music, essentially — you would probably get different results.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Six nights a week on The Art Laboe Connection, Laboe takes requests from his loyal listeners, who tune in on more than a dozen stations in California and the Southwestern United States.

This week, he’ll be hosting his annual series of Valentine’s concerts, featuring the “Oldies But Goodies” he’s played for decades.

Laboe, with his welcoming baritone voice, has won his share of accolades over his long career. Among others, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1981 and a spot in the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2012.

But it’s the adoration of Laboe’s fans that keeps him going.

“You have a beautiful, handsome voice,” caller “Leticia” recently told Laboe on the air. “You’re in the right field.”

Somewhat flustered, Laboe replied, “You’ve got me blushing.”

In Love With Radio From An Early Age

Laboe’s story starts in 1925, when he was born Arthur Egnoian in Salt Lake City.

He says from the moment his family got their first radio, he was hooked.

“I was 8 years old and we plugged it in, and I told my mom, ‘Mom, the box is talking!’ ” Laboe recalls. “And after that, she couldn’t tear me away from this radio.”

By the time he was a teenager, he was on the air himself with a low-watt ham radio.

“I’d talk to neighbors and I’d give them a phone number once in a while,” Laboe says, “and I could get a call or two.”

He served in the military during World War II, and his training for the U.S. Army Signal Corps helped him to talk his way into a job in radio. It was a station manager at KSAN in San Francisco who said he should change his last name from Egnoian to Laboe.

An Early Pioneer In Rock ‘N’ Roll

By the mid-1950s, the newly renamed Art Laboe was hosting his own show in Los Angeles, just as rock ‘n’ roll was bursting into the scene. And Laboe wanted to be part of it.

“People are playing Doris Day, [and] ‘Que Sera, Sera,’ ” Laboe says. “And I’d say, ‘OK, Mothers, gather up your daughters. Here comes Art Laboe and his devil music!’ ”

Even early on, Laboe was an innovator. He would get out of the studio and broadcast live from now-defunct Scrivener’s drive-in restaurants in LA. People would sit in their cars, windows rolled down, and shout out requests.

“He understood that cars and music and teenagers go together, especially in Los Angeles,” says Josh Kun, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.

Kun says the on-air requests — with messages to loved ones serving in the military, or even in prison — have always been the key to Laboe’s appeal.

“He’s recognized that playing songs on the radio is never just about playing songs on the radio,” he says, “that playing songs is about building communities and it’s about connecting to the most intimate, most painful, most emotional aspects of people’s lives.”

Over the decades, Laboe has worked as concert promoter, helped produce new artists, and was one of the first people to sell compilation albums with his “Oldies But Goodies” series.

But on one station or another, Laboe has remained on the radio — and stayed with his listeners.

Among LA Latinos, Laboe An ‘Icon’

Somewhat surprisingly, this 88-year-old Armenian-American has his most ardent following among Latinos.

A group called the South El Monte Arts Posse has been gathering oral histories and photos of the city’s early rock ‘n’ roll scene and its connections in Mexican-American life. Laboe is part of that tradition.

Rubén Guevara, a 71-year-old musician, attended a recent event held by the Arts Posse. And he says Laboe has provided the soundtrack to a lot of life in Southern California.

Laboe played “music we fell in love to, got married to, raised kids with,” Guevara says. “And he became, you know, a really constant family member.”

Luie Delgado, 36, says that Laboe has listened, without judgment, to people of all backgrounds, “taking messages and names and names that were familiar, names that were even in Spanish.”

He says what makes Laboe’s show powerful, is “just knowing that you were being heard.”

No Plans To Retire

Laboe says it’s “difficult” to think of leaving the business: “I’m still a radio guy,” he says.

It’s even harder for his fans to think of him going off the air.

Susan Straight, a writer and professor at the University of California, Riverside, says she grew up listening to Laboe and still calls in with her own dedications.

“I think of him as timeless,” she says. “And I have to confess, I have never, ever thought about there being a night, when Art Laboe’s voice wasn’t there.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

But he was something else, too: He was a person who believed deeply that people should sing, in groups, with harmony, in public — and not just in church. He was a passionate director of probably thousands of pickup choirs, formed at the beginnings of performances and disbanded when they were over. That became even more true as he got older and his voice weakened, but it was true all along.

Seeger’s album Singalong Sanders Theater was recorded in 1980 at Sanders Theater in Cambridge. On it, he plays — and, when necessary, teaches the crowd — “L’Internationale” and “If I Had A Hammer,” but also “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” and even “Hole In The Bucket.” (He was not kidding about things you would think of as camp songs. Ever.) He explains how “Acres Of Clams,” a song about digging for clams in Puget Sound, originated as the 19th-century song “Old Rosin The Beau,” a flat-out old-time pun, and how it went through several variations as, among other things, a campaign song. He teaches them a version of “Old Time Religion” that rhymes “Aphrodite” with “see-through nightie” and uses the expression “I’m a Zarathustra booster.” He sings “Down-a-Down,” a song that spends several verses building up to a punch line about a failed hookup attempt, and he tells them the story of the Homestead Strike.

And always, always, on this record and others, he’s yelling for the tenors and trying to give them their note. These shows were attended by a lot of people who liked to sing and liked to sing in harmony, so they had a built-in advantage. And you can get guys to jump in on a low part. And you can usually get women to sing the melody and an improvised alto part. But oh, tenors. You have to encourage tenors.

But most enchantingly, he leads a “long meter” version of “Amazing Grace.” He explains that long meter means, “No matter how slow I go, don’t stop singin’. Just take a new breath and keep on goin’, and nobody’ll know the difference.”

(Just take a new breath and keep on goin’, and nobody’ll know the difference. Pete Seeger’s Guide To Life, through singing, Part One.)

He takes them through the first verse, the one they all know — “Where’s the tenoooooors?” he sings at one point — pausing on every chord to let it settle and to underscore any note that might be missing. They’re following him, and they’re following each other, and they’re still learning how to make an “s” sound, as a group, with any sort of coordination.

And then he calls out, line-by-line, the verse fewer of them know. “Shall I be wafted to the sky,” he shouts, and they sing it back to him. They’re getting stronger by then. They’re sounding more and more like a choir. It’s lovely. They finish the verse, and they go back to the beginning.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now –”

And it is here, on “now,” the third time through the melody, that suddenly, abruptly, spine-tinglingly, they are perfect. And he knows, because he held them on the first “now” for about five seconds, but he holds them on this one for 10. They are all suspended, surrounded, momentarily flawless musicians.

Pete Seeger understood something fundamental about humans and music, which is that many people can’t sing on key, but all crowds can. Even without rehearsal, public choirs can be stunning to listen to and thrilling to be part of. And he believed that everyone should do it, that people should retain the ability to get in a room and sing, because it was good for you, and because it taught people to pitch in and be brave.

There’s an old Weavers record where he’s leading a singalong of “Michael Row The Boat Ashore,” and — after making sure the tenors know their part — he says this: “Don’t let your neighbor look at you peculiarly if you sing too loud. You kick ’em in the ribs and get ’em singin’, too.”

(Don’t let your neighbor look at you peculiarly if you sing too loud. Pete Seeger’s Guide To Life, Through Singing, Part Two.)

There are a million Seeger records floating around out there, originals and compilations, and lots of Weavers stuff, too. (Beware the early Weavers releases from Decca, though, because they include the hilarious “Goodnight, Irene” that starts with that goofy violin and which I think either Seeger or Lee Hays referred to in the documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t That A Time as a presentation of the group as “a Barbie doll and three stiffs.” It might not have been “stiffs,” and I can’t locate the movie anywhere to double-check, but it was something equally withering.)

But for me, you want to go for the live records — that Singalong, or his Carnegie Hall concert that includes him singing other people’s songs like “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and “My Ramblin’ Boy.” There are live Weavers recordings as well, and they’re equally wonderful.

Seeger was an activist for many, many causes, including many that he would undoubtedly have listed above public singing in terms of urgency. Still, his impassioned belief that people should sing, loudly, in front of each other, with throats open and heads back? That’s a big part of what I learned, and one of the many debts I owe him.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

They’ve got a zillion categories showcasing all kinds of great and interesting music (really!) in all kinds of genres (really!). But when it comes to awards night, you see a tiny selection of awards (eight or nine, maybe, in three hours), together with a bunch of performances ranging from the flawless to the weird thing that happened last year involving Frank Ocean’s video legs.

And every year, Stephen Thompson of NPR Music joins me for a live discussion in which we try to come to terms with our love of some of this music, our frustration with other parts of this music, and our advancing age. We sort of love the Grammys, the way you love a relative you wouldn’t necessarily want to move in with, but who always sends you home from dinner saying, “So THAT happened.”

Sunday night’s ceremony is scheduled to include a Lifetime Achievement Award for The Beatles (finally, some love for those guys!), all kinds of filler (yay!), and of course performances from folks including Madonna, Katy Perry, and — have no fear — Taylor Swift, because it appears that that’s the law.

Our comment section below will be open, and we especially love using it to entertain ourselves during the commercials, so please leave your comments right down there (running them in the chat box is way too distracting for everyone, we’ve found) and we’ll try to surface some of our favorites.

We’ll be here at about 7:45, warming up for the 8:00 show. Please join us.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

There’s a simple solution for at least one of those: Abolish the Best New Artist category altogether.

Of course, there are those who would call for the abolition of the entire enterprise. But even accepting the framework and mission of the Grammys at face value, Best New Artist is an odd duck. It’s predictive at best (and the only explicitly predictive award, at that) and patronizing at worst (and the only explicitly patronizing award, at that).

Take, for example, the nearly annual discussion of the “Best New Artist curse.” This year’s model seems to have focused on “Royals” singer Lorde, who has received four nominations in major categories like Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Album but not, alas, Best New Artist.

In arguing that Lorde should be thankful for that snub, Forbes’s Ruth Blatt takes exactly two sentences to make a comparison that hits on the exact problem with the category: Jon Landau’s famous review stating, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Just as that review set expectations that Springsteen was apprehensive about living up to, argues Blatt, so should Lorde be relieved that she can avoid the spotlight that a potential Best New Artist win would bestow upon her.

This, like the more general cataloguing of previous winners and assessment of the worthiness (or un-) of their subsequent careers, is frankly madness. It is based on the understanding that, alone amongst the 82 Grammys being given out this year, Best New Artist is awarded not for the work of the past year but for the work the performer will be doing in years to come. It professes to honor an artist now for what they will do in the future.

At the same time, Best New Artist carries with it the less-generous whiff of being a Grammy with training wheels. Grouping together performers purely on the basis of when their careers began (or, as the case often is, took off) is the recording industry equivalent of setting aside a kids’ table at its biggest annual event. It creates a minor-league award that makes the implicit argument that the nominees aren’t strong enough on their own amongst more established artists.

That’s insulting to the people the National Academy Of Recording Arts And Sciences is claiming to honor, all the more so when the nominees are also up for other awards (as are Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Kacey Musgraves and Ed Sheeran this year). In those cases, a Best New Artist nomination is redundant. For artists without any other nominations (like poor James Blake), it’s a consolation prize, a condescending pat on the back that says, “Good job… for a rookie.”

And that’s saying nothing of the many unique ways that Best New Artist offers NARAS to embarrass itself (beyond the usual, anyway). Lauryn Hill won in 1999 as a solo artist, two years after winning two Grammys (including Best Rap Album) as a member of the Fugees. 2001 winner Shelby Lynne accepted her award by saying, “13 years and six albums to get here.” And by the time Fountains Of Wayne were nominated (but didn’t win) in 2004 on the occasion of their first and only top 40 hit, they’d already released three albums (two on a major label) and had been the subject of a feature in People magazine.

So in the end, you have the most poorly-defined of all the Grammy categories (itself quite an accomplishment) that salutes performers for things that haven’t happened yet — when, that is, it’s not implying that the nominees aren’t quite ready for the big time. Best New Artist may date back to the second-ever Grammys, but plenty of categories have been discontinued since then. The Oscars retired their Special Juvenile Award in 1961 (allowing Patty Duke to win in a straightforward Best Supporting Actress race two years later), and the Golden Globes dropped the variously titled Promising Newcomer/Best Acting Debut/New Star award after 1983. It’s time the Grammys followed suit.

(And Song Of The Year is for the composition, while Record Of The Year goes to the recording proper. So now we’ve cleared that up.)

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.