“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/.

Later, they’d get weird; experimental, rebellious, more transparently and transcendentally high than maybe any band ever, at least to hear the music tell it. They became legends, they became celebrities and movie stars. They had a dark breakup like so many great loves, and they went their separate ways, and one of them was shot and one died of cancer, and they became a story as well as a band.

But back then, when they appeared on Ed Sullivan, they were just a band. A really good band, a really popular band, a phenomenally exciting band. But they were a band. And you hear those songs, I mean, “All My Loving.” Is that a great song? Or is it just a really, really, really good song? “Till There Was You,” they borrowed from The Music Man. They stole it from Broadway, the sweetest, corniest kind of Broadway, too. The Music Man wasn’t the Rent or Hair of its time; it was just a pretty little show about an Iowa librarian. Imagine bringing those lyrics to teenagers now: “There were bells on the hills, but I never heard them ringing; no, I never heard them at all till there was you.” If they didn’t roll their eyes, their parents would.

Back Before They Were Genius

That wasn’t all the Beatles were lifting, of course; they were voracious appropriators. Almost half of their first album was covers. And from early on, they were dipping their buckets deeply into Little Richard and Motown, most of all, both directly and indirectly. Not just that though, they would later do country like “Act Naturally,” not to mention “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which sounds like exactly the kind of simple, music-hall ditty their audience might have wanted to get past.

In those early days of getting to know Americans, the Beatles performed songs that would live forever, like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and ones that are for fans, like “This Boy.” These aren’t the songs that people will tell you changed everything musically speaking; purists usually point to later albums — your Sgt. Pepper, your White Album, your Revolver and Abbey Road — for that. At this point, they were pop stars, they really were, so much so that John Lennon was introduced to American television audiences with the caption, “Sorry Girls, He’s Married.” Their music was exceptional, but it was joyfully, spiritedly, danceably pop.

In their later years, the Beatles would appeal to the American mythology of genius: the dark creatives at war over one’s new partner, the trips to see the Maharishi and the flights of fancy like Magical Mystery Tour. Early on though, when they were pop stars, they appealed, and still do, to our fascination with alchemy.

On their own, later, what they produced was sometimes brilliant, but also sometimes … well, common. They read as pop stars again, sometimes shaking their piece of the earth, but more often seeming strangely mortal. Wonderful, but mortal, even before John Lennon died the kind of death that brought about its own songs of grieving, just as Buddy Holly’s death had five years before the Beatles came to the United States.

A Superhero Origin Story

But back then, even those of us who weren’t alive know perfectly well it was a thing that we, on the other hand, have never seen. Not all at once, not in one band. From movements, maybe. From MTV. But not all in one band have we ever watched everything change as fast as everyone pretty much agrees it did. From these guys who would later prove capable of folly and even schmaltz was this explosive, energizing, resonant music that managed to get respect despite being hugely popular with teenage girls, which is very, very difficult to do. Only a few months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, something really good happened. And it was a band.

If arrival in the United States makes an origin story at all, it’s not an origin story like a hard-working professional has; it’s an origin story like a superhero has. The lights come on, the man says “The Beatles!” the band starts playing, and it’s just music on a variety show, but people are still talking about it 50 years later. Why? Is it just the music? Is it just the very good songs and the smart choices of source material? Was it us? Was it Kennedy? Was it timing?

It was the music; musicologists can explain — and could even then — how surprisingly complex some of this material was, and how much more carefully arranged it was than much of the pop available at the same time. And it was appeal that can’t exactly be quantified; you can hear it when you put those albums again and hear a song you love, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually you realize that even the lionized form of this band doesn’t convey how much they sank into our bones, whether we were here for them or not.

I was born the year they broke up for good, only months before Paul McCartney filed a lawsuit to dissolve the band. But of all the bands that weren’t active when I was alive, none comes close to the influence of this one. I can remember putting the records on (we used to have these round black discs with grooves in them and we would scratch them with diamond needles to make music come out). I can even remember what the lyrics looked like on the album sleeves, even though I didn’t have the first clue what a lot of them meant.

When I was in college, over a holiday weekend, a radio station somewhere ran every recorded Beatles song from A to Z, and my friend taped it to cassette and eventually copied it for me. They’d left only one out, and if you could identify it, you could win money. (It was “Please Please Me,” easy to spot since it failed to follow “Please Mr. Postman.” My friend didn’t win.) So for years, I had ratty old cassette copies of Beatles songs, not in album order, but in alphabetical order. It was one of the bands I listened to, even though Lennon had died by then.

Later on it was genius, but that early stuff, that early stuff is as close as you’re going to get to magic. The differences between this band and a million others aren’t easy for a layperson to put her finger on. It’s mysterious: take this band, add this audience, add this music, pick your moment, and it goes. And 50 years later, we’ve never gotten it to happen again.

Many thanks to my pal and amateur Beatles-ologist Marc Hirsh for his help with this piece. Anything good, he helped with. Anything bad was all me.

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/.

This week, Watson talks with guest host Kelly McEvers about a rising star who has made hip-hop serious business, and the advertising tactics that life insurance companies are using to attract young people.

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/.