Music Tuesday: Lollapalooza, old-school hip-hop and supporting East Africa

This week we're recovering from Lollapalooza after three days and in the sun and storms of Chicago, IL. We also travel back to the birth of a genre in honor of one of those that made it great. And finally, we showcase a Bob Marley & The Wailers classic, re-released today in support of Save the Children's East Africa campaign.

You'll find all this and more on youtube.com/music, where each day we serve you up the tastiest morsels from the world of music video.

Lollapalooza 2011
Twenty years ago Perry Farrell founded the traveling circus of a festival that was Lollapalooza. Now with its roots firmly planted in Chicago, the three day extravaganza continues to grow, mixing the biggest names in music with a dizzying array of bright young stars. This year YouTube brought the festival to the world, live streaming 39 great acts from across the weekend including headliners Coldplay, My Morning Jacket and the Foo Fighters. Check out some highlights in the playlist below.



Old-School Hip-Hop
In music, you gotta know your history and appreciate the artists who laid the foundation for today’s tunes. Today is Kurtis Blow’s birthday, which put us in mind of the golden age of hip-hop when rap battles on your front stoop, wheels of steel and gold chains were the rage. To celebrate an era whose influence is still resonating today, we put together a playlist of the best videos of the era from folks like the Fat Boys, RUN-DMC, Slick Rick and the Sugar Hill Gang. The music holds up, and trust us—so does the fashion.



High Tide or Low Tide
A devastating food crisis continues to impact millions of children and their families across East Africa. Today, Save the Children and the Marley family re-release the 1973 song 'High Tide or Low Tide' to raise funds for food, water and medicine. The project is supported by Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Justin Beiber and many others in the entertainment industry, and the video was crafted by Oscar winning director Kevin Macdonald.



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Music Tuesday: Lollapalooza Week on YouTube, and more

Can’t make it to Chicago this weekend to check out Lollapalooza on its 20th anniversary? We’ve got you covered. Starting at 11:45am PT this Friday, you’ll be able to watch four festival stages live on youtube.com/lollapalooza. The webcast will run all weekend long and feature a few bands you might have heard of: Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Muse, Damian Marley and Nas, Bright Eyes and many more. See the full list of bands participating in the webcast here.

To celebrate, we’ve been featuring video premieres from some of the biggest names playing the festival/webcast. On Monday, the Foo Fighters unveiled their affecting “Garage Tour” short film, which follows the band as they play intimate shows in people’s garages across the country. (Warning: the first vignette might make you cry.) Today, we feature headliners My Morning Jacket. We’ll have more premieres from bands playing the webcast through the week; keep checking back to youtube.com/music.

My Morning Jacket curation
My Morning Jacket takes to the homepage today with a curation of some of their favorite videos. We’re still over the moon about the amazing clip from a Jim Henson short they chose, which is so beautifully edited it feels like music, even though it’s not. The band also shows a marked predilection for jazz and Marvin Gaye, which is hard to argue with. And in honor of their participation in the Lollapalooza webcast later this week, they premiere their video for “Holdin On To Black Metal” with us today.



Global Ghetto Music
In recent years, we’ve seen urban and electronic music circle the globe and shape-shift everywhere it landed. Miami Bass and old-school hip-hop headed to Brazil and became baile funk; house music headed to South Africa and became kwaito. Dance music trickled down to Angola and became kuduro. A few years ago, M.I.A. grabbed headlines for tapping into this rich vein of global funk. Today we showcase bands who are picking up where she left off, marrying their local sounds to hip-hop and electronic source material.



Toro y Moi “How I Know” video premiere
And last (but by no means least!), we debut a brand-new video from the genre-evading indie/psych/chillwave phenom Toro y Moi (aka Chaz Bundwick). “How I Know” is easily one of the best songs off of Bundwick’s lauded Underneath The Pines, a track that marries his gauzy vocals with damaged Burt Bacharach-esque pop and a palpable sense of longing. Put it together with a video that references movies like Goonies, Poltergeist, Ghostbusters and Victorian ghost stories, and you have pure genius. The video was directed by Jordan Kim, whose wonderful animation work you might know from the hipster kids show Yo Gabba Gabba.



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Music Tuesday: Bjork, Mick Jagger and bidding farewell to Amy Winehouse

The death of Amy Winehouse on Saturday has dominated music headlines. This week on youtube.com/music, we commemorate her talent and mourn her passing, while also turning our gaze to a famous rocker’s birthday and a video premiere.

RIP Amy Winehouse
Amy Winehouse came into the music world as a singer-songwriter who had the phrasing of a world-class jazz singer and the swagger of a hip-hop star. She left it as a tragedy and cautionary tale. Winehouse was just 27 years old when she died—the same age as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. It’s both auspicious and grim company to keep, and Ms. Winehouse fulfilled both attributes, grabbing the world’s attention with her ferociously good music (which succeeded, in no small part, thanks to the contributions from her borrowed band The Dap-Kings) and then slowly squandering that attention with increasingly addled behavior that was fueled by her multiple addictions.

After the story fades, the music will remain. People may think of the bravado-laden “Rehab” as her signature song, but the flipside of Winehouse’s bravado was intense vulnerability, which you hear in spades on wonderful songs like “Love Is A Losing Game” or the deceptively upbeat “He Can Only Hold Her.” To pay homage to Winehouse, we shied away from her official music videos and looked for live performances that let you experience her towering talent more directly -- as well as her charm and humor.



Happy Birthday, Mick
Rock’s most dynamic frontman turns 68 years old today. We salute the Jagger-meister with a playlist of videos capturing his onstage antics through the years.



Bjork “Crystalline” video premiere
The Icelandic singer has made a career of subverting expectations and pushing boundaries, so it’s no surprise that her upcoming album Biophilia is in fact not an album but an app that’s due out in September. You can chew on that, or you can check out her mystical new video for “Crystalline,” which debuts with us today.



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Music Tuesday: Portugal. The Man and vintage global sounds

Summer music festivals are in full swing here in the States. Music fanatics gathered in Chicago this past weekend to attend the Pitchfork Music Festival, and to celebrate, we rounded up videos from some of the best acts appearing there. Last week we also took a look at parodies of Tyler, The Creator’s “Yonkers” video. The unofficial head of the Odd Future hip-hop crew is controversial, but it’s clear his aesthetic has pushed a lot of buttons—and the results are hilarious. And if you need a little mindless fun, we threw up a playlist of ‘80s Summer Party songs for your (guilty) pleasure, which leads us into this week’s heavy dose of retro music.

Portugal. The Man’s sci-fi obsession
People label the enigmatically-named Portugal. The Man an indie rock band, but take one listen and you’ll hear these guys are drawing straight from the classic rock songbook, whether it’s The Beatles, Mark Bolan or Led Zeppelin. That grounding in musical history gives a sense of warmth and even inevitability to their songs—this is sweeping music that frequently sounds bigger than its years. The band also happens to be huge film buffs, which translates into a body of videos which range from the epic to the strange, and which are always visually arresting. Today they take to the homepage to celebrate their new album In The Mountain In The Cloud and to share their two major obsessions: kung fu and sci-fi, with a heaping helping of Wu-Tang Clan thrown in for good measure.



Global Retro
A music movement is afoot. The sound is vintage psychedelic, funk and soul recordings from remote corners of the globe. The labels are Analog Africa, Soundway Records, VampiSoul...the list goes on and on. In the past few years crate-digging for undiscovered music from countries like Ghana, Nigera, and Colombia has been raised to the level of an art form—and the gems these label unearth have given music lovers a new cause for celebration. Now the labels are making videos to introduce us to the often psychedelic radness that went on in other countries while the rest of us were listening to The Beatles...or were more likely not even born.



Joe Clausell “Hammock House”
Continuing in the vintage vein: New York dance music DJ Joe Claussell was recently given unlimited access to the vaults of the classic salsa label Fania Records. Fania was home to the titans of New York salsa, from Celia Cruz to Hector Lavoe. Faced with such riches, Claussell dug deep, remixing a melange of Latin soul and salsa cuts for his new album. We’re psyched to premiere a new, extended video that features the DJ in his native habitat, playing music that still defines the city that never sleeps.



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Music Tuesday: The Needle Drop, fresh faces and more

It’s been a busy few weeks on youtube.com/music. We celebrated the July 4 weekend in the U.S. with a playlist of music to BBQ by and took a look at the women of Americana. Last Tuesday we were wooed by indie rockers YACHT, who made a completely adorable video introducing their curation of the YouTube homepage. We also paid homage to the Latin Alternative Music Conference, a gathering for Latino buzz bands that took place in NYC last week. Then it was on to a haunting new genre of music, and a look at the latest in live performances on YouTube.

Introducing The Needle Drop
This week we debut a new monthly series from Anthony Fantano, the DJ and music critic otherwise known by his channel name, The Needle Drop. Anthony quickly became one of our favorite music reviewers on YouTube for his witty and perhaps nerdy insights into a broad range of music. Sure, he skews indie, but as he admits himself, that’s only when he’s not reviewing major label releases, hip-hop or metal. His serious engagement with the music is matched only by his entertaining screen personality, and this week he begins a monthly round-up for us of his favorite releases, complete with music videos and reviews.



Fresh Faces: July
Oodles of under-the-radar musicians find a home for their work on YouTube, and every month we feature four of them on the homepage. Today we profile four very different artists who bring strong, distinct perspectives to their work. Shankar Tucker is a young clarinetist who got obsessed by Indian classical music, with awesome results. Jayanti’s now-burgeoning career got started when a friend took a video of her singing a song at dinner one night. LaTosha Brown is a crazily talented singer who actually stopped performing eight years ago and now heads the Gulf Coast Fund, a social justice philanthropy organization. (San Francisco micro-label Porto Franco Records caught one arresting video of her singing recently, and we decided it deserved a feature.) And we just liked Faded Paper Figures’ style.



Kurt Vile “Baby’s Arms”
Vile’s deceptively simple song gets its power from its stripped-down aesthetic, and it’s bolstered by an extraordinarily lo-fi video which was shot entirely on a smartphone. This is the kind of one-two punch you have to love.



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Music Tuesday: Mystery bands, Buddy Holly and more

Things have been popping on youtube.com/music over the last week. Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s son Seun just released a new album, and in honor of the potent genre his dad created, we put together a playlist of Afrobeat essentials. We also joined the world in celebrating pride week last weekend with a clutch of anthemic songs new and old. And we turned our attention to England, where the Glastonbury music festival raged. We remembered Glastos past and heard from a young band named Viva Brother, who played the festival for the first time and guided us through the experience. Oh yeah, and pop star/actress Selena Gomez debuted her new album (with commentary) on Sunday. On to this week!

Mystery bands
With the release of Shabazz Palaces’s full-length debut Black Up this week (which you can listen to in its entirety here), we found ourselves thinking about disguises, and all the bands over the years who’ve used them. Shabazz Palaces offers an avant-garde take on hip-hop; the group is helmed by Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets, but he hid behind the moniker Palaceer Lazaro for several years and still refuses to name his collaborators. Butler isn’t the first to cloak his musical experiments in a veil of mystery. This week, we present some artists who have used anonymity to fuel their boundary-pushing work, starting with San Francisco provocateurs The Residents and moving through the leftfield R&B of The Weeknd (who seem to be linked with Drake), the pop culture pastiche act Nike7UP, British oddities Hype Williams and more.



Buddy Holly raves on
Buddy Holly forever altered the course of rock’n’roll with his astonishing 25 hit songs—all of which he penned and recorded before he died in a plane crash at the age of 22. Don McLean famously sang that the day the plane crashed was “the day the music died,” and it was hard not to agree with him. But nothing proves Holly’s music lives on like Rave On Buddy Holly, a tribute album that features everybody from CeeLo Green to Patti Smith covering his songs. We check out a few tracks from the album as well as other tributes to the rock’n’roll pioneer.



Breakbot “Fantasy Jacques Renault Remix”
With “Fantasy,” the French producer Breakbot turned out a song that could have come off of Michael Jackson’s “Off The Wall” circa 1979. But really it’s the video that had us at hello: a mash-up of roller-skating videos from the 1970s and ‘80s that practically screams “summer.”



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Music Tuesday: Other Music, Terra Naomi and Pete Rock

Summer is finally underway in the northern hemisphere, and while new releases may be slowing down, youtube.com/music is getting busy. Neo-soul songstress Jill Scott graced us with a playlist of her inspirations over the weekend, the ever-charming Alicia Keys celebrates the ten-year anniversary of Songs In A Minor with an invitation to the YouTube community and the music world mourned the loss of Clarence Clemons, the gentle giant who played saxophone with Bruce Springsteen for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, everybody from Bon Iver to Pitbull are releasing new albums today. Later this week we’ll feature a contest, another video premiere and some very special coverage from England’s Glastonbury music festival; be sure to check out youtube.com/music over the weekend for updates.

Other Music recommends...music!
When we started inviting independent record stores to curate playlists of their favorite music, we had no idea that so many of you would be watching. More than 500k views later, Amoeba Music’s playlist is still turning people on to good music, so this month we head to the East Coast to see what’s popping at Other Music, the New York record store known as a home to all things indie, experimental and adventurous. They came up with a creative collection of videos which we’re featuring on the homepage today.



Terra Naomi
One of YouTube’s early music stars, Terra Naomi set the template for many who followed. Her song “Say It’s Possible” featured one of the first crowdsourced music videos; five years later, she’s releasing a new album and a new crowdsourced video, which she’s premiering with us today. The video is directed by Alex Albrecht and made in conjunction with iPhone app Hipstamatic and pulls images from over 10,000 entries from around the world. She also shares a playlist of some of her favorite cover songs of all time.



Smif-n-Wessun & Pete Rock premiere the album Monumental
Smif-n-Wessun (later known as Cocoa Brovaz after a legal dispute over their name) helped define hardcore hip-hop lyricism with a string of successful, critically-lauded albums back in the 1990s. Pete Rock has been in the game just as long, an emcee and producer who helped define jazz-hop alongside acts like A Tribe Called Quest. He went on to become one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s go-to producers, crafting tracks for everyone from Raekwon to Ghostface Killah. Monumental proves the duo’s tag-team rap style is still on lock, while Pete Rock’s production never misses the mark — and often recalls his late, great colleague, the venerated J Dilla. Check it out now, one week before release date.



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Music Tuesday: Eminem’s live Q&A, new jazz and dubstep meets G-Funk

It’s a quiet week on the new release front, but on the video front, things are popping. Perhaps the biggest debut was Katy Perry’s new video. The pop vixen performs as her alter-ego Kathy Beth Terry, and the video features none other than Rebecca Black and other familiar faces. If that doesn’t float your boat, check out what else is happening on youtube.com/music today.

Eminem’s favorite collaborations
How many EPs generate this much buzz? Eminem and fellow Detroit rapper Royce da 5'9 go way back -- the duo met in 1997 and immediately clicked. They formed Bad Meets Evil and recorded a few songs, but then Emimen got signed to a major label and, well, you know the rest. Though Royce appeared on The Slim Shady LP, various beefs led the friends to fall out until a mutual friend’s death reunited them a few years ago. Now they’re back in the studio, and Royce’s skillful rhymes seem to have invigorated Eminem: he sounds looser and more playful than you’ve heard him in years. You can see their chemistry in the video, which emphasizes the lyricism and wordplay with painted graphics. Today, Eminem picks his favorite collaborative videos to celebrate the release. It’s a Dre-heavy mix, naturally, but he also showcases an EPMD classic and the Junior Mafia evergreen “Mo Money, Mo Problems.” Also, Royce and the famously publicity-averse Mr. Mathers take to his YouTube channel this afternoon at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT to answer your questions live.



New jazz, now
This week, we extract some fresh jazz tidbits for the curious. Top of our list? Ambrose Akinmusire, a young trumpeter out of Oakland, Ca. who has been making waves among jazz fans for his fluid compositions and compelling tone. We’ve also got Norah Jones singing a lovely rendition of “Come Rain or Come Shine” with Wynton Marsalis and a short piece on the new album from the sultry Brazilian vocalist Eliane Elias.



CHLLNGR “Ask For”
This is the first single off of CHLLNGR’s upcoming release Haven. Who is CHLLNGR? The Danish producer has been quietly remixing everybody from M.I.A. to The XX, but that’s not why we love him. First, the creepy video is a win: shot in a forest outside of Copenhagen, nothing much happens, yet you keep watching in rapt anticipation. Something might happen. Equally awesome is the song’s G-funk synthesizer line, which erupts straight out of the West Coast circa 1992 and collides with dubstep’s unsteady bass (currently London’s biggest export). It’s a subtle and smart combination, and it has us looking forward to more from this producer from the north country.



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