“In search of something real...”

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Welcome to

Music Week...

Moment Of Truth

Ahead of releasing his first memoir, Rebel With A Cause, industry legend Darcus Beese gets animated with Music Week this issue, tackling a host of topics from A&R to AI and his memories of working with Amy Winehouse. One subject that crops up is his reaction to the venomous diss tracks traded between Kendrick Lamar and Drake earlier this year. Interestingly, it’s not the winner that he dwells on so much as what it represented for the industry. “[The beef ] was a burst of excitement that we don’t have enough of, it just woke people up,” he said. “I love that it became this water-cooler moment. When people ask if there are still ‘moments’ in music, you point to things like this.” Indeed, when you turn to thinking about how many of those musical water-cooler moments we’ve seen in recent memory, there are perhaps nowhere near enough of them as we’d probably like. Kendrick and Drake aside, Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour arriving in the UK was assuredly a capital M, capital OMENT, as was Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter country takeover. Glastonbury, of course, served up a host of them. And there was another that really jumped out at me owing to its peculiar nature: Charli XCX and her latest album Brat. What was so striking was that – aside from the brilliant music, the unexpected The Girl, So Confusing Version With Lorde and the star’s natural charisma – Charli engineered a big global moment out of Brat’s lo-res, garish green cover. In an age where artwork is often reduced to the size of a stamp on DSPs, and where some even question what purpose it has in the streaming era, this rare feat became even more impressive to me. The artwork was a key point of separation against a lot of today’s sleek, manicured launches. It could have been another Charli XCX album, instead it felt like so much more. “I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong,” Charli told Vogue Singapore of the cover that doubled-up as a guerrilla marketing masterclass. “I’d like for us to question our expectations of pop culture – why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad? I’m interested in the narratives behind that and I want to provoke people. I’m not doing things to be nice.” So it was that, for a good while, the internet was seemingly painted snot green in tribute to Brat. It was the point when Twin Peaks legend Kyle MacLachlan changed his Instagram profile to his name Brat-style that it really hit home for me, personally. Between the Brat-inspired flags at Glastonbury and the articles mourning the closing of the green ‘Brat wall’ in Brooklyn, its cultural impact is still ongoing. I’m personally really inspired that album artwork could achieve this much. We’ve seen beef and tours make headlines. We’ve seen artwork. I can’t help but wonder what else we’ll see supercharge some more big moments this year. We need more of them.

George Garner, Editor-In-Chief musicweeknews

@musicweek musicweekinsta