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Mister Cee’s acknowledgment that he is grappling with his sexual identity comes amid the gradual easing of hip-hop’s internalized homophobia. Over the last couple of years Frank Ocean, the soul singer and affiliate of the hip-hop crew Odd Future, openly discussed his love for a man; ASAP Rocky and Kanye West have loudly disavowed homophobia (though Rocky visibly struggled at the MTV Video Music Awards last month when put on stage next to the openly gay basketball player Jason Collins), and Jay Z voiced his support for marriage equality.

This reflects a generational shift in attitudes in the culture at large, a slight change in the class positioning of hip-hop’s mainstream, and a broadening of hip-hop’s fan base. Antigay sentiment has long been part of that world — two decades ago there were virtual witch hunts to root out rappers who might be gay — but as hip-hop becomes more central to pop culture, its values are evolving. It’s no longer tenable for hip-hop to be an island.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/arts/music/homophobia-and-hip-hop-a-confession-breaks-a-barrier.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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For better or worse, the spread of digitized agriculture is changing the very nature of what it means to be a farmer. Henry Fincher, Hunter’s dad, is 58 and has been farming since he was a kid. “I picked a lot of cotton by hand, dragging it in a sack,” he says, standing in his spotless cowboy boots and blue jeans in a bare dirt field adjoining the one I watched his son plant. Back then, in between planting and harvesting seasons, “we’d hunt all winter, and fish and swim all summer,” he says. “Now, when you’re not in the field, you’re on the computer.” The Finchers have 134 fields split into multiple planting zones, and the data for each needs constant updating. The family also has to track everything from the weather to stockpiled grain inventories in the overseas markets they sell into. All of which is just fine with Johnny Verell. “I don’t wanna be out in the sun rebuilding a tractor engine,” he says. “I’d rather be on the computer side.”

Over the past century, mechanization has shrunk the proportion of Americans working in agriculture from 41 percent to less than two percent. In coming years, families like the Finchers may continue to make their living from the land, but their jobs won’t involve much interaction with the actual dirt. John Deere and other companies are prototyping machines that won’t need any driver at all. It won’t be long before you can control a tractor via a laptop in your living room, just as today’s air-force pilots fly drones over Afghanistan from an air-conditioned control station in Nevada. American agriculture may soon be just one more business run from a cubicle farm.

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– http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/field-datastream-65371/

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The Beastie Boys released Paul’s Boutique in 1989, and immediately its Dust Brothers’ produced sound collage was hailed by critics. It was widely known at the time that the album contained multiple samples, but all the sources weren’t immediately clear. In TufAmerica’s original complaint, the plaintiff stated that “only after conducting a careful audio analysis” was it able to “determine” that the Beastie Boys had sampled its music.

That allegation raised a provocative issue: If the copying was so minimal as to avoid detection, was the appropriation sufficiently substantial to be deemed an infringement?

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– http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/beastie-boys-cant-escape-pauls-628260

lupe fiasco – peace of paper cup of jayzus

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In the Clinton-Reagan era, for instance, the right often used culture and foreign policy to convince economically struggling Americans to vote against bigger government. But a mountain of survey data—plus the heavily Democratic tilt of Millennials in every national election in which they have voted—suggests that they are less susceptible to these right-wing populist appeals. For one thing, right-wing populism generally requires rousing white, Christian, straight, native-born Americans against Americans who are not all those things. But among Millennials, there are fewer white, Christian non-immigrants to rouse. Forty percent of Millennials are racial or ethnic minorities. Less than half say religion is “very important” to their lives.

And even those Millennials who are white, Christian, straight, and native-born are less resentful of people who are not. According to a 2010 Pew survey, whites under the age of 30 were more than 50 points more likely than whites over 65 to say they were comfortable with someone in their family marrying someone of another ethnicity or race. A 2011 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that almost 50 percent of evangelicals under the age of 30 back gay marriage.

Of course, new racial, ethnic, and sexual fault lines could emerge. But today, a Republican seeking to divert Millennial frustrations in a conservative cultural direction must reckon with the fact that Millennials are dramatically more liberal than the elderly and substantially more liberal than the Reagan-Clinton generation on every major culture war issue except abortion (where there is no significant generational divide).

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– http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html

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In the era of post-punk and grunge, groups ruled and singer-songwriters were thought limp and uncool. Solo artists tried to muddy that distinction by adopting handles that sounded like band names—bandonyms, as I’ve called them, such as Smog, the Mountain Goats, or Palace. Drawing on the “old, weird America” (in Greil Marcus’ problematic phrase) of country and hillbilly music was another way that artists who leaned toward introspective acoustic music could find a niche and some crucial mystique. There were many kinds of alt-country, but one of its functions was as a refuge for the singer-songwriter in an inhospitable time.

Underlining that fact is how quickly many of the best of them shed the country trappings. Most had resisted the alt-country label in the first place, with a typical Gen-X wariness toward branding—enough so that the genre’s flagship magazine No Depression felt compelled to tag itself the journal of “alternative country music (whatever that is).” But once they’d gotten established, many such artists started trucking down more esoteric roads.

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– http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/09/the_lumineers_and_mumford_sons_what_they_could_learn_from_neko_case.single.html

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Pop music is full of famous dates: Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Aug. 1, 1981, MTV’s on-air debut.

Another, Feb. 15, 1972 — when federal copyright protection began to apply to recordings — has less recognition. But a recent string of lawsuits argue that licensing issues tied to that date may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to singers and record labels. If the suits are successful, they could also bring a headache of liability to satellite and Internet radio services.

On Wednesday, the three largest record companies — Sony, Universal and Warner, along with ABKCO, an independent that controls many of the Rolling Stones’ early music rights — sued Sirius XM Radio in a California court, saying that the satellite service used recordings from before 1972 without permission. Even though federal copyright protection does not apply to these recordings, the suits say that they are still covered by state law.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/business/media/big-record-labels-file-copyright-suit-against-sirius-xm.html?ref=todayspaper

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When it comes to advertising, Facebook has long maintained that it can freely use a person’s name, photo, comments and other information in advertising as long as it shows the ad only to people who already have rights to see the underlying information. For example, if you compliment Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte in a post that can theoretically be viewed by your Facebook friends, the coffee company can pay Facebook to broadcast that comment to all of your friends to improve the chances that they see it.

That kind of advertising, known as a sponsored story, is valuable to advertisers because it looks like a product endorsement from a trusted friend rather than a traditional ad.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/technology/personaltech/ftc-looking-into-facebook-privacy-policy.html?ref=todayspaper