Recently in R.I.P. Category

Michael Jackson passed away on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at the age of 50. The monumental loss has been felt around the world. Jackson was a prodigiously talented singer and dancer -- an icon that transcended borders, race and age. Beginning in 1969 with the Jackson 5, Michael Jackson loomed over the pop landscape like no one before. Thriller, Off The Wall and Bad rank as three of the greatest pop albums of all time. But more than just the music, Jackson understood the value of spectacle in pop entertainment, and his own life took on a mythical quality. Sure, the fall in the '90s was fast and hard, but Rhapsody would like to take this moment to remember the numerous career highlights from the King of Pop.

	LISTEN: Michael Jackson’s pinnacle, the unforgettable Thriller		PLAY: MJ’s best songs not on Thriller
	REMEMBER: Our Editors reflect on the man, the music and his legacy		FAMILY: The greatest music from the Jackson clan
	DISCOVER: Songs from Aaliyah, Jay-Z, Kanye and Bjork that sampled MJ		READ: The Top 25 Pop Albums of the 1980s

I saw Jay Bennett perform just one time apart from his seven-year stint with Wilco at a Detroit dive called the Lager House, in the shadow of the abandoned Tigers Stadium. For me, a huge fan of Bennett's contributions to Wilco and his first solo record, The Palace at 4am, the performance was hugely deflating -- a drunken mess of bluesy, distorted bar-band rock that seemed completely incongruous with the subtle genius who made Wilco records come to life. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy's greatest talent has always been the ability to surround himself with the right musicians, and Bennett's holistic, high-minded approach as the multi-instrumentalist yielded both artists' best work. But that was hardly the Bennett that showed up that night in Detroit; the blown-out versions of tunes from The Palace at 4am grew more defiant as the room grew emptier, ensuring that Bennett would capture onlythe most determined of Wilco's audience who had turned up. Foolishly, I left early.

When Bennett was found dead last weekend, the news murmured through the Sasquatch Music Festival in central Washington State. The cause of death is still unknown, but the circumstances of a public quarrel with his old band followed the news closely. Recently, Bennett had filed a lawsuit against Tweedy for breach of contract and unpaid artist's royalties, stemming in part from his role in a 2002 documentary about Wilco, in which he was unflatteringly portrayed. Even though he was on a recording tear at his studio, Pieholden Studios (named for a Wilco song), and enrolled in post-graduate classes at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (an institution where he'd already earned numerous degrees), his health wasn't good; he was also about to have hip-replacement surgery and the timing of the surgery was linked to the lawsuit in message boards.

But as Wilco fans return to Bennett's recordings, it's clear that his legacy won't be darkened by the clouds that hung over his late life. His legacy is that of a selfless, brilliant musician better at playing other people's songs than his own (many of his songs turn out overly crowded with ideas). He was the brains behind the decade's brainiest band, and an arranger who could transform Jeff Tweedy's occasionally obtuse treatises on yuppie discontent into sparkling, profoundly universal statements. It was this ability -- to see into the guts of a song and infuse it with just the right sound -- that made the musical settings for songs written by Woody Guthrie on the Mermaid Avenue recordings pitch-perfect. In celebration of his stunning career, we revisit some of Bennett's greatest musical moments.

Nick Drake was a genius. There's no doubt about it. But he was a tad too effete for my taste -- a private school flower sprung from the gardens of classic literature and fine poetry. That’s not my world. I’m a clumsy, sentimental dude who shakes hands firmly with phrases like "Be a man about it” and "You’re my girl." This is why I mourn the death of Brit folk icon John Martyn, who died from pneumonia on January 29, thus joining his old pal Nick. Martyn's was an art that spoke to me: funky blues music for lovers that reeks of sex, booze and tears. Here was a guy who once referred to marijuana as "mary jane" because that’s what he actually called the stuff.

I don’t want to say Martyn sang from the heart; that implies I somehow know his essence. But he definitely sounded as if he did. The man could emote like nobody’s business. And yet Martyn was a profoundly avant garde individual, far more so than just about any singer-songwriter of his generation. Anybody who digs What's Going On?, Astral Weeksand There’s a Riot Goin’ On has to track down cult classics like Solid Air and the harrowing Grace & Danger (recorded while Martyn's marriage to singer and collaborator Beverly Martyn fell apart). Both albums are the creations of an artist dissolving the lines between folk, soul, free jazz, ambient electronic music and even dub.

For a long time it seemed as if the only musicians who understood what Martyn was up to were fellow mavericks like Arthur Russell, Talk Talk and Portishead. Nowadays, however, just about anybody tinkering with acoustic guitars and programmed beats -- and there are a lot -- seem to be nicking tricks from the guy. That's cool and all. But in the end there will only ever be one John Martyn. Rest in peace.

Fans of any '60s icon share a similar gripe: the legacy of too many great artists is inextricably tied to too few of their songs in heavy rotation on oldies stations. These select tracks get played and played out, and eventually even the lifelong Beatles fan reaches for the dial during the third daily course of "Yellow Submarine." Today, I cued up the Four Tops after reading about the passing of the band's leader, Levi Stubbs, who died in his sleep in his Detroit home at the age of 72, and was reminded about how this predicament is particularly hard on the stable of artists from '60s Motown: The Jackson 5 is relegated to "I'll Be There"; Stevie Wonder, a Motown artist with as deep and wide-ranging catalog of any, is on three times an afternoon with "For Once in My Life." For the Four Tops, the heavy-rotation hits come between 1964's "Baby, I Need Your Loving" and their final Top 10 in 1973, "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)." Of the handful of stuff between these bookends, some, like The Big Chill-approved "It's the Same Old Song," represent Motown's streamlined mainstream operation. Others, like "Reach Out, I'll Be There," speak to the group's power in the studio. But it's the outlying, oddly successful hit "Bernadette," a tune that is among their most popular and their most enduring, that best demonstrates Stubbs' power as a performer. It's the rare example of a heavy-rotation hit that lives up to its responsibilities. 

by Chuck Eddy

"Manny Farber, a painter whose spiky, impassioned film criticism waged war against sacred cows like Orson Welles and elevated American genre-movie directors like Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller to the Hollywood pantheon, died on Monday at his home in Leucadia, Calif. He was 91...In a famous essay for Film Culture magazine in 1962, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” he lambasted the portentous, meaning-laden cinema of Welles and his progeny and praised the freewheeling, instinctive work of underrated directors of crime, western and horror films." -- William Grimes, New York Times, August 20, 2008.

by Chuck Eddy

Isaac Hayes never could say goodbye. And if few of us anticipated that the Black Moses would finally cross over to the other side -- on Sunday, as has been widely reported, his wife discovered his body next to a still-running treadmill in their suburban Memphis home, and he was pronounced dead an hour later -- maybe it's because he always gave the impression that he could last forever. In fact, that was the main point of some of his best music.

by Chuck Eddy

It's become this ridiculous cliché in recent years to pretend that "such and such people were the rock stars of their day," whatever that's supposed to mean. Just over the weekend, I saw the claim bestowed upon both early '60s advertising bigwigs (in a New York Times Sunday magazine piece about the TV series Mad Men) and old-time magicians (on Antiques Roadshow). But this morning, when I learned George Carlin had succumbed to heart failure Sunday evening in Santa Monica at the age of 71, the obits reminded me of something -- back in suburban Detroit, in 1974, when I was fresh out of eighth grade at Our Lady of Refuge, this fellow lapsed Catholic seemed to me like a bigger rock star than any rock star I could name, give or take maybe Elton John. And when you think about it, it was guys like Carlin and Cheech and Chong and Richard Pryor whose Watergate-era bullsh*t-detection and post-hippie potty mouths set the stage for what rock music -- or, even more maybe, hip-hop -- would eventually evolve into. So if George Carlin wasn't the rock star of his day, maybe spouting the seven words you can't say on television made him a rap star, at least.

by Chuck Eddy

Bo Diddley, who died Monday at 79, inherited a beat that's been traced back through the '30s fieldworker blues chant "Chevrolet" to the millenium-old West African rhythm Kpanlogo, and he helped invent rock 'n' roll, funk, hard rock, disco, heavy metal, '80s pop, new country and rap music with it. (Via talk-rhymed first-person braggadocio in the latter case -- and "Say Man" has to count as one of the original dis records.)

Bo Diddley’s pre-language rock 'n' roll rhythm, the “Bo Diddley Beat,” was permanently embedded in the human consciousness in 1955 when Ellas Otha Bates (a.k.a. Ellas McDaniel, a.k.a. Bo Diddley) appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show playing it, instead of the Tennessee Ernie Ford song he had agreed to perform. The rest is indeed history as Diddley remains one of the three most important figures in the creation of rock 'n' roll and its subsequent offshoots. Like Chuck Berry's and Little Richard’s, Diddley’s influence was pervasive, and instrumental in the formation of the rock vocabulary -- legend has it that early Rolling Stones shows featured the band simply playing the "Bo Diddley Beat" for the entire night to a roomful of ecstatic kids.

by Chuck Eddy

In a February seemingly loaded with music obituaries - reggae pioneer Joe Gibbs, drum legend Buddy Miles, Christian-rock godfather Larry Norman, crunk haven TVT Records - one of the more discouraging was the 13-year-old roots Americana magazine No Depression.

by Chris Ryan

On Monday, February 25, songwriter Stephen "Static" Garret died of an apparent brain aneurysm, robbing pop music of one its most articulate and sensitive voices, even if his own voice was rarely heard.

by Piotr Orlov

Behold, a requiem for the music producer! In 2008, when pretty much any Tom, Dick or Harriet with a Pro Tools set-up and some decent microphones could finagle a “produced by” credit onto the meta-data file of a digital release, let’s take a moment to pay homage to a pair of gentlemen who worked a little harder in creating great music. It wasn’t just different skill sets or historical perspectives that separated Teo Macero and Joe Gibbs from the multitudes of today’s whippersnappers. Macero, who passed away after a long illness on February 19 at the age of 82, and Gibbs, who died of a sudden heart attack on February 21 at the age of 65, also possessed visions (sonic, aesthetic, hell, even commercial) they could share with their collaborators and guide them to a new place. Rare gifts in the age of press-and-record.

by Sarah Bardeen

It's a heartbreaking story: a musician in the prime of his career suffers from blurred vision, goes to the doctor and two days later, he's dead. But Andy Palacio wasn't just any musician. The man championed his native -- and dying -- Garifuna culture, helped revive its disappearing language, and made music that enthralled fans around the globe.

by Nate Cavalieri

After hearing the news about songwriter Dan Fogelberg, who lost his battle with cancer yesterday, it seemed appropriate to cue up his essential hit, "Leader of the Band." Fogelberg wrote it about being the "living legacy" of his father, a community bandleader in Peoria, Illinois, and put it square in the middle of what would ultimately be his career-defining album, 1981's The Innocent Age.