Month: May 2023

Colombian star J Balvin is going full speed in the music video for “Toretto,” which is part of the Fast X soundtrack. The three-minute clip starts off with Balvin receiving a set of keys from a man who doesn’t appear on screen, but his deep and hoarse voice gives him away.

“Let me show you how I ride,” the hitmaker tells Vin Diesel. “Buckle up,” the action star responds. “Watch me,” Balvin says before taking off for a ride.

At the end of his drive, the artist boasts to Diesel, “Told you I’m good!” Responds the impressed actor, “Not bad!”

According to a press release, in “Toretto,” Diesel makes his first music video appearance in the 22-year-spanning Fast & Furious films. The video pays homage to the franchise’s history and affinity for cars, speed and family bonds. Balvin’s fast-paced track is part of the soundtrack for Fast X, the tenth film of the series, which is set to arrive in theaters Friday, May 19.

The Fast X soundtrack includes songs by other artists such as Maria Becerra, Myke Towers, Ludmilla, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Jimin of BTS, Kodak Black, NLE Choppa. The soundtrack will also be available May 19 via Artist Partner Group.

Most recently, Balvin — who in total has 35 top 10 hits on Billboard‘s Hot Latin Songs chart — officially joined Roc Nation as a management client, where he will be overseen directly by Jay Brown and Chris Knight. Over the summer, he’ll kick off a series of European tour dates, mostly festivals, beginning with a June 24 performance at the Solydays festival in Paris. You can see the dates here.

Watch J Balvin show Vin Diesel what he’s got in the “Toretto” video above.

For such an enduring anthem that continues to define wild, wild youth to this day, Nirvana‘s breakthrough 1991 hit “Smell Like Teen Spirit” is inscrutable at best. “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido?” Not exactly

According to late Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain‘s widow, former Hole front woman Courtney Love, the lyrics Cobain didn’t use were somehow more byzantine. Love broke down some of the song’s scrapped lines during an appearance on Rob Harvilla’s The Ringer podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, an excellent series that has gone way beyond its title’s promise to tackle the tales behind such classics as the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” and many, many more.

Love noted that some of the cutting room floor lines ended up in Cobain’s published journals, while others have never seen the light of day. When Harvilla asked if she would mind singing a few of them a cappella, Love obliged, first asking the host if he had a guitar while explaining that some were sketches in which Cobain was trying to work out the rhyme scheme for the song.

Love then sang the lines, “Come out and play/ Make up the rules/ I know I hope to buy the truth/ Who will be the king and queen of all the outcasted teens?” While those lyrics don’t resemble anything in the final, another couplet she sang was somewhat closer to the final chorus: “We’re so lazy and so stupid/ Blame our parents and the cupids/ A deposit for a bottle/ Stick it inside, no role model.”

She then went into another verse that went, “Come out and play/ Make up the rules/ Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose/ Out little group has always been and always will until the end.” In a fascinating peek into at the subtle lyrical tweaks that can take a good song into all-time-classic, Love sang another couplet that was close, but not quite final. “Something I bought and don’t deserve/ To know, oh no, a dirty word/ Load up on guns and bring your friends/ I know, I know it’s wrong to offend/ Take off your clothes/ I’ll see you in court.”

She then ran through a verse that, again, provided a window into the germ that became an anthem of several generations. “We merge ahead, this special day/ This day giving amnesty to sacrilege/ A denial, and from strangers/ A revival, and from favors/ Here we are now, we’re so famous/ Here we are now, entertain us.”

Believe it or not, there was even more. “Come out and play and make up the rules/ I know I hope to buy the truth/ Who will be the king and queen of all the outcasted teens… We’re so lazy, and so stupid/ And from Vegas, here we are now, entertain us.” The final bit of lyrical leftovers included the lines, “I’ll take a slide, I’ll be over here/ Sustain a pride from a boring stare/ Just humor them, a relaxing dose/ To have a child is a selfish roast.”

Love said the unused lyrics reveal a alternate universe, what with the lines about the outcasted teens and the one about being famous at a time when the world hardly knew the group, not to mention the bit about Las Vegas, a city she said Cobain had never been to at that point. “The only consistencies it retains are ‘load up on guns’ and ‘our little group has always been until the end,’” she said. “There is no more. There is no other lyrics from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” she added, admitting she tends not to listen to Nirvana’s music.

The lengthy chat also included digressions into her buying Cobain a Leonard Cohen lyric book, the beginnings of Cobain’s private feud with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, which allegedly included Kurt saying Love “wasn’t allowed” to listen to PJ’s “Jeremy” while pregnant with the couple’s daughter, as well as talk about their heroin use and Kurt’s favorite band, The Melvins.

Listen to the episode below (“Teen Spirit” talk begins around the two-hour mark).

In Billboard’s monthly emerging dance artist spotlight we get to know Salute, the Vienna-born, Manchester-based artist making colorful, comfy club tunes.

The Project: Shield EP, released earlier this month on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint.

The Origin: Salute, born Felix Nyajo, was raised in Vienna, Austria, in what they describe as a traditional working-class suburb. “Pretty chill, not too much happening,” they say. “Summers were super hot and the winds were super cold. It was good.”

Between their parents and older brother, the household playlist rotated American gospel, highlife, R&B, soul and hip-hop — but as far as their dance music influences go, video games were crucial. FIFA Street 2 and SSX brimmed with the exciting, frenetic sounds of jungle, grime and U.K. garage and inspired Salute to learn production. 

When they were old enough to get in the mix of Vienna’s small club scene, they quickly hit their ceiling. “I kind of felt a bit suffocated, because I knew nothing was gonna come of me staying there and trying to have a career in music,” they say. To get closer to the industry, they moved to the U.K. in 2014. Going to clubs every weekend served as a crash course in U.K. dance music, from breaks and bass music to house and techno. 

Over the next five years they continued releasing music, including the My Heart mixtape and Condition trilogy, based on themes of mourning. Salute’s sonic shift across these early releases is evident, from syrupy post-dubstep instrumentals inspired by Hudson Mohawke and Mount Kimbie to an acutely more clubby vibe. In September of 2021, their track “Joy” launched Atlantic Records U.K.’s dance imprint Signal >> Supply. And in what must be a career milestone for any U.K. artist, “Joy” also appeared on an episode of Love Island U.K.

The Sound: Salute, 27, describes their style as “fast and soulful house music,” a catch-all term encompassing their many influences including U.K. garage, techno, classic house and French house. It’s also incredibly warm, inviting and cozy — it just feels good.

The Record: Shield is Salute’s first EP on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint. To some, the title connotes visions of protection and defense — literal armor. For Salute, “It’s just comfort. Most of these songs just feel very comfortable to me… Obviously a lot of them are very, but at the same time they feel like a blanket.”

The EP’s opening track, “Run Away With You,” sets this tone with a soaring mix of synths, vocal snippets and accents that, like a sunrise, inspire a mood of promise and possibility. Over a brisk rhythm and ballooning bassline, vocalist No Rome sings, “I would run away with you if you would run away with me, too.” Meanwhile, buzzing lead single “Wait For It” anticipates the ecstasy of partying all night. Made around the same time as “Joy,” it sat in Salute’s vault for years, just waiting for the right moment for release. Similarly, “Feels Like My Hands Are On Fire” has existed in several iterations over the past five years. Salute finally finished it with help from The 1975’s George Daniel, whose careful restructuring added a greater pop appeal.

“Peach” with Sammy Virji is the most recently produced of the bunch. A rolling bassline and crooning vocals coated in a silk finish, it rightfully caused a stir when Salute debuted it at their Boiler Room set last December. The song is also a callback to 2012-2013, the years they call “one of the golden eras of dance music … I feel like music back then was just super fun, and I think that’s one thing that kind of got lost over the years, up until recently.”

Managed By: Will Frost and Luke James of London’s House Of Us

Management Strategy: “Broadly, the strategy is always adapting,” says Frost, “but when it comes to Felix’s records, it’s always been having a huge degree of trust which we’ve built up over the years of working so closely together, around ten years now. When they’re putting together a project, I have complete trust in their vision for the body of work whether that’s creatively in the visuals or the music itself, and they’ve always given me space to help them with the right people to either write a vocal or get the right mix engineer or feature on the record and it all shows in Shield, which is some of their best work to date. 

“Now with the excellent Luke on the management team, the strategy has very much become building a fanbase who will come to watch Felix play. Felix’s sets are so incredible, and the reception and interaction with the crowd because of their skill and energy is unmatched, so we want to maximize that by putting on amazing shows, capturing the atmosphere of the night and building an audience that will buy tickets to experience it for themselves — we are seeing it grow rapidly over the last few months globally and have some really exciting plans as we also develop it in to a live show that still maintains that energy from their DJ sets.”

First Song That Made Salute Love Dance Music: They cite Lethal Bizzle’s 2005 single “Kickback,” which appeared on the FIFA Street 2 soundtrack, as their introduction to grime. “I was completely blown away by it ’cause it was unlike anything I’ve ever heard,” they say. The moment led them down a YouTube rabbit hole where they discovered artists like Dizzee Rascal and Wiley on the way to dubstep, garage and the wider web of U.K. dance music.

Advice Every New Dance Artist Needs to Hear: “Just make as much music as possible. You can’t really skip that step. There’s no way to like, just overnight, become really good. If you’re starting out, what you’ll naturally tend to do is to imitate an artist that you really like, which is a good way to learn production. I actually encourage it. 

“But after a while, you’re gonna have to make a decision about what it is you want to do in music. The only way you can do that is by thinking very intentionally about the space you want to take up. That requires asking yourself questions about what your taste is, what you want to achieve as a DJ or a producer, whether you want to DJ at all, what you want your place to be, why you enjoy making dance music, what it is about dance music that makes you happy. I feel like that allows you to develop a sense of identity, which is something that people who listen to music can latch onto… I think people can really sense when the music comes from somewhere special.”

Why They Make Music: “The most important thing when I make music is I’m having fun doing it, and that makes me really happy. Figuring out how to achieve that has been one of the biggest things for me… putting an idea from your brain into a computer is the funnest part of it all.”

Up Next: Salute is currently on the U.S. leg of their international spring/summer tour, with stops Thursday (May 18) in San Francisco, Friday (May 19) in Los Angeles and their first EDC Las Vegas set this Saturday (May 20.) “I’d hear about [EDC] on podcasts that I was listening to like, ten years ago,” they say. “When I got the offer to play it, I kind of laughed to myself ‘cause like, that’s actually quite crazy.”

After Vegas, it’s non-stop until September: Salute is scheduled to play a full slate of festivals — Parklife, Glastonbury and Defected Croatia among them — while also touring Asia for the first time and later playing Ibiza’s lauded Circoloco.

Tributes are flowing for Andrew Penhallow, the dance music visionary who created twin platforms for the genre, exposing millions of young Australians to DJ culture and electronic tunes through his Volition Records label, and in a live setting with Big Day Out’s Boiler Room.

U.K.-born Penhallow got his career underway in the 1980s when he and business partner Paul Gardiner pooled together $30,000 and set up Gardiner and Penhallow company, otherwise known as GAP.

“Paul got $10,000, I got $10,000 from my then mother-in-law. Then Paul got another $10,000 from his wife’s ex-husband who was a brain surgeon,” he recounted to Scream City fanzine.

Through GAP, Penhallow and Gardiner landed a licensing deal for Factory Records, the label helmed by the late Manchester scene-builder Tony Wilson. Factory Australasia would operate as an extension of that great British label, unleashing its roster of alternative rock and indie gems onto the Aussie market, from Joy Division and New Order, to Happy Mondays and others.

Penhallow learned the business, formed contacts and embarked on a path that would lift dance music from the underground and into the spotlight.

With the formation of Volition Records in the late 1980s, Penhallow assembled a stable of this country’s finest electronic acts, from Severed Heads to Boxcar, Itch-E and Scratch-E, Single Gun Theory, FSOM, Southend, Vision Four 5, and Sexing The Cherry.

The hits would come, thanks in part to the expansion of the BDO and the national rollout of the triple j radio network, which latched onto Severed Heads’ remix of “Dead Eyes Opened,” Southend’s “The Winner Is…” and Itch-E and Scratch-E’s “Sweetness and Light,” an ARIA Award winner for best dance release.

Volition’s acts were at home in the buzzing rave and club scene of the 1990s, but with a Penhallow masterstroke, found a fresh new audience with the traveling Big Day Out, and its Boiler Room, a specialist dance-music space within a wider one-day riot of rock and alternative.

Penhallow’s signings, and other major stars of electronic music, from the Prodigy to Fatboy Slim and Aphex Twin, would pack out the Boiler Room, which he co-produced (the Gold Coast Parklands leg was, appropriately, a site storage room which would reach boiling point late in the day).

At its peak, the Big Day Out, co-founded by the late Ken West and Viv Lees, would sell 330,000 tickets in one round trip. Many would have been exposed to DJ and PA culture for the first time by paying a visit to the Boiler Room, a space that “impacted the electronic live music space in Australia for eternity,” reads a message from the producers of Sydney’s Electronic Music Conference. “Thank you for your incredible contribution, and thank you for the music, Mr. Penhallow.”

Penhallow even had a hand in the breakthrough of OMC and their hit “How Bizarre,” by inviting the NZ group on the 1997 BDO tour.

Volition would reach its end in the late ‘90s, and Penhallow ultimately handed his Boiler Room duties to the next generation. But his legacy is being remember by those who worked with him.

“We’ll miss you so much AP,” reads a social post from Boxcar. “You changed us and Australian music forever, from Severed Heads to Falling Joys, Vision Four Five, Itch-E & Scratch-E, Single Gun Theory, Sexing the Cherry, FSOM, Sisters Underground, Southend, Scattered Order, Ups & Downs…the sensational Robert Racic and Factory Music before that! A.P was a TRAILBLAZER”.

A post from Vision Four 5’s reads: “Definitely way too soon for a man with such drive, passion, energy and damn good artwork – ALWAYS. You’ll be missed Andy – you changed many many people’s lives for the better.”

Details on Penhallow’s death were unclear at the time of writing. He’s survived by his partner Virginia and brother John.