Zack O'Malley Greenburg's Blog, page 7

Music's Biggest Winners And Losers Of 2022

The season of year-end rankings is drawing to a close. So, per an annual tradition dating back to my Forbes days, I’m going to squeeze in one more before the ball drops. Who had the best and worst 2022 in the music business? Here are my picks for three of each, in no particular order.

Bad Bunny

The Puerto Rican superstar transcended boundaries of language and genre in ways once never thought possible, and now he’s cashing in. Singing and rapping in Spanish, his unique blend of Reggaeton and hip-ho...

Jay-Z Green

Jay-Z recently regained his title as hip-hop’s wealthiest mogul, with a net worth of $1.5 billion gleaned from an empire encompassing everything from champagne to startups. Had things gone differently 20 years ago, he might’ve already added automobiles to that list—thanks to a vehicle called the Jay-Z Jeep.

The SUV would have been produced by Chrysler and its Mopar division. Among the features: a butter-cream leather interior, 22-inch chrome wheels and a premium sound system preloaded with every ...

Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2022

“I’m not a numbers guy,” Kanye West once told me in an interview about his Yeezy sneakers. “These things are made to bring incalculable joy.”

West, who now goes simply by “Ye,” hasn’t been bringing much joy of late. His recent outburst of hate speech, namely a string of Anti-Semitic remarks, prompted Adidas to pull the plug on the wildly lucrative footwear deal that made him a billionaire two years ago. As a result, his two-year run in ten-figure territory is over—and hip-hop’s wealth hierarchy h...

Don't Take Me Out To The Ballgame!

The below story also appears in the current print edition of Dan’s Papers. I didn’t end up playing in today’s 74th Annual Artists & Writers Game because I finally got Covid; fortunately, it seems I haven’t infected anyone. I’m doing ok—worst part is having to quarantine from baby Riley. Enjoy the piece!

You never want to make the final out of a ballgame. You really never want to make the final out of a ballgame on the basepaths. And you really, really never want to make the final out of a ballgam...

Don't Call It A Comeback

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The last time you heard from me—aside from in the preamble to this excellent guest essay a couple weeks ago—was just after I became a dad for the first time. I gushed about how Riley had arrived, immediately changing my life in the ways fatherhood is supposed to, and also in ways I’d never imagined.

Riley is now two and a half months old; not only do I love her more ...

Why Mood Is The New Musical Genre

Greetings from paternity leave! Please enjoy this guest post by Tiffany Ng. In addition to doing some fantastic editorial research for me on We Are All Musicians Now and other projects this year, she served as culture editor at the Yale Daily News before her recent graduation. She’s also written for Vogue Hong Kong and High Snobiety— and understands far better than me not only what “the kids” are listening to, but how they’re classifying it. As for yours truly, I’ll be back in action later this m...

For Riley

This is the final installment of my book We Are All Musicians Now. Below, you’ll find my last post before paternity leave: an open letter to my beloved kiddo, Riley Mira Greenburg—in some ways, already a musician herself.

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Dear Riley,

You arrived at 3:06pm on May 20th, in the style of Julius Caesar, and immediately contributed your vocal stylings to Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” as it echoed through the operating room. Shortly thereafter, you ...

Spotify Isn’t Netflix—For Better Or Worse

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I’ll admit it: I spent years mooching a Netflix subscription from a significant other’s ex-boyfriend’s parents. Don’t judge, you’ve done something equally ignominious, and so have millions upon millions of others. So when Netflix recently “announced” that password sharing eats into profits, I was surprised to see the stock plummet 35% in a single day.

To be fair, Netflix shared some additional gloomy news at the same ti...

Books Are Vinyl Albums Now

This is the latest installment of my book  We Are All Musicians Now . To make sure you don’t miss future serializations, subscribe here. Below you’ll find the fourth part of the book’s coda. Enjoy!

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A decade ago, when Penguin published my Jay-Z biography Empire State of Mind, it came with all the bells and whistles associated with big hardcovers, despite my paltry first-time author advance. The title leapt off the cover in embossed yellow acros...

A Coda For Cano

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Ask any baseball fan, and they’ll tell you lefties look better swinging a bat. Maybe it’s because they have a split-second longer to recognize a pitch thrown by a righty, or because they don’t have to twist awkwardly to run toward first afterwards. Then again, as the Washington Post once noted, “We may never ever really know why it’s so beautiful. It just is, okay?”

Back in 2013, the sweetest-swinging lefty on the New Yo...