Post by Fuggle on Dec 7, 2005 21:13:56 GMT -5
Sound Affects
Suits, squares and… spyware?
By: Jordan Deam
Issue date: 12/7/05 Section: Cadenza
Media Credit: www.flaminglips.com
The Flaming Lips
Media Credit: www.rarebeatles.com
The Beatles
Media Credit: www.spike00.com
Public Image, Ltd.
From what I've gathered from talking with my elders, there was a time in popular music history called the Good Old Days. It was a simple and joyous time, a time when bands were excited with the possibilities of sound, when audiences craved what they had never heard before and when the industry hadn't quite figured out how to exploit either side of the market with clinical efficiency.
The precise boundary dates of the Good Old Days are hotly contested: a coworker at my uncle's warehouse last summer, a rabid CSNY fan, insisted that it began with the christening of David Crosby (Aug. 17, 1941) and ended with the Iran Contra affair (which, he claims, happened "right after the Feds shut Woodstock down"), while the goth girl that I lifeguarded with in high school felt it began with the release of the Cure's seminal album, "Disintegration," and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (She didn't offer an explanation). But both would agree on one thing: the Good Old Days are over, and they're not coming back anytime soon.
Case in point: the recently unearthed Rootkit scandal perpetuated by the friendly folks at Sony BMG. For those less intimately connected to the world of entertainment news, I'll break it down: for a few weeks in late October and early November, international supercorporation Sony BMG released select CDs containing a program that would install itself on the user's computer the first time the CD is played. This software decreases the computer's performance, is undetectable by antivirus software and leaves the computer open to a plethora of insidious spyware that, for example, allows international supercorporations to find out whether people who visit Amnesty International's Web site also spend hours at eBaum's World watching videos of people lighting themselves on fire. (Wouldn't you pay to find out?)
Of course, this was a colossal fuck-up on Sony BMG's part, not only because they invaded the privacy of the very consumers from whom they profit, but because it was quickly discovered and lambasted by even the most conservative media outlets. Whereas we all knew since that old lady was sued for filesharing that the RIAA is a group of moneygrubbing bastards, now we have concrete proof that the music industry is, in fact, run by an evil technodemon bent on enslaving the world's population by corrupting its PCs.
But it was not always this way: harken back, reader, to the Good Old Days of music marketing, when filesharing meant humming the melody of the latest Hollies single to your friends, when a portable radio the size of a paperback novel was considered high-tech, and when the Monkees' lack of talent actually caused a minor controversy. We've all enjoyed the music from this period, but while a passionate guitar solo can grow stale after a few decades of rotation on classic rock radio stations, watching corporate assholes fall flat on their faces is, and always will be, timeless. Here are a few of the more feeble and transparent attempts by a group of stodgy, uptight republicans to market a product whose hipness they cannot begin to comprehend:
1) The Flaming Lips play the Peach Pit on "90210"
Any shred of pseudo-ironic indie cred that this bizarre event might grant the show immediately evaporates when Ian Ziering utters a line that will go down in infamy: "You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!" It's understandable that The Flaming Lips hadn't heard of "90210" - anyone who's ever seen the documentary "Okie Noodling" with its companion soundtrack by the Lips will realize that these guys come from a very different world. Likewise, aside from the marginal success of "She Don't Use Jelly," very few people had heard of The Flaming Lips, including, apparently, the management at Warner Bros., who just happened to own all of The Flaming Lips' intellectual property. The stars must have been aligned for an embarrassment of this magnitude to occur in front of a nation of unsuspecting teenage girls.
2) The Beatles release "Yesterday…and Today" in the U.S.
This one requires a bit more explanation: after having their UK-released materials chopped up and reassembled into their American counterparts, the Fab Four got fed up with their management and decided to let their discontent manifest itself creatively. What followed was the infamous "Butcher cover" of the Frankensteinian "Yesterday…and Today," depicting the English boys in butcher smocks, covered in raw meat and the dismembered limbs of plastic baby dolls. Somehow the art was approved for widespread commercial release, until department stores saw the cover and refused the sell them. A "glamour shot" of the group sitting around a piece of inoffensive luggage was pasted on to thousands of the originals; now, you can find framed copies selling for more than $500 on eBay. Yesterday's scandal…is tomorrow's conversation piece, I guess.
3) Public Image, Ltd. Perform on "American Bandstand"
This one is, without a doubt, the Halley's Comet of marketing screw-ups. It is so brilliant in its irony that it's doubtful we'll see another blunder of its scale in our lifetimes. On the one hand, we have Public Image, Ltd., fronted by John Lydon, née Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. A collective of musicians so conscious of their music as a commodity that Lydon often quipped, "We're a corporation, not a band." A group of sneering British punks playing drug-addled atonal vamps that seem to go on into eternity. Then we have the congenial but plastic Dick Clark, surrounded by a bunch of actors paid to play fun, freewheeling teenagers. Of course, it doesn't take long for disorder to set in. Lydon makes no effort to hide his lip-synching and begins harassing the cameramen within the first few bars of "Poptones." The audience, no doubt confused and frightened by the performance, tries desperately to stay in character, but to no avail: by the time the band launches into "Careering," Lydon has incited the faux teenagers to storm the stage. Dick Clark later referred to the episode as "one of the ten best 'American Bandstand' episodes of all time," an opinion that must have taken years of hypnotherapy for Clark to arrive at.
Suits, squares and… spyware?
By: Jordan Deam
Issue date: 12/7/05 Section: Cadenza
Media Credit: www.flaminglips.com
The Flaming Lips
Media Credit: www.rarebeatles.com
The Beatles
Media Credit: www.spike00.com
Public Image, Ltd.
From what I've gathered from talking with my elders, there was a time in popular music history called the Good Old Days. It was a simple and joyous time, a time when bands were excited with the possibilities of sound, when audiences craved what they had never heard before and when the industry hadn't quite figured out how to exploit either side of the market with clinical efficiency.
The precise boundary dates of the Good Old Days are hotly contested: a coworker at my uncle's warehouse last summer, a rabid CSNY fan, insisted that it began with the christening of David Crosby (Aug. 17, 1941) and ended with the Iran Contra affair (which, he claims, happened "right after the Feds shut Woodstock down"), while the goth girl that I lifeguarded with in high school felt it began with the release of the Cure's seminal album, "Disintegration," and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (She didn't offer an explanation). But both would agree on one thing: the Good Old Days are over, and they're not coming back anytime soon.
Case in point: the recently unearthed Rootkit scandal perpetuated by the friendly folks at Sony BMG. For those less intimately connected to the world of entertainment news, I'll break it down: for a few weeks in late October and early November, international supercorporation Sony BMG released select CDs containing a program that would install itself on the user's computer the first time the CD is played. This software decreases the computer's performance, is undetectable by antivirus software and leaves the computer open to a plethora of insidious spyware that, for example, allows international supercorporations to find out whether people who visit Amnesty International's Web site also spend hours at eBaum's World watching videos of people lighting themselves on fire. (Wouldn't you pay to find out?)
Of course, this was a colossal fuck-up on Sony BMG's part, not only because they invaded the privacy of the very consumers from whom they profit, but because it was quickly discovered and lambasted by even the most conservative media outlets. Whereas we all knew since that old lady was sued for filesharing that the RIAA is a group of moneygrubbing bastards, now we have concrete proof that the music industry is, in fact, run by an evil technodemon bent on enslaving the world's population by corrupting its PCs.
But it was not always this way: harken back, reader, to the Good Old Days of music marketing, when filesharing meant humming the melody of the latest Hollies single to your friends, when a portable radio the size of a paperback novel was considered high-tech, and when the Monkees' lack of talent actually caused a minor controversy. We've all enjoyed the music from this period, but while a passionate guitar solo can grow stale after a few decades of rotation on classic rock radio stations, watching corporate assholes fall flat on their faces is, and always will be, timeless. Here are a few of the more feeble and transparent attempts by a group of stodgy, uptight republicans to market a product whose hipness they cannot begin to comprehend:
1) The Flaming Lips play the Peach Pit on "90210"
Any shred of pseudo-ironic indie cred that this bizarre event might grant the show immediately evaporates when Ian Ziering utters a line that will go down in infamy: "You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!" It's understandable that The Flaming Lips hadn't heard of "90210" - anyone who's ever seen the documentary "Okie Noodling" with its companion soundtrack by the Lips will realize that these guys come from a very different world. Likewise, aside from the marginal success of "She Don't Use Jelly," very few people had heard of The Flaming Lips, including, apparently, the management at Warner Bros., who just happened to own all of The Flaming Lips' intellectual property. The stars must have been aligned for an embarrassment of this magnitude to occur in front of a nation of unsuspecting teenage girls.
2) The Beatles release "Yesterday…and Today" in the U.S.
This one requires a bit more explanation: after having their UK-released materials chopped up and reassembled into their American counterparts, the Fab Four got fed up with their management and decided to let their discontent manifest itself creatively. What followed was the infamous "Butcher cover" of the Frankensteinian "Yesterday…and Today," depicting the English boys in butcher smocks, covered in raw meat and the dismembered limbs of plastic baby dolls. Somehow the art was approved for widespread commercial release, until department stores saw the cover and refused the sell them. A "glamour shot" of the group sitting around a piece of inoffensive luggage was pasted on to thousands of the originals; now, you can find framed copies selling for more than $500 on eBay. Yesterday's scandal…is tomorrow's conversation piece, I guess.
3) Public Image, Ltd. Perform on "American Bandstand"
This one is, without a doubt, the Halley's Comet of marketing screw-ups. It is so brilliant in its irony that it's doubtful we'll see another blunder of its scale in our lifetimes. On the one hand, we have Public Image, Ltd., fronted by John Lydon, née Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. A collective of musicians so conscious of their music as a commodity that Lydon often quipped, "We're a corporation, not a band." A group of sneering British punks playing drug-addled atonal vamps that seem to go on into eternity. Then we have the congenial but plastic Dick Clark, surrounded by a bunch of actors paid to play fun, freewheeling teenagers. Of course, it doesn't take long for disorder to set in. Lydon makes no effort to hide his lip-synching and begins harassing the cameramen within the first few bars of "Poptones." The audience, no doubt confused and frightened by the performance, tries desperately to stay in character, but to no avail: by the time the band launches into "Careering," Lydon has incited the faux teenagers to storm the stage. Dick Clark later referred to the episode as "one of the ten best 'American Bandstand' episodes of all time," an opinion that must have taken years of hypnotherapy for Clark to arrive at.