Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

Beyonce has recently won a Grammy for her song Single Ladies, featuring the memorable line “If you liked it you should have put a ring on it.” Rather than simply not caring about it — my normal reaction to an awards show — I instead found myself disappointed and a little bit angry at the choice made by the panel of “industry experts” this year.

It should not have been surprising. The music industry uses the Grammy’s as a reward to the artists that toe the company line, or to make up for past mistakes — for instance, they finally got around to Neil Young, who spent his 50 year career being insufficiently commercial — and the song’s a hit with a superstar behind it.

But from another perspective, Single Ladies is simply awful. Not musically, but lyrically — it is about a young woman who broke up with a boyfriend of three years because he did not propose. The verses imply that she’ll be happy to come back, if he changes his mind and will “put a ring on it” and own her. Her words, not mine.

It’s not the commitment — it’s the ring. Buy me. Own me.

A strange message to be sending in this day and age, and not one that should be celebrated and showered with awards. But somehow the LA Times felt that the chorus demanding a ring somehow promotes the empowerment of women. The Toronto Star went a step further and declared it to be an “anthem for women” in the tradition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, or Aretha Franklin’s Respect, reporting that the position the song takes — essentially that love doesn’t matter and a woman can be purchased — “has a powerful feminist message.”

Part of my taking such umbrage with the selection — giving a Grammy to a huge hit by a huge star is hardly off the wall, after all — can be found by placing this in the context of my own situation.

Having recently proposed myself, the suggestion in the song — that had I not done so, a “strong” woman would leave for lack of receiving a ring — angers me.

Doing pre-shopping research for the ring I bought led me to site after site which suggested (either politely or bluntly) that if I fucked up the ring choice, Karen would say “no”.

They were aiming, like Beyonce, to tell me that the ring is the thing.

The ring is not the thing. An engagement ring is a token, something to remember the moment in which two people agreed to get married. It is not merely jewelry, like a birthday gift might be. The woman does not say “yes” or “no” to the ring. They say it to the proposal.

Or they should.

Perhaps Beyonce and the Big Bad Blog have just teamed up to identify a contributor to a high divorce rate.

observations and opinions beyonce, divorce, engagement, feminism, marriage, music, rings

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)

Tech and World, observations and opinions ACTA, anti-conterfeit trade agreement, books, copyright, cory doctorow, e-books, go to hellman, law, libraries, music, piracy, publishing

	Wired gives us their Top 20 iPhone applications of 2009.
Last.fm gives us their Top 40 artists of 2009.
Susannah Breslin gives us her top blog posts of 2009.	Adam P Knave gives us his Top 10 comics of the decade.
2009: A year in reading.	The top ten things that should have happened, but didn’t in 2009.
National Geographic provides us with the Top Ten fossils of 2009.	Need a New Year’s resolution? Here you go.
Wired gives us 5 legal cases that defined the musical landscape in 2009.	Movies! Ten movies you might have seen this year, but shouldn’t have. And Ten movies you probably haven’t heard of, but should watch.
	Cracked gives us their top 5 … everything of the decade.
The Best of the Big Bad Blog

linking 2009, best of, books, cracked, decade, dinosaurs, fossils, google, lady gaga, last.fm, movies, music, national geographic, new year, reading, resolutions, the big picture, wired

A perplexing story unfolded over the first few weeks of December, as Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name, originally released in 1992, made it’s way to the top of the UK charts just in time for Christmas. The UK media makes a big deal over what happens to be the top selling song leading up to Christmas day, making it into a big story. Additionally, one could not avoid those people who were working with the Rage Against the Machine Christmas #1 campaign. For the first time in thirty-three years, I was actually aware of the battle for the number one single at Christmas.

As much as I like Rage Against the Machine, and as amusing as the campaign was, one word continued to echo around my head: Why?

The artists themselves, of course, would like to be number one. It means that they are selling more songs than anybody else. Always a good place to be. But why did the fans care? Why should people time their purchase to make an impact on the charts — doesn’t that just deprive you of having the music when you want it? Many people appear to have bought a song they already had, in order to help push that song to number one … that is just strange. The goal became the chart position itself, as though being number one makes a song (or a band) better than it would have been without it. Or more successful. Or more popular.

None of this is true. The chart is merely a representation of what people happen to be buying — it makes no statement about the quality of the music.

Take, for example, Led Zeppelin. They have never had a number one song. In 1971, they released their fourth album. It remains a popular little collection of songs, boasting oft-heard numbers such as Stairway to Heaven. It was released in November, just in time for Christmas. The Xmas number one that year? Benny Hill, singing Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West).

On May 5th, 1973, Led Zeppelin broke the record for the number of people attending a concert. The number one song at the time? Dawn (featuring Tony Orlando), Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree. Of course, that was knocked off shortly thereafter by Wizzard with See My Baby Jive.

I cannot think that anybody actually believes that Dawn or Wizzard were more popular than Led Zeppelin in the early 1970s (or at any point in time). Nor are people apt to suggest that many people consider Ernie to be a better (or more popular) song than Stairway to Heaven. It just happened to sell a large number of copies over a short period of time.

The presence of number one hits do not make Dawn and Tony Orlando or Wizzard into more successful acts than Led Zeppelin, from any perspective — financial, aesthetic, critical, or otherwise. Nor does the Christmas number one battle mean anything in regards to Rage Against the Machine or Joe McElderry. The former has its legacy pretty much written — their big hits and influential work was done 15 to 20 years ago. The latter has just released his first song, and (presumably) his career is still ahead of him, whether or not that song was number one on Christmas day.

The Guardian has suggested that the campaign is a good thing, that it shows that the chart reflects the “democratised” nature of purchase-by-download. I disagree.

The presence of Killing in the Name Of at the top of the chart is merely a victory of viral marketing via social networks over the television marketing of shows such as X Factor. Neither is much to my liking. Rather than having a music chart that can reflect the music that people in December 2009 like and enjoy, all this battle does is remind us that what drives music sales is not the quality of the music being produced, but the quality of the marketing behind the music.

The Facebook group, and overall campaign is simply a marketing campaign. A free marketing campaign, which record labels will certainly attempt to emulate in future years, attempting to get nostalgic adults to knock their children’s music from the number one spot with their superior purchasing power. A true “victory for pop” (to borrow the phrase from The Guardian) would be for a song to gain momentum without a “grassroots” marketing campaign on Facebook, or a season of television to promote the singer. It would be for people to discover a piece of music, love it, share it, and watch it grow in popularity.

Music is not — or should not be — about the chart or the marketing. It should be about the music. The campaign that put Rage Against the Machine at number one simply shows how far away from that we are.

Not all of it is bad, however. The benefit of having a grassroots campaign is that the people involved in the marketing actually care, network, and bond. In this case, those behind the Rage Against the Machine campaign are also trying to support Shelter. As this is a charity that I like to support, I’d suggest that you might want to make a donation.

observations and opinions Benny Hill, chart, christmas, Dawn, Joe McElderry, killing in the name, led zeppelin, music, number one, pop, rage against the machine, rock, See My Baby Jive, Stairway to Heaven, Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree, Tony Orlando, Wizzard, Xmas