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dailytomlinson · 4 years

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When reflecting on music’s most influential artists, critics tend to use statistics to measure their legacy—whether it’s a band reaching #1 on the charts, multiple sold-out tours, or albums that represent a generation. Those types of accolades and praise are for bands that, typically, exist within rock with a predominantly sizeable male fanbase, like The Rolling Stones or The Beatles. For English-Irish boyband One Direction, who actually broke one of The Beatles biggest achievements by having five Top 10 debut tracks on the Hot 100 compared to The Beatles’ four, have sold out multiple tours and delivered five albums five years in a row, they have not been regarded as much of an influential force in the music industry as they should be.

Today—on July 23rd 2020—the band celebrates ten years since they first became a band, even if five years of that time was during a prolonged indefinite hiatus while each of the members pursued solo ventures. A decade marks ten years of One Direction and, for the fans, ten years of an impactful legacy the band, both together and apart, has had on their lives.

After being thrown together on The X-Factor back in July 2010, the band did more in five years than most bands do in their entire careers; they released five albums and sold more than 6.49 million copies in just America alone, filmed one concert documentary and one tour film, completed multiple world tours, and pursued philanthropic ventures. All of those things didn’t come without a price, though. Zayn Malik left the band in 2014 due to his mental health suffering. The band toured consistently every year with hardly ever having any personal time off, and add in an album release a year, they were extremely overworked.

There’s a belief boy bands have an expiry date, and it’s likely their management felt they needed to get as much out of the band while they believed they were still relevant. It’s likely that fans would’ve stuck around if the members took time between their albums and tours. In 2015, when the hiatus began, people wondered if One Direction really could ever come back and, if they did, would fans still really care about them?

“One Direction was one of the biggest and most successful bands,” said @TheHarryNews, a Twitter fan update account. “They achieved amazing things in the five years they were together, despite being overworked by putting out albums and touring every year, which isn’t normal.”

One specific thread that ties together every fans’ thoughts when they reflect on why they decided to become fans of the boys in the first place is the carefree and loving rapport the band has with one another. We’ve all seen The X Factor video diaries, laughed over their banter during interviews, and watched every live performance they did to look out for cute interactions between our favourite members. In their own unique way, One Direction helped defy traits typically associated with toxic masculinity; they didn’t shy away from their affection for one another and made that known in interviews and concerts. Their friendship set them apart, made them more real, and through them, we made friendships of our own.

When someone seeks out new friends, they go to where they feel safest: the communities of people who love the same things as they do. Social media not only propelled the band to international audiences, but it also helped many fans meet the people they now call their lifelong friends. “They have impacted my life in ways I never thought a ‘boyband’ could,” said Lauren, a fan from Buffalo, NY. “They gave me the best friends I could ever ask for, helped me when I was lost and thought I had no one. They ultimately helped me find myself.”

Social media did more than just help us make friends. It was also a major catalyst for the band’s success, and a large part is due to update accounts on Twitter that were created by fans, for fans. Fan-created update accounts would document every single movement and moment made by the band’s five members, whether it was live-streaming a concert or updating fans on the band’s whereabouts. For @With1DNews, a UK/Canada-based update account, it’s a labour of true love for the band that “glued them together” in the first place. “We found each other through our 1D fan accounts on Twitter,” they said. “We started talking about the boys, then our lives, and quickly became great friends.”

Even though they started the account after the hiatus already began, they still felt like fans needed One Direction news. “We had noticed there weren’t really any active 1D update accounts left and we knew a lot of fellow 1D fans were still interested in seeing news about the boys’ careers and lives. It was also because we missed seeing 1D together and hearing about them together. We thought, why not create this space that connects them even if they’re now all going their own way.”

Update accounts take as much time, effort, and energy as an unpaid second job; it requires those who run them to schedule themselves accordingly to cover certain times of each day to ensure their fellow fans get updated in a timely manner, and they do as much fact-checking and researching that any other traditional news outlet does.

Even if some critics might not consider One Direction an influential force in the music industry, the impact they continue to have on their fans is what has set them apart from every other musical act. In a scene in One Direction’s concert documentary, This Is Us, a fan breathlessly states “I know they love me, even if they don’t know me.” This type of parasocial relationship to a band is something not many understand; it’s a sense of intimacy that doesn’t require either party to actually deeply know one another on a personal level but is still as meaningful and significant as actual relationships.

A connection with the band is even more prevalent for Amy, a Los Angeles based writer and mum of two, because of the impact the band has had on her family is something that isn’t tangible but has been detrimental to her children’s development. “I have a child with physical and neurological disabilities who, prior to One Direction, was completely non-verbal and really struggling to find motivation and happiness amongst all the doctors and therapy appointments,” stated Amy. “They have done more for her development, including indirectly teaching her to speak and sing, than any therapy she’s ever done. Up until we found the boys, everything was trial and error; trying to find what makes sense to her and would, in turn, make the world make sense to her. Who knew the key would be a ‘silly’ boy band?”

Many fans have expressed that the band is their happy place – the only positive light in their life when things got tough. For so many, the band came at a time when they desperately needed something to help them through difficult situations whether that be pressure from school, jobs, peers, or life in general. Watching the ‘Best Song Ever’ music video, or a funny interview felt like a cure to smile and laugh after a long day. “They were what we turned to when we felt overwhelmed in our own lives. Now, we’re adults, and they still bring us as much happiness as they did when we were younger,” says @With1DNews.

Not only that, but the band has also helped fans gain more confidence in themselves. By helping create a space and community for them, fans who may have felt lonely, different, or struggled to find a place they belonged had somewhere to go now. They made friends who accepted them, endless content that felt like a burst of serotonin, and a band of boys who told them through lyrics how great and valuable they are, songs like ‘Through the Dark’, ‘Diana’, and ‘Little Things’. Through the band, One Direction fans created their own safe space to work out and navigate their own identity; a space that is free from outside shame where they could be whoever they wanted to be because the people they loved the most accepted them for exactly who they are.

Despite the safety found in those spaces, others have given those fans different descriptions: Hysterical. Rabid. Extra. ‘Screamers.’ Those are just a few of the many words that have been used to describe female fans of boy bands, both past and present. Although these words carry negative connotations, they imply something more powerful than any naysayer could understand or try to define: the sheer force that comes with unashamedly loving something so deeply, you don’t really care about anyone else’s opinions.

Young female fans are the most supportive, passionate fanbase an artist can have, yet they are the most trivialized and ridiculed both within and outside of the music industry. At the start of their career, music’s most beloved band The Beatles was a boy band that catapulted into fame because of, not despite, their female fans. It wasn’t until male fans noticed the band’s progression into an experimental sound when they decided to embrace the band and deem them worthy of their support after they began playing ‘real’ music.

Even if there are major similarities between The Beatles and One Direction, the latter is still regarded by many to be a manufactured pop boy band with a ‘teenybopper’ fanbase. The members of the band have consistently embraced and validated their predominantly female fanbase; Harry Styles has been consistently vocal about this matter, going so far as to say “Teenage-girl fans — they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you.”

In ‘Girl Almighty’, the fifth track on their fourth album, Four, the band addressed the way their fans have been misjudged and labelled ‘crazy’ because of their passion and not only applauded them for their dedication and love, but bowed down to them as well; “Let’s have another toast to the girl almighty […] I get down on my knees for you.” Not only has One Direction always known who helped them get to where they are today, but they’ve also never shied away from declaring their respect for them, constantly validating their fans’ feelings.

For One Direction’s fans, a decade of the band’s formation represents ten years of a legacy that will continue on, even if the band never formally get back together. For Amy, it doesn’t really matter if they got their start on a TV talent show because it’s the fans that made them and set the band apart from every other boyband. “What we all created together feels so untouchable in regards to boy bands of the past and ones to come. I think people will look back in awe and see what we see; we’ve been so incredibly lucky to have witnessed the magic of One Direction.”

They might not be aware of it, but One Direction was incredible at predicting what was to come in their own music; “Who’s gonna be the first to say goodbye?” / “But it’s not the end, I’ll see your face again” / “We had some good times, didn’t we? We wore our hearts out on our sleeve” / “We could be the greatest team that the world has ever seen.” In ‘Best Song Ever’, a song that ordinary listeners would not exactly consider overly sentimental or profound, there is one lyric that will always stand out for the fans to represent One Direction’s legacy perfectly: “I hope you’ll remember how we danced.” Ten years later, we haven’t forgotten.

#tmrw magazine #230720 #10years1d #press

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michaeloneillwords-music · 3 years

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Oasis: Knobworth. Cocaine, Caricature and ‘The Culture Industry’s’ wet dream.

This week sees the release of the documentary film ‘Oasis Knobworth 1996’ which marks 25 years since the Manchester rock band played to over a quarter of a million disciples in a field in Hertfordshire across two nights. Obviously brand Oasis couldn’t miss the opportunity to celebrate its own greatness, in what is now being understood and accepted as some sort of era defining moment in pop cultural history. As a native of Manchester, who whether he likes it or not is psychically entrenched in the cities musical and cultural legacy and who was 15 years old when this event took place, I equally cannot miss the opportunity to challenge this retro fetish overstatement and present my own subjective understanding and experience of watching these caricatures of sex, drugs and rock roll as they rose to prominence. Let's face it ‘the culture industry’ has always needed fodder to sell to a teenage audience who in coming of age are flirting with the mask of social identity which is heavily informed by pop culture, and from late 1995 onwards Oasis, led by the brothers Gallagher were that fodder. The juggernaut of utter nonsense that they were peddling really began with the release of their sophomore effort (What’s the story) Morning Glory on the 2nd of October 1995, which to this day has gone on to sell in excess of 22 million copies worldwide, figures that depressingly highlight the state we are in as a species. Upon hearing the album as a 14 year engrossed in pop music culture I immediately disliked it. Gone were the walls of thick guitars, punkish irreverence and embellishments of baggy Northern Psychedelia that marked the best moments of their debut album, instead the listener was subjected to an overly clean, acoustic, commercial sounding record that was lyrically lazy, pedestrian and trite, to me it was and always will be an artistic car crash. It sounded immediately like a band uninterested in challenging itself or its audience, who instead were solely concerned with mass appeal, shifting units and making money. Whilst it should always be noted that the Gallagher brothers made no attempt to hide their aspirations for commercial success, material wealth and brand ubiquity, I simply find such sole motivations a turn off, that, more often than not result in utter dross, the kind that defines Oasis’ discography. Indeed, any ascent to the summit of pop culture will rarely be the sole result of an absolute desire for honest and uncompromising artistic expression, to just ‘make something’ regardless of economic reward or consideration for the consequences of what that expression communicates, represents or signifies. Indeed, such an approach will often come into direct conflict with the bottom line of the music industry, which is solely concerned with profit, monopolistic market control, the dissemination of ideology and projection of archetypes. And so it is that far from the ‘deviant bad boys of pop’ peddled by the culture industry press from 1995 onward, Oasis were actually a very obedient market vehicle for profit, who promoted nihilistic hedonism, idolatry, narcissism, misplaced masculinity, benign sexism, cocaine, lager and a depressing caricature of working class identity, and last but not least a brand of Beatles infused substance devoid pub rock. The ‘culture industry’ had been peddling this sort of shit from the mid 60’s in pop music and long before in general pop culture and as a result dear reader it was obviously very marketable once again to the mid-nineties teenage generation and to many subsequent generations for that matter. The game doesn't change. Oasis were and remain a wet dream of ‘the culture industry’, all too happy to short change a generation of youth culture with their destructive notions of cool, short sighted egocentric one dimensional outlook, and celebration of pack animal conformity under a banner of ‘rock and roll’ which signals ‘defiance’ ‘deviance’ and ‘hope’ but when unpacked and interrogated actually reveals a concession and obedience to the drudgery, depression and anomie of a top down controlled market culture by both the band and its disciples. They were without doubt a grey cloud of hard materialist understanding and sense pleasure that would leave Saint Francis of Assisi empty inside and reaching for a razor blade. I think it was the idolatry, narcissism and the reductionist mask of masculinity (that were all no doubt in the air at Knobworth, I couldn’t actually say as I wasn’t there, I had seen them on 26/11/1995 at the Manchester Nynex, and although I certainly do have deep seated masochistic tendencies everybody has a limit, and once was enough) that the band and its followers displayed that really didn’t sit well with me when the cultural juggernaut of Oasis and Britpop took off. These traits were for the most part distilled, embodied, displayed and performed by the band's frontman Liam Gallagher, a man whose answer to all of life’s existential conundrums is a pint of Carling. To me, Liam always carried a look of someone who had been asked a question they didn’t understand and was just trying to front it out with a gormless stare in an attempt to display some presence of depth and mystique to his onlooking disciples and celebrity obsessed media. When he did speak his articulations rarely got beyond how he was ‘mad for it’, how he was the ‘best frontman’ in the ‘best band’ and when his adopted mask of self-confidence was ever threatened would often bark ‘fook off’ in deflection and defence. Gallagher became the ‘Archetype’ that the modern-day British working class (and wannabe working class) alpha male identity is built on. Replete with feather cut, stone island jacket, adidas originals and cheap cocaine, ready to perform the identity prison they have adopted until the cows come home. I occasionally ponder as to whether the clinging too and performance of such a symbolically material identity merely masks an innate fear, and serves to deny the unpacking and unmasking of the ‘authentic self’, and how that process would more than likely contradict the projected ‘tower of strength’ that is indefinitely projected and protected by this deflective mask. I mean I thought we were an expression of consciousness with the innate capacity for creativity, who are looking to integrate the inner self into the ‘persona’ so as to not be imprisoned and tormented by the demands of the social mask, the gulf between the two and its insistence for the inauthentic? Who knows, and ultimately who really cares in this day and age. In terms of the idolatry, the fans deification of Liam and his brother Noel, alongside their deification of John Lennon, the two Paul McCartney's, Bozo and Poor Weller also really pissed me off when I was 15 and still doesn’t sit right with me today. It's the rock n roll hierarchy-musical establishment-gotta pay your dues-know the classics-they’re a fucking genius claptrap that really gets me goat. I mean fuck off, they've just made a record aided and abetted by an industry who want to flog them to death for moolah, and i’m expected to sit here and believe they're some sort of god like genius that captured the feelings of a mass populace, nah mate, it was capital backed exceptional marketing and mass gullibility. Limmy would capture working class culture in a 20 second video clip shot on his phone for nothing entitled “She’s turned the weans against us” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VaPQflLq0&ab_channel=Limmy) in a far more profound and meaningful way 15 years after Knobworth. Furthermore, music solely informed and inspired by music and music history makes me want piss on my own face. That whole disciple of rock n roll dogmatic cultish crap, we want to be like our hero's motivation is so very depressing. I mean you’re having a unique subjective sensory experience, migrating through your own orbit of experience, and then when you engage with your creative faculties as a singular human being you adopt wholesale the principles and goals of those who’ve gone before you, or equally when simply embodying your identity it’s one built on the fetishization of a vapid celebrity archetype? Really? Really though? You’re not gonna take the opportunity to figure yourself out and project the uniqueness of your experience, reject or accept the external organising principles or merely just ‘mix the fucker up’? Hey who am I to pose such questions I guess, and in the immortal words of Oasis “You have to be yourself, you can’t be no one else”. Ha. I do think that line should now be updated to “you have to be a caricature of yourself because you cannot be anything else” though. Ooooh. Anyway, I shouldn’t really be blaming the current mask of one dimensional male social identity or celebrity deification on Oasis, they’re merely a cog in a machine that reproduces this reproduction over and over. However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that they are Manchester's greatest cultural own goal (shame really cause after the opening 5 or 10 minutes I was thinking we've got a team here), who made and continue to make to this day nonsensical grey groove-less drudgery a viable commodity with posthumous releases and as solo artists. Now that may be easy for me to say, as I was without doubt somewhat spoiled by exposure to the cities compelling history of DIY music from a young age, from the shadowy existential concrete corridors of Joy Division to the sharp witted marriage of high/low brow culture and realism/surrealism presented by The Fall, all the way through to the theological and philosophical street politics of The Stone Roses. Come 1995/96 I maybe expected more, but therein was a lesson for me, never expect, and indeed, always take the art and never the artist, and never ever deify. Musically Oasis were breathtakingly boring, real stodgy laboured stuff, and lyrically, to be brutally honest they were cringeworthy and embarrassing. However, to give them their due they did have conviction, but I’m sure that fellow Northerner Harold Shipman also had conviction in his creative output, but ultimately that doesn’t mean it was any good now does it? To me Oasis sounded like they were sent from the back of a battered cement mixer, or the lounge of the Robin Hood, or from the bottom of an overflowing ashtray on a coffee table in a council flat where shit cocaine is being relentlessly sniffed and Sky Sports News plays indefinitely. Symbolically they may be best defined as a scrunched up and discarded losing betting slip on the floor of a bookmaker’s that is heavy with the air of momentary hope, desperation, and inevitable loss. No thanks. P.S Look, all subjective criticism aside, Oasis spoke to millions and for that I congratulate them, they just never really spoke to me. Initially Liam and Noel were a breath of fresh air with their straight up lads with guitars attitude, riding their obvious desire with endlessly projected self- belief. However, to me there was just nothing after that initial Jab of intent present on Definitely Maybe and in interviews circa 94/95, there was no hook, combination or knock-out punch. Couple that with a general lack of grace, rhythm and finesse in the ring and to me as a spectacle it became boring very quickly, and as the rounds wore on that predictable Jab looked tired and stale, and the self-belief turned to coke fuelled narcissism. The ‘flock identity’ that materialised in the slipstream of their ascent and especially the attitude mimicry that was present then and remains today in the ‘Oasis Fan’ to be truthful is touch tragic. Furthermore, I've always held a deep-seated scepticism of the dynamics and motivations of 'the crowd' at the point of critical mass, especially when corporate power is deeply involved and invested in the relationship between the art and the audience. D'you know what I mean?

#manchester #music #social commentary #philosophy #cultural critique

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natromanxoff · 4 years

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Freddie Mercury and the Wade Deacon/Halewood Connection (by Mike Royden)

...Freddie lived for music, and in August 1969 he seized upon the opportunity he’d been waiting for – to sing in a band. Too impatient to form one of his own, he did the next best thing and found himself a ready-made outfit. His quarry was Ibex, a Merseyside-base trio comprising Mike Bersin (guitar and vocals.) and John ‘Tupp’ Taylor (bass and vocals) and a drummer by the name of Mike ‘Miffer’ Smith.

...“We met the members of Smile at a pub called the Kensington,” recalls ‘Tupp’ Taylor. “We saw them play a couple of times and they were really good. They had a great vocal-harmony thing going. Tim Staffell, their bass player, was a really good singer, and Freddie was a mate of theirs. We’d all sit around and have amazing vocal sessions singing Bee Gees, Beach Boys and Beatles songs. We could do great harmonies because there was three of them in Smile, myself, Mike Bersin, who’d chip in, and Freddie, of course.”

At this point, it was common knowledge among the Smile crowd that Freddie was desperate to get into Brian and Roger’s band. Perhaps joining Ibex might be a way in.

“Freddie hadn’t quite persuaded Smile to take him on as a vocalist,” confirms Mike Bersin. “They thought they were doing OK as they were. So, he said, “You know what you guys need, and that’s a vocalist.’ He was right, too, as John Taylor recalls: “I wasn’t the world’s greatest singer by any stretch of the imagination.” And as Ken Testi reveals “Mike had never been confident about his singing, but had been pushed into it.”

Freddie first met Ibex on 13th August 1969. Such was his enthusiasm, that just ten days later, he’d learned the bands’ set, brought in a few new songs, and had travelled up to Bolton, Lancashire, for a gig with them – his debut public performance. The date was 23rd August, and the occasion was one of Bolton’s regular afternoon ‘Bluesology’ sessions, held at the town’s Octagon theatre. For Ibex and friends, it was the event of the summer. No fewer than 15 bodies, including Freddie, Ken Testi, and the band’s other roadie Geoff Higgins, Paul Humberstone, assorted friends and girlfriends, plus Ibex’s instruments were squeezed into a transit van borrowed from Richard Thompson, a mate of Freddie’s who’d previously drummed in ‘1984’ with Brian May and Tim Staffell.

...The following day, Ibex appeared in the first ‘Bluesology pop-in’, an open-air event on the bandstand in Bolton’s Queen’s Park. On the bill were local band Back, another called Birth, Spyrogyra, Gum Boot Smith, The White Myth, Stuart Butterworth, Phil Renwick and, of course, Ibex. In a report published the day before the Bolton Evening News wrote ‘The last -named act make a journey from London especially for the concert. The climax of the whole affair will be a supergroup, in which all the performers will play together. If the weather is fine the noise should be terrific”.

Remarkably, for such a relatively inauspicious event, Freddie’s first-ever public performance was extremely well documented. There were at least three photographers present, and the proceedings were covered in Bolton’s Evening News for the second time on 25th August. This even featured an uncredited photograph of Freddie, with the caption: ‘One of the performers gets into his stride’ If Freddie wanted to be a star, he was going about it the right way.”

“Freddie really loved going up to Bolton to play with Ibex,” remembers Paul Humberstone. “He was really on form. The band was very basic, but good. They did very reasonable cover versions, and were very loud. That was his very first outing with the band, but Fred struck his pose. Remember him doing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’? He was like that only without the eye makeup.”

“Freddie was shy offstage,” recalls Ken Testi, “but he knew how to front a show. It was his way of expressing that side of his personality. Everything on stage later in Queen, he was doing with Ibex at his first gig: marching from one end of the stage to another, from left to right and back again. Stomping about. He brought dynamics, freshness and presentation to the band that had been completely lacking previously.”

Mike Bersin agrees: “As a three piece, we’d thought it was sufficient to play fairly basic music and not worry too much about stage craft. Freddie was much better at putting on a show and entertaining people. That was pretty radical for us. I thought that’s what the light show was for, you know, we make the music and the audience can watch the pretty coloured bubbles behind us, but Freddie was different. He was so wonderfully camp in that beautifully English foppish way. With hindsight, I recognise the determination to succeed that he had in spades. He demanded to be treated as a star before he was one. His talent and ambition made people react in very different ways, but it wasn't an unpleasant thing.

As the rest of us would wear jeans and trench coats, he was the fur-and-satin man and all the moves and poses he had with Queen, were already there with Ibex, he never imitated anybody, Freddie was Freddie from day one, he was entirely his own creation and a culture shock. He worked extremely hard to be something worth to look at and to listen to. He only had one pair of boots, one t-shirt, one pair of trousers, one belt and one jacket. Still he remained immaculate. We had some gigs in Bolton which were very significant to the band. While we were getting ready, Freddie had been backcombing his long hair to make it stand out more and twitching himself in the mirror for ages. I eventually yelled at him: 'For God's sake, stop messing with your hair, Freddie!', to which he responded: 'But I'm a star, dear boy!'. There is not a lot you can say to that. In many ways, you felt Freddie almost wasn't real.”

“I don’t think Freddie developed,” reckons John ‘Tupp’ Taylor. “The first day he stood in front of that crowd, he had it all going. It seemed as if he’d been practicing for years to be ready. We’d only ever sang together as mates before that. We’d never done anything by way of trying it out. He was going to be in the band and everyone was happy with that. Once Freddie was in, we changed in loads of different directions. We began to play ‘Jailhouse Rock’, for a start! I think that was the first thing we did with him on stage.”

Back in London, a revitalised Ibex began to make plans. “Freddie and the band very quickly became inseparable,” remembers Ken Testi. “They were spending large parts of their time together, working out a new set which included different covers and some original stuff.”

Mike Bersin: “Freddie was the most musical of all of us. He was trained on the piano, and he could write on the black notes. He said ‘We’re never going to get anywhere playing all this three-chord blues crap, we’ll have to write some songs.’ A couple of things came out of it, but they’ve all vanished now. I can’t imagine they would be very satisfactory anyway – largely because he was working with me, and my understanding of music was incredibly rudimentary. We used to argue about whether we should put in key changes. I’d say ‘What do you want a key change for?’ And he’d say that it made a song more interesting, it gave it a lift. I’d think ‘Why has he got this thing about gratuitous key changes?’ The idea of changing the key of a song just because it made it more interesting to listen to was really alien to me.That said, Geoff Higgins remembers at least one decent Bulsara-Bersin tune: “ They did a great song called ‘Lover; the lyrics used to go, ‘Lover, you never believe me’ and Fred later turned it into ‘Liar, you never believe me’ It was almost the same tune, but not quite. In fact, it was similar to ‘Communication Breakdown’, they used to rip off Led Zeppelin a lot.”

That said, Geoff Higgins remembers at least one decent Bulsara-Bersin tune: “ They did a great song called ‘Lover; the lyrics used to go, ‘Lover, you never believe me’ and Fred later turned it into ‘Liar, you never believe me’ It was almost the same tune, but not quite. In fact, it was similar to ‘Communication Breakdown’, they used to rip off Led Zeppelin a lot.”

Before they knew it, however, the summer was over and it was September. Mike Bersin returned to Liverpool to begin his pre-diploma years at the local art college, at what is now John Moores University. With nothing better to celebrate than the new term, the pre-dip freshers threw a party, and who better to provide the entertainment than Mike’s band, Ibex? Subsequently Ibex’s third and final gig took place on 9th September 1969 at the Sink Club in Liverpool, a former soul-blue hang out in the basement of the Rumbling Tum – a place Ken Testi remembers as a “pretty dodgy, post beatnik café”.

...Geoff has a further revelation, which called to mind Paul McCartney’s presence in the audience at the first-ever recording of John Lennon with the Quarry Men back in 1957. “Smile were in Liverpool that night… playing another club, possibly the Green Door. And because we were at the Sink, they came down to see us.” The rest of the story is almost too good to be true. Brimming with encouragement for their flamboyant friend Brian May and Roger Taylor wasted no time in joining Freddie on stage (or as near as they could get.) They probably bashed out a few Smile numbers and this occasion marked the first time the three of them played together in front of an audience. “We virtually had Queen in there,” remarks Ken Testi, “although of course we didn’t know it then.” However, here’s the sting: although Geoff Higgins’ tape recorder was still only yards away at the time, the tape ran out before the three musicians had the chance to play a note together.

Wreckage

Sometime between 9th September and the end of October 1969, probably while Freddie was staying with Geoff Higgins in Liverpool, [flat above Dovedale Towers, Penny Lane], Ibex underwent a mini upheaval – at Freddie’s instigation. “I recall him canvassing the idea of calling the band Wreckage, but nobody was enthusiastic,” reveals Mike Bersin. “Then he phoned me one night and said, ‘the others don’t mind. How do you feel?’ I said. ‘If they agree then fine’. So, we went along to the next rehearsal and all the gear had been sprayed ‘Wreckage’. When I spoke to the others about it, Freddie had phoned them all up and had the same conversation”.

The name-change went hand-in-hand with the departure of drummer Mike ‘Miffer’ Smith as Freddie documented in a letter to Celine Daley. Dated 26th October the letter bears the address 40, Ferry Road, Barnes SW13 – another flat rented that summer by members of Ibex, Smile and various associates.

‘Miffer’ is not with us anymore,” wrote Freddie, “cause the bastard just got up and left one morning saying he was going to be a milkman back in Widnes. (he meant it too).” He goes on to boast that Roger and he go ‘poncing and ultrablagging just about everywhere,” which led to the pair “being termed as a couple of queens.” Interestingly, this word doesn’t seem to imply any of its more modern connotations. There was another term for that, as Ibex’s former drummer was well aware. “Miffer, the sod,” wrote Freddie, “went and told everyone down here that I had seriously turned into a fully-fledged queer.”

“You can see he was exploring the concept there, can’t you?” interjects Mike Bersin, “to see how many people felt about it and how comfortable he was with it. He was always very camp, but when I knew him, he was living with Mary Austin, and I certainly knew at least one other girlfriend he knew at the time. So, he was kind of straight then, but if he hadn’t come out of the closet, he was certainly looking through the keyhole.”

Crucially, as far as Queen’s pre-history is concerned, Freddie pinpoints the date when Ibex became Wreckage: “Our first booking as Wreckage is on Friday, 31st October at Ealing College,” he wrote. He also names Richard Thompson, the former drummer in Brian May’s 1984, as Miffer’s replacement.

“I’d known Freddie for years,” Richard recalls. “I first met him in 1966. I used to go round his house to listen to Beatles records. Then we’d go and watch Smile play, before he joined Ibex. I knew all of Ibex’s songs, as I’d watch them perform, so there was no point auditioning anyone else.”

With Wreckage’s first (and Freddie’s forth) concert appearance just five days away, the band set about rehearsing a new set. “Mike came down today,” wrote Freddie to Celine, “for a five-hour live marathon practise. Richard collapsed halfway through and I’ve really gone and lost my voice (no kidding). It hurts just to breathe. Hope I’m OK for this Friday, ‘cause I’m going to out-ponce everybody in sight. (it shall be easy.)” Freddie ended the letter with this hitherto unpublished information: “We’ve written a few new numbers: 1) ‘Green’; 2) ‘Without You’, 3) ‘Blag-a-blues’, 4) ‘Cancer on My Mind’ (originally called ‘Priestess’.)

“Freddie always had very unusual titles at that stage.” Recalls Mike Bersin. “I can’t remember what ‘Green’ was about. It might be the one with the intro which went, E, A, D, G, D, A, E, A, D, G, D, A in guitar chords”. As neither Ibex nor Wreckage went within striking distance of a recording studio, none of these songs was ever recorded officially. Miraculously, however one of them has survived – and it’s the one that stuck in Mike Bersin’s mind, ‘Green’.

...“We also played somewhere in Richmond, at a rugby club,” recalls John Taylor. “A friend of Brian May’s arranged it, and Brian came along. He thought our image was ‘savage’. He thought we were really good. ‘Oh Savage’ he said.”

#ibex #ibex band #wreckage #wreckage band #freddie mercury #smile #smile band #roger taylor #brian may

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rachelkaser · 3 years

Text

Stay Golden Sunday: Big Daddy

Blanche’s Southern gentleman father visits with unusual news. Sophia curses a neighbor.

Picture It...

Sophia and Dorothy meet in the kitchen the morning after a big storm. Sophia is cranky because Rose woke her up, afraid and wanting comfort. All four Girls meet in the living room, where Blanche excitedly explains that her father, who she calls Big Daddy (who everyone calls Big Daddy, in fact), is coming for a visit. She excitedly reminisces about how beloved he was by her community growing up, getting caught in her remembrances of her saccharine Southern upbringing (which Dorothy finds ridiculous). Blanche hurries out to go get gifts for him.

Rose goes out to the lanai, and calls out for Sophia and Dorothy. They find that the storm has knocked a tree down on to their lanai furniture. Their next-door neighbor, Mr. Barton enters and notices the tree. When Rose says it’s fortunate his tree didn’t fall on his house instead, he takes exception to it being “his.” He refuses to move the tree despite Mrs. Barton’s attempts to smooth over the situation. When he makes a derisive remark about “you Italians” to Dorothy and Sophia, the latter gives him the Evil Eye. He’s now cursed until he moves the tree. Mr. Barton scoffs and leaves with his wife.

DOROTHY: Oh Ma, why’d you do that? You just made matters worse with that ridiculous curse. SOPHIA: Ridiculous? The curse works. Believe me. I’ve used it before. DOROTHY: Oh, when? SOPHIA: Baltimore Colts, New York Jets, 1969. Draw your own conclusions.

The next day, Dorothy says she’s confirmed via their property map that the tree definitely belongs to Mr. Barton and he has to haul it away, though Sophia still things the curse will do the trick. Blanche emerges in a mint-colored Southern Belle gown, but when she answers the door, it’s Mr. Barton. He’s convinced Sophia slashed his tires, and refuses to move the tree. Dorothy opens the door in a fury after Mr. Barton storms out, only to see Big Daddy Hollingsworth, in a Colonel Sanders suit with a ten-gallon hat on.

Blanche excitedly introduces everyone to her father. Big Daddy pays great compliments to Rose, who he compares to Dinah Shore (which... yeah, I can see it); and to Sophia, who he praises for her stunning, classical “Eye-talian” beauty. (Sophia: “You need boots to listen to this guy.”) He tells Blanche he has a surprise for her: He’ll be singing at a club the next night. Blanche is stunned, and asks why he’d do that, and he says singing is his “calling.” After he leaves, Blanche worries at his apparently out-of-character behavior, and Dorothy encourages her to talk to him instead of jumping to conclusions.

BLANCHE: I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for why my daddy’s lost the stuffing out of his comforter.

Big Daddy returns that night, and Blanche is waiting up to talk to him. He effuses about how much he loves singing, and plays her one of his own compositions. It’s a genuinely terrible song that leaves Blanche cringing. When he finishes, she tells him this sudden career change concerns her, and tells him to go home and rest. He reveals that he sold their family home to fund his singing career, and Blanche explodes, forbidding him from continuing with his schemes. Big Daddy takes exception, and yells back until the other Girls come in. He apologizes to them and leaves the house.

Blanche is still upset and tells the Girls her father’s really gone off the deep end, selling the property he spent his lifetime building. As the Girls drift into the kitchen, Blanche is having trouble reconciling that her father is no longer the pillar he once was and has reached an age where they need to start thinking about his mental health. Dorothy and Rose comfort her, with Rose reminiscing about a time her father pulled a tuna-shaped parade float up a hill singlehandedly while dressed as a jar of mayonnaise. Blanche says her dad’s always been there to take care of her, and now she’ll have do the same for him.

BIG DADDY: You know, if there was some rain coming down, and a soft train whistle in the distance, this moment would have the makings of a first-rate country song.

The next night, Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy are off to see Big Daddy’s show at the Sagebrush Club -- Sophia declines when invited. Mr. and Mrs. Barton arrive, and Mr. Barton is a mess, asking to see “the witch.” He begs Sophia on his knees to remove the Curse, as he’s suffered several other inexplicable misfortunes. Sophia agrees when he promises to remove the tree, and he quickly hurries out. Mrs. Barton stays behind to apologize to the Girls and reveals that she did all the “curse” work to get her husband to act right.

The Girls arrive at the rather seedy Sagebrush Club, where Blanche pretends not to know every man present or that there’s a mechanical bull in the backroom. She asks a waiter about their reservations, and he reveals management canceled Big Daddy’s second show after the first show. Blanche goes backstage to comfort her father. A very stereotypical cowboy named Rusty attempts to put the moves on Dorothy and Rose, but Dorothy quickly puts the smackdown on him.

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Blanche enters Big Daddy’s dressing room and tells him how sorry he is that his show was canceled. Big Daddy says he’s just going to have to try again. Blanche asks him why he’s going to continue when he’s no good. He tells her he knows he’s no good, and opens up to her about the real reason he wants to try this: He’d always wanted to have a big adventure, but settled down with Blanche’s mother. Now he wants to try something new, something adventurous. Blanche apologizes for not hearing him out, and sings the chorus of his song with him.

“Excuse me, Rose, but have I given you any indication at all that I care?”

Both the A- and B-plots this week are excellent, and the characters all have some great zingers. Big Daddy, Blanche’s very Southern father, makes his first appearance on the show, and after being talked up by Blanche both in this episode and in previous episodes, he doesn’t disappoint. He honestly wouldn’t look out of place as a one-off character on Dallas.

I find it interesting that both Rose and Blanche have already had episodes where they have to learn how to interact with their parents as adults. Dorothy and Sophia are already on that level, so I suppose it makes sense that those two need to learn how to do the same thing. Outside of Sophia, parents don’t play as big a role in this show as children do, which makes sense considering the Girls are grandparents themselves -- Big Daddy is the only one who will play any kind of recurring role.

BLANCHE: Now listen girls, my father is an old-time Southern aristocrat, who is used to fine manners and gentility. So please, please, please be on your best behavior. *they all look at Sophia* SOPHIA: Why’s everyone looking at me?!

The A-plot’s a bit melodramatic, but it’s mitigated by the scene where Big Daddy tries to sing. It’s such an hilariously terrible performance, but I think the funniest part actually comes from the audience. After he strums the final note on his guitar, there’s a beat for the audience reaction, and you can hear one or two members hesitantly start to clap, as if they’re not sure if that’s the expected reaction, but other than that it’s silence until Blanche says her line.

This is one of the final roles of character actor Murray Hamilton. It’s not often I get to say an actor appeared on both of my favorite older TV shows: Golden Girls and Perry Mason. If only he’d also appeared on I Love Lucy, then I’d get the hat trick -- I’m still looking for the actor who was on all three. Hamilton died just four months after the episode aired, which is presumably why the character was recast when he appears in a later episode. He’s very convincing as Blanche’s gentlemanly father, even though he was only 10 years older than Rue McClanahan. Though it is a bit disconcerting that Blanche’s father looks younger than some of the men she’s dated.

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No one says how old Big Daddy is, but presumably since Blanche is in her 50s (she wouldn’t admit that on pain of death, but come on, she has a 16-year-old grandson), he’s got to be in his late 70s, early 80s. While it might be a bit late to launch a career as a country-western singer (who does Beatle medleys for some reason), the message that you’re never too old to try new things and your mental health should not be called into question for it is still a good one.

That said, the part that worries me is when he tells Blanche, almost as an afterthought, that he’s sold his family estate to fund his new venture. Since that’s a property that presumably his four children would have grown up on and that they’re now not going to inherit, it’s actually kind of concerning that he just sold it without making any of them aware of it. I know I got on Kirsten back in the episode about Rose’s will for acting entitled to her mother’s money and getting mad that Rose would have spent it, and I still stand by that.

SOPHIA: Play it safe. Stick with the curse. DOROTHY: Ma, I’ve stayed with you all these years. *Sophia raises her hand to administer the Evil Eye again*

But the difference here being Blanche is more upset that he would do something so impulsive after having spent so much of his life building up that estate -- and I’m with her on that, not because it points to a potential health problem, but because it’s reckless and foolish. And it doesn’t really get resolved. Blanche just agrees to support her father and doesn’t seem to address the fact that he’s now effectively homeless.

One of the funniest parts of the episode is at the beginning, when Blanche is reminiscing about her Southern upbringing and makes it sound like she grew up 100 years in the past -- what with all the sipping mint juleps under an old magnolia and exchanging prize-winning pecan pie recipes. That’s funny enough, but what makes it funnier is that Dorothy and Sophia have about as much patience as you’d expect two Brooklyn women to have for such gauzy nonsense:

DOROTHY: Tell me Blanche, during any of this, would the farmhands suddenly break into a chorus of “Dem Old Cotton Fields Back Home?” ... BLANCHE: I want him to feel right at home. SOPHIA: Then get the Millers across the street to tar and feather their lawn jockey.

The B-plot is what really makes this episode great. While Blanche and her father working out their issues is engaging enough, but Sophia steals the show when she goes to war with Mr. Barton. The Evil Eye she directs his way is nothing short of epic. I also enjoy that Dorothy is just as invested in it as her mother is, getting equally offended at being referred to as “You Italians,” she tries to get Mr. Barton to back down through the power of civic justice and a property map, and when all else fails, echoes her mother calling him “Mouth,” albeit accidentally to Big Daddy.

Also, bravo to this show for fleshing out Mrs. Barton. She appears in two scenes and at first appears to do nothing but try ineffectively to correct her jerk husband. Then comes the revelation that she was actually responsible for all the misfortunes that befell him -- I admire her ingenuity, because that’s the only way a stubborn bastard like her husband would ever apologize to his neighbors, despite clearly being in the wrong.

DOROTHY: Blanche, who do we see about our table? BLANCHE: Oh I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve ever been here. RUSTY: Well howdy Blanche! COWBOY: Howdy Blanche. Ladies. BLANCHE: No, I’m wrong. I think the museum did have its Christmas party here.

By the way, is it just me, or is there a lot of interest in Sophia’s Italian-ness this episode? Not only is her subplot about the Sicilian evil eye (when I was a kid, I thought that was made up -- I’m obviously not even remotely Italian), but Mr. Barton uses it as an insult, and then Big Daddy compliments her “Eye-talian” beauty. Sophia’s Sicilian flavor is one of my favorite things about her, and this episode has some of her best moments.

Out of all the characters, Rose is the one who ends up getting short shrift this week. I’m noticing something from this first season: Whenever there’s an episode where one Girl is left out of the bulk of the story, the writers compensate by giving her a big monologue in roughly the middle of the episode, usually in the kitchen over cheesecake. Once you notice the pattern, it’s impossible to un-notice it -- several episodes in this first season alone have followed this pattern.

ROSE: What on earth do you do with a mechanical bull? DOROTHY: Introduce him to a mechanical cow, Rose.

Still, if Betty White only gets a handful of lines and one monologue this week, she makes full use of them, and it’s especially cute that, unlike Dorothy and Sophia, she seems to enjoy the very Southern-ness that Blanche and her father exude, saying “It’s like being in Gone with the Wind!”

Episode rating: 🍰🍰🍰🍰 (four cheesecake slices out of five)

Favorite part of the episode:

The entire curse B-plot, especially the lines: “I can’t sleep! I can’t eat!” “You can’t sit.”

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#golden girls #stay golden #picture it #stay golden sunday #blanche devereaux #sophia petrillo #rose nylund #dorothy zbornak #s01e24 #big daddy

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subtextread · 4 years

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Dear abu,

I can imagine a different timeline where it’s you and me getting coffee this week instead of me being a weird dissociating zombie human trying to reckon with the one year anniversary of your death. We would definitely be talking about the insurgency at the capitol (would there still have been an insurgency in this timeline though?). I think I would be talking about whiteness and you would be talking about hubris and false conservatism and it would be sentiments as shared as possible between two people who hold different textbook party affiliations and different generational experiences, etc.

It threw me a little that the conversation we had about land was in 2017. That’s longer ago than I expected. That means you were in a darker place for longer than I remembered. Heatedish conversations about politics were before then because after, you were kind of preoccupied.

But even in this period where you were struggling with land shit, you still came to some of my shows. My bandmate said she saw that you got some of the best photos of the stage. I don’t know where your phone is, but I wonder if you enjoyed rewatching our noisey Beatles covers when you had some time away from the rest of the family in Pakistan.

Here are some other random memories:

- when we would take the bus for some reason you really liked the Claritin ad lol

- i think the first time i saw you and mom share space intentionally after the divorce was when i got a tonsillectomy. I remember waking up from being under and being like wtf this looks wrong somehow haha

- i used to wait by the windows on days you were supposed to come visit in the pre cell phone era because i was a brat and didn’t understand the fraught nature of public transit and i would get super mad at you when you were late and you would laugh about it with mom behind my back

- one time my mom heard me reading urdu and she was so amazed that she called you to have you hear it and it was the first time she did something like that and it was such a moment of recognizing that a person’s child was doing something impressive and that person wasn’t there but probably deserved to be witness to it too - and such a moment was so foreign because really you and mom barely spoke in the 25 years you lived past your divorce

- you weren’t like really interested in not me members of my family lmao. I remember when I tried to show you photos of the niblings or hc’s kiddos who were/are my entire world you were like (pat pat) on their heads lol

- you asked about my childhood friend a lot, and i told her that when she reached out to offer condolences

- i think i have a weird affection for cnn because i remember you watching it lol

- some of the films we saw in theaters together were clockstoppers (lol), tron: legacy (which is like a random favorite movie that I haven’t watched since you died because #dadfeelings), i think both rugrats films?, princess diaries (also #dadfeelings but #poorlyexecuted), a really bad bollywood film that had a trailer for eik ladkhi ko dekha at the start lol. I had to leave the theater for this one because the gratuitous nationalist torture scenes and the audience weirdly applauding them made me want to die, but i respected that the second you came out the theater you apologized LOL. i’m sure there were more!

- you wanted me to go to whitney young (satan’s playground), and I did (not because you wanted me to lol) and it was the worst lol

- you used to spontaneously bring me burgers when i was a kid even though you never ever ever ever ate them and i wonder now if it was some sort of like vicarious thing because you were cautious about your health but maybe wanted to just buy it to get it out of your system lol

- one time we spent all day at cook county hospital because you needed to get checked out and it’s the only place that doesn’t require insurance and it was so busy and the wait and all the people in the gigantic industrial-feeling waiting area was like such a damning example of healthcare injustice that i saw and didn’t understand at all at that young age

- one time we went to six flags but i only went on one ride because i was too scared!

- one time we went to the circus and as we were walking through a parking lot, I was turning to face you to talk as I walked and you, because you were a super chill and tentative person, didn’t warn me in time that i was about to smack into a parked car’s side mirror and i had a long gash in my face that left a scar for a few years lmao

- i remember you fractured your foot once and i didn’t understand why you were still walking on it

- one time you mentioned the dum dum girls and i was like what dad when did you get cool but it’s just because you read their name in a magazine

- you bought me my first cd! Alicia Keyes Songs in A Minor lol

- you wanted me to be good at the monkey bars but i wasn’t - the playground where we tried has been torn down but the park is still there and that’s where i put the dried stems from the flowers tracy got me when you died

- i wish i drove you around more. should’ve chauffeured you around dad lol. I have no recollection of seeing you drive ever even though you drove a taxi and a truck

- [redacted trauma memory]

- i just went through my emails and messages on facebook - i wish i had like a record of all our texts ever but whatever. some are cute and nice, some are uh bizarre lol, some are angry, but the vast vast majority are emails of me just being like “hi! Hope you’re well! Where are you! Did you get a new number!” Lol you would always leave without telling me or telling me super super last minute and so much of my virtual communication was just like trying to find you.

This makes me sad:

Hope you are resting peacefully. I hope I remember more things soon!

#grief blogging

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karliesbuzzcut · 5 years

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When art really speaks to you, pt. 2: probably just a coincidence but idk

Disclaimer: all these theories are rabbit holes on their own, so trying to explain them in a couple of paragraphs is, automatically, doing them a disservice. Especially since I’m only going to be primarily addressing the part of the theory that focuses on the artist communicating with their public through their work.

Since I’ve already dedicated paragraphs to the introduction in part 1, let’s just jump into it.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s fuckton of theories.

Let’s start with the daddy of all conspiracies. After all, not many can gloat about their reachings becoming a movie starring Tom Hanks.

The thing with Da Vinci’s conspiracies is that there are so many of them, and they range from “maybe this is also a painting made by Da Vinci but he wasn’t credited because of reasons” to ALIENS. Which, I think, shows how different our interpretations of art can be, and how much it depends on an already established worldview.

But the most interesting part isn’t the conclusions, but how people look for clues. For example, just like people say Taylor Swift is obsessed with numbers or oranges (depending who you ask, I guess), Da Vinci was supposedly a big fan of reflections. So, if you want to decode his paintings you must mirror them... and then move then a little bit... there you go, you’ve just found yourself an alien...! Or a daemon...! Or someone wearing a funny hat! And that’s totally what he wanted us to find, right? Why else would he had shown any sort of interest in reflections if he didn’t want us to reflect everything!!

Shakespeare is an illusion... kinda, but yeah.

Personally, I think Kaylors would love to dig into this one. Sure, it doesn’t have many lesbians playing political spies. But it does involve a lot of literature analysis. Just like Kaylors don’t think a heterosexual woman could’ve written Taylor’s songs; some people (referred as anti-Stratfordians, thank you very much) don’t think someone from a lower class could’ve written Shakespeare’s plays.

Here’s the tea... the very cold tea: because Shakespeare was the son of a glover, anti-Stratfordians say he couldn’t have had the knowledge to write his plays. They, instead, come up with a list of “more suitable” writers that could’ve worked together. But they decided to keep their identities a secret because being a play writer, at that time, wasn’t respectable. Here, we will start noticing a trend with Conspiracy Theories: society, as a whole, can’t handle the truth, only a selected few. That’s where Francis Bacon comes in.

Francis Bacon was a very smart dude. He, also, worked for the state - giving him the credentials to be worthy of writing Shakespeare calibre plays. And also, also, he developed a method to conceal messages in the presentation of a text. To be able to do this, you would need to use two typefaces. Guess what has more than one typeface? Shakespeare’s plays.

I have to say - while I don’t believe either theory we have seen, they are somewhat understandable. We barely know anything about Shakespeare and Da Vinci beyond their work, so it’s normal that people are trying to figure out who they were; what did they believed in; where did they get all of their knowledge. We like theorising about the answers to these questions, knowing we’ll never get a confirmed truth. Not so the case with our next conspiracy...

Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper - someone had to be, right?

Now, allow me to fangirl all over this one. It combines my interests for conspiracy theories, true crime and pop-culture.

I’m assuming everyone here knows about Jack the Ripper: a serial killer who murdered at least 5 people (mainly prostitutes) in London, between the years 1888 and 1891. Well, someone looked at this and thought “you know what this murder-mystery is missing? Famous people”. Well, this theory says that the author of Alice in Wonderland did it He was the only celebrity living nearby at the time of the killings, so... 🤷‍♀️

This becomes a case of “I have already made up my mind about this issue, so I’m going to go ahead and search for proof that confirms it”. Authors and, now, internet sleuths went through his books, selected this random-ass excerpt from the nursery version of Alice and decided it was an anagram. And a crappy one at that. Supposedly, if you arrange the letters you get a detailed and gruesome confession. You, however, have to take away some letter and add others. Listen, I’m not an English major, but I’ve heard that’s cheating.

This theory also has that characteristic we mentioned: the “I don’t want to admit it out loud, so I’m going to come up with convoluted ways for my audience to figure it out” - which almost borders on psychotic behaviour. But at least it, somewhat, works with the serial killer narrative, you know? Not very much with Taylor, a woman who simply wants to chill with her girlfriend.

The moon landing was fake and directed by Stanley Kubrick.

I’m not going to dig into the moon landing conspiracy, this post is going to be long enough already. Just know that, when the USA government was planning to fake the whole thing, they had just watched ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and they were all like “that’s so cool! That’s how we want our fake moon landing to look!” So they contacted its director, Kubrick.

According to the theory, Kubrick felt really guilty afterwards but he couldn’t say anything about it because he signed an NDA? it would be dangerous, I guess. So he did the same thing Taylor would do decades later: he “spelled it out” for us on his work, under the excuse of “I didn’t explicitly said it, did I? My most intelligent and attractive fans just happened to figure it out for themselves”.

The movie ‘The Shinning’ has been analysed to shreds. Think ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video, but 2 hours and 26 minutes instead. There are many theories about its underlying theme, but we’re only focusing on the moon landing one. The biggest piece of evidence, according to believers, comes from that famous scene in the hallway. Basically, the kid, Danny, is on the floor playing and wearing an Apollo 11 sweater. He stands up = the rocket launches. He walks to Room N.237. Which is almost an anagram for MOON - but actually, a perfect anagram for MORON - I didn’t come up with that joke, I’m just sharing it. Anyway. In the book, the room number is 217 but Kubrick changed it to 237 because there are 237,000 miles between the Earth and the Moon... except that’s not exactly true, but this is their Kissgate, you see?

“Paul is Dead” aka “the granddaddy of Kaylor is Real”

Now, this is THE conspiracy theory. Kaylors would love to have the amount of evidence this theory has. Give them 50 years, they’ll get there.

Our story starts in 1966, Paul McCartney dies in a car accident. The British Government panics, “this will drive our teenagers into a massive suicide!” So they cover it up. They find this guy who looks like Paul and hire him to replace the original.

You might’ve only heard about those stores where pop-stars get their beards. But there’s also a branch that focuses on celebrity look-a-likes.

The rest of The Beatles went along with it (because that’s how these artists seem to operate, they’re always the victims of their circumstances) but they did not like it. So - you guessed it - they used their music, artwork, photo-shoots, etc. to communicate the truth. Faux-Paul might’ve felt a bit awkward about it, but he’s a nice chap and let the other guys work through their grief.

Kaylors might have agreed on blue being the colour of breaks up and yellow is for Karlie-Sunshine; but the Paul-truthers concluded white is the colour of heaven, jeans are for gravediggers and black for morticians... oh! And not wearing shoes means you’re dead. Taylor being near a door symbolises her leaving the closet; Paul being near an open trunk symbolises him being in a coffin. Is the letter K, for Karlie, surrounding Taylor? Well, there’s a 28IF in the plaques of a car, for Paul being 28 IF he hadn’t died. People hear a phantasmagorical “she” in ‘Call It What You Want’; just like people heard “I buried Paul” in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

If you have never looked up this theory, I seriously recommend it. There are so many parallels with Kaylor. Here’s a 30 minute video, if you’re interested. It summarises the theory neatly while discussing the effects that these, seemingly innocent, conspiracies have on the way we absorb information.

Paul might be dead but 2pac is very much alive.

If I haven’t made it clear by now, I think it’s very deceptive to use a musician’s lyrics to back up your alternate version of events. As confessional as these verses can be, they’re still a form of art. Which, in terms of music lyrics, they need to follow certain parameters, as well as a desired sound. And, as many other forms of art, they might focus a bit more on transmitting a feeling, rather than an accurate portrayal of reality.

Why am I stopping to say all of this now? Well, because this specific theory relies a lot on Tupac’s lyrics.

A bit of context: In 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot 4 times while at a stoplight. He died from his injuries days later. While there are theories, to this day, no one knows who killed him. Unless you believe one of those theories, which claims no one did.

The believers of this theory cite Tupac’s lyrics to argue that he was explicitly telling his fans that he was going to fake his own death. Here are two examples:

I’ve been shot and murdered, can’t tell you how it happened word for word but best believe that n*****’ gonna get what they deserve. - Richie Rich’s N***** Done Change

I heard rumours that I died murdered in cold blood, traumatised pictures of me in my final states — you know mama cried. But that was fiction, some coward got the story twisted - Aint’ Hard 2 Find

Just like anti-Kaylors don’t necessarily oppose the idea of Taylor being gay; I bet the “antis” of this theory aren’t happy Tupac died and weren’t against his existence on the first place. It’s more of an argument about confusing your feelings with facts, just because they can be more comforting or exciting.

“Avril Lavigne is dead”... or “every artist you think is alive is, actually, dead and, the ones you think are dead, aren’t” I guess.

After everything we have seen, this one isn’t that interesting. The real Avril died in 2003, right after her first album. Her record label bought a new one. Proof? She says ‘dead’ in ‘My Happy Ending’, blah, blah. A poor man’s “Paul is Dead”.

I added it, mainly for the lulz, after the last entry, I needed them. But also because it all started with a blog. What’s hilarious is that the guy who created it admitted he only did it to show how gullible people are but, at that point, he had already convinced people about. The conspirators didn’t need him anymore. So they discarded him but not the Theory... which just reminds me a little too much of how TCG, HBH, Jennyboom &co. have been excommunicated from the Church of Kaylor.

Beyonce and Jay Z are members of the sexy sexy Illuminati.

I did not save the best for last. But maybe I’m just biased because the Illuminati theory bores me to death. However, if you allow me a bit of social criticism... remember how the Shakespeare Conspiracy started because a bunch of classicist people didn’t believe a lower class citizen could write such good plays? I think this one has a bit of that. I’d bet my life that this one started when a bunch of white dudes got super uncomfortable by black people being so talented and earning their successful.

What this Conspiracy shows, too, is the amplifying effect the internet has had on the proliferation of such theories. Most of the conspiracies I’ve mentioned were huge... but how were you supposed to communicate your ideas and add to the old ones, before the internet? You could publish a book. Talk about it at parties. And, at some point, there were internet forums but, still, you can’t compare that to how widespread Social Media is nowadays.

Today, we can watch someone ramble for 2 hours on YouTube about how Beyonce looks like a robot if you watch Single Ladies in reverse; read someone’s dissertation of ‘Apeshit’; or spend all night looking at those pictures where someone has drawn a red circle around anything that resembles a triangle.

It might look like a lot of evidence but that’s only because there are a lot of people very attached to this theory. Wanting - for whatever reason - for it to be true (perhaps because it would confirm that their fears about the world were well founded). And all those dozens or hundredths of people were working together to form as many patterns as possible.

Unfortunately we are going to keep talking about the Illuminati in Part 3 but also about Taylor, so that should be nice. Because - to the surprise of absolutely no one - there’s a bunch of people who also think they understand Taylor better than the rest. That they have figured out her secret codes and her ultimate message. Only, not all of those theories involve lesbian supermodels, so they aren’t as popular on Tumblr.

#Kaylor #conspiracy theory

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tiesandtea · 4 years

Text

The London Suede Come To America (1995)

"Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof," says Suede mainman Brett Anderson. "When I wrote 'So Young' I wanted a song that was like that... pure raging excitement."

By Michael Goldberg, Addicted To Noise (ATN), San Francisco. Archived here.

ATN was founded by Goldberg, who previously worked as an associate editor and senior writer for Rolling Stone, in 1994. It was one of the first online music magazine that offered audio samples and video interview clips with its editorial content. The first issue came out in December 1994. (x, x)

In the midst of a February/March club tour of America, ATN caught up with Anderson in Detroit for a frank chat about naked men in dog collars, the New British Invasion, the Sex Pistols, and his drug(s) of choice.

Suede leader Brett Anderson is a wisp of a man, who claims not to court controversy despite provocative album cover art and such lyrics as "I want the style of a woman, the kiss of a man." Yet he's caused plenty of controvery. Consider his comment to Details that he's "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience." Sexual ambiguity sells, as has been clear since Elvis appeared on the scene some 40-plus years ago.

Suede bring Bowie's Ziggy Stardust sound (and androgyny) into the '90s. These Brits know how to make hits. "So Young," "The Drowners," "Metal Mickey," and "Animal Nitrate" were brash, infectious pop confections that begged to blast from car radios. They flew up the charts in Britain upon release.

Dog Man Star, the group's second album, is a song suite, an hour of metallic bang-a-gong rockers and ethereal ballads. Anderson can sing as trashy as the late Marc Bolan, but he can also hold his own crooning with the likes of George Michael or, going back some decades, Bing Crosby. And he's not afraid to go against conventionin fact, he seems to relish it freely admitting that he liked Kriss Kross records and just can't understand the popularity of grunge rockers Pearl Jam and neo-punks Green Day and the Offspring.

Anderson and bassist Mat Osman grew up in Haywards Heath, a bland suburb located 40 miles south of London ("Quite a horrible little place," Anderson told one reporter). His father took odd jobs; in recent years he's driven a taxi. His mother died of cancer in 1989. His father was a fan of Liszt, going so far as to name Anderson's sister Blandine, after the composer's daughter. He first heard both the Beatles and the Sex Pistols playing on his sister's phonograph.

Anderson felt like an outsider from as early as he can remember. And he always wanted to be a rock star. In fact, he says he assumed everyone wanted to be rock stars, and was flabbergasted the first time he met someone who didn't.

Away from the raucous punk and post punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s (he was 7 years old in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols), Anderson romanticised being in a band, and dreamed. Ask him his influences and he doesn't hesitate: the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, "and punk bands like Crass."

In 1985, at age 15, Anderson strummed an acoustic guitar and sang on the street for spare change. He says he played in "hundreds" of bands [clearly an overstatement] but eventually landed in London with Osman. They placed an ad in the New Musical Express which brought them guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler, and some time later replaced their drum machine with Simon Gilbert.

By April of 1992, before they'd even had a record released, Melody Maker put them on the cover, declaring, "The Best New Band In Britain." Funny thing is, they lived up to the hype.

And they've managed to survive their 15 minutes of fame. Anderson expects the group to record another album following spring and summer tours of Asia and Europe, then return to tour America in the winter. The album won't be released until next year.

Addicted To Noise: I found it interesting that "So Young," off your first album, was about that feeling of invincibilty experienced when one is "so young," a sentiment more recently expressed in the Oasis' hit "Live Forever."

Brett Anderson: "So Young" came from our first flush of success and the desire of everyone around you to kind of settle you down. The desire of people to almost build a rock star career, and to actually take all the joy out of it, the pure joy you get out of being in a band that people love. It was one of those songs that I wrote with an audience in mind. There's certain songs that you have to hear sung back at you. One of the things that I loved about "The Drowners" [their first UK hit], it was written as a quite personal thing but the way the song works best is when you've got 2000 people singing, "You're taking me over." I did have in my head the vision of 5000 people singing back to me with "So Young." I love that. It was supposed to be quite anthemic, it was supposed to be quite stupid. I didn't want to be turned into some kind of intelligent, literate pop star, you know what I mean?

ATN: Why not?

Anderson: I don't think there's any place for intelligence in music. I can't see the point. Music's instinctive and it's natural and it's dumb. It's real dumb.

ATN: What were you trying to communicate in that song?

Anderson: There's just a feeling of absolute invincibility that you get sometimes, especially if you've been in bands a long time and it's taking you a while to actually convince people. Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof. I wanted a song that was like that. That was actually almost pure raging excitement.

ATN: The cover of your latest album, Dog Man Star, depicts a young man lying naked on a bed. Who is that?

Anderson: The picture is from a book of photographs I've had for a long time. It's actually the husband of the photographer who took it and it was taken the day after they split up. It's a beautiful picture. It's something I've had for a long time and we've never made a record that really fit it, and then we did. It was one of those things where I took it into the band and everyone went "Ah, that's the one."

ATN: Both album covers are controversial in their own way.

Anderson: They're not meant to be in the slightest. You should see the original of the Suede album. The picture we used is actually cropped. The original full picture, the woman on the right is naked in a wheelchair and the other one is kneeling to kiss her. It's a beautiful picture. And we got the right to use it. But one of the things we did was to phone up the two models in the picture to check if they were all right with it because it's an image that's going to be seen all over the world and one of them didn't want it used. Which is fair enough. It's a twenty year old picture, or whatever. But I just liked the mood of it so we cropped it. But it wasn't intended to be controversial. I mean one of the things people always say is it's so androgynous. Which is really weird, cause in the original you can tell it's two women. But anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit.

"If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs," says Anderson. "It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good."

ATN: Yeah, but that's what's so interesting particularly about America. I've lived in San Francisco all my life and in San Francisco, as you know, is a very sexually liberated city. But you go to Kansas, or some of these places you go through when you tour, and it's like the Stone Age.

Anderson: I know. America is definitely like three or four different countries. No, there was no intention to be controversial. I'm not really interested in being controversial. If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs. It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good.

ATN: In putting two women kissing on the cover of that album, what did you want to say?

Anderson: Nothing. It's a beautiful image. I don't give a fuck about things like that, what people will think. One of the funny things about that is you had all these people phoning me up going, "Yeah, we think we're offended by your album cover but we're not sure. Cause we don't know what it is." Oh, well it's a man kissing a woman. "Oh." Only kidding, it's two women. "Oh, we're offended then." No, no I was joking. It's actually a man and a woman. "Oh we're not offended then." It's the same fucking picture. It's not for me to think about. I'm not going to think about it.

ATN: But you got that kind of reaction to the first one and then you put out Dog Man Star. You're saying you weren't courting controversy with that cover?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. It's because we come from Britain where no one gives a shit. Really. And to think that a semi-naked man is in any way controversial is one of the great horrors of this century. You should have seen the original fucking cover for Dog Man Star, man.

ATN: What was that like?

Anderson: It's from One Hundred and Twenty Days In Sodom . You know that film? Passolini?

ATN: I haven't seen that.

Anderson: It's fantastic. It was the naked man in a dog collar snarling at the camera. That was a fucking brilliant picture but we couldn't get the rights to that. So perhaps we should have gone with that and then I could be discussing controversy with you. I don't think it's a big deal. There are people who are professionally outraged nowadays . That's their job. But no one's actually outraged. They just think they ought to be.

ATN: It's a position they take.

Anderson: Right. It's my job to be outraged by a naked man. And it's the woman over there whose job it is to be outraged by a naked woman.

ATN: Do you think there's a New British Invasion really going on right now? Can it be compared to what happened with the original "British Invasion" in the '60s? And do you think that that's what's going to happen?

Anderson: No I don't think so. It's all very well for a bunch of people in the media to get excited about it, but a British invasion is when British bands start selling a lot of records in the States, and at the moment British bands aren't selling any records.

ATN: It seems to me that some of the bands haven't been getting the kind of shot that they should get over here.

Anderson: We've certainly felt like that. It's always been quite strange for us 'cause the records have kind of leapt out everywhere else, all over Europe and Japan. The records just sell more and more each time. But we've found that American radio is pretty hard going. And radio and MTV are pretty much what make you over here.

ATN: You're over here, you're touring. Are you feeling like there's any kind of change yet in the reception?

Anderson: Absolutely. It's probably different for us because we've got pretty much a hardcore cult following over here. So we've never had a problem in the US. It's always been very comfortable for us. We've always had a very good time here. Whether or not that translates into anything kind of mainstream, we'll have to see. There's definitely a different musical climate in England and a different musical climate in America. I don't think the bands have ever been less connected. And I think that's a real shame. I think all the great music in the world has been universal music. I'm not really interested in flying the flag for Britain. I don't give a shit, really. I'd like to make records that turn the world on. That everyone wanted. I think the whole thing is a bit of a red herring.

ATN: What are you saying?

Anderson: The whole idea of British Invasions and American renaissances. It does away with the concept of people just making good records.

ATN: There are some really great English bands right now. Suede, Oasis, Bush, Elastica...

Anderson: I think definitely the British music scene has fucking woken up a little bit and realized that you can't just sit around and make cool records for your mates. But I think there's a long ways to go. And things are still pretty divided between Britain and the US. There's no way you could hear a record and say, "I'm not sure which country that comes from." That's quite a shame, I think.

ATN: One problem is that people in America aren't really getting exposed to the new British rock & roll.

Anderson: That's the frustrating thing. I don't mind being hated. There's loads of places we go where people have heard us and they despise us. Yeah, it's really frustrating to know that people just haven't heard of you. And the real divisions in American radio. For a while I spent 24 hours a day listening to alternative radio. I think it's horrifying [the way bands are pigeonholed]. I think it's completely un-American. And I think it's a real problem for a lot of British bands, 'cause a lot of British bands fall between the genres. I mean I don't think of us as an alternative band and we'd sound pretty exotic on alternative radio. But then if you try to get us on Top 40 radio, they say we're too alternative. The problem is if you don't immediately fit into something quite comfortable. American radio has become more and more compartmentalized, which is a shame because it's a totally un-American attitude. One of the things that Americans have always been respected for is the breadth of what they're into. America has been the place where people like Black Sabbath and they like Portishead. I think it's quite sad that it's actually being carved up, kind of like demographic radio.

ATN: Dog Man Star seems more introspective, with a lot more ballads and slower material than the first album.

Anderson: A lot of changes between this album and the first one are just to do with having the time and the money to make the record that we always wanted to make. The first record is filled up with live tracks and things we've been playing for a couple of years. And when you're starting out you write big storming rockers that actually grab people's attention. You're desperate to be heard. Whereas this one we knew people were actually going to listen to it. It's a bit more subtle. We wanted to do something that you could really just lose yourself in, that you could dive into. And we wanted to actually make an album rather than a collection of singles. We sat and wrote it as an album. You know, we wrote the songs in one batch and all of the songs are like little cousins of each other. And it's supposed to be a whole album that you can actually live in and from the minute it turns on you just get swept away by it. There are a lot of changes of mood in it and a lot of changes of pace. Like one long song with an introduction, verses and choruses and even an outro.

Anderson: But I don't think it's more introspective. I think it's less introspective.

ATN: Really?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it takes on the world a bit more. I think the record takes the world on, whereas the first one was probably what was happening in our heads. This one lives in the real world.

ATN: Give me an example of that.

Anderson: Something like "We Are the Pigs" or "The Asphalt World." They're not about just what's going on in my head. They're about the people around me and the world about me and the city around me and the country around me.

ATN: Did you go somewhere to write the album?

Anderson: I did. I was living in a place called Highgate. It's a very strange place. It's a beautiful little bit of London. It's like the 14th century or something. It's got like a village green and people have rabbit hutches in their gardens and it's between two of the fucking roughest bits of London. I basically just shut myself in a bare white room for about three months and I didn't do anything but just sit and write. It's quite an inspiring place because it's very quiet and very calm but you're seconds away from real degradation and squalor. I find it quite inspiring. I need a bit of calm to write. I don't need calm in any other part of my life. But to write, I like to just sit back and let it wash over me.

ATN: Talk a bit about the lyrics on this album, and the songs.

Anderson: I think a lot of it is very blank. A lot blanker than the first one. For the first one, I used to sit down and actually slave over them and change words and did like 50 drafts. But a song like "The Asphalt World" is really simply written and it's written about kind of what I did during the day. I wanted to write something that was quite simple, that was just about me and the people around me. Things like that and "The 2 of Us" are almost like reflections on the day before. Whereas something like "Daddy's Speeding," that pretty much came to me in a dream. I had a dream that I was sent back in time to save James Dean from the car crash. We ended up getting loaded together and I didn't bother. I could have saved him.

"Still Life" came from living in that kind of place, being surrounded by housewives and incredibly bored people. It's one of the strange things that people think our lifestyle is always quite frenetic but it's actually pretty much like a housewife's a lot of the time. You know, 23 hours a day it's pure boredom. And I was trying to write a song that was about me and about them. I pottered down to the shops in the middle of the day and would see these incredibly bored people actually become almost completely disconnected from life.

Kind of like fading alcoholic housewives. And "We Are The Pigs" is probably about the division between those people and fucking two minutes down the road, people living in Archways and the way there's no connection between the two.

ATN: I want to get your opinion on some of the other English bands. What do you think of Oasis?

Anderson: I think they're all right. Yeah. I don't know their music very well but I think they're quite exciting, which is good for a English band. I think they sound pretty natural.

ATN: You've heard "Live Forever"?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it's all right. A lot of the bands that people always ask me about I'm not particularly interested in.

ATN: What do you listen to?

Anderson: I like Beatles and the Stones. I like a lot of modern stuff, dance music, soul, rap. I like people who can actually sing. That turns me on. I like Prince. I like a lot of rappers because they've got kind of a hypnotic quality to them. There's too many people who are kind of singing essay writers. I'm quite turned on by people who have the power in their voice, whether I agree with what they say or not. Perhaps Jim Morrison or Nick Cave, who have a bit of authority, who have a bit of power to them. It doesn't matter what they say, it's the way they say it that's quite important to me.

ATN: Any particular rappers.

Anderson: Oh, Snoop Doggy Dogg.

ATN: Yeah, he's great.

Anderson: The thing is I don't agree with anything he says but you have to listen to him. I like Kris Kross as well. And people like Coolio. And who does that "Regulate"?

ATN: Warren G.

Anderson: I like a really smooth sound, I like people who can really sing, you know? That's almost disappeared. A lot of modern singing, a lot of rock singing and soul singing, it's all technique, all showing off. It's wailing and howling and hitting the high notes. I like people who can whisper in your ear instead of shouting at you.

ATN: Initially there was a lot of talk about Suede in terms of sort of reviving the glam thing and the Bowie thing? What did you think about that?

Anderson: I never, never understood it. I have no idea what was going on. I've always hated glam rock. I thought it was appalling. I'm not really interested in fake music and it was very fake music. I was a bit horrified by it all.

ATN: Did the Bowie references make sense?

Anderson: Oh yeah. I'm a massive fan. It frustrates me when people go over the top about it, but I think he's great.

ATN: What music influenced you when you were young?

Anderson: I suppose the punk stuff. If we're talking about what turned me on to music, what made me pick up a guitar. It was kind of like Crass and people like that. I like Sex Pistols and stuff, but I come a bit late to it.

"Anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit," says Anderson.

ATN: And who else?

Anderson: A lot of tough punk. Real annoying your parents music, mixed with that, stuff my sister listened to: Beatles and Stones and Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. And then after that, I suppose when I was old enough to buy records, it was the music of the day: The Jam and the Specials and Japan and people like that, just stuff you heard on the radio, basically. My musical education is not a list of cool, cult artists I spent years trudging around record shops to find. It's stuff you hear on the radio when you're having a tea on a Sunday night. That's where my love of music comes from, big pop music.

ATN: When things first broke for Suede, how old were you?

Anderson: About 23.

ATN: How did you handle it?

Anderson: It was easy, it wasn't that much of a problem. It really isn't. You can imagine what it's like being incredibly famous. [laughs] You can! It's like any other life, but you get recognized more often. You just have to wash your hair a bit more often, you can't buy as much pornography.

ATN: Look at the Kurt Cobain situation.

Anderson: That's a very different thing. He was a lot more famous than I was, and to his credit, one of the things that really saddens me about that is he spent a lot of time saying he was deeply unhappy with success. And everyone thought it was an image. That's one of the things that's sad about fakes in music. They actually ruin it for anyone who is telling the truth. Because if it wasn't for the fact that here's generations of people who have thought it's cool to be tortured, perhaps people would have taken him a bit more seriously when he said he hated himself and that he hated what he was doing. I look at like Sinead O'Connor now. I read something she said and I feel horrified for her, really sorry for her, because she's saying that she can't handle it and she's having a terrible time. And everyone thinks it's a joke, everyone thinks it's her image. And that really saddens me and that's why I've always tried to be blatantly honest in interviews.

ATN: Why did you call this album Dog Man Star?

Anderson: Its just three of my favorite words, really. It's just something that a lot of the songs are about. Almost like the three stages of man, the three things you can be. I feel very dog-like at the moment.

ATN: Sort of like the animal state to whatever state we are in at the moment to a spiritually enlightened state?

Anderson: Perhaps not a spiritually enlightened state, but I've always been attracted to people who actually think of themselves as stars, people who actually treat life like a film or a book. I don't mean in the sense of people who are actually in the public eye. There's a lot of people who have sold 60 million records who you see 50 times a day who don't have the faintest star quality to them, and then there's a lot of people working gas stations, they just have that aura around them? They just make things happen out of everyday life.

ATN: In the first song on the album, you make reference to Winterland, you make reference to introducing the band, which I took you to be talking about the Band, you know, Robbie Robertson's The Band.

Anderson: [Laughs] No.

ATN: That's where they played when they played their first performance.

Anderson: I was thinking the Sex Pistols' final gig.

ATN: But that's pretty wild. I was at that show at Winterland, actually.

Anderson: You're kidding.

ATN: It was probably the greatest show that I ever saw.

Anderson: I was watching it just recently. I've got bits of it on video. It's something I've seen about a million times. That bit at the end. [Starts to deliver lyrics in a monotonal Johnny Rotten voice] "This is no fun/ No fun/ At all."

ATN: People were throwing money and all kinds of stuff onto the stage. Rotten was just picking the stuff up. And the audience was just the most bizarre audience. It was a mixture of people that were totally into the band and people who had come to see the freak show.

Anderson: Yeah totally. I've always been fascinated by them and by that gig and just the way they managed to compress everything into a year. Or in the case of that show, anything you could ever ask for a gig in three-quarters of an hour. I just love the idea of a final moment. Of a band just being in the present.

ATN: The thing was, though, when you were there, the music sounded so great and so powerful. Some people tended to say, oh, the Sex Pistols couldn't play that good...

Anderson: Oh they fucking rule! We were listening to the album last night on the bus. If you listen to it now, it just sounds like the greatest rock album in the world.

ATN: Never Mind the Bollocks . . .

Anderson: Yeah. It's so completely almost like year zero it's ridiculous. It's like listening to Chuck Berry.

ATN: Exactly.

Anderson: Or the Rolling Stones. It's just a fucking absolutely great melodic rock album. All the things that people say about them are absolutely untrue. There's only one criteria for musicianship, as far as I'm concerned, and that's whether you can get across what you're saying with your instrument and with your voice. I'm not interested in any kind of technique or anything like that. To me, a great musician is someone that you understand what they feel when they pick up a guitar and there's people who can do that with three chords and there's people who can play entire symphonies and have never moved a human soul.

ATN: All these guitar players who can play scales up the wazzoo, but so what?

Anderson: The real problem is, you've got someone like Sex Pistols, they come along and people mistake it. People think that the way they played was what was important, people actually think that if they can replicate the sound as raw or amateurish as that, that they'll somehow be as great as them. And it has nothing to do with that, it has nothing to do with the level of musicianship. It has to do with the fact that they actually send an electric shock through you. And there's people who do that with incredibly complicated music and there's people who do that with incredibly simple music.

ATN: How old were you when you were exposed to "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy . . . ?"

Anderson: That's the strange thing. I was just really too young. It was '76 when that happened, which is 20 years ago now. I was about 9 or 10, so I wasn't a punk. I couldn't get to any punk gigs or anything. So we just got these ripples in the suburbs, this incredibly frustrating feeling 'cause you knew you were getting everything like second or third hand and you knew you were missing out. Luckily they were one of the few bands where the records were so fucking powerful that it didn't make any difference, you could actually plug into it. Half of my life I've kind of lived the pop dream, wanting to be in a band, and it comes from that, it comes from being cut off from it and just having these little bits of vinyl which were my only connection to it. It's not like nowadays where any kind of fucking two-bit thing makes it, you see it everywhere. It was in the news. I can remember for a few weeks where that was the news. You know what I mean, the Sex Pistols.

ATN: Was it the Sex Pistols or what was it that actually made you make the decision, OK, I want to do this?

Anderson: It's one of those things that's always seemed completely natural to me. It's almost the other way around. I can remember the first time I met someone who didn't want to be in a band. And I can remember thinking it was the most bizarre thing. I thought they were making it up. I just assumed that everyone wanted to be in a band and a lot of people settled for something else.

I guess that punk was really important just because the first time you pick up a guitar, you're not going to be able to play "Brown Sugar," but you are going to be able to play stuff like "Bodies" and "Submission." I used to be in a punk band called The Pigs. We played these kind of like bastardized Sex Pistols and Fall songs about the countryside. I mean they actually connected you to music.

One of the big problems of coming from the kind of place I come from is there's no history, there's no music, you can't imagine yourself as a pop star. You couldn't say, "I want to be in a band." There weren't any bands. There wasn't a local scene or anything. The nearest big town is Brighton and that's never produced anything. One of the things about the Smiths I loved when I was growing up was just the kind of obvious ordinariness of them and the fact that they were making beautiful, important music and they were just obviously kind of like the square kid in the back of the class.

ATN: Haywards Heath is where you grew up, right?

Anderson: Yes.

ATN: But that's 40 miles from London. That doesn't seem that far to me, but it sounds like it felt like it was a million miles away from anything cool.

Anderson: Oh yeah, completely. It's near enough, I used to go up to London when I was 15, 16, but kind of as a complete tourist. I used to wander around the streets with my mouth open. I didn't get to do anything. I just went to wander around and soak it all in. I think that's quite important to be cut off from it, because you keep your romantic view of it intact.

ATN: You romanticize it.

Anderson: People actually from London, they're a bunch of fucking, cynical old farts, they really are. They've all seen it all before, they've all been backstage. They've already seen the downside of it and we never really had that. We still kind of actually believed in the band. And I think a lot of big city people just don't. They don't believe in the power of music.

ATN: About how old were you when you had The Pigs?

Anderson: The Pigs. I guess I must have been about 15.

ATN: Was that your first band?

Anderson: I've had hundreds. Bedroom bands. I was in a band called Suave and the Elegant. They did kind of Beatles covers. None of us could play. Just farting around. And then, when I met Mat [Osman], it was the same thing, we couldn't play. We had a drum machine in the bedroom and we'd do these dreadful fucking songs.

ATN: How come you parted ways with guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler?

Anderson: He just didn't really enjoy being in the band anymore. There was just no point having anyone in the band who doesn't think it's the greatest thing on earth, you know what I mean?

ATN: So basically he got bored with it or frustrated with it?

Anderson: I think he wanted to do everything himself. He's very musical and he just wanted to sit and play guitar and write songs. And if you want to be in a big band, you actually have to work at it. You have to be singer and musician and businessman and politician and interviewee and all these things at the same time.

ATN: Do you worry at all that not having his musical input is going to affect things like coming up with material?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. We're working a lot faster that we ever have done.

ATN: And you like the material as much?

Anderson: Yeah, certainly. I'm really excited about it. The thing is, I'm writing stuff on my own and I'm writing stuff with [new guitarist] Richard Oakes and I'm writing stuff with the band. Richard is vomiting stuff out.

ATN: What makes you mad?

Anderson: I guess absolute waste. Just the realms of crappy fucking records. Piles of dogshit. You could get rid of 95% of the records that were ever released and no one would be any the worse off. I'd like to see MTV close down for an hour and go, I'm sorry there's nothing good to put on. Or a music magazine saying, we're not coming next week because nothing happened.

ATN: It seems like there's always been this classic tension between the creative sidesomeone trying to make great rock & rolland the record company's side, where it's a business trying to make money. And it's like they don't care whether it's the Sex Pistols or whether it's Journey.

Anderson: At the same time, it's very easy to just be purely musical and just sit at home all day and make beautiful records that no one hears. I can't get away from the fact that if we make a record now, because of record companies, 90% of the world's population can get a hold of it in a week and that's a fucking fantastic thing. That's technology being used in an incredible way. You can't knock it. If you're going to make a record to communicate to people, then you should make sure people fucking hear it. I think that's really important. I don't want to just sit home and say, we just write music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it's a bonus.

ATN: One of the reasons that there's so many crappy records is because the record companies don't know. They're trying to find something...

Anderson: They're doing a job. I'm very aware of that. Every single person you meet in the entire fucking rock-and-roll industry is doing their job and they're looking out for number one. It is a fucking industry and you've just to be completely aware of that. That's why you have to be quite a tight unit as a band because it's the four of you against the rest of the world. However much there's people around us who have our best interests at heart, at the end of the day we're the band and we know what's best. We have pretty much absolute control over Suede. We have more control than pretty much any band out there today.

ATN: Do you make the business decisions?

Anderson: Yeah. Everything follows from the records. Basically, when it comes to selling, we leave the record company to it. That's what they're there for. They're the salesmen. But we're one of the few bands where no one hears our record until we've finished it. And then we come out with a finished record, finished artwork. And we hand it over, we say these are going to be the singles, and we let them to the bits that I have no fucking interest in. Like marketing it.

ATN: When you handed a record over to them, have they ever come back to you and said, "Oh, we think you should do this or we think you should get that song remixed?"

Anderson: [laughs] They wouldn't fucking dare. I mean we listen to them. Every now and then the American record company will say, "I think this would make a great single in America." And we have listened to them in the past. But pretty much anything we actually care about, we do ourselves. No, no one's ever suggested that to us. No one's ever suggested remixing or anything like that. I think they know that it would be a terrible, terrible mistake.

ATN: You've toured America now, this is the third time?

Anderson: Yeah.

ATN: What do you think about this place, given that you've been here enough times that you have some sense of it?

Anderson: I love the place. I do love the place. There's a real openness to it that you don't get in lot in other countries.

ATN: What are some of the specific things that you like?

Anderson: I've had some of the best nights of my life kind of lost in strange American cities. Just being swept along. People are completely receptive to, I don't know, letting loose. Getting loaded and getting loose. Just because there's a kind of dumbness to the place. There is! Which I really like. Let's just see what happens, that kind of thing. England can be a very claustrophobic place, especially if you're vaguely well-known and I don't get that in America at all. I find the opportunities for getting yourself in trouble are vast here.

ATN: Can you be more specific?

Anderson: Not without perjuring myself at a later date. [laughs] I like the people here. I like the fact that people will actually try anything. And I like the way it's very fast moving. It really suits a band on tour. In Britain and Europe it takes kind of six months to get to know people so there's no point in meeting people. Whereas in America you meet people and they're like, "Hi, I'm Cindy, I was abused as a child and I'm a Gemini." And you're off, you know what I mean?

ATN: What's your goal for Suede?

Anderson: Just to make a string of absolutely great records. That was my goal for Suede when I was 12 years old. Doesn't change. One of the only things that doesn't change. To make just an absolute realm of fantastic records that people love.

ATN: Do you have aspirations of having the biggest band in the world?

Anderson: No. I want to be the best band in the world.

ATN: How did you come up with the name?

Anderson: It's just a beautiful, sensual word. It sounds really nice and looks really good. It's a sensual thing rather than intellectual. I've probably gone on many times about how Suede is the animal skin around a human body. But that all came later, when I was getting fucking [laughs] pretentious in interviews. It was just a sensuous, sensual word.

ATN: How did you feel about having to be the London Suede?

Anderson: It stank. I think it's shit.

ATN: What do you think of some of the American bands that have made it in recent years ranging from Pearl Jam to more recently, the Offspring and Green Day?

Anderson: I don't get it. I wish I did. I wish I could at least have understood it but didn't like it. But I just don't get it at all. I'm completely amused by it.

ATN: Are there any American bands that you do like?

Anderson: I like that Sheryl Crow record a lot. I like Perry Farrell, I think he's pretty cool. I like R.E.M.

ATN: You do?

Anderson: Yeah, I do like R.E.M. a lot.

ATN: What do you think of Monster?

Anderson: I think they got away with fucking murder.

ATN: Oh really?

Anderson: I understand it, though. I really understand it. It would be really easy to make another record like the last one and it's quite brave to make a record that you know is going to sell less. I don't think it's a particularly great album at all. I'd love to have been in the business long enough where people actually give you the benefit of the doubt whereas we're in the situation where people always assume the worst. We're always fighting for people to like our records. Whereas I think there are a few fucking statesmen in the world, like Paul fucking Weller in Britain, just because he's been around so long, if he makes a quarter of the way decent record, it's kind of like the second coming. Back to R.E.M., I just like the way they can be that big and that simple. I can't think of another band who've got that big and have actually used it to get simpler and more direct instead of turning into something enormous.

ATN: Speaking of the second coming, do you have anything to say about the Stone Roses' return after so many years of fucking 'round or whatever they were doing?

Anderson: Musically, it's great. They're probably some of the best musicians in Britain and they can actually fucking play. But one of the reasons I really liked the first album is I thought they actually had some songs. And I don't think they have on this one. But that's my personal taste. I like songs. And I don't think this is a very songy album.

ATN: How do drugs affect what you do?

Anderson: Apart from making me get up late for interviews, not very much. It's just something I do. It's not kind of a building brick in Suede, it's something I do personally.

ATN: Do you find it creatively stimulating?

Anderson: Very, very rarely. Not normally. When I wrote this album, I wasn't even drinking. I just locked myself in a white room for 14 hours a day. Pepped myself up with ginseng. Very occasionally I feel inspired by drugs, but not very often. And when we play live, it's funny, when we play live, none of us even have a beer before we go on. We played before 70,000 last year at a festival and we were the only people straight there.

ATN: So is it more a way of getting outside of yourself?

Anderson: I do it for exactly the same reasons that everyone else does. It's a good laugh. It makes me feel in different ways but that's no different from the reasons why millions of people who take drugs. I'd like to say it's some kind of creative elixir but to be honest, most drugs are incredibly uncreative. Cocaine is the least creative drug I can think of. Dope is fucking pointless. It's not a musical thing at all.

ATN: What's your drug of choice?

Anderson: What's the drug of choice? [laughs] I'll take anything, man. I don't really like slow drugs. I don't like drugs that slow you down. I don't like downers. I don't like anything that makes you fucking buzz off to a dream world. I like things that heighten....

ATN: In other words you don't like heroin.

Anderson: No, not particularly. I'm not really interested in dream drugs. I like things that light up your life, pep you up. Ginseng is my drug of choice. And Guinness. [laughs] Any drug that begins with "g," basically.

ATN: At certain points, do you sit back and say, this is amazing that I've been able to achieve what we have achieved?

Anderson: Regularly. Regularly I look in the mirror and say, I'm the luckiest man alive. Yeah, it hasn't lost its wonder for me at all. You can get worn away sometimes, but there's always the moment when you listen back to a track or the moment you play a great gig where you feel like Superman, actually feel like 500 feet tall.

ATN: In terms of the state of rock & roll right now, what's going on from your point of view?

Anderson: I think it's quite inspiring. I think it's quite inspiring in Britain and I think Americans seem quite inspired about the whole thing. I think Britain's producing some halfway decent records for once and I think people are actually astounded that Britain has risen and is beginning to get off its fucking ass. I think the American scene has totally been shook up by cheap bands and the fact that record companies are running around like headless chickens because money doesn't equal success anymore. I think that's great.

What I don't like at the moment is the kind of cult, alternative elements of it, the way everyone is playing to these tiny little demographic audiences and there's no kind of connection across any kind of cultures or even across a fucking big lake like the Atlantic.

ATN: When Elvis Presley died, Lester Banks wrote about Elvis and he said that Elvis was the last rock star that connected everybody.

Anderson: The really big problem is every band in the entire world is living in the shadows of the Beatles and there ain't going to be no more Beatles unfortunately because everyone knows too much and everyone has more access. So people can have music that completely fits them, and you end up with these bizarre musical sub-cultures that are just aimed at one percent of the population. And you never can have another Beatles and I find that incredibly sad. Because that is the blueprint, I think, for every band, for every decent band, to try and make records that turn the whole world on, records that anyone can connect with.

ATN: You really believe in the positive effect that a great rock-and-roll record can have on people.

Anderson: Certainly. Even if it's the most stupid record and it does nothing more for you than brighten up your day for four minutes when it comes on the car radio, it's still more powerful than the other art forms.

ATN: At its best, what do you think it can do?

Anderson: At its absolute best, I think it can totally empower people and totally make people feel like they're wearing a suit of armor and strengthen people and make people feel above the shit of the world. Even at its worst, it can be fucking great. I think a dumb-assed pop song, the dumbest of the dumb-assed pop song is probably more important than any fucking painting done since the war or any sculpture or anything like that.

ATN: Why do you feel that way?

Anderson: It affects people in a way that those things don't. It affects people in a totally natural, physical, emotional way. Not in an intellectual way. It's democratic. It's the only fucking democratic art form left. You can get it anywhere. One of the great things about music is it does belong to everyone and that great songs just come to live in the air. That's why I like the radio so much. That was my first introduction to music. Every now and then I turn it on and think, what a fantastic thing it is. Just that you can have these things all the time. You don't have to go to a fucking gallery, you don't have to pay anything. There just isn't any equivalent for any other art form and it's fucking cheap, music. It must be said. You can get yourself an original Suede for what, about $15?

ATN: Now, it seems like, in terms of a CD, it lasts for quite a long time.

Anderson: Oh, that's a typical fucking American attitude. They always want to know how long it lasts. It is. It's the only place I've ever been in the world where they come first and ask you at a gig, how long are you going to play? Who gives you a shit, you know what I mean?

ATN: I know what you mean. Like a shitty band could play for 3 hours, who cares and like 10 minutes of greatness....

Anderson: I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain when they played for 20 minutes and they were fucking incredible!

ATN: The first time they came to America they played at a little club called the I-Beam in San Francisco and it was amazing.

Anderson: I can just imagine in America someone going, "That was incredible, why don't you play longer?" People always want a fucking encore.

#brett anderson #suede #this is long AF but genuinely interesting!#the london suede #atn #addicted to noise

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bangwoolofbangtan · 4 years

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How BTS and Its ARMY Could Change the Music Industry

By Rebecca Davis

It was just a year ago that BTS’ Love Yourself: Speak Yourself tour was selling out stadiums all over the world. Each night of the 20-date trek, which grossed $116 million, a total of nearly a million ticket buyers around the planet witnessed a thumping opening liturgy at the top of the K-pop band’s set in the form of the song “Dionysus.”

As flames shot up from the stage, seven figures emerged in supplicant white amid Greek columns and a long altar. Rapper RM (full name: Kim Nam-joon) led the way, twirling the staff of the titular mythical deity, as group mates Jin (Kim Seok-jin), SUGA (Min Yoon-gi), j-hope (Jung Ho-seok), Jimin (Park Ji-min), V (Kim Tae-hyung) and Jung Kook (Jeon Jung-kook) flanked him in a display of choreographed precision. The crowd, reaching peak pandemonium in a night full of deafening screams, made willing maenads and satyrs, transported by the band’s presence. An anthem about rebirth and self-discovery through the ecstatic collective experience of music was received as intended — as if from the gods.

Idol worship is by no means a new concept in pop music — remember John Lennon’s provocative statement in 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”? — but there’s something about BTS that turns fandom up to 11. The global brigade of BTS acolytes is collectively known by the acronym ARMY, short for Adorable Representative MC for Youth, a moniker chosen by Big Hit Entertainment, the company that launched the band. ARMY comprises the lion’s share of a Twitter audience that’s 29.2 million followers strong, more than triple that of any other K-pop group, and growing daily. BTS’ Instagram presence of 30.6 million followers (also rising rapidly), is trailed closely only by YG Entertainment’s Blackpink, at 29.3 million.

“It is because ARMY exists that we exist,” Jin says.

To understand the scope of BTS Inc.: An influential 2018 study by the Hyundai Research Institute estimated that the ripple effects from the boy band’s ecosystem contribute roughly $4.9 billion annually to South Korea’s GDP, on track to generate more value over 10 years than the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. The study gauged that in 2017, one in 13 visitors to the country came for BTS-related pilgrimages. That ratio may soon be growing. Spotify has reported a 300% spike in new listeners to the group since the Aug. 21 release of “Dynamite,” BTS’ first all-English single.

The BTS boom has also driven Big Hit to launch an IPO in October projected to raise some $811 million. (Each BTS member will be awarded shares worth approximately $8 million.) Of Big Hit’s revenue in 2019, 97.4% was generated by BTS, including $130 million worth of T-shirts, cosmetics, dolls and other merchandise.

The numbers are no accident. The South Korean government began investing strategically in the arts and the digital economy to help steer the country out of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. On the heels of “Parasite” sweeping the Oscars, the worldwide success of BTS may be another sign to the West that Seoul might be the center of a new force in creative production.

Big Hit, and the K-pop music business in general, have proved just how much a band, and a company, can prosper through a direct-to-consumer relationship, driven by digital platforms and dedicated apps with lots of behind-the-scenes content that keeps fans emotionally involved. It’s engagement on a scale that no Western artist has ever achieved, despite decades of radio promotion and the best retail strategy.

For the global music industry, the band’s success has meant a serious rethink of how a record company — in BTS’ case, Sony Music’s Columbia Records, which distributes the group’s music in the U.S. (though the band is not signed to the label) — builds and maintains a fan base. You could almost look at it as a collaborative arrangement: As music is being made in real time, decision-makers and strategists at Big Hit and Columbia are taking in and processing the comments and views of ARMY and pivoting accordingly.

“It creates a self-sustaining engine that, eventually, becomes hits perpetuating more hits,” says Neil Jacobson, a former president of Geffen Records who runs Hallwood, a talent agency for producers and songwriters. “A label wants that fan connection happening all the time so that they can consistently release and promote music. But in the past, there had always been intermediaries that labels had to talk to in order to manifest exposure. Now, there is a mechanism for an artist to speak directly to their fans. That didn’t exist before, and it has turbocharged the process.”

It’s all led to this “Dynamite” moment: The single has sold nearly 700,000 adjusted song units since its release — good for a gold record certification by the RIAA. The song is quickly becoming the band’s biggest radio hit to date (without a featured artist, it’s worth noting), and represents a significant breakout beyond its core audience. After that, will Grammys follow?

“They check all the boxes,” says Jenna Andrews, the vocal producer on “Dynamite” who also serves as an executive at Sony’s Records label. “I’ve never seen anything like BTS in terms of singing and dancing. This is just an indication of what’s yet to come. They’re going to take over the world.”

Kathryn Lofton, Yale University professor of religious and American studies and author of the book “Consuming Religion,” says that the bond BTS has with its ARMY is different from the typical singer-fan connection because “BTS’ driving commitment is to their relationship to the fan group, to the manufacturing of their communal joy for you to participate in.” It’s why she views BTS as “a religious project; they are seeking to make a togetherness that you can’t stop wanting to be a part of.”

Lofton also makes a point of distinguishing ARMY from the groupies associated with Beatlemania. Sure, BTS fans know the hagiography and backstory of each member, but everything about the band’s output prioritizes the collective over the individual.

The band itself has certainly leaned into the comparison with the Fab Four. For instance, it re-created the iconic moment of the Beatles’ 1964 debut at the Ed Sullivan Theater last May on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” — in a black-and-white segment that showed the K-pop band performing as mop tops in tailored suits.

But while John, Paul, George and Ringo had spotlight moments of their own, both within and outside the band — songs they wrote individually, causes they took up personally — with BTS, it’s all for one all the time. Unlike many other groups, the members share single, collective Twitter and Instagram accounts, and release even solo material through their shared channel. Accomplishments are never spoken of as belonging to any one group member but rather as the work of the team (and, of course, ARMY). In their videos, they often begin in solo shots but end up together.

This all strays from the typical tropes of Western boy bands including New Edition and ’N Sync, which have all proffered “star” frontmen. The thinking for decades had been that a record company would be lucky to have one breakout solo career among the bunch.

But BTS’ selfless approach didn’t happen randomly: The group was envisioned as a collective to heal the alienation that ails us in the digital age. Its name — “BTS” stands for Beyond the Scene — is an invitation to fans to join them offstage via almost daily video content featuring moments in their intimate if immaculately curated private lives on YouTube, Twitter and Big Hit app Weverse.

In 2011, Big Hit’s revenues from its then-main acts, Lim Jeong-hee and boy band 2AM, were plummeting. As the shadow of bankruptcy loomed, Bang Si-hyuk, now chairman, and Lenzo Yoon, global CEO, felt the company needed a total revamp. They stopped all normal work for months and called on employees to perform market research instead, seeking a new vision and formula.

Bang describes the conclusion they reached in a recent Harvard Business School case study of the firm written by Anita Elberse and Lizzy Woodham: “You would think that with the development of digital technology, people can come together more easily, but we found that it is actually more likely that people will feel more isolated. And so we need to find a way to help them, inspire them and heal them.”

Reflecting on the choice to develop a group that satiated this need, Yoon says in the study: “I think back then in 2011, with the conclusions we drew, we found the wild ginseng, as we say in Korea.”

On “Dynamite,” Big Hit worked with Columbia to further cultivate that ginseng. Pitched by Jacobson to label chairman Ron Perry, who guided and essentially A&R’d the song, worked to radio by Columbia executive VP and head of promotion Peter Gray (who has broken hits for Dua Lipa, Kelly Clarkson and Kings of Leon), and all overseen and informed by the years of management savvy of Big Hit, it’s the kind of artist development that was a music business calling card and that has lost its place in the fast-paced world of digital releases.

Radio exposure is not considered as impactful in Korea as it is in the U.S., notes RM, and so BTS — “maybe naively” — didn’t hit the ground in the U.S. thinking, ‘What can boost our airplay?’” the last time around. Still, RM notes that the band has “100% trust” in Columbia, Big Hit and the greater BTS community. “ARMY and the label are all trying their best,” he says, recounting how in the band’s early days, fans would send bouquets to radio DJs to get their songs on the air.

“Our goal is to try to show ourselves, expose ourselves to ARMY as much as possible,” adds Jin. “There are a lot of platforms now.”

In some ways, BTS’ ARMY has grown into its own force and brought the group along for the ride. In the world of K-pop, the expectation is that entertainers stay far away from politics, but as the genre has grown more global, it has begun to reach a transnational cohort to whom matters of social justice are top of mind.

When Variety broke the news on June 6 that BTS and Big Hit had donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter, BTS fans quickly flocked to #MatchAMillion through a link sent out by the fan charity Twitter account @OneInAnARMY. They hit the financial target in just 25 hours.

Erika Overton, a 40-year-old Georgia resident and one of the co-founders of the account, says of the experience: “It was one of the craziest nights I’ve ever seen. I was on Twitter all night. We were refreshing the page every couple of minutes, going, ‘Oh, my God …’” Witnessing ARMY’s U.S. battalion bring the message of Black Lives Matter to fans in other parts of the world who were unfamiliar with the movement was a “big educational moment that was really, really beautiful to see,” says Overton, who is African American.

What Overton saw was facilitated by networks of fan translators who also turn Big Hit’s Korean content into dozens of languages. Other ARMY groups provide counseling or tutoring services, invent themed recipes or write informational threads on everything from the history of the music industry and how charts work to Jungian philosophy, which deeply informs the BTS albums.

Some fan accounts have even become registered nonprofits, with dozens of administrators spread around the world putting in nearly full-time work on top of their day jobs.

In addition to Black Lives Matter, BTS this year donated $1 million to Crew Nation, a Live Nation campaign to support live entertainment personnel impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. And it has continued its campaign with UNICEF to end child violence. But the band members are reticent to take on the role of global activists. “I don’t consider ourselves as political,” says Suga. “We aren’t trying to send out some grandiose message. We would never see ARMY as a conduit for our voice or our opinion. ARMY speaks their own initiatives, and we always respect their opinions, as we respect any other person’s.”

RM, on the other hand, keeps the door open for a kind of apolitical politics based more on actions than words: “We are not political figures, but as they say, everything is political eventually. Even a pebble can be political.”

The scale of its influence is not something that the group takes lightly. “Our [‘Dynamite’] video has seen 80 million, almost 90 million views in just a day. In a way, that’s very weighty — and almost frightening,” RM told Variety the day after its debut, explaining that the balancing act is often one of how to juggle the burdens of being both role models and artists.

Some Korean scholars feel that BTS’ statement in support of BLM shows how ARMY is actually out ahead of Big Hit, spontaneously enacting its own initiatives to which the company must then respond. “Big Hit thinks they can create a company-dominated [approach to] fandom, but fans are agents doing only what they want, not what they don’t want,” says ethnomusicologist Kim Jungwon of Yonsei University in Seoul. For Kim, the fluidity of ARMY’s unplanned, collective responses “is the possible answer to BTS’ success.”

Candace Epps-Robertson, an ARMY member and assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of North Carolina, says the affirmational content of the group’s lyrics and videos may sound simple, but lay the groundwork for millions of fans to learn to engage critically with each other and develop a transcultural sense of global citizenship. “The message of ‘you, yourself, are enough, and you should love who you are and start with that — I think people miss how radical that can actually be,” she says. “We can’t overlook the power of that as an invitation to people to be part of this community.”

The Grammys, where BTS is eligible for record of the year, among other categories (nomination ballots for the 2021 awards, slated to air Jan. 31, went out on Sept. 28), provide a chance for the group to gain industry recognition as a mainstream contender, not just a K-pop act.

Asked why the Grammys matter so much to them, Suga seems to bristle a bit at the question. “I grew up watching American award shows, so obviously we all know and I know the importance of the Grammys,” he says. “It’s a dream anyone working in music has.”

RM says having the goal of a Grammy, an industry-voted award, “motivates us to work harder. As Suga said, if you are in music, the Grammy Awards are something that you cannot help but to look toward and set as an eventual goal.”

BTS’ global influence will soon collide with national duty, and a Grammy Award or three could help maintain its momentum. The band members all have to participate in Korea’s mandatory military service by the age of 28 — and four of them are within two years of that threshold. “Big Hit really wants to target the Grammys before [the members] go into the army,” says an industry source privy to the company’s marketing plans, adding that, from Big Hit’s perspective, it would be best for business if the boys all perform their service at the same time.

The group renewed its contract with Big Hit in 2018, which commits the members to another seven years with the firm, but the army service issue could knock off two years within that time span. A company statement ahead of Big Hit’s IPO shows that Jin, the oldest group member (he’ll be 28 in December), must conscript by 2022 even if he gets an extension of the draft deadline. The statement discloses that plans to prerecord content to be released over the course of any army tenure are being discussed.

South Korea officially changed its rules in July to allow draftees access to once-banned cellphones on weeknights and weekends, meaning BTS could theoretically continue some interaction with fans. However, the taking of photos, video or audio recordings remains prohibited. (Historically, most Korean celebs have fallen silent during their service.)

Soldiering aside, with the push from Big Hit’s IPO, multiple TV appearances — including an ongoing weeklong takeover of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” — the chart success of “Dynamite” and growing Grammy buzz, BTS is poised to make some serious noise this fall, which is saying a lot for a group known to shake the decibel scale with a wave or a wink. But perhaps the most significant measure of its ascent is underscored by the frequent speculation of the band’s place in a new moment for the music industry.

“What would it mean not just to include the sound of Korea in the annals of world music, but to actually propose that the South Korean sound is the next chapter?” posits Yale’s Lofton. “What if BTS are actually the next Beatles?”

©variety.com

#kim taehyung #kim namjoon #bts #kim seokjin #jung hoseok #bts update #jeon jungkook #min yoongi #park jimin #bts variety #bts variety photoshoot #bts variety article #bts article #bts photoshoot

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andthebandbeginstoplay · 5 years

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My Two Fandoms Collide: A Paul McCartney x Taylor Swift Masterpost

Hello friends. It has recently come to my attention that there is crossover between my two favorite fandoms. I am here to answer all your Paul McCartney Taylor Swift questions, and generally provide support for the idea that there will be a collaboration between the two iconic songwriters on T’s new album. Are some things a stretch? Sure. But I want to explore all possibilities. Buckle up because it’s gonna be a wild ride.

This all seems to have started when Paul McCartney told BBC that the song Who Cares, on his new album, Egypt Station, was inspired by Taylor Swift and her relationship with her fans. The song is about internet bullying and Paul said:

"I was actually thinking about Taylor Swift and her relationship to her young fans and how it's sort of a sisterly thing. And I was imagining talking to one of these young fans and saying, 'Have you ever been bullied? Do you get bullied? Then I say, 'Who cares about the idiots? Who cares about all this? Who cares about you? Well... I do.’"

Basically Paul McCartney is the sweetest best person alive and I love him very much.

This all came to the attention of Swifties when Taylor Swift said that Paul McCartney was one of the top three things influencing her in a video for Time Magazine. She called him a role model, and praised his incredible abilities as an entertainer. (Another influence she said was tumblr :D Also interesting that both Paul and T have crazy strong and supportive tumblr communities...although i have no idea if Paul has ever been on tumblr, but if so HI PAUL WE LOVE YOU)

Given the bajillion clues that Taylor has been dropping about her new album recently, we can reasonably assume that this comment needs a fair amount of dissection. So here are all of reasons that Paul McCartney and the Beatles are going to be important in TS7:

1 - We’ll start with the most obvious clue, which is on Taylor’s Instagram. In February Taylor publicly started her TS7 era with a new instagram aesthetic, basically on February 10th everything went from red, white, and black to sparkly, dreamy pastels. In the very first picture of this era she is wearing a fairytale worthy dress. Guess who she credited for the outfit? Stella McCartney, a designer and Paul McCartney’s daughter. This is also interesting because when she credits people (style, photography, etc.) she typically just lists them at the end of the caption, but in this post she thanked Stella as part of the caption, so it seems like she was specifically calling attention to the McCartney family.

2 - Paul & Taylor have one very unique thing in common - they are both “dead”. The old Taylor, of course, died in Look What You Made Me Do on Reputation. However, Paul’s death was not self inflicted. Basically in the 1960s rumors started to fly that Paul McCartney had died in an accident and the Beatles had replaced him with a look-alike in order to keep their fame and upward trajectory going. People thought that the band had left clues in their album art and lyrics, and went on a crazy easter egg hunt to find the truth (sound familiar, Swifties?) “Paul is dead” was basically the best meme of 1969 and the story went 1960s-viral and was picked up by radio stations, newspapers, and magazines.

3 - In 2018 Taylor Swift interviewed Pattie Body who is a FUCKING ICON. She was one of the most famous models of the 1960s, was married to the Beatle George Harrison for most of the time the Beatles were together, and inspired a million incredible rock songs (like Something by The Beatles and Layla by Eric Clapton). In the interview they talked a lot about Beatlemania and what it’s like to deal with an extreme amount of attention and pressure, especially at a very young age. I particularly found this pairing interesting because T hasn’t listed the Beatles as a main influence before, so I was excited to see the crossover beginning. Full article here.

4 - In the ME! music video there’s an entire section where we are randomly taken to a 1960′s concert. Tbh this is super unrelated to anything else that is happening and doesn’t really make much sense with the rest of the video, that exists in a fantasy city. All of the outfits in this scene are very Pattie-Boyd-like, but what I think is even more significant is the screaming, crying crowd that Taylor & Brandon are performing for. People in the crowd are going CRAZY for the performance. A couple of the close-up shots of people in the audience completely losing it look identical to fans at Beatle’s concerts at the height of Beatlemania.

5 - THIS ONE GOES OUT TO THE GAYLORS. One of the most popular theories about the Beatles, specifically on Tumblr, is that Paul McCartney and John Lennon were in love. Their couple name is “McLennon”. There is evidence for days that the bandmates were more than friends and a general consensus that WE LOVE THEIR LOVE. However, they always had to keep things hush hush because #the60s and #PR. There is a lot of speculation around Taylor’s sexuality and the idea that she might come out in her seventh album. From rainbows to pronoun usage, there are a lot of clues that T likes girls, but had to keep quiet about it for the sake of her PR.

6 - LAST AND CERTAINLY LEAST both Paul and Taylor are known for dancing their butts of at awards shows, even if no one is dancing with them. I’m mostly putting this in here because I wanted to post these cute gifs of them:

OKAY THAT’S ALL I HAVE FOR YOU THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME I NEED TO LOG OFF NOW BEFORE I COMBUST

#the beatles #paul mccartney #taylor swift #ts7 #fandom

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ts1989fanatic · 5 years

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MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

JUNE 20, 2019 7:00PM (UTC)

I'm not saying that Taylor Swift is the Beatles. But is she? Let's look at the facts: Both the Fab Four and Swift went from youthful mega fame to durable adult success; both managed to balance being wildly popular with staying gleefully provocative; both turned their flings, feuds and phases into lucrative musical output. But where Taylor really snatches that bowl cut wig is in the way she's leaned in to fandom's obsessive belief that our idols communicate their truly enlightened followers on a whole other level. Goo goo g'joob!

For as long as humans have been churning out creative works, they've been inserting hidden messages into them. Wake up, sheeple, it's called allegory. And along with the poetic, "It works on two levels" flourishes, we've also been adding "Did you see what I did there?" ones. Illuminated manuscripts are riddled with marginalia seemingly drawn for the sole purpose of entertaining the artist and the rare rando who'd notice it. You can find similar little winks throughout classic architecture, if you know where to look. But symbolism is a two-way street, with artists inserting enigmatic clues into their works and audiences free to interpret said works in their own, sometimes entirely different ways. Enter John, Paul, George, Ringo and Taylor. One of the most gloriously bonkerballs conspiracy theories of all times began, of course, with a disavowal of a conspiracy theory. While history is a murky thing, the first rumblings appear to started in 1967, with a fanzine called "The Beatles Monthly Book" with tamping a "FALSE RUMOUR" from January that "that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on the M1. But, of course, there was absolutely no truth in it at all." Two years later, a Drake University newspaper piece discussed the now bubbling rumors of Paul's demise and replacement with a lookalike — and the alleged secret messages on The White Album to prove it. Soon after, Detroit disc jockey Russ Gibb fielded a phone call from a listener about the rumors. Gibb, with a keen ear for ratings bait, took the story and ran with it, and his show became an early landing page for theories and clues.

It didn't take long for a trove of "evidence" to emerge, from John's alleged "I buried Paul" on "Strawberry Fields (he later insisted he was saying "cranberry sauce") to the "funeral procession" cover of Abbey Road, with its cryptic "28IF" license plate on a nearby VW. The entirety of "I Am the Walrus" was cited as an account of Paul's death and its concealment. The fact that the conspiracy theory was able to get this big and this elaborate so quickly is truly a testament to resourcefulness and persistence of a pre-Internet rabbit hole generation. Well done, boomers.

Why the biggest band in the world would engage in a coverup and then confess about it in cryptic song lyrics album art is beyond me; I assume everyone was on psychedelics at the time. McCartney soon had to issue a public declaration of his continued existence, even appearing with his family on the cover of Life magazine with the headline "Paul is still with us." Now it's 50 years later and he still hasn't convinced everybody.

Taylor Swift may never have had to contend with an elaborate hoax theory about her existence, but she has cheerfully declared herself dead — or at least buried the "old Taylor." She's also, increasingly, loaded her work with more Easter eggs than a White House lawn in the springtime. Because it gets attention — bigger than Jesus-level attention.

If there are lizard people, Taylor Swift is DEFINITELY their queen. She famously works her lucky number, 13, into both her music and videos whenever possible. After her 2016 feud with the Kardashian-Wests blew up and social media embraced the serpent as Swift's patronus, she fully took it on, loading snake imagery into her videos as if to say, yes world, here I am, in my full reptile form. But then, the snake morphed into a butterfly because that is how biology works in Swiftland, keep up. Earlier this year, Swift made a mural of a butterfly appear in Nashville as "the best surprise clue" regarding her new song, commending fans for their "FBI level detective skills" in figuring out that the butterfly was Taylor.

Over the past few years, Swift has gone from directly naming songs after her exes to being a person whose videos are now accompanied by lengthy explainers of all the secret messages and symbolism. And your family said you'd never find a use for that art history degree. Popsugar recently found 28 hidden clues in her "Me!" video, which is only eleven fewer than an entire Rick Riordan series. And her latest, the hot take generator "You Need to Calm Down," is so dense with celebrity cameos and numbers and tricky secrets that I do, in fact, need to calm down, because somewhere in all of this there are the coordinates to where the aliens are hidden.

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rockandrollstorytime · 5 years

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Rock and Roll Storytime #8: The Rolling Stones at Altamont (AKA One of the Worst Concert Disasters of All Time)

The year 1969 had been a hectic one, both for the world in general (with the continuing Vietnam War, the Chappaquiddick incident, and the moon landings) and especially for rock and roll (with the death of Brian Jones, Woodstock, and the Beatles starting to head full-steam down the road that led them to their break-up in April 1970). Capping off this year full of highs and lows, there was Altamont, which has been labelled by many as the death of the 60′s. At the very least, it certainly brought a premature end to the idealism that the youths of that generation held dear.

Lord knows, I will always say that Brian Jones should have had a chance to get back on his feet and I’m super salty that he’s dead, but honestly, I’m glad he missed out on this one.

Before I tell the story of Altamont though, I must ask… Whose bright idea was it to hire the Hell’s Angels as security for a Rolling Stones concert and pay them with $500 of beer?

Well, to answer that question, I’m going to have to begin this story with the ending of another. Truly, the roots of this ill-thought-out decision lies within events that had happened that summer.

I’ve mentioned Brian Jones already, but to give those of you who are new to this the rundown, Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was the Stones’ first guitarist, and at the start, he was the brains of the band. Seven years, a bunch of internal conflict with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Loog Oldham, a messy relationship with Anita Pallenberg, drug abuse and alcoholism, two drug trials, and a fuck-ton of stress later, Brian was in a state we’d call “mental exhaustion” (didn’t help that his physical health was shit too). Where in 1966 he was contributing some of the best parts of the Stones’ early music, such as the sitar on “Paint It Black”, in 1969, he’d rarely show up to the studio, and if he did, he would usually be too intoxicated to properly contribute. In fact, on Let It Bleed, he only contributed to two songs: “Midnight Rambler” (congas) and “You’ve Got the Silver” (autoharp).

In June 1969, the Stones decided they wanted to go on tour again, but then, they found out that due to the fact that Brian had twice been convicted of drug possession, it’d be unlikely that he could receive a visa to perform in the U.S.A., if at all. Ultimately, Mick and Keith decided that their best option would be to fire Brian, and so, on June 8, 1969, they went down to Brian’s home, Cotchford Farm, to tell him that he would no longer be with the group. According to those present, Brian had been expecting this, and in the various press releases, it was made to appear as if Brian had left the band on his own terms. His statement read, in part, “I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting. We no longer communicate musically. The Stones’ music is not to my taste any more. The work of Mick and Keith has progressed at a tangent, at least to my way of thinking. I have a desire to play my own brand of music rather than that of others, no matter how much I appreciate their musical concepts.”

At this point in time, whether Brian was accepting of this turn of events or not is up to conjecture.

In either case, the Stones brought in 20-year-old Mick Taylor (previously of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) to replace Brian, and at a press conference on June 13, the Stones announced that they would be holding a free concert on July 5 in order to properly introduce their new guitarist.

And then, just three days before the concert was set to take place, Brian drowned in his backyard swimming pool, being just twenty-seven years old. Although the coroner ruled it death by misadventure (which personal research seems to support), theories have long persisted that Brian was, in fact, murdered, but that is, of course, a story for another day.

The Stones in the Park concert quickly became a tribute to Brian Jones, and at the start, Mick read two verses of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, and as the band launched into “I’m Yours and I’m Hers” by Johnny Winters (one of Brian’s favourite songs), thousands of butterflies were released, though this was against park stipulation, as they were voracious Cabbage White butterflies, and many had died due to the boxes not being properly ventilated.

What’s important to this story about the concert at Hyde Park is that the London chapter of the Hell’s Angels was there providing security that day. It is also important to note that the Grateful Dead (who, incidentally, also had a member of the 27 Club in their line-up) had also hired the Hell’s Angels as security numerous times.

Several months later, the Stones had been having a pretty good run with their American tour, which was able to slightly mitigate some of the shady business practices Allen Klein had subjected them to, but throughout, fans and journalists kept complaining about high ticket prices. If you ask me though, those bitches were lucky. I’d rather be paying three to eight dollars (equivalent to $21.21 to $56.57 in 2019) as opposed to a minimum of $159 that tickets to a Rolling Stones concert now sell for. Not to mention, Woodstock had happened in August that year, and that was a big success, so in Mick Jagger’s 26-year-old, immature, unwise brain, that obviously meant that they should have another free concert like the one at Hyde Park. Really, in his mind, the peace and love movement was only just beginning, so what could go wrong?

As Murphy’s Law will tell you, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”

Oh, and go wrong it did.

The first major problem was that they couldn’t get a venue.

The concert was set for December 6, and their tour manager, Sam Cutler, struggled to get them a venue. He tried San Jose’s State University, but there had been a three-day festival recently, and the city wasn’t exactly in the mood for another batch of hippies storming the city so soon afterward, so that was out of bounds. He then tried gunning for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, but there was a football game between the Chicago Bears and the San Francisco 49-ers taking place in the same general location, which made use of the venue impractical. He then tried getting Sears Point Raceway on board, but disputes quickly arose over filming distribution rights and an up-front fee of $300,000.

Finally, just two days before the concert was set to take place, the Stones’ management managed to get a hold of Altamont Speedway (it helped that the owner, Dick Carter, apparently offered the venue for free).

As you can imagine, there was a whole shit-ton of problems that arose from that, and Rolling Stone magazine, in its piece on the tragedy, listed the following logistical problems:

“1) Promise a free concert by a popular rock group which rarely appears in this country. Announce the site only four days in advance.

2) Change the location 20 hours before the concert.

3) The new concert site should be as close as possible to a giant freeway.

4) Make sure the grounds are barren, treeless, desolate.

5) Don’t warn neighboring landowners that hundreds of thousands of people are expected. Be unaware of their out-front hostility toward long hair and rock music.

6) Provide one-sixtieth the required toilet facilities to insure that people will use nearby fields, the sides of cars, etc.

7) The stage should be located in an area likely to be completely surrounded by people and their vehicles.

8) Build the stage low enough to be easily hurdled. Don’t secure a clear area between stage and audience.

9) Provide an unreliable barely audible low fidelity sound system.

10) Ask the Hell’s Angels to act as ‘security’ guards.”

Most sane people would have quit while they were ahead, but this is the Rolling Stones we’re talking about. Between Brian Jones having five kids by the age of twenty-three, Mick Jagger allegedly sleeping with over 4,000 women (and don’t get me started on him and David Bowie), Keith Richards’ drug habits and his snorting his dad’s ashes, Bill Wyman dating a teenager while he was in his forties, and Charlie Watts punching Mick Jagger in the face, we are absolutely not dealing with the most sane bunch of individuals on the planet.

And let’s not forget that some idiot decided it’d be a great idea to pay the Hell’s Angels in $500 of beer (the equivalent of $3,535.43 in 2019).

Yeah, if you listened closely to the sounds of the earth in 1969, I can guarantee you, you probably would have heard a barely-cold-in-the-ground Brian Jones spinning in his grave over this stupidity (because he was acting as the band’s manager for a time in their early days before Andrew Oldham came on board).

Let’s also not forget that they hired a particularly notorious batch of Hell’s Angels from Oakland, California, whereas the Grateful Dead found their “security bikers” in Sacramento. Apparently, Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully even tried to warn the Stones about the “real” Hell’s Angels after seeing the footage from Hyde Park, but obviously, they didn’t take whatever warning he tried to give them to heart. The hippies in general had a romanticized image of the Hell’s Angels in their heads, seeing them as “outlaw brothers of the counterculture.”

No points for guessing how that worked out, but let’s continue regardless.

Set to perform that night were Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, the Grateful Dead, and of course, the Rolling Stones.

They would all be performing on a stage that was just thirty-nine inches off the ground and surrounded on all sides by over 300,000 attendees. Apparently, this had been planned to create a more “intimate” experience.

From what I could tell, waivers were not involved.

For the sake of time, I can’t give you a minute-by-minute analysis of the event, but I can still provide a basic timeline of all that happened.

So, everything went relatively smoothly as Santana performed their set, but it was only downhill from there. As the day progressed, the crowd started fighting each other, and the “security” sure as hell didn’t help matters. At some point, someone knocked over one of the Angel’s motorcycles, which was likely an accident. However, the Angels were already pretty pissy, and plus, rule number one when it comes to the Angels is “Don’t mess with the motorcycles.” So, the Angels, already high thanks to someone spiking the beer with acid, started indiscriminately assaulting audience members they didn’t like with sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains, including a guy who was running around naked and someone else who was trying to take pictures of the stage. One woman who called in to a radio station the next day reported that she saw five fistfights, and the Angels were involved in every last one. She tried to intervene, but the people around her warned her not to, fearing for both their safety and hers.

During Jefferson Airplane’s set, Marty Balin was knocked unconscious when he tried to intervene in a fight between the audience members and Hell’s Angels. When Paul Kantner grabbed a mic and sarcastically thanked the Angels, Bill Fritsch grabbed the mic from him and started arguing with him about it. In addition, Denise Jewkes, lead singer of Ace of Cups, was hit in the head with a beer bottle and suffered a skull fracture. Her husband, Noel, had to lead his six-month pregnant wife through the sea of people so she could get medical attention. The Stones later paid her medical expenses. By this point, news of what was going on out front was beginning to seep into the backstage areas and even back to the Stones at their hotel room, but most of the acts decided to press on regardless. However, after hearing about what happened to Marty from Michael Shrieve, the guys from the Grateful Dead decided to book it.

Yeah. Thanks a bunch, assholes.

The crowd did calm down a bit for the Flying Burrito Brothers’ set, because really, who can say no to Gram Parsons? However, that calm was only temporary. When the Stones arrived by helicopter, it wasn’t even ten seconds before someone punched Mick Jagger in the face. Also, Bill Wyman missed the first helicopter out, so the Stones were already going to be late.

And then Mick Jagger decided he wanted to be all dramatic and shit, so the crowds were forced to wait until nightfall for the Stones’ set.

Meanwhile, during Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s set, a “stoned out” Angel reportedly stabbed Stephen Stills in the leg whenever he stepped forward to sing, leaving trails of blood running down his leg.

By the time the Stones were anywhere near ready to take the stage, things started to degenerate even further, to the point where the Angels (who already despised Mick’s scrawny, English arse) pretty much forced the Stones to go out on stage regardless of whether they were ready or not, just to prevent a full-scale riot.

It was in that moment Mick knew… he fucked up royally.

As Mick observed the constant fighting between the audience members and Hell’s Angels during the show as he sang “Sympathy for the Devil”, he desperately, defeatedly, pleaded for calm, his usual bravado completely absent for once in his adult life. However, it was clear that the Angels already weren’t going to listen to the flamboyant musician they clearly hated, and tensions had been simmering too long throughout the day, so Mick’s pleas for peace practically went completely unheard.

Mick Taylor later said, “The Hell’s Angels had a lot to do with it. The people that were working with us getting the concert together thought it would be a good idea to have them as a security force. But I got the impression that because they were a security force they were using it as an excuse. They’re just very, very violent people. I think we expected probably something like the Hell’s Angels that were our security force at Hyde Park, but of course they’re not the real Hell’s Angels, they’re completely phony. These guys in California are the real thing — they’re very violent. I had expected a nice sort of peaceful concert. I didn’t expect anything like that in San Francisco because they are so used to having nice things there. That’s where free concerts started, and I thought a society like San Francisco could have done much better. We were on the road when it was being organized, we weren’t involved at all. We would have liked to have been. Perhaps the only thing we needed security for was the Hell’s Angels. I really don’t know what caused it but it just depressed me because it could have been so beautiful that day”

(I feel so sorry for Mick Taylor. The kid was just twenty years old when he saw all this bullshit going down.)

Now, what I’m going to do with this go-around, before I describe what happened next, is tell you a little bit about Meredith Hunter. He was just eighteen when he went to Altamont with his girlfriend, Patti Bredehoft. The only reason he had a gun that day, according to his family, was for self-protection, given that he was basically a young black man with a white girlfriend in a sea of white people, at a time and place where racism was still very much prevalent. Allegedly, the gun didn’t even have any bullets in it; it would just be a last resort to deter anyone giving him trouble. Like most 18-year-olds, he was also a bit naive, and though his girlfriend wanted to leave, he convinced her to stay for the Rolling Stones’ set. At one point, he was already set upon by Hell’s Angels, but that time, it was only a scuffle. What is known is that he was high on methamphetamines, but what isn’t known for sure is his general demeanour. Some said he had a crazy look in his eye, while others said that he seemed calm, though he was upset at the violence.

And then, all hell broke loose.

youtube

As “Under My Thumb” was ending, cameras found an opening into the crowd, into which stumbled Meredith Hunter. He grabbed his gun, a .22 calibre revolver, which was visible to cameras against Patti’s dress. When Alan Passaro saw this, he immediately assumed that Hunter was trying to shoot somebody, and started stabbing him (this was, again, in plain view of a bunch of cameras). Subsequently, he was repeatedly kicked in the head, trying to tell his attackers that he wasn’t trying to kill anybody. However, the Angels were convinced that he was attempting to shoot somebody, and that’s essentially what the narrative became- that a crazed black kid high on meth tried to shoot Mick or one of the other Rolling Stones (which, believe me, I’d be salty about even if I hadn’t read a Rolling Stone article about him).

It was little Mick Taylor who managed to keep things rolling (a bit) by suggesting they play “Brown Sugar”, which had only been recorded the previous Tuesday.

Somehow, after the vicious beating he’d suffered, Meredith was still alive, and a doctor at the scene looked at him and recommended that he get immediate medical attention, or else he’d die. However, the only helicopter at the scene was reserved for the Rolling Stones, and the pilot made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that no one else was allowed on board. Hunter ended up dying of his injuries while they waited for emergency responders.

I don’t quite know how well the situation was explained, but still, dick move on the part of the helicopter pilots.

In addition to Hunter, three other people died, one after falling into a fast-moving irrigation duct while tripping on LSD, and two others were killed in their sleeping bags during a hit-and-run accident. There were also four reported births, one of which occurred during Jefferson Airplane’s set.

The day after the concert, the Stones flew back to London, as the news slowly disseminated throughout the world.

youtube

In 1971, a documentary about the tragedy, Gimme Shelter, was released to the public. However, in the years since, many have argued that is meant to excuse the Stones’ actions and is an apologist piece of media. Still, the footage itself does show a chilling account of what happened that day, if you can ignore that overall narrative (though you really shoudn’t ignore that).

Alan Passaro was later charged with Meredith’s murder, but was acquitted by an all-white jury, who likely either excused the crime due to racism, or just didn’t have the full story.

After Altamont, just about everybody turned on each other. The audience members, many of whom undoubtedly still live with the scars of that fateful night blamed the Hell’s Angels, whereas the Angels laid some of the blame on the audience members, and most of it on the people who hired them, whilst the Stones said they’d never work with the Hell’s Angels again (which, allegedly, almost resulted in some of them trying to assassinate Mick Jagger).

In my honest, humble, not-so-professional opinion, I say the blame should be laid with the Stones’ management, Mick Jagger, the Grateful Dead, and the Hell’s Angels. The concert should have been planned over a matter of months instead of weeks, held in a proper venue, and above all else, not had fucking Hell’s Angels as security guards.

While the Grateful Dead came out of it rather unscathed (mostly because they didn’t play), it’s been said that the Stones lost quite a bit of their edge. It’s easy to say that they grew up a lot because of this event, becoming a lot humbler, and a lot less greedy and risky as a direct result of this. It’s even to a point where people haven’t liked much of what they’ve put out since the 1980’s. Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young declined to have their performances shown in Gimme Shelter, and have since spoken very little about the event. Meanwhile, Alan Passaro drowned in 1985, though the circumstances of his death are suspicious, to say the least. Meanwhile, Meredith Hunter’s family still deals with the trauma of his death, and aside from a $10,000 ($70,708.59) settlement, the Stones never even approached the family to offer their condolences, or even a half-assed explanation (I don’t recommend the latter approach). The Hell’s Angels also had their reputations as dangerous outsiders cemented by this event, given that they’d caused at least 75-90% of the violence that took place that day.

Keith Richards has maintained his “fuck-all” attitude about this through the years, even writing in his 2010 autobiography “In actual fact, if it hadn’t been for the murder, we’d have thought it a very smooth gig by the skin of its fucking teeth.”

There is a reason that many of the dreams of the 60′s died at Altamont, and all the evidence you really need is the footage that was shot that night and the words of the people who saw the fiasco first hand.

Sources: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/remembering-meredith-hunter-the-fan-killed-at-altamont-630260/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-rolling-stones-disaster-at-altamont-let-it-bleed-71299/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidchiu/2019/12/03/altamont-at-50-the-disastrous-concert-that-brought-the-60s-to-a-crashing-halt/#535871c31941 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-chaos-of-altamont-and-the-murder-of-meredith-hunter https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-altamont-festival-brings-the-1960s-to-a-violent-end https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/altamont-wasnt-the-end-of-the-60s-it-was-the-start-of-rock-n-roll-disasters https://worldhistoryproject.org/1969/12/6/altamont-free-concert Altamont by Joel Selvin Life by Keith Richards https://allthatsinteresting.com/altamont-speedway-free-concert https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/lifestyle/altamont-rolling-stones-50th-anniversary/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Meredith_Hunter http://timeisonourside.com/chron1969.html https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/01/altamont-free-concert-in-1969/ https://www.ranker.com/list/altamont-free-concert-facts/jen-jeffers http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/On-This-Day–Deaths-at-Rolling-Stones–Altamont-Concert-Shocks-the-Nation.html https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/altamont.php https://westegg.com/inflation/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUlyVSfhgaM https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-rolling-stones/1969/altamont-speedway-tracy-ca-43d6fbb3.html https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/just-a-shot-away-a-history-of-altamont-by-saul-austerlitz-reviewed.html

#mick jagger #keith richards #brian jones #charlie watts #bill wyman #mick taylor #the rolling stones #jefferson airplane #santana #flying burrito brothers #the grateful dead #cw: drugs #cw: death #cw: racism #cw: murder #cw: assault #cw: violence #this concert was such a mess

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seromreven · 5 years

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title: blue velvet | prologue.

pairings: john lennon/male!reader & paul mccartney/reader | various pairings both including and not including the reader.

summary: it’s the turn of the new decade; you’re the leader of a band that has its residency in a popular nightclub in Hamburg. One fateful night you meet The Beatles, a band new in town, and things take a turn as your relationship with two of the members of the band evolves.

author’s note: if you can’t tell where i’m going with this; then we’re two. but the writing bug bit me and i’m all out of bug spray.

also on ao3!

The dirt and broken bottles on the asphalt cracked loudly under your feet as you crossed the old pitiful road towards the back entrance of the Kaiserkeller to meet your bandmates for a night of senseless fun.

They had raved on and on for forever about the two new bands that had started to play there earlier that month and insisted that you just had to see them perform. You knew not much else than their apparent capabilities to play as your friends had neither disclosed their names or anything else, for some unknown reason.

It was early October and the few trees that proudly stood in the nearby patches of grass had turned various colours of yellows and oranges. It was all a pretty sight, really. Probably would be even more so during the day when it wasn’t highlighted by sharp neon and blinking lights from the nearby shops, nightclubs and what else.

You went around the building to the front entrance and looked around. The line wasn’t terribly long, it being late in the night on a typical workday. On the other side of the street stood men promoting their business, trying to lure tourists and locals equally inside. Few pairs of sex workers stood scattered around, scantily clothed as they waited for customers.

You went straight to the bouncer and in, alright, German explained that your friends were already inside. It was a tough sell but eventually, with your grace and charm (and a few marks), he let up and stepped aside so you could pass. Good thing your German was more than adequate, otherwise, it would have been completely impossible. Few locals had the patience for English speakers.

The inside of the club was warm and you immediately shredded your vintage long coat, bought cheaply in a flea market once upon a noon, exposing your navy blue t-shirt that fitted tightly around you and one you thought made you look very attractive, if you could be so bold to say.

You headed straight to the bar as you decided to grab a beer before you went looking for your friends, or before they found you. Either way, beer was the main priority.

You shoved yourself through the crowd of dancing and talking people, careful in pushing them aside as you neither were in the mood for getting drinks spilt on you or getting hit by some pissed German; pissed in both senses of the word, mind.

The bar wasn’t all too busy as most people were far too focused on the performing band. You quickly ordered your drink in German and glanced to the stage.

The lead singer looked tall from where you stood. Blonde and in a bright blue suit, matching the technicolour pink suits of the rest of the band. He was attractive and while you had heard better singing; it wasn’t all too bad.

Though what grasped your attention more so was the drumming. A good beat and great timing, something you could imagine would at least have had your own drummers attention. Nevermind that, the man behind the set was interesting as well. Hair in a messy quiff that curled at its edges; presumably from sweat, with a prominent white streak going down one side of his hair. Genetic or dyed, you couldn’t tell from this distance. His drooping eyes and large nose made him look rather intimidating, though admittedly; it gave you a different effect than fear and thoughts of what those hands could do arose in your mind.

Man, not even halfway through your beer and your thoughts were getting frisky… This could turn into an interesting night.

You bottomed your drink. The warm and stinging sensation as it went through your throat was just what you needed. You turned away from the stage and leaned your back against the bar, nodding along to the beat, and looked around the large room and over the crowds.

You easily found them. Booker, your bassist, had his arm slung over the shoulder of your eternally sulking drummer, Wolfgang. The local to the area of the band and a man who had been an enormous help in communicating with managers and finding food and board. Not only because of his fluency in German but also because he was simply more logically minded than other two of the band. And even if you were the official leader of the band; you just never had patience with men in suits.

You sneaked your way over to them; slowly, in hopes of taking them by surprise. The last member of your band, Charlie, spotted you but as you showed him the universal sigh of ‘keep quiet’ and silently shushed him. He rolled his eyes with a small smirk and went back to his conversation with a young brunette at his side.

And, well, it was pretty easy. Booker and Wolfgang both had their backs to you. Booker too distracted by his own loud voice. Wolfgang probably trying his best not to kill the guy and doing his best to just watch the performing band.

And, so it was incredibly hilarious when you finally got up behind them and yelled in their ears.

The music stilled for a short second before picking up again at the commotion you had created by taking Booker by a big enough surprise that he fell off his chair with a yelp, dragging Wolfgang down with him as his arm was still around the poor man.

You stared down at them while laughing loudly.

“Guten Abend,” you managed to push through your laughter as Booker blinked dumbfounded up at you with a Wolfgang pinned underneath his arm. Wolfgang threw off the renegade arm with a groan and quickly got to his feet with a scowl.

“I am getting a drink,” he growled and shoved past you. You weren’t worried about his anger. Pour a few beers in him and it’s all forgotten about. So you shrugged and dumped yourself down in his now abandoned seat while ignoring Booker’s struggles in getting back up.

“Not cool,” Booker muttered as he finally found his way back to his seat.

“So!” You energetically clasped your hands, getting Charlie’s attention back away from the girl, and looked to the stage. “This one of the bands you talked about?”

Charlie nodded, “yes. This is…,” there was a pause as he was trying to remember, ”Rory Storm and The Hurricanes-“ you snorted into your drink at the name, “-the other band we talked about will be on afterwards.”

“And they are…?”

“The Beatles!” The woman beside Charlie erupted with a bright smile, taking you slightly by surprise as you had completely forgotten she was even there. Clearly a fan. Charlie glanced shortly at her before looking back at you.

“You’ve heard them before?” You asked the stranger.

“Oh, yes! They’re great! And so cute,” she gushed. She was clearly blushing and you assumed it was from the thoughts of these Beatles guys rather than the warmth of the room. Charlie seemed mildly irritated at the prospect of new competition.

You hummed in thought and looked to the stage. Cute, eh? We’ll see about that. So far the selection of cute guys was rather slim to none if the current band and your friends were ignored. Even slimmer when counting the possibilities of them even being interested in other men. You sighed; it was rough but you weren’t going to give up just yet.

The announcement of the band getting to their last number filled the room and was accepted with protests and groans; much to the amusements of the members of the band. The singer reassured the audience with charm that they would be on stage soon again and then continued informing them of when.

Just as they stepped off the stage, a new one entered. They were a sharp contrast to the colourful suits of the Hurricanes. All in this band but the drummer were dressed in attire typical of what was pretty known as Teddy Boys back in England. Leather jackets and drainpipe trousers abound. They also wore boots with what looked like thick heels. Much more rough in appearance than the band before them, so much you could say.

The leader, or so you assumed, stepped to the mic with a guitar in hand and introduced them as The Beatles. Huh.

He introduced himself as John. His eyes were slim and narrowed. And though you couldn’t see the form of his nose from where you sat; it had a prominent presence on his face. He wasn’t… unattractive, with his leather jacket and quiff he actually made a striking picture.

He made a few jokes, none were paid attention to as you were far too busy studying him and the other members.

On both his sides stood two men; one with a guitar and one with a bass. The bassist looked bored. Or unimpressed by something, you couldn’t tell. He wore dark shades that helped to give him a mysterious air around him. But honestly, it made you lose your interest in him.

So you looked to guitarist and found that you had to begrudgingly agree with Charlie’s date.

He was cute. With a baby face, high raised eyebrows and pouting lips; he stood out from the otherwise masculine players of the band. Sure, he tried to fit in with his hairstyle and similar clothes but he still lacked the rough edges and defined jaws that the members had.

Speaking of; the last member for you to look at had some prominent cheekbones and jaw. But what most stood out to you about how was how young he looked. Surely he didn’t belong in a bar? You could be wrong but, man, you felt a protective instinct rush over as you watched him play.

You had studied them for a while now and they were well into their second number as you looked at them in silence. It wasn’t until you felt a tab on your shoulder that you finally looked away from them.

“Seeing something you like?” Booker smirked at you from his seat next to you. He probably knew that you had at your uncharacteristic silence. You huffed in response and took a big sip from his large glass of lager.

“Hey, get your own, you cheap ass,” he pulled the glass away from you as you snickered. The amber liquid almost spilt over the edge of the glass as it was pulled across the table. You glanced to the bar and saw that some of the band members from That Guy and The Hurricanes stood at the bar.

“...Maybe I will,” you muttered and stood up with your eyes back unto the stage. They were deep into a Buddy Holly number and as you went across the room to the bar; your eyes met with the leaders as he sang. A chill shot through, one which you ignored and chalked up to be the drinks getting to you. You broke the staring contest and continued to the bar.

There you found Wolfgang grovelling with a woman hanging on his arm. It seemed his dark and mysterious act was having some success. Now, it was up to you if you wanted to meddle in that or not. You know, for the hell of it.

You decided to get a drink first and see where it went from there.

A bejewelled hand rested around a glass beside you as you leaned across the bar due to the lack of available stools. The hand was large and masculine, adorned with multiple rings. Curious, you looked to your right and saw that it was the drummer from the previous band. He was alone, the rest of the members scattered around the bar, and still wore the brightly coloured suit.

And as you got your drink; you turned to face him and asked, “hey, you’re a Hurricane, right?”

He turned to you, confusion clear on his face, and blinked. It was rather cute and did its work on slowly tearing down the otherwise intimidating look he had about him.

After a few seconds, he chuckled with a slight nod of his head, “I am.”

You smiled and reached your hand out for him to shake. “First time seeing your guys today but I gotta say; already a fan. Of you especially.” Your hand was met with the mixings of warm skin and cool metal of his rings. It was a nice sensation on your heated skin. He thanked you with sweet laughter.

“Now,” you leaned forward, “doesn’t this joint have a backstage room for stars like you to hang around in?” You finished off with a slow sip of your beer.

“Yes, but they don’t serve beer there. Nor do they have the presence of delightful company of men like you,” he leaned forward too and you said with a low hum, “well, that could quickly be arranged.” His brow raised as he smirked but just as he opened his mouth to say something; you felt a tab on your shoulder and you sighed, closing your eyes for just a second before turning around.

It was Booker with a red-headed girl hanging around his arm.

You raised your brow at him; indication for him to speak.

“This is, um, Flora. And we gotta, uh, go. Home. Now,” he nodded. Most likely to himself than anyone else. He was drunk. You hadn’t been at the club for long so either he and the others had been here early, or Booker suddenly had been busy while you weren’t looking.

“...Sure, you go do that.”

You weren’t quite fond of having been interrupted in your chat with the drummer… Who’s name you realised you still didn’t know. But you understood why you had been. The four of you in the band shared an apartment so it was important to know when there were guests.

Booker left and you turned back to face the attractive drummer only to find him missing.

“Damn it,” you whispered to yourself and gave all your attention into your beer as you looked around the room to see if you could spot him.

You had no such luck and you soon resigned yourself to watching the band. The babyface was singing now. And for all his adorable traits, your eyes constantly wandered to the leader who was strumming along with the beat on his guitar.

Why? You weren’t incredibly attracted to him and yet there was something that drew your eyes to him. And how his fingers moved across the strings. Could it be his defined jaw or narrow eyes that drew you? Or simply the way he played?

You had to distract yourself away from… that. And so you looked anywhere else until your eyes landed on your former table where Charlie now sat alone. Your eyes met and you waved him over.

“What happened to the bird?” You asked him after he ordered a beer.

“A hurricane swept her up,” he answered and causing you to snicker. He shortly frowned before joining in on the laughter.

Something was tucking your gut and you asked, “short one with a white streak in his hair?”

He nodded as he drank from his glass.

Damn.

“So,” quickly changing the topic from your defeat, “Booker left. With a girl.”

He nodded.

“And where’s Wolf?” You asked and looked around. You hadn’t seen him in a while and, honestly, you were starting to fear he was mad at you.

“He left. Probably to have a shag on your bed,” he laughed and patted you on the back. Fuck. Definitely still mad then.

You sighed, “so much for a guys night out, eh?”

Charlie just shrugged, “it always goes like this so it’s no big surprise, really.”

You nodded with a sigh as he looked around the bar. “Now let’s find you a handsome lad so you’re not the odd one out when we get back.”

You were lucky with friends like these. Homosexuality was not something that was discussed. It was frowned upon. And more importantly; it was downright illegal. Though the legality of things was constantly ignored in this neighbourhood. And same-sex relationships weren’t exactly uncommon. Your friends were understanding for the most part. While they didn’t pretend to understand it, the certainty tried. And would defend you when the need to arose. And you would forever be grateful about it.

But getting back to the topic, you asked Charlie; “And what about you?”

“I got me trusty hand,” he laughed and you rolled your eyes at him before breaking out in a burst of tipsy wheezing laughter.

Hours passed of fooling around and joking. And drinking. Neither of you had felt a hurry to get anywhere or get with anyone.

You didn’t know how many hours passed but it was enough for an entirely different band to be playing as you glanced up and over to the stage. Didn’t these bands perform for hours on end? Huh.

You looked around and saw that the crowd was significantly less crowded than a few hours ago. Or more than a few. Man, time could fly when you had fun.

Charlie had, with your permission, slinked off with a busty blonde only a few minutes prior which now left you to be all alone in the bar. Aside from the sea of strangers, of course. It was well past midnight and you were about to call it a day and bottom you lager when you felt a light shove on your right.

It was the baby faced guitarist from earlier. Though it weren’t him that had pushed you but rather a man whom he was having a heated discussion with. His back was turned to you but from the smooth leather jacket, you could only assume it was another Beatle. Auburn hair met the collar of the neck of the jacket and you tried to recall the different hair colours of the band. But the lighting of the stage had been to no help.

He backed into you again, almost causing you to spill your drink, and you sighed. You would have to say something to home but drunks could be so damn temperamental with a taste for blood. Eh, well, here goes nothing.

You tapped him on the shoulder and as he turned, you said; “guy, you need to watch your steps or I’m gonna spill my drink.” And turned back to quickly take a sip of said drink.

“And so what if you do?” Was barked right back at you and as you turned with a frown and slowly blinked as you faced the source. It was the frontman of The Beatles. Who was now stepping closer to you in a threatening fashion. Wonderful.

His breath smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and the way he looked down on at you affected you in such a way you felt that you should be ashamed of. But that could come later. Right now you needed to focus on not getting into a fight with a guy you’d rather do much else with. The young man behind him placed a gentle hand on his bicep as he whispered a name, John you thought you heard, but it was quickly pushed away.

“Look, pal,” you started but quickly was interrupted by a swinging fist.

Damnit.

#the beatles #john lennon #george harrison #paul mccartney #ringo starr #male reader #reader insert #reader #beatles fanfiction #fanfiction #fanfic #hamburg days #blue velvet fic

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