Black Friday? More Like Bleak Friday!

Does anyone think this Black Friday thing is getting kinda out of hand? I've been getting offers and promos for at least a couple of weeks now. There are signs in most of the shop windows in town offering sales that last from the middle of November to the end of next week. Where I work, we seem positively restrained, limiting our Black Friday event to "just" four days.

It's turning into its own holiday. Some of the offers even refer to it as one. I realize that in the US there were already three major holidays very close together with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year but now the US gets four and we're up to three, with one of them just being shopping. 

Not that we didn't have a pure shopping "holiday" already. We just rolled it in with another, the way Black Friday started. For all of my childhood and well into my middle-age, the New Year Sales were a big enough deal to get national news coverage every year. 

I think that tailed off in the nineties, when people got too impatient to wait for the calendar to flip over. Now it all rolls into Christmas with shops opening for big sales on December 26. With the growth of Black Friday, that means we have two, huge, blow-out sale events in the same month. 

I get the commercial value of the post-Christmas sales, whatever day they start, so stores can shift all that surplus stock that didn't sell as well as they'd hoped, but isn't Black Friday just encouraging a customers buy the same things they were going to buy anyway but pay less for them? I mean, I'm not that organized but I know from long experience on the other side of the counter that many people are. Still, if everyone's doing it, right?

Boxing Day Sales - Richard Dawson

 But I didn't come here to talk about work. I have a Black Friday Grab Bag of my own to sell you.

The 2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar Rulebook

Here's how it's going to go this year. 

1. There will be not one but two Advent Calendar posts every day from the first of December until Christmas Day. This is not an attempt to pad my post count for the year. That's just a happy side-effect.
   
2. One of the posts will be Naughty. The other will be Nice.
3. The music in the Nice posts will be something I think is wholesome or cheerful or uplifting or that celebrates the season unironically. Possibly all of those.
   
4. The Naughty posts will... not be that. They might be jarring or downbeat or express negative feelings about the holidays or generally just feel off in some indefinable way.
5. I decide which songs go where and even I might not be able to explain why so just go with it, alright?
6. The Nice posts will be illustrated with an image taken by me, most likely a still from some video footage I have lying around. It will be original work, untouched except for some cropping and maybe a filter once in a while.
7. The Naughty posts will be the same image after it's been given to an AI to play with. I'll use the original as the starter image, give the AI some prompts, maybe iterate on it a little and see what comes out. I may also futz around with it in post-production. 

I've already got the first week mostly done. I'd rather put it all together in real time but I had to do some in advance because I'm working three out of the first five days and on another I'm going to a funeral.

Even doubled, the calendar will use less than half the songs I'd bookmarked but if you want to subject yourself to the full experience, there's a Playlist on my YouTube channel. I have listened to everything on it multiple times but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. It's a lot in more ways than one.

All comments on the musical choices are welcome as always but I would be even more interested to hear any thoughts on the images and the use of AI, from an aesthetic, creative and ethical standpoints. If anyone even cares about this stuff any more, which I'm beginning to doubt. I'm very curious to get a feel for where people think the boundaries of creativity lie in this technology.

I Only Really Like One K-Pop Band And It Had To Be This One

That's not entirely true. I like a few others but my favorite by a long way has to be New Jeans. They've featured in a number of music posts here and I get genuinely excited every time a new song by them appears in my music feeds.

That hasn't happened for a while and may never happen again. Every time I see the band's name now, it's in a news article, another installment in the never-ending soap opera that's become the story of their lives. I haven't been keeping up with the fine details but New Jeans and their erstwhile producer Min-Hee Jin have been locked in an existential battle with their label, Ador and its corporate overlords, Hybe for...

... I'm not even sure what for, exactly. The BBC has a short catch-up that covers the basics but the intensity is such that it sometimes feels like the souls of their firstborn might be at stake rather than their future as a pop group. 

It's been uncomfortable to watch the story unfold at times. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say New Jeans are fighting for the existential right of members of a musical act to be treated as individual, thinking, feeling, human beings rather than corporate assets. It's both a disturbing vision of the future and a reminder of a past I thought we'd outgrown.

Whatever it is that's going on, at no point has anyone from Ador or Hybe come across, at least in the reporting I've seen, as anything more than an uncaring company shill. It's like reading a dystopian cyberpunk novel set in a bleak, corporate future.

The latest development is that New Jeans, who from my ignorant and uninformed perspective seem to be taking the same idiosyncratic and intelligent approach they've previously applied to making music, having presented a legal challenge to their owners record company, which went unacknowledged and unanswered until the absolute last moment, with a press conference saying they no longer work for Ador.

Ador appear frighteningly uninterested in anything the band might want or say. Their stance seems to be that they never did anything wrong and a contract is a contract and why won't you silly little girls just shut up and sing? It's like the Golden Age of Hollywood all over again. Or Tin Pan Alley. And we know how those ended. 

Selfishly, I'd just like the band to be able to work with the producer of their choice, who just happens to be the one who helped them make all those great records, so they can make some more. It'd be great to have them pop up in my feeds talking about their new music, not about contract law, bullying and corporate greed. As it is, they must be miserable and frustrated and no-one is making any music at all. 

How Much Is Too Much?

 Ride On Time - Black Box (Best-selling UK single of 1989)

Then again, maybe there's too much music already, so does any of it really matter? Apparently there's now more music being released every single day in 2024 than there was in the whole of 1989. 

That takes some processing, doesn't it? I mean, it's not like there wasn't plenty back then. 1989 was close to the apex of that long, cultural period, when pop music ruled everyone's lives in a way it very definitely doesn't any more (Pace Taylor Swift.) That the decline in pop music's cultural influence should co-incide so neatly with exponential volumetric growth and ever-increasing ease of access is almost certainly no co-incidence.

The "study" linked in the NME article above comes from Music Radar and appears on closer examination to be more like an opinion piece on the evils of the subscription model in music distribution. The author pretty much makes his position clear with the opening quote: “All subscription models are from Satan and there is a special place in hell for those people in charge that went for this business model” although since it's a quote from someone on YouTube, I'm not sure it has the authority he's assigning it.

The actual stat about music released now versus 1989 comes from a more convincing source, Will Page, former Chief Economist for Spotify, the company widely seen as the cause of the problem. Whatever the problem is, which is not exactly clear.

Leaving aside the fundamental issue of Spotify's indefensible payment model, something Kate Nash is in the process of sorting out right now, by means of pictures of her butt on the back of a truck (Go get 'em, Kate. You rock!) the big question in my mind is how is anyone supposed to find anything in all of this? I mean, I spend hours trawling the net, searching for stuff I haven't heard before and even then I keep seeing mostly the same things, over and over...

There are supposedly 75 million people uploading original music right now. By 2030 they say it'll be more like 200 million. And that's just the humans. Wait 'till the AIs get in on the act.

I recommend letting me do the hard work. I'll pick 'em. You just sit back and enjoy yourselves.

Speaking of the 1980s...

I pretty much never mention politics on the blog and I'm not going to start now but I came across something this morning and I found it so evocative I felt I really shouldn't keep it to myself. It's from one of the columns Hunter S Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner in the mid-1980s, later collected and published under the title Generation of Swine, which just happens to my bathroom book of the moment:

"A Democratic victory would not change the world, but it would at least slow the berserk white-trash momentum of the bombs-and-Jesus crowd. Those people have had their way long enough. Not even the Book of Revelations threatens a plague of vengeful yahoos. We all need a rest from this pogrom. Ronald Reagan is an old man. It will be the rest of us who will face Armageddon."

Hunter was talking about the 1986 Senate elections. I'm not sure if I find that reassuring or deeply depressing. Probably both.

And now, some music. Well, some more music, I guess.

Peace Song - Fat Dog

See? Things can turn out alright in the end!