I'm having a bit of a lazy day today but I don't want to skip posting
altogether, so let's have a half-assed musical grab bag! First and second up,
two very odd news stories about possibly the two most famous rock stars on the
planet.
I mean, yes, obviously that's a contentious claim to make about anyone but if you can't claim something like that about Dylan and the Beatles...
Oh, alright then, how about the two most famous octogenarian rock stars? Anyone going to fight me on that?
Fab Macca Wacky Paul "Thumbs Aloft" McCartney Banned From Reddit
When I say the Beatles, obviously I mean one of them. Well, two, kind of. As will be revealed, Ringo was there, too. But no-one would claim Ringo Starr was one of the most famous rock stars in the world, would they? Not even when he was in the sodding Beatles. He's just Ringo ffs!
Paul McCartney, though. He still has power. Although not enough to keep the moderators at Reddit from banning him, apparently. Here's how it supposedly happened.
Macca played an "intimate" gig yesterday in front of an audience that defies belief. So much so, I'm going to copy/paste the highlights of the guest list, as reported by Stereogum:
"Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Tate McRae, Christina Aguilera, Steven Tyler, Anthony Kiedis, John Mayer, Renee Rapp, Finneas, Nat Wolff, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockart, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Jason Bateman, Jon Hamm, Owen Wilson, Steve Carrell, Joey King, Emma Watson, Jake Shane..."
Oh yeah, Ringo was there, too.
That's a list of people so famous there is literally just the one name I don't recognize, Jake Shane. What's even more amazing is I don't just know the names, I know who every last one of them is and what they're famous for. (Okay, okay. You got me. Not Nat Wolff... although I swear I have heard the name. I just don't remember where or when.)
I'm surprised all these people are allowed to be in the same place at the same time. Isn't there some kind of insurance thing, where they have to go to gigs in groups of no more than three? Like how heirs to the throne have to travel on separate planes? It's just as well there wasn't a fire. We'd have needed a whole new zeitgeist.
Unsurprisingly, given the audience, it was a no phones show. No phones means no pictures.
Wasn't it nice, then, for Paul to post some pictures of the gig on his personal subReddit? Video, too. What a generous and thoughtful chap he is!
Someone at Reddit didn't seem to think so. Not long after the links appeared, Paul's account got banned. I can hear him, in my mind, yelling "Don't they know who I am?" He's not quite as cuddly as he looks, you know.
His account has been restored but the pictures and video haven't. Maybe he'll put them on YouTube instead.
Hi. I'm Bob Dylan. Can you spare $5?
Bob Dylan is a Nobel Prizewinner. For literature, no less. His writing has value. And that value is five dollars a month.
Bob started a Patreon because of course he did. Why wouldn't he? He's Bob Fricken' Dylan! He can do what he likes! He always has.
Seriously, when did anything Bob Dylan did ever make any sense? Have you read Tarantula? Has anyone? (Clearly no-one on the Nobel Committee...)
Even so, this one takes some beating. Patreon is that platform people use when no-one in whatever business they wish they were in thinks their stuff is worth paying them for, isn't it? The idea is it lets you bypass the regular distribution channels (I.E. the professional ones.) and go straight to the audience. With a begging bowl.
OK, cheap shot. Patreon is a good option for all sorts of perfectly bona fide projects in the same way Kickstarter is, even if some people abuse it. We do tend to give the side-eye to established companies launching Kickstarters, though, so if a semi-billionaire (He's worth $500m, supposedly.) with a guaranteed pipeline to mainstream publishers starts a Patreon for his fiction and charges $5 a month for it, is that abusing the platform? Or the audience? Or is it just Bob being Bob?
Whatever it is, that's what he's done. And what does your five dollars get you?
"Audio Essays" about figures from American history, read out loud by AI, according to some reports. And "Letters Never Sent", which is a series with one entry so far, that being a note from Mark Twain to Rudolf Valentino. That widely-used expression "You couldn't make it up" somehow just doesn't seem strong enough, does it?
There are also going to be short stories. Bob's posted one already. It's called Bull Rider and it "tells the story of a man who seeks out a Texan rodeo to try bull riding." It's credited to Marty Lombard, who may or may not be Bob writing under a pen name.
Just for the hell of it, he's also thrown in a video of Mahalia Jackson because why not? If you want to give Bob five dollars, which I can't imagine why you would not, here's where to send your money.
And now for a couple of covers. The first is odd. Not Bob Dylan on Patreon odd or Macca banned from Reddit odd but still... odd.
Goodbye Horses - Kevin Abstract
Kevin Abstract used to be in Brockhampton, about whom I know very little. Goodbye Horses is "that song from Silence of the Lambs" as I put it back in January of last year, which is selling it very short indeed. It's a song people like to cover.
There are at least three versions of it on this blog already, although the one in the post I linked has been taken down from YouTube due to "a copyright claim by Leslie Mentel".No clue what that's about. The two versions in this post are still up, though.
Kevin Abstract chose it for TripleJ's Like A Version segment. He also chose to do it with a string quartet, while reading some of the lyrics off his phone. Not the choruses, though. Why he chose to do it that way may be explained in the inevitable "Go Behind" video that always accompanies the cover. Or it may not.
It's actually a really good cover but then it's a bombproof choice.
A couple of weeks ago I'd never heard of Lime Garden. Now I have two of their songs cued up for a post and then there's this fantastic cover. Just feel the bass on that!
In fact, as it happens, one of the songs I have backfiled to share is the second one they do in this video, Downtown Lover. I guess I could have edited it out but that would have meant doing some work and I'm really not up for any of that today, as must be obvious by now. Not when it's so much easier to crib ideas off someone else.
But, hey! At least I did the re-writes myself. I could have gotten an AI to do it. If it's good enough for Bob... (Ok, I did get AI to do the Macca pic at the top.)
AI Used In This Post
Just that header image. It was that or steal someone's copyrighted photos so... lesser of two evils?
It was done in five seconds using QWEN Image SD at NightCafe with the relevant headline as the prompt. Then I used the Ink Sketch filter in Paint.Net to rough it up and called it done. I did say I was feeling lazy.
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The Glimmer Twins want a word with you...
ReplyDeleteThat aside, did that McCartney thing actually happen? Isn't that like banning Leonard Bernstein? It seems not only surreal, but that Paul McCartney would actually know about Reddit in the first place seems a bit surprising. If it did happen, my money is that some other celebrity bitched and that was the reason why it was taken down. Because pettiness knows no bounds.