Weekend Reads (September 28): Miley Cyrus, Maggie Smith (RIP), Mozart, Cheese
Recommended weekend reading material for September 28, 2024.
If you’d like an example of just how messed up the music industry is these days, look no further than the lawsuit accusing Miley Cyrus of ripping off Bruno Mars for her hit song “Flowers.”
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Los Angeles federal court by the company Tempo Music Investments, which claimed that “Flowers” includes unauthorised “exploitation” of the song. Co-writers Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack are also named, and Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, Walmart and other companies are accused for distributing the song.
Mars, however, is not named as a plaintiff: Tempo Music said it owns a portion of “When I Was Your Man” purchased from co-writer Philip Lawrence.
Note that Mars himself isn’t suing Cyrus. Rather, it’s an investment firm that owns a small share of the rights to Mars’s song, which they bought from one of the song’s writers. (The same firm has also acquired the catalogs of Wiz Khalifa and Florida Georgia Line, to name a few artists.)
However, the lawsuit ignores the long musical tradition of artists responding to, and riffing on, the songs of other artists — as explained by music producer Luxxury.
Musicians understand there’s sort of an unspoken musician code. We are all reusing the same chords, very similar melodies, very similar ideas, words, lyrics. You’re going to find similarities all the time.
So the fact that it’s not Bruno Mars suing Miley Cyrus is really significant to me. It’s so far removed from the artists communicating with each other. It’s just about extracting wealth at the very highest level.
As more and more artist catalogs are acquired by private equity and investment firms hoping to make lots of money by licensing said catalogs, I think we can expect more and more lawsuits like this. At least until the artists themselves start calling it out for the greedy behavior that it is.
Although frontwoman Trish Keenan died back in 2011, Broadcast has continued to release music mined from a considerable archive of demos and other recordings. Now, as the band prepares to release it’s final album, Alexis Petridis ranks the band’s 20 best songs.
Related: My review of 2003’s Haha Sound. “There are still plenty of random analog bubbles and gurgles, but they are constrained and given direction by the band’s gauzy songwriting. As a result, the songs have an experimental, unpredictable feel to them but never lose their listenability or catchiness.”
I came across Molly White’s analysis of the recent Internet Archive lawsuit but I wanted to take my time going through it because she addresses a lot, and specifically the aggressive practices of the U.S. publishing industry.
Rather than implementing their own expensive and labor-intensive lending systems, libraries typically sign up with a provider like Overdrive (the creator of the Libby app) or Hoopla. Through these platforms, they purchase metered e-book licenses at rates that are typically multiple times what they would spend on a physical copy of the same book. These licenses permit the libraries to lend out their e-books, typically, to a single patron at a time per copy, for a fixed number of times or for a fixed duration. This is ostensibly to mimic the wear and tear on typical physical books that forces libraries to periodically purchase new copies, but in reality seems to reflect hypothetical wear and tear on books if they were made of tissue paper and loaned only to people who promise to exclusively read them in the bathtub. Other restrictions may also apply: for example, some publishers only allow each library to purchase a single e-book copy of newly released books, for fear of libraries “cannibalizing” their print sales. Some e-book publishers do not offer library licenses on any terms whatsoever. The whole model is premised on the idea that libraries and their patrons are the enemy of publishers — and, by extension, the authors they claim to represent.
Publishers treat this new e-book lending model as some sort of natural law of How Digital Books Must Be Loaned rather than a horrendously extractive scheme they’ve recently come up with themselves, to benefit themselves at everyone else’s expense. To be clear: this model is not something enshrined in law (yet) or based in the fundamental principles behind copyright (a legal concept which, I must point out, was designed not for the purposes of enriching publishers or even authors, but rather to promote the progress of arts and science). Today’s e-book lending is a system created by the publishers, for the publishers, and it is one which those publishers are now working hard to codify and protect.
Via Manton Reece.
As I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, I’ve always thought that the Internet Archive’s legal defense was shaky — though I support their efforts from a philosophical standpoint — so the court ruling didn’t surprise me. That said, there’s no denying that the big publishers are driven less by concern for their authors and readers, and more out of a desire to protect their own profits — hence some of their frankly ridiculous e-book policies.
Although sci-fi and fantasy books enjoy immense popularity in the secular market, sci-fi and fantasy authors are struggling to find a similar niche in the Christian market. That may be due, in part, to an apparent bias that Christian publishers have against genre fiction.
Laube has worked in Christian publishing for over 40 years and has been a literary agent for 20. “The speculative genre has an inconsistent history in the Christian market over the last 40 years,” Laube said. “I believe it is due partly because a publisher needs not only editorial expertise in the genre but also sales and marketing support... There might be an editor who believes in the genre, but a marketing or sales department may not have the same enthusiasm.”
Among Christian publishers, this lack of enthusiasm may relate to the stigma some readers associate with the fantasy magic found in the Harry Potter series or with the materialistic worldview found in secular science fiction. McCrumb has even had folks question her faith: “Some people have suggested that I worship humanity over God. Others have suggested that I change and ‘write something worthwhile.’”
Related: Back in 2011, Sandra Miesel wrote about the numerous Catholic writers who’ve toiled away in the fields of sci-fi and fantasy, including Walter M. Miller, Jr., Gene Wolfe, Fred Saberhagen, and of course, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Molly Templeton sings the praises of books that are just OK, and laments the way that social media has forced us to be hyperbolic about everything.
I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations about the internet, this land of sprawl and niche, but I think this is perhaps another kind of polarization bred by social media and the attention economy. A calm appraisal of a book, or movie, or album, gets no views. No one clicks. No one hate-reads. If you want eyeballs, you have to yell, whether in appreciation or loathing. I’ve been thinking about this in terms of language for years, catching myself using extreme terms — hated, loved, incredible, the worst — when really, a lot of the things I was reading or watching were just fine. Good, even. Well-made, if not exactly my jam. Did I haaaaate it, or was it just okay?
I know I’ve certainly caught myself lapsing into hyperbolic language, particularly in my “Cultural Diet” reviews, and I try to keep it down to a bare minimum. But the way I look at it, anything rated 3 ½ stars or higher is something that I really do think people should check out.
The BBC sound effects library, which contains over 33,000 recordings taken over the last 100 years, is now freely available for “personal, educational or research purposes.” Available sounds include everything from train yards and WWI aircraft to sporting events and field recordings.
Maggie Smith, best known for her roles as Harry Potter’s Professor Minerva McGonagall and Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess, died this week at the age of 89.
A master at classical and contemporary roles who was as renowned for her subtlety as for her broad-stroke mannerisms, the red-haired Smith delighted several generations of theatergoers on both sides of the Atlantic with signature performances in Mary, Mary, Hedda Gabler, Othello, Private Lives, Night and Day and Lettice and Lovage, and audiences around the world for her work in such films as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, California Suite, A Room With a View, Travels With My Aunt, Hot Millions, A Private Function, Gosford Park, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel.
Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, paid tribute to Smith: “I will always consider myself amazingly lucky to have been able to work with her, and to spend time around her on set. The word legend is overused but if it applies to anyone in our industry then it applies to her.”
New music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was recently discovered in a German library.
The piece, which dates to the mid- to late-1760s, consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio. It lasts around 12 minutes, researchers with the Leipzig Municipal Libraries said in a statement.
Researchers discovered the work at the city's music library while compiling the latest edition of the so-called Koechel catalog, the definitive archive of Mozart's musical works.
Watch a video of musicians performing the piece, which is titled “Ganz kleine Nachtmusik” (“Quite Little Night Music” in English).
Finally, the world’s oldest cheese has been discovered in a grave in northwestern China.
Humanity’s love affair with cheese goes back millenniums. Scientists have found fatty residues on 7,000-year-old pottery that were most likely from cheese, and 4,000-year-old Sumerian texts mention the dairy product. But the Tarim Basin samples are the oldest substances in the world that scientists can confidently call cheese.
Via 1440.
From the Blog
The Cure — aka, my favorite band of all time — officially announced Songs of a Lost World, their first album in sixteen years, and released its first single earlier this week. With its unfurling guitars, sweeping synths, ceremonial rhythms, and of course, Robert Smith’s ageless voice, “Alone” is the perfect opener for a Cure album, and a very good sign of things to come; listen to it here.
Related: Back in 2010, I shared twelve of my favorite Cure songs to celebrate the impending release of Disintegration’s deluxe edition.
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