Man, it's pretty apparent that bands gave much less of a shit 20 years ago about print deadlines for December issues of music magazines. (I remember MBDTF seeming like a pretty atypically late release.) Seems like recently, with the notable exception of a handful of surprise releases, the lid gets put on the album-ular year by Veterans Day.
Is this a safe space? Because I'm about to do the internet commenting equivalent of a riverdance in a mine-field.
I've long had a theory that if Erykah Badu had spent the summer of '96 in the Billboard Pop Top 10 with a fairly routine but well-executed cover of a Roberta Flack song (which was a cover of a Lori Leiberman song about Don fucking McLean's "American Pie" [which is aside the point, but tickles me nevertheless]), people would talk about Mama's Gun the way they they've talked about The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Because other than that, Mama's Gun is clearly the less-dated, better produced, more influential, more consistent, more innovative, and frankly, just overall better album.
LOL, and you also tricked me into making myself seem like much more of a Ryan Adams fan than I actually am, which is something I generally tried to avoid before being a Ryan Adams fan became problematic.
Not sure how it was marketed outside of the states, but I bought the 9-track Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 at a Tallahassee, FL Wal-Mart after seeing Elf in November, 2003. It was a few weeks after Rock n Roll came out, which I hated, so I ate the narrative up. The next EP, marketed as Love Is Hell, Pt. 2 came out a month later. The full-length LP came out the following May.
It'd be like if Nelly released a compilation album of his masterful 2004 duology Sweat and Suit and called it something like SuitSweat.
(Kidding aside, you're right. I actually didn't realize that Body Talk was a compilation, not a Love Is Hell-style combination of the two EPs/mini-LPs until a few years down the line. GNR apparently put out a one CD combination of the two Use Your Illusion albums, but seven years after the original release and only as a K-Mart exclusive.)
This is a good point, and I'm glad you made it. But, I mean, the article also says Albania is in Central Europe. I think some of us decided to skip the low-hanging fruit and get esoteric with our internet pontificating. I know I'm still trying to shoe-horn my Skanderbeg take in here somewhere. (Note: I don't have a Skanderbeg take.)
The skulls of their enemies, not indeed of all, but of those whom they most detest, they treat as follows. Having sawn off the portion below the eyebrows, and cleaned out the inside, they cover the outside with leather. When a man is poor, this is all that he does; but if he is rich, he also lines the inside with gold: in either case the skull is used as a drinking-cup. They do the same with the skulls of their own kith and kin if they have been at feud with them, and have vanquished them in the presence of the king. When strangers whom they deem of any account come to visit them, these skulls are handed round, and the host tells how that these were his relations who made war upon him, and how that he got the better of them; all this being looked upon as proof of bravery.
So the practice entered the historical record with the practice of history. I have never been so simultaneously delighted and disgusted to be a "that guy" before.
It's a bit different than the Irish example. The country outline that Dua Lipa includes on the post is what's commonly referred to as "Greater Albania." Those borders include plenty of areas where ethnic Albanians aren't in the majority. And, really, if you're going to expect us to put up with irredentism, the least you could do ground it in semi-compelling historical arguments. The borders Lipa seems to be endorsing are based on the combination of four administrative units in the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the one time Albania expanded its borders to include some of these regions, it was a fascist client state where they gladly engaged in persecution of other nationalities. (World War II in the Balkans was extremely complicated, but it's not a great look.)
There's always a thin line between nationalism and fantasy. The Greater Albania that Lipa seems to be calling for is pretty firmly across that line. Especially in a region where ahistorical irredentism has gotten a whole lot of people killed over the past century or so.
Speaking of Sugar, I stumbled upon the Beaster EP for the first time a few weeks ago I can't get over how great it is. I probably like it better than Copper Blue.
Lol. Yeah, the amount of ass-covering you have to do to convince people that you're not making a bad faith argument can be exhausting. It's the price we have to pay for the previous 25+ years of discourse on the internet, I guess.
Me: I’m gonna take 10 minutes to post my quick take on this Lady A article. Sharing quick takes is fun! Why did I start commenting so infrequently?
[90 minutes and a 600+ word internet comment that will maybe a half dozen people will glance at before giving up later]
Also, me: oh yeah, now I remember why
Here's the problem with this. This isn't a two-sided argument and people who are making it one are thinking extremely simplistically. As tempting as it may be to root for the veteran local blues singer, especially given the fact that the "other side" appears to be a shitty Nashville pop group with a problematic name, I don't think people reflectively agreeing with Ms. White have any real understanding of what they're agreeing to. Don't let the particulars of this specific beef distract you from the basic premise that a person or group can own and/or control certain combinations of words is a fucking absurdity that we should only put up with in the most limited of circumstances.
I'm not arguing that we should ban the concept of intellectual property. We shouldn't. But we should remember that IP rights are absurd legal fictions we put up with to avoid worse outcomes. The reason we have IP is that we decided that the societal interest in continued creative innovation is so great that it outweighs my personal interest in doing whatever I want with property I own. That's a pretty big deal because "doing what I want with my property" is basically the foundation of all civil law. But it's important to stress that the reason we have IP rights is to protect future creative innovation, not to preserve previous works of creation.
Trademark is a bit different than copyright in that it explicitly sets out to protect already established intellectual property. The reasoning behind this added layer of protection is that using a trademarked term or symbol not only free-rides on the back of someone else's creative innovation, but dilutes the worth of that creative innovation. For instance, if I write a bunch of watered-down Jimmy Page riffs and start a band named Greta Van Fleet, I'm not doing Led Zeppelin any real harm. But if I put out the music as "Led Zeppelin," I'm not only free-riding on the creative work of others, but also potentially weakening the future earning power of that brand.
And there's the fucking magic word. You can't trademark an "identity", or "essence", or "individuality", or "experience". You trademark a brand. You copyright a poem. You trademark a jingle.
Since this issue came up Ms. White has argued that she has the exclusive right to use the brand. Legally, she has absolutely no argument. Not only does she not hold a trademark, but it's extremely unlikely that she could demonstrate that Lady Antebellum's use of the same brand had any negative effect whatsoever on her brand's future earning power. As far as moral rights go, the question is more subjective and ambiguous. I'd argue that a) I'm not sure if anyone should have the 'moral rights' to exclusive use of the combination of a common title and a letter of the alphabet; b) it's undermined by the fact that Ms. White shares a Spotify artist page with what appear to be two other Lady A's; and c) it's kind of hard to sustain a moral right after you tried to sell it for a seven-figure payoff (even when you include a matching charitable demand).
Binary interpretations of legal disputes are easy to fall into, but almost always false. It's human instinct for us to read a right side and a wrong side into any conflict, but the truth is both sides in a civil dispute both sides are usually assholes. The former Lady Antebellum picked a dumb band name and really, really, really need to hire a new PR guy. (They also make shitty music). Ms. White's co-option of BLM talking points in this dispute after she demanded a $5 million personal payout as blackmail for a band to use branding they already held the trademark to is pretty gross. She also has caused me to feel compelled to defend Lady Antebellum for the past few days, which is really fucking gross.
This is extremely incorrect. Copyright protection resides in the intellectual property itself. You don’t have to actually do anything to copyright something you created, the creation itself gave you the copyright. Registering a copyright basically amounts to giving the government a piece of paper saying “I have a copyright to x.” But a creator still has a copyright in a piece of intellectual property even if they don’t register it.
Filing for a trademark isn’t as rigorous as filing for a patent, but it does involve filing an application which can be denied if you fail to make certain specific showings of fact. Trademark applications are actually checked against the record, and you don’t have a trademark in something until the application is approved and your trademark is registered.
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