Imagethief

Tag: Music

  • Sheeran-gate!

    Sheeran-gate!

    The neutral path Ed Sheeran wanted to take was always a mirage

    Full disclosure: I have never knowingly heard a Macklemore or Ed Sheeran song. I gather that Sheeran is an occupationally tousled, red-headed Yorkshire pop-muppet, while Macklemore is like if you diluted a level tablespoon of Eminem into a gallon of room-temperature Seattle tap water. They’ve been performing together on a stadium tour that Sheeran is headlining and that is billed as “The Loop” and tragically not as “Ginger/Danger.” I am available for branding work.

    Until last week I was safely sheltered from Sheeran and Macklemore behind my generational armor. But the disintegration of their US tour over Macklemore’s public support for Palestine was interesting, so I’ve had to pay attention, fml. I assume some of you are healthy and not as terminally online as I am, so we’re going start with the back-story.

    The Washington Post has a good summary of the situation, but here are the major beats:

    • On September 7th, speaking from stage at a concert in New Jersey, Macklemore made about two minutes of “free Palestine” remarks. Macklemore is an imperfect vessel for pro-Palestine messages. Back in 2014, he performed as a horrifying Jewish caricature. He apologized and swore it was inadvertent, but you be the judge.
    • On Monday, September 14th, Macklemore said in an Instagram post (😡) that, “Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour.”1 Macklemore said that Sheeran had told him that Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots football team (derogatory) and of Gillette Stadium, where the tour was scheduled to play, had made the demand after Macklemore’s Palestine remarks. Kraft is Jewish, tightly aligned with the ADL, and AIPAC and has been a strong supporter of Israel and the IDF. He’s also the founder and primary backer of the Blue Square Alliance, of the “Stand up to Jew Hate” television ads.
    • Sheeran responded on Instagram (😡😡) with a long statement, “laying out some facts.” I’ve pasted the whole thing below because we’re going to have fun annotating it. It’s bad.
    • On Wednesday, the 16th, Macklemore put his money where his mouth was (again on Instagram, 😡😡😡), and announced he was donating $1 million of his earnings from the tour to Palestinian relief organizations. He invited Robert Kraft to match the donation.
    • Also on Wednesday, the Gillette Stadium account on Instagram (😡😡😡😡) published a statement from Kraft, which said (both-sides trigger warning) “all lives are worth protecting” and that “Ed…asked me to commit $2 million to match his donation to aid in the region…” The statement did not actually confirm that Kraft would make such a donation to “the region.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • And finally, on Wednesday, a bunch of Ed Sheeran’s other supporting acts and backing band members quit in solidarity with Macklemore. Some were publicly diplomatic toward Sheeran, but the equal-opportunity assassins at satirical newspaper The Onion were not.
    • Deliciously, right as the scandal was kicking off, Guitar Center, which is like if Skeletor operated a chain of overpriced music stores, launched a contest in which “YOU COULD OPEN FOR ED SHEERAN!” This was instantly hijacked in entertainingly profane ways.
    • As all of this was happening, Sheeran received vocal support on X.com from English far-right agitator and world-champion racist Tommy Robinson, while YouTube children’s personality and neighborhood saint Ms. Rachel announced on Instagram (😡😡😡😡😡) that she would match Macklemore’s $1 million donation.

    If you’re gaining Tommy Robinson and losing Ms. Rachel, you are in trouble! But the show must go on, by contract.

    Professionally tousled, personally troubled.

    The mirage of the neutral path

    Let’s establish the playing field. The Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 was a brutal act of terrorism and a horrifying crime. Israel’s response in Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of civilian victims and members of the current Israeli government have made statements that suggest their motivations are broader than simply eliminating Hamas. Meanwhile, America (and much of the world) has a real and rising antisemitism problem. But accusations of antisemitism have also been weaponized for political purposes in the US. Amidst all of this, the American public’s view of Israel has cratered since 2023. It’s views of Palestinians have stayed relatively flat, despite America’s chronic islamophobia.

    In the words of the prophet Flavor Flav, it all adds up to a funky situation.2 I can’t blame anyone for tiptoeing as delicately as possible through this minefield. But I found Sheeran’s statement “laying out some facts” unsatisfying. Here it is in full. I’ve highlighted and [annotated] some interesting bits.

    I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. [Israel and Palestine, not Israel and Hamas. Both-sides alert – fine on its face, but elides that since October 7th, 2023, most of the suffering has been directed at Palestinians in Gaza, which is the issue at hand.] There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated.

    Macklemore asked to join my tour last year and I agreed, because I respect him as an artist. [This feels shifty. “Macklemore came to me. Don’t blame me!” Otherwise, why even include it?]

    As with all my support acts, I agree that they play a setlist of their choosing.

    After Macklemore’s performances at my New Jersey shows, venues on my upcoming tour dates communicated that they would pull the shows if he was still supporting. I was informed that this stance was based on how Macklemore conveyed part of his message during his performance, rather than on everything that was said. [What does that mean and why does it matter at all? We can all watch the video. Sheeran is raising questions that go unanswered.] I spoke with the venues at length all week to try and build a bridge.

    One of those people was Robert Kraft. I was also involved in direct talks with promoters along with activists on both sides to try and find a mutual resolution for all, but the venue’s and promoter’s decision was final.

    Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine. Macklemore’s contract for the tour was with the promoter, not me. [“Don’t blame me! I’m a smol ginger bean who has only sold 200 million records and 126 billion streams worldwide and I have no power at all in this dynamic.”]

    I would never let down the fans who had made plans, nor would I abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living. [“Why I didn’t take a moral stand. I’m thinking of you, (Bane voice) the people!” This is actually a recitation of stakeholders that will become important to us, below.]

    I have always used my platform and music to bring people from all
    backgrounds and cultures together and this won’t ever change. Those who have been to one of my shows will know that they are about unity, joy, escapism, love, and a place for everyone to feel welcome.

    I am not complicit. [Don’t say what you aren’t. Say what you are. Why would you introduce the word “complicit” and give everyone an easy pull quote?] I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care. Nor does it mean I don’t support causes in my own, personal way. [Again, invites a question he doesn’t seem to want to answer. “What causes? How have you supported them? Are any of them the Palestinians?”]

    There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics – my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds. [Leave the kids out of it. You sing about waking up drunk “on the right side of the wrong bed” and drinking and smoking cigarettes at age fifteen. That’s OK for kids, but politics will scorch their little ears? Also, Sheeran has publicly taken political positions on several occasions.] Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum. I respect Macklemore’s strength of purpose to stand up and shout for what he believes. However, there is room for multiple approaches to the same end: peace. I choose to use my fame and platform to be a place of safety and sanctuary, to maintain diplomacy and keep conversations open, not closed. If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change. There are different approaches to being an advocate for change. [This comes off as a neg of Macklemore. He has “the strength of purpose to stand up and shout” but “if we only focus on shouting the loudest…” The ability to shout, figuratively, is one of the main tools of celebrities with huge platforms and lots of cultural capital.]

    I have spent this week trying to build bridges, to find a solution and unfortunately, was unable to do so. I know who I am, both as a person and as an artist, and those who know my heart know my values too.

    Ed

    The whole statement is squishy. I have values but you won’t know what they are. I support causes but won’t tell you what or how. I respect Macklemore but his approach was wrong. Sheeran is the superstar and headliner, but he deflects responsibility everywhere else: to Kraft, the promoters, the audience, Macklemore. There is a Sheeran-shaped hole in place of anything that feels like a principle or moral bedrock.

    The problem is that Sheeran is trying to articulate a neutral path that doesn’t exist. If that path ever existed, it vanished the moment Kraft and the promoters delivered an ultimatum. Forget the statement. Once the ultimatum arrived, what mattered was Sheeran’s possible actions. These were: align with Kraft and the promoters at the expense of Macklemore, and implicitly against the Palestinian people, or align with Macklemore, and implicitly with the Palestinian people. Any other option was a mirage.

    To be fair, Sheeran had a range of stakeholders to satisfy. The obvious ones are the following, ordered in the priority his actions and statements implied:

    • The promoters and venue owners (want a show, but only without Macklemore)
    • His audience and fans (want a show)
    • The crews working on and supporting his shows and the other businesses that stood to benefit (want a show)
    • His supporting acts and backing musicians and the community of performers they represent (want Macklemore supported)

    In this model, the wants of the promoters and venue owners conflict with the wants of the supporting acts and backing musicians. In fact, almost all the pressure aligns in the direction of, “have a show.” That’s the easy choice and path of least resistance. That’s the path the money wants.

    But that doesn’t mean it’s the right path! The point of having principles and some moral bedrock is to help you assess if the hard choice is in fact the correct one. Sheeran presented his actions as favoring his fans, but he looked spineless and his supporting acts and backing band walked. That’s a bad look, even before you get to being dunked on by Ms. Rachel.

    Seeing the bigger crisis

    I’ve poked fun at this situation, and it is funny as long as you view the crisis as, “Ed has to save his show while being yelled at by everyone.”

    But you can widen your field of view and see a bigger, less funny crisis. One where a billionaire venue owner with specific political beliefs dictated what a popular artist could say from the stage about an important and arguably mainstream issue. That is a precedent that leads in bad directions. It’s one thing for an artist to choose to be apolitical on stage. It’s another altogether for venue owners and promoters to ban politics that they disagree with. That feels like something an artist of Sheeran’s stature should have a point of view on.

    A lot hinges on how you hear Macklemore’s remarks. Are they antisemitic and therefore beyond the pale? I don’t hear it, but others might.3  As I noted, Macklemore is an imperfect messenger. But one reason the Israel-Hamas war is fiendishly difficult to navigate is that there has been a bitter three-year struggle to define the boundaries of acceptable public speech about the conflict, especially when that speech involves support for Palestinians. This incident was a skirmish in that broader struggle.

    How you define this crisis, and the width of your field of view, determines the actions and messages that you consider. I can’t tell you what Ed Sheeran should have done, because I’m just some guy and not a huge pop act powering an economy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Sheeran is acting as not just Ed Sheeran, artist, but as CEO of Ed Sheeran, Inc. It’s hard to analyze a company’s actions from the outside. You don’t know the details of the business and its stakeholders and risks, including the legal risks, which might be substantial.

    But I can tell you what I would have respected much more than his mushy statement, above. Even if Sheeran didn’t want to take a position on the Palestinians, he could have set as his moral bedrock artists’ rights to express their personal opinions and beliefs from stage. This would have meant telling Kraft and the promoters that he wouldn’t remove Macklemore from the tour. It would have put control of the situation in Macklemore’s hands, letting him decide whether he stays on and the concert is spiked, or he withdraws and it continues. If he steps down voluntarily, Sheeran is spared a world of grief.

    That’s all a risk, with big financial stakes! But it’s anchored in a clear principle, and it would have let Sheeran issue a statement like this (using some of his language):

    After Macklemore’s recent remarks calling for a free Palestine, Robert Kraft and the promoters of The Loop tour demanded that he not perform with us at Gillette Stadium later this month.

    The world is complicated and sometimes difficult. That’s why I have always used my platform and music to bring people from all backgrounds and cultures together and this won’t ever change. Those who have been to one of my shows will know that they are about unity, joy, escapism, love, and a place for everyone to feel welcome.

    However, as a performer, I also know the power of being able to speak my truth to the audience, and the privilege of having a platform that lets me reach millions of people. That’s why I will always support the right of artists to speak and sing freely and passionately about the things that matter to them and move them, and the right of the audience to decide for themselves how they feel about it.

    I am standing by my friend Macklemore because I respect his strength of purpose to stand up for what he personally believes. That’s something we as artists should all be willing to do.

    I will not ask Macklemore to leave the tour, and I will respect whatever decision he makes. There is nothing I want more than to perform for my fans in New England, and I look forward to doing that, whether at Gillette Stadium later this month, or at another venue and time.

    Maybe the show would have been cancelled, and it still elides an explicit stance on Palestine. But it would have set forth a real principle and showed that Sheeran was willing to stand by it, even if that was the hard decision. This also flips the prioritization of Sheeran’s stakeholders, putting the community of artists and performers—Sheeran’s peers—at the top and the venue owners and promoters at the bottom. Where this places the fans depends on what you think Sheeran’s duty to them is. Is his duty just to deliver a show? Or is it something deeper? Only Sheeran can decide that.

    Ultimately, Sheeran couldn’t escape picking a side in the Israel-Palestine issue. He just picked the side with power, by default. Maybe that was the sensible business decision. Sheeran played solo for a packed house in Philadelphia on Saturday, the 20th, just days after all of this went down. There were a few protestors, but nothing that affected the show. He even addressed Gaza, a bit of damage control.

    But the damage to Sheeran’s reputation is done, the skirmish is lost, and the window for public discourse about Gaza and the Palestinians is a little bit narrower than it was before. In his statement, Sheeran wrote that he chose to use his fame and platform to “keep conversations open, not closed.” But his actions helped to slam the door shut.

    Originally published on Substack

    Update 9/24:

    I finally saw video of Sheeran’s remarks in Philadelphia on the 20th. He acknowledges the speech issue, which is good. The proof will be next time he has to make a hard choice, but it’s a start.

    1. The use of Instagram as the celebrity public communication platform is annoying as fuck as you have to scroll through multiple image tiles of text, but I get why they do it. It is where their audiences are. ↩︎
    2. From Public Enemy’s “911 is a Joke.” I’ve always heard it as “fuckin’ situation” and I always will, but that’s not what the official documentation says. ↩︎
    3. If you’re wondering, I’m Jewish. My ancestors on both sides fled Russia and Ukraine for the US and the UK respectively at the turn of the 20th century. ↩︎

  • Black or White

    Black or White

    How hard should we cancel the Michael Jackson biopic?

    I was in high school in 1982 when Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out. Those were the days of national monoculture, and that album was the aural equivalent of chewing gum on your shoe. It was in cars, in malls, in the 7-11 while you were getting a Slurpee, just impossible to ignore. People forget that “Michael or Prince?” was a national debate during Reagan’s first term.

    The videos for “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” were credited with breaking the “color barrier” on MTV, which was barely a year old and a new taste-making force in pop music. Seven of the nine tracks on Thriller were top-ten hits and the album was number one on the Billboard charts for 37 weeks. Michael Jackson, 24 years old but nearly two decades into his pop-music career, reached celebrity escape-velocity and became the King of Pop™.

    Jackson’s life story is fascinating. Molded into early celebrity by a domineering father, he appeared to spend much of his life in arrested childhood. Neverland Ranch, Bubbles the chimp, his extreme cosmetic surgery and progressive de-blackification, his masked kids. A troubled late-career shadowed by debt, drug abuse, deep eccentricity and several credible allegations of child sexual abuse, most famously covered in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.1 Finally, death at 50 from a drug overdose on the eve of a series of comeback concerts in London. Fertile territory for a biopic on race, celebrity, sexual pathology and the cost of fame! 

    Alas, that is not the biopic you’re going to get. The biopic you’re going to get is Michael, and it is reportedly on track to be a monster hit. But the movie elides all that late-career complexity and ends with Jackson’s triumphant concert at Wembley in 1988, when he was still on the rise and before any troubling child sexual abuse allegations.

    Read the rest on Substack

    From the producers of “Bohemian Rhapsody”

  • Valley of the Dinosaur Rockers

    A heady mix of raw sexual energy and whiskey marketing

    In retrospect, the mistake was going to a concert in Concord on a Thursday evening. We live in Redwood City and the 50 mile rush-hour drive to Concord took us two and a half crawling hours. But we’d bought the tickets six or eight months before, when the prospect of the drive was remote, and my son was excited to see a double bill of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

    Yes, this was my 16 year-old son’s choice. He may be a half-Asian zoomer, but he has the musical tastes of a white boomer from Little Rock. His playlist is a mix of 70’s prog, southern rock and classic country. 

    I didn’t do this to him! If my influence won, he would be playing non-stop Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. I went to the University of California Santa Cruz in the 1980s and they wouldn’t give you a diploma until you could recite the discographies of both bands and debate the merits of their various eras. Was it all downhill after Syd Barrett left Floyd? These are the questions one grapples with in the ivory towers of the academy. Often as one also grapples with a four foot tall bong.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Adventures in audio tape

    Yesterday Bloomberg ran what was essentially a PR piece for Ballfinger, a German maker of rarefied audio equipment, including reel-to-reel stereo tape decks that start at $11,000. The thesis: reel to reel is making a comeback.

    This is of course a bullshit trend story. I am sure the people who buy $10,000 glass-platter turntables will give these a look, but there is no way that reel-to-reel tape is coming back in any meaningful way. I say this as a recent returnee to vinyl (at a somewhat lower price point), and as someone with a fair tolerance for fiddly audio-visual equipment. But these are beautiful decks, and they remind me of a long-dormant soft-spot in my heart for reel-to-reel.

    I’ve always appreciated the inherently mechanical aspect to music, and therefore I have some affection for elaborately mechanical analog reproduction methods. One of my earliest musical memories is my great-uncle David playing “Abbey Road” on a reel-to-reel deck when I was ten or so, sitting on the carpet in front of the stereo. To this day the opening measures of “Come Together” call to mind dreamily turning tape reels.

    Uncle David was a German Jewish immigrant, a Holocaust survivor by way of the East End of London who found his way to business success and, ultimately, Palo Alto. He and my great aunt Anne, who was English, traveled extensively and radiated sophisticated late-seventies cosmopolitanism in an era when my own family was scruffily academic. David had the first electronic calculator that I ever saw, a delightful piece of technological sorcery. I will forever associate visits to his house with Japanese prints and the aroma of ginger ale. In such a context, reel-to-reel was almost inevitable.

    David also used that reel-to-reel deck to introduce me to “The Goon Show”, the legendary BBC radio comedy starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. He ran me a cassette copy of his reel of four episodes, and I listened to that cassette for twenty-five years until, when it was on the threshold of disintegration, I finally digitized it.

    David’s was the only reel-to-reel deck I ever saw that was part of someone’s everyday stereo setup. However, after a long detour through the benighted era of cassette tape (Mix tapes! Dolby B noise reduction!), reel-to-reel came back into my life during grad school, in the early nineties, when I did college radio. Most of our audio production was done on quarter-inch reel, and I spent countless pre-digital hours slicing up Ampex 456 with razor blades, hanging the clips from wires, and splicing them back together with Scotch Tape. I even made some money on the side editing for Antenna Theater, an outfit from Marin that recorded books on tape using reel-to-reel.

    In those days my friends and I also used reel-to-reel for music production. My buddy Gabe and I had been college bandmates in my undergraduate days. That was the era of four-track cassette recorders, the production media of choice for threadbare ‘80s garage bands everywhere. If nothing else, four-tracks enforced a certain ingenuity, as you figured out how many generations you could ping-pong tracks before the only thing you heard was tape noise. Fortunately, this was a skill I’d honed in junior high school, recording audio science fiction epics on dual cassette decks with my nerdy tween friends.

    After college Gabe and I kept jamming, and there was a brief moment between the Tascam four-tracks and the rise of digital when he had an eight-track reel-to-reel in his bedroom. This was the coolest bit of band equipment that any of my friends had ever owned, and it expanded our production horizons dramatically. We mixed down to Digital Audio Tape (DAT) cassettes, another short-lived tape format that inhabited the lacuna between the fall of analog and the rise of accessible digital audio workstations.

    Gabe’s eight-track also taught us the eternal lesson that, no matter how many recording tracks you have, it’s always exactly one less than you need. This was especially true when you had to give a track up to SMPTE time code, which we used to synchronize the analog tape deck with a digital keyboard and drum machine. SMTPE time code sounds like something Jeff Goldblum would tell you portends an alien invasion, and it would inevitably bleed into the neighboring tracks because we couldn’t spare a guard track between the time code and the music. I can still hear it when I listen to those songs. Gabe would soon abandon the analog eight-track for an Alesis ADAT, a contemporary of DAT that used VHS tapes to record eight digital audio tracks. This worked every bit as well as you imagine a recording technology based on VHS media would, but it had a digital sync clock and didn’t need SMPTE, so there’s one more recording track for you if you can un-jam the machine.

    In that era I also spent time in SF State’s recording studio, working with two-inch, 24-track tape on a giant, two-horsepower deck. It was a beast the size of a Viking stove — the reels alone weighed ten pounds when fully wound. All of us with long hair, men and women alike, were advised to keep our ponytails and dreads well away from the reels during transport if we wanted to go through life with scalps. It was huge fun. Finally, we had all the tracks! The instructor, John Barsotti, who’d been a professional engineer, had a first-generation copy of the Billie Jean master on a half-inch stereo reel at 30-inches-per-second, basically the maximum useful ratio of tape surface area to signal achievable. He played it for us in the control room over the big Tannoy monitors and it absolutely blew my mind. I’d heard the song dozens of times before then and been indifferent to it, but I’ve been a fan of Billie Jean ever since. Ah-HOOO!

    But, as anyone who remembers “be kind, rewind” knows, tape is a pain, and not just because it has to be rewound. Tape degrades. Tails in? Tails out? Where on the reel is the cut you’re looking for? Tape is not just the platonic example of a linear media, it’s actually linear. The deck jams and tape stretches and snaps. It’s bulky and weighs a ton. It fouls during rewind or fast forward and suddenly the studio is knee deep in tangles of it. Digital tape formats were only ever awkward placeholders for something better. For production purposes, tape was rightly displaced by random access digital. I went from cutting 456 to using SoundTools on an Intergraph workstation and it was like being born again.

    I’m sure these new reel-to-reel decks will find their place. There is an eccentric for every audiophile market, no matter how niche. People do buy old TEAC decks and scour flea markets and e-Bay for secondhand reels. And I am sure there are people out there who will buy these Ballfinger decks, if for no other reason than they are gorgeous objects that also play analog music at ridiculously high quality. (And I live in Silicon Valley, a place with a well documented weakness for gorgeously over-engineered frippery.)

    But it won’t be me. My wife has already warned me that under no circumstances am I to buy an expensive German tape deck. Or, for that matter, any tape deck. I’ve been enjoying my LPs, but, nostalgia notwithstanding, the old razor-nicks on my hands say I gotta draw the line at tape.

    Also posted on Medium.