by Flack » Thu Oct 07, 2010 6:47 pm
Hah! That is odd. Who am I to deny a beaver of pleasure?
---
About a decade ago, I was doing freelance music reviews for a heavy metal website. The way the site worked was, music labels and occasionally aspiring musicians would mail stacks of CDs to the site owner in exchange for reviews. The webmaster would then redistribute the CDs to we, the people, who would write the reviews.
So one day this CD arrives and the band's name is Abortion Clinic. The songs are all over the top in that SOD/MOD type of way, but it's just not that good. So I get the funny (I thought) idea of writing a terrible, over the top review of the album. No punches held, just an all out assault on the band. In my defense, I thought (A) the band probably won't see it, and (B) if they do, it'll be funny because they'll be like "aw check out this terrible review!"
Of course that's not what happened. After reading the review, the band took immediate offense and all hell broke loose. At one point, they threatened to sue us because we put a picture of the album cover next to the review, which they said was copyright infringement. The part they were really pissed off about was that I made fun of the fact that they had dedicated the album to their Uncle John. "What Uncle wouldn't be proud to have a band named Abortion Clinic dedicated an album to him? I'll bet it's the talk of Thanksgiving!" or something like that. Anyway, turns out Uncle John had just died of cancer, so it was kind of a sore spot. Another thing I slagged them for was they had basically copied an old SOD song, changed it very, very slightly, and put it on the CD. They later retorted that they had e-mailed some member of the band and that guy said "it was cool". My point wasn't whether or not they had permission to do it, my point was that it was unoriginal and lame to do, regardless of whether or not anyone had blessed it.
So let me tell you what I learned -- I learned that the way things work is, a band/artist/author/director/whatever publishes a work, then a reviewer reviews it, then the band/artist/etc. can say whatever they want, and that should be the end of it. I didn't really understand the rules back then, so when they responded to me, I responded to them. This pretty much led to an all out war between the band and their fans and our website. There were a lot of mean, shitty e-mails exchanged.
At one point the band demanded that we remove the review and replace it with what we REALLY thought about the CD. I still had a pet pig at the time, and so I took the album cover, defaced it, drew a giant pentagram on the CD, cut it in half, stuck it in the litter box, and let the pig shit on it. Then I took a picture of that, and we replaced the review with that picture. I won't tell you how well that went over. Eventually we decided that it was a worse punishment to simply remove their band's name from our site and quit giving them attention, which is what we did.
For quite a while the band had a small quote from my review on their website. I can't remember the exact phrase but it was something like where I had said 'the only way you could consider this a good cd is if you plan on using it for a coaster' and they put 'good cd' as a quote from me.
Anyway, that's the story.
Hah! That is odd. Who am I to deny a beaver of pleasure?
---
About a decade ago, I was doing freelance music reviews for a heavy metal website. The way the site worked was, music labels and occasionally aspiring musicians would mail stacks of CDs to the site owner in exchange for reviews. The webmaster would then redistribute the CDs to we, the people, who would write the reviews.
So one day this CD arrives and the band's name is Abortion Clinic. The songs are all over the top in that SOD/MOD type of way, but it's just not that good. So I get the funny (I thought) idea of writing a terrible, over the top review of the album. No punches held, just an all out assault on the band. In my defense, I thought (A) the band probably won't see it, and (B) if they do, it'll be funny because they'll be like "aw check out this terrible review!"
Of course that's not what happened. After reading the review, the band took immediate offense and all hell broke loose. At one point, they threatened to sue us because we put a picture of the album cover next to the review, which they said was copyright infringement. The part they were really pissed off about was that I made fun of the fact that they had dedicated the album to their Uncle John. "What Uncle wouldn't be proud to have a band named Abortion Clinic dedicated an album to him? I'll bet it's the talk of Thanksgiving!" or something like that. Anyway, turns out Uncle John had just died of cancer, so it was kind of a sore spot. Another thing I slagged them for was they had basically copied an old SOD song, changed it very, very slightly, and put it on the CD. They later retorted that they had e-mailed some member of the band and that guy said "it was cool". My point wasn't whether or not they had permission to do it, my point was that it was unoriginal and lame to do, regardless of whether or not anyone had blessed it.
So let me tell you what I learned -- I learned that the way things work is, a band/artist/author/director/whatever publishes a work, then a reviewer reviews it, then the band/artist/etc. can say whatever they want, and that should be the end of it. I didn't really understand the rules back then, so when they responded to me, I responded to them. This pretty much led to an all out war between the band and their fans and our website. There were a lot of mean, shitty e-mails exchanged.
At one point the band demanded that we remove the review and replace it with what we REALLY thought about the CD. I still had a pet pig at the time, and so I took the album cover, defaced it, drew a giant pentagram on the CD, cut it in half, stuck it in the litter box, and let the pig shit on it. Then I took a picture of that, and we replaced the review with that picture. I won't tell you how well that went over. Eventually we decided that it was a worse punishment to simply remove their band's name from our site and quit giving them attention, which is what we did.
For quite a while the band had a small quote from my review on their website. I can't remember the exact phrase but it was something like where I had said 'the only way you could consider this a good cd is if you plan on using it for a coaster' and they put 'good cd' as a quote from me.
Anyway, that's the story.