Dear Warner Music Group Executives:
The BBC reports that twenty million people wanted to purchase tickets to the historic Led Zeppelin show held at the O2 Arena on December 10, 2007. With only 20,000 tickets available, needless to say there were many disappointed fans who couldn't be there when the band took the stage for the first time in 19 years.
Immediately after the show, grainy, low fidelity clips appeared on YouTube and were eagerly watched by fans. I wanted to see how different the band looked since the time I saw them at Madison Square Garden in June 1977. Alas, you had already started to pull down the clips, claiming copyright infringement.
Your actions completely underestimate the power of a rabid fan base to help sell legal recordings, which is, after all, what you...
Music
Dear Taeyang,
I’ve been following your career for a while now. My introduction to K-pop involved watching old Big Bang videos as well as the members’ solo releases, and your Solar album was the very first physical K-pop album I ever owned. For the past few years, I watched as your band went through different concepts and hairstyles while you kept faithful to the mohawk, letting it reach Jedward levels in terms of height, in what was probably an attempt to make yourself look taller. And after tons of people complained about your lack of change, I watched you ditch the mohawk for hairstyles such as bringing back the dookie braids, this perm, and now this:
A part of me wonders if this is all some sort of ploy to get you back on World Star Hip Hop. But whatever the reason for this...
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Dear Korean Cultural Centre,
As France prepares for its first ever K-POP concert with one of South Korea’s leading entertainment companies, the general feeling around the blogosphere is that this will truly be a historical moment. As many have said, “The Hallyu is finally here” but for me as a British supporter of Korean culture this sentiment falls flat for me in many ways. Korean people have been in England for a long time, and managed to integrate quietly into places like New Malden and the surrounding areas of Kingston. It has become quite a ‘thing’ for those that have discovered Korean culture to take a kind of pilgrimage to New Malden just to go into shops that sell Korean media and to visit restaurants where they can eat famous dishes such as bibimbap, kimchi and ddeokbokki. The...
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Dear Praise Band,
I so appreciate your willingness and desire to offer up your gifts to God in worship. I appreciate your devotion and celebrate your faithfulness--schlepping to church early, Sunday after Sunday, making time for practice mid-week, learning and writing new songs, and so much more. Like those skilled artists and artisans that God used to create the tabernacle (Exodus 36), you are willing to put your artistic gifts in service to the Triune God.
So please receive this little missive in the spirit it is meant: as an encouragement to reflect on the practice of "leading worship." It seems to me that you are often simply co-opted into a practice without being encouraged to reflect on its rationale, its "reason why." In other words, it seems to me that you are often...
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Dear Ms. Swift:
I write to urge you to drop your endorsement of Diet Coke, which contains the artificial sweetener aspartame. I am glad that you are not promoting full-calorie Coca-Cola, which promotes diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other health problems. But Diet Coke and other sodas sweetened with aspartame may raise consumers’ risk of cancer.
A prominent laboratory conducted three major studies of aspartame and found that it caused cancer in both rats and mice. In the two tests on rats, aspartame caused lymphomas, leukemias, kidney tumors, and breast cancer. A study in mice found that it caused liver and lung cancer. Scientists generally accept that if a chemical causes cancer in lab animals it likely increases the risk of cancer in humans.
While the Food and Drug...
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Dear Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez,
I haven’t had an earworm infection this bad since “Oops, I Did it Again.” And let me tell you, that was bad. At some point in 2000 I heard Britney’s song, and then I heard it again somewhere else—it’s the repetition that gets you—and before I knew it my brain had it on repeat. And was melting. Neurons killed themselves rather than continue to suffer that song. It took months to recover. I’m not sure my cognitive skills ever did.
And, to be totally frank, it’s worse this time. That’s probably because now I have young kids, who weren’t around for “Oops…" But they sure know your work. These sweet, young, tender feisty mischievous things have become living, singing, laughing manifestations of the demon that you wrought, which now lives in my...
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Dear Mr. Rhymes,
When you get a song stuck in your head, is it the entire thing? Do you have to walk a few blocks to get through the three or four minutes of intro, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, breakdown, chorus, and ending? If so, I envy you. Sloshing around in my head all day is just audio backwash. I’ll spend a day or two with a phrase from a Chris Rock special, then maybe a week with a few seconds of a musical cue for a play I did eight years ago. Over and over again. I don’t want to get too personal here, so I’ll just say I have a deficit disorder and not tell you which.
Over the past fourteen years, I’ve spent a lot of time with one particular line of yours stuck in my head. Not even a line, maybe half a line. And it’s not even stuck, it just lives there. It’s from that song...
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Dear venue owners and managers,
You may have noticed a decline in attendance, lower quality of music, and generally unappreciative performers. I feel your pain and have some suggestions for you so that you get the highest quality of music, more attendance, and happiness in your life.
We professional musicians--the humble, the great--know we are servants. We bring joy and soul to the darkest corners of downtown, and then shlep our axes through the back alleys.
Pay us.
That’s right! Monetary compensation for a service which we have trained for years to be able to provide. Some of us even went to school to better understand the magic that we bring. Do you understand how disheartening it is to watch the doorman go home with most of our cover?
Weed out the amateurs. We don’t...
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Dear Justin
I am the mother to a 12 year old 'Belieber'.. like millions of other Mum's around the world our households have become caught up in 'Bieber Fever'.
Last time you visited in Australia in 2011 you were all our household was talking about (whether we liked it or not). Having (been forced to) watch your Never Say Never movie we were under the impression that Meet...
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Firstly, it’s great to have you in the UK on your Mrs Carter world tour, though I’m pretty sure I and many others won’t be able to get my hands on a ticket (a friend just showed me some tickets are on sale for £10,000). Of course the next best thing for those who aren't willing to make indulgences is being able to watch videos and see pictures of your performances, that’s when I read that you had banned professional photographers from the whole of the world tour.
It struck me as a curious thing when at the end of the day all publicity is good publicity and your known for being one of the best performers in the world. The media will instead be given a link to a website that will have selected shots from her Amsterdam, Belgrade, Zagreb and Bratislava performances, all of which were...
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