Killed by Death

[DBB]

So I went to the last independent record store that has not went out of business since the Target, Best Buy, Borders and Barnes and Nobles appeared on the highway leading out of town a few years back (the strip mall and big box backbone for the flesh and blood of ticky-tacky townhouse subdivisions popping up around this exurb in the making), to buy Motorhead Kiss of Death a couple of days after its release, figuring that it would be there since the owner has stocked every live album, re-release, DVD or new album Motorhead has released the past three years and came up empty. I did not want to walk away empty handed so I bought A Matter of Life of Death and might as well have spent my money on some Britney Spears CDs for all the enjoyment it has given me. How anyone can claim that this album compares to the older classic material or is the best since Seventh Son (Up The X-Factor!!!) without being on massive quantities of uncut Peruvian cocaine is beyond me—but that is another a story.

The daughter of the owner (a real mom and pop operation) found it odd that it was not in stock and there was a space on the new releases wall where Kiss of Death could have been, but she asked me “Did Sony release it?” I said I believed that Sanctuary was distributed in the US by Sony (correct I was) and she told me that Sony had stopped distributing to small record stores entirely about a week or so earlier. She said that it was a bit of a sore spot with her father and that he wasn’t in a mood to talk about it yet, and when he called me today after a much longer period than a special order would normally take, he sounded down-in-the-mouth about the fact that it had taken so long and wanted to know if I had already went out and bought a copy because of the delay. I hadn’t and haven’t had an opportunity to listen to it yet (soon), but Sony has decided that they are only going to deal with the large chains and are freezing small, independent record stores out.

Happy, happy times and not one mention of it anywhere I imagine as the market tightens the noose around the neck of local, small record shops.

I am going in tomorrow or early next week to special order some things and collect a batch of distribution catalogs to gaze in wide wonder at the selling points and prose of publicists and think I am going to raise the subject with the owner, so I may have a some more concrete things to say about this subject later.

 

[BenMech]

Dave, this post is one big reason why I'd like to have more realtime chat media to talk to you, like instant messenger or an IRC channel - hey Jim?

I have thoughts about this.

While I couldn't give a flying fuck about new Maiden or the umpteenth similar Motorhead album, your deeper point about the actions of Sony, which isn't a creative arts company, but a pure hardware CONGLOMERATE manipulating the market.

They happen to be playing nastily with their movie companies too, in regards to professional criticism.

 

[circus_brimstone]

They happen to be playing nastily with their movie companies too, in regards to professional criticism.

 

[BenMech]

Sony no longer screens movies by their studios (Columbia, Tri-Star, Sony Pictures Classics) for critics before they open for audiences, because they say "Critics shouldn't have special privileges".

Remember a few years ago, they INVENTED a print critic who gave Columbia films great print blurbs and soundbites?

 

[DBB]

Hmmmmmm. They cannot tolerate the slightest bit of criticism it seems. Why should they though? I guess the promotional fluff in the papers and on morning shows really does the trick for them and is a neutral environment that becomes a slew of positive press by default since the movie seems interesting and alluring if everyone is excited to be talking about it.

Overkill really. They have more than enough avenues for generating positive press. Studios will cut critics words totally out of context to make a movie appear “brilliant,” “gripping,” and “compelling” when the critic may have been talking about the performance of a supporting actor wasted in a toilet bowl production. There is also blatant misquoting and the “quote whores” (not my words) from smaller media outlets that are more than happy to hand out praise in exchange for seeing their name in print and probably some perks on the side.

Probably something I should go back and look at more closely, the parallels to the state of metal coverage should be obvious.

Hell…I have been misquoted once and it made me think about some things. The second review I wrote was for Goat Horn Threatening Force and this line is the teaser or excerpt above the link to my review on the band’s press page:

This classic stop-gap EP rules...

Well, I consciously avoided using the word “rules” to describe a band’s work because it is overused back then and still do (lone exception Andralls Inner Trauma used for highlighting and dramatic effect, but probably lost in the welter of words I’ve spewed out).

This is what I actually wrote in the review and it had much more to do with describing the nature of a stopgap EP than any value judgment (positive or negative) in relation to the band:

Threatening Force, an old-fashioned stopgap EP containing a brief intro