It's a Girl Thing...

Don't ask how I got into look at this - but I stumbled across a MySpace profile (http://www.myspace.com/girlthing) last week for a band that has long since been defunct. Officially, the band 'Girl Thing' split in 2000 after one top ten single, and a half-arsed album release and lost millions of $$ for their record company RCA. The marketing was slick, albeit fairly generic and a repetative of the Spice Girl formula, but the second single off the album crashed and burned and RCA cut their losses and run while they still had some shreds of dignity left.


Girl Thing: Tanked

The interesting thing is how, 6 years on, the marketing machine still appears to be running for a product that has lost all of its wheels.

For a start, someone is still logging on - as the MySpace site records the last long in as today. Secondly, someone is still adding friends and until 2005, someone was writing blogs. Even other MySpacers are logging in and saying hello. The individual photos of band members all have dates of births attached to them.

Nostalgia perhaps? A crazy, obsessed fan? Maybe the writers of the songs use the site as a platform to demostrate their talents? But surely the marketing team can't be using this as testimonial?

But when you look through the blog, there's a great comment from someone who actually appeared to be behind the band - their vocal coach - who simply asks 'who set up this site'? Clearly those people close to the band have even less idea than anyone else.

The really amusing bits can be found when you read the 'biography' for the band. It may be tongue in cheek; they may mean this for real - but in the description of the band's sound, this phrase is immortal :

"The Girl Thing sound crossed a Betty Boo-meets-NWA rap-style with the incessant bounce of melodic dance pop."

Please, please let me be in the room when Betty Boo meets Dr.Dre, Ice Cube and the rest of NWA....posh Kensington, West London, meets Compton, downtown LA. Brilliant.

I Like To Party With Beer

A fairly comprehensive statement that probably needs very little in the way of explanation. Which should make the following video all the more easy to understand.

Except by the end of it you can't help but wonder how the thing got made at all. I mean, if I drank the amount of beer in order to be inspired enough to make this advert, making the advert, would be the last thing on my mind. If you get my drift.

So in the end you have to take your hats off the Norwegians for their talent at getting so obviously blind drunk and still managing to programme the computers enough to generate such genius work. I have only looked through a couple of the videos but I'm sure the next one MUST be about kebabs...

I'm rather disturbed too by the frame that YouTube has decided to use to introduce this clip...

Definition Of Stupid

Customer On Phone: "So what makes Liquor Superstores so, well, super?"
Manager: "Well there's our lowest liquor price guarantee."
Customer On Phone: "Lowest Liquor Price Guarantee?"

Is he thick? He's managed to dial the number and construct a sentence so what the fook is so hard to understand about those four words?

But actually the manager goes on to say that they'll guarantee the lowest price on only certain products. Ah ha. Here's the catch. Good job thickie customer actually asked that question otherwise the manager wouldn't have been able to qualify the small print behind this seemingly unbelieveable offer.

It's mindless and repetative. It drives you nuts just listening to it. It's mock-up situation that makes you cringe and reach for the CD button. Why do people do this to us? Alcohol is fun and enjoyable - I don't want to be tormented into a shop just to save me some pennies.

We can see through the loss-leader scam - in fact, you've managed to spend an entire advert telling us that this is what you're doing. They mumble some other info about largest choice under one roof only for you to be stung when you get inside the store with mark-ups on everything else.

Okay, so it's nothing new...but crikey, Coles should be able to do better with their advertising. After all, it's CHEAP BOOZE FOR GODS SAKE. How hard can that be to come up with something inspirational?

I always said that when I die, if I go to Hell, I'll find myself crammed in a lift, stuck between floors, with too many people listening to the greatest hits of Tito Puento over the lift tannoy system. I now know that his songs will be interrupted by a stream of poorly thought through radio adverts....

Get Out Of My Pool!

Outside of what this advert is implying about the female climbing out of the pool, here is another genius advert from a company called OB. I doubt anyone is going to need any explanation about what OB specialise in making for women, but I'm sure if you do, you can Google it.

Click on the section above to see the full advert.

Extract from Columbia Records Survey

Kids from Unis in America were all interviewed about music and here are some of the results....

“The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.”

Radio, it would appear, is dead. Video finally got it.

iTunes loophole: Straight Edge Article Six

So the story goes something like this...

I downloaded a track from iTunes the other week. I think it was the Axwell track I mentioned earlier in another blog. There is no mention on the album that it is a mix album, although if you have half a brain, you'd realise it was. But I don't half a brain, so I downloaded it and of course, at the end of the track, it's still at full volume when the track cuts out. Sounds ridiculous.

So I told iTunes this, and to their credit, they gave me the $1.69 back without any argument and apologised about the 'poor quality of the track'.



iTunes: not iDiots

I replied saying 'it wasn't the quality, it was the fact that you've sold me an incomplete song and that your website is full of mis-information when mix CDs clearly aren't labelled as such.'

They thanked me and off we all went.

It reminded me of a time when I nearly threw my toys out the pram at HMV. I bought a CD in the bargain basement bin - not even I will reveal who the CD was by - and when I got home, I peeled the stickers off the front of the CD to find the words 'all or some of the tracks may have been re-recorded by one or more of the original artists.'

Yep. A bad karaoke CD. It was horrible and I was livid at HMV. 'Top dog for music' seemed like a bit of a joke. I almost went back and complained; I even thought about writing a letter - then I realised that would mean that more people, other than the cashier and myself, would know what I bought. It wasn't worth the chance that people I knew could find out.

So anyway this brings me in a roundabout way, to my point:

Straight Edge Article Six of The Theory Of Revolution: Be Honest


Bill Gates once said that your 'unhappiest customers are your greatest source of learning.' More and more of my purchases have moved from HMV to other retailers and online - a similar pattern to most of the general public - but I used to LOVE going to HMV and wandering around for hours. But once you've been cheated on a dodgy copy of Bucks Fizz's greatest hits (DAMN, SHIT, I didn't mean to say that...F**K I wish I could take that back), you feel totally betrayed.

Maybe I'm over-exaggeratting, but the Article should never be questioned. Be honest, and your customers and consumers will be honest with you.

The 13th Post: Welcome Mr. Billy Ocean

Better get this one out of the way as quickly as possible.

Been downloading music off iTunes today - rumours are iTunes is going to go wireless soon, which will mean you'll be able to download music anywhere there is a wireless network - and that iPods will be set-up to download the music themselves. Exciting stuff. Anyone hoping to catch-up and compete with Apple in this department has a LONG way to go...

I spent the morning downloading random tunes that I haven't heard for ages, or things that are sitting in the UK and US charts that Australia hasn't seen yet. I got the following:

'The Longest Time' - Billy Joel
'Tell Her About It' - Billy Joel
'When The GoinG Gets Tough' - Billy Ocean
'Get Out Of My Dreams' - Billy Ocean
'Carribean Queen' - Bill Ocean

And then one a more modern and less tragic note:

'With Every HEartbeat' - Robyn feat. Kleerup
'I Found You' - Axwell


Axwell: Not a twat

I made the mistake of buying the last one off a 'mix' CD on iTunes, which I should have realised means the song stops half-way through as it's mixed into the next song, which makes it sound ridiculous. I'm going to complain to iTunes and see if I can get a credit for it. Should be interesting to see what they say...


Ocean: Salty & Very Deep

And what is it with Billy Ocean? I realised after downloading them that all three songs I bought have sub-titles next to the main title of the song:

When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going)
Get Out Of My Dreams (Get Into My Car)
Carribean Queen (No More Love On The Run)

Maybe Mr. OCean was in two minds when he was thinking about a title for these songs? Maybe he was writing them with someone else, and they were arguing so much that this was the compromise? Maybe he suffered from an accute case of duel personality and each of the people in his head kept re-writing the titles?

He actually had an accute habit of it. Other songs included 'I Sleep So Much Better (In Someone Else's Bed)' and 'On The Run (Hold On Brother)' and 'Stop Me (If You've Heard It All Before)'.

The man was obsessed. Maybe his name wasn't Billy Ocean, but actually Billy (Ocean). Or maybe it was Billy Ocean (From Fyzabad In Trinidad)? Actually his real name was Leslie, so maybe some extreme 'your first name makes you sound like a GIRL' name-calling at school had left him with severe pyschological damage, causing him to name everything he created with specific and descriptive titles to avoid ANY confusion?

Still, I'm sure he was a nice man. According to Wikipedia he is now a teacher. I bet the students all write 'Leslie' in big letters on the blackboard before he comes in to class.