How to be a top music tweeter, plus PG Wodehouse and the Nazis and a Ghostbuster in Euston
How to be a top tweeter
Bob Lefsetz is a maverick, speaks-his-mind kind of guy, who every week whacks out a news-letter telling the music industry what he thinks it should be doing. This week's has got some interesting things to say about social networking, and how it can affect a record's chances. The music industry being a cut-throat business, buzz is all-important. Hence Lefsetz's point that the received wisdom – don't release at the weekend – may not hold true any longer. Friday at 4pm, he says, is "the most retweetable time".
As people gear up for their leisure time, that's when social networking kicks in and is most useful to those trying to shift units. If you can own the weekend, you've won. Lefsetz draws a comparison with Radiohead's pay-what-you-want gimmick for the 2007 album In Rainbows; by dropping the news on a Sunday night, after the papers had gone to print, the story ruled the internet.
Going back to pre-internet days, Van Halen launched their world-conquering album 1984 on 1 January. When the rest of the music industry was dabbing at post-NYE vomit stains, Van Halen were destroying all comers. See what happens if you take your eye off the ball?
An uncivil reminder
David Cameron has expressed his interest in learning from Los Angeles in the aftermath of England's urban rioting. He could stop by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and have a look at their reconstruction of Edward Kienholz's gruesome installation Five Car Stud. A lifesize tableau of five white men torturing and castrating a black man, it's a savage reminder of the brutalisation of the African-American population in the pre-civil rights era. This is actually the first time Five Car Stud has gone on show in the US, its only previous public outing being the landmark Documenta 5 exhibition in West Germany in 1972.
Wodehouse and the Nazis
It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. The day before the story broke that MI5 were releasing their file on PG Wodehouse, the film trade press reported that a biopic of Wodehouse was on the way, with esteemed Il Postino director Michael Radford attached. It will focus on the very period that got MI5 interested; Wodehouse's sojourn in Berlin and the radio broadcasts he made from Germany in 1941, which triggered revulsion in Britain. I'm still a huge fan of Bertie Wooster and all that, but I hope Radford will be a bit harder on the writer than literary commentators currently are. Most seem happy to close ranks and swallow the "naive, silly ass" defence that Wodehouse himself put forward to MI5 when they questioned him in 1944 as a possible Nazi collaborator; forgetting that, before the war, Nazi admiration was not uncommon in certain echelons in the UK – call it the "Edward VIII position". Moreover, no Englishman, however stupid, could have forgotten that the Nazis had, months before he made the recordings, killed 40,000 British civilians in the Blitz. And whatever he was, Wodehouse wasn't stupid.
A Ghostbuster in Euston
Ah, the convenience of the cameraphone. And blimey, the reach of Twitter. Without them, we would never have known that Bill Murray used a mobility buggy to get around Euston station. We owe you, @empiremagazine
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/aug/30/arts-diary
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