Adele -pic from Facebook
Following a claim about an on-stage incident, Getintothis’ Shaun Ponsonby explores a recent pandemic.
Ha! Fooled you!
You see what I did there? Click-bait. It’s annoying, isn’t it? To take something completely out of context or wholly fabricated, make it the headline of some mediocre (at best) article and see the hits rise and rise. Because you are all basically a bunch of idiots and you fall for it every time. And you have body odour. Buy some deodorant, you idiot.
But that is the world we live in now. Regular means of communication and journalism have changed beyond recognition and taking a cue from marketing companies who continue to talk about “digital” without knowing what it even means. For future reference, it means about the same as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious; nothing, just a mere buzz word to fill some gaps in a script.
I would actually be fine with this if it was just on social media. As a hatemongering, unsociable turd I don’t see much on social media anyway. Occasionally those quizzes will come up; Only 88% of People Passed This Test. Your interest perks, and you click on it, and the questions are about as challenging as a Year 6 SATS test. Maybe they meant 88% of 11 year olds, check the small print.
But, no! It has found its way into our failing press as well. The problem there is that, if we have learned nothing else about humanoids – which I am proud to say I have never been – it is that they are lazy, and will shout their mouth off about something they haven’t looked into like they are a fucking expert, despite an astonishing level of ignorance (see: that self-absorbed douche balloon Julia Hartley-Brewer). This means that a lot of people read the headline, misinterpret it and somebody becomes a public enemy for something that has been wrongly attributed to them.
This last week, Tony Visconti , the legendary producer behind much of David Bowie’s greatest work, was interviewed with noted intellectual thought factory The Daily Star, in which he gave his thoughts on the current state of pop music. “You turn the radio on and its fluff, you are listening to 90% computerised voices,” he said. “We know Adele has a great voice but it’s even questionable if that is actually her voice or how much has been manipulated. We don’t know. There’s a sound to pop now that is so perfect it’s boring, because everything is fixed.”
You may notice he mentioned Adele there. I like Adele as a person. Musically and lyrically she has all the sophistication of a wet flannel. But I like her. If she made music more in line with her personality, she might be on to something – and I am sure she will take heed of my advice, despite the millions of records she has sold.
But Adele, in her infinite award-winning Adele-ness, clearly didn’t see the whole quote. Because the press are currently so far up her arse that they can literally smell the shit in her intestines and won’t tell her that it stinks, they took that little line about her out of context, blew it out of proportion and slapped it in headlines, leading to people grabbing the wrong end of the stick and beating around the bush with it. What started off as quite clearly a hyperbolic example that Visconti pulled out of his arse in the heat of the moment, was interpreted as a pointed attack on Adele.
To be clear, it wasn’t. What he is saying is that there’s so much manipulation in modern pop that it is hard to know the real deal it comes along. He categorically did not say “Adele is shit and can’t sing and doesn’t sing on her own records”, which is how Adele interpreted the click-bait headline.
On stage in some city, somewhere, she announced; “Some dickhead tried to say that my voice was not me on record. Suck my dick.” Leaving aside the lack of respect shown to a man who has produced much more important work than she could ever hope to by referring to him merely as “some dickhead” and apparently inadvertently announcing that she is a man, it’s pretty obvious that she allowed herself to get wound up about something that didn’t really happen.
Visconti apologised. Sort of. He said to Billboard, quite reasonably; “I’m sorry that what I said in regards to what’s being played on radio was misconstrued yet I cannot apologise for something taken the wrong way. If Adele has taken my comments as offensive that was certainly not my intent. Adele has a great voice and it brings pleasure to millions.”
And he shouldn’t have to apologise. Neither should Adele. The click-bait whores should. They purposely misrepresented him, and to what end? Just to get a few measly hits? That might not sound like a big deal here, but it is representative of the pretty bad direction we have found ourselves in.
You know the way we proudly exclaim that World War II was our reaction to the atrocities in Germany? Imagine in the years to come if we have to sheepishly explain to our Grandchildren (or, in my case, the staff in the nursing home) that World War III was the result of overreaction to click-bait.
[paypal-donation]
