14 minute read
The BRIT Awards 2022
It felt big, it felt thrilling, and it sure felt fiery. The BRIT Awards returned to the O2 Arena on February 8 with some blistering performances, and some very worthy winners...
Winners included Little Simz (Best New Artist) and Sam Fender (Best Rock/Alternative), while Anne-Marie and Liam Gallagher performed live
Ed Sheeran performed two songs on the night, while BRIT winner Dave was joined on stage by peers including Giggs (pictured bottom left)
Becky Hill (bottom left) won her first ever BRIT, capping a memorable night for Polydor – whose other domestic artist winners included Sam Fender and Holly Humberstone
BRITs: All the winners
Album Of The Year
Adele – 30
Artist Of The Year
Adele
Best Group Wolf Alice
Song Of The Year Adele – Easy On Me
Best New Artist
Little Simz
Best International Artist
Billie Eilish
Best International Group
Silk Sonic
Best International Song Olivia Rodrigo – Good 4 U
BRITS Rising Star Holly Humberstone
Best Dance
Becky Hill
Best Rock/Alternative
Sam Fender
Best Pop/R&B
Dua Lipa
Best Hip-Hop/Grime/Rap
Dave
Producer Of The Year
Inflo
Songwriter Of The Year
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran collected the BRIT award for the year’s Best Songwriter, while performing alongside Bring Me The Horizon
THE GREAT ROCK N(FT) ROLL SWINDLE
Eamonn Forde raises some concerns over a potential music biz bubble – in which the non-fungible get filthy and furious…
In May 1980, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle film was released. In it, Malcolm McLaren took a phantasmagorical, if not outright Stalinist, approach to the history of his former management charges, the Sex Pistols.
In his narration of the film – which structurally is, in modern parlance, a ‘hot mess’ – McLaren renamed himself The Embezzler. He posited that the band was entirely his creation and that he alone, as the great situationist auteur, was stage managing every movement and syllable to simultaneously goad, satirise, undermine, delegitimise and bleed dry the music business.
He called this grand act The Swindle and outlined his 10 (retrospectively defined) lessons to explain just how he pulled off such a daring heist.
Rewatching the film over four decades on, one is put in mind of many things currently gripping the modern music industry, but none more so than NFTs and how they have shifted, in the space of a year, from being a hugely exciting creative and commercial force into being hijacked by a new generation of crypto grifters. (Legal notice: I am in no way suggesting that all NFTs are a scam or towering follies, but rather that scam artists are increasingly flocking to them like carrion crows. These people are stripping NFTs of their original purposes and benefits.)
This is unquestionably a boom area for the business and every week brings some new NFT launch that has generated some seriously eyebursting sums of money (while creating what is claimed to be the world’s first NFT music label) or stands as a serious strategy statement linked to Web3 in general and NFTs in particular.
Yet there is a duplicity cracking open at the very centre of the music NFT gold rush that risks soiling the entire enterprise.
The Sex Pistols (first time around) barely lasted two-and-a-half years and the media storm that engulfed them (from Bill Grundy in October 1976 to Johnny Rotten walking out in January 1978) was a fleeting 16 months. We are really only a year into NFTs as something the music industry is getting its head around. The precipice looms.
Applying McLaren-esque thinking, we can see how NFTs have had a similar trajectory – coming from the underground and exploding into the mainstream consciousness before collapsing into confusion, recrimination and accusations of being ripped off. Replace EMI and A&M with assorted Silicon Valley evangelists who are then superseded by unregulated and hedonistic crypto bros looking to make fast money through whatever means they can and the narrative arc is unnervingly similar.
Let’s revisit those McLaren lessons to see how well they fit ‘the new NFT paradigm’.
LESSON 1: HOW TO MANUFACTURE YOUR NFT
Barely anyone in music knew, or cared, about NFTs until early 2021 when Grimes made $6 million selling digital art. Then, like major label A&Rs seeing a new scene bloom on indie labels, they all piled in. No one was quite sure what to do so they just copied what everyone else was doing. If you hadn’t made an NFT, ran the proposition, did you even exist?
LESSON 2: ESTABLISH THE NAME ‘NFT’
‘Non-fungible token’ is an ugly and clunky phrase and no one is quite sure what ‘fungible’ actually means. There will inevitably be mushroom jokes. ‘NFT’ is a lot slicker and if you repeat it enough times then people will stop asking what the letters stand for and thereafter be terrified to admit they don’t actually know.
LESSON 3: SELL THE SWINDLE
This is the point where honourable actions, or even just panicked bandwagon jumping, get corrupted by opportunistic outsiders. Bless Ozzy Osborne’s demonic heart, but his CryptoBatz collection was quickly hijacked by phishing scammers who were intent on fleecing innocent buyers. Scammers also sailed into OpenSea to digitally loot and plunder. The RIAA is currently chasing down HitPiece for mass infringement of musicians’ IP rights in what it says is “little more than a scam operation”. Even HMRC in the UK is seizing NFTs as evidence in
a complex VAT fraud investigation involving a multitude of alleged fake companies. The swindle for McLaren hinged on one group, meaning it could only have so much impact. The swindle in NFTs is beginning to feel industrialised.
LESSON 4: DO NOT PLAY, DON’T GIVE THE GAME AWAY
This ‘less is more’ approach (out of necessity when the Pistols were banned from playing various cities in the UK) created a mythology around them and fixed in people’s minds the notion that they were just too dangerous to be put in front of the public. The closest the NFT world gets to this is trying to create false scarcity by offering NFTs in a 24- or 48hour window. That’s less about danger and more about desperation. NFT (Faux-Limited Edition).
LESSON 5: HOW TO STEAL AS MUCH MONEY AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE FROM THE ARTIST OR INVESTOR OF YOUR CHOICE
After taking legal advice, there is nothing we wish to write here just yet.
LESSON 6: BECOME THE WORLD’S GREATEST TOURIST ATTRACTION
‘NFT’ was unquestionably the buzz term of 2021 and saw everyone in music try and launch an NFT collection – or at least kick the (non-fungible) tyres. Like a panicked crowd, the stampede grew exponentially greater, but most were unsure where they were actually running to; or even why.
LESSON 7: CULTIVATE HATRED, IT’S YOUR GREATEST ASSET
This is all down to the bloviation of the tech bros. ‘You don’t care about NFTs, dude?’ they will bellow, between chugs from an oversized Champagne bottle that costs more than your car, while standing somewhere repulsively expensive in Palm Springs or on top of a garish skyscraper in the UAE. ‘You only hate us because you ain’t us. Yeeeeaaahhhhhh!’ This has none of the curdling menace of McLaren’s take on The Society Of The Spectacle. It is less Guy Debord and more guys who are boorish.
LESSON 8: HOW TO DIVERSIFY YOUR BUSINESS
The rebranding process is already underway as NFTs get rolled into the catch-all term ‘Web3’, which encompasses cryptocurrency, the blockchain and tokens. Like the wildcatters in the oil industry, NFTs have done the hard work for themselves so are happy to sit back and let others take it all to the next stage while they reap the benefits.
LESSON 9: TAKING CIVILISATION TO THE BARBARIANS
This was McLaren’s twist on neo-colonialism as the Sex Pistols played the US on their disastrous last tour, suggesting their brutal chaos was there to shock a dozing nation out of its backwards slumbers. There is a subset of NFT evangelists who present NFTs as digital’s highest stage of evolution and use derision to convince disbelievers that their Luddite leanings are holding their own development back. Shame is used as both carrot and stick.
LESSON 10: WHO KILLED BAMBI?
‘Never trust a hippie’ sang Tadpole (aka Edward Tudor-Pole) in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle’s cinema lobby sequence. ‘Never trust a tech bro’, should be its modern incarnation. Even the Trumps are now hawking NFTs. This can only ever be a foreshadowing of darker times ahead.
Johnny Rotten’s final words at the Sex Pistols’ (then) last show, in San Francisco on 14 January 1978 still echo down the years. “Ah-hah-hah!” he jeered, on his haunches, staring down the audience, “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Goodnight.”
The band’s closing act on stage was to play an apposite cover of No Fun by The Stooges. Were it to happen today, they’d perhaps retitle it No Funge.
The last laugh? Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols have reformed three times since their split in 1978
WHY THE ‘TORTURED ARTIST’ CLICHÉ NEEDS TO GET IN THE BIN
Rhian Jones challenges a well-worn music industry trope, and surveys the damaging effect it can have on creative careers...
For many years, the idea that great suffering leads to great art has prevailed. Heartbreak albums are, arguably, amongst some of the best, and there are countless songs about loss and the most challenging things we, as humans, have to go through that cut straight through and leave you breathless.
I get this gut-punch while listening to Amy Winehouse’s Love is a Losing Game, for example, and, more recently, Yebba’s October Song from her astounding debut, Dawn, which recalls a memory about her mum who she sadly lost to suicide. There’s no question that musicians who pour their hearts and souls into their work have a deep connection to their emotions, which in turn helps listeners tune into theirs.
There’s also evidence that alongside that gift comes a certain emotional sensitivity in the way musicians move through life. As Elton John manager David Furnish said in the previous edition of this magazine, “Artists are the most sensitive of people — if you prick them, they really bleed.” Fellow manager Ashley Page backs this up in his interview elsewhere in this magazine: “You are dealing with, on a very personal level, very emotional people, and rightly so — the greatest songs are written because people are emotional.”
Scientific studies have looked into this and found similar conclusions. In his book, Creativity, which explores the creative process and lives of creative people, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted that “the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment”.
What I’ve found gets confused, though, in this conversation, is the difference between emotional sensitivity and mental ill-health. Musicians who are unwell might be branded as ‘tortured artists’ whose problems are just part and parcel of life as a creative. This is compounded by studies that say
musicians are at a higher risk of developing mental health issues than the general population. It’s easy to look at all of this and come to the conclusion that a creative and emotionally sensitive brain is predisposed to developing mental health issues, but it’s a reductive idea that ignores the complexity of health and risks discouraging those suffering from finding support.
In addition, research has found no such concrete link. For example, a study published in 2012 of more than a million people in Sweden found that, aside from authors, who had a higher prevalence of experiencing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, people in creative professions were no more likely to have a psychiatric disorder than those in the control group. And alongside the high-profile examples of so-called ‘tortured artists’ are many others who’ve also created brilliant work while maintaining a generally balanced state of mind.
In reality, the causes of mental ill-health are complex. They span a multitude of factors, including genetics, environment, upbringing, trauma, deprivation and stress. Between 2017 and 2019, a lot of much-loved musicians sadly
Yebba’s acclaimed debut LP, Dawn, was released last year
died to suicide, including Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, Avicii, Keith Flint and Scott Hutchison. During that time, some fingers were pointed towards the music industry as the sole cause, and while that has a certain level of validity, it’s also not the complete picture — we know, for instance, that suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged under 50, whether they work in music or not. Mental ill-health is quite prevalent, generally — research from charity Mind says that one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year.
Alongside studies and articles delving into the commonality of mental ill-health in music are others that say similar about other industries. In finance, for example, a 2018 study said that 62% of financial sector firms saw an increase in mental health related illness, which was partly due to the ludicrously long hours and demands of the job. (I once had a conversation with a young banker who was telling me about how common it was to get a taxi home from the office in the early hours of the morning, have it wait outside while you took a shower, before getting back in and returning to work — it’s not hard to imagine the impact this culture would have on health.)
A 2019 article titled ‘Inside Fashion’s Enduring Mental Health Epidemic’ laid out similar challenges due to low wages and pressure. Neither of the above examples suggested that
the suffering of those working in the respective industries had anything to do with the innate make-up of the workers.
What does make sense, however, is that if you put an emotionally sensitive person into a highpressure environment, and don’t give them the support they need, health problems are likely to occur. This is especially true if that person has had a traumatic upbringing and/or existing mental health issues that have been left untreated.
Sensitivity alone doesn’t result in selfdestruction. To me, it’s an ‘and’ rather than an ‘equals’. Amy Winehouse was an incredible lyricist because she was emotionally intelligent and sensitive and she was struggling with addiction and an eating disorder. Scott Hutchison was also a brilliant songwriter who had a deep connection with his innate creativity and he suffered with depression and alcohol misuse.
Suggesting that one equals the other, for anyone, is going to be unhelpful for the development of the music industry’s approach to health and wellbeing as it risks not getting to the root cause of any problems and therefore being able to help solve them. As the pandemic hopefully fades into history and the music industry gets back on its feet, doing away with this well-worn cliché will only help it emerge stronger and more ethically sound than before, while ensuring long-term sustainability for the talent it works with in years to come.
