Good Grieg, Charlie Brown, You Better Not Be Telling Tall Tales!

So I got in an argument the other day, right? True story. Some jackass was going on about how pop stars these days “game the charts” by selling multiple versions of the same thing with “only superficial differences between versions”, sometimes marketing these alternates as limited editions available exclusively on the artist’s web-store for a short time in order to “exploit the FOMO of their younger fanbase”, only to subsequently let Walmart and other big-box stores sell all the same versions at a slight discount relative to the pre-orders direct from the artist in question, triggering a cascade of cancelled orders from the aforesaid artists’ respective web-stores that they would do well to confirm the magnitude of with their bookkeeper in case a marketing mis-step for which no one deserves blame or shame but which one might prefer to avoid next time around really has taken place. Or the other thing he claimed they do to artificially bolster sales numbers is to bundle a digital copy of their record with shirts or other merch.

His argument ran thus:

“If 8 people buy a copy of your record and two of those people buy t-shirts with your face on it that come with a download code rendered superfluous by the physical copy of the same damn record shipped simultaneously with the shirt in the same damn box, you ain’t sold 10 records. You sold 8 records and two t-shirts, for fuck’s sake! That shit can’t count towards their chart position or I’m finna go vigilante, you feel me?”

To which came my retort:

“No, actually, I don’t feel you, my friend, but then again, the only time I’ve ever paid any attention at all to chart positions was when I lost all respect for Maynard after he jumped on the misogynist bandwagon celebrating that Tool’s eminently forgettable 2019 record whose name I couldn’t be bothered to look up had outsold Lover a few weeks after the latter’s release during the former’s initial week of sales by posting a ham-fisted meme featuring Thanos on Twitter replete with an eye-roll inducing description of the joke to gloat over what his toxic fanbase considered the triumph of ‘real music’ over mass-produced tripe, a perspective to which I couldn’t be more arrogantly opposed in spite of having smashed my copy of Lover with a hammer at the insistence of the oracle. Tool are a bunch of poseurs whose psychedelic posturing is laughably pathetic to anyone whose life is an embodiment of the principle that all of existence is one. And I’d go on record saying exactly that, finishing off by suggesting Maynard sodomize himself with a flathead screwdriver under the influence of ayahuasca until he’s ready to apologize if he really wants to claim he’s learned anything at all from his trips, the little bitch. And the cherry on top would be the third line of the twelfth hexagram to describe the shame he ought to feel for being such a poseur while being looked up to by so many naive dipshits.”

Miraculously, this seemed to increase my esteem in his eyes:

“Damn, that some Ryan Hurd big dick energy if I ever seen it! Norway he’d do it, and 3 years is kind of a long time to hold a grudge, but damn, that’d be tight, though, wouldn’t it? Shiiiit….”

Now that I’d earned his respect, I decided to challenge him with a little hypothetical to see how consistent he was in his beliefs:

“Suppose a complete nobody with no social status and a career going nowhere sent a love letter to one of these pop stars with whom you take umbrage and, upon signs that the letter had been warmly received, proceeded to obliquely court said pop star via publicly available posts on various social media platforms with which said pop star would engage through a VPN in order to hide messages in puns or associations derived from the geographical reports in the engagement analytics on one or more of the platforms employed by this hypothetical complete nobody. Now suppose for one reason or another, it became impossible to proceed any further towards consummating the courtship by such indirect means, and, to circumvent the difficulty, the pop star in question mails a postcard to the complete nobody upon which a date in the near future is written and nothing more. On the date in question, the complete nobody drives himself over to one of the pop star’s homes and their first kiss is so dynamite, the musical it inspires her to compose wins a Tony. Now let me ask you: did this couple cultivate a relationship in secret right under the vigilant watch of a rabidly observant fanbase and relentlessly exploitative paparazzi against all odds without ever directly speaking, or not?”

His response was immediate and emphatic:

“Obviously, what is this ninja shit? Did somebody actually do that?! That’s next level, man… But yeah, a postcard with a date on it ain’t speaking, that’s a 4damsure…..”

To which I replied with a mic drop: “Gotcha. Now don’t you make me have to pirate Midnights to jam out to it in a timely fashion by taking too long with that postcard, y’hear? XOXO”