B-sting

As you get older, you get milder about a lot of things. When I was in my late teens, early twenties, I developed my own musical taste, like every one does at that age. And not just what music you love and is yours, but also what music you hate or at least should hate by the definitions that you’ve set. In my case, I only have a few specific musicians I specifically hate and perhaps a few genres I sort of do. Becoming milder means I have sort of forgiven Marco Borsato, but still cling to my hatred of Kane, even if they have disbanded.

There’s a few parameters I can easily identify music I’ll most likely not enjoy. Is it guitar music? This places it at an automatic disadvantage, because there’s only so many way the same few chords can and have been rehashed. I'm a firm believer that 'new sounds' can only produced with new tools (aka electronics). Is it loud or soft guitar music? If it’s loud, I might like it, but only if it’s like at Foo Fighters-level of awesome. Even a lot of varieties of metal tend to bore me these days. Oh, it’s soft music? Ouch, especially if it’s like singer-songwriter, I might grow bored of it really fast, even though there are a few rare exceptions (like Ane Brun). Did I mention I hate Blaudzun? Wait, is it Dutch??? Like sung in Dutch … oh boy. We have just found a genre you’ll have to be exceptionally special to grab my attention. Wait, it’s also bland, safe music? You lost me. Wait and the lyrics are also poetic and pretentious? And the Dutch music industry loves them to bits? Surely, I hate this band with a vengeance, right?

Yet, there’s a rather bland, prentious-sounding, industry-friendly soft rock band in Dutch that your mom would love that emerged in the nineties that I didn’t ignore, hated or passed under my radar. That band is Van Dik Hout.

Quick bio: Van Dik Hout is a band of classmates from Den Helder, who moved to Haarlem, a city known for having a dialect that’s basically Perfect Dutch As It Should Be and later Amsterdam. Their band name in English translates to ‘Of Thick Wood’ and is a reference to the Dutch saying that from thick wood you make planks, in other words: working hard, but not very accurate. Their break-through hit was “Stil in Mij” (Silent in Me) in 1994 and from there they released various more songs that would skim into the lower ranks of the Dutch charts. They dueted with art/rock icon Herman Brood before he died and they formed the temporary band De Poema’s with comedy duo Acda & De Munnik, who were scoring hits of their own in the nineties. They still release stuff, but these days they mostly just tour theaters with a greatest hits set. Oh and they never changed their original line-up.

Mind you, when you’re a kid in the 1980’s, there is a lot of fuel of things to hate when you get to a rebellious age in the 1990’s. In the 1980’s anything Dutch was bad by definition. Whether it be literature (boring pretentious novels loaded with metaphors they hit you over the head with in school), cinema (low-brow comedies, films about World War 2 or film adaptations of said books, all with at least one obligatory sex scene, because we’re liberal) or music (I present you: André Hazes, Corrie Konings and BZN which is an abbreviation of what literally means Band Without Name). Sure, there were plenty of exceptions. In retrospect there’s a lot of hip synth pop bands from the eighties and bands like Doe Maar. But as a general rule you were supposed to hate anything Dutch. And let’s be honest, with such big exports as 2 Unlimited and the Vengaboys, that trend seemed to continue into the nineties. (BTW: I actually kinda like 2 Unlimited).

Van Dik Hout were at the end of that perfect storm. They were Dutch, sang in Dutch, the band members seemed like kids who went to university and they wrote vague poetic soft rock songs and ballads about being to drunk and falling in love. And their timing could not be worse, landing in the middle of the grunge-era. What was not to hate?

I can't really put my finger on why I like them. Maybe it's because they were playing cleverly with words at a time when I was learning to play creatively with words myself to express my feelings. Maybe I've never made an issue out of liking things that were at odds with each other (I liked 2 Unlimited and metal at the same time, which in highschool was a big no-no if you wanted to be cool). And maybe it's just because they were just there in a time when music, any music, was important for me to remember that time where all your senses are in full alert. 

Maybe it's just cause when you get older and milder, you remember the time when you were still refining your choices and remember what you used to weigh those choices.

Originally published at B-sting.com. You can comment here or there.

The usual culprit for clone songs are advertising companies. Not wanting to pay the original artist, but still use their funky tune, they usually resort to making something so similar to the original, you’d think it was the same song with a few notes out of place. It happened to Eminem, Sigur Rós, REM and now it seems The XX are the latest victim. Compare the following songs:

The song “Intro” by the XX, released in August 2009:

And this Hugo Boss commercial released in April 2014:

Obviously, the XX’s record company is not pleased about this.

Like this? Buy me a drink!

You may have seen the Upworthy page with the cringy-worthy title "No One Applauds This Woman Because They're Too Creeped Out At Themselves To Put Their Hands Together" in which this YouTube video plays in which "Kate Cooper, Marketing Consultant on the Food Industry" tells you the 'horrible' things the food industry does to sell you stuff and cover up their 'crimes'.

However a lot of people may not have paid attention to the text below the video on Upworthy, which is completely missing on the YouTube description and even when you follow the link on YouTube to the site, you might only catch when you see the credits (in tiny print):

Original video by Catsnake Film. Full disclosure: The speaker in this video is actually an actress named Kate Miles, but the facts about produce and its marketing are 100% real. The audience is also real, and thus the looks of disgust are totally real too.

Emphasis by me there. There is so many things wrong with this.

First off, full disclosure on my part: I hate Upworthy. For a number of reasons, including deceptive, non-descriptive titles for articles, making money off 'great ideas' by other people, generally making money off charity, presenting short blurbs as 'the shocking facts' and many other things. But I will give them credit where it's due: they actually printed the full disclosure. That at least shows some decency and attempt at honesty, even though what they printed is still not honest. More about that later.

Second full-disclosure: I eat meat. I am not proud of this nor am I fervently anti-vegan or something. If you think you are making the world a better place by eating only home-grown carrots, then I applaud you. I do appreciate your effort in making the world a more sustainable place and I do agree humanity is kinda wrecking the place. What I don't agree on is how to fix this. This video is not fixing it.

And now with that out of the way, let's get down to what's wrong with that video.

Let's get the elephant out of the room. Kate Cooper is a big fat liar. She's an actress. She plays a role. She is actually Kate Mills. And that's fine. Lots of people are actors. They play roles. They pretend to be some one else, because in general it amuses us to hear stories and we like getting 'lied' to in that way. And it's logical to hire an actress to play a marketing consultant, cause only a suicidal marketing consultant who just went rogue would tell such 'inside information' about the industry. You need a liar to expose the liars! Or ... do you?

The inside information isn't inside information at all. You knew this. All of us know this. Marketing makes things look better than they are. It tells us to buy things we may not strictly speaking need, but it tells us to want them any how. Every product has 10% less fat, is 20% off and is marketed as 'natural'. You're not stupid, right? You knew this. You just keep busting yourself up for falling for it every time.

You did indeed buy the Big Brand cola because you recognised the name and it was conveniently placed at eye-level and not the cola that was sitting on the lowest shelf that had a label that looked like it came straight out of sewage plant, but still was 3 times cheaper than the Big Brand cola. No, I'm lying, you already knew this. You drink water from the tap (cheap, clean, healthy and sustainable!) because it needs no marketing. You stay away from marketing temples like stores. Every day. Right?

So if you don't fall for marketing ... how did you fall for Kate Cooper then? Because she's there to market something too and you didn't even notice it. She's hired by Compassion in World Farming to sell this idea to you that farming should be done otherwise. In fact they are not even opposed to eating meat. In fact, they are part of the food industry, except they are just a small group trying to change it. How? Well, did you check out their page or did you just share a video that the marketing in the food industry is bad? Did you invest any attention into this at all? What do you know about them at all?

And that's where the problem is with this. This video is marketing, viral marketing. It's short, it's snappy and it's easy to share. The message: Food marketing bad, Napster good. You just bought the product, you feel damn good about it. So good even, you just went out and recommended all your friends to buy it too. And you didn't even flip the box and see what's on the ingredients label.

For instance, did you even question the 'fact' (as Upworthy calls it) why the audience looked so shocked? Their response may have been 'real' (again quote Upworthy), but what is really going on?

Maybe they are shocked because they are marketing consultants and were offended by this woman who interfered with their marketing get-together and be a dick right in their faces. Maybe they didn't applaud because they disliked what she says. Maybe they are indeed really shocked at these facts. Maybe they were just expecting something else and are now question where the hidden camera is and this is just some prank tv-show. Maybe they even did applaud at the end of the video, but it was edited out and replaced with the sound of the actress walking away.

You assume they are shocked at these 'facts', because that's what the maker of the video orchestrated to happen. That's what they are spinning in this video. And they filmed all the audience members who were shocked and made damn sure those were included in the final cut of their film. But not their responses afterwards.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see the world change for the better. And I too dislike the fact that the only way to combat marketing is with more marketing. I even had to use a snappy title myself for this post to get your attention. But what really irks me is that marketing plays on emotions and distracts us from any real solution and more importantly: it distracts us from facts. And if there is one thing this video is not doing is presents facts. Or rather: all the facts.

It's presenting selected facts to underline an opinion. There's no science here. There's not even an argument. There's animal cruelty in the food industry. But how much? This video doesn't say. It just claims there is. How much is spent by the industry to make it better? Doesn't say. How much is spent on false marketing? How much is the general public unaware of what goes on in the marketing industry? Nothing, nada. This video doesn't even present a solution, only a vaguely defined problem. And that, what they call in marketing, is a cliffhanger.

So do me a favour, if you do care about the well-being of animals, share something that actually helps the world become a better place, not just sells the idea that everything sucks. Cause that makes you the sucker.