The Best and Worst of Everything Else
Everything else aside, 2020 was a banner year for music. In addition to some truly stellar albums and songs, there was also plenty of sillier stuff to dig into: misguided anthems about the pandemic, casual covers and collaborations, good and bad tweets galore, and of course, Bernie Sanders introducing the Strokes and Soccer Mommy. On this episode, Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by Associate Editor Anna Gaca and News Editor Matthew Strauss for a senior superlatives-style rundown of the best and worst in these categories and more. Thanks for listening to the Pitchfork Review this year! We’ll be back with new episodes in 2021.
Listen to this week’s episode below, and subscribe to The Pitchfork Review for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also check out an excerpt of the podcast’s transcript below. Read Pitchfork’s lists of 2020’s best albums, songs, and music books, and see the results of our readers’ poll.
Puja Patel: We have entered the beefing section of our best/worst list. Let’s begin with: what was the best lawsuit of 2020, and what was the worst? And I’m going to let you guys explain what “best” and “worst” mean in the context of legal troubles or drama.
Matthew Strauss: I can kick this off with the absolute best lawsuit I’ve ever seen. As part of my job as news editor, I end up going through a lot of legal documents, and most of them are really boring, just entirely procedural. But every once in a while there’s something you can actually understand, and it’s incredible to go through everything that’s being alleged. You just want it all to be true, and you want to keep reading more and more.
So, Pat Corcoran, better known as Pat the Manager, sued his former client, Chance the Rapper. What makes this lawsuit so good for me is that I lived through it, and it’s extremely validating. Like, we covered Chance extremely closely for the last few years until basically what Pat is alleging. We would just do a lot of news stories. You know, this guy’s got a feature on this song, this guy’s on TV, et cetera, et cetera, he’s a real superstar. And then he drops the absolute worst album in The Big Day, which is his debut album. And it’s about getting married.
So basically, Pat says Chance didn’t try at all on that album. It was just freestyling a lot of the time, and he had a lot of hangers-on in the studio and when [Chance] announced the release date, [Pat] was basically like, you haven’t even started this. Like, don’t announce this. But Chance did it anyway.
And it was funny to check our news story about it. There’s like a 45-minute gap between when Chance says Big Day coming in February and when Pat says it. And I’d just like to imagine Pat hopped on the phone with him and he’s like, “Hey man, you know, we go back a long way. Do you think you could delete that tweet?”
Basically the album flopped. He says nobody likes it. It sold terribly. He had to cancel his tour because nobody was going to go to it, and then Pat ultimately got fired.
PP: Matt, can you explain that lawsuit for us? What is he suing him for?
MS: The boring part of it is that Pat the Manager claims he is owed commission on Chance’s streaming royalties, album sales, touring income, and some other revenues through a certain number of years. And Chance, as it’s alleged in the lawsuit, has apparently withheld that.
The real meat of it is that it really leaves the door open for anybody who makes a terrible album to get sued. I think that’s really what we could all look forward to. So if anybody is listening and happened to work on, let’s just say Jesus Is King, and feels they’re short 15 bucks or something: I say just sue them and say, “Nobody liked it. You owe me my money.”
Anna Gaca: I find it refreshing to see someone admit that a tour was canceled because the album flopped. A lot of times you hear that on hearsay and they’ll say, oh, we had scheduling conflicts. We’re going to postpone it until after the next album. And it’s nice to see that fig leaf removed in this case.
MS: Well, it should also be clarified that Chance never admitted that. He said it was to spend time with his daughter and wife.
PP: What is the worst lawsuit? I feel like all of these can be best and worst.
AG: My pick for worst lawsuit is a little bit the opposite of the Chance versus Pat lawsuit, because it is just procedural. The facts of this case are so divorced from how I would call it, how it is on the ground. And it is Lady A, the band formerly Lady Antebellum, suing Lady A the blues singer, aka Anita White.
You remember this story. Lady Antebellum decided that their name was offensive, a little bit belatedly, and changed it to Lady A and accidentally stole the name of this existing musician who went by Lady A. And they’ve had sort of a contested relationship that devolves into, ironically, the band suing the individual musician.
If you read the fine print of the lawsuit itself, it’s not actually that bad. They’re not asking her for money. They’re not asking her to give up her name. They’re just trying to establish their own copyright claims on the same terms. But the optics of it just could not be worse, of this white band who realize that their name was racially offensive, so they took this Black performer’s name. And now they’re kind of using the legal system to double down and enforce that choice.
I think it’s just really the opposite of classy, especially in a year when lesser known artists are struggling and can’t perform live. This whole fight has destroyed Lady A the blues singer’s SEO. So she’s now suing them for money in damages, which I think we’ll probably not see resolved until sometime next year. But a low point for me.
PP: And one of the funniest problematic elements also at the forefront of this is that Lady Antebellum changing their name to Lady A just means that the A still stands for antebellum. Like, it’s not solving the issue of removing the word antebellum, which has very specific history and connotation to it. It’s not solving that problem. It’s just abbreviating it to the letter A.
AG: A real lack of creative thinking here and a real lack of awareness of how their actions will come across to the world. They’ve really brought a lot of a bad look on themselves.
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December 18, 2020 at 10:56PM
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The Best, Worst, and Weirdest Music News of 2020 - Pitchfork
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