The 6 Most Elaborate F-Yous From Musicians to the Industry
#3. Time Warner Pays for Wilco Album Twice
In 2001, there was a change in management at Reprise Records, the label for Wilco. That was bad news for the band, as the new boss wasn't a fan. The group was in the middle of recording their wonderfully titled fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, when the label decided it didn't have any of those money-spinning hit singles. The new boss, David Kahne, demanded that the group go back and come up with something a little more radio-friendly.
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This made Nels Cline so angry he ate his guitar.
Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy refused, and the album was subsequently shelved by parent company Time Warner on the grounds that releasing it would destroy the band's career.
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"Leave the music to us, and we'll leave the disheveled hippying to you."
The label helpfully suggested that Wilco release the album independently, which amounts to a less harsh way of saying "please don't work for us anymore." The band ponied up $50,000 to sever their contract with Reprise and, as part of that deal, retained the rights to their "career ending" album. But it was later reported that the band paid nothing at all for the rights. Reprise just wanted the negative publicity surrounding their shitty treatment of the band to go away.
With their album rejected, Wilco looked in pretty bad shape. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it seemed, was doomed to go the way of many other rejected albums and exist in a perennial bootleg nightmare for years to come. At least it would have, if it was still the '70s.
Or the '60s, or '80s, or '90s ... most decades, really.
Instead of going the independent route, the band decided to stream the entire thing for free on their website. Lower quality MP3s had already been popping up on file-sharing sites anyway, so it seemed a sensible measure to take back some control of the distribution of their work. So, on September 18, 2001, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot went live on wilcoworld.net and got 3.5 million hits in the first month. Traffic quadrupled over the ensuing weeks, and on tour the band noted that fans knew all the words to the unreleased songs.
At this point, record companies tore themselves away from their boardroom paper orgies and took notice of this unusual phenomenon called the Internet and the buzz over this downloadable album. A major bidding war began over the rejected work and Wilco, with combined sales of barely half a million for their first three albums, found themselves with an awful lot of power. An unconfirmed rumor at the time even has Reprise kindly offering to take them back. Wilco had other ideas.
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"If you all wouldn't mind pooping in that giant paper bag on your way out, we'll tow it over to Mr. Kahne's front porch."
Eventually the winning label would be Nonesuch Records. But here's the twist: That's another label that just happened to be owned by Time Warner. That is, the same company that had previously paid for the band to record the album, then rejected the album and given away the recordings they'd financed for free. A Nonesuch vice president summed it up, presumably with a big grin on his face:
"There was a common perception and irony of one Warner label passing on the record and letting the band go out of its contract for very little cost, and another Warner label picking it up and putting it out. In other words, paying for it twice."
To this day, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot remains the most well-received and the biggest-selling album of the band's career.
#2. Mike Oldfield Tells Richard Branson to Fuck Off in Morse Code
When musicians find massive success with their very first album, they often struggle to record a follow up that will live up to its predecessor, be it artistically or commercially.
Mike Oldfield was faced with something of a similar problem when his planet-conquering album Tubular Bells sold millions around the world on its release in 1973. It also provided the soundtrack to the nightmares of an entire generation, thanks to a tie-in with massive hit horror film The Exorcist.
Oldfield played most of the instruments on the album, which included acoustic guitar, mandolin, piano and whatever a flageolet is. It not only did wonders for his career, it also literally helped launch Virgin, as it was the fledgling company's very first release. Richard Branson had been running a chain of budget-price record stores at the time, and the album made him the most well-coiffured rich man in the world.
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Although he still had to steal all his clothes from work.
Maintaining such a level of success was going to be difficult, especially considering that not every Mike Oldfield album would be accompanied by a genre-defining horror film tie-in. But honestly, has a person who uses a flageolet on an album ever really been that concerned with commercial success?
After more than a decade of dwindling record sales, Virgin finally grew impatient with the man whose record helped launch the company. At the time, Virgin was judged to be worth almost $1 billion of Thorn EMI's money. That's the kind of dire financial straits that limit greedy execs to wiping their asses with mere $50s instead of the $100s they're used to. Obviously, something had to be done. So Richard Branson demanded that Oldfield record a musical sequel to his first giant selling album.
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Mike Oldfield, seen here with something ridiculous.
Oldfield, not one who takes to label intervention kindly, answered this request with a baffling piece of work called Amarok, 60 minutes of uninterrupted and completely noncommercial instrumentals, purposely recorded so that there was no possibility any piece of music could be edited into a nifty single or a horror film theme song.
Rama
Although he did "play" a vacuum cleaner on one of the tracks, which must have helped sales.
And just to make sure Virgin knew that what he was doing was completely intentional, he told them so 48 minutes into the album in the wonderfully geeky way that only a man who learned to play 807 instruments (not the actual figure, it's probably much higher) by his late teens could.
The album includes the phrase "Fuck off RB" in Morse code, with "RB" standing for, you guessed it, Richard Branson. Then he offered 1,000 pounds to the first person to find the hidden message (and of course someone did).
The fiasco eventually led to Oldfield bolting from Virgin Records, leaving him free to pursue whatever wacky, genre-bending ideas he wanted. His first order of business, awesomely, was to finally record that Tubular Bells II album that Richard Branson so badly wanted and, now, would never profit from.
#1. Label Refuses to Release Black Flag Album, Band Breaks into Warehouse
Hardcore punk act Black Flag was never going to be the most parent-friendly band in the world. There's a number of reasons for this, like their explicit nihilistic lyrics or having macho, shaven-headed Henry Rollins as their lead singer.
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Those floating words follow him everywhere. They make driving extraordinarily dangerous.
After two well-received EPs, a lot of good press and regular violence at their gigs -- the punk rock equivalent of a standing ovation -- the band was on something of a roll by the time their debut album, Damaged, was set to be released. Then their label boss Al Bergamo actually decided to listen to it. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. In fact, he thought it was an "immoral" and "anti-parent" record and that the band had no "redeeming social value."
Dixon Coulbourn, Idle Times
He didn't even care that they had the third sweatiest frontman in entertainment.
Bergamo decided to shelve the album at the last minute. And we mean at the very last minute -- it had already been pressed and packaged. Literally the only thing left to do was ship it to record stores. So that decision left 25,000 copies of the record sitting in a warehouse uselessly offending no one.
The band wasn't happy, and they planned to do something about it. Two things, actually. First, they had a go at Bergamo and his morals by breaking into the pressing plant where the record was and putting stickers saying "As a parent ... I found it an anti-parent record" over the MCA label on the album cover.
With that done, they then ignored their distribution deal with Unicorn Records and released the album through Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's label SST instead. Now you'd think that, given what Bergamo had said about one of America's first hardcore punk acts, MCA would be happy to be rid of them and not let the label's name be sullied by such a morally bankrupt group of musicians. Record labels, however, generally deal in more tangible sorts of things than the less spendable notion of morals. The band was sued for breach of contract. They were prevented from releasing anything for two years while legal proceedings rumbled along.
The group made do with putting out pre-Rollins-era Black Flag records under their own surnames, but even this wasn't enough for the label, who issued more legal documents against the band saying that they'd violated a court injunction against releasing any new material. Two of the band members even wound up in jail for contempt of court. The case might have gone on for another few years had it not been for a nice bit of karma seeing Unicorn Records, the MCA subsidiary that the album was to be released through, go out of business in 1983.
SST, on the other hand, continues to this day and has been home to the likes of Sonic Youth, Husker Du and Dinosaur Jr. over the years. Suck it, corporate America.
For more from Kevin, read Listening to Grasshoppers or procrastinate together on Twitter.
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the moral of this article, when people help you become a millionaire, do everything you can to f**k them over once you no longer need them........?
Reply"their explicit nihilistic lyrics or having macho, shaven-headed Henry Rollins as their lead singer."
ReplyIt's common knowledge, but as the photo you included in the article shows, Rollins had long hair when he was with Black Flag, because f u c k the author.
You are an idiot. Do you listen to Black Flag even? Hes bald throughout the majority of his career, he has hair in the first pic from when they just began and hadnt refined his image and his last pic is from about 5 yrs ago during his spoken word tour.
"their explicit nihilistic lyrics or having macho, shaven-headed Henry Rollins as their lead singer."
ReplyIt's common knowledge, but as the photo you included in the article clearly shows, Rollins had long hair when he was with Black Flag, because f u c k the author.
Re. the Black Flag entry: Bah! Rollins was the fourth lead singer, following behind Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena. In fact, if it weren't for Black Flag, Henry Rollins would probably still be in D.C., lifting weights and writing bad poetry.
ReplyNow you kids get the hell off my lawn.
He hasn't been diagnosed yet, and probably isn't going to be, but there is no way that Mike Oldfield isn't some kind of autistic.
ReplyI haven't read all of these comments, so forgive me if someone already mentioned this, but you can't forget that The Replacements broke into Twin Tone Records, stole their master tapes, and threw them into the Mississippi.
ReplyCome in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
ReplyCome in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
ReplyWrong. Jonny cash said the biggest f u in history.
ReplyVince Gill and the entire Academy of Country Music Awards disses the Dixie Chicks, while they diss Toby Keith: The Dixie Chicks were nominated for some awards the year following their criticism of Toby Keith's "The Angry American". They didn't show up in person, but rather via satellite, wearing T-shirts that had "F.U.T.K." crudely bedazzled onto them. Most people took this to mean "Fuck You, Toby Keith".
ReplyNow, for those who don't know... Vince Gill is usually the host of the ACM Awards and is considered to be the nicest guy in the country music industry. His response to the Dixie Chick's little stunt: Coughing their band's name, so's to make it almost incoherent whenever they were nominated for an award, which cause mass applause.
Now, the Dixie Chicks are has-beens and Toby Keith is still going strong. Perhaps the ultimate "F-You!", in a way...
F. U. V. Y.
As posted on broadsheet.ie:
ReplyThe Sex Pistols have just signed a new deal with Universal Music (see below), which if they got a decent advance/signing fee will mean that because of mergers etc., they will essentially have gotten 5 advances for the same album from what is now the same company. The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle indeed. Breakdown as follows:
1976 – Sex Pistols sign a deal with EMI. They get dropped weeks later, but keep the advance. (Famously singing about it on “EMI Unlimited”)
1977 – Sex Pistols sign a deal with A&M. They get dropped weeks later, but keep the advance.
1977 – Sex Pistols sign a deal with Virgin, who eventually releases the album.
Meanwhile, over in the land of labels consolidating with each other…
1992 – Virgin Records sold to EMI, meaning that Sex Pistols are back
on EMI (re-inking a new deal, new Best Of etc.)
1998 – Polygram (who bought A&M in 1989) gets bought by Universal,
meaning all A&M catalogue ends up on Universal.
2011 – EMI bought by Universal.
2012 – Sex Pistols sign a new deal with Universal.
Which means the Sex Pistols have signed a deal with EMI (twice), A&M, Virgin and now Universal, all of whom are now/will be owned by Universal, and all essentially for the same album – “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.”
And the lesson?
This is why you should own the copyright to your own albums.
metal machine music was a pretty elaborate f**k you i think,i guess someone must have mentioned it already,i wont bother check.
ReplyWas it a f**k you? I just thought it was experimental music he was working on.
What about Sara Bareilles "Love Song"?
ReplyHer producers wanted her to write a love song, and she clearly states in the song,
"I'm not gonna write you a love song, cuz you asked for it, cuz you need one..."
Have they talked about Neil Young and Geffen records yet?
ReplyThis might have already been asked but why isn't the story behind Sleep's dopesmoker on this list? The band literally spent all the labels money on drugs and equipment only to record one song that was one hour long.
ReplyPunk music doesn't seem to do well with record labels (unsurprisingly.) One of my favourite songs by the Sex Pistols is "EMI". It's the last song on "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" and is basically about how EMI sucks and how they went to A&M records after. As far as I can remember, I was fourteen a long time ago.
ReplyMy favorite song off the album, too. It's a shame it's their only album, and Sid had to go off the deep end (with Nancy)...
Trent Reznor is about 50 types of awesome, but he can get quite pissy when dicked around with. This quote along with others shows that-and I'm the same damn way. I guess that's why I'm a huge NIN and Reznor fan.
ReplyWhen he broods, duck. The guy has access to all kinds of heavy musical machinery. You see a keyboard, he sees a crowbar. Just get on your knees and thank whoever he is not able to be menstrual.
I don't think the world would last.
NIN stands for "Neat Is Nice" right?
None of these seemed particularly elaborate.
ReplyWell, I don't know sticking an F you in morse code is pretty elaborate.
"before Mick Jagger started to look like a South American transsexual". As a trans person I have a problem with this. I love Cracked but this is maybe the third or fourth time this site has said something negative about transpeople. I'm perfectly fine with humour making jokes about minoritys but this isn't making fun of transphobia, it's being transphobic.
Reply Hide All See All 14 RepliesWelcome to Cracked.
That's not transphobic, that's stating some trannies just look ugly as sin. And apparently South American ones look ugly as sin.
Didn't this comment already happen?
Ehhh. I took it to mean that's what the author thinks Mick looks like. Exactly how is this a negative remark? It's kind of what he looks like. Doesn't mean anyone hates or fears or is disgusted by him for looking that way, it's just kinda what the guy looks like. If you're saying that South American transsexual people would be offended by being compared to Mick Jagger, I would have to assume you are hateful towards elderly slender white British men with a penchant for effeminate clothing. THAT'S THE TRUTH, ISN'T IT, HATE MONGER???
Welcome to the Internet, period. :o/
Welcome to humanity, it.
Mink Rebellion - "trannies" is not a word you should use.. ever. Whether the writer of this article knows any Trans people or has seen any that arn't the media stereotype. I doubt. It is transphobic. Claiming South American Transsexual are all ugly or using the word "Transsexual" as a negative is transphobic.
NovusOrdo - I have a hatred towards no group of people in particular. The reason I am annoyed by the author of this articles joke is because it is based on a stereootype. All transpeople are ugly is a stereotype, just like the stereotype that all transpeople are female or old. The word Transsexual is also outdated and "Transgender" is the word used. Basically cisgendered (meaning not Trans) people shouldn't be using Transpeople as the butt of their jokes anymore.
Paulwbowling - If you just called me "it", go f**k yourself.
Firesong and FromTokyo - :P I'm well used to offensive humour. I just hold this site to higher standards. I wouldn't complain on /b/ for example.
No, it's being funny. In order to complain or make a joke, you have to be able to tolerate be complained about and take a joke.
So in other words, just shut up. Go play the gay card somewhere else.
Hm. He kind of does look like an old transie though.
I'm shocked at all the downvotes that Etchers is getting. They (I'm unsure if Etchers is a Trans-Woman or a Trans-Man) have presented very valid criticisms that are being shot down... quite immaturely, actually. And I definitely cannot believe the "it" comment got any thumbs up at all - that makes me sad. Yes, this is a humor site, but I'd like to think that we're not juveniles here.
No one is born post-op. Kinda seems fair game.
I have so many ways I want to respond to this.
# Three articles a day, every day, and you've found (maybe) 4 offensive things. Cracked is totally against everything you stand for!
# I love tehjokes about other peoples. But why are you [my shit]phobic?
# When you can finally give and take a joke without anyone slitting their wrists, you're mainstream.
# If you listen really hard, you can heard the sound of no one caring.
And let's face it, transexuals are defective and should be strapped into Clockwork Orange chairs with their eyelids propped open or sent to camps.
"As a transsexual..., I found it an anti-transsexual article..."
Something you forgot to mention about the Mike Oldfield story. The Tubular Bells 2 thing was really only the tip of the Iceberg Richard Branson also tied up the publishing rights to all of Oldfield's releases on the Virgin label to a bullshit 35 year contract, which meant that Oldfield, besides what he was owed in royalties and copyrights, actually saw very little money from his records until 2008. And Oldfield wasn't the only one screwed over by Richard Branson. Branson has a huge track record of f*****g over the bands he's signed to Virgin in one way or another. For example, the members of Gong claim to have never received any payment from the sales of their "Flying Teapot" album. Also, Branson dropped Henry Cow simply because they weren't making any money for the label, probably because Branson refused to have the band's records distributed outside of England, even though they were more popular in continental Europe. Branson also withheld massive royalty payments from XTC, which they only recovered from the label after leaving the label and auditing them. So yeah, Richard Branson is a f*****g bastard, and Mike Oldfield got the best revenge on him.
Reply...I never thought I'd see Gong mentioned in an article on Cracked. Or anywhere else for that matter.
I read an article on Steve Hillage (ex-Gong guitarist) a few years back, in which he summed up Branson perfectly: "He had that gift of taking you to the cleaners, but you still loved the guy.)
And ah yes, XTC ... who finally prevailed by following Zappa's advice: "It always pays to audit!"