ONTD ORIGINAL: Messiest moments in music, a GIFstory, part 1
(hi mods: I fixed the embeds/image links! 3rd time's a charm!)
This post (and series? maybe? if anyone reads this?) is dedicated to some of the messiest moments in music. I have also inserted as many gifs as possible to enhance ONTD reading comprehension. This is a subjective post so if you are convinced that these moments aren't messy or ugly enough then please feel free to
I want to thank the internet for being a treasure trove of information, human nature for creating all these shady situations, my grad school application for providing me something to avoid doing while I worked on these writeups, the wonderful crew at McDonalds for spending hours making those Egg McMuffins, and ONTDers for being fabulous and entertaining.
No Justice, Know Shade: Martha vs the Machine
The 90s was the House music hey day in the mainstream, full of big voices layered over sick beats (© Taylor Swift). Unfortunately for those upwardly-mobile DJs and production houses, sometimes those big voices weren't coming out of the most conventionally attractive women. One of the big voice behind (literally and figuratively) some of the biggest hits of the 90s was Martha Wash, who at this point in her career was most known for:
Martha gave songs like "Everybody Dance Now," "Strike It Up," "Everybody Everybody" and "You're My One and Only True Love" the vocal bombast they needed to be hits. So while the musical minds behind Black Box, C+C Music Factory and Seduction were happy to accept Martha's vocal contributions, they were reluctant to give any actual tangible credit to the plus-sized woman. So...they didn't. Observe:
Here's the C+C Music Factory music video (the woman lip-syncing Martha's part is Actual Singer on Other C+C Music Factory Songs Zelma Davis):
Here's the Seduction music video (April Harris is the "singer" in the video and credited as the lead singer. At this point Seduction was just the house name given to any song under the Seduction "brand" regardless of vocalist; after the Seduction brand had a few hits under its belt they retconned a girl group called Seduction featuring Harris and RuPaul bff Michelle Visage)
Here is the Black Box single artwork featuring model Katrin Quinol, whom you may need to be reminded DID NOT SING ANY THESE SONGS:
Just in case you were wondering why Katrin Quinol didn't bring her vocal talents to Miami the band:
What...you would have assumed that the women singing in the videos and on the single covers were the vocalists?
Of course it would be a totally reasonable assumption and that's why the acts did it in the first place. Not that putting models on the cover of an album was a new practice in the 90s though.
^^^The difference was that nobody thought that sis was Herb Alpert so while it was objectifying towards women, it wasn't necessarily misleading.
In Martha's case her involvement in all these songs was minimized to a comical degree. No trace of her exists in any of the videos, and she wasn't credited as a lead vocalist in any of them. None of the singles even used authorized vocals, Martha was under the impression she was recording vocals that would only be used as demos . If they paid her at all, it was peanuts. Maybe at this point you're thinking that these claims are all a bit OTT…I mean, there's no way they did all that shit, right? They had to have credited Martha SOMEWHERE. They had to have gotten SOME kind of agreement from her to use the vocals. They had to have had her sign SOME contract where she agreed on an dollar amount...
So Martha decided to sue, and she cleaned up with her lawsuits as much as a private citizen can clean up when suing a bunch of enormous media conglomerates. She settled with RCA, A&M and Sony, getting the money, record contract, tour, and retroactive credit she deserved. Her lawsuits left their own legacy too - the record labels were so embarrassed that they had denied someone their proper credit, reinforcing society's white-normative beauty standards by erasing the contributions of a plus-sized WOC, that it became standard practice to REQUIRE accurate vocal credits, so perhaps the entertainment industry could move towards a more inclusive and accepting envir-
j/k! Record labels require accurate vocal credits from their artists because they realized they'd be on the hook for more lawsuits from vocalists (like Martha) or record buyers (like the class action lawsuits they had to deal with post-Milli Vanilli) if they misrepresented personnel. That's not to say that liner notes are now officially 100% accurate all the time -I think we can all agree that they are probably still full of crap quite often- but the liability is now on the artists rather than the record label if anything turns out to be false.
Honorable mention: Martha Wash is the most egregious example due to the number of times her vocals were appropriated and the success of the songs, but she's just one example out of many - and who knows how many instances of this have gone unchecked? Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam" did something particularly coldblooded.mp3 though: they erased the presence of Ya Kid K, who was an actual member of Technotronic and not just a session singer.
Congolese model Felly mimes in the video, and the single artwork is pretty blatant about it too
It didn't last long though - Ya Kid K was front and center on the next single, Felly was relegated to background dancer.
Fun fact: "It's Raining Men" was originally offered to Donna Summer, who turned it down due to the glib "hallelujahs" and "amens," which offended her born-again Christian sensibilities.
Sources 1| 2| 3|my memory
ontd, have your contributions to a hit song ever been minimized/erased?
This post (and series? maybe? if anyone reads this?) is dedicated to some of the messiest moments in music. I have also inserted as many gifs as possible to enhance ONTD reading comprehension. This is a subjective post so if you are convinced that these moments aren't messy or ugly enough then please feel free to
I want to thank the internet for being a treasure trove of information, human nature for creating all these shady situations, my grad school application for providing me something to avoid doing while I worked on these writeups, the wonderful crew at McDonalds for spending hours making those Egg McMuffins, and ONTDers for being fabulous and entertaining.
No Justice, Know Shade: Martha vs the Machine
The 90s was the House music hey day in the mainstream, full of big voices layered over sick beats (© Taylor Swift). Unfortunately for those upwardly-mobile DJs and production houses, sometimes those big voices weren't coming out of the most conventionally attractive women. One of the big voice behind (literally and figuratively) some of the biggest hits of the 90s was Martha Wash, who at this point in her career was most known for:
Click to viewMartha gave songs like "Everybody Dance Now," "Strike It Up," "Everybody Everybody" and "You're My One and Only True Love" the vocal bombast they needed to be hits. So while the musical minds behind Black Box, C+C Music Factory and Seduction were happy to accept Martha's vocal contributions, they were reluctant to give any actual tangible credit to the plus-sized woman. So...they didn't. Observe:
Here's the C+C Music Factory music video (the woman lip-syncing Martha's part is Actual Singer on Other C+C Music Factory Songs Zelma Davis):
Here's the Seduction music video (April Harris is the "singer" in the video and credited as the lead singer. At this point Seduction was just the house name given to any song under the Seduction "brand" regardless of vocalist; after the Seduction brand had a few hits under its belt they retconned a girl group called Seduction featuring Harris and RuPaul bff Michelle Visage)
Here is the Black Box single artwork featuring model Katrin Quinol, whom you may need to be reminded DID NOT SING ANY THESE SONGS:
Just in case you were wondering why Katrin Quinol didn't bring her vocal talents to Miami the band:
What...you would have assumed that the women singing in the videos and on the single covers were the vocalists?
Of course it would be a totally reasonable assumption and that's why the acts did it in the first place. Not that putting models on the cover of an album was a new practice in the 90s though.
^^^The difference was that nobody thought that sis was Herb Alpert so while it was objectifying towards women, it wasn't necessarily misleading.
In Martha's case her involvement in all these songs was minimized to a comical degree. No trace of her exists in any of the videos, and she wasn't credited as a lead vocalist in any of them. None of the singles even used authorized vocals, Martha was under the impression she was recording vocals that would only be used as demos . If they paid her at all, it was peanuts. Maybe at this point you're thinking that these claims are all a bit OTT…I mean, there's no way they did all that shit, right? They had to have credited Martha SOMEWHERE. They had to have gotten SOME kind of agreement from her to use the vocals. They had to have had her sign SOME contract where she agreed on an dollar amount...
So Martha decided to sue, and she cleaned up with her lawsuits as much as a private citizen can clean up when suing a bunch of enormous media conglomerates. She settled with RCA, A&M and Sony, getting the money, record contract, tour, and retroactive credit she deserved. Her lawsuits left their own legacy too - the record labels were so embarrassed that they had denied someone their proper credit, reinforcing society's white-normative beauty standards by erasing the contributions of a plus-sized WOC, that it became standard practice to REQUIRE accurate vocal credits, so perhaps the entertainment industry could move towards a more inclusive and accepting envir-
j/k! Record labels require accurate vocal credits from their artists because they realized they'd be on the hook for more lawsuits from vocalists (like Martha) or record buyers (like the class action lawsuits they had to deal with post-Milli Vanilli) if they misrepresented personnel. That's not to say that liner notes are now officially 100% accurate all the time -I think we can all agree that they are probably still full of crap quite often- but the liability is now on the artists rather than the record label if anything turns out to be false.
Honorable mention: Martha Wash is the most egregious example due to the number of times her vocals were appropriated and the success of the songs, but she's just one example out of many - and who knows how many instances of this have gone unchecked? Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam" did something particularly coldblooded.mp3 though: they erased the presence of Ya Kid K, who was an actual member of Technotronic and not just a session singer.
Congolese model Felly mimes in the video, and the single artwork is pretty blatant about it too
It didn't last long though - Ya Kid K was front and center on the next single, Felly was relegated to background dancer.
Fun fact: "It's Raining Men" was originally offered to Donna Summer, who turned it down due to the glib "hallelujahs" and "amens," which offended her born-again Christian sensibilities.
Sources 1| 2| 3|my memory
ontd, have your contributions to a hit song ever been minimized/erased?