How wrong is this?
When a beer company approaches you and offers up two free pint glasses featuring limited edition ‘artwork inspired by music’ (and some badges), start seeing red. You may remember some of Beck’s’ earlier campaigns such as getting up and coming artists to produce art for their bottles, or perhaps Damien Hirst’s tiresome thirsty work for the German brewer.
Regardless, this campaign is about beer and art inspired by music.
I received this unsolicited email earlier today:
From:
Chris Welton
Message:
Hey Ash,
How’s it going? I’m Chris and I work with Beck’s Vier.
This summer has seen the Beck’s Vier Music Inspires Art tour with
headline acts like The Horrors, Gold Panda, These New Puritans and
Metronomy. (http://www.facebook.com/becksvier).
As part of all this activity we have created some limited edition
concept pint glasses that have been designed by some of the finest
emerging artists using musicians as their inspiration.
I wanted to get in touch today to see if I could send you through
both of these glasses?
Let me know your address and I’ll get this in the post along with a
few specially designed badges as well.
If you need any more information just drop me a line.
Cheers,
Chris
I had a look around on a few sites (here, here and here for starters), and saw a few ‘music sites’ offering up these fab glasses as prizes. But what struck me was that some artist chose to use Black Flag to inspire their ‘art’ for a pint glass. Anyone who knows anything about Black Flag will know that that’s not right.
After disseminating my disgust on Twitter, the observant @mandrewB noticed that the lyric Beck’s attribute to Black Flag actually comes from Joy Division‘s ‘Transmission’.
So I wrote back to Chris at Beck’s.
Dear Chris,
Thanks for the offer, but I’m assuming there’s been a huge fuck up somewhere.
The first line of the Black Flag’s ‘TV Party’ is not, “Radio…Live transmission”.
What is being quoted there is the first line of ‘Transmission’, by Joy Division.
Black Flag’s ‘TV Party’ features on the same album (Damaged) as ‘Six Pack’ which is another of the Flag’s anti-drinking songs.
Furthermore, Rollins doesn’t even drink, so I don’t see how your artist has managed to put the ethos of a seminal hardcore punk band together with beer. TV Party is an ironic piss take of men with nothing better to do than sit around, drink beer and watch TV. It is not literally about getting loaded.
If you read Stevie Chick’s brilliant biography of the band, or just look on Wikipedia, you’ll realise what a huge mistake this is.
Best wishes,
Ash Akhtar.
Chris replied:
From:
Chris Welton
Message:
Hey man,
We’ll get on fixing that first line copy, it’s obviously not right. Apologies.
This whole project challenged young artists from the YCN to create designs based on music that inspires them. We did a similar thing last year as well.
I can see your point but it was really up to them and this particular artist loves TV Party and the design is inspired purely by that music.
Thanks for getting back to me.
Cheers,
Chris
So, this the artist’s fault? Is that missing apostrophe from ‘tracks’ in the ad’s very first line the artist’s fault too?
Does this fiasco mean that Beck’s know:
a) Fuck all about music.
b) Fuck all about art.
c) Both.
Leave your answer to the question in the comments below.