Taylor Swift Sued But the Song Lyrics Too 'Banal' to Steal

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“In the early 2000s, popular culture was adequately suffused with the concepts of players and haters to render the phrases ‘playas… gonna play’ or ‘haters… gonna hate,’ standing on their own, no more creative than ‘runners gonna run’; ‘drummers gonna drum’; or ‘swimmers gonna swim,’” he wrote. “The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal....”

Not only is the concept not creative and banal, he wrote, the lyrics themselves “lack the modicum of originality and creativity required for copyright protection.” Dancing in the hiss of the sizzle, he concluded that they are “too brief, unoriginal, and uncreative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act.”

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• US judge says 'haters gonna hate' phrase 'too banal' to copyright in Taylor Swift case

A Music Review I Liked

Community comes to show at Blackbeard’s Delight

(nice *specific* lead – good scene)The speakers were breaking with ear crunching distortion, my feet stuck to a grimy glazed with spilt beer, the room was hot and moist, the vocals were overpowered by a constant sound of feedback , and the only thing that ran through my head was how good the show was.

Yeah, that’s right - I was actually impressed.

Snuggled in between a bar and an apartment, SubMission Art Space is located at 18the  and Mission in the Mission district. It’s (nice) quiet in size but loud in color and the events that usually take place there. (an insight based on experience which builds credibility)It is home usually to punk and hardcore shows that require less elegance and more room for the audience and the band. It wasn’t a surprise that on May 1, WAG, Hibbity Dibbity, Native and Plastic Villains decided to take over the space for a show titled Blackbeard’s Delight.

(nice) The show started late due with the usual, “band isn’t ready quite yet,” explanation. Crowds of college-aged students flooded the entrance of SubMission showing (a cynic would change this to “tickets and IDs,  not all of them fake”) their ID’s and tickets, he usual scenario that usually takes place at shows as small as these.

It wasn’t until the first band, WAG, came onto stage that I realized I had just stepped into a downward spiral of lo-fi music. The band consisted of four members who came onto stage playing a combined flavor of blues mixed with twangy folk – immediately recognized as a very odd genre for a space such as SubMission. Regardless of the odd combination of music against setting, the crowd chanted along with the ballad-sounding songs that Wag brought to the stage. Again, I was mildly impressed though more anxious for some harder music than really enjoying what Wag had to offer.

(I love the next two grafs. It is rich in detail. Among other things, it builds credibility. It takes the stale notion of 'been to a lot of  shows' and justifies its inclusion.) However, something interesting (let the 'interesting' be implicit in the detail) caught my attention during their set, and it wasn’t what was happening on stage Everyone in the audience was captivated. Every. Single. Person. Including the bands that were playing the rest of the night.

Now, I have to add that I’ve been a fair number of shows in my time. I have seen very different sights while looking around during bands’ sets; There have been people texting, people crowding at the bar,  few watching and the others talking amongst themselves, and so on. However, I have never seen such connection betweeen the band and the audience and – it became clear – the camaraderie between each of the bands that were playing that night.

Throughout each of the sets, there was a spark of genuine interest in???? for each person playing that night. After WAG’s set, Natives came on. Natives has a louder grunge sound. Distorted guitars and acid-rock vocals bring together a very swiftly moving sound that has enough rhythm to get people dancing, but enough vocals to still keep the lyrics relevant.

Right after, Hibbity Dibbity, a psychedelic garage rock group, went up to the stage and got people dancing and singing along to their 60’s style music. The crowd went wild, and I found myself dancing as well. Continuing with the same grungy feel, Hibbity Dibbity played through the horrible sound quality of SubMission with funk and ease.

However, the best part was seeing the audience so captivated and so involved with their music: the mass of heads bobbing and swaying to the sound of music, the heat (‘heat resonating’ - do I like your moving a ‘sound’ word into another context? You know, I think I do)resonating from bodies in the crowd, and the chorus of voices singing along to verses from each band. At one point, the singer for Hibbity Dibbity announced that it was May Day and to remember the importance of its meaning – (I’d love it if you right here included your interpretation of its meaning. To me May Day is international worker’s day, a *socialist*  holiday. Same for you???). Immediately, people yelled in celebration and rounds of drinks were ordered for everyone in the space.

This show embodied the communal value that the San Francisco Bay Area has (says who??? maybe you need to reiterate your experience) that does not exist in most places. These are the tight-knit scenes that begin to (you mean afterwards in memory???)fray in most people’s minds.  

(A judgment a confident, well-informed reviewer who knows ‘the scene’ is entitled to make. You write with authority and you support most of your judgments with detail. Thus, when you make a Big Statement, I figure you have been out and about enough to make it. Also, it comes late in the review after you have established such authority. You have 'earned' the right to say this.)This was a prime example that residents of the Bay Area like to keep things local and community based – including their music.

Hibbity Dibbity finished their set, and the clock showed the time where most people would be ready to head on home and call it a night.

But of course, this wasn’t an option for the attendees of Blackbeard’s Delight.

Plastic Villains, the final and most renowned band of the night, came on stage to the roar of applause and screams from the crowd.

“Don’t stop making music!” someone screamed from my right.

And like clockwork, the band started playing while the eyes of each and every (too much? First time I read this I intended to write, ‘Oh come on. Each one?’ But next graf shows you know exactly what  you are up to) audience member glistened while watching the band.

That was the beauty of this show. Each person was there in his or her (the old grammarian in me) entirety. Texting was at a minimum, people weren’t walled off into groups or standing by themselves. The crowd was engaged in the show to their full ability. And it felt like a community. It felt as if everyone knew each other before coming into SubMission and was spending time together as they usually do.

(Notice that I’m tightening this just a little. The fewer words, the stronger the point, I think)The best part of this show may not have been the venue, the music (dash for ‘haha’ emphasis)- or the alcohol. It was the people who took the time to make it out to the show and create an experience consisting of numerous conversations, indelible engagement, and lots of group singing.

I really like the way you give me the experience, the effect. Detailing the music is fine, but I like your taking me into the experience of the live show, which is so much more than just the music. It's mostly chronological, but your two-graf lead makes a strong general point before you 'start the clock.' Your point seemed to be that the evening worked as a whole, every part contributing to a total experience. I'll buy that.)

How I Learned the Instruments of the Orchestra

Ian Port's Guidelines for Freelance Reviewers

Ian’s Last Night guidelines

- Remember that what happens onstage/behind the decks isn't the only thing readers are interested in. Sometimes the crowd and the scene make for a better story than the performance itself. Make sure to give readers a sense for the night as a whole, not just the show.

- We're critics, not cheerleaders. Don't slam anyone undeservedly, but don't refrain from making critical comments – or even ripping the artist a thoughtful, evidence-supported new one, if that’s warranted. If something really sucks, don't mince words about it. On the flip side, don’t gush at length about how great a performance was. It’s ok to be very positive, but aim to show your readers why something was good or bad, rather than just telling us it was so.

- You don't have to look at these as straightforward, stodgy concert reviews. Feel free to think up a funny or weird angle, write a review as a list (or some other format), write it like you’re an alien experiencing human/San Francisco culture for the first time, or go off the wall in some other way. But be sure to make it clear what you’re writing about.

- Shoot for somewhere between 400 and 800 words overall.

- band/group names are always singular (Simian Mobile Diso is, has, loves, etc.) unless it's something like The Frogs, in which case you'd give it a plural verb.

 - It's ok to use first-person a little bit, but the general thrust of the article should not use first-person. It's partly a matter of taste and partly company policy. It's just as easy to write without the first person, and sometimes the whole It-struck-me-like-this style can come across a bit self-indulgent. That said, it's ok to go there sometimes.

- Avoid cliches and tired words/phrasing ALWAYS. Mind Orwell's five rules of writing (http://grammar.about.com/od/writersonwriting/a/OrwellRules.htm ) -- actually, live by those rules and you'll be a better than writer than 90 percent of your competition.

- One of the challenges of your job is to find new words to describe people dancing, beats dropping, and other common club occurrences. I'm not pretending this will be easy, but use your imagination. We want to avoid the commonly used words and phrases to make the reviews exciting to read. Think of new ways to describe what's going on -- they can be wacky and funny and weird as long as they're understandable.

- Your reader doesn't know what you know and may not have even been there -- so in order to write coherently, you will have to describe and mention things that would be obvious to people who were there. Strive to write so that someone who has lived in a cave for the last 30 years could read your post and get the gist of it.

- We're often inclined to write reviews in chronological order -- starting at the beginning of the night and writing to the end -- but this usually isn't the best way to do it. You may want to start with the interesting stuff and a gripping main idea to hook your reader, give a brief summary of what happened, then go into other details. You also don't have to say everything that happened -- just point out the funny/unusual/otherwise noteworthy stuff.

Ian Port, Late of the SF Weekly, Sums Up the Local Scene, Leaves Town

 He tells me many things I didn't know.

Before the internet, "national culture" largely meant whatever was happening in L.A. or New York, or whatever those cities were obsessed with. If a regional act didn't sell enough records or play enough good shows to be deemed important by the people there, it had a diminished voice. Its sounds and biography and lifestyle didn't enter the larger consciousness, or at least didn't enter it through the front door. And I think that's really why music fans express happiness about a local band or local event making it: It means that the ideas, lifestyles, and politics of a place, reflected in this creative work, are influencing the way people elsewhere live and think.

In Reviewing, the Problem of Shared Vocabulary, of Universal Assumptions

Classic Rock (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let's imagine your saying something like, "That will never be classic rock." Just what is classic rock, anyway? A writer at Nate Silver's 538 website runs the numbers.

To see what the current state of classic rock in the United States looks like, I monitored 25 classic rock radio stations¹ operating in 30 of the country’s largest metropolitan areas for a week in June.² The result, after some substantial data cleaning, was a list of 2,230 unique songs by 475 unique artists, with a total record of 37,665 coded song plays across the stations.

I found that classic rock is more than just music from a certain era, and that it changes depending on where you live. What plays in New York — a disproportionate amount of Billy Joel, for example — won’t necessarily fly in San Antonio, which prefers Mötley Crüe. Classic rock is heavily influenced by region, and in ways that are unexpected. For example, Los Angeles is playing Pearl Jam, a band most popular in the 1990s, five times more frequently than the rest of the country. Boston is playing the ’70s-era Allman Brothers six times more frequently.