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Beef Of The Week #386: Beefs Of The Year 2017

By | Published on Friday 22 December 2017

Cow

It’s nearly Christmas and no one is arguing anymore. Not even the Gallagher brothers. There will be no fighting now until the new year. Or at least until Christmas morning.

So, with that in mind, in this week’s Beef Of The Week column we’re instead going to look back at our top five musical showdowns of 2017.

So, here we are, in reverse order…

5. Falling House v Left Shark
In 2015, Katy Perry gave us Left Shark. Left Shark was a happy reminder of the brightly coloured times we were then living in, where even things that didn’t go to plan were entertaining. Just getting up there and giving it a go was good enough. The 2017 sequel was Falling House. Falling House was a similar reminder of the times we were living in. Everything was awful and looked like it was probably painful. That dancer dressed as a house fell hard off the BRIT Awards stage, as giant skeleton effigies of Theresa May and Donald Trump pranced around for a room of drunken music industry executives.

4. Wu-Tang Clan v Woof-Tang Clan
It wasn’t all awful in 2017, though. It was, after all, the year that we discovered a dog walking business in New York called Woof-Tang Clan. Of course, it did come to our attention because it was being sued by the Wu-Tang Clan. RZA wasn’t happy that the dog-related business was trying to trademark its name. It’s still not clear if that means the producer is hoping to set up his own dog walking company. We can only hope.

3. B.o.B v Science
B.o.B has been insisting for some time now that the Earth is flat. He’s absolutely convinced of it, no matter what evidence he is presented with. This year, he decided that he would get some evidence of his own, announcing plans to launch “multiple weather balloons and satellites into space for experimental exploration”. Ignoring the fact that the science behind satellites only works if the Earth is round, he set up a crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000 to get his project (literally) off the ground. Someone pointed out this wasn’t enough to launch anything into space, so he upped it to $1 million. Still not enough, but that hardly matters, as three months later he’s raised less than $7000.

2. Russia v Ukraine
The dispute between Russia and Ukraine over the ownership of Crimea is a very serious diplomatic situation. Still, it was hard not to be at least slightly amused when that quarrel spilled over into Eurovision. Russia was already angry about Ukraine’s 2016 Eurovision winning song ‘1944’, which it claimed was about the Crimea dispute. As a result, Russia was expected to boycott the 2017 Kiev-hosted contest. However, at the last minute, it put forward Julia Samoilova as its entrant. Ukraine responded by saying that it would arrest her if she travelled to Kiev. After much wrangling, Russia was told Samoilova could appear via satellite (not B.o.B’s), at which point the country pulled out. Of Eurovision, not Crimea.

1. Bob Dylan v Literature
Amazingly, this has now managed to be our favourite beef of two consecutive years. As you’ll remember, Bob Dylan was named the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Due to grumpiness on his part, he initially failed to acknowledge the award, then refused to turn up to collect it. Eventually he did pick it up, but in secret. And there was still the matter of the speech he needed to give in order to claim his prize money. Shortly before the deadline for that, he turned one in, both in written and audio form. Then, in possibly the greatest surprise twist of all time, it turned out he’d plagiarised parts of the speech he’d written for an award recognising his great contributions to literature. And from a ‘Moby Dick’ study guide no less.



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