And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #129: Marina v 679

By | Published on Friday 28 September 2012

Marina And The Diamonds

Earlier this week, a new Marina And The Diamonds video was supposed to hit the internet. The song it would accompany, ‘How To Be A Heartbreaker’, was featured as an extra track on the US edition of her latest album, ‘Electra Heart’, and is due to make its way to the UK by way of a standalone single release. But all did not go to plan.

As fans waited for the video to appear, Marina took to Twitter to announce: “So, someone at my record label won’t let me release the video [because] I look ugly in it apparently and we need more $/time to paint out [the] ugly parts”, adding: “The video will be out end of the week. If not, I am happy to leak the ‘minger’ version for my fans”.

Addressing the comment, her UK label, Warner’s 679, tweeted: “For the record, we think M’s a babe”.

As it seems that the order for the video rework came from somewhere higher up the Warner Music chain (possibly in the US), 679’s comment was presumably just an offhand message of support, possibly addressing messages from fans who had been questioning the company on the decision. It became quite difficult to check this though, as a large number of Marina’s fans, in misguided attempts to ‘defend’ the pop star, then started sending death threats to 679, which is no fun at all.

“Wasn’t our decision, stop sending death threats, etc etc”, came 679’s first slightly nonplussed reaction to this, and then a day later: “Just to reiterate; 679 did not make the decision to hold [back] the Marina video for further edits. And we don’t think Marina’s ugly, we’re not blind”.

All’s well that ends well, eh? Except that it still seems that someone somewhere did decide that Marina appeared so unsightly in one of her videos that it should never been seen by public eyes. Which you might say is gross misogyny on the part of her label, though (if you were feeling more forgiving) you might suggest it was an overly cautious executive decision to protect an artist from possible public reactions in that cruel world out there. After all, another female pop star, Lady Gaga, spent much of this week in the press just because she put on a small amount of weight and because a US politician called her a slut.

Over in another part of the Warner empire (Atlantic), another musician was making an appeal to the label, but in this case it was to delete something from the internet rather than putting it up there. In a bid to promote the band’s new EP and current tour, Atlantic asked Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchinson to start posting short audio blogs to SoundCloud.

After getting off to a faltering start on Wednesday, Hutchison decided to give it another go later that evening. Unfortunately, later that evening he was very drunk. Hungover the next morning he apparently pleaded with the label to remove it, but the team there refused on the grounds that it was funnier not to.

So, in lieu of a Marina And The Diamonds video to show you, here is the sound of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison quite drunk:

NOTE: As has been pointed out in the comments, originally part of this article referred to tweets from (it turned out) a fake account designed (annoyingly well) to look like Marina’s real Twitter account. We apologise for this error. But, hey, the video in question is now online, so go and watch it here.



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