dogfight wrote:
I hope your joking and not actually trying to imply that Gackt killed Kami. I know there are a lot of Gackt haters here, but I expected no one would sink that low.
Yeah, holylampposts isn't stupid. Just hilarious.
I thought your critique was interesting, so I addressed it:
dogfight wrote:
If that isn’t enough to alert you that the interview is a hoax, just consider the basic premise behind it. A wealthy Japanese ex-corporate executive is willing to risk both jail and death in order to rat out the mafia to a blogger. What’s more, we are never given the name of this executive. Instead he goes by a one name pseudonym making it impossible to verify who he is or even if he exists. This violates the 6th rule of the Authority Appeal fallacy. You should never trust unnamed sources !
This contradicts itself: The pseudonym is exactly what makes it plausible that he may be offering risky information. Though you shouldn't necessarily trust a source hiding behind a pseudonym when it is being reported in a non-professional venue like this blog, serious news reporters practice this all the time and the pseudonym shouldn't discredit the source in any way. Again, it actually is what makes it more plausible.
Also, this isn't "ratting out the mafia". Really, like Geisha has already said, it's not blowing the lid off of
anything; it's hardly an exposé of
anything--a lot of this stuff can apply to just about any popular music scene. It's mostly just juicy hyperbole with some fascinating (and believable) tidbits mixed in.
The apparent contradiction about bands being able to leave labels reflects how shoddily prepared the report is, but I don't think it's totally contradictory--when he's talking about guys like Kamijo who left labels and started their own, those were smart, talented guys that didn't tie themselves down with bad contracts early on. The other bands who are tied to the label are those that were manufactured and made up of street punk hacks that didn't know what they were doing, hadn't even finished school, and signed shitty contracts. The fact that the article makes no effort to distinguish between the smart, talented musicians in the scene and the total tools is to their discredit for sure. But I don't think it's a contradiction.
Also, he didn't say indie labels are all employees of major labels, he said they are employees of
parent indie labels, so to speak. Right? And then those parent labels sell their "child" labels to actual
major labels. So again, not really a contradiction, just fuzzy reporting.
Good criticism, though. This really is unprofessional.