Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Looking at Kim Sears' chest

The appearance of Kim Sears at Andy Murray's Australian Open final wearing a Parental Advisory shirt (following being caught on camera swearing like a Gamergater spotting a feminist) was a good joke.

And what do you do with a good joke? Why, you analyse to death. Hence, the BBC used the shirt as a leaping-off point for a piece about the Parental Advisory logo.

And who better to share a thought or two about something music-related than Gennaro Castaldo, once HMV's homme de pensee, now installed on the South Bank as BPI's thought monarch:

But Gennaro Castaldo from the BPI admits that the label can undermine its own purpose. "Yes, there is that badge of honour aspect to it," he says. "The impulse behind it is to make parents and consumers aware of the content but it does have a dual effect - after all we've all been teenagers driven by a need to be anti-establishment and anti-parents. That's not going to change."

It makes you wonder what Gennaro's anti-establishment teenage years were like - sticking out press releases without notes for editors, perhaps. "Screw you mom, screw you dad, I'm not going to indicate where more follows and there's not a thing you can do about it."

I'm not sure Gennaro's statement makes much sense - if parents are seeing a sticker and going 'ooh, this is a rude record, I shall not buy it' and teenagers are seeing a sticker and going 'ooh this is a rude record, I shall buy it', I don't think that's a dual effect; it's alerting both sets of passers-by that there is a rude record on sale.

Obviously Gennaro knows in his heart that most teenagers will see a CD carrying a parental advisory sticker not in a shop as they go about making music purchases, but as they go through their parent's record collection going 'so you had to put these in, what, a BluRay machine? Is that how it worked?'

To be fair, not all youngsters wouldn't recognise a disc if it was sharpened to a point and used to slice their modish beards off. There's the subset of The Kids buying vinyl, and it was this "trend" thatsaw the Telegraph seeking Castaldo's counsel. What's going on, asked the Telegraph:

Vinyl-record sales are booming, too. Last year they hit an estimated 1.2 million – the highest for 20 years, and a five-fold increase since 2008. Threatened by seemingly superior technologies, the old discs seemed headed for extinction, but – as with books – it is the “soul” of vinyl that has been its salvation.

In particular, fans like the covers – once an art genre in their own right and now being rediscovered by a new generation. “They are one of the key reasons people are buying vinyl again,” says Gennaro Castaldo of the British Phonographic Industry. “They help to transform a record into an artefact fans like to own and collect.”

Yeah. What Castaldo doesn't warn The Kids is that when they come to move out of their parent's homes, the purchase of vinyl is going to add boxes and boxes of weight to every time they shift from house to house in the future. Good luck with that, The Kids.

BPI decides to extend its moral guardianship to the internet

As if not managing to find a way to make money online wasn't occupying enough of the BPI's time, it's just announced a scheme which will fail to stop children seeing porny pop videos and hearing bad words in songs.

The risible "parental guidance" sticker - itself based on a weak idea by Tipper Gore - is moving online. New Media Age:

From today (Thursday), online content will have to display the parental advisory logo, for the first time since the scheme was introduced over 15 years ago.

According to the BPI, some digital music stores have already been showing the label against content but most audio and video streaming services, including Spotify and Napster, had not yet implemented a consistent parental guidance system.

Napster hasn't implemented a parental guidance system? That must be worrying news, should anyone under the age of thirty ever find out what Napster is.

The BPI hasn't stopped to think how its system - which, presumably, will only apply to music-related content put online by its members in the UK - could be considered a "consistent parental guidance system". Unless there are people whose sole online activity consists, consistently, of watching music videos made by EMI UK, Sony UK and the other two.

Still, it's good to know that the parents who have hitherto not noticed, say, Rihanna's video being full of S&M-lite imagery, will clearly be checking the little symbol at the start of the video now. "Goodness, now there's a warning at the front, I've suddenly spotted that this video being flung at my popkids is full of filth."

Green Day don't want to go to WalMart

You'd have thought - given their target audience tends to be the sort who still go shopping with their parents - Green Day would be determined to do everything they could to make sure their new record, 21st Century Breakdown, would appear on the shelves of WalMart.

It's too their credit, though, that they have refused the edits the store demanded and taken the loss of not having the record in the stores:

[I]n Armstrong's view, "There's nothing dirty about our record."

"They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there," he said. "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something."

There is a wider point, though: WalMart say in their defence that they won't stock Parental Advisory stickered product, and it's up to the bands involved if they want to make a version which avoids the sticker.

You could ask why Green Day choose to rail against WalMart for rejecting stickered content, rather than at the stickering process in the first place.

You might even ask that if you support Tipper Gore types who don't like sweary music, in fact. Because surely WalMart refusing to stock the parental advisory stickers is not just an indication of prissiness on their part, but also that the sticker system doesn't really work. Because if stickering did keep kids from "unacceptable" content, surely WalMart would be just as happy to sell Green Day's album to its customers as they are, for example, to sell them the SAW movies?