Robin Thicke attempts to rig Amazon's 'other fans of this artist might like' recommendations

Robin Thicke has decided who he should best be compared to.

Surprisingly, it's not Paul Raymond and Peter Stringfellow:

''A lot of good white soul singers, like Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald, did soul music for a while then had their pop breakthrough. That's what's happening to me.
''But I think John Lennon is blue-eyed soul. Bob Dylan is blue-eyed soul, Bruce Springsteen is blue-eyed soul.''

This was in a piece in Vanity Fair. More like a sodding carnival of vanity.

Bookmarks: Internet stuff - Vampire Weekend

Vanity Fair cover the Contra album cover model and her complaint in some depth; it kicks the idea that this was a family photo which someone found in a box sale into touch while it's still taking a breath, and weighs the counterclaims between model Ann Kennis and the man who claims he took the picture Tod Brody.

Kennis says she can't remember the picture being take, but doesn't buy Brody's story; Brody spends a lot of time explaining why the internet paints him as untrustworthy, but the key paragraph is probably this:

If the Contra case does go to trial, the outcome could hinge on a key document: a model release form that appears to be dated July 30, 2009. (The date is crossed out and re-written.) The form is from Vampire Weekend Inc. to someone named “Kirsten Johnsen” (spelled “Johnson” elsewhere on the form), who signed her permission for the band to use her image for a fee of $1. The form contains no mention of Brody, but it does include an address named in the suit as Brody’s residence. No release form from the 1980s has yet been presented in court.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet: Cantrell on Cline

Vanity Fair listens as Laura Cantrell visits the site of Patsy Cline's plane crash:

About a mile off the highway, the house lots and yards yield to thicker woods. The light through the windshield is wintry, high, and dull. A modest marker signals entry to the site, and two gravel tracks divert from the main road. A small wooden shelter appears, painted white and covered in graffiti, displaying old news clippings about the crash. Several steps beyond the shelter, a path travels steeply down a little ravine. At the bottom is a large gray boulder, four to five feet high and several feet across and deep. The path down to it is steep but gradual, and the stone bears the inscription: “On this site March 5, 1963 Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Randy Hughes lost their lives. In loving memory, July 6, 1996.”

[via Earbender Twitter]

Ditto naked, Gallagher in bed: Best fronts ever?

The Periodical Publisher's Assocation has decided to celebrate the diversity of magazines - that's what they said - by organising a poll to find the nation's favourite all-time magazine cover.

They've drawn up a shortlist, which includes a Nova and an Oz cover; a Private Eye front page that seems to have been chosen more-or-at-less at random (although a random choice are removing the funny-but-controversial ones); two with Victoria Beckham on (a Heat and an OK) - because that shows the variety on the newstands, doesn't it.

The shortlist also includes a Radio Times - a Doctor Who cover, because all Radio Times front pages have to have Doctor Who on by law and two Vogues.

There are a couple of actually inventive covers - Empire's breathing Darth Vader and Take A Break's scratch-n-sniff bloke's armpit - and Loaded's scribbled on Keegan, which was quite a brave move at the time and exactly the sort of inspired wit which the magazine stopped doing after about issue three.

But what's this? Vanity Fair's "London Swings Again" shot of Gallagher in bed with Patsy Kensit. This has been chosen by Mother & Baby's Miranda Levy:

For me, it has to be Vanity Fair's 'London Swings Again' cover. It's March 1997, Tony Blair is two heartbeats away from Number 10, and here are Liam and Patsy, swathed in a Union Jack bedspread, giving us buckets of contempt and attitude. This was the age of Blur v Oasis, Geri in platform boots at the Brits, Damien Hurst's formaldehyde sheep. A cover that sums up an era.

March 1997 was nearly two years after Blur versus Oasis and Damien Hirst's Away From The Flock was from 1993. And while the original Time "Swinging City" piece was important, as it was praise from elsewhere, Vanity Fair UK's lumbering jump on the bandwagon looked more like an attempt by a few London party-goers to convince themselves they were at the centre of things, and misjudging quite badly.

Even more surprisingly, the awkward Beth Ditto nude cover has made the cut, with a nomination from Decanter magazine's Guy Woodward:

Attitude, impact, humour, relevance and courage. Demands attention, and shows brilliant powers of imagination and persuasion, along with the courage to go off-brand in terms of content while remaining absolutely on-brand in terms of message.

Putting a naked woman on the front of a magazine isn't really much of an act of imagination, and persuading Beth Ditto to remove her clothes doesn't take much persuading. Indeed, that this was a tired, over-sold retread of the PJ Harvey cover from years back (and the snarky Silverfish one that followed it) suggests that it wasn't that far off-brand.

And what was the message? That the only way a female singer could hope to get a cover of the NME is by getting her tits out? That - goodness - larger women can remove their clothes too? But if it was humorous, is the joke meant to be that it's a fat woman on the front of the magazine? If it was a statement, why was the picture airbrushed? We don't think the NME really knew what it was doing when it ran the cover; perhaps we should vote for it to win in a bid to finally find out?

Annie gets her gun

Having taken pictures of a half-naked child, Annie Leibovitz misses the point slightly:

"Miley and I looked at fashion photographs together and we discussed the picture in that context before we shot it. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little make-up, and I think it is very beautiful."

You hear? It's not like she's caked Miley's face with make-up like a whore or something.

Leibovitz misses (or pretends to be missing) what might be upsetting people - it's not a question of if the image is beautiful or not, it's the extent to which an adult should be printing sexualised pictures of children in a national magazine. Perhaps the picture is being misinterpreted, but Leibovitz is not an idiot. She knows exactly what sort of reaction a sexy picture of a child is going to get - fluttering your eyelids and saying "gosh, but it's pretty" is no kind of explanation at all.

Bono helps the Africans

We're a little behind the loop on this one, but we've just seen a physical copy of the Bono-edited edition of Vanity Fair - you remember, with Madonna and George Bush and the like on the twenty "collectors" covers (encouraging you to buy the same fashion magazine 20 times; that'll raise spirits of people living on less than a dollar a day).

There, slipped inside, was a Jewellery supplement, advertising gold and diamonds and multinational couples dealing in precious metals and gems.

Bono's Vanity Fair

Never has the title of the magazine been so apt. Bono is guest-editing Vanity Fair, and to show how incredibly well connected he is ("to make a serious point about poverty") he got twenty famous faces to create twenty different covers:

The covers depict stars receiving and passing on a message about the continent's plight.
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George Bush, politician Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and tycoons Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were among those who posed for photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Bono said he wanted to show Africa as "an opportunity" and added: "If I wasn't a singer I probably would have been a journalist."

Or a property developer. Or a Wall Street financier. If he wasn't those things, he probably would have been a journalist.

Leaving aside the concept of the cover, which manages to unite twee and overblown, isn't there something a little unsettling about trying to raise awareness of the plight of people with very, very little by decadently lavishing resources on producing twenty slightly different versions of the same magazine? And putting the same sort of people who usually turn up on Vanity Fair covers is hardly going to make much of an impact. Is this the best idea Bono could think of? Why not really create an impact by, say, having a cover printed on plain paper, rather than glossy? Something which would stand out from the other magazines and other editions of the title? And seem a little less like a greedy civilisation consuming enormous resources while half the world starves.