Liberty Fraud Alert?!
I'm complaining about private equity; I have thoughts on the lead up to the WNBA playoffs
MUSIC
I have nothing to offer you except this version of “See-Line Woman” by Nina Simone and lengthened by Masters at Work that we heard whilst Out the other night. Thanks to Leo who did the research to find the correct version.
THOUGHTS
The ethics of music streaming is basically the last thing anyone needs to care about right now, but I have thoughts.
I’ve had a weird love-hate relationship with Blackbird Spyplane for a while. His philosophical missives usually strike me as bizarrely naive for someone in his 40s who has apparently been thinking about fashion for a long time (and yet I still pay for a subscription…). But lo! This week’s ‘sletter was titled “Streaming is an affront to God,” which is a sentence that I think I’ve actually uttered before. In it, he details the ways that streaming music devalues it, and makes it difficult to approach with raw, childlike curiosity, which he is able to do now that he forgoes Spotify, or something.
Kyle Chayka also had a short piece a few weeks ago in the New Yorker bitching about the new Spotify interface, and how it, similarly, devalues music. The new interface apparently makes it nigh impossible to find full albums, and has therefore become enshittified, to use Corey Doctorow’s term a la mode. The takeaway? Ol’ KC subscribed to Apple Music instead, lmao. (Someone, please give me Kyle’s job, for the love of god. I, or really any teenager off the street, can critique technology better in the year 2024.)
I have never used streaming services for music (please hold your applause!), and if two essays are anything like a zeitgeist, maybe one is forming. But they both fail to actually acknowledge the reason streaming services exist in the first place: they were created, propagated, and are maintained by private equity firms, which eat the intellectual property of the music and other media they contain. They only make money off of the biggest hits and therefore won’t invest in artists the way even the basically also evil record companies did until ~15 years ago. It’s completely fucking insane that we’ve handed the reins of everything we value dearly (including but not limited to housing, childcare, food systems) to these PE finance bros, but they will never, ever give them back, no matter how qUiRkY our music intake becomes. Until PE is regulated out of existence, this is what we’re dealing with… so… vote Kamala? Jk jk. Much like Kyle’s solution, mine is simply to turn to another platform: Bandcamp (and torrenting :)) (and an unhinged workflow that allows me to get these MP3s onto my iPhone).
And now what you’ve all come here for:
WNBA RECAP/ FEELINGS
Lots of basketball feelings in the countdown to the WNBA finals, but I’m going to try to keep this brief.
Many headlines: the Liberty are on fraud alert after their ugly win against Las Vegas on Sunday. This game sucked (see below). I think they can beat the allegations, but Betnijah needs to be OK (seems like she is), and they need to tighten it up.
It’s awful to see a player get injured live in front of you, or live on TV. It sucks more when you feel you have an emotional connection to the player, and understand her as a key to your chosen team’s success. It sucks EVEN MORE when this player just recovered from this very same injury through surgery and rehab, only to come back and play with a ferocity that reignited the team, and everyone’s love for her. I’m talking about Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s accidental collision with JJ at the beginning of the 4th quarter of the Las Vegas game, which sent her hobbling to the locker room after she landed badly on her right knee, which she had just recovered from surgery on. (She ended up being OK and even played quite a few excellent minutes in Tuesday night’s blowout game against Dallas).
It’s crazy to me that you have to just keep playing, even though you just saw your teammate’s (and presumably close friend’s) knee blow out in the exact same way that required surgery to fix, right in front of your eyes. In that respect, I wasn’t shocked to see Stewie miss two free throws shortly after that happened — she was SHOOK, I think everyone was. What’s interesting in professional athletics is that you’re not allowed to be that shook, to the point where I haven’t even heard other analysis suggesting that’s why the Liberty played poorly after that point, that’s why Stewie and Sab couldn’t make their free throws. Being scared for your teammate and your team’s future isn’t supposed to factor in? I wasn’t present in Barclays but everyone online said that B going down sucked the oxygen out of the room, and no one recovered.
I need Sabrina to calm down. The identity of this team is supposed to be unselfishness and ball movement, and I see her as the team’s only weak point in this regard. On Sunday she was throwing brick after absolute brick, like actual airballs, and she would not cut it out. She had a bad game, which is, yes, unfortunate, but she was also taking good looks away from her teammates when they could have done more. Was it just that she wanted to throw bombs in front of the many basketball celebs that were in attendance, including but not limited to Steph Curry, Paige Bueckers, and Dawn Staley? Is she really that shallow? Was she not getting the right calls from the coaches’ bench? I did notice her behavior change dramatically in the games against Dallas where she was supremely unselfish, so either she got an earful from Sandy, OR the absence of ceLIBERTY row helped her regain her common sense.
This was the first game A’ja Wilson missed since 2019. And after that she came up and just secured the record for most points scored in a single season, 929 points, breaking Diana Taurasi’s record. She averages 27.3 points per game. Her not-so-secret relationship with Bam is the stuff of dreams. And YES, it is my absolute delight to confirm that her parents did indeed name her after the Steely Dan album. She is the MVP, she is the moment.
Right?!?!?! Should I buy this shirt? Do they play this song at Aces games?? That said, her team is getting harder to even generally wish good things for, even when they’re being cute on social media. The whining about the officiating causing their loss on Sunday was annoying at best. Everyone knows the officiating sucks in the W, but it all comes out in the wash: the refs are inconsistent, but not biased. I think Zena Keita of The Athletic Women’s Basketball podcast said: I actually wonder if everyone was taking notes on the French team’s play in the Olympic gold medal game: foul so often and so aggressively that the refs basically can’t keep up, and then gamble with making big illegal plays, especially in the 4th. If so, buckle up for the playoffs… (This is also interesting because Sandy really begs her team not to foul purposefully, it’s not part of her playbook at all).
I watched Friday night’s Lynx game against the Fever. Maybe this is too obvious to spend time mulling over, but I’ll just say that wheresoever Caitlin goes, so go the Fever. They don’t really know what to do when she’s off the floor, and they all lose their minds when she loses hers. Her weakest point has always been her emotional volatility (which is something the Fever stans and press consistently overlook to their detriment, imo), and when she gets frustrated the whole thing falls apart. Shit is not a game to Caitlin, it’s life or death, and when things are not not going her way, she’s a mark. And — I don’t mean to say that the rest of the team are bad players, there’s clearly a lot of talent to go around (they could never make me hate you, Aliyah Boston). But they’ve built their entire machine around CC’s skillset, as I guess they should, but then they don’t know who they are when she’s falling apart, and their bench doesn’t seem deep enough to make it all work in the long run. She’s been playing 38-40 minute games (40 minutes is a full game in the WNBA), which I guess just seems unwise to me, someone who doesn’t know much, but does know that CC’s rookie centerpiece peers Angel and Cam Brink have already gone down for the season with terrible injuries.
Did you know that Caitlin has a cute boyfriend (I was actually hoping the heterosexuality allegations were unproven and based solely on her chosen hairstyle of ponytail-with-headband, but alas they are verified) and that her brother who she is very close with is an extremely pro-Palestine activist? She seems much cooler than I thought she was. Keep living in your feelings, Caitlin!
Angel did indeed suffer a season-ending injury in a wrist fracture that she’ll get surgery on soon. Heartbreaking! I love watching her play, and the rest of the season will be so much more boring without her. The Sky won their first game after her absence due to the sheer HARDNESS of Chennedy Carter, who scored 26 points. (And we’re lucky to see Chennedy out here alive! She was in the hospital for several days with Covid just a couple weeks ago!) I’m still rooting for them to clinch the 8th spot for the playoffs. Maybe they’ll figure out how to best use Kamilla, and then it’s over for the rest of these h0es.
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert on CNBC this week… LOL. LMAO. She really said that the racism, homophobia, and general bigotry directed at players (and maybe specifically at Angel Reese) is OK because it generates more viewership than the W has ever gotten before. She and the league are making bank off the race war that trolls set up between CC and Angel, so she doesn’t care, and the players can just log off if they don’t like what they see online. And she’s nostalgic for the racism of the NBA in the 90s? She felt compelled to tweet that racism is bad afterwards, but as others have noted, at least we have Syd Colson’s social media reactions, and many, many additional player comments saying what their bosses’ boss should have said first. But it explains a lot, no?
