If Kate Bush ever received offers and was tempted to sell her song catalog, as almost every great songwriter of the last 60 years has done, right now she’ll be thanking heaven she didn’t. Since her song Running Up That Hill appeared in the fourth season of Stranger Things, as is known, listeners have skyrocketed (in mid-June, she had about 57 million on Spotify) and a very young audience has suddenly become interested in the singer. Englishwoman famous for being a kind of mystical great-great-granddaughter of the Brönte. Since Bush owns her entire catalog, through a company called Noble and Brite, and hasn’t even given up a license, now all the benefits of her sudden fame are hers without intermediaries. The Music Business Worldwide website calculates that only from Spotify Bush is earning about 200,000 dollars a week – a lot for a platform famous for the low income it reports to artists – but that as a whole its catalog is being revalued much more, and compares it with Queen, whose surviving members retain the rights to their much-played and licensed songs.
THE ‘PROTOSPAGUETTI’ OF BORAU
From silent westerns to revisions of the genre such as Los Hermanos Sisters, the Filmoteca de Catalunya is going to dedicate the summer to exploring Western films in depth, without ignoring the canonical (there is The Diligence) but also looking for the rarities of the genre. That’s where Brandy comes in, the curious debut of José Luis Borau in the cinema. He shot it in 1963, after having won the national end-of-course award, it was based on the character of El Coyote from the popular novels by José Mallorquín and was a premonition of what the spaghetti western would later be, since it was a co-production Italian-Spanish. Filmo screens it on August 18.
‘AUSTENIAN’ FOR ALL
There are statements in the world of culture that have no date. “Several books, series and exhibitions about Andy Warhol coincide”, for example, is something that could be written in 2002 and 2022. Another of those is “things are happening around Jane Austen”. That there are new adaptations and versions of the author of Sense and Sentiment is not new, because it is more than proven that her material is ductile, stainless and withstands everything. But even so, we could say that an important Austenian wave is coming. The Cosmo channel has just released season two of Sandition, the series based on Austen’s unfinished novel that the British ITV channel had decided to stop producing but was saved in extremis by the American PBS due to the clamor of the fans. Fire Island is available at Disney, the very free adaptation of Pride and Prejudice set in the gay-friendly vacation resort, and the controversial trailer for the long-awaited Persuasion in which Dakota Johnson utters the famous words that (not ) wrote Steventon’s: “Now we are something worse than exes, we are friends.”
MCCARTNEY FOR LESS THAN 30 EUROS
the cheese
HUMOR AND VIOLENCE
Mexican-Grace writer Juan Pablo Villalobos offers an online course at La Llama, the Barcelona bookstore/school specializing in humor, with an intriguing premise to say the least. It is called Humor and violence and in it, through several videos of about 10 or 12 minutes, it deals with how comedy is activated in situations of genocide, totalitarianism and organized crime. In the first chapter, for example, it talks about how humor is always the last resort of the vanquished, their last vestige of dignity when all is lost, and later on the level of commitment of the humorist is addressed, if he acquires some kind of of duty beyond being funny.
