ADELE AND JESSIE J: MUSIC INDUSTRY CASE STUDIES

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is an English female singer and songwriter who made a successful career throughout her years of being within the music industry. Adele graduated from the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in 2006 and in that same year after her demo was posted by a friend on Myspace she was given a recording contract by XL Recordings.  XL Records are an English independent record label owned by Richard Russell, and although the record label is successful, majority of the artists are lacking in a worldwide audience in comparison to Adele. It was actually reported that the sales of Adele's Album 21 helped increase XL Recordings bank balance from £3million to £32million in the space of 12 months and as of March 2011, XL Recordings had released three albums that had sold over a million copies in the UK: The Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, Adele's 19, and Adele's 21. In 2007 she receieved the Brit Awards “Critics’ Choice” award and won the BBC Sound of 2008 poll. Her album 19 was then released a year after in 2008 becoming a commercial success and was certified platinum 7 times in the UK and double platinum in the US. An appearance on Saturday Night Live in the late year of 2008 also boosted her career in  the US and at the 51^St Annual Grammy Awards in 2009 she received the awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Adele released her second Album 21 in 2011 inspired by the break up from her former partner. After recording the song Skyfall in 2012 for the new James Bond movie which sold more than two million copies worldwide Adele took a break and gave birth to her son that same year. Adele ended her trilogy with the album 25 released in 2015 late November and became the fastest selling album in UK Chart history having over 800,000 copies sold in its first week and on the 15^th of January 2016, her sales were estimated at more than 100 million records, making her one of the world's best-selling artists. A controversial topic with the artist was her weight which she stated in an interview as “It seemed to astound people that I was plus size and successful”. Which Is the truth, within the media majority of female artists are seen in a particular way, most in a provocative light and have a similar slim body type however Adele becomes an anomaly to this particular stance in the media saying that “I don't care anyway. You don't see music, you listen to music, so what does it even matter?'

Jessica Ellen Cornish (born 27 March 1988) also known as Jessie J is a 27 year old English female singer songwriter also. Born and raised in London, she started her career on stage, aged 11, with a role in the West End musical Whistle Down the Wind. She studied at the BRIT School when she was 16 years old and wrote her first song at 17 “Big White Room” inspired by real life events. At that same age the artist also joined the girl group: Soul Deep but left after two years before signing with Gut Records which however went bankrupt before releasing any of her music. This did not stop the artist however as she managed to secure a songwriting deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing in which she wrote for artists including Chris Brown and Miley Cyrus where she was responsible for writing her Number 1 hit ‘Party in the U.S.A. Jessie J continued to create an online presence and later signed to Universal Records working with Dr. Luke, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, rapper B.o.B, and R&B producer Labrinth on her debut album, Who You Are. In 2010, her first single, from the album "Do It Like a Dude," originally written for Rihanna, which peaked at number two on the UK Singles Charts and won Best Song at the 2011 MOBO Awards. On 4 June 2012, Jessie appeared at the Diamond Jubilee Concert for Queen Elizabeth II, performing a duet with will.i.am and in August 2012 she performed "Price Tag", "Written in the Stars", "Dynamite", and "You Should Be Dancing" with Tinie Tempah and Taio Cruz, and "We Will Rock You" with Queen at the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In 2015, she became the judge and mentor of The Voice Australia.In the nominations for the 2016 Brit Awards, Jessie J's 2015 single "Flashlight" (from the soundtrack to the film Pitch Perfect 2) was among the nominees for Best British Video. In early 2011, Jessie J suffered a panic attack on stage after she was forced to perform in the dark and also was asked about her bisexuality on the In Demand radio show which she later stated was a phase however still believes that  sexuality is valuable to young teens, especially for young girls unsure of themselves because of their sexuality and identity.

News Article

Reporter 'groped' whilst covering Carnival on live television

During the annual carnival of Cologne Germany the city was back into the spot light after on live television one of the female reporters was a victim of sexual assault. The police have been searching for a suspect and have been on high alert after hundreds of women began to come forward and file complaints on having being groped by men on New Years Eve as described as

'being of North African or Arabic origin'

However despite this the man that did grope the reporter seemed to be of European origin. In my opinion I think that female harassment is in some cases a taboo subject, in which people do not tend to talk about, especially in a society that is clearly male dominating (dominant ideology) so I think it is extremely important that the matter was spoken about. Furthermore, I do not however understand CNN's reference to the ethnicity of the assaulter's, the decision a person makes hardly correlates with their culture but leans more towards their mental state. This therefore shows a link between the representation of ethnicity within the media as even though the true assaulter was a European man there still had to be a mention of other races, as if that would really cloud the issue at hand.  

Case Studies

News Posts from Twitter

Stacey Dooley: Saving the Cybersex Girls & Reggie Yates: Race Riots (CASE STUDIES)

Stacey Dooley's Cyber Sex Scandal documentary featuring on BBC 3 focuses specifically on the new upcoming internet based 'forced' sexual relations between men and children ranging from 11-18 years old in the Philippines. The documentary introduces the audience to what Cyber Sex actually is which involves men/woman but a larger demographic of men exploiting Filipino children online through FaceBook. In the documentary we learn that the reason for the huge Filipino women being a victim of cyber sex is due to the rise of cheap internet access in the country as well as the fact that because it is a third world country, many of the women participating are poor and in need of money, thus making them easy targets to these men who would easily pay them for completing any task that they so desire. This year alone 139 British people alone have been investigated for paying to watch Filipino children online, the UN suspect that there are up to 750,000 people online who hunt constantly for children to exploit for their sexual desire. In the documentary we witness a woman (Lennie King)  who works for an organisation involved in hunting and tracking down the paedophiles created a fake account using the Filipino child 'Sweetie' after realising that the European and African children were not as successful, after which there was a huge swamp of predators who "wanted her to remove her bra, play with herself, sometimes have sex with her siblings, things like that it went very far". Stacey Dooley informs us that even mothers 'pimp' out their own children on the internet to make money for their families, a lot of the mothers attempt to do it themselves but after seeing a huge spike in the interest of younger women they turn to their own children. After watching this documentary I have realised that it displays a lot of the undercover things that you do not normally hear about, especially the fact that the main three countries that are the main predators for the young Filipino children stem from the UK, US and Germany, three well known and thriving countries are the ones that are exploit these children which is actually quite horrific and says a lot about the things that could happen behind closed doors.

Reggie Yates Race Riots: the documentary which featured on BBC 3 focuses on the town Ferguson a year on from when Mike Brown an unarmed black teenager was shot six times by a Police Officer. Reggie Yates being a black man even states in the documentary that “As a black man, I can’t help feeling that if I lived here, it could have been me,”  and as we go on in the documentary we see that it could have been since that year in the US 176 black people have died at the hands of federal officers and in the town of Ferguson where over 70% of the population is black and nearly all of those that are enforcers of the law are white and most people who even attend the courts who get fined for small issues such as driving through a red light, the 'sagging pants' offence are all black but it seems as though all these laws are some how structured to target the black demographic in the first place. Clifton Kinnie who was Reggie Yates 'tour guide' giving him an insight into what it was like in Ferguson, and an activist in the Riots that went on after Michael Browns death ended the documentary with the words 'I just want freedom' using an annecdote of his little brother wanting to grow up as a black boy and not have the colour of his skin justify who he is and have criminal jurisdictions placed against him for being black, also. This in turn reminded me a lot of the Martin Luther King speech, further alluding to the fact that in America and in a lot of other places there still is a huge stigma and stereotype placed against black people. In the documentary we also saw the support of people within Ferguson for the police officer who shot Michael Brown as well as people who supported the law enforcers in general and majority of the people there being white, and only one person their was black. For me what was strange in the scenario was when two black boys came to the protest the black man was the one who said 'oh here we go' obviously indicating he assumed there would be trouble. Although both sides stand for equality and peace they both have ways of excluding each other racially even if they do not openly say they are 'racist' there is evidence which states otherwise.

News Report: Dstrkt Club

It has come to the attention that a club in London known as DSTRKT has almost 'altered racist' views against women who are darker or of a larger size, on the weekend before the 1st of October a woman alleged two of her friends were denied entry to the club because of their size and race. Lin Mei, who was invited to the club by a promoter, claims that on arrival two of her friends (Reisha and Tasha) were asked to stand on the other side of the road so that the manager could see them. At this point the manager described the girls as "too dark" and "overweight" before refusing them entry. Protesters gathered outside of the club after hearing what happened and the club has been held under a lot of scrutiny by celebrities such as the artist Omarion who refused to attend the club when visiting London and Tameka Empson the BBC Soap Star who was invited to the club after winning an award but tweeted that she wouldn't go because she 'probably wouldn't be allowed in'.

In my opinion I think that this is a way of people finally understanding the hardships that darker skinned black females face, and even the larger females too, it is bad enough that society has already categorized black females but to put them into another bracket is quite shocking, although it has been going on for quite a while in different places so for the sudden uproar in it now just because of one nightclub is worth questioning. 

Skyfall and Kingsman Comparison

Both Skyfall and Kingsman (Both British movies) have shown a great amount of success in the Gross profit region, Skyfall managing to break through the stigma of the other previous Bond movies and made it to $1 billion internationally and became one of the most successful in the franchise, although Kingsman did not do as well it still made a decent amount of $128,261,724 considering the fact that it was not a sequel as James Bond was but simply stood on its own with a gentle push of having a successful director as Matthew Vaughn who directed Kick-Ass and X-Men First Class, there wasn’t much else to make it stand out off the shelf, especially with the huge amount of competition with sticking with the same ‘MI6 and Spy genre’ that his been running its way through the Film Industry since the mid 90s with movies like Men In Black, The James Bond sequels and The Bourne Identity. However despite that it still managed to create quite a good profit which may be because it appealed to a newer form of audience.

Kingsman: The Secret Service was centred around Eggsy, a misfit teenager from England whose Dad (before he was murdered) was a Kingsman Agent, which later on in the film Eggsy turned out to train in his father’s footsteps and become one. There was a chronological narrative structure (linear) throughout the movie as we the audience saw the various disruptions and issues Eggsy was faced with as he was facing them which therefore built a connection with the audience. As mentioned before both movies are British and were set and filmed in Britain however Kingsman pays attention to the grittier side of Britain showing more realistic elements of the suffering a mother goes through after the loss of a husband and the troubles Eggsy went through in the movie in order to help his family e.g. dropping out of extra-curriculum activities. Baring this in mind there is still typical British iconography for example the ‘bull dog’ which also features in the Bond movie right at the beginning, there was also the scenery at the pub throughout the movie which is ideal to an international viewer, this is where stereotypes come into play, but not necessarily in a negative light, it is simply done to infuse profit as because it is a British movie, people who are not from Britain want to see the typical ‘British’ setting.

Skyfall the 23^rd Installment to the James Bond sequels although set in the same place and from the same action thriller genre it focuses on a different aspect. The James Bond movies tend to target a much older audience due to the sophisticated dialogue used and the general approach the characters have to one and other, it is much more efficient in the way that it is run and has less comical references than Kingsman had in my opinion because it did not need comedy in order to make the viewers focus as the viewers would’ve been in the ‘James Bond’ fan base typically for quite a considerable amount of time. Skyfall also had a linear structure, starting straight into action with the ‘assumed death’ of agent 007 which in its own kept the audience captivated right from the start. Skyfall has much more of a masculine ideology and characteristics throughout the movie than Kingsman did, both the protagonist and the antagonist were males both having high status.

In conclusion although both movies follow the same genre they still remain quite different however tend to both incorporate similar attributes from other movies e.g.  Captain America: Winter Soldier, in terms of revealing the real plan of the technocratic cryptocracy but also in Skyfall there is some links to the Dark Knight, for example when James Bond is pronounced dead and he is aimlessly walking around getting drunk he is only pulled back to 'save London' much like Bruce Wayne's only motivation is saving Gotham after being constantly cooped up in his mansion doing nothing. However there is still a link to the dominant ideology in both movies, this being that in both movies the main heroes such as the Kingsman Agents and the Agents of Skyfall are both middle aged white men, this clearly shows that a lot of these large blockbuster movies always have a solid reflection of their roles in the industries with the movies that they make and always come off as the prestigious heroes.