PYF Bootleg/Knockoff: When God Whre Me He Wsust Sherngshu

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Bootleg/Knockoff: When God Whre Me He Wsust Sherngshu

C.M. Kruger: Oct 28, 2013

Aphrodite posted:

What's the Lion King topper?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au4tlMRI1eg

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 05:21

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 16:54

C.M. Kruger: Oct 28, 2013

Facebook Aunt posted:

Is Japan known for having good steel? I thought the whole point of folding the sword a thousand times was to make up for lovely steel.

Pre-late-80s/90s Japanese (and South Korean) cars were notorious for having rust issues as I recall.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2016 09:22

C.M. Kruger: Oct 28, 2013

PeaceDiner posted:

Is it considered a knock-off if it's published by the same person as the original? I'm not sure if this exactly is the right thread for these albums, but I figured that they're interesting enough.

So, back in the early 80s, a German man named Ingo Nowotny started up a record label called Metal Enterprises. It originally just printed some licensed (or perhaps unlicensed) versions of foreign releases. It managed to get some real money in when they put out albums by the German band B�hse Onkelz, who were one of Germany's best-selling indie rock acts at the time. They used these to record some downright strange albums, including albums that were straight-up just heavy metal covers of pop, folk, and funk songs.

Now, that's not what's exactly interesting nor are these the purpose of this post. What is interesting is their fake albums. Using what I assume is a group of in-house musicians, they recorded several albums that they then put out as the "second" album of several of the groups they had on their license - and these albums sounded almost nothing like the original bands. Godzilla went from passable heavy metal to some combination of rock and reggae. Thrash Queen went from badly-produced but decent speed metal to thrash metal with an indescribably operatic/howling lead singer that could barely pronounce her English lyrics. Killer Fox went from middle-of-the-road metal to what one person described as "if The Residents had made a Sci-fi concept Metal album." And my favorite conversion would have to be Fucker, whose first album was hardcore punk headed by a black guy that contained anti-racist lyrics but whose second "album" was white power Oi.

I've personally never seen anything like it - even the "fake albums" from Cobra Records were fantastic and didn't pretend to be a different band. Here's some examples of the fake bands in question.

If anything it sounds kinda like they were doing tax scam records.
http://www.poo poo-fi.com/interviews/AaronMilenski

quote:

S-F: Could you define what a tax scam release is?

AM: In 1976, some record label executives discovered that it was possible to create an entire label as a subsidiary to the major label, and to write it off as a huge tax loss to help the �real� label remain profitable. The idea was that a large number of albums (for instance, Tiger Lily and Guinness released almost 100 records each in just under two years) would be on the new label, and the entire batch (ie, every copy of all of the records) would be listed as unsold. They would probably list something like 10,000 copies pressed of each record, even though it�s possible that they pressed up only a few hundred or so. The ones they pressed were never even attempted to be sold; they were sent as promos and dumped into warehouses with cutouts.

Where this gets even more interesting is that in order to create 100 albums in just over a year�s time, the labels had to dig up everything they had in the vaults: demos, albums that were intended to be released but were not, tapes that were purchased from other labels, re-releases of albums that they had released on real labels under different names, stuff that was not ready to be released yet, etc. Many of these are clearly not finished or not properly mastered. The album covers follow a bare bones principle: a simple cover photo and a white back cover with a minimal amount of info (song titles, label info, maybe credits, though many of those are missing and/or fake.)

Apparently whatever loophole they discovered was closed by 1978 or so, as every one of these labels existed only in the years 1976�1978 (although it is suspected that the legit label B.T. Puppy, run by the Tokens, released about a dozen or so albums purposely at a loss in the early �70s, as there are many albums on that label that are very very rare, and the official word is that the small releases were �contractually obligated,� whatever that really means.)

Obviously, every one of these labels was associated with a larger label, but nobody knows the actual connections, except in the case of the most famous tax scam label, Tiger Lily, which was a subsidiary of Roulette, run by Morris Levy, who is known to have had connections to the Genovese crime family. The other very large tax scam label is Guinness (and Dellwood, which is another name for the same label), which released about 100 albums. Other known tax- scam labels are Tomorrow, Tribute, Illusion, Rocking Horse, and Crazy Cajun, and a few more are suspected. There is also one called �Album World,� which pulled the neat trick of giving every release a different �label� name, though they all had catalogue numbers that started with AW and all had the Album World address on the back cover.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 06:28

C.M. Kruger: Oct 28, 2013

media: the honorable samurai warrior fights on foot in honorable duels of single combat, bushido, etc.
reality: the samurai rides around on a adorable pony firing arrows at levy infantry like a guy who goes 75-3 on a Battlefield server after they get the jet.