Main Pop Girl

Dear Mr. Tromp, As webmaster, administrator and content writer of #PopHatesFlops, I am awoken every morning by a flurry of e-mails related to my website which I must attend to. Generally these e-mails are simple acknowledgements of errors that have occurred on the websites; often they are updates offered by our host or system manufacturers; and sometimes they are complaints by users of abuse on the website. Most common of all the e-mails in my inbox are newsletters from various outlets promoting their latest wares; and most rare are those threatening legal action against me and my website. I have been unlucky enough to receive half a dozen or so legal threats over the years since I first started PHF in 2012. When we posted about a Natalia Kills song 'Heart To Break' in 2013, we were sent a cease and desist letter from Ms. Kills' team asking us to take the article down as it was regarding a song that was unlawfully obtained. When the Lana Del Rey track 'Noir' was discussed in 2014 before its leak we were sent a cease and desist letter from Music Rights Australia telling us to erase any reference of the track. Earlier this year, we were admonished with fake claims of illegality from an imposter of the artist Allie X who claimed that we were trading her tracks illegally; it was later revealed that they were in fact just a crazed stan who had taken their obsession too far. And the latest legal advice we've received has been from you. This morning I woke up to receive the following e-mail from you, hastily copy and pasted with the remnants of a long-lost formatting persisting on: As mentioned, we have received many legal threats in the past, but this is by far the most shoddy and unprofessional one yet. From the unprofessional Gmail address to the poorly researched information on defamation which you clearly copied from an article entitled 'How To Delete Things from the Internet', your e-mail was a trainwreck from the greeting to the sign-off. Unfortunately, Jay, unlike you I am well aware of my rights and the protections I have under the law of my home country Australia. Over the past three weeks, I have binge-watched five seasons of CBS's hit show The Good Wife (airing Sunday nights at 9pm) and thus have an understanding of the law only matched by the top district attorneys (probably). You claim that our website's lone post about you was defamatory - and yet judging by your own (plagiarised) definitions of defamation it was nothing of the sort. Firstly, you have been grossly misinformed, as we did not post about you on social media. Secondly, as stated in our Terms & Conditions, all posts on #PopHatesFlops are inherently statements of opinion belonging to the users they are made by and thus are not intended for interpretation as fact. As you yourself copy and pasted, "for celebrities and public figures [...] the statement [must] be maliciously untrue - you knew it was false". As is apparent in a quick perusal of our post, Jay, nothing that any of our members said was in fact false - you have admitted to illegally posting a song by Lady Gaga on iTunes, thus violating intellectual property laws. We did not harm your reputation - you handled that all on your own. It's equally clear that your request for us to remove our content is simply an effort to avoid permanent evidence of your misdoings to be floating around - misdoings that you admitted in your own e-mail to be illegal, and which are thus not protected by the laws of the United States of America. You seem to now be claiming that you never posted the song at all, and that the whole thing was a dream in the over-active imagination of DJ White Shadow. Rest assured that all posts about you on any website (including your own Tumblr, which you have now deleted) have been documented for good on The Way Back Machine. Frankly, the whole attempt at a threatening e-mail was laughable. And possibly the funniest thing about the whole situation is the fact that if you had simply asked me to remove the thread in a polite way without resorting to baseless threats I would have done so. The current trend of threatening legal action against those who frustrate you online - whether it be someone telling the truth about you on a forum post, or a music fan who has just leaked a song you were trading just days ago - is snide, unfair and hypocritical, and must be stopped. As such, I will not follow the lead of other websites like GagaDaily who have removed every post written about you from their website; but will stand by the posts that were made on PHF with the full force of the United States and Australian legal systems at my side. I hope you rethink your attempts at at a power play, and wish you luck restoring your besmirched name. I sympathise with you for facing legal trouble from a huge corporation such as Interscope and wish you luck in your legal battle - hopefully the judge will be lenient on you and you will not face prison time. Thank you for wishing me a nice day, and I pray you have the same. Kind Regards, Mo Update: After conversing further with Mr. Tromp over e-mail, he has publicly and privately apologised for his threats towards us on his Twitter page. In turn, we have agreed to remove the original post as a good-will gesture towards him. We appreciate Mr. Tromp's willingness to sort the situation out. We certainly sympathise with his situation and we wish him all the best in the future. We urge Interscope Records and Lady Gaga's team to forgive him his mistakes as we have done.

Growing up isn’t always easy. Hormones course rampantly through your body like cheap liquor, insignificant issues are morphed into earth-shattering natural disasters, and all the while you walk the floss-fine tightrope between parental expectations and inner desires. If life is merely a series of hurdles established by the gods for mortals to overcome, adolescence is surely the first major challenge that most people would face - and often it offers stumbles that can’t be recovered from. And yet, as soon as the thickets of youth begin to clear and innocent smiles are transformed into wrinkled parchments, its terrors are often forgotten or overlooked, written off as the by-products of a natural chemical imbalance. Thus is the paradox explored in Nicholas Dante’s debut album, Hue (released on April 1st, 2016), which ambitiously strives towards a serious comprehension and acknowledgement of the troubles of teenagehood by distilling them into musical form. Described by Dante as a lyrical “story”, the album narrates the turbulence of growing up in an uncertain world and experiencing the novelty of first love, all while dealing with the loss of innocence that comes from understanding the world around you in a new way. It’s an issue that Dante, who hails from opulent Long Island in New York, has had a long time to consider in his sixteen years of life. Inspired by the idols of his childhood, Dante looked towards such mononyms as Britney, Beyonce and Michael to create what has become as much a tribute to his inspirations as it is an assertion of independence. It is the Gatsby-esque experiences which coloured these sixteen years that culminate in Dante's lead single from the project, 'Make U Weep'. Featuring an absolutely relentless barrage of a bassline and lyrics that read like an entry straight from Heidi Montag's sex diary about going "down on you low/Taking control/Give you some good/Cause ya' know that I could give you what you deserve", the track distills the feeling of drunk sex into a total of three minutes and twenty-three seconds. ‘Make U Weep’, which is written and produced by Luke Gus, is an anomaly on an album which is otherwise entirely self-written and produced by Gryves Martell of Britney Spears' Bare fan-made album fame; but in reality, all eight tracks excel in production and professionalism far beyond what you might expect from a first-time singer and self-professed ATRL star. And despite the five-star calibre of the tracks, they’re all centred around a vulnerability and intimacy which you’d be hard pressed to find in any A-list star. Dante says that his main goal with his music is to relate to people on a visceral level, bonding over the shared experience of first love and the awkwardness of teenage affection. For him, Hue is a realisation of self-worth and confidence as an independent musician making his way in the twenty-first century; but it also marks the end of an era, and the nostalgia for those adolescent days behind him pulses through the album. It’s a feeling that everyone can relate to: the sense of an ending that comes with the final chapter of every book and every final goodbye to a departing friend. But with every ending comes the beginning of something new; and with Hue, we get the sense that Dante’s possibilities are as limitless as the spectrum of colours which inspired its title.

Alt-pop up and comer Halsey has become the subject of controversy today over predictably petty social media happenings. Fans who went to check her official Twitter page today were left perplexed in the face of a message saying that the account "doesn't exist". There was no clear explanation for the deletion, but many are pointing to Instagram drama as the source of all problems. On the second of April, the popstar posted an image of a person kissing a mannequin with text overlaid reading "Everything is changing and I don't know where I fit". The image immediately blew up when it was discovered that Halsey had not made the image herself but had predictably found the image on Tumblr and failed to credit the original artist. The comments became more and more vitriolic after it was said that Halsey had blocked the original artist on Instagram from commenting on the image. However, as it turned out, Instagram had automatically blocked the artists comments after they had commented too many times on the work. While her Twitter account has been closed, the Instagram photo in question is still up with a current count of 157 000 likes and almost 10 000 comments. The hatred is still spreading on the page, with people calling the artist "ugly", a "waste of oxygen" and telling her to kill herself. For her part, Halsey has updated the caption of the image to read "Photo by @affectioms sorry I didn't know." While we're hardly the biggest fans of Halsey in the world, and artists definitely deserve credit for their original work, the amount of spiteful remarks aimed towards Halsey in this case is clearly unjustified. Images are regularly reposted around Instagram and Tumblr without credit, and while Halsey, as a public figure, should expect negativity as her brand becomes larger, the original artist should also expect a lack of credit for their work when they post it to these websites. What are your thoughts on the situation? Are you glad Halsey deactivated her account to avoid the haters, or should she have fought back? Let us know in the comments down below!