I’ll defer to you and Bytegeist on this one. While I recalled the name from years back, I can’t say I’m familiar with the content. The wiki page I linked states:
…which seems to suggest that the album was hastily thrown together with minimal effort. But then, it is wikipedia…
The great Van Morrison had to make an album to fulfill his contract with Bang Records in 1967. He improvised 31 songs during a single session, most between a minute and a minute-and-a-half long.
The first five songs were all variations of the same thing: Twist and Shake, Shake and Roll, Stomp and Scream, Scream and Holler, Jump and Thump… then he really got creative with tunes like “Want a Danish?”, “You Say France and I Whistle”, and “Ring Worm.”
Story and songs available online from many sources, including this one.
I think for semi-experimental products, there’s also an awareness that they may be half-baked or too early for the market, so success is defined a little differently than just making money- there’s defining the interface for a class of product, there’s identifying the actual market, there’s identifying major pitfalls, etc… all of which may be successful, even if the product isn’t classically successful.
And, in the case of sports like football, continuing to run plays rather than running out the clock increases the risk that one or more of your players could get injured thereby making them unavailable to play in the next game or games. That’s why when you’re in this position, it’s best to take a snap and fall on the ball a few times rather than continue to run a superfluous offensive drive that ends up in the loss of your quarterback or running back for the season.
You can find a photo at the bottom of this page. Note that the article and the photo are from 1984.
Bit of a tangent - sort of related to bands putting out deliberately shit albums - The labour party manifesto for the 1983 UK general election was memorably termed the 'the longest suicide note in history’. It articulated a number of left wing policies that the country had no appetite for, behind an unelectable labour party leader going up against an ascendant Margaret Thatcher, and weighed in at 700 (!) pages.
It’s been said that the right and more centrist elements of the party, seeing how hopeless things were, just stood back and let the left have free rein. Result - labour were decimated at the polls and the left of the party was buried as a mainstream political voice. They have yet to re-emerge.
Whilst that’s just an anecdotal rumour, and maybe a convenient one given the eventual re-positioning of the party in the middle ground under John Smith and then Tony Blair, the manifesto seems such an incredulous thing to lay before the electorate that you have to believe some labour MPs had the true measure of it.
Given the OKC Thunder opened their first season with an absolutely horrendous record (something like 5 wins and 30 losses), I doubt their poor play down the stretch in Seattle was intentional.
This is true, but I’m speaking of plays like this, where Brian Westbrook intentionally failed to score a touchdown which would have given his team a 16-6 (probably 17-6 with the extra point) lead, instead kneeling on the ball to run out the clock. It might have been strategic, but it was definitely peculiar and an intentional failure.
Fantasy football players and bookies the world over must have lost their minds when he did that.
Don’t record companies reject obvious crappy offerings and insist upon a higher quality of recordings? I could see putting together an album filled with actual songs of the approximate length with actual instruments played and the band members actually singing, but no decent record company will accept a record filled with static, car doors banging, dogs barking, etc., as a legitimate album unless the recording artist is already known for those sounds.