Fifty Shades of Grey and its siblings. Now you can buy the album.
The background
Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James is now the best-selling book of all time in the UK, shifting a massive 5.3 million copies (including ebooks.) It’s sold 3.8 million physical books, and a mere 1.5 million ebooks. The follow ups, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, sold 3.6 million and 3.2 million copies respectively, making UK sales of 12 million. The first book has sold more than The Highway Code, and more than Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (despite not having “code” in the title.)
In global terms it’s still miles behind Harry Potter, which shifted 450 million: Fifty Shades is on a paltry 40 million, reported The Telegraph. The book sees the seduction of Anastasia Steele by the tycoon Christian Grey. If you hadn’t had enough of it, a film is in the works; they’ve also released a soundtrack.
“She rarely gives interviews and the raciest detail she has supplied about her own life is that she likes to eat Nutella straight from the jar,” said Anita Singh of E L James, on The Telegraph.
Humbug! It’s a terrible spankbuster
Not everybody was happy. Andrew O’Hagan, in The London Review of Books, said: “It’s not that Fifty Shades of Grey and EL James’s other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.”
The album is a bit creepy; it also has The Flower Duet on it
But if you do like it, don’t worry, there’s even more stuff you can buy. “Bedsheets and perfume and lingerie and jewelry are not enough,” said Jen Doll on The Atlantic Wire. There’s now an album you can listen to as you read. It’s been “curated” by E L James, and aims to set “[a] mysterious and alluring atmosphere with just the slightest hint of danger.” It has 15 classical tracks by such eminent composers as Chopin, Debussy, Bach, Rachmaninoff and Verdi. This, said Doll, will “provide a valuable lesson in the ongoing debate over the question ‘If you make it, will they buy it?’” Is it “a bit creepy or overreaching”? she wondered. And it’s also called Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album, “which seems to keep the door wide open for future soundtracks.” Still, at least Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, which is mentioned int he book, has jumped to the top of the classical charts. The first track on the album is, inevitably, The Flower Duet by Lakme, which Periscope last remembers being used as a British Airways advert. Now that’s erotic.
