More evidence of the sickening barbarity of America’s penal institutions: LIL WAYNE is being hassled because officers found headphones and the charger for an MP3 player in his cell. (The actual MP3 player was found stashed in a nearby cell.) Is Rikers Island really so cruel as to rob Wayne of music, the one non-purple thing that restores his soul and arouses his passions? Is it fair to deny an artist his right to listen to MP3s after he’s leaked so many of his own, freely and willingly, to the public? This isn’t justice. If only Kareem Saïd were alive to rise up against this inhumanity.
And that’s not the only trouble our Weezing hero finds himself in: producer Bangladesh is suing Wayne’s Cash Money label for overdue royalties. The label, it’s alleged, has failed to send checks for “A Milli,” one of Weezy’s biggest hits, and is on the hook for something like half a million bucks. Shame on you, Cash Money — this non-payment is particularly egregious given the producer’s history of famine and desperate poverty, which prompted George Harrison to come to his aid with a high-profile relief concert in 1971.
I can’t believe I’m mentioning ADAM ANT for the second time this month — that’s such an exponential increase in Ant-news frequency that my column is in danger of being overrun. This time, we find our aging, paint-faced drum major in a church in Portsmouth, England, where a show went direly awry. According to an account in the Sun:
“When he was heckled by the crowd of 200 — which included young children — he snarled: ‘I’m a punk rocker. I don't do Christian. You can fuck off to the church.’ ”
Somehow, proclaiming your punk principles seems a little less bitchin’ when you’re 55 years old, in a church, being mocked by children. “The show was shit,” Ant later told the paper. “I wasn’t told it was in a church hall.”
LOU REED, having long since run out of art relevant to his own species, is putting on a symphony for dogs at a Sydney music festival. It’ll be composed entirely in pitches too high for human ears but audible to canine ones — which sounds like a cute idea until you think about how shitty that’ll be for the intended audience. Dog whistles and those ultrasonic anti-bark things work by startling and disorienting dogs with unpleasantly high tones, so expect your pets to react about as well as mankind did to Metal Machine Music.
In other news that sounds as if it had been made up as filler for idiotic pop-guffaw columns like this one, the guitarist for TOKIO HOTEL told the German newspaper Bild that he fell ill on tour after taking an overdose of Viagra. For two days, he suffered from headaches, blurry vision, and unfun boners. “Unfortunately there were situations where it just wasn’t appropriate,” he said, and we all completely believed his awesome wacky rock-and-roll party story and it was totally legendary.
I swear, maybe they heard I was sick last week so they’re just pitching me softballs.
