Billboard talks to the other man accused in Chuck Philips’ LA Times story about the 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur, Jimmy Rosemond. Rosemond is currently the manager of the Game and other rappers. He says a couple of interesting things:

[T]he five-shot theory doesn’t work for me. […] Tupac was walking around laughing. I only saw one bullet hole, so this whole five-shot theory never made sense. Tupac was walking around, he had a little bit of blood dripping from his head and he was laughing, rolled up a spliff and waited for the ambulance. It was just irresponsible on Chuck Phillips’ part to throw me under the bus like that from information he gathered from government informants that had lengthy sentences.

And he says this about James Sabatino, the center of the hoax that has embarrassed the LAT and Philips:

I don’t even know who James Sabatino is and for me to conspire with him to do anything … is ridiculous. He’s 30 years old now, so this guy was 16 or 17 years old when this incident happened? I’m 43 year old man. Then I was in my 30s and I was hanging out with a 16-year-old? There is no way.

Rosemond says he’s going to be suing. We’ll see. Philips gave this background and opportunity for denial from Rosemond in the original story:

Rosemond, who has served prison time for drug dealing and weapons offenses, has been described by Vibe magazine as “one of the most respected and feared players in hip-hop.” His Czar Entertainment represents rappers Shyne, Too Short, Gucci Mane and the Game.

Rosemond has long denied any role in the Quad incident. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but his lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, dismissed the new information as “ancient double-hearsay allegations.”

Lichtman noted that Rosemond had never been charged or questioned in connection with the attack — a sign, Lichtman said, that federal authorities have “discounted” what the informant told them. Rosemond “was not involved in the assault and will not be prosecuted for it,” Lichtman said.

While we won’t know for sure until the paper reveals the results of its internal investigation into the story, a libel case doesn’t seem like a sure thing. Leaving aside the high bar of showing Philips acted with “reckless disregard,” as I noted last week, while the Times and Philips have apologized for “partially” basing the story on what it acknowledges were forged documents, they have not as yet formally retracted its allegations.

—

Previously:

At the LA Times, the pain may be just beginning

Did the LAT get hoaxed on its Tupac bombshell?

Also:

The LAT’s apology and its original story.

The Smoking Gun’s expose of the hoax.

We reclined, the other day, accompanied by the new issue of Rolling Stone, a fresh stack of Fig Newtons, and a sense of keen anticipation. Who would not be excited at the prospect of hearing this fabled magazine’s thoughts on the quality of and accomplishments embodied within the new R.E.M. album, Accelerate?

Indeed, “accelerate” was a word we would have used to describe our pulse.

We were pleased to see the reviewer was David Fricke, one of the publication’s critical big guns. Chewing thoughtfully on a cake-covered fruit treat, we read:

Accelerate is […] one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made…

… [Singer Michael] Stipe has not sounded this viscerally engaged in his singing and poetically lethal in his writing since the twilight of the Reagan administration…

…Ultimately, the best thing about Accelerate is that R.E.M. sound whole again.

As we mentally added those emphases, we pondered their meaning, and once we got it straight we liked what we were hearing. There had been a lull, Fricke was telling us. There were certainly some R.E.M. albums that weren’t the band’s best, obviously, but this wasn’t one of them. Since the Reagan years—i.e., the late 1980s—he seemed to imply, Stipe’s singing was sometimes not engaged and not lethal. But that, thankfully, had been rectified. The subtext of all three of these observations was plain: R.E.M. is getting better.

It was a relief. But then we had … a hankering. A hankering to hear about the bad old days.

So we went back to RS’s review of the previous R.E.M. album, Around the Sun. We were a little confused, at first, because the reviewer, Barry Walters, hailed the thing as a “comeback”! He continued:

Unlike 1998’s Up, on which the band crafted beautiful but belabored studio experimentation, and unlike 2001’s Reveal, where they relaxed but didn’t deliver many memorable melodies, R.E.M. here resemble their classic selves.

Hmm. It sure sounded like R.E.M. had been back in top rock ‘n’ roll form for that one too. But fortunately, Walters was pointing us to the real problem: It must have been Reveal!

We hate Reveal!

Our fingers smudged and aching (metaphorically), we paged back to that review next. We couldn’t wait. The executioner was Rob Sheffield:

The last we heard from R.E.M. was the 1998 transitional album Up, their first without [drummer Bill] Berry, a sour, parched affair that hasn’t gained any luster with time.

But the past few years have been rough on R.E.M. and their fans, especially with the departure of drummer Bill Berry. So it’s inspiring to hear Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills brighten up on Reveal, telling a few fables of their own reconstruction with an album of gorgeous, woozily sun-struck ballads. […] It’s a spiritual renewal rooted in a musical one.

We were chagrined at first. A renewal? Why, that’s one step removed from a redux, and a kissing cousin to a comeback.

But then we realized. Reveal wasn’t the problem. We love Reveal! It was a reconstruction-like renewal. And inspiring, too.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle had clicked into place. It was unanimous. David Fricke, Barry Walters and Rob Sheffield: They were all telling us that the nadir of R.E.M.’s career was a snake-in-the-grass little CD called Up. That must have been the real culprit!

We trembled with anticipation to read the spanking the magazine must have given that dog! Ann Powers had the assignment:

Like 1992’s Automatic for the People, Up seeks a unified mood, but its scope is broader than that collection of elegies.

[…]

Radiohead’s OK Computer […] is the Pet Sounds to this Sgt. Pepper—the challenge that stimulates risk. Buck and Mills cultivate the same multitiered spaciousness that makes OK Computer so rich. Trading off instruments, denying the guitar its usual primacy without diminishing its impact, Buck and Mills have orchestrated their rock as never before.

So Up was better than Automatic for the People … and worthy of comparison not just to OK Computer but Sgt. Pepper.

It sure didn’t sound that bad.

At that point, we realized what the problem was. R.E.M. had set the bar for itself, and reviewers, impossibly high. On its eleventh studio album, Up, the group had come up with a Sgt. Pepper-like masterpiece.

Since then, critics have had to deal with something unexpected. R.E.M. have consistently topped that stirring work, each successive release being so good as to make clear the flaws of the one before it.

At this point, the implication is clear: As far as Rolling Stone is concerned, R.E.M.’s best work is ahead of it.

David Ansen has accepted a buyout at Newsweek, one of more than 100 staffers at the newsweekly to do so.* Variety’s Anne Thompson has been surveying the damage:

The current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday’s John Anderson, The Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News’ Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Some have retired and some have been pushed out.

There’s two ways to look at this, of course; on the one hand it seems like a massive shakeout in the critical corps is going to leave a handful of top and ever-more-influential critics at some national or quasi-national outlets, and then an ever-dwindling number of nominally professional practitioners at the local venues that can afford them.

That’s bad, right? Yes and no. From the point of view of newspaper economics, at a time of massive financial contraction, it’s possible that metro dailies, particularly, don’t need film critics. They should instead invest their entertainment budgets covering the things that only they can do: Local theater, the music scenes, the local performing arts. That’s something the paper can provide that no one else can.

The quality of movie coverage in those papers has always been dicey. First of all, there aren’t enough good writers in the universe to produce decent copy for many hundreds of dailies. Even for decent ones, there’s often pressure not to be too mean about crummy but high-profile films. As for features, it get worse: There’s a tradition for, say, weekend entertainment sections, of simply taking whatever the biggest celebrity face that can plausibly be used and splashing it across the cover. For film, that might be a feature on some new film, which nine times out of ten is based on a junket at which the ostensible subject of the article was interviewed in a round-table setting. (Sometimes the actual writing is done by a stringer the paper might use occasionally out of Los Angeles.) Finally, if the paper deigned to take notice of smaller films, you might find details printed in tiny agate type buried in smudged listings.

It’s pretty sad. Why do they keep doing it? The answer to that question is interesting. The paper is basically just looking for filler to slip around the movie ads, a huge income stream for a typical daily. It’s not often commented on, but over the past five or ten years there was a big movement in dailies to split the weekend art sections in two: Friday, the day of the traditional big daily weekend art section, was given over almost entirely to films and DVDs. The rest of the weekend arts coverage was moved up to Thursday.

That gave the paper two chances to sell movie ads. At the same time, many of them were experimenting with selling folks subscriptions from Friday to Sunday. (”You obviously don’t want to get our crummy paper seven days a week; how about just three?”) The Thursday section gave them something to use to try to coax folks up to four days a week.

Now, note that very little of what I’ve been writing about has anything at all to do with readers—what they might like, or what they might find useful. (The alternative press built their own little financial empire partially out of providing readers better film coverage, both in terms of writing about films and also having comprehensive and easier-to-use listings.)

In the newsweeklies, their main job is to supply the studios with one or two film covers a year; since the concern is solely increased newsstand sales, the only consideration is the film’s blockbuster potential, and to promote cover those, folks like Ansen were trotted out to supply breathless behind-the-scenes detail and carefully not let on that the film in question was dreck.

And the punchline to all this is, of course, that for readers, for folks who just want some good writing on film, the internet is a candy store. The real problem is whether the great critics of the future—the Jonathan Rosenbaums of the next generation—will be vulnerable. Right now, it looks like the digital world will provide them many opportunities.

* The economics of Ansen’s departure don’t seem to benefit Newsweek much. He’s three years from retirement; Thompson says he’s staying on for the rest of the year, picking up two years salary, and a sweetened pension, and getting health coverage until he turns 65. If he weren’t leaving, the mag would get two more years of work out of him for the same amount of money—and not have to fatten his pension.

Portfolio.com has an exclusive story detailing another shoe-drop in a slowly coalescing line of music-industry thinking that ISPs should charge customers fees to compensate the labels for their losses to online downloading. That idea has been floating around for a long time, and even has a history; cassette tapes were taxed back in the day to compensate the industry for the scourge of that era, which was known as “home taping.”

The interesting twist this time, which takes it out of the no-go category, is that the fees would be voluntary, and allow those paying it to download all the music they want for free.

The thrust of the Postfolio account is that Warner capo Edward Bronfman has hired a guy named Richard Griffin, who used to run Geffen’s digital operation and who according to the story has a reputation as a “industry critic.” Here’s his money quote:

“Today, it has become purely voluntary to pay for music,” Griffin told Portfolio.com in an exclusive sit-down this week. “If I tell you to go listen to this band, you could pay, or you might not. It’s pretty much up to you. So the music business has become a big tip jar.”

Go ahead and savor those last words for a few seconds. Coming from someone in an industry that has treated its customers like an ATM machine for the last fifty years, it’s a heady concept.

As for particulars, the story says:

Bronfman has asked Griffin, formerly Geffen Music’s digital chief, to develop a model that would create a pool of money from user fees to be distributed to artists and copyright holders. Warner has given Griffin a three-year contract to form a new organization to spearhead the plan.

Later in the story, Griffin says he’ll be forming a company that in the long term will not be owned by Warner to somehow institute the plan. The story includes some critics of the idea, on the predictable grounds. A$5 per month fee is floated, but Griffin says the figure would somehow be negotiated in each country.

To Hitsville, the big problem doesn’t really get addressed. The labels’ chief raisons d’etre—finding artists, developing their careers, manufacturing and marketing their music—have all been shown to be done better by different institutions. The main effect a new cash pool like this—which Griffin speculates might raise as much as $20 billion a year—would have is to prop up an industry no one really wants or needs any more.

In this sense, the plan may be a hail mary pass by a guy leading a company, the Warner Music Group, whose stock price is about a sixth of that it was two years ago, and his buddies, all of whom are in the same sinking boat.
Griffin carefully says the industry has no set $5 a month fee in mind—that was Portfolio’s supposition—but freely uses the $20 billion figure. That’s a little strange; the music industry right now represents only half that, in the U.S. at least, down from about $15 billion in the 1990s. (He may be talking globally.) But if you were running a music company in today’s climate, wouldn’t you love something that would take you back to your revenue levels before the digital tsunami hit?

To which a consumer might respond: Your idea has merit—but how about we institute it without you?

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Should the record industry tax ISPs?

Chuck Philips is the reporter from the Los Angeles Times who was shamed this week when it came out that he had built his latest blockbuster story on forged documents. I’ve been a fan for a long time, since his dogged exposés of music-business nonsense in the late 1990s. When no one else seemed to care, he and his partner at the time, Michael Hiltzik, took on payola in the radio business and rafts of malfeasance at the organization that puts on the Grammys, NARAS.

(Among other things, the pair revealed that the group’s much-touted charitable arm, MusiCares, wasn’t much of a charity)

So it’s been difficult to watch a stalwart suffer through the ongoing debacle. But based on a close reading of what his story actually said and what we’ve learned elsewhere and in the paper’s apology, this debacle may be just getting started.

Philips, a probing and serious reporter, should be given credit for refusing to give up on the many unsolved crimes that have been left in the wake of the Tupac Shakur/Notorious B.I.G. feud.

That said, the L.A. Times apology story issued yesterday, acknowledging the forged documents, leave many unanswered questions. Read over closely, the apology story can be seen to have been carefully, even gingerly worded. We still don’t know many things.

Here are the questions the paper’s promised full investigation will need to address.

1) The Times apologized for using the false documents, which were revealed in a devastating report on the Smoking Gun on Wednesday. But is the paper retracting the story? As of now, it remains up on the site with the apology report above it. The paper did not say if it was standing by the rest of the original report or not.

Many articles on the imbroglio have referred to the story as a retraction. (The NYT hed was “Newspaper Says Article on Rapper Was False” and used the word “retraction” in the body; many others have followed suit), but that’s not how I read it. Indeed, the story carefully says the original report was “partially based” on the forgeries.

2) This creates new problems. As I wrote yesterday, here is the most difficult-to-parse passage in Philips’s story, emphasis added:

The FBI documents do not name the informant. The Times learned his identity and verified that he was at the Quad on the night of the assault. When contacted, the man said the FBI records accurately convey what happened, and what he told investigators.

As we have seen, the documents were forgeries, apparently created by a comically inept con man, James Sabatino, who’s been in jail for the past ten years. They purported to be the views of the “informant” Philips refers to—who (oddly enough, if Sabatino did forge them) points the finger at Sabatino as one of the conspirators of the attack on Tupac Shakur in a New York recording studio in 1994.

Who was the informant, and how did he confirm an account from a forged document?

The possible answers all raise new questions. Stay with me: A) The “informant” could be in on the conspiracy with Sabatino to fool Philips. This seems elaborate, and requires Philips to have been duped multiple ways, but is in keeping with Sabatino’s breathtakingly rococo flim-flamming. B) It’s possible that Sabatino himself was the informant and told Philips so, explaining that the FBI wrote about him in the third person in the forged documents to conceal his identity. C) Philips found the forged documents, identified Sabatino as the informant, and used him as confirmation. But, since Philips apparently found the documents in a court filing Sabatino himself made, this explanation would require a huge naiveté on Philips’ part and a great deal of creative dissembling on Sabatino’s. D) Finally, I suppose it’s remotely possible that the informant did exist and did talk to the FBI, and that Sabatino knew about this, but that he forged the documents because he couldn’t produce them himself—in other words, that they were forgeries of documents that in some variant did existed somewhere. The original Smoking Gun exposé of the Times’ mistake, however, contains assertions that make this unlikely.

In the end, though, none of these seems plausible, given the detail Philips supplies. The informant confirmed the documents. He was at the studio the night of the shooting. Philips verified his identity.

This issue is the one in which the Times and Philips seem the most vulnerable. It’s hard to conceive of an answer to the question “Who was the informant?” that doesn’t increase the paper’s embarrassment.

3) Which brings us to the next question: Was Sabatino, in the end, the main source for the story? Was he in a sense used as a double source, confirming his own, forged, information? Consider this passage:

[Shakur associate Jaques] Agnant and Sabatino helped plan the attack, working out the timing, arranging for the three assailants to be driven to the studio and mapping out their escape route, according to the informant and the other sources. Sabatino informed Combs and Wallace in advance that a trap had been laid for Shakur, the sources said.

Shakur’s friend Randy “Stretch” Walker was in on the plan, the sources said. In the hours before the attack, Shakur and Rosemond argued several times over the phone about how much Shakur would be paid. After the dispute was settled, Walker notified Agnant when Shakur was en route, the sources said.

Around 11:30 p.m., Sabatino effectively locked down the 10th floor, quietly intercepting anyone who tried to leave, the FBI informant and the other sources said.

According to the Smoking Gun story, Sabatino was a marginal, ridiculous figure on the scene who was not even at the studio that night. The one person on the entire planet who seems to consider Sabatino a major player in anything is Sabatino. If, in the end, Sabatino was Philips’s main source for the account, the entire story becomes a little comical. (Try inserting the word “Sabatino” for “sources” and “the other sources” in the emphasized passages above.)

4) The story the LAT originally published goes farther, however: Philips wrote:

Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.

He also said he identified the actual attackers and had contact with two of them:

The three men identified by the sources as Shakur’s assailants are all serving time in federal penitentiaries for unrelated crimes. The Times is withholding their names because they have not been charged.

In correspondence with The Times, one of the men said that Rosemond orchestrated the ambush. Another was cryptic. He wrote that the statute of limitations for the assault had expired, and he offered to produce, for an unspecified fee, the medallion stolen from Shakur.

The third inmate denied involvement in the attack.

Do these corroborations (whose existence are also implicit in the use of the plural in the phrase “the other sources” elsewhere in the story) stand on their own? The reason serious news operations require multiple sources is that it lessens the chances that a particular assertion is false. They are, in effect, insurance. The question is, was the LAT’s insurance good in this case? That, too, the paper needs to make clear to readers.

5) The paper should address the conflicts between what it reported and what TSG contended. For example, in Philips’s story, Sabatino is a rap promoter and close associate of Combs:

Sabatino became a fixture in Combs’ circle. He went on the road with B.I.G. and joined Combs on his 1997 “No Way Out” tour, helping him stage lavish private parties and land corporate sponsorships.

In the TSG story he is a buffoon.

Philips’s story places Sabatino at the studio the night Shakur was killed. TSG, by contrast, includes this withering passage:

[I]n the reams of copy about the 1994 attack, Sabatino’s name has never appeared anywhere. The first time a publication linked him to the Shakur ambush came last week in the Times, thanks to one of the FBI “302s” obtained by the country’s fourth-largest newspaper.

The New York Police Department probe of the Quad Studios incident was headed by Detective Joseph Babnik […]. In an interview, Babnik, now retired, told TSG that Sabatino’s name “does not ring a bell” and that he could not recall anyone with that surname being connected to the Shakur case. Asked if he would have recalled a rotund white teenager being present at Quad Studios that night, Babnik said yes, adding that the only white witnesses he recalled interviewing were employed in technical capacities at the recording studio.

6) Finally, the Times needs to address why basic background research was not done on a major story’s protagonist. How did it miss sharing with readers the true character of Sabatino, a good chunk of whose background could have been ascertained in a rudimentary Google or Lexis search? (Most notably, a lengthy feature on Sabatino’s buffoonish career was published by the Miami New Times in 1999.)

———

For the last five or six years, Chuck Philips has been delving into a story that most journalistic outlets have shunned: the destructive, debilitating, bloody gang war between east and west coast rappers.

It’s amazing seeing Sean Combs being able to play the victim in the wake of the forged documents debacle. He’s now threatening the Times with a libel suit. The last time Combs got involved with the law, one of his entourage, a rapper named Shyne, shot a gun three times in a crowded nightclub, wounding three people. (He shot one woman in the face, and was sporting hollow-point bullets. Nice.)

Combs then took off—he jumped in a car with Jennifer Lopez, flirted with tragedy by running eleven Manhattan red lights at high speed, and was found to have an unregistered gun in his car. He managed to beat the resulting charges, but his buddy Shyne got ten years.

That doesn’t mean Combs conspired to shoot Tupac Shakur, but it does remind us that, while most of the entertainment press focuses on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, there are a few reporters out there who spend long years on the tough story.

What I hope will happen for Philips’s sake is that he can demonstrate that the rest of his sourcing for the story was sound and that the overall thrust of the original investigation was true. He can then take his lumps for getting scammed by Sabatino (and possibly others), ward off any libel threats from Combs and Co., and rebuild his reputation. If he can’t, for Chuck Philips and the Los Angeles Times, the apology will have been only the beginning.

The NYT this a.m. had a story by Michael Cieply about how Paramount needed to step gingerly in its divorce negotiations with Steven Speilberg and David Geffen. Paramount bought the pair’s Dreamworks studio three years ago, and the relationship has been rocky ever since. The story is another in an ongoing case study in how Spielberg gets the best press in Hollywood.

If the pair do leave Paramount, Cieply reports, the process could be painful. Spielberg apparently has a contractual claim to certain personal projects at Dreamworks, which he would accordingly be able to take with him to another studio. The rest would presumably be Paramount’s. But the story seems rather finely attuned to Spielberg’s delicate sensibilities:

If the Paramount and DreamWorks sides don’t soon resolve their rocky relationship, one that has played out messily in the public eye over matters of proper credit and respect, they may have to figure things out project by project, reliving any breakup a hundred times over.In the worst case Paramount could see a big chunk of its development schedule paralyzed and its relationship with its most prized filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg, endangered. To offend him is to risk his saying “I’ll never make another picture at Paramount,” said Roger Smith, the executive editor and a motion picture analyst for Global Media Intelligence, a research company.

Emphasis added. The story also says this:

The DreamWorks side might assert that he, by virtue of his position with DreamWorks, is effectively attached to the entire development pool—more than 100 projects […].

Given the reach of Mr. Spielberg’s contract, attachment to all the projects could let him block Paramount from using them without his consent—enormous leverage in any negotiation over taking the projects elsewhere.

Whether a claim of such broad involvement would survive a legal challenge is an open question. Simply to assert it, however, could put Paramount executives in the unhappy position of having to confront the filmmaker who is arguably the industry’s most powerful.

This report, like much of the commentary surrounding the departure of the Weinstein Brothers from Disney and, more recently, the departure of Bob Shaye of New Line from Warner Brothers, is written in an oddly blindered way.

Spielberg and Geffen sold their studio to Paramount for 1.6 billion dollars (more on that figure in a minute), just as the Weinsteins sold theirs to Disney and Shaye sold his to Warner. When, after a few years, the minimoguls decide they don’t like working for someone else, they always try to make it seem like the big bad studio is crushing the little guy.

I have no love for the studios, but there’s a really simple way to not get into that situation, which is not sell your company in the first place. But Spielberg and Geffen had their eyes on that $1.6 billion. You can’t blame them or the Weinsteins for milking the idea as much as they can, but the stories about these contretemps should forcefully put the matter in context. (”Harvey Weinstein’s $35 million payday from Disney made him a decisively rich man and set him up to make millions more off ever-bigger budgets supplied by the studio. But now he’s learning the downside as he prepares to leave Disney and is confronting the fact that the studio is under the to-him-bizarre misapprehension that it owns Miramax, rather than he…”)

If you don’t include that information, it’s easy to step into the realm of the unreal. Isn’t the idea, for example, that Steven Spielberg could walk off with all of DreamWorks’ current projects slightly far-fetched? Yes, he could “assert” that right, but the fact is, he sold those rights in 2005. Imagine the Times story written this way:

Steven Spielberg’s failed dream of his own studio went several further steps down the road of absurdity this week. He is preparing to leave his DreamWorks, which is now owned by Paramount. His office tried to float the idea that, upon his departure, a “personal project” provision of his contract might encompass all of the DreamWorks studio’s 100-plus films in some form of development.

After 11 years of only intermittent success with DreamWorks, Spielberg and his partner, David Geffen, gave up and sold their company to Paramount for $1.6 billion in 2005. The idea that the director could walk away with the studio’s inventory was greated with hoots at the Paramount offices. “Sure, he can have all those projects,” said one Paramount executive, who asked not to be named because it is company policy not to be quoted ridiculing the talent. “All we need from him is … a check for $1.6 billion dollars!”

That’s closer to what’s going to happen. Spielberg is always being portrayed as a tender button whose fragile self-image is ever in danger of being undermined, when in fact he always elicits special treatment. (Remember too that Spielberg made most of his biggest movies for distributors other than DreamWorks.) The DreamWorks/Paramount feud blew up last fall when Geffen had a public pout because he and Spielberg weren’t being sufficiently appreciated by their Paramount and Viacom bosses. (One said the studio wouldn’t miss Spielberg, financially speaking.) The pair’s third partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who now oversees DreamWorks Animation, a separate company, called Spielberg a “national treasure.”

But it’s possible that in the end, Paramount already overpaid for the company, so Spielberg and Geffen have even less to complain about. DreamWorks wanted to sell itself to NBC Universal, but the deal was scotched when NBC lowered its offer. So the trio ran to Paramount, which paid $1.6 billion and then turned around and sold off the company’s library for $900 million. Since then, DreamWorks has continued to be only intermittently successful; the animated films don’t count, remember, and it had to share profits of its highest-grossing hit, Transformers, with Universal. How this track record entitles the director to walk off with the office equipment as he leaves Paramount’s employ is a mystery.

The Los Angeles Times and star investigative reporter Chuck Philips were the subjects of a humiliating apology from the paper for basing an investigative report on false documents.

The apology is here.

The original Philips story detailed a conspiracy against and attack on rapper Tupac Shakur, who was ambushed in the lobby of a New York recording studio in 1994 and shot five times. Shakur survived, but the assault sparked a rap gang war that ultimately left him and rival rapper the Notorious B.I.G. dead.

The LAT story was partially based on FBI documents the paper now acknowledges were forgeries.

Yesterday, the Smoking Gun web site published a devastating 5000-word refutation of the documents, convincingly detailing not only their falsity but also the strange character behind them, a compulsive con man and rap wannabe who seemed to have spent most of his short adult life in jail for one hare-brained scheme after another.

From the LAT apology story:

“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”

In his statement, [Deputy Managing Editor Marc] Duvoisin added: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

The thrust of the original story was that two New York rap folks set Shakur up that night; the attack was supposed to be a beating, but guns were drawn and shooting resulted. The paper also said that producer Sean “Puffy” Combs knew about the attack in advance. Combs has denied it and is now threatening to sue.

In the wake of this debacle, however, at least four clear questions remain.

In the original story, Philips wrote:

The [now discredited] records—summaries of FBI interviews with the informant conducted in July and December 2002—provide details of how Shakur was lured to the studio and ambushed. Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.

Were those corroborations part of the fraud? Sources telling a reporter what he wanted to hear? Or are they evidence on their own that the thrust of the story was valid?

Question two: Here’s the most troubling passage in the LAT story, and one that was not explained in the apology:

The FBI documents do not name the informant. The Times learned his identity and verified that he was at the Quad on the night of the assault. When contacted, the man said the FBI records accurately convey what happened, and what he told investigators. He and the other sources interviewed for this article discussed the events of Nov. 30, 1994, on condition that their names not be published.

I asked Philips if he still stood behind that assertion in the story; will post his answer if he responds.

Third, what exactly was Sabatino’s real career in the rap world? The Smoking Gun expose is an indelible portrait of an incompetent con man—one with almost a compulsion to scam, but undercut by a comic array of personal qualities that undermine this compulsion, ranging from ADD to what might charitably be described as unclear thinking.

In Philips’ story, he is a “promoter”; there is little hint of the, ah, pungency of his career. Still, it asserted this:

Sabatino became a fixture in Combs’ circle. He went on the road with B.I.G. and joined Combs on his 1997 “No Way Out” tour, helping him stage lavish private parties and land corporate sponsorships.

During the tour, Sabatino used fake credit cards to run up tens of thousands of dollars in charges for hotel suites, limousines and helicopters for the Bad Boy entourage. He was arrested in London and extradited to the U.S. He is serving an 111⁄2-year prison term for wire fraud and racketeering.

The TSG story says only that he was jailed in London for “ripping off the Four Seasons hotel.” Was Sabatino an associate of Combs or not? The LAT apology didn’t address that issue, either.

Which brings up the final and perhaps most problematic issue of the story: How much did Philips rely on Sabatino as an unnamed source? The apology story says he trusted the fake FBI documents because he found them in a court filing. (Unfortunately, it was a Sabatino court filing.)

In the original story, Philips wrote that Sabatino “declined to comment.” But was he a major behind-the-scenes source? Could he be the “informant” himself, confirming the accuracy of the documents he forged? Still to be heard from the Times is whether the remainder of the Philips’ original contentions were sound—or whether the extent to which he relied on Sabatino as a major but unnamed source has compromised the rest of the story.

In Bill Carter’s lengthy NYT story today about Katie Couric’s (and CBS’s) behind-the-scenes game-playing to get the network a debate, there is one voice that is never heard from.

That’s the journo somewhere in CBS News saying, “Great Jesus Christ; it has come to the point where we’re going around begging to host a debate? A primary debate?!?”

CBS News, of course, was a fairly significant new operation, several decades ago. (The idea that broadcast news organizations are in the same league with the top-level print leviathans is quaint, but most people feel it was a serious outfit.) What happened next is complicated, but basically, the rise of cable news changed the world, MTV bought it, and then the world changed again.

As cost-cutting and collapsing internal standards took their toll, its evening news program drifted. The network’s response was to take a soft news celebrity face and try to skate for a few more years on fluff. That hasn’t worked so well: Its nightly news ratings are generally about 75 percent of those of NBC. By all accounts Couric’s enormous salary sucks cash out of the newsroom, and since the network doesn’t have a cable network its back-of-the-broadcast costs are going to remain high.

The coverage the broadcast news organizations get in the journalism world far outstrips their importance. “Eight million viewers–that’s a lot,” someone will say, roughly, of NBC’s (or ABC’s) nightly viewers. I hate to play the “seniors don’t count” card, but actual viewership in the 25 to 54 demographic is less than a third of that for all the networks, and I think there aren’t too many folks under 25 tuning in to see Couric.

For reasons I’ve written about before, I don’t take Couric seriously as a newsperson, and apparently few others do as well. Now the network is so desperate that we’re seeing new erosions of standards. The spectacle of the person who sits in a nightly broadcasts news anchor seat so desperate for ratings that she personally calls the campaigns of political figures and twists arms to get a debate–as the Times detailed–is something out of a Paddy Chayefsky script.

Beyond that, in the event, what possible argument can she make? “I’ll be nice to you?” “I’ll be mean to the other guy?” “I’ll be nice to you if you’re president?” “CBS News will remember this?” Is there a single thing Couric could say that wouldn’t on its face compromise her objectivity and that of her network? It’s the equivalent of calling up Obama and asking him to make an appearance at her daughter’s birthday party. There’s nothing in it for him at all; but how could he refuse?

The Smoking Gun has posted a story saying the LA Times was “hoaxed” in its blockbuster Tupac story last week.

That feature, which the LAT now says was the largest hit-getter it has ever posted online, detailed the background of a 1994 New York assault in which rapper Tupac Shakur was shot five times. The Times story named the men behind the shooting and spoke, anonymously, to the folks who the paper said did it.

The paper said the attack was supposed to have merely been a beating, but matters escalated once guns were drawn. Most damningly, the paper said rapper and impresario Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, who was the Notorious B.I.G.’s producer, knew in advance that the attack was going to happen.

The Smoking Gun story begins like this:

Last week’s bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.

It continues:

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

Emphases added. The piece, heavily reported and fully 5000 words long, zeroes in on two elements that could turn out to be embarrassing for the LAT and its star reporter, Chuck Philips.

(The Times itself just posted a story saying it would make an internal investigation of the documents’ authenticity.)

For the first, TSG got its hands on the FBI records the Times used to undergird its assertion that a confidential informant told the bureau a) that Tupac had been set up and b) who did it. (The LAT even posted copies of them online.) The paper said the two behind the attack were a manager named James Rosemond and another man, James Sabatino, whom the paper described as a “promoter.”

TSG, however, contends that the records were forgeries—and crude ones at that, created by Sabatino, from jail (!). The site, in what seems to a devastating debunking of the evidence, said the documents aren’t in the FBI file systems; that they appear to have been generated from a typewriter, rather than a computer (the site says there are strikeovers, for example); that there are many typographical errors and misspellings; that they use acronyms the FBI doesn’t use; and that the typing matches other legal submissions from Sabatino behind bars.

Secondly, there is the issue of Sabatino himself, who is not quoted in the LAT story but is said to have been one of the two masterminds of the attack. The rest of the TSG story details the insane history of Sabatino, a white kid who appears to have been a compulsive scam artist, a rap mogul wannabe and, possibly, mentally deranged. (For unclear reasons, he began sending death threats to Bill Clinton and other officials while in a British prison, for example.)

Sabatino’s methods are so crude, and has spent so much time behind bars, that it can charitably be said that he seems an unlikely protagonist in a story whose other principals include Shakur, Puffy, Biggie and Suge Knight. For example, Philips wrote:

[Jaques] Agnant and Sabatino helped plan the attack, working out the timing, arranging for the three assailants to be driven to the studio and mapping out their escape route, according to the informant and the other sources. Sabatino informed Combs and Wallace in advance that a trap had been laid for Shakur, the sources said.

Still to be seen is whether the story wipes out the assertions of the Times story entirely. Philips in his original opus wrote: “Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.”

But read closer and things become murkier. If the TSG is correct, Sabatino concocted the documents and there is no “informant.” But Philips wrote:

The FBI documents do not name the informant. The Times learned his identity and verified that he was at the Quad on the night of the assault. When contacted, the man said the FBI records accurately convey what happened, and what he told investigators. He and the other sources interviewed for this article discussed the events of Nov. 30, 1994, on condition that their names not be published.

Their accounts are consistent with Shakur’s own. In interviews and on recordings, the rapper blamed Rosemond, Combs and their associates for the attack and promised to get even.

Did Sabatino line up a fake informant for Philips as well? If nothing else, Philips did not delve deeply enough into Sabatino’s background; a small fraction of the TSG material would have ofered a much different portrait of the alleged conspirator. For example, Philips wrote:

Shakur also became acquainted with Sabatino, a 19-year-old Italian American who co-promoted rap conventions with Rosemond. Sabatino had Brooklyn roots of a different kind that gave him cachet in the hip-hop world: His father was a captain in the Colombo crime family, according to federal authorities.

TSG said the elder Sabatino was not known to Mafia investigators, and that he was instead the manager of a Florida restaurant.

Lots and lots to mull on here. Lifehacker got a note from a reader who said she’d been torrenting movies. She wrote:

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail from Cablevision (my ISP) saying that Paramount/Dreamworks had filed a complaint with them regarding my illegal download of one of their films.

The letter states that I am not being sued and my service is not being disconnected at this point but that Paramount/Dreamworks has the right to pursue legal action against me and Cablevision was warning me of that.

The site asks for similar stories and advice for the poor thing, and gets a flood. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake, but there’s a lot of seemingly sincere testimony that points out the grey areas going on ouside the press, and the courtrooms, as this orthographically creative comment suggests:

Happened to me a WHILE back with Cox. They tol me to delete the data and to not continue downloading copywriten materials. Then they told me to call them when I had done so. No biggy. They aren;t as bad as the RIA.

As you might know, the R&B star R. Kelly is supposed to go on trial in Chicago on child-sex charges in May, more than five years after a videotape came to light of a figure the police say is the singer performing various sex acts with and on an under-aged girl.

Five years! It’s been so long that, these days, papers write about Kelly all the time and barely mention his legal problems.

Hitsville, as a public service, is bringing them and you up to date on what exactly R. Kelly did and has done that got him in the pickle he is in today. Last week, we detailed some of the singer’s greatest hits—”hits,” that is, in the sexual predator sense of the term.

This week, the story continues, from the poignant to the positively sickening. Last week, we got up to “Accusation #5.” Let’s continue!

In 1994, Kelly married a 15-year old girl. Married! Her name was Aaliyah Haughton; she was a singer and a protege of Kelly’s with whom, associates have said, he was having an affair. Without telling her what was going on, Kelly arranged an impromptu wedding at a suburban Chicago hotel and then swept her toward a plane. Fortunately, the girl called her parents. They came and got her and, articles have said, the pair never saw each other again. Accusation #6.

As rumors surfaced about the union, Kelly lied about it. But then Vibe magazine found a marriage certificate, on which Haughton’s age was listed as 18. The union was annulled a short time later. (Over the next six years or so Haughton, under the stage name Aaliyah, became a fairly big star before dying in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2001.)

When the one girl tried to sue Kelly in Chicago, he filed a pre-emptive $30,000 suit against her, charging her with trying to blackmail him. He hired high-powered NY publicist Dan Klores—and got mentions of his lawsuit in several large papers, while the girl’s suit went unpublicized! Seems like the papers missed a big story: Reported the Chicago Sun-Times, several years later:

“Many celebrities are constantly being harassed and sued, and more often than not, they decide to settle,” a Kelly spokesman working with Klores told the Daily News in 1996. “Kelly has decided, ‘No way.’”

But sources said that Kelly reconsidered that hard-line position and settled with [the girl] on January 23, 1998, just four days after she gave a seven-hour deposition. The sources said that Kelly’s attorneys were shocked by what they heard in the session, and that Kelly quickly ended the case by paying Hawkins a quarter of a million dollars.

In 1998, Kelly picked up a 16-year-old girl at the so-called “Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonalds” in Chicago, just north of the Loop. They had an affair that lasted until she told him she was pregnant, GQ reported; one of Kelly’s associates drove her to the abortion clinic. Accusation # 7.

Kelly grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The profile of Kelly in GQ magazine says that “family members and early associates” said that Kelly had been abused by an older neighborhood man as a child.

They also said he had tried to commit suicide as a youth, but covered up the story of the resulting bullet wound by saying some kids who had been trying to steal his bike shot him.

Associates of Kelly have said as well that he can barely read or do basic math; he later confessed in a Vibe magazine story to being illiterate.

According to GQ, Kelly is estranged from his siblings and didn’t take care of his mother, who drove a beat-up car and could not pay her medical bills. After she died of cancer in 1997, Kelly declared that he had “found the lord”!

After the original Sun-Times story that revealed his pattern of preying on young girls, Kelly kept getting into trouble! The Chicago lawyer who handled the first four legal cases against Kelly represented at least one other victim as well. Accusation #8!

GQ also reported that Kelly’s personal hygiene left a lot to be desired; he could wear the same clothes for a week, the story said. Said one of his former assistants: “I could never understand the women. I’d be like, ‘How could you be with him when he stink like that?’” Smelly Kelly!

The videotape that really got Kelly into trouble was described as “well lit” and “crystal clear” by those who have seen it. Originally, his contention was that it was not he in the video; that’s what he told the interviewers in a cozy chat on BET in 2002. More recently, his lawyer has said his contention will be that the woman on the tape wasn’t underage.

Hey, isn’t this all part of the glamorous world of the modern pop star? Is Hitsville being prudish? A British magazine seems to have been the only publication to have asked Jim DeRogatis, the reporter who broke the R. Kelly story originally, about what the tape was like. DeRogatis said:

“[T]his is not Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson. It’s not fun and games. This girl has the disembodied look of a rape victim and he’s urinating in her mouth. It’s a sickening spectacle.”

In another interview, Kelly said:

“I’m not who these people are talking about. I’m not a criminal. I think I’m the only one that can understand how [Osama] bin Laden feels […] being someone that’s hunted down or being someone that’s constantly made to look like the devil himself.”

. . .

Last week’s R. Kelly SexFacts™ are here.

More R. Kelly SexFacts™ are coming soon! Remember, kids—“R. Kelly SexFacts”™ are based entirely on reporting in reputable publications!

“World Tour ‘88″
YOUNG FRESH FELLOWS
from Totally Lost

Younger readers will want to know that, for a time, the shambling, transcendent Young Fresh Fellows had a decent following; their obscure but plainly beloved power-pop, driven by Scott McCaughey’s insanely memorable songs and one of the sharpest drummers in the business, snapped heads live and made a lot of fans. (One of the group’s claims to fame was being asked to play at Paul Westerberg’s wedding.)

The provenance of “World Tour ‘88,” a mock history of the band and one of the funniest tracks I’ve ever heard, is a bit muddled. It was a “bonus track,” back in the day, that was either not on the CD but on the vinyl edition of “Totally Lost,” or on the CD but not the vinyl. I forget.

Many years ago, interviewing head Fellow Scott McCaughey, I complimented him on the song’s in-jokes. He said thanks, but that he hadn’t actually written it. As I recall, I think he was the credited songwriter, and like I said the song is about the band; confused and backpedaling, I said, Well, it’s certainly sung with a lot of spot-on deadpan humor. He said he hadn’t sung it, either. This comedy went on for a while before he said a friend of the band’s had written and recorded the thing solo, for the group, and that rather than re-record it they just added it one of the editions of their next album.

As I recall, it was done by a brother or a cousin of one of the band members; this Fellows fan site says it’s Mike Ritt.

So now when you listen to it, you can hear that it was probably done in a home studio, with a simple drum machine and a few instruments and sound effects layered on. That just makes the joke funnier.

There’s a million “rise and fall of a rock ‘n’ roll band” songs; this one imagines the Fellows as superstars, wined and dined and playing Japan. Part of the joke here comes from the time; in the late 1980s, the “college rock” era, selling out and going large was a big issue—for a while it was about the only thing Westerberg wrote about. It was hilarious even to consider the Fellows playing Budokan, and a little bit of a tweak to suggest that if the Fellows did get huge that they’d be just as foolish about it as any hair band.

(This was all before Nirvana, of course, when a lot of things folks thought would never happen … happened.)

Anyway, music politics aside, the song is distinguished by the vocals: the singer, ruefully, can see what’s going on, but he’s helpless to stop it. He can only marvel at the steamroller:

Well the royalties get spent up quick
‘Cause we buy stuff for our friends
And Bruno wanted some Sennheiser mikes
So Joey Roth from A&R
Picks up our tab at the bar
Our label treats us nice and says we’re great
World tour ‘88

“World Tour ‘88″ peppers this “Behind the Music” melodrama with YFF arcana and music industry in-jokes. They’re all having a lot of fun, but listen closely and you see it’s all coming out of the band’s advance. There’s an electric wash of a crowd noise, an emcee shouting “All right, Tokyo!” and a dorky guitar fanfare, but what you come away with is that sorrowful inevitability. The song ends with a statement of paralyzed wonder that captures stardom as well as anyone has:

Somehow I still feel pretty much the same
And we never really asked for all this fame
But it’s pretty cool what’s happened as of late
World tour ‘88

——

Last week’s “Song about rock.”

The complete “Songs about rock.”

Does it bug you when a certain band puts out a certain CD, and all the press about it keeps hammering on a specific point… and then the band’s next record comes out, and all the press and PR hammers home a precisely opposite one? Generally, it’s a variant of “It’s a return to the band in top rock ‘n’ roll form!”

How many times have I heard, “We wanted to put out a U2 record that didn’t sound like a U2 record” or somesuch, followed two years later with “We really felt like the fans deserved a U2 record”?

It happens for three reasons. One, readers and fans seem to like it—it makes for easily digestible data that can be readily repeated in social situations, and it doesn’t require any pesky critical thinking. Two, it’s part of the PR strategy the band and its handlers had cooked up for that particular CD/tour/live DVD promotional endeavor.

The third reason is the complicity of the press, which gets forgotten sometimes. Consider Michael Stipe in an interview on Pitchfork. He’s talking about precisely this issue; for R.E.M., in 2008, it involves Around the Sun, the group’s last album, which wasn’t considered successful, in the context of the new one, Accelerate, which from the title to the first, riff-laden single, is designed to show off an R.E.M. in, er, top rock ’n’ roll form. (See also Green [1988] and Monster [1994].)

Stipe and Pitchfork then go on at length to discuss how and why this all happens, in their usual intelligent fashion, which at once manages to play into these patterns and put them in context:

Pitchfork: A lot of people have remarked on the punchiness and conciseness of the album. Is that a reaction to Around the Sun?

[Michael Stipe]: You’re going to read that over and over again, and we freely admit that we lost focus on the last record. But we also say, and people tend to downplay this part, I really like the material on that record. I think the songs are great. It’s just the way we approached them in the studio that really I don’t think made them shine as much as they might have. And whatever steps we’ve taken, I’m not going to badmouth any of the work that we’ve done, but I’m also not deluded about it. It’s not as much of a reaction as reporters who we’ve sat at a table face to face with… Everyone comes into an interview situation with their own story and their own idea and then they cherrypick the comments that help create their argument. And so I think for the band members it’s not as much a reaction to the last record as you might read. It’s simply that we all realize that we had lost focus, and we did the most obvious thing, which is to write really fast songs that are really in your face and kind of raw.

Pitchfork: That whole “reaction” line seems to be an easy story to sell.

MS: Yeah, it’s a fine story. It’s not exactly accurate, is what I’m saying.

Except .. it is.

It’s common to hear the Apple iTunes music store described as a “loss leader” for the company; that’s an image Steve Jobs has encouraged, as well. Billboard recently crunched the numbers and discovered, as you might expect, that that’s not the full story. (I can’t give you a link because the magazine’s incomprehensible web site can’t find it for me.)

Ed Christman, the Billboard’s retail columnist, figures Apple sold 1.7 billion tracks last year out of the store, which makes for about $1.9B in revenue, taking into account slightly higher prices overseas. Apple turns over 70 percent of that to the music companies, leaving $570M for the company.

Apple doesn’t break down its figures for Christman as to marketing and technical expenses; so he looks at how Amazon works and concludes the company spends about $180M a year on such things, meaning that Apple might make about $390M profit on the iTunes operation, before depreciation, amortization or taxes.

Four hundred million dollars in profit would be a lot of any company, including Apple—until last year, when its profits rocketed up (65 percent and more, in some quarters, to more than $4B for the year) and its stock price doubled.

Still, in the end it seems that the iTunes store represents about 10 percent of the company’s profit. That’s not decisive, but it’s not chump change, either. And the nature of digital sales is such that, as the stores sales grow, Apple’s profit margin will grow as well.

It could perhaps just be the sites I browse, but I keep hitting odd discussions of a recent Ween song, “Your Party.” The band is two guys, who call themselves Gene and Dean Ween; like the Beasties, the creators of “South Park,” Beck and a few other people, they traffic in fairly high-level pop-culture jokestering, combining an ability to approximate all sorts of genres and a deadpan delivery. In Ween’s case this is all leavened with a rather more druggy aesthetic than the others, and sometimes it’s not-all-that high level. But the band’s opaque humor remains sharp.

“Your Party” is definitely a joke song, but it’s hard to tell how or why it is. It’s basically a recorded formal thank-you note. (”We had a good time at your party/ The wife and I thank you very much,” runs the chorus.) The music is lulling, the beat is restrained; there’s a tasteful smooth jazz essence in the instrumentation and arrangements, and, curiously, in the lyrics as well:

There were beverages laid out for the party
There were candy and spices and tricolored pastas
The meat carved was drawn from succulent juices

The vocals have more than a touch of this grandiose formality to them. The song concludes:

Later on when we were under the covers
I closed my eyes, then I drifted to sleep
I dreamed about me maybe throwing a party
And just how great that would be

And to top it all off there’s a groovin’ sax solo—by Danvid Sanborn—lacing the entire song.

But … there’s something about the song that sticks in your head. One blogger had this to say about it:

I’ve been made aware of [Ween’s] new single “Your Party” off La Cucaracha while listening to [the radio show] Left of Center on Sirius. I sat through it in its entirety one time, which was plenty. Now, every time it comes on I change the station as quickly as I can. It’s a schmaltzy, seemingly endless, retro slow-jam about a (very boring) party played without a hint of irony. Typical Ween, except for the fact that it’s not the least bit funny, amusing, or even slightly catchy. I abhor this song. And, apparently, I am not alone. One of the LOC DJ’s, Jenny Eliscu, was talking last weekend about how the station has been barraged with hate mail aimed at “Your Party”, yet they still continue to play it because of all the “Ween fans out there.”

That produced the predictable backlash, including:

Really? You don’t see the irony? Let me guess…you’re still single and bar-hopping your way through your late 30’s. Do you still dress like a bike messenger? Pull your pants up, you dorky hipster.

And:

When I hear that “Your Party” song, I shed a tear and mourn the death of once-great station (LOC). It bothered me so much the other day that I had to take off my rectangular glasses and massage my temples to ease the pain.

Is this what the world’s come to? I can’t enjoy the serene, majestic overtures of the Arcade Fire without being subjected to this tripe? ‘Tis a sad day.

And:

Oh dear!!! My Left of Center has been polluted by a Joking Rock song!!! I DARE SAY!!! I must dispatch a missive post haste to the music punditry at Slate to alert them to this vexatious rumpus!!!

More here.

You can probably find a download of the song here. Video of the band sans Sanborn here.

Music consumers, the record industry wants you to know that this is going to hurt them more than it’s going to hurt you! If the Recording Industry Association of America sues you, it’s … for your own good.

“This is a form of tough love,” said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA in Washington, which is made up of the biggest music industry labels.

That comes from a column up at Marketwatch by Therese Poletti. I looked it up and find it comes from an interview Cnet did with Lamy last year.

Lamy is talking about the tens of thousands of lawsuits the industry group has filed against online file-sharers. Hitsville’s position is that, while sharing music that way is unquestionably wrong, the RIAA’s tactics are counterproductive and useless in any case, given the nature of the new digital world.

Why the industry persists in this initiative, however, is also tied to the nature of the new digital world. There is nothing else it can do. It’s hard to see a model of the future that has a meaningful role for the record companies, as they are configured today. What the RIAA calls “tough love” from this vantage point seems more like the thrashings about of a wolverine with its leg caught in a trap.

Or if you want a more culturally evocative metaphor, check out Poletti’s column:

As any fan of “The Sopranos” knows, the mob often takes out its enemies in a gruesome fashion as a way to warn others to fall in line.

The same can be said of the campaign over the past four years instigated by the dreaded Recording Industry Association of America, more commonly known as the RIAA, which has been on a mission to stop or slow down the practice of illegal music downloading online.

Their special target, as most people know, has been college students, with some seeing their very education come under threat for what used to be a time-honored tradition — copying their friends’ music.

[…]

Much like the New York mob family in “The Sopranos,” the RIAA is trying to send a blunt message—that downloading free music using peer-to-peer networks could cost them dearly.

I don’t condone music piracy, but the RIAA’s tactics are nearly as bad as the actions of mobsters, real or fictional.

Her whole column, here, is worth reading. I think though she doesn’t take her analogy far enough. The RIAA says kids are stealing from artists, but of course the music labels are well known for screwing their artists in many different ways, most notably by not paying the royalties they are supposed to. That’s why the group is using Soprano tactics: Stealing from artists is their turf.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said yesterday it would distribute one of its most popular shows on the BitTorrent networks, Cnet says:

On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year’s broadcast of Canada’s “Next Great Prime Minister.” This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.

Slashdot discusses the issue here.*

TV show they’re talking about is a reality affair where kids apparently offer solutions to the country’s problems. “DRM” is digital rights management, which restricts the ways consumers can use media they buy; “p2p” stands for “peer-to-peer,” which just describes programs that feed digital files between users.

So basically it means that the CBC is going to be throwing one of its shows up on the internet for people to download for free, without restrictions.

This development is a small but potential chink-in-the-wall story. Here’s why. In the file-sharing networks— the users of which the RIAA has been assaulting with tens of thousands of lawsuits—the technology is, in internet terms, slightly antique at this point.

Joe has a copy of Rihanna’s song “Umbrella,” Sarah does a search of the networks, finds the song, clicks on the song title—and a copy of the file is dutifully streamed into her computer at a speed that can range from the fast to the positively pokey.

Which is fine for a relatively small music file. BitTorrent, a protocol adopted by many sophisticated users but barely used at all by quote-unquote normal folks, is often described as “file-sharing on steroids.” It’s a powerful tool in transferring large files—like video. By tracking copies of the same files across many different computers, it “torrents” different pieces from different users into your computer in a rush.

Indeed, it can be dizzyingly fast. Folks aren’t transferring songs on the torrents; they are transferring whole albums, whole discographies, TV shows, entire seasons of TV shows, films, and HD films.

So anyway, my point is this: Any development that introduces more folks to torrenting, the worse it’s going to be for the media industries. “Come for the high-minded Canadian Public Broadcasting shows; stay for the pirated high-quality copy of the upcoming summer blockbuster!”

—-

* You gotta love Slashdot: In the comments section about this story, there is first an extended mind-numbing discussion about internet providers throttling BitTorrent downloads (“If by “locked”, you mean you need to pay an ETF to get out, you’re not really stuck. They’re required by law to offer wholesale service, assuming you’re hooked up to an ADSL or ADSL2+ DSLAM”). Then the discussion goes off into U.S./Canada pros and cons, as evidenced by Niagara Falls and, um, other things. (“Americans have the right to bear arms. Canadian women have the right to bear breasts.”)

The New York Observer says the NY Times is looking for a replacement for the critic, who is leaving for the New Yorker. The candidates:

According to several sources with knowledge of the situation, the paper has already been in contact with at least two people: Jon Caramanica, a Brooklyn native and Harvard graduate who is the music editor at Vibe (a position that he’s leaving later this week, a source said); and Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, who wrote the cover story on country singer Taylor Swift for the current issue of Blender.

R. Kelly is supposed to go on trial in Chicago on child-sex charges in May, more than five years after a videotape came to light of a figure the police say is the singer performing various sex acts with and on an under-aged girl.

Hitsville, like other commentators, has focused on the big picture: Kelly’s basically been caught red-handed three times having sex with under-aged kids!

But everyone knows all that! In the last exciting weeks before Kelly may finally come to trial, Hitsville is planning to present ongoing installments of R. Kelly SexFacts™, which will fill in interested readers with some of the behind-the-scenes tidits that make this story so compelling and, truth be told, more than a little barfy.Let’s get started!

The R. Kelly case started when Jim DeRogatis, the pop critic at the Chicago Sun-Times,* and Abdon M. Pallasch, the paper’s legal reporter, wrote a 3000-word story detailing the Chicago star’s penchant for young girls. It was published way back in December 2000—the day before a sold-out Christmas concert by the singer at the city’s United Center!

The story detailed the first sex suit against Kelly, including the $250,000 out-of-court settlement that resulted. The pair also talked with a woman who said she’d had sex with Kelly as a 15-year-old, and even had sex with him and another girl. According to the story, Kelly met the girls by hanging out with the choir at his old high school, the scamp! Accusations #s 1 and 2!

A year later, DeRogatis received a phone call telling him to check his mailbox. In it was a videotape showing Kelly having sex with a young girl. The girl’s aunt identified her, and Kelly. In the tape, the singer called her by her first name; she called him “Daddy.” Accusation #3.

After the tapes came to light, Kelly’s lawyer said this: “The fact is there is no tape of R. Kelly having sex. There have been reports in the media of different tapes, and none of them agrees with the other. If someone does say there is a tape out there, those claims are false—absolutely false.”

The lawyer hired San Francisco investigator Jack Palladino to find out who might be trying to smear Kelly’s name by, presumably, making and releasing a fake videotape!

The Chicago Tribune weighed in, too! Kelly was sued for an “indecent sexual relationship” in 2000 and 2001 with an Epic records intern, who was 17 at the time, the paper reported. (The story named the woman and quoted her attorney.) Kelly settled the matter out of court! Accusation #4.

According to the same story, the same lawyer settled a similar lawsuit that charged Kelly with having sex with yet another girl when she was a minor. (She was named as well.) Accusation #5.

A few months later, the original girl’s aunt, an R&B singer named Stephanie Edwards, who records under the name Sparkle and was once Kelly’s protege, confirmed in an LA radio interview that the girl in the video was her niece, who was 14 at the time—and 12 when she met Kelly!

After the interview, the station’s program director said the station’s programmers were debating whether they should stop playing Kelly’s music.

That was all five years ago. The judge in the case noted last week he had held 112 hearings on the case thus far!

. . .

More R. Kelly SexFacts™ are coming soon!

* DeRogatis is an old friend of mine, but I haven’t talked to him about any of this, incidentally. “R. Kelly SexFacts”™ are based entirely on reporting in reputable publications!

London’s Financial Times is reporting that Apple and the record companies have something new to fight about: How much Apple would have to pay per iPod or iPhone to give users unlimited access to virtually the entire iTunes store music library.

This is a variation on the “subscription model,” like Rhapsody and other services, where folks can listen to as much music as they want—as long as they keep paying a monthly fee. When the fees stop, so does the music.

In the Apple version, the FT says, that cost would be incorporated into the cost of the device, and would last as long as the device did. The hitch: Nokia, the Finnish phone company, is trying to cut a similar deal with the music industry, and offering $80 per unit.

Steve Jobs is holding the line at $20, the FT says, citing as sources two executives.