String Cheese Incidents: Cops swoop on fans

Midway between "heavy-handedness" and "shooting fish in a barrel", police targetted two Vail dates on String Cheese Incident's farewell tour, swooping up about ten drug arrests each time.

The band have chosen to distance themselves from the fans on this one:

“The String Cheese Incident does not and never has condoned any kind of illegal behavior,” said Carrie Lombardi with Madison House Publicity in Boulder. The company handles publicity for String Cheese Incident.

“The band is not responsible for fans’ behavior,” she said. “They’ve been together for 15 years without much incident, and these things are the irresponsible behavior of the few that the media always pays attention to.”

So, that's fifteen year without "much incident" - she doesn't say if there's ever been much String Cheese. It would have been nice for the band to have said something that sounded a little less like a disappointed headmaster, especially since the media has generated a response like this, from the Daily Sentinel:

String Cheese Incident was formed in 1993 in Boulder. Described as a jam band, String Cheese Incident has been compared to the Grateful Dead, because both bands toured much of the time with fans who followed them. Drug use by fans during Grateful Dead concerts has been documented.

Nice - people say this band sound like a band whose fans used drugs, ergo, the targeting of their fans is a sane response. Rather than allowing their publicist to aid this sort of media froth, shouldn't the band offer something more of a stand?

What the RIAA have done for the world

The RIAA's heavy-handed legal activities - sending letters demanding large sums of cash under the threat of being taken to court, and having to pay much more - has been pulling in a nice pile of cash for the record labels. It almost looks so easy, it could be a scam.

Indeed, it is a scam - but at least the RIAA do have some sort of moral point they're trying to make, however wrong it may be, and however nastily they're going about it.

In their wake, however, there are now scammers using the same method purely to make some ill-gotten gains. P2P users get a legal-looking letter claiming they've downloaded an illegal copy of some game, an offer to settle out-of-court and a load of bumpf which seems to suggest they might have unwittingly done something wrong. People pay up.

After all, people who've never downloaded music pay up to the RIAA as it's the line of least resistance.

Well done, RIAA: You've created a whole new type of crime.

Fall Out Boy: Thanks for the money

It was spotted first by Dictionary Girl, a blogger on the Suicide Girls network (no, we really do only read it for the articles): Fall Out Boy's video for Thanks For The Memories is little more than a sold-out, soulless advertising hoarding. At least the opening caption has the good grace to mention the sponsorship tie-up with TAG (a can of spray with which young American boy virgins attempt to attract females, kind of akin to Lynx), but the repeated shots of Nokia brand mobile phones - that's Nokia - are either paid, undeclared endorsements, or else a startling coincidence. The pointless scene which makes much of a Ford Tahoe also reeks of being funded by a marketing department.

We live in a capitalist society, and advertising is everywhere. But when your video is made according to rules laid down by men in suits, and you're too busy pocketing the cash to even acknowledge that you've been bought, that makes you worse than Fay Weldon. At least she admitted how cheaply her art could be bought.

Eyes and ears

Talking of Conor Oberst, the young man with most eyelike eyes in the music industry is currently streaming his new album, Cassadaga, from the Saddle Creek records website. There's also a couple of free MP3 downloads, and if you get the right keystroke combination, video of a naked Conor Oberst, lashed to a waterwheel, being pawed at by a gang of scrawny androgynous young peoples.

We may have just dreamed one of those parts.

Wuss watch

From one set of awards to another... Cracked have totted up some sort of voting system to name the nine greatest wusses in rock today. In full:

Billy Corgan and James Iha
Chris Cornell
Moby
Belle And Sebastian
Voxtrot
Conor Oberst
Sufjan Stevens
Brandon Flowers
Panic! At The Disco

We're not sure that including Belle & Sebastian is fair, really - they've always been sensitive and haven't ever pretended to be "raaaaaawwwk", whereas nailing Corgan and Flowers for thinking that not shaving for a couple of days is on a par with fighting, bare-knuckle, in the car park round the back of The Goat And Compass is a bit nearer the mark. But what sort of list is this, without a My Chemical Romance in sight?

We are the world

We really wish Radio 3 would come up with a better name for their world music awards than the World Music Awards, but they haven't. And probably won't. This year's winners have been announced:

Africa: Mahmoud Ahmed
Asia/Pacific: Debashish Bhattacharya
Americas: Gogol Bordello
Europe: Camille
Mid East & North America: Ghada Shbeir
Newcomer: K'Naan
Cross-cultural: Medioni & Rodriguez
Club Global Award: Gotan Project
Album of the Year: Ali Farka Toure - Savane

It's quite an honour to be the best album out of all the albums on the planet.

We can't help but wonder if Fonseca is feeling a little bit robbed at having missed out on the Americas prize to the Bordellos.

Stones cool on global warming

The Rolling Stones have denied they're going to be top of the bill at Al Gore's London global warming gig, as they'd have to cancel their Rome date to be there.

And The Stones never cancel tour dates. Unless, you know, one of them falls out a tree, or something. Or goes into rehab. Or if it makes fiscal sense to relocate an entire leg of the tour into a different tax year. Or if everyone will be at home watching one of those history-sized gigs like Live Aid on their telly that night.

Hang on... we might have a winner...

Stipe plans to park tanks on Bono's lawn

Okay, we know Sir Bono of Bono is 73% Dutch these days, but even so, it's curious that REM have picked Dublin Olympia ("in the shadow of the U2 tower, like everything else in Dublin") for a residency honing down material for the next album. They'll play every night between June 30th and July 5th, except for the 2nd.

Expanding fringe

T on The Park's Edinburgh festival spin-off T On The Fringe has announced that Johnny Borrell and the Razorlights will join the Foo Fighters and Kaiser Chiefs topping off nights in the capital this August.

Taking the Mika

They say revenge is a dish best served cold - but then they also say that you shouldn't take your vest off before the end of May and that would just make you stink. Mika, though, is up for a spot of revenge, having once been knocked back by Simon Cowell:

"I had a meeting with Simon a few years back. He said my songs weren't very good and I wasn't a songwriter.

"Then I spotted a gold disc for the Teletubbies single to the left of him and thought, 'This is possibly not the man for me'."

Some might say the bright, empty Teletubbies song isn't a million miles from Grace Kelly - and if we remember correctly, wasn't the official response to the huge "Is Tinky-Winky gay" story a refusal to even countenance talking about the Teletubbies' sexuality?

Diddy flees from wannabe Daddy

We always knew that Sean Combs was all puff and no balls. Does any man in 2007 really get so thrown by having a bloke hit on him that he