Lil Wayne lil' better than TMZ claimed

Last night, TMZ was writing Lil Wayne off, finger hovering above the button to post the prepared obituary:

Wayne's mother is currently on a plane flying to Los Angeles -- and we're told all major decisions about Wayne's health (including the decision to discontinue life support) will not be made until she arrives.

What TMZ have quietly, and shamelessly, dropped from their story is their claim that Wayne had received the last rites. Because it simply wasn't true.

You'd think TMZ, of all people, would know that you can't do something like that without people noticing - they might have taken down the fact-that-wasn't, but all the gossip sites that leach off them had already copied the story and written 'TMZ say Wayne getting last rites' into the permanent record. And a gazillion tweets also caught the error:

BREAKING: TMZ reports that rapper Lil Wayne is in critical condition and has been read his last rites. wp.me/p2OIU3-7bj

— FOX17 (@FOX17) March 16, 2013

The reaction to TMZ's early dispatch on Lil'Wayne's final dispatch hasn't been warm, it's fair to say. The Huffington Post captured TI's response:

That shit surely got his mama hurtin,his kids hurtin,& he got true to da game patnas like me & Othas who ready to RIDE bout all da fuck shit

Which, funnily enough, is exactly the same thing Leveson said in his report in the section on the Express' coverage of The McCanns.

To be fair to TMZ, their crack team has realised that something is odd about the whole story:

Wayne is sleeping right now ... which is odd, because he just tweeted saying he's OK and thanking people for the prayers and love.

Yes, the attempt to try and pretend it hadn't killed him off is being built around an attempt to make something out of the idea that someone might be tweeting from his account.

You know what, TMZ - the really astonishing thing about Lil Wayne's official account saying he's OK isn't that it contradicts what you heard about him sleeping, but more that it contradicts the thing you published about him having the last rites.

Sure, everyone makes mistakes and - in a bid to outrun the hearses, you're going to be liable to make mistakes of this nature. But surely - as self-appointed guardians of showbiz behaviour - an admission and an apology is what's called for, not a silent deletion and a hope nobody noticed?

Bonus bogus: TMZ collect a bunch of reactions to Wayne's hospitalization, not one of which mentions last rites, nor the site's part in the exaggeration of his death.

Do not let us detain you, Lil Wayne

Lil Wayne has announced that he's finding himself increasingly bored of his rapping, at last giving us something with which we can make common cause:

"I think I deserve that [a break from performing]. I think fans deserve a little-to-no Wayne. I've been everywhere. I've been out on everybody's song. I'm still on everybody's song.

"My artists are doing awesome; I believe the fans deserve some peace from me, so I'll be on my skateboard in the meantime."

You know you've got troubles when even you realise what your fans really want is for you to shut up for a while.

Still, it's easy to snicker at Wayne, but at least he does have enough self-awareness to realise there comes a point when we have been delighted by him enough. If only some other people could take that hint. Kanye, Cent, Vox - we're looking at you. And quite a few others, too.

Why did Lil'Wayne quit Twitter?

Because stringing 140 characters together in an interesting fashion is impossible for him without a producer telling him what to do, perhaps?

No, apparently not. He tells (sweet Jesus Christ) - Paris Hilton:

"I just shut my Twitter account down because I got hacked. Once I got hacked I had Twitter fix it. They changed it. And then it got hacked again so I just shut it down. As of right now, I'm on Twitter strike."

No, to be honest, I hadn't noticed he'd gone. If he's really on Twitter strike, shouldn't there be an animated gif of Wayne stood by a brazier pop up when you're trying to log in to the homepage?

Of course, when Wayne says he was "hacked" he means someone logged in pretending to be him, so he's probably really just on 'one of my flunkies guessing my password is WAYNEISTHEBEST strike'.

When your life can't get any worse, there's Lil Wayne

As if being in prison and suicidal wasn't bad enough, for some prisoners in the US, they're now going to have Lil Wayne in charge of making sure they don't kill themselves.

Couldn't they have put him in a position where if he makes a slip it won't be quite so fatal? Isn't having Wayne in charge of making sure you don't die a bit of the cruel and unusuals?

Lil'Wayne: Littler, waning

Lil Wayne's last album sold a million copies in its first week, in the US alone.

How is the new one doing? Not so good:

Cash Money/Universal Motown’s Lil Wayne long-awaited rock album, Rebirth, hit yesterday, and looks on track for between 140-150k in first-week sales as he prepares to be imprisoned for a year on gun possession charges.

That's a lot of fans to misplace in eighteen months or so.

Lil Wayne schedules prison time

It's yet to be convincingly explained to me how Americans get given prison dates the way the British get hospital appointments - an invitation to come over some time in the future.

Lil Wayne, American justice has decided, must spend time in prison to make society safer (he was waggling a gun round.)

Fair enough. But if prison is vital in turning him from a gun-toting threat to society into a good and honest man, why does he not have to go until February? Isn't it a bit dangerous having him wandering round over Christmas, potentially shooting at Santa as he flies overhead?

Or... are the authorities really saying that prison has such little effect, it doesn't really matter when you go?

Wild west wiki: Lil Wayne

Wikipedia. It's a wonderful source of information, isn't it? Imagine you wanted to know something about Lil Wayne, for example. Everything you need to know.

Of course, yesterday evening at 8pm, Lil Wayne's entry was a little more pithy. But it still told you everything you needed to know.

Amusingly, on the Wikipedia Talk Page for Lil Wayne, there's currently fevered debate over if you can trust YouTube - because:

a documentary posted by an anonymous uploader on YouTube can't be treated as a documentary at all. There needs to be credibility and reliablity in the publishing chain, or the source isn't reliable.

That was, erm, Kww who said that.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Copyright catfights: Lil Wayne illustrates a point

The idea of copyright was, you'll recall, to encourage creativity. That was meant to be the point. Not to monetise ideas - although that was part of the means to the end - but simply to encourage the sharing of new stuff.

Now, you might feel that there's nothing wrong with turning synaptic sparks into money, or indeed that an idea should be a cash generator in perpetuity. But even if you do believe that, you'd be forced to admit that copyright law, with all its addenda and redrafts and extensions, isn't a good way of achieving that goal because it's trying to do something that copyright wasn't really supposed to do.

If you need evidence of just how ridiculous and broken copyright law has become, look no further than the legal squall generated by Lil Wayne's track I Feel Like Dying.

Urband & Lazar Music Publishing are suing Lil Wayne for the use of an uncleared sample from a track by Karma-Ann Swanepoel. That's a business suing, not the actual creator of the track. Oh, and they want to see financial data from the album Tha Carter III.

I Feel Like Dying isn't on Tha Carter III, but:

a lawyer for Urband & Lazar argues that Lil Wayne promoted the album by singing that song in concert and allowing fans to download it for free on his Web site.

So they're looking for a slice of money from album sales on a track that wasn't even on the album.

Let's just take a moment or two to pull up a chair, and ponder this: Lil Wayne uses a sample - uncleared, admittedly - on a track he gave away. So he's being sued on the basis, presumably, that someone who heard the sample might have gone on to buy the album - a someone who wouldn't have done so otherwise.

Presumably, a very disappointed someone if that had been their motivation.

Now, though, Lil Wayne has also issued a lawsuit - he's trying to make his producer pay for the mistake, on the grounds that it was up to the producer to clear the samples.

This, then, is how we stimulate creativity in 2009, is it? Or doesn't this whole farrago just suggest you'd be better off not bothering to try anything as it'll end up with a barrage of angry lawyers working off their mortgages?

VH1 bring back Behind The Music

By the time VH1 axed its Behind The Music series, it was looking pretty tired - reduced to doing a special on Pantera. But, hey, it's been five years or so - surely some exciting new bands have come and given the revived series lots of juicy stories for their wish list? Right?

Lil Wayne and Scott Weiland have signed on to participate, and the network is near agreements with several other performers.

So, no, then. Lil Wayne? Really?

Lil' Wayne getting legal woe

Proving that not everyone breathes a sigh of relief when Lil'Wayne doesn't turn up when he's expected, a Rochester promoter after he failed to play three gigs there.

Or, rather, one gig he failed to play three times:

Promoter Ed Strickland told democratandchronicle.com : “This is a business. I have a commitment to my investors, the public. A lot of money — TV, radio, print — went to make this thing happen.”

Although, actually, it didn't happen, did it?

If albums sales in December hit 60 million, Bob Lefsetz is going to look a little silly

Bob Lefsetz has a deliciously waspish commentary on the 100 best-selling albums this year:

33. Madonna "Hard Candy" 673,475

I bet she’s pissed. She did everything in her power to make this record a hit. Worked with the flavors of the day… But she’s an oldies act, who’s overcharging and playing venues too big and not selling out.

Love to see her squirm.

That less than three quarters of a million figure, by the way, is sales in the US. Not the UK. Presumably she's hoping that if Guy is no longer her husband, he'll have to buy the next record and she needs every sale she can get.

The best seller so far this year in the US?

1. Lil Wayne "Tha Carter III" 2,671,816

Do we want to focus on the Internet marketing campaign (i.e. the steady release of free product), the discounts/free goods to retail, the fact that a hip-hop album is number one or the low total gross. I choose to look at this final fact. There’s not a lot of road business. A 360 deal with most rappers won’t help your bottom line. Lil Wayne’s the king, but it’s not the domain it used to be.

Calling him a king is a bit much - the US albums market is barely a Dukedom right now.

The takeaway fact?

[E]asy riches are out of the industry’s grasp. The nineties are history. The golden age of pigs at the trough are done. You’d better make good music that appeals to an audience that is willing to listen to you for years. You’d better be willing to get your money on the installment plan instead of all up front. You’d better realize this is no longer the lottery, but a business based on bunts and singles instead of grand slams.

Nobody is buying albums any more, because nobody needs to. The public have been freed from subsidising filler.

Mixed luck for Lil'types

Lil Kim has fallen out with her new record label, even before managing to record one album for them. Actually, it's the not recording an album that has got her into trouble - Brookland Media is suing for USD2.5million on account of her not delivering an album. Kim wants to rework her contract; her people suggest that suing is the label's way of pressurising her into sticking with the original deal.

Of course, neither side is particularly sympathetic, so let's instead spare a thought for the innocent victim: Atlantic, who won't be getting the two hundred grand from Brookland they were promised for releasing Kim from her deal with them. Not for now, any way.

Meanwhile, Lil' Wayne celebrated his birthday with a gift of a million dollars in a briefcase, that would seem to be a little tactless in the current economic climate were it not obviously a crappy stunt to try and make people interested in him. He probably wrapped it himself, too.

Kanye West wants his fans to be all eclectic

Given that Kanye West has been going off the boil a little of late, it's probably quite brave of him to suggest to his fans that they widen their musical horizons. He might try to be a little more coherent, though:

"Nas is the only MC of my generation — maybe Rakim, but he was the generation before me — Nas was the most respected MC in every genre of rap. Nigga, he could do a song with Puffy or Wu-Tang."

Goodness, as wide as Diddy or the Wu-Tangs, eh? That's pretty adaptable.

But Kanye has more:

"How is Soulja Boy killing hip-hop? He had one of the biggest songs of the summer. If anything, he's helping keep it alive. You don't have to be Lil Wayne in order for people to say your shit is fresh.

"Open y'all's fuckin' minds. Be accepting of different people. Let people be who they are."

It's not clear if West ever goes round commenting on blogs suggesting that people's tastes are wrong and it's clear they must be bitter or haters. But it's nice to see West moving on from his usual favourite subject of himself. At least for a short while:

"You know how many people came at me, calling me 'gay' cause I wear my jeans the fresh way?" he said to the audience. "Or 'cause I said, 'Hey, dude, how y'all gonna say 'fuck' right in front of a gay dude's face and act like that's OK?' That shit is disrespectful.

"It took me time to break out of the mental prisons I was in. The stereotypes of the fear of the backlash that I would get for believing in what I believe in, for accepting people for who they are."

I don't know about you, but I lost that somewhere around the idea of wearing jeans in a fresh way. And I can't begin to understand what a stereotype of a fear of a backlash is, but I think he's saying it's harder to be tolerant than it is to be victimised. And that there should be some sort of parade for people who wear their trousers freshly.

When is a leak not a bad thing?

Curious: while in the UK, a bloke's just been arrested for selling promos on eBay, and in the US Universal has dragged someone to court for the same reason, Pat Monaco, executive Vice President of Sales at the Universal Monaco has been suggesting that the leak of Lil Wayne's album onto the net was a positive boon to sales:

"The accounts were bullish by 10 in the morning," reports Pat Monaco, exec VP of sales for the Universal Motown Republic Group. "The sales the first few hours were exceeding the rate that the Kanye album sold a year ago." (That one ended up selling 957,000 the first week; nothing has come close since.) "Wayne was one of these records that, because it was so highly anticipated, with the leaks and everything, it caused more people to go out at 8 in the morning to buy the CD."

Even more curious: both Entertainment Weekly's Hollywood Insider blog and Undercover music news were carrying this quote earlier in the day, but it's disappeared from both.

[Thanks to Joe for the story tip]

Grab! Snap! Sues!

The Projekt Revolution crowd-crush was nothing more than youthful exuberance - and probably some sugary drinks. When Tyrique Layne got crushed at a Lil Wayne concert, though, she alleges it was because Wayne had thrown money into the crowd. Now, she wants Wayne to throw some money at her. She's suing for a million dollars.

Rap sheet: two arrests in New York

Police-related problems for Lil Wayne and Ja Rule, both of whom were stopped by police while allegedly carrying guns at the weekend.

Wayne managed to draw attention to himself by smoking a joint in the street; Mr. Rule's car was pulled over for speeding. Both men were carrying handguns, according to the crimesheets.