Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Rolling Stone decides its not Miller time

Back, then, to last night's inductions to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Over at Rolling Stone, you can read dispatches from the night.

You can read, for example, Deep Purple's acceptance speeches.

You can luxuriate in every detail of how Lars Ulrich introduced them.

You can spend some time with the text of Kendrick Lamar's introduction of NWA.

You can read NWA's acceptance speeches.

You can pore over every detail of Dan Auerbach's introduction to Steve Miller's induction.

And of course, you can read Miller's acc... oh, hang on. No, you can't. The Steve Miller acceptance speech, which - as we heard earlier was the only interesting thing of the evening.

Why, you wonder, would Rolling Stone neglect to run a speech which attacked the very idea of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and called out its management? I wonder if Wikipedia might have a hint?

Jann Simon Wenner (born January 7, 1946) is the co-founder and publisher of the popular culture biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the current owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.
[...]
Wenner, who was made a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983, has endured controversy during his career as it relates to his involvement in the organization.

That noise? That's the sound of Wenner's part in the Berkely Free Speech Movement being erased from history.

Rolling Stone has chosen their best album

Oh, Rolling Stone, could you be any more of a Dad? With all of 2014's albums to choose from, you've chosen the one we didn't get to choose:

There was no bigger album of 2014 – in terms of surprise, generosity and controversy. Songs of Innocence is also the rebirth of the year. Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. put their lives on the line: giving away 11 songs of guitar rapture and frank, emotional tales of how they became a band out of the rough streets and spiritual ferment of Seventies Dublin.

Or 'fading brand attempt a desperate reboot by creating a Year Zero mythos; realising nobody would buy it, they force it into people's hands'. Who would fall for that schtick, bar another fading brand?

See the collection of everyone's best-of lists

Rolling Stone: shelf hog

Really interesting post on David Hepworth's blog where he points out that the "terrorist" Rolling Stone issue doubled newsstand sales. To 13,000:

The really interesting thing was this was twice as many as usual, which means that the average issue of Rolling Stone, no matter what superstar, nymphet or American icon is on its cover, no matter how fabulous the cover concept, no matter how expensive the photographer, actually manages to motivate just six and a half thousand Americans to go to the news stand.

Now, it's America, where magazines are sold more through subscription than on the shelves, but that figure of 6,500 is fascinating.

There isn't a supermarket book corner, 7-11 rack or Barnes & Noble display which doesn't carry a couple of issues of each edition Rolling Stone. Even if you cautiously estimate that as 50,000 outlets across the US, with two issues each... that's a hell of a lot of magazines being printed simply to be pulped.

On the cover of Rolling Stone

This is the cover of the new Rolling Stone - it's quite controversial:

Yes, to the shock of America, Rolling Stone are running a cover that isn't of a topless female celebrity holding a hat over her tits. Americans are struggling to understand this deviation from house sty...

Oh, hang on. Apparently that isn't the problem. Thinkprogress' Judd Legum tries to boil down what the problem is here:

New Rolling Stone cover turns the Boston bomber into Jim Morrison. A comparison: pic.twitter.com/UJKhAMJSGO

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 16, 2013

Oh, yes. It's a head-and-shoulders shot on the cover of the magazine, and they had a head-and-shoulders shot of Jim Morrison about three thousand years ago, so it's clear that what they're trying to do there is turn one into the other.

It couldn't just be that they've put a photo of the subject of their cover story on the, erm, front cover, could it?

The complaints seem to fall into two large clumps, on a sliding scale of ill-informedness.

The first is a suggestion that RS is trying to make Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into some sort of rock star, because they've put him on the cover of a rock magazine, and what else can it mean other than 'Tsarnaev is a rock star'.

The magazine sighs, and tries to explain that while people might think RS is a rock magazine, it really isn't:

The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day.

I think that's quite mild, really. After all, Rolling Stone is arguably at its worse when it talk about music, lurching between Tom Waits and Janet Jackson (providing she's got her top off).

It makes you wonder what the complainants think PJ O'Rourke has been filing all these years - do they think he was reviewing Green Day gigs and asking Bonnie Rait about her fitness regime? Do they assume that Hunter S Thompson's main order of business was joining Sting in the studio?

The second group seem at least vaguely aware that the title covers current affairs but, in the style of the 'he's looking like Jim Morrison' observation, that it's wrong to have an accused murderer on the cover, especially when he looks so bloody handsome.

America, it seems, wants its monsters to look like monsters (except the ones out of Monsters Inc). How dare Rolling Stone suggest there might be a more nuanced position; that the man accused of bringing death and misery to so many could look like the sort of boy you'd hope your daughter would take to the prom?

Bizarrely, CVS and a grocery chain have even gone to the lengths of pulling the magazine from their shelves. They happily sold copies of Time with Osama on the front; they stocked and shipped back Newsweeks with Bin Laden covers. I'd love to see CVS explain what policy it is that they're invoking here.

The point being missed in the all the squawking is that the cover is the story - that to his friends, he was just the sort of kid who would make a great prom date:

Someone mentions one of the surveillance videos of Jahar, which shows him impassively watching as people begin to run in response to the blast. "I mean, that's just the face I'd always see chilling, talking, smoking," says Jackson. He wishes­ Jahar had looked panicked. "At least then I'd be able to say, 'OK, something happened.' But . . . nothing."

Rolling Stone has published a thoughtful article about not judging something by the cover. It's a pity a lot of people won't get to read it, because they're so quick to do just that.

Journobit: Chet Flippo

Chet Flippo, the man who put the country into Rolling Stone, has died.

Here's a slice of Flippo's Dolly Parton coverstory from 1980, the point where Parton was about to add film star to her already packed cv:

One of the lesser noticed of twelve children in a poor Tennessee family, Dolly began planning her escape to the world of money and glamour as soon as she heard about it. The minute she was out of high school, she was on a Greyhound bus to Nashville to try to be a country star. But girl singers – that's what they called them then – in country music were rare and generally regarded as so much flesh. Parton used her iron will, her incredibly seductive and powerful voice, her ability to write songs and her self-confidence and ambition to knock down the brick walls that stood between her and her goals. She also played up her beauty and her hourglass figure. She started to make secret lists of the fairy-tale futures she sought. She is a fiercely positive thinker, and her private lists worked like voodoo. Nashville never knew what hit it. She became a country star.

Still, Nashville wasn't enough, so she plotted her superstar map and left Nashville for Los Angeles and full blown pop management. Her husband, Carl Dean, a seldom-seen Nashville contractor, approved, and she set out to become superfamous. She deliberately made the kind of pop music she thought would gain her both a new audience and the power to do whatever she wanted. She thinks the strategy is working.

After his time at Rolling Stone, Flippo wrote books, taught journalism and then wound up as editorial director of CMT. But you can take the man out of music journalism, but... well, he still was writing a weekly column, Nashville Skyline, for the CMT website.

His last column appeared earlier this month, and aptly for a man best known writing which helped country crossover, he ended with some thoughts on the new Nashville crossovers:

There's also the war between modern radio country -- also being called old rock masquerading as country -- and more traditional artists and then, of course, there's also hick-hop music. You'll see plenty of all of that on display this week.

And there was also the sight of both Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift performing recently onstage with the Rolling Stones. That gives a whole new definition to crossover country.

But then there was also the recently-taped CMT Crossroads with Jack White hosting Willie Nelson as his Third Man Records studio downtown, with Leon Russell, Norah Jones, Neil Young and others, with music ranging all across the country music spectrum.

Then we have the spectacle of Natalie Maines -- remember her? -- declaring "war on Nashville" in the pages of Rolling Stone. Apparently, Maines' war consists of angrily stamping her foot and saying, "Oh, fie!"

Chet Flippo had been ill for some time. He died June 19th, in Nashville, at the age of 69.

Rolling Stone website passed from father to son

Here's a wacky coincidence - the person put in charge of running the Rolling Stone website, Gus Wenner, has the same surname as the man in charge, Jay Wenner. What are the odds, eh?

Now, it might be that Gus Wenner is the best-placed-person in the world to run the RS website, but given he's the bosses' son, it's hard not to smell a bit of a rat.

Gawker drips sarcasm all over the place:

Gus Wenner, 22, is an amazing media success story. Just a few years ago, he was a Brown University student playing in a band with fellow celebukid Brown student Scout Willis. Today, he's still playing in a band with Scout Willis— and also running the website of a major national magazine!
[...]
Jann confirmed the appointment to us. Gus followed the traditional route to a perch atop the media hierarchy: playing in an alt-country band in college. He's earned it.

Hey, haters, just because you didn't have the foresight to be made from the sperm in Jann Wener's testicles, how can you bitch against this hard-won appointment?

The email from Papa Smurf explained why Gus's skillset is perfect for running the key offering of a major international brand:

David Kang and I are very pleased —and I am very proud —to announce that Gus Wenner, after leading the re-launch re-design effort for our website, will now continue by heading up the overall operations of RollingStone.com.

There was a relaunch? There was a redesign?

Let's see how that worked, shall we?

Here's Rolling Stone a year ago:

And here's Rolling Stone today:

But maybe I'm being unfair - after all, front pages are front pages, right? Let's take a look at the pre-junior content pages:

And a year later, after the redesign?

Anyone prepared to undertake such a fundamental relaunch and redesign (albeit one that seems to consist mostly of dropping StumbleUpon from the social networking bar) is clearly ready for the big job.

After all, just ask Rupert Murdoch: what can go wrong with putting your untested son in charge?

What the pop papers say: Staggers launches attack on the NME front

I've been banging on about how the NME has got locked into a dependency on the sort of heritage act that it was supposed to have blown away back in 1977 for a while now. I doubt it bothers them much.

They might want to be a bit more concerned about a similar complaint from the New Statesman. Because if anyone is going to write from a sympathetic position, understanding the difficulties in shepherding a long-in-the-tooth magazine through hostile times, it's the New Statesman.

Writing on the paper's Cultural Capital blog, Rob Hastings asks why NME readers find themselves cast as Cole Sears, so often seeing dead people:

Personally, I can’t complain. After drunkenly bopping away to Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines during most of my drunken uni nights out – back when I would buy the NME week-in, week-out and blu-tacked the front covers to my bedroom door – the subsequent decline in the bubble of excitement around indie rock in favour of electro and hip-hop has left me cold, making me explore older artists’ back catalogues more often than discovering new bands. Save for Arcade Fire or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the surest way for the NME to secure me as a reader these days would admittedly involve sticking Bob Dylan or Neil Young on the front.

But perhaps that sums up the sadness of the situation. The magazine’s frequent decision to promote features on “heritage” acts from the past rather than interviews with exciting new groups such as Mercury Prize contenders Alt-J or Django Django must be commercially driven – either because the current crop of up-and-coming acts just aren’t deemed good enough, or because people listening to the hottest acts don’t care what the NME has to say anymore, leaving the magazine groping for older readers to sustain itself.

In the comments section, Alex Lyall thinks he has a gotcha:

Hilarious because NME's new cover has Palma Violets on it. A band much younger than Cobain, Curtis or Lennon

This does miss the point a bit; Hastings doesn't say that they only do heritage covers.

But boy, they do do a lot of them. I think you have to go back to April/May to find a two week period where the cover was given over two weeks running to artists who hadn't already made enough to buy an island (Tyler The Creator followed by Friendly Fires) and probably back to 2008's Fucked Up-Glasvegas-Crystal Castles page ones for a three week run of new music covers.

And next week is a tenth anniversary of Up The Bracket special, so it's not as if the Palma Violets cover really is the start of a new era of looking forward.

What makes it worse, though, is that the Palma Violets cover is part of a New Music special. A special! It's like the New Statesman doing a left-leaning political narrative special.

And the coverlines don't exactly suggest the paper has much faith in new music interesting its readers:

NEW MUSIC SPECIAL 25 BRILLANT BANDS YOU HAVE TO HEAR
PICKED BY LILY ALLEN, THE CRIBS, MANICS, BATS FOR LASHES AND TONS MORE

Don't worry, people - the new noises have been filtered through the same acts we're always going on about.

Are you still nervous?

STILL GOT IT
How DAMON, WELLER, BJORK & THOM embraced the future

What? Still feel that despite offering 'new' music from a bunch of acts with 113 years of experience between them, we might be getting too edgy?

Don't panic, dear reader:

OASIS: THE REUNION
Bonehead spills the beans

An interview with Bonehead about Oasis. Could anything be less relevant to a new music special?

To be fair, the Damon/Weller/Bjork/Thom piece is well meant, but misfires. Barry Nicolson starts out with a thesis that older musicians don't have to get stuck into just playing the hits. That's true, but an article that gathers up artists who share little beyond being a bit older might not want to use a pull quote which asserts:

Age is no more relevant than gender or sexuality

Ah, and if we could only say so confidently that gender isn't relevant.

But with Rolling Stone just about to publish a "special" about Women Who Rock, I'm not sure we can.

Adam Yauch: A round-up

As you might imagine, there's a lot of Adam Yauch memories being shared online today. Here's a quick dip into some of them.

Dose.ca points out that he was a Beastie Boys multitasker:

With Adam Yauch's passing, the Beastie Boys have lost not one, but two members. Under the name (lederhosen, and fake-beard) of Nathanial Hornblower, the erstwhile MCA shaped the band's visual legacy from the '80s up to the present day. Yauch directed many of the Beasties' best videos -- though his alter-ego wasn't necessarily relegated to behind the camera. (In 1994, for instance, Hornblower crashed the stage at the MTV VMAs, stealing the mic from R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe -- who wasn't as acquainted with the "Swiss" director as the kids at home.)

Spinner shook Twitter for responses:

"In times of doubt I can think on the dharma and the enlightened ones who graduated samsara" #RIPMCA -- Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend

The Beastie Boys basically invented the concept of the cool white person. #RIPMCA -- Chromeo

Such sad news about Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. A fellow Buddhist and part of hip hop history!! R.I.P! -- Boy George

RIP Adam Yauch. You made my teenage years more fun and your art made it easier for me to do what I do. For a Beastie, you sure were a beaut. -- Kevin Smith, filmmaker

Rolling Stone reprints their 1998 Beasties cover story:

Adam "MCA" YAUCH – the spiritual seeker – what of him? He registers under the name I. Clouseau, as in Inspector Clouseau, for he is a huge Peter Sellers fan. His favorite Sellers movie is The Party. "He plays an Indian actor," Yauch says, "and the movie was banned in India because he is playing this bumbling idiot in the middle of all these white people, and some Indian people were insulted by it. But the irony is that he's really the only intelligent person there – all the other people are morons. So it has a cool theme."

Cool, yes, and you are free to interpret it as you wish: as an anti-racist parable related by a white rapper; as a parable about the Beasties themselves, who started out acting the idiot and worked hard to convince the world that they are, in fact, intelligent people; or, more simply, as the plot of a fairly funny movie from the Sixties.

Wired's Underwired music column salutes Yauch's role in remix culture:

Specifically, he was the thoughtful one when it came to the Beasties’ ethos on sampling, telling Wired in 2004 how the group approached sampling and how he felt about other artists borrowing from Beastie Boys’ cuts.

“It’s totally context. And it depends on how much of our song they’re using and how much of a part it plays in their song,” he said. “We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It’s not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different than taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop.”

On NME.com Matthew Horton captures the way the band's early activities might have left them frozen in some parts of the public's mind:

In the consciousness of your mums, dads and Daily Express readers, the Beastie Boys will always be those snotty-nosed frat boys winching a colossal phallus, but through Yauch's vision they changed hip-hop's mindset and as a collective with a ridiculous lack of inhibitions they influenced everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to Eminem, Guru to Gorillaz, Beck to blimmin' Limp Bizkit. Yauch, you were the funkiest of bosses and you'll be missed.

As you might expect, it's the New York Times Artsbeat blog which records the facts:

Mr. Yauch’s mother said he died at 9 a.m. on Friday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan with his parents, his in-laws, his wife, Dechen Wangdu, and his 13-year-old daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch, at his bedside. He had been admitted to the hospital on April 14 after a three-year battle with cancer of the salivary gland. He was conscious until the end.

“He was a very courageous person,” his mother, Frances Yauch, said. “He fought a long battle with cancer. He was hopeful to the very end.”

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Rolling Stone

If you've looked at Rolling Stone recently - and it would probably have had a woman in her pants on the cover - you might have wondered just when it started to be so hypersexualised. So did Mary Nell Trautner and Erin Hatton; so they've produced a graph which shows that - perhaps unsurprisingly - women started to appear mostly in their bras during the 1990s. Sociological Images has the graph and commentary.

Rolling Stone: dead or stumbling?

Robin Davey at Kerascene is currently reading the last rites for Rolling Stone, based on how few 'likes' their current cover stars picked up:

What can a feature on the front of the most regarded and iconic musical magazine get you?

Over the two-week period that this particular issue covered, the band mustered up about 2000 Facebook likes. When I first looked it stood at a little over 10,000, now it stands and just under 12,000.

Is that really the weight that Rolling Stone has in the current market?

If so, it would appear that opinionated music journalism is certainly stumbling if not already dead.

Perhaps. But let's just hold off pushing the title into a hole and examine this a bit.

Rolling Stone still claims to sell just shy of 1.4 million copies an issue, so it's got a bit of a pulse. But that's not really Davey's point; he's suggesting that while people might still buy the magazine, it's not got any influence.

But hold on a moment - which band was featured on this cover?

The Sheepdogs.

Yes, exactly. The Sheepdogs. Who weren't on the cover of the magazine because the editors thought they were any good, but because they'd won some sort of contest to be there.

Here they are, look:

To be frank, given that they're on the cover of the magazine after winning some sort of raffle, and given how, if you'll let me judge a book by its magazine cover, they appear to be what you'd get if a Coldplay tribute band tried to turn themselves at short notice into a Doctor Hook tribute act, it's a miracle they picked up 2,000 likes.

Are we even sure that 'extra Facebook likes' is even a fair metric for judging the impact of a band appearing on a magazine cover? Isn't it quite a leap from going 'well, this band might be worth a listen' to liking on Facebook - there are bands that I have been passionate about, or dreamed of getting passionate with, for a generation who I haven't even visited on Facebook. Possibly, the cover has generated new fans who choose to mark their fandom in other ways; possibly, the cover has got some people mildly interested but whose interest has yet to turn into any form of commitment as permanent as a public click on a 'like' button.

Do we even know what proportion of Rolling Stone readers use Facebook in such a way as to interact with bands through the Like button? For all we know, 2,000 likes might represent all people who read Rolling Stone and use the Like button.

And, equally important: what Rolling Stone reader is interested in new music anyway? It's not 1972 any more; don't Rolling Stone's key audience approach new bands in the way Seinfeld approaches potential new friends - "thanks for your interest, but I'm not really in the market right now. I've got no vacancies." In measuring calls to action, wouldn't you be better off seeing how many people respond to a cover saying 'look, another Elvis Costello Best Of has been released'?

Rolling Stone might have lost its claims to cultural leadership. It might be stumbling into a long, whistling downwards plume. But all we've got here is evidence that if you put a rubbish-looking band on the front page, it doesn't generate much Facebook love for said band. It's interesting; I'm just not sure it matters at all.

Rihanna: Have I mentioned S&M recently?

The Daily Mail better brace itself, as just a few days after the paper ran an article slagging off pop music in general and Vogue in particular for focusing on Rihanna's S&M-tinged period, a so-called family publication is bringing it all up again:

'I like to be tied up and spanked': How Rihanna's song S&M isn't just for show
[...]She is constantly pushing boundaries with her raunchy dance moves, sexually-charged lyrics and racy costumes.

And it turns out, Rihanna's risqué antics aren't just for show.

The singer has told how she is 'a bit masochistic' in the bedroom in a revealing new interview.
[...]
She adds: 'Using whips and chains is too planned... you have to stop and look for the whip. I prefer them to use their hands.'

'I like to take the reins in my life, but I enjoy being submissive in the bedroom. In there I can be a little lady and have a male who has responsibility for the situation. That's sexy."

And what is this publication that risks outraging the Mail by running long extracts of an interview in which Rihanna talks about sex?

Erm, inevtiably, it's the Daily Mail.

The interview itself - along with the sort of photo the paper criticised Vogue for running last week - is lifted from Rolling Stone.

You'd think that Rolling Stone would know better than to give her more space to talk about oh-so-shocking sexual stuff like it was true. What S&M fan would have to "find" their stuff?

Rolling Stone tries to clarify Bieber's abortion positon

Anti-choice munchkin Justin Bieber drifted into talking about abortion in his Rolling Stone interview, coming down so far to the right on the debate he might have made Sarah Palin feel a bit queasy:

When asked where he stands on abortion he told Vanessa Grigoriadis, "It's like killing a baby." He was then asked if he believed in abortion for rape victims, and replied, "I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

Is anyone else having a queasy moment imagining - sometime in 2040 - Canadian Premier Bieber laughing at his days as a pop star?

The idea that rape happens for a reason and that, you know, if you haven't been raped there's no way you can actually feel disgusted at the idea that some people would force a woman to carry a baby conceived during an assault hasn't been going down too well.

Happily, Rolling Stone have rushed forward to clarify that Bieber had been slightly misquoted:

A rep for the publication says, "Due to an editing error, this story originally included an incomplete quote from Justin Bieber.

"The full quote, his response to whether abortions should be allowed in cases of rape, reads, 'Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don't know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that.'"

Is it just me, or does the full quote still show him suggesting that being raped is all part of some grand plan, and unable to even allow the possibility that a woman might want access to abortion under those circumstances. Unless Rolling Stone also edited out the words "and would make me think again. Moving to a completely different subject, I was hearing that some spiders eat their partners. That sounds kind of gross" between "sad" and "but", I don't think it changes the tone or sense of what he said at all.

Courtney Love remains Courtney Love

Of course Courtney Love greeted her New York Times interviewer naked and drunk. Of course she did. The only real mystery in the event is why Rolling Stone wrote about it thus:

She may have tried to remake her image in recent years, but Courtney Love's interview with New York Times reporter Eric Wilson lived "right up to my worst reputation," as she put it.

Rolling Stone thinks Love has been trying to remake her image in recent years? Really? With the endless rants about houses bought in Curt's name, and fuck this and screw that, and Ryan Adams stole something and the people she doesn't get on with are all wrong and evil and Activision never got permission to do that thing they did and so she's going to sue them just as soon as her daughter comes back?

It's like saying that Burma has been doing its best to be a model democracy, so it's a bit surprising the election results came out the way they did, surely?

Rolling Stone: better late than never

Probably only ten years after the rest of the world, Rolling Stone has decided that the war on file sharing was a bad move, and sent an ironic thanks to record executives for the war on mp3s:

It must have cost a bundle in future revenue, but don't worry - computers are a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid.

The note is handwritten. If you look, you'll notice that Rolling Stone still capitalise the "i" in "internet". Perhaps this explains why they're only now going 'hold on - this attack on Napster might be an own-goal'.

Rolling Stone, though, have embraced the internet. On the page promoting the current issue, there's this link:

See more stars getting naked on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Downloadable: Emily Jane White

Rolling Stone have called her a "Hot Chanteuse", which probably tells you more about Rolling Stone than it does about Emily Jane White. Download Red Serpent and listen to her SanFran coffeeshop goth and decide how hot she is for yourself. And if she deserves to have schoolboy French thrown about her.

Gordon in the morning: All I got was a headful of heroin

Gordon Smart has worrying news for the S Club Juniors, as Russell Brand wants to kill them:

OUTSPOKEN RUSSELL BRAND has called for "teenybopper" pop stars to take heroin - so some of them DIE.

The comic said the idea would "weed out" those who did not have true talent and save the industry.

And it was an idea he was seriously promoting, wasn't it, Smart? Presented with a Powerpoint flipchart and a single-sided A4 takeaway, rather than, say, just being an amusing throwaway gag in a Rolling Stone interview.

Last night anti-drug campaigners called his comments "idiocy".

Did they? It's interesting that you don't name any. Because, frankly, if anyone working in addiction or drugs control responded to this with the words "I don't think a small joke in a Rolling Stone interview is worth detaining us, they're probably in the wrong job.

Xiu Xiu Camel suit stubbed

Back at the end of 2007, Rolling Stone ran a piece about indie bands which looked oddly like a Camel cigarettes advert. There was an angry letter at the time, but Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up decided to take it further by launching a class action lawsuit.

Somewhat surprisingly, the case has been dismissed by Justice Robert Dondero on the grounds that he's apparently never heard of advertorials:

The justices found no evidence that R.J. Reynolds, Camel's parent company, influenced Rolling Stone's editorial content or decisions. What's more, the justices wrote, Rolling Stone's main purpose is publishing a magazine -- noncommercial speech -- not selling cigarettes.

"Simply put, there is no legal precedent for converting noncommercial speech into commercial speech merely based on its proximity to the latter," Justice Robert Dondero wrote. "There is also no precedent for converting a noncommercial speaker into a commercial speaker in the absence of any direct interest in the product or service being sold."

So, legally and in the US at least, slapping a load of text in a heavily-sponsored stand alone pull-out isn't meant to use the value of the subjects of the "non-commercial" text to add lustre to the sponsor.

Presumably, Justice Dondero would therefore be incredibly laid-back if someone ran a magazine about him sponsored entirely by massage parlours and escort agencies.

The complaint, surely, wasn't about 'being near some ads', it was about 'being in a sponsored section'; the judge seems to have failed to grasp the difference.

Still, it's handy for Rolling Stone to be reminded that its main purpose is the articles it runs, and not the adverts it carries. Let's hope that news gets back to Rolling Stone.

Italian Rolling Stone seems to have lost its way

Apparently impressed by his anti-democratic and sexist ways, Rolling Stone has made Silvio Berlusconi rock star of the year. Not that it approves:

There was no political agenda behind the choice. "We are far from favouring Left or Right," said [Italian edition editor Carlo] Antonelli. "Silvio Berlusconi's daily behaviour, his furious vitality, his inimitable lifestyle have given him, especially this year, incredible international popularity."

Really? Who actually likes him, then?

BET hip-hop awards: That's probably all we need from Eminem

During last night's BET HipHop Awards, Eminem took part in a rap-event which saw him trot out this line:

“My dick is so big if I add another inch to it you would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it.”

Rolling Stone's reaction is to flubber about if BET should have broadcast the line or just cut it out, which seems to be missing the point by an olympic length. Yes, they probably should have broadcast it rather than pretending Eminem didn't say it.

The question, surely, is what the hell was he thinking when he used the line in the first place?

Toby Keith gets upset with Ethan Hawke

I'm not sure what Ethan Hawke was doing writing a feature on Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone in the first place, but he did; and in the course of it, made reference to a spat between Kris and an unnamed country star backstage in 2003. The unnamed figure comes off as a bit of a tiresome fool.

Still, it was in Rolling Stone so nobody will notice, right? And the unnamed country singer can rest easy. And even if a person did stumble across the piece, Hawke's gone out his way to not name him, so it's not like anyone will be any the wiser.

Unless he starts to honk his large-galloned hat off, of course.

Hang about... what's that noise? Is that Toby Keith powering up?

"I don't know Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke wanted to do some kind of superficial Rolling Stone article. And he did everything he could to make his story the greatest story ever in Rolling Stone," Keith said. "And it was a fictitious (expletive) lie. O.K?

"He didn't even call me by my name. ... He called Norah Jones, Ray Charles, everybody else by name. Willie (Nelson), Kris (Kristofferson). Why didn't he call my name? Why didn't he say Toby Keith walked through and said this (expletive)? Right? You know why. You know why. You know as good as anybody why. He didn't want to (expletive) deal with the aftermath."

Only Toby Keith would think a story about him behaving like a buffoon backstage at a gig would constitute "the greatest story ever in Rolling Stone". It's hard to imagine that an anecdote with Toby Keith in would even manage to compete for the title of "the most interesting anecdote about a man called Keith", to be frank.

Still, it's lovely to see the closing-time thought-buffet that is Keith screaming loudly to ensure that everyone knows the unnamed character in the tale is him, before then shouting even louder about how it isn't true. The best thing to do under these circumstances is draw as much attention as possible to things.