Muse take up some of Vince Cable's slack

Good old Muse have donated £15,000 worth of equipment and money to Plymouth University to encourage students on music courses.

Now, if they could just find a couple more billion to make good the cash axed from the university system elsewhere...

Madonna's charity abandons Malawi school build

It turns out that even a combination of Madonna and Kabbalah can't build a school, as Raising Malawi has junked plans to build:

The organisation, Raising Malawi, has ousted its board of directors and replaced its members with a new set of officials that includes Madonna and her manager, the Times reported.

"A thoughtful decision has been made to discontinue plans for the Raising Malawi Academy for Girls, as it was originally conceived," Michael Berg, co-founder of Raising Malawi, said in an e-mail to members who had contributed to the project.

Perhaps we should send in Toby Young - he seems determined to open a school despite knowing bugger all about it, so he has the perfect credentials.

Raising Malawi has so far spent over two million on not building a school, and you'd have to say brining the management of the project closer to the heart of the Kabbalah Center doesn't really bode well for the future.

GCSEs in Charlotte Church

When I saw this headline in the Telegraph:

GCSE pupils to study words of Charlotte Church

I assumed they were talking about lyrics, and was coming up with a post that was going to suggest there'd be a comprehension question about what she meant by telling a Dorothy on Over The Rainbow that she was "a lovely girl with a lot of talent".

But then I opened the story, and apparently students are going to have questions set from her Channel Four comedy programme. Which was a better joke.

The idea is that "the kids" will be able to relate to this more easily than, ooh, something difficult - but surely no teenager would have ever seen Church's Channel Four show? Or, indeed, if anyone did?

Kano bids to be the new Grange Hill Kids

It must have seemed a brilliant idea when it was first floated - "why don't we get one of these rappy chaps to do a pop music video to promote diplomas?" - but it's impossible to hear about Kano doing a spot for the Education Department without the need for five minutes work to uncurl your toes.

Mind you, I suspect the Telegraph might have taken a bit of licence here:

Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, has hired the British rapper Kano to promote the diploma, the Government's alternative to GCSEs and A-levels.

"Hello? Is that Mr. Kano? It's Ed here. Ed Balls. No... no this is not a prank phone-call, why would you think that? Yes, Balls. No, no, not head, it's Ed. Ed Balls... hello? Hello?"

Don't laugh, it'll be Tory party policy before you know it

Ian Brown thinks that working-class pride can be rebuilt by showing them 50 Cent movies:

He tells Britain's Mojo magazine, "I think all kids should be made to watch the Biggie Smalls film (Notorious), the Eminem story (8 Mile) and the 50 Cent film (Get Rich or Die Tryin').

"There's not enough about working class kids getting on in life, the working class got cut out of history, and we can't let that happen.

"I met Biggie Smalls in September 1995 and it was mega (amazing). He was like something out of the Bible, talking in parables, and he looked like an old '20s jazz star. Some days I have to pinch myself that I met him."

The explanation of what "mega" means is ContactMusic's, I should point out.

But, seriously, Ian? You think that Fiddy is going to somehow inspire a kid living in Moulsecoomb and isn't as far from their experiences as, say, giving them a copy of Love On The Dole? Also, isn't part of the message of Get Rich that you can make a fortune dealing drugs as a handy fall-back if you're not that good at rapping?

Shante didn't

I picked up a story from the New York Daily News last week about how Roxanne Shante had had to battle Warners to get them to honour a clause in her contract to fund her PhD.

It turns out to be less than solid: Ben Sheffer has been digging for Slate and he finds no trace of Shante having completed any degree, much less one funded by Warners:

When told of Warner's denial that it financed her education, Shanté repeated, "Hip-hop paid for my education, kept me from going to the streets." But she was unable to provide detail. "To my knowledge, that [Warner] is exactly where the checks came from. … All I know is that it was done." In a later e-mail, Shanté wrote that she was informed by Cold Chillin's former CEO Tyrone Williams that Warner "along with another party that chose to stay anonymous paid for my education." Shanté did not respond to Slate's request that she put us in touch with Williams.

This seems to be a bit of a shift from "Warners were contractually obliged to pay for my eduction" to "the money I made from music, which came from Warners as far as I know."

It looks like the New York Daily News hadn't really done very much to stack up its story in the first place.

Dr Roxanne Shante - sponsored, unwillingly, by Warners

UPDATE: The only problem with this story is that it turns out to be completely untrue

The story behind Roxanne Shante's PhD tells you a lot in one sitting about what those major labels are like.

Back when she was 14, Warners signed her up to a contract which promised - somewhat unwisely on Warner's part - to fund her education for life. You can see the cogs turning as that was drafted: A young black rapper from the projects - how much would that cost us anyway? Besides, we'll probably never have to honour the clause...

Trouble is, for Warners, that Shante was as sharp as her rapping, and went on to do a PhD. The quarter of a million dollar bill was posted to Warners and... surprise! They tried to weasel out of it:

"They kept stumbling over their words, and they didn't have an exact reason why they were telling me no," Shante said.

Eventually, Warners were faced with a choice between looking like a bunch of shysters who made wild promises to a fourteen year-old girl to get her to sign a contract, or finding the money from somewhere. They wound up doing both.

Shante found an arm-twisting ally in Marguerita Grecco, the dean at Marymount Manhattan College. Shante showed her the contract, and the dean let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money.

"I told Dean Grecco that either I'm going to go here or go to the streets, so I need your help," Shante recalls. "She said, 'We're going to make them pay for this.'"

Grecco submitted and resubmitted the bills to the label, which finally agreed to honor the contract when Shante threatened to go public with the story.

Still, Warners must have eventually figured that paying a couple of hundred thousand dollars to keep this sort of story out of the public prints was money well... oh, hang on a moment...

Jennifer Ellison offers the benefits of her experience

Don't put your daughter in the Jennifer Ellison stage school, Mrs Worthington.

Yes, Ellison is bringing her showbiz know how to the good people of Liverpool:

The theatre star hopes to have The Jennifer Ellison Fame Academy, “where stars are born”, up and running in 2009.

Modules taught at the school are expected to include "Loaded or Zoo - which one's for you?", "Knowing when it's right to take your bra off - and when to keep it on" and "how to turn a role in Brookside into some sort of career".

Ellison is filling a gap in the market:

"There are not many academies for people like me who do everything – dancing, acting, singing and modelling – and I do not believe there is anywhere catering for young people who want to do it all in the north west."

Perhaps there's a reason why not many academies - sorry, stage schools - are designed to turn out jack-of-all-trades; it could be the same reason that there isn't a school in Manchester which is dedicated to training the softball-playing botanist tuba stars of the future.

Lesson one: Queuing

Auditioning for the X-Factor isn't that tricky, you'd have thought: stand around in a queue for ages - with a bit of waving at a camera; then have your dreams pissed over with a differing level of public humiliation.

Even so, apparently now you can do a course in going on the X Factor. You even get a diploma, although we suspect it might not count towards entry on a degree-level course.

Mel C fights for alma mater

Most schools, when faced with the axe, have to assemble a few old boys who've climbed corporate polls since their departure. Fairfield High in Widnes is able to call on the might of Mel C:

“Not only did I leave with a great education, I was able to pursue my love of performing arts and sport. Both departments were brilliant – kept me busy and out of trouble.”

Without Fairfield, Melanie Chisholm might never have been a Spice Girl, in other words. Where are you lot off to with those burning torches?

That's Doctor Edge to you

From: The_Edge@u2.nl
To: <undisclosed recipients>

Subject: My Family Are So Proud

I am now to be referred to as Dr. The Edge haha ;) Took me a few moments to get
fully accredited, but after getting a call from The Berklee College of Music at Boston they got me setup with a honorary doctorate in no time!!!

When the going gets tough, the tough apply to convocation

If Billy Ocean deserves an honorary doctorate for writing Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car and the theme to that Michael Douglas movie from back when Michael Douglas was a fairly charming man and not so obsessed with a sense of his own greatness only someone as apparently blind to every nuance of their own surroundings as Catherine Zeta Jones could manage to spend any time in his presence, then what on that scale would, say, Costello or Clinton or, dammit, Haines deserve?