The Who are going to do a Rock Band videogame next year, Industry Gamers reports. Roger Daltrey apparently let the cat out of the bag in this Springfield (Mass.) Republican interview, in which he was asked about The Beatles: Rock Band and said:
"The game, yeah, yeah, they're going to be doing a Who one next year. There is one planned. [The idea] is fabulous. Anything that gets non-musical people interested in music is wonderful. In my opinion, music is our last true great freedom. They can burn our books, they can burn our paintings, but they can't stop us singing and making music."
Unless they burn our game consoles.
No wonder Daltrey's enthusiastic. The Beatles' Rock Band version has overtakenGuitar Hero in U.S. sales.
We already knew that Bono was putting his poverty crusade on hold so he can lust after getting U2 its own Rock Band. But that's not a done deal.
Bono probably needs to close that deal, because U2 is basically employing deficit spending to stage its obscenely expensive and lavish tour. Just before its Sunday stop at the Rose Bowl, U2 had played in front of 3 million people and had grossed $300 million — and have barely recovered startup costs. Absurdest excess: a 170-ton, $40 million, four-pronged stage.
This is not believed to be part of Bono's trifecta publicity crusades of his war on world poverty, rubbing elbows with Paul Wolfowitz and other pols, and landing on the cover of Time. (See George Monbiot's roasting of Bono from 2005 for giving legitimacy to the those responsible for keeping much of the world in poverty.) Below, Bono and Wolfowitz making war plans during the Bush Era:
Ruling "could help break open the tight controls that have crippled the ability of filmmakers, musicians, videogame designers and other artists to widely market their creations at reasonable prices." Other major trade clashes between China and U.S. are also coming to a head.
Sheryl Weinstein, former chief financial officer at Hadassah, a major Jewish women's organization, fesses up to an affair with Bernie. She and her hubby (and Hadassah) not only lost their asses to Bernie, but she personally lost hers to him. Now we know that Bernie made at least one deposit.
When it comes to the battle of dead pop stars, Elvis has left the building, and MJ has taken the stage. In the 48 days since his death, Michael Jackson has earned $100 million in film and merchandising deals, and his handlers expect another $100 million by the end of the year. Co-executor says, "Clearly that's a new record for estates that likely will not be broken."
Maybe Michael Jackson's will really did run out, but the estate documents he left behind may live forever.
Curious about MJ's will and the fight over his estate? Don't stop till you get enough info from Death and Taxes - The Blog ), where Chicago-area estates lawyer Joel Schoenmeyer breaks it down.
While you're at it, click on the above video for MJ and James Brown sharing a stage.
Federal prosecutors are supposedly focusing on Bernie Madoff's "close associates." Other people may speculate — not Madoff, who didn't speculate at all, considering that he didn't make a single trade — but the feds know that Madoff couldn't have pulled off his scam alone. At the very least, lots of his fellow traders and other outsiders on Wall Street knew that Madoff's claims of a steady return, year after year, no matter how the market was doing, were bullshit. All credit to Harry Markopolos, but he couldn't possibly have been the only person to have figured it out.
Unraveling the finances of both Madoff and MJ may take forever. Lawyers around the globe are trying to figure out how much money Madoff made off with (and who's got it now). They're searching for documents. MJ's finances are even more complicated, but lawyers already have most of the documents — too many of them, no doubt.
Who's going to wind up with Madoff's wealth? His money spigot has finally been turned off, but there are billions already out there. The only thing we know for sure is that trustee Irving Picard is in line for a 3 percent commission. As law prof Lawrence Velvel says, "Were Picard to recover ten billion dollars in these suits and distribute it to Madoff victims, his personal share, at three percent, would be 300 million dollars. Nice work if you can get it."
Aside from the complex question of lawyers' fees, who's going to wind up with what share of the rest of MJ's wealth? "The settling of his estate will be complicated," the L.A. Times understates. Especially because the spigot is wide open, and the cash keeps gushing out.
Of all the people unhappy about Michael Jackson's death, no businessman is suffering as much as Philip Anschutz, the secretive, right-wing Christian tycoon from Colorado who controls a sports and entertainment empire.
The heavily in-debt Jackson's death wipes out the extremely expensive MJ comeback already financed by Anschutz's AEG Live concert-promotion behemoth and set to kick off July 8 in London.
Despite the millions of dollars that his empire had a chance to make off the King of Pop, Anschutz didn't even want to get involved: Jackson's very existence — not to mention the star's so-gay behavior (and his ambiguous sexuality and various molestation accusations) — had to have deeply offended Anschutz. He had to be persuaded by private-equity pal Tom Barrack of Colony Capital to invest in Jackson.
Part of that tale was told only a few weeks ago in an L.A. Times piece about Barrack's rescue of Jackson, "To this financier, Michael Jackson is an undervalued asset."Chris Lee and Harriet Ryan lay out an interesting yarn about Barrack, who controls casinos, hotels, et al. around the world, stepping in to buy Neverland and rescue Jackson:
In Jackson, Barrack saw the sort of undervalued asset his private equity firm, Colony Capital, had succeeded with in the past. He wrote a check to save the ranch and placed a call to a friend, conservative business magnate Philip Anschutz, whose holdings include the concert production firm AEG Live. ... Barrack said the prospect of helping Jackson, given his recent criminal case, gave Anschutz, a devout Christian, pause.
(Yeah, no doubt. Anschutz has been a heavy contributor to various anti-gay and other "morality" causes; his money played a crucial role in the passage of Colorado's anti-gay Amendment Two in 1992.)
But Anschutz agreed, and he put Jackson in touch with his AEG subsidiary. The rest was going to be history: the biggest, baddest career re-launch ever. And a series of deals by which Anschutz and Barrack would have raked in millions — concerts staged by an Anschutz subsidiary and appearances in venues controlled by Barrack.
Al Sharpton, the great healer, has naturally tried to interject himself into the state Senate mess that has paralyzed any legislative attempt to work on New York's economic crisis.
But the guy who was able to get James Brown to appear with him can't even get Governor David Paterson to a palaver.
Every state is hurting, but only New York has Al Sharpton. But Sharpton's lost his touch. Back in 1974, when he was only 19 and America's cities were either burning or smoldering, Sharpton horned in on one of James Brown's appearances on Soul Train. In the video above, host Don Cornelius introduces Sharpton, who presents the Godfather of Soul with a gold record and touts himself as a young black leader. (It was a gold record that Brown already had received, obviously, but it was repackaged so Sharpton could present it and thus garner some publicity. Which he did.)
In the current crisis in Albany, Sharpton has so far garnered just a modicum of publicity. How did the "summit" turn out? It didn't amount to much of anything. Sharpton did meet Saturday with erstwhile rebel senator Hiram Monserrate and others. They posed for pictures, said a few words, and then retired for a private meeting. Invited guest David Paterson was apparently a no-show.
Phil Murphy, the Democrats' big-time fundraiser, is on tap for the big job of U.S. ambassador to Germany, reportsDer Spiegel in a global news scoop. And buried at the bottom of the German mag's story is the little nugget that Murphy's friends include "band members of the rock group Guns N' Roses."
Can't find that connection mentioned anywhere else, but it wouldn't be the first time that rockers lowered themselves to the level of bankers.
Last September, Murphy — a former Goldman Sachs banker and the party's national finance chairman during the '08 campaign — hosted a $2,300-per-person Obama fundraiser for 200 people at his New Jersey home. Among the guests were Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea. Later that evening, the Bon Jovis adjourned to their nearby home to host 100 people at their own fundraiser for Obama. The price to get in? $30,800 a person.
Maybe Der Spiegel got its rockers mixed up, confusing Der Axl with Bon Jovi, who's such a big fan of Obama's that he wound up performing at Obama's inauguration concert.
In any case, Bon Jovi's big-ticket event on behalf of Obama last year was sure to make Phil Murphy a lifelong fan.
The gap between bestsellers and the rest is widening, ... a pattern also seen with movie and TV consumption too. ... [B]ands fourth of fifth on a bill are relatively worse off than they were ten years ago. So much for the internet as the great leveller: You literally got lost in the noise.
But why does popular taste follow this shape? For Andrew Bud, who worked on last year's study [cited in this Register story], the answer is simple:
"An obvious answer is that it's through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That's what culture is. So the fact we're seeing the log normal distribution here may point to the power of culture on people's choices. ... [O]nce the nature of the digital market is understood, we can build businesses that reward composers and songwriters. (Not something a concern for the Pirates).
McDuff calls the February 2009 piece a "parody," but that's too modest and it's inaccurate. This is spot-on recent history, set to music to make it palatable, but as tragic as it is comic. Like the featured tune in a horror musical.
Really clever to include a mention of Sandy Weill, the guy who started Citigroup on the road to wherever it's helping drag the rest of us to. (Tip of the hat to reader Sam Dixon for pointing me to the video.)
Best of all is McDuff's sense of humor: The closing lyric is "Here's hoping the markets get strong/So I'm not writing another song ..." Prediction: They won't, and he will.
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