MGF Presents The Saturday Swindle Sheet #126

Columns

Welcome back to The Saturday Swindle Sheet.
I’m Jeff Fernandez, and in the interest of brevity, let’s get to it…

BLURBS OF THE WEEK

A longtime associate of R. Kelly has filed a lawsuit against the singer, claiming that last February he was assaulted at Kelly’s home in Olympia Fields, Ill., and was left with permanent injuries. Henry Love Vaughn, who told reporters that he has been “like an uncle” to Kelly, and has been helping him with his career since he was a teenager, was at the house to watch the NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 19, and says he was punched several times by John Levy, a member of Kelly’s entourage, and was then dragged to the front room by several others to be thrown out. It was at that point that Vaughn says, “R. Kelly sees me bleeding, grabs me, hits me upside the head and takes me into the basement. … [there he repeatedly strikes me] about the face and body. … Then he drags me up the stairs and past security at the gate.” While Olympia Fields police say that they have investigated the complaint and will not file charges, Vaughn claims that along with his police report, he has photos of his bloody lip and paperwork from a nearby hospital describing his injuries. As a bonus, the suit also claims breach of contract in that Kelly reneged on a promise to pay Vaughn royalties for his part in the production of the hit song “Step in the Name of Love”. Representatives for Kelly said that Vaughn, “a “disgruntled former employee and hanger-on, … [and] his lawsuit is a pathetic collection of half-truths, distortions and outright lies.” They added that Vaughn was drunk on the night of the alleged assault (which Vaughn disputes), and had to be subdued and ultimately taken off of the premises after he got too rowdy. Asked why he thinks he would have been beaten by Kelly and his associates, Vaughn said he isn’t sure, but thought that it may have stemmed from critical comments he made that night about Kelly’s 7-year-old daughter dancing like a stripper on a pool table. When asked about that claim, Kelly told reporters for The Saturday Swindle Sheet, in an EXCLUSIVE interview, that his children were upstairs sleeping that night, “[a]nd furthermore, I would never let my 7-year-old daughter dance like a stripper on top of a pool table. Another 7-year-old girl that’s not my daughter… well, that’s a different story. I don’t think I’d have any problem with that, then. And I don’t think I’d have a problem urinating on her either.”

Rapper Cassidy (né Barry Reese) was in stable condition at a New Jersey hospital on Friday after being involved in a car accident early Thursday morning. According to Grady Spivey, Cassidy’s A&R rep, the rapper was traveling in Jersey City in a large SUV with a driver, Spivey, and another unidentified man, en route to Yonkers, N.Y., when a much larger truck careered (not careened) through an intersection and slammed into the side of the vehicle. Cassidy, who was seated behind the driver, was thrown over a row of seats, sustaining a fractured skull and broken bones in his face. The Saturday Swindle Sheet wishes Cassidy a speedy recovery.

DMX was involved in SHENANIGANS once again last weekend, as he appeared at Hot 97’s Back to School Jam at the Nassau Coliseum in New York on Saturday night. After being told before his performance that it would have to be cut by 15 minutes due to time constraints, the rapper tried to rally the crowd as his set was to have ended, and when the sound technician proceeded to cut off his microphone he threw a shit fit, tossing sound equipment around and confronting and trying to start a fight with the technician, although it never panned out to any violence. Finally, he ended up storming off the stage like the true prima donna that he is. However, DMX did get some violence in a few minutes later, when he returned to the stage with his entourage, taunting the crowd and pretty much just showboating and flexing. After an audience member who had had enough tossed a metal folding chair onto the stage, a member of DMX’s entourage tossed it back in the crowd, striking a woman in the head. In related news, 50 Cent was also at the Back to School Jam, and according to witnesses, on that particular day he looked like the Jackalope.


Although The Saturday Swindle Sheet has no official footage of a fan getting hit with a folding chair at recent DMX performance in New York, we’d be willing to bet that it probably looked something like this.

Ray Davies, the singer and founding member of The Kinks, was presented with BMI’s Icon Award on Tuesday, for what organizers referred to as his “enduring influence on generations of music makers”, including Morrissey/The Smiths, Blur, and Oasis. “It’s always great to be able to accept things like this for the guys in the band as well,” Davies said at the ceremony in London. “They were great. They were my muse. Except for that wanker John Gosling. Oh, he knows why…”

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Chris Cunningham’s New Project, Metallica Woes
By Trevor Presiloski

You remember Chris Cunningham? He was one of those directors back in the day when music videos used to actually rule. He did that Aphex Twin video, “Windowlicker”? Arguably the best hip-hop video ever made that wasn’t a hip-hop video? No? I’m too old? Well, anyway this is The Horrors tune “Sheena Is a Parasite”. Creepy as hell.

But what to talk about this week? Paris Hilton apparently went platinum this week. No, not her album. Her vagina. Ho-hum.

Metallica is apparently still being haunted by Cliff Burton. That, or Lars still hasn’t gotten over losing his ‘little Danish friend’ and has gone completely senile. Hey, they’re old enough to start exhibiting signs of a complete and utter mental breakdown. Plus, all that alcohol abuse can’t help things.

Go buy the new Killers disc, or, if you want something that’s NOT going to make you jump around like an idiot, go get the Devil & Daniel Johnston.

tpresiloski@gmail.com

The EarWorm
By Misha Sumra

“Is that a worm in your ear?”

You know what it’s like. You’re merrily going about your business—at work, at home, out with friends—when suddenly you hear a little snippet of a song or tune. And all of sudden, the entire thing is in your head, and it won’t go away, no matter what you do.

ARGH!

I’ve got a pretty good memory for song lyrics. I hear it a few times, and the words are right there, ready in case a need for sing-along emerges. Which makes me vulnerable to the EarWorm phenomenon… In fact, I have a worrying tendency for the aforesaid worms to emerge from my own brain for no good reason whatsoever.

So, what’s the solutions? Obviously, if it’s a good EarWorm, then there’s no need to get rid of it; but if it’s annoying song, or a hated one, action has to be taken.

Generally, I find the best way to kill an EarWorm is to drown it. Portable music players are excellent for this—put the headphones in, stick a good song on, and wait for the music to pass straight to your brain, seemingly bypassing the ears). But what if your mp3 player’s out of battery? Or you don’t have it? That’s when you need to have internal backups—songs or part-songs that you can pull out of memory and use to down the Worm. My personal favourites are the hook from
“Siberian Khatru” by Yes, and the bass line from The White Stripes’ “Seven
Nation Army”.

Of course, care must be taken that the music used for Worm-drowning
doesn’t wind up an EarWorm itself…

multiclassgeek@gmail.com

THE MOST RIDICULOUS ITEM OF THE WEEK

The Delicious Rox Festival at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, Mo., was cut short last weekend after a woman in the audience was struck in the head with a bottle that had been hurled into the crowd by one of the performers onstage, possibly from Fozzy. That band had just ended its set at around 10 p.m., when an announcement was made that due to an insurance stipulation, the show had to be immediately canceled in the event of a fan getting injured. That’s lame. While 17 of the 19 bands had already performed, headliners Drowning Pool and Fear Factory still had yet to play. Local police were called in shortly thereafter to control the crowd and to get them out of the venue in an orderly fashion. This just in… reporters for The Saturday Swindle Sheet have uncovered from an EXCLUSIVE source that the bottle was actually thrown by Burton C. Bell after he contracted a nasty case of diarrhea, and rather than have to announce to the crowd that Fear Factory’s set would be canceled due to his diarrhea, he decided to just hurl a bottle into the crowd instead. Genius.

Cheers
-JF2k6!