HOT: Wikipedia as Backstage Pass
With its user-created and policed policy and notorious user-generated pranks and factual errors, Wikipedia should never be taken as gospel. But the site’s easily manipulated nature came in handy recently for a fan of Australian Electronic duo Peking Duk. The fan approached security at a concert in Melbourne and requested backstage access, saying he was one of the members’ stepbrothers. As proof, he showed the security guard Peking Duk’s Wikipedia page, which he moments earlier had updated so it had his name listed as “family.” The fan not only reached the backstage area, but also had drinks with the performers, who (perhaps unwisely) praised the stunt.
WARM: Pitchfork Pans Pope
As of press time, Pope Francis’ debut album Wake Up!, the first “Pop” effort (it’s actually been described more as Prog Rock) by a Pope, had yet to dent the Billboard charts. But the album, which features “vocals” taken from speeches by the Pope over the past couple of years, has been going through a different rite of passage for new Rock artists — the record review. Pitchfork, which has a rep for snarky and overwrought reviews, gave the LP a measly (yet Biblical) “3.16” on its “1-10” review scale. The mostly cheeky review doesn’t disappointed; referring to a “lyric” about “the beauty of holiness,” the reviewer writes, “if this album is the indication, beauty isn’t exactly holiness’ sound.”
COLD: Moz’s ‘Bad Sex’
This year has been up and down for ex-Smiths singer Morrissey. Though he managed a successful touring run, he was also allegedly groped by TSA officials during a security screening and is reportedly having a tough time finding a record label. Moz’s 2015 is ending on a sour note — the British singer scored a dubious award from the U.K.’s Literary Review. A passage from Morrissey’s first novel, List of the Lost, which has characters embroiled in “one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation,” scored the magazine’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” for 2015.
