Pardon me if I smell a little worse than usual this week. I've been dumpster diving in the PR bin, the rankest receptacle of music industry waste, and I've come up with a dripping fistful of the month's hottest garbage.We'll start with the popular misconception that all publicity is good publicity:
A year after her GRAMMYs debut, "Gun Girl" Sasha Gradiva is rushed to the hospital for exhaustion and dehydration on the day of the awards show
LOS ANGELES — As this year's 55th Annual GRAMMY Awards get underway, many are still talking about the stars who made fashion statements at last year's awards: Fergie, Nicki Minaj, and Jessie J to name a few, but none made a bigger splash than newcomer Sasha Gradiva. Just a year ago Gradiva took the GRAMMYs by storm with her "terminator" meets Barbie getup, but on the heels of her #LOVERSWANTEDTOUR the singer was rushed to Saint Francis hospital in Memphis, TN yesterday to be treated for exhaustion and dehydration.
Last year, a mostly unknown Russian pop singer named Sasha Gradiva hit the Grammy red carpet — who knows why she was there? — wearing a gown festooned with guns. Some people noticed; nobody is still talking about it.
Now, in some harebrained gambit, her PR agency has decided to insert her back into the Grammy spotlight by planting a weirdly celebratory story about her hospital stay (they even included an unglamorous photo of Sasha looking bored in a hospital bed).
God knows why they did this. Maybe they were trying to explain her absence from the Grammys without admitting she just wasn't invited this year, or maybe they're trying to cultivate a hardcore party image with the "exhaustion and dehydration" thing. They must know that everyone in the entire universe will read that as a euphemism for something terrible, like "cocaine nose collapse" or "speedball heart attack" or "torso bursting with spider eggs."
My best guess is they needed an excuse to remind everyone of her gun dress, which was a minor story a year ago, and this was as good a chance as they were going to get. Here's some free PR advice: now that flashing guns in public is about as popular as being engulfed in flames, 2013 might not be the right time to remind everyone about the gun dress. If none of her singles are taking off and you still need a PR angle, you could try positioning her as, like, "Sasha Gradiva, the most exhausted and dehydrated woman in showbiz," or something.
And now, from the News Stories Manufactured Entirely for My Benefit Department:
Famed Attorney Willie Gary Files Half-Billion Dollar Lawsuit on behalf of Music Legend Chubby Checker against Hewlett Packard and Palm, Inc. for Copyright Infringement
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — Famed attorney Willie Gary [. . . ] filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit on behalf of world-renown music legend, Chubby Checker who is known for the ever-popular #1 hit "The Twist." The lawsuit was filed today against technology giant Hewlett Packard and its subsidiary Palm, Inc. for maintaining a software application called "Chubby Checker" for Palm products.
