It's summer, maybe the dog days of summer, and time for the silly season in American press when they can't find anything newsworthy to write about. So there are lots of features on food and fashion and usually an drippy ice cream cone finds its way to the cover of a national magazine somewhere. Less and less music news or artist tours to report due to the way industry has been structuring itself over the past decade. Apparently the same is true for the British press. That means I don't have anything terribly worthwhile to write about, either.

There are galas awarding humanitarianism and charitable acts

Lebenty Lebentynth Reggae Tour about to splash again, revived after hiatus to generate much needed income for expansion

Also to be funded in part by the flight of capital, I mean investment incentive conveniently coat tailing on the tour.

And of course the left-behinds, those lesser tabloid types whinging and sounding like so many sacks of sour grapes, or old two faced moralistic types.

And a few reissues that cause the remote music critic to ponder re-assessment of what has been presented as historic fact or legend

All I know about any of this is something I'd read probably in Rolling Stone back in 1974. Talking about the then up and coming Island records. An anonymous person close to the scene was quoted as saying (this might not be an exact quote as I'm remembering something I read only once over 20 years ago), "They're so cheap they wouldn't pay five dollars to watch two chimpanzees fuck." And somehow, that single solitary veddy British vulgarity symbolized what I was certain was the entire inside scene to me. I had a vague idea, but who really was that "they" the speaker was referring to? That implied there was more in operation there than a single visionary figurehead calling all the shots, something that implied a cultural mindset.  ¶ 6/17/2006 06:44:00 AM