The good news about Ultragrrrl's latest piece of rapturous press-praise: It's in way-late-to-the-game
Vanity Fair, meaning that the backlash can be only a few weeks away. The bad news: Considering that the glowingly sycophantastic piece is credited to Ultra's long-time friend Marc Spitz,
VF no longer believes it's a conflict of interest to allow IM best-buddies to write about one another. In one of the weakest disclosures ever, Spitz notes that he and Ultra (we can't believe we're calling her that) are merely former
Spin magazine "co-workers," conveniently leaving out the fact that they're actually
late-night party pals who
sometimes DJ together. That probably explains why the item contains not even the slightest trace of skepticism—and why no one at the magazine bothered to ground the rather lofty claim that Interpol or My Chemical Romance would never have made it without Ultra's help. Yay, bestest friends working together! Yay, bad journalism!
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Idolator
Dear Portfolio: No matter what Sarah "Ultragrrrl" Lewitinn tells you, "eschew[ing] the popular computer program Serato Scratch Live to manage [your] playlists and instead [using] CD players connected to a mixer" has jack shit to do with "greater discipline" being forced upon you. Not to begrudge anyone who can actually get away with charging $250 an hour to play "Come on Eileen" and "Billie Jean," of course; I used to do something similar when I was seven years old by putting sticks in paper containers and attempting to sell the result as "firewood." [
In addition to the rumors of layoffs at Sony BMG, another major label has started to shed personnel, with Island Def Jam letting people go on Friday; among the rumored departures are executive vice president of promotion Greg Thompson and A & R honchos Paul Pontius and Rob Stevenson. Island Def Jam has also severed its ties with Stolen Transmission, the "incubator" label that was run by Sarah "Ultragrrrl" Lewitinn, who addressed the situation in an upbeat post on AbsolutePunk.net:
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