Call us dubious

Dozens of top music business executives and star musicians sued themselves after a Recording Industry Assn. of America sweep last summer revealed that each had taped albums from friends’ record collections instead of buying them.

“Technically it’s as illegal as unauthorized downloading,” said new RIAA President Cary Sherman, who was named in the suit, having admitted to making a cassette of a friend’s Motley Crue album in the ‘80s. “It doesn’t matter whether you copy one song, or a thousand. Stealing is stealing.”

Coincidentally, former Crue drummer Tommy Lee was among those who joined Sherman at a Washington news conference announcing the suits, along with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Sheryl Crow and heads of five major record labels.

“I owe all my fans a big apology for setting such a poor example in such a flagrant way,” said Lee, referring to the widely circulated home video that showed Lee and his then wife, Pamela Anderson, illegally making cassettes from an uncle’s Uriah Heep albums.

Well, OK, none of this ever happened in the complex legal world of downloading.

What really happened in 2003 was that the RIAA sued, among others, one Ernest Brenot of Ridgefield, Wash. Brenot was accused of illegally sharing more than 700 songs, including tracks by Vanilla Ice and Linkin Park.

The 79-year-old retiree and his wife, Dorothy, were a little surprised by this in the fall, because they neither own nor know how to use a computer, according to a handwritten note they sent to the judge in the case.

The Associated Press reported that the couple thought that their being named in the suit may have stemmed from their son-in-law briefly adding an Internet account to their cable service. Dorothy Brenot also was quoted as being offended by the suggestion that they listened to music like that.

The Brenots are clear-cut winners of the music business’ scapegoats of the year award. Although targeting downloading is a legitimate pursuit, nailing such folks as the Brenots, while obscuring other reasons for the downturn in music sales (the state of the economy and the lack of artist development, to name two) earns the music business itself the top honor in Pop Eye’s Dubious Distinctions rundown for 2003.

You can’t tuna fish

Jessica SIMPSON, vying with Paris Hilton to be spokesmodel for the American education system, mused during an episode of MTV’s “Newlyweds” (the reality show featuring her and mate Nick Lachey) about the origin of the tuna she was eating. She was confused because the product was called Chicken of the Sea, and she wasn’t sure if it was fish or fowl. The makers of the product, not wanting to further any doubt, hosted Simpson for a tour of their San Diego plant in October. The real shocker was that boney Simpson actually eats.

No whistling Dixie

Jessica SIMPSON presumably knows that the Dixie Chicks are people, not poultry. So even she must have had some awareness of the war of words between the Chicks and Toby Keith that stemmed from Natalie Maines’ verbal swipe at President Bush and continued well after the shock and awe was over. But there was some less familiar fallout from the feud:

-- The morning radio team at WFLZ-FM in Tampa, Fla., cheerfully joined parent company Clear Channel’s anti-Dixie Chicks bandwagon, organizing a protest rally outside an arena where the band was to perform in May. Only problem: the concert was promoted by ... Clear Channel.

-- Merle Haggard, the old Okie from Muskogee himself, tried to play peacemaker, proposing an official truce between Keith and the Chicks, which he suggested be sealed with a joint concert in New York -- with him on the bill as well, of course.

“Let me be the mediator and let us be the voices of America and show that we can have different political opinions and still work together,” he told online music magazine Launch.

He’s still waiting for a response from the other camps.

Raw material girl

Madonna also cast a net on the Internet to foil unauthorized downloaders, “leaking” fake tracks purported to be from her “American Life” album. Those who got the tracks from Kazaa or other peer-to-peer services discovered that what they had were actually just tape loops of the singer making a profane admonishment.

Within days, though, her official website was hacked, with an equally profane response scrawled across its home page. And not long after, something called the Madonna Remix Project launched, with a website at which amateur producers and DJs posted their own tracks built around the Material Girl’s dummy recording.

Safer than the ‘60s

The headline of the year, from a Reuters story about the Rolling Stones’ February concert at Staples Center to support an environmental initiative, evoking the tragic results of Altamont in 1969, the last time the Stones held a concert without an entry fee:

“Rolling Stones Give Free Concert -- No One Killed”

Now that Mick Jagger has been knighted, he is officially not amused.

One baaad concert

A fan at a March concert by Norwegian death metal band Mayhem in Oslo was hospitalized with a fractured skull after being hit by a flying sheep’s head. The dead animal was being carved on stage as part of the band’s act when the head slipped from singer Maniac’s knife. “My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now,” the fan, Per Kristian Hagen, told the Associated Press. “I like them, but not when they come flying through the air.”

Art imitates life

In June, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London announced that a new figure of Britney Spears would be fitted with inflatable breasts that would rise and fall in time to music.