Indie Rock Sues Rolling Stone and Camel

Perhaps you’ve heard the angry murmuring, well now there’s litigiousness to make it official - In a dense ad section for Camel cigarettes in Rolling Stone, Xiu Xiu, A Silver Mount Zion, Lavender Diamond, Fucked Up and dozens more beloved independent music makers, many local, found themselves mapped, tagged and ‘name checked’ without so much as a how do you do.

So now they’re fighting back with a case strong enough to get them seriously paid I suspect, more power to them:

Indie rock bands Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up today filed a class action lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (the parent company of Camel cigarettes) and Wenner Media (the publisher of Rolling Stone) alleging the unauthorized use of artists’ names, unauthorized use of artist names for commercial advantage (right of publicity), and unfair business practices, all in regards to the ‘Indie Rock Universe’ multipage advertising section that appeared in the 40th Anniversary issue of the magazine published on November 15. The class action, which was instigated by Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up but filed on behalf of 186 bands and artists featured in the pull out spread, accuses both the cigarette company and the magazine of engaging in “despicable conduct” that was “illegal under settled, unambiguous California statutory and common law.” The lawsuit demands Rolling Stone publish an admission that the artists’ names were used without consent in a spread equal in size to the original ad, as well as seeking actual and punitive financial damages. (Under California law, this could conceptually amount to $750 per issue of Rolling Stone, per band, or a whopping $195.3 billion

camel thinks they made indie

A verbal description of the multi-page advertising ’ section with its centerpiece foldout is necessarily sequential, abstract, cumbersome, incomplete and indirect (as are verbal descriptions of music). But viewing the actual publication leaves no doubt about its intended and actual impact on the reader: the foldout is placed in the midst of the section, as the main event, preceded and heralded by the Camel-suffused graphics and text on page 64, and by the gatefold pages which appear when one turns page 64, finally to make its dramatic full-spread arrival on the opening of the gatefold pages, with a concluding flourish on page 72, which reprises and reinforces page 64 and the gatefold pages, and functions as a parting impression, reminding the viewer upon his or her exit from this “Indie Universe” that it is Camel cigarettes which sponsors (in every sense) and has put on the whole show for the presumed “indie music”-identified reader. Deliberate and intended use of the artists’ names as an—or even the—essential credibility-generating engine within the advertising apparatus designed to deliver these commercial “goods”—Camel cigarette sales—is immediately apparent, and undeniable.

And nauseating! Find out more on the Daily Swarm. Or if it makes you queasy to see the fake outsider art on the “indie universe” pages and countless bands with serious ethics embedded in a cigarette ad they weren’t paid for or contacted about and treated like they’re being done a favour, well skip it, blow off some steam.. perhaps by reading this angry letter aloud in some sort of performative Fucked Up fashion?