As publicity stunts go, things couldn't be working out better for Neurosonic.
Neurowho? They're a punkish rock band from Canada currently riding a mini-wave of controversy thanks to the song "So Many People."
It's a direct attack on Ashlee Simpson, with particular focus on her famous lip-synching disaster during "Saturday Night Live." The video features a Simpsonesque blonde hanging out in nightclubs with a couple of Lindsay and Paris look-alikes. Meantime, singer Jason Darr unleashes his venom: "Everything under the sun going to hell in an episode of 'SNL' / Watch it on the TV / You ugly girl, you cannot sing / You can't even lip-synch."
Darr also gripes about the Billboard Awards (Simpson won Best New Female Artist of the Year in 2004) and wonders if any sexual favors were traded for hit records.
When Neurosonic played The Knitting Factory in Manhattan last week, Darr claimed that Simpson's boyfriend, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, "has a cease and desist out against us." That made Page Six of The New York Post, and gullible Internet sites quickly spread the news.
Yesterday, however, Wentz denied it on his own blog: "no i have never heard of that band or ever sent a cease and desist in my life. hope it works out for you."
Now, there's plenty of lameness to go around in any story involving Simpson and Wentz, but the biggest culprits are Neurosonic. Simpson flubbed her "SNL" appearance in Oct 2004 -- that's three years ago. The public has since moved on to other examples of idiocy (Don Imus, the O'Donnell-Trump feud, the mortgage crisis), but here's Neurosonic still seething about how Simpson won a Billboard award.
Check out the video here: