LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Coroners have completed the autopsy report on the body of pop star Michael Jackson, but details remained under wraps on Monday as police probe the cause of the singer's death and his prescription drug use. A Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said detectives requested the autopsy, which includes toxicology tests, remain sealed until their investigation was finished. He could not say when it would be completed and declined to offer more details.
Some media outlets reported that the "Thriller" singer's body has now been buried at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles, but that could not immediately be confirmed through a family spokesman. A cemetery spokesman declined to comment.
Police are looking into why the 50-year-old singer died suddenly of cardiac arrest on June 25. Numerous media reports have said officials are focused on Jackson's use of a powerful anesthetic called propofol to sleep. Police and federal agents have raided several offices of Jackson's doctors as part of their probe.
Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the singer's will said he had approved several business deals, including a $60 million agreement with Columbia Pictures to make a movie from video of the King of Pop's rehearsals for a series of concerts that had been set to take place in London this past July.
Those shows were dubbed "This Is It" by Jackson, and the movie will be similarly titled. Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp's Sony Pictures Entertainment, said the film, due to be in theaters on October 30, will have performances and behind-the-scenes video of Jackson preparing for the concerts. Some of it will be shown in movie theaters in 3-D.
The judge also agreed to the re-issuance of the singer's autobiography, "Moonwalk," currently planned for October.
Lawyers spent much of Monday in court wrangling over merchandising deals still being planned and a traveling exhibition of Jackson memorabilia that concert promoter AEG Live, which had backed the London concerts, wants to mount.
In nine short years, Paul McCartney will hit the jackpot again.
The 67-year-old former Beatle -- already worth about 440 million pounds ($737 million), according to a report by Britain's Sunday Times in April -- will be able to start reclaiming the copyrights to the lucrative Beatles catalog.
He and John Lennon, the Fab Four's primary songwriters, lost control of pop's most coveted catalog as the band was falling apart. They continued to receive songwriting royalties, but have lost out on a massive windfall over the years from licensing deals.
All but a handful of Beatles copyrights eventually ended up with Michael Jackson, and these 250-or-so songs form the crown jewel of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a 50-50 joint venture between the late singer and Sony Corp.
The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 gave songwriters the ability to recapture the publishing share of the copyright on pre-1978 works after two consecutive 28-year terms or 56 years. That means Beatles compositions registered in 1962 will be eligible for reversion in the United States in 2018, while songs written in 1970 will be eligible in 2026.
Under a clause in the Copyright Act, heirs of songwriters who die during the first 28-year term can recapture the publisher's portion of copyrighted works at the end of that term. In the case of Lennon, who died in 1980, the publisher's portion of his share of the Lennon-McCartney catalog for songs written in 1962 became eligible for reversion in 1990, while songs written in 1970 were eligible in 1998.
Sources say that Sony/ATV cut a deal with Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, prior to the reversion dates to retain its publisher's share for the life of the copyright.
In the internecine history of the Beatles' publishing, Lennon and McCartney effectively lost control of the group's song rights even while the group was still a recording entity, in 1969.
That was when Northern Songs, the company established six years earlier solely to publish their joint compositions by English publisher Dick James and Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was sold to British media tycoon Lew Grade's ATV Music. Ownership of ATV subsequently passed to Australian billionaire Robert Holmes a Court and then, in 1985, to Jackson, who paid $47.5 million for the company.
NEW YORK (Billboard) - Sprawled on her bed in an Amsterdam hotel, Lady GaGa is channeling Lady Godiva-sans the horse.
While the 23-year-old has famously worn everything from Kermit the Frog to a hat made to resemble the solar system, today she's rocking the one constant in her ever shifting wardrobe-underpants. And nothing more.
But despite her dominance on the pop charts worldwide and bleached blonde hair, GaGa is not the average pop tart. She's an accomplished songwriter and performer who seems to have come out of nowhere, bursting from the corner of Ludlow and Rivington fully formed and fabulous. In conversation, she's chatty and articulate, but gives off the distinct sense she's 10 steps ahead of everyone else -- while the Internet is still buzzing about the lampshade she wore over her face in a TV interview, she's plotting her next move.
Of course, if she invests wisely, she may never need to work again: Her debut album, "The Fame" has sold nearly 1.3 million copies in the United States since its low-key release last September via Interscope. For the year, it's both the best-selling set for a debut artist, and the fifth-best-selling album overall.
Her digital single, "Just Dance," has sold 4.4 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the No. 2 best-selling digital song of all time. Earlier this week, she snagged nine nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards, sharing the lead with Beyonce.
In addition to co-writing all the tracks on her album, GaGa has previously written for Fergie, the Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears and New Kids on the Block.
"Getting into writing for others happened naturally, because at the time, I didn't have a record deal," GaGa says. "I don't have an ego about other people singing my songs."
And-as surprising as it may seem amid her outre outfits and the nudge-nudge-wink-wink lyrics-GaGa's path from behind-the-scenes songwriter to cultural phenomenon was a smart, regimented plan. Before she was Lady GaGa, she was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, an Italian Catholic schoolgirl from Yonkers, N.Y. She played piano and studied music as a child, but it wasn't until she hit her early 20s that her songwriting and performance style clicked.
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Britney's back. Or rather, Britney's been to the brink and back. After a turbulent few years during which she went way off the deep end -- her every pratfall documented by the tabloids -- Britney Spears appears to have returned to something resembling normal life. We'll get their own glimpse when the 27-year-old pop superstar's Circus tour hits some Canadian dates this month and next. But what we'll see on stage may not be indicative of what's really going on behind closed doors.
Information on Spears' life these days is hard to find, even for Rolling Stone magazine. The singer was twice featured on the publication's cover in the past 13 months. In February 2008 the magazine ran a black-and-white close-up of her, straight-faced, with the headline "Britney Spears -- Inside An American Tragedy;" the second cover, in December, showed a laughing Spears, blond locks cascading over her shoulders and belly button exposed, beside the caption, "Yes She Can! -- Britney Returns."
But as the two articles demonstrate, it's not quite as simple as that. The February piece shows Spears at the apex of a major meltdown: the result of years of repression, controlling of her every move on a family-fuelled road to fame that began when she was four, an alcoholic father, out-of-touch mother, troubled romantic relationships, drug problems, resentment of her oppressive good-girl image and, ultimately a rebellion against everything her family, handlers and the world ever made her out to be.
From her 1998 career-making hit, ". . . Baby One More Time" (and the sassy schoolgirl video that accompanied it) onward, the former Mickey Mouse Club star pushed up against her squeaky clean southern gal identity, alternately fostering and defying it.
During a May 2000 press conference in Montreal, while on tour for her second album Oops! . . . I Did It Again, Spears painted herself as an average gal. "I like peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches," she said. "I'm the type of person that can't sit inside my hotel room and have people (running around me). I have to get out and do normal things, go shopping, stuff like that."
Fast-forward eight years, and (as documented in last February's Rolling Stone article) Spears is storming through a shopping mall with paparazzo then-boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, swearing at everyone in sight. "I don't know who you think I am, b---," she says to a female fan who gets in her way, "but I'm not that person."
The article depicts a Spears at odds with the world around her, struggling with her sanity, social norms and everything everyone ever expected from her.
She is in a very different place now.
The December Rolling Stone article found Spears just as her new album was being released. The single "Womanizer" had made its debut at No. 1, as had the album. And while everything seemed to have magically returned to status quo, a great deal of work was going on behind the scenes to make it just so.
After her two involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations in January 2008, Spears' father obtained legal conservatorship over her in February making him responsible for her finances and most of the details of her life. He rehired her former manager and set strict rules for her day-to-day existence.
The positive side: Spears now has access to her two children; she is exercising again; has released a new album, which is doing well; is on a successful tour for that album; and according to recent reports, is dating her longtime agent, Jason Trawick, 37, whom her dad approves.
The troubling: Spears' every move is monitored. "If I wasn't under the restraints I'm under, I'd feel so liberated," she has said.
Her father recently fired three dancers from her tour for failing drug tests, according to Entertainment Weekly. Phone calls are filtered. Even the interview with Rolling Stone was "a rigorously micromanaged process," in which questions had to be submitted in advance for approval, and any remotely personal query was discarded.
In a way, it is a return to the Britney Spears of old, where it was all about appearances.
There's no going back, of course. Spears has been through the ringer, hit rock bottom, and we've witnessed her every misadventure in excruciating and fascinating detail.
But we're willing to believe. People are again buying her albums, going to her concerts, rooting for her in some sentimental, sympathetic way.
Circus is a more conventional album than the aptly-titled Blackout (which, ironically, with its boundary-pushing electro-pop production, may be the best thing she has released so far). It doesn't dig too deep; the closest it comes to commentary on Spears' reality is the title track, with its allusion to the media circus that surrounds her, but it is merely implied ("All eyes on me in the centre of the ring just like a circus"), and a far less pertinent statement than Blackout's "Piece Of Me."
A hint of her feelings can be found in the lovesick "Out From Under," as she sings, "I'll get it all figured out, when I'm out from under."
There is titillating provocation on the cunningly titled "If U Seek Amy" (say it fast). But we're back to pop for pop's sake. And in that context, Spears remains a big draw. Old pal, icon and former kissing partner Madonna attended her Wednesday night concert in Long Island. Directed by longtime Madge collaborator Jamie King, it features big-top themed numbers, a Bollywood send-up and a pseudo-strip tease.
In her set list, at least, the past is all but forgotten -- most of the material in the show is from her last two albums. The present -- fabricated, fragile and flawed -- is better, or at least more comfortable, than the alternative. It's a mutually agreed upon fantasy that allows everyone to pretend nothing ever happened.
The show, as they say, must go on.
Canadian tour dates include: March 18, Toronto; March 20, Montreal; April 6, Edmonton; April 8, Vancouver.
