You're in your record-company office on a sunny day in August 2017, four days after neo-Nazis marched on CHARLOTTESVILLE, and you get a package with a KU KLUX KLAN return address containing a cassette tape labeled "TRUMP/COMEY Recordings" with Russian text, garbled audio and an email address taking you to a password-protected site featuring a Russian flag and an eyeball staring back at you. Do you a) contact the FBI and the police, b) take your computer immediately offline and notify your IT department, c) get incredibly creeped out, d) vow to never write about, talk about or promote whatever idiot prankster—you hope it's a prankster—sent you this thing, or e) all of the above? It took a while for people in the music biz on Wednesday to figure out that this particular mailing was the work of a PORTLAND indie-rock band, which I will not mention by name and which I do not plan to write about again. I was not a recipient, but I witnessed the horrified reactions. There is never a good time for a prank as tasteless as this; but this is a particularly horrible time. The band, after being outed, released a tone-deaf statement saying the mailing was aimed mostly at far-right media with the intention of trolling them. It's a creepy, idiotic troll no matter who it's addressed to, and that much creepier when also addressed to innocent, unaware record-company staffers who may be, say, Jewish. It's a desperate and awful way to try to generate publicity for an album, and feeds a roaring fire of fear, hatred and confusion that needs to be extinguished, not fed. The band, for what it's worth, is not ARCADE FIRE, which has spent the summer engaged in a bizarre, protracted fake-news publicity campaign of its own, which has not risen to the KKK level of tastelessness but which is, at best, an unfortunate way to promote art in 2017. The idea of fake news isn't funny right now. Campaigns like this prey on people's unease and help to normalize the very concept they aim to parody. Please cease and desist, band from MONTREAL, and goodbye, band from Portland... In other white-supremacist news, SPOTIFY responded to a DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS article citing 37 "white supremacist hate bands" whose music was on the service by removing them. DMN reports that DEEZER is following suit... TAYLOR SWIFT's blunt, forceful testimony last week in her civil case against a radio DJ who she said groped her—a jury agreed—may have been a watershed legal moment, providing both a path and inspiration for sexual assault victims who have been too scared, intimidated or numb to pursue their own cases in court. Not all, obviously, have Swift's resources or the freedom to devote so much time to the fight, but lawyers, advocates and victims say her positive example may be a resource of its own. Has it changed Swift herself? MusicSET: "Taylor Swift Takes the Stand"... Unfortunately, there are still CHRIS BROWNs out there, too... WU-TANG CLAN ain't nuthing ta f*** wit, even if you're MARTIN SHKRELI... RIP JO WALKER-MEADOR.