And because of this affinity for controversy, Katy Perry is currently getting the hiding of her life. A couple of days ago The Sun published a photo of Katy Perry posing with a knife accompanied by a headline similar to but not exactly ‘BURN THE WITCH FOR SHE KNOWES MAGICK!’ and now all hell has broken loose.

So, with the sound of tabloid disapproval ringing in her ears, Katy Perry has released a statement saying that she is ‘against all violence’. Problem solved. Now The Sun can get back to the real threat to the nation’s youth – all those pictures of Katy Perry wearing 1940s swimsuits. Seriously, if we start seeing girls dressed as WWII cheesecake models in the street, we’re going to form a mob and burn Katy’s house down.

You know who we feel sorry for? Forks. Over the last few weeks it’s been all knife this and knife that – what with Angelina Jolie buying a knife for her six-year-old son and Kerry Katona throwing a shitty fit about it – and yet the fork, the knife’s humble cutlery partner and perhaps the more versatile implement of the two, has been shunned. Truly, the fork is the four-pronged McCartney to the knife’s pointy Lennon.

And now it’s time for Katy Perry to damage her reputation by association to a knife. Up until now, not much has really been known about Katy Perry, apart from the fact that she once annoyed Jesus by singing a song about kissing a girl and fell onto a big cake the other day. That’s literally it.

Or that literally was it until Wednesday, when The Sun newspaper decided to publish a three-year-old photo of Katy Perry holding a knife quite close to her eye alongside a screaming piece of journalism linking her to the wave of teenage knife crime that’s sweeping the UK at the moment. Because, as we all know, teenagers are easily manipulated and love to emulate their idols.

Incidentally, that’s true – as children we were influenced by everything we saw on TV, which is why we spent six solid months of 1989 dressed as David The Gnome and once tried to kill ourselves because we couldn’t push cuckoo clocks and beachballs out of our arses like Bertha, the mid-1980s animated children’s factory unit. But this is besides the point.

Anyway, astonished that her transparently controversy-baiting photo has actually become somewhat controversial, Katy Perry has issued something of a stunned statement pointing out that death by stabbing doesn’t make her particularly happy. MTV reports:

Her US publicist told MTV News: “Katy Perry is against all violence. The photo in question was taken in 2005 and is in no way related to the current events in the UK.”

It’s just an upsetting coincidence, that’s all, that a photo of Katy Perry wielding a knife has been published during a moral panic about youth-based knife crime.

But if you think this is a storm, just wait until you see the other pictures of Katy Perry from 2005 that happen to eerily echo current news, like the photo of Katy Perry dressed as Sarah Palin skinning a moose, the photo of Katy Perry dressed as a crying stockbroker and the photo of Katy Perry denying that she condones knife crime based on a photo of Katy Perry that was taken three years before that one.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Well now it would seem she’s got herself into MMA – that’s mixed martial arts – with some hardcore street fighting action. Well, hardcore may be a bit far, but Lily Allen did go and try to beat up a random French girl for insulting her.

And we shouldn’t forget that she also managed to swear like a navvie, and she managed to do all of this in front of about 32,000 paparazzi and other press hounds. Not a bad effort, we have to say. But to top off all the topping offs that could be topped off, there’s a video too – and it’s after the jump.

Yes, we thought we’d managed to get rid of her to our good friends in the US, but it would seem we’ve struck out in that respect and Lily remains firmly on British soil.

Exiting Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, Lily was apparently abused by a French passer-by, which caused her to react in a way befitting of any Brit taking issue with a Frenchie: through the art of violence.

Unfortunately, the battering took on something of a pathetic form and was easily upstaged by Allen’s hilarious foul mouth, which managed to put even the great swear-machine Brian Blessed to shame.

While it would appear Lily Allen isn’t taking her own advice, at least it looks like she is following through with her attempted crusade to rid the streets of violence. Though we didn’t expect her to get rid of it personally, nor did we expect her to get rid of violence with violence.

But we’re not questioning her logic – we don’t want to be battered, for one.

Rather than natter on any more, why don’t we just let you see for yourselves – here we have Lily Allen, attempting to punch a French girl, failing, swearing a lot and being calmed down by Miquita Oliver who used to be on Popworld.

It really does have it all – tension, violence, beauty, international appeal, a resolution and a lesson at the end of it all: “violence is bad.”

(Alright, so we’ll admit that video’s a bit rubbish, but it’s better than most of the other ones around and we couldn’t embed the one that The Sun has up – but hey, at least you can hear her swearing like a disgruntled navvie, eh?)

Just ask Ashanti, whose marketing team decided it would be a good idea to encourage ultraviolence, if not murder, with fans of the R&B ’star’.

It’s a bold move, that’s for sure, but we can’t help but think it’s one that should have had a little more thought put into it before being unleashed on the world.

See, spreading people around a major city and making them stand as human statues to advertise a product – that’s a PR stunt.

A tame one, but it does a job. Flashmobbing and viral marketing – they’re both efforts that appeared in recent times, used for the evil marketing team. They’re not particularly spectacular, generally speaking, but they do what they have to: something a bit different that advertises a product.

While it can’t be argued that Ashanti’s recent stunt wasn’t a ‘bit different’, it certainly can be argued that encouraging violence and murder probably isn’t the best of ideas.

Different? Yes. Ill-advised? Most definitely. Did we mention that Ashanti’s recent marketing ploy for her new single encouraged violence and murder? No? Well it did. Just to be clear on that one.

It all started with the video for the single in question, ‘The Way That I Love You‘. In the video, a clearly quite-pissed-off Ashanti deals with a cheating boyfriend by, well, killing him. Quite a lot. In the face. It’s an interesting take on the situation, and one hecklerspray doesn’t find too far-fetched when it comes to the world of relationships.

But then the problems started – the PR types decided it would be a good idea to incorporate this murderous tendency into the website for Ashanti’s track. By incorporating fake news reports of a spate of murders, allowing potential killers that visited the site to choose their murder weapon and – probably most frightening of all – allowing visitors to send e-cards to people they suspected were cheating on them. As Ashanti herself told Newsday:

“If you have someone you think is cheating on you, you can send them an e-mail blast and customize it and accuse them of maybe not being emotionally available, or you found them cheating on you, or sneaking around with one of your friends.”

It’s clearly a good thing that a musician in the public eye is encouraging such mistrust, and showing people the correct way to respond to any fears or concerns they may have about a relationship. No more should we talk about things, come to sensible conclusions or possibly involve professional help: no, we should threaten, accuse and murder.

Aaaand, we let out a collective sigh.

Fortunately for the world, the insane people who tend to complain about everything, as well as some of those religious types have combined their efforts and got the bloody stupid campaign pulled. Normally hecklerspray would do its best to avoid these types, but sometimes you just have to side with the enemy to face a greater threat – namely, Universal Motown, who released this statement:

“Ashanti and her music have always been about self-empowerment and addressing the issues that are most meaningful to her. We stand by our artist and her creative choices.”

Which could be read as ‘we like the idea of, and actively encourage murder’, if you looked at it in that way. It’s probably not the best marketing strategy really, is it? But hey, at least it’s managed to get her some more coverage, which means it’s worked, which means we’ve fallen for it… bugger.

And yesterday Nicole Kidman went to the United Nations headquarters in New York to further her cause. Speaking in front of the world’s media, Nicole Kidman told the world’s press about her commitment to the campaign. With the help of world governments and the United Nations, Nicole Kidman said, within ten years she can meet her target of having 75% of the world’s females married off to alcoholic country singers.

What? Nicole Kidman was actually talking about the violence towards women thing? Oh, what a hilarious misunderstanding.

We’re not sure exactly what it is that the United Nations does, but we’re beginning to think it’s some sort of freakish trap set up by the paparazzi to ensnare celebrities. There sure are a lot of famous folk that get to hang around the UN these days, you see – from Angelina Jolie to Madonna to Ban Ki-moon, who we think is famous because he made an internet sex tape or something once.

And now we can add Nicole Kidman to the list. Although she’s busy juggling being pregnant with her first child and looking exactly like some kind of bat, Nicole Kidman still found time to roll on down to the United Nations headquarters in New York yesterday to speak about the thing that matters second-most to her after deliberately making commercially unsuccessful movies.

That, of course, is violence against women. And, as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Development Fund for Women, it’s well within Nicole Kidman’s rights to call press conferences to make non-specific calls for change to nobody in general whenever she feels like it. As People reports, yesterday Nicole Kidman felt like it:

“Obviously, I’m emotionally connected to this,” Kidman said of her commitment during a press conference Tuesday at United Nations headquarters in New York. “I’m a mother. I have a child on the way. A lot of it is realizing the things that are wrong and [pondering] how can I contribute to help my children have a better life?” Kidman, 40, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Development Fund for Women (since 2006), spoke passionately about the need to curb violence against women – which she called the “most widespread human rights violation of our time.” … Kidman noted that “one in three women will encounter violence in some way, shape or form against them in their lifetime.” She added, “That’s an extraordinary statistic. Yet do we ever hear it?”

Oh blah blah blah, it’s always women this and violence that with Nicole Kidman. But what about the oppression suffered by good-looking middle-class white boys with blonde hair, blue eyes and impeccable dress sense, huh? Why are we condemned to suffer in silence? Why?

Anyway, celebrity endorsements like these usually help to raise awareness of serious issues, so perhaps Nicole Kidman really has done some good here. And if just one man gets drunk after work tonight, goes home and – instead of hitting his wife like normal – takes out his pent-up rage on a piece of furniture or a household pet, then Nicole Kidman will have done her job. High-fives all round.

Read more:

Nicole Kidman Campaigns To Stop Violence Against Women – People