We’ve had our share of interns come through the Tone Deaf offices and we’ve all been interns at one time or another. Your duties are pretty clear: administrative tasks, research, and fetching the occasional coffee.

It’s pretty much the same wherever you go, even if you’re interning at a record label. Usually, you’re fetching more coffee there. As far as we know, scalping tickets to an artist’s show is not part of the job description.

But one record label intern is in seriously hot water after he got Oakland-based roots musician Xavier Dphrepaulezz, known to fans as Fantastic Negrito, detained by police shortly before he was set to hit stage.

As Consequence of Sound reports, Dphrepaulezz was detained by local police officers shortly before his scheduled performance at Outside Lands in San Francisco, when an associate of his crew was found illegally selling VIP tickets on Craiglist.

On Saturday afternoon, Dphrepaulezz approached the entrance of Golden Gate Park expecting to find a golf cart waiting to take him to the stage. Instead, he was greeted by 10 members of the local police department.

The officers promptly handcuffed the musician without explanation. Eventually, he was told that he would no longer be performing at the event after someone found a VIP wristband being sold on Craigslist by one of his label’s interns, who was present with him at the scene.

Speaking to Consequence of Sound, Dphrepaulezz described the experience as “being treated like an animal”. After being handcuffed, the musician was forced to the ground and eventually removed from the park grounds.

He was then detained for three hours before being released with a citation for “peddling without a permit”. Dphrepaulezz said he has “absolutely no idea” how the SFPD has jurisdiction over a wristband’s sale on a third-party website.

“The incident is over now. I don’t even hold it against the intern. He’s a good kid. As soon as he saw what was going down, he manned up and took responsibility,” Dphrepaulezz added.

“I don’t have anything to do with tickets or wristbands to these things — I’m too focused on the performance to keep track of those things.”

“Detained by SFPD,” the musician tweeted at the time. “Intern from our office sold a ticket and we are cancelled. Intern got hold of wrist band and tried to sell ticket on Craigslist police held me for 3 hours.”

“Looks like we are cancelled,” he later wrote. “Inern… nice kid made a bad decision that affected all of us. I hope he learned something. ‘That kid fucked us’ as the gentleman just stated.”

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“SFPD handcuffs me detains me for 3 hours because an intern tried to sell tix. The kid probably needed the money rent is high in the bay.” Meanwhile, festival organisers simply tweeted that Fantastic Negrito “can’t make the set today”.

As Consequence of Sound notes, though artists selling their complimentary tickets is certainly a taboo practice, it’s hard to grasp how such an act, especially when the artist himself was not involved, could escalate into police action.

Meanwhile, Dphrepaulezz seems to have a pretty chilled outlook on the whole incident, though we can’t imagine the label feel the same way. We can probably safely say that he’s now a “former intern” at that particular label.

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