It’s rarely a good thing when dates are postponed or a tour is canceled. However, in the case of Sleigh Bells and Tyler Perry’s latest “Madea” tour, each act decided to bypass the usual publicity to speak directly to their fans.

We’ll start with Sleigh Bells, the New York City-based duo consisting of Derek Edward Miller on guitar and Alexis Krauss on vocals. Apparently Miller suffered a spot of bad luck while in Florida. From the group’s Facebook page:

“Apologies for canceling Pygmalion & Midpoint. I fractured the radial bone in my right arm at a skate park in Tequesta, FL. My arm is healing well but we gotta play it safe so I don’t fuck it up some more. We’ve had to move our Chicago (Metro) show to 11/4, Bowling Green to 11/7, Columbus to 11/8, and Rochester to 11/9. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Sounds kind of basic and to-the-point, doesn’t it? Tyler Perry, on the other hand, had plenty to say when he announced the cancelation of his “Madea Gets A Job” tour.

From Perry (distributed through an email the from tour’s producer):

“Hey Guys,

“Unfortunately, due to circumstances that I can’t control, we’ve had to cancel this leg of the Madea Gets A Job tour.

“Here’s why. I set a ticket price for the show starting at $25.

“The reason I set the price so low is so that everyone could get a chance to come out and see the show. I know how tight things are right now. I GET IT! I do not tour to make a living, I tour because I love staying connected to all of you. I love seeing your faces, hearing you laugh and seeing you enjoy yourselves. It gives me great joy. Even though it’s a lot of work, I really don’t mind doing it. Because of that, what I do is make sure that the promoter sets a reasonable ticket price and the prices are $25, $45 and $65. Even though I set these prices so that they are affordable, fees are added that are out of my control and the price of the tickets can almost double. Add to that, when you go online looking for tickets, IN LOTS OF CASES, you are being led to a bootlegger and you don’t even know it. There are a lot of ticket bootleggers and scalpers that buy lots of shows and sell them to the public for double, sometimes triple the price. I’ve been dealing with this for years but now with the internet I’ve never seen it this bad.”

In short, Perry hates scalpers and may not be too crazy about the Internet. Meanwhile, Madea is still unemployed. If you think you’ve got it tough, just ask Perry how things are going with him. Better yet, ask Madea.