New Yorker editor David Remnick, who caught Bruce Springsteen on his most recent tour, notes that the Boss has been playing “American Skin (41 Shots),” the song he premiered in 2000 in response to the killing of Amadou Diallo by the New York City police, in memory of Trayvon Martin. The rendition of the song from the Tampa stop is gorgeous, and tragic—and I think really enhanced beautifully by his backing singers here:

That refrain, “Is it a gun? / Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? / This is your life” is so particularly chilling given the details of Martin’s death, the mundanity of that ice tea and the candy. And the caution the mother gives her son in the song, her injunction that “You got to understand the rules / Promise me if an officer stops you’ll always be polite / Never ever run away and promise mama you’ll keep your hands in sight” is a particularly sick reminder of how futile that promise is when you’re faced with someone determined to read you as a criminal, to do you harm, to execute their own twisted version of justice.

The bridge is yours.

-Anti-Flag v. Springsteen.

-It’s too bad New Girl‘s ratings have cratered as the show’s gotten much more fun to watch.

-Which science fiction scenario is most likely to happen in the (reasonably) near future?

-I’d actually like Michelle Obama even more than I already do if I thought she was reading Mommy porn.

-Time traveling Aubrey Plaza!

Jasiri X has been on quite a tear lately, and his most recent track, an excoriation of both George Zimmerman’s actions and the attitudes that have contributed to Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida three weeks ago and the refusal to charge Zimmerman, is no exception:

I really like the decision to build this off of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild.” That “What’s a king to a god? What’s a god to an unbeliever?” couplet is a nice way to get at both the power relationship between Zimmerman and Trayvon, and the enormities of justice promised and denied.

Listening to this crystallized my main point of frustration with Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball, which felt like a solid but weirdly unengaged album. It’s so obsessed with creating myths that there aren’t specific narratives in the songs, whether they’re fictions out of the whole cloth or fictionalized versions of stories that are familiar because they’re true. There are veiled references to Katrina, and giant mosquitos in the Meadowlands, dates thrown out for us to sink emotional hooks into, but there are no characters, and no real stories. America’s too rich in terms of its triumphs and its tragedies to turn our iconic figures into blank monoliths. We need a thousand Lonesome Deaths of Hattie Carroll. Springsteen isn’t the only person capable of writing such songs these days (we do, after all, still have Dylan around), but if he’s going to tackle injustice, it would have been nice to see him do it with some detail.

The bridge is yours.

-The final word on Chris Brown.

-Ryan McGee on how HBO killed the episode.

-Get a track off Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” every day for the next nine days.

-Ah, the joys of a good old-fashioned public art controversy.

-The weirdest political endorsements by musicians.

Predictably, but ludicrously, NBC has already apologized for M.I.A.’s bleeped use of the word “shit” in a verse during last night’s Super Bowl halftime show and for her flipping the bird in a gesture so fleeting it barely registered during the sound and the fury and the chariot bearers and the church choirs. I profoundly wish they hadn’t. The incident was so fleeting that to argue it impacted innocent children doesn’t just strain credulity but snaps it. And groveling to the forces who are massing to make hay of a minor slip gives unfortunate credibility to decency mavens everywhere, who are complaining that it violates Madonna’s promise to have a clean show (a promise she essentially kept in her own performance) and to argue that it’s clearly a legitimate controversy because lots of people have written about it in a scramble for post-Super Bowl page views.

I’ve always thought M.I.A. could be sort of irritating in her striving to be controversial, but I also assume that combination of pop-culture it-girl factor and rebelliousness is precisely why she ended up on the bill with Nicki and Madonna. Flipping off a fairly distant camera in a busy shot during a performance with a lot of pelvis bumping seems entirely consistent with that image. NBC got what they paid for, a well-executed performance with a frisson of danger, and I’m not sure why they should be sorry for that.

And NBC shouldn’t take seriously the idea that artists shouldn’t be allowed fleeting obscenities, or that obsessive monitoring outweighs creative and mildly risky programming. The publication of articles about the fact that M.I.A. did something entirely in character is not the same thing as demonstrating that harm came from her performance. In the absence of any remotely compelling evidence to the contrary, I seriously doubt that millions of American families are going to have to have tough conversations over their orange juice this morning about what that thing that lady did on stage means and why we don’t do it in polite company.

If they do, part of that conversation should include the fact that sometimes people gets excited or overwhelmed and act out, and that self-control is an important thing, whether you’re Meryl Streep getting overcome during the Golden Globes and letting an obscenity slip or M.I.A. on a Super Bowl stage getting caught up in the excitement. Humanity is a rough, obscene thing, and this is one of the gentlest possible ways of dealing with it—certainly much more gentle than the New Yorker story about the sexual assault and murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, which I read not knowing what I was getting into when I myself was ten, and which left me gravely shaken for months. By the time children are old enough to understand obscenity and indecency in all their forms, they’re also nigh-impossible to protect entirely. The issue is not preventing them from seeing anything, but giving parents the tools to discuss whatever their children might encounter in a meaningful and supportive way.

And frankly, if parents are going to take on the futile quest of establishing a zero-tolerance policy against anything that might potentially get obscene, it makes no sense that they’d allow their children to watch the halftime show in the first place. Justin Timberlake’s exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast (something for which she was unfairly pilloried) was, to at least half of that duo, a shocking and unexpected accident. Prince may not have gotten naked, but his guitar-and-groin silhouette made a sexual statement on a vastly larger and clearer scale than M.I.A.’s finger against a busy background. Bruce Springsteen, who may be extremely sexy but is hardly a legendarily lewd performer, crotch-slammed a camera. The Super Bowl halftime show has a well-established reputation for being a place where people like to get a little controversial and even if they don’t plan it, do so by accident. And the game itself is a violent spectacle in which men are sometimes injured in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch and to discuss, even for adults.

If I were worried about my kids, promises or no, I’d keep them away, particularly in a year that featured performers famous for taboo-defying performances that suggest oral sex; a singer with a blow-up doll persona; and singer famous for being a a global-citizen authority-bucker who has been criticized for her praise of the Tamil Tigers, all of whom were announced in advance and all of whom are exceedingly Googleable. Kids who are young enough to be damaged by their first exposure to a fleeting obscenity or gesture probably shouldn’t be up late enough on a school night, and if kids are staying up because they’re already passionate Madonna, Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. fans, nothing in that performance was something they wouldn’t have absorbed from the music.

Whether it’s Prohibition, SOPA, or efforts to crack down on Janet Jackson’s nipples, policies that try to get to zero on things that most of adult society is either not horribly offended by or rather invested in having access to are doomed to failure. In particular, in a world with wildly differing standards, you’re never going to get society to protect you or your children from everything you find harmful—that’s work you have to do on your own, even if it means opting out. Whether you’re really willing to do that is a good test of how far your commitment extends.

By Tara McGuinness

My colleague Alyssa has written about Bruce Springsteen’s new song “We Take Care of Our Own.” As usual, the Boss’ latest is a perfect and poetic anthem for a divided national conversation dominated by the question of whether our country and economy will work for most Americans or just the wealthy few—the 99. His answer? “We take care of our own… we take care of our own, wherever this flag is flown.”

Judging by this weekend’s sale of concert tickets for Springsteen’s April 1 show, it is clear that while the Boss reminds us we need a country that works for all Americans, Ticketmaster, his ticket provider, continues to take care of people who can afford $600 tickets on eBay.

Ordinary fans who got up at 10AM on Saturday morning when tickets went on sale were shut out, receiving notifications that tickets were unavailable just three minutes after the sale started. A pair of floor tickets for that show were listed for $624 even before tickets went on sale, and by Monday morning, there were more than 80 eBay listings for Springsteen at the Verizon Center, all costing hundreds of dollars. Some listed for more than a thousand dollars.

Springsteen, whose music champions the downtrodden and working man, had a similar problem in 2009, where Ticketmaste redirected some prospective customers to its own premium resale page, TicketsNow. After some people unwittingly bought tickets at multiples of face value, Ticketmaster apologized and said they would never do it again.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer even called for an investigation at a time Ticketmaster was seeking approval of its merger with Live Nation, which was completed in Jan. 2010. Springsteen spoke out against the merger, though it didn’t stop the U.S. from approving it. The new parent company—The Live Nation and Ticketmaster Entertainment is $2.5 billion company—that appears to be making excellent profits.

Unfortunately the last dust up didn’t prevent the Boss from using Ticketmaster for his next tour. Other artists, like Paul Simon, have combated scalpers with assorted programs. For a show at Washington’s 9:30 Club last year, all tickets were delivered through Will Call, and the purchaser could only pick up tickets on the way into the show, with no time to resell. Springsteen is perhaps the most powerful entertainment advocate for the American working class, so perhaps that is why we hold the Boss to a higher standard than anyone else. The $600 ticket is just another indicator of the growing disparity between the super rich and everyone else in the United States today, especially because in between the time Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) was released to the time Magic (2007) came out, there was a 10 point drop in average worker wages and a 219 percent increase in corporate profits.

No one captures the spirit of hard working Americans like Bruce Springsteen. But in sticking with Ticketmaster, the Boss’s tours are setup for the bosses—not necessarily everyone else.

The Boss is in full rallying cry mode:

This seems practically designed to be played at Obama-Biden rallies (if not the Democratic National Convention itself). The choice of Chicago as the origin point for that sense of mutual care seems pretty deliberate. The song itself relies mostly on that central mantra, and less on the striking imagery that to my mind is the hallmark of so many of Springsteen’s best songs. But “Where’s the work that set my hands, my soul free / Where’s the spirit that’ll reign, reign over me / Where’s the promise, from sea to shining sea” sure seems like an apt set of questions in an age of continuing recession and concern about the ability of the American dream to pass viably from one generation to the next. Especially given that the title of his new album is Wrecking Ball.

As a September 11 song, it’s definitely not as corny as it could have been, even if it buys into the idea that everything changed after the attacks, and it’s got some genuinely evocative imagery in service of its anti-war message:

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Still, Bruce Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe” is both more broadly applicable—you don’t have to have lost someone in the September 11 attacks or the subsequent wars to be included in the lyrics—and a bit more pointed about economics:

Then there’s Rod Stewart’s totally apolitical version, which is a great hopeless love song:

Unfortunately, it’s not available in an embeddable version, but John McCutcheon mashes up Bruce and Rod’s versions in a cover he calls “Reasons to Believe.”

The New York Times spotlights a big development for the music industry: under a provision of American copyright law, artists are about to start being able to reclaim the rights to their catalogues as long as they get their applications in on time:

“This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology,” said Kenneth J. Abdo, a lawyer who leads a termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and has filed claims for some of his clients, who include Kool and the Gang. As a result the four major record companies — Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner — have made it clear that they will not relinquish recordings they consider their property without a fight.

“We believe the termination right doesn’t apply to most sound recordings,” said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying group in Washington that represents the interests of record labels. As the record companies see it, the master recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists who wrote and recorded the songs, because, the labels argue, the records are “works for hire,” compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, their employees.

Independent copyright experts, however, find that argument unconvincing. Not only have recording artists traditionally paid for the making of their records themselves, with advances from the record companies that are then charged against royalties, they are also exempted from both the obligations and benefits an employee typically expects.

I’ve always found the argument that downloading music rather purchasing it is a form of sticking it to the man kind of specious. And I wonder how long it’ll last as artists start getting the rights to their own work back. It’ll also be interesting to see if this makes the recording industry even more conservative, willing to fund only acts that it thinks will pay off big for them for the years that they own that work, or if it’ll make them more willing to experiment on music that won’t be a death blow when it’s gone. I also don’t know if there are artists who would want to do this, but I’d be curious to see if any labels experimented with making artists actual employees, paying them salaries and benefits and taking care of their Social Security withholding, in exchange for full rights to their work. If you want to work in a genre that generates steady but not wild profits, that might actually be a good deal for some artists and some labels — I don’t think there will be a ton of folks who fall into that sweet spot, but there might be some.