I will admit to a serious soft spot for Baz Luhrmann’s pop-music drenched spectacles—I wrote last year that I think there’s something marvelous about the fact that we got Moulin Rouge and the iPod in the same year, the movie anticipating how much we’d come to love accentuating and heightening our lives by adding carefully curated soundtracks to them. I also quite liked OutKast’s underrated Idlewild, a visually gorgeous marriage of jazz age and hip-hop, and I’m happy to revisit that union, even in a movie that puts black music at the service of white characters in the same way white audiences once consumed jazz.

That said, I’ve always been left, perhaps heretically, a trifle cold by The Great Gatsby, and I’m curious as to how it’ll play when the movie is released in December.

The movie’s class politics are probably best described as universally disgusted. Gatsby makes the error of assuming that wealth can purchase him respect and love, falling into gauche error as a result, while the old monied Buchanans are revealed to be repulsive, crude people. But it’s a lot easier to shudder away from money as a source of happiness in favor of a more refined sensibility in a boom era than it is in a recession. This is neither a revenge fantasy nor a pure escape. But certainly, Leonardo DiCaprio’s exactly the right person to play Gatsby, even leaving aside that he was Luhrmann’s muse before he was Martin Scorsese’s. He’s achieved a kind of profound remoteness. And these days, the idea that someone could lever themselves from one class to another by sheer force of will is a more remote dream than ever.

The bridge is yours.

-TV’s best gingers.

-Reflections on Adam Yauch’s death.

-David Tennant might be in the next Fast and Furious movie.

-Having the guy behind Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine working on the Catching Fire script sounds exciting.

-Sandra Day O’Connor gets into the video game business.

I’ve never been exceptionally compelled by the provocateurism of hip-hop group Odd Future, particularly given the collective’s penchant for disturbingly unempathetic talk about rape. But the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica has a profile of Earl Sweatshirt, a member of Odd Future whose mother sent him to school in Samoa just as the collective was taking off, and who has now returned to the United States. And there’s an interesting anecdote about both that rape talk, and Earl’s time away:

As part of the Coral Reef curriculum he also performed community service, spending time working at Samoa Victim Support Group, a center for survivors of sexual abuse, including children.

“That was a pivotal moment,” he said one afternoon at Bristol Farms, a supermarket near his manager’s office. One of the things Earl Sweatshirt had been prized for as a rapper was his extreme imagery, bordering on vile. “You can detach imagery from words,” he said, adding that he “never actually pictured” the things he rapped about. (“Lyrics About Rape, Coke, And Couches Will Be Blaring In Your Ears,” was how “Earl,” the album, was advertised on Odd Future’s Tumblr when it was released in March 2010.)

By the time he began working at the center, “I had already come to the conclusion that I was done talking about” that sort of subject matter, he said, but coming face to face with young people who had suffered in that way was overwhelming. “There’s nothing that you can — there’s no — you can’t evade the — there’s no defense for like — if you have any ounce of humanity,” he said, the feeling swallowing the words.

Sensitivity and sympathy aren’t just things we inherently have. We learn them, often most effectively by directly facing other people’s pain. And I’d be really interested not just in hearing what Earl talks about when he’s set that old attitude and subject material aside, but to see him make music about that process of growing into sympathy, and into greater experience of the world.

The bridge is yours.

-Ben Kingsley will be the villain in Iron Man 3. It’s a great time to be a British actor who wants to break into superhero and sci-fi franchises as a baddie.

-Adam McKay, bless him, is starting to give us Anchorman 2 details.

-The average American household is now paying $86 a month for cable.

-Chevy Chase: still angry, still with the voicemails.

-F. Gary Gray may give us an NWA biopic.

-Everything I’ve seen about Brave just makes me more excited for it:

The bridge is yours.

-A dissection of Roman Reloaded.

-The most important Hollywood producers for 2012.

-How to tell when the superhero movie craze is over.

-I’ll be writing more about Chris Klein’s disappearance and American Reunion, but this is a nice little chat with him.

-I feel like fighting someone while attached to a chair would be pretty difficult:

Almost since there’s been hip-hop, there have been white women covering songs originally recorded by black men, often for comedic effect. Most recently, Katy Perry turned in a less-utterly-humiliating-than-could-have-been expected rendition of “Ni**as in Paris.” She avoided the most obvious conflict by performing the clean version, subbing in “ninjas” for the title term and avoiding the spectacle of a white girl thinking it’s okay to use “nigger” or a variation thereof just because it appears in lyrics. Plus, the oral sex jokes are at least kind of in keeping with the faux-Sapphic hijinks that got Perry famous in the first place:

Then, there’s Karmin, who have made their entire career out of the incongruity of two white hipsters—but really, mostly, a white chick—stepping into the lyrics laid down by black rappers. There’s no question that Amy Heidemann deserves to be the champion at any number of karaoke nights, but there’s something a little weird about the idea that this is a hook for an entire career. It’s also interesting to see them take Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now” to Ellen and Ryan Seacrest’s show, places where the original artist himself is (justly, I think) not exactly welcome:

In 2006, Robyn and Jenny Wilson covered Saul Williams’ “List of Demands (reparations).” It’s a song that’s arguably as much about romantic relationships as race, and that’s clear in the original. But Robyn and Wilson did leave out a striking verse that compares a confrontation between lovers to a confrontation between a man and the police. Williams sang in the original “Call the police! / I’m strapped to the teeth and liable to disregard your every belief…Protect ya neck,’cause, son, I’m breaking out of my noose.” That seems like a wise omission. It’d be hard for either of these women to deliver those lines with any credibility or claim to familiarity with the experiences they’re using as metaphors:

But the best entry in the the white-ladies-covering-black-male-rappers genre remains Jenny Owen Youngs, who in her cover of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” made herself the most normal thing in the setting. When there are giant penguins and abominable snowmen about, the focus doesn’t have to be the supposed incongruity between the singer and her lyrics:

After the revelation that newspapers owned by the Murdoch family’s News International division had hacked the phones of everyone from members of the British royal family to the victims of the bombings of London’s subways on July 7, 2005 in pursuit of stories, it was inevitable that the company—and the family—would suffer consequences. News of the World, the paper most deeply embroiled in the scandal, closed last summer after it became clear that advertisers wouldn’t continue to support the publication. And now, James Murdoch, News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch’s son, has resigned from his position of executive chairman of News International. He’s transferred to New York where, as Rupert Murdoch explained, “James will continue to assume a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay TV businesses and broader international operations.”

In other words, it sounds like James Murdoch will do penance for the hacking scandal by going to work on Fox News. While both channels have clear conservative slants, neither has committed journalistic sins as grave as the phone hacking scandal. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been free of ethical slips. In 2008, Fox and Friends ran clearly doctors pictures of New York Times reporters in what seemed to be retaliation for the Times writing an unflattering piece about the network’s ratings. And in 2009, the network twice aired misleading reports about the size of crowds at a rally organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann and a book signing by former Gov. Sarah Palin. In both cases, the network suggested the choices of footage were errors rather than an intentional attempt to mislead audiences about the success of those events. The culture may be conservative, but it’s not one of rampant law-breaking and privacy violations.

It’s not necessarily clear what James, whose career has been marked by a mixed record and persistent charges of nepotism, will bring to News Corporation’s American pay television business. But given that he started out in business by backing Rawkus Records, a hip-hop label that helped launch Mos Def and Talib Kweli (it was later acquired by News Corporation), maybe James can help the network get over its paranoid fear of rap music. Whether Fox Nation is referring to Obama’s birthday party as a “hip-hop BBQ,” or suggesting that the sight of Colin Powell with hip-hop stars mean he’s on the verge of endorsing Obama, Fox loves pulling out references to hip-hop to suggest that Obama is unacceptably black. It’s the least of Fox News’ problems, but it’s one way James Murdoch could make a substantive contribution to the company—unless his father wants to send him back to running record labels News Corporation can use to subsidize their other businesses.

Mos Def, performing under his Yasiin Bey stage name, took a shot at turning “Ni**as in Paris,” the most recent single off Kanye West and Jay-Z’s joint album Watch the Throne, into a piece of biting social commentary:

I don’t necessarily think that “Ni**as in Paris,” which is pretty obviously about the distorting influence of wealth, needed a socially conscious-remix as an antidote. That said, the riffs on the original are pretty funny, turning a bathroom hook up into a parody of Cosby-like concern with how young black men present themselves; a joke about lesbians into a commentary on fast food and diabetes; and I pretty much lost it at “Prince Williams ain’t do it right if you ask me / If I was him I’d put some black up in my family.” I’m less compelled by the slightly apocalyptic stuff towards the end, but it’s a pretty comprehensive and clever inversion of the song.

And it’s also part of a noble semi-tradition of other rappers poking Kanye and Jay-Z about their politics. Kanye may have gone socially-conscious on his remix of his own song, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but the line that everyone remembers from that song is Jay-Z declaring that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It took Lupe Fiasco to drop actual knowledge about the history of the contemporary diamond trade and talk jewelry depreciation:

Some days the American common sense deficit seems worse than others, and such was the case when XXL published a video interview with the rapper Too $hort, titled “Fatherly Advice From Too $hort — Lesson Three: The Birds & The Bees.” Which in this case apparently means advice for boys who are starting to be attracted to girls on how to “take it to the hole.” And more importantly, suggesting that groping girls and pushing them up against walls is the quickest route to male sexual gratification. As disgusting as schooling young people in sexual assault is, and as horrifying as the thought is that such advocacy of assault would constitute “fatherly advice”—and XXL has apologized profusely for posting the video, as well they should—Too $hort’s apology may be even more revealing.

“When I got on camera I was in Too $hort mode and had a lapse of judgment. I would never advise a child or young man to do these things, it’s not how I get down,” he said in his apology. “Although I have made my career on dirty raps, I have worked over the years to somewhat balance the content of my music with giving back to the community. Just coming from a man who wants to see young people get ahead in life, I’m gonna do my best to help and not hurt. If you’re a young man or a kid who looks up to me, don’t get caught up in the pimp, player, gangster hip-hop personas. Just be yourself.”

First, there’s the idea that it’s totally fine to advocate molesting young girls as long as you’re in character, because no harm can possibly be done from giving that advice. Even if it’s very, very clear that advice is comedic or performative (something that might be less clear in an interview than in a song), that still suggests that something that actually happens to women and is completely and utterly awful is hilarious to contemplate—even when the “joke” isn’t well-crafted, or crafted at all to reveal the ugliness of such attitudes.

Then, there’s the idea that private conduct is, if not more impactful than the product you sell and the entertainment industry helps you distribute widely, at least balancing it out. I think it’s great if stars want to give back to their communities. But they’re kidding themselves if they think it’s some sort of spiritual tithe for disseminating ideas that at best are demeaning and at best could contribute to someone justifying themselves when they assault someone.