The season of graduation is upon us, a time when those moving on to the next stage in their lives are deluged with cliche wisdom and even worse pop music. So to countervail all of that, here’s a reminder that growing up is awesome, you will stay in touch with all the right people (who mostly won’t be who you expect), and if all else fails, Beth Ditto will be there to bail you out.

First, a reminder: graduation is overhyped. People have been worrying about keeping friends and staying with their school significant others since the Paleolithic age, or at least since the Beach Boys were covering the Four Freshman a capella and having it count as pop music. You will survive, and the ties that endure will not be the ones you fret about the most:

Second piece of caution: fetishizing your youth is silly. Growing up is fantastic. You have more responsibilities, but also infinitely more freedom, and infinitely more sense of what you can do with it. Oh, who am I kidding. I just wanted to post this version of “Forever Young” that’s been turned into a Ron Paul-influenced screed about individual liberty:

But if you are worried, after hanging out with my best friend form high school in San Francisco, I can attest that Vitamin C was totally right that it is possible to stay in touch with folks, though good luck on the finding a job that won’t interfere with your tan thing. That may not be a reasonable thing to expect in your benefits package in this economy:

Blink-182 is criminally underrated. I sort of feel like “Going Away to College,” which acknowledges that you can both love someone and inevitably end up growing apart from them, should be mandatory listening for every high school senior in the country:

I would probably do almost anything that Baz Luhrmann told me to do, but Mary Schmich’s advice (often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut) is honestly dead-on, even if I recognized its value better in hindsight than I did when I heard it in middle school:

And for anyone for whom school wasn’t even close to the best year of their lives, Green Day has the perfect kiss-off:

Do people remember Semisonic? Does liking them make me an Old? Either way, as a follow-up to the whole life gets better when you grow up and go out into the world thing, “Closing Time” is a good reminder that sometimes a definitive, dignified exit is better than hanging around wishing that things wouldn’t have to change:

And Beth Ditto has just the anthem you need to move on to the next one:

Dan Solomon follows up my post on D’Angelo and what happens to men when they find themselves treated like women with an important reminder that men talk about wanting to be objectified in a way that isn’t really supported by their behavior:

If they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property…So much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. And it sounds like a dumb hypothetical, something that has no real connection to reality, because there’s no real equivalence between the way society does (or even can) treat men and the way it treats women. Except, kinda, there is — and the way the men who do get treated that way tend to do whatever it takes to get out from under it. That’s probably worth considering, fellas, the next time you try to make that argument.

I don’t write about the way men’s bodies are portrayed in the media as much as I write about women, if only because women are treated so much worse. Women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right. Now, of course, there are all sorts of culturally conditioned ideal bodies: a skinny Jewish nerd’s dreaming his way into Superman’s body and Superman’s tights is having a different experience from a black man raised in the Pentecostal church who is grappling with the connection between body and soul. But I’m intrigued by those self-perceptions, varied though they may be. I’m used to the constant struggle to think of my body as something that belongs to me, but I’m not personally familiar with my body not performing up to an arbitrary set of standards set for it. I can imagine there are difficulties I simply can’t fathom.

I may not be a huge fan of today’s boy bands. But while that phenomenon has come and gone, I feel like it’s been an awesome couple of years for young female solo artists to roll out weird pop love songs that are full of ambiguity, hedging, and occasional joy, to be silly, and self-aware. So because it’s Friday, have a mix tape.

Most recently, there’s rapper Kitty Pryde, who, if her name wasn’t awesome enough, riffs on and undermines the sentiment in popular songs and laces them with sips of Bud Light Lime and cigarette smoke in “Okay Cupid”:

I’ve mentioned my love for Carly Rae Jepsen’s video for “Call Me Maybe,” but the lyrics are also charmingly ambiguous about loving the idea of someone more than you actually care for the person obscured by those ideas—and the prospect that you might not want to disturb that idea with actual contact:

Both of these songs, of course, are kin to what will probably the best Miley Cyrus song of all time, the “Sunglasses at Night”-biting, best-song-about-awkwardness-to-dance-to “See You Again”:

Then there’s Rye Rye, who remains my favorite new rapper despite having not actually released an album, does the impossible and revitalizes the Venga Boys back catalogue while turning herself into a victorious video game avatar in “Boom Boom,” where she talks about watching porn—or lying in the grass and watching clouds go by—with her chosen guy:

Adele’s voice is incredible, but she’s not the only young Brit turning out fun love songs. I’m partial to Little Boots, particularly when she gets her romantic sci-fi on:

If you’re in a goofier mode, hang out with Ke$ha, who was dismissed as an embarrassment but who I think is a lot more self-aware creation, a critique of the kind of thing Rihanna does when she slaps on a bunch of harem pants and tries to pretend she can dance:

But if you prefer your critiques of pop tarts to be sincere and gorgeous (and want your sincere white girls to cover something other than hip-hop) rather than goofy, there’s always Ingrid Michaelson’s gorgeous a capella cover of “We Found Love”:

And in her inimitable, filthy (and I really do mean filthy) way, Azealia Banks is having way more fun than the rest of us:

In college, a good friend introduced me to Against Me! through their very funny song “Baby, I’m an Anarchist“—he meant it as a poke in the ribs about my liberal, rather unradical politics, but I mostly took it as an introduction to a great new band. So I read with interest the news in Rolling Stone that Against Me! singer Tom Gabel is going to begin the process of transitioning from male to female, and will take the name Laura Jane Grace.

It doesn’t feel quite right for me to say I’m excited about this—Grace’s life is her own, and I don’t want to reduce it to an instrument by which the rock and punk communities can prove themselves enlightened or regressive. But I am glad to see someone whose music has been important to me move closer to her share of happiness. I hope this announcement both is greeted with support and starts new conversations about gender and rock. And I am unambiguously excited by the prospect that Grace’s announcement could bring Against Me!’s music to new fans who might not have seen a home for themselves in punk before.

What initially drew me to Against Me! was the way the band explored both the identities we chose, and the ones we feel are imposed upon us, and not in a cookie-cutter “I hate my Mom and Dad” way. “Baby I’m an Anarchist” was one of the first love songs I heard about why a couple shouldn’t be together, that argued that political differences were enough to convince the main character “No, I won’t take your hand / And marry the State.” That was an exciting proposition, even if, like my friend Spencer Ackerman, I was more sympathetic to the put-upon liberal than the singer. In “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” Grace looked wryly back to a time when “I had the style, I had the ambition. / I read all the authors, I knew the right slogans. / There was no war but the class war. / I was ready to set the world on fire.” And “Walking Is Still Honest” is one of the clearest explanations I know of what it’s like to feel radically out of place, with its chorus that begs “Can anybody tell me why God won’t speak to me? / Why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas? / Why death is easier than living / You can be almost anything / When you’re on your fucking knees.”

If these songs were more general, others took on gender identity in more pointed ways. As others have pointed out, Grace’s announcement might not be a surprise to close listeners to Against Me!’s lyrics. In the 2007 track “The Ocean,” Grace sang “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her,” but that’s hardly the only Against Me! song to allude to gender identity and the desire for transformation. In 2009′s “White Crosses,” the song’s protagonist is “Eye-balled with suspicion by a pencil skirt in high heels, you realize that you’re talking to yourself.” “Spanish Moss,” released the same year, promised “You can always change who you are. / You just need to find some place to get away. / You can forget your name. / And there’s no need to apologize. / 
I caught a glimpse of this life, it could be such a very good life.” I hope Grace finds that the real thing is as good as the glimpse of it:

And maybe Rolling Stone’s handling of the story, which so far seems relatively sensitive in its positive portrayal of Laura Jane Grace and uses the appropriate pronouns to refer to her, is proof that the rock community’s made progress. In 2006, when Rolling Stone published a long look at Lana Wachowski’s decision to identify as female, the magazine portrayed her grappling with her gender identity less as a sensitive process to be treated with respect than as an extension of a sexual relationship between Lana and a dominatrix. Because the Wachowkis don’t speak to the press, Rolling Stone didn’t have the same access to Lana Wachowski as they appear to have had to Grace. But the story was still rooted in basic misunderstanding, obsessively and misguidedly focused on what gossip columnist Liz Smith put it in her discussion of the piece, “the world of transgender sex and kink to the max.” It’s nice to know that Rolling Stone’s become, in the intervening years, a place where Laura Jane Grace would feel comfortable coming out. Hopefully the rock and punk worlds follow suit.

There are a lot of folks who think that copyright terms are too long, locking up works long past the point when the people who created them can benefit from their sale. But when Congress passed the extension of copyright, it also wrote in the requirement that after 35 years, artists who gave up their copyrights to the companies they were signed with, often when they were in unfavorable negotiating positions, to get them back. And now a federal court has upheld that ability to reclaim copyrights, despite industry objections that producers should be given a share of rights or that individuals can’t reclaim their copyrights on works with multiple authors, which means that Victor Willis can get his copyright to some of the Village People’s most famous songs back. From Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter:

It’s a ticking time bomb for the music industry, and thus, the lawsuit by Scorpio and Can’t Stop to prevent Willis from making his own termination became one of the industry’s first and most important legal battles on this front.
In the case, the publishers made the argument that Willis’ copyright pullback should be deemed improper because the songs were created by several authors — not just Willis. They argued he couldn’t terminate a share; that he needed all of the co-authors on board.

On Monday, Judge Moskowitz rejected that assessment. “The Court concludes that a joint author who separately transfers his copyright interest may unilaterally terminate the grant,” writes the judge in the opinion.

The judge adds that the law doesn’t require a joint author to enter into a joint grant with one of his co-authors, nor does the statute provide that “where two or more joint authors enter into separate grants, a majority of those authors is needed to terminate any one of those grants.”

This is copyright working as it’s intended, to help non-corporation people benefit from the work they’ve created. I’d imagine the music industry will continue to fight this and do its best to hold on to as much copyright as possible. But I’ll be curious to see how the business model responds. Record companies are already confronting the fact that artists don’t have to rely on them for distribution. It’s not a good look to be the folks who are fighting artists’ attempts to profit off their own work, as if 35 years isn’t enough.

I spent a bunch of last week immersed in the music of my youth and today’s for a piece in The Atlantic on boy bands, specifically The Wanted and One Direction, which are taking teenage girls’ radios (or whatever the newfangled equivalent is) by storm. Our default assumption tends to be, I think, that boy band songs are substanceless trifle meant to make girls feel all lovey-dovey. But listening to this stuff through the years is a reminder that when boys talk to girls about love, even and maybe especially in commercial packaging, things can get awfully creepy.

Take the Monkees “Daydream Believer,” which is kind of breathtaking in its condescending dismissiveness. The girl in question is a “daydream believer / and a homecoming queen.” She couldn’t possibly have real concerns:

Then, there’s the Jackson 5′s “Stop (The Love You Save),” which is literally slut-shaming from the lips of a kid who’s too young to be having sex:

From my own era, ‘N Sync’s “Girlfriend” is textbook negging. “Does he even know you’re alive?” are not words to make a woman feel treasured—they’re words to make her vulnerable:

And the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” is the weirdest, neediest thing of all time, the inverse of wooing, paired with a truly terrible attempt at a “Thriller” ripoff:

I don’t know what it says about how conditioned preteen girls are that we listen to these songs and hear professions of adoration. Clearly, the only solution is to hook the young women in our lives up with Boyz II Men sooner:

Following up on yesterday’s conversation about the odd tendency of some hipsters to cling to racism as proof that they are edgy, fearless truthtellers, reader BC sends along Lester Bangs’ “The White Noise Supremacists,” (NB: the link leads to a PDF download) published in the Village Voice in 1979. It’s quite the piece of writing, in which Bangs tries to square up honestly to his own past as someone who used racist language and sentiments to project what he saw as a certain kind of coolness, and to examine the persistence of racism in some of the music scenes that he loves. Bangs isn’t perfect here, or elsewhere, but his assertion of empathy as a radical value that transcends accusations of corniness is important to the debates that we’ve been having over the past few weeks.

It’s also an amazing illustration of how, even if there’s less tolerance for outright assertions of white power in scenes that like to style themselves cutting edge, certain kinds of behavior still get mined for the theoretical currency they convey. Bangs writes, and I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting at length from a very long piece:

You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized. Which is why it has to be monitored, made taboo and restrained, by society and the individual….

I figured all this was in the Lenny Bruce spirit of let’s-defuse-them-epithets-byslinging-’em-out in Detroit I thought absolutely nothing of going to parties with people like David Ruffin and Bobby Womack where I’d get drunk, maul the women, and improvise blues songs along the lines of “Sho’ wish ah wuz a nigger / Then mah dick’d be bigger,” and of course they all laughed. It took years before I realized what an asshole I’d been, not to mention how lucky I was to get out of there with my white hide intact.

I’m sure a lot of those guys were very happy to see this white kid drunk on his ass making a complete fool if not a human TV set out of himself, but to this day I wonder how many of them hated my guts right then. Because Lenny Bruce was wrong—maybe in a better world than this such parlor games would amount to cleansing jet offtakes, and between friends, where a certain bond of mutual trust has been firmly established, good natured racial tradeoffs can be part of the vocabulary of understood affections. But beyond that trouble begins—when you fail to realize that no matter how harmless your intentions are, there is no reason to think that any shit that comes out of your mouth is going to be understood or happily received. Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect. This seems almost too simple and obvious to say, but maybe it’s good to have some-thing simple and obvious stated once in a while, especially in this citadel of journalistic overthink. If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture- flak hailing on you wherever you go. Ivan Julian told me that whenever he hears the word “nigger,” no matter who says it, black or white, he wants to kill. Once when I was drunk I told Hell that the only reason hippies ever existed in the first place was because of niggers, and when I mentioned it to Ivan while doing this article I said, “You probably don’t even remember-” “Oh yeah, I remember,” he cut me off…

Things like the Creem articles and partydown exhibitionism represented a reaction against the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussyfooting around questions of racial and sexual identity, questions we were quite prepared to drive over with bulldozers. We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecar they Coked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mind-lessness which seemed to represent, as Mark Jacobson pointed out in his Voice piece on Legs McNeil, a new kind of cool…

I can go just so far with affectations of kneejerk cretinism before I puke. I remember the guy in the American Nazi Party being asked, “What about the six million?” in PBS’s California Reich, and answering “Well, the way I heard it it was only really four-and-a-half million, but I wish it was six,” and I imagine you’d find that pretty hilarious too [the you is Miriam Linna of the Cramps]. I probably would have at one time. If that makes me a wimp now, good, that means you and anybody else who wants to get their random vicarious kicks off White Power can stay the fuck away from me.

Just go read the whole thing and then come back so we can talk about it.

The idea of making a movie out of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks is ludicrous, and not just because the brilliant, weird movie I’m Not There already burned through all the best, most inventive ideas for who could possibly play Bob Dylan. If you do Blood on the Tracks as a straight narrative of a relationship breaking down, reducing the music to background atmospherics, you lose all the weird brilliance of the world Dylan’s created. And if you try to od it as a series of short vignettes, it’s hard to think how the narrative might work. But as long as this thing’s in the works anyway, here are five ideas for who should play some of the more entertaining characters on Dylan’s album:

-The Ex-Husband from “Tangled Up in Blue”: If “she was married when we first met / soon to be divorced,” it’s worth remembering that someone else got their heart broken before Dylan’s operatic love story even got kickstarted. John Hawkes is awfully good at portraying hope that expects to be disappointed, whether as Sol Star on Deadwood or paralyzed journalist Mark O’Brien in The Surrogate, about a paralyzed man who decides to lose his virginity, which will be major Oscar-bait when it comes out later this year. If anyone deserves to be in proximity to Bob Dylan, it’s him.

-The Parrot from “Simple Twist of Fate”: If the parrot from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is available, he’s definitely put in enough time in the background on a goofy project. Now’s his time to prove that he’s an artist.

-Mrs. Gray from “Idiot Wind”: Now that the American Pie franchise has come to a conclusion, Jennifer Coolidge is free from the obligations of obligations of playing Stifler’s mom. But she could put that experience to good use playing a sexy widow who runs off to Italy with someone inappropriate and an enormous amount of money. Maybe Eugene Levy can play Mr. Gray, who gets shot. Those eyebrows are great at conveying surprise.

-Lily, from “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”: Emma Stone got famous as a redhead, only to reveal that her natural hair color was actually blonde. So who better to play a gorgeous frontier girl who switches hair color as part of a life transformation. She’d be awesome in an adaptation of the most epic song on “Blood on the Tracks.” And now that David Milch is available, maybe he could dust himself off and go back to the frontier well. I would totally watch this as a stand-alone movie.

-The message-deliverer from “If You See Her, Say Hello”: It has to be pretty stressful being the go-between for Bob Dylan and a woman he’s broken up with. But Adam Pally deserves a European vacation after all the awesome work he’s put in on Happy Endings this year. And any awkward news is more palatable when delivered by a man who’s in full-on bear mode.

The bridge is yours.

-This new James Brown biography looks pretty good.

-Modern Family‘s cast would like all the money, please.

-Could The Hunger Games get a Best Picture nomination?

-Gamers have bigger reward centers in their brains.

-One more day until Community day!

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.