Stay classy, Sony. According to the Guardian, after Whitney Houston’s death, her label raised the price of at least one of her albums to take advantage of the immediate spike in sales:

The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99. Houston’s The Ultimate Collection, originally released in 1997, was the second top-selling album on iTunes on Monday morning. Apple returned the album to its original price late on Sunday.

It seems like it ought to have been enough for Sony to privately enjoy the revitalization of an album from its back catalogue: Houston was years away from her peak selling potential at the time of her death, which sent The Ultimate Collection to the top of the iTunes charts. A move like this may be strategic from a business perspective, but it looks impressively greedy. Given how hard the content industry is pushing to sell the public on the idea that they’re only acting in the best interests of creators in pushing for stronger copyright protections, profiting off a dead artist is decidedly off-message.

If the soundtrack to Barack Obama’s first campaign for the presidency was the kind of mixtape a guy uses to woo a smitten new girlfriend, the songs he’ll be using on the campaign trail the second time around are all about adding a little spice to an established relationship. He’s moved on, as Bloomberg points out, from songs like “Move On Up” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” to more contemplative songs about attachment and commitment.

There are songs for estranged lovers, like Zac Brown Band’s “Keep Me In Mind,” a reminder that non-Obama alternatives could be decidedly bleak. “We always go our separate ways, but no one can love you, baby, the way I do / Keep me in mind /Somewhere along the road you might find me,” the song goes. “The world can be real tough, find shelter in me / If there’s no one else to love, keep me in mind.” Whether in Aretha Franklin’s cover of “The Weight” with it’s offer to “Put the weight on me,” or REO Speedwagon’s “Roll With the Changes,” with its promise that “As soon as you are able, woman, I am willin’ / To make the break that we are on the brink of / My cup is on the table – my love is spillin’ / Waiting here for you to take and drink of,” these songs are about partnership, about sharing the load—they’re about marriage rather than dating. Sugarland’s “Everyday America” is a reminder to stick with it if you’ve got a “Good man but a bad year.”

Unsurprisingly, Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” is there in the mix, taking that sense of responsibility between two people national. Gwen Stefani connects individuals to a larger cause, reminding us that “You don’t have to be a famous person / Just to make your mark / A mother can be an inspiration / To her little son.” Montgomery Gentry’s “My Town” draws a direct line between the health of small towns and the hard work that goes into maintaining personal relationships—and insists that temporary dissatisfaction is a prelude to a life-long committment: “Where I ran off ‘cos I got mad, / An’ it came to blows with my old man. /Where I came back to settle down, /It’s where they’ll put me in the ground.”

Beyond the messages of the songs, it’s worth looking at how the playlist is calibrated to assert a cultural connection between the President and voters who might need a reminder of what they and Obama have in common when it comes to culture. The soundtrack’s heavily weighted to contemporary music: 17 of the 29 songs on it were released after 2000, and not surprisingly, given the president’s age, the 1970s are the second-most popular decade on the list. And to woo younger viewers, it’s available on Spotify. It’s similarly weighted towards male vocalists: 17 of the songs are by male solo artists or all-male groups, and another 8 are by groups that include both men and women—it’s men’s voices who will introduce Obama to his constituents.

There’s no remixing of the president’s speeches from the Black Eyed Peas Will.i.am, a major celebrity surrogate in the last campaign, this time around, and no “My President is Black” for those Young Jeezy fans in the audience. In fact, there’s no hip-hop on the list at all—black artists are represented by funk and soul instead, and I’d guess Ledisi will get a nice and deserved sales bump from her inclusion in this list. And I’m a bit surprised that Ricky Martin’s the only prominent Latino artist on the list. If Obama was willing to be a little downbeat, Los Lobos “One Time, One Night” could have been a good addition. Instead, the re-election campaign is going country, if not all the way chicken-fried.

“There are only three ways to end your career as a rock star,” Stephen Colbert tells James Murphy in a clip shown near the beginning of Shut Up and Play the Hits, a good concert movie but not very revealing look at the end of LCD Soundsystem, which I saw at Sundance. “Overdose, overstay your welcome, or write Spider-Man: The Musical.” Clearly, Murphy and LCD Soundsystem did none of those things. And while the footage of their final, sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden is undeniably joyous, the movie doesn’t have much to offer in terms of explaining what it means to Murphy—or the other members of the band—that their grand experiment is over, or in terms of helping us understand Murphy himself.

I should admit that while I like LCD Soundsystem just fine, I’m not particularly bought into the voice-of-a-generation hype. The movie may work better for very, very passionate fans of Murphy and the band, especially since it spends a lot of time validating their greatness. The most direct and irritating form of this is a deeply grating interview with Chuck Klosterman that’s meant to tie together concert segments and scenes of Murphy wandering around New York in a day-after-it-all-ends haze. Klosterman spends about half his time expounding personal theories, like “the Internet was causing people to have a different relationship with history,” or that “bands are sort of remembered for their collected successes, but they’re sort of defined by their singular failures” that might have seemed profound when he was in college, but don’t elicit particularly specific or revealing answers. When he does manage to get something interesting out of Murphy, it’s usually by asking a question that’s fawning in the extreme, like how Murphy thinks the audience (which in the movie, includes a guy who’s weeping uncontrollably and Donald Glover) reacts to him. “I’ve never been to a show I loved where I didn’t believe something about that person,” Murphy tells him, though he never explores the gap between that perception and reality. “Up there, there’s something happening that I’m not a sixteen-year-old and I’m still transported by.”

Age and gender would have been other areas where the movie could have produced some interesting introspection, but instead, it never goes beyond the level of observation. “If you were a writer, you’d still be young. If you were an actor, you’d be right in the sweet spot,” Klosterman tells him. But the movie doesn’t talk at all what it means about the market that Murphy became a rock star at an advanced age, or what his gender’s allowed him to achieve that might not have been possible if he were a woman. “I’m 41, and I don’t have kids, and I want to have kids,” Murphy says at some point. But Shut Up and Play the Hits never tells us if he’s single or taken, and if single, why it hasn’t worked out previously for reasons other than the fact that he spent some time being a rock star. Watching Murphy lie on the floor of his expensive New York apartment, reach up and open the door of his fancy stove revealing a pizza stone within, and then closing it again, is not a substitute for information and insight.

That said, the music sounds dandy, and the up-close look at musicians putting together a show on stage with all the tweaks that implies is a lot of fun to watch. If Shut Up and Play the Hits were just a straight concert movie, it’d be a delight for fans to watch and a terrific introduction to the band for folks who are coming too late to the party. But the interstitial material only really works if you’re not just familiar with LCD Soundsystem but a supplicant at their particular altar.

What is it with Republican presidential candidates and campaign trail songs? Newt Gingrich has just been sued by Rude Music Inc. for using Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in political events since 2009:

The company wants him to stop immediately and is asking a court to award the band damages. But it’s not necessarily clear that they’ll rule in his favor. As Slate explained in 2008, after the band Heart asked John McCain’s presidential campaign to stop using their song “Barracuda” to introduce Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin at rallies, if campaigns get licenses to perform songs from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, they’re probably in the clear. If you’ve got an ASCAP license, you don’t have to ask artists whose music is registered through the society for specific permission to play their songs. “Eye of the Tiger” is in the ASCAP database, so it’s probably a question of whether Gingrich’s campaign or the venues where the song has been played have they appropriate licenses.

That said, there’s something amusing about the regular kerfuffles between Republican candidates and recording artists. Ever since George Will and Michael Deaver tried to see if Bruce Springsteen would endorse Ronald Reagan for president, Republicans have run into trouble over the songs they’ve played on the campaign trail or the artists’ whose work they’ve tried to claim have supported their messaging. McCain didn’t just run into trouble with Heart during the 2008 campaign: Jackson Browne sued him for using part of “Running on Empty” in a campaign ad (ASCAP licenses don’t cover video productions, which must get separate permission). Tom Petty went after George W. Bush for using “Don’t Back Down” in 2004, and asked Michele Bachmann to stop using “American Girl” on the trail. Maybe it’s time for Republican candidates to start reaching out to artists before picking their soundtracks.

This post contains spoilers for A Vist from the Goon Squad.

There may be something sentimental about the idea that we are all connected, affected by each others’ actions and worldviews in ways we can’t see until later. But for a novel that’s ultimately about how art helps us collectively and individually overcome the traumas of September 11, it’s a fitting ideological framework. The events of that day came about in part because of reactions to our actions that we didn’t see, or take seriously enough, in part because a small group of poisonously angry men wanted to make themselves seen, and felt. In the years since the attacks, we’ve mostly responded by trying to regulate the world in a way that’s more advantageous to us, to see everything, even at the expense of privacy and liberty. The power of Egan’s novel comes from asserting a positive vision of interconnection, one governed not by power and victory but by compassion and openness.

Because it turns out, of course, that Alex’s bad night with Sasha in the early years after the attacks ends up becoming the key to his ability to appreciate the event that changes — and maybe heals — a nation. As the New Yorker of longer vintage, she is part of his initiation into city. And years later, her experience of loss will refract back to him:

Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty…The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

He’s right to be anxious, maybe even more than we can understand. Egan’s very, very good at evoking the future. She places us in time with the reference to a 15-year war and the baby boom that followed, though whether it’s our involvement in the Middle East or another conflict remains unclear. Her description of social networking gives us a sense of vaster, though still personal, webs of connection, of earlier adoption of technology by children. Both the war and the spread of technology have enabled the expansion of the state security apparatus, though whether the fear is legitimate or justified also remains open to question. And the reaction to Scotty’s performance, the moment when “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched,” are so strong that they suggest that things got truly bad. It might still be possible to make rock music, and to market it, but there’s something shimmering off the page.
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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.

It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time for a bunch of people to release parody songs, try to rile folks up by getting edgy, or simply to make their share of the annual market. Here are the contenders so far:

1. Johnny Depp, making a cameo on Babybird’s “Jesus Stag Night Club”: Oh, people, this is not good. If you’re at the level of describing Jesus as having “hair like a lady/ Bloody thorns round his ear like he was a crazy,” you’re telling us a lot more about your powers of observation and ability to write creative lyrics — and apparently, your fondness for Tucker Max-inflected bros’ nights out. Take one of this article for The Onion and call me when you have better ideas. And Christians who are offended? Let this one go. It’s not going to find legs:

2. In the parody category, “You’re A Mean One, Newt Gingrich“: Points off for sexist and creative fail referring to Callista as a “bimbo,” and for the media criticism fail of missing the Judd Apatow revolution in telling us “Unless you’re there for pity or laughs, a portly man will never find success on TV, unless you’re Santa Claus, of course.” That said, it’s a decent facsimile, of course. And given the depths that the Republican presidential field has sunk to, musically, this is fitting. Still, it’s hard to beat Adam Sandler for loose, goofy holiday parody.

3. She & Him, “Baby It’s Cold Outside”: My extreme dislike of New Girl doesn’t mean my heart is too stony to occasionally be softened by the dulcet tones of Zooey Deschanel’s side hustle. As Bitch points out, the song doesn’t get any less date-rapey when you swap the genders (the parts in the original song are labeled “mouse” and “wolf”). But the light touch and the creepy material still make this nicely unnerving in a way Johnny Depp and his pals could only dream of:

4. Yoko Ono and the Flaming Lips, “Atlas Eets Chrismas”: They go all Kings’ Chorus and world-historical empathetic on this, and I’m not going to lie. It’s both totally corny and kind of great:

As one does in the ThinkProgress blog HQ from time to time, I was listening to t.A.T.u., which struck me as surprisingly un-Auto-Tuned — and weirdly committed to a vision of heterosexuality as war — for a cutesy fake lesbian Russian pop duo:

Yglesias and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s pretty hard to get a hit out of Russia or Eastern Europe unless it’s sold as extremely high camp, a la t.A.T.u. or “Dragostea Din Tei,” (which has the distinction of inspiring the single best New York Times headline ever committed to print, “Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa“):

Or totally ripped off, as with the song “Around the World” is based on:

That’s kind of sad. When Scandanavian people make uber-earnest and insanely catchy dance music, we call them Robyn and love them. Russians and Romanians have it tough. This, however, was probably not ever going to have a lot of appeal in the West: