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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of what that might have been is suggested in Dolly’s tremendously funny, frightening story, which feels especially timely after the recent scrutiny of celebrities like Hillary Swank who took huge sums of money to entertain dictators. This section of the book feels slightly more hyper-real than the rest of the novel — it’s hard to believe, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring, that a hat or a hottie would actually change the international perception of a murderous dictator. But there’s something true about the fact that we’re easily distractible: “I wonder how the general dances? And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the general’s image problems would be solved. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.” And I’m also fascinated by the way Lulu moves through the novel, first as a distantly-glimpsed figure during the Africa trip, then as the unflappable little girl eating star fruit in a dictatorship, and finally, as a vision of the future, the person who is figuring out things that Alex and Bennie can’t.

And as for the woman who was that young girl once? If Sasha’s role in Alex’s life was to help guarantee that he would stay in New York, and that he’d see the city in a way that lets him see Scotty’s moment of glory the way that he does, it turns out that she’s had a role of her own. It’s hard to write about the powerpoint section of the novel, because it reads more like poetry than prose, because the visual journeys through it are so important. But I really appreciate that the broken woman we got at the beginning of the novel has gotten to be:

like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorced—a grandfather—would visit Sasha at home in the California desert. He would step through a living room strewn with the flotsam of her young kids and watch the western sun blaze through a sliding glass door. And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. “See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.”

Our lives are miracles, both on their own and in the way they interact with everyone else’s to form something more complex than we can see in the moment, or even over the sweep of our lives. A novel like this needs an omniscient narrator. It takes someone with a vision this big to understand it all.

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.

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:

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:

Midway through Latoya Peterson’s piece on Nevermind, Allison Wolfe from Bratmobile talks about her feeling that Nevermind kind of marked the end of a once-cohesive music scene. The audience for Nirvana got bigger, but it got worse. They tapped into a meathead mass audience that had no room for riot girls or politics or anything else. Wolfe felt alienated. All true.

But from my perspective, Nevermind was not a revelation but a gateway to revelation. I loved it. But I also loved Metallica’s Black Album and I didn’t see a difference between them. But precisely because I loved the Black Album and Nevermind, I got other albums by those bands. I got Kill ‘Em All, and I got Bleach. I got Incesticide. And Incesticide was, for a twelve or thirteen year-old living on the east coast a window back into that lost world whose passage Wolfe laments. The sound is low-fi, it’s punk rock. The liner notes were amazing, both a window into a political perspective and a road map to other bands. Vaselines? Jesus Lizard? If “at this point in Rock history, Punk Rock (whilestill sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone” then what was it while it lived? I was curious. That meant things. The songs meant things. The album meant something. But I heard it because of Nevermind. Because Nirvana was on the radio and on MTV. Because people outside the community heard the band. And it’s one of the reasons I think selling out and going mainstream is underrated. If you’re doing something good, you should try to be popular! Then you have the audience you can sell your passions to. Kurt Cobain, obviously, turned out to be the kind of guy who thought it would be smart to treat depression with heroin so he didn’t see it that way. But he’s wrong.

As it turns out, Bel Canto isn’t a terrific book about terrorism, because the terrorists in the novel are sort of incompetent, not particularly violent, and most importantly for the overall structure and argument of the novel, just as susceptible to the beauty of high and low art as the people they’ve captured. And that ability to be moved by opera, to fall under the sweet hypnosis of of a telenovela, is what enables captors and hostages to come together for a season in a sort of utopian society. There’s a magical realism about it — this isn’t finding a galleon stranded inland and covered in flowers or unusually long-lived gypsies, or anything. But in these fractured times, there is something miraculous about the idea that common knowledge of pop culture could save a life, as it does early in the hostage-taking:

The Catholic priests, sons of those murdering Spanish missionaries, loved to tell the people that the truth would set them free, and in this case, they were exactly correct. The General named Benjamin had cocked his gun and was prepared ot make an example by dispatching the Vice President into the next world, but the soap opera story stopped him. As much as he was sick to know that five months of planning for this one evening to kidnap the President and possibly overthrow the entire government were worthless and he was now saddled with two hundred and twenty-two hostages lying before him on the floor, he believed the Vice President’s story completely. Noe one could make it up. It was too petty and small-minded…But Maria, even in the jungle where televisions were rare, electricity sketchy, and reception nonexistent, people spoke of this Maria. Even Benjamin, who cared for nothing but the freedom of the oppressed, knew something of Maria. Her program came on in the afternoons from Monday to Friday, with a special episode on Tuesday nights which more or less summarized the week for those who had to work during the day. If Maria was to be freed, it was not surprising that it should happen on a Tuesday night.

I can’t actually decide if I think it’s more miraculous that the characters are united by low culture, which is not normally assumed to have transcendent, cosmic power, or that the power of opera, which is not the most accessible art form (and the book spends a lot of time meditating on both what it means to be able to communicate with everyone, and no one), could prove so universally appealing:

Too much time had been spent weeping on the sofa or staring out the window. Now there was music and an accompanist. Roxanne Coss had risked her voice on Gianna Schicchi and found that her voice was still there…no one could shoot her while they sang. By extension they were all safe, and so they pressed in close to the piano to listen…When she got the song exactly right she took it straight through to the end without a flutter of hesitation. it was impossible to say that her singing had improved, but there was something in her interpretation of the lines that had shifted almost imperceptibly. She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

Anyway, even if Bel Canto isn’t a realistic book about terrorism, it’s a beautiful, resonant book about culture and beauty. Even raving maniacs who kill children want to be able to claim certain transcendent artists as their own, no matter how they have to stretch to do it.

It’s not that covers don’t exist in hip-hop—searching “A Milli” on YouTube brings up 60,400 results—just that the more productive territory in the genre tends to crop up in sampling, which is effectively what Lil Mama’s doing here semi-collaboratively with Avril Lavigne (The get-out-of-my-way declaration of “Eight bars and stop” as she starts a verse is awesome great. Can she and Rye-Rye please record together?):

and in radical lyrical revamps of existing hip-hop tracks, a la Lupe Fiasco’s amping up of the politics in Kanye’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” complete with explanation of how bling is a depreciating asset:

But in terms of demonstrating competitors’ skills, I’m not sure it would make sense, for example, to ask competitors to recreate Eminem’s verse on “Forever.” And in terms of pulling a mass audience (as would, of course, be the goal if they put the show on a network rather than a niche channel) that might not be versed in hip-hop’s back catalogue, I wonder if you’d have to get artists freestyling over pop songs, like Queen Latifah does with “Poker Face” here, and hope it’s enough to jump demographics or bring in audiences who wouldn’t normally turn in to a singing competition show:

I bet he would, too. But even though I absolutely love Nirvana I’ve come to think that these particular kind of values that Cobain stood for were hideously wrongheaded. After all, Cobain literally killed himself. He wasn’t so much keeping it real and being authentic as he was a severely depressed heroin addict who really needed some help in life. A brilliant artist? Yes. But a horrible model of how to think about life. He ought to be thrilled that the songs he wrote continue to mean something to people and to be played. Miley Cyrus was 18 months old when Cobain died and many of her fans are even younger than she is. Yet here she is playing Cobain’s song to an audience in Ecuador. That, to me, is how you take art seriously—by celebrating it, and taking joy in the idea of a growing set of people experiencing it.

But what they failed to note is that the growth impact is especially large if you focus the attention on the specific sub-set of poor people who are retired or severely disabled, since such individuals contribute little-or-nothing to the nation’s measured economic output.

This measures something that’s both larger and smaller than the “music” industry. The newspaper industry isn’t the words industry or even the news industry. People still listen to music. People still play music. People who play music even still earn money. But the business of selling recordings of music is shrinking. Which, of course, is exactly what ought to be happening to it. Distributing a digital copy of an album to a person’s computer is much cheaper than manufacturing and distributing a physical CD to a retail store. In a competitive market, the price of a widget ought to approximate the marginal cost of producing an additional widget. That’s one reason why this blog is free to read. Thanks to copyright, a recordings-seller does have some level of market power to allow him to seek monopoly rents. But there’s a pretty high degree of substitutability between different songs, so the competition is still pretty intense and the prices are low.

This is one reason why I would discourage bands from trying to underprice tickets at their own shows as a reward to fans. Since digital copies of recordings are non-rival and basically free to make, any non-zero sale price entails some deadweight loss. And since concert tickets are necessarily scarce, any sub-market price entails some deadweight loss. The optimal strategy for a popular band that wants to do something nice is market pricing for concert tickets, plus free recordings. Or even better, you could release your records into the public domain.

As history’s greatest monster, I’ve long been disturbed by good bands’ aversion to efficient demand-based pricing for their shows. Annie Lowrey’s article about LCD Soundsystem’s anti-scalper efforts is confirming my priors:

But LCD fans were not left out in the cold. The debacle attracted the wrath of the band’s charismatic front man, James Murphy. On LCD Soundsystem’s blog, he wrote: “this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd MSG gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it’s knocked us on our asses.”

The market had failed in his mind. He told fans not to pay thousands of dollars to get into the Madison Square Garden show: “I will try to figure a way out to fuck these fuckers. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, IT IS NOT WORTH THAT KIND OF MONEY TO SEE US!” Soon enough, he realized he had an ace up his sleeve. He flooded the market, adding shows, upping ticket supply, and hopefully pushing prices down. (Those shows will go on sale this Friday.)

This is my current understanding of the dilemma. Optimal allocation of LCD Soundsystem tickets requires demand-responsive ticket pricing. But good rock bands are not composed of narrow-minded amoral profit-maximizers. Consequently, they’re motivated to price tickets at a lower level than the market will bear leading, in turn, to middlemen getting the rents. What’s needed is a way for bands to price tickets at demand-responsive levels in a way that’s consistent with the norm that the guys in a cool band shouldn’t be narrow-minded profit-maximizers. The best solution here, I think, is charity.

Someone (Bono?) needs to set up a trust fund to which bands will allocate the excess revenues that accumulate when the market price of concert tickets exceeds the “fair” price as determined by the bands’ moral intuitions. In that case, instead of a situation where “[t]ickets with a face value of $49.50 were going for 12 times that” on a secondary market you’d have a scenario where tickets are going for $500 and $450 out of that goes to the trust fund. The fund could take the money and give it to poor people in Africa and India. They need the money a good deal more than LCD Soundsystem fans do. You could say, very legitimately, “it’s too bad that not every fan can see the show, but we need some allocation mechanism, and I’ve tried to pick the one that will do the world the most good.” Hopefully Jeff Sachs would vouch for the plan.

I was at a party last night featuring some of the young stars of progressive writing (Dylan Matthews, Ned Resnikoff, etc.) when some folks in the next room fired up No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs” on Rock Band.

The young folks are familiar with the tune, but I wondered if they really understood what it meant to screen one’s phonecalls. The answer turned out to be: Not really. The consensus view was that it had something to do with checking caller ID. The truth, of course, is implicit right there in the chorus: “Sorry I’m not home right now / I’m walking in a spiderweb / So leave a message and I’ll call you back / A likely story but leave a message and I’ll call you back.” The speaker doesn’t have caller ID (which was bleeding edge technology at the time) so instead she was screening her phone calls by letting the answering machine pick up the phone and deliver her outbound message. Then the caller would start to talk, identifying himself, and the screener would either pick up the phone or else ignore the message. Hence the sarcasm of “a likely story.”

At any rate, consider that a lesson for the young people and a chilling reminder to the rest of us of how old we are.

I would only add to this that one of my favorite full track mashups is Fugazi vs Destiny’s Child, melding “Waiting Room” with “Independent Woman.” The fact of the matter is that “Waiting Room” was just born to be a fun song, and it’s hopelessly sabotaged by Fugazi’s fundamentally anti-fun ideology. It takes the mash-up era to unleash the lurking genius in this tune.