The latest rumor about how the Olympics will close themselves out next month comes from The Sun: "[Oasis's Liam Gallagher] will perform a new arrangement of... 'Wonderwall' with bandmates Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Chris Sharrock."

12. All of the track & field competitors dress up like Benny Hill and chase each other around the stadium while the London Philharmonic plays "Yakety Sax."

11. The Teletubbies perform a skit depicting the post-Reformation history of religion in the UK; when they conclude, the Archbishop of Canterbury claps his hands and says "again, again!"

10. Paul and Ringo are joined by a holographic John and George for a Beatles reunion, during which they only play Van Halen songs.

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T-Pain: Accused of killing music with the microphone, on the Internet.

People have been concerned for a very long time with what's killing music. The current boogeyman is undoubtedly Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software that can both sweeten off-key voices and create new vocal effects. Some have long protested its ubiquity: It will kill real vocals! Live performances will die out! It makes human performers sound like robots! But it also falls into a rich tradition of new musical ideas that were thought to be on the very verge of killing music forever—which is another way of saying "changing music a little," of course. Let's look back at seven centuries' worth of music's impending demise and see what we can learn.

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Piracy is theft.

Piracy isn't theft because nothing physical is being stolen.

You are taking money out of the hands of artists.

Artists were already being ripped off by labels.

Artists can make the money back by touring.

Kickstarter.

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This month, to celebrate the Internet's unbridled love for wallowing in nostalgia and even greater relishing of talking about why certain cultural artifacts are horrible, Sound of the City presents First Worsts, a series in which our writers remember the first time... they ever hated a song enough to call it The Worst. (And to be fair, we're also going to see how these songs have stood the test of time.)

THE SONG: U2, "Discotheque."
THE YEAR: 1997.
THE REASONS: Bono isn't a very good irony filter.

Like most people who write about how much they like pop music, I once really hated pop music. I came to pop late: born in 1979, the first new non-Weird Al album I can remember being into was 1990's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. A year or so later, the Nirvana explosion hit me hard, and I had thoroughly internalized my alt/indie idols' decrying of inauthentic pop. Of course, I was still listening to Use Your Illusion every day; lacking male music nerd friends, I didn't really have the proper context to understand what I was supposed to dislike. (My female music nerd friends just made me rad Britpop mixtapes after I would pretend to know who Blur were.) And so, given the standards as I understood them, what did I finally get around to hating? An album that was literally called Pop. Released by U2 in 1997, it served as the conceptual center of a tour and ironic turn for the band. I took the bait, centering my disdain on the lead single, "Discotheque."

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​Sound of the City's search for the quintessential New York City musician enters Round Two this week. Today, all the remaining contenders in the Uptown division battle it out in the Round of 32. Keep up with all the action here.

In a stunning upset, No. 10 seed Laura Nyro has upended the brackets of musicologists throughout the New York metropolitan area by toppling perpetual online fan favorite Lady Gaga early. She now moves on to the second round, and is facing a formidable opponent: No. 2 seed Paul Simon, who beat out Slick Rick in the round of 64. Can Nyro continue her unlikely run? Or will Simon&30151;one of the most important musicians of the past half-century, and an avid chronicler of New York's past—prove triumphant?

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Unlike MTV's Video Music Awards, which usually reward some combination of pop excellence, symbolic audacity, and likelihood of being controversial, the Grammys' short-form music video category is a lot like the Oscars. They don't always pick the best videos—this year's list omits such highlights as Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass," Ke$ha's "Blow," the Beastie Boys' "Make Some Noise," and Beyoncé's "Girls (Who Run the World)"—but they do a good job of capturing the middlebrow zeitgeist, recognizing those videos that manage to combine critical respectability with popular appeal. Looking through their past winners, they generally pick the right one from the bunch ("Opposites Attract" in 1991, "Losing My Religion" in 1992, "Digging in the Dirt" in 1993). Their blind spot is the same one in every other category: older artists. That's why "Free as a Bird" beat "Tonight, Tonight" in 1997, and Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down" won over Feist's "1234" in 2008. With no dead artists eligible this year, will the righteous (Adele) triumph? Or will Grammy voters give in to their lazier impulses and just pick OK Go?

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via YouTube

Yesterday, President Barack Obama's team released a Spotify playlist for his 2012 re-election campaign, announcing it via every form of social media imaginable. According to an announcement that accompanied the more traditional means of releasing political information—a leak—the playlist will ostensibly be used "for crowd events (rallies, ropelines, etc.)."

Efforts to decode its message have generally focused on breaking the playlist down by genre, with the assumption that, in the words of the Atlantic's David Graham, "this list is carefully calibrated to appeal for optimal demographic appeal—age, gender, geography, race, and socioeconomics." But such mercenary calculations would be a far blunter tool than what the Obama campaign seems to be doing here. Instead of just trying to signal a cultural affinity with voters through shared tastes in music, this playlist captures the broader cultural identities in which music plays an important part but is far from the whole shebang.

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Nicki Minaj's "Stupid Hoe" is supposed to be a diss track aimed at Lil Kim, but in the tradition of diss tracks, it's pretty weak. Something like Jay-Z's "Takeover" uses specific, personal information about the people involved, going so far as to propose a mathematical equation at one point. Even Lil Kim's diss of Nicki, "Black Friday," gathers together evidence about Nicki (she is weird, she has a large butt) and Kim (she is real, she has been around for a long time) to make its case. The diss track is a lawyerly form, accumulating exhibits and summarizing with a killer closing statement to produce a unanimous jury decision.

Nicki can do that ("Lemme get this straight, wait, I'm the rookie?"), but on "Stupid Hoe," she mostly doesn't. She takes a few shots, calling Kim "Bubbles," but none of these hit much harder than her "Tragedy" verse, which itself felt perfunctory. As a track, it's a good one, minimal, loud, and aggressive. But as a diss, it's incomplete without the video, which came out Monday.

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For those people who adore Kelly Clarkson and hate Ron Paul supporters, the inaugural American Idol's Wednesday night endorsement of Paul's presidential candidacy was especially painful. The move might have been merely confusing in years past, when Paul was a web-specific phenomenon—the equivalent of Carrie Underwood using a ragecomic as her next album cover, or Perez Hilton having a record label—but the recent exposure of Paul's startlingly racist and homophobic newsletters from the 1980s shifted Kelly's gung-ho Paulophilia from quirky to offensive. It turned out that Clarkson (apparently honestly) didn't know about Paul's issues, but the course of excusing her endorsement raised a host of other problems. The resulting Twitfit played out like a weird kind of crossover special, including a co-sign from Michelle Branch, a sullen @-reply to music critic Matt Cibula, and Clarkson's revelation that she is a pro-Obama Republican. The stormy response was heartening, if also predictable (what books will Ron Paul supporters recommend I read in responses to this post? Leave your answer in the comments!), and both Clarkson's and Branch's responses to the criticism—that whether or not Paul was prejudiced, they certainly weren't—were helpful little distillations of the issues inherent in collectively supporting a presidential candidate who doesn't believe in doing things collectively.

In retrospect, though, the endorsement makes a depressing amount of sense, and not just because Clarkson and Paul are fellow Texans. For all the supposedly progressive politics of rock and pop, the structure of the business is incredibly entrepreneurial, with musicians required to front a remarkable amount of their own money for instruments, travel, and recording before they see any sort of return on their investment. There's no large-scale structure that can provide steady employment (and health insurance) while nurturing innovation, just a produce-or-die ethos that receives no subsidies or grants. In America, at least, one of the few areas of life in which government really does have minimal involvement is pop music.

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You may have heard that Rick Perry's mind-meltingly horrible anti-gay campaign ad has more dislikes on YouTube than Rebecca Black's "Friday." The story has been covered by Time, the Today Show, and the Huffington Post, among many others. There's only one problem: that's not actually true. The current version of "Friday" has only been online since September, even though the Internet's interest in the song clearly dates back to March. That's because the original YouTube upload of the clip was removed in an aborted attempt to put it behind a paywall; when that didn't work, "Friday"'s creators re-upped the original clip, thus resetting the counter on views and dislikes. That current version, it's true, only has some 250k+ dislikes, less than Perry's now-400k+ figure. But before it was taken down, the original upload had more than three million dislikes, far outstripping what Perry's video has accumulated. (Some outlets got it even more wrong, trying to claim that passing Black's video made Perry's the most-disliked in YouTube history, even though two Justin Bieber clips and Black's other video have far more dislikes than Perry's.)

While some outlets have issued corrections, the "fact" has gone viral, leaving the more interesting question of why, exactly, it's important that Perry is more disliked than Black (or Bieber). On one level, of course, it's just good news for liberals, a nice confirmation that their repulsed reaction to Perry's ad is shared by lots of others. But it belies a deeper anxiety about the relationship between politics and entertainment. In the last few years, YouTube has taken a weirdly major role in our political campaigns, serving as the central clearinghouse of everything from campaign ads like Perry's to major campaign speeches, career-ending gaffes, and even presidential debates, to say nothing of all the reaction videos and remixes voters produce.

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