Sure, pop stars, rockers and rappers are faced with some troubling commercial realities these days: plummeting album sales, diminished opportunities for commercial airplay, rampant Information Age bootlegging and a wildly oversaturated musical marketplace.

But at least they don’t have to worry about a certain bugbear that caused previous generations of performers untold sleepless nights. Acts from the bottom to the pinnacle of the pop strata no longer have to worry about losing their integrity by selling out.

As laid out by this story, which appears in Sunday’s Calendar section, selling out is no longer possible – at least within certain time-honored notions of that term. These days, hip-hoppers, rock stars and pop acts are lending their music and images to a variety of branded products and services in ways that would have been beyond antithetical in, say, the Woodstock era, the punk rock '70s or the slacker-era '90s.

They make you eat your vegetables. They yell at you for getting mud on your new penny loafers. In some cases, they leave you in a car on a hot day with the windows not rolled down enough or get you a prescription to Ritalin. But overall, moms are pretty awesome -- especially to hug.

To wit: The vast and eclectic body of pop paeans to mothers that have been recorded over the last half century (to be sure, there are great mom songs from beyond that epoch but, hey, this is a blog post, not an encyclopedia). With that in mind, Pop & Hiss submits for your consideration an arbitrary survey of mom songs cobbled together hurriedly on the eve of Mother's Day weekend: 

"Mother Stands for Comfort": Kate Bush

Sample lyric: "Mother stands for comfort/Mother will hide the murderer/Mother hides the madman/Mother will stay mum"

I heart mom: Eerie synth-driven workout in the name of atmospheric angst though the song may be, it drives home an important truth. Kate Bush's mom loves her so much she is prepared to commit perjury -- in the face of some unspecified but no doubt horrific act of manslaughter -- in order to preserve the sacrosanct bond between mother and daughter.

The L.A. Weekly reports that the successful but increasingly controversial Sunset Junction street fair (which takes place every August) has found itself embroiled in a civil war of sorts, the result of an ongoing conflict with neighbors and Silver Lake-area business owners, that went unresolved last year.

The Weekly writes that last night the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Governing Board "voted unanimously in favor of a motion stating that it will 'oppose the Sunset Junction Street Festival in its current format.' What this means for the future of the popular festival is still unknown. There are talks that a series of meetings between Sunset Junction organizers and the Neighborhood Council will occur between now and the event, which the Sunset Junction website has announced will take place on August 22 and 23 and, as stated in the meeting, permits are still pending."

In August, Pop & Hiss devoted considerable digital ink to the dispute between the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance (the official organizers of the Sunset Junction street fair) and area business owners frustrated with being excluded from the festival's footprint, which, for the second year in a row, terminated at Sanborn rather than continuing down Sunset to Edgecliffe, as it had done since the fair's humble inception 28 years ago. The festival has become increasingly music-driven, with multiple stages offering music throughout the day and night; last year's headliners included Cold War Kids, Broken Social Scene and Sam Moore.

Things reached a climax the day the festival was scheduled to start when business owners from the excluded swath of Sunset (arguably the heart of Sunset Junction) arrived for an early morning meeting with the organizers and a representative from Councilman Eric Garcetti's office, only to find that despite a motion passed by the City Council mandating a return to the original footprint, the official gate had been erected, again, at Sanborn.

There was a faux gate at Edgecliffe, and the portion of Sunset Boulevard leading to the real pay gate at Sanborn was completely empty with no vendors or stages.

Business owners were furious. They felt that the organizers were spitefully disregarding the will of the City Council and the neighborhood and vowed to take an early stance the following year. It seems they've made good on that promise. We'll be keeping our eyes peeled for more updates.

--Jessica Gelt

Photo of a very packed Sunset Boulevard during Sunset Junction 2008, by Stefano Paltera / For The Times

What do you get when you combine a 91-year-old female drummer on an oxygen tank; an eccentric, Grammy-winning songwriter; and one of L.A.'s funkiest, hyper-local galleries? A party that will likely be unlike any you've ever attended.

The drummer is Jerrie Thill, a spunky phenom from the Jazz Age who still performs at the El Cid in Silver Lake. The songwriter is Allee Willis, who has penned a wildly diverse catalog of tunes including the theme to "Friends," the Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" and "The Color Purple" musical. The gallery is Ghettogloss, the tiny Silver Lake-salon-that-could. The fortunate union of the three is in celebration of the YouTube premiere of a music video called "Hey Jerrie," directed by Willis and starring Thill.

The video features a catchy, jazz-driven number that Willis wrote and animated photos from Thill's life of drumming (featuring almost as many era-defining styles as I have fingers), interspersed with footage of Jerrie, as she is today, swinging her brushes above her head and pleasantly tap, tap, tapping on her kit.

"I generally like very offbeat talent," explains Willis. "But Jerrie is just a fine musician." Willis had already made a number of music videos featuring herself as her alter-ego "Bubbles" when she discovered Thill, who was playing her monthly Sunday gig at El Cid. Willis was immediately bowled over by the spunky nonagenarian. "I adored being around her," she says.

A day after the announcement that the Nederlander Organization has acquired rights to produce a musical version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" comes legal uncertainty for fans looking forward to a Broadway-style version of the epochal 1983 "Dawn of the Dead" meets "Soul Train" music video.

Turns out that the 14-minute mini-film's director and co-writer John Landis -- the movie comedy maestro behind "Animal House," "The Blues Brothers" and "An American Werewolf in London" -- filed court papers last Wednesday suing Jackson's company, Optimum Productions, for breach of contract. (You can see them reprinted here courtesy of thewrap.com.) At issue: Landis alleges that the King of Pop has been bilking him out of profits from "Thriller" and its accompanying "making of" documentary since 2005.

Among the complaint's accusations:

Lil Wayne: guitar hero. Who’d have thunk it?

Seems like every time you see the froggy-voiced rap superstar these days, he’s got a guitar strapped over his shoulder. Or he’s noodling tunelessly on one. Or as is most often likely, he’s just pretending to play a guitar -- even if the song he is performing has no actual guitar playing in it.

For evidence, look no further than three of the Cash Money Millionaire’s appearances: with Kid Rock at the Country Music Awards, Lil Wayne’s video for “Mrs. Officer” and his recent collabo with Kevin Rudolf, “Let It Rock.”

My Pop & Hiss colleague Ann Powers mulled over the genesis and cultural ramifications of "flyover rock" in Sunday's Calendar, trying to pin down the reasons behind the huge popularity of bands such as Hinder, Nickelback, Daughtry and such. There is a lineage that goes back decades, from the titans of '70s codpiece rock through hair metal, grunge and "American Idol" outliers, and she articulates it well. To my ears, though, this latest crop of modern rock is actually a continuation of a sound and ethic that planted its roots in the immediate post-grunge '90s, and no man is more responsible for it than Creed's Scott Stapp. So let me be your Virgil, dear reader, into the maw of Creed's gifts to today's mainstream rock music.

Normally, it takes three instances of any given event to constitute a trend in media-land fluffery, but this particular recent double-take in album art is too gnarly to avoid comment. Scuzz-rockers Eagles of Death Metal and the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon have inadvertently shared a formula for a successful album cover. Take either a doe-eyed schoolgirl or a crimson-nailed vixen, give her some blood-dripping human viscera to hold (and, in EoDM's case, plug a guitar cable into) and voilà: a vaguely misogynist, vaguely menacing and totally gross LP sleeve!