This weekend, DJs from across the nation will be gathering in D.C. for the Million DJ March. The event will feature a panel discussion, a celebrity basketball game, and performances on and speakers on the National Mall. The organizers hope the event will help unify DJs to assert their rights in the entertainment industry. What they organizers lack in substance they make up for in lofty goals. I don’t even think there are a million DJs in America, but we will see how many turn out this weekend. Featured speakers/performers - KRS One, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Joell Ortiz, DJ Geometrix, Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, DJ Kool and many many more.

Schedule and info is at the Million DJ March Blog

“Who knew jazz was such a threat to the U.S.?”

This was the rhetorical question Holly Cole posed to her audience at Birchmere Music Hall last night, by way of apology and explanation for the gig in Alexandria that she had to cancel last February. In an open letter on her Web site, the Canadian singer explained:

I am terribly disappointed I had to cancel the first five dates on our US tour. I can’t tell you how upsetting this was…. This all happened because of a series of foul ups within the US Immigration Department…. Ultimately, I had to resort to canceling the shows because we simply weren’t allowed to cross the border.

Last night was Holly’s last gig of a tour that got way more complicated than anyone could have imagined, but she and her band went out in relative style. Sounding slightly strained at times—a lot of travel and battles with American bureaucracy will take it out of a person—she appeased an audience of die-hards with both big hits and new tracks. Shrieks of joy greeted the opening chords of “Cry if You Want To,” “Slow Boat to China,” “Me and My Shadow,” “Invitation to the Blues” (one of her finest Tom Waits interpretations), “Larger than Life,” and “The House is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye.”

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Before Barack Obama took the stage in front of a crowd of 75,000 in Portland yesterday, the Decemberists played a stacked set concluding with a mass singalong on “Sons & Daughters,” with� its drawn-out chorus of “Here all the bombs fade away.” The song, a rallying cry for hope, peace, and…mouthfuls of cinnamon, seemed to strike an appropriate-if-predictable tone for Obama’s largest congregation to date.

But it’s worth remembering some other theme songs that have scored the candidates’ respective campaigns. In January, Obama took mild heat when his campaign included a prominent rendition of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”� at his Iowa victory bash. As the New York Post notes, the song’s refrain, famous for its assertion that of Hova’s 99 problems, “a bitch ain’t one,”� struck some as a Hillary dig.

The same Post piece gives a run-down on some other notable campaign jingles, including Hillary’s invocation of the Céline Dion turkey “You & I,” also featured in a strange and maudlin campaign video with viral intent:

…not to be confused, naturally, with the 2ge+her-worthy “hillary4u+me”:

Elsewhere, the ever-provocative RightWingNews.com offers suggestions for the DailyKos “Obama Theme Song” list, with snarky offerings from the Platters‘ “The Great Pretender” to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” to “Cocaine,” which they bafflingly attribute to ZZ Top. (Come on, guys, even Republicans should know their J.J. Cale from their ZZ Top.)

Meanwhile, Harold Meyerson’s most recent op-ed in the Washington Post puts forth a promising possibility for McCain’s theme song going into the general election:

If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there’s one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words “an Englishman” to “American” to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year…. For some, “American” is a race — white — no less than a nationality, and it’s on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

Not exactly the scathingest thing Meyerson’s ever written, but an apt choice for the whitest party (no black national politicians; blacks compose 2 to 4 percent of the Republican electorate across the board) since Alexander Kerensky got drunk with a gang of polar bears.

In short, Jackie Wilson–whose”Higher” rates only seventh on the Daily Kos list–is most likely absent from the McCain campaign’s iPod Shuffle….

…the closest thing being “Johnny B. Goode,” which (for a while) was nearly as ubiquitous at McCain victory rallies as Joe Lieberman. For a while, I dug the choice (Chuck Berry, not Joe Lieberman), until I did the math and realized that when the single came out in ‘58, McCain was already too old to think it was cool.

Next stop on the Straight-Talk Express: Perry Como.

Think you’ve got a snappy choice for campaign theme song? Tell us about it in the comments.

Last night, WHUT-TV was screening a pretty good documentary, entitled Sam Cooke: Legend. More or less: A lot of the time, WHUT was actually broadcasting from its studio, doing its pledge “break.” A long, long break.

“It’s so important to give your financial support to WHUT,” they’re saying, “so that we can keep bringing you outstanding programs like Sam Cooke, and programs about other great artists and great music.”

…So how come the only time they broadcast these great music programs is during the pledge drives?

When your stock-in-trade is arch white-boy funk–the kind that boosted a thousand launch parties in the dot-com ’90s–the second act of your career is bound to be a little clumsy and full of odd moves. Hey, you started out odd. So when Mike Doughty, former Soul Coughing frontman and Suicide Girls photog, played the 9:30 Club on Saturday night, he closed up the main set with a cover of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a tune he included on a 2005 EP. Why might he do such a thing?

1. Mike Doughty Was Being Amusingly Ironic The first single from his new album, Golden Delicious, is called “27 Jennifers,” and his MySpace page has 27 Jennifers, Jennys, etc, in his top friends list. And toward the end of 9:30 Club set, he warned the crowd that he and his band would dispense with the usual encore rigmarole and instead just stand with their backs turned for a few seconds. So, playing a ditty about a guy who gets conned out of whiskey and cigarettes in exchange for some useless poker advice before cranking out the fan favorites? Total irony move.

2. Mike Doughty Is Not Being Ironic at All and Instead Admires the Impressive Structural Integrity of “The Gambler,” Which, to the Best of My Knowledge, Is the Only Pop Song to Inspire a Made for TV Movie “It really, REALLY wasn’t intended to be ironic,” Doughty told Austinist last October. “It’s a great song! I think a lot of things that are considered hipster-irony-statements are in fact sincere–the artifacts that get re-framed as “irony” are usually really beautiful things.”

3. Doughty Sincerely Loves the Songcraft of “The Gambler” but Cannot Effectively Argue That Point to His Target Audience Without Contriving Complex Framing Devices With Which to Swaddle His Cover of It Doughty isn’t good about putting words in a straight line–if he were alive three generations ago he’d be writing Dadaist sound poems. The whole point of Soul Coughing’s lyrics were words that sounded fun and rubbery bouncing off the beats, and now that he’s kinda-sorta a singer-songwriter he’s having a tough time making a simple point. “Busting Up a Starbucks” isn’t about that, really, and no song with the word “decathecting” in it is going to get into the Nashville Songwriters Foundation Hall of Fame. Incapable of being so articulate himself and desperately needing to, he reaches for the simplest tune he can think of. And when he finds one, he’s gonna hang onto it for a while. Mike Doughty knows when to hold ‘em.