Monday is the 4th of July, and among all the parades and flag-waving, it’s a chance to maybe think about what this country is and what its ideals represent. The American Dream — both the great shining vision and its dark underbelly — has been a powerful motif in literature over the years, dissected and discussed in works like The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, The Grapes of Wrath, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and many more. It’s also been a recurrent subject for songwriters, both as an ideal to which to aspire and a myth to be debunked. Here’s a mixtape that looks at both ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in between.

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There are two types of people in the world: those who actually enjoy American Idol and those who only tune in to the finale to see famous musicians play their hits amid elaborate stage set-ups, awards show-style. We won’t judge you for belonging to the former category, but we fall firmly into the latter. Thankfully for us, last night’s celebrity line-up was major: Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Bono and the Edge, Steven Tyler, and Marc Anthony and J.Lo all serenaded the crowd. (Several notables teamed up with Idol contestants, too, from TLC to Judas Priest.) So, how did the night’s non-contestants fare? We rate their performances we actually care about from best to worst after the jump.

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1. The 19 new films contending for the Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival have been announced, and they include Pedro Almodóvar’s La Piel Que Habito, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. [via ArtsBeat]

2. Bruce Campbell has confirmed that the long-rumored Evil Dead reboot will happen — he’s not just sure when. “Who can say -– we’re all working on other jobs right now. We’re not trying to dodge anybody’s questions, there just isn’t that much to talk about. The remake’s gonna kick ass –- you have my word.” [via Paste Mag]

3. It’s a miracle: A mango jelly bean was found with Kate Middleton’s face on it in Britain. Says the enterprising chap who found it: “Given that the royal wedding is only a few weeks away, we hope to make a few pounds out of it by selling it on the internet to a collector.” [via Gawker]

4. How exactly are book signings supposed to work in the age of the eBook? The New York Times offers up a few ideas, including having an author sign your iPad, which just sounds nuts to us.

5. William Shatner has announced the tracklist for his space-inspired covers album, Searching For Major Tom, and it includes songs by U2, Frank Sinatra, Queen, and Pink Floyd. [via HuffPo]

Bonus link: Watch Roger Ebert’s TED Talk About Losing His Voice

1. The nominees for The 15th Annual Webby Awards were announced this morning, and the list includes Justin Bieber, Angry Birds, Groupon, the Old Spice Guy, Arcade Fire, The Bed Intruder Song, SoundCloud, and Flipboard .

2. “I’m around great women, starting with my mom. Women keep men cool. The hotter the chick the cooler the guy … that sounds like a really bad rap line!” – Jay-Z talks about his new lifestyle website and explains how he became the coolest man on Earth to Gwyneth Paltrow in GOOP

3. With ticket sales estimated to top $700 million, U2’s 360 Degrees tour has surpassed The Rolling Stones’s Bigger Bang tour as the highest grossing tour of all time. Says their manager: “That dollar figure for the gross looks enormous! Of course I can’t tell you what the net is, but I can tell you that the band spend enormous sums on production for their audience.” Point taken, but how much could a giant claw (or three) cost? [via Vulture]

4. Look at a photo of a decidedly pregnant Tina Fey that was snapped while she was leaving The Late Show With David Letterman last night.

5. Ikea’s first US-based factory in Danville, Virginia, has become “a target of racial discrimination complaints, a heated union-organizing battle, and turnover from disgruntled employees.” Of note: workers at similar factories in Sweden make a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and five weeks of paid vacation. That’s compared to $8 an hour in Danville and 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company. [via LAT]

Bonus link: It’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s!

Poor Titus Andronicus. They were all excited to go on tour with The Pogues, but apparently the experience has left a sour taste – singer Patrick Stickles told Spinner this week, “I hated the tour. It made me furious throughout. I didn’t think that we were treated at all with the respect that we deserved, not even the respect as saying, ‘We’re an important punk band,’ but respect that we’re human beings.” Still, for all that their support slot turned out to be a huge let-down, at least they didn’t get beaten up, or get chased out of the country, or end up stuck inside a giant lemon. Here we “celebrate” ten of rock ’n’ roll’s most hilariously disastrous concert tours.

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Despite the recent release of Kanye West’s official music video for “Monster,” one intrepid internet mash-up artist crafted his own version out of — what else? — clips of Muppets. It got us thinking about the gems of Muppet mash-up past. With enough ingenuity and some timing you can get those little felt critters to mime singing almost anything, from U2 to gangster rap to Lightning Bolt. Our selections for the most awesome and strangely appropriate Muppet mash-up music videos, after the jump.

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1. Bon Jovi — who raked in over $200 million on their global Circle Tour — has beaten AC/DC and U2 to score the highest grossing tour of 2010. Lady Gaga came in fourth, taking in a whopping $133.6 million from her Little Monsters. [via NME]

2. Reese Witherspoon is engaged to her boyfriend, CAA agent Jim Toth, whom she has been dating since her split with Jake Gyllenhaal early last year. [via The Wrap]

3. “Viewed from a certain, admittedly uncharitable, angle, Blue Valentine looks like a grim, dirty-realist, festival-circuit version of (and sequel to) Knocked Up… The grainy, washed-out colors of the breakup phase, which contrast with the somewhat brighter palette of the courtship sections, create an illusion of immediacy and rawness that is underlined by the scruffy Keystone State locations.” – A.O. Scott reviews the film in The New York Times

4. A group funded by George Clooney has teamed up with Google and the United Nations on a project “that will collect real-time satellite imagery and combine it with field analysis” on the borders of the Sudan. [via AP]

5. The United States Postal Service has announced plans to release five Pixar character stamps as part of its 2011 commemorative stamp program. The stamps — which pay homage to Cars, Ratatouille, Toy Story, Up, and WALL-E — will be available for purchase starting August 19. [via The Sly Oyster]

Bonus link: The World’s Most Arresting Images

1. ArtsBeat is reporting that the opening of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Lights will now be pushed from January 11 until sometime in February. This will allow time for the creators to make several changes, including changing the final number, rewriting the dialogue, adding new music from the composers, U2’s Bono and the Edge.

2. Watch David Letterman’s hilarious tribute to Larry King, who hosted Larry King Live for the last time last night, complete with a Larry blooper reel. [via Gawker.tv]

3. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are pitching a new movie! According to the LA Times, “While the plot is being kept under tight wraps — it’s a pitch, so a script has yet to be written, and Kaufman movies are famously hard to describe in a few sentences anyway — two people familiar with the project said it has been making the rounds to independent financiers in recent weeks.”

4. Yesterday Anne Hathaway surprised the kids from the PS22 Chorus with the news that they’ll be performing at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony on February 27th. Watch a video of their reaction.

5. An anonymous LA street artist has put a new work in response to MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch’s decision to paint over another artist’s mural that he had commissioned: “The wheat-pasted mural depicts the face of Deitch on the body of an Iranian ayatollah holding an extension pole with a paint roller at the end — and it’s set against Italian street artist Blu’s now-controversial anti-war imagery.” [via Culture Monster]

Bonus link: Roger Ebert’s Top 10 Films of 2010

For everyone who’s ever wanted to answer “How long must we sing this song?” with “Actually, I’d love it if you’d stop right now” comes Killing Bono — a real movie based on Neil McCormick’s rock memoir of the same name. While it isn’t actually about murdering the U2 frontman (we assume we would have read about that in the news), it does follow a young Dublin band struggling through the mid-’70s as their pal Bono rose to international mega-stardom. The trailer makes the film, which stars Ben Barnes, look pretty fun in that retro, across-the-pond rock way. And considering that it includes great puns like, “the other band always had… The Edge,” you will probably want to watch.

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On Monday, Coach Leonard Skinner — the beloved high school teacher and namesake of Lynyrd Skynyrd — passed away at the age of 77, and a little piece of frat rock died with him. A sad event for lovers of Southern jukebox-jams everywhere, to be sure, but also a reminder of a pretty good band name back story. It got us thinking about our favorite, unexpected band names and where they come from. Virginia Woolf stories, slang terms for speed, poorly understood foreign terms: all are fodder for some pretty excellent handles. So, in memory of Coach Skinner, we’ve compiled the etymology of 10 famous band names.

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