iTunes charts

iTUNES CHARTS: There’s an interesting mix this morning in the Top 10 albums, with Vampire Weekend and Demi Lovato—who are expected to fight it out for the top spot on next Tuesday’s sales chart—making strong initial moves (and causing us to wonder whether there’s any overlap in their respective bases). These two lead five debuts onto the leaderboard, which also contains the preorder for Daft Punk, which hits a week from today. But how about the Gatsby soundtrack, which continues to have a surprisingly steady presence in the store after spending most of the last week at #1. Not only that, but, as we pointed out yesterday, Lana Del Rey’s contribution to the collection is starting to look like an unanticipated hit as it joins the usual suspects on the iTunes singles chart. In a related note, the featured piece on the front page of the Calendar section in this morning’s L.A. Times is a commentary from the paper’s theater critic, Charles McNulty, who expected to loathe the critically savaged film but wound up enjoying it. McNulty now regards Baz Luhrmann’s typically unorthodox reimagining of the great American novel “not as a botched translation but as a diverting pop-cultural riff that has as much to say about Fitzgerald's novel as it does about the connection between two decadent eras, the Jazz Age and our own.” He further notes that the Jay-Z-curated soundtrack “freed me from the expectation of highly polished literary realism. If you can't make the conceptual leap of a "Gatsby" movie featuring tracks by Beyoncé, Andre 3000 and Lana Del Rey, then by all means stay away.” Could this be the harbinger of a wholesale embrace of the polarizing movie? (5/14a)