Though Spector liked being a musician, he loathed having anyone — especially industry suits — tell him what to do. So after the Teddy Bears broke up and he had honed his gifts with a stint at New York’s legendary pop factory, the Brill Building, Spector co-founded his own label, Philles. It was there he began to find his groove. Spector continued to play and write, but quickly discovered his real talent was as a musical architect, putting the elements of song together in new and deeply affecting ways.

By the time he was 21, Spector was a millionaire. Within a mere three years, he had produced more than 20 hit singles and given birth to a style bombastically christened “the Wall of Sound.” The Jewish kid whose first love was jazz, this reedy little dynamo from the Bronx, had created a noise that was very, very big.

The Wall of Sound was a musical mind-slam; it overloaded the auditory nerves with such sweepingly complex arrangements and such a barrage of instruments that it rendered the individual parts of the whole unrecognizable. Spector called his singles “little symphonies for the kids,” but they were closer to opera — full of romantic Sturm und Drang and more than occasional dips into absolute madness. The Wall was the sound of young love distilled into the three-minute opus — beautiful and horrible and sweet and suffocating.

To his towering layers of melody Spector piled on lyrics just a little more insistently than anybody else; he added singers whose voices could careen from radio-ready fluff to an anguished wail on the turn of a note. And during the powder-keg tension of the early civil rights era, he had the chutzpah to be colorblind, creating music that refused to be identified by the races of the artists who performed it. It was for his stars the Righteous Brothers (Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield) that the term “blue-eyed soul” was coined, as if the idea of white singers making truly soulful music had not been possible before. But if his music wasn’t black or white, neither were the feelings it depicted. Nothing was ever simple in a Phil Spector song.

Because Spector produced as a young man, his music had an authentically
vulnerable young sound. It was simultaneously rough and elaborate; it beckoned with a finger snap and thumped like a heartbeat. And it laid bare Spector’s own private and painful bêtes noire — his hyperkinetic, insomniac energy; his doomed love affairs; his family’s legacy of mental illness.

Spector knew the tumult and the masochism of love, how a blow can seem like a caress when you haven’t yet learned the difference between the two. The shocking power of “He Hit Me (But It Felt Like a Kiss),” which was banned by some radio stations because of its lyrics, has only increased over time; it’s brutal proof of Spector’s unflinching understanding that not all relationships are chaste, “Walking in the Sand”
affairs. His music reflected the intensity of first love and first sex, when one’s newfound capacity for pleasure can be so desperately good it crosses over into torment.

Spector had a gift for expressing that raw emotion from a female as well as male perspective. Two of the primary vehicles for his recording studio passions, the Crystals and Ronettes, were the first girl groups to be frankly carnal and unabashed about stating their needs; their voices howled above tsunamis of melody. The heroines of “Then He Kissed Me,” for example, were so blown away at being “kissed in a way that I’d never been kissed before” that the music could only thunder along in knee-buckling amazement at the erotic sensation. Ronettes’ lead singer Ronnie Bennett — Spector’s lover and later wife — didn’t stop at simply asking to “be my little baby,” she demanded that you “be my baby now” with a gorgeously scary urgency. On the painfully majestic “River Deep-Mountain High,” his ultimate metaphor for the soaring, sinking nature of love, Spector reduced Tina Turner to trembling, practically choking sobs, as she moaned, “Do I love you, my oh my?” And then, to show men also could be passion’s victims, he had the Righteous Brothers throw themselves from the cliffs in such instant pop masterpieces as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (“You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips/There’s no tenderness like before in your fingertips”).

But one can only feel so much for so long. By 1966, propelled by the commercial failure of “River Deep-Mountain High,” he had begun his disgusted retreat away from the music world and into seclusion. He continued to work sporadically, notably on the Beatles’ final group and early solo projects. It was he who put the final touches on the “Let It Be” album, and he who gave Lennon’s “Instant Karma” its transcendent edge. The song was one of his last real hits, which may be why it sounds like a supernova, an outburst whose finality only adds to its luster.

The “tycoon of teen” was burned out well before he even hit 30, in 1970. In later years Spector traded his vibrancy for eccentricity. By the time he produced the Ramones’ 1980 “End of the Century,” he was as famous for being a show business kook as he’d ever been for being a producer. The punk heroes did a cover of “Baby I Love You” that creaked with irony.

Gothic stories of drugs and vicious guard dogs and bodyguards spilled out from his Hollywood mansion. Spector took to wearing a gun on his hip and, for a while, a gigantic cross around his neck. He could waste entire days listening to the
same track over and over and over again. Guests at his mansion found themselves subjected to capricious lock-ins; his children and ex-wives would claim Spector abused them. The brilliant, beautiful romantic couldn’t die like a Romeo or waste away like a Keats; he settled instead for a dementia-tinged exile. Today Spector still works now and then, but mostly, the man who built the Wall of Sound has erected around himself a wall of silence. And if there are still intoxicating melodies playing in his head, he’s no longer terribly interested in unleashing them on the world.

Spector was the first producer as star, the first behind-the-scenes recording wizard who was bigger than any of his artists. His 1963 Yuletide compilation, “A Christmas Gift to You,” is still better known as Phil Spector’s Christmas album, as if the collective talents of its formidable contributors are small potatoes next to the creative firepower of its maestro. He was the man who gave the “American Bandstand” generation a darker and more sexual edge, the prodigy who inspired everyone from the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones to Bruce Springsteen. He was the first punk, the visionary who fused the pathos of jazz with the vitality of rock ‘n’ roll. He was and remains the classic 20th century pop-genius madman.

Spector was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. But with his masterpieces dumped into the uneven pile of Oldies “classics,” it’s easy nowadays to overlook Spector’s contribution. And that’s a shame. Because Spector’s greatest songs can still make you feel again — not in a
cloyingly nostalgic way, but in a brazenly real one — what it is to confront the world with a young and pliant soul. And they can remind you that while hearts are broken all the time by pain and loneliness, those in love can be wrecked just as easily by pure, astonishing joy.

How far to take retouching isn’t just an issue for glossy magazines anymore. As Glamour points out, there are over “70 iPhone apps to help you alter your photos before you press upload” – and even more possibilities once the images hit your computer. Perhaps that’s why Glamour readers are so comfortable with a little cleaning up here and there. The magazine reports that “Nearly 60 percent [of readers] feel it’s OK for a woman to tweak her personal pictures.” Moreover, a whopping “23 percent of women ages 25 to 29 do it; that number climbs to 41 percent among those ages 18 to 24.” The younger you are, it seems, the less inhibited you’ll be about retouching your image.

But readers are considerably less lenient when someone else is wielding the tools. “Only 43 percent of women said it was OK for magazines to retouch, and just 39 percent were comfortable with ads doing so.” Why so schizo? Perhaps the results reflect a level of previously unacknowledged vanity and hypocrisy – some rampant trend of falsifying our personal images. Glamour certainly takes a dim view of it, getting Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies” and “Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” to note, “It makes us think there must really be something wrong with us if we can’t even look as good as the average woman on Facebook.”

But there’s more to it. For one thing, unless you’re blatantly faking your looks for a dating profile (PS don’t), chances are whatever altering you do of your photos isn’t in the service of selling somebody an unattainable bill of goods. It’s one thing to be cool with zapping out a zit on a regular person’s avatar, but it’s another ball of wax entirely when a company is trying to sell a product based on an image that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Just this week, the British Advertising Standards Authority yet again yanked a major cosmetics campaign, noting that a recent L’Oreal ad featuring Rachel Weisz “misrepresented the results that the product could achieve.” And when magazines are peddling the fantasy that actresses are slinking into bikinis six weeks after delivering their twins, or, for that matter, that Faith Hill doesn’t have a collarbone and Kelly Clarkson doesn’t have a butt, well, perhaps readers are justified in feeling a little gun-shy. And, for another thing, the way that individuals use retouching isn’t always merely in service of looking as hot as possible. It’s often just about making the picture itself interesting – griming it up for a vintage effect, going crazy with the exposure. It’s a different kind of retouching, one that doesn’t begin and end with creating a fake set of abs on the cover of Ab Monthly.

Regardless, Glamour is clearly ready to heed the words of its readers. It’s not just altruism at play here: too many public embarrassments when the unaltered versions of overly enthusiastic photo spreads appear and your credibility is shot to hell. Yet it’s also an acknowledgment that, as Glamour puts it, “retouching has its limits — or should — and Glamour plans to take a stronger role in setting ours.” What’s at stake isn’t the softening of expression lines or removal of sleep-deprivation dark circles – those things will go on. But a too perfect image loses not just its humanity; it loses what sites like Flickr have based their whole appeal on: interestingness. “You told us you don’t want little things like freckles and scars removed,” Cindi Leive wrote, adding, “And while our policy has always been not to alter a woman’s body shape, we’ll also be asking photographers we hire not to manipulate body size in the photos we commission, even if a celebrity or model requests a digital diet.” Beautiful girls in beautiful photos still sell magazines – and by extension, lipstick and jeans and all the aspirational dreams associated with them. But a pledge to go a little easier on the alterations suggests the possible beginning of fashion’s unlikeliest trend ever. A dash of authenticity.

Lagerfeld’s remarks came within a piece in which he also declared, “If I was a woman in Russia I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly,” and that “Nobody wants Greece to disappear, but they have really disgusting habits – Italy as well.” He also claimed that Michelle Obama once said, “Why you don’t like my big black ass?” (the First Lady never said any such thing), and asserted that “People in magazines are 50 percent bimbo and 50 percent pregnant women.” So Adele gets off pretty lightly in the whole thing. Okay, his math might not be that far off on the magazine content thing, but it’s safe to say that while the man can rock a double-breasted silhouette like nobody’s business, he might just be a total moron.

Yet despite his unique version of high praise for Adele, plenty offense at Lagerfeld’s remarks. Fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone shot back on Twitter “Love Adele Boycott Chanel.” Anderson Cooper added Lagerfeld to his weekly “Ridiculist,” calling him, spectacularly, a “fashion designer and Edward Gorey cartoon character and chronic foot-in-mouth disease sufferer.”

For his part, Lagerfeld, perhaps sensing accurately that it’s one thing to put down Russia, Greece and Italy, but you do not want to screw with Adele fans, beat a hasty retreat from his remarks. “I’d like to say to Adele that I am your biggest admirer,” he added in Metro later in the week. “Sometimes when you take a sentence out of the article it changes the meaning of the thought. What I said was in relation to Lana Del Rey and the sentence has since been taken out of context from how it was originally published. I actually prefer Adele, she is my favorite singer and I am a great admirer of her. I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off. I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance. Adele is a beautiful girl. She is the best. And I can’t wait for her next CD.” Thanks for tossing Adele the bone of a “beautiful face,” Karl.

It’s significant that in his original story, Lagerfeld very clearly decreed Adele “a little too fat,” but the paper’s writer Kenya Hunt quoted it Wednesday as “a little bit fat.” Frankly, neither line is cool, but Lagerfeld’s true observation, his deeming Adele “too fat,” shouldn’t be altered or toned down. It’s significant because it implies not merely that she is particular body type, but that said type is unacceptable, that it is “too” much to deal with. Too fat for whom? Not Adele, clearly. Not her throngs of fans.

Somehow, in this day and age, the fact that a young woman of ample proportions is making it is considered revolutionary – unnerving even. That’s not just Lagerfeld-specific idiocy either. This very week, New York Times magazine writer Jacob Brown crowned Lana Del Rey as “the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse.” Really? Who knew that the world needed a “skinnier” antidote to Adele, that her size was somehow on par with the late Winehouse’s addictions?

Thank God that Adele herself, who underwent throat surgery in November currently and has the top-selling album in the country, has a different set of priorities — one that doesn’t include giving a toss about what some fan-brandishing fashion designer or Lana Del Rey slobbering Times writer or anybody else thinks about her body. She tells Anderson Cooper on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” “I don’t want to be some skinny mini with my tits out. I really don’t want to do it and I don’t want people confusing what it is that I am about…. I’ve never seen magazine covers and music videos and been like, I need to look like that to be a success.” She’s right, she doesn’t. She’s up for six Grammys this Sunday and has even managed to adorn the cover of Vogue, despite her crippling handicap of weighing over 100 pounds. She tells Cooper, “I represent the majority of women and I’m very proud of that.” But whatever your size, she represents a whole lot more — dare we say, a breathtaking voice of sanity in a size-obsessed world?

At issue is the group’s contention that by hiring Ellen DeGeneres for a new campaign, the department store is “jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon” and turning away from “traditional families.” The organization warns darkly that “Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.” There is so much to love in that sentence alone. Culture war! Brand transformation! Fearless disregard for the rules of comma usage after a subordinate clause! “The majority of JC Penney shoppers will be offended,” they continue, “and choose to no longer shop there.”

JC Penney, however, which recently declared that “We share the same fundamental values as Ellen,” has  remained unmoved from its perch on a “pro-gay bandwagon” in the midst of a “culture war.” (I hope that bandwagon is reinforced.) Also unmoved: the woman at the center of the controversy.

On her daytime talk show Wednesday, DeGeneres cheerfully opened by talking about Proposition 8 being overturned in California, then segued into a riff about her partnership with Penney’s. “Normally I try not to pay attention to my haters,” she said, “but this time I’d like to talk about it.”

After announcing she was “proud and happy” that JC Penney was sticking by her side, she explained to America that “Being gay or pro-gay is not a bandwagon. You don’t get a free ride anywhere. There’s no music, and occasionally we’ll sing, ‘We Are Family,’ but that’s about it.” And she noted that “For a group that calls itself the Million Moms, they have only 40,000 members on their [Facebook] page. They’re rounding to the nearest million.” It was a witty retort to a campaign of hate, though frankly, not nearly as hilarious as the Million Moms’ depiction of DeGeneres as an “open homosexual spokesperson.”

On her show, DeGeneres read some of the hundreds of supportive messages that have been posted on the Million Moms’ own Facebook page since their campaign against her launched. DeGeneres has also received public support from, of all people, Bill O’Reilly, who said on his program Tuesday that the protest was “a witch hunt and shouldn’t happen.” When you’re too loathsome for Bill O’Reilly, you’ve really outdone yourself, loathsomeness-wise.

One Million Moms describes itself as an organization for people who are “fed up” and “tired,” one that devotes itself, seemingly exclusively, to complaining “on behalf of our children.” On her program Wednesday, DeGeneres said, “I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated, and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.” Even the most die-hard shopper knows that values aren’t just reasonably priced furnishings from the Cindy Crawford collection. They’re how you live. And if you’re going to be on a bandwagon, who wouldn’t choose the one without all those angry people on it?

It seems fair enough to create a boundary on a social media site. And it doesn’t take much searching – likely in your own friend feed – to see plenty of mothers who have profile photos or family albums that depict them proudly nursing their children.

The problem, however, is Facebook’s capriciousness enforcement terms, and how maddeningly punitive and arbitrary they can be. Some women skate by with nary an eyelash batted at their pictures. But a person whose photo is deemed by Facebook to have an unacceptable degree of nipple will not just find the picture removed, but often her account temporarily deleted on a vague “breach of terms of use” charge. Treating women like petty criminals for posting what are obviously not sexually explicit images is just stupid business.

So on Monday, mothers took to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and offices all over the world to do their lactating in person. As childbirth educator Emma Kwasnica, who attended a nurse-in in Houston this week, told the local CBS affiliate, “There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers.”

Judge for yourself — though be prepared that the occasional nipple may qualify the images as NSFW — the “Topfree Equal Rights Association” has a neat compilation of photos that Facebook users say have been removed over the years. Some of them dare to show a contentiously exposed, not-in-use breast along with a baby contentedly latched on the other one.

None of them seem especially incendiary — and none of them look that different from other photos that  survived just fine on Facebook. The idea that the biggest difference between the photos that stay and those that are deleted is “users who complain” is insulting. It tells women to be prepared to be punished, largely on the basis of whether someone else decides they ought to be. And in the same week that a jackass like Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg whined that the Affordable Care Act, which grants a “reasonable break time” and space for working mothers to express milk, will turn America’s workplaces into sinisterly futuristic-sounding “lactation chambers,” Facebook’s ongoing boneheadedness speaks to a larger issue. It illuminates the depressing reality that breast-feeding, after all this time, is still deemed inappropriate, unproductive and just plain icky. And that a nipple, even one with a hungry baby nearby, is just darn scandalous.

Why does it matter? And why would a woman choose to post a photo of her baby at her breast, anyway? Well, for starters, if you’ve got a baby, chances are high that you’re in a near-constant state of having somebody clamped on you. If somebody wants to take a picture, odds are good that’s what it’s going to be. It’s often sweet, tender and special, and photos encourage other people to accept it and maybe even give it a go themselves. A photo, after all, is a defining statement. And it’s one any mother, especially a new one, should be free to make.

With a relentless social media nightmare and a surge of high-profile promises of financial support for Planned Parenthood on its hands, the Komen foundation had, by Friday, backed off, apologizing “to the American public for recent decisions” and vowing to “continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood.” Yet the shadow of its anti-Planned Parenthood bigwig loomed large, especially for an organization that insists it has no political agenda. So as a new campaign for Komen to oust Handel was picking up steam across Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday, she stepped down.

Her departure doesn’t appear to be that of a woman cowed by the events of the recent past. She says she has declined any severance package, and in her resignation letter, she says she is “deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it” and that “neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology.” Indeed, Handel could not possibly have gone rogue on this one and implemented the disastrous decision about Planned Parenthood all by her lonesome. But in a Huffington Post story Sunday, Laura Bassett reported that a Komen insider told her “Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria. She said, ‘If we just say it’s about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.’”

For now, the matter seems at an end. A representative for Planned Parenthood referred Salon this Tuesday morning to the organization’s statement from last Friday and told us, “We have no plans to say anything further.” But in this crucial election year, the Komen mess and the departure of Handel send a powerful message — that when you screw around with screenings and services to women who might otherwise not afford them, it does not go unnoticed. You say it’s not political? It’s about women’s health and women’s bodies. It’s political as hell. And it will be in November.