Whether the soundtrack of your summer is a CD or the TV, we’re here to help with a look at the category leaders in the mags that specialize in entertainment of all types — with the best in sights, sounds and celebs.

If you thought Rolling Stone was edited by a bunch of old hippies hellbent on coddling the Obama administration, take a look at the scathing story on the oil spill. The article tars Obama and his cowboy-hatted Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for failing to follow through on promised industry crackdowns, and notes that BP’s “response plan — cut and pasted from its plan for the Arctic — was so sloppy that it promised to protect walruses in the Gulf.” Elsewhere, there’s a dull, fawning cover story on Jay-Z that’s offset by a fun read on James Murphy, the 40-year-old techno-geek behind LCD Soundsystem.

TV Guide is the Cliff Notes version for couch potatoes, which is pretty scary when you consider that the tube requires so little effort in the first place. The magazine mostly previews upcoming shows and does the occasional post-mortem on past episodes. Problem is, you can get most of this by flipping through your cable guide. So what is the point of TV Guide? We’re still not sure after reading the summer preview edition. Sadly, the magazine doesn’t break any news or offer new tidbits on much-anticipated shows such as “True Blood” or “Mad Men.” We were even more startled to discover that the magazine still prints — yes, on paper — the primetime TV schedule.

Talk about the dog days of summer. Entertainment Weekly points out that this summer may go down as the worst for popcorn-munching moviegoers. May attendance is down nearly 20 percent from last year and box office numbers are off roughly $150 million from last year. Egads! But rather than highlighting the obvious Hollywood downward trend, the article’s author, Mark Harris, comes off like a Debbie Downer, opting not to offer any insights into the causes of the problems befalling the movie biz. Elsewhere, the magazine dishes out a sycophantic review of “True Blood.”

It’s rare that an up-and-coming rap star truly keeps it real as Kid Cudi does in his Q&A with Spin magazine: “I have not made it. If I stop working tomorrow, I will go broke,” he confesses. Spin’s most recent issue highlights a number of fresh new artists you probably haven’t heard of but should, including The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, who shows The Post a little love in one feature. Peppered with compelling mini-interviews and Q&A’s, Spin also boasts of having the lowdown on hipster music festivals like Lollapalooza, Lilith Fair and other marathon concerts, where fans intermittently can get trippy on the latest tunes, suffer through bouts of dehydration and foul weather while sporting the same grimy clothes for days on end. The magazine also serves up a cover story musing whether Stone Temple Pilot’s oft-drug-addled lead singer Scott Weiland will “stay out of his own way long enough to return the band to their former glory?”

An oil-covered pelican on the cover of Time makes the magazine hard to ignore. Inside, the spill coverage is more thorough than Newsweek’s, though we still would like to see more on the future state of oil since deep sea drilling is the only way for the industry to survive. Well worth reading is the mag’s coverage over the Israeli flotilla raid, and what it says about the true soul of Israel. Much of the issue focuses on Africa’s serious malaria problem. But we’re wondering why the mag chose this exploration when Gulf Coast residents — and perhaps those of us on the Eastern seaboard — are in the path of the oil spill.

Newsweek‘s cover story is on Saint Sarah Palin. It is a feature opportunity lost. First, there’s the cover. Last week she endorsed two candidates who won key primaries. Why does Newsweek not show her and the winning candidates? Without that, this cover picture of Palin praying does not feel topical. Then, the story itself explains how she has galvanized ordinary Christian women, showing them how they can do amazing things. This would be interesting if Newsweek spent some time also explaining how this translates into political capital. Sadly, the editors fell short of convincing us that Palin is a political power — or just a mid-term panderer to special interests. We did like the feature on Apple versus Google that compared their current mobile phone battle to the one Apple waged against Microsoft for the personal computer when Apple tried to do everything itself with its self-contained Macs. Microsoft won that war, and journalist Daniel Lyons makes the argument that Google is about to cook Apple, which is making the same tactical mistakes with its iPhones and iPads.