Shakira – “Underneath Your Clothes”

Released: 4.18.02 Peak: #9 As our introduction to the oddest Latin crossover star since Che, “Whenever Wherever” was less than ideal–the sort of ethnically charged dance-rock novelty that assimilated all too readily to the pop ebb and flow. But “Underneath Your Clothes” tinkered with the architecture of power balladry too forthrightly to fade into the [...]

Nelly – “Hot in Herre”

Release: 4.16.02 Peak: #1 The first time I heard “Hot in Herre,” alone in my car, I laughed out loud twice. The deadpan response “I am getting so hot/ I wanna take my clothes off” stirred up my first giggles, and Nelly’s bedroom imitation of his seducee (“Girl I think my butt gettin’ big”) topped [...]

Maxwell – “This Woman’s Work”

Released: 3.16.02 Peak: #15 Kate Bush’s faerie-goth spirit has always led me to anticipate elliptical lyrics; when I hunker down and listen closely I’m often disarmed by her relative straightforwardness as a writer. I mean, “Wuthering Heights” tells the story of Wuthering Heights more directly than Bronte did (even if that kinda undermines the ingenuity [...]

Best Albums 2002 (21-25)

25. The Hives–Veni Vidi Vicious These nattily suited Swedes and their imaginary svengali may never have dropped le bomb or converted Yanks to kilograms, but they did as much to k.o. “pure” garage revivalism as Jack White’s left hook. Realizing that rock-is-back hype could never be justified, the Hives reveled in it instead. Their Sonics-Stooges-Voidoids [...]

Britney Spears – “Overprotected”

Released: 3.12.02 Peak: #86 “I’m a Slave 4 U” was an unsatisfying introduction to Act III of the ever-impinging adulthood of Britney Spears. If only the song had left a little more to the imagination, and allowed us to hear “U” as the audience to which Britney was indentured, or the public image in which [...]

Big Tymers – “Still Fly”

Released: 3.12.02 Peak: # 11 Hip-hop materialism is an easy target for critics, especially of the white middle-class stripe. When said palefaces yearn for the days of Public Enemy and rap that “meant something,” I suspect they miss Chuck D’s politics less than his austerity. (They also ignore the fact that Public Enemy still exists.) [...]

Alan Jackson – “Drive (For Daddy Gene)”

Released: 2.2.02 Peak: #28 After the collapse of the Twin Towers, a September 11 mega-anthem loomed even more inevitably than the siege of Baghdad. With the efforts of the super-famous either premature (McCartney’s “Freedom”) or belated (Springsteen’s “The Rising”), the vacuum soon filled with vague patriotism (Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the [...]

Pink – “Don’t Let Me Get Me”

Released: 2.19.02 Peak: #8 I don’t know exactly what L.A. told her, but Alecia Moore was never no damn Britney Spears, not by a long shot. In her initial manifestation as spunky R&B malcontent, Pink and her au courant stutter-stop beats competed not with the blonde teen idols, but with the various one-named (usually black) [...]

Tweet – “Oops (Oh My)”

Released: 1.15.02 Peak: #27 Every beatmaster has his own strengths, so let’s just put it this way: The Neptunes could never have scored as steamy an exercise in female self-pleasure as “Oops (Oh My).” No need to be all hypothetical about it either: “I am/ Get-ting so hot/ I’m gonna take my clothes off” is [...]

Best Albums 2001 (1-5)

5. Basement Jaxx — Rooty Remedy strained house’s formal constrictions; these drunken two-step beats stagger and swerve with an ingenuity far dafter and punker than the competition. Techno Jawas scavenging Euro-soul droids from the scrapheap of 20th century club life, Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe trafficked in self-aware sleaze like the full-blooded Prince fans they [...]