Amy Winehouse feat. Ghostface — “You Know I’m No Good”

Released: 3.6.07 Peak: #77 Maybe I’m an old sober crank, my objections to “Rehab” too personal to interest recreational users. But I’ve heard too many hopeless addicts insist that love will solve their problems to get off on that sad, recycled mirage as a wholesome pop conceit. I say better to go the full Ke$ha [...]

Lil Mama — “Lip Gloss”

Released: 3.6.07 Peak: #5 Serious art form that it is, hip-hop would prefer that you trace its lineage to Jamaican toasting, the Last Poets, something weighty and cultural and footnotable in an undergrad research paper. But rap owes its vitality no less to double-dutch rhyming than to its manlier antecedents, a fact the music’s vexed [...]

Best Albums 2007 (21-25)

25. Blitzen Trapper — Wild Mountain Nation Hootin’ and hollerin’ with a fervor as isolated as the internet permits, these Portland hippies are among the decade’s better examples of what’s gained by not moving to Brooklyn. Imagine an alternate universe where Pavement rather than Uncle Tupelo had pioneered alt-country, where Elephant 6 bands were weaned [...]

Randy Newman — “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country”

Released: 1.30.07 Peak:  Did not chart By 2000 or so, Randy Newman had grown so successful at his day job that most under-thirties, even smart music obsessives, knew him solely as a composer of homely Disney ditties and perennial Oscar winner. (Though that’s maybe preferable to when “Short People” had typecast him as a kooky [...]

“The Sweet Escape” — Gwen Stefani feat. Akon

Released: 1.1.07 Peak: #2 Oh, I don’t know, maybe I am a fan. If nothing else, Gwen’s commitment to superficiality means her taste in 80s pop is better than that of yr average slavish retro dude, not to mention yr average reluctant pop sellout. She loves chintz for its own sake, not for its resale [...]

Beyoncé — “Irreplaceable”

Released: 12.5.06 Peak: #1 Beyoncé contends that the travails of her mistreated Dreamgirls character “inspired” the music on B-Day, and how fitting that a genuine star should alchemize worthwhile pop from (and simultaneously one-up) a rank pile of Motown clichés bowdlerized into stank showtune clichés. Anyone who prefers Jennifer Hudson’s maudlin slog though “One Night [...]