I Think UR a Contrarian: The 21 Most Controversial Songs of 2010

I Think UR a Contrarian by cureforbedbugs


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I've been plastering this thing all over the interweb, so I figured I should actually explain what it is to you non-Jukebox people (all two of you).

Basically, I've become obsessed with tracking the most controversial tracks -- those with the most polarized scores -- on The Singles Jukebox. It's a simple average deviation formula that tweaks for number of contributors (twenty people violently disagreeing is obviously more controversial than six people violently disagreeing).

So I thought, what would do justice to these tracks? Just sticking them on a CD compilation is no good -- yer guaranteed to hate half! So instead I made sure you could really hate everything, by mixing it all together in a big controversy stew. I'm not much of a DJ -- I do this stuff intuitively using a manual BPM counter and a math formula I teach to students to get 'em jazzed about cross-multiply-and-divide (that's basically all beat-matching is), and then chop it together on Final Cut, the only editing software I really know how to use.

Accordingly, this is a pretty cerebral mix, though I don't think it's particularly unlistenable. But definitely fits the genre category "Music to Blog By."

Here is the Controversy List in its entirety. In the future I'll update these in a Google spreadsheet.

Why does this list go to 21, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. There was not a single country song in the Top Twenty! That is a travesty. Also, I got to the last part of the mix ("Toot It and Boot It") and had nothing that fit. That's when Jesus took the wheel and, via Jonathan Bogart's 2010 mix, tossed Carrie Underwood into my lap. Er, figuratively speaking. The result is one of my favorites on here, "Toot It and Undo It," an answer track to YG -- "You stole my happy! You made me cry! Took the lonely, and took me for a ride!" ("And you love the way I ride it!").

Also on this mix: The Ke$ha 0pera, the only usable five seconds of Everything Everything's "MY KZ, UR BF" (when the remixes of your song are successful mostly to the extent that they completely scrape away every existing element of the original, you should rethink your band strategy).

As soon as I uploaded this thing I noticed all kinds of little errors, but true to the nature of this project, I will not actually fix them.

And now! COMMENTARY! Please note that a lot of the original Jukebox entries have great comment threads. In fact, the only piece from the Jukebox to be published elsewhere is a comment by Erika Villani on "Empire State of Mind"!

1. Cannibalizing of Pigeons (Ke$ha, The Knife, and M.I.A.)

Ke$ha: The 0p Opera will one day be truly glorious. I have the sense that Ke$ha has no long-term future whatsoever in the music industry (and I really like Ke$ha) which means that the time for revisionist high-art reconsideration is nigh. I also stuck M.I.A. on here because fuuuuuuuck "Born Free" is hard to mix with anything else. I'm still not sure whether I like the song (my blurb was a cop out) but it's one of the few 2010 albums I've kept in my iTunes to digest.



Ke$ha (#1):

"I’m puzzled, though not the least bit entertained." (Jer Fairall)

"I’m amazed." (Frank Kogan)





The Knife (#5):

"The part of me that thinks of the Jukebox as a proving ground for pop suggests that this doesn’t deserve a good mark for violating those tenets, no matter how good it is, but you know what? Screw it." (Ian Mathers)

"This evokes grown men and women wearing contorted masks and squeezing strange noises out of their throats, to the accompaniment of exotic gewgaws. Not terrible." (Alfred Soto)





M.I.A. (#6):

"But provocation is her gift, and that’s what she spends most of the song doing: I just wonder if 'All those imitators, stick it' is aimed at Santigold." (Michelangelo Matos)

"Provocateur? Commentator? Even remotely coherent? No, jumped-up art student throwing signifiers together without any skill, who has ideas above her station and songs beneath listenability. Telling imitators to stick it is pretty big for someone who hasn’t had an original musical idea in her life, frankly." (Edward Oculicz)




2. Go Do Yourself (Cee-Lo Green, Jonsi)

There's something perversely satisfying about stretching the Cee-Lo vocal out like taffy -- and using a tinny DIY acapella (thanks, anonymous internet person!). The pop-cultural baggage of "Fuck You" neither excites nor enrages me, but there's something about the song's solidness that bothers me a little -- its meticulousness suggests a big ol' stick up its butt (hmmm, does Cee-Lo ever turn around in the video? He certainly looks uncomfortable in his pimp suit). Meanwhile Jonsi is a very different sort of meticulous -- the kind that you have to peck apart and stitch together in little snippets. He's like what Owl City would sound like if it were actually fronted by owls (i.e., much better).


Cee-Lo Green (#13):

"How much fun is this song?" (Rebecca Toennessen)

"I think the adjective you really want to use is ‘virulent’.” (Al Shipley, quoting David Raposa discussing Neon Trees)





Jonsi (#16):

"Olivier Messiaen’s music was always marred by his assumption that an audience could find God passively, just by sitting back and opening itself up to various sounds. Like Messiaen, Jónsi uses elements of birdsong (echoed in the video treatment) and unconventional rhythms to blur the distinction between the mundane and the spiritual. Yet 'Go Do' strikes me as anti-Messiaen in the most important respects." (Martin Kavka)

"Kind of crazy how singers like this so often tend to make my jaw and fists clench as soon as they begin. Totally involuntary reflex, too, I think; I promise to get it checked sometime. Anyway, here it’s a shame, since those electronic noises at the start were rather nifty for five seconds." (Chuck Eddy)





3. Your Motherfucking Lovebot (Nicki Minaj, Robyn)

Two ladies about whom I had stronger feelings yesteryear. I guess I can go ahead and partake in some convenient revisionism about how much enthusiasm I really had for Robyn's first ("indie") album -- looking at year-ends, my favorite song was good for 8th best of 2005 and the album never placed on one of my lists. But I never took to anything off of Body Talk; especially not "Fembot," which I actively loathed in real time (here I semi-lazily swiped the most recognizable bit, canned the embarrassing rapping, and called it a hook). As for Nicki, I get why someone might love or hate Pink Friday depending on what you like in her -- I like her in both her R&B and hip-hop incarnation (it's not like there's a huge glut of great female R&B vocalists on the charts these days, and Nicki is doing things backwards, using hip-hop to break into R&B rather than vice versa, which I kinda dig on principle) I just don't like the experience of turning that switch back and forth. Missy Elliott's Under Construction does a similar trick, but it's much more "business up front party in the back" (yes, I just compared Missy Elliott to a mullet; and no, I'm not sure if actually that phrase should be reversed -- "Work It" is certainly fun, but it's also not fooling around about tomfoolery; it's an unstoppable single [maybe "block party" in the back is the phrase?]). I cheated here and swapped Nicki's "Monster" verse in for the weak if serviceable "Your Love" rap.


Nicki Minaj (#2):

"You get into a stage in relationships where the other person can do no wrong, and you love everything they do. I suspect I’m in that with Nicki Minaj." (Martin Skidmore)

"As little use as I have for Nicki’s schtick, I do on some level respect her for sticking to her guns with relentlessly schticky stuff like 'Massive Attack' and many of her hit collaborations. This song proves she’s as willing as anyone to sand down whatever rough edges she does have for the most insipid possible radio jam, though." (Al Shipley)





Robyn - Fembot (#14):

"It’s a cliché of a meme that was dull to begin with atop a beat that sets new lows in weediness." (Alex Macpherson)

"Man, the future sounds amazing." (Doug Robertson)




4. Infinity Guitar Paving Company (Sleigh Bells, Joanna Newsom)

Two albums I never really "made it through" for opposite reasons -- the Sleigh Bells album is over before I've figured out how I feel about it, all eight or nine times I listened to it. Joanna I can't get past c. track three. Both have a lead singer problem -- I have a nagging feeling that I'm listening to their music in "theory," which is how I imagine some people think I probably listen to the music they can't stand. But no, to really enjoy something thoughtfully-not-viscerally I need to be closer to its thoughts, and I imagine that Joanna Newsom and Alexis Krauss think more similarly to me than Ke$ha. But I'd still rather be listening to the latter. I separate out what the two of them get really, really right -- STOMP STOMP CLAP (the consciously blown-out aesthetic feels a little wax museum-ish to me; I appreciate this song's more transparent approach to bleacher-stomping) and a pleasant melody. So no guitars for Sleigh Bells (save the trademark rhythmic doodly-doo at the end of the phrase) and no words for Joanna -- they have infinity of these things but they're not what I was looking for.


Sleigh Bells (#8):

"We’re at a time when children’s culture, and girl culture specifically, is hyper-marketed. Hannah Montana’s its own institution, flanked by the Bratz and Cliques and Gossip Girls and whatever else finances people’s solid gold Ferraris. But there’s also an incredible amount of nostalgia for what preceded it, for the stuff and milieu girls grew up with and loved. Sleigh Bells tap right into that vein; they’re up there with Tuscadero and Shampoo and the whole poppified post-riot-grrl lot. I’m shouting right along with them." (Katherine St. Asaph)

"Sleigh Bells use pointless abrasion to cover up the fact that no actual musical event will occur during the course of your listening experience." (Mallory O'Donnell)





Joanna Newsom (#4):

"Every layer of this has contours to delve into – Joanna twists and winds her way around the instruments, around your ears and your brain and your heart. At seven minutes in length, I’ve probably spent a couple of hours of my life in 2010 listening to this, and I pick up on more nuances every single time." (Alex Ostroff)

"The lyrics are new age twaddle, her voice is the helium bunny gone weird, and the production is filled to the gills with sheer pretension. Can she go away soon?" (Anthony Easton)





5. King of Drunk Girls (LCD Soundsystem, The Tallest Man on Earth)

The music in "Drunk Girls" has grown on me, though I still think the lyrics are reaching for more off-the-wall wackiness than they get and that it gets old after a minute. "King of Spain," on the other hand, gets old in about twenty seconds. So the obvious choice here was to gut the LCD song and childishly mock The Tallest Man on Earth w/ chipmunkery. I think that "I never knew I was a lover / And I wear my boots of Spanish leather" might be the beginning of an OK Velvet Underground homage.


LCD Soundsystem (#15):

"James Murphy clearly thinks that bellowing the title in the manner of a football fan vomiting over our shoes isn’t enough for us to get it, so the music mimics the clumsy, graceless motion of a beer-sodden tramp lurching along the pavement." (Alex Macpherson)

"Admittedly, this is somewhat awkward and kind of obnoxious. But so is being incredibly drunk. And much like being incredibly drunk, this song is also a great deal of fun, and compels you to dance in an uncoordinated and unself-conscious manner, regardless of who might see you." (Alex Ostroff)





The Tallest Man on Earth (#3):

"Kristian Matsson’s Dylanisms are not about affecting a nasal rasp or perfecting a troubadour posture, but rather — like the year’s wisest and most resonant pop homages, from “Fuck You” to “Tightrope” — about taking what you’ve learned from history to tell your own stories with that much more evocative force." (Jer Fairall)

"I thought only that douche from Counting Crows wanted to be Bob Dylan." (Tal Rosenberg)




6. Statistics (Peer-Reviewed) (Lyfe Jennings)

Am I alone in thinking that computer-speak voices are really funny? (Crickets.) Uh, OK. Anyway, I had a lot of fun taking apart "Statistics" for its accuracy this year. To recap: if 80% of men are undateable, as Lyfe suggests, and 10% of the remaining 20% are gay, then that means that a remaining 2% are undateable, hence 18% are still OK. And that doesn't even account for overlapping qualities -- are we really to believe that a separate 25% of men who can't be faithful have zero overlap with the 25% of men that are unstable? Isn't infidelity, in Lyfe's view here, a kind of instability? Anyway. I decided that someone should follow up Anthony Easton's question of whether or not these statistics were peer-reviewed. I give Lyfe a C- in Applied Statistics, since you have to give some credit for the novelty of his experiment.


Lyfe Jennings (#20):

"I’m not really sure what to make of this lecture on the fickleness of males and the necessity of not taking your clothes off unless (and I suspect this is key) the man you’re taking them off in front of is Lyfe Jennings."(Hazel Robinson)

"Shit, can I marry him?" (Michelangelo Matos)




7. Sex Is a Standard Deviation (Lyfe Jennings, Ciara f. Ludacris)

Now we reach the point of the mix where I accidentally find two songs that work pretty well together and, accordingly, let Ciara ride the beat a while. I'm a firm "6" on the Ciara track with its original backing but the smoother beat here makes me like it a lot more, and I now find myself relistening to the original a lot. I like that Ludacris is still technically featured in his screwed intro but doesn't get a chance to hashtag it up.


Ciara f. Ludacris (#10):

"Ciara commandeers a beat that creeps and stomps in a manner so tightly coiled that it feels one second away from busting, while singing about doing exactly that." (Jordan Sargeant)

"Her personality is as blank and paper-thin as her voice, and the chest-thumping bravado strains credulity worse than that attempt at a melismatic vamp at the end." (Al Shipley)




8. Fuck, "Flash Delirium" Is, Like, the Coolest Song I've Ever Heard in My Whole Life (Die Antwoord, MGMT)

Never got around to listening to $0$ -- it didn't strike me as particularly interesting or particularly WTF at the time (it seemed too obviously an "avant" semi-parody) and I didn't care to get into the speculation game. That said, "Enter the Ninja" is certainly memorable, and not bad as a song (the trick is to realize how close to credible the female vocals in it are -- here I've slowed/pitched it down slightly and it's not too far from icy indie bliss-out). MGMT on the other hand I just couldn't get a handle on -- too disjointed, too incompetent, too much like a third-rate Super Furry Animals trying to soundtrack an iPod commercial (on "Flash Delirium" anyway). And yet the sample from "Kids" helped me kinda sorta like a Chiddy Bang song! I took what I thought was the dumbest part of "Flash Delirium" (also the part I liked the best, go fig -- Kat Stevens refers to it as the "shambolic flute break") and paired it with Ninja expounding on its coolness. MGMT are nothing if not all up in the interweb.


Die Antwoord (#17):

"You’d think by now I would have stopped finding joy in the moment when everydork W.T. Jones stops the song to bask and preen with his now notorious pronouncement 'this is like… the coolest song I ever heard in my whole life,' but the truth is that I still pretty much agree with him." (John Seroff)

"Perhaps the worst record that will ever be made by anyone, ever." (Edward Oculicz)





MGMT (#11):

"What a dreadful mess. It veers between a mixed-bag of 60’s garage sounds (less Phil Spector, more Primal Scream aping the Stones) and a soggy, meandering attempt at psychedelia, like if the The Byrds had grown up in a commune made out of Weetabix on the outskirts of Luton. That shambolic flute break is one of the most half-arsed things I’ve heard this year." (Kat Stevens)

"It’s a great song, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go; and, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go, it went. Man, if MGMT keeps coming up with stuff like this I’m going to have to start paying attention to them." (Matt Cibula)




9. MY FN, YR STYL (Liz Phair, Everything Everything)

Two tough ones to mix -- Everything Everything's track hops over the place so fast that I had to edit in a single bass note to make the outro loop work, and even then it starts a little wonky. So I copped out with ethereal lyrics, which coincidentally matched the key and rhythm (more or less) of Liz Phair's prettier section of the "Bollywood" beat. I liked Liz Phair's album as a confusing mass of stuff but excerpting it doesn't really do that experience justice. So I ripped some context from NPR and let the beat rock.


Liz Phair (#8):

"What this reminds me of most is the kind of unfiltered, anything-at-the-wall approach that Christian contemporary singers, especially those who considered themselves entertainers, were taking in the late 80s and early 90s, when record labels were generous but no one had any clue what might catch on, and cool wasn’t an option in the first place." (Jonathan Bogart)

"It’s such a car crash of a record that there was clearly no expectation of it being a single, it’s like Liz wanted to make a Laurie Anderson B-Side but only had three samples and one terrible actor available." (Pete Baran)





MY KZ, UR BF (#9):

"It’s a song I quite like but haven’t managed to figure out why!" (William B. Swygart)

"You know when a song has so many things wrong with it but you LOVE it anyway? This is the opposite of that. Sorry dudes." (Kat Stevens)



10. Toot It and Undo It (YG, Carrie Underwood)

Two unexpected faves on this one -- already mentioned why I think it works conceptually above. "Toot It and Boot It" has been begging for someone to excerpt the "whoa" section (which they stupidly only let play through once before going to the next verse) and put it in a better song. This isn't that song, but it does give you a sense of what the song might have been if they'd figured out that the heart of the song is the group singing, not the chorus. Meanwhile I fell in love with "Undo It" after not paying much attention to it. I sort of like pitching Carrie down, though I think to make the keys match I fucked with it a bit too much. But I didn't want to touch the YG part.


YG (#12):

"Two things make this: the dusty turntable snippet you don’t really otherwise hear on the radio in all-electro-everything 2010, and the everyone-join-in 'whoa-oh-oh-oh' chants that, even though put to better context here, might as well come from a damned Arrested Development record. Shame about the rapping, which is at best unmemorable, charmless at worst." (Rodney J. Greene)

"As laid-back a hip hop number as I’ve heard in a while, drawled lyrics over a lazily fingersnapping backing, sounding totally stoned and fuzzily happy. Thing is, it’s about fucking a woman then throwing her out, awareness of which rather kills the relaxed, contented feeling the sound creates, for me." (Martin Skidmore)





Carrie Underwood (#21):

"This doesn’t hang together at all: no natural emotional development; feels like successive effects just thrown in our face. It does seem at one with the desperate dance-pop mess of 2010, however, and I’m hoping that crossover radio play will make this song make more sense." (Frank Kogan)

"The chorus is basically Kelly Clarkson’s 'Miss Independent' dressed in country flannel and fast-forwarded to the end of the relationship. I happen to love 'Miss Independent.'" (Katherine St. Asaph)





11. When a Woman Gives Up the Gun (Vampire Weekend, R. Kelly)

Whew, the end o' the mix -- this was an easy one; take the propulsive guitar backing and glockenspiel from Vampire Weekend and let R. Kelly do the singing. These are both albums I'm pretty lukewarm about, erring on the side of warm not luke -- a fitting spectacle from two meh-plus sources. I get a little too cheeky on this one, wobbling Kells's syllables even longer than he does (though not as much longer as you might think!), but fuck it, gotta end on a bang. I don't think I can sit through the entirety of "When a Woman Loves" if it's not a live version (ugh, canned orchestra must die) but the breakdown and ending are worth preserving.



Vampire Weekend (#18):

"The evocation of a life unlived and the pervasive sense of approaching obsolescence are masterful and affecting, like a less explicit take on LCD Soundsystem’s 'All My Friends.'" (Alex Ostroff)

"Limp US college indie, with a simpleminded tune, fussy instrumentation and terrible singing. I am entirely mystified at their success -- I can’t hear anything in them that I can imagine anyone liking at all. This seemed to drag on for hours." (Martin Skidmore)





R. Kelly (#19):

"I’m not sure anyone thought that what pop needed in 2010 was a response song to Percy Sledge’s 1966 'When A Man Loves A Woman,' sung in a variety of early-soul voices with cheap bombast and the merest hint of Autotune, but that’s R. Kelly. Identifying needs no one has and then filling them with such confidence and brio that it’s impossible not to shout thank you! right back at him." (Jonathan Bogart)

"Kells, you have money. Hire real musicians." (Katie Lewis)




That's all, folks. See you next year -- same controversial time, same controversial station!