​Off the top of my head, I can come up with more "controversial" stances Katy Perry has taken than I can count on one hand: "Ur So Gay" being mean, homophobic, and seemingly aimed at Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz; "I Kissed a Girl" being shock-Sapphic and heteronormative; "You / PMS / Like a bitch / I would know" in "Hot N Cold"; the Sesame Street debacle; the unparalleled mastery of the Maxim mien to optimize titillation; the use of "Last Friday Night" to hop on Rebecca Black's comet and put on nerd drag; the use of "Firework" to hop on the It Gets Better wave; the uncomfortably xenophobic "E.T.," and specifically a remix in which one of the most famous black rappers of the moment was turned into a lascivious, rape-y beast; the microwaved breakup "rage" of "Part of Me" getting timed to a) the end of a very public relationship, b) the re-release of an album, and c) the Grammys in which Adele's heartfelt kiss-offs were venerated. Her debut album was named One of the Boys; her "California Gurls" had a Snoop Dogg verse because casual misogyny and watered-down Golden State triumphalism fit, and "Gurls" because she decided to make it the least convincing Big Star tribute ever.

So why is Katy Perry not going all the way when covering "Niggas in Paris," and instead doing Karmin-style genre tourism? C'mon, Katy: We know what you're saying when you say "ninja," just like Reggie "Combat Jack" Osse did when he took the Voice's Tom Breihan to task for using "ninja" as a substitute for "nigga" in 2006. And you even admit in the opening seconds of your BBC performance that things are going to get embarrassing!

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​Superstar pals and Young Money labelmates Lil Wayne and Drake released two of the biggest albums of 2011—Tha Carter IV and Take Care—and both are still spinning off hits well into 2012. But a look at the singles charts reveals something odd: the biggest current hits off both albums aren't available on every copy of the album, but are instead bonus tracks from their deluxe editions. Drake's "The Motto," which features Wayne, currently tops the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and is at No. 19 on the Hot 100 after peaking at No. 16. And Wayne's own "Mirror," featuring Bruno Mars, is Weezy's highest current solo entry on the Hot 100, at No. 68 (it also peaked at No. 16). If you go into one of the few stores still selling CDs today, though, odds are that the versions of Tha Carter IV and Take Care in the racks won't include those current hits.

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via Cats Who Look Like Skrillex

Will this cat win Best New Artist?

​Welcome to Sound of the City's liveblog of the 54th Annual Grammys, coming to you live from a couch in Astoria. There are quite a few questions lurking around tonight's ceremony. Will Adele sweep the three major categories in which she's nominated, thus putting a cap on the megaselling, incredibly popular 21—and how will she sound in her live return? Will Skrillex (above, sorta) put a wub-wub-wub on the Best New Artist category? Will Bon Iver pout his way to the podium if he upsets Adele in Record or Song of the Year? Will Adam Levine upstage the Beach Boys when they share the stage? Will LL Cool J make at least 10 cross-promotional references to other CBS shows? Will Kanye West show up? Will the Whitney Houston tribute be okay? Tune in belooowwww!

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​Every year, when I get involved in Grammy debates with my cooler friends, I tell them the problem with the awards isn't that they reward mass-appeal schlock. If the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is doing its job right, it should be rewarding popular, undeniable, and somewhat unhip records. The problem is that NARAS can't even reward the popular stuff right.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the Record of the Year category, which, next to the coveted, show-closing Album of the Year prize, should be the marquee award of the night. If NARAS were on its game, it would nominate five high-gloss, career-defining singles that crushed at Top 40, R&B/hip-hop, country or rock radio and then give the big prize to a title that makes everyone say, Yeah, okay, love it or hate it, that record dominated.

Instead, Record of the Year has largely become a head-scratching nonevent, in which NARAS, like a middlebrow missile, homes in on a song that's neither hip enough to be a critics' favorite nor undeniable enough to appeal to the casual TV viewership. Just in the last decade, NARAS has given you such Records of the Year as the Dixie Chicks' most atonal and bile-filled single; two little-heard "event" duets by Ray Charles with Norah Jones, and Robert Plant and Allison Krauss; and a U2 song some like to call a "9/11 anthem," ignoring the fact that anthems are usually widely known and this song came out a year before the tragedy and missed the Hot 100, not even charting after 9/11. Even some of the better RotY picks have been wrongheaded—I happen to like Coldplay's "Clocks," winner in 2004, but over OutKast's "Hey Ya!" and Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love"? Way to miss the plot, NARAS. (I wish YouTube had a clip from the '04 show of presenter and friend-of-OutKast Mary J. Blige, visibly deflating when she opened the envelope and read "Clocks," like the word was "broccoli.")

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​One of the most frustrating things about discussing the Billboard singles charts is how a song's peak position—the highest spot it occupied on a chart during its run—is almost universally regarded as the permanent measurement of its success or popularity. Any song that reaches No. 1 is embalmed forever as a chart-topper, the biggest of the big, and any song that didn't is presumed to be less successful in every way. And in the iTunes era, peaks can be even more misleading, as songs by artists with big fanbases rocket up the chart the week after they go onsale, and then have to slowly pick up momentum in the slower moving world of radio to actually stay on the chart.

That's why I love looking at Billboard's year-end charts: you finally get authoritative rankings of how successful songs were relative to each other, based on their entire chart lifespan during the year, not just how popular they were on the particular week they reached critical mass. You can always use anecdotal evidence, or more complicated statistics like sales figures or radio spins to measure a song's staying power, but the 2011 year-end Hot 100 lays it all out, in simple single- and double-digit numbers as easy to understand as a chart peak. Of course, as my colleague Chris Molanphy has noted, the year-end chart runs from the beginning of December to the end of November, and heavily favors songs that broke earlier in the chart year. But even taking that into account, the 2011 list handily debunks the validity of the chart peak as the final word.

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​The Song: Katy Perry Featuring Missy Elliott, "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (Remix)"
The Crimes: Chart-jacking, inanity, wasting the long-M.I.A. Missy Elliott on a nothing verse, allowing lazy writers to compare Teenage Dream to Bad because, seriously, as fucking if.

The story of Katy Perry's chart domination in 2011 is one that has been chronicled in this space amply by our own Chris Molanphy, and hoo boy is it a depressing one, if appropriately in keeping with Perry's overall brute-force nature. Briefly: She notched five chart-topping singles from her 2010 album Teenage Dream, matching the record-setting total of No. 1s that Michael Jackson achieved with his much superior album Bad. Two of those No. 1s had their tracks to the top greased by grafted-on verses from popular rappers. (A third remix-assisted single might just do the same thing and help her break the record.) The first to do so, the t.A.T.u.-pilfering ode to intergalactic other-sex "E.T.," got a boost from a creepy Kanye West verse; the second, the overly self-consciously '80s-homaging "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)," was the track to tie Jackson's record, and a rush-released remix with a few bars from Missy Elliott helped take it to the top.

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D.L. Anderson

That's ee-vayr to you, Nicki Minaj.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Greetings to you four from Bloomington, Indiana, a happening college town perhaps one or more of you have flown over at some point. It's the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael and David Lee Roth, and the home of John Mellencamp and Jagjaguwar Records, a label which this year released an album called Bon Iver, Bon Iver that you may have heard of. Most critics liked it, some liked it a lot, Rosie O'Donnell wanted more, pop lovers and rockists alike united to sneer at the smoothness of his album's textures and its ostensibly outré signifiers (I prefer the first album, but am a sucker for the Bruce Hornsby vibes of "Beth/Rest"). At the time of writing, 317,375 music fans have purchased it—40,000 more than Fleet Foxes, 40,000 less than LMFAO. Yet once the album was nominated for several Grammys last month, lots of people microcasted their ignorance of this album on Twitter. Quickly, another person culled this proudly professed ignorance into a Tumblr called "Who Is Bon Iver?" A member of a long-dormant Australian DJ concern accused him of "selling out" for lending his increased profile to something so horrifying as a whiskey concern, even though the accuser's own group hypocritically endorses deadly mountain calamities.

So what happened? Did the Bro From Eau Claire break through, or is he still a secret? If you follow music on the internet with any regularity, you couldn't go a day without hearing about him, but if you don't, there's a good chance you don't have any idea how to pronounce the name, and wait, the white guy from Kanye's album made his own album and everyone loves it apparently? To Twitter! It's clear why Bon Iver in 2011, just like Arcade Fire in 2010, made ripples critically, popularly, and awardishly—they fit long-established rock tropes into a modern, gently hip, and well-executed form. And it's also clear that this is happening at a point when with very few exceptions, good weird rock music is the last thing you expect to hear released by a music label owned by a multinational corporation.

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Nicola Roberts, having herself a lucky day with the Village Voice.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Hey all. Again, thanks to Maura for putting this together, and thanks to Katherine for not only writing another outstanding recap of 2011 but also handing off to me no less topics than Bon Iver, PBR&B, K-Pop, all hip-hop, the cloud, and trollgaze. Where should I start?

Not with trollgaze, but we'll get there, for better or for worse. How about Nicola Roberts? I completely agree with you on that record, Tom, and I know from conversation that Maura and Katherine do too. (Eric?) I'd imagine that my experience with it was pretty common: Blown away by the singles, and by the fact that Cinderella's Eyes was almost a Girls Aloud album, it took me a while to allow it to develop into much more than that. I still enjoyed it plenty—amid the worst year for music ever, how could you not?—but not as much as I did once I started paying closer attention to its latter half.

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Kanye West at Occupy Wall Street; confused woman.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Hello all, and thanks! I'm honored to be here. Let's talk about the collapse of the global economy.

Or rather, let's not; as tempting as it is to link early 2011's glut of apocalyptic dance or late 2011's druggy numbness to financial panic or cultural malaise, you'd have to glibly ignore 99% of both music and the cultural moment. Even the arguments that almost worked didn't, like the reductive meme that Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was just about being rich, not about the experience of being black and having become rich. And speaking of the 99%, it's far too soon to anoint any Occupy Wall Street anthem. (Sorry, Jonah, Miley's track is just a fanvid.) There's been music on the ground, of course, and there's an album coming out, but it's telling (of my now-bastardized Google Reader feed, if nothing else) that my main associations between music and Occupy are three things: the Radiohead non-concert that turned out to be a new-media bro's prank, the musicians whose Zuccotti cameos were probably out of good intent but in practice indistinguishable from photo ops, and the albums in Occupy's library, which was seized after the NYPD raids—alas, the cloud couldn't save it.

Nor can megastars—they're too busy mythologizing themselves to survive in lieu of those megasales. There are exceptions; candor in interviews and mega-megasales aside, you can't really call Adele a "celebrity," at least not using that term. (Contrary to rockist belief, this is not a selling point.) But take Rihanna, who's wearing herself out being better at this sort of thing than anyone else. Icky news stories? Out-ick them on Twitter! Gossip cackling about Chris Brown? Tease it in the "We Found Love" video! Moral guardians carping about being too sexy? Send racks of raunch down the Talk That Talk assembly line!

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​Thanks to her husband, Katy Perry considers herself as an honorary Brit. But as the most frequent current inhabitant of the Billboard charts, she must wish we were all anglophiles.

If only America had a Christmas No. 1 competition as rabid and media-fueled as Old Blighty's! Katy would have that improbable, record-shattering sixth Hot 100 chart-topper from her Teenage Dream album all sewn up by year's end. All she'd have to do is call her current hit, "The One That Got Away"—currently No. 4 on the Hot 100—her bid for a Christmas No. 1, and thousands of pop buyers would comply.

But if she and her label, EMI, can't get us to give her a chart-topper the British way, they'll try other avenues—like peoples' hunger to fill that shiny new Apple gadget they're opening on the 25th.

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