F2K10 is a countdown of the 20 worst songs of 2010. Track our progress here.

​If the New York Times called Liz Phair's 2003 pop album "an embarrassing form of career suicide," then "Bollywood" is her ghost coming back to toilet paper her grave. After all of indie-rock's circa 2003 hand-wringing and moralizing about Phair working with icky Capitol Records and Avril Lavigne's evil producers, we should probably draft Phair a formal apology. We will gladly take her glossiest, Mileyest, most cynical bubblegum over whatever the fuck this is. Wait, I think she's rapping. Yes, yes, she's definitely rapping. Oh no. And this after we thought the national nightmare of Fannypack was over.

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​As it turns out, Mick Jagger did not pen a response to the new Keith Richards autobiography, Life, and accidentally send it to a journalist, who published it on Slate. That was a joke (though the writer now calls his facts "fairly incontrovertible"). But Liz Phair, whose canonical album Exile in Guyville is famously (and arguably) a song-for-song reaction to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, really did write about the new book!

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Darren Ankenmann

We were sent this.

Over July 4th weekend, Liz Phair released Funstyle, her first full length in five years. For just five dollars for a full album download, the 11 tracks came with a message: the music within cost her relationships with her management company and ATO Records, who'd just enthusiastically reissued her 1993 classic album, Exile in Guyville. As par for Liz Phair's last 10 years, Funstyle sent the Phair faithful into a tizzy, with its notable nods to Bollywood, humorous scatting about her recent career troubles, and ethereal electronic arrangements.

Through a distribution company called Rocket Science Ventures, Funstyle received an official release on October 19 and along with it comes 10 songs from the much bootlegged Girlysound tapes, four-track recordings that served as precursors to Guyville. Phair is headlining the Bowery Ballroom on Monday, December 13--tickets go on sale today at noon. Sound of the City recently caught up with Phair, who spoke candidly about her experience with Capitol Records in the early 2000s, letting go of Guyville, and her work as a composer for televisions shows such as 90210 and In Plain Sight.

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​On Saturday, lizphair.com suddenly had a new album available via download for a mere $5.99, with one streaming track as a sample, or maybe a warning: "Bollywood" features our heroine rapping in different voices over, yes, a Bollywood tabla. This, in addition to the low asking price, prnt scrn/ctrl+p cover art, and simple enough title (Funstyle), begs you not to take the result too seriously, even if it's her first album in half a decade. But nothing is so simple with Liz Phair, who's incurred bad blood from critics and longtime fans in ways unseen in pop since perhaps Neil Young's vocoders-to-country '80s.

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