​Maybe it's all that misguided Year of the Woman chatter that dominated year-end roundups, or the slow, agonizing creep of Fashion Week, or the coming apocalypse, but hoo boy has there been a lot of terrible writing about female musicians in the past few weeks. The latest offender is the New York Times style magazine T's cover-worthy profile of Lana Del Rey, which manages to be offensive from its first sentence and somehow gets worse from there. (There are even photos by the terminally icky Terry Richardson.) This piece inspired me to put forth four questions that writers, whether they're male or female, whether they're people with Tumblrs or those important enough to score offices at the New York Times building, should ask themselves before hitting "send" on their next piece about a woman making music.

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​For the last twenty years, the award for Album of the Year, the biggest Grammy honor of them all, has tended to go to two types of people: young women and old men. Female solo artists under 30 (Lauryn Hill, Taylor Swift) and male veterans over 40 (Tony Bennett, U2) have dominated the category for two decades with only a few exceptions: the youngish male rappers in Outkast, the wide range of musicians on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and the thirtysomethings in the Dixie Chicks and the Arcade Fire. This year, that pattern's unlikely to be broken, with only one of the five nominees falling outside either of those two categories.

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​The Song: Rihanna, "S&M"
The Crimes: Dressing a bloodless ode to kink up by saying it's actually about the media? Na na na na na na, come on, girl.

Pop stars need their personas as much as they need the songs that take them to the top of the charts—and lest you think that need exists in a vacuum, trust that the people consuming the songs need those hooks as well. So Ke$ha is the "trashy" one, and Taylor is the "good" one, and Gaga is the "arty" one, and Katy is the "annoying" one. After the lukewarm response to her brooding 2009 album Rated R, the Barbadian pop star Rihanna decided to kickstart the process of reinventing herself as the "really, really, really sexy" one on her 2010 full-length Loud—and just in case you weren't entirely sure of how far she'd go, "S&M," an ode to getting one's kink on that manages to turn the zipless fuck into something almost completely lifeless as well, signified the pinnacle of that particular campaign. (Or the nadir, depending on how you look at it.)

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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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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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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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​
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.

Thanks Maura! And hello Nick, Katherine and Eric.

Post-megasales megastars? Beyoncé and Gaga fit the bill, for certain. There are convincing post-rationalisations of why sales on those albums were soft—Beyoncé can do what she likes, and what she likes right now is old-school soul belters; and Gaga's mix of hi-NRG and stadium rock is a maximalist step too far. But nobody would dispute Beyoncé and Gaga's presence. If you look at the top celebs on Facebook, the appetite for musicians is endless: scattered athletes and actors cower in the shadow of pop stars living and dead, G and B among them. So perhaps pop music is becoming like comics—a minor artform, fiercely loved by enthusiasts but nugatory in revenue terms, whose real value lies in powering something else. What comics IP does for the film industry, pop does for the celebrity biz—provide a stream of garish, blockbuster characters and never mind the source material.

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The Album of the Year nominees, as presented by Katy Perry.

​Last night's Grammy nominations show was full of pomp, eyeliner, and people on Twitter becoming very confused. Here's the complete list of nominees; below, 20 questions that we're still wrestling with some 14 hours after the broadcast signed off.

1. "Super Bass": Robbed or totally robbed?

2. Now that Rihanna is officially an Album Artist thanks to her Album of the Year nod for Loud, are critics going to rush to reevaluate Talk That Talk before they file their Best Of '11 lists?

3. A song from freakin' Family Guy gets a nod in the Best Song Written For Visual Media category but the Lonely Island's "Jack Sparrow" doesn't? Come on.

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​Pop-chart record-keeping can be as contentious as baseball's, and we've got quite the steroids-style asterisk forming atop Billboard's Hot 100. On the most recent chart, the most pervasive radio star of the last half-decade brushed past a couple of legends into the hall of fame. And like Barry Bonds after his record-setting 2001 season, she isn't done yet.

I'm talking about Rihanna, who scored her 11th billed credit atop the Hot 100 with the Calvin Harris-produced and supported single "We Found Love." The electro-thumping midtempo track has been America's top-selling single for two weeks now, and another 243,000 downloads sold this past week allows Rihanna to replace Adele's five-week chart-topper "Someone Like You" in the top slot. Even though Adele's torch ballad is the most-played song at radio, and Rihanna's song only ranks seventh in airplay, the huge sales margin for "Found"—topping "Someone" by nearly 100,000 last week—gives Ri the edge.

To put it mildly, the Barbadian pop goddess is on a tear. "Found" is her fourth No. 1 single just in the last 12 months, following last November's "What's My Name" featuring Drake; December's "Only Girl (In the World)"; and this April's "S&M" featuring Britney Spears. That run of smashes (which was broken up by a few lower-charting singles, including the recent Top 10 "Cheers (Drink to That)" and the flops "Man Down" and "California King Bed") has hurtled Rihanna into rarefied chart company.

Career No. 1 hits is one of the biggest chart barometers we have—only major superstars need apply. As recently as the early fall of 2010, before Rihanna started this latest run, her seven chart-toppers placed her in the neighborhood of such estimable pop kings as Phil Collins and George Michael. Now, by scoring her 11th No. 1, Ri has moved past the career totals of Stevie Wonder and Janet Jackson, and she's currently tied with all-time diva Whitney Houston. If she keeps this trend going, she could be surpassing the likes of Madonna, the Supremes and even Michael Jackson within a year or two.

Holy "Umbrella"! How did this happen?

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​Yesterday the video for "We Found Love," the first single off Rihanna's sixth (!) album Talk That Talk, landed online, and it's definitely taking the '90s revival to heretofore-unseen mainstream levels: Ri wears Docs and washed-out denim as the housey, repetitive song swirls around her; the landscape of Ireland is shot in a way that recalls both Trainspotting and The Snapper (the latter was the 1993 sort-of-a-sequel to The Commitments, about a young single woman who gets pregnant). And this being a video by Rihanna, who's still trying to paint herself as edgy and out there, sex and drugs are present as well. There are makeout sessions in a bathtub and in a takeaway shop and in a grocery. There are also lots of references to, gasp, drugs, which will no doubt result in MTV calling for edits to the clip. Shoot, I bet they'll even want to edit out the scene that finds Rihanna's paramour blowing cigarette smoke into the pop star's mouth. (Is this a thing that people find erotic?)

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