A look at the week's hottest pop clips, including the frolicsome ribaldry of Robin Thicke, the mansion malaise of 50 Cent and the insufferable wackness of Somethingorother Yacht Idiots.

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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.

Hi again everyone,

Sure, there was lots of great music put out by women this year—my Pazz and Jop top tens will be stuffed with them. But does that make 2011 a Year of the Woman by any stretch? I'd argue no, and I suspect the guy who I overheard on the subway the other day, who was complaining that while he liked Lady Gaga going to a concert of hers would make him feel like less of a man, would agree with me; those people horrified by "Super Bass"'s showing on the Pitchfork singles list might as well. If anything what bothered me about the Year of the Bro (yes, I'm calling it this now) was the way that gender roles became more circumscribed, the way that people who called bullshit on misogyny and homophobia (OK, I'm mostly talking about Tyler here) were mocked in ways that Nick rightly pointed out were absolutely conservative, and the end result was little more than a lot of empty laughter and "objective" music-blog reports that implied an overtightened sphincter on one side.

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Robin Thicke
Highline Ballroom
Friday, December 9

Better than: Dinner and a movie.

Not to make Robin Thicke's sold-out show at Highline Ballroom a race thing, but no one got to make the joke about a white R&B singer with a smoking biracial wife singing to a largely black audience before he did. As his band cued up "All Tied Up," a Downy-soft slow jam from his excellent new album Love After War, Thicke surveyed the crowd and said, "There's white people in here tonight—this is rare." Then he chuckled and said, "I must be blowing up!"

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Over the weekend a lot of my Facebook friends reposted a CNN piece called "Where Is The Love In R&B?" that served as a sort of lengthy "get off my lawn with your sex and hedonism" diatribe; while it's undoubtedly true that commercial radio is more crass today than it was back in the era of WPIX playing nothing but love songs, the piece was not without its many issues, from citing that awfully flawed study about the narcissism in popular music that was floating around earlier this year to blaming the rise of the laptop musician for the nosedive in songs the writer saw as romantic. (Not to mention that it took Miguel's ode to getting off "Quickie" to task while failing to notice that his screwed-down fidelity pledged had actually performed better on the airplay-based R&B chart—by topping it.) What better day than today, which marks the release of Robin Thicke's super-uxorious, quite fantastic Love After War, to rebut the claims about R&B being a complete wasteland? Six tracks from this year that made the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts and that will melt even the coldest heart (take it from someone who knows!) below.

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This list began as a joke, but the longer I contemplated it, the more depressing its basic concept became. Consider: not only could I easily string together ten of Game's fruitless attempts to force label executives to release The R.E.D. Album, his followup to 2008's LAX; I had to make decisions about which ten to include. If you can think of a more damning condemnation of both commercial gangsta-rapper woes and major-label wastefulness, I'm all ears.

For mid-level major-label rappers like Game, keeping your fans satisfied while they wait impatiently for a product you keep desperately promising is right around the corner has become a melancholy fact of life. Unless you currently have at least two Top Ten hits currently floating in the radio-playlist soup, your album is a theoretical construct, no more "around the corner" than universal health care.

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Didn't imagine this happening either so soon or so randomly. Robin Thicke needs to rethink his whole life at this point but Nicki is a win in any context. Bonus points for Letterman's self-deprecating Sex Therapy joke and his courtly greeting of the diminutive female rapper, post performance. Real charisma! (Oh, also, Bossip did the important work of compiling the results of Nicki's call for "boobz" via Twitter. Confusing. But also compelling, in the people will pretty much do anything you ask them to do sense.)