Brian McKnight, the R&B singer known for sultry songs like "Back At One," will perform with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Blue Note next month, with two shows each night from May 16 to 18. For some reason, though, the press release heralding this engagement doesn't mention the song he released this week to much fanfare—"If You're Ready To Learn," in which McKnight offers to show a woman how to use her genitalia to its fullest potential. The track burned up TMZ and its also-rans, which were positiviely scandalized by the idea that an R&B singer would use the word "pussy" in one of his songs. Which is making me wonder if McKnight knew exactly what he was doing when he released it! Time to break out The Trollgaze Index, in which we gauge the media-manipulation skills of today's musical artists.

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Last night, Rihanna and Chris Brown leaked two collaborations, a remix of her dessert-fetish track "Birthday Cake" and a rework of his Generic Club Banger No. 86 "Turn Up The Music." The releases inspired much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, but how do they fit into the pantheon of trollgaze? A subjective yet scientific analysis below.

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In another era, Lana Del Rey would just be another pretty pop singer with a second-rate voice and big, unrealized ambitions, a major-label footnote maybe worth a page or two in a book about the foibles of the early-'10s music industry. But this is The Age Of Trollgaze, and so her "mysterious" origins and melted-cover-girl looks get fetishized and obsessed over by members of the peanut gallery who fancy themselves as "indie," but who are just as into the notion of hatefucking unavailable women as their brethren who read The Superficial and its ilk—even the most anodyne mentions of her music on any site with a comment section will devolve into incoherent referenda on her physical self, an inevitability almost as concrete as debates on political blogs turning into arguments over whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama ruined the country more irrevocably. The songs are often overtaken by these tussles enough that they are merely termed "fine," or "shitty," or somewhere in between those two on the one-word-judgment spectrum.

Del Rey's debut album Born To Die comes out, finally, early next year, and the ready-for-radio version of its title track appeared on her YouTube channel last night after being performed in Europe a few times over the past month. How does it fit into this debased, hashtag-riddled age that we are currently living in? Our mathematical analysis, below.

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For better or worse one of 2011's most notable music stars is Rebecca Black, the California tween whose warbling of the inanity-filled ode to weekends "Friday" lit up the Internet—and nearly resulted in a slight recalibration of the formula for a "successful" pop song. (Awkwardly pronouncing a common word over the simplest sing-song melody = a sorely underexploited recipe for brain glue. Watch out for this tactic to be used over and over again in 2012, probably over thudding Eurohouse beats.) Her new video "Person Of Interest" has weird crime-scene imagery, a romantic counterpart who resembles a mirror-image Black, and lots of skee-ball shots. But is it designed for the express purpose of profiting off the Internet's negative attention? Our mathematical analysis below.

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The ever-evolving microgenre of "trollgaze" isn't just limited to whippersnapper up-and-comers. Today we look at one of this week's most chattered-about albums, the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration Lulu, to try and deduce one thing: Can a 90-minute double album based off German Expressionist theater and performed by a bunch of dudes who decided they really, really liked each other after jamming in honor of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame actually be an Internet con? Sound of the City's highly mathematical analysis, below.

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Don't get spun out—eat spun sugar instead!

2011 has been the year of "trollgaze," a media-agnostic genre name for those pieces of pop culture as designed for maximum Internet attention as they are pieces of art that can stand (or at least wobble) on their own. The ways to get inducted into the trollgaze pantheon are as plentiful as self-congratulatory Lil B retweets; in music alone, they can involve dropping songs chock-full of easy ways to laugh at them (extra points if you're being dead serious about doing so), acting like an entitled punkass brat, complaining about people saying that you're acting like an e.p.b., or somewhat ineptly playing on the already-existent prejudices possessed by critical-mass online audiences, among other things. With so many things these days vying for the masses' increasingly divided attention, though, it's becoming tougher and tougher to gauge whether or not a piece of cultural ephemera is actually trying to double as its social-media strategy.

To help all the overwhelmed online music consumers out there figure out if a piece of music is trollgaze or not—it's kind of difficult!—Sound of the City is establishing The Trollgaze Index, a scientific method by which we deduce just how hard musicians are trying to play their listeners for the fool. We'll measure on a 50-point scale; a score of 35 or more means that, yes, if you're paying attention to the video or the song or the "viral" campaign, you—and we—have been trolled. Installment one (from, appropriately enough, an Odd Future-affiliated act that calls itself "The Internet") after the jump.

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