Yesterday the Alabama rapper Krispy Kreme—think a 21-year-old Paul Wall lookalike who sounds like a Yelawolf impersonator whose tricks are performing with a mouth full of marbles and rhyming "back" with "back," streamed over a super-slow Internet connection"—released the song "Best Friends," a charming little ditty about his best friend (of course) being hooded and hustled into a van as he's kidnapped by a 17-year-old drug dealer. It's dedicated to Tupac; it features clothing fashioned by the popular-slash-loathed MC Mac Miller. All of this, of course, means that it's time to break out The Trollgaze Index, in which we gauge the media-manipulation skills of today's musical artists.

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If Noz and The Onion collaborated, they might come up with a scenario like this one: Gucci Mane and Selena Gomez star in a Harmony Korine-directed film alongside James Franco, whose character is loosely based on the little-known YouTube rapper Riff Raff. But, of course, this is the era of trollgaze, so that movie is very real. (Which should be obvious considering the presence of Franco, Hollywood's most visible and consistent troll.) Real, too, are these photos of Franco—in full Riff Raff regalia, cornrows and all—mugging on a fake Spring Break concert stage holding a pistol in each hand.

All of which brings up many questions—but here's an important one: Just who is Riff Raff?

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You might have heard that the much-discussed singer Lana Del Rey had her U.S. television debut this past weekend on Saturday Night Live, and that the hive mind of public opinion declared that her performances, of "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" did not go well. The satirical indie-chronicle Hipster Runoff's declaration that she "effing TANK[ED]" was echoed by even the most opinion-averse media outlets, with even the publicist-friendly Us wondering if she "bomb[ed]."

While the two performances were low-energy and marked by Del Rey attempting to rein in her voice and seeming not entirely sure of what to do with her corporeal self more than anything else, they didn't seem that much different than her first TV appearance when she performed "Games" on the UK television show Later With Jools Holland back in October. Still, even some who were on the Lana Del Train in the autumn seemed to be taken aback by Saturday's display, resulting in a Great Big Pile On Lana that seemed more intense and widespread than the ones that have occurred any other time her name was mentioned since "Video Games"'s YouTube debut. What happened?

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Last night as part of keeping my musical resolution about not falling in the trap of listening to old music and not new stuff I ran a Spotify search for music from this calendar year, and topping the list was a song apparently called "Perry 2012." Being that my roommate is a political reporter who was awash in the news of the Iowa caucuses as I conducted my search, I assumed that the song was actually about Rick Perry, the Texas governor turned GOP presidential hopeful who was in the process of coming in fifth in the Hawkeye State as I typed. And so I hunkered down in my chair and listened, and... the song didn't sound that bad? It melded thumpy chart-pop bounce and the aesthetics of the the label Slabco's charming bedroom synthpop offerings in such a way that it reminded me of a somewhat more twee update of the word-light, yet catchphrase-heavy 1991 techno breakthrough "James Brown Is Dead." Clip after the jump.

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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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You may have heard that Rick Perry's mind-meltingly horrible anti-gay campaign ad has more dislikes on YouTube than Rebecca Black's "Friday." The story has been covered by Time, the Today Show, and the Huffington Post, among many others. There's only one problem: that's not actually true. The current version of "Friday" has only been online since September, even though the Internet's interest in the song clearly dates back to March. That's because the original YouTube upload of the clip was removed in an aborted attempt to put it behind a paywall; when that didn't work, "Friday"'s creators re-upped the original clip, thus resetting the counter on views and dislikes. That current version, it's true, only has some 250k+ dislikes, less than Perry's now-400k+ figure. But before it was taken down, the original upload had more than three million dislikes, far outstripping what Perry's video has accumulated. (Some outlets got it even more wrong, trying to claim that passing Black's video made Perry's the most-disliked in YouTube history, even though two Justin Bieber clips and Black's other video have far more dislikes than Perry's.)

While some outlets have issued corrections, the "fact" has gone viral, leaving the more interesting question of why, exactly, it's important that Perry is more disliked than Black (or Bieber). On one level, of course, it's just good news for liberals, a nice confirmation that their repulsed reaction to Perry's ad is shared by lots of others. But it belies a deeper anxiety about the relationship between politics and entertainment. In the last few years, YouTube has taken a weirdly major role in our political campaigns, serving as the central clearinghouse of everything from campaign ads like Perry's to major campaign speeches, career-ending gaffes, and even presidential debates, to say nothing of all the reaction videos and remixes voters produce.

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Last month lots of ink and pixels were spent on Lulu, the collaboration between downtown bard Lou Reed and thrash lifers Metallica—"worst album of the year or maybe ever" declarations; "you just don't understand what Lou is trying to do" cries from partisans/people suspicious of the unwashed's lack of knowledge about the Frank Wedekind plays the album was based on; head-scratching so fervent it resulted in bleeding. But for all that hue and cry and Internet arguing, the thing didn't make much of a dent sales-wise; it debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 36, selling 13,000 copies in its first week, and then nosedived off the chart in week two. Blame the leak, which came a couple of weeks before the album's bow in stores, or blame the bad buzz, or blame the economy—but don't blame a weak promotional campaign: Despite the soft launch, a video by a big-name director—Requiem For A Dream/Black Swan helmsman Darren Aronofsky—debuted over the weekend. It's for the 3:45 single edit (work with me here; the full track's 5:18!) of "The View," and it starts off as your pretty standard black-and-white "guys rehearsing" clip (complete with people getting out of their cars), then gets hazier as the murk of metal and back-and-forth shouts by Reed and Metallica frontman James Hetfield intensifies. And of course, it ends with Reed being thrilled by the brilliance that has just ensued. Clip 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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