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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Big news about pop music on MSNBC.com: Apparently songs like Kelly Clarkson's new track "Mr. Know It All" (above), as well as older invective-filled songs like "U + Ur Hand" and "Before He Cheats" and "the not-even-that-big-hit "According To You"—songs in which wronged women sing about the men who broke their hearts— are proof that man-bashing is a surefire key to chart success. Apparently this is all an aftereffect of the riot grrrl movement, just another example of feminism ruining things for everyone. Or something like that! The piece is pretty muddled, with evidence coming in the form of one current hit, a couple of older ones, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," and a listicle from Vibe Vixen claiming that Ciara's gender-bendy "Like A Boy" is actually a "male-bashing anthem." (TLC's "No Scrubs" is No. 1, in case you were wondering what to put on your next man-hating iTunes playlist.)

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Last night, Lance Bass—former 'N Sync member, aspiring astronaut, and now apparently boy-band guru—offered a tutorial on how to get your probably-jokey, possibly-somewhat-serious musical project noticed by those folks on the Internet who are looking for things to giggle at as they while away at work.

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