​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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Glee Live
Nassau Coliseum
Saturday, June 18

Better than: A slushie to the face.

Getting caught up in a cultural juggernaut leaves you ripe for teasing. I casually followed Glee at the beginning, but I didn't tumble headfirst into true fandom until this season, sacrificing my Tuesdays to write Gleecaps and pushing the show on friends and family at every opportunity. "Fan," you learn, can become something of a dirty word; when you're a fan of something mainstream it's even dirtier. Which is why I reveled in the opportunity to watch the cast of Glee perform live twice in one day at the same venue this weekend. (Before anyone asks, no, they do not actually do drastically different things between shows; I effectively watched the same set of song and dance numbers back to back.)

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F2K10 is a countdown of the 20 worst songs of 2010. Track our progress here.

​The Fox show Glee might have been the most aggravating pop-cultural phenomenon of the year, what with its persistent conflation of the terms "stereotype" and "nuanced character who's really bringing something new to prime time," its ability to stoke predictable culture-war outrage, and the way it thrived while the superior show starring Jane Lynch that debuted last year got hung out to dry by the nth-rate cable network on which it aired.

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​The phenomenally successful Glee kicked off its second season earlier this week, with Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' home-town anthem "Empire State Of Mind" showcased in the opening song spot. But while entire episodes of the show have been effectively hooked around the music of pop icons Madonna, Lady Gaga, and (next week) Britney Spears--a factor which has helped cast recording CDs shift over seven million copies, while also giving a sales boost to the original artist's songs--Glee's rap routines exist unceremoniously between the embarrassing and the horrific. ("Did you know that there's a forum on my blog that's begging you to stop rapping?" the school's blogger asks club leader Mr. Schuester, a teacher whose main educational maneuver seems to be performing tacky rap hits, at one point.) Here are ten Glee-flipped versions of rap songs--and the occasional rap-related r&b ditty--that will have you thinking perhaps Vanilla Ice wasn't that bad after all.

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