Why is this woman smiling? Because you're clapping along with her song.

​Lately, when I turn on a hip-hop station, I feel like I'm being applauded, and I don't always feel like returning the favor. I'm not referring just to the default use of handclaps (sampled or, more likely, emulated by drum machines) as snare drums in beats, which has been a common practice and has been prevalent since Lil Jon's reign in the mid-2000s. I'm referring to the fast and steady eighth note clap-clap-clap-clap pattern running through several current hits on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, including Big Sean's remix of "Dance (A$$)" featuring Nicki Minaj, which recently peaked at No. 3, and Rihanna's controversial Chris Brown-assisted remix of "Birthday Cake," which rocketed to No. 4 last week after only five weeks on the chart. I like to call these songs "clappers" in homage to both the sound-activated light switch and to the '60s Northern Soul scene, in which British fans of American R&B gravitated toward heavily rhythmic "stompers" that had a snare drum hit on every quarter note (think "I Can't Help Myself" by The Four Tops).

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​Sledgehammer-pop duo Sleigh Bells visited the BBC recently, and as one tends to do when one visits the hallowed British broadcasting institution, they laid down a cover—of Beyoncé's breezy kiss-off "Irreplaceable." The combined moxie of Beyoncé and Sleigh Bells frontwoman Alexis Krauss should result in fireworks, right? Well, not so much; Krauss sighs her way through the song, turning her voice into a mew that sounds like she was trying to sing along with the radio while not being heard by her roommates or anyone else outside of a six-inch radius. (Also, some of the guitar chords are a bit off.) It's not Karmin-level offensive, but it's sorta disappointing. Listen below.

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​Superstar pals and Young Money labelmates Lil Wayne and Drake released two of the biggest albums of 2011—Tha Carter IV and Take Care—and both are still spinning off hits well into 2012. But a look at the singles charts reveals something odd: the biggest current hits off both albums aren't available on every copy of the album, but are instead bonus tracks from their deluxe editions. Drake's "The Motto," which features Wayne, currently tops the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and is at No. 19 on the Hot 100 after peaking at No. 16. And Wayne's own "Mirror," featuring Bruno Mars, is Weezy's highest current solo entry on the Hot 100, at No. 68 (it also peaked at No. 16). If you go into one of the few stores still selling CDs today, though, odds are that the versions of Tha Carter IV and Take Care in the racks won't include those current hits.

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​The Grammys created the awkwardly named Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category ten years ago, around the time Ja Rule's various "thug love" duets were dominating the airwaves. The award recognized a growing sector of popular music that didn't quite fit into the preexisting rap, R&B or pop song awards, and its creation was a prescient move. In 2001, 13% of Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 Songs featured at least one rapper and one singer; in 2011 that number had doubled to 26% (after peaking at 33% in 2010). The category's a little more unpredictable this year, as NARAS snubbed the biggest dancefloor-friendly rapped-and-sung hits of the year ("Give Me Everything," "Party Rock Anthem," "On The Floor," "E.T.") in favor of more urban radio fare.

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​If the triumph of tUnE-yArDs in this year's Pazz & Jop albums poll was one of the biggest upsets in the poll's history, then the companion singles poll offered one of its most predictable winners to date: Adele's "Rolling In The Deep." Smart money had been on that song taking the prize since it began its record-breaking chart run almost exactly a year ago, and few songs offered it much realistic competition. When I was predicting results among friends in recent weeks, only two songs seemed like remotely possible spoilers, and I was close enough on one (Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass," which finished at No. 3) and way off on another (Foster The People's "Pumped Up Kicks," at No. 10).

My Sound of the City chart talk colleague Chris Molanphy already viewed the albums poll through the prism of sales in his Pazz & Jop essay, where he lamented the inaccuracy of his own prediction that Adele's 21 would become the third album to ever rank as both the top-selling album of a year and the Pazz & Jop-voting bloc's favorite (after Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born In The U.S.A.). Apparently not enough of the five million Americans who bought 21 were also professional music critics; the album finished at No. 6 on the poll. But Adele did notch a similarly rare achievement on the singles poll, where "Rolling In The Deep" became the third poll winner in Pazz & Jop history to have also been Billboard's No. 1 song of the year. Again, one of the precedents is an unsurprising '80s blockbuster, Prince's "When Doves Cry," but the other is a bit more surprising: "Gangsta's Paradise." The Coolio smash dominated 1995 with a Stevie Wonder melody and a Dangerous Minds soundtrack placement—and it spawned an obligatory "Weird Al" Yankovic parody—but otherwise it's hardly a canonized pop classic.

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Aaliyah.

​Not very many hours after Beyoncé gave birth to their daughter Blue Ivy Carter, Jay-Z commemorated the occasion in song. "Glory" sounds humbled and relieved, and soft enough to bear some marks; at certain points, Jay's voice almost seems to quaver. He goes from revealing a past miscarriage to sharing the precise date of conception, as if still ambling through the ward in elated exhaustion. Next time he leaves condoms on a baby seat, it'll feel like a sitcom joke, not potential diss material.

The kid herself makes an appearance, wailing all over the track. Blue Ivy must be the first infant to receive a feature credit for their sampled gurgles—canny as ever, dad—but she's only the youngest entry in pop's tiny, adorable line of incidental newborns. Given that the subtlety of the effect in question falls somewhere between siren noises and neighing, it tends to be used sparingly yet memorably. Pace Kelis, here are six other songs of the baby.

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​It's been about 36 hours since Beyoncé gave birth to Blue Ivy Carter, her first child with Jay-Z, so why shouldn't he release a song dedicated to his new offspring? And so, here's "Glory," credited to Jay-Z and "B.I.C.," who apparently is an up-and-coming young star responsible for the coos and gurgling that floats in and out of the song. (But what could the acronym mean???) It's happy and humbled just like all those shots of new dads in movies; you can almost smell the cigars being lit as Jay tosses off his first (but probably not last) dedication to his daughter, which has as its best line "You're the child of a child from Destiny's Child." Listen below.

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​Late Saturday Beyoncé, having taken over an entire floor at Lenox Hill Hospital, gave birth to her first child with Jay-Z—a daughter named Blue Ivy. No sooner did the name surface (well, at first the Internet got it wrong, referring to the baby as "Ivy Blue") than did the super-stupid conspiracy theories about the name pop up and spread like wildfire—because, of course, it's fun to make fun of a baby that isn't even a week old because her parents happen to be more famous and make more money than you. Oh, class warfare, you manifest yourself in the strangest ways! Four of the most ridiculous explanations below.

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​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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D.L. Anderson

That's ee-vayr to you, Nicki Minaj.

​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.

Greetings to you four from Bloomington, Indiana, a happening college town perhaps one or more of you have flown over at some point. It's the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael and David Lee Roth, and the home of John Mellencamp and Jagjaguwar Records, a label which this year released an album called Bon Iver, Bon Iver that you may have heard of. Most critics liked it, some liked it a lot, Rosie O'Donnell wanted more, pop lovers and rockists alike united to sneer at the smoothness of his album's textures and its ostensibly outré signifiers (I prefer the first album, but am a sucker for the Bruce Hornsby vibes of "Beth/Rest"). At the time of writing, 317,375 music fans have purchased it—40,000 more than Fleet Foxes, 40,000 less than LMFAO. Yet once the album was nominated for several Grammys last month, lots of people microcasted their ignorance of this album on Twitter. Quickly, another person culled this proudly professed ignorance into a Tumblr called "Who Is Bon Iver?" A member of a long-dormant Australian DJ concern accused him of "selling out" for lending his increased profile to something so horrifying as a whiskey concern, even though the accuser's own group hypocritically endorses deadly mountain calamities.

So what happened? Did the Bro From Eau Claire break through, or is he still a secret? If you follow music on the internet with any regularity, you couldn't go a day without hearing about him, but if you don't, there's a good chance you don't have any idea how to pronounce the name, and wait, the white guy from Kanye's album made his own album and everyone loves it apparently? To Twitter! It's clear why Bon Iver in 2011, just like Arcade Fire in 2010, made ripples critically, popularly, and awardishly—they fit long-established rock tropes into a modern, gently hip, and well-executed form. And it's also clear that this is happening at a point when with very few exceptions, good weird rock music is the last thing you expect to hear released by a music label owned by a multinational corporation.

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