Dan Wilson's hits, then (left) and now.

It's a familiar scene to anyone who's seen VH1 programs like Behind The Music or Where Are They Now?, or the channel's endless lists of 'one-hit wonders' of the '80s and '90s: a musician whose brief fling with stardom is well behind them sits at the mixing desk of a studio, while the voiceover details that they're moving into production or songwriting, to help guide new talent. It usually feels like an unconvincing cliche, like an actor saying "But what I really want to do is direct."

I thought back to those scenes when the Dixie Chicks won Song of the Year at the 2007 Grammys for "Not Ready To Make Nice," and a familiar face got to accept the award with them: Dan Wilson, who less than a decade earlier had enjoyed fleeting fame as the frontman of Semisonic. Their 1998 single "Closing Time" reached No. 11 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart (which means it would've been a top 40 hit, if Billboard had allowed songs without a physical single onto the Hot 100 at the time), but none of the band's other singles were remotely as successful. So when Semisonic broke up just one album later, it'd be reasonable to assume Wilson too would disappear; instead Wilson scored big, first with the Dixie Chicks, and then with three songs on Adele's blockbuster album 21, including the chart-topper "Someone Like You."

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If you've listened to much urban radio lately, or even a little, you may have noticed that Lil Wayne and his Young Money Entertainment labelmates, particularly Drake and Nicki MInaj, are quite popular. You may have also noticed the same thing in 2011. And in 2010. And 2009. But perhaps nothing underscores the staggering extent of their domination of the airwaves quite like their presence on the top 100 songs of Billboard's 2011 year-end R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. No fewer than 25 songs, a full quarter of the list, feature at least one of those three Young Money stars. Wayne has the most, with 13, with Drake coming in with 11, and Minaj boasts 5. Add labelmate Tyga's appearance on Chris Brown's 2010 holdover "Deuces," and you've got 26. (I'm also counting Ace Hood's supposed solo hit "Hustle Hard," which was only ever played on the radio in the form of its remix that features Wayne, in those figures.)

The 25% Young Money market share on urban radio in 2011 is only a slight uptick from 2010, when the label held strong with 20%. And with Drake rising to prominence in early 2009 and Minaj following soon after, we've now had three consecutive years of Young Money domination, which had already been preceded by Lil Wayne's decade-long climb to becoming arguably the biggest star in hip-hop. In a way, the Young Money triad's success is nothing new; hip-hop has long thrived on crews and labels in which several popular acts stand shoulder to shoulder, from the Juice Crew to the Native Tongues. And in the modern era of corporate-minded rap, every star has his own label imprint with a roster full of loyal friends and collaborators. Mainstream hip-hop can almost be divided into eras defined by the biggest labels of the moment, the '90s cycling from Death Row to Bad Boy to No Limit. By the end of the decade, Lil Wayne had gotten his first taste of fame as part of the Cash Money Records hit factory, from which of course he later spun off Young Money as his star rose.

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Maybe it's all that misguided Year of the Woman chatter that dominated year-end roundups, or the slow, agonizing creep of Fashion Week, or the coming apocalypse, but hoo boy has there been a lot of terrible writing about female musicians in the past few weeks. The latest offender is the New York Times style magazine T's cover-worthy profile of Lana Del Rey, which manages to be offensive from its first sentence and somehow gets worse from there. (There are even photos by the terminally icky Terry Richardson.) This piece inspired me to put forth four questions that writers, whether they're male or female, whether they're people with Tumblrs or those important enough to score offices at the New York Times building, should ask themselves before hitting "send" on their next piece about a woman making music.

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In this week's Voice I wrote about Skrillex, the emo-dude-gone-dubstep-auteur who's spawned a bunch of funny-Photoshop blogs and garnered five Grammy nominations. One of the categories he's nominated in is one of the Big Four—Best New Artist, which seems to have shaken off its "one-way ticket to obscurity" stigma (recent winners include Maroon 5 and probably Woman Of This Year Adele). But does he have any chance at all of winning this genre-spanning category on Sunday night, and introducing those American viewers who aren't familiar with the EDM circuit to his aesthetic? In the first of a series of oddsmaking posts on SOTC over the next few days, we handicap his odds against The Band Perry, Bon Iver, J. Cole, and Nicki Minaj.

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Well! When I went to bed last night I figured I'd be writing about a couple of aspects of Madonna's Super Bowl halftime show, during which she ran through her catalog with the assistance of Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Cee Lo Green, LMFAO, a marching band, a choir, and gladiators. There was the whole notion of bringing voguing, which she plucked out of the gay underground two decades ago, to the most heteronormative major event America's spectacle has to offer; there was the nitpicking over the set list (sure, it's a relatively minor hit in the Madonna catalog, but "Causing A Commotion" would have slotted into the medley nicely); and there was, of course, the cruel exclusion of Shufflebot from LMFAO's cameo. (Seriously, what?) But this morning all the chatter was about the controversy stoked by the controversy-stoking M.I.A., who flipped off the camera as a way to put a period on her verse on the still-underwhelming new Madonna track "Give Me All Your Luvin." Just when you thought it was safe to bring pop music back into the halftime show... a finger happens. The only way this could have inspired more silly outrage is if her finger had been drizzled with truffle oil first.

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Cage not built by BET's Standards and Practices Department.

This week the Internet lit up with the news that Nicki Minaj's eye-popping new video for her Lil Kim dis track "Stupid Hoe" had been "banned by BET," a logical follow-up to the "too hot for TV" narrative kicked off by her tweeting that the Hype WIlliams-directed clip would premiere on the streaming-video site Vevo because "it's important that my art is not tampered with, or compromised prior to you viewing it for the 1st time." But in the age of music videos being not all that great for ratings and Minaj's clip raking in 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours online, what does "banning" a video from a channel that maybe shows videos for a couple of hours a day really mean? I asked Steven J. Gottlieb, who runs the music-video news site Video Static and consults with record labels on their video needs, for his take.

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Nicki Minaj's "Stupid Hoe" is supposed to be a diss track aimed at Lil Kim, but in the tradition of diss tracks, it's pretty weak. Something like Jay-Z's "Takeover" uses specific, personal information about the people involved, going so far as to propose a mathematical equation at one point. Even Lil Kim's diss of Nicki, "Black Friday," gathers together evidence about Nicki (she is weird, she has a large butt) and Kim (she is real, she has been around for a long time) to make its case. The diss track is a lawyerly form, accumulating exhibits and summarizing with a killer closing statement to produce a unanimous jury decision.

Nicki can do that ("Lemme get this straight, wait, I'm the rookie?"), but on "Stupid Hoe," she mostly doesn't. She takes a few shots, calling Kim "Bubbles," but none of these hit much harder than her "Tragedy" verse, which itself felt perfunctory. As a track, it's a good one, minimal, loud, and aggressive. But as a diss, it's incomplete without the video, which came out Monday.

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"On Nov. 26, 2010, MAC introduced Ms. Minaj's Pink Friday lipstick, selling all 3,000 in stock in 15 minutes, in addition to an eye-popping 27,000 in the next three weeks. The company spent little on advertising, Mr. Demsey said, with sales driven mostly by Ms. Minaj's voluminous postings to fans via Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, 8 of 10 buyers were new to the MAC Web site."
—The New York Times took a look at the rising fashion-industry moxie of Nicki Minaj, and this anecdote showcasing her fans' devotion all the way back in 2010 serves as a sort of portent to her being invited to fashion shows by Anna Wintour and the like. Beginning next month, Minaj will help promote the cosmetic company's Viva Glam line alongside Ricky Martin; she's stepping into the awkwardly heeled shoes of none other than Lady Gaga. The Mr. Demsey referred above is John Demsey of MAC parent company Estée Lauder, who referred to Minaj's aesthetic as "a mashup style between Vivienne Westwood and a Harajuku girl." Which I think sounds a bit reductive!

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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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.

Hi again everyone,

Sure, there was lots of great music put out by women this year—my Pazz and Jop top tens will be stuffed with them. But does that make 2011 a Year of the Woman by any stretch? I'd argue no, and I suspect the guy who I overheard on the subway the other day, who was complaining that while he liked Lady Gaga going to a concert of hers would make him feel like less of a man, would agree with me; those people horrified by "Super Bass"'s showing on the Pitchfork singles list might as well. If anything what bothered me about the Year of the Bro (yes, I'm calling it this now) was the way that gender roles became more circumscribed, the way that people who called bullshit on misogyny and homophobia (OK, I'm mostly talking about Tyler here) were mocked in ways that Nick rightly pointed out were absolutely conservative, and the end result was little more than a lot of empty laughter and "objective" music-blog reports that implied an overtightened sphincter on one side.

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