Quite Contrary

Pase Rock/Spank Rock “Lindsay Lohan” – There’s a good chance that you’ve heard this — several other blogs jumped on this the moment that it hit the internet, but nobody really said anything about it other than something to the effect of “SPANK ROCK LINDSAY OMG LOLZ,” which is pretty disappointing given that this song is more ripe for critical dissection than most anything else that has turned up in the past few months. For one thing, this could be the single most confused song about sex that I’ve ever heard — multiple voices trade off verses, and no one can decide whether or not they want to fuck her, insult her, or tell her to put on some panties. It’s a rather brilliant musical expression of the creepy cycle of post-TMZ tabloid sleaze in the way it begins with lust directed toward the sexualized young celebrity that mutates into a contempt that intensifies to become a quasi-S&M hate-fuck impulse before collapsing into self-loathing. The song spins through that cycle so rapidly that the lyrics pass by in a vertiginous haze of ideas about sex, celebrity culture, and class without forming any sort of coherent stance on anything, which is, of course, exactly how most people feel about this sort of thing. The best part of the song comes at the end, when a gravel-voiced dude barks an especially raunchy verse that concludes with the exclamation “I don’t care about sex! / No, wait a minute, I LOVE IT!” before breaking into a giggle fit that acknowledges his own conflicted ridiculousness. (Click here for the Spank Rock MySpace page. Needless to say, this song is extremely Not Safe For Work.)

Elsewhere: Idolator’s Jackin’ Pop critics poll is up, and you can see my ballot here. Something to keep in mind is that my ballot is not intended to be some sort of proper year-end list for myself or this site (there will never be list features on Fluxblog), but rather a vote and nothing more. (I’m glad to see that some of my ponies did very well in this race!)

I also voted in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll, and when that is online, you will notice that my ballot for each is a little different, as is the list I did for the Insound mailing list. I put them together on different days, and things shifted a bit. The singles ballot is not meant to be understood as my favorite songs of the year. In order to narrow things down, I followed two simple rules — songs must be actual singles (no favored album cuts) and songs from my albums list were disqualified to make room for more artists in an attempt to broaden the scope a little bit. There’s a lot of wonderful records that I feel very strongly about that didn’t make it to these ballots, and as you might have picked up from reading this site over the past few years, I like a lot more music than can be stuffed into 20 slots on a ballot.