Just to state the obvious, this is not a lesbian or bisexual anthem; this is burlesque. It has the same quality of knowing coyness, the tease and titillation, designed to arouse and amuse without making any promises. I imagine most of its sales are to women who can't wait to sing along and taunt their boyfriends--and maybe some of their more uptight girlfriends--to death. The rest of the sales are to guys who've been suckered, with maybe a few to guys who know they've been suckered and appreciate the fact. Pro-sex feminists should love it. Me, I like it, and it certainly brightens up the top ten. But it isn't anything new or the end of civilization (or pop music) as we know it. If it were about two guys making out, though--now that would be something to get excited about.

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This gets by on the lyrics, which are balder and nastier even than "Irreplaceable", Stargate and Ne-Yo's last foray into this territory. But with her umpteenth top ten in hand, it's finally time to speak the unspeakable about Rihanna: her problem isn't that she sings like a machine, but that she can barely sing at all. Though you'd never know it by listening to her voice, this song has a melodic chorus that should lift it straight up to pop heaven. But not only can't Rihanna soar, she hardly gets off the ground, and in deference to her weakness the arrangement downplays the moment and the whole song lies flat. I will admit, though, that she's a better singer than she is an actor. I mean, please.

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The real indicator of how stoned Wayne was when he made this isn't the sparse, distorted, stretched-out sound, it's the length. At five minutes, it's a one-idea, single-entendre track that seems to go on forever. Eventually, it turns into a looping, blissed-out, groove for the sake of the groove--an exercise in blunt-sharpened attention to the infinitesimal details found in the silence between the beats. He isn't in There's A Riot Goin' On territory (the lyrics are too generic for that), but he's heading in the right direction. Since dope is generally less damaging than freebasing, Wayne may avoid the inevitable self-collapse that usually follows the kind of artistic breakthrough he's demonstrated over the last year. He may still have a career, and even something to say, five years from now. The again, if the lyrics are any indication, he may just say fuck it and turn into 50 Cent.

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In most cases, when a producer (here it's Polow Da Don) slaps together obvious borrowings from previous hits in the hope of making a big score, the result is so calculated and false you can almost hear the cynicism and smell the desperation. This is an exception. The borrowings--from "Umbrella" and "Don’t Stop the Music", along with some T-Pain-style auto-tuning and a Ne-Yo-like uptempo four-four--are impossible not to notice, but their familiarity, which might have killed a lesser record, instead fills this with pleasing echoes of every buoyant, joyous moment to grace a pop record over the last year, tying them all up in a single irresistible package. The lyrics, as usual, are nonsense, and Brown still sings as if he has an oversized wad of bubblegum in his mouth, but it doesn’t matter. By the end of the summer we’ll all be sick of it, but right now this sounds like the first great top ten record of the year. It’s about time.

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Yuck. The over-the-top arrangement is tasteless enough--dirge organ slipping into a portentous hip-hop rhythm decorated with Casio beats, fading at the end into strings playing what sounds like a requiem--but the lyrics, with their constant references to cutting, open veins, scars, and life bleeding away, are even worse. For the final touch, Lewis sings with a pseudo-operatic, melismatic intensity that puts her somewhere between Celine Dion and Mariah Carey in the gifted-but-totally-self-absorbed sweepstakes. If Beyonce or Ciara or Pink or some other woman with an ounce of self-respect doesn't get back in the top ten soon, this piece of romantic masochism could set pop-feminism back twenty years. Brought to you by the Diva-loving Simon Cowell, and endorsed by Oprah, who should know better.

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After all the hoops her record company put her through to get her second album released in the US (roughly half the tracks are different from the original UK version--among the missing is the daringly satirical, woefully misunderstood "I Wanna Have Your Babies"), Bedingfield's bright, catchy ode to a life free and uncontrolled carries more resonance than first appears. If only I could believe her dreams of a place where rivers flow and there are "no lies, only butterflies" (ugh), were at least partly ironic. I mean, even if you've already admitted to yourself that you're not Shelley or Keats, that doesn't mean you stop trying. Unless, that is, you've been totally ground down by your record company.

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Brian Eno's production ads musical focus, and Chris Martin's voice sounds sharper when he has real things to sing about, as opposed to spiritual vagaries we'd understand if only we could see them flying out of the underground like he does. All the same, melodically this sounds a lot like "Speed of Sound", and the toppled king Martin goes on about seems more metaphorical (a broken romance? Tony Blair? EMI?) than actual. What's more, pair this with the simultaneously released Violet Hill (can't really call them a and b sides, can you?), and you catch a whiff of that old dinosaur, the concept album. Talk about fallen kings.

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What's most surprising about this record is how formally unpop it is while still being catchy as hell. The hooks, if you can call them that, are built around those moments Wayne pauses for breath or to gather his thoughts in the midst of his stream-of-consciousness freestyling. His delivery is so distinctive, in its sense of both rhythm and timbre, that he makes every bit of boast and brag sound original. And when he chuckles to himself he's as cute and charming as Miley Cyrus. But even though he's king of the non-sequiter simile, he's not saying anything here that you haven't heard before. Which is why this is a good record and not a great one.

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This has its charms, and if there's one thing the writing and production team of Amato and James know it's how to deploy hooks and make performers sound good. But let's face it, Cyrus isn't a performer so much as a marketing scheme, and this is designed to hit the tweener demographic right between the eyes. The sophistication of the arrangement hints at maturity, which only makes Cyrus sound more like a teenager, and the shifting tempos allow tweeners to cycle through all their moods (do they have more than three?) in the space of a single song. The final result: demographic button pushing at the highest possible level of achievement, and I bet it makes daddy proud.

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This is like some old time comedy act: the smooth, handsome, sophisticated straight man, and the cruder, lewder, more down to earth funny guy. Except Ne-Yo sounds more mechanical here than sophisticated, and Plies is a grotesque: lewd and crude to be sure, but never funny. There's a case to made for this kind of record, revealing the two sides of male desire, etc., but that would require some sort of human connection between the performers and the audience, and I don't get any sense of that here. Plies is just showing off, which he wouldn't be able to do if Ne-Yo--who's doing nothing more than cashing a check on a decent hook he doesn't consider worth developing himself--wasn't there to hold the record up.

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