The Top O’ The Charts (Source: Billboard 2009)

Jay Sean, “Down (feat. Lil’ Wayne)”

The way it used to be: Bumping, grinding and sweating in your mansion. If you’re Jay Sean, you have accomplished one great thing during your U.S. invasion: you have finally dethroned the Black Eyed Peas and their awful “feelings” (L’chaim!). You look good and feel great. You can even summon balls of light from your fingers, and your entire world looks like it was filmed through a filter that screams, “Wet dream!”

You’re also British. We didn’t react so well to Robbie Williams (“Too British and possibly gay,” we said in our Texan drawls before returning to our tea parties and death penalty pretty parties). We don’t quite know who you are. Are you Justin Timberlake? Chris Brown? Usher?

“So nondescript,” we whine. “Can you turn on the auto-tune, please?”

“No, no!” You protest. “Please don’t leave! I have buckets of champagne, and just look at my beautiful man-nips!” Then you take out your pocket Lil’ Wayne because you think we’ll love it when you whip him out. (No homo.) Whoops! We don’t like him. Guess it’s back to chilly man-nips and chipping Cheerios for you.

Cobra Starship, “Good Girls Go Bad (feat. Leighton Meester)”

The way it is now: Sneaking into clubs located in the basement of your local city deli. This is the kind of thing that would make Glenn Beck cry on television in front of 50 bajillion people every night: “Why are the kids dancing in the basement of delis? Where are the trendy dance clubs for real, ordinary Americans?” Then Beck will blame it on Barack Hussein X’s trendy, arugula-flavored, crypto-Muslim-commie plot to destroy America before drawing an elaborate flow chart with his feces.

Cobra Starship is not Glenn Beck, but if they ever made a flow chart for this song, it would contain two bubbles: “Good girls?” ↑ “We make ’em go bad.” Especially when it’s obligatory “bad girl” Blair Waldorf (What is this “Leighton Meester”?) cuffing hipsters while wearing pumps. This is terrible, somehow! Questions: Is it acceptable to wear Prada while conducting a raid? Is it okay to sing “I know your type, boy, you’re dangerous / You’re that guy I’d be stupid to trust / But just one night couldn’t be so wrong / You make me wanna lose control”? Doesn’t it mean you’re a “good girl” if you’re on the side of the law? Is “Leighton Meester” an actress or a dish commonly ordered in a Latvian restaurant?

I don’t know! Perhaps this video is a pitch for the CW’s Gossip Girl spin-off, “Vice is Nice, But . . . You Know,” wherein socialite Waldorf joins the police force and encounters working-class struggles while juggling her upper-class reputation. Dan Humphrey can be her partner, and he will ask her to read his horrible Jay McInerney fan fiction during every crime scene (Blair will just scoff, and tell him to avoid getting any crime scene evidence on her Manolos). At the end of each episode, Blair learns an important lesson and concludes, “I may not be GOOD girl, but at least I’m not a BAD cop.” And then she arrests some Hot Topic Hipsters. And giggles.

Shakira, “She-Wolf”

The way it should be: Writhing in ecstasy on the dance floor. Your new girlfriend is somewhat, maybe, possibly strange. She speaks in tongues, pants wildly and whenever you move close to her she growls back at you. Sometimes you’ll ask her mundane things, and she’ll just howl at you (e.g. “Honey, pass me my Mojito.” “A-ROO!”). Tonight’s theme is: patriarchal oppression. “Wait,” you think, “isn’t that the theme every night?” She thinks you treat her like a “coffee machine in an office.” “That is the stupidest thing anyone has said to me,” you think, but you bite your tongue in fear that she’ll rip it out and belly dance all over it. “Is this love, or is it Memorex?” Just when you think you hate her, you love her all over again. “Yes,” you want to say, “I do have it in me. There is: indeed: a she-wolf living inside me. I’m gonna let it out. I’m gonna let it out, dammit!” And so you do, except you’re not that flexible, and you’re not that great at dancing. In fact, you look like you’re caught in a blender. You are Woody Allen on the dance floor. Still, your girlfriend is proud. You have gone from square, alpha male to fierce, independent woman in one night. Because she loves you, she rips out your heart and eats it. You just smile with a tear in your eye and say, “That’s my little she-wolf.”