chart.

christina milian has the most perfect bubblegum r'n'b voice, she makes all her sustained proper singing bits really pretty to offset the chewy latina thing and her own singles are great - so great that spizzazzz was started just so we could say she's fucking cool. but now she's slumming it with passive-aggressive romeo and using the "top billin'" beat, which isn't automatically a bad thing i suppose, i just can't imagine romeo making a good hiphop-tempo record ever (he has the second-worst "seductive" style in all of music behind s****y [yay, he's at number ten!], though it's not drastically different from nelly's delicate flow on "dilemma" - maybe its romeo's annoying face!). milian makes it worth hearing but she's showing her lack of world-beating success by appearing at all - this shouldn't matter but i don't want to feel like i'm listening to second rate pop by second rate pop stars! it's not like j lo would have done this song, and that's the barometer by which milian must be judged (not always counting actual quality of music).

only "beautiful stranger" has transcended madonna's horribly coached voice in like the past eight years; "die another day" was ear-pricking for a few listens but all the melodrama is lame and now i don't want to play it again ever.

hearing that whitney's new song was called "whatchulookinat", i wanted to believe it would be a dancehall beat made entirely from gunshot noises - the chorus would be a brief silence before whitney screamed "whatchu lookin at!? (bang! bang!)" like five or six times, and the verses would be all about which haters she'd like to shoot with big motherfucking guns! and oh look, the sweaty-lipped, paranoid lyrics of the released song really are scary, even if the production is some unremarkable puffy-ness. there was surely a choice to be made on this comeback: to present a 'same as it ever was/i've been doing this for years' classic vibe where all her problems are put aside to bask in the glory of being a soul diva; or to address everyone who's fucked with her, a tactic which can only make her seem even crazier! can you guess which path she chose?? (she even explicitly tries to alienate everyone who's not in her "strong following" of good-hearted whitney obsessives!)

amerie (at number forty!) faces the plight of most american urban acts who don't get picked up for heavy a-list radio one love - a shame of course cuz "why don't we fall in love" brings the drama nicely, even if it's more of a summer melancholy style than winter chill (the video is set on the first day of summer, you dumbo marketing fucks!). i suppose the disappointing sales are mostly to do with the lack of having anything familiar to hang it on, like a nep beat or a cameo by a rapper who is properly famous here, which ludacris still isn't, thank christ. i wish "grindin" would get released over here because i can't even fathom whether it would do well or not. that's exciting!

all the other new entries are impossibly bad.