Bringing a dog to life with music (Radio in Retrospect #1)

14 May, 2026

I want to force myself to think about and subsequently write about something, and writing about Sophie made me realize that I want to write more about music in specific. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, sure, but that's awesome on its face. So, over the course of about a dozen posts, I'll be revisiting the strange music of America at the end of 2010. We may weep, we may cringe, we may find meaning; and we will repeat this process until I've staked an opinion on every song on the Billboard Year-End Top 100 of 2010.

As a sort of framing device I'll be applying letter grades to each song (A++ to F-). I'm choosing such a frivolous system so it doesn't distract from the point of the music review: to say something insightful about as many songs as possible, and something witty about the rest.

#100: Lover, Lover — Jerrod Niemann

So let's start off with a confession: Historically, I haven't been a fan of country music sung by men. I was once a "no rap no country" bro, and while I've made drastic changes to both my taste and my gender, I only came out of the former shell out of affection for Carrie Underwood¹. I'm still not singing along to "Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit". So I judged Jerrod Niemann by his cover, and thus I was... pleasantly surprised!

This song is a cover of "You Don't Treat Me No Good No More" by the group Sonia Dada. It's groovy, it's catchy, and it feels like it comes from a human instead of a label. The chorus has nice harmonies with a soul bent, and they never get boring or grating. I'm also a sucker for a good breakdown, and this song has one! My main critique is that as I listen to it, I want to fast-forward through the verses to get to the chorus again. But since the chorus is so much more memorable than the verses, when I revisit the memory of listening to this song I only think about the part that I remember! This psychological trick makes me smile thinking about the song.

Rating: Above forgettable (B)

#99: Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart — Alicia Keys

So this song bores me. It's repetitive, it's melodramatic, it's a certified Brick Wall Experience. Something about the technology and clubbing culture of the 2010s made it a breeding ground for songs with mixing that doesn't sound good when you listen to it ten years later on headphones. I truly have little to say about this song, musically, other than that it sounds like a classical composer discovered the 80's, but not in an interesting way. Instead I want to talk about the music video, wherein Alicia Keys brings a dog back to life for no reason.

You heard me. Let's sum up the video. First, after a weird, ominous introduction, Alicia Keys writhes on a bed sexlessly yet erotically, in a way well within the grammar of music videos. Second, Miss Keys wanders around a dilapidated building for a minute. Then, of course, she brings a dog to life. That is, Alicia Keys sees a child crying over the limp body of a little doggy, and casually uses the superpowers she apparently has to reanimate the lifeless pooch on the spot. The weirdness dam is broken; now she gets on her tron bike, scoots off, and super jumps to the top of a building so she can shimmy more (she has not heretofore indicated that she has a tron bike or super jump powers; recall that for the first 100 seconds of the video, she's been mostly hanging out). As the song winds down, she has some sort of superpower-type interaction with a former-lover-type man (something between stealing his powers and force choking him) and zooms off to play piano and reminisce over a photograph. Nothing makes sense on a literal level, and even on the level of ideas and themes the connection is paperthin.

My heart yearns to like this video. I just watched The Wall recently and had a great time in part because the plot plays second fiddle to the weird tangle of themes and emotions. Maybe that sounds like what this is, but it's just not. In fact, for such a bizarre video, I would have preferred a little more auteurship, or even just a little more tightness. None of these perk-up-your-ears moments synchronize with the music — she doesn't bring the dog to life as the chorus hits, or anything like that. It truly could have been a music video for any Alicia Keys song. It's unique, but it's not touching; it's at best hypnotic in a way I associate with Mad Libs and exquisite corpse.

And most fascinating of all, I've watched it, like, five times to make sure I'm representing it accurately, and still have absolutely nothing to say about the song itself.

Rating: At least I get a clickbait title out of this (D)

#98: Teach Me How To Dougie — Cali Swag District

This is the first song on this list that I've heard before. I didn't care that much about this song as a kid, and I certainly wouldn't have cared if someone told me that the titular Dougie was rap pioneer Doug E. Fresh! But, as the quaintness of the name "Cali Swag District" shows, time changes us all. I feel like of the thousand songs trying to do the "rap over a simple, hypnotic beat" strategy around this time, this one is somewhere on the top of the heap. The beat just demands your attention, and it develops so subtly yet so perfectly over the song.

But most importantly, I like the weird way this song plays with the line-dance genre. Picture the female singer: a partygoer, eager to learn the Cupid shuffle or the cha-cha slide, desperate for some way to get on the dance floor and move in a way that they can't fuck up. "Teach me how to Dougie," says she. And to this, Smoove turns away from her, facing the camera, and tells us: "All my bitches love me". That was apparently his takeaway from this interaction. I find this both devastatingly funny and deeply refreshing.

Rating: I'm bitches (that is, I love him) (A-)

#97: Smile — Uncle Kracker

What is there to say about a song called "Smile" by a man who, of his own volition, goes by the name "Uncle Kracker-with-a-K"? It's twee, it's dull, it's giving "boy Kelly Clarkson". The chorus is just a list of boring similes. I could eat up this cavalcade of southernisms if they were delivered with southern charm, but they aren't, so they register as boring cliches. If you gave a low-temperature chatbot a line from the chorus, it would complete it, because every sentence in this song is of the form "you make me [VERB] like a [MOST OBVIOUS POSSIBLE NOUN]". It's scarcely tolerable. If it approaches true genius, it's that it's not interesting enough for me to latch onto it, and therefore feel true anger.

Rating: You make me groan like a pun (D)

#96: Life After You — Daughtry

So when I posed this little game to myself, where I find something to say about every Billboard Top 100 song of 2010, I did consider that sometimes I would have to listen to two bad songs in a row. This is that moment.

This is better than "Smile", in the same way that plain Wonderbread is better than burnt Wonderbread, but it's melodramatic and felt twice as long as it was. I'm really averse to the American Idol house style, and honestly to a large swath of emotional male vocalists. On the one hand, that's not Daughtry's fault; on the other, there are plenty of Daughty-type songs I could find something to say about, and this isn't one of them.

Rating: In one ear and out the other (D+)

#95: King of Anything — Sara Bareilles

Full disclosure: I had a celebrity crush on Sara Bareilles as a kid. I was genuinely crestfallen the first time I relistened to her flagship single "Brave" as an adult. It didn't hold up to my memory of it, the version of the song I instinctively sanded down into a perfect pearl out of lost affection.

That's why I'm pleased to report that "King of Anything" slaps. It's rooted in the vibes of the late 2000s with its quirky little percussion, but the a capella elements still sound fresh. It's bright and fun! There are two things I really like. First, the title of the song suggests a sort of enjambment, where we read the refrain "Who died and made you king of anything" such that "king of anything" is a self-contained noun phrase, like "ruler of everything". That poetry play is fun, and makes the song feel less repetitive. Second, and perhaps more vitally, I love Bareilles' little "and yoo~" in the chorus.

Rating: Genuinely good pop (A)

#94: American Honey — Lady A

Sorry, honey. Mommy can't waste time making fun of Lady A (fka Lady Antebellum) for their name change. Mommy's busy wondering why this song is called "American Honey".

I have never seen the words "America" and "honey" appear so many times in tandem without any meaning being created, and I've skimmed the Book of Mormon. The vibe is very "The guitarist thought of a phrase that had a ring to it, and we went with our first draft". Lady A probably has genuine feelings of nostalgia, but they don't make it onto the page, or into my ears — they're not loading up this phrase with any meaning, they're just stapling it to a vague sense of "was-ness". And this happens every single stanza! It's boring, that's just it.

I just feel like Lady A is doing nostalgiabait wrong. I don't know the performers' hearts — maybe they really are nostalgic for American honey in specific. But I do suspect that they, or at least many of their listeners, would be equally affected by some other word that forms amphibraphic bimeter when placed after "American". American meadow. American lover. American summer. My search history is full of phrases like "is honey a culture war thing" and "honey industry 1980s" because I just don't get it otherwise. My heart is hardened, I'm sorry.

Also, this crosses more into "unreasonable bias" than "accounting for taste": I hate uplifting songs in the third-person. I mean, I don't like "uplifting" songs generally, so it's not like they're losing out on a potential album purchase. But if you're talking about how "she" was afflicted but then persevered, or how "she" grew up happy and honey and wise or whatever happens in this song, my arbitrary preference is mostly that you put on a damn first-person persona or go home.

Rating: Nominative Determinists Stunned As Lady A Earns (D-)

#93: The Only Exception — Paramore

I've heard this song a lot, but I never would have guessed it was the same Paramore that gave us "Into You" and "Misery Business". Good for them; they have some serious range!

This is a hard song to describe liking because it just has good nuts and bolts. Good vocal performance, good production, good arrangement. A bridge that's genuinely surprising or affecting, and not just random bullshit to break up the monotony. Speaking of monotony, it's funny that after criticizing American Honey for being repetitive I'm now heaping praise onto a song whose chorus is one sentence repeated four times. Part of it is that it's the sort of sentence that makes sense to repeat — I think a lot of that comes down to the power of the address, the word "you". Part of it is that Hayley Paramore's voice is angelic. Part of it is that there's an interesting melody. Part of it is that they've discovered the existence of a fifth chord. It's all fundamentals. The line between "The Only Exception" and "ew, another repetitive pop song with a pentatonic melody" is thin, and the skill ceiling is high. That's art for you.

2010, as we will see, was a bad year for the dynamics enjoyers among us. So many songs start at approximately the intensity they end, or escalate by adding, like, one grating synth. Granted, in 2010 the tastemakers were out clubbing instead of listening to songs start-to-finish with noise-canceling headphones; maybe those decisions work better in that environment. I wouldn't know, that's not my scene. What I do know is that when Hayley Paramore gets quiet — genuinely quiet — and then loud again, and then even louder and throatier into the tag, it's soulwarming.

Rating: Genuinely good pop (A+)

This was fun, right? Tune in next time, where we'll ask: Does the line "Guns turn boys into pussies, sex change" become better or worse if it's the only interesting line in the verse? Don't forget to subscribe via RSS or mailing list to find out, and tell me what you thought in the meantime.

#music #radio-retro