Khia's new single, “Be Your Lady,” is unremarkable R&B boilerplate with a sluggish rhythm that I can imagine clearing dance floors nationwide. What is remarkable about the song are the lyrics, which are helpfully flashed onscreen in the video below.

The crass materialism and unsexy salaciousness are breathtaking—or maybe I just don't listen to enough new R&B to be inured to this sort of mentality. The Atlanta-based singer's delivery doesn't reveal a trace of facetiousness; she seems utterly sincere when she declares, “if it ain't about that cash, then it ain't about us, honey.”

Maybe a lot of guys dig this sort of attitude, but it seems both toxically retrograde for the feminist “cause” (whatever that is nowadays) and corny (“I wanna meet your mother/I wanna cook your dinner and fold your clothes/I wanna have your baby, etc.”), and, I dunno, devoid of that good ol' romantic whatsis upon which male/female relations have been based for centuries. The lyrics have all the warmth of a corporate business plan (“I'm that bitch that you need on your side so you can run this shit"). But who cares if you can “eat out” Khia while she's fixing you breakfast “butt naked”?

Now, her 2002 club smash “My Neck, My Back” is more like it. Its single-minded, relentless focus on Khia receiving oral pleasure is refreshing in this male-dominated domain, and it has no pretensions other than to get a tongue (any tongue, as long as a man's attached to it) in her groove. Plus, the music's much sexier and, I daresay, cunning, than that of “Be Your Lady.”

“Be Your Lady”

“My Neck, My Back”

DJs! I call for a moratorium on playing Justice Vs Simian's “We Are Your Friends.” Please do not spin it again until at least 2009. This naggingly catchy tune was already played the hell out when I left Seattle in March of this year. Now when you play the track (I still hear it nearly every time I go out), you merely serve to broadcast your own lack of creativity and your willingness to pander to the sheeple. The horse is not only flogged to death; its remains are starting to reek something awful.

For everyone who doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about, check out the video below, and then imagine hearing the music to it every night for the past year+. I dare say that you too would want to put dynamite in any offending DJ's headphones.

Let Joe Cocker serenade you, lady.

Outside of Memphis Café in Costa Mesa, a group of us are chatting while inside Ubiquity hip-hop artist Ohmega Watts is DJing a set of strong if overly familiar cuts for Abstract Workshop’s Versatile night. We can see in the distance a figure walking toward us. To me, it looks like a man in drag. This person is wearing a tiara and a gaudily “classy” prom dress with a sash bearing some scrawl I can’t read. When the queen reaches us, it’s clear that this is a woman, perhaps in her late 40s. She holds a piece of paper with lyrics to “You Are So Beautiful (To Me),” the schmaltzy, oft-covered ballad with which Joe Cocker, Kenny Rogers and others have had hits. Tiara or no, this woman is not beautiful, not (to me), anyway.

With a tragic desperation, she asks each of us to sing this song to her. We all kindly reject her offer. A Ubiquity employee nicely advises her to contact his agent, adding that his performance price is exorbitant. I explain to her that if I sang this song, she’d regret ever being born. She takes my word for it. A local DJ asks her if he can take her photo with him in it. She agrees. Other folks are shooting photos and/or video of this pathetic scene, too. When the pathos becomes unbearable, I exit, with the song still unsung.

Ex-Soundgarden/ex-Audioslave vocalist Chris Cornell recently released a solo album, Carry On, which is an effortfully mediocre and thoroughly undistinguished collection of 40-something-former-hard-rock-guy-tentatively-enters-maturity songs. Ordinarily, I would let its arrival go without mention or second thought, but it contains one especially heinous crime to the auditory canals that deserves censure. I'm talking about his rendition of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean.”

First, I doubt anyone—especially your humble blogger—needs to hear “Billie Jean” ever again. As great and indelibly catchy as it is, the song's been overplayed so much, it's become as familiar and innocuous as the sound of your electric toothbrush or refrigerator hum. (I don't care how badly Jacko needs the money; please let this song go unsung.) Second, if you are going to cover “Billie Jean,” why would you ditch its incredibly funky and lithe rhythm and substitute it with a leaden blues arrangement and add a generic Guitar Center jagoff ax solo? And then why would you over-emote so wretchedly that you make Joe Cocker seem reserved in comparison? Like his fellow grunge icon Eddie Vedder, Cornell is under the tragic delusion that he has soul. Seriously, Chris (and Interscope Records), what the hell were you thinking? In a court of law, you would be sentenced to 10 years of looking at this website.