by RuPaul
(RuCo)

For the past month, since the finale of RuPaul's Drag Race on Logo TV, I have been walking around the apartment dazedly singing, "Don't be jealous of my boogie, don't be jealous of my boogie, don't be jealous" over and over again to myself, barely realizing it. So even though the song actually came out in 2009, I'm counting it as a 2010 single because it got exposed wider than ever on the back of a staged catfight between the three drag performers the program chose between for the apparently official title of Next Drag Superstar. Not to mention that it was the final song that the two contestants up for elimination had to, in Ru's immortal words, "lip-synch for your life." As much tricksterism as parody, the show's drag routines are as razor sharp as they are affectionate, and, even knowing that Drag Race wouldn't be possible if not for the handful of shows it parodies, particularly Project Runway (Ru's even got a Models of the Runway–style spin-off titled—what else?—Untucked), the program gives me more hope for TV than anything I've seen since Mad Men. At the least, it's the funniest and probably best TV show a pop artist (however briefly and however eccentrically) has ever starred in.

by Northern Portrait
(Matinée)

Man, do these guys rip off the Smiths! Boy, does it sound good! They're from Copenhagen, so they immediately sound rounder, prettier, gauzier, even harder to take seriously, and more Euro-trilly than their obvious model, and it turns out that shamelessness suits the sound just fine.

by Distance
(Chestplate)

Back before dubstep exploded into a zillion shards, each intersecting with some other aspect of dance-floor music you'd never have imagined, my favorite practitioner of the genre was the UK's Greg Sanders, aka Distance, whose 2007 My Demons has a sleek classicism that makes the music sound both utterly new and like it's been around for decades. The A-side of this new 12-inch leans in the gnarlier "wobble" direction the likes of Caspa have made hay with—and it gives me bad techstep flashbacks. But the B picks right up like My Demons had happened yesterday. And if dubstep were moving as leisurely as most other dance music in evolutionary terms, yesterday is exactly when My Demons would have come out.