by Ray Jr. feat. Erika Kayne
(YouTube)
You never know what you're going to get from the internet. Sometimes if you look in the right places—Facebook on a weeknight, for example—you find out that songs like this one exist. Yes, you read the subtitle right: The song's chorus features a very flat R&B subdiva belting a lyric that, once heard, is never forgotten: "DON'T CUM IN ME, DON'T CUM IN MAAAYYY/DON'T CUM IN ME, DON'T CUM IN MAAAYYY." There is also a rapper dude whose idea of a boast is that he "pops so many pills, I can fuck for a week," as well as the flatly immortal "love to hear that nookie fart." Thanks for everything, internet.
by Ladysmith Black Mambazo
(www.soundcloud.com/jbleicher)
Of course, the internet does sometimes provide. (In this case, through a publicist's e-mail.) It's amazing this song hadn't happened already: Who better to extol the virtues of a quack-quack here and a quack-quack there than the world's foremost Zulu a cappella vocal group, who can quack just as well as they can do everything else? They cluck, moo, whinny, snort, and do that tongue-rolling trilling noise they do in every song, as well as announce what they're doing: "It's a chicken!" "A pig." The kicker is the spoken finale: "For all of us in Ladysmith Black Mambazo, we want to thank you for visiting our farm in South Africa."
by the Mountain Goats
(YouTube)
In front of a red curtain, alone with an acoustic guitar, John Darnielle starts this one like a joke: "This is a song with the same four chords I use most of the time/When I've got something on my mind." The audience laughs, and then Darnielle stops them cold with a simple, heartbreaking refrain: "People were mean to you/But I always thought you were cool." This was high school, and however long down the road he is, his narrator offers the kindest thought he can spare: "I hope you love your life like I love mine." It's on YouTube and will apparently stay there: Darnielle offered it up via his Twitter account, calling it "a song I played that someone video'd, and it won't be on the next album." Why on earth not?