It’s a Hit

by Beyoncé
(Music World)

You may have heard that Beyoncé is not one but two people on
her new album, which even in its deluxe edition spreads a CD’s worth of
music over two, just in case you were wondering whose lawyers won the
record-company contract negotiations. Too bad I Am… Sasha
Fierce would boil down to a decent EP, this song being the clear,
obvious standout. Where the album’s other party tracks seem to strain
to sound futuristic or even utterly right-now (as with “Diva,” a
wholesale rewrite of Lil Wayne’s “A Milli”), the “Single Ladies” track
just wows and flutters as giddily as any great bubblegum: clacking
double-dutch jump-rope rhythm, depth-charge synth-bass, keyboard lines
like pinwheels. And of course a lyric about how the good thing B’s got
is no longer up for grabs because you were too big a schmuck to nab it
while the nabbing was good—this rich, successful, apparently
happily married woman’s greatest theme.

by Solange
(Music World)

Beyoncé’s younger sister, Solange, emerged as a fairly
cookie-cutter R&B diva earlier in the decade, but on her second
album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, she mines a far more
appealing vein, collaborating with Raphael Saadiq, the Neptunes,
Cee-Lo, and Mark Ronson on an album whose throwback sound evokes a more
candy-colored variation on Erykah Badu’s I-can-do-anything-I-want
mission statement New Amerykah: Part One. On this summery
single, Solange stretches a wonky metaphor (“Who would have known/The
rain and the sunshine/Baby, baby, built up these walls of mine”) over
the Monkees’ classic “Mary Mary” breakbeat, sounding every bit as
strong as her big sis even as she purrs, “Ba-b-b-b-baby, don’t blow me
away.”

by Pink
(LaFace/Zomba)

“I’ve got a brand-new attitude,” she sings, “and I’m gonna wear it
tonight.” The attitude, in case you’re wondering, is called “Pat
Benatar”—only Benatar wished she had this kind of heavy,
overbearing compression. Oh, wait—no she didn’t, and neither in
her right mind does anyone else.