With the Down Guillotine

When Swedish pop icon Robyn revealed her unique plans regarding a long-awaited followup to her smash 2005 self-titled album - namely, plans to release no fewer than three albums by the end of 2010 - even the most loyal Robyn fans (myself included) met the news with a mixture of giddy excitement and, frankly, varying degrees of incredulity. Body Talk Pt. 1 dropped in June following by as much as three months the individual releases of no fewer than four of the eight tracks on the album, and though appetites were whetted, timing still caused even major Robyn proponents like Pitchfork to refer to the three-album project with tentative vocabulary. Then came the word, as the diminutive Swede was rounding up a successful U.S. mini-tour with newly dance-oriented American singer Kelis, that Body Talk Pt. 2 was ready for a September 6 UK release (a US release date of September 7 followed, albeit not quite swiftly enough to calm some nervous hearts stateside), and a track listing coinciding with the release of the second album's lead single "Hang With Me" (accompanied by a charming if not exactly wave-making video) confirmed that the penultimate offering of the proposed trilogy would contain the much buzzed-about collaboration with rapper Snoop Dogg, best known recently as the other culprit behind Katy Perry's inescapable summer number one "California Gurls."

Fortunately for this impatient Robyn fan, a certain resourceful significant other of mine has managed to acquire a rather advanced copy of the second of what now looks like it may actually be three albums Robyn drops in 2010. And it's GOOD. (More on that later, but trust me.) And for you, my loyal readers, I hereby offer you a first listen to the fabled collaboration with the D. O. double-G, a raucous, boastful display of entirely deserved superiority sprinkled with plenty of expletives, obligatory and fabulously cringe-inducing rhymes, and carried along by a high-tempo, speaker-bursting bass line. This is not the first time the two pop music giants have shared the same track, although Robyn's participation in the Fyre Department remix to Snoop Dogg's 2008 single "Sexual Eruption" was subsequent to the original track's release and not a "collaboration" in the same sense.

The plot of the new track, you ask? Well, it's essentially four minutes of Robyn and "Big Snoopy Dogg" alternating verses (with the occasional chorus thrown in) delineating all of the supposed tough guys of the world who "know better than to fuck with" them. Among them: the French, the Russians, the LAPD, the CIA, the FBI, the Vatican ("I sat down with the Romans," Robyn says, "And said we need a black pope, but she better be a woman"), the music industry, and the Devil himself.

Sounds pretty badass, but what else would you expect when two of the most consistently enjoyable artists working today team up to throw it down? Check out the new track and let me know what you think!

Dolce

Pink

Red It

Yellow

Mellow Yellow

Forget About Your Monday Morning

I've been ragging on Christina Aguilera a lot lately, I realize, which is a shame because I happen to hold her in particularly high regard as an artist (which is a major reason I've been coming down hard on her recently). Back to Basics is one of the three or four albums of the last decade I have most admired both aesthetically and artistically, and - critics be damned - Stripped is perhaps the single most iconic and influential album of my past ten years, nearly as much as No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom and Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill defined my adolescence. Plus, I've discovered that ever since the cathartic release of my critical frustration with it last week, I've become able to actually enjoy Bionic exponentially more to the point that many of the tracks have found their way onto my weekly-changing pop attention deficit disorder on-the-go playlists.

So I thought I'd through Xtina a little bone today and spend a paragraph or so discussing something she's done recently that I thoroughly like. Hence, I present to you the bonus track "Monday Morning," which is among my two or three favorite cuts on Bionic (and, to be fair, at one point was my uncontested top pick). And hey, it couldn't be more timely. The breezy, hakuna matata bonus track fits thematically with its parent album but it could hardly sound more different, at least in terms of tempo and tone (the Hill & Switch production, centering on a boomeranging electronic descant, is an obvious little sister to the producing team's great "Elastic Love"). Actually, the first time I listened to Bionic start to finish I wasn't sure where album ended and bonus began (or I lost count somewhere in the eighteen-track bombardment) and heard "Monday Morning" as the album's closing track - and I have to say, considering the overwhelming and largely negative effect the album had upon me at first run, I found a bit of solace in "Monday Morning," finding it an enjoyable, grounding stress reliever that allowed me an easier comedown (in hindsight, the actual closer, "Vanity," is exponentially more appropriate). Now that I've gotten wise, I enjoy this little bonus gem in a way few tracks can be: as a pleasant, stand-alone morsel of music by an artist of whom I am fond, free from the burden or bond of any particular album or specific time.

Tropic Thunder

Windswept

Eeny, Weeny, Teeny Weenie

Even if the early '90s were something of a dark age for pop music, I have to give the era props: from Madonna's fantastic double whammy of "Justify My Love" and "Erotica" on through the first half of the decade, there was some raunchy stuff being put out there by some of the more sexually liberated women in the music industry. What better way to celebrate this Hump Day than striking a blow for censorship-free media with something from the R-rated archives of '90s pop music? Since I'm also feeling a little catty at present, for the first in what will become a regular midweek morsel here on Vertigo Shtick here's a snarky little ditty from 1994, 20 Fingers' thumping first single "Short Dick Man" as today's Song for the Day.

"Short Dick Man"

20 Fingers

20 Fingers

(ZYX, 1994)

Trivia: "Short Dick Man" was written and produced by 20 Fingers, aka Charlie Babie and Manfred Mohr, with vocals by Gillette, who also included the track on her solo album On The Attack. The track was a big European hit and held the French number one spot for several weeks, although in the UK it was released in a censored version titled "Short Short Man."

I know, right?