I don't think "Brave" is all that good a song either, but I mean, at least it doesn't feature a couplet as inane as "I went from zero / To my own hero"

Sadly, this is her highest-rated album on the site.

"Dark Horse" is one of the better tracks on the album, but for god knows what reason it just gives up once it gets to the chorus.

"I firmly believe Teenage Dream is one of the best pop songs of the last decade"
Oh my god, thank you. Like, I'm not a big fan of Katy Perry in general but that song just does not get enough credit.

In Perry's defense, if you watch any interviews with McKee, you'll see she cites actual stories about the writing processes for given songs, including Perry's best song to date, "Teenage Dream," where she pretty specifically details how the two of them wrote the song together. And as I mentioned elsewhere in the…

"What is the relationship between the 'artist' and the 'art'? Is Katy Perry/Rihanna/Miley/Lady Gaga/Bieber/Gomez writing the stuff she/he sings? If not, then who is? And what type of decision-making process does each song go through before it ends up on a record?"
It varies by artist; those like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus,…

No more wailing than Ke$ha's album got, which honestly was a bit more tame than I expected. Granted, I think CRJ's album probably deserved a higher grade than Ke$ha's got and who knows how the AV Club commentariat would have responded to a B+/A-.

I'm not sure why I like Craig as much as I do so far. It might just be Eichner's delivery.

I'm an enthusiast of girl pop, though I am a man: I prefer Selena Gomez over her Disney contemporaries, despite having less personality than Miley and less of a voice than Demi Lovato, she seems to get the best songs. She's a bit like Britney in that regard; her facelessness somehow manages to work in her favor. Her…

Ehhhh, I definitely agree on the first part, but even outside the realm of love songs I still tend to prefer female vocalists over male vocalists.

The music section has always been the AV Club's weakest. They really only review three or four albums a week and it's disappointing.

I find both songs repugnant, but at least "We Can't Stop"'s repugnancy is solely limited to the lyrics and vocals. "Royals" is pretty awful all around. It's the most undeservedly self-satisfied number one of the year so far, which is quite the achievement considering it's preceded by Katy Perry's "Roar."

Meh. Once they started leaving for tribal with almost no strategery beforehand I knew something was up. I mean, Brad basically said "and that's it, Ciera's going home" or something along those lines. I figured something was going to go awry, but I wasn't expecting Caleb to be the one to start it.

But what about Mariah Carey and Miguel's "#Beautiful"? It's easily one of the year's best singles, and I say that as someone who's never even been a fan of Mariah Carey!

Meh. There are a few solid tracks here ("Team," "A World Alone," and "Ribs," chiefly) but for the most part this is just Lana Del Rey pastiche minus the glamor and glitz with narrower lyrical perspectives and filtered through an affectless alto. I'm not really getting how this album and "Royals" are so popular. She's…

I'm kind of surprised by how much Pitchfork hated this, considering Part 1 scored an 8.4, and the review was done by the same guy.

Well here's some 30 Rock news: Season 7 just got added to Netflix

Wow I am not very good at picking people. My first draft was Tyson, Marissa, Candice, and Rachel. Two of the four got sent to Redemption Island in the first episode, so I changed it and now one of the four is on Redemption Island again.

I…sort of agree. I liked "I Love It" at first but after a couple plays the "abrasiveness" got to be too much of a drag on the song and I grew tired of it pretty quickly. "All Night" definitely downs the abrasiveness, but that's really the only difference to me. It feels more like a mellower remix of the same song.…

The first song of theirs that I heard was "Gun" and I so immediately fell in love with it that I refused to listen to any of their other songs because I just knew they weren't going to live up to that one song. But then I listened to "The Mother We Share" and I was amazed to find that I loved it JUST AS MUCH.