Jay Jay French of Twisted Sister has remade his band's "I Wanna Rock" into "I Want Barack" (singer Dee Snider isn't on the song because he endorses John McCain). Remember when Tag Team re-appropriated "Whomp! (There It Is)" for Addams Family Values? This is worse.

What It Is: The entry into the 21st century for James Todd Smith (aka LL Cool J).

What the Idea Was: After spending most of the 1990s as an ab model, LL Cool J tried to come back to his harder roots (with mixed results) while declaring himself the "greatest of all time."

Why It's Only a Penny: LL should know that cred cannot be bought over the span of a single album (especially after that video for "Hey Lover," not to mention In the House), but he tries to do it anyway. The result is a strange mix of pop-centric funk beats accompanied by LL's tough guy stories, with guest spots from DMX, XZibit, Prodigy and Method Man (but also from almost-was Amil and never-weres Kelly Price and Kandice Love). Also, the full title is (deep breath) G.O.A.T. Featuring James T. Smith, The Greatest of All Time.

Why It's Worth the Shipping: With the pretty good jams "Take It Off," "Fuhgidabowdit" and "U Can't Fuck With Me," it essentially amounts to the last good LL Cool J album (were you even aware the guy put out three albums since this one?). The beats, while not terribly interesting, represent a noble attempt to bridge the two sides of LL's career. There is great, tight story telling on songs like "Homicide," but it's often derailed by awkward attempts at profundity (the chorus of "Homicide" is "I don't mean this in a disrespectful way/But Columbine happens in the hood every day"). In other words: a failure, but a pretty fascinating one.

Above is the album cover for Madonna's new album Hard Candy. Seriously. There are many questions (for example, "Is she feeling okay?"), but the main one is this: What is Madonna the champion of? Candy? Straddling? She's taping her hands — does she want to challenge UFC Lightweight Champion B.J. Penn? (Let's hope not, as I'm pretty sure he'd snap her arms off.) The mind reels.

Britney Spears premieres her new animated video today, which made me think of this. The above clip is the opening to Kingdom Hearts 2, a video game for Playstation 2 that combines that the Final Fantasy game series with the Disney universe. The video is a delightfully trippy piece of Japanese video game animation, but the song underneath it is truly awesome: it's by Utada Hikaru, a Japanese dance-pop singer who has apparently sold forty-one million albums worldwide. Since only dorks like myself have gotten the chance to experience "My Sanctuary" (a haunting piece of jagged disco), I now share it with the universe. Clearly, Britney has an uphill battle ahead of her. Now I'll go back to playing Dungeons and Dragons.

There are thousands of albums available online for as little as one cent (which is far more satisfying than downloading for free, for some reason). Some of them are gems. Here is one of them.

What It Is: The only major label release from Girls Against Boys, a Washington, D.C.-bred, keyboard-heavy post-hardcore band who put out a series of excellent albums in the early 1990s (including Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby and House of GVSB).

What the Idea Was: Girls Against Boys combined two things that record executives were excited about in the mid-'90s: alt-rock and dance music. Their dangerous-sounding low end dance beats seemed like a natural fit for an industry who thought the Prodigy was going to be the next big thing.

Why It's Only a Penny: By the time this album came out in 1998, both the alt-rock and electronica bubbles had essentially burst. It doesn't help that the album sometimes sounds like a parody of a Girls Against Boys recording and contains the lyric "Kiss my soundsystem/Eat my headache." Also, it's called Freak On Ica.

Why It's Worth the Shipping: "Psycho-Future" and "Push the Fader" are hard-hitting, sludgy workouts that are interrupted by jagged shards of post-punk guitar. Had this album come out a few years earlier, these guys could have totally opened for U2.

For some reason (likely because of the recent NBA All-Star festivities), a tiny little album called B-Ball's Best Kept Secret has snuck back into the wilds of the Internet zeitgeist. Released in 1994, B-Ball's Best Kept Secret handed the microphone over to some hoops heroes and let them rap. Because I love both hip-hop and basketball, I procured a copy and have been listening to it non-stop. Some of the performers acquit themselves nicely: Shaquille O'Neal has always been a functional (if not terribly impressive) MC, and former Slam Dunk champ Cedric Ceballos could probably pass as a low-level Dipset member. Sadly, the boobie prize lands in the lap of Malik Sealy, a former journeyman who was tragically killed by a drunk driver in 2000. His song, "Lost in the Sauce," is stilted and awkward, with one of those choruses that sounds like it's trying to coin slang and a saxophone sample that might be a leftover from Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rump Shaker." It's also one of two songs that use the line "Life is a jumpshot" (Sealy says, "Sometimes you're on or sometimes you might be off," while Chris Mills merely rhymes "Sometimes it's not"). It's a bummer.

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As Peter Travers has noted elswhere on this website, the backlash against Juno was typical and inevitable. I like to think I was ahead of the curve on this, as the first ten minutes of that movie hurt real bad when I saw it at a press screening a few months ago. Though the movie evens out a bit after that first scene, I still thought Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning script was too cloying and occasionally offensive.

But last night I was watching Gilmore Girls on DVD (I am in season one and plan on watching the whole series over the next few months, a project I recently undertook with The X-Files; see how glamorous the life of a rock critic can be?) and I realized something: Juno MacGuff is just Rory Gilmore with different cultural references.

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