Click to listen to Glee's "Loser Like Me"

For their first foray into original music, the producers of Glee didn't exactly go out on a limb: They hired Swedish songwriting genius Max Martin, the most reliable and prolific hitmaker of the last decade and a half. The results are predictably fizzy: a fiendishly catchy verse with a hopped-up beat and pop-funk chicken-scratch guitars, followed by an even catchier singsong chorus. The lyric, belted out with bright-sided earnestness by Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, distills the show's theme: the mystical power of a good tune and a well-choreographed jazz hands routine to turn geeks into gods. "I could be a superstar," Monteith exults, "I'll see you when you wash my car."

Photos: TV on the Cover of Rolling Stone

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.