2005: #10 - "Hollaback Girl"

Where songs like "Mickey" or Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" employ actual cheerleading sounds and melodies, while at the same time masquerading as legitimate songs with legitimate lyrics, and end up sounding half-catchy and half-juvenile in the process, "Hollaback Girl" just sounds 100% schizophrenic and delusional, the sound of a 40-year old woman screeching out non-sequiturs and pretending she is in high school, all while the hardest beats and handclaps you'll ever hear on Top 40 radio merge with beautiful, minimal and perfectly-placed synth melodies and harmonies. We don't have a clue what it intends to achieve, and therein lies its greatness.

Dubbed by some as the most annoying song of all-time, "Hollaback Girl", with its puzzling contrast of perfectly inane lyrics and insanely perfect melody and sonics, has antagonized our ironic bullshit detector for over 5 years. We could never decide if it was good, so-bad-it's-good, ironically bad, or flat out bad. Now, much older and somewhat wiser, we're able to conclude that not only is Gwen Stefani totally serious here, but that the song is utterly unclassifiable. It's not quite the best song of 2005, it can't possibly be the worst, but there is certainly no in-between ground.