We're at a point where unemployed cavemen pedal credit cards on TV, Tyra Banks has not one, but two, programs of her own, and Lindsay Lohan is, for some reason, famous. No wonder D4L's "Laffy Taffy," a song whose badness was practically inconceivable even 10 short years ago, has captured the hearts and minds of our great nation.

This has been the best year on record for the horrifying toe-tapper, those songs you love despite every fiber of good sense in your being (my humps, my humps, my humps) and that you pray nightly your mother never hears. And, dubious though the honor may be, "Laffy Taffy" might take the proverbial cake of crap for 2005. It is a song in which someone says, "Girl, shake that laffy taffy," or something like it, roughly 50 times in less than four minutes.

You'd like to think that as a species, we would've evolved beyond the point where something like that would actually affect us. But as a song for dancing as well as a curiosity of our increasingly ludicrous culture, "Laffy Taffy" is a force of nature all its own. It is intoxicatingly, hypnotically awful, but it'll probably outlive us all, and I suggest we surrender to it before it eats us.

The rest of D4L's debut full-length, Down 4 Life, isn't much to bark at, a formless grab bag of played-out Southern rap conventions nowhere near as compelling as its lead single. I don't suggest you buy it. I do, however, suggest you begin to brace yourselves now. Somewhere, there's somebody who wants nothing more than to write a song even worse than "Laffy Taffy."

-- Reviewed by Paul Thompson