As a follow-up to Lee and Sheely’s excellent Think/Counterthink on the Miley Cyrus track “Party in the U.S.A.,” this edition of Musical Talmud wades into the shin-deep puddle of pop that ebbs and flows in the general area of the Jonas Brothers — the sunny shoal of music that feels comfortably warm until you realize it is the kiddie pool, at which point it becomes gross and creepy.

Listeners to the podcast (and other people who make the quixotic choice of hearing me talk) know that I have my money on a dog in the Disney Channel Music fight — although she is a young girl and it’s not a nice or appropriate thing to call girls dogs. And no, I don’t have inappropriate designs on her. But I like her music and think she has a bright future.

Today in Musical Talmud, we discuss “Get Back,” the first single off the first solo album (which came out last year) by the talented singer and, in the time-honored and resurgent American tradition of pop stars who rise to stardom from movie musicals (talk about the new Great Depression!), not-especially-great-actress Demi Lovato.

And yes, she actually wrote it.

[Can you take me higher? Today, the Overthinkers enter the Think Tank to tackle the greatest key change in popular music. Read the four entries and vote for your favorite at the end. —Ed.]

Fenzel, The Thong Song

Pop songs often lie, and that’s fine. There’s something aspirational about pop music — it’s escapist, and it hopes for a world much different from our own. In this world, Britney is a Slave 4 U, everybody gets to be immortal with the Oasis Brothers, and Whitney Houston will always love Kevin Costner. It’s liberating, sort of. At the very least, it relieves us a bit of the mundanity of the real world.

But Sisqo gives us a special sort of delusion. At the peak of a mounting cascade of modulations that wails to the heavens with a fury and pathos no undergarment ever deserved, Sisqo belts out the greatest counterfactual in all of music.