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1. Art Brut, “Direct Hit.” Eddie Argos is like a less dyspeptic Mark E. Smith, a man who clearly relishes the power of rock ‘n’ roll just as much as the ridiculousness of it. “Direct Hit” is from Art Brut’s follow-up to “Bang Bang Rock and Roll,” “It’s a Bit Complicated,” and it doesn’t have anything nearly as giddy/brilliant/stupid as “Good Weekend,” but it is still a great tool to use on friends who don’t believe that rock is fun.

2. The Budos Band, “His Girl.”

3. The Screaming Blue Messiahs, “Bikini Red.”

4. Midlake, “Head Home.”

5. TV On the Radio, “Snakes and Martyrs.”

6. Bruce Springsteen, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.” I have said many times that there are simply no good reasons for me to ever spin Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” again — I heard it so much during 1984-86 that it is a dead album for me. That said, “The River” lives on as a great slab of big-and-brilliant traditional rock, and it’s also the last Springsteen album that I truly loved — I admire and respect “Nebraska” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” but that’s not love.

“Magic” recaptures the classic E Street Band sound, and “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” (and “I’ll Work For Your Love”) is archetypal 1973-78 Springsteen. The lyrics play in that rough, rusty Jersey playground of his classic period and would read like self-parody if Springsteen didn’t thoroughly own this stuff. It’s also his best melody in years: it gave me chills when I first heard it, and if it catches me in the right mood two weeks after its release, it still does.

7. Feist feat. the Postal Service, “Mushaboom.”

8. Brian Eno, “1/1.”

9. Mew, “The Zookeeper’s Boy.”

10. Soft Cell, “Sex Dwarf.” I hate when this shows up in my shuffle, but it is what it is: a self-consciously decadent piece of leather-strap New Wave by Marc Almond, who did much better music as a solo artist in the late-’80s. The repetition was probably designed to sound lurid, but it veers closer to idiocy. An artifact from the black turtleneck/floppy hair days.

1. The Beatles, “Yellow Submarine.” What can be said about this song that has not been said 7 billion times in the past? Sure, those seeking deeper meaning have always pointed out its apocalyptic undertones, of people living in submarines after the Cold War suddenly heated up and the only way to avoid blisters and roving bands of cannibalistic mutants is to live underwater, presumably harvesting krill or plankton to keep your shipmates from envisioning you as having a roasted turkey for a body.

But I digress. All I know is that my son, Sam, was having a bad morning today — screaming his perfect little head off on the way to daycare/work. He only quieted down while “Yellow Submarine” played. Those guys knew how to make the kiddies happy and blow the minds of their parents/older siblings.

2. M.I.A., “Fire, Fire.” — This made him scream again. Somehow, polyrhythms and Third World rapping don’t cut it with Sam.

3. Roxy Music, “Same Old Scene.”

4. Hot Chip, “ABC.”

5. Princess Superstar, “Wet! Wet! Wet!” — Concetta Kirschner has a mouth about as clean as gas station plunger, but because Princess Supe (and her testosteroney colleague, MC Paul Barman) never moved beyond cult status, parents groups never rose up against her, thereby securing Platinum sales and enough bling to spangle Long Island. She’s also now 36, which makes her Jean Stapleton in hip-hop years, and makes her two and half times as old as Miley Cyrus, so the music industry’s already got her on the (Logan’s) run.

6. Josh Rouse, “Car Crash.”

7. The Postmarks, “Summers Never Seem To Last.”

8. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Half-Awake (Deb)”

9. Paul Weller, “Sweet Pea, My Sweet Pea.”

10. Ivy, “Digging Your Scene.” This is a cover of an over-electrified 1986 hit from the Blow Monkeys — you know, that kind of kitchen-sink production in which the mixer threw so many synth lines into the arrangement that it made people both twitch uncontrollably and buy parachute pants? Well, Adam Schlesinger, Dominque Durand and Andy Chase did it French Pop style, which perfectly rectifies a pretty great song about dangerous coupling.

This series was one of the earliest to premiere this season, and it came in with enough baggage to weigh down most the young competitors seen on this misbegotten con job — not to mention comparisons to an odd Stanford Prison Experiment-like incident in Norman back in the ’50s. Blasted by some critics for exploiting kids and investigated for possible violations of New Mexico’s child labor laws, “Kid Nation” put a bunch of kids in a supposed ghost town and purported to allow them to build their own society without adult interference.

So I was intrigued, mainly because it had “Lord of the Flies” overtones and, if done correctly by someone like, say R.J. Cutler, there could have even been a hint of reality to this reality television. Instead, “Kid Nation” is a super-lame “Survivor” rip-off, all the way down to dividing the 8-to15-year-old contestants into teams and creating “challenges.” And this ghost town — who is anyone kidding? Frontier City looks more authentic.

“Kid Nation” could have gotten it right if it had taken some kind of cross-section of society and just taped what happened. Instead, they cast the show for entertainment (pageant queen, delinquent, born leader, eccentric goofball) and manipulate the situation for maximum drama.