Announcement: Chanteuse and rapper lock eyes

Merely for stomping over the thriving subgenre inaugurated by Method Man and Mary J. Blige (and adulterated to increasingly cowardly returns) of shoving sensitive poetry in a chanteuse's ear that the rapper is too thuggish to repeat himself, Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland's "Promiscuous" is the single of the year. This is one of the few contemporary R&B hits in which the rapper and chanteuse are evenly matched -- in this case it's all the more impressive considering the chanteuse in question is birdbrain Nelly Furtado. It's an honest-to-goodness dialogue, fraught with tension and smut, and as ludicrous in its way as Raekwon and Ghostface trading lines*. As for Timbo, well, all those records with Aaliyah and Missy Elliott sure helped.

* Maybe the trend was dying anyway. Ghostface, always the cuddliest Wu-ster, wheezes like the Irish grandma in a John Ford movie in his duet with Ne-Yo, "Back Like That."