was great." Altogether, whatever offensiveness by the cover version was trivial until about 2010. By 2020, Folds had had five songs on Billboard's popular charts, starting in 1998 with his breakthrough his "Brick" and into 2015. Both in 2005, two of the five songs reached the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100. "Landed," highly promoted by Epic Records' major label Sony Music, on the Hot 100 for two weeks, peaked on February 26 at #77. The other, "featuring" bass guitarist Jared Reynolds and drummer Lindsay Jamieson as "Mr. Reynolds" and "Lin-Z," a rendition ironically sentimental, "had spread by word of mouth and was now doubling my audiences," if regrettably raising share of "drunken college boys," Folds recalls. "Bitches Ain't Shit," on the Hot 100 for the one week ending April 2, placed #71. "The cackles and singing from the audiences," writes a researcher, "suggest that they are hailed by the song, welcomed in, and engaged to be a part of it. And they like it." In gist, "the collision" of character's role versus performer's mold bares "the network" of unseen implications. Prefacing an April 2007 performance, Folds recalled "one nasty letter" and a few times of almost been beaten up, "once by a kind of uptight hippie woman who said it was demeaning to women." He referred her to "the lyrics department"—Dr. Dre—while her daughter, age 13, "apparently loves the song." At this Michigan State University show, the first line, Bitches ain't shit, drew a male yell So true!, yet the reception, eager and joyous, was evidently led by female voices. This remained so in April 2017 at a theater in Eastern Pennsylvania. In 2008, book publisher Rough Guides anthologized the song in the Best Music You've Never Heard. Rejection A 2005 album review recalls, about Ben Folds, "his tricksy piano songs were the first to teach us that alt.rock didn't need to arrive strapped to a Marshall amp." Perhaps likewise, "Folds has always been defined by what he is not—not hip, not fresh, not underground"—till Songs for Silverman, "more mature," lent "solid core to his musings." His solo debut or 2001 album's title track, "Rockin' the Suburbs," evoked nonidentity by satirizing him as a white male of middle class. Yet after 2009, that "identity" plus "scrutiny" of his old songs found they "aren't terribly reassuring to feminist listeners." In a 1998 issue of Bitch, a writer sensed