LoveGame by Lady Gaga (2009)

LoveGame is The Fame at its most mechanical: a RedOne beat like a pinball machine, a chant for a chorus and a polite request to take a ride on something she calls a "disco stick". The verses are a flirtation conducted entirely in commands, like a sat-nav with intentions. It is a song about wanting, written by someone who had decided that wanting should sound like a slot machine paying out.

Released as the third single from The Fame, it reached number five in the United States in 2009 and went three times Platinum. The video, set in a New York subway station and shot at the Port of Los Angeles, was banned outright by MTV Arabia and kept out of daytime slots by Australia's Network Ten, which did for the sales what bans always do. Gaga's explanation of the "disco stick" has been quoted ever since, mostly by people who had already worked it out on the first listen.

Its afterlife is as the clean case. Most innuendo on this list is argued over; LoveGame is settled, because the author settled it. When a reader asks whether a "disco stick" is what they think it is, the answer is a quote, not a reading, which is why the evidence badge here says documented and the disco, regrettably, is not involved.