Popular culture no longer applies to me
Since Cory was born I no longer have the energy to futz with hooking up my iPod to the the car stereo. This means over the last week I’ve experienced brief, breathtakingly painful exposures to what we, in a moment of pure disgust at the failure of language, can only call Top 40 radio.
No wonder the major label’s business model now relies on suing people instead of selling music.
Big right now are two rap-ballads to strippers — “Pop, Lock, and Drop It” by Huey, and another which I seem to have blocked out at the moment. Pop rap has fallen on truly hard times; at least Vanilla Ice had rhymes — a lot of the new pop rap tracks I’ve heard sound like a bunch of K-Mart Rain-Man Gangstas repeating the same line over and over again.
There’s also an cloying whiny misogynistic number by Sean Kingston called “Beautiful Girls” which goes something like this:
You’re way too beautiful girl
That’s why it’ll never work
You’ll have me suicidal, suicidal
When you say it’s over
Damn all these beautiful girls
They only wanna do you dirt
They’ll have you suicidal, suicidal
When they say it’s over
The lyrics are like an outline of sixties pop, stripped down and translated into cliché. I think I’ve heard that song sixty times in the last week. I have the lyrics memorized and I don’t want them.
And WTF is Gwen Stefani doing? Isn’t she old enough to know better? What bet did she lose to be forced to record crap like “4 in the Morning”?
Stay up till Four In The Morning & the tears are pouring
& I want to make it worth the fight
What have we been doing for all this time?
Baby if we’re gonna do it, come on do it right
You know, I’ve felt the same way trying to assemble IKEA furniture.
To top it all off, almost everything has been run through the vocal-snap machine so there’s this queer electronic trill on everyone’s voice. Even the rappers.
I am beginning to understand why people get all excited about the White Stripes.
