Radiohead

I try to stay current, I really do. 25 to 35 are critical ages, where it is all too easy to slip, little by little, into the comfort of your CD collection/MP3 playlist as a shunt against the time and effort required to assimilate new input from a musical landscape that is necessarily shifting away from the comforting sounds of your developmental years as more and more of your time is devoted to the messy churn of proto-adult becoming. And it is possible to underestimate the deeply-ingrained Tunguska-like impact of whatever happens to be popular when you're 13. There are people running around out there right now with a soft spot in their heart for Papa Roach because that's what happened to be playing in the half-lit basement the night the slutty girl from the flag team let them slide hard into third base for the first time. That's the thing about Proustian sense memory: it doesn't discriminate for quality. Ever eaten a madeleine? You probably have, but just don't remember. Bo-ring.

Conscious of this, as I said, I have made an effort to stay current. It was pretty easy for me considering Too Much Joy haven't put out an album in over a decade. A lot of new stuff fits in that conspicuous void.

All that is to say, look, I'm not just a complaining old dude. I listen to stuff. New stuff even. Stuff maybe that I wouldn't ever necessarily buy or listen to voluntarily if I had any kind of control over the slacker.com streaming web station that is played very loudly three cubicles over from me at work. I know all the words to more than one Daughtry song, for example. Like many facts about myself (irrational fear of mice, clown porn fetish, my "Jimmy Carter" mole), it's not something I'm particularly proud of; it just is.

Now that my objective popular culture bona fides have been unarguably established, I can say with clarity and purpose that Ke$ha must be stopped.

It isn't that hard to see the genealogy of this awful, awful phenomenon. Whenever something successful occurs, all sorts of vaguely similar things are dredged up from the rightfully-ignored sludgy bottom of the cultural river in its wide, frothy wake.

I actually kind of like Lady Gaga. There's really nothing about warmed over disco and her club-kid-meets-Pekingese look to recommend in particular, but the relevant details all come out in the execution. Yes, sometimes she's a grown woman wearing a cape made out of a polar bear, but "Bad Romance" is catchy as all hell.

So Lady Gaga sells a bazillion copies and hey! Here's this other semi-weird-looking blonde girl willing to walk out in public wearing face paint and a buffalo head-dress while lip-syncing to a fully computerized Auto-Tuned track. Ridiculous? Sure. But because of the long Gaga coattails, people buy up something samey out of... I don't want to say laziness... Newtonian social inertia? Yes, that's more polite.

I just want to say, beware. I know slippery slope arguments are specious and fairly Fox News-y, but if we keep it up with the blondes-with-no-shame theme, the next stop? Heidi Montag. No culture can survive that. That's what killed Rome. Well, that and the Hun.