Thoughts, notes, observations on the everyday nonsense of American Pop Culture from one of the most not-hip people on the face of the planet...

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Beating a very attractive and skinny dead horse....

Last night, I was unable to sleep and I was left with watching MTV’s Insomniac Music Theater (which usually knocks me right out) – on mute. For one reason or another, the network kept showing videos of various singing floozies, most of which I didn’t recognize.

Each video had a “hot girl” wearing some form of low-slung pants, a bikini top or otherwise barely-there shirt to show off her hot girl abs, a bellybutton ring and usually some form of shiny oil to make her look…I dunno….sweaty? And, of course, each video had a dark background and a slew of background dancers who were hot, but not as hot as the “lead singer.” And the entire video in each case had no real plot or performance…it was merely a vehicle to zoom in on the “hot girl’s” body. It’s as if the music industry agents never quite came out of that “let’s find the next Britney Spears” mode.

One of these videos, I found, was by South American Shakira, who I think has a very distinctive voice and great sound…but who I assume will never reach any sort of lasting stardom because her image is so very MTV. She looked and danced exactly like the other floozies I saw in the videos, right down to the three minutes of jump-cut video of her pulsating abs.

Why is the music industry still putting out these cookie cutter singers? Solo female pop is on the way out (don’t believe me, just look at the charts) and it’s because of a glut in the market. As good as some of the standouts may be, I honestly couldn’t pick them out of a lineup of today’s mass-marketed hot girls. Honestly, are they even that “hot” anymore, if they all look the same?

Girls with great voices and great talent are still dumbed down by their agents, stuffed into tight clothes to writhe to market-tested pop songs….and for what? To have a big single, an almost-nude Maxim spread and an eventual fade to nothingness?

It’s a real shame the music industry won’t wake up and see what it needs to be doing. The younger generation has very few real female musicians. We need more Alicia Keys’, not Britney Spears’. We need more girl-fronted rock (a la Garbage), not all-girl pop-hop (a la Destiny’s Child). We need more guitar-playing singer-songwriting women, not high-pitched bump n’ grind girls.

Hear me out there? Think of all the little mini-sluts you helped to create in our middle schools and consider what sort of music they are going to need when they are actually old enough to have sex instead of look like they’re selling it. If nothing else, think of the future, when you’ll ant to sell boxed sets on TV and you’ll find that all the industry had for about 10 years was a bunch of no-name one-hit-wonders.

But hell, they were hot.

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