This Todd Snider song is almost fifteen years old, but I'd never heard it before, and the satire is still sharp. It's like a mini-history of rock and roll "authenticity". The more I hear him, the more I think Snider may be the best there is right now.

Bono and the Edge are writing a Spiderman musical to open on Broadway in 2010. Julie Taymor, whose work has never done anything for me except give me the giggles (and not in a good way), is directing. My spidey ridiculo-pretensio sense is already tingling.

You don't have to be an asshole to be a rock and roll star, but if you want to be a rock and roll manager it's pretty much a requirement. It's not just good for your business, but it's good for your competitors' business as well. Just ask Irving Azoff, the CEO of Ticketmaster (and manager of The Eagles) who testified in Congress today about the proposed Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger:

...Azoff argued that the merger could bring new opportunities for existing ticketing companies. "We've been told and we believe that if this merger were approved, that many of our larger clients would opt out," he said, pointing out that Ticketmaster has about 11,000 clients. "From hearing all the comments that I hear, I think that so many people would be upset about this merger that I'm sure a lot of our clients would leave."

In other words, being the biggest asshole on the block and pissing everybody off inspires competition and innovation among all the people who'd like to kick the shit out of you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the kind of thinking that helped bring the music business, and everything else, to the edge of collapse to begin with?

There are many ways to get into the top ten, but these days there is apparently only one way to get to number one, and that's to leapfrog a prodigious number of places directly to the top spot, only to be leapt over yourself a week or two later. That's what the last three number one records have done, though it does look like it will be awhile before we see a new one. There's nothing in the upper reaches of the charts, aside from T.I.'s "Dead and Gone" (which was heavily boosted this week by the Grammies, and may well drop next week), that appears to have the strength to haul itself up one rung at a time, and nothing in this week's debuts will do much leapfrogging anytime soon. That's without even considering Flo Rida's astonishing sales figures--over 600,000 sold in one week. Even if his sales drop by double digit percentages over the next few weeks, it will be awhile before anyone is close to catching him. Unless...well, I'm not sure who would be able to pull it off--Justin Timberlake, maybe?--but by the end of the year we may well see the first single of the digital age to sell a million copies in a week. And just wait, in a year or two million selling debuts will probably be as common, and as easily swept off the charts, as flies. They may not even make number one.

Though this week's debuts lack any real top ten potential, they make for an interesting bunch: two Lily Allen songs (including "Fuck You", which, as Chris Molanphy points out, probably owes its high debut to curiosity more than anything else); a piece of jokey white frat rap ("I Love College") that thankfully seems to be influenced more by the Native Tongues Posse than, say, Eminem or Bubba Sparxxx; and finally, 50 Cent's latest attempt to revive his career. Whatever you think of 50 Cent, there's no doubt that "I Get In" is the best thing he's done since "A Little Bit". It's impossible not to wonder, though, since the song is basically about alcoholism, whether he might be offering us an explanation of his lost years. If he is, he doesn't sound too apologetic about it.

Rascal Flatts, sued for copyright infringement, throw up their hands and confess the facts:

To the extent that "No Reins" shares any similarities with the plaintiff's alleged copyrighted work, any such similarities between the two works are the result of coincidence and/or the use of common or trite ideas.

Translation: you can't sue us for stealing ideas, because we've never had any.

(HT: The 9513)

Possibly the greatest "yeah, we're sexist, but we feel really bad about it" video of all time. Good song, too. (HT: Mighty Girl)

Nothing new in the top ten this week, a sentence I have a feeling I'm going to be using a lot this year, but there are signs of movement lower down, and a couple of, ahem, interesting debuts. First is Lil Wayne's "Prom Queen", otherwise known as "Metal Madness Meets Autotune". The rap/metal combine is old news, of course, and though this isn't as horrible as it might be--Wayne remains the most fascinating vocalist on the planet--it isn't quite Body Count either. He does earn points for introducing what is basically teen-pop subject matter into metal, though. Speed it up a little and it could be the Jonas Brothers.

What may be an even more important mixing of genres comes a little further down the chart. Even in my wildest dreams (which last night included driving a mountain road listening to a new Donovan single) would I consider the match up found on "Right Round": Flo Rida and Dr. Luke. It was obvious from his first batch of singles that Flo Rida had pop proclivities, but who'd have thought he'd go all the way like this? Though I've never been a hater, the follow-ups to "Low" were dismal, and though they sold well, I figured he was essentially a one shot. This should prove me wrong.

It was late August or early September when I began to feel as if the bottom had dropped out of pop music. It had been scraping bottom, both artistically and economically, for some time, but now it seemed to have cracked through the floor and plummeted into an even deeper abyss. This feeling was tinged with both hope and despair. Despair because, economically, things could still get much worse; hope, because, artistically, there seems to be nowhere to go but up, though that will most likely be preceded by a lot of scurrying around sideways and bumping into things.

This feeling wasn't the result of a sudden surge of terrible records, or even the slow, endless ooze of the mediocre--as someone once said of the poor, the mediocre will always be with us. Instead, it was the result of the surprise appearance in the top ten of three great records: "A Milli", "Paper Planes", and "Love Lockdown".

Normally, the appearance of such quality product in such a short space of time would be cause for celebration, suggesting a revitalization of the top ten after what had been a particularly moribund year. Instead, for two important reasons, they felt like the final nails in the coffin of the previous era of pop music.

First of all, they weren't pop records, at least by any previously recognized standard (or any future standard, for that matter, as I'll explain in a moment). Each one contained pop elements, but deconstructed, twisted, or downplayed in such a way as to be almost unrecognizable. "Love Lockdown" and "A Milli" were driven by classic pop and hip-hop themes--thwarted passion and rap braggadocio--but presented in such a stripped to the bone fashion as to both defy and redefine those sentimental mainstays. "Paper Planes", meanwhile, though the most pop sounding of the three (which is ironic enough, for a start), is so deep and broad in meaning and suggestion that it blows apart the usual pop song framework. Almost every interpretation of the song I've read comes to a different conclusion as to what it's ultimately about, but every one of those interpretations sounds right--the record is so deep it may be impossible to come up with a definitive explanation of its meaning.

Second, and in terms of pop as a whole this is much more important, these records are impossible to follow. Great as they are, they don't point or lead to anyplace that anyone else would be able to go (if Beyonce's "Diva", a ridiculous attempt to create a female version of "A Milli", is any example, no one should even try). These songs don't create a new standard for pop to build on, they destroy the old one. After this, everything constructed around the old patterns is going to sound tired and cliched. We need something completely new, but I suspect it will be a few years before we get it.

I should know better than to review pop records until I've heard them on either a decent sound system or in an automobile. Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" caught me up short a couple of months ago when I finally listened to it on my stereo--the multiple vocal tracks and weird stereo separation make that song come alive in a way it never does through even the best headphones--and now much the same thing has happened with Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You", which popped up in my iPod shuffle on the drive to work this morning. The muffled sound which I took as a sign of creative exhaustion turns out to be the result of low-grade headphones (i.e., the ones I normally wear at work) forced to deal with high-grade distortion effects. What I first heard as a muddy drone turns out to be an energetic, echoing buzz that runs the entire length of the song, filling the sparse arrangement with a crackling drive that disappears if you don't hear it on a decent system, or at least in the open air. Having heard the song the way it's supposed to be heard, I now like this better than "Since U Been Gone".

The late pop critic Ellen Willis once devised a simple test for determining whether a record was sexist or not: if it was hard to imagine a member of the opposite sex singing the same song--such as Cat Steven's "Wild World"--then it was sexist; if it was easy to imagine the roles being reversed, then the song wasn't sexist, however unpleasant the sentiment expressed might be, as in the Stones' "Under My Thumb". With that in mind, can anyone imagine a guy singing "If you like it then you should've put a ring on it?" Just saying.

When I first skimmed through the Freaky Trigger post I wrote about earlier, I though it was referring to the number of new artists on the British charts each year, not just the total number of new records. I soon realized my mistake, but I also wondered if the number of new artists might be a useful indicator of chart health (if there is such a thing), or, on a larger scale, cultural vibrancy (however that would be defined). These are vague concepts, I know, and obviously other measures need to be taken into account, but the chart below makes some interesting suggestions nevertheless, especially about how downloading is affecting the number of new artists who achieve a certain threshold of public attention. Right now, the news isn't good.

Looking at the overall chart, it's easy to pick out what might be called the boom years for new artists: 1957-1959 (post-Elvis rock and roll); the late '70s (disco and new wave); the mid- to late-'90s (post-grunge and the hip-hop takeover of radio). It's also easy to see the reason behind some of the low points, especially 1998 and after, when Billboard changed their rules about airplay-only singles. The deep trough in 1973 is probably an anomaly, but would certainly make an interesting subject for further research.

As for the current trough--2007 and 2008 were the worst years for new artists since 1973--the reason isn't hard to find. And though it's always tempting to blame industry machinations for this sort of thing, this time the blame falls squarely on the audience. Faced with a wider range of choice than ever before--at least as far as purchasing individual tracks--the audience hunkered down and bought the latest from their favorite artists over and over and over again.

Taylor Swift fans put fourteen of her songs on the chart this year. The Jonas Brothers had nine; David Cook twelve (eleven in one week); Lil Wayne six (not counting all his guest appearances); T.I. six; Kanye West and Nickelback five each. That's seven artists who were responsible for 57 chart hits. Add in those who had three or four (Rihanna, Pink, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney), and you have thirteen artists who had more hits than all the new artists to make the Hot 100 this year combined (and, yes, I know David Cook was one of the new ones, but as far as I'm concerned you can only be counted as a new artist once).

I see no sign of this changing anytime soon, especially as long as iTunes maintains their a la carte model, allowing consumers to cherry pick LPs for their favorite cuts, and as more labels take advantage the "complete your album" feature and issue new tracks on a weekly basis in the lead-up to the release of a big album.

But as the graph indicates, there may also be a larger cycle at work here, one that has little or nothing to do with markets and physical product and delivery systems. Every twenty years or so--the late '50s, the late '70s, the late '90s until Billboard changed their rules--the percentage of new artists soars, usually in line with a complete changeover in the style of music that's popular.

Right now that sounds somewhat depressing--do we really need to wait seven to ten years for things to get interesting on the pop charts again? But at least we can look back and see indications that things will get better, and that somewhere out there there's a bunch of twelve-year-olds planning to take over the world as soon as they get their chops down.