The Illiterate

This morning I listened to the latest tracks from Glee to enter the Hot 100. There are five of them, they’re the five top debuts this week, and they’re terrible. I’ve been dreading this moment all summer. I had a feeling the music, and the show itself, would get worse rather than better. I still haven’t seen the show, but it appears I was right on both counts.

For the last few months I’ve been arguing with myself: there’s no reason to expect anything worthwhile to come out of this show, but at the same time, having decided to write this column every week, I felt a duty to review the records, even if, week by week, it felt more and more as if I were trying to put into words what it’s like to listen to the sounds emanating from an abyss. At the same time, I also feel a certain duty to pop music itself, its survival and further growth, which Glee seems intent on preventing, if not killing outright.

After listening to this week’s entries, however, by the end of which I felt like crawling into a fetal position under my desk and crying, I came up with what strikes me as a promising compromise between reality and what I wish was the truth. Starting with the next Hot 100 Roundup, I will no longer review the Glee Cast singles. Since facts are, unfortunately, facts, I will still list the titles and their chart placement, but I won’t make any comment otherwise. I will probably give each one a cursory listen, and I may occasionally make some general comment about the show and its pernicious influence on the culture (I’m working on one right now), but in the main I intend to ignore them. I intend to ignore them with extreme prejudice.

This doesn’t mean that I will leave a gaping hole in the middle of my column. Since one of the things I dislike about the Glee singles is their displacement on the chart of other new, undoubtedly superior records, preventing them from getting the exposure they deserve, I will do what little I can to rescue those records from obscurity (many of them, no doubt, won’t need my help, but it’s the thought that counts). So, for every week that Glee puts songs on the chart, I will dip into Billboard’s Bubbling Under chart (which lists the 25 songs below the Hot 100) and review an equal number of records that haven’t yet made the big chart. If by some odd chance there aren’t enough to fill all the spaces Glee occupies, I’ll just pick some recent record out of the blue that I think is worthy of notice (some weeks I may do this anyway, just because I feel like it, or if I stumble on something particularly worthwhile).

This strikes me as the least I can do in a Gleeified world, short of ranting and crying on YouTube or committing violent acts.