A word about cheap thrills.

1. If you're going to do glorified Jive Bunny -- and I WHOLLY ENCOURAGE THIS -- just fucking DO IT. This is where Girl Talk might have learned from what is (to the best of my understanding based on about thirteen minutes of uh "research") Steinski's bag. JUST GIMME THE GODDAMN HOOK AND MOVE ON. Mashing two random tracks on yer iTunes Party Faves mix together produces some seriously ugly stuff. (Hint: if one song is in one key, and the other song is in a completely DIFFERENT key, they may not sound great on top of each other. Perhaps you should find some way to transition between the tracks instead of hoping that enough tin-ears won't notice.) [EDIT: 'Course the stuff that actually dates closer to Jive Bunny sounds more like it, and gets more, um, "tasteful" as it goes along. Still works, but less so on the cheap thrill tip.]

2. When my girlfriend fiancee (whoa) immediately recognizes the Pixies guitar in yer post-grunge alt-pop and doesn't hate it, YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY COPPED SOME AWESOME 90's NOSTALGIA. So congratulations are in order to CSS, whose new album is about 20 times better than their first one.

3. Musical theater nerds are not legitimately cool. I knew some. I was in the drama department myself -- I played piano for them on occasion. They have their own scenes and social hierarchies, but they need some jostling from everyone else -- they need to have a somewhat troubled relationship with everyone else. They need to scrap a little for their legitimacy. Hip -- and unchallenged -- musical theater people are pretty much the most annoying high school social category imaginable, and now they are making WONKY POP. Alphabeat need to be given wedgies, and yet they are NOT. This may encourage them to keep making music.

3. Diplo/Santogold mix makes me like Santogold a little more, which isn't saying as much as I wish it would. This has been a banner year for knee-jerk intense dislike of persona for me (and that's really saying something!) and Santogold is probably, aside from the following point, the highest profile -- and most promising -- awful person making pretty good music. I just wish she didn't try to do the lone renegade songwriter thing and the principled artiste w/ disdain for the MAINSTREAM thing at the same time. It's not a good look. Diplo buries her in all kinds of crazy-ass crap, drowns out the nastier points of her condescending shtick just by surrounding her with NOISE. Good noise. Not particularly organized noise. It's nice.

4. I ADMIT THAT THE KATY PERRY ALBUM IS CATCHY. I LISTENED TO KATIE PERRY AND I LIKED IT -- IT FELT SO WRONG. IT DID NOT FEEL SO RIGHT. Seriously, if you're not even the SLIGHTEST BIT uncomfortable with it, we need to talk. I need to understand how your mind works. She's just despicable. Her persona is some cartoon -- whom I'm supposed to sort of LIKE even if in spite of myself, mind -- of the girl who, after I said hi to her in seventh grade, looked at me for a moment and sneered, "what makes you think you can talk to me?" (See how everything goes back to middle school?)

She's like everything I hate about Avril Lavigne concentrated into one of those hard little balls of mucous that you randomly cough up sometimes.

She is a former Christian artist. Ah, so there is something about her, if you look at it in a holistic, meta sorta way. A subject for future research.

But if people liking her in her current incarnation says something about something (and I'm not convinced it does), I'm worried. I just can't imagine an argument made in her favor aside from my caps-lock admittance of simple plezure above -- but...how on earth can you justify WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THESE SONGS? The most repressive "in the know" persona of all time -- the highest narrow-minded to winky-"we're all in on it" ratio I've ever come across, which is saying something given how much time I've spent on the INTERNET. Please justify her so that I can get all self-righteous and indignant already.

Destroy all LOLsbians

NEOLOGISM ALERT!

Well, this one isn't exactly a neologism. Lolsbianism basically goes something like this: "Ugh, boys are just TOO AWFUL, I should just turn GAY and that would solve all my problems amirite hehe."

Katy Perry, Imani Copolla...even Skye did it on her last album. The Veronicas at least do a variation that seems more like bisexual free-for-all, and it's not as potentially (though not necessarily, and I've had some interesting conversations about it) problematic as "Secret."

Look, first of all the joke's just not that funny. Haha, guys like girls who kiss girls! But if you ever really did it, they'd FUCKING FLIP OUT, right?!

No, we wouldn't, if we weren't disgusting human beings. It's not a big deal.

And, more importantly...some people are actually gay. They have this thing where they're trying to be treated with the respect and rights that straight people, even the ones who get back at their ex-boyfriends by making out with someone on the same team ("the same team," Imani? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME???), have. It's kind of still a big deal.

Skye Thursdays are the new Skye Fridays.

Pictured L-R: Skye Sweetnam, Tim Armstrong

Obligatory monthly link to Radosh.net, accompanied with the usual approving nod.

This things I believe:

(1) The Leona Lewis album is pretty awesome. Wrote about it more here.

(2) Co-mused on HOAR POP here.

(3) Fun-with-capital-F album that I cannot get behind no no no never I will not: Alphabeat. F-W-C-F album I can get behind: The B-52s.

(4) Opinions veer from "Marit Larsen's retarded little sister" to...gets a bit tedious: The Do. What if Lady Sovereign threw a carnival and nobody came? "Weight on my shoulder / Carry your boulder" may be the couplet DUD of the year, though.

(5) This Supergrass album is thoroughly enjoyable. My expectations were not high, exceeded.

(6) David Banner doesn't seem to grasp the subtle harmonic difference between singing a melody in the key in which the music is played and singing a melody in a key slightly different from the music being played.

(7) Neither does Girl Talk. The more I listen to Feed the Animals, the more I agree with Alfred Soto about it. The album is viscerally, unrelentingly unpleasant, but I'm also a sucker for cheap thrills.