I imagine myself in the amniotic fluid in 1987, a year that can boast a few good movies - few of them truly great – and it seems increasingly long ago – like ’87 is now a birth-year for old people and has-beens. You know, 24-year-olds. If you were born in 1987, you should already have been famous by now for at least a couple of years. Or started some totally intuitive internet program, service, or viral concept. All the good tech-savvy or pop culturally profound memes that elicit a “duh” -- you should have come up with by now. Duh.

Pop culture is a barometer of change and the more I pay attention, the older and more curmudgeonly I feel. Obviously, the actors and pop stars are younger. The Twilight gang (Kristen Stewart ’90; Taylor Lautner ’92) and Miley Cyrus (’90). I don’t even recognize who’s on the cover of Entertainment Weekly half the time anymore, and my ignorance only makes me more indignant (if I don’t know them, they must not be interesting)—a self-fulfilling prophecy of continued ignorance and bitterness.

I am willfully ignorant and spiteful. But the thing is, I’m also pretty sure that I’m correct in saying that pop culture has declined significantly. You see, shitty massive pop cultural events of my day were actually good: Take Titanic. Sure, I hated My Heart Will Go On, and even as a 9-year old, recognized the inelegance of James Camerson’s screenplay. But it’s a great movie with appealing performances, lavish set-pieces, and a real sense of time and place. Bring It On. Remember that? Everyone quoted the shit out of that movie, and it was all okay because we remember watching that movie and falling in love with Eliza Dushku, Kirsten Dunst, and Jessie Bradford. Come on – that tooth-brushing scene is so cute. And at least Anchor Man, arguably the most overrated of comedy classics, at least starred interesting people like Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell.

No one wants to talk about the deterioration of our popular entertainment, I think, for fear of sounding like an old codger. For admitting that fuck, I was born in nineteen eighty-seven and yes, you kids these days who like this stuff are Pavlovian dogs with no taste. You’d just as soon eat the bell itself than stop a minute and consider the following:

we had Leonardo DiCaprio; you have Zac Efron. We had Hanson. You have Justin Bieber. We grew up watching The Simpsons; you only know Family Guy. We remember a time when we bought CD’s because you had to – And that’s part of why it was fun. And none of this Netflix/megavideo bullshit. We braved the heinous selection and surly clerks at Blockbuster… on weekend nights…with our parents. Because seeing movies were more than just intermittent entertainment on a different tab during lulls in facebook chats.

Why the decline? A complex answer. The short version is this: when the internet took over, people realized they didn’t have to pay for content anymore. They could download it all for free, and no company can generate revenue by providing a service that everyone can get for free. In essence, the record industry and the newspaper industry got diagnosed with a terminal disease. (And coming soon to a graveyard near you: the publishing and movie industry). Some would argue that the record industry had been smoking cigarettes in the form of pricey CD’s and therefore deserves blame for their own demise.
The decay of these industries in the wake of filesharing coincided and inevitably accelerated the lovely global trend of media conglomeration and corporatization. Sinking revenues? Might as well band together and make some profit for chrissakes.

What happens when you have industries without capital; without the security that they will make it through the next fiscal year? Incredibly shitty products. A&R departments were the first to go and the most under-funded parts of a record label. After all, innovation is never in the budget when raw survival depends on the minimization of risk and the maximization of profit, regardless of external factors, and regardless of long-term vs. short-term profits.

How does this translate more specifically? How does the sausage factory bring together so many nasty, inedible parts and cheaply produce the Rhianna wurst? Well, consider a few things.

Music is incredibly cheap to make these days using software like ProTools. All you need is an MBox, ProTools, Reason, and the use of your hands, and you can pretty much record a pop album. A cursory understanding of these programs reveals how much pop producers abuse them. Case in point: back in the day, rap used to sample nasty funk grooves; but now all you hear in pop rap are impossibly fast sixteenth-note hi-hat rhythms that could never be played by a human being…that’s the Redrum patch on Reason. The genius of Redrum is that you don’t actually have to think out your rhythms before you program them. Just add and subtract to the grid, and you have yourself a beat worthy of Drake and any other rap pop schmo. Given how easy it is do this, is it any wonder that music sounds so computerized? To record live sound requires engineering, instruments, and people that engineer and play said instruments -- and more importantly - a sophistication in sonic decision-making that a post-production-centric approach disregards. Record companies consider the previous sentence and think of two words: “labor” and “cost.” Why pay a team of 20 professionals to record and perform live instrumentation when you can hire one guy to sit in front of his computer and synthesize music.

But no evil ascends without supporters. Cheerleaders. Collaborators.

I personally blame a lot of it on the so-bad-it’s-good mentality of influential, clever gay men in the media. Fiercely judgmental and catty, they have championed terrible corporate pop music (go to a gay bar and it’s almost exactly the same playlist as Top 40 radio). Either gay culture has ended entirely and gays just love the same awful music as every other ignorant, susceptible dumbass in Murika with a car stereo; or the gay camp sensibility has merged miraculously with the shrinking artistic ambitions and reliance on cheap provocation that corporate labels have foisted upon the public as a result of vanishing budgets.

It is a well-established fact that gay men champion ‘low culture,’ bad taste, etc, and certainly, the best place to find the lowest of the low is on your favorite pop Clear Channel station. But really, gay men reached something of a groupthink frenzy in their idolatry of Lady Gaga, a prophet as phony as Joseph Smith, who I hope meets a less violent though similarly ignominious break with her supporters.

American gay men seem to have a firm grasp on two things: they love dick and they love Lady Gaga – and this instigates a polarizing cleavage. It’s true: the pseudo-political cause that is Lady Gaga angers me almost as much as Mother Theresa pisses me off Christopher Hitchens. Is this woman a musician or a lousy fake non-profit? Someone from the IRS needs to investigate and make sure she is not using her pro-gay marketing scheme to write off her taxes. That would almost be as bad as those lumber tax loopholes John Kerry was bitching about in ’04. There is nothing authentic about the Lady Gaga farce except how authentically cynical her whole enterprise is.

For starters, you don’t need to listen to a side-by-side comparison of “Born this Way” and “Express Yourself” to know that Lady Gaga is a blatant rip-off of Madonna; in concept, in marketing demographic, in genre.

But here’s the thing: Madonna was Madonna. Literally, she was born Madonna, went to Michigan for ballet, moved to New York and was a club girl hanging out with gay dudes, singing and dancing the same kind of music she became famous for: club music for gay dudes. Lady Gaga was Stefani Germanotta, an altogether tacky piano-based singer-songwriter with pseudo-soulful-but-actually-ultra-white-sounding alto, meandering melodies, grade-school poetry, and the piano skills of a precocious twelve-year-old pupil that knows how to play a few Fiona Apple songs. Dubbed “the next Norah Jones” by a totally uncreative and sycophantic emcee who thought he was the next Mario Lopez, Stefani performed her heart out at an NYU concert. The results speak for themselves. Then watch this hilarious clip of her at The Bitter End, that dreaded club that NYC musicians never want to play at because it’s pay-to-play, incredibly un-hip, and kind of a tourist trap that books awful bands from out of town that don’t know any better. Her band is totally pathetic – the straightest boys with zero style - and they’re covering Dy’er Maker, which was covered by Sheryl Crow.

Stefani may have been a fag hag, but she was a whitebread one; not on the cutting edge of fashion, style, alternative thinking, or talent.

There are great artists who raise our expectations about what can be accepted as popular entertainment by the masses, and thereby enlarge our imaginations; there are good artists and craftsmen who contribute to the vastness of the creative content out there with ; and then there are artists who actively lower our standards and should be banished and admonished. Gaga is one of these.