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.