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Call it a comeback

Music Features

The Big Hurt: Hagar the horrible

From the “alas” file: TRL, American youth culture’s most essential barometer of its own stupidity, is leaving the airwaves after 10 years of abject wretchedness. This is a show that made high-functioning retardates like CARSON DALY and JESSE CAMP famous, that exalted such worthless acts as JESSE McCARTNEY and HILLARY DUFF, that was synonymous with the boy-band boom of the early 2000s — how, in this nation we so love, could a show so monumentally worthless, so insulting to intelligence and destructive to culture, be cancelled? If you can’t make money off bad taste, teenage idiocy, and no-talent hackery, maybe this really is the end of the American era.

DMX is sitting in a Phoenix jail, now facing charges of theft on top of his recent drug conviction and still-pending possession and animal-cruelty counts. And rapper WEBBIE has been arrested after leading cops on a high-speed chase on a Mississippi highway. He’s facing felony counts for running from the cops and driving under the influence, as well as a misdemeanor possession charge. What the hell is society coming to when rappers are getting arrested before I’ve even heard of them?

That’s three paragraphs in a row where I’ve posed thought-provoking rhetorical questions, so I think I owe you an insightful declaration. ROB THOMAS must be fired into the sun; taxpayer money is no object. In case you’re wondering what reminded me of him, I was just checking out a little blurb about his new album on Billboard.com and he actually used the phrase “my pop sensibility.” Can you believe that jive? He’s co-opting the language of shitty critics to describe himself. This is worse than the time Gang of Four called their album “angular.”

PINK FLOYD founder and keyboardist RICHARD WRIGHT has passed on. Although bandmate David Gilmour provided a touching tribute to the man and his music, perhaps no one summed up our mood better than our old friend Neil Portnow of the Recording Academy: “Our deepest sympathies go out to his family and fans at this difficult time, as we remember this influential musician.” Wright is best known for his distinctive playing and songwriting on such albums as Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, and for his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, in which he recounted his turbulent youth as an impoverished African-American in Mississippi.

The GRAMMYS won three Emmys. Ha! It gets less funny the more you think about it, so please proceed forthwith to the next news item.

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