What's with today today?

So, I just finished watching Christina Aguilera's latest trick, "Dirrty". (Note the 2 r's, but do not confuse with Nelly's "Hot in Herre", which I am currently listening to and embracing the irony of the forthcoming remarks I am going to make.) Okay, focus!

So, like I said, I just watched "Dirrty" because it was touted essentially as the porn version of Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U", and it delivered! Now I'm thinking, What the hell? What's with music and music videos today? What have we come to? Did "Thriller", "Learning to Fly" and various other stylized, "vanguard" videos teach today's pop acts nothing? People like Justin Timberlake and Britney (though not Christina to my knowledge) claim respect, reverence and inspiration in innovative videos and innovative acts and then they put out these schlock videos, wearing a felt hat and a "Beat It" jacket and saying this "new sound" is truly them, but edgier. (In a sidebar, edgy took the throne as the most trite word in the music industry somewhere in the past five to ten years.)

One of my most recently cultivated complaints is that music today is crap. It's all a send-up to some ideal that we don't believe in anymore because we're too busy proclaiming, sampling and downloading the talent of generations past rather than coming up with our talent. Or, if we do happen to develop something "new", it's synthetic and forced, kind of like techno or this quickly-becoming-tiresome pop-rap-r&b fusion music. There's nothing new. In the past five years, we've taken an entire culture, pretending to discover their talents because we've run out of our own. We called that the Latin Invasion.

When the most complimentary thing we can say about the most powerful not-yet-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman performer in the music industry (along with several of her flesh-baring, no-balls-high-singing cronies) is that at least (s)he's a good dancer, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But back to the business at hand, that dirrty whore and her dirrty video. First off, it's the most blatant rip-off of everything popular or trying to be today that I even got the references, and that takes a lot. Did she specifically hire a choreographer and tell him to "copy every video that airs on MTV today!" -- the video reeks of Shakira, Willa Ford, *NSync's "Pop", DMX and "I'm a Slave 4 U," among others. Granted, Christina can't dance as well as Britney (natch), but she could at least hire someone who will teach her a new move. Thematically -- if I can even use that word -- it was this heinous mix between an 8MM-esque snuff film, Britney's "Overprotected" (replete with water/mud gyrations), Gia and Raging Bull with li'l Christina herself portraying Bobby D. (Feel free to substitute LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" into that last slot if it pisses you off more.) Oh, and it gets better. Christina, who incidentally won the Best New Artist Grammy not many years ago, is consistently sitting spread-legged with these odd chaps that would reveal something decidedly dirrty if not for those cursed red knickers strategically placed over her Brazilian bikini wax. The word fetish has never been more appropriate. And adding insult to injury, raccoon-eyes' recent penchant for piercings, 18 visits to the tanning salon a day and oddly colored dreadlocks makes her look like something that came out of a glamour POW camp. (Did I miss when she formally declared that she's not Hispanic anymore but black now? I must have because she announces her Afro-pride with a rough-and-tumble gangsta "What" at the end.)

So, with that rant through, I think that everyone should see the video. Just because. Treat yourself to a moment to feel proud of yourself that 30 years from now you won't be sitting in a brothel in Tijuana with this video casting its tasteless shadow on your youth.