YEAH YEAH (YEEEAAHHH)

Usher is currently on tour with Chris Brown, who was an up-and-coming teenage prodigy from Tappahannock, VA, right across the river from my ancestral home in Westmoreland County, who is best known for beating up Rihanna and whose career never recovered. Diddy or R. Kelly and Chris Brown would be a better tour.

Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” was a huge inescapable hit, as was one other on that album I can’t remember. Adam Levine, the frontman, is better known as an all-purpose professional celebrity guy like Ryan Seacrest was before Wheel of Fortune, and I think he is/was a judge on some singing or talent show.

That was me who suggested Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as a huge album in its time that nobody talks about anymore.

I think Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” was 2004. Call me a feeg but I really like that song – when I was working in a grocery store that was one of the only songs that didn’t totally suck or I had heard a million times (that stupid Katy Perry song about it never really being over is a guilty pleasure too). I looked it up and was surprised it was that old, but like cars or video-game graphics, the last decade-plus are all the same (all sound the same) to me. For some reason I never downloaded “Unwritten” as I did Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (I generally don’t believe in guilty pleasures – I unabashedly like ABBA and disco – but I make an exception for a few.)

If you want to talk about rock and roll’s creative exhaustion, as many years passed between “Johnny B. Goode” and “Video Killed the Radio Star” as have elapsed between now and 2004. The big ’60s guys are hitting 80 en masse now or were already there. Fifteen years passed between the Natasha Bedingfield and Katy Perry songs (“Never Really Over”, btw) – can you tell the difference? That’s as much time aa between “Johnny B Goode” and Tales from Topographic Oceans.