"Popular Music is in worse shape than I thought"
- an NPR listner on last Thursday's All Things Considered


Although he was talking about the new Beatles tribute This Bird Has Flown (which honestly sounds pretty OK to me), I managed to reach the same conclusion by flipping through an Alternative Press magazine that someone left behind at the coffee shop.

Here are the estimated stats based on my 5 minutes of perusal:

70% of the rock/emo/indie/whatever bands were in carefully cultivated costumes, mostly "vampire" or "androgynous rock star" (please note that they are not actual rock stars; they are kids dressed as rock stars, possibly for Halloween)
10% of the bands were sweaty, shirtless, and unabashedly homoerotic
2% of the bands had female members, and of those, 95% were photographed "sexily"
8% of the bands looked like normal people who might actually play interesting music
99.9% of the people in bands were white
98% of the people in bands were men
100% of the people in bands were in their teens or early twenties, or were trying to look it
100% of the bands had incredibly stupid and pretentious names, such as "Every Time I Die," "From Autumn to Ashes," and "My Chemical Romance" -- who told them these were good band names???

OK, I gotta clean soy chai vomit off my computer now. Peace Out.