Pop's New Low

I don't want to spend too much time blogging about crap pop songs, but incidental hearings of a recent single by Rhianna have started to drive me completely insane. The song is SOS and I have to raise a white flag of my own here.

To be fair, I am not in the target demographic for the gorgeous pop songstress, but I wish she and her handlers could have come up with something better than a tuneless dirge set to the tune of Soft Cell's Tainted Love.

The issue here is not sampling. That debate is long over and, frankly, I like too much hip hop to speak out against sampling. While I don't consider it the musical equivalent of being Elton John on the piano, I wouldn't want to have missed the work of De La Soul or Mos Def's "Miss Fat Booty" because of sampling snobbery.

But this isn't a clever sample and nothing remotely clever has been done with it. It's the latest song to take a song with a certain cachet and record a girl singing stupid lyrics over it. And these are just plain terrible. We hit a new low a few years ago when Jessica Simpson recorded "Jack and Diane" as "I Think I've in Love With You" and now Rhianna is here to knock the bar down a few more notches.

At least the writers of the original songs get a credit and get to watch the royalties roll in a big way for a song they recorded over 20 years ago. I'm sure they're not complaining. But I am! Ah well, at least I can change the station. And fend off these phonies with my iPod headphones. I just wanted to register my displeasure.


On the other hand, these gals is HOTT!