ridiculously extraterrestrial

Like a great deal of moderately self-aware people who suffered from the hipster prick affliction at some point in their lives (it's an epidemic now, isn't it?), I at one point--let's call that point "high school"--cared deeply about what my musical taste said about me. It mattered so much that my first relationship was based entirely on the fact that Fake Plastic Trees both made us cry.

Enter college. My lost years, which I'm sure I'll whine about plenty in later posts. I ceased to care about keeping up with the latest hip ear candy and glutted myself in top 40 trash, half due to laziness and the other half due to some Gaga-esque retaliation to the smug self-satisfaction that comes with an obscure musical palate. Mostly laziness, though. I've developed a very high tolerance for the ridiculous when it comes to pop, but Katy Perry's E.T. takes the cake.

I heard it first on the way to an impromptu trip to Vegas. It takes a little more than ten hours to make the drive from the SF Bay Area to Sin City, and yet I'm sure I heard this song 25 if not more times. Twenty five times too many. I'm meh when it comes to having any actual opinion on Miss Perry and her music--I finally nailed this cumbersome figure skating move while the rink blasted Firework, and California Girls  is saved from my scorn by virtue of Johnny Weir in leather jeggings. To be fair to Katy Perry, however, the most offensive (in all senses of the word) portion of this song actually belongs to Kanye West. Surprise, surprise. I continue to fail to see his purported genius, and this really does not help:

I know a bar out in Mars
Where they driving spaceships instead of cars
Cop a Prada spacesuit about the stars
Getting stupid ass straight out the jar
Pockets on Shrek, Rockets on deck
Tell me what’s next, alien sex
I’ma disrobe you, than I’mma probe you
See I abducted you, so I tell ya what to do
I tell ya what to do, what to do, what to do

Newsflash to KWest: No amount of Prada is going to make the idea of alien probing even remotely sexy. Add to that the less-than-subtle whiff of rape imagery and Shrek. Katy Perry's parts, while not as blatantly distasteful and/or inane, still reeks of srsly?! lulz. I honestly wonder whether this is her attempt at aping Lady Gaga-type whatthefuckery. Whatever your opinion of Gaga is, her over-the-top nonsensicality "worked" for her because it was novel and intentional. We do not need multiple Poker Face copycats on the airwaves. Everything already sounds the same as it is.

But who am I to talk about music? I happily embrace every catchy top 40 song there until the next heavily auto-tuned masterpiece comes along. The only musical constant in my life is Fake Plastic Trees.