I have this huge post planned about music videos and how they sort of shaped my childhood in more perverse ways than people usually describe, and in doing some research I stumbled across something altogether more recent than Dirrty by Christina Aguilera

This is Scream and Shout by will.i.am and Britney Spears, and it sounds like an early Eiffel 65 demo and it’s horrifyingly awful and is set to get into the US top ten singles chart next week

And without giving too much away I’ve realised that if you wanted to get away with this sort of shit in the 2000s you had to essentially film softcore pornography, and that’s how you’d sell records that were ostensibly awful - sex sells, and lots of people watched music videos, and would fall for a handful of jiggling boobs time and time again

Now, though, music videos are kind of a placeholder and as such it’s perfectly permissible for something as dull as the above to suffice as the showcase for a chart-topper, and that strikes me as weird, because it either means that good taste in music is rapidly declining (which would be great for the sort of snobbish nostalgia that “adults” like “me” tend to indulge in) or more likely it destroys the above hypothesis and we were tasteless all along, and the titillation was just the audiovisual equivalent of a side salad to a great old entrée of horseshit