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It's incredibly sad that we have an entire generation of kids who don't know what musical talent is and don't expect "music stars" to exhibit a trace of it, even during a concert they're charging $100 or more to attend. But what's even sadder than that is that they excuse Britney by saying she can't sing because she has to dance. Two points about that:

1. Who asked you to dance, especially if it means you can't sing during your own concert? I'm a writer, so that's like me telling a client, "I'd love to write a script for you, but I'm too busy juggling to type. I know you didn't ask me to juggle, and that it's entirely incidental to the main point of our transaction, but it's just something I do, and I'm letting it take precedence over the actual job."

2. Britney is a lousy "dancer." Her dancing is to real dancing as her "singing" is to real singing. There's no flow, no grace; it's just a mixture of cliched pole dancer moves and bad cheerleader choreography. You can even see where one "hunk" ends and the next begins because she clomps back to her base spot, plants herself on the piece of tape at center stage, counts "1-2-3-4" (which I suspect is as high as she can count), then launches into her next clunky hunk.

Sorry, I won't cut these squirts any slack just because they're young. When I was young, everyone in my school liked disco, while I was into Bowie and the Kinks. 30 years later, Bowie and the Kinks still sound great. Can you imagine what the current pap will sound like three decades hence? Even the Archies sound better than Britney. At least those cartoon characters' lips matched up fairly well with the words when they sang.

Yep -- one of the most outrageous things about the Super Bowl halftime show, besides the obvious one, is how exactly one performer, Kid Rock, had a live band and actually performed without lip-synching. Like I said about Milli Vanilli, it used to be a big scandal when artists lip-synched; not anymore. People will say that Milli Vanilli was different because they were lip-synching to somebody else's voices. Well, how do we know that any of these other "artists" are actually singing on their own records, when they can't even perform live?

I blame MTV for that, where the visual became more important than the audio. And what cracks me up now is that one of the original "can't sing, but dances a lot" artists, Paula Abdul, now judges singers on American Idol!

Good points! And as MC Hammer ruefully learned, having a million people on stage with you is going to cost a lot of money. The moment I saw him on Saturday Night Live with 50 people on stage, I knew he was going to go broke!

Anyhow, back to Britney. She's only 22, and she's already beginning to look like a crack whore. It's got to kill her that Norah Jones and Alicia Keys, who are both attractive and close to her age, can actually sing, write songs, and play the piano, and have careers which focus on their music and not their looks. And to top it all off, despite the fact that they don't cavort like strippers, they are outselling Britney by a mile.

I agree. I got mocked for liking the Ramones, the Police, the Clash, etc. when everybody else in my school was listening to Journey and Rick Springfield. What music has stood the test of time?