Why does this shit surprise me?

I'm watching Much Music [that's Canadian MTV, Saint] while tooling around the hotel room, and Kelly Clarkson's new video for "Since You Been Gone" comes on and apparently she's not the hip-hop-lite poseur she was on her first album. Now she's a rockin' chick, a la Avril or someone crappy like that, who dresses and sings all aggro. WTF? Why do people think packaging this shit thusly will sell? Why the hell does it sell? In one scene she's destroying her ex's stuff in their apartment, and she pulls all of his LP's off the shelf (LP's are SO indie!) and I swear one of them was a Chicago record. As in Peter Cetera, "You're the Inspiration", cheesy 80's rock icons Chicago. (Yeah, yeah, I know they go further back than that, and were totally different in the 60's and 70's, but even that era Chicago isn't cool enough for the image they created for the video). It's so sad, the state of music today. Not that good music isn't being made, but so much crap, and even good, music is so artificially dressed and marketed, because we can't just hear good music, we need to SEE how cool it is, how the artist fits the particular mold that the kids want to buy these days. It's just disgusting, but still I'm watching this channel, now showing a band called Boy, who wants to be the next Franz Ferdinand, judging by their stupid, retro-sounding rock song and slobby appearance. And what bad thing happened to Green Day that made everyone want to make amends and kiss their ass so much over the American Idiot album? Don't get me wrong, I'd rather see Green Day selling records and winning Grammy's instead of all the other crappy pop/hip-hop people, but why the super-wet rim job of praise heaped on the album as if it were some watershed, herculean effort capturing the zeitgeist of the American experience in the early 21st Century, destined to be engraved in gold and put into the Smithsonian for future generations to worship? It's a Green Day album. It rocks, and sounds like all the other Green Day albums. The lyrical content is somewhat politically poignant, but not particularly artful or poetic. I like Green Day (so don't beat me up Lawyer Guy, if you're reading) but I'm not buying the whole canonization effort over this album.

Whew! I'm spent!