Pop-punk? I ask this in all sincerity, mostly because someone sent me Bowling For Soup’s “High School Never Ends” during an instant message conversation:

I wouldn’t say I felt the pale flame of nostalgia or anything, but it did make me go huh, and remember how much fun the video for “1985,” was, and how good the band was at contributing to at pop culture if not at actually contributing to it:

The same was much more aggressively true of blink-182, of course, about whom I feel much more strongly:

So what happened? Did pop culture just get so shamelessly ridiculous that there wasn’t room for this kind of internal critique? Did it seem unnecessary coming from dudes with unapologetically terrible and intense emotional awareness of how absurdly they were behaving? I don’t kid myself that the music was great, but I kind of miss this kind of thing:

It’s a lot more honest in its fear and foolishness than Judd Apatow movies, anyway.

Heh:

I think it’s time for my annual watching of Fever Pitch in preparation for the True Arrival of Spring. It has been a long winter.

I hope there never comes a day when a new Britney Spears album makes me feel anything less than happy. It’s not that Britney is anything close to a great musician, but she’s well-engineered, and sometimes you need music that’s emotionally uncomplicated, where the emotional crescendo is never ecstatic, but the lows aren’t too bad either. To my mind, the standout song on Femme Fatale, which drops today, is the pleasantly eccentric, low-key “How I Roll”:

It took me a couple of listens to decide that, and now I sort of can’t stop listening to it. The song’s profoundly silly: its got these bubbly, poppy sounds setting the pace. Britney actually declares at one point that she’s got “nine lives, like a kitty cat.” But it’s playful without being outrageously, desperately sexy, exactly the right tempo to bop your head along to in the car on a sunny day. Which is of course what it’s intended for. Sometimes there’s virtue in just hitting the hell out of your mark, however modest that mark might be. The whole album’s streaming here.