Schadenfreude moment of the week: the headline reading "Christina Aguilera Out of Action with Tonsillitis." How I laughed.

BAHA, HUMBUG

Song I will be sick of by the time you read this: "Who Let the Dogs Out?" by the Baha Men (below). Who licensed it to every single sports arena across this country? When both Jay Leno on the Tonight Show and whoever did the commentary during the World Series can make jokes about the song... Can you say overplayed?

HOLLER DOLLY

I've been thinking about leadoff singles from Spice Girls albums. (Procrastination does terrible things to your mind.) "Wannabe" announced the brash arrival of a group hell-bent on asserting their (grating) presence. "Spice Up Your Life" was a giant "screw you, if you think we're cheesy we'll give you as cheesy as cheesy gets." So what does "Holler"-available as an import double-A side single with "Let Love Lead the Way"-say? With its stuttering beats and lyrics about sex ("I wanna make you holler"), it just comes across as a generic R&B song. What's more, they don't seem to be having any fun. And it's sad that the whole song sounds subservient to the production of Rodney Jerkins. Time to reevaluate my women's studies paper on the Spices as feminist role models.

"Let Love Lead the Way," if you were wondering, is just schmaltz digitized.

And proving that the Internet really has everything random under the sun, the picture below is from a fan site that has Claymation models of the Spices (back in the days when there were five of them), while www.playerhaters.com/spice/poems.html holds haikus written about the Spice Girls, many of which can't be published in a family newspaper. Here's one of the non-risque ones:

Sometimes I watch them

And strange voices in my head

Tell me to hurt them

RECOMMENDED READING

Can you listen to Kid A, the new Radiohead album, without thinking "this is Radiohead, supposedly the greatest band of the 1990s?" It's like not thinking about a pink elephant.

One never considers The New Yorker a place to read about popular music, but last week's issue had a good article by Nick Hornby (of High Fidelity and About a Boy fame and possibly one of the best writers on popular culture) on that very question, and why people will universally learn to adore it because of who Radiohead are. Check it out.

DREAM OF ECLECTIC SHEEP