Quite frequently, I get emails from people about music. Perhaps "frequently" is misleading. I get about three emails a month. Of those at least one is music-oriented. They vary a bit, but generally the theme is "music sucks, except for my favorite bands which I will now list for you."
  Now let's get two things straight. First; I am a big fan of shameless promotion. If you like a band, and you want to try and use this space to get the word out about them, that's fine. Huzzah. Second; I do think that, in general, pop music is pretty appalling. I almost never listen to music radio anymore, because I find that, despite tuning in once or twice a month, I still recognize about every third song I hear. Frankly, I think that the corporate consolidation of radio is slowly strangling musical diversity, but that's another rant. The point is, I don't have any love for a vast majority of the music that is popular enough to make it on TRL. I feel your pain, music loathers.
  Having said that, I really think you should suck it up for once. If the state of popular music today is the most depressing thing you have to face this morning, then you're on your way to having a pretty fucking good day. There are people who can't hear the music they want on the radio because their government won't allow it to be played on the air. Hell, there are people who will wake up early so they can go to the hospital for kidney dialysis, because their name hasn't come up on the transplant waiting list yet. There are people who are living, breathing, screwing, starving and dying all over the world, and guy who's shitting out his large intestine because he drank the water from the river that runs past a pesticide plant before it gets to his village is never going to care that Britney Spears sells more records than Jimmy Eat World.
  I understand that sometimes it can be hard to keep these things in perspective. It's very easy to whine about the everyday problems in one's own life, and not take into account the suffering of less fortunate people. I've been guilty of forgetting the big picture innumerable times myself, so I don't escape blame when I say that we should all take a moment to be thankful for the things that we have, or at least for the things we don't have, like herpes, or a fascist regime ruling over us. Let's try to keep that in mind the next time we're tempted to lament the sad state of popular music. Instead, concentrate on how cool it is that, amongst all the dreck out there, you've managed to find a few bands that you really dig. Think about how satisfying it is to be able to feel superior to all the bubble-gum listening drones, and to sneer at the mass-marketed crap you see on MTV. If you can't be thankful for your music store cred, at least take a moment to be happy that you're not dying of a horrible wasting disease. Unless you are. In that case, go right ahead and bitch.