I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And one thing immediately jumped out at me. There are a lot of young, blonde, female teen idol "singers" who I've never even heard of--but they all look the same. The Evil-Big-Name-Recording-Companies must have cloned Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera/Blonde-Girl-What's-Her-Name and never disclosed this to the National Bioethics Advisory Committee.
For years America (meaning the USA) had a lock on defining popular music, even though the Brits would often come back at us with improved versions of our own inventions, but since radio consolidation, bean counters taking over the music biz, and the music biz imploding because it doesn't want to sell singles online, we have ended up nothing but Britneys and gansta rappers. The rest of the world is finally surpassing us in interesting new music. But, it'll be a few years before you see Japanese, Indian, African rock stars regularly (according to this dubious wikipedia entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_music_artists], "Wei Wei" and "B'z" are huge worldwide bestsellers). At least we're seeing South American rock stars now.
