a really excellent piece by Nick Sylvester and W. David Marx
on Girl Talk, wittily dissecting "the phenomenon" and demonstrating beyond doubt that placing Feed the Animals high on one's 2008 Picks is the Pseud move of the year…

(or even Pseudo-Poptimist move -- an example maybe of how the Pleasure Principle can be turned into a Big Other, "I must not fail in my duty to be pleasured and nonsnobby and perpetually sunnyside-upful about the state-of-pop")

too many good bits in the piece to quote ("legomaniac" ; Kanye's "Stronger" as "a dead-end, a cultural vasectomy"), nifty use of Adorno...

course i did say it rather more pithily earlier in the year

and less pithily but rather precociously earlier in the decade (the section called "Lameness on the Horizon")