Who the hell is Ke-dollarsign-ha?

If I didn't know what that performer, Kesha, looked like, I would have just assumed the musical performance on last Saturday's SNL was some new cast member doing a spoof of terrible contemporary club music.

And this person is popular? How? Popularity does not a quality product make.

If she's even notable in a year there may be some point to her "success" as a media, well, person. At the moment I look at it more as a matter of successful market saturation by a bunch of industry executives who have a stranglehold over the music industry as a whole. Do you really think that most DJ's actually select the music they want to play? It all comes from a thousand miles away from their station on preselected play lists. They screen callers who tell the call screener what they want to hear and put them on the air to "request" that song be played.

But anyway, that performance...

The terrible "ballad" she attempted at the start of one of her songs and the occasional heavy breathing into the mic during her SNL "act" was almost enough to convince me that the heavily auto-tuned song was actually performed live until the backing tune continued to play when she actually didn't move her lips. I don't care if it's an industry practice or what they do on SNL. Live means LIVE to me. If people "want to hear what is on the CD" stay at home and save 50+ bucks and listen to the music at home. Is the money really worth seeing someone move on stage like an interpretive dancer? Do you need to see Britney Spears go through the motions walking around on stage lip-syncing? Do you need to see Kesha move around like a someone doing a string dance to a prerecorded music track?

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these people (I hesitate to say artists or musicians) since they're heavily manipulated by the machinations of record executives who keep almost every penny of their record sales. These naive young people burn through whatever money they got when signing their contract and after a spike in album sales often times have extremely poor concert sales (the thing that oftentimes is the only think that makes them any money) and end up broke or crazy or both.