No one begrudges [Jessica] Simpson her ambitions. But spend three or four minutes with Simpson's "With You"—"With nothing but a T-shirt on/ I never felt so beautiful/ Baby as I do now"—and you might find yourself longing for the days when professional songwriters ruled the pop charts. Happily, there's no reason to think that the future of pop music is one in which all of the songs will be written by the artists themselves—there are still pop singers who show no inclination toward songwriting. More important, it's pretty clear that there are plenty unequipped to write anything at all. And as the novelty wears off in songwriting, as in most things, the marketplace will hopefully begin to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. Thank God for capitalism.
Comment spam is an ongoing problems that we're trying to address. Previously we required people to create accounts and log in. I am thankful to say that is no longer the case. We're giving Captcha another try and are playing around with a text-based Q&A variant of Captcha. So bear with us as we try to figure out how to best get a handle ont he problem. Please note that any comment on a post more than 30 days old will go into the moderation queue, where I will get to it when I can which could be once a week.
