Working out at my new gym is so different. Not only are my workout mates often guys with biceps like basketballs but there are about a thousand TVs and TV channels. One of those channels, the one you get to hear without headphones - in fact, can't help but hear - is from ClubCom, a private TV network for health clubs. It's all music videos, at least when I'm watching, sometimes interrupted by a message from the health club people, like when a beefy animated guy comes on and warns: Always use a spotter.
If you don't know what that means, well, don't lift weights.
This easy video watching is great, because one of my goals this year is to learn more about pop music, which I stopped listening to sometime about 1969.
I started in February by watching the Grammys.
The show started off pretty lame. "Who's that guy who looks like Prince?" I asked my husband.
"That's Prince," he said.
The show was unusually sober, shall we say, since it was broadcast so soon after the flap over Janet Jackson's breast. Oh, by the way, one critic referred to it as her "middle-aged breast." Janet Jackson is 37.
So, anyway, I was glad to get a second chance at pop music without having to waste any more time.
After a month or so on a treadmill or elliptical or bike in front of a ClubCom screen, I've concluded:
To be a pop singer today if you're a girl, you need to be cute. Really, really cute and really, really thin, as in model thin. Janis Ian or Carole King could never make a hit song today. Tina Turner? Forget it.
You have to be really, really young. These girls are all 14. They appear to have personalities like those girls you knew in high school who weren't interested in anything but their make-up and their clothes, kind of like I was in high school, come to think of it, only I couldn't sing.
You have to display a pre-adolescent Barbie sexuality that would seem to appeal more to kids who aren't old enough to purchase their own CDs.
You need only one facial expression: mopey. There's not a whole lot of joie de vivre here.
If you're a guy, you don't have to be really, really cute, although a lot of them are. It's okay if you resemble Jack Black in School of Rock.
Either guy or girl - and this really surprised me - you don't have to be able to dance.
Look closely at these videos: none of the singers or musicians move their feet. There may seem to be movement, but it can be attributed to all sorts of vehicles used in the videos - cars, airplanes, bicycles, skateboards, spaceships. Wind machines are big. So are moving backgrounds. Sometimes pop stars do actually move, but it's all upper body - sort of like cheerleaders who do the arm motions but can't jump or do splits. There are legs, either bare or in tight black pants, shot from below so that they look 10 feet long, often splayed wide with lots of white space in between, implying that some movement was involved in getting them there. But you don't see the legs move.
Another surprise: With half of all college students today seemingly enrolled in film or video programs, there is absolutely nothing cinematically interesting going on here. Madonna's 1980s videos look like Fellini, by comparison.
So, okay, okay, there are exceptions.
OutKast moves. (I've only seen that video play once.)
Lisa Loeb's clever All Day borrows from the Rugrats movie and Lisa herself morphs into animation and out.
Coldplay is just good clean shots of the band playing in a white space - a welcome relief after all the silliness.
But, look, I'm not saying things were any better in the 1960s. The Turtles' big hit, Happy Together, is now a jingle for Applebee's.
Which seems about right.
- Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
