STD S4: Now That’s What I Call Star Trek (Vol. 4)

After reviewing all of seasons one and two, I made it through one episode of season three. Let’s hope it goes better this year...

Now playing: “Toxic” by Britney Spears

Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to be a pop star. You’re rich. You’re famous. People passionately talk about you all over the internet with a cult-like infantile reverence for their obsessive orthodoxy.

And yet, your “contribution” to the world is entire albums’ worth of saccharin, trite drivel with the superficial complexity of a jigsaw puzzle manufactured by accountants and lawyers to remain just stimulating enough to gain audiences' attention, but deliberately making sure to never require actual effort or they dare risk alienating those same fans with the need for thought.

The result is “popularity” through a broken audience: thousands literally trained by the producers (almost-laughably called “artists”) to respond to structure, sounds, and lyrics in predictable ways and with an intentional vicarious emotional release; entire fanbases of nothing more than marionettes always on the cusp of seeking out and discarding the media they’ve been brainwashed into thinking they need for emotional support.

The escapism of the structure itself is the appeal, the predictability the comfort. Or, as Adorno put it: “Distraction is not only a presupposition…