King of Pop hardly deserves title - I beg to differ.

Hey everybody, remember Michael Jackson? Well just in case you were one of those fortunate few who had forgotten all about his annoying existence, here he is with a new album. While I personally haven't listened to much of it yet, it seems to mimic his past albums very closely. Let me paraphrase: "Look at me! Aren't I great? I have no musical talent! Buy my albums anyway!"

Bashing Michael Jackson isn't extremely challenging, so perhaps I should feel somewhat foolish for even taking the time to write this. Some time between all those cosmetic surgeries and the Presley marriage, Jackson had done enough damage to his own reputation that one needed do no more than utter the name, "Michael Jackson," to elicit a roll of the eyes.

Still, it's hard to resist making fun of someone who had the arrogance to crown himself "King of Pop."

As tempting as it is to mock of Michael Jackson for bleaching his skin, molesting little boys (maybe), and staging a phony marriage, I'm going to focus on his music. It is frequently said of Michael Jackson that he has "rhythm," or that he makes music you can "dance to." This isn't much of an argument. Have you ever listened to any dance remixes? Have you noticed that they all impose the same pedestrian beat on top of the original song? Really folks, the reason you find dance mixes in the bargain bin at record stores is because that's where they belong.

Dance music is neither hard to envision nor create, and why we should give Michael Jackson credit for it is beyond me.

Many people will also profess to enjoy Michael Jackson because of his stint with the Jackson 5. The real question is, why? The nearest parallel to the Jackson 5 is Hanson. Do any of you like Hanson? No? Then why like the Jackson 5? I challenge anyone who seriously enjoys the Jackson 5 to listen to any Hanson song and explain to me how they are different. Both groups feature silly, clichd songs about love and life, and both rely on similarly basic (read: boring) musical arrangements.

In fact, the only real difference between the two that I can discern is that in the case of the Jackson 5, it wasn't until after he hit puberty that one of the members started looking more like an attractive woman than a man. Occasionally, though, the argument in favor of the Jackson 5 will be simply a nostalgic one - this is especially confusing when it is being made by a member of our own generation, since none of us were alive when Michael was still a part of the Jackson 5.

Michael Jackson's music is plainly bad, and proof of this can easily be found in the absurdly large amount of PR effort that has gone into engineering Jackson's public persona. Michael Jackson's glitzy showmanship is all a cover for his woeful artistic inadequacy.

His white gloves and band-aids, aside from suggesting that his fingers frequently are placed where they don't belong, scream out: "I've run out of ideas for my music, so I've chosen to distract you with shiny objects and a dance that is not actually a dance instead." Wouldn't you feel at least a little foolish if you fell for that?

There is also the tried and true yardstick of the "stadium theorem." The stadium theorem simply states that any musical group that is popular enough to play in a stadium sucks.

This is supported by basic common sense. Think about it: how easy is it to get 70,000+ people together at the same time? Not very, unless you are appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ricky Martin, Michael Jackson, U2: they all pass the infamous stadium test, and trust me, they all suck big time.