Not necessarily. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance is a high watermark of recent popular culture, Keisha is OK, and KAty Perry wears good dresses, like a proper pop star.

On a girl pop tip, Katy B's LP is one of my favourites of the year so far.

I've not seen the link, but some modern stuff is good, honest!

I think there's probably more people on here who like current 'pop' than I've seen for quite some time. From where I'm sitting anyway there's been possibly more interesting and certainly more enjoyable things going on in pop than I've seen in any other field recently.

I'm going through a phase where I'm rapidly falling out of love with guitar music while simultaneously enjoying pop more and more. I'd rather listen to Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, Firework by Katy Perry or Tik Tok by Ke$ha than most things actually.

Add to this Katy B (as JoLean mentions), Jamie Woon, Robyn et al, and pop's in fine fettle. It looks like this could be the year when dubstep properly crosses over into the mainstream too, which would be very much "a good thing."

Toxic last night while flicking through the music channels. It's such a great pop song. I was going to post the video on this thread but found this cover version instead which underlines the point that among the dross there is still plenty of good music to be inspired by. And this is more than a pretty good cover version to demonstrate the inherent quality of the song:

Here's the same girl covering Laura Marling's Devil's Spoke:

The kids are alright, methinks.