Philadelphia Weekly

It's Thursday midmorning, and you're on the El, sippin' coffee, mindin' your business when it happens: The passenger next to you gets an incoming phone call. Her ringtone cries out loudly: "I love it (I love it)/ You love it (you love it)/ Every time (every time)/ We touchin' (we touchin')/ I want it (I want it)/ You want it (you want it)/ I'll see you (I'll see you)/ In the mornin' (in the mornin')."

All you can do is pray the call is taken in haste.

But it matters little. The sounds of J. Holiday's woeful, repetitive and ploddingly dull shitstorm of a song "Bed" have worked their way into your brain like a ravenous earwig. It'll seep into your head subtly over the course of the day. In your quiet moments, there it will be. An intruder most foul, most unwelcome. Songs you don't particularly like (or loathe outright) have set up shop in your unsuspecting dome before. It's happened for about as long as you can remember. But it's happening more frequently now, you suspect, and this worries you.

When will it stop? After all, you're just beginning to pull out of the tailspin known as "Crank Dat Soulja Boy," recovering from your bout with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful," forgetting Pussycat Dolls "Don't Cha," leaving everything ever written by Akon in the rearview and forgiving "My Humps" for, like a bubonic plague of the ears, pissing all over your inner sanctuary.

This is one serious slump. When did it start and why?

Much has been made about the death of the album. With peer-to-peer music piracy, iTunes and ever-shrinking attention spans, people who keep tabs on this sort of thing agree that the album is going to croak soon if it hasn't already. What hasn't been discussed is what happens when the single takes the album's place at music's throne and is given almighty power, a trend that had pretty great results its first go-round in the '50s, but doesn't look so healthy in its current infancy.

Hit songs are meant to be catchy, and hooks are meant to hook you in. Nothing new there. These are hits, after all, and part of their appeal is that they're designed for maximum impact. The difference is, in today's climate singles are released and devoured at a pace bordering on rocket speed and their effects need to be more immediate than ever, the aural equivalent of a boxer's stick and move. Artists now write singles with this type of hyper-disposability in mind; McDonalds' "I'm Lovin' It" fattened up by three minutes and released to radio like a pipe bomb.

This trend has been given a name: ringtone rap. And it's bleeding over into every corner of music's checkerboard, staining R&B, country and pop. Just a few short years ago this wasn't the case, and an artist you couldn't stand was perfectly capable of releasing a song you couldn't deny. (I'm thinking Ashlee Simpson's "Pieces of Me" here.)

But things are looking down, and America's pop-culture jumbo jet is in a nosedive. We've been fed empty calories long enough to start craving them.

As a result a car rolls by, windows cracked, Pink's "U + Ur Hand" blaring, and that's all it takes. You've been infected. You may never buy the album. But its claws are in you. Eventually a song you could've easily ignored, say, five years ago becomes more and more ubiquitous, earning every third spin on Wired 96.5, washing over the closing credits of your favorite TV show, or spilling from someone's phone on the El. Well-traveled strands of zeros and ones, today's singles are.

It wears on you, and you begin to relent. Soon Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot," Fergie's "Glamorous" and that irritating song by Panic! at the Disco become an accepted norm; Rihanna's "Umbrella" a standard of excellence.

This isn't to say all hits nowadays are repetitive, or that all repetitive hits are awful. You could listen to Chris Brown's "Kiss Kiss" and nothing else from now until the end of time and live a perfectly adequate life. Same goes for Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss," Lily Allen's "Smile" and anything currently being played on the radio produced by Timbaland (excepting One Republic's "Apologize"). There's actual scientific proof confirming this.

But more often than not the single's unchecked power in the current climate isn't working so hot. Just think about what it's done to a formerly rock-solid artist like Alicia Keys next time her shrill "No One" visits your thoughts the moment just before sleep.

Or, again, J. Holiday's "Bed," a template for the current batch of hits being written, and truly one of the most insipid songs ever; a miserable, vile listening experience that steals a bit of the soul each time it's heard.

A bit harsh? Maybe. But I'm as sure of that as I am of this: I'll be singing it to myself all goddamn day.