"Love" songs

What happened to music?

Most people would say that things like boy bands are nothing new, but considering that the modern boy band is only about 30 years old I'd beg to differ. Referencing boy bands, what confuses me is how musical popularity seems to have changed over the generations.

Mick Jagger, Steven Tyler, Eric Clapton: none of these men are what one would call classically attractive, yet they have all been sex symbols in their time. At Beatles concerts women would pass out at the first song and remain unconscious throughout the concert, according to some roadies.
This is the classic concept of being a musical celebrity: the music that you make, the emotion you can invoke is what makes you attractive. It was not only appealing for those less-attractive to have the chance to be sex symbols; it was a beautiful sentiment that love and other emotions can be evoked through music.

Now look at the most rampantly popular "artists" of the last few decades: Britney Spears, Justin Bieber,  One Direction, Ke$ha, Rihanna and Chris Brown.

These days it seems that sex appeal (or so-called "romance appeal" in the vein of Bieber and One Direction, as Twilight has shown the belief that some magical girly-boy will take the girls away to an enchanted castle seems to be one of the best selling points of the modern age) is the greatest selling point to make stars out of nobodies, and even those short fifteen minutes of fame make millions upon millions for record execs so this process continues.
The douchebag movement seems in full swing, as every pop sex-celeb seems to be focused on getting more and more disgusting and obnoxious. Anyone who's seen Bieber's latest hairdo should be able to attest that it would make even Jersey Shore rejects recoil at its foulness, while Spears poses in classic trailer-trash mirror pics wearing a bikini with her children gleefully in the shot.
This is to say nothing of Rihanna, who is not only a skank but further setting back feminism. She gleefully spends more and more time around the piece of fossilized cat shit that beat the ever-loving fuck (and possibly the common sense) out of her, saying that she's an independent woman who doesn't have to explain her decisions. This is, of course, when she's not going around topless in entirely see-through bras.

This, of course, leads to the idea of modern sex appeal, which seems to be that the trashiest women seem to be lauded as the sexiest woman alive. See Rihanna last year, praised for her sexiness despite her saggy body and lack of self-care.
Now, I'm not saying that every woman needs to aspire to some idea of perfection in order to be considered attractive, but that a bit of self-respect is necessary. There are plenty of beautiful women who deserve that accolade far more than Rihanna and who don't go around whoring themselves out to cameras.
In this "modern" concept of sex appeal, men are reduced to nothing more than some sort of magic fairy-person to whisk the woman away to a life of luxury, and anyone who doesn't live up to that is filth. Likewise, women are reduced to nothing more than vagina, tits and ass to be used and thrown away as one sees fit, and real women then suffer under this supposed "requirement," branded as sex objects by advertising and insulted for having two X chromosomes.

So, to everyone who thinks that Bieber is the ultimate man, an asexual little simp who claims to want only to love you for eternity and can be picked up or put away at will; to everyone who thinks Rihanna is the ultimate woman, a trashy, easy-to-get living sex toy designed to give it up and not care about anything else; kindly go fuck yourselves, violently, with a corkscrew.