Banishing Gwen Stefani

Someone, and I am nominating myself, has to tell Gwen Stefani to go away and never return to the land of music. Growing up in suburbia, I was exposed to my share of No Doubt and Stefani, and I cannot remember thinking any of it was good. For some reason, I have not been able to shake her awful cacophony. I can lose a telemarketer with CIA level ease, but Gwen Stefani's claims of not being a "hollaback girl" (we will leave aside the idiotic question of what precisely a hollaback girl is) continue to dog me in my car, on television, and in restaurants.

To me, Gwen Stefani is sort of an embodiment of that irritating Southern California nonsense pop artist who will do anything for you to look at her. People, mostly tween girls, laud Gwen Stefani for being "unique and different" (since we are already leaving things aside, let us add to the list that unique and different mean essentially the same thing.) A lot of things are unique and different, like watching Don Johnson intentionally, or tetanus. You can see that being unique and different isn't always positive. My other gripe with Gwen Stefani is how recycled she is. Not only does her music fail to strike an original chord with me, all of her bad songs sound the same. "Hollaback Girl" sounds stunningly similar to "Hella Good" or "Hey Baby." Plus, all the songs I can think of at the moment start with "H." That is pretty weird too, and probably should be studied by professionals.

In summation, I wish on a thousand stars that someone at ICM reads this and uses their industry power to convince Gwen Stefani that she could refocus her efforts and considerable means to building a music school for kids. Maybe one day, we could be spared another Gwen Stefani. I think we'd all be winners then, and I'd sure feel hella good.