(This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.)

Today, the NYTimes, my go-to source for rant-inspiring material, ran an article entitled “Country’s New Face: It’s Young and Blonde”. Hearkening back to sometime in the early 18^th century, the piece expresses surprise that a female country musician might have gotten her start on the mysterious new interweb. Ignoring the fact that country’s new face sounds a lot like its old face (were not Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and Tanya Tucker once every bit as young and blonde as Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and LeAnn Rimes)?), the article found another way to piss me off. Allow me to quote at length:

“In a video posted to YouTube in January 2008, Veronica Ballestrini — then 16, blond, precocious — sits on a wrinkled couch wearing a pink Abercrombie & Fitch zip-up hoodie and clutching a guitar…

…A year and a half later, all the screen time has begun to pay off. Last spring [Ballestrini] recorded a proper video for “Amazing,” a single of her own, and uploaded it. After a couple of weeks it was picked up by CMT.com, the digital arm of Country Music Television, and shown on CMT Pure Country, the network’s all-video digital channel.

A young female country singer savvily using online media to construct a career built on largely self-written songs about teenage experiences? The Taylor Swift Playbook is making the rounds.”

Why does this piss me off so much? Because this article, like so many describing the amazing promotional power of the internet, ignores the fact that the vast majority of musicians who have managed to transmute online fame into tangible success in the real world have been attractive young females. In other words, it is the male tendency to click on every image of a sexy teenager, whether the underlying link is hawking emoticons or offering the opportunity to reconnect with that slutty redhead from high school, that has made these women famous. How revolutionary.

The evidence is overwhelming. There’s Julia Nunes, the babyish blonde ukelele sensation who parlayed her YouTube videos into an opening slot on Ben Folds’ 2008 tour. Or what about Lily Allen, the multi-platinum singer/songwriter who become a poster child for MySpace (even though she was already signed to a record label when she started posting videos there). Then there’s Lily Allen redux, Kate Nash, the more talented (and less born into fame) of the two, who also credits MySpace with her success. Most egregious are YouTube’s five breakout musicians of 2008— Marié Digby (currently signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records), Mia Rose (Cherry Entertainment), Dondria Nicole (Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def/Island Urban), Esmée Denters (Justin Timberlake’s label, Tenman Records), and Lisa Lavie (who has chosen to release her albums independently).

Each of these five women, as well as another few dozen I’m too demoralised to list, started out singing covers of pop songs on YouTube, either while accompanying herself on a guitar strummed with a coma-inducing rhythmic regularity, or else a capella, utilizing her free hand as a baton with which to conduct her Fantasy-era-Mariah-Carey-style coloratura. Then some record exec found himself carrying underwood (file under: jokes that never get old) while watching her video, and made a call. Consider Mia Rose, who is an absolutely gorgeous Portuguese girl and shares her name with a prominent porn star. Both of these facts go further to explain her YouTube channel’s 204,000 subscribers than her voice, which is seldom even in key. Esmée Denters’ medley of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, performed during her opening for Timberlake in London, is truly painful. Try not to cringe when the back-up singers arrive and pretend to rock out to this skinny white girl’s half-assed attempts to dance.

I realize this may sound like over the top rage, but there is so much talent out there on the web, it hurts to see all the attention go to cute eighteen year-old girls singing covers. Just to prove I know how to be positive, here’s an example of a musician I love, Jack Conte. He’s using the medium of YouTube not just to put himself out there, but to produce interesting original music and creative videos. He has 1/200^th the fanbase that Esmée has, and 500 times the talent. But that’s how the web goes. My advice to Jack? I think it’s time to consider a dye job. And a sex change.