I am so ashamed of the popular music of today that I have not listened to the radio or watched a music video in four years.

No, I do adore music. Sometimes I need music just to breathe.

However, tuning in means torture in the form of formulaic and repetitive music or silly and meaningless songs.

When did the music around us become so superficial? When did it become image instead of sound? Where are the depths and the emotions I crave in music?

I could turn on MTV today and all I'd see would be scantily clad silicone-enhanced females prancing about the screen singing a ballad someone else wrote.

You know what I'm talking about - those worthless boy bands and their female counterparts.

A song to me is more than a voice and carefully orchestrated notes on various instruments - it is the passion and soul of unadulterated emotion fueled by a brilliant poetic mind behind it that makes it a song, not just a bunch of words on top of music.

It is not the carefully choreographed dance monstrosities or the sexually explicit romp of young pop stars across a stage as they belt out songs they did not create.

Furthermore, no one can convey emotions detailed in a song like the person who felt them and put them into words in the first place.

Now, I can understand that some people don't want to sing their own songs or that some simply sing them better.

The best example of this is the famed version of "Respect" performed by Aretha Franklin. The song, originally written for Otis Redding, was a dismal failure in the pop charts. But with Franklin's soul-filled vocals, the song catapulted to number one and is recalled without hesitation by the masses today - nearly 30 years later.

But don't ask me to respect you if your best songs - that you didn't even write - are about sex, drugs and crime, when your listening audience is mainly comprised of pre-teens.

I remember what I listened to when I was about 10 or 11 years old, like most of us probably could. Pointer Sisters and New Kids on the Block haunted my tape player for years.

Neither inspired me to slap on some lipstick and grind up to a metal pole like the music that our youth is spoon-fed from today's radio.

That's exactly how cheap and devoid of inspiration musicians like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys are. They chirp songs to millions of viewers for unimaginable amounts of money without appreciating the full weight of the song's story.

Their influence is turning our youth into make-up-caked children whose attainment of individuality becomes more impossible with each new carbon copy of Spears that graces the air waves with another vacuous song.

Where are the Jimi Hendrixes, the Paul Simons and the Miles Davises of our generation? Where is the fulfillment in songs that fail to inspire?

Today, music is business.

Marketing, sales and commercials are all the industry cares about - not the music and not emotions

Underground music is all that is left of music that meant something beyond dollar signs. Bands like Modest Mouse, Digable Planets, Portishead and Fugazi come to mind as just some of the real artists that exist in today's music.

Fugazi is a perfect example of a band that didn't "sell-out" to the corporate world. Instead of signing to a record label, they formed their own label, Dischord. After more than 10 years together, the men of Fugazi are still churning out albums. The band charges eight dollars for compact discs and five dollars for shows, and they refuse to sell merchandise of any kind for profit.

Although the "grunge rock" of the early '90s was short-lived, at least it was a musical movement that I could be proud of. Bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden sang songs because they felt them, not because they were paid to.

It's sad, but I really don’t see how the situation is going to change for the better. The good artists will be shoved further and further to the back to make room for the more commercially successful.

Eventually the situation could escalate to a rendition of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" - a society where what is accepted is deemed so only by the masses and all those who stray suffer a fiery death.

Scary, don't you think? Or don't you think?