By Johnny Ray Huston

THEY MAY HAVE diamond-encrusted gold fronts, but today's pop stars have no bite. It's hard to remember the last time popular music was this retrograde and boring. Summer is usually at least a time when new vehicles hit the market, outfitted in producers' innovations for chart combat. But the past few weeks have brought canceled concerts, fourth-string singles from last year's contenders, and underwhelming returns by – and from – overfamiliar performers. Already relegated to secondary satellite-channel status, MTV's and VH1's music video programming remains locked in the same played-out grooves. The doo-doo aroma is long gone from OutKast's dried-out "Roses" as it's shown for the 13,853rd time.

Not that this matters in the realm of music television, which continues to gradually erase the musical element from its initial practice of advertising musical products. Britney Spears's ticket sales may have suffered a knee injury, and her album may be on the wrong side of the top 50's velvet rope, but VH1 remains faithful to the advertising powers of its "Toxic" doll, rubbing her diamond-toned microdermabrasion treatments in viewers' faces via reruns of The Fabulous Life of: Britney Spears. That episode, like others, builds to a frenzied shopping addict's demonstration of celebrity wealth. Britney could spend her millions "circling the earth 300 times in a private jet drinking 25 million coffees from the Coffee Bean," the show's narrator excitedly declares.

And she should – after all, as the show's creators pinpoint with a sadist's confidence, a viewer can dream. Fahrenheit 9/11's use of Britney's gum-cracking assertion that we should, um, just trust and, like, support our president isn't random; she's an icon of the Bush era, and as such, her current ailing status may not be wholly coincidental. Yet the Fabulous Life parade goes on, with Us's Michael Lewittes, a Howdy Doody for the jet-set elite, dutifully reminding watchers that "the rest of the riffraff can't get close" to Britney when she goes clubbing.

The riffraff can't get close by watching The Fabulous Life either – aside from some beach footage of her berating a video-cam stalker, Britney is even more remote and two-dimensional than in concert – all the better to function as a conduit plugging skin-care specialists, security companies, four-star hotels, alligator-killing fashionistas, and the underlying ethos of Fortune magazine. Still photos of Britney multiply like virus cells to signify multiple purchases or myriad millions as a sound similar to a rustling beaded curtain of rubies punctuates each exclamation by the show's narrator. If Nick Broomfield is the bastard child of Robin Leach, detailing the lifestyles of the poor and downtrodden in posh tones, then the voice-over specialist of The Fabulous Life qualifies as Leach's hyper, irony-free legit son. During Reagan's heyday, when Leach would accompany D-listers such as General Hospital's Jacklyn Zeman on a luxurious spa trip, one at least got the sense that it was a reward for the relatively hard work of learning new lines every day. The Fabulous Life's celebrities exist, just out of reach, to sell.

A more recent episode details the dynasty of the music biz's biggest success story during a sorry year, Usher. While Britney's refusal to go away suggests that pop is in the consumptive-cough phase of decadence, Usher's ever growing eminence suggests that the diminishing artistic returns of timeworn formulas will persist. In concert, the real Usher looks and sounds small, but his projected image is another matter: he plays to the audience through the camera with expert efficiency, turning each live show into television. As a dancer, he isn't as dynamic as Michael Jackson, and as a singer, he hardly threatens Marvin Gaye, but his pantomime imitations of those individuals – combined with a waxed, plucked, and sculpted doll physique – apparently add up to platinum times five. Flipping the script of Justin Timberlake's Justified in its exploitation of a gossip-fodder breakup (with TLC's Chilli), the sex-addict through-line of Usher's Confessions sucks the real-life pain from autobiographical Gaye disclosures such as Here, My Dear, replacing it with bogus grief and convincing greed.

Summer pop's few pleasures so far have been low-key and throwback soulful, from Angie Stone's "I Wanna Thank Ya" to Anthony Hamilton's "Charlene" (though someone needs to outfit Hamilton with stylist repellent, right quick). During an election year, the absolute lack of opinion – let alone political commentary – in commercial genres from rock to rap is shameful. The sole exception might be Jadakiss, whose new single, "Why," begins by berating the record industry before going on to ask, "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" Later in the same verse, Jada rhymes, "Why they come up wit' the witness protection? / Why they let the terminator win the election? / Come on, pay attention." The inquiring form may free up impulsive commentary ("Why Halle have to let a white man pop her to get a Oscar? / Why Denzel have to be crooked before he took it?," and, later, "Why they ain't give us a cure for AIDS?"), but it also reflects the resignation of a lone voice expecting to go ignored.

Rock the vote? The Beastie Boys bash Bush throughout To the Five Boroughs, and Morrissey snipes at the president at the beginning of You Are the Quarry, but the many MTV- and VH1-endorsed younger groups who claim either as an influence remain complacent and vacuous. When Morrissey conveyed the news that Reagan had died to an audience in Dublin, adding that he wished death had claimed George W. Bush instead, his remark – in keeping with past commentary picturing deceased monarchs and Thatcher on the guillotine – was promptly "Drudged" into oblivion by ceaseless waves of vengeful e-mail. You Are the Quarry's top 10-grazing U.S. sales were quickly outnumbered by the half-million hits received by a single article on Manchester Online. (Only Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse has expressed sympathy since – while outside of the United States, of course.)

That pre-Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore-issey moment counts as the only fleeting instant in which the mainstream music industry has approached – however flippantly – the culture war being waged in multiplexes and art-house chains, where Moore and Control Room aim to reframe debate. Nearly three years after Party Music, the Coup's prophetic political insight remains a standby tonic against hip-hop hitmakers who would rather floss than fire the boss. Eminem seems to have shelved "We as Americans" in favor of D12 high jinks and spa routines – The Fabulous Life of: Hip Hop Superstars 2004 interviews the friend of Dorothy responsible for Eminem's facials, Ole Henriksen, who breaks the important news that he's "helping to elevate [Eminem's] skin to be the best it can be."

Still living large thanks to Biggie and Mary J.'s talent, P. Diddy proclaims that "hip-hop is the most vibrant thing" earlier in the same episode, but the only thing that separates Hip Hop Superstars 2004 from the cast of Friends or Princes William and Harry or any other Fabulous subject is the relative creativity of the rappers' hustle. Is it any wonder that pop's best stars of the moment are played by Dave Chapelle? Whether imagining the Paul Robeson tears of a Lil' Jon clown or satirizing Diddy's Making the Band life lessons, Chapelle has added content to shallow characters. If today's pop stars are very expensive yet little more than a joke, they should be thankful Chapelle has the ability to make them funny. Because, really, the united state of pop this year is far from fabulous. It's downright sad.