There are certain things a culture can do to obliterate itself on the relevance scale. When the Mayans lost their empire to the Spaniards, imported disease, a misuse of local resources and poor agribusiness practices, and ridiculous sacrifices to damaged goods gods certainly didn't help matters.

Making stars out of Katy Perry and fetishizing suicide as a manner of speaking out against the Man tends in this direction.

But where things start to go really wrong is in the department of good taste, and nowhere is this more egregiously offended than when it comes to jeggings. Looking back, I think they were the first sign of the crumbling of the Mayan power as well.

Jeggings are the unholy union of leggings and jeans. Like Tiger sleeping with multitudes of creepily unattractive bimbos, this lithe love child carries the stigma of denim mated with spandex, as if the two even had a chance at a decent relationship.

Unlike capri pants, whose summery feel gave them a sense of playful innocence, if short lived usefulness, jeggings already feel dated and unusable in all but the most bizarre circumstances. They might find a home in a Greenwich village showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with its gaudy pu pu platter of human misery and ridiculousness, but outside of that or Cher's sad Botox-injection of a funeral, these harbingers of anti-fashion say nothing and do less.

What exactly do jeggings accomplish other than forcing your legs into an acid washed splotchy gym pant of dubious pattern, making you appear half-primed to camouflage yourself amongst alien shrubbery to avoid being eaten by a denim-hungry bird of prey? Mobile elongated cottage cheese containers aren't what we were promised by futurists and science fiction gurus of the 50's, but oh what our collective disposable imaginations have wrought. You might have thought the words "denim" and "camel-toe" could occupy the same sentence, much less the same anatomical area, but thanks to jeggings, humans can now move on to the next sin against nature.

If they were shorter, you could excuse them as a kind of aerodynamic cowboy underwear, or as bike shorts. But jeggings elicit the feeling that you are a prostitute with a high risk for gonorrhea and stupidity.

Problems compound when men start to adopt women's fashion. They did it with berets, skinny jeans, and now, sadly, Jeggings, which promotes tucking, as if the emasculation of men wasn't limited to cutting off the circulation to one's genitals. Turns out the Crying Game is less revolutionary now that Lady Gaga has co-opted the androgynous look for her own private monster playground.

The one good thing to emerge from the jeggings' rise to fashion frenzy is the downgrade of muffin tops and visible g-strings to just "trashy." Civilization's decline may not be certain if we can just mature fast enough to reject these bad ideas before they expand outwards like visible cellulite ripples on a fat girl's thighs.

Can you ever have too much Auto-Tune? Of course. Like crack cocaine, affairs, and Cheetos, Auto-Tune should only be used sparingly, and with regard to the sanctity of pure professionalism and ability. One can be sure Britney Spears is a consummate professional. I have no doubt she, like others in her field, has some moderate ability to spew insipid lyrics at a somewhat accurate pitch range, assuming she's free from unnecessary K-Fed-erated influence. When that previous night's bender pushes her voice to a Valley of Incomprehensible Suckiness for a muon's lifespan, Auto-Tune is and should be called into service to correct the aural offense and realign the discombobulated EQ settings.

However, the age of T-Pain and the once-funny Auto-Tune the News has made the original geek product--an algorithm powerered pitch perfecter--into an annoying and overused audio malaprop. Now we're inundated with songs deliberately infused with modulated sine waves disguising the human voice in a myriad of colorful harmonics and twisting tremelos of electrical wankery. The shy kid from Owl City now sounds like Postal Service's Ben Gibbard, thanks to Auto-Tuning, and the entire Maroon 5 band has been converted from mobile bacterial lumps with vocal cords into streamlined, pitch-corrected Speak-n-Spells. Kanye West, who currently embodies the highest echelon of douchebaggery in music, had already jumped the shark when he produced 808's & Heartbreak, an auto-tuned, empty shell of dead-weight and dime store delivery. (Though without Auto-tune, Kanye would be a noisy collection of vocal noises--talent here lies in producing Pringles-neatness out of a bag of greasy Lays.)

Thanks to Auto-Tune's mainstream appeal (read: idiot producers and the idiot consumers who subsidize egregious Auto-Tune abuses comprise the majority) the path behind us, where Auto-Tune is a only music nerd's wet dream, is sadly blocked by the amazingly preserved corpse of Cher. It would appear the music industry is nuptially locked in an unholy embrace with Auto-Tuning. Our only recourse is to purchase karaoke versions of all our favorite songs, and rerecording the lyrics in our bedrooms, sans vocoding plugin. It may be raw, and it may not be beautiful. But dammit, at least it's better than the sonic abuse we now call pop music.