The tragic result: a country of mournfully ignorant culture hounds, faux-intellectuals who consider themselves aware because they listen to Arcade Fire, follow the Silversun Pickups, and march to the tune of any Radiohead song.

What passes for depth in the music of these musical druids is the equivalent of glacial melting, with watered-down allusions, overused 4/4 beats, and tunes that only add to the ocean of mediocrity surrounding our mundane techno/cultural landscape. Indeed, the indie musical revolution resembles the explosion of easy-access pornography, coinciding with burgeoning broadband usage in the late 90's, giving bands a more visible platform from which to perform, providing them with more ways to "get their music out."

Just as the porn industry invented and utilized new technology platforms to showcase human perversion and degradation, indie music effectively wrangled technology as grassroots broadcasting. What was once safely ensconced in some poor father's garage and the occasional open mic salon was now given more wide coverage. MySpace and Facebook offered musicians a public space and the means to distribute crap dressed up in espresso coffee sleeves and ironic facial hair with minimal expense.

What makes all this indie music bad? At its core, the bands producing this insipid stuff suffer from authenticity crises. Dandies pimp out their world-conscious lyrics, supported by an eclectic mix of unusual instruments, the use of which is meant to convey authenticity and originality. But guitar-based pop about girls and how they ruin or improve life isn't exactly new.

These bands and their empty music are, like porn, the stinking effluence of a culture that has lost substance or meaning. To paraphrase Bart Simpson, we need another ZOO8 to thin out their ranks.

You know the musical equivalent? Including a third, fourth, or Jimi help us, fifth guitarist in a band.

The duality of life is well established, except in theology where yin/yang, Manichaeism and similar systems are damnable blasphemy worse than voting Green in a national election. Two sexes complement each other, as you'll learn if you try to hang out with a couple by your lonesome or arrive late to an even-numbered orgy. Point guards have shooting guards, and Blair Waldorf and Jenny Humphrey will be locked in competition for Ultimate Queen till the rapture.

Rhythm and lead. Two guitarists provide all the musical creativity any band needs from its six-string section. Like a breadwinner and homemaker, lead brings home the bacon and rhythm keeps the family together. Sometimes they join in beautiful, soaring solos that aurally mimic lovemaking. The (pre-Green album) interplay between Weezer's Rivers Cuomo and Brian Bell could have brought together Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in timeless romance, obviating the need for a magic mailbox in "The Lake House."

There's room for disagreement on whether to add a ukelelist, banjoist or musical sawist to any given band, which each increase the chance that NPR or Austin City Limits will call. But no one can credibly argue that more than two guitars does anything more than make an insecure band member feel better.

The Strokes' frontman Julian Casablancas had this guitarfluous problem in the traveling band for his solo act when I saw them last week. Nary a bass player to be seen, three keyboards, and three guitars for most numbers.  During one song, there were four people playing guitar. What did it accomplish? Just giving them something to do while the most slovenly, uninspiring frontman in pop meandered around the stage sans instrument like he lost a contact lens, and distracting from the excellent fretwork of the band's lead guitarist.

Unless you fly like an Eagle, there's no point piling on the guitars. Any virtuosity will get lost in the melee of sound, like pundits trying to talk above John McLaughlin on his show, and most likely you'll confirm to the crowd you learned just enough guitar to score. Remember this wisdom from Pete Hornberger: "The more people you add, the less effective it is. Like a neighborhood dad garage band."

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.

The Sunday jazz brunch is a staple of the restaurant with no obvious attractions on the day heathens need to replenish their energy lost to hours of juice and hugging on Saturday night.  It's often deployed by establishments who can't boast pictures of famous patrons on the wall, cater to the headset-wearing C-level executive with an expense account five days a week, and know marketing better than cooking.

Your parents visiting from Jersey, college freshmen in search of something "real" and anyone with a Vanessa Williams album flock to the jazz brunch.  A little math convinces these credulous demographics to open their vacuum-sealed wallets:  You'd pay a $20 cover and $10 drink minimum anywhere else to see live jazz, which is all the same anyway.  Why not throw in a buffet - or artfully arranged platters with cutesy names like Crustina Agoudara - and a Bikini Bellini instead?

The problem with the jazz brunch is that it inverts the natural order of jazz.  Forget for a moment that Negro spirituals, borne in the toil of slavery, aren't usually associated with lox, challah bread and frittatas.  When have jazz musicians ever been awake before noon, and in a clean room?  The smoky nightclub is the maternity ward of jazz, and its mother's milk is illegal hooch.  (The onset of smoking bans and sippy cup-sized martinis, sadly, reflects the senile years of jazz.)

Non-guitar solos have been driven to extinction in every genre to safeguard the first-laid privileges of the Ax Man.  The exception is jazz, a wilderness preserve of self-aggrandizement where blurry fingering, elaborate blowing and sensuous cymbaling determine the pecking order of the peckers.  The wincing wail of a sax or machine-gun patter of piano keys are simply more tasteful translations of coital release.

In the Bizarro world of the jazz brunch, the background is the front-most consideration.  A slight rise in the level of serotonin, and a 40-percent increase in the price of brunch, is the highest end of the band playing a jazz brunch.  The players can't be too creative, too affective, too noticeable, for fear of interrupting the conversation and continual placing of new orders.  Anything suggesting individuality gets the band the boot.

In the book of Revelation, the LORD tells the church of Laodicea, "Since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth."  In the Sunday jazz brunch, America has swallowed hard.