I know all about our mechanical and magical pop stars. I mean, I’m rapidly fleeing that most beloved of demographics, the 18-34 set, but I still know, I am still “hep” enough to recognize the faces and auto-tuned voices that run our society.

Zum Beispiel:

• Taylor Swift, the porcelain kewpie-doll golem who threw a teary-eyed hex at Kanye West at the MTV Video Music Awards, after Kanye insulted Scott Borchetta, the Nashville warlock who gave her life by fashioning her from the whitest clays and sticking a slip of paper in her mouth, the paper containing a single word: dixie.

• Kanye West, of course, is a walking talking person-sized teddy bear with a drum machine heart who can take human form when he drinks enough Red Bull, or eats enough peyote.

• Then there’s Lady Gaga, the temporally-unstuck quasi-trans-ultrasexual who has drifted into our timescape to fill the collective unconscious with latex bodysuits and an incestuous amalgam of the last quarter-century of vapid dance and techno music. Of course she tries too hard; we already know how her story ends; in typical time-travel fashion, her tragic story has already been told. You and I know it as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Compare with this and you make the call.)

• Enough has been said about Britney Spears already.

• Jay-Z? Yet another cyborg.

• Beyonce is a parallel-universe Philip Glass with a permanently-dislocated pelvis, yet somehow she makes it work. Such repetition! Such gyration! Does she even have any bones at all? (No. She has no bones at all. She’s like a shark, all cartilage. And yes, I should have put a ring on it. Stop reminding me.)

There are so many more, but most of them are crude puppets that even the casual observer recognizes as, well, puppets.

(Links and everything. This is dangerously close to a real blog post. For shame on thee, The Hairy Skeleton.)