Cyrus McNally McNally is a fourth-year neuroscience student who spends his spare time developing computer models of psychiatric disorders. Your opinions are welcomed: nougat@ucla.edu.

The Backstreet Boys are wrapping up another mind-blowing, heavily experimental set at a dimly lit club on the east Sunset strip, and AJ has just bitten the entire wing off a live bat some fan threw onstage.

Kevin and Howie are finishing the last haiku in “Space Jazz Odyssey,” a 30-minute, free-form composition conceptualizing the quintet’s metaphysical ideals of salvation and states of consciousness. Nick passed out in an onstage Adderall binge and Brian is trying to mix in cuts from the Flavor Flav solo album.

Absent from the crowd are the teenyboppers of the 20th century, who once pulled their hair out and screamed about what critics have called the most successful boy band in modern history. In their place are mostly couples of a disgruntled, bored generation who are unimpressed with what adulthood has turned out to be.

Through the .music they seek truth, answers and a viscosity of credence absent in the music of their parents’ generation of the 1990s, which was doomed to formulaic lives governed by the economy. They seek change, substance and a new way of life.

Back to reality. So, maybe no one has yet introduced the Backstreet Boys to LSD or any other psychedelic drugs, as the previous scenario imagines, but hey, maybe someone should! I mean, look what Bob Dylan did for the Beatles! In 1964, the Beatles were your average world-conquering, female-heart-dominating, all-time record-breaking boy band. Bob Dylan handed them a joint, and by 1965 the band had started playing sitars and putting reversed vocal “messages” in its albums.

Millions of dollars in record sales and a drug revolution later, the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus Christ” (according to John Lennon anyway). So maybe the Beatles had the upper hand on our beloved Backstreet Boys to begin with (the band wrote and played its own songs – an amazing feat by today’s standards), but our Fab Five could benefit its own career by spending more time with Bob Dylan.

Well, the point of this column isn’t that music influenced by drugs is good, but that boy bands and most other popular music is bad! And let me tell you how bad it is. It’s not bad like Michael Jackson is bad. It’s bad like Bruin defense.

Have we really advanced so far as a civilization, that Rolling Stone – arguably the world’s definitive source for current music trends – features a teeny-bopping sensation in a suggestive, half-naked pose (well, I’m not really complaining about that part) on the cover of almost every issue? At one point, to be on the cover of Rolling Stone meant you had skills, funk or at least creativity. Now it means you have a terrific butt.

The fact is, most of the artists of today’s Billboard Top 50 don’t just put me to sleep, they make me mad! They make me a bitter human being, ashamed to be an American, where Eminem is an icon because he can spout bull faster than any other Slim Shady, where people take Marilyn Manson seriously and where *NSYNC takes itself seriously.

America’s current popular music reeks with unoriginality. It is merely a festering money pit preying on the simple-mindedness inherent in the mentality of the masses, inbred with crass commercialist tactics and fronted with terrific derriere. While its production might be as slick as Steve Lavin’s hair, this music is not about creativity.

Listen up. The Man (i.e. record companies) doesn’t care about stirring your mind or your booty. He cares about only one thing: your money. He has devised a contraption so diabolical and so efficient that most of you do not even realize you are being oppressed – held back from experiencing fresh, innovative music. We give seemingly benign nomenclature to this contraption: the “boy band.”

And although the popularity of this tried and true capitalist machine will eventually pass, as all things tend to do, I would like to give thanks to the boy band machines and the terrific butts on Rolling Stone pretending to be musicians, not because I appreciate their art, but because without their dominating popularity, there could be no “underground” music scene, and therefore no good music whatsoever.

If the boy bands and other pop music machines had never stolen the limelight, then minicultures centered around reactionary genres, such as turntablism, trip-hop or emo could have never evolved.

By keeping their manipulative hands off hybridized music too weird for the masses, and thus not castrating creativity, big record corporations are doing the evolution of music a favor. Even though groundbreaking artists like DJ Shadow, Portishead and Modest Mouse sell decently, their music remains free from big label requirements and whims, keeping the spirit of independent music – and evolutionary processes in music – alive.

Now, dear readers, for those of you who have gotten this far, the next time you decide to go record shopping, I challenge you to think for yourself! Break away from mass mentality! Don’t give in to arbitrary trends! Buy something different for a change. Remember, as Winston Churchill once said, “To change is to improve, to change often is to be perfect.” And, don’t let the man keep you down!