All these pop stars are hitting the wrong notes

Once someone is that blatantly up for sale, how can their music convey any emotion?

No one should expect a music awards ceremony to give prizes to the most deserving artists, but surely someone could have drawn the line at Justin poxy Timberlake. Because not only has he made a pile of drivel, his tour is sponsored by McDonald's, with huge McDonald's arches surrounding the venues. Once someone is that blatantly up for sale, how can their music convey any emotion whatsoever?

Would Aretha Franklin have been as stirring if she'd sung "You make me feel/like a Happy Meal". Would the blues have any purpose if Muddy Waters had sung "Woke up this morning, I'm at the end of the line/thank the Lord for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin breakfast, only one forty-nine."

But Timberlake wasn't the most unsettling part of the evening. Nor was it the diabolical Dido, with her anodyne suburban pap, music for people who don't like music, every edge removed to leave a computerised blandness to jangle in the background as you're planting bulbs symmetrically in your tidy garden or choosing a carpet in B&Q.

Much more disturbing was that even the hip-hop scene seems to have been dragged down to this level. So the brilliantly innovative OutKast performed with a troupe of dancers dressed as skeletons, who did one of those routines you used to get on the Black and White Minstrels or Saturday Evening telly in about 1971. Maybe ITV was trying this out because it's planning on getting Max Bygraves to host a rap show, with songs like "A, you're adorable, B, you're so beautiful, C, you're a cutie full of charms, D, you dis' me bitch and E, you're eating lead, it's fun to wander through the alphabet with you."

But worst of all is how comfortable this industry is to promote the global dominance of rappers like 50 Cent. The difference between the current crop and the previous generation of hip-hop superstars is that most of the latterstarted out as cauldrons of emotion but ended up with no greater cause than displaying their wealth. Whereas the current crop start out like that, dispensing with the need to have an opinion about anything beyond their own career in the first place. Tupac, for example, may have perished in a futile feud, but his first album was a powerful anthem for civil rights, partly in homage to his mother who was a Black Panther.

Perhaps, along with the popularity of Spike Lee and especially his film about Malcolm X, this reflected a renewed political edge amongst blacks in America, following the Los Angeles riots. By the mid-Nineties this had receded, but the most popular rappers would still at least try to articulate some sort of world viewpoint, even if it often made hardly any sense. So for a while it seemed every hip-hop album would contain a speech that went something like "Yeah, like I'm here representing, ya know what I'm saying, for the people. 'Cos the people's all we got. You take away the people and you just got, like, ya know, buildings and mud and polystyrene and shit, and that's why every day I thank the Lord."

Whereas Puff Daddy was never concerned with any issue apart from bragging how rich he was, like a black Liberace. To be fair he did have one musical achievement, which was to take a Sting song and make it worse, so I suppose he deserves an award for that.

The 50 Cent album for which he's received such acclaim is called Get rich or die tryin', and one advert in the awards featured him and Jay-Z publicising their line of trainers. If they hear groundbreaking black albums of the past, such as Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, they must think this was a neat line in publicity. Perhaps they imagine him appearing in cinema adverts saying "We all know what's going on this season - Gaye's Green Stripe. I wouldn't be seen in the grapevine without them."

So of course the current rap stars fit neatly alongside Dido and Justin Timberlake at a ceremony that gave a special award to Duran Duran, the band that most enthusiastically embraced the Thatcherite spirit of the Eighties.

By the time of next year's ceremony there'll be an award for the best hip-hop advert. One nominee will be Busta Rhymes, for one when he and his son come in the door splattered with blood. And his wife says: "Hey Busta baby, not another drive-by. Look at the state of those shirts, that blood will NEVER come out." Then a next-door neighbour will say: "That's where you're wrong babe, back in the day a nigga get shot and you don't never get those whites clean, but new Daz eats into stains and by tomorrow those bitches be as white as Eminem's ass."

But 50 Cent will be the winner, with him standing before his black-tinted window limousine rapping "Yo, that goes like a shot/But I know it's not/Going to hit the spot/Like Bisto. Hmm, it's got/A flow as hot/As a ho's G-spot." The only trouble being this will spark a deadly feud with P Diddy and his Oxo posse.