Slippery wet pop princesses and shadowy figures of the post-2000 electro disco scene dominate American pop music today. If you are in the music business and have checked into rehab or gotten pregnant recently, it probably means you fall on the opposite side of the pop music paradigm from Kanye West, Daft Punk and Justice. The exploited, confused and addicted pop stars are objects for the cultural taste making of the blog-dance/hip-hop superstar producers and promoters.

Exploitation has always been a part of the music business, but the extreme success of self-destructive stars from Britney Spears to Amy Winehouse to 50 Cent, paired with the cool robotic self-control of Daft Punk (dubbed by a close friend of mine “the new Beatles”) makes me wonder how pop music in 2008 can shake up the hierarchies of wider culture.

Take the current ideal consumer of pop music, a.k.a. Pitchfork Media loser. We’ll call him Tom. Tom enjoys popular music and wonders why disco ever went underground. Tom wants to live in Williamsburg in NYC, but knows the job market there is terrible and the scene is on its way out. Tom is probably young, male and educated. Tom’s New Year’s Eve party may have featured microbrews and designer drugs. Tom drives (if he drives) his parents’ Prius.

I don’t want to see Tom at any of my shows, but he is always there, a bit too drunk but still looking bored and anxious. He is shy and good-looking and apparently indifferent to everything. He badly needs to rock out.

What I’m trying to illuminate is the kind of limited cultural vocabulary that defines the music scene these days, itself defined by music blogs, masculinity, money and light drug use. There are too many rules governing the inner circle of the pop-music cadre (in which I include myself) and determining the next big thing in music.

For example, guitars are out unless they are only fetished renderings of distortion and self-stimulation. Decadence and decadism are both rampant. The ‘80s are cool, but they were better the first time. The ‘90s are amazing, but it’s too soon to bring them back. The ‘70s were funny and stupid. The ‘60s were better than sex. Did the ‘50s really happen? Who was even alive in the ‘40s — Cher maybe?

Unfortunately for new ideas, the dominant self-consciously authentic pop music of my lifetime has already been ‘90s grunge: the music of Nirvana and Generation X. The trite solution: We bring back grunge and let everyone know how we really feel — not with synthesizers, but with electric guitars, strained vocals and harsh melodies.

In order to allow Tom to move on from electropop, we need to get him back to his grunge roots — the kind of music that was happening when he was a young boy. Loud, simple music can solve the world’s cultural ills. This time around, we can make distortion about feeling and not aggression. We can stop breaking guitars and start breaking hearts. We can even stay off the heroin and live past 28, if we listen to a bit of smooth jazz or NPR on the side.

Let’s do this grunge thing again, kids. There are even signs, including the success of the contemporary L.A. grunge band Silversun Pickups (they headlined the Capitol Hill Block Party last year) and the statement of Jona Bechtolt of Yacht and the Blow (no guitars anywhere in sight) that he is a grunge musician.

I swear this is not ironic Seattle hipster posturing. Go buy a Smashing Pumpkins record and a Telecaster and let’s do this thing.