It isn’t so bad for the formerly young when Alicia Keys and Jay-Z make the Billboard Hot 100; we know who these people are. But lately the pop charts have been killed with utterly foreign entities that no one over 25 has ever heard of. Who or what is a Ke$ha or a Jason Derülo? And why is it so disorienting to learn that the one with the dollar sign in her name is a white chick, while the one with the umlaut in his name is a black dude? Below, a helpful decoding of the new pop landscape for the no longer hip.


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