“Just follow your heart/ Your intuition/ It will lead you in the right direction.”

Oh, Jewel, why have you forsaken us? All those years of fragile soulfulness, reminding impressionable girls that their hands really were their own, and that they’ve been down so long that the end must be drawing near, and for what? This empty sub-Shakira beat? This inane pop-lite that drips with the stench of betrayed idealism? Shame on you!

It happens of course, the youthful bloom of simple sentiment and achingly emotional songs lain in sacrifice at the temple of world dominance. And I’d have been rejoicing – nubile blonde thing that she is, just made for the stiletto walk of shame - had she not turned in such a pitifully lackluster effort dressed up as parody. I mean, go ahead and make your video a metanarrative commentary on the modern music industry, complete with ‘viewer comments’ saying how much better you sound now that you flash all that cleavage, but that doesn’t change the fact you’re willfully perpetuating the system you’ve been so loftily deriding at great profit for all these years.

Want some love from me? Sorry. A man carrying a flashing neon sign pointing at his head reading ‘Wanker’ doesn’t excuse the fact he is one. In fact, it takes him to a whole new level of inexcusability for the simple fact that he is in full knowledge of his wanking status and yet prances round, unapologetic! He expects us to celebrate his proud display of arrogance in inadequacy! Pah!

Because there’s selling out, and then there’s fellating the Man while dressed in a gimp suit sewn by underage orphans in Guatemala. There’s abandoning your integrity, and then there’s ripping said integrity into tiny shreds, setting them alight and then gulping the ashes down with a gulp of Diet Coke drunk so that the label’s facing the camera. A street prostitute with three kids and a crack habit, now there’s someone I can respect. She does what she has to, but you my dear have a few million record sales in the bank.

Say it with me: Shame. On. You.

(For the record, my problem is not with a performer who previously defined herself as the feminist, anti-exploitative voice of a good many women choosing to redefine herself as a sexual object in order to sell records (because anyone who’s devoured ‘Jupiter’ or ‘Absence of Fear’ can tell of their sensuous desire and raw sexual power); Actually, hell, it is! But throwing vodka in my eyes is the fact that she did it with such a goddamn awful record!)

Watch the dream die here