Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Chris Brown, and Whitney Houston make Ozzy Osbourne look tame

It wasn’t always this way. For decades, it was the hard-rock nation that spawned the professional lunatics of pop music. You had Ozzy Osbourne snorting lines of live ants and eating flying mammals in Des Moines, Iowa. You had Mötley Crüe doing smack at white weddings, killing their friends in car crashes, and honking boat horns (not to mention Pamela Anderson’s cervix) with their pants-pythons. And most insane of all, you had Axl Rose doing his best to convince the unwashed greaseballs of North America that there’s nothing sexier than a man in a chinchilla-fur coat, army boots, and nut-hugging white biker shorts.

Those days are all over. When was the last time a poodle-doo-sporting hair farmer did something outrageous besides endorsing the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is Rick Santorum? (Sorry, Dave Mustaine, but Lars Ulrich had you pegged right all along.)

The biggest WTF news is that Rihanna has rejoined Team Breezy, at least in the studio. That’s right, the same guy who turned RiRi into his own personal piñata right before the 2009 Grammys is back on her speed dial. The chart-topping pop queen has officially collaborated with her former boyfriend on a remix of her “Birthday Cake” single. That’s none other than Brown you hear crooning, “Girl, I wanna fuck you right now/Been a long time I been missing your body.” On the positive side of things, at least he’s not singing, “Girl, I wanna fuck you up right now.”

Still, seriously, girl, what the fuck? No one cares what you do with old Fists of Fury in the privacy of your own Barbados-beachfront mansion. For all we care, he can pig-roast you with the corpse of Ike Turner while a naked-except-for-his-cowboy-hat Max Hardcore films it. But did you have to announce, even symbolically, to the entire world that you’re willing to let bygones be bygones, the resulting hype guaranteed to shoot you to number one? And if you really had to collaborate with Brown, couldn’t you have picked something a little more fitting, like, say M. Ward’s “Human Punching Bag”, Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed”, or LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”?

Over in pop music’s most bling-gilded of ivory towers, we’ve had Jay-Z and Beyoncé doing their best to make sure their already famous daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, grows up as normal as every other kid. And what better way to do that than by taking out a trademark application on her name? This takes balls, if for no other reason than, in the out-there-moniker sweepstakes, “Blue Ivy Carter” is nowhere near as “unique” as “Bogart Che Peyote”, “Moxie Crimefighter”, “Audio Science”, “Banjo”, “Buddy Bear”, or “Mars Merkaba”. Hell, suddenly “Prince Michael Jackson II”—aka “Blanket”—sounds positively nuts in comparison.

Still, Hova and Sasha Fierce obviously believe they’ve spawned a brand worth protecting. And in fairness, folks are already looking to cash in on their golden child, with a fragrance manufacturer wanting to trademark a hastily whipped-up concoction called Blue Ivy Carter Glory IV. Sensible folks would have let said fragrance pimp have at ’er; given that little Blue Ivy Carter is currently dumping in her Huggies five or six times a day, that’s one perfume you don’t want behind your ears unless you’re shooting a German scheisse video. Still, couldn’t Jay-Z and Beyoncé have just sucked this one up? Next thing you know, Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow will be making sure there’s no such thing as an apple at your local supermarket.

Lastly, would someone explain why, exactly, the death of Whitney Houston is being touted as the biggest tragedy since Wacko Jacko shuffled off to Never Never Land? The world has evidently gone so insane, it’s forgotten that, for the past decade, the singer’s biggest hits were on a crack pipe. (Not tasteless enough for you? How about this? Question: What do Whitney Houston and a spider have in common? Answer: They both have problems getting out of the bathtub!)

Give the old-school diva credit for being crazy right to the end, though. The National Enquirer is reporting that the night before her death, Houston was living la vida loca at Tru Hollywood nightclub in Los Angeles, drinking like a dehydrated Charles Bukowski despite requests from her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, to slow down. Those with enquiring minds have also learned that according to “eyewitnesses”, Houston was out on a balcony later, shrieking, “I’m tired of this shit, I’m tired of this shit!”

Presumably, she wasn’t talking about the onetime gods of heavy metal stubbornly refusing to give up their crowns as the craziest motherfuckers in pop music.

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