But then there was the designer's "family row. "There sat mom Ricky, daughter Dylan of Dylan's Candy Bar, sons Andrew (a film producer) and David (who works for his father), and David's girlfriend, model and designer Lauren Bush. Shortly before the show began, Janet Jackson, wearing a black pencil skirt, a white blouse and gray sweater, all of this neatly belted together, was brought out and seated between Andrew and Dylan. He appeared shy, but Ms. Lauren seemed excited by the pop-star's presence.

As the show began, Ms. Lauren and Ms. Jackson discussed each piece as it came out: heavy-duty denim  paired with feminine blouses; pretty cotton summer dresses; and masculine pinstriped suits with newsboy caps. Each time a model strutted by the pair, Dylan would whisper something in Janet's ear and then rub her fingers together in that way that suggests  the particular feel of a fabric. Then Janet would rub her fingers together too in response. And so there would be moments when both women were fiercely rubbing their fingers and whispering into each other's hair. Then they would both nod at each other and smile.

When the long, silk dresses came out, Janet actually mouthed, "I LOVE it," so clearly that the Transom could read her lips from across the room.

A memorial tribute performance honoring... Michael Jackson.

Sunday, 8/9 Central, with special guest Janet Jackson.

Stay classy, MTV!

On-again: Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer were seen together at La Esquina. [P6]  

A rep for Janet Jackson claims migraines are the reason she keeps canceling tour dates. [People]  

Ivanka Trump is partnering with food conglomerate ConAgra to "free working Americans from the lunch rut of eating the same boring, expensive or unhealthy food at their desks day after day." Details about the project don't seem to be available, but there is a blog. [Cityfile]

David Bouley's new project at 10 Hudson Square will be a combination of a small downstairs restaurant and an upstairs bakery.  The restaurant will have 45 seats and will serve a bistro menu, and a small bar will serve sushi and made-to-order sandwiches. [Eater]

During a talk about the joys of philanthropy featuring Bill Clinton, The Economist's Matthew Bishop noted, "Neuroscientists have monitored the part of the brain where you get the reward for giving, and it's the same place for sex." The former president's response? "The older you get, the more the giving scale goes up."  [R&M]

Drummer Travis Barker, who was injured n a plane crash two weeks ago, has been released from the hospital. [US Weekly]

Lawyers representing Heath Ledger's daughter, Matilda, are suing his life insurance company over $10 million they are withholding because of the "suspicious" nature of his death. [R&M] 

Janet Jackson was hospitalized yesterday, but her reps aren't saying why. [People]

Real Housewives of New York City star Luann de Lesseps managed to give dating advice to two women at the St. Regis that was at once unsolicited, racist, and sexist. [P6]

Drew Barrymore's friends think she start seeing guys her own age after she was spotted with three different twentysomethings last week. [Full Disclosure]

Dennis Quaid is unhappy that ex-wife Meg Ryan discussed their breakup while promoting her new film, The Women. "I, myself, moved on years ago," he said. [R&M]

Jermaine Dupri drank "Jay-Z's Ace of Spades Champagne and Patrón tequila" until he vomited in girlfriend Janet Jackson's lap at Tenjune. [P6]

Heather Locklear was arrested in Californa for driving under the influence of prescription medication. [US Weekly]

The court ruled that the FCC acted "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in issuing the fine, departing from its established practice of applying equal standards to indecent words and images and fining indecent programming only when it is "pervasive as to amount to 'shock treatment' for the audience."

"Like any agency, the FCC may change its policies without judicial second-guessing, but it cannot change a well-established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure," said the court. "The Commission's determination that CBS' broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency's departure from its prior policy. Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change — that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency."

Phew. Finally, we can let go of all that guilt since fleeting images of half-exposed breasts aren't as evil as we'd thought.

There is no shortage of music by divas today, as Janet Jackson and Erykah Badu release albums, as well. On Discipline, according to allmusic.com, Janet " takes the S&M imagery further, and more deeply personal, than she did on The Velvet Rope" (Um, what's my safe word?), while Erykah Badu's first true album in eight years, New Amerykah, is poised to make believers of everyone, again.

You had me at "bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage." It's a quote from Pitchfork's rave review of Beach House's self-titled debut in 2006. Clearly the Baltimore duet of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have had the street cred and the depth from the get-go. Now, it's time to see if they have the breadth. Judging by the hypnotic and whimsical video for "You Came to Me," off their new album, Devotion, they are about to prove just that.

Pete Rock has been producing hip-hop albums since the early '90's, working during that time with such legendary New York native sons as Run DMC and Nas, amongst others. His latest album, NY's Finest, celebrates the rich tradition of big-apple emcees (and killer beats)—it features appearances by LL Cool J, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, MF Doom, Redman. For anyone curious about the mysteries of hip-hop producing, in the video, he gives a little glimpse into his creative process, finishing it off with an impressive sampling of Pat Banetar's "Love Is a Battlefield." Nothing will make you feel so old and so young at the same time.

It's hard to get a handle on British pop artists Goldfrapp. Once you think you've got them all figured out—experimental! electronica! dance! rock!—they go and change on you again. Their latest, Seventh Album, offers another round in their "evolution," as they ditch everything for lush folk ballads. Ok!

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the origins of Beach House. They are from Baltimore. The Observer apologizes for the error.

I don't know about you, but I'm fascinated by catch phrases and what it says about us when one of them catches on. I'm having a drink with an editor before going to the book party for Still Holding , Bruce Wagner's deeply disturbing new novel (part of his cell-phone catch-phrase trilogy, which also includes I'm Losing You and I'll Let You Go ), and for some reason we got to trading catch phrases from Zoolander .

I could be wrong, but I think the number of Zoolander aficionados out there is approaching the critical mass required to tip it over from stupid guilty pleasure to Spinal Tap –like cult status. It plays enough on cable, and it's one of those comedies that grows on you. Not as good as Spinal Tap (really, what is?), but up there with Waiting for Guffman .

Anyway, as I recall, she threw down the tragicomic "orange mocha frappuccino" fatal gasoline male-model immolation fight, with the idiot Wham! song on the soundtrack (you had to be there), and I came back with the super-groovy loft-scene moment when Owen Wilson asks some spacey stunner: "Ennui, could you get us some of that tea [we] drank when we were free-climbing the Mayan ruins?" (Could somebody please make a movie starring the woman who played Ennui?)

At which point, the editor came back with the genius apes-and-iMac riff on Kubrick's 2001 . I tried to up the ante with what has become my all-time super-fave Zoolander catch phrase. It's the one delivered by Evil Fashion Guru Mugatu, Will Ferrell's great role.

It's the moment when Mugatu denounces Derek Zoolander, the moronic male model (played with steel-jawed stupidity by Ben Stiller) who's become famous for his signature "Looks": "Blue Steel," "Le Tigre" and "Ferrari." The embittered Mugatu cries out with helpless rage, "They're the same face ! Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills !"

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills …. I don't know whether it was a subsurface catch phrase before Will Ferrell uttered it (the movie was released in September 2001) and he just propelled it into mainstream popular consciousness, or whether he (or the screenwriters) invented it, but it seems like it's a phrase that's found its moment: 3,400 Google entries so far, with variations like "Are you on crazy pills?" and "What am I, on crazy pills?"

I guess it's not hard to figure out why this moment in history precipitated "crazy pills" into pop argot. Certainly it had something to do with the way Will Ferrell did it so perfectly, while faintly mocking it at the same time. But these last two years have been a kind of Bad Dream-History on crazy pills, you might say. So the timing was right.

And such "verbal icons"-as they used to call them in the Yale English Department (where the catch phrase "verbal icon" was invented)-as "crazy pills" don't get propelled into popular linguistic consciousness unless they strike a chord, expressing or echoing something deeply felt in the collective unconscious in some new way.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills …. It's that feeling you get when everyone around you seems to have willingly bought into something that seems like a mass delusion to you. (For me, Seinfeld was an example-and, more recently, Lord of the Rings .) In effect, what it's really saying, obviously (or "obvs"-catch word of the guy on whatevs.org), is that everyone else is on "crazy pills."

Anyway, forgive the long wind-up, but I just want to say that in the past few weeks, when I'm watching the way pseudo-events like the Dean "scream" and "the breast" become somehow real events by having real-world consequences, I want to say, "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills." The insanely disproportionate reaction to those pieces of videotape is crazy-making. My fave example of media hypocrisy on the question was the Dateline show that featured an in-depth analysis of the Janet Jackson breast-baring, with all the simulacrum of solemnity a TV magazine show can muster (the greatness of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is in the dead-on parody of TV magazine solemnity they do). Dateline then followed that segment later in the program with some pathetic "exclusive" about what? The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue! Complete with acres more of partially, subtly, obliquely, coyly exposed breasts than just the one oh-so-terrifyingly bared at the Super Bowl.

Am I on crazy pills? It seems to me the real scandal was that MTV, the allegedly hip music network, had Janet and Justin on the half-time show in the first place. Really thinking outside the box. Why not be really daring and get Donny and Marie?

But I've veered off-course here. What I'm trying to get at is the other piece of videotape shot on Super Sunday. The one that exposed something more than skin-deep, some ugly abscess in the human heart below the skin, a tape that asks questions deeper than "Have you seen a breast before"?

I'm talking about the Evie's Car Wash Abduction Video. Yes, it's been played frequently , but with nothing like the ridiculous frequency of Janet Jackson's tiled-out breast. (It would make an interesting study for some cultural-studies major: tiling-style differentials. I saw one instance, on MSNBC, where the tiles seemed to be barely enlarged pixels, hardly a disguise at all, while other networks had veritable floor-tile-sized squares of light that magnified the "disguised" breast into Rothian proportions.)

Have you seen that haunting Evie's Car Wash video? The one taken in a Sarasota car-wash parking lot by a surveillance camera that presents, in stuttering rapid-still motion, the abduction of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia. We see her approached by a skeeve wearing some kind of uniform shirt; he stops her and then leads her off to what would ultimately be her brutal murder. The video ends with the young girl and her alleged murderer walking rapidly out of the frame. It is basically about the moment of approach, the moment of decision to initiate the act.

Am I on crazy pills? How often does it happen that we witness the very moment of choosing evil? Is Janet Jackson's breast more worth replaying and re-discussing to the point of regurgitation, just because it's a celebrity breast? (Is this further confirmation of one of the central metaphors of Bruce Wagner's new novel: celebrity worship as symptom of cultural brain damage?)

Where are the congressional committees convening, the pundit panels debating what this piece of tape, the Evie's Car Wash tape, means? Bill O'Reilly has gone on a crusade against the judge who refused to return the skeeve to prison for a parole violation, but I wonder if there's a deeper question here. The question the tape asks is: How did the skeeve-how could any human-get to the point that he was capable of doing this? A "flip-flop" in his attempt to reconcile with his wife? (Which is what his boss suggested in a piece in the Post .) Of course, that suggests something akin to a blame-the-victim explanation-a blame-the-wife explanation-for Carlie's death.

O.K., you say, it must be something deeper, something that happened in his childhood, so he really couldn't help it. When she walked across the deserted parking lot, he didn't really have a choice. He'd been programmed by his history and psychology to do what he did. And if he was programmed, the implication is he wasn't responsible for his act. He had no choice in the matter. Or did he? That's the kind of question you find yourself asking when you watch that videotape. Sure, it's a question that can occupy you in the abstract at any moment-it's a fundamental question about determinism and free will-but here it was in your face.

Can any psychological investigation into the skeeve's childhood and youth explain-thus, in effect, excuse-him? Was it, in other words, something beyond his control? Or was there a choice, a choice to do evil, and what does that say about human nature, that it contains the capacity for that kind of choice?

Sure, a million moments like this happen every year all over the world. But here we were, witnessing it right in front of our own eyes. That fusion of the casual and the sinister in the jumpy surveillance-cam style, the meeting, the paths crossing that will soon devolve into horror. It asks questions that go beyond the psychological explicability of evil. I can't help seeing a stark moment like this-the visible manifestation of the million other invisible moments like it-as asking questions about whether we live in a universe of moral justice or meaningless cruelty.

2) Here's the Shift to Lear

That was why, I guess, I found myself thinking about it at a certain point during the first preview of the Christopher Plummer and Jonathan Miller King Lear at Lincoln Center. (This is not a review, but it's unlikely you'll see a better live Lear in your life than Mr. Plummer, although I'm still under the spell of Peter Brook's film, with Paul Scofield as Lear, and the remarkable Lear of Michael Horden in the BBC television version directed by, yes, Jonathan Miller, who has made this his play.)

Lear is, of course, in at least one important respect about "the myth of moral justice" (the title, by the way, of a provocatively skeptical book about the law, forthcoming from my colleague-no relation-Thane Rosenbaum). "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport," as the blinded Gloucester says bitterly in Lear . It's hard to disagree when you look back at the history of the past century. Although, for some, Lear is a play about the ways that suffering is, in some sense, redemptive.

The particular scene that triggered the connection I'm thinking of is the one where the blind Gloucester-his eyes gouged out for his loyalty to Lear-encounters his fugitive son Edgar posing as a madman.

But I want to digress for a moment about the way the blinding of Gloucester (James Blendick) is handled in this production. It's a horrifying scene however you play it, horrible even in a play whose final scene has been called, by the brilliant scholar Stephen Booth, "the most terrifying five minutes in literature."

Shakespeare didn't explicitly indicate how he wanted the blinding done, so the director faces a choice: full-frontal blinding, where the audience watches the nails and tongs gouge out the "vile jelly" (as the tender-hearted Cornwall calls it) from Gloucester's eye sockets. Or should the blinding be staged more obliquely, or out of sight altogether?

Many directors have felt full-frontal blinding too unbearable to inflict upon the audience, in effect torturing the spectators' eyes in a way analogous to the way Gloucester's are tortured.

According to Stanley Well's Oxford edition, in Jonathan Miller's 1989 Old Vic production, Sir Jonathan took the eye-gouging entirely offstage. All you heard were the screams, a powerful concept calling upon the audience's inner eye to torture itself with the "image of that horror."

In this production, he does something different: Gloucester's onstage, but he's seated with his back turned to us. His tormentors face us directly, giving us a chance to look into the eyes of the gougers . That's where the Mystery is, the mystery of cruelty and evil. Those are the "vile jellies."

But to return to the subsequent meeting of the blind Gloucester, who is led through the countryside by some unnamed "Old Man" and crosses paths with his son, the fugitive Edgar disguised as a madman. Edgar cries out, "But who comes here? My father, poorly led?"

That phrase, "poorly led," was the one that conjured up the surveillance-cam image of Carlie Brucia being led to her death. There has been a certain amount of scholarly disputation over "poorly led." Some have suggested that it's a printer's misreading of Shakespeare's "foul papers" (as his lost manuscript is called), and that it should read "my father, parti-eyed," as in his eyes multi-colored by blood and bandages. But I've found the argument made by R.A. Foakes in the Arden edition persuasive: Edgar sees his father "led" before he knows he's blind.

In any case, I've never had a problem with "poorly led." It's one of those incredibly resonant phrases: We are all, to one degree or another, "poorly led," aren't we? Poorly led, misled, led astray, flying blind, wandering across the wasteland of a deserted parking lot with only an uncaring surveillance cam to watch over us and someone who wishes us ill-our death itself, perhaps-approaching.

Hmmm. Pretty bleak. I think I need an orange mocha frappuccino.

If it follows precedent, the President will explain that the investigation will not play the blame game, but will confine itself to learning whether or not the intelligence community had warned CBS that Ms. Jackson had a right tit. Did CBS and Viacom know? And if they did know, did the people at the top know, and should they have been able to connect the dots and anticipate what Justin Timberlake called a "wardrobe malfunction"?

The Democrats are screaming cover-up, although, under the circumstances, that particular accusation doesn't seem to hold much water. What they're demanding to know is: Does Jackson have another breast? Is America in danger of a second surprise attack? Does Timberlake have any confederates? Are there other men who hope to do the same thing?

The intelligence community is casting a wider and more suspicious net. They are expressing skepticism about the so-called Jackson right breast. Was what was shown on television really a right breast, and did it really belong to Janet Jackson? Could this be fraud? Given that some members of the Jackson family are famous for their feats of cosmetic metamorphosis, how can the government have been so sure that Janet Jackson has tits? She may have had one or even two at one time, but that was years ago. Prior to the shocking event broadcast from the Super Bowl, when, if ever, were this woman's tit and/or tits last seen? She has been under constant public inspection for years, and there are no published accounts of her tits' whereabouts. Satellite photographs have shown protuberances on her costumes which the ministers of all the major religions have decried, but we don't know if they were protesting actual breasts or simulated breasts achieved with foam rubber, rolled-up socks or other devices commonly used by such people, whoever they may be.

Democrats and even a few Republicans are saying that these questions cannot be answered by the President's investigation, which is being conducted by his own appointee, Michael Powell, the chairman of the F.C.C. and the son of Colin Powell, who told the United Nations Security Council on another occasion that "We know from sources that a missile brigade outside of Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents …. " If the Jackson family suffers from a propensity for self-morphing, the Powells may have a problem with hysterical exaggeration.

Regardless, the demand for another investigation grows louder by the day. Critics outside the administration are pointing out that the nation is (if you'll pardon the expression) virtually naked against the possibility of another attack. At any moment, some indescribably comely chanteuse might commit a shocking ecdysiastical act on network television and, according to Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security czar, no way currently exists to stop her. Attorney General John Ashcroft reports that even with the powers vested in him under the PATRIOT Act, he has been unable to reverse the growing number of male entertainers grabbing their crotches in prime time. Although the Justice Department has denied it, the rumor in Washington has it that Mr. Ashcroft is considering arresting women with buxom profiles and sending them to Guantánamo. A small group in the department is arguing for making busty women wear muu-muus and signs warning others that they are potentially dangerous.

Half of Washington-the noisy half-is unanimous that another committee is needed. All experts agree that it must be nonpolitical, nonpartisan and above politics. The only people who fit that description are a small number of anchorites-who live in the desert on the tops of columns-among the Coptic Christians of Egypt. (For more, see St. Simon Stylites, A.D. 390-459, the first and most famous of these holy flagpole-sitters.) Unfortunately, the Copts are Monophysites, who deny the divinity of Christ and are therefore not likely to be accepted by the Republican base. There is a Monophysite community in America, centered in southwest Colorado, and although they are the swing vote in that one Congressional district, senior political analysts on CNN doubt that there are enough of them for the President to move to the left on the issue and strip Jesus of his divinity. The evangelical backlash would be too great. The second objection is that the Colorado Monophysites community contains no anchorites. If the new committee were to be made up of real, nonpolitical anchorites, they would have to be imported-and if they insisted on remaining on the tops of their columns, the committee would be yet more cumbersome than most government commissions.

A second battle has erupted over when the committee should make its findings public. The nonpolitical people are insisting that nothing be said until after the elections in the fall, otherwise the voters might stumble across the facts and cast their ballots accordingly-and if there is one thing which can mess up a modern Bush-type exportable democracy, it is an informed electorate. So that's a non-starter.

In the meantime, a third committee has been formed to address the question of accountability and transparency. This is the forum in which the heads of the spy agencies, the intelligence (such as it is) and counterintelligence community, get to explain how it wasn't their fault. Had they only known what the other agencies and departments did know at the time but didn't tell them, they would have been able to run out into the mass of gyrating pelvises at Super Bowl half-time and throw themselves between the television cameras and Janet Jackson's so-called tit.

This committee will show how the tit attack was not the failure of anyone in the government to do his job, but the failure was the system. The system is bad-very bad-and it should be dragged over the coals and revised. The system is so bad that the computers can't talk to each other and none of the agencies have each other's telephone numbers. If Congress would be good enough to appropriate just a few more billion dollars, a new birth of coordination and interpersonal relations will occur in the intelligence community and America will be safe.

Some elements are not waiting on the committees and the commissions, be they high-level or low, blue-ribbon or another color. Judith Miller, the ace finder of weapons of mass destruction for The New York Times , is on the case with a crack team of people assigned to her by the Army. They have vowed-notice that they tend to vow in these situations-to fan out across Hollywood, where it is believed that thousands of tits are stored in closely guarded warehouses and on unmonitored cable channels.

The search for tits being carried on by police agencies everywhere has come up with shocking discoveries. Many major religious and cultural institutions have been revealed to be significant tit repositories. The Vatican Museum is crawling with them-very large ones, often without pasties and clearly within the sight of children. There is enough of this kind of material in the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone to pose a significant threat to the American family. An unknown but what is believed to be a huge number of tits-running into the tens of thousands-are being brought into the country by thousands of Hispanic women every day, or so it is believed. No one can say how big the undocumented or illegal tit problem is.

The President is considering increasing money for his sexual-abstinence program. Some thought is being given to ending the war on the Muslims, since Mr. Bush has been told that they are as strong on girl virginity as he is. An anti-titical movement is not out of the question, with American women being encouraged to wear veils and long robes in public. But one way or another, Mr. Bush is determined to keep the nation safe.

Obviously, the success of Rent has had a big effect at Mickey Central. If La Bohème could make it on Broadway without anybody from the pop pantheon to make it bankable, imagine what could happen with the addition of Elton John and Tim Rice to the title of another opera.

But what opera?

This is where marketing comes in. Africa has been rich colonial fodder for the Imperial Rodent of late: The Lion King , Tarzan and The Prince of Egypt are all examples of the continent's ability to add to the Big Mouse's bottom line. So Aida is the obvious choice. In addition to the geography, the opera has its love triangle of Aida, the Nubian slave loved by Radames, the Egyptian soldier, who is loved in turn by Amneris, the Pharaoh's daughter. Lots of angst, everybody dies at the end, and let's not forget all the cute stuffed-animal possibilities presented by the Triumphal March scene. Michael Graves can do the pyramids!

The time is camembert-ripe to usher grand opera off the stage of the Met and to fully explore the licensing potential that haute culture has heretofore ignored. Aida , the musical; Aida , the animated feature; Aida , the perfume. If recent reports of his financial straits are to be credited, (Sir) E really needs the money. And, after his recent heart scare, who could begrudge (Sir) E his chance at voguing with Verdi?

But it wouldn't be Disney without some tinkering. So, as Mr. Rice explains in the album notes to the rather cumbersomely titled Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida , this "is a tale of one nation's harsh subjugation of another." It's obvious that Aida 's libretto is in the public domain and ready for a P.C. update. None of that 19th-century romantic tripe for this audience. Aida is political! It has racial conflict! It's now!

High concept established, the march on New York begins. Like any product, Aida must be test-marketed. The production had a "world premiere" in Atlanta in October 1998. Entitled Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida , with a book by Linda Woolverton, it seems to have passed with nary a blip on the seismo-cultural graph. (Sir) E's version, with book and lyrics by (Not-yet Sir) T, who numbers The Lion King among other dubious achievements, is now back to Aida , with the unindicted co-conspirators taking precedence on the marquee. The new (!) improved (!) production will attack Chicago first, then, in spring 2000, it will be born on Broadway. After all, Giuseppe Verdi's Aida (as now we must term it) had its world premiere in Cairo, so the argument could be made that (Sir) E is only flattering by imitation.

But the question remains: Can you take the kids? Disney is notably averse to death. After all, Bambi's Mom and the Lion King's Dad were (a) animated and (b) supporting characters. Perhaps if Chicago doesn't work out, they will change the ending and have Radames and Aida run off to join a support group for treasonous interracial couples. There may yet be a happy ending–stay tuned.

In the meantime, for those of us unable to wait, a CD has been released. "Emphatically not" a cast album, each of the songs has been mixed, engineered and manufactured by a different "team" with performers who include (among others) Sting, Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, James Taylor and, of course, (Sir) E. The 15 songs credit well over 100 people. The perps then thank an additional 112 individuals, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., Boyz II Men, the Spice Girls and "everyone at Castel M. and Woodside, everyone at Rocket, Island and Mercury records, all artist and producer management companies and all musicians who participated on this album." It's a pre-emptive Oscar speech and there hasn't even been a film made.

It's hard to say which is worse–the music or the lyrics–but it's safe to say that the text seems to linger on, while the music thankfully fades from memory. The tunes range from those appropriate to background sound at Kmart to the merely glutinous. No competition for "Celeste Aïda" here. Some of it is even funny: Tina Turner's version of "Easy as Life" is done as homage to the Supremes, and (Sir) E's duet with (Diva) Janet Jackson is somewhat reminiscent of a shampoo commercial. To be fair, the album notes contain a disclaimer: This version of the show, "is simply a selection … interpreted by an extremely distinguished array of performers, each of whom was given absolute artistic freedom," a sort of pop version of bel canto. The liberty may have even precluded (Sir) E and Ms. Jackson from actually being in the same studio at the same time. It certainly sounds that way. Whatever the method, the entire score has a glossy, electronic, mixed-to-death sound that excludes any human contribution (unless one counts the digital dexterity necessary to adjust the state-of-the-art knobs on the recording dashboards).

Moving from the tunes to the text, Mr. Rice's notes assure us, in what sounds like a possible defense against a class action suit, that the lyrics are the "intended stage version of the words you will read herein."

And what deathless poetry this is! Unfortunately, the obvious advantage of producing opera in a language the audience can't understand never occurred to the neophytes Mr. John and Mr. Rice. Sub- or supra- titles to the contrary, opera works in part because it's incomprehensible. This Aida bombs when you understand what's going on.

A high point of the undertaking has to be Sting's attempt to link "ruler" with "minusculer" in the opening "Another Pyramid." Mr. Rice hasn't been this memorable since the "Lauren Bacall me" of Evita . Anachronisms abound: The Buddhist concept of past lives is popular ("Written in the Stars") while Lenny Kravitz sings both parts of the duet "Like Father, Like Son," with Dad admonishing, "You can't escape your genes." You can almost feel your Calvins contracting.

In the post-Diana age, we are all aware of (Sir) E's chaste passion for princesses and interesting clothes. Since presumably he won't be performing in whatever version of this disaster eventually winds up in Gotham, he takes the opportunity to cross-sing both Amneris and Aida (albeit in separate rock arias).

But my favorite part of Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida is found in Mr. Rice's notes. He writes, "Verdi's Michael Eisner was the Khedive of Egypt." Comparing the Senior Mouseketeer to the degenerate head of what was then a decaying Ottoman satrapy is pretty much worth the price of the CD.