Jessica Simpson....Live??

After her recent efforts to help the nation become sufficiently inebriated to endure her singing - if not the mere fact of her unbidden existence - Jessica Simpson's latest musical pop-up book, a loose assemblage of atonal discord known to the three people who could care as, "Do You Know?" was released today. Or should that be, 'paroled'?

To celebrate this new low-point in her ongoing crusade of setting remarkably low standards for herself then invariably failing to live up to them, the nice folk who run ABC invited her to perform in Times Square, thereby inaugurating Good Morning America's 'Fall Concert Series.'

In front of a large, and possibly medicated audience and on live, national television she also performed a track from her 2003 fictional classic, "In This Skin." After a few bars [which, coincidentally, is the only condition in which one should hear her at all,] she stopped the band and said she couldn't hear anything. She then counted to three - all by herself - and started again from the beginning.

Let's be quite clear: The single viable reason why any vocal artist would need to stop a performance due to a lack of 'hearing' is because they couldn't be sure they were keeping up with the tape. If you're actually singing and your feedback dies, you use the other ear.

Canadian reporters who were obliged to endure the purgatory of a recent concert in Niagara Falls reacted with what may be the single most accurate and acerbic review of a Simpson performance ever recorded, "It might be unfair calling Jessica Simpson's show a train wreck - At some point, a train knows where it's going."

This latest charade is implacable proof of the spotless precision of that elegant summation.

There are performers in this country who could produce a more melodious sound if they were currently gargling with Pennzoil. But they can't get a break. And the incessant and suffocating promotion of the risible dearth of perceptible talent exhibited by Ms. Simpson and her equally bogus contemporaries is a significant reason why.

America, you deserve so much better than this!

Watch for yourself [if you dare] and see if you can spot where the tape dies...