I Wanna Be Mike Skinner. Man, That's Just About As Funky As You Can Be.

Adam Duritz bonds with humble fan, considers writing decent song.

Duritz attends premiere with Mary Louise Parker, beautiful actress about whom he will soon write a cringe-inducing song.

UK rapper Mike Skinner has a pint while trying to figure out how to write about fame without turning into Duritz-like creature.

A bit Slate-heavy the last couple of days, forgive me, but the site also had a review of The Streets' forthcoming third record today. (For clarity moving ahead, The Streets is basically one guy named Mike Skinner, pictured above.)

Everything I've read mentions that the album focuses on the trials and tribulations of life post-fame, and I agree with Slate's Jody Rosen that this is usually a bad sign. I'll leave aside judgment on this particular record until I've heard it. (Rosen likes it; other assessments have been more mixed. Many critics raved more about Skinner's second album, A Grand Don't Come for Free, than his first, Original Pirate Material. I felt the follow-up was a slight disappointment, if only slight -- the lyrics, key to Skinner's appeal, seemed less inspired to me on Grand, but its best songs were more mature and fully realized than the best on the debut. Long story short: I'm bracing myself for a letdown.)

But about fame: What could be more boring? I remember when Counting Crows hit it big -- a band many of you probably despise. The reason I liked (and still like) "Mr. Jones" is because the song sympathetically but critically addresses its subjects, people desperate for stardom because of a craving that stardom could never fill. The song's power, if you think it has any apart from a pretty good hook, comes from the intersection of their striving and the meaninglessness of that striving. Even if you think the message is still too obvious, the song gets its point across by plainly expressing the dream of its characters. When Adam Duritz sings, "We're gonna be big stars," you're not supposed to think, "Yes, and then they'll be happy!"

Duh, right?

The rest of the first album was full of hand-wringing, depressive but pastoral/rustic, existential love songs. Then, the follow-up album was lousy with caterwauling about dating movie stars and life as a rock star, expressed in solipsistic blather like this:

I was out on the radio starting to change
somewhere out in America
it's starting to rain
could you tell me the things you remember about me?

Yes. I remember you were a decent songwriter.

(Luckily, Duritz recovered, within reason. He's still a self-dramatizing sad sack, and you have to like that to like him, but the band's last, Hard Candy, featured some really good songs alongside some mediocre ones.)

Anyway, the most irritating thing he did around the time of the second album was change the lyrics of "Mr. Jones" to reflect his own stardom. Toward the end of the song, instead of singing "When everybody loves you, that's just about as funky as you can be," he sang "When everybody loves you, that's just about as f---ed up as you can be." Nothing like a sledge hammer to drive home a point. Poor baby.

The point of all this rambling (and there was a lot more of it than I had planned, so: sorry, sorry, sorry) is that Mike Skinner has been appealing -- way more than Duritz, obviously -- precisely because he sings about everyday activities like playing video games and making out on the couch with your girlfriend and drinking pints with a few rowdy friends. I'm eager (anxious, rather, given how much I've enjoyed his work) to see if he can pull off this next move.