Like many other 30-year-olds, my concept of a great night out increasingly involves making a pot of white cheddar shells and cheese and staying in to watch House Hunters. I’ve always been slow to take to new trends — it took me five years to agree to having a cell phone and I finally opened a MySpace account only after all of my friends had already moved to Facebook — but now I am positively backsliding into utter cultural oblivion, especially as it pertains to current popular music.

This naturally has a lot to do with the fact that on those few occasions when I venture outside of the house at night, it’s to dark wood-panelled pubs with names like “The Pig and Gribble” or “The Hanged Goat” instead of fog-machine-clouded hookup bars with names like “Sharkeeze Lounge and Vomitorium” or “Ronnie’s House of Leering and $1 Well Shots.” The kind of places I go to these days seem to be populated by sad intellectuals with Elvis Costello glasses who are perpetually sighing into their artisan beers, places whose jukeboxes seem to be stocked solely with Joy Division albums — places in which there is nary a bare midriff nor a hot new club track to be found. So I guess I can understand why it took me a full year to realize that the Black Eyed Peas had released an album in 2009 with such widely-known and widely-played songs on it as “Imma Be” and “Boom Boom Pow.”

Full disclosure: I downloaded these particular tracks and commenced trying to reconnect with the Youth of Today. Full disclosure, round two: my brain has taken a liking to these songs, particularly “Boom Boom Pow.” Furthermore, my brain has decided without consulting me first that “Boom Boom Pow” is quite obviously the Best Song of All Time. So much so that it must play it repeatedly, with no advance warning, and often in undesirable settings such as at my department’s team meeting and during my appointment with the gynecologist.

 

Despite the involuntary overkill, I’ve never failed to be impressed with the way Fergie had the presence of mind on BBP to declare that she is “so 3008.” Talk about future-forward thinking! She is pretty much guaranteeing her cultural relevancy for the next 1,000 years. Think of the immediate loss of impact if she’d insisted instead that she was so 2008, especially given the fact that the song was released in 2009. Incidentally, I originally misunderstood the lyrics — must have been hearing loss due to wayward chunks of shells and cheese in my ears — and for a long while believed it went “I’m so 3008 / you so 2008.” It wasn’t until a friend informed me with a barely-restrained smirk that Her Fergness was actually saying “I’m so 3008 / you so 2000 and late” that I was like OH SNAP! That’s an even mightier diss than suggesting that your enemy is similar to our most recent leap year!

Here’s what worries me, though. What happens in 3008? That song will pretty much be over. Dead and buried. They are going to have to solemnly remove it from its permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Best Songs of All Time. Flags will be furled, tears shed. Trumpets will be silenced. They will probably set an Auto-Tune processor on fire in despondent tribute. This is it, men! Our world as we know it has come to an end. Let the global wars wage and the gale-force winds rage. We have lost the will to go on.

I think Fergie would do well to stave off the downfall of humanity by pre-recording alternative lyrics. Each year from 3008 on, future generations can simply replace that vocal snippet with a more relevant version. That way, she’ll remain one step ahead of the game, and ensure her seat on the throne of pop culture for many more millennia to come.

Of course, we can’t know what the world will be like thousands of years from now, so my best advice is that she record many, many options to ensure that at least one is actually usable at that point. Some humble suggestions:

I’m so 3009
You be withering on the vine // OR // You on a run on like a cosine // OR // You all bent like a fork tine // OR // You stuck in a box made of pine // OR // You FDA-unapproved like off-label quinine // OR // On your liver and brain I will dine // OR // You have incurred a parking fine

I’m so 3010
Ain’t got no yang to your yin // OR // You burn in the hellfires of your own sin (particularly useful if religious condemnation is in vogue that year!) // OR // You the Stimpy to my Ren // OR // You take off your clothes and cry when you’re drunk on gin // OR // You outdated like your Gramma’s den // OR // You extinct like tuna with a blue fin

And so on.

Ferg, if you’re reading this, you can thank me by advancing some of your massive royalties. In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to work. These DVR’d episodes of House Hunters aren’t going to watch themselves.