I still haven’t gotten that boom boom boom.

For 19 weeks during this sweaty sabbatical known as summer, Black Eyed Peas have reigned supreme atop the Billboard Hot 100 charts with their strobe-light, influenced jams “Boom Boom Pow” and “I gotta feeling.” Nothing has been able to thwart the foursomes’ ferociousness (not even you, Drake). Turn on the radio and within an instant you’ll hear their optimistic prose, “tonight’s gonna be a good night,” over some synthed-out bleep blips only available in the world “The Fifth Element” took place in.

It seems after her proclamation “just dance” earlier this year, everyone has been abiding to Ms. GaGa’s request. Disco sticks and she-wolfs and Cobra Starships sound like the characters of a bad Ed Wood film. In actuality, they’re the characters of one of the hottest things on the planet (not even you, Megan Fox); dance music!

In just a few months, Top 40 radio has meticulously evolved from R&B-laden hip-hop songs about the club to power pop about kissing girls into the sounds you might find in a Manhattan industrial park at 5 a.m.: hard bass, zooming lasers and gibberish.

Some of it’s good; Shakira’s “She Wolf” is out of this world and easily one of the better songs released this year, and the new one from Pitbull has an instrumental-backing that’s infectious.

But dance music is much like a 21-year-old going to a non-alcoholic dance club in search of a date: it’s not worth it.

From Kevin Rudolf’s mega-nerd riff on “Let It Rock,” to cherubic Sean Kingston pleading with someone to “dial 911,” all the way to ex-Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, everyone is trying to capitalize on that boom boom pow mentality, “forget the world and dance.”

My biggest gripe is that it all sounds so very much the same. Seriously, I thought I was a connoisseur of popular music until I thought I heard that “Shooting Star” song on loop for the entire month of June every time I turned on the radio. A simple formula for the perfect dance song contains two or three incoherent words, an 808 drum that will make ears bleed and a robo-beat from the year 3000.

Maybe I’m just getting older, but I can’t find the novelties in a country with an over-saturation of everything dance. From the radio to the slew of inspirational dance shows on TV, it’s just too much. 2009 was the year of “Dance Flick,” people. When’s it going to end?

But just when we thought it was okay to let go of our inhibitions and do as GaGa said and just dance; dance veteran Cascada makes a song called “Evacuate the Dancefloor?”

Without a floor to dance on, how can we truly live?

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