POP MUSIC REVIEW : Copycat Pretty Boy Floyd at the Palace

If you smash your guitar after only the third song of the set, what are you going to do after that? If you’re the L.A. glam-pop band Pretty Boy Floyd, at the Palace on Thursday, the answer is clear: more of the same.

You’ll do splits and squats straight out of a Callanetics video; you’ll rub up against your singer when you solo like a bear trying to rid himself of ants on a tree--if you’re the drummer, you might stand up on your stool and bang on cymbals for a while, a roadie holding your skinny legs so you don’t fall. You’ll continue to sound like every horrible copy band who ever played a freshman mixer in the ‘70s (not a prom; you’re not that accomplished), except that those things that sound like Angel songs and Babys songs and Sweet songs will be your originals. You’ll do the inevitable Kiss chestnut “Rock ‘n’ Roll All Nite” and forget half the chords.

And it won’t really matter all that much, because Pretty Boy Floyd is a rock ‘n’ roll band about marketing rock ‘n’ roll as surely as the Sex Pistols were, pouf fashion plates beside whom Boy George looks butch, and it kind of glories in its own stupidity. “We got some shirts too, man.” “Thank you all for buying our album, man.” “Check out our first MTV video, man.”

And the little girls understand.