OK, so right now I'm listening to Kelly Clarkson's just-released My December, aka The Album Clive Davis Doesn't Want You To Hear.

Much ado has been made about the Original Idol's controversial new opus and its supposed lack of commercial appeal. Like, along with her poorly timed decision to fire her management firm (um, called The Firm) and cancel her summer tour just two weeks before My December's street date, there were those troubling rumors about Clive "I Don't Hear A Single" Davis tearing her a new you-know-what in record label board meetings. Or that gossip about him dangling a $10 million carrot in front of her face to persuade her to cut five songs that apparently didn't sound enough like "Since U Been Gone Part 2: Electric Boogaloo."

Sheesh. No wonder our beloved Miss Independent sounds so pissed off on "Never Again."

Anyhoo, after all this hype and hearsay, I was expecting My December to sound like a nails-on-chalkboard cross between Metal Machine Music and, say, the second Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album. Or at least to bear a passing resemblance to other troubled divas' radio-unfriendly, repeatedly shelved masterworks, like Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine and Nellie McKay's Pretty Little Head. But you know what? While nothing on My December sounds fluffy enough to have made it onto the From Justin To Kelly soundtrack, it still pretty much sounds like good ole Kelly to me.

Seriously, how can Clive listen to "How I Feel" and not hear a single? Keep in mind this is the man who single-handedly wrecked the career of Idol also-ran Bo Bice by making him record tepid, ProTooled-to-death, Goo Goo Dolls-y pap instead of just letting Bo just go off and make Confederate-flag-flying country-metal with Cinderella's Tom Keifer (trust me, the latter option was a far better career path for Bo). Clive's also the dude who rather openly dissed my main man Taylor Hicks (another non-compromising Idol, note) on the season 6 American Idol finale, instead gushing so longwindedly about his compliant little puppet/protégé Carrie Underwood that he made the finale run seven minutes over and get cut off on everyone's TiVo...thus ruining Jordin Sparks's big-win moment. And now, Kelly is his latest victim. Really, Clive, how many dreams must you crush before you will be satisfied?

Come on now, over at the bootcamp studio where I make myself miserable every day by running at a kneecap-shattering, chased-by-ax-murderer pace on a treadmill, my workout instructor has been playing an advance of My December for weeks. "One Minute" and "How I Feel" keep me and my fellow bootcampers' legs/heart/blood pumping during those grueling incline runs, then we get all yoga-y and mellow to "Sober," "Be Still," and "Irvine" during our post-workout stretch. And if an album can keep a bunch of sweaty hardbodies in perpetual motion for 60 minutes, then it's safe to assume it does not suck. At all.

As for the much-ballyhooed "darkness" of My December's lyrical content, well...have you ever really listened closely to "Since U Been Gone," "Because Of You," or "Walk Away"? This is hardly the first time our poor bachelorette (who recently confessed to Elle that she's never been in love) has sung her broken heart out regarding her man troubles. True, she's never quite done it with as much bunny-boiling, Benatar-esque vitriol as she does on "Never Again," but that's just what makes that anthem so damn awesome. And, like I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, she has a lot to be angry about these days.

I'm pretty angry myself about this whole mess. But you know, I'm actually starting to think this anti-Kelly smear campaign is one big reverse-psychology marketing ploy: Word gets out that Kelly's career is in trouble, so all those devoted Kellyheads buy it in droves to "save" her and prove all those nasty naysayers wrong; meanwhile, more casual fans want to hear it too, just to see what all the fuss is about. Result? A number-one debut next week on the Billboard charts.

If this was the plan all along, then maybe Clive Davis really is a genius.