Well, hello there everyone! It’s a pleasure to be diving into the PopPolitics pool, floaties and swim fins left brazenly by the diving board.

While we’re waiting for the cabana boy to send us a floating tray of margaritas, let’s discuss Kelly Clarkson. Say what you will about your Justin Timberlakes and your Christina Aguileras, but I think K.C. is one of the most unusual, exciting pop stars of the moment.

Consider this: she just released “Never Again,” the first single from her upcoming third album, and it isn’t about being famous or rich.

And that’s surprising, since almost every other recording artist who has reached her level of fame talks about those things all the time. For over a decade, in fact, wealth and power have been the text or subtext of most hit songs. An obvious example is “Give it To Me,” the recent number one single by Timbaland, Nelly Furtado, and Justin Timberlake in which all three brag about dominating the charts, the clubs, and every city on this planet.

But the facts of a singer’s status spring up in less obvious places, too. In her new single “Umbrella,” Rihanna sings how faithful she’ll be to her boyfriend — that she’ll be his umbrella in the worst storms of his life — and she reiterates her point with this opening verse:

You have my heart
And we’ll never be worlds apart
May be in magazines
But you’ll still be my star (baby)
‘Cause in the dark
You can’t see shiny cars
And that’s when you need me there
With you I’ll always share

In other words, Rihanna may be on the cover of magazines, but she’ll always be there for her man. How generous! Jennifer Lopez said the same thing in “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.”

Granted, all the artists I’ve mentioned are influenced by hip-hop, a genre that prides itself on talking about fame and money. But just listen to rock acts like Fall Out Boy (excellently analyzed in this New Yorker profile) or Good Charlotte. They may be angry about it, but they’re still focusing on how famous they are.

And … sheesh. That just gets old, you know? Especially taken with the endless assault of celebrity worship-disguised-as-journalism that populates E! Entertainment Television and the pages of every magazine at your supermarket.

Unless your supermarket is Whole Foods. Then the magazines have covers made of recycled paper and feature stories about whether bikram yoga is good for your children.

But no matter your grocery store, you probably know what I’m talking about. By and large, we’ve got a pop music culture designed to remind us that our favorite singers are nothing like us.

Every video, every single is poised to make us — the unwealthy masses — remember that they live in a different universe than we do. Even when they fall in love, these singers do it in the back of a limo. When their hearts break, the pieces scatter across a bathroom floor that’s been inlaid with diamonds.

Now I’m not saying that the current crop of pop stars invented wealth and celebrity worship. I did go on a high school field trip to see the old Rockefeller mansions, after all. Nor have I forgotten that genres like country and folk still present their stars as everyday people.

But pop stars — those singers who excite mass hysteria among listeners of many different backgrounds and ages — used to be relatable as well. The Beatles? Just four shaggy-haired guys from Liverpool. Bruce Springsteen? I think he fixed my car right before he went on stage. Even Madonna used to seem like a tough girl from Michigan who would eat macaroni out of an aluminum foil tray. That was the entire mythology created by the videos for “Material Girl” and “Papa Don’t Preach.”

A major benefit of such a persona is that it can help an artist’s songs inspire passion in a listener. I mean, I used to belt Debbie Gibson’s “Lost in Your Eyes” because it seemed like it was speaking to my teenage heart. If Debbie had crooned, “I get lost/In your eyes/And then I fly/My own private jet/Around the world,” my emotional involvement might have diminished.

And that very involvement is what can make pop music so much more than distracting fun. Hearing a song that speaks to our experience can imprint it on our hearts, forever conjuring some important part of our lives.

And I think Kelly Clarkson’s music is encouraging that kind of connection. In “Never Again,” she delivers a scorching rock damnation of a man who abandoned her. Not a movie star, mind you, or a duke. Just a man. The volcanic emotion of her voice and the furious pace of the music let us know that’s she is m-a-d. Maybe we’ve felt that way, too.

Clarkson treads similar ground on her album “Breakaway.” The song “Because of You” was a top ten hit about enduring the pain of her parents’ divorce, and “Since U Been Gone” became an anthem for overcoming bad relationships. Time and again, Kelly Clarkson is our pop music sin eater, suffering through everyday problems and then using her incredible voice to power through them.

I hope she keeps it up on her new album. I’d much rather know how she survived her last break-up than what she thinks about the 2007 Mercedes sedan.