Jon Pareles – pop's Cassandra

In these perilous times, we must snatch some comfort from consistency – like Jon Pareles', who can always be counted on to miss the point. Wiping tears from his eyes with a hanky he's hoping to drop in front of Bono, Pareles decries the venality of radio and the consumers who tune in and download:

Voting with its dollars, the public ignored the esoteric favorites championed by critics and went for music that offered a little comfort and dance beats. Entertainment, not ambition, was the priority.

Entertainment is always part of the story. Getting heard widely and regularly is the essential part of becoming a pop phenomenon. Yet through the years, the most memorable blockbusters have aspired to something beyond popularity. They set out to inspire, to startle, to define an era or to defy it. For the likes of Nirvana, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Metallica or Bruce Springsteen, catchiness has been a means rather than an end. By those standards, million-selling pop in 2005 was downright quiescent. That may be part of the reason that album sales dropped again in 2005: mass-market hits felt disposable, like a momentary pleasure rather than like something worth owning.

I can see the frissons of self-congratulation after he realized that "quiescent" not only sounded intelligent and anti-pop, but was several notes flat.