That’s the basic takeaway from this old interview that Andrew Earles posted to his blog. Way too many people take pop music way too seriously. It doesn’t deserve it.

The fans of the critics’ faves don’t think for themselves–if they did, what comes out of their mouths might be interesting, what lives in their book and record collections might actually be surprising, and their respective senses of humor might stray from the cringe-inducing.

This is fine snark, even if it does beg the question of why something needs to be surprising in order to be good, which leads in turn to the question of what makes something as ephemeral as pop good, which runs us down to debate the premise that all pop is ephemeral, and I say the hell with it and listen to Raw Power for the thousandth time.