The first band I truly loved was The Beatles. Before them there was only about five styles of music to listen to: Motown, rawk'nroll, country, pop, and AOM (adult oriented music).

Pop music is just something that was on in the background, something on the radio while we hung out at Dairy Queen. And because it was around us - even tho we weren't really listening - certain songs become part of our cultural fabric, part of our selves. Stuff that I thought was crap on the radio when I was 14 can now pull at my heartstrings and move me emotionally in a way that the newer stuff, say, Radiohead, Eminem or System of a Down - no matter how creative - simply cannot.

Any music that has lived with you, in you, can do this. But pop's catchiness makes it commonplace. These songs are often widely known, and so anyone from your culture and generation - like it or not - will be bonded by a common canon of pop songs. But there is something more too. The catchiness, the background-usage means that it is easy to get massively subversive messages out into mass consciousness thru pop. My niece was ten years old when she would sing along to Nirvana's tales of excessive drug consumption. At the same age I was listening to Lou Reed telling me "she never lost her head even when she was giving head" in Walk On The Wild Side.

All that aside, I think we had some decent pop music in the 80s. Consider: U2, The Traveling Wilburys, R.E.M., The Police, Elvis Costello, The Tubes (okay, they were more theater rock than pop), but I hope you get my drift. Some of that mainstream stuff wasn't bad.

*ahem* And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.