Like any secret laid bare after years of only furtive acknowledgment, this one has disrupted many lives and caused reactions ranging from rage to self-righteous moralizing to Fuchs’ own remarkably generous forgiveness of those who knew something terrible had happened but didn’t directly respond. (Here’s a good, if incomplete, roundup of responses.) Fowley’s reputation is now rightly destroyed. Other Runaways members and people involved with the band have come under fire and responded. (One of them, Runaways biographer Evelyn McDonnell, is my friend and longtime collaborator, and her comments have expanded the discussion in important ways.) As others shared crucial truths or pontificated, Fuchs herself, now a lawyer, employed her own great eloquence to call for the focus to remain on “holding rapists, abusers and bullies accountable.” Several commenters have mentioned that the 1970s was a time when the exploitation of very young women was often in the media, citing the famous examples of the groupie milieu surrounding Led Zeppelin and the statutory rape case that exiled film director Roman Polanski from the U.S.

Here’s the truth: The history of rock turns on moments in which women and young boys were exploited in myriad financial, emotional and sexual ways. This most sordid secret history lurks in the background, but it’s not incidental: from the teen-scream 1950s onward, one of the music’s fundamental functions has been to frame and express sexual feelings for and from the very young, and its culture has included real kids, the kind who feel free but remain very vulnerable, relating to older men whose glamour and influence encourages trust, not caution. The worst, weakest and most self-deluded of these men have stepped over moral lines, over and over again. It happened in the early 1960s, when, according to Patti LaBelle, her fellow soul great Jackie Wilson attempted to assault her — then a teenage member of the Bluebelles — backstage at a show. It’s happening now, with 23-year-old Warped Tour performer Jake Mcelfresh (who performs as Front Porch Step) facing accusations of sending explicit texts to girls as young as 13.

Examined coldly, these cases really don’t seem to inhabit a proverbial gray area. Men have behaved abhorrently toward young women whose only mistake was in assuming they’d be treated with respect. Yet the music itself, so redolent of pleasure, muddies peoples’ responses. We want to enjoy it and to take its dares. And for young girls and boys, it does express real sexual feelings, often otherwise denied. The craving for that expression has led to a startling number of cases in which deeply inappropriate responses to it have been rationalized or simply overlooked.

Sometimes, as with the Fuchs story, useful public conversations do emerge in light of young people’s exploitation. The trials of R. Kelly, who was eventually acquitted of crimes against several underage girls in Chicago, became a touchstone for those questioning the the enjoyment of explicit music and the celebration of its creators. And sometimes the men involved are so blatantly transgressive that they become pariahs: when 30-something metalhead Ted Nugent became the legal guardian of his teenage lover in the 1970s, all the while recording songs like “Jailbait,” it added to his reputation as a truly unstable character.

But the many more examples of sexual encounters crossing over into criminality have made such behavior almost mundane. Start at rock’s beginning, with a foursome of legends — Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, all of whom had significant relationships with teenage girls while they were major celebrities in their 20s and, in Berry’s case, 30s. This is the foundation of the music. It’s no wonder that such troubles haunt it to this day.

In 1956, Little Richard looked out of a hotel window in Savannah, Ga., and spotted a 16-year-old named Audrey Robinson. He was 24. He pursued her and they became intimate, though not in the conventional way — according to Richard’s autobiography, he liked to watch while she had sex with others. (Robinson has denied this.) Changing her name to Lee Angel, Robinson became a renowned exotic dancer, and she has stayed close to Richard into their old age. Was this a relationship between equals? It’s hard to say. The same question has been asked of the most notorious sex scandal in early rock: In 1958, rockabilly pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gale Brown; he was 22. Myra had the support of her family — her father sometimes played bass with Lewis — but years later, after the couple was divorced, she claimed that Lewis had abused her.

In 1959, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu on a German army base and began dating her. He was 24. He moved her to Memphis when she was 17, but, perhaps frightened into waiting by the scandal afflicting Lewis after his marriage to Myra, waited to marry her until she was 21. That same year, Chuck Berry was arrested in St. Louis, Mo., for transporting a minor across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The 14-year-old in question was a runaway named Janice Escalanti whom Berry met and wooed (according to her court testimony and accounts from other witnesses; he denies any intimacy) on the road. Berry was 33. His conviction and imprisonment demonstrates a racist double standard that put African-Americans behind bars while whites like Presley remained free. Yet this wasn’t an isolated incident; the year before, he’d been arrested for gun possession in St. Charles, Mo., while in the company of his then-lover, Joan Mathis, who was 17.

All of these stories have become part of rock’s lore, perhaps tainting the reputations of some of the music’s greatest figures, but hardly sinking them. The notorious tales just keep rolling on. In 1966, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull was 20 and already a mother when police on a drug raid at Keith Richards’ mansion found her wrapped in a fur rug while tripping, the only woman in the house. While the Rolling Stones survived this scandal unscathed, it led to Faithfull being branded a “whore” in the British media and led to an escalating drug habit. In 1972, Lori Maddox was 14; she met Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page at L.A.’s Hyatt House hotel, where he spirited her away and kept her under lock and key for many nights to shield the fact that he was committing statutory rape. In 1982, Tam Paton, the manager of teen idols the Bay City Rollers, was convicted of molesting two boys as part of the Walton Hop scandal, which eventually took down numerous British music business executives who frequented that all-ages Surrey club. In the 1990s, teen pop mogul Lou Pearlman allegedly demanded sexual favors from many of the underage musicians he managed, some of whom were only 13.

These rock and pop memories are all ones I pulled from the top of my head, without doing any research. They’re not obscure. And they’re being made anew every day. The threat of adult men violating women and boys haunts every era and subculture, because art worlds like these exist within a larger culture that’s fundamentally patriarchal and racist, placing white men in positions of ultimate authority, and men above women, even when people work to cultivate equality. (This is Sexism 101, and many writers have shown how it works in popular music.) Because rock and roll originates within a celebration of the spirit of teenage self-empowerment, girls especially have moved more freely within the spaces it creates than they could elsewhere, and, in doing so, have often found themselves in peril of violation by the very men who would call them queens.

Loving rock and roll requires engaging with a terrible reality, one that the music itself has not solved and sometimes helped its fans to forget. It’s this: The real erotic freedom many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll is always partial and precarious. As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body, that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you. And they may do so even if they’re great artists, “good” guys, even legends. They may do so even if, unlike the clearly amoral Kim Fowley, they mean to do their best.

It’s crucial that the truth that Jackie Fuchs has raised, truth that keeps resurfacing, not be turned against young women. Society needed rock and roll partly because the fact that young people are sexual had been kept under wraps in ways that stigmatized the very people whom moral arbiters meant to protect. But young people are also insecure in so many ways: in their minds, in their social status, in their very bodies. Becoming aware of their vulnerability necessarily changes what we can accept within the wondrous spaces that music can build. The painful knowledge of that tenderness, so easily misused, is what I carry around within my mind as a lifelong fan of loud guitars and the heat they generate — a woman who was once a high school girl getting felt up in the bathroom of a Seattle all-ages club by a local bass player who abandoned me when I almost threw up a White Russian all over his red New Wave pants. My free will put me in that bathroom. I know the rush of feeling sexy and young and wanted. I know what can come next.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

It’s never been easy, in the modern world, to sit with the unnameable. The extremes people embrace in order to simply be united with, and humbled by, creation are the subject of a huge body of literature stretching from ancient texts to today’s self-help e-books, and of visual art and theater ranging from Hitsuzendo calligraphy to Meredith Monk’s performance art. Music is a paradox within this pursuit: It fills the empty space of solitude even as it stimulates a desire for it. (The first promotional push for Carrie & Lowell came in the form of “silent listening parties” where people sat “alone” together in record stores and galleries worldwide, absorbing the music on headphones.) And it serves as a vehicle for narratives, but it always pulls against those stories, sometimes even noisily overwhelming them. “I think it’s who we are as human beings, storytelling,” Stevens told an interviewer in 2006. “People love to talk about themselves and about their lives and about their day, and everything has a narrative interest to it. That said, I think music is a supernatural kind of abstract form that transcends all of that.”

For a writer like Stevens, who usually stresses patterns and mythologies within his work, the turn toward autobiography is risky. It opens the door to fetishization, something Stevens already has to deal with because of his good looks and invitingly gentle performance style. In the era of pop music, many artists people mention as embodying solitude have very noisy personal narratives indeed — they are troubled figures like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, both possible suicides, or ones who consciously cultivated singular paths parallel to their natural communities, like Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, famous for his devotion to Zen, is a star of the essayist Pico Iyer’s recent TED-sponsored book on secular solitude, The Art of Stillness — the prime example of a meditative life that can still make room for major concert tours, Courvoisier and the occasional “beautiful young companion.” Iyer writes of hearing Cohen’s croaky late masterpiece, Old Ideas, in a Starbuck’s in downtown Los Angeles, and ponders, “Cohen seemed to be bringing us bulletins from somewhere more rooted than the CNN newsroom, and to be talking to us, as the best friends do, without varnish or evasion or design.” To be open to his plain words, though, it helps to know that Cohen’s been perfecting it for half a century. His biography is a key to understanding his messages, but it’s also something of a distraction.

Younger artists who take solitude or silence as a theme do so knowing how difficult it is to even approach such matters without immediately negating their core meaning. What’s unusual about Carrie & Lowell is the way it wrestles with biography while also holding it at a distance, as Stevens has in all its work. He’s said that the album is “not my art project; it’s my life,” a statement that sounds like half a modest admission and half an excuse. But it’s not true — Carrie & Lowell is as carefully designed and formally ambitious as were much grander-seeming endeavors like the electronics-based Age of Adz or his short-lived but very fruitful (he only did two, great, albums) Fifty States project. Its minimalist arrangements, created not alone in fact but in partnership with his longtime friend and collaborator Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett, invoke not folk music so much as the sources that signal introspection for many listeners: hymns and plainsong; Brian Eno‘s ambient soundtracks; the yeshiva school solemnity of early Simon & Garfunkel. (And, yes, Elliott Smith, who like Stevens was a formalist more obsessed with tone than with narrative.) In his lyrics, Stevens pursues two main themes: how grief distorts memory, turning it into shards of insight mingled with fiction; and how mourning becomes its own strange pilgrimage, often leading people into self-abnegating pursuits like sexual excess and self-harm as, crushed by guilt and terrified by loss, they pursue dangerous supposed distractions that are really necessary encounters with the void.

Songs like “Beloved of John” and “All Of Me Wants All of You,” intentionally or not, recall the holy perversity of works by Baudelaire or Jean Genet, or even James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, in which erotic encounters are a kind of cleansing by fire. In “The Only Thing,” Stevens recounts himself as saved from suicide through moments of grace conveyed within the shape of the stars or a water stain in a hotel room bathtub. But it is his clasp of the razor, of the car wheel almost taking him off the road, that allows for redemption. Negating piety, admitting perversion, Stevens opens himself up to the salvation of emptiness: “Blind faith, God’s grace, nothing else to impart.”

Tracing the confusion and the enlightenment that mourning and isolation invite, Stevens joins a handful of other artists returning solitude to the center of the musical conversation this year. It’s a difficult subject to approach honestly in 2015, not only because being alone often feels impossible within contemporary society’s wireless matrix, but because the experience is so often commodified, reduced to the price tag on a yoga mat or the itemized bill for a faux-monastic spa retreat. Yet the best albums of this season consider both the costs of isolation and the value of pursuing it.

Kendrick Lamar’s epic To Pimp a Butterfly would at first seem to be the opposite of Stevens’s compact and delicate work. Yet as many of those praising the album have noted, Lamar’s first effort post-serious fame is deeply informed by a sense of alienation. “There are dozens of collaborators on To Pimp a Butterfly, but there is only one author,” Sean Fennessy noted in Grantland. “Round and round he goes, a continuous loop of alone.” Oliver Wang’s All Things Considered review concluded with an image of Lamar as always hovering both above and below the Black America his music thickly evokes in sounds and images, even though he remains a part of it — he’s a kind of ghost of inequality and hope, past, present and future. More specifically, Lamar has been compared to the triumvirate of African-American writers at the center of mid- 20^th-century American literature, all influenced by European existentialist philosophy: Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. As those writers did in their novels, Lamar creates a main character on To Pimp A Butterfly who is both alienated by racism and consciously endeavoring to stand apart, more in dialogue with myth and history than with those who would bait and degrade him in daily life. In songs like “For Sale?” and the Sufjan Stevens-sampling “Hood Politics,” Lamar finds both strength and great personal cost in his quest to absorb and reflect the process through which African-American men are both made and ruined by capitalist America. If on Carrie & Lowell Stevens separates himself, in grief, to ultimately undergo a spiritual transformation, on Butterfly Lamar does the same thing in anger, in order to become more effective as a political force.

Lamar, who like Stevens is a Christian, views the spiritual aspect of his quest as an ongoing encounter with the ancestors who uplift and challenge him. He speaks to many non-corporeal beings throughout the album, which begins with an image of him alone, masturbating to thoughts of a lost first love and concludes with a long dialogue between Lamar and his long-dead role model Tupac Shakur, ingeniously constructed using old interview material. He absorbs the identity of television’s most famous slave in “King Kunta” and, in several songs, fights off a female devil figure he calls Lucy (as Anwen Crawford astutely suggests in The New Yorker, Lamar’s inspiring embrace of his African patrimony on Butterfly is matched by a nascent fear of the tempting feminine.) The two most intimate songs on the album are inner monologues (or, since Lamar embraces the existentialist idea of a fragmented self, conversations): the life-affirming “i” and the dark-night rumination “u.” And on an album whose funk connections flow as deep as the sea, several key moments feature only the human voice. These punctuating semi-silences make the point that, while music is the great sustainer of African-American culture and spiritual health, stepping away from it can also sometimes be rejuvenating in itself: a way of making space to better grasp the harsh realities that music helps people survive.

For all of its swagger and motion, To Pimp a Butterfly counters a notable lack of portrayals of African-American male interior lives in our culture. bell hooks has noted that most such depictions encourage the idea that “real [black] men are all body and no mind.” She recalled dealing with a white male illustrator’s draft images for one of her books: “I noticed that many of the images were of black boys in motion, running, jumping, playing; I requested images of black boys being still, enjoying solitude, reading.” Kendrick Lamar is a physically dexterous rapper, but he really stands out as a man whose thoughts fly faster than his feet, especially in spaces where he can be alone. Even the sometimes excruciating conflict he endures within the scenes he crafts feels like a tonic, because like his imagined mentor Shakur, he demands solitude as a fundamental right, a way of recognizing his own divinely sparked humanity.

For the British folk-now-rock musician Laura Marling, solitude is also a right to be claimed, but she wants to feel it in motion. Her seventh album, Short Movie, is in the vein of women wanderers’ manifestoes like Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness adventure Wild, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira (to which it’s being continually compared) and Chrissie Hynde’s first album with the Pretenders. Musically, it’s a band album, unlike many of Marling’s more acoustic earlier efforts; story-wise, it takes the 25-year-old expatriate from lover to lover and weird scene to weird scene as she travels in an America full of signposts she must mark as her own and roadblocks — most of them human, and male — she must negotiate.

“Is it still okay that I don’t know how to be? Alone?” she sings in the first line of the steadily frantic single “False Hope,” cutting the sentence into subject-verb and predicate, as if to answer her own question: There is no being unless you can stand apart. In another song, “Walk Alone,” Marling worries that her desire for a new lover has robbed her of the ability to even take a step without him; in a third, “How Can I,” she asks that man (or maybe it’s another) to “keep your love around me so I can’t be alone.” There’s a Lamar-style internal argument going on in these lyrics: Marling craves interdependency, but also chafes against it, knowing that the old story of the mastered young woman continually threatens to envelop her. The music is furiously paced, centered around Marling’s fleet, aggressive guitar picking, which keeps her band in frenetic pursuit. It sounds like she is birthing herself, and she is often enraged by the process — not only by the cluelessness of the men with whom she wants to stay but who can’t handle her whole being, but with herself by being so scattered, so scared, so full of herself but still uncertain about where that self begins and ends.

Like Stevens, Marling favors imagery culled from myths and other esoteric sources. Like Lamar, she is aware that her most personal struggles reflect inequities that go well beyond her time and place. She imagines herself as a daughter of the Sufi mystic G.I. Gurdjieff in one song, and as a “horse with no name,” whom no warrior can ride, in another. Her metaphors invoke a long history of feminist imaginings. In the gorgeously sad love song, “Howl,” she reminds listeners that women’s solitude has often served to protect others over whom they stand watch: “The long tears of women are silent,” she sings, so they won’t wake those who sleep.”

Marling longs to walk and wake alone, but also dreads doing so, because in solitude, all of one’s foibles become clear, even as a path toward a less habit-ridden way of being beckons. “Loving you is complicated,” Lamar says to his own ego in “u,” lovingly clinging to the weaknesses that intermingle with his ambition and his integrity. The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she reflects solitude’s crisis: the challenge of being, unmasked.

“I wanted to be quiet in a nonquiet situation,” the composer John Cage wrote in 1948, while he was still formulating a solution that would eventually lead to his famous innovation of writing music with no notes at all. In 1949, the most famous monk of the last century — Thomas Merton — lamented that even cloistered religious people had become too conscious of what their renunciations might do, keeping silence as a form of payback for all the clatter in the world, instead of accessing the real self that was no self, that couldn’t show off by fasting or rising at midnight to sing. In 1961, as part of a dialogue with the Zen master D.T. Suzuki, Merton found it necessary to remind the era’s many spiritual seekers that Paradise, if not Heaven, was a place on earth that could only be achieved by ceasing the constant reactivity that had become the human condition, “the emptiness and purity of heart which had belonged to Adam and Eve in Eden,” where they sought “paradise within themselves, or rather above and beyond themselves.” This was the same goal the secular pilgrim Cheryl Strayed sought when she walked 1100 miles alone up the Pacific Crest Trail in 1994. She found liberation from self while lost above the treeline, shouting into silence she ultimately couldn’t affect, realizing, was she wrote in her memoir, “Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

If Stevens, in his devotion to beauty and to craft, ultimately retains his monklike demeanor (please read Fenton Johnson’s essay in the current issue of Harper’s for more on how such practices thrive in the secular world) and Lamar stands out as a politicized existentialist, Marling joins writers like Strayed in adding to the literature of women’s liberation through solitude. Wandering the Pacific Coast Trail where she became a temporary hermit, survivalist and explorer — all roles that, for centuries, were primarily associated with men — Strayed realizes at one point in her journey that true solitude has changed her very definition of aloneness. She recognizes it as a form of connection, not privacy; as a way of inhabiting her real self by seeing how permeable are its boundaries. “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was,” she writes. “Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.” This is the ultimate goal of genuine solitude, and the subject of the music inspired by it: to reveal how human beings are ever a part of what flows through and around them, even apart from it.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Last month, Let’s Talk About Love was reissued with a set of new essays by writers like Nick Hornby, Krist Novaselic, James Franco and NPR Music’s own Ann Powers. The timing couldn’t have been better. In 2014, nothing starts a fight more quickly than a huge pop song. Ann and Carl exchanged notes on why.

• Part One: Is There A Crisis In Music Criticism?
• Part Two: Why Do People Have Beef With Poptimism? Because It’s Winning
• Part Three: Five Rules For New Pop Criticism
• Part Four: Don’t Front
• Part Five: Music We All Love Has Done Way More Harm Than Miley Ever Will

PART ONE: Is There A Crisis In Music Criticism?

Hello Carl!

First off, congrats on the new edition of Let’s Talk About Love, now subtitled “Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste.” I’m proud to be a part of that volume! But I have to ask you: Have you been working a particularly effective marketing campaign for the book? Every week lately a new argument erupts about musical taste and listening practices — exactly what you examine so artfully in your book.

These arguments often focus on music writing, yet they resonate in ways that any ardent music lover would understand. Here’s a refresher on a few of the disputes, in case they didn’t clog up our readers’ Facebook feeds the way they did ours: The new blog My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection plays on longstanding ideas about nerdy male record collectors and the women who (barely) tolerate them. A debate between the writer/musician Rick Moody and the musician/writer Dean Wareham about Daft Punk played on ancient tensions about the nature of, ahem, authenticity. A couple of prominent essays decrying music writers’ interest in the Top 40 bubbled under with questions about what it even means to care deeply about music in a world where corporate pop rules the airwaves and endless distraction dominates the Web.

Some concerns are realistic: Writers like us, who’ve devoted years to becoming culturally knowledgeable, are losing jobs to unpaid bloggers, and peer-to-peer recommendation on streaming services eliminates the need for radio disc jockeys and record clerks. Authority has lost its mojo. But more ineffable dread is in the air, reflecting the rise of technologies that make things easy, and easy to treat lightly. Music-making by machine has opened up that practice in wonderful ways, but what about the value of hard musical work? I’m not mourning the diminishment of record-collector obsessiveness, but without hard listening — hours and hours of focus on a few songs, until they become part of you — does loving music become a trivial pursuit? Does the dexterity involved in surfing the huge waves of available sounds make going deep obsolete?

That’s a line of despair I don’t buy, a new version of the moldy-fig attitude that greeted the jitterbuggers and The Beatles and Madonna and hip-hop in decades past. But I can’t figure out why it’s resonating now. This is a moment of great empowerment for music lovers. So much is available. Technology constantly offers new tools to enable and organize musical appreciation. And everyone can be a critic, after all, posting playlists and YouTube responses, blogging and Tumbling, telling the world that this is my jam.

So why the whiff of fear right now — not revolving around the music industry falling apart or musicians being able to pay their health insurance, but about more philosophical matters of meaning and authority? Perhaps it’s a reaction to the clamor so many soundwaves creates, an attempt to contain the uncontainable.

But I also think we all feel exposed. In her book Alone Together, the sociologist Sherry Turkle mentions music as a source of worry for teens on social media; they’re worried that if they “like” the wrong bands — State Radio instead of Spoon is one kid’s example — they’ll lose the respect of their peers. This resonated with me. Shaming is back in style when we talk about music. A line from your book keeps coming into my mind: “Shame has a way of throwing you back upon your own existence, on the unbearable truth that you are identical with you, that you are your limits.” In this vastly open moment when an average person could lose herself in virtually any musical experience, why is the conversation about music so concernt with limits — and with shame?

Looking forward to your insights,

AKP

PART TWO: Why Do People Have Beef With Poptimism? Because It’s Winning

Hi Ann,

Thanks so much for inviting me to kick around this can with you, in some ways rusty, in others barely unsealed, always full of wriggly worms — earworms, clickbait and many other species. You’re right that I could hardly have arranged for a better moment for the expansion of my book (including your wonderful essay) to appear, with all the passionate fights breaking out about what makes music merit attention.

My new Afterword is partly about the issues you raise: how technology and the millennial generation, among other factors, have altered the skyline of taste. I even speculate if it’s possible to conceive of a “post-taste” society, in which hardly anyone maintains a loyalty to any aesthetic guidelines, and we just surf from meme to meme.

So it’s startling to witness all these cases — to your examples, add this 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll (highly skewed questions and all) — that make it sound like little has changed since I first went through my own version of ex-rock-snob-rehab under the guiding star of Céline Dion. We still have this spectacle of people (mostly straight white men of a certain age) angry that we treat music made with drum machines, or for dance floors, or with rapping (unless it’s “political”), or by Beyoncé with the same respect and depth of thought we’d devote to anthems sung by bands of guys with guitars. It seems like this month we’re gonna ponder like it’s 1999.

But that glimpse is deceptive. Look at the actual music-criticism world, and you’ll see Saul Austerlitz in the Times Magazine is right about one thing: Pro-pop forces dominate. There’s you at NPR, me at Slate, Jody Rosen at New York magazine/Vulture, Jon Caramanica and his colleagues in the NYT proper, Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker and more at nearly every other prominent mainstream venue you could mention. Even Pitchfork, once a redoubt of indie-rock obscurantism, now devotes generous space to dance, pop, hip-hop and other forms.

And that reflects the range of enthusiasms held by a typical music-loving North American under, say, 35 (whom I suspect is poorly represented in any poll sponsored by 60 Minutes, the former location of Andy Rooney’s lawn). As remarked on the Grantland Pop Culture podcast last week, generations who grew up with Napster, iPods, MySpace, streaming services and YouTube are bound to have sampled and imprinted on wider sounds than people who got into music by inheriting records from their older brothers.

Not to say there aren’t still hip-hop heads, rockers, folkies, metalheads, noise freaks, ravers and indie introverts alongside the BeyHive, Beliebers and Bangerz, each with their own niche sites and networks. But I bet most of them are more aware of other styles and genres than their likes would’ve been a decade ago.

Therefore, I have to call what we’re hearing from the anti-pop authors a backlash, sour grapes from people just noticing that a cultural battle is over and they “lost.” We can sympathize with their sense of bewilderment and status vertigo — the way we can with “men’s rights” activists, for instance — without letting ourselves be trolled into rehashing the “disco sucks” debate. Let’s not be sore winners.

But yes, theirs is a magnified variety of the insecurity and resentment we all feel on some level. It’s about the music, videos, tweets and updates that flood toward us in near-infinite quantities at light speed (I always think of the prescient phrase the pre-punk band Pere Ubu coined in the 1970s: “Datapanik in the Year Zero“).

But more than that, in a globalized, polycultural, multilateral, warming, mass-migrating world, we have urgent questions such as, “Where is the center?” “Which information matters?” “Who benefits?” “What does that make me?” They’re the same anxieties that have powered the polarization of American political camps.

A painful thing about encountering otherness — even in the form of music you don’t get or identify with — is that it makes you aware of your own smallness, your vulnerability and, yes, thus your shame. It undercuts any fantasy that your own lifestyle, traits and priorities might be universal — it tells you that you’re specifically bounded by your own context, while other realms may be indifferent to your existence.

If you’re straight, white, relatively well-off, cis-male, Anglo-American or any combination thereof, that can be particularly disorienting, coming from a culture that used to pretend reality did revolve around you. But even those who aren’t privileged or rock revanchists have to cope with these global realignments. Perhaps one challenge is to find pleasures in the tensions rather than lashing back.

So a question to ask at this point, Ann, is where our pro-pop POV does have blind spots, as any dominant perspective does. What might we be missing out on, as writers and listeners, that might be vital to decoding, critiquing and simply soundtracking this planet in transition (and peril)? Are we suffering from over-consensus? Why? Oh, and with the anniversary of the death of the leader of arguably the last essential rock band, allow me to add: Is there a role left there for rock?

Adieu to déjà vu,

Carl

PART THREE: Five Rules For New Pop Criticism

Carl,

I appreciate a challenge. And you pose exactly the right one by asking me to identify poptimism’s blind spots. By the way, though I know some people think the term’s silly, I like “poptimism” — because it sounds so pop, like something out of a cheerful ad campaign or a self-help book. Its silliness checks ego. In the spirit of self-help, I’ll offer my suggestions in list form: Five Ways to Be a Better Poptimist. These pointers apply to writers, but also might be useful to any fan who goes to see tUnE-yArDs on Friday night and cranks Pink in the gym Saturday morning.

1. Don’t insist that pop be hip. A good chunk of mainstream music gains inspiration from more cutting-edge stuff — always has. (Remember when The Monkees went psychedelic?) But plenty of it plays by other rules: It could be rooted in Christian contemporary music, emo, or soft rock. That doesn’t make it less meaningful; it just takes work to understand these other legacies. It’s cool if you find John Legend corny, but respect that for millions his grounding in group harmony singing and Bacharach balladry signals sophistication. Respect values other than your own.

2. Understand that selling records is the point. The major players in creating mainstream pop don’t care about integrity, in the restrictive sense. They’re collaborators, and they’re interested in making money. So yes, Dr. Luke encourages his ingénue protégés to trade in feminine stereotypes (sometimes in highly questionable ways), and Avicii goes for obvious beats. Great pop sneaks in subtleties to enrich and even sometimes undermine the obvious elements that make a song pop out of the radio. Appreciating that requires an adjustment of one’s aesthetics. Recognize the value in familiarity and big gestures.

3. Acknowledge that the assembly line is a cornerstone of pop. Since the days of Tin Pan Alley, pop’s spirit has been one of energizing collaboration and seat-by-the-pants innovation. There’s little room in this game for purist notions of artistic integrity. “We Can’t Stop” has seven writers and was originally intended for Rihanna. What’s interesting about the song is how it transformed in the process of becoming Miley Cyrus’s signature. Know the limits of this kind of production while also noticing where the soul can slip in.

4. Physically connect with the mainstream, but don’t presume you know what its different corners are all about. Lindsay Zoladz recently wrote on her Tumblr about attending a Miley concert and realizing that — at least sometimes — she wanted to write for the Bangerz, Miley’s devotees, not for her fellow Pitchfork nerds. I applaud her insistence that music obsessives need to look outside the confines of their own tribe and learn from non-fetishists. But the desire to identify can sometimes obscure that “otherness” you mention, even for poptimists. As enriching as it is to feel good in a crowd of strangers, it’s equally useful to go where things are less comfortable. For every charming fan you might meet at a non-hipster show, there’s a drunk one, and one whose political views are really different than your own, and one who (if you go see Kirk Franklin or Mary J. Blige) might ask you to pray with them. As you’ve said, encountering the other can be difficult — for poptimists too. It should be difficult. Insight comes from wrestling with the awkwardness.

5. Go beyond Beyonce. I think we all need to acknowledge that King Bey is not your average diva-bear, and that putting her on a best-list is not an adventurous move. Assignment for all poptimists: have an opinion about the Jason DeRulo album that drops today.

I’ve rambled on with my unsolicited advice, and now there’s no room to talk about rock! I hope we can take that up in the next round. One thought: in his excellent feature on EMA — whose album The Future’s Void is one of my 2014 faves — Sasha Frere-Jones almost calls her music rock, but instead says it’s a “hairy, occasionally digital beast.” I like that phrase. It sounds like what Jimi Hendrix would play now. In other words, to trace where rock went, we have to agree on what it is. And that isn’t easy.

Enlighten me,

AKP

PART FOUR: Don’t Front

Ann,

What a fantastic list of pop self-improvement tips. By the way, I’m touched by your defense of “poptimism” as a term, but it seems like too many people are put off by the neologism. It sounds a little dated to me now, like a slogan from a past generation’s protest movement, and its positive-thinking vibe misleads people like Saul Austerlitz to assume it means unthinking approval of all things pop, rather than just being open-minded and critically engaged. “Rockism,” on the other hand, still seems useful as an umbrella term for Austerlitz and his ilk’s biases.

“Wrestling with the awkwardness” and respecting non-hip values brings me back to another few thoughts about shame, music and identity. Perhaps it’s because music as an art form is so fundamentally abstract — a vibration in the air that produces a sound in the brain, rising almost like a thought — that it makes us feel so tentative and unsure about its status and its meanings. So it gets surrounded with visible signs like fashion and photographs, ranked by charts every week and annual lists, straining to make a form so ineffably mobile to hold still.

Writing my book about taste and Céline Dion, and discussing it later, I’m always aware of a tinge of embarrassment that I’m talking about an artist so feminine, flashy, lush and sentimental. I have an impulse to rush to explain that she’s only a case study for the sake of a bigger intellectual project. It’s as if I sense my stock in the sexual marketplace dropping. But if I’m mindful of that shame and can sit with it, it’s valuable — it confers a humility that nurtures the patience and non-judgment to encounter strangers and intimates alike on something closer to their own terms, without reflex posturing. It might seem like a weird exercise, but it’s an experience I really recommend.

In the current argument about pop, though, a few friends have confessed that what they now find difficult isn’t discussing either superstar phenomena or arty outliers, but the uncomfortably in-between. One person said he’d never tell anyone at a cultural-studies conference that he was really into Beck‘s sedate new album; another admitted he didn’t want others to know he liked Foster the People, saying, “The middlebrow is always the most abject.” Big pop is brashly bright, but second-tier pop can seem earnest and ingratiating, as if it’s trying too hard. I do think there’s a tendency right now to write guitar bands off as either meatheads or dully self-involved white boys, and while there’s some justice to redressing their past overestimation that way, it can also be a bit sweeping and self-congratulatory.

It often takes us the longest to stop punishing the merely good artists for not being geniuses, but eventually we do — Hall & Oates just got into the Rock Hall of Fame, for instance, but a decade ago people were still snickering at their 1980s blue-eyed soul-pop, no doubt in shame over having liked it for a while. I wonder if we can learn to skip that middle step? I’ve admired you for having the maturity to attend to the communal virtues of Mumford and Sons and other neo-folk bands I find icky, for instance. I suspect I dislike them partly because I grew up with 1970s Catholic folk-guitar masses, so such jangly uplift choral music strikes me as oppressively naïve.

Which may lead us to another pro-pop pointer: Beware your own self-projections. We talk a lot about how taste is aspirational — that people are drawn to music that makes them feel more sophisticated, popular, worldly, etc. But taste also can be defensive: We often reject not only music that reminds us of classes of people we look down on, but music that evokes attributes we dislike in ourselves. (I discussed this dynamic at the end of this piece about my antipathy for The National.) A little bit of self-skepticism is great, but too much can be unhealthy.

At the same time it is important in exploring unfamiliar genres and fan communities to always be yourself. We want to meet and learn from people not like us, and allow ourselves to be changed in the process, but that doesn’t mean appropriating their experiences. Suburban teens posing as gangsters are always the most obvious example. In the recent New Yorker profile of Hot 97 hip-hop DJ Peter Rosenberg, I loved the tale of how he introduced himself to the station boss with the DJ name he’d been using, “PMD,” and was upbraided, “No, you’re Rosenberg.” As a white, Jewish aficionado of a black-based music, Rosenberg gradually made it a rule only to talk about things he actually knew, like music and sports, and not pretend to understand dealing cocaine, or living in the projects. That’s a step in being a conscientious traveler rather than a foolish or exploitive interloper: Don’t front.

After all, genuine causes for shame are riddled through pop history: American popular culture has its deepest roots in slavery, the blackface minstrel show, ethnic vaudeville comedy, brothels and burlesque, religious revival movements, rural poverty, urban segregation, mob-run clubs and labels, wheeler-dealer rip-offs and plenty of other not-so-pretty chapters. Cultural theft, pandering, shock and other crass moves are bound up with pop innovation and creativity. Be critical, but don’t get on high horses, because very few of our artistic heroes can be disentangled from those dubious, sometimes tragic associations.

Which leads me to another aphorism: Always connect, to misquote E.M. Forster. When an artist seems inexplicable to you, compare them with analogous figures from contexts you do understand. It was hugely helpful for me to think of Céline Dion in the lineage of the 19th-century parlor song, light opera and variety-show entertainment from the stage to radio to early television both here and in Europe, for example. If Kanye West seems obnoxious, remember egotistical, style-violating provocateurs like Little Richard or Marlene Dietrich or even Bob Dylan raising hackles in the past. But also look at linkage points within and between genres — in contemporary global pop, for instance, it’s often really illuminating to follow major writer-producers like Max Martin, Dr. Luke, etc., in their work with myriad artists to get a sense of the methodology and craftsmanship behind the hits. But be mindful of the differences too.

In pop, after all, there are only two constants — change and resistance to change. Rock fans right now are in denial that rock’s becoming a vintage, heritage music, just like jazz, blues, soul, funk and other period forms. Even rap might be heading the same way. That doesn’t mean great work can’t be done there, but it will face the puzzle of how to honor its inheritance while speaking to new circumstances. It may never again be where the main cultural heat is, except as a hybrid ingredient. But there’s no shame in that.

Carl

PART FIVE: Music We All Love Has Done Way More Harm Than Miley Ever Will

Dear Carl,

I’m excited about the Handbook for Better Pop Listening we’ve assembled during this chat! Maybe it can be included in the next editions of Let’s Talk About Love. And I really appreciate you bringing up another subject some might find academic — American music’s deep historical roots in transgressions much more serious than the mild deceptions of Auto-Tune. Obviously, minstrelsy stands out, but beyond that one (once hugely popular) phenomenon, the many ways of belittling others through caricature and uncredited imitation that our rock and pop heroes have devised. The one-year anniversary of Twerkgate is almost upon us, and the crucial discussion about racism and cultural absorption it inspired has been shelved, it seems, to make room for less truly troubling forms of self-analysis — not to mention an endless stream of videos made by kids happy to take up Miley’s directives.

But the great thing about popular music, I think, is that it connects so deeply with our bodies that it can move us in new directions. For every time music has been used to promote misunderstanding and oppression, there are many more when it’s lifted people up, making them feel better within themselves and helping them better understand others whose differences they feared. I know that on one level, music is abstract — like a thought, as you say. But it’s also like a feeling, a real sensual and emotional pull. Music can make you feel like a room without a roof. When that’s happening, all the categories we build as thinkers recede, and whatever sound made it happen is glorious.

Love, not just talk,

AKP

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

NPR Music’s Ann Powers was in Austin for the keynote, and she filed this report.

Enclosed in a garbage-bag bridal ensemble seemingly designed to remind us she’s wedded to her art, Lady Gaga sat in conversation with longtime music-television personality John Norris Friday morning, pouring forth a stream of strong statements about stardom, artistic freedom and her number-one value, the truth of the inner self. During an hour-long South by Southwest conference keynote event, the platinum-dreadlocked queen of arena-rock transgression shed a tear or two as she exhorted the crowd with inspirational catchphrases and feisty rejoinders to the corporate forces who took her recording career to the top (and more lately, might be dragging her down). As always with Gaga, the interview offered plenty of warm support for anyone struggling with self-definition, and it occasionally turned daring, though not in unexpected ways. Mostly it proved a poignant illustration of just how difficult it is for even our most innovative mainstream stars to steer clear of the fundamental confinements and contradictions of corporate pop.

“I will retire from the commercial market if I have to be something other than myself,” Gaga insisted, after explaining why she agreed to allow the snack-chip corporation Frito-Lay to aggressively brand her Thursday night showcase at Stubb’s BBQ, down the street from the Hilton where the keynote took place. That decision was denounced by some and accepted with a raised eyebrow by others. Gaga argued that partnering with Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand offered an escape route from corporate slavery, because sponsorships allow freedom, while record labels do not. “Without sponsorships, we won’t have any more artists in Austin,” she said, clearly meaning Top-40 artists, not the kids who sleep in their vans to play bar shows during SXSW. Continuing to develop her anti-label, pro-brand rhetoric, Gaga ultimately landed on a catchphrase that expressed both her own confusion and the music industry’s: “Don’t sell out. Sell in.”

“Sell in,” of course, doesn’t mean anything obvious. It does, however, echo the exhortation to “lean in” that serves as a title for Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book, and which has become the mantra for feminism’s current full embrace of corporate capitalism. Lady Gaga seems an unlikely figure to take this message to the pop world — Beyonce got there first, for one thing, and for another, Gaga has always stood for the outsiders whose proud queerness or neck tattoos or basic social awkwardness would prevent them from selling or leaning in if they wanted to do so.

Yet it’s not a shock, especially given the career dip Gaga has taken since her latest album Artpop failed to sell as well as expected, that Gaga is struggling to figure out how to maintain the influence that allowed her to become the patron saint of outsiders in the first place. She’s done powerful things in that role, including working for causes like marriage equality in impressively concrete ways. But perhaps Gaga has not always been aware that, like any beneficiary of music-industry promotion, she was always constantly compromising.

How else to explain Gaga’s insistence to Norris that “I don’t know what f— all I have to do with Katy Perry,” despite the fact that both chart-toppers are signed to subsidiaries of the Universal Music Group? Or her advice to young artists to “stop taking selfies, because that won’t make you a star,” when a brilliant and challenging image is so integral to Gaga’s own success? Or her conviction that she’d be happy going back to the underground clubs of New York’s Lower East Side, when those clubs, like underground culture in Manhattan in general, have been pushed out by the corporate forces of gentrification?

The boldness Lady Gaga displayed in her discussion with Norris was that of a dreamer, not a doer: She seemed like someone testing out challenges that might help her make new moves, rather than realistically pointing herself or anyone else toward new ways of being. It was heartfelt, yet her words felt scripted, recalling nothing so much as the dialogue uttered by Hayden Panettiere as the embattled country music ingénue Juliette Barnes in the nighttime soap Nashville.

Perhaps this critique seems too harsh. Lady Gaga remains one of pop’s most fascinating and powerful characters. She’s done real, impactful work for the social causes she embraces, especially marriage equality, and as an artist she remains far more interesting than ninety-five per cent of what mainstream pop produces. And her truth-telling can be powerful. Noting that she’s won Grammy awards, toured the world multiple times, and succeeded in making albums that represent her own true sensibilities, she told Norris that her corporate handlers still valued her looks over her accomplishments. “We just want you to look beautiful,” she said, echoing what she had been told.

“Is it all back to tits and ass?” Gaga wondered. “That’s so sad.”

It is sad that a major industry player would still be required to put her looks above her creative work. Speaking out against this fact, Gaga exposed how limiting mainstream stardom can be, even for those women whom fans idealize as remarkably subversive or at least independent. Yet the most powerful thing about this keynote conversation wasn’t Gaga’s insistence on being herself, but her ambivalence about what that self is really made of. Once she was determined to remake the pop machine from within. Now she’s allowing us to witness her struggle to dismantle it — or perhaps to simply find a way to take apart the creation it made of her.

“Nobody put me in a weird machine and popped me out: Gaga,” she told Norris. The awareness Gaga showed during this conversation intimately illustrated how even major stars are facing a reckoning as the music industry continues to fall apart. Can Gaga reclaim some semblance of the realness she so values through these new assertions of independence? To do so would be a bold mission. Then again, partly because of her, “Bold Mission” is now a well-known Doritos slogan. Between the act and the brand, Lady Gaga — like pop itself — is trying to find her way.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Yet after twenty-plus years of on-and-off attendance, I’ve discovered that there is a key to discovering the Hidden Wisdom of South By Southwest. This kind of self-help goes beyond what any herbal remedy, extra phone battery or pair of sensible shoes offers. Those practical survival tools are givens. So is some modicum of misery, born of overabundance. That’s the paradox of choice. But the too-muchness of SXSW can become a route to knowing yourself better, as a music lover, a listener, and a cultural explorer.

Here are some things you can do to make your South By Southwest experience not just a gauntlet to survive, but also a source of renewal. Making these choices can benefit anyone who comes to Austin, badge on lanyard – newcomers and veterans alike – and even those following along remotely, from the comfort of a Wi-Fi enabled home. It turns out that what makes South By Southwest more than bearable is exactly what makes loving music so important. To quote my favorite actual self-help book, it’s all about embracing the full catastrophe.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For my money, this is the best single use of popular music in a film this year. It structures the entire film by establishing both the ground of the Rosenfeld-Prosser relationship and the reason for their inevitable triumph. As Ellington fans, and as perfect listeners, these two stand together above the rest. No one — not the cops, or more powerful crooks, or an angry wife, or even, in the worst of times, each other — can break the connection between them, as elastic and strong as the winding lines of a Johnny Hodges saxophone solo.

This achievement comes in a remarkable year for music as an engine of plot and mood in Oscar-nominated movies. I’ve already commented on the astonishing way 12 Years a Slave demonstrates how song and dance were forces of both liberation and further oppression for Africans living under American bondage. I still think that film’s profundities on the subject can’t be topped, but after seeing all of the year’s Best Picture nominees, I’m happy to say that most offer at least one signature scene that reveals how, in our lives as well as in cinema, music shapes character and cements relationships.

You won’t see these songs up for their own awards on Sunday night, but they animate nearly everything else that’s nominated — performances and plot twists and the unknowable thing that tethers us to home even when we’re spinning in space. I’ll be rooting for Frozen‘s blockbuster, “Let It Go,” and for Will Butler and Owen Pallett’s tender, sad score for Her, but let’s imagine a new category: Here are five nominees for what you might call Best Music in Reel Life.

1. Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams get down to “I Feel Love” in American Hustle.

I’ve already given my proposed statuette to a different scene in David O. Russell’s song-saturated film, but two others rival it. The one in which Jennifer Lawrence furiously housecleans while singing along to Wings’ “Live and Let Die” feels slightly overplayed to me: too much hair-tossing, not enough genuine rage. But the brief encounter between Cooper and Adams on the dancefloor expertly captures how two desiring bodies could use Eurodisco’s gale force pull to align. Cooper is all in, his torso undulating, sweat collecting in his perm. Adams circles him and flits away like a coked-up Tinkerbell, her independence intact even when she rubs up against him. Their dynamic is fully established by the time they make it into one of Studio 54’s infamous bathroom stalls: and like Donna Summer herself riding on the wave of Giorgio Moroder’s synths, Adams is in charge, even when she seems to start to surrender.

2. Rayon blasts some T. Rex in Dallas Buyer’s Club.

Director Jean-Marc Vallee, whose films have always ingeniously used music, Gave Jared Leto a gift by making 1970s rock god Mark Bolan this AIDS drama’s patron saint. The glam connection clearly helps this eyeliner rocker lean into the role of the transgender heroine Rayon with conviction instead of camp. Not reducible to one scene, Rayon’s reliance on Bolan’s music and look — and the way she uses it to invade the space of Matthew McConaughey’s Ron Woodruff, incrementally unsettling him by playing songs on her tape deck and pinning hot photos of Bolan to the wall of the apartment where they run the buyer’s club — offers insight into how music fanship can become not just a source of style for some, but a matter of root identity, and even life or death.

3. George Clooney floats free to Hank Williams, Jr. in Gravity.

I’m with the many critics who’ve gasped at the technical wonder of Alfonso Cuaron’s astronaut drama while gagging on its ridiculous dialogue. In a key sequence, however, a sentimental song sets the tone in ways that the tragic backstory of scientist Ryan Stone cannot. George Clooney’s Matt Kowalksi is the most genteel of space cowboys, but he has his own corny side, which shows in the tall tales he tells and the music he listens to while lingering in the void. The Hank Williams, Jr. ballad “Angels Are Hard To Find” ain’t Wagner; it’s exactly the kind of weeper that manages huge emotions instead of intensifying them. Listening to it is a coping mechanism that serves Kowalski’s longing to be normal; when it plays a second time, as he saves Sandra Bullock’s Stone from death and launches her on what will soon become her terrifying solo journey, the song reminds us that the most unimaginable human realities constantly intermingle with the banal stuff of daily life.

4. Stacy Keach kills at karaoke in Nebraska.

Alexander Payne’s perplexed love letter to his home state and the sinewy people it’s made is filled with incredibly realistic non-events: the family party where everybody silently watches sports on television; the trip to the graveyard that brings out the most embarrassing side of the family matriarch. Its music scene, a classic in the growing subgenre of celluloid karaoke, is equally, unbearably authentic. As Ed Pegram, the aging bully of the Grant family’s hometown, Stacy Keach oils bluster with Brylcreem — and delivers a version of the monumental Elvis song “In the Ghetto” that reveals all of his hubris along with all of his power over a pitiful community. Bruce Dern’s Woody Grant withers under the force, invoking the pain of every one of us who’s had to endure being accosted by the humiliating amplification of an unwanted “Happy Birthday” or dedication from the bar.

5. Scarlett Johanssen and Joaquin Phoenix write a song together in Her.

This one is an extra — since “The Moon Song,” actually written by Her director Spike Jonze and his longtime collaborator (and, for a while, girlfriend) Karen O, did earn an official nomination. The way the little wisp of a ditty unfolds as part of Her‘s love story is what makes it truly memorable, though. More than the film’s rather uncomfortable sex scene or the other dates Phoenix’s Twombly makes special for his computer queen, the pair’s after-dinner collaboration on a piece of music shows the depth of their intimacy. He strums a ukulele. She sings. They sing together. It’s not magic or even advanced technology: it’s soul communication, as easy and miraculous as love itself. And as fragile. In the simplest of the scenes that have made music real for us this year, Jonze asserts that it can also help us be meaningful to each other in ways that mere words or even images fail.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Beatsy seems to know me. That time when we were walking by the river and he suggested I listen to “Struttin’” by The Meters? He must have known my mood was dragging and I needed a boost. Or when we were alone in the kitchen, me nursing an Old Fashioned, and seemingly out of nowhere he put on a deep cut from my favorite John Cale album? I hadn’t input anything about the years I spent right after college listening to Paris 1919 every late afternoon. What, was Beatsy reading my mind?

When I let myself go and don’t think too hard about the reality of Beats Music — that, like every customizable online service, it’s partly pre-programmed and partly tracking me in a way that could also be defined as intrusive — I can pursue this fictional relationship. It’s a lot like that Spike Jonze movie Her (and I’m not the first music critic to acknowledge that), except our romance is wholly defined by our mutual love of old soul, weird European art rock and Dolly Parton.

I’m not as deluded as Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Theodore Twombly, of course; I don’t expect Beatsy to pleasure me in any way beyond the musical. But the splash made by Beats, the first streaming music service to come to listeners from the center of the conventional music industry, directly relates to its makers’ commitment to the system preferences of the human heart.

It’s right there in the company’s slogan, which describes Beats as “A new music service curated by people who believe music is emotion and life.” The most visible members of the Beats team are celebrities known for corralling intense feeling: Jimmy Iovine, the producer and record executive whom most Americans got to know as a mentor on American Idol; Dr. Dre, the hip hop pioneer who created the moodscape of gangsta rap and mentored pop’s most expressive head case, Eminem; and Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who was second only to Kurt Cobain in revealing the tortured soul of ’90s alternative rock.

Their well-publicized participation is one of many reasons Beats has been warmly greeted by the media and socially active music fans. From its well-regarded team of curators to the chummy presence of playlist makers like Jay Z and Bruce Springsteen, every marketing message Beats sends assures potential users that it will treat the songs and artists they love with care. More importantly, I think, Beats seems to love and respect the music lover. It does this through an interface that’s designed to make listening to music feel as interactive as possible — like forming a friendship, or even a love affair.

At the heart of every winning aspect of Beats is a commitment to what should be obvious in 2014 — that music is not a product, but a process grounded in the human impulse to connect. “Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life,” the philosopher Susanne Langer once wrote; for both its makers and listeners, music can become a kind of doppelganger for feelings as it unfolds over time and then replays, not only on vinyl or whatever other material that contains it, but within our musings and memories. Once music could be recorded, that analogue became actually analog, then digital; people confused the packages holding it with the thing itself. Which wasn’t a thing. Thus the age of recordings unfolded, confusing us. Kids slept with their transistor radios and kissed the faces of their idols on album covers.

The great thing about the fluid and disembodied nature of streaming is that it reveals that there is no product, no end point or object to music: just playing, listening, loving, remembering, reinterpreting. This has always been true. Yet we can’t comprehend this without a way to talk about it. The people behind Beats seem to understand that love is the way.

The Beats slogan “Music is emotion” sounds like a corny catchphrase. But “music is relationship” is science — the sound waves hitting my ear, its signals running through my brain. The Beats interface is all about that relationship, and more than that, it offers that relationship by becoming a companion.

From the sign-up screen, with its gently rounded font and frequent, trust-building use of the word “you,” Beats Music is designed to resemble a sentient being. It’s nowhere near as good on the web as on my phone; it’s designed for the devices we caress with our fingertips and make our constant companions. Like Samantha, the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her, Beatsy doesn’t feel like a prop. It’s more like a character. Its success depends upon users’ willingness to feel something about a computer program, to use that program as an intermediary in creating human relationships, and ultimately to be in relationship with the interface itself, enjoying its subtleties with the smiling abandon of Joaquin Phoenix dancing with his virtual lover on the Santa Monica boardwalk.

The process of getting to know Beats reveals how it evokes artificial intelligence. It begins with the process of hooking up: during sign-up, Beatsy asked me a few questions that wouldn’t have been out of place on an early date with my own music-nerd husband. What kind of music do you like? No, wait, get more specific: Choose three favorite artists. No cheating! I pondered: Do I want to tell the interface I very occasionally listen to New Age? I could almost hear Beatsy chuckle seductively when I went ahead and filled in all of the available bubbles, trying to hedge my bets and, dare I say, impress him.

Because this process works through animation instead of a standard form, it feels more personal and continually compelling. Beatsy listens and responds. As soon as I picked my faves, he offered me a token of its esteem: a screen just for you with playlists and albums my preferences indicate that I’d like. I’d proven my grounding in classic sounds by selecting Dolly Parton and Percy Sledge, and shown a little daring by making my third pick the psych-metal band High on Fire. My new interface humored my old-school ways with a playlist of drinking songs by Willie Nelson and one introducing Sam Cooke (I’m familiar with him, Beatsy, don’t condescend) and threw in a suggestion to try the Japanese noise rock band Boris as a gesture toward my alternative side.

I could fall for this interface, I thought. It really did seem to be getting to know me. Next came the serious flirtation stage: playing with The Sentence, or what some have called “Mad Libs.” Thought up by Reznor, this feature has been much discussed as Beatsy’s most entertaining element: Fill in the blanks to make surrealistic sentences that describe the milieu, mood, and general style of a listening session. Here’s one I tapped in last week: I’m under the stars and feel like going out with Cupid to seminal indie. Your turn, Beatsy. The algorithm offered me Sleater-Kinney‘s “Words and Guitar” — one of my favorite songs! I almost blushed.

A game like this takes two, and as we played it, Beatsy seemed to understand me even better. Did it feel me getting bored with its selections when I proposed I’m on a rooftop and feel like working with beautiful people to vintage soul & funk? Once I switched working to chilling, the familiar Aretha and Otis tracks were usurped by semi-obscurities by Allen Toussaint and Betty Davis. But Beatsy wasn’t perfect, and even this I appreciated. Some of his moves were laughably clunky: Every time I’d change my location to in my underwear he’d whip out “Let’s Get It On.” I kind of loved that. The system was naïve; I’d have to teach Beatsy a few things.

But what if you don’t want to fall in love with Beatsy? What if you just want to use him, ahem, it? That’s possible, but not easy. The search function takes time to master; it presents cluttered pages that require wading to get to specific content. It also gets things wrong, in the way you’d expect from a young interface. Searching for tracks by the vintage ’50s crooner Johnnie Ray, I got Ray Wylie Hubbard and Intro to Sugar Ray. I expect Beats programmers will learn, as its users learn, to overcome these errors. But I doubt that’s a priority for the company. Just as public libraries have turned away from their archival functions to become gathering places for locals interested in meeting each other or using the Internet and other services, Beats will likely never prioritize active archival explorations — which aren’t about relationships, but acquisition (of information, if not actual downloads). That’s okay. The Library of Congress is still there for my nerd needs.

Beats poses two other problems; one it may evolve past and the other is more sinister. The service is highly curated, with playlists by experts and charismatic enthusiasts from the staff of XXL Magazine to indoor cycling hub Soulcycle to sports stars like LeBron James and musicians like Nikki Six (whose playlist of Best First Cuts From 1970s Albums rocks, man). But their identities are downplayed in favor of the interface itself, and as Eliot van Buskirk pointed out in his Hypebot review of Beats, those playlists are fixed. Beatsy still doesn’t provide what an old-fashioned record store clerk could give — or for that matter, a real sweetheart: human interaction that changes with you as your mood changes and your knowledge grows.

My other reservation about Beats is the same one some critics have expressed about Her‘s Samantha. Let’s be real. Beatsy is a corporate tool. I paid for him. (Actually, I was provided a free trial by the company, but I’m going to pay for him. No way I’m giving this guy up.) And he — it — must ultimately serve a bottom line that’s not emotional, but oriented toward profit. Beatsy wants my money, and that influences the ways it romances me: what artists are highlighted in the playlists, what pops up on my “just for you” page, and other factors I may not even notice yet. The deep intimacy and individuality of musical expression and reception always makes us forget that within capitalism, it is always a commodity. Beatsy is particularly good at erasing this awareness.

That’s the lure, if also the danger, of consumer culture as it becomes ever more sophisticated: its incomplete satisfactions keep expanding to suit the limits of the everyday. Music now often feels best within the comfortable constraints a great interface provides. Like the many other screen-frames we now put around our lives, Beats redefines solitary experiences (reading, tapping on a keyboard and, usually, listening on headphones) as communal. Maybe it seems strange that it works so well when applied to music listening, which can be so sweatily, sexily physical in other contexts. But isn’t music also somehow always experienced alone? My ears. My song. My Beatsy. It’s not as lonely as it sounds.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Arguments are now raging across social media about Macklemore & Lewis, entitlement, and the ethics of industry prizes. It’s come to light that some voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the Grammys, attempted to block the duo from the rap category altogether, arguing that the Top-Ten singles off The Heist, are pop, not rap. That they come out of a specific community that isn’t central to hip-hop’s most familiar histories is baked into their very existence. “Same Love,” the rapper’s Song-of-the-Year-nominated meditation on his own privilege and hip-hop’s homophobia, did real political work when Washington State’s successful 2013 campaign for marriage equality adopted it as an anthem. Macklemore & Lewis donated the profits from the song to the campaign — one of several ways that this longtime Seattle hip-hop fixture has done his due diligence at home.

“Same Love,” however, can be viewed as another kind of appropriation; that of a straight artist benefitting from the pathos of another group’s oppression. Sunday’s performance of the song made this tension palpable. The rapper-diva Queen Latifah, whose own privacy about her sexuality is a sore point for some, officiated the legal marriage of 33 straight and gay couples in the Nokia Theater aisles while Madonna, in an outfit she might have borrowed from one of The Isley Brothers circa 1971, duetted with the songs original hook singer, the very feminine lesbian Mary Lambert. The camera seemed to dwell on the heterosexual couples in the group. Madonna carried a “pimp” cane, adding a frisson of minstrelsy to the scene.

It was a mess. Yet for all of its tacky mixed signals, the wedding scene expressed the spirit of this year’s entire Grammy ceremony — just as Macklemore embodies the central questions popular music raises today: What is a meaningful alliance, and what is tokenism? Who gets to occupy the limited crossover spaces reserved for artists from niche communities in the mainstream? Does it make any difference if an artist means well? And what progress has been made on the endless wheel of struggle?

White appropriation of black self-expression has been the essence of pop since before the Civil War, but we are not living in that moment, or even in 1956, when Elvis blended moves he learned from blues men, rockabilly women and white gospel quartets and shook the world. On the surface, opportunity abounds. Hip-hop is a black art form whose leading voices are openly proud race men like Kanye West and Jay Z, and no white rapper can change that.

Yet where it matters — in positions of power held within the music business, in what gets played on the radio, and in how legitimating rituals like the Grammys play out — those old race-based patterns endure. Inequity is built into a recording industry that was formally segregated for decades and which continues to push white and black artists into different streams. The Top 40 format, which generates hits, still favors white artists. The margin held by LGBTQ artists throughout the creative industries is expanding but still shaky. All of this is public knowledge, endlessly discussed. But change is grindingly slow.

That’s why Macklemore’s story is simply one small part of the bigger story of the Grammys, and of post-millennial pop. Artists of color won in two televised categories — Jay Z took home a statue for “Holy Grail,” a song dominated by the voice of the blue-eyed soul king Justin Timberlake, and Bruno Mars, the Filipino-Latino-Jewish heartthrob who quietly represents America’s emerging multiracial majority, won Best Pop Vocal album for Unorthodox Jukebox. The other top winners were all white and, perhaps not incidentally, publicly heterosexual. Each found success with sounds obviously rooted in black or queer sources. What distinguished one from the other during the telecast was the way in which each acknowledged this fact.

Daft Punk, the veteran French electronic duo who won Album and Record of the year, wear helmets when they perform, assuming robot identities, so they brought up singer Pharrell Williams and venerable funk guitarist Nile Rodgers, whose riffs powered Daft Punk’s hit “Get Lucky,” to stand in the spotlight. This made Daft Punk’s victories seem like what they were: wins made possible by the African-American geniuses the duo employed. Lorde, the teenage New Zealander whose Song of the Year “Royals” caused a Macklemore-like stir for its use of hip-hop beats and critique of hip-hop culture, took the opposite approach. Looking utterly gothic in dark lipstick and black-and-white clothes, she suppressed any signals of hip-hop being part of her palette. Country artist Kacey Musgraves used costume in a different way, to subtly acknowledge a debt, this time to queer culture. The spangly cowgirl dress she wore while singing “Follow Your Arrow,” a queer-spirited ode to persona exploration, had the flair of drag; later, her openly gay producer and co-writer Shane McAnally stood by her side as she accepted her award for Best Country Album for Same Trailer, Different Park.

These moments proved how skilled pop stars are becoming at stepping through the landmines of race and sex. The erasure of a source puts the issue of appropriation on the back burner; tacit acknowledgment can forestall any arguments about it. What resonate most are the confrontations that occur within music-making itself, which lend depth and energy to the anger, resentment, guilt and hope that people on the different sides of these arguments are expressing. One outstanding performance Sunday channeled fury, another cultivated happiness. Both offered ways to stop and recharge in the midst of these ongoing conflicts.

Kendrick Lamar, the great robbed hope of 2014, delivered a fiery performance that was its own (sadly, only symbolic) victory. He did so while Imagine Dragons, winner of the Grammy for Best Rock Performance, played behind him. Lamar’s charisma was no surprise; his talent is that big. But the involvement of a critically reviled rock band from Utah seemed incongruous — at first.

Imagine Dragons currently rules alternative rock, not a scene known for interracial collaborations. Yet the Utah band’s producer and mentor is Alex da Kid, a biracial British beats-maker who established himself working with Eminem, Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. As the rapper spit his rhymes and the rockers pounded out a massive beat on theatrically huge drums, the deep connection between their disparate musical approaches became clear: The shock of it felt cleansing.

The seamless blend of Lamar’s words and the Imagine Dragons thump was one of the Grammy telecast’s most electric moments. The other came when Daft Punk performed a medley with Stevie Wonder, the living spirit of pop eclecticism and politically fearless grace, that generated a massive dance party in the aisle. The robots stayed behind a screen for most of the song, letting their hero lead the way. These contrasting moments of rage and joy didn’t minimize the debates that defined this year’s Grammys; they engaged with them and broke through to some kind of momentary freedom. Maybe that’s all the peace pop can offer right now.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

I recently reached Segarra on the phone in Nashville, where she was enjoying some downtime before hitting the promotional trail in support of Small Town Heroes, out February 11 on ATO Records. It is the prolific collective’s sixth album and first on a major independent label. Segarra’s a self-starter; as every description of her notes, the Bronx native spent her late teens hopping trains before settling in New Orleans, where busking became her means of musical self-education. There, she developed a singing style based in gentle persuasion — Segarra’s morning-after alto might be the least showy great voice to hit the national scene this year — and a conversational way with old song forms. In conversation, she reveals herself as a busy reader, a dedicated friend to outsiders and a bubbly enthusiast when it comes to the peers she plays with and the musical elders she reveres.

Our long, idea-sparking talk concluded with Segarra explaining the origin of the song debuted here, her most explicitly political to date. “The Body Electric” is a riot grrrl-inspired confrontation with musical misogyny she’s dedicated to Damini, the woman who was killed during a gang rape on a Delhi bus in 2012. “My generation has just seen so much,” Segarra said. “Every time we feel like nothing can shock us anymore, something does come along and shock us. It always feels like things are getting crazier than they just were.” Hurray For the Riff Raff makes music that helps listeners find a place within old folkways, and gets them dancing in ways that change things.

ANN POWERS: Your songs often have a very traditional frame. You even use familiar titles, like “Crash on the Highway” and “End of the Line.”

ALYNDA LEE SEGARRA: I try to go about being very obvious about my inspirations. It’s kind of a brave move on our part to say, this is obviously taken from an older form of music. And we’re so comfortable with ourselves as a band, and I’m trying to be comfortable enough as a songwriter to say that we’re bringing something unique to it and it’s going to be a point of view the world hasn’t really heard yet. I’m not afraid to make that connection obvious.

I also feel like that with songs that we cover. A lot of bands try to cover songs that are more obscure. While that can be really interesting, sometimes I want to do songs that everybody knows, because they haven’t heard someone like me sing them yet. So it’s going to be different.

What exactly do you mean by “someone like me”?

A Puerto Rican from the Bronx who went to the South, who also feels queer, who also loves classic country and rock ‘n’ roll. What’s interesting about all of those elements together is that it can attract a lot of different people, can relate to it. That’s something I’ve learned over time: learning how to be comfortable with yourself as a complex person, and feeling like you don’t need to throw away any part of yourself in order to become an artist, or feel connected to one particular group.

What is great about what we’re doing with our music right now is that we’re expanding a lot of people’s ideas of who listens to these certain types of music, or who belongs in that realm. I really like to make our image as a very queer band. Yosi [Perlstein, the band’s transgender fiddle player] identifies as queer. So do I, as a longtime ally of queer causes. And it really means a lot to people to feel like they belong in certain places that they never felt they belonged in. We’ll play in dive bars, or in country bars, and for the first time maybe ever, a lot of queer people feel like they can go there and hang out. And they can listen to that music because it doesn’t have the connotation of being sung by people who hate them.

What about being Puerto Rican in a mostly white scene?

It’s definitely become more of a focus for me, just in learning how I identify as Puerto Rican. It’s a really interesting way to grow up when you don’t fit into all the expectations of what you’re supposed to be like because of your race or ethnicity. So it’s been a journey of me learning about other Puerto Ricans or Hispanics — or people of color in general — who’ve played music that I do connect with. Because I didn’t grow up loving salsa and hip-hop. So in my personal life that’s definitely been a real focus. But it’s also just a part of my worldview. It comes from studying feminist theory and trying to figure out how to change all types of boundaries with whatever we’re doing.

You were putting together your musical canon at the same time you were reading those books.

A big part of my musical education was me saying to myself, “I wanna listen to primarily women, and I don’t wanna listen to the [male] legends. When I was finally able to settle down and get a record player, I only wanted to listen to Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith, or Nina Simone. I wanted to educate myself about female musicians. And only after I felt like I did that for a good period of time was I able to listen to Sam[‘s advice — guitarist Sam Doores of the Deslondes is Segarra’s frequent collaborator] and listen to some Dylan.

You’re such a politically-minded person, but this isn’t a time when overt ideologies express themselves much within popular music.

I feel really lonely. There isn’t much out there right now. The main genre that’s creating politically conscious music is hip-hop, which is really awesome, because it’s also the sound that younger people, my age, really trust. They don’t see it as a throwback, or corny; it’s very new and still rebellious to them. [But] a lot of incredible political hip-hop artists are still really homophobic, or really sexist. When I listen to it sometimes I have to really sit back and try to understand where the artist is coming from, and how they grew up; what values were pushed on them. But also it gets really tiring.

Who do you consider your elders, as a politically aware artist?

It goes anywhere from Leadbelly and Billie Holiday and Woody Guthrie to Bikini Kill. My generation really needs music that is talking about the disillusionment and the fear that we’re feeling, that we’re trying to be too tough to even recognize or talk about. And I think that the Occupy movement really inspired me and I was really excited by it, and I felt like what was lacking was a major push of musicians and artists to join that movement. When you’re looking to the civil rights movement — if you heard that music and didn’t feel like, okay, I’m going anywhere you want me to go, I believe in this, you had no soul!

Punk also inspired you.

When I first heard Bikini Kill, it was so freeing for me as a fourteen-year-old girl to say, this music is truly for me. It’s there so I feel empowered; it’s there so I feel good, and I don’t have to worry about this singer saying something that’s gonna make me feel like crap about myself.

You busked when you first started out; what did you learn from that experience?

I’ve thought a lot about the role of street musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans. I started playing in New Orleans the year that the storms happened, the winter before the storm. And the feeling in me changed when I came back and witnessed people really struggling, and the city just really trying to get back on its feet. I suddenly felt like, wow, is what I’m doing mooching off of this city, and using the city’s identity to make money? Or am I actually trying to preserve the tradition? I think it’s a really fine line.

It’s something that a lot of young people who come to New Orleans have a hard time with, because they genuinely love the music. And they just want to be a part of something that is real, that they can trust. They know this music is made by real people and is really beautiful. They also want to make some money. It’s an interesting dynamic.

You’re not doing the full-on, costume-wearing revivalist thing, though, the way some young New Orleans performers do.

I like to keep artists in mind when I’m writing a song as these little guardian angels. With something like “The New San Francisco Bay Blues” I was thinking a lot about John Prine, and also Ma Rainey. How do you combine all those elements together? I’m learning a lot more about my sound and how I like to sing and play, what feels natural to me, and I found that playing more along the Townes Van Zandt style of very laid-back … I’m just not a very boisterous person. Learning about where my voice feels comfortable and what feels natural to me, but also keeping a very specific frame of mind. What do I want to put across in this song? And I feel like a lot of times it’s not very obvious. It’s just a very subtle thing. I just have my intentions in there.

Tell me about writing “The Body Electric.” It’s a turn toward the overtly political for you.

It had been an idea in my mind for months. I was out at a club one night and I heard somebody sing a murder ballad, it was a new song — very rock ‘n’ roll, a song about killing his girlfriend for cheating on him. There was just something that popped into me at that moment when I was listening to the song, where I suddenly realized, this person is so disconnected from what they’re saying. It was one of those moments when you’re like, the whole world has gone crazy! And now he can sing about killing his girlfriend and everybody just shrugs it off.

We hear the song and say, oh, but it’s in that old form. They don’t really mean that, they’re just singing it. That’s very similar to, oh he didn’t mean it, she was drunk. Or he didn’t mean it; she made him really angry. All of those things had started to play in my mind as ways that we try to make sense of something that’s basically just violent and crazy. And I just suddenly felt like it was my place to say something about it.

I thought about it for a very long time, and I thought about “Caleb Meyer,” the Gillian Welch song, which is a murder ballad, but the woman survives and is able to defend herself. And I was thinking about the woman in New Delhi who was killed on a public bus, and the articles in the news about young women in high school getting sexually assaulted and it gets out on the Internet. These boys are actually not thinking they’re doing anything wrong, to the point where they can videotape it, put it on the Internet and not think they’re going to get in trouble or that anyone would get upset about it. And suddenly, I thought, it’s time for a song about bringing that back to something very simple and direct. I’m a human, when you say that, you’re talking about killing me. You’re talking about killing my best friend.

But the title is poetic.

The whole adventure of making the title of the song — I’m really bad at titles. I wanted to be proud of what the title was. It refers to the Walt Whitman poem, “I Sing the Body Electric,” which was all about [saying] every body is sacred. But it’s also about the woman murdered on the public bus. They never released her name; but people called her Damini, which means lightning, because what happened to her sparked a revolution. It sparked anger in women in India, who felt like, this has happened for so long, and this has to be the last one. I wanted to have some kind of reference to electricity or lightning in the title. It all came together in that phrase.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.