Well as it turns out plenty of people could and here’s how it happens. It isn’t people denying the latter proposition who wind up annoying us. O no. The latter proposition, as we’ve already noted, is unassailable: the relative complexity of an object (say, a song) has nothing whatsoever to do with its quality. OK OK. Whether something’s good or not has nothing to do with how easy it is to grasp, we said above. But you’ll recall that the initial proposition was a bit less general. It was: Just because it’s easy to understand doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. When the thought gets phrased like that, all the terms load themselves up with a lot of nasty traces and we eventually end up at foolish conclusions like Complexity is necessarily boring or good musicians are wankers or all songs should be three minutes long. (All three of these being propositions, it should be noted for the sake of fairness, that have worked to my happy advantage off and on since 1991.) There are other equally irritating ways of putting it: there’s If it can’t be fully grasped on first listen, it’s dull. And there’s pop music isn’t literature, you know. (Of course it is. What else is it, then? Custom? Ritual? Product? Quiet down, you, I’m onto something here.) There’s also How can you not like Daft Punk, which is enough to drive a temperate man to drink. Cheap vodka. Nightly. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 [ next ]