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Would Ira Robbins or Brian James—or any of those who lionize Bangs—ever agree to publish lines like that today? Not likely. And it has nothing to do with corporations or selling out. It has to do with the terrible hipster orthodoxy that governs pop music journalism. Despite the beauty and power of much popular music, the critics have become a cross between Holden Caulfield and a taxidermist. They talk about themselves, then set to work labeling the genres, subgenres and sub-subgenres the work involves—all without broaching any broader themes.

The above-mentioned piece by David Dunlap is a perfect example. He opens his review of the band Royksopp (for rock critics, the more obscure the band the better) by confessing that "the best down tempo electronica albums trigger a scene in my mind as if from some European drama: It's the gray morning after a night of revelry, and I'm being driven away in a cab from the apartment of a supermodel whom I'll never see again." Okay, fine, the reader thinks. He's going to use this bubble from his imagination to talk about this record, and tie the music to grand, timeless themes about romance, love, and loneliness.

But that never happens. Dunlap is too busy proving his bona fides as an omniscient scenester. He calls the singer "an uncanny mesh of Bjork and Cindy Lauper." One song is "R & B-esque." And be relieved (or warned): the album in question "won't be filed alongside George Jones's The Battle and Fleetwood Mac's Rumors in the Heartbreak Hall of Fame." Moreover, Royksopp has a "vinyl nerdiness" and suffers from "Bacharach worship." Writers (and showoffs) like David Dunlap, Jr., have embraced Bangs' occasionally beatnik, sarcastic, first-person style but none of the true iconoclasm or spiritual passion behind it—they've abandoned any claims to truth, or rather any truth other than the idea that they have huge CD collections and that corporate rock sucks.

To be fair to Brian James, he does acknowledge that Bangs' "increasing rejection of nihilism and solipsism, the most important development of his late period, is regrettably lost on his followers." And how. When I was rereading Bangs' review of Astral Weeks, I was floored by what he said about the song "Madame George." It's a song about a transvestite, but there is nothing vulgar about it—it is about the humanity of even the strangest of us. "The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song," Bangs writes, "is that there's nothing at all sensationalist, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag queen … it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature." Bangs then goes on a magnificent digression about the problem of seeing the miracle of each human life, and how doing so can almost be too much to bear:

As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out of a fifth floor window rather than read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other [expletive's] problems … so you stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die.

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